Freenet Page 6

  One single filament of light hung from a wall bracket near the pebbled ceiling of the cave where stalactites had been broken off to leave flat stumps of rock. A crude painting hung on one wall, the brush strokes childlike in simplicity, a fertile landscape with lush vegetation under a haloed moon, an image of paradise from a book perhaps. This was probably Zen’s room as a child. His personal effects were probably still in the chest of drawers. Dizzy with sickness and too much ale, Simara felt like she was infringing on Zen’s privacy, invading his past. Awkward circumstance had thrust her into his life, and now into his family. She had embarrassed herself in front of his former lovers. What must they all be thinking about her, the strange alien girl from the stars?

  THREE

  Her stepfather came to her in a dream again, the same midnight horror, his slavering face stinking of alcohol and rough with stubble. His fingers groped her, pinching between her legs. Give me some tight pussy, you cheap slut. He pressed his body upon her, his penis a dead weight. You dirty girl, you like that don’t you? She screamed and lashed out against him. She punched him in the face and kicked him in the scrotum. “No!” she shouted. “Get off me, you drunken bastard!”

  They fell in a tangle as the hammock tilted upside down. Simara grunted with pain as her arm and shoulder hit against solid rock.

  “What in Kiva’s name?” Zen said as he stood and staggered back against the wall. He brushed at a wall switch to turn on the single filament of light, a bare candle in the darkness. His eyes were red and bleary from too much mead, his stance wavery and uncertain. “What are you doing in my bed?”

  Simara looked up and rubbed at her elbow. Her arm had gone numb and fuzzy with pain. God damn it all.

  Luaz flung back the tapestry as she barrelled into the bedchamber. She surveyed the scene in an instant and froze for an explanation, her eyes wide with astonishment. Simara burst into tears, her stepfather’s face still leering in her mind’s eye, a poison of violation roiling inside her.

  “I …” Zen began and stopped, clearly drunk and disoriented. He seemed to be pondering some great paradox as he rubbed a fresh bruise on his chin.

  Simara picked herself up and hobbled past them for the cave mouth, desperate to escape.

  “Wait, just a minute,” Luaz said behind her, but Simara dared not turn back for a confrontation. She ran blindly up the tunnel and followed the sound of music in the distance, wandering from corridor to corridor until she found her way back to the crystal ballroom. The crowd had thinned for the afterparty, but a trio blowing brass horns accompanied a string band now, and a ­circle of onlookers gyrated to a jazzy tune. The style of dance had changed markedly from the formal rituals of tradition to a wild freeform of movement, the dancers younger, some with drinks in hand. Incredibly, the buffet table was stocked with fresh pastries, and Simara gorged on fruity concoctions dusted with icing ­sugar until she felt strength return. She took a cup of guava mead and sipped her drink as she searched for a secluded corner to hide from the riot of colour and noise.

  A young man caught her attention from across the room, and she turned away too late. He began to push toward her through the crowd, a blond boy dressed in a bright yellow robe with a red crescent emblazoned on the chest. He strolled up to her with lazy confidence and smiled. “Can I serve you anything?”

  Simara sipped her drink. “No, thank you.”

  He nodded, nonchalant. “Great party. Happy Vishan. I’m Justin.”

  “Simara.”

  “You’re looking well.”

  “You also,” she said with caution, wondering about every nuance of communication and trying to play it safe. “I’m just visiting.”

  “I can see that,” the boy said as he plucked at his robe.

  Of course, her white tunic marked her as a tourist. Everything was colour coded in this crazy place. She smiled with wan resignation.

  “I’m from the clan of the moon lizard,” Justin said.

  “That sounds like a frightening creature. Do they eat humans?”

  He laughed with a pleasant lilt. “No, they’re quite small. About the size of a cave ferret.”

  “Hmm,” she said, wondering how big a cave ferret might be and whether that was a new cause for worry.

  “Where are you staying?”

  She thumbed absently over her shoulder. “With a friend. He’s busy at the moment.”

  “Would you like a guided tour of the caverns while you wait? See the wonders wrought by Kiva?”

  Simara splayed her fingers at the magnificence of the ballroom. “It’s all phantasmagorical to a space rat like me.”

