by Leye Adenle
‘I will take you,’ Galigangangah said. She turned to the rest of them and said, ‘I will take him to the surface,’ then she interpreted it in their various languages.
‘Thank you,’ I said.
‘Don’t thank me,’ she said. ‘I just want to get rid of you.’
Galigangangah gave me one of the black cloaks they wore. It smelt sweet, like potpourri, and it was light and soft against the skin. I had been bare before them all the while, but only when they gave me something to cover myself did I truly feel naked.
Galigangangah and I began the journey back to the surface through a narrow tunnel behind a boulder, which they rolled away. She was in front and she held one of the glowing stones so we could see where we were going as we crawled on our bellies, an exercise that consumed considerably less effort than if we’d been on Earth. It hit me then that in the cave we had walked as if we were on Earth. I wanted to ask her how this was possible but I knew that doing so would only further expose my lack of knowledge, which in her mind made me a dangerous imposter.
‘Galigangangah,’ I said, ‘can I ask you something?’
She did not stop and she did not respond. But at least she had not said no.
‘You said you wanted to get rid of me,’ I said. ‘What did you mean by that?’
‘I meant I want to get rid of you. I will take you to the surface but you must not come back.’
‘Why?’
‘We are all women, all of us, even the reds that rescued you.’
‘Reds. That’s what you call them?’
‘Do you know what they are?’
‘No. How do you know they are female?’
‘Women know other women.’
‘Ok. What does that have to do with wanting to get rid of me?’
‘None of us has seen a man since we were taken. If you have not come to rescue us, I don’t want you around us.’
‘Oh. Ok. I get it.’
We continued in silence. We were climbing all the time in a spiralling gentle slope that seemed to go on and on. We must have been climbing for an hour, and even though the ascent required little effort, my arms were getting tired and my tummy had sounded off its second rumble.
‘What do you eat?’ I said.
‘There are rocks full of minerals.’
‘You eat rocks?’
‘Plants don’t grow on the moon.’
‘And you are able to survive on this?’
She stopped for the first time since we left. Perhaps she had some edible rocks on her.
‘I’m good for now,’ I said. ‘Sh. Did you hear that?’ ‘Hear what?’
‘That.’
‘No. Oh. That’s my tummy.’
‘Oh. Ok. We are close. We haven’t finished digging this one so you’ll have to dig your way through.’
‘This is not the tunnel you escaped through?’
‘No. We filled up the one we used with rocks, so that we won’t be found. We were digging this one for others, just like other people dug the one we used, but now we must fill this one up and start all over again.’
She plastered herself to the wall of the tunnel to let me pass. I did not much like her plan but I squeezed past her all the same. Our bodies brushed against one another and I felt just how emaciated she was. She held my arm to stop me when we were aligned flush against each other.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ she said, ‘and I don’t know why Itohan told us to get you. But if you come back, I will crack your skull on a rock.’
She began to crawl backwards down the tunnel. She took her light with her and I watched her green illuminated features fading away.
Chapter 53 The Beautiful Side of The Moon
I was alone, underground, in a tight tunnel on the moon. There was no light, so I could not see anything. Ahead of me was a wall of rocks that only yielded trickles of sand to my fingers; behind was death. It wasn’t long before my mind began to compare my current situation to that of someone unlucky enough – or the victim of treachery vile enough – to be buried alive. What if they closed the tunnel behind me? What if I dig and dig and never make it to the surface? What if this was how Galigangangah planned to get rid of me, by entombing me in an anonymous hole beneath the lunar surface, my name, my life, all I had done and all that I was, forever lost, forever inconsequential, forever forgotten.
Inevitable panic arrived with a quickening of my heartbeat. I dug with my hands till my nails cracked and my fingers bled. I scraped the loose sand and injured myself on the rocks. I pushed what I managed to free down past me into the tunnel. Galigangangah said the surface was close; if that was not a lie, did she mean close in distance, or close in the time it would take me to dig my way through? At the rate I was progressing, (in my estimation I was tunnelling through one foot an hour), it would take me six hours to dig my own length, but exactly how many feet, or metres, or miles to the surface was it?
What if she had led me to the wrong side of the moon, to where the air was poison to my human lungs? I stopped digging. I hotly despised my own brain for serving up all the possible traps I could be digging myself into. For once in my life, I understood the oft-quoted adage that ignorance is bliss. When I continued digging again, it was slowly and with trepidation, because the next handful of sand and rock I dislodged could bring my own death tumbling down with it.
