| OCR Text |
Show Acting Alone Page 11 Chapter Two Hems of black habits brushed into piles of yellow crystal rat poison, sweeping along one sticky crystal at a time, down the dark pebbly basalt floor of the tunnel. Shadows of black veils and white coifs and wimples lurched in candlelight. Candleflames sizzled dangerously close to the yellow mudlike deposits on the sides of the huge, fat pipes that for over a hundred years had fed geothermal heat into the bowels of the buildings overhead, the physical plant, or earthly aspect of Saint Paphnutius convent. Sister Polycarpana never could remember the siren code. Nor could anybody else. They were in their monthly day of recollection, so nobody had been outside for a while. Nobody could say what the weather was like. So, for all Polycarpana knew, they could now be having one of those rare mountain climbing tornadoes, such as the triple-braided one last year that "roto-rooted a ski slope right next door to us, but miraculously left Mother P.'s shrine intact," as Sister Simone Stylite put it. (Simone was joking even in her pain and fear, propped and wrapped there in the stretcher, her round head cradled between Polycarpana's straining elbows.) Or else the sirens could be singing about a nuclear attack on NORAD, which was buried deep in the solid rock beneath these deep tunnels. Or perhaps this could be merely a practice simulation of either one of these |
