Clarity's Dawn

by A. R. Knight

  “Not unless you want to take a dive down there.” Viera nods towards the depths.

  With our direction settled comes the hard part: how do we get over to the other side? There aren’t ladders, handholds or anything else I could see that would serve to let us clamber way around and across. We’ll have to find something, and that’s when I notice Malo holding his miner.

  “Sometimes,” Malo says. “You have to make your own way.”

  He raises the miner, leans out over the edge, and begins to stitch red bolts into the sludge covered side of the central pipe. Every shot from the miner carves a small ledge into the pipe’s metal side; charring off the sludge and burning a line. The warrior holds the beams long enough to create a foot hold, then shifts, eventually going through all the power in both of his miners. By the time the weapons sputter to nothing, we have a semicircles worth of black jagged metal and charred chunks of crud waiting to test our weight.

  Viera goes to take the first step and I grab her arm, pull her back.

  “I’m the lightest,” I say. “You should let me go first. The ledges are most likely to support me.”

  “And what if they don’t?” Malo says. “You’ll fall. Maybe die.”

  “If I don’t we all will. For once, let me take the risk,” I reply.

  They look at me like I’m being stupid, but they don’t understand how annoying it is to be held back. To be protected all the time. Besides, there’s a chance that I’ll find something on the other side to help them get across. It makes sense for me to go first. It makes sense for me to risk myself for the group.

  The first ledge, a lip of curled, black metal, sits half a meter beneath where we stand. With Malo holding my right arm, I step onto it. I rock my foot into the notch, testing its strength. When it doesn’t break apart, I step with my right leg. Plant both feet. The ledge holds, for the moment.

  “Let go,” I say to Malo, and he hesitates. “Do it, Malo.”

  My friend releases my wrist, his finger slide apart from mine and I’m free. That sensation alone almost sends me off the ledge, which is barely big enough for the front of my feet. I flex forward so that I fall against the outer wall of the large pipe. My hands dig into the sticky sludge, give me some traction even at the cost of knowing what my fingers are digging into.

  “The next one is slightly up,” Viera calls to me, as if I didn’t know.

  I take a look at the next ledge, and then count the rest. Eighteen burned-out cliffs carved by Malo’s miner along the outside of the central tube’s wall. Eighteen careful jumps to make; keeping my feet planted, my weight shifted. Any missteps would send me falling down into some infinite black. And, knowing what we’ve been walking in, I’m not sure I’d want to survive should I slip.

  “Just go slow,” Viera says, again giving the obvious tip.

  I reach with my left arm and place it against the wall above the next ledge. No handholds, just muck. But it’s better than sheer metal. I bend my legs against the ledge. I make the short hop, but as I do so I feel the first ledge beneath me break away, those charred bits crumbling down to the bottom. And as I land on this one, it too starts to bend and snap.

  I have to move.

  I flash back to the jungle, racing through the trees, and I move in the same way I used to when I was a child. I bound quickly, planting and jumping, oftentimes only getting one foot on the black charred edges. I hear Malo and Viera yelling, at first, and then they fall silent as they see me leap from one to the next. As they see me survive.

  Left foot shove, right foot catch, my hands pushing off and steadying in equal measure. I don’t even count, my every focus on the next jump. And then I’m landing, before I realize it, in the haloed tube on the opposite side.

  I splash through a pile of muck and catch myself, kneeling in it, but breathing hard and too tired to care. Every single one of Malo’s blasted platforms is gone. Every single one disintegrated into the depths.

  “I’m never doing that again,” I call back across to them.

  “I’m with you,” Viera replies from the other end.

  Our voices echo around the tube and for a moment I wonder if we’re giving ourselves away. But there hasn’t been a sound from back behind us for a long time. Whatever’s after us either gave up, or assumed we went a different way.

  Speaking of, I turn and look into where I made my way. It looks just like where we came from. No equipment, no clear way to get Malo and Viera across. Even though I have miners, we’re not going to try the ledges again. So I turn back to them and say I’m going on alone.

