Earth

A poor joke, but it touched off nervous titters.

“A few more turns and you’ll arrive at the main grotto, where our famous worms will perform their unique show for you — the centerpiece of Waitomo Caves. Then, by another route, you’ll be returned here to the landing. We hope you enjoy your visit to the wonder of the Waikato.”

Some wonder. So far Teresa hadn’t seen anything particularly impressive. Much bigger caves were regularly featured on the National Geographic net-zine.

The tourists just ahead of them boarded a boat. There was room remaining at the back, but their guide held out a hand to stop Manella. “You, sir, look just a bit heavy to add here. I’ll take you two in the last one myself.”

As Pedro sniffed indignantly, the guide helped them into the final boat. Then he moved to the bow and cast off. The dim remaining light disappeared behind them as he pulled the ceiling-spa

Teresa tried using biofeedback to speed her adaptation to the dark and found it disconcerting how little training helped. You couldn’t amplify what doesn’t exist.

By now there were no signs of the other boats. They might have drifted over a cliff, for all Teresa knew. Or perhaps some stealthy monster waited just ahead, plucking each group silently and swiftly from their stygian barges.

The waters were chill to her fingertips when she dragged them alongside. They also seemed to have a faint oily quality. Bringing a few drops to her lips, she tasted minerals. It wasn’t unpleasant though. The underground river was slow but clear and fresh. It tasted timeless.

“Some years the water rises too high to let boats pass,” the guide told them in a soft voice. “And during droughts they can be stranded.”

“Are there eyeless fish, down here?” Teresa asked.

The native’s low, disembodied laughter seemed to dance along the sculpted rocks. “Of course! What sort of buried river would this be without such? They live on seeds, pollen, and insect larvae carried down here from ki waho, the outside world. Some of those larvae survive to become flies, which in turn feed…”

Teresa grabbed the gu

She traced the faint scrape of a boot on a sandy bank. Without any sight at all, not even the dark eclipse of Manella in front of her, she sensed only vague movement as their vessel scoured along a limestone verge and then emerged round a corner into a starry night.

Teresa gasped. Stars? Sudden disorientation left her staring at the brilliant vault overhead, amazed.

But it was early afternoon when we arrived. How ?

Automatically, she sought her friends, the familiar constellations, and recognized none of them. Everything had changed! It was as if she’d passed through some science fictional device, to a world in some distant galaxy. The swirl of stellar clusters arced overhead in vast, regal, and totally alien splendor.

Teresa blinked, suffering from acuity of senses. Hearing told her she was underground. Her internal gyroscope said she was less than two kilometers from the car. And yet the clinquant stars screamed of open sky. She shook her head. Wrong. Wrong. Readjust. Don’t make assumptions!

All this happened in a narrow instant, the time it took for her to notice that every one of these “stars” shone the same exact shade of bright green. In half a second Teresa settled the sensory clash, seeing how this artful hoax was perpetrated.

The boat rocked as a figure occulted the false constellations, stepping back into the bow. The guide’s silhouette eclipsed bright pinpoints as he hauled away at a line of blackness overhead. “Our cave worms make their homes along the roof,” his voice echoed softly. “They produce a phosphorescence that lures newly hatched flies and other insects whose eggs and larvae were swept here from the outside world. The bright spots lead those insects not outside, not back into Te Ao-marama, but onto sticky snares.”

Something was wrong. Teresa sat forward. She whispered. “Pedro, his voice…”

With unca

Now she felt sheepish for even momentarily mistaking the lights overhead for stars. Their slow passage let her estimate parallax… ranging from one and a half to three meters above them. She’ could, in fact, follow the rough contours of the ceiling now. Anyway, there was no twinkle from atmospheric distortion. Some of the “stars” were, in fact, large oblong shapes.

Still… She blinked, and suddenly rationalization departed once more. For another thrilling moment Teresa purposely enjoyed the illusion again, looking out on an alien sky, on the fringes of some strange spiral arm with fields of verdant suns — the mysterious night glitter of a faraway frontier.

Their guide’s shadow was the black outline of a nebula. The nebula moved. So, she suddenly noticed, did a regular, straight boundary. A rectangular blackness, free of green, passed over them as if demarking a gate. Soon Teresa heard a low rumble of motors and sensed a barrier roll behind them. The emerald starscape vanished.

“Now, if you’ll please cover your eyes,” the shadow said. She felt Manella move to comply, but only shaded hers. To close them completely would demand too much trust.

A sharp glow suddenly grew ahead of them. Perhaps it was only a dim lamp, but the glare felt intense enough to hurt her dark-adapted retinas. It quickly drove out all remaining trace of the worm phosphors. Teresa bade them farewell regretfully.

The boat bumped once more and stopped. “Come this way please,” the voice told them. She felt a touch on her arm and Teresa let herself be led, blinking, out of the swaying craft. Her eyes tearing somewhat from the brightness, she had to squint past rays of diffraction to see who had replaced their original guide. It was a brown-haired man, lightly freckled, who clearly owned no Polynesian ancestry at all. Right now he regarded Pedro with an expression she couldn’t read, but obviously carrying strong emotion.

“Hello, Manella,” he said, apparently making an effort to be polite.

It was Teresa’s first chance to scrutinize Alex Lustig in person. In photographs he had appeared distant, distracted, and some of that quality was present. But now she thought she perceived something else as well, possibly the expression of one who has sought strangeness, and found much more than he had ever bargained for.

Pedro used a kerchief to wipe his eyes. “Hello yourself, Lustig. Thanks for seeing us. Now, I hope you have a good explanation for what you’ve been up to?”

Here they were deep underground, out of contact with any of their own people or, in fact, any legal authority — and sure enough, old Pedro was slipping right back into the role of paternal authority figure.

“As you wish.” Alex Lustig nodded, apparently un-fazed. “If you two will follow me, I’ll tell you everything. But I warn you, it will be hard to believe.”

Of course Pedro wouldn’t let someone else get the last word in, even with a line like that.

“From you, my boy, I expect no less than the completely preposterous and utterly calamitous.”

An hour later Teresa wondered why she only felt anesthetized, when she really ought to loathe the man. Even if he hadn’t made the monster eating away at the Earth’s heart, he was still the one who had brought this thing to her attention.

Then there was his role in triggering the burst of coherent gravity waves that drove Jason and nine others on their one-way journey to the stars. That, too, should be reason enough to despise Alex Lustig. And yet the only emotions she felt capable of right now were more immediate ones… such as the wry pleasure of seeing Pedro Manella for the first time at a loss for words.