A few fistfuls of moon substance later and my fingers stretched into open air. I panicked and withdrew my hand in a flash, my fingers tingling with fear of the danger they might have been exposed to. A ray of light stretched into the hole I had made. I held my breath and retreated the few inches I could move in the tight space. When my lungs were bursting, and my skin was not melting from poison- ous gas, and my eyeballs were not peppered or burning, I exhaled, still fearful that the next breath I took would be my last. When my lungs were emptied of life-sustaining oxygen, I took a tiny exploratory breath. The air was good to breathe. I made the hole just large enough to get a better look. Outside was brilliant as day. I was looking up at the sky, and from my limited point of view I could tell that very high above me there was a glass dome, beyond which the blackness of space prevailed. In the dome there was light, but I could not yet see where from. I listened for sounds. There were none. I considered waiting till night to make my exit, then I remembered there was no night and day on the moon, only constant light and constant darkness, depending on the side.
I listened. I dug in intervals. When I had made a hole large enough to fit through, I waited in case the people or robots I had not seen or heard were waiting for me outside the tunnel.
I inched my head out, ready to retreat into the tunnel in an instant, like a tortoise into its shell, at the slightest hint of danger. There was nothing around me save for rocks embedded in dusty sand. The dome above was so immense that I could not see where it touched the ground. It was as high as the sky was far from the Earth’s surface.
I climbed out and shook the dust off my cloak. Standing upright I saw beyond the boulders encircling me. I saw the land of the robots.
Tall windowless steel structures rose from the ground in clusters. Between them, white shimmering roads weaved in and out.
I saw the robots too. I was at the edge of town and they were busy constructing a new tower of steel and laying the road around it. They worked with torches and laser cutters. They were every shape of robot I had ever seen, and a few I had never imagined or would never have imagined. They were built for the purpose they served, so the one welding plates of steel together was an upright cylinder on tractor wheels and had four arms, two to hold things together in place and two that were welding heads. There were humanoid ones too. They appeared to supervise the work. Between the workers, tiny machines flitted about getting in the way. They were after discarded scraps of building material. The other robots shooed them away with their chainsaw hands and laser tails.
It was indeed a city of robots. I did not see any abducted humans or magicians. But what need would robots have for
houses?
I shook the remaining dust off my cloak and started walking towards them.
Chapter 54 Silhouettes of Fire
Like someone walking towards a pack of wild animals, I approached the robots with caution. As I got closer, I began to differentiate the various sounds they caused; the clanks of their feet on concrete, the steady grind of their tractor wheels upon the tarmac they were laying, the rhythmic, perfect cadence of the bangs of their hammers, the rotor scream of their electric screwdrivers. But they made no sounds themselves – no machine noises or clunks or whirling emitted from their metallic bodies. Their silence made them seem more real, almost alive, in a way. They also moved with the fluidity and natural grace of animals. They were the most advanced robots I’d ever seen, in real life or in the movies. They seemed organic.
I walked slowly into their midst. I kept my arms steady by my sides. I stopped and stood still when I was deep amongst them. They just carried on with their work. To them, I was simply another obstacle to navigate around. The tiny playful ones gathered at my feet – they were all sorts of shapes. Some had many ‘eyes’, lenses through which they looked at me, some had two, and some had only one. Those who had necks, or the robot equivalent, bent them from side to side and studied me from different angles. I stayed perfectly still and waited for the bigger ones to take notice of me.
The little robots, like little children, got bored with the unresponsive thing and they moved on, but I remained unchallenged by the workers. Perhaps watching them seemingly communicating and interacting, like labourers and their foremen on Earth, had made me erroneously assume I’d found artificial intelligence on the moon. Perhaps if I said to these robots, ‘I come in peace’, or ‘Take me to your leader,’ they would neither understand nor react to the joke.
They could not serve my purpose, so I continued on my way along the white shimmering road they were building, hoping to find the one I was looking for. I encountered many more robots and none of them paid me any attention. They were mindless worker beings, programmed to build houses and streets and no more. I was getting dismayed. I suspected that the strength of my conviction, which gave me a confidence that I had not examined for fear of jinxing it, would begin to waver as I had more and more time to question my own courage.
The further I walked along the road that was wide but devoid of vehicles, past buildings that were tall but win- dowless, the more I began to wonder if it wasn’t just a city of robots. I passed side roads that didn’t look interesting, then I came to a wide open junction the size of a football field. There the roads split into three, all equally spaced, and the buildings were much taller, like the tallest sky-scrapers on Earth. But the tall buildings were still just steel monoliths that had no doors or windows or balconies or anything. I felt I had come to the middle of town, but all around me the only life was the robots cleaning, sweep- ing, welding, and building. And they were not even alive. I stood and looked around me, at the busy machines and the lifeless city. Then suddenly they all stopped. The sound of a chainsaw was last to die. The silence was ab- solute. I looked about me for what had made them stop. It was then that I noticed their metal heads were turned to me and their glass eyes were staring at me. It was as if a pride of lions had suddenly noticed the gazelle that had wandered into their midst. They outnumbered me thousands to one. I was the gazelle about to be devoured.
Together, they began to close in on me. From all directions they approached, their gaze never leaving me.
I tried, but I could not read the intentions of the machines. But their slow deliberate progress towards me wasn’t friendly.
