Schismatrix plus - Bruce Sterling [114]
He was attacked. The enemy was on him. He felt a sudden ghastly rending as claws tore into him from above, the alien pain garbled in translation, cramming his brain with black nausea and dread. He flopped in death-stricken convulsion, his face slid apart in a nightmare extrusion of razored mandibles, and he caught a leg and sheared it off at the joint; he smelled hot hunger and pain and the bright hot radiance of his own juices bursting, and then the cold, the seeping, the bright spark fading to become one with the old stone and the age and the dark....
The exterior microphones of his helmet caught Constantine's voice and fed it through his nerves. "Abelard."
Lindsay's throat was rull of rust. "I hear you."
"You're alive?"
The nerve block in his neck half dissolved and he felt his own body, as insubstantial as warm gas. He groped for the strip of dermadisks beside his hand: the perforated plastic felt as thin as ribbon. He peeled off another disk with his fingers and pressed it raggedly against the base of his thumb.
"We must try again."
"What did you see, Abelard? I must know."
"Halls. Walls. Dark stones."
"And gulfs? Black gulfs of nothing, bigger than God?"
"I can't talk." The other dose was hitting him, language was collapsing, a tangle of irrelevant assumptions shattered by sudden doubt, wads of grammar mashed beneath the impact of the drug. "Again."
He was back. He could feel the enemy now, sense his presence as a weak distant tingling. The light was clearer, gigantic radiant washes seeping through masses of stone so rotten with age that they were thin as cloth. Fastidiously, he ran his foreclaws through the polyps around his mouth, cleansing them of damp grime. He felt a sense of hunger so overwhelming that the scales equalized, and he realized that the urge to live and kill was as huge as the vaults around him.
He found the enemy crouched within a cul-de-sac between a harsh decaying bridge and its supporting beams. He smelled the fear.
The enemy's position was wrong. The enemy clung to the wall in a false perspective, perceiving the endless horizon as a shattering abyss. The gulf below was an eternal one, a chaos of walls, chambers, landings, self-replicating, built from nothing, a terrifying ramification of infinity. He attacked, biting deep into the back plates, the taste of hot ooze driving him into frenzy. The enemy slashed back, digging, pushing, pale claws scraping the rock. His jaws ripped free from the enemy's back. The enemy struggled to push him away, to shove him backward into the horizon. For a moment he was gripped by the enemy's own perspective. He knew suddenly that if he fell he would fall forever. Into the abyss, plunging into his own terror and defeat, endlessly, through the self-spinning labyrinth, mind frozen in boundless anguish, a maze of unending experience, unending fright, implacable walls, halls, steps, ramps, crypts, vaults, passages, always icy, always out of reach.
He skidded back. The enemy was desperate, scrabbling convulsively, galvanized with pain. His own claws were slipping. The stone was rejecting him, becoming slicker. Suddenly the breakthrough came, and he saw the world for what it was. His claws slid in, then, with phantom ease, stone slipping aside like smoke.
Then he was anchored. The enemy pushed at him helplessly, uselessly. He tasted the sudden gush of despair as the enemy turned to