The First Immortal

by Leo Lukas

  When he woke up, he needed a few seconds to realize where he was. Soft fleece enveloped him. Damp, cold, clammy. He must have sweated a great deal. A stench bored into his nose as soon as he stretched and rolled on his side. But he did shower, didn't he? Even so, his armpits and crotch gave off emanations that made him feel ashamed. He pulled the cover over his head—only to notice that it had been defiled by dark red spots, dried blood from his many wounds.

  He fell back into a doze once more. He dreamed of Rautsh and Gujnar, of the old and wrinkled Matekten and the lively, lovely Espechl.

  Where am I? he asked himself, fogged by sleep, when he woke again. He focused his gaze. Not in the village, not in the Garden of Everwas. There were no rooms like this there—at home. The lines were much too straight, the edges much too sharp. Not made by human hands. The light was much too unrelentingly blue, and the air too ... metallic. Jutting from the mirror-smooth walls around him were thin, transparent shelves. On them were piled clothing and pieces of equipment along with a kind of mineral collection.

  Across from the head end of his couch and in the middle of the strange hut stood an easy chair. Duani, who had slept beneath a covering of colorful patches that had been sewn together, opened her eyes and looked straight at him. "Sleep well?"

  "Uh ... yes, very. I think so."

  "And now what?"

  "Where are my pants?"

  "Behind you."

  He fished his single item of clothing from the couch and slipped into it. Then he sat up, feeling his ankle, which was much less swollen. He took a step to test it, cautious at first, then he put his full weight on his foot. No pain. "I'm going on."

  "Yes?"

  "Yes." What else should he do? He could stay ten years in the Vertical Village and never feel at home. "Would you like to come with me?"

  Duani laughed, probably because it had sounded so meek and begging. "Certainly not."

  "I'll come back."

  She shrugged. An embarrassed silence followed. Innumerable questions lay on Boryk's tongue, but he didn't know where or how he should begin. Finally he forced himself to ask one after all. "Haven't you ever wanted to know what lies beyond the horizon?"

  "You mean down below in the sea? No. Can't you just swim to it?"

  "Just up to a few dozen meters in front of it. Then the countercurrent gets so strong that you soon lose interest."

  "I see. As for me, I'd be more interested in finding out who hollowed out the Silver Mountain and especially what is in those sectors where access is closed off to us. But nobody can answer that."

  Boryk shook his head regretfully. "There's nothing about it in the Holy Writ."

  Again they were silent for several breaths. Duani energetically brushed her dark, finger-long, curly hair. She was so beautiful and seemed so familiar to him and yet at the same time unreachably strange. Something stood between them, and Boryk suspected what it was. It was the power, his own uncanny power, inexplicable even to him, that he had exercised on his crèche-brothers and later, in Duani's presence, on the Matekten. While he didn't think that the Espechl, who seemed so very self-confident, was afraid of him because of it, she wouldn't be entirely comfortable with him, either.

  He tried to read her large, brown eyes, but she averted her gaze.

  "All right. Well ... then I'll be going now."

  "Whatever you like. I won't hold you up ... No, wait. Do you even know the way?"

  "I thought I'd go back to where I left the path. And then ... upwards until I can't go any further. Very simple."

  "It isn't really that simple, little man! You don't know what it's like up there. You don't have the least idea of conditions in the volcano mountains. The cliffs are treacherous. You'll be in trouble before you know it. You won't be able to go up or down any more, or even forward or back, and if you try to do something out of desperation, you'll fall and break your neck. Snap, done, over with. Is that what you're headed for? It's completely insane!"

  She had spoken in growing anger, almost screaming at the end, furiously throwing her hairbrush into a corner. Boryk stood there with his mouth open. He had not expected such an outburst of emotion. Duani was actually shaking!

  "Please understand, I don't have any other choice," he said in a low, insistent voice, trying to explain his situation to her. "The Creative Divinity itself decreed the Holy Quest. It's said in the Holy Writ: 'Upon each autumn solstice, the young men of seven years shall seek the Beyond in order to honor Me and to gain glory for themselves. To Hell they shall venture and undergo the trial so that My gaze shall fall benevolently upon them and I shall separate the weeds from the grain, the spoiled from the chosen.'"

