Ajax Penumbra 1969 (Kindle Single) by Robin Sloan Read Free Book Online Page B

the shadows. He grunts, waves them through, and continues around the fence, all without ever quite looking them in the face.
    The mouth of the Transbay Tube gapes hugely. Loose dirt hangs ragged around its metal lip; it looks less like a public works project and more like an ancient tomb. There is no train track yet. Instead, a wide, weedy path descends from the worksite, marked with treads where trucks have passed.
    There are no lights. They are prepared for this. Corvina lifts a camping lantern and hangs it from his handlebars. “Ready?”
    Penumbra steadies himself. “I suppose so.”
    The tube swallows them. Corvina zips out ahead, pedaling with long sure strokes, his gearshift clucking and crackling as he moves swiftly to the most efficient ratio. Penumbra glances back, watching the view through the tube’s entrance—a dusty oval of Oakland sky—shrink and fade until it is no brighter than the blotches of color that his retinas produce in the absence of light.
    It is darkness of a kind and quality that he has never experienced. The floor of the tube is smooth under his tires; it feels like he is racing indoors, across a basketball court or a bank lobby. There is, every few seconds, a dull
whump
as he crosses one of the tube’s seams: the places where the huge metal segments have been joined together and sealed against the bay.
    The bay is out there. Up there. How deep is it? Penumbra has no idea. It might be ten feet; it might be a hundred. The air has changed. It is cold and damp, thick with the smell of trapped exhaust. He wonders if there is enough oxygen down here, really? What if the work crews have not yet prepared it for human traffic? What if he and Corvina swoon halfway through? What if no one finds them until morning?
    Corvina is racing ahead. The lantern’s spark bobs and dips on his handlebars and casts a crazy shadow behind him, a dark avatar that dances and leaps across the floor of the tube.
    Penumbra cries out: “Slow down!”—but Corvina doesn’t hear him, or he can’t understand, or he won’t listen. Penumbra sucks in a lungful of heavy air and cries again: “
Could you please
—ah.” He gives up. Corvina’s shadow recedes; the spark grows smaller. The darkness clamps down.
    Penumbra comes to a halt, his chest heaving. He rests on the handlebars, which he can feel but not see. Corvina’s lantern shrinks to nothing.
    He is a man unaccustomed to anger but he feels it now. Corvina! He is, Penumbra realizes, not the man to follow into a terrifying subterranean tunnel. He is capable, yes, and commanding—but he has no patience for anyone who cannot keep up.
    Well.
    He cannot stand here forever.
    Penumbra pedals slowly forward, testing. It is all darkness ahead, a pure blank void—but, of course, there are no obstacles. Nothing stands in his way. He feels the bicycle’s front wheel rise, realizes he is climbing the curve of the tube; he jerks the handlebars, allows gravity pull him back down. This can work. He simply has to go by feel, let the curves do their work. He simply has to keep pedaling. He can close his eyes. There is nothing that can hurt him here.
    He loses track of time. The whole universe contracts into the almost philosophical darkness of the tube, the curve of its space-time that he tracks with his legs, not with his eyes. Perhaps he will emerge and find that ten years have passed. Fifty. He smiles at that, and does the math, counting the years in time with the pedals: 2017 … 2018 … 2019. How will this city look in the twenty-first century? Maybe those Yerba Buena Gardens will finally have a plant or—
    Corvina cries out. “Ajax! Is that you?”
    Penumbra comes to a skidding stop. “Where are you?”
    “Here, here.” His voice cries bleakly out of the darkness nearby; Penumbra can almost see him, a dark outline against the deeper darkness of the tube. Corvina appears to be sitting on the ground. “I need help, I need … it’s too dark, Ajax. I lost the