REGENESIS

by D. Scott Dickinson

  “They are timid and unarmed. Easy prey for Gruk the Brave and his warriors.”

  What the hunters do not discern is the timorous hedging of their leader. He will stay behind, guarding the prisoners, while the hunters enjoy the glory of capturing and herding the clutch of new slaves into the tower.

  “Kill the ones that resist,” he barks; “bring the others to me!”

  Abandoning all pretense at stealth, the hunters charge out from the shadowed trench. Menacingly raising their cudgels high to strike fear in the approaching bipeds. The furry creatures appear frozen and stunned by the assault.

  Mistaking their reaction for paralysis and fear, the hunters redouble their pace to make quick work of such easy victims.

  But as they reach the furry creatures, the hunters encounter something they did not expect: a blur of long, curved fangs and razor-sharp talons that literally rip the attackers to shreds.

  In an instant, six severed heads, clumps of hair, flesh and shards of blood-soaked bone litter the ground. Mortal testimony to the failed ambuscade.

  Meanwhile, Davina has slowly edged her way toward the long lance Gruk disdainfully cast on the ground as of little threat or use. Holding his cudgel high, he looks gleefully down at both captives.

  “Soon there will be slaves enough for all, and I, Gruk the Brave, will return to the village in triumph. The mightiest slave-catcher of our race!

  “You will be honored to be my mate,” he boasts to Davina.

  While he understands none of what is uttered, Noah shakes his fist at the brute in defiance.

  Reaching her lance, Davina lunges and, with its shaft firmly in her grasp, sweeps its sharp point toward Gruk. But the brute is too fast and, with one downward swipe, bats the lance to one side where it falls harmlessly to the ground.

  That is when Noah charges and pushes Gruk out of the tower, back into the trench.

  Espying the slaughtered remains of his hunters, the coward bolts from the trench and flees toward the city gate. Sensing no threat to them, the furry bipeds let him pass.

  Gruk is soon through the gate and scuttling across the open plain in panic.

  Chapter 54. Earth and Fire

  The last bestial brute flees to the magma mines. The river of fire consumes him. And now there is none.

  Returning to his mate, Noah declares: “We are saved! The brutes attacked our friends near the city gate.

  “Not a beast is left alive, save the one who guarded us. And he is fleeing across the plain.”

  Emerging from the dark trench, like two apparitions materializing out of shadow, Noah and his mate wend their way through the scattered remains of the brutish hunters to the furry bipeds gathered together inside the city gate.

  Davina is first to speak, as she thanks the band’s leader in his own tongue:

  “You have saved us both, and the child I bear, from the brutes who would murder him and our baby and enslave me. You need not remain outside the walls this day, for you have rid the city of the evil that dwelt here.”

  Later, amid the soft, sighing sounds of the sleeping band, Noah informs his mate that when fully rested he must pursue the escaping beast.

  “I saw the coarse footprints of these brutes crisscrossing the smudged prints of others on the open plain, and that means they are adept at tracking.

  “So long as the escaped beast remains alive, we cannot find peace. For we will be ever vulnerable to him tracking us down and murdering us in our sleep.

  “The business has to be finished. I will end it now while there are fresh prints to follow.”

  Shuddering at the brute’s threat to her unborn child, Davina readily agrees, adding only that she will accompany him in the pursuit.

  Taking their leave of the furry bipeds, the couple emerge onto the plain. Following Gruk’s coarse, shambling footprints.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Fleeing the carnage that consumed the rest of his hunters, Gruk has stealthily made his way to the only place of concealment in the open terrain. A slight rise cresting into a mound that offers sole relief from the monotony of the flat, bare landscape.

  The sneaking brute has been rewarded by the discovery of an aperture on the far side of the mound. Opening into a dark, wet tunnel leading downward into blackness.

  Creeping warily, lest the sound of his passing alerts the furry creatures or some unknown menace dwelling within, Gruk crawls gingerly into deeper darkness.