  "Dammit, you actually take it seriously, don't you? Do you absolutely have to prove yourself no matter what?"

  "Yes." My Mama, Fosse, and the other fathers ought to be proud of me, he added in his thoughts. At least for once.

  "Little men! The really short ones! They're the worst of all," Duani snapped as her bosom heaved most charmingly. "Oh, all right. I must be crazy, but I'll help you. Now listen, there is one other way to the volcano peak. That is, not from outside over the cliffs, but from within, inside the mountain, understand? It's steep and not without danger as well, but it's still easier going, especially for a flat-footed, turnip-growing, thick-headed bumpkin of a growth-stunted Flatland farmer." As she finished haranguing him, her stormy mood faded away just as quickly as it had blown up. He saw that she was having to make an effort to suppress a grin. "I'll take you there, you lunatic."

  The object had a peculiar shape. And it was large. Larger than any space vehicle the Akonians currently possessed: a full 4165 meters long. It was constructed around a slender central cylinder 250 meters in diameter. Four cylinders had been attached parallel to it, each just as wide and 815 meters long. Below them—if the bow end was considered "up"—and at approximately the middle of the assembly was a ring around the central shaft, spanning about 1100 meters from one side of the ring to the other. The tubular ring itself had a cross-section of 150 meters. Two-thirds of the way down the length of the object was a conspicuous grid structure.

  "That grid must be what projects the neutrino capture-field," Achab ta Mentec explained. "In my opinion, that is how the detection shield is generated—with that and with the outrigger there."

  He pointed to a long, slender, tubular structure running along the side of the ship, encircled by an extended spiral construction at the bow end and, at the aft end, connected to the grid of the central hub. Between the attached, shorter cylinders and the bow was a smaller, thinner ring.

  "Probably contains antennae or a reserve system for the neutrino capture field," Achab said.

  "It's one strange ship," Aykalie commented. "And not an especially elegant design, if you ask me. Reminds me a little of a bug zapper. You know, those lamps that people put in their gardens to keep pesky insects away."

  "Beauty was hardly a top priority for the builders," Achab retorted, sounding almost a little insulted. "What they wanted was stability, functional reliability, and long-term durability. For that period, I think it's more than a remarkable engineering achievement."

  "Hey, you don't have to defend that ugly thing. You didn't build it, after all."

  "I think Achab is right," Mechtan said, trying to defuse the argument before it grew any more serious. "Very remarkable. Each of the smaller cylinders alone contains a volume of forty million cubic meters. You could put all kinds of things in there. Wouldn't surprise me if they're the passenger quarters. About 10,000 people could be easily housed in there."

  "So it's some kind of space station?" Aykalie asked. Then, to Achab, she said: "What makes you think that thing is 55,000 years old—and built by the Lemurians?"

  "I could roughly reconstruct its flight-path. With a very high probability, the object set out from Lemur. In the direction of the east side of the Galaxy."

  "Towards ... Akon? Towards here?"

  "Almost precisely, even."

  "By th
e Blue Sun! But ... wait! The Blue System wasn't even settled 55,000 years ago. How in the name of Vehraáto could they have known ... ?"

  "How in the name of Vehraáto should I of all people know?" Achab replied, imitating her tone of voice, his bushy gray eyebrows raised mockingly. "I'm afraid my discovery will provide us with more than just this one mystery."

  "Only too true," Aykalie's grandfather snorted. "Mysterious affair, this. And hot, damned hot, you can take it from an old warhorse. Assume you could determine the age of the object from overall isotope measurements?"

  "Only indirectly. Although the ship set out 55,000 years ago, it has not been underway nearly so long from the subjective viewpoint of any postulated inhabitants. Only about five to six hundred years."

  Mechtan whistled. "Do you mean to say it's in dilation flight? I'll be damned!"

  "Well, of course!" Aykalie exclaimed, louder than she intended, having caught the Admiral's contagious enthusiasm. "According to everything we know, the Lemurians didn't have faster-than-light engines in that era!"