  There’s immediate protest. Malo warns about my safety, Viera, about theirs. About being left with nowhere to go. To which I say, “We have to find some way for you to get over here. Unless you can fly, I don’t see another option.”

  I think we all know that, so after some more grumbling, the pair of them calm down. Take up their positions on the tube and settle in. While I turn to face the dark, and start walking. This is the first time I’ve been alone, truly alone in so long. Nothing in my head, no friends, or protectors. All that’s here in this foul-smelling waste is me and the muck.

  The soup in the bottom of the pipe sucks at my feet with every step. Every breath makes me want to choke on the heavy smells clinging to my throat. Bangs and rumbles echo around me, and the only light I have comes from those small globes, little points of white casting small circles against the endless dark.

  There’s only one direction to go, so I trudge on. Think about Viera and Malo, trapped back on the edge. Any Sevora force finding them would have them trapped, and likely have them dead, or captured.

  I surprise myself by laughing at the thought of Viera with a Sevora in her head. What sort of arguments she would get in, debates she’d have with the creature. Would she do the opposite of what it wanted just to spite the thing?

  The sound of my own laughter rings loud through the tunnel, and at first I’m fascinated. I’ve never been somewhere with a true echo, and this carries and carries.

  Until something different comes back.

  It’s a grizzled grind, a shuffling of something large and stiff shoving aside the slop against the metal sides of the tube. And it’s coming towards me.

  My instincts tell me to run, to hide, but there’s no place to do either. So instead I wait, hands clenched and defiant. The first thing I notice is a new glow. One that shines brighter, with long lights splashing across the walls in front of me. It moves, growing closer until it rounds a bend ahead and I’m hit with a blinding force of white.

  My eyes try to shut, but I’m not fast enough. I step back without thinking and slip in the liquid and fall, splashing in the slime as the thing draws closer. The white blots out everything, and it grows and grows and I raise my hands to shield my eyes but still tendrils of bright squeeze through my fingers and stab holes in my vision. I might be saying something but I don’t know because the growling, roaring churn of the monster is so loud as to render my ears useless.

  It stops.

  There’s no rumble anymore, no grinding. Just the gentle lap of the muck around me as it roils with the settle of the Beast. The lights dim and narrow into to a soft yellow, leaving iridescent halos in my vision, the same type I’d get for staring at Ignos for too long.

  “What are you supposed to be?” The words have a leathery ring to them, like the splat of slick skin against itself, like instruments I once heard in the jungle, played by hitting sticks against covered, dried melon shells.

  Yet it clearly says words and just as clearly says them in the same common language that all these creatures seem to use. My language.

  “I don’t know,” I reply. “But I’m a human.”

  “Human? Haven’t heard that name before. Admittedly, I haven’t left these tunnels for more than a cycle now. Seems plausible the slugs above might have found one or two new species since then.”

  “Slugs above?” I try to pick myself up, but I’m still a little blinded, and as I rise my hand s
lips and I splash back into the mud.

  “Here, little thing, let me help you. Stay still.”

  I’m alone, stuck in the slop, half-blind and terrified of the thing in front of me, but with no options, I do as the voice says. I stay still. There’s a metallic whine and I feel, courtesy of dripping drops from above, something slide over my head, reaching behind me to settle into the soup. The noise begins again after a moment’s pause and I feel first the liquid and then something hard press against my back and push me forward so that I’m sliding along the bottom of the tube. I yelp, ask what’s happening but all I get is a soft laugh, a kind of willowy chortle.

  “It won’t hurt you. Just settle in.”

  My legs slide across the floor of the tube, and in a moment I’m underneath the front lights. The goop slides away as I’m shoved up a small ramp. The metal piece pushing me slams into place and I realize I’m not in the tube anymore. At least, not directly. Dim red lights spark up, and I know I’m in the belly of the monster.