  The tunnel narrows perceptibly as its base begins to level off. He is unable to crawl farther. Feeling his way along the slick, stone wall, he nearly falls as his palms reach out and find no purchase in a wide opening on one side.

  Moving cautiously in this new direction, he soon reaches a bramble of thick, palsied, hanging vines. Festooned like a stalactite curtain across the entrance to a high, enclosed chamber. Every surface is clotted with the same sclerotic tangle.

  The wet filaments of the curtain part easily at his touch, and he soon finds himself standing inside the open chamber. The thick white strands are everywhere, the hoary, pendant roots of a dead past, and their matted cluster of curtain conceals its secret of one-way passage.

  That is when Gruk’s world goes still!

  He is struck by the deathly silence of the place. It is as if the curtain of wet strands is conspiring with the matted surfaces to create a black hole sucking and swallowing every vibration of sound.

  The wet filaments glow softly. Their bioluminescence emitting enough light for Gruk to clearly see the extent and features of the chamber. Unlike the mirror-slick solidity of stone surface in the outer tunnel, the patches of exposed wall in this place are heavily pocked with hollow pore-like openings. Whose emptiness traps and mutes all sound.

  At first, the walls and curtain in the chamber join to close in around him. Making the space feel cramped.

  But he soon will learn the unreal nature of its dimension!

  He issues a guttural challenge to the unnatural silence, but is not rewarded with a returning echo. It only magnifies the emptiness and strangeness of this hollow place.

  As his vision takes in the new surroundings, he is jolted by an unexpected sensation. Rivaling the uncanny absence of sound.

  While he can see the closed-in physical extent of the chamber, he has an overwhelming sense of infinity here. Walls he can see and touch, but which seem as endless and unreachable as the starry heavens that have so awed his tribe in the journey beyond their cloud-covered polar home.

  The twin sensations of preternatural silence and loss of physical boundaries are disorienting.

  But these are not what drives the brute to panic.

  It is the rising, metronomic beat of urgently flowing liquid that strikes fear in his pumping heart.

  The anechoic chamber has absorbed all competing sound and, into the vacuum of silence, the rush of blood surging within the brute’s circulatory system pounds through the false infinity surrounding him.

  Unchallenged by other sound, the insistent tympanic throb rises steadily in intensity until its volume becomes deafening to the brute.

  Like Edgar Allen Poe’s tell-tale heart, it threatens to drive the listener mad.

  That is when Gruk plunges headlong into a final, fatal turn.

  Lunging back to the curtain, the brute grasps its hanging strands and tries to pull them open. But unlike the opposite side, which yielded so easily to admit him into this soundless place, the curtain will not part!

  It is as seamless and solid as the sheer ice cliffs that separated his frozen home from the world beyond. And it gives rise to the same fear of isolation and entrapment.

  Gasping in terror, he slowly steps backward. Into a void as the floor drops out from under his feet. And he plunges down a vertical chimney against a strong updraft of air.

  When he reaches bottom, he is astonished to find himself sitting upright at the solid base of a vent rising from a wide, open vista of earth and fire.

  The ventral shaft has disgorged Gruk onto a tenuous ledge overl
ooking a glowing maelstrom between the banks of the Great Magma Mines.

  Mighty rivers of molten rock boil out from fissures in solid stone. Race across his vision in eddying streams. And are swallowed by solid stone once more at the far end of the vast open cavern.

  He is enthralled by the spectacle of streaming magma and wonders how it remains so cool in the face of white-hot, flaming rivulets so near to where he sits.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  Having lost the brute’s tracks on the rockier, more irregular surface of the plain leading to the hidden aperture, Noah and Davina discover a more distant narrow fissure in the earth and enter the cavern directly. But at a different point.

  As they cautiously feel their way along a raised ledge, Noah tells his mate to hold the lances while he scouts the bright opening at the visible end of the ledge.