  “You’re from the stars?”

  “Not exactly. You can’t actually land on a star.”

  “Ahh,” he said. “Wow.”

  She shook her head with self-effacement. “It’s not all that great.”

  “So, what about the tour? I know all the local sights.”

  “Sure, I guess. Someplace quiet would be nice.” She followed his elbow of invitation into a new branch of tunnels lit by the ubiquitous glow tube overhead. The upper mountain was riddled with a labyrinthine maze carved naturally by water and smooth to the touch. The cavern ceilings were hung with all manner of exotic stalactites, some like icicles, others flat like tapestries.

  “First stop is the drapery room,” Justin said. “It took a million years to make these designs.” He waved a hand up grandly. “These giant sheets formed from seepage through fractures in the bedrock. Some are so thin you can see through them.”

  “Amazing.” They did indeed look like hanging cloth in elaborate folds, white and shiny like porcelain. Simara reached up to touch a wet edge. “They’re still growing,” she said as she rubbed liquid between her fingers. Down at her feet, the rock was mounded with a convoluted texture that reminded her of brain tissue.

  “Just over a centimetre every hundred years,” Justin said with a nod of sure wisdom. He poked her elbow to get her attention. “Next up is Kivakulia, the Apparition of God.”

  Simara dragged her eyes away to follow Justin up another tunnel. They climbed a steep incline and grappled loose gravel with their hands to steady themselves. A damp odour reminded her of the smell of clouds and rain. A reddish glow emanated from the top of the hill and grew brighter as they approached.

  “This is the most holy place in the mountain, Kivakulia. The early explorers knew they had found God when they came upon this formation.” A huge, glowing angel stood before them, stretching from floor to ceiling, flared out and flattened in the middle. The column emitted light in the red-orange end of the spectrum, seemingly by magic in the darkness. A fence with an iron railing had been erected in a hexagon around it.

  “No way,” Simara said in awe. “It must be a trick.”

  “Imagine creeping through these tunnels in the days before Bali had electricity,” Justin said, “exploring in the darkness with your headlamp beam or flashlight in hand, and seeing the Apparition of God for the first time. That must have been something.”

  “Why does it glow? Is it hot?”

  “No, it’s fluorescent calcite,” he said, “activated by impurities like manganese. The invisible short-wavelength radiation is absorbed by the crystals and remitted as a longer wavelength that we can see. It’s also slightly phosphorescent, which means it will continue to glow after the light source is removed.”

  “It’s not magic?”

  “No, but it was thought to be a supernatural manifestation for many years. You can see why.”

  “That is totally awesome!”

  “Kivakulia,” he said with pride.

  “Can I touch it?”

  He frowned. “No, the oil from your fingers might harm these delicate crystals. But there’s more. The lover’s room is just down this tunnel to the left. It’s a cavern filled with standing stones growing up from the floor.”

  Simara followed him farther into the fantastical maze, marvelling at each new texture of marbled calcite—gourds and clumsy ribbons, fountains
and stubby fingers. For untold millennia before the arrival of humans, the seeping waters had toiled over these artful creations, drip by steady drip. Could it really be just an accident, a chance variation of rainwater and underground streams? Or was this Kiva’s declaration of glory?

  “Watch your head here,” Justin said as he stood by a narrow crevice. He pushed the back of her neck to guide her forward past a craggy overhang. She stooped and felt a brush of rock at her hair.

  The tunnel opened up into a dimly lit grotto of wonder. Huge marble statues rose erect from the ground like a white army at attention, their heads blunt and rounded, glistening with life. Corresponding stalactites hung dripping high above in darkness, and a few had reached their partners to form pearly columns of calcite. “You can touch freely in the lover’s room,” Justin said. Simara stepped forward to the nearest formation and stroked cool calcite, smooth as glass and hard as iron. She envisioned primitive explorers surrounded by these standing stones, praising the wondrous works of Kiva. Murmured voices sounded in the distance, and as her eyes adjusted to the meagre light, Simara noticed couples sequestered in distant shadows.

  “About fifty centuries ago, there was a drought in the water supply here,” Justin said behind her. “You can see that the stalagmites were narrowed for awhile and then renewed.”