  All around me are scattered piles of junk. Or at least that’s what I think they are, seeing as I’m not sure what any of it is. There’s tangled ends of netting and string. Broken pipes and things that look like they may have been miners once in some distant existence but have now become rusted relics. While my first thought is that this place is immense, I find, as my eyes adjust, that it’s rather small. Half as tall as the tube. Maybe four meters wide.

  A swishing slither from above tells me I’m not alone.

  “I’m coming down,” the voice says, and, like on Cobalt, it’s coming from speakers around me.

  Something in the top opens, and a square of light - the same yellow that the rumbling monster shines from its lamps - projects on the floor and a moment later a creature plops down.

  It’s a strange thing, almost like a water droplet trying to hold its shape. A milky white skin, and two long stalks, that, towards their tops, form large dual-pupiled eyes. The creature, though, is tiny. Maybe half as tall as I am. It stands, if you want to call it that, in the small space without a problem.

  Then it moves towards me by shuffling its skin around and around. Like a jungle snake from back home, though this looks nothing like anything I’ve seen on Earth.

  “Never eyed one like me before?” The creature says, and I confirm that it’s the skin rippling together that’s making the noises, waves crashing along its creamy surface.

  “No,” I say. “What are you?”

  “Oh, well, I’m an Ooblot. You know, the things that usually travel in threes?”

  I shake my head.

  “Well, I suppose I don’t know you. Seems reasonable you might not know me. But then, I have to ask, what are you doing down here?”

  I tell the Ooblot my story. Spill it out because the Ooblot seems content to listen, and right now I’m desperate for a friend. Desperate to find some way to rescue Viera and Malo. This Ooblot might be my answer.

  “Good thing you’re not still hosted,” The Ooblot says when I’m done. “The Beast would have picked that up, you know. These lights glow red for a reason. A specific frequency, makes a host eye’s twitch. The Sevora can’t stand it.”

  “And if I’d been hosted? What would you have done?”

  “The Beast isn’t just a junker. It’s a burner too. I leave that latch closed, flip the switch, and then you fry.”

  “Then I’m glad I’m not hosted.”

  “Aren’t we all. Then again, Clarity’s Dawn wouldn’t exist if we hadn’t had our time with the slugs. Have to know your enemy before you can fight it, right?”

  The name rings a bell. Ignos had warned me against it. But the other thing, the feathered, cloaked creature that had saved us from the first prison here had claimed to be part of Clarity’s Dawn. So maybe they weren’t all bad.

  Also, the Ooblot claimed not to be hosted. That, right now, would have to be enough.

  “I need to help my friends. They’re stuck on the other side of that big cylinder behind us,” I say as the Ooblot’s many eyes look over its junk trove. “Can you get them across?”

  “Get them over the main channel? With this thing? How far can you jump?”

  I shrug.

  “Guess we’ll find out.”

  The Ooblot rolls away from me, back underneath the square light where it dropped, and says, “Follow me right on up and we’ll get to finding your friends.”

  The Ooblot quivers and then its entire body mass squelches down, expanding into a puddle with the two eye stalks, and then it pulls up and launches through the hole.

  “Come on now, you can climb up here.” The Ooblot’s cheerful voice echoes from the upper level.

  I blink once or twice, confirm that what I just saw is not some sort of illusion, then take some tentative steps. It’s nice walking on metal again rather than the thick muck. I do notice, though, that what I thought was rust on the pieces of junk around me is instead dried dirt, the same mud from the tube. Seems like this Beast is meant to gather whatever the Ooblot happens to find down here.

  “Do you have a name?” I call as I move towards the hole.

  I stare up, again shielding my eyes against the bright light, and a pair of curious stalks appear, looking back at me.

  “T’Oli,” the Ooblot replies. “That’s what you can call me.”

  “I’m Kaishi.”

  “What a cool name. Much better than mine. But then, we Ooblots aren’t exactly known for creativity. If you want processes, though, we are your species.”

