Thinking was troublesome, hurtful, and useless. He gave up thinking and merely went.
They had left the sneakways of the house and entered a natural tunnel, or so Questioner identified it from the texture of the stone. There was no way to get lost, for there were no side tunnels, merely this partially dissolved stratum of limestone, floored with harder stone, naturally sloping downward and penetrated from above by rough tufts of root. Among the roots she heard the squeak and chitter of small creatures, and when one fled across the edge of her sight she saw a being the size of her hand, winged with tight membranes stretching between fore and rear limbs.
“What is that called?” she asked, directing her voice down the tunnel ahead of them.
“Dibigon,” came a drifting voice, soft as the twitter of a drowsy bird. “Self-creators. You would say swoopers.”
“I didn’t know they could speak our language,” muttered Mouche, talking to his feet. “No one told me.” Then, remembering his childhood, he flushed again. Of course they had spoken his language. How could he have forgotten?
Questioner called, “How far down do we go?”
“All way,” whispered the voice. “To baimoi. To dwell-below.”
As they went farther, the stones around them began to glow, at first with a hint of palest green along the edges, growing brighter the farther they went, enabling them to see the outlines of the stones around them, the fading distance of the tunnel ahead. Questioner reduced her own light to a soft, reddish glow, and soon the luminescence became a brighter yellow. Coincident with this brightening, they heard the murmuring of a stream.
They found the source of the liquid burbling at an intersection of their tunnel and a larger, more cylindrical one was half-filled with smooth, dark water, visible as a shadow against the bright luminescence of the opposite wall. The water, though silent elsewhere throughout its course, burbled at the conjunction of the two tunnels where irregular blocks of stone had fallen to interrupt its flow. There, also, were two podlike shapes drawn onto the shingle, each one about five meters long and less than a meter wide, each shining with the same light as the stone itself.
Questioner put her face close to the rock, amplified her vision, and saw that the luminescence was the product of bacteria accumulated in lichenous growths that covered every surface. Some were effulgently yellow, others emitted blue or green or even violet light.
Ornery looked over the pods, thumping them with her fist and finding them rather rubbery. “You don’t call these ships, I hope,” she said in a disgusted tone. “Canoes, I’d call them, if that.”
“Their size befits a small river,” said Questioner. “Neither of these will bear my weight, however, so I will rely upon my flotation devices.”
“Flotation devices?” asked Ornery.
“Some worlds are water worlds,” said Questioner. “Some people swim or even dive about their activities. Some people are arboreal. Some are cave dwellers. I was designed to get about in any of them, to swim or dive or brachiate or soar or crawl, not always gracefully, but always efficiently.”
Mouche and Ornery stared doubtfully at the pods, looking around for something more solid, seeing nothing that would float. It seemed to be the pod or nothing. Questioner, reading their minds, patted them on the shoulders comfortingly. “Many things will no doubt be made clear as we go.”
Several Timmys leapt into one of the boats, which then slipped into the water of its own accord and floated a little way downstream, remaining there, quiet in the current. Mouche and Ornery started to push one of the boats into the river, only to have it slip along the rocky beach by itself. They climbed into it, sat in the rubbery bottom facing one another and felt their bottoms bumping over small rocks that were easily discernable through the half-flexible substance of the vessel. Questioner waded into the stream and hooked herself to the back edge of the boat that held Mouche and Ornery, her mid parts ballooning until she bobbed on the ripples like a hollow ball. She was near enough that her reddish glow still illuminated both Mouche and Ornery, near enough to speak and be heard, though once they had pushed off into the river, she seemed disinclined to do so. There were no paddles or oars. Evidently it was intended they should simply float wherever they were going, though that did not explain the fact that the little boats maintained their relative distance and position, no matter how the tunnel twisted or how the water eddied.