  Simara peered up at the huge columns anew and noticed the bulbous tips on each one. Oh, mothership, each one looked like a penis at attention! “Wow, that’s definitely an army of phallic symbols.”

  Justin chuckled knowingly with invitation. “That’s why the lovers meet here.”

  Simara felt a flush of insurgent fear as she turned to him. Sure enough, he had pulled up his yellow robe and held it above his naked hips as he leaned with casual ease against a marble column. The white stalagmite between his thighs stood upright with promise. Can you give me a hand, good friend?

  With a gesture of pure instinct, Simara hauled back and sucker-­punched Justin with a vicious roundhouse blow straight to the cheekbone. He cried out and fell to the ground with his nose in his palms as blood began to drip between his fingers. He rolled and cried like a wounded animal as Simara curled her bruised fist in her abdomen, wondering what the hell had just happened. She felt like a dirty girl again, violated anew. “Cover yourself up, you pervert,” she said as she kicked his naked thigh, and Justin groaned and scrabbled at his gown with bloody hands.

  A crowd of lovers quickly surrounded them and sent for aid, and the local constabulary arrived within minutes to take Simara into custody. An hour later she was in jail, stuck behind iron bars in an austere cave just big enough to recline, cold and shivering under a scrap of rotting canvas—from the heights of majesty to the depths of desolation in one act of thoughtless violence. God damn, what a mess. She had assaulted two men in less than two hours, and there was no use crying about it now. This was the absolute end. She could fall no further from here, and mothership would never find her in this underground prison. A calm and vacuous dread of depression surrounded her like an ­impenetrable curtain. She surely deserved a cruel fate, and a just punishment awaited her.

  A magistrate official guarded her from his desk across the cavern, where he sat creaking in a leather office chair while he scanned a digital reader. Simara felt the weight of a towering mountain of calcite above her, ready to fall and crush her like a bug. She buried her face in a mouldy blanket and drifted in fitful sleep. She tossed and turned on the rocky surface and felt worse with every awakening. Out of habit, she tapped her earlobe when she woke and got a dead blank from the V-net each time—no audio, no vidi. Mothership had forsaken her.

  A buzzing drone sounded in her ears, a permanent headache of fatigue. She stirred to a familiar voice and struggled against a dull heaviness of slumber. She pressed her cheek against iron bars to see Luaz arguing with the magistrate and gesticulating with animation. “I demand the right of substitution for my clan,” Luaz said.

  The official shook his head. “She’s not of your clan. She’s an offworlder and must pay the specified ransom.”

  “She’s staying in my cave. She’s partnered with my son.”

  The man wiped at his brow, testing deep furrows. “Damn you, woman. Do you think I want to spend all Vishan in this office?”

  “I demand the right of substitution for my clan as decreed in the Charter of Privilege,” Luaz repeated, her chin defiant.

  The magistrate reached into his desk drawer and slammed a key card on the table. “Do it yourself,” he snarled. “I wash my hands of your insolence.”

  Luaz picked up the card and strode to Simara’s cramped prison cave. She swiped the lock mechanism and swung the bars open. “Get out,” she said fiercely.

  Simara squirmed forward and slid out of captivity, stumbling to her knees under the weight of gravity. She straightened aching muscles and watched in horror as Luaz crawled into the tiny crypt and pulled the iron door closed with a clang. “No,” Simara croaked.

  Luaz blinked at her, resolute, a stubborn old woman.

  Simara held out an open palm. “Give me the key.”

  Luaz shuffled her body into the cave as far as she could go and glared back, her face a stern white mask. Behind them, the magistrate spoke into a communications device in his cupped hand, his voice a whisper of aggravation.

  Simara sighed with confusion. “What are you doing, Luaz?”

  “I have the legal right to take your place.”

  “You don’t even know me. I’m a terrible person.”

  Luaz shook her head. “You may think so now, but I’ve seen the hand of Kiva. Obedience is my privilege of consecration.”

  Oh crap, that sounded like religious jargon—no point in trying to argue. Simara settled cross-legged on the rock in front of the cold iron cage and stared up into eyes glinting with holy light from the dark recess. Surely the woman would listen to reason. “Do you have a partner? Someone I can contact?”