  "The object's velocity is currently just under the speed of light—and, according to the available data, has been for quite some length of time," Achab said, revealing yet another piece of information. He was enjoying it. He held forth with as much self-appreciation as Aykalie's husband Jars did during his lectures. She didn't care for it. She would have preferred her men to be different from each other. That was the point of the thing, after all.

  Or was Achab play-acting again? Had he fallen into this manner of speaking intentionally? Was he imitating Jars in order to irritate her even more?

  I'll make you pay for that, you bastard, she swore to herself. I don't have any idea how yet, but something is sure to occur to me.

  "We shouldn't waste any time when we match our speed with the object and go on board," Mechtan considered out loud. "At a dilation factor of around one to one hundred, more than enough real time will elapse in any event."

  "I've worked out a provisional plan that will take about six and a half hours. We might dare to assume that the artifact has its own acceleration absorbers. So, if we install additional neutralizers from our own stock that compensate at a rate of 50 kilometers per second squared it should be possible to bring the object to a relative stop in about 100 minutes with continuous braking by tractor beams. Of course the object's structural strength has to be considered so we will proceed carefully, increasing the force in stages, so that any incident can be avoided. We must also allow a certain amount of time for making contact and communicating with any crewmembers. Thus the six and a half hours, which amount to 650 hours or 27 days standard time."

  "That settles it—I'm going on board with you," Aykalie said firmly. "No power in the world can make me sit here twiddling my thumbs for nearly a month until this operation is completed. I couldn't stand it. I'd simply go crazy with tension and curiosity."

  "And of course we wouldn't want to risk that." Mechtan winked at her. "Isn't that right, Achab?"

  He smiled. "Who am I to question the orders of my Takhan? It would be an honor and a pleasure to take a step into the past of our people at the side of two noble tan Taklirs." He made a slight, even gallant, bow, something that Jars would never in his life manage to pull off.

  Ah yes, Aykalie thought, placated and delighting in the warm feeling that rose up within her body. That's just how I like it, boy.

  5

  A Festival in Hell, a Revelation, and an Oath

  Oh, that was why they were called the Shadow People!

  Boryk reached for his head and felt the spectacles that Duani had given him when they parted. The world outside the Garden of Everwas was confusing, but often riddles solved themselves easily and almost in passing.

  The spectacles in question, a genuine miracle of the engineers' art, allowed their wearer to see even in near-total darkness.

  In a way, they gave him a second eyesight, "shadow vision" so to speak. Without them it would have been impossible for Boryk to manage the climb up through the horribly high, vertical, and only faintly lit shaft.

  Once again he cursed his short legs. There were rungs for climbing on the wall of the circular shaft, but they were set so far apart that he couldn't simply climb upwards step by step as he would on a ladder. Standing on one rung, with the next rung at a little above his waist, he could only barely reach the rung after that with outstretched hands. Then he clutched it tightly, set his feet against the curving shaft wall, and pulled himself higher, with his leather-trousered rear end dangling over the yawning emptiness, until his naked toes could find support on the metal bar of the intermediate rung. Breathed heavily. Then, with aching muscles, reached for the next rung ...

  Whoever made these passageways, he or she wasn't thinking of us little people. More like they had giants in mind, at least twice as tall.

  And again a rung, and another, and then the next. Boryk sucked the stale, dusty, cough-provoking air into his lungs. He looked neither up nor down, only at the finger-thick rung in above him. He did notice that he was steadily losing weight. And that was good: otherwise he wouldn't have been able to keep up this kind of progress for even 50 meters. And so exhaustion and relief balanced each other on the scale. At some point he was almost starting to float. He pushed out of his crouch, went on hand over hand, gained speed, put one, then two, then three rungs behind him ...

  Panic hit him when he became completely weightless. That happened just before the end of the shaft. Another four, five rungs further, and he had to hang on with all of his strength to keep from being pulled upwards. When he reached the shaft's upper opening, he was overwhelmed by the extremely unpleasant, dizzying feeling that "up" had suddenly turned into "down."

