Hyperthought (17 page)

With shaking legs, I stood up on the narrow shelf and tried to hoist Jin’s unconscious body over my shoulder. Wouldn’t you know, he picked that moment to wake up in a panic. I suppose he was suffocating. Anyway, he began clawing so violently at the inside of the fabriglass bag that he broke out of my grip and fell into the liquid. I couldn’t see through the darkness, but I heard splashing, so I dove in and swam for him.

Fabriglass is tough material. You need a diamond blade to cut it—or maybe just a meta-surge of adrenaline. By the time I reached him, Jin had managed to tear a rip in the bag, and it was filling fast with liquid and sinking.

“Jin, relax! Stop kicking!”

He didn’t hear me. When he sank below the surface, I dove with him, trying by feel alone to free him from the lethal bag. I felt his hands moving. With unbelievable strength, he tore the rip wider and wider till he’d rent the bag from one end to the other. Then he shed it like an old skin, and we kicked to the surface. He tore the helmet off with so much force, I heard the gasket rip. And I heard him sucking great gulps of air.

“Hil—hil—” he spluttered unintelligibly.

“Jin,” I panted, touching him in the darkness to make sure he was there. He shook himself and treaded the fluid with steady, powerful kicks.

“Hilarious!” he yelled at the top of his voice. And then he began to laugh.

THE BLACK TIDE
surged around us, lifting us higher, and the walls echoed with Jin’s laughter. “This way, pet. We’ll cross this river. There’s a bridge. And beyond that, a chamber.”

“What? You can see in the dark?”

“I hear it,” he shouted, still laughing. “Jolie, I hear everything!”

“You can hear a bridge?” I’d browsed video about ancient bats navigating through dark caves. “You mean like sonar?”

Jin laughed even louder. He was swimming away from me. I heard long measured strokes. He seemed to have recovered from his paralysis. Quickly, I followed in his wake.

The surging liquid thrust me bodily against a large outcropping. Its surface was slick and wet and hard to grasp. I felt Jin’s hand gripping my upper arm. In one easy motion, he hauled me up out of the fluid and set me on my feet. “The bridge,” he said. His strength seemed superhuman, and yet as I bumped against him in the dark, I felt his wasted limbs and skeletal torso. He hadn’t miraculously sprouted muscles. What could have produced such a physical change in him?

“Stay close to me, pet. The footing’s precarious. This bridge is very old.” He snatched the collar of my uniform just as I lost my balance. “Wonderful!” he said. “We must get to the chamber. It’s coming clearer by the second.”

I clung to him on the greasy, wet structure he called a bridge. The surface felt like gelatin, only it seemed to be creeping around my feet like something alive. I couldn’t find traction. How could he see where to stand? I asked, “What’s coming clearer, Jin?”

“You worry so much, pet,” he answered with wry amusement. His soft Pacific accent touched me to the quick. He sounded like himself again. He said, “Take my arm. I can read your thoughts. I can hear the cells in your body. They make a sort of chittering. The sensations are coming from everywhere. This is amazing!” Then he let out an exuberant whooping laugh. “Hoo-hoo-hoo!”

About then, we both slipped and fell in a sprawling heap together, and my fingers touched down onto the viscous oozy surface. Jin hooted again like a delighted lunatic. “Forgive me, pet. This is hard to get used to. I need time to adjust.”

“Jin, stop it.” I grabbed his shoulders and shook him. This “bridge,” as he called it, terrified me. I couldn’t see a thing. The dark was so thick, it seemed as if the very fabric of space were closing in on us. Only the fluid gurgling below gave me a sense of dimension. That and the warmth of Jin’s body. His skin felt hot to the touch. I clung to him.

“That base note I was hearing before,” he said, “it’s fracturing.”

“Huh?” I didn’t have an inkling what he meant.

“Noise. Feedback. It’s like a scream. I have to find the patterns. This is—not what I expected.”

A shiver ran up the back of my neck. “Jin, what are you talking about?” I tugged at his arms, trying to get his attention and bring him back to the present.

In response, he sprang to his feet and hauled me up so fast, my bream caught in my throat. “You’re right, Jolie. This air is filled with toxins. Come on. Let’s cross the bridge. I need to reach that chamber.”

He grasped me around my middle and lifted me off my feet like a package. “Chemicals,” he said, sauntering through the darkness. “You’re wondering where I get my strength. Acetylcholine, adenosine triphosphate, adrenaline, a whole alphabet of brain chemicals. Ha. I can name them all if you like. I just realized I control their manufacture now.”

