Madame and the two Hags had chosen to sit in the rear of the inflatable boat. Simon and Calvy and the three remaining Haggers sat two on each side and one in front. They were so busy listening to the silence that they did not speak at all, and they floated on the small river for what seemed to them some considerable time before the tunnel narrowed, the water began to rush, and they found themselves plunging through the same narrow throat of stone the prior expedition had traversed, into the same larger river and across it, where the boat ricocheted violently off the tunnel wall.

"I suppose we're sure everyone went this way," murmured D'Jevier, as the Haggers and Calvy g'Valdet tried to paddle the boat back into the center of the stream.

"We saw their tracks on the sand. We saw the impressions made by at least two boats," muttered Calvy, fighting his desire to curse at the Haggers, who persisted in paddling against one another's efforts so that the clumsy boat spun lazily around as the current caught it.

"Let me," said Madame, moving to the place across the boat from Calvy and taking the oar from the Hagger there. "Watch me," she said to him. "It is necessary to coordinate the strokes or we go nowhere."

"Now where did you pick that up?" said Calvy in an interested tone.

"My friends and I do a bit of wilderness walking," said Madame, concentrating on her paddling. "And canoeing."

Among Simon, Madame, and Calvy, they managed to turn the boat so that it faced downstream and keep it there with only occasional dips of the paddles. When Madame thought the Haggers had the idea, she gave up her paddle and returned to the company of the Hags.

"Have you met the Questioner?" Calvy asked over his shoulder.

"We have," said Onsofruct. "A very civil contraption."

"Civil on the outside, but she wasn't fooled," said D'Jevier. "She knew something. Maybe everything. I thought we might sidetrack her onto the threat posed by the volcanoes, but she made it clear she knew what we were up to."

"You mean the Timmys?" Calvy asked.

"Oh, definitely the Timmys," D'Jevier acknowledged. "She had these two young Earthers with her, very open-faced and so milky-lipped that one might think them moments from mama's breast, but they turned out to be quite perceptive. I should have expected that. She'd scarcely have brought them, otherwise."

"How do you read all this, Madame?" Calvy asked over his shoulder. "This current journey of ours?"

Madame said, "How can we read it? The Timmys took the Questioner's people, her Earther aides went after them, then Questioner and two pressed men became third in line. Why the Timmys took the first ones ..." She shrugged invisibly. "Who knows?"

"I've been doing some research," Calvy persisted. "Our records since we've been on Newholme show that episodes of vulcanism increase during lunar conjunctions. Multiple conjunctions are usually accompanied by some very big quakes. If the Timmys were here before we were (and I think we have to accept that they were), then they've evolved under conditions of periodic vulcanism and presumably would know how to deal with it ... unless this time is really different from any former time."

"As to that," said Onsofruct, "we don't know about all possible former times. We've only been here a few hundred years."

Calvy said, "We don't know, but the planet does. There's a gravelly cliff west of Naibah that sheds a few feet of itself every time we have a quake. Each of the falls has time to weather and change color before it gets covered by the next layer. When you drill into the deposit, you get a nicely striped core, one you can read like tree rings. So, I had a few of my supernumes take some really deep core samples, as deep as we can get with the equipment we have."

"And?" queried D'Jevier. "What did you find?"

"We got back about five thousand years. If we had better equipment, we could go deeper and probably read up to hundreds of thousands, but during those five thousand years, at least, we find thick deposits every seven or eight hundred years, but the gravel that's falling now is already thicker than the thickest previous layer."

"You didn't tell us that?" said D'Jevier. "You didn't say a word about it."

"My people finished up the report last night," Calvy responded mildly. "I've not had a chance to tell anyone. It does make me wonder whether we colonists have destroyed or weakened some vital link in this planet's ecology."

"But we haven't!" Onsofruct objected.

Calvy gave her a grin over his shoulder, saying, "Well, that's true to form. If we have, we could hardly admit it to ourselves if we had, could we? Or to anyone else?"

"But to allege such a thing ..." Her voice trailed away.

"It's only an inference, Ma'am." He paused in his paddling, then said firmly, "Still, it can't be discounted without some proof to the contrary. How do we know what the first settlers did? Why were they wiped out, as we presume they were? Was it because they had committed some grave offense?"

Onsofruct opened her mouth to retort, more out of habitual response to any male criticism than from real conviction of the innocence of the first settlers. Her words were stopped by a sound they all heard in the same instant: a grating sound, quite distant, but coming nearer and growing louder.

They fell silent. Calvy, Simon, and the Haggers dipped their paddles, pushing the boat along a little faster than the water, then faster yet, as though to escape.

"Shhh," said Madame, leaning forward. "If it already knows we're here, we can't outrun it. If it doesn't know, paddling may attract it."

"It?" demanded Simon, glancing at her over his shoulder, the whites of his eyes gleaming.

"The sound-maker. Let us go softly."

The sound came from downriver, getting louder with each moment until it reached a screaming crescendo and abruptly stopped. The reverberations died away. Silence returned. The river curved slightly; they floated around the bend and abruptly b.u.mped into a weir set across the river.