  Feet first, he landed on a peak. This was not the highest point of the volcano mountain, however. On the contrary. Its opening was above him and had just spat him out. He had fallen out of it onto something like cotton. Onto dark clouds. He stood on clouds, sank into smoke. Into the iridescently glistening column of smoke rising out of the highest cliffs that he had seen yesterday from far away—was it really only a day ago, not longer?

  With that, a further mystery that had plagued him for weeks and months was unexpectedly solved. How could one reach the Other Side if over a thousand meters lay between the highest volcano peak and the sky?

  Answer: Completely detached, freed from all earthly hindrances. Within the smoke column. Drifting down light as a feather—actually rising—without having to move a muscle.

  Boryk floated along through the vapor. The lightness that had overcome his body had also spread to his mind. He felt exhilarated, ecstatic, as though in a dream. Lacking a mirror, he couldn't check the expression on his face, but he was fairly convinced that it would have been a good match for the enraptured grin of Fosse, his favorite father, after a few mugs of hardcider.

  However, the corridor where he came back to himself some time later had a sobering effect on Boryk. He was still weightless, swimming through the unnaturally pure, odorless air. But around him stretched a skin. It was as though he was inside a fluorescing intestine. Waving filaments of pure light reached for him and into him. Pawed at him, fondled him in a disgusting way. They writhed inside of him, turning his innermost self inside out. They did not cause any physical pain, just the feeling of being completely laid bare without there being the slightest way to defend against them.

  The torture ended at some point, and the ghastly corridor turned back into a column of smoke in which Boryk floated downwards. The humiliation of what he had just experienced still writhed within him, so his elation over reaching his goal was somewhat subdued.

  For without a doubt he now found himself on the other side, in Hell. The smoky column set him down on a peak. Around him rose a chain of jagged mountains completely identical to the volcano peaks above in Heaven. But at the foot stretched not the Garden of Everwas, but ...

  A sea, enormous in its extent. As far as Boryk could see, the water surrounded the base of the
mountains on all sides. Only a strip of sandy desert separated it from the horizon. In the sky shone a sun that seemed to him slightly less bright than the great light of his homeland. But that could have just been his imagination.

  Huts stood on the foothills of the mountains, on the seashore, and on poles in the sea itself. They were inhabited since smoke rose from their chimneys. He could also make out tiny figures, mostly female it seemed to him. Boryk would have liked nothing better than to leap down headlong to them. But something told him that while he weighed very little up here, he would regain his full weight by the time he reached the bottom and break every bone in his body.

  During his descent, he admonished himself repeatedly to be level-headed and watchful. Perhaps half-wild beasts roamed here that obeyed their owners to only a very limited extent, as had been the case with the Digger up above. Fortunately his caution proved to be unfounded, since he noticed nothing dangerous. He also discovered no entrances into the mountain, no signs at all that people had ever settled up here. The rocky landscape appeared completely untouched, virgin, desolate. There wasn't even any wind worth mentioning.

  When he finally reached the seashore many hours later, long after sundown, he was thoroughly tired. Only the pride of having undergone the great adventure so far kept him on his feet. And the fear, his old, greatest fear. Of what was coming next.

  Fighting with the dwellers of Hell, stealing their women, and then ...

  The two moons in the sky stood very close to each other. It must have been just before midnight. Nothing moved among the huts on the shore. The gardens, fields, and meadows lay deserted. The surface of the sea was as smooth as a mirror.

  And now? Boryk had no idea what to do next. He couldn't just knock on some door and brightly exclaim, "Howdy! Nice evening, isn't it? I just dropped in from up in Heaven. You won't mind, will you, if I abduct some of your girls so they can finally deflower me?"

  On the other hand ...

  Why not, actually? What could happen to him? After all, he had the power to force them to his will. But did he really dare rely on it? On both occasions when he had been able to awaken the power within him, he had been in a crisis situation. On top of the foothill, Rautsh had threatened him with death, and was on the point of killing him with a stone. Later, in the cave, sheer desperation had overwhelmed Boryk because the Matekten had wanted to send him back into the mountain wilderness even though he was exhausted, half starved, and half-dead of thirst, and despite his wounds and sprained ankle.