Without warning, he started sprinting along the bridge. I locked my arms around his waist, totally disoriented. He leaped into the air, and it seemed as if we’d never touch down, but he landed perfectly on one foot and kept running. “This is marvelous,” he shouted. “Hoo-hoo! I’m in conscious control of my entire brain. I can do anything!”

“Jin, slow down!” I pleaded, bouncing along on his hip.

“You want light, pet? You want to see? Certainly.”

I sensed a faint rosy glow. After hours in pitch-darkness, the light came as a shock, and for an instant, my mind reeled trying to comprehend where it came from. Jin still held my waist in the crook of his elbow, so my perspective was way off kilter. I whipped my head around to locate the light source. The glow was radiating from Jin’s forehead! Gradually, his whole face grew luminous. Sacred Angels of Physics!

“See what I can do?” He grinned like a goblin. “I can tune my brain’s energy to visible wavelengths. This is fun!”

“Stop it! Please!”

“Ah, you’re crying. Sweet little savage. Your fear rings in my head. Please don’t be upset.” The glow radiating from his face subsided, but after that, it never completely disappeared. “We’re nearly there, Jolie. Hold on.”

“There? Where?”

Jin loped on across the narrow slippery bridge. In the spectral glow, the walls around us sweated and glistened, and when I looked down, I saw the bridge’s surface ripple with shades of gray, like colorless rainbows gliding through an oil slick. The river of gurgling fluid lay far, far below. Abruptly, Jin halted and set me on my feet.

His forehead grew more luminous, and I saw him wince and press his temples. “That awful static. It’s the Net! The signals are full of cross-talk and echoes. Rumors. Gossip. Cyclones of feedback corrupting the code. No wonder people get confused. I wouldn’t have expected Net beams to penetrate this deep in the Earth.”

“The Net?” I squatted and clung to the bridge so I wouldn’t slip again. “You mean the actual Net? By any chance, can you hear Luc Viollett’s voice?”

“Don’t worry, pet. We’ve crossed the bridge. The chamber’s not far. I sense its resonance. A focal point of energies. That’s where we must go. First, we crawl. Then the chamber. You’re still with me, yes?”

“I’m with you, Jin.”

The structure he insisted on calling a bridge abutted a rough, furrowed wall. I felt it with my hands in the semidarkness but couldn’t find any opening. Jin moved my hands down to the base of the wall, and I felt a whoosh of air rushing from a low horizontal fissure. His face brightened with that eerie flesh-colored light that seemed to issue directly through his skin. He pointed, and I could see the crack running along the base of the wall.

“We’ll go together,” he said, crouching down.

I dropped to my knees beside him. Then he drew my hand to his lips. “La Sauvage. You trust me.”

It was a simple statement, spoken with evident surprise. In answer, I lay down flat on my belly and wriggled into the fissure. The opening was narrow from floor to ceiling, but very very wide in the horizontal plane. Maybe this fissure ran for hundreds of kilometers, an empty gap in the layers of folded Earth. When my eyes adjusted to the thin light radiating from Jin’s forehead, I could see hundreds of stalactites dripping, dry as dust, from the low ceiling. Some were tiny nubs, but others had grown long enough to meet their counterpart stalagmites on the floor below. These reminded me of miniature columns in an ancient gothic hall, except they seemed too spindly to support such a vast roof.

Lying on my belly, I had to muscle my way in with elbows and feet. The sharp little stalagmites chewed through my musketeer uniform like teeth. At least the floor was dry. The seepage that had caused these formations must have turned to dust ages ago. Soon, I felt a blast of wind and turned my face to avoid the flying grit Jin moved in beside me. I could hear the scrabbling noises he made, and that gave me comfort.

Side by side, we pushed through the horizontal fissure for what seemed like hours, wending through the stalactite columns, fighting the stinging headwind that grew stronger as we went. My nose started running, and my eyes streamed tears. I had to use my sleeve as a handkerchief.

The fissure was not table-flat. It rose and fell like the space between two crumpled quilts. Sometimes we climbed almost straight up, and other times we slid headfirst down dusty hillocks. Occasionally the ceiling height increased a little—though never enough to let us crawl on hands and knees. Twice, the ceiling dropped so low, I had to exhale all the breath from my lungs to squeeze through. Jin wouldn’t have made it if he hadn’t lost so much weight. Ça va, what a place for a surfer girl.

