The Jewels of Aptor Part 29

Dunderhead had an annoying habit of re-setting his clock every evening making sure that the red second hand was still sweeping away the minutes. (In her plans for this morning she had catalogued his every habitual action, and had observed this one for three nights running, hanging upside down from the bulky stone portcullis above and outside his window.)

Tugging on the string, she saw it leap from the crevices into a straight line and then lift from the floor as she drew it tauter, and then go slack as the plug blipped quietly onto the floor.

Next she pulled the string again until the slack left and raised her end a few inches from the floor. With her free hand now she gave the string a small twit and watched the vibration run up and down the string twice.

The knot's invention was an ingenuous one. At the vibration, two opposed loops shook away from a third, and a four millimeter length of rubber band that had been sewn in tautened and released a fourth loop from around a small length of number four gauge wire with a holding tonsure of three quarters of a gram, and the opposing vibration returning up the thread loosed a similar apparatus on the other side of the plug. The knot fell away, and she wound it quickly around her hand. She stood up, closed the door, and the oiled lock was perfectly silent. The door k.n.o.b was just the slightest bit greasy, she noted. Careless.

Back in her room, it was standing on the table. Sunlight from the high window fell red across the board. It was very early in the morning. She took the parts of the motor up in her hands. "I guess we try you out today? No?" She answered herself, "Yes." Finally she put the parts in the paper bag, strode out of the room, and slammed the ... whirled around and caught it once more. "Gnnnnnnn," she said. "Do you want to get caught?" For the second time she answered herself, "Yes. And remember that too. Or you'll never get through it."

As she walked down the hall, she heard through one of the windows the chirp of a blue lizard from the garden. "The sound I wanted to hear,"

she smiled to herself. "A good sign."

Turning into the temple, she started down the side aisle. The great black columns pa.s.sed before her. Something moved between the columns along the other side, swift and indistinct as a bird's shadow. At least she thought she saw something. "Remember," she reminded herself, "you have guilt feelings about this whole thing, and you could very easily be manufacturing delusions to scare yourself out of going through with it."

She went on, pa.s.sed two more columns, and saw it again. "Or," she went on with her monologue, "you could be purposefully ignoring the very obvious fact that there is somebody over there who is going to see you.

So watch it." There were mirrors somewhere in the temple, but they weren't on the opposite wall, so she couldn't be seeing herself. In fact the mirrors were out in the vestibule through which she had come and maybe this other person had come, so maybe it was seeing her as a reflection of ... "Unscramble that syntax," she told herself. "You think like that and you'll never make it."

But there was somebody, with no clothes on (for all practical purposes) sneaking between the pillars. And he had four arms. That made her start to think of something else, but the thought as it arrowed into the past, suddenly got deflected, turned completely about, and jammed into her brain again, because he was staring directly at her.

_If he starts walking toward me_, she thought, _I'm going to be scared out of my ears. So I better start walking toward him. Besides, I want to see what he looks like._ She started out from the columns. Glancing quickly both ways, she saw that the temple was deserted save for them.

_He's a kid_, she thought, three quarters of the way across. _My age_, she added, and again a foreign thought attempted to intrude itself on her but never made it, because he was coming toward her now. At last he stopped before her, silent, muscles like tight wire under the brown skin, black hair ma.s.sing low on his forehead, his eyes deep beneath the black shrub of brows.

She gulped and asked him, "What are you doing here? Do you know somebody could catch you in here and get mad as h.e.l.l? I know I couldn't possibly have, but I think I've seen you before some place; if somebody comes along, they might even think you were trying to steal Hama's eye." _I shouldn't have said that_, she thought, _because he moved funny._ "You better get out of here because everybody will be up here in a half an hour for morning services."

At that news, he suddenly darted forward, pa.s.sed her, and sprinted down toward the altar.

"Hey!" she called and ran after him.

Snake vaulted over the bra.s.s altar rail.

"Wait a minute," she called, catching up. "Wait, will you!"

Snake turned as she slung her leg across the bra.s.s bar. "Look, I realize I gave away my hand. But that was only guilt feelings. You gave yours away too, though. And if you don't think you've got guilt feelings, boy, you're crazy."

Snake frowned, tilted his head, and then grinned.

"So we'll help each other see," she said. "You want it too, don't you."

She pointed up to the head of the statue towering above them. "So let's co-operate. I'll get it for a little while. Then you can have it." He was listening, she saw, so she guessed her strategy was working. _Play it by ear now_, she thought. "We'll help each other. Shake on it, huh?"

She stuck out her hand.

All four hands reached forward.

_Whoops_, she thought, _I hope he's not offended._

But the four hands grasped hers, and she added her second to the juncture. "All right," she said. "Come on. Now I had all this figured out last night. And we don't have much time. Let's go around ..." But he walked over to where the stalks of wheat spired from the altar base up through Hama's fist, and grabbed a stalk with the three hands, and hand, over hand, over hand, began to hoist himself up to where the first broad sheets of metal leaves leaned out to form a small platform. At first his dirty feet swung out frog-like, but then he caught the stem with his toes and at last hoisted himself to the front and looked down at her.

"I can't climb up there," she said, "I don't have your elevation power."

Snake looked down and shrugged.