The grinding plate at the end of the single hand of a robot on wheels began to spin. One by one all their tools began to switch back on. The one with chainsaws for arms started revving its cutting chain with jagged diamond teeth. Blue flame jetted from the hands of a welder robot. One with a long arm that lacked an elbow and ended in the bulbous head of a large sledgehammer dragged its heavy hammer along the ground, scratching a trail behind it.
By now, they were less than a few metres from me. I was within easy reach of their tools.
I put up my hand and I said, ‘Wait.’
They stopped, but their weapons continued flaming and spinning.
I felt it in me. It was like a swelling in my chest. It was a most powerful emotion. Its intensity made my eyes burn. I wanted to cry, I wanted to scream. My heart smiled. My excitement was uncontainable. My entire body tingled from my most unbelievable discovery.
I raised my other hand and brought my palms together.
With savage ferocity, the robots turned on one another. They sawed each other’s arms off. They torched each other’s bodies, they twisted steel heads till they popped out, drilled into metallic chests, and ripped out wiring.
All around, the sound of brutal mechanical warfare wheezed and scraped and screeched. Even the little ones were not spared as they were trampled and flattened in the melee. Then the ground shook in time with a heavy thud in distance. A moment passed and the ground shook again with another thud. Something huge was approaching. I waited for it.
A gigantic metal robot stepped into view between two rows of skyscrapers on one of the three roads leading away from where I stood, and the ground shook heavily under its footsteps. It was at least five storeys high. Its metallic body was featureless, even its hands lacked fingers – there was just a thumb and a palm. It marched on. It kicked the warring robots out of its path or simply stamped them beneath its feet. At the foot of the junction it stopped, its blank face staring at me, then the ground shook again with another heavy thud. Two more giant robots marched out from the other roads. Like the first, they too stopped and stared, all of them equidistant from me. They had me boxed in.
I waved my hand at the first one but its mechanical being did not respond to my command. I tried another one, then the one behind me, but all of them were immune to my will.
Then I noticed something about the battle of the smaller robots. The way they waged war with ingenious savagery suggested that they indeed had their own minds
minds that were able to imagine such creative destructiveness, just like the minds of the humans who had made them. But not so with the colossal beings that had just arrived. They, unlike the smaller robots, were true mind- less puppets controlled by others whose minds I could not access.
The first of the giants suddenly took on an orange glow all over the front of its body, like metal heating up, until it was fiery red. This burning lump of metal split away from the body of the great robot and ran towards me, leaving robots melting in the burning footsteps it left behind. The other two robots also shed fiery clones of themselves, and the freed masses of fire were running towards me too.
There was only one thing left for me to do. I looked up to the dome of glass above me and I flew straight up, leaving the silhouettes of fire to run into each other. I looked down even as I braced for the huge explosion as they crashed into one another, but rather than be destroyed in a ball of fire as I’d hoped, they merged into one, and a larger burning beast was born, three times as big as the original ones. Its body of fire burned with three times the intensity. It stretched its hands up towards me where I hovered just beneath the highest point of the dome. It rose from the ground and flew towards me, shedding tongues of flame behind it.
Chapter 55 Cool Moon Fire
The heat from the fiery beast warmed me up quickly as it flew straight at me. In no time it would reach me and incinerate me in the flaming hands stretched out in front of it for just that purpose. I considered breaking through the dome above me, but that would make the air unbreathable for the abductees hidden in the caves below, and I wasn’t sure I could survive in space myself, or continue to fly for that matter. The beast was so big there was no way I could outfly it. Even if we played a game of dodge across the inner circumference of the dome, it was only a matter of time before it held me in its grip of fire.
It was really close. The heat radiating from
it was un- bearable and I could not look directly at the glare of its body.
I flew headfirst, flat against the curve of the dome. Below, the beast changed directions to follow me, shed- ding more flame as it turned. By the intensity of the heat, I judged when I was far enough from it, then I let myself fall. I passed the burning mass on my way down. It was already changing its direction. The three giant robots were still standing in place, their heads turned up to me. In rapid succession their bodies glowed and they shed flaming copies of themselves over and over again. Each of the burning silhouettes ran straight ahead as they were created, and merged in the middle. The beast that had been after me landed in the burning mass beneath us and immediately became several times bigger. The robots kept emitting more and more copies and the beast of fire kept growing bigger and brighter.
I landed on the flat top of a steel building. I shielded my face with my arm, to protect my eyes from the brilliance of the monster that was now as tall as the skyscrapers. The beast burnt with such intensity that a wind of scorching heat blew out from it. The edges of my cloak began to smoulder, tiny embers blew away from it. The steel beneath my bare feet became too hot to stand on. The beast continued to grow.
Soon its head would reach the top of the dome.
I flew away towards the edge of town. With strides that spanned entire blocks, the fire monster followed me. My cloak began to smoke all over as it disintegrated around me in tiny sparks. The hair on my exposed legs curled from the heat and reduced to ashes. The soles of my feet began to blister.