  “His name was Valda, a good man to the core, a wonderful father. He died two years ago from a quick cancer.”

  “Zen’s father?”

  “Zen’s heart followed him to the grave on that final night. His soul turned black and vacant with despair, and he fled alone into the wilderness to grovel in his ruin. I lost my two loves in a single stroke of fate. My life was wiped away, scrubbed clean to the bedrock. How could I start again at this age?” The light from her eyes went dark as she ducked her head. “Zen’s few visits on the days of ceremony were those of a ghost, a boy devoid of hope, a stranger in the skin of a man.”

  “I’m sorry,” Simara said.

  “Not your fault.” Luaz waved a hand. “The rads take us all in time—the great plagues of Bali.” A pause lingered between them, an emptiness longing to be filled. “When I saw Zen return with you for Vishan, my son had come back from the dead. He has spark in his eyes again, and life in his heart. Whatever you did to him was a blessing from Kiva. Whatever they do to me now will never matter, now that I have seen his true face again.”

  A stalactite dripped steadily in the distance for many minutes as Simara examined her feelings for Zen. He was an attractive and sensitive man, a comfortable friend, but did she love him? Could she live her entire life with him? Mothership, they had only just met. She could not imagine being intimate with him, sharing his body.

  Hunger began to gnaw inside her. She wondered if she might be allowed to bring food for Luaz, who surely must be in grave discomfort by now at her age, but realized with a start that she was completely lost underground. She couldn’t wander the tunnels on her own in search of a kitchen pantry and risk getting trapped in a sinkhole or killed in a fall. She was still at the mercy of her captors, trapped in a maze of rock on an alien planet. She folded her arms and settled her back against cold prison bars. “How did you birth a baby here, Luaz? Zen said it was impossible.”

  “The rads on Bali ruin all delicate DNA, but Trade Station stays in protected orbit on the dark side from Signa, shadowed from danger. Valda was a g
overnor in those days, so we were able to travel to the station for fertility enhancement. Zen was conceived by genetic cleansing and lived his first year in a controlled biosphere.”

  “It must have been terribly expensive for you.”

  “We were rich in those days,” Luaz said. “We took too much for granted.”

  “You raised a fine boy.”

  “Yes, that much is true,” she said wistfully. “The early days were the best, the days when Zen was in school, before the turmoils of adolescence. The teenage years seemed so fraught with meaning, every nuance of life blown out of proportion. Was it the same for you?”

  Simara shook her head, unable to empathize. “I don’t think so. I lived a solitary life in space, conjoined with machine intelligence.” Her guardian mothership was her only real friend, but this elder woman would have little understanding of digital consciousness or the psychic realms of the freenet. In simple grounder terms, Simara had spent most of her waking life as a V-net avatar, a phantom in the machine. “My stepfather went through a series of wives, so I had surrogate parents of sorts and a good relationship with the latest one. She died a few months ago in a vacuum breach.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry to hear such tragedy,” Luaz said in sympathy.

  “That’s all right. We’ve both had our share of pain.”

  “There will always be pain,” Luaz said. “That’s the one constant of life. We must remember the joy and dwell on it anew every day.”

  Simara lapsed into silence as she considered the wise and gentle counsel of the elder. Her own memories were filled with bad images and emotional trauma, leering faces and foul language. Where was her happiness? Where was her reward?

  Finally Zen and Justin arrived in the prison house and approached the magistrate’s table with contrition. Zen looked bleary-eyed with a hangover, his chin speckled with downy stubble. Justin’s face was puffy and bruised, his parrot-nose red and swollen. The magistrate spoke in hushed anger to the boys as they exchanged courtroom evidence outside Simara’s earshot. He looked over at her periodically with petulance, and finally summoned her with a growl. She hobbled over and stood with her head bowed, afraid to speak, feeling a doom of impending punishment. The boys had matching purple welts under their left eyes and Justin’s nostrils were stuffed with cotton. Of course she should have noticed his romantic signals. He had touched the back of her neck on the way to the lover’s cavern—that was probably the height of foreplay on this horrible planet!