"Oh d.a.m.n," she said. "I'll do it my way." She ran across the altar to the great foot of the statue. Sitting cross-legged, Hama's foot was on his side. Using the ridges made by the toes as steps, she clammered up to the dark bulge of the deity's G.o.dlike bunion. She made her way across the ankle, up the slanting shin, back down the black thigh, until she stood at the crevice where the leg and torso met.

Out beyond the great knee, Snake regarded her from his perch in the groin of yellow leaf. They were about equal height.

"Yoo-hoo," she waved. "Meet you at the clavicle." Then she stuck her tongue out. The bulges in the belly of the G.o.d made a treacherous ledge along which she inched until she arrived at the cavernous naval, leaving wet handprints on the black stone.

The G.o.d's belly b.u.t.ton from this intimate distance revealed itself as a circular door about five feet in diameter and controlled by a combination lock. She missed the first number twice, dried her hands off, and began again. According to the plans in the main safe of the temple (on which she had first practiced combination breaking) there was a ladder behind this door which led up into the statue. She remembered it clearly; and saved her life by doing so.

Because when she caught the second number, reversed the direction and felt the telltale click of the third, she pulled on the handle and was almost pushed from the ledge by the swinging circular door. She grabbed at a handle that she hardly saw on the door's inside, just as the stone slipped from beneath her feet. Then she was hanging five feet out in the air over the sacred groin some fifty feet below.

The first thing she tried, after closing her eyes and mumbling a few laws of motion, was to swing the door to. When she swung out, however, the door swung closed; and when she swung in, the door swung opened.

After a while, she just hung. She gave small thanks that she had dried her hands. When her arms began to ache, she wished that she hadn't, because then it would be over by now. She went over what she knew about taking judo falls.

Then the door swung closed, and someone grabbed her around the waist.

She didn't open her eyes, but felt her body pressed against the tilting stone. Her arms fell tingling to her sides. The ligaments flamed with pain. Then the pain dulled to throbbing, and she opened her eyes. "How the h.e.l.l did you get down here?" she asked Snake. With his help she staggered through the open door and stopped to rub her arms. "How did you know about the ladder?"

They were standing in the shaft now, with the ladder beside them running up into the darkness.

He looked at her with a puzzled expression.

"What is it?" she asked. "Oh, I'll be able to climb up there, never you worry. Hey, can you speak?"

Snake shook his head.

"Oh," she said. Something started at the edge of her mind again, a picture of something unpleasant. Snake had started up the ladder, which he had come down so quickly a minute ago. She glanced out the door, saw that the temple was empty, pulled the door to, and followed.

They ascended into complete darkness. Her arms were beginning to ache again, just slightly. She reached up for the next rung, and found it in its proper place. Then the next. And then again the next.

She started counting steps now, and when seventy-four, seventy-five, and seventy-six dropped below her, there was a missing rung. She reached above it, but there was none. She ran her hand up the edge of the ladder and found that it suddenly curved into the wall. "Hey, you," she said in the darkness.

Something touched her waist. "Gnnnnnggggg," she said. "Don't _do_ that."

It touched her on the leg, took hold of her ankle, and pulled. "Watch out," she said.

It pulled again. She raised her foot, and it was tugged sideways a good foot and a half and set on solid flooring. Then a hand (her foot was not released) took her arm, and another held her waist, and tugged. She stiffened for one instant before she remembered the number of limbs her companion had. Then she came off the ladder, sideways into the dark, afraid to put her other foot down lest she step headlong into the seventy-five foot plus shaft.

But he tugged again, and in losing her balance, her foot came down on cool, solid stone. Holding her arm now, he led her along the tunnel.

They pa.s.sed into a steep incline. Now down the upper arm, she recalled.

"I feel like Eurydice," she said aloud.

_You ... funny ..._ an echoing voice sounded in her skull.

"Hey," she said. "What was that?" But the voice was silent. The wall turned abruptly and the floor leveled out. They were in a section of the pa.s.sage now that corresponded roughly to the statue's radial artery. At the wrist, there was a light. They mounted a stairway, came out a trap door, and found themselves standing high in the temple. Below them the great room spread, vastly deep, and still empty. Beside them, the stems of the bronze wheat stalks rose up through the fist and spired another fifty feet before breaking into cl.u.s.ters of golden grain and leaves.

Across from them, over the dark curve of Gargantuan chest, in the statue's other hand, the shaft of the scythe leaned away into shadow.

"Look," she said. "You follow me now." She started back along the top of the forearm and then began the tedious climb over the rippling biceps, till at last they reached the broad shoulder. They walked across the hollow above the collar bone until they stood just below the great scooping sh.e.l.l of the ear.

She took the paper bag she had stuffed into her belt, tied one end of the string around the neck, and then, holding the other, she heaved the bag up and over the ear. She got the other end of the string, knotted it as high as she could reach, and gave it a tug. "I hope this works," she said. "I had it all figured out yesterday. The tensile strength of this stuff is about two hundred and fifty pounds, which ought to do for you and me." She planted her foot on the swell of the neck tendon, and in seven leaps she made it to the lobe of the ear. She swung around into the hollow, using the frontal wing as a pivot. Crouching in the hollow trumpet, she looked down at Snake. "Come up," she said. "Hurry up."

Snake joined her a moment later.