"What in the name of seven devils?" murmured Calvy.

D'Jevier turned on a light and examined the weir. Not rock. Something else. Something smooth and rubbery that gave slightly when she pressed it with her fist. To their right a pebbly beach had been deposited along a shelving recess in the tunnel wall, and it showed the mark of two boats and footprints that led back toward crevices in the tunnel wall.

"They were here," said Onsofrunct. "There's the treadmark of the Questioner, and the footprints of two people."

They paddled the boat to sh.o.r.e, got out and pulled it up onto the pebbles where they stood, shining their lights on a patch of finer sand.

"Not only two people," said Simon. "Other things, too."

"Timmys?" asked Onsofruct.

"That size, at least," said Madame. She turned her light onto the small area around them. A rocky wall, a few fallen chunks of that wall, no openings that they could see-that they could ... see.

"That wasn't there before," whispered one Hagger to another, pointing.

They all looked. An opening. Too small to worry about. They looked away, looked back. Perhaps not that small. Looked away, looked back.

"It's opening," said D'Jevier in a shocked voice. "The rock is opening!"

It was opening slowly, a vertical slit, perhaps as high as their boat was wide. It made a grating sound as it went on opening, wider and wider, displaying a gleaming orb inside which swiveled in their direction. An eye, with a vertical pupil. And another slit opening, a much wider horizontal one, below. A mouth.

From which, after some time-while they all froze in place, scarcely breathing-came a voice like rocks grinding together.

"I am sent by Bofusdiaga, burrower of walls, singer of the sun, death defier, savior of Quaggima. I am sent by him who alloys and thereby preserves. I have come to take you to the Fauxi-dizalonz."

Onsofruct sagged. Calvy and Madame caught her as she crumpled to the ground.

The mouth opened again. "Terror is inappropriate. Proper emotion is grat.i.tude. I am tunneler. My way is much less tiring than the way of the Pillared Sea. Besides, many of your people are already there."

D'Jevier cleared her throat several times, managing to get the words out on the third try. "We're searching for ... ah, some others who have come this way...."

"First group, eight strange people belonging to Questioner. They are already at Fauxi-dizalonz arguing with one another. Second group, two dancers, they are now in swimmer, arguing with Timmys about mothers and fathers. Soon they will be at Fauxi-dizalonz. Third group: Mouchidi, Ornery, and the Questioner, they are far ahead on the Pillared Sea, experiencing the Quaggima voyage, and arguing with the Corojum."

"Mouche!" cried Madame. "Mouche also?"

"So I have said. You are fifth group. If we go same way, would not catch them in time."

"Who's the fourth group?" demanded Calvy.

"The jongau." The messenger spat the words in a hail of gravel. "Many jongau. Large and small, all horrid, they are going on the surface, and they are getting near to the sacred place."

"The jongau," said Madame. "Being?"

"That Ashes. Those sons of Ashes. All those bent ones. They will be there, too, and I have come to take you where you can meet them."

The voice made Madame think of walking on scree, a gravelly crunch, rattle, and slide. Was this irritation? Or mere impatience? "We are grateful," she said loudly.

The mouth turned up its corners, dislodging small boulders in the process. "At least you are not arguing! Mankind is a very arguing species! Bring your belongings," it said, then opened its mouth to display two complicated, bellowslike structures on either side and between them, access to a dry, sandy-floored s.p.a.ce.

"I think it means we should go in," said Calvy, a slight tremor in his voice. "I presume it knows we are easily crushed."

The mouth waited. "After you," said Simon politely, needing two tries to get it out.

Madame pressed her lips tightly together, took a deep breath, lifted her pack from the boat and walked into the creature's mouth. After a long moment, D'Jevier and Onsofruct did likewise.

Simon looked after them, doubtfully.

"This is why women rule this world," Calvy observed. "We men can't make up our minds."

"I'm going, I'm going," said Simon, taking up his pack. "What about the Haggers?"

The Haggers were out in the river, having already waded some distance along the edge in the direction they had come.

Calvy called, "Farewell. Don't forget to turn off into the little stream when you get there."

They splashed more rapidly away, without replying. Calvy picked up his own pack and one of theirs; Simon took another; together they stepped into the mouth of Bofusdiaga's messenger.

52.

Leggers, Tunnelers, and a.s.sorted Traffic.

Ashes rode westward like a man possessed by a dream, waking occasionally into a fit of anger, then falling into his reverie once more. His sons trailed behind him, lagging as much as they could without stirring him into a rage, whispering together so he would not hear them, for whenever he heard them he demanded to know what they were saying, what they were thinking, what insurgency they were planning.

"You'll do what I tell you," he said, not once but a dozen times when he came to himself. "You know what's good for you, you'll do what I tell you."

"He's got to have somebody to boss around," whispered Bane. "If we'd been girls, like he planned, he'd have been just the same with them, made them do whatever he wanted. He'd have hitched them up to Mooly, prob'ly. Or one of those others."

