Wolfram “Both Ways Baby” Marflow dug one claw into the hard earth, anchoring himself to the side of the cave. Two kilometers down, the compacted soil felt like granite, and dripped with a sour mash, as if the weight of the Moufette planetary crust was squeezing it like an orange rind.
Fellow spelunker, Minister Dagget — geophysics fellow at the Xandrian Institute for Exhaustible Reductions — drove a rappel anchor bolt into a fissure, leaned back, and pulled out a hand-rolled cigarillo.
“Do you have to do that?” Wolfram grumbled. “I don’t want to breathe that foulness in such close quarters.”
“We may be friends,” Dagget said, “but I also paid your jumpship fare for this little vacation.”
Wolfram shook his head. “You wanted my eyes for your descent more than you wanted my company.”
Dagget chuckled. “Nonsense. You’ve a lovely personality. One out of every thousand Xandrians says so.”
“Bunch of lab rats.”
“Nicest thing you’ve said all day.” Dagget pulled his headlamp off and aimed it down the tunneled slope to their left. “My charge cell must be dying. I usually get ten meters of visibility out of this thing.”
Wolfram followed the beam. He could see the diffusion of its light accelerate as if being pushed back by invisible waves. He had Tsallis eyesight — evolved over eons in the grottos of his home world, Jorsham.
“You got different gravity laws on Moufette?” Wolfram pointed down into the cavern. “Or does Abyssal Cave mean we’re spelunking into oblivion here?”
“Ours is 70% of what you have on Jorsham, if that’s what you mean. I’ve long suspected that it’s what accounts for your thick heads and propensity to drag your knuckles.”
Dagget was about to light his cigarillo, when Wolfram grabbed his friend’s oil lighter and dropped down to the mouth of the sloped tunnel. He hunched over, sniffed the ground, then struck the lighter’s flint — Dagget went in for old-world accoutrements, though it made his geophysics friends think his bowel movements weren’t a crime against indoor plumbing, which they most certainly were.
The oil wick flared, but the dark rock beneath it didn’t glint or shine. In fact, it seemed to pull the light inside it, absorbing it somehow.
“Well, that’s just great,” Wolfram muttered.
“You taking up smoking, then?” Dagget asked.
Wolfram stood up. “This was a setup. Or at least you suspected something was down here, something a geophysicist at an Exhaustible Reductions lab might need eyes like mine to find.”
Dagget grinned. “It’s true then?”
“Whatever this rock is, it’s not rock. At least not only rock. It’s… dark. It seems to absorb or distort any form of light that tries to touch its surface.”
Dagget fed some rappel line and scrambled down beside Wolfram. “It was a supposition is all. I concluded that if we went deep enough, the mechanical physics present at the surface would change, warp in some way.”
“So, you lured me here under false pretenses, fed me three roast fowl and a mug of buttered rum, then asked me to cave dive with you because no Xandrian was dumb enough to do it. Especially since you hoped to discover what… a new element? Something about which we know nothing? You and I could, in fact, be going sterile right this moment. Ja’nene is going stop letting us play together —”
“Wolfram! Do you realize that that is exactly what you and I have just done on our little spelunking adventure?”
“Gone infertile?”
Dagget shook his head. “We’ve identified a sixth element.”
“About which we know nothing,” Wolfram repeated. “Chaos reign, you fool, what if it were combustible? You and I might have blown a moon-sized hole in your little planet of lab rats.”
Dagget wasn’t listening. He’d scooped up a couple of chunks of the dark matter and dropped them in a gunny sack. Without a word, he started ascending to the surface.
Wolfram paced the lab for three days, sure at any moment that this new element, which Dagget had taken to calling simply Dark, was, in fact, going to finally blow. He might have preferred it if it had. The lab was a dismal place — blackout shades cast the whole place in a sterile darkness, without any of the fragrance of rich loam or sturdiness of basalt rock Wolfram loved in the grottos of Jorsham. Labs were for rats.
“Take a look at this.” It was one of the convicted battle chemists working on the dark matter they’d harvested from the Abyssal Caves. Dagget hired these chemists because should the lab actually blow — it had done so four times — it was just seen as a rough kind of justice if a convict got hurt. Not a big deal. And Dagget’s lab was a for-profit enterprise, distilling minerals and whatever else into serviceable weapons.
Dagget rushed over. “Yes, what have you found?”
The battle chemist held up a beaker with his heavily tattooed hands. “The Dark has what you might call ‘obfuscation’ properties.”
Wolfram cocked his head. “They teach you words like that in prison.”
The battle chemist glared at him. “I taught rare earth and vacuum propulsion at the Sawtell Institute before this happy little appointment. My tattoos throw you? Or maybe your scraggly mane is clogging up your ears?”
Wolfram shoved the chemist. Dagget jumped between them. “Enough.” He then turned to his lab rat. “Now, what does this mean?”
The chemist snarled one last time at Wolfram. “It means there’s now a new branch of elemental investigation for Skills that can be purposed from this Dark element. Right now, you could sell an investor on a basic Blur Skill from it — good for evasion, things like that. But that’s just the beginning.”
Dagget swished the liquid which distorted the beaker as it swirled inside, then he began to grin and laugh in precisely the maniacal way that left Wolfram wondering why his own massively toothy underbite, wildly long white hair, and clawed gnarled hands made him seem to others — at least at first sight — the crazy one.
Then Wolfram’s old friend turned to him. “You’re going to Altareth, aren’t you?”
“Oh no,” Wolfram said, “I’m no pack mule. And you don’t even know if this element is stable.”
“Precisely,” Dagget said with more than a little glee. “An old friend of mine has just been made provost at the new Broker Academy on Altareth. He’ll put Dark and Blur into rotation there. We can gather practical data in real time, and get paid in the process.”
“We?”
“Our spelunking adventure will finally pay us both some handsome dividends. Besides, you don’t have a useful cover for showing up at Convocation, anyway. No one is going to believe you came on account of decency.”
At that Wolfram finally laughed.
“It’s settled, then. I’ll call Provost Marblemaw and set it all up.”
“Just like you do everything else,” Wolfram said. “I should have known better than to trust a Xandrian who smokes cigarillos.”