Brent marched from one bus stop to another, gradually becoming more agitated. Viki tagged along silently, for once not making any suggestions; Brent got put down often enough that he rarely asserted any sort of knowledge. It hurt when he finally spoke up—even to a little sister—and then turned out to be wrong. After the third false start, Brent hunkered down close to the ground. For a moment, Viki thought maybe he was just going to wait for a bus to come along—a thoroughly unpleasant possibility to Viki. They'd been out for more than an hour and they hadn't even seen a local jitney. Maybe she would have to stick her pointy little hands into the problem....But after a minute, Brent stood up and started across the street. "I bet the Big Dig people didn't get the day off. That's only a mile south of here. There are always buses from there."
Ha.That was just what Viki had been about to suggest. Blessed be patience.
The street was still in morning shadow. This was the deepest part of the winter season at Princeton. Here and there the frost in the darker nooks was so deep that it might have been snow itself. But the section they were walking through now was not gardened. The only plants were unruly weeds and free crawlers. On sweaty, hot days between storms, the place would have been alive with midges and drinkers.
On either side of the street were multistory warehouses. Things weren't so quiet and deserted here. The ground buzzed and thrummed with the sound of unseen diggers. Freight trucks moved in and out of the area. Every few hundred yards, a plot of land was barricaded off from all but the construction crews. Viki tugged at Brent's arms, urging him to crawl under the barricades. "Hey, it's our dad who's the reason for all this. We deserve to see!" Brent would never accept such a rationalization, but his little sister was already past the no-trespassing signs. He had to come along just to protect her.
They crept past tall bundles of reinforcement steel, and piles of masonry. There was something powerful and alien about this place. In the house on the hill, everything was so safe, so orderly. Here...well, she could see endless opportunities for the careless to lacerate a foot, cut an eye. Heck, if you tipped over one of those standing slabs, it would squash you flat. All the possibilities were crystal clear in her mind...and exciting. They carefully made their way to the lip of a caisson, avoiding the eyes of the workman and the various interesting opportunities for fatal accidents.
The railing was two strands of twine.If you don't want to die, don't falloff! Viki and her brother hunkered close to the ground and stuck their heads over the abyss. For a moment, it was too dark to see. The heated air that drifted up carried the smell of burning oil and hot metal. It was a caress and a slap in the head all at once. And the sounds: workers shouting, metal grinding against metal, engines, and a strange hissing. Viki dipped her head, letting all her eyes adjust to the gloom. There was light, but nothing like day or night. She had seen small electric-arc lamps in Daddy's labs. These ones were huge: pencils of light glowing mostly in the ultra and far ultra—colors you never see bright except in the disk of the sun. The color splashed off the hooded workers, spread speckling glints up and down the shaft....There were other less spectacular lights, steadier ones, electric lamps that shone local splotches of tamed color here and there. Still twelve years before the Dark, and they were building a whole city down there. She could see avenues of stone, huge tunnels leading off from the walls of the shaft. And in the tunnels she glimpsed darker holes...ramps to smaller diggings? Buildings and homes and gardens would come later, but already the caves were mostly dug. Looking down, Viki felt an attraction that was new to her, the natural, protective attraction of a deepness. But what these workers were doing was a thousand times grander than any ordinary deepness. If all you wanted to do was sleep frozen through the Dark, you needed just enough space for your sleeping pool and a startup cache. Such already existed in the city deepness beneath the old town center—and had existed there for almost twenty generations. This new construction was tolive in, awake. In some places, where air seal and insulation could be assured, it was built right at ground level. In other areas, it was dug down hundreds of feet, an eerie reverse of the buildings that made Princeton's skyline.
