Free Reprisal by Mitchell Smith Page A

through them. She was too frightened to let go of the safety shunt, let its cam engage to halt her.
    She hung frozen instead, gripping the rack with all her strength so the rope, as friction took hold, gradually ... gradually ran through more slowly, until she was hardly falling, until she was only drifting down into darkness forty stories deep ... her pack dangling beneath her with the rope sacks, the Blue Water line feeding out of the first one.
    Embarrassed, grateful to be alone and have no one know how she'd panicked--gripping her rack in terror, instead of simply releasing the shunt-Joanna sailed down, sailed down the murmuring rope, its thin, sheathed nylon cording strong enough to hold anything but a fool.
    She imagined Merle Budwing's ghost calling to her from below. A ghost eternally in darkness, coolness, calling others down to him at the bottom of the pit. It would make a poem. ...
    Now, after those moments of fear, the reality of Frank's dying came sharply, freshly to her. She'd thought of her loss, of his leaving her. She'd thought of Frank's death--but not his dying. She hadn't considered the moments of drowning, his exhaustion and agony.
    Descending through an immense stone cathedral, hundreds of empty feet across, more hundreds of feet deep--its upper air lit after all, now that her eyes were accustomed, by two dim slender beams of light from minor cracks in the great dome of its ceiling--Joanna began to cry, and realized it was only the second time she had wept since Frank had died, as if she'd been waiting for this more proper place for tears. The cave, like the ocean, revealing so clearly how small, how minor they were, and in what a temporary way Frank had lived--and she lived still, and hung now on her little thread, a tiny, thinking spider with a poem in its head.
    Joanna took a breath and stopped crying. She blew her nose on her coverall sleeve, eased the bars of her rack and fell a little faster, so the Blue Water's sound rose in pitch as it payed through the friction. Above her as she sank, the rope's thin strand ran up and out of her helmet's light into distance and vaulted uncertain shadow. Beneath her was a gulf of deeper, then perfect dark.

    Joanna stood, her helmet lamp switched off, on heaped shifting slabs of fallen stone. She'd tied her second length of line on at two hundred and thirty feet ... then attached herself to the new rope below the joining knot, to rappel down the last two hundred-plus feet to the pit's floor.
    She'd turned off her helmet lamp to enjoy the dark, to stand in this great vault of darkness deep within the world ... alone except for Merle Budwing's ghost. He'd struck this heap of spoil after accelerating second by second in his fall, breathless, out of shout, not knowing when he'd strike--or whether he'd strike at all, perhaps only fall and fall forever, fall endless miles in pitch darkness toward the center of the earth.
    For him, the white smacking flash of impact must have been a fraction of an instant of relief.
    Joanna looked up, searched for those two beams of light in the dome's great height, and saw, high and higher, almost out of sight, their hair-thin traces that by contrast made the cavern's darkness darker, as if it were flooded by a river of blackness flowing in, and bringing silence with it.
    She lit her helmet lamp, and by that small bright cone of light fed the slack running end of the second Blue Water length into a rope bag, then weighted that with a heavy chunk of rock. Above the rope bag and its stone, the rest of the line rose up into cool damp dark air, up forty stories to the mud chute, the passage, and the gate. The rope, hanging slender as her finger, and moving slightly in the cave's cool breezes, was her only way up, her only way out.
    She took her chest harness off and left it with the rack and shunt by the rope sacks, along with her sling of carabiners. Then she dug in the equipment pack and took out two nylon tape runners and the sixty-foot