Dante’s Equation

She did desire him; that was not the issue. It was… what? Her, her own body, her own self. She was afraid of… of not being attractive enough, of being foolish in her intimacy, of being absurd. How could she bear that? Better not to let him get close at all.

And she finally saw that for what it was: a very old defense mechanism. When, she wondered, had she decided she was unlovable? Decided rejection was so inevitable it was better not to try?

“This is ridiculous,” she said, standing up. When Nate deigned to return they could discuss it like rational human beings. She was willing to… to make concessions, even if the mere thought turned her to jelly. Yes. Okay. Yes. Fine!

Until then, she was going to go see those damned ante

The walk took several hours. The round dome was smaller than that of the spaceport, but it had the same thick walls. There was the suction sound of a breaking seal as she tugged the doors open. Inside, endless branching corridors were labeled at the top in numbers, probably coordinates. The individual rooms were comprised of enormous panels in rows like bookshelves, panels with millions of tiny light indicators, most of them dark. This was the City’s power grid.

The place was empty. She thought about searching for the grid’s control room, to try to learn more about their power source, but she didn’t want to spend hours in here, not alone. Besides, what had really drawn her was the ante

The ante

Jill fingered them, as if she could tell time by the density of the layers. Old. How old? She had no idea. But she had the feeling it was like finding ancient pyramids in the middle of a modern city.

This place was a riddle, but it was not what she’d been hoping for. If this civilization was manipulating the wave, this kind of ante

She had walked quite a ways into the ante

The bunker, too, looked like it hadn’t been used in years. At the bottom of the stairs was a door. Did she dare? Was there a reason to? She sighed. What she wanted was to go back to the apartment and see if Nate was there. But she was here and it had been a long walk. She might as well get her money’s worth.

She went down the steep well of a staircase and felt the air grow chill. The door at the bottom looked heavy and old. It did not open automatically. She put her fingers experimentally into a narrow slot and found a latch. The door sprang inward.

Inside, steep stairs continued down and down. A cool tu

She began descending, one hand checking her balance against the wall.

The stairs went on and on for a long time. At several points she almost turned around, but in the end she went down the steps because they were there, because the bottom, by definition, had to exist. She felt as though she was descending into the underworld. There was a metallic smell, like the reek of a subway system.

The stairs leveled out, growing narrower and narrower. Then there were no more stairs.

She stepped out into a vast underground complex. It was so cavernous, the distant sides were lost in darkness. It had to be vast because it had been built to house a machine, a machine with long, curving arms that stretched for miles. Its scale reminded her of a superconductor, but it wasn’t a superconductor. No, she knew what it was: it was a generator, a wave generator. She had found what she’d been looking for.

She stood and admired it, heart tripping in her chest, appreciating its scale, appreciating its very existence. The ante

But this machine was as ancient as the ante

She found a door in one of the curved walls—a door with a handle not very much different from those on Earth. She pulled on it—it gave a little, but it was stuck from neglect. She tugged and tugged, slowly gaining half inch by half inch.

Inside the machine, the corridors were so dark she had to grope her way along. With some trepidation she moved away from the door, unwilling to give up now. She felt chairs and walls and knobby instruments. She thought she could make out a faint glow up ahead, and she stumbled toward it.

The glow, up close, was coming from a screen set in a disarray of wires and switches, a screen that looked very much like a computer or a television screen. There was a button underneath the screen and she touched it. The glow was replaced by a video recording of a man. It wasn’t a man exactly, but it was humanoid and closer to her own species than the aliens were. The translator in her ear clicked into action, deciphering his words.

He was explaining the use of the machine. His voice was low-pitched and slow and there was something wrong with him. There was something in his voice, in the wildness of his large, swimmy eyes. But she couldn’t quite make out what he was saying about the machine because he was repeating himself. He kept talking about “only wanting to help” and the dead, the dead, the dead.

The screen switched to images of bloody carnage in the desert sun, of red-soaked sand and fragments of limbs and unidentifiable body parts, of a city in ruins, smoldering, parts of it oddly warped and distorted. In one surreal image the camera pa

Explosion, Jill thought, her mind and heart sickening. It was the only thing that came to mind. But where was this city and who were these people? Why were these images here, in the bowels of this machine, in the subterranean vaults of this place?