  The eye stalks vanish; T’Oli’s waiting for me to come up there. I stand tall, reach up with my arms, and I barely get over the lip into the upper level with the tips of my fingers, one hand on the left and right sides of the square opening. There’s no way I’ll be able to pull myself up with my fingertips. I’m about to say so when I feel a soft, warm glove surround the fingers of my left hand. The glove suddenly hardens, locking my left hand in place.

  I yelp, and immediately T’Oli comes blubbering back, its eye stalks showing again.

  “Don’t worry, that’s just me. We Ooblots have what we like to call a certain finesse. An ability, we say. We can harden ourselves - as stiff as metal if we have to.”

  “You’ve trapped my hand?”

  “It’s hardly a trap if I’m willing to let you free whenever you ask. I thought having the grip might make it easier for you to get yourself up here.”

  I try, and while my left arm lifts me slightly, my right hand slips off the lip. “I don’t think that works.”

  “Swing your right hand over here then,” T’Oli says.

  “Can you let go for a minute? I need to shift.”

  The seal around my hand softens and I slip free without an ounce of stickiness. I take a second to stare at my left hand, but it looks normal. No cuts or tears, no blotches or change in color. Looks like whatever the Ooblot’s doing, it’s not hurting me.

  So I put both my hands on the left side of the opening, a little apart. Like climbing a tree. This time, T’Oli covers both of them and locks me in. I still don’t have a great grip, but I’m able to pull myself up, high enough for my head get over the lip. But it’s not enough - with my hands stuck and T’Oli in the way, I can’t lean forward. My muscles are burning and in a second they’re going to give out.

  Before I can ask for help, T’Oli rolls forward, its upper body sliding over the hardened lower half. It rolls into my face and I close my eyes. I feel T’Oli transition to rock, the whole of it clinging to my shoulders, face and hair, and then the Ooblot starts to pull.

  I wind up going up, then over the edge, facing down and resting on T’Oli’s body the whole way. Until my entire chest is clear of the hole, and then T’Oli liquifies itself and slides out from under me, leaving me gasping for air against the hard floor.

  “What was that?” I said after a take a few cautionary breaths.

  “An Ooblot pivot,” T’Oli states. “Turn myself into a lever and pull. Really not all that special. Do it all the time
.”

  “Sure...” My voice trails away as I look around.

  Where we are, on the second floor of the Beast, looks like the shuttle we took away from Cobalt. There are a few things that the Oratus called terminals; screens blinking with various diagrams and bars and numbers. Data that I’m sure I could understand if I had time to study it.

  My eyes, though, are drawn to other things. For one, what’s playing on the ceiling above me. Now that we’re both out, a metal grate slides over the hole to the lower level and, as it does so, the light shining down dims and lines illuminate all across the ceiling; neon blues and purples, sketching out what’s obviously a map. The dim light pulses gently now in the same red glow as the ones below.

  “The map’s my own design,” T’Oli quivers. “Put her together based on what I’ve seen done in some of those paintings they have around here. You’ve seen them, right? The ones with the shifting walls? This one tracks our position, shows it on the ceiling. True, I can pull up there in the screen, but that’s no fun.”

  “I thought Ooblots weren’t creative?”

  “Get stuck in this thing long enough and anyone will get the urge to do something different.”

  I can’t argue with that. Even though I’ve only been here a few minutes, the cramped ceilings and close walls are making me nervous. I’m a creature of free air - jungle forest or hillside plains. Cobalt, the shuttle, and all the narrow corridors on Vimelia do more to make me homesick than anything else.

  “So where are we?”

  “See that light? That’s us. The lines are the tube system around here, and if you watch while we move, they’ll change.”

  The mention of movement makes me remember that Vieira and Malo have been on the edge of that cylinder for a while now. They might be in trouble even as we’re standing here. T’Oli catches the panic on my face and, even as I start asking about my friends, slides over to the terminals and presses itself against the wall. All of the Ooblot sluices into cracks and crevices, hardens against levers and buttons that I don’t even notice are there until T’Oli is grasping all of them.