“Can we rest?” I asked, at a point where the ceiling rose a little.

Unaccountably, Jin starting laughing. Soon, his laughter grew hectic, and he spoke through gasps, “Judith’s coming. I can hear her heartbeat.”

Judith Merida! I sucked a breath and scrambled forward, but Jin gripped my wrist. “Relax, Jolie. She’s a long way off. We can rest a while. Judith’s not a threat to us.”

“If she catches you—”

“Jolie, your fear stabs my head. Please calm down.”

He shifted in the narrow space, then held very still. I knew he was listening to something I couldn’t hear. Something real, or just a maniacal song in his brain, how could I know? As quietly as possible, I drew a deep breath and tried to shut down my alarm. Gusts whistled through the fissure, and in the wan light radiating from Jin’s forehead, I saw a tiny needle-shaped stalagmite rising from the floor between my outstretched fingers. It looked like a time-frozen rocket launch. For how many centuries had it been forming? Was I the first to see it? I counted my breaths and waited for my heartbeat to slow, but I couldn’t keep silent forever. “Jin?”

“Yes?” he said with a distracted air. His face had begun to glow brighter. He must have been concentrating very hard.

“There’s something I’ve always wondered about.”

“Yes, angel?” Jin was studying the patterns of nubby stalactites above his head as if he could hear them growing.

I shook his knee to get his attention. “That movie you made that got banned from the Net. What was that about?”

“Movie?” He glanced at me with a puzzled expression. “I’d forgotten it. Why do you care, pet?”

“Curiosity,” I said. “Tell me.”

“It was a documentary. Based on an eleventh-century Javanese poem called ‘Arjunavivaha’.” He touched his tongue to one of the little stalactites and made a wry face.

“But why was it banned?” I persisted.

Jin frowned and blinked his eyes, as if the effort to remember troubled him. Then he recited in a singsong chant, “There was once a coastal kingdom, long ago in Java. Green trees waved in gentle breezes. And blue ocean broke on white sand. It could have been paradise.”

He paused so long, I had to prompt him. “So then one day…?”

With a brief smile, he continued. “Then one day, Sumatran pirates murdered the Javanese king and enslaved the people. The king’s son-in-law escaped into the jungle, where he lived with vagabonds and searched for understanding of Krishna’s plan. His name was Prince Airlangga.” Jin winked at me when he mentioned that name. Then he broke off a bit of the stalactite and rolled it between his fingers. “Instead of enlightenment though, Airlangga found the jungle was full of hunger and filth and disease. So in frustration, he took up arms to drive the Sumatrans away by force. But on the day Airlangga went to war, he recognized one of the pirates as his own father. And he couldn’t fight.”

Jin crushed the bit of stone between his fingers. I watched the dust sift to the floor. He seemed lost in thought.

“But that wasn’t the end,” I said, hopefully.

As if he’d forgotten my presence, Jin glanced at me in surprise. “No, it wasn’t. The story goes that the prince prayed for guidance, and the great god Krishna revealed himself in a vision. Krishna said, ‘Rise, Airlangga. Take back my kingdom, and make my people safe’.”

“So he did,” I said. “Airlangga drove the pirates away.”

“Yes. And afterward, he ruled Java in peace for 30 years. That part is historically true. When he died, the Javanese people laid him to rest at Belahan, under a carving of Vishnu, the preserver of the universe.”

Belahan. I remembered that name. Jin had asked me about the carvings of Belahan on the very first day we met.

“I get it. You’re Prince Airlangga, and your father’s the Sumatran priate. It’s one of those political flicks.”

Jin’s bitter laughter echoed in the narrow space. “I never had a chance to finish the last scene. But I still have my working tapes. They’re stored in a public mailbox at Tokyo Data. Someday, a hacker will stumble onto them, and then we’ll see.”

I laid my cheek flat on the stone floor and snuffled dust. Poor Jin.

Abruptly his laughter choked off, and his next words came out more sober. “Jolie, you pity me.”

“Uh…”

“You think my obsession with my father is pitiable.” He remained silent a moment. The light in his face flickered like a candle. Then he drew me into his arms. “Come here, pet. It’s interesting, seeing myself through another person’s thoughts. Light refracted through a new kind of prism.” His fingers moved steadily through my hair, but he was talking to himself. “I know it’s a waste of time to care what Father thinks about me. The truth is, he doesn’t think about me at all.”