“There. That’s exactly the sort of thing we mean.” Outside, it was summer, and in the last light, townsfolk were out bowling on the green. Laughter, calls of children, quiet bursts of applause, and something about it all made Lindsay, forever denied any such tranquil community, briefly fear for the structural integrity of his heart. Since then he had been receiving, with a somewhat alarming frequency, questionnaires printed on official forms, thinly disguised demands for samples of his bodily fluids, unannounced visits from bespectacled, bearded gentlemen speaking in a variety of European accents and actually wearing white coats who wished to examine him. Finally the Inconvenience had flown on without him, Chick Counterfly temporarily assuming X.O. duties, in order that Lindsay might enter the C. of C. Biometric Institute of Neuropathy, to undergo a “battery” of mental tests, upon release from which he was to proceed with all haste to a certain uncharted Inner Asian oasis serving as a base for the subdesertine craft in the region, for rendezvous with H.M.S.F. Saksaul.
Like Balaam’s ass, it was the camel tonight who first detected something amiss, freezing in midstep, violently clenching every muscle in its body, and attempting un-camel-like cries it hoped its rider might at least become alarmed by the queerness of.
Presently, from just over the dune to his left, Lindsay heard someone calling his name.
“Yes do stop for a moment Lindsay,” added a voice from the other side of the track, whose source was no more visible.
“We have messages for you,” hissed an augmented choir of voices.
“All right now, old scout,” Lindsay reassured the camel, “it’s quite common out here, reported as long ago as Marco Polo, I’ve personally run into something like it in the Far North as well, yes plenty of times.” More loudly, as if replying to the now-accelerating importunacy, “Simple Rapture of the Sands, absence of light, hearing grows sharper, energy reallocated across the sensorium—”
“LINDSAYLindsayLindsaylindsay . . .”
The camel looked around at him with a long eye-roll meant, mutatis mutandis, to convey skepticism.
“You must leave this track you were told never to step from, come to us, just over this dune—”
“I shall wait here,” advised the aeronaut, as primly as the situation permitted. “If you will, come to me.”
“Plenty of wives over here,” the voices called. “Don’t forget that this is the Desert. . . .”
“With its well-known demands upon the mind . . .”
“ . . . which so often may be resolved as polygamy.”
“Heh, heh . . .”
“Wives in blossom, pan-spectral fields full of wives Lindsay, here is the Great Wife-Bazaar of the World-Island. . . .”
And not only the sibilant words but also liquid sounds, kisses, suction, mixed in with the unceasing friction of sand in its travels. An obscure local insult directed at himself? Or was it the camel they were trying to lure?
So star after star climbed to its meridian and then descended, and the camel took his way a step at a time, and all was saturated in expectancy. . . .
At dawn a brief wind arrived, from somewhere up ahead. Lindsay recognized the smell of wild “Euphrates” poplars coming into blossom. An oasis, a real one, had been waiting out there all night just past his reach, where now, among the redispositions of the morning, he rode in to find the rest of the crew, lying around experiencing the effects of the water here, which, somewhat odd-tasting but far from actually poisonous, was in fact much preferred, by the large population of travelers out here who knew of it, to either aryq or hasheesh, as a facilitator of passage between the worlds.
Lindsay shook his head at the tableau of chemical debauchery before him. For a terrible moment, he was certain, beyond reason, that none of these figures were his real fellow crewmen at all, but rather a ghost-Unit, from some Abode he wished never to visit, resolved on working him mischief, who had been painstakingly, intricately masked to look like Chums of Chance.
But then Darby Suckling caught sight of him, and the moment passed. “Eeyynnhh, will ya look at who’s here. Hey, Nutso! When’d they let you out of that B.I.N.? I thought you’d be locked up for good.”
Relieved, Lindsay limited his reply to a seventeen-syllable all-purpose threat of physical violence, failing even to mention Suckling’s mother.
“NOW, SET THE Special Desert Detail. . . . Secure hatches fore and aft. . . . All hands prepare to submerge. . . .”
That excitement peculiar to under-sand travel could be felt as ship’s personnel moved busily forward and aft in the dimly-lighted spaces of the subdesertine frigate Saksaul. Diamond-edged sand-augers cranked up to operating speed, beginning to bite all but frictionlessly into the sands of the Inner Asian desert, as steering-vanes smoothly came into play, increasing the angle of penetration. Any observer upon a nearby dune might have watched, perhaps in superstitious terror, as the craft, unhurriedly pursuing its dive into the lightless world, at last vanished beneath the sands, only a short-lived dust-devil remaining behind where the fantail had been.
Once having reached standard operating depth, the ship leveled off and was brought to cruising speed. Down in the engineering spaces, the Viscosity Gang began to throw one by one the switches that would couple to the ship’s main engine their banks of so-called Eta/Nu Transformators, causing the observation windows up on the bridge to start trembling like drumheads, and a succession of colors to flow across the polished surfaces, as the view out the windows, pari passu, began to clear.
“Now light all cruising-lamps,” ordered Captain Toadflax. As the searchlight filaments, fashioned of a secret alloy, became heated to the correct operating temperature and wave-length, the view beneath the dunes, blurry at first but soon adjusted, sprang vividly to life.
It as little resembled the upper-world view of the desert as the depths of an ocean do its own surface. Enormous schools of what might have been some beetle species swarmed, as if curious, iridescently in and out of the searchlight-beams, while, too far away to examine in any detail—in some cases, indeed, well past the smeared boundaries of the visible—darker shapes kept pace with the ship’s progress, showing now and then a flash, bright as unsheathed steel. Presently, according to the charts, felt more than seen, there rose to port and starboard the jagged mountain ranges known to long-time Inner Asian sand-dogs as the Deep Blavatsky.
“Only way a man can hang on to his wits,” as Captain Toadflax jovially informed his guests, “is to be stationed at an instrument he can’t avoid tending to. These windows here are basically just for the entertainment of lubbers such as yourselves, no offense of course.”
“None taken!” replied the Chums, as they had long learned to do, in cheery unison. Indeed, their demeanor today struck more than one observer as almost provokingly self-satisfied. Their mammoth airship was back at the oasis encampment, safely within a picket of Gurkhas fabled for their merciless dedication to perimeter defense. Miles Blundell, as Commissary, had put up a number of appetizing picnic luncheons, sizable enough to share with any members of the Saksaul’s crew whose delight in sand-duty cuisine might have begun, however tentatively, to ebb. And before them lay exactly the sort of adventure that was sure to appeal to their too-often ill-considered taste for the histrionic yet unprofitable.
“It is down here—” declared Captain Toadflax, “quite intact and, make no mistake, inhabited as well—that the true Shambhala will be found, just as real as anything. And those German professors,” jerking an irascible thumb upward, “who keep waltzing out here by the wagonload, can dig till they’re too blistered to dig anymore, and they still won’t ever find it, not without the right equipment—the map you fellows brought, plus our ship’s Paramor-phoscope. And as any Tibetan lama will tell you, the right attitude.”
“Then your mission—”
“As ever—to find the holy City ourselves, be there ‘fustest with the mostest,’ as your General Forrest used to say—no reason you shouldn’t know that.”
“Of course we
don’t mean to pry—”
“Oh, you lads are all right. I mean, if you aren’t all right