"I can't figure why Marool took us away from our mama," said Dyre, who'd been puzzling over this for the better part of a day. "He said she was jealous, but she didn't seem jealous over men. She had plenty of men. Why'd he want her dead? Specially, since she couldn't smell him. Seems like he'd have rather kidnapped her, brought her out here to keep around. She wasn't old. Maybe she'd have had a daughter for him."

"Other thing," mused Bane. "He never said how our mama died, did he?"

"Never said what her name was, nothin'."

"Somethin' else. There's this pond he talks about. So, you go in there, you can't die, right? So, how come when our mama was sick or hurt or whatever, he didn't take her there and fix her?"

Dyre looked crafty. "Maybe he hated her. Maybe he just as soon she died."

"That don't make sense! He wanted children, and he went to all that trouble, why would he let her die?"

"Maybe he couldn't tell her what to do, so he decided he didn't want to bother."

"Maybe Marool was her," said Bane, not thinking what he said, his unconscious prompting him to a truth he immediately recognized and wanted to unsay.

Dyre said nothing. He pretended not to have heard. He did not want to have heard because ... well, because. They'd killed her, was why. And they'd done ... lots of other things. And if she had been, well then, Ashes had lied to them. But if she had been, then why hadn't she known? Why hadn't they known? Why had they grown up in that place near Nehbe, and at Dutter's farm? She hadn't kept them by her, and she should have. If it was so. Which it probably wasn't.

Bane did not repeat himself. What he had said did not bear repeating. Not that it was wrong. Ashes had told them sons of thunder couldn't do wrong so long as they did what they wanted to. Whatever they wanted to do was right. It's just that he should have been told. If what he had said was right, he should have been told. Ashes said people back there on Thor, they killed off a lot of people who didn't believe what they did: mothers, fathers, kids, made no difference. So, it wasn't wrong to have killed her. It was just ... Well, it was the way it happened. There could have been a better way than that.

Late in the afternoon, as the three rode abreast along a wider stretch of the trail, Ashes pointed off into the west at a certain high, ragged line of mountain.

"That's the edge of the chasm," he said.

"How deep?" grunted Bane.

"Well, there's a shallow crater and a deep one. The deep one's maybe five, ten kilometers to the bottom," said Ashes. "Before the pond, we used to have a member of our brotherhood named Maq Bunnari, Bunny the Book, we used to call him because he was always reading. He read everything, he knew anything there was to know about anything. So, just before we left Thor, Bunny was in charge of looking around for a place for us to go. There wasn't a lot of choices in the nearby sectors, but one of them was this place, so Bunny got the geological report, and according to him, the chasm was an 'anomalous feature.' Seems like that the chasm was a two-mouthed volcano to start with, pretty much dead, so the two domes fell in and that made two pot-shaped valleys, right? So, just like it was aiming for the bull's eye, a meteor fell right into the southern valley, and it punched a pretty big hole. The report said there was a h.e.l.l of a big, deep cone-shaped hole down inside that mountain.

"Well, Bunny, he read this and he said there shouldn't be a hole that deep because most of the stuff that blows out of a meteor hole falls right back in. Bunny said if there was this big hole, something besides a meteor did it, and before we settled here, maybe we ought to find out who or what it was. Well, we didn't have time for that, but Bunny wouldn't shut up about it. One night after we'd been here a while, Mooly and Bone, they got aggravated at him calling them stupid for not finding out what made the hole, and one night they beat him up so bad he died."

Ashes barked laughter. "Bunny was right, dead right, it turned out. When those Timmys and their friends took us to the pond, we saw all kinds of things carrying gravel out of that hole and smoothing down the sides. They'd cut them a twisty road back and forth, too, so they could get to the bottom."

"Can we get to the bottom?"

"Oh, we could probl'y get down there all right, they probl'y wouldn't care, but it'd be a waste of time, it's so deep, standing up on that ridge, you can't see the bottom."

"Webwings saw the bottom. He said those Questioner's people was there."

"Webwings only flew to the pond, and that's in the other crater, the shallow one. See, when the meteor fell, it broke the wall between the two, so you got this crater shaped like an eight, and back and forth around the top half you've got this road that goes down to the pond, then you go through the gap to the other crater, and you wind back and forth down to the bottom of that."

"You been there lately?" asked Bane.

Ashes shrugged, shaking his head. "No reason to go. Web flies down to the pond sometimes, partway, anyhow. He says it's real busy down there, lots of critters coming and going. Up until now, I figure, with all that busy going on, no reason for me to get in the middle of it."

"Where's ... where's your old friends? The ones that stayed there."

"Oh, some of 'em in the raggedy edge, up there. See, that's all volcanic up there, full of gas bubble caves. Nice and smooth and round inside, good shelter. That's where old Pete put himself, into a long chain of bubble caves, about halfway down to the pond. Some of the others, they're between here and there. Hughy Huge, he's along the road we're coming to. And Roger the Rock, he's some way ahead."

"How much longer to get there?"

"Not so far, now. Down at the bottom of this hill we come to the road. From here on, we can go right straight there."

"Who built the road?" Bane asked. "Timmys?"