  With her safely behind him, he steps out onto the end of the ledge into a panorama of swirling, fiery magma streaming into many whirlpools racing across a white-hot sea.

  ∆ ∆ ∆

  So riveted is he, the brute at first fails to notice he is not alone in this cavernous sphere of flowing magma.

  As he turns to rise, he looks into the astonished face of his nemesis, the erect, hairless one who stole Gruk’s new she. Who herself suddenly appears, lances in hand, directly behind her mate.

  Ever the coward, Gruk springs away from the he-creature toward a narrow shaft of solid stone reaching from his thin ledge to a black opening on the near side of the immense cavern. Once across the shaft, he means to hammer the farther end with his cudgel and cause his pursuer to plunge into the flaming magma below.

  Divining Gruk’s purpose, the hairless one is unexpectedly quick as he dashes toward the fleeing brute to cut off his retreat. But with a cry of triumph, Gruk reaches the shaft first. Falling from the ledge and scuttling across the stony pathway on all fours.

  That is when his plan goes horribly wrong!

  That is when the Judas molecule exacts the planet’s final revenge.

  To Noah, it seems like the world is catching its breath as events unfold in slow motion.

  As Gruk clutches the rocky edge of the shaft to steady himself, the cudgel begins slipping from his grip. Leaning out to save it from falling, his feet slip from the stony path and his free hand loses purchase.

  They irresistibly follow his body’s freefall as the shrieking brute plummets toward the white-hot magma.

  As it makes contact with the invisible sleeve of Judas molecules, his torso flash-freezes. Followed by a tangle of legs, thighs, arms and, finally, the hideous head. His obscene lips curled into a rictus scream.

  The icy shards explode onto the magma’s leprous skin, sending up scattered wisps of white smoke.

  Soon, there is nothing left of Gruk. With only sparks on the magma surface bearing fiery testament to the last of a debased race.

  A sudden, breath-like intake of air sweeps through the vast cavern. The long pent-up echo of a world finally rid of the scourge that nearly destroyed it.

  For Noah, the lancing shaft is the way once taken, for he has been here before.

  He knows the narrow stone bridge is passable, because he has passed over it before.

  And he knows it will take him and his mate back to the open plain, because he has followed it there before.

  With scarcely a downward glance, Noah beckons to his mate and, together, they race across the stony shaft on a path he knows will lead them back to the walled city of towers.

  Chapter 55. The Great Cataclysm

  As the last bestial brute exhales his final breath, a remarkable chain of events begins to unfold at the moon’s polar antipodes. The far ends of the world.

  They are the labor pains the astral maiden foretold.

  In the first sign of global transformation, the thickly layered cloudbanks at both polar extremes begin to break up. For the first time since the degradation of this world, the heated intensity of two suns strikes through as the opaque layers of mist are peeled aside.

  In the southern polar region, rivulets of water begin coursing down the flanks of the melting crystal spires. A tsunami of ocean and ice-melt floods around the base of the disappearing spires. Drowning and washing away every living thing.

  While the clouds race away northward toward a waiting equator.

  In the northern polar region, the same kind of tsunami engulfs volcanized vents rent into a scarred landscape. Sending up towering columns of steam. The skyward particles quickly condense into a thick fog that follows the layered clouds.

  Streaming southward toward the equator.

  Purified of all land-dwelling life, both polar regions are largely reclaimed by a rising sea. Smatterings of disconnected islands are all that remain of the once great polar land masses: a northern and a southern archipelago devoid of surface life.

  Yet, even here, on these isolated outposts of firm earth, life finds a way and will re-emerge. Warmed and nourished by sunlight they have never known. Evolving and adapting in ways their world has never known.

  For the first time, ocean waves lick at the frozen northern and southern margins of the barren tundras separating the polar seas from the temperate zones.

  For the first time, shadows move over the landscape in the light of day.

  As these cataclysmic events transpire at the surface of the far ends of the world, momentous changes are taking place within its bowels.

  Underground rivers rush upward to the surface, flowing across the land from ventral pores, in a global diaphoresis of the life-sustaining moisture. Preserved by the planet in underground cisterns and river caves. Once-dry stretches of the temperate zone are suddenly awash in the essential element of life.

  The vast corridors of magma seal themselves and are contained in their subterranean arteries. Shielding the planet’s surface from their hellish fire and heat. Having done its part in preserving the planet, the geologic lifeblood returns to its sheltered, hidden realm.

  It is as if the world is turning itself inside out, returning to a pristine beginning when clear, fresh water mottled its surface and white-hot magma flowed unseen beneath the earth.

  Indeed, the world is in rebirth, preparing for the regenesis it knows will come.

  And the agents of that regenesis are a man and his mate setting out from the walled city in their quest to remake the world.

  They carry with them the seeds of a new and fruitful harvest. And she carries within her the seed of a new and promising civilization. While the furry bipeds accompanying them will help assure the success of their great quest. Homeless outcasts of a diminished world, their unmoored plight binds them together in common purpose.

  For this small, distant moon, it is a second chance at life everlasting.

  As the planet heals itself of old wounds and these orphans of a lesser world bring it new hope.

  Chapter 56. Pearls in the Sky

  Congratulating Davina on the couple’s quick and safe return, the furry bipeds enter the tower behind Noah and his mate and discover it is very different from their first visit to this place.

  The masonry walls are remarkably aged and show every sign of imminent crumbling.

  There are no windows, no doors save for the one they entered and no other apertures of any kind.

  The ancient walls are rough but seamless, and the bare dirt floor looks as old as the dust lying upon it.

  Taken together, the interior of the tower appears to have aged many millennia in the short time since they made their earlier visit.

  It is as if the tower had held its vitality, resisting the ravages of time, until the voice revealed its message. Then, in the blink of an eye, all the intervening ages caught up and turned the stony heap into the aged, hoary edifice it has become.

  But the thick, soft dust carpeting the floor welcomes the travelers and, for the first time in many days, they sleep soundly in its pillowy embrace. Rest is vital this time because they will awaken to a changed world with many difficult leagues ahead of th
em.

  The leader is first to rise, and he leaves the others to rest while he proceeds to the city gate on the lookout for dire wolves.

  When he reaches the elevated passage, a startling scene spreads out before him!

  Gone is the once-arid plain. The outer walls are inundated with water pooling at their base. And discrete bodies of water, great and small, mottle the plain in every direction.

  As they slept, vast reservoirs of water, once coursing through underground river caves, pumped up to the surface of the world. Transforming the temperate latitudes into a land of lakes, ponds, rivers and streams. All glistening like diamonds in the light of two suns.

  Examining the water pooling like a moat around the outer walls, the leader discovers it is quite shallow and passable. Looking beyond it to the broader open plain, he discerns wide stretches of dry earth between the dappling bodies of water, and he knows they will have passable levees of firm ground in whatever direction they take.

  Returning to the tower, he finds the others awake and urgently relates all he has seen to Davina and to his fellows. Her eyes shine with anticipation as he describes the new world of wonder waiting to greet them on this new day.

  After a few hurried words from her mate, Davina approaches the leader again.

  They cannot leave this place until certain matters are settled.

  As Noah waits for his mate to accompany him to the gate of the walled city, she is in animated conversation with the leader of the furry bipeds.

  “We must be near the sea,” the leader explains. “It is the Life Source, and the Old One beckons me to it. For us, the inland reaches are too bare, too hot and have too few of the finned creatures which are our food.”

  Nodding, Davina concedes: “Very well. We will choose a place near the ocean’s shore. But it must be temperate and suitable for growing the plants whose seeds we bear. For they are our food.”

  As the leader nods his assent, Davina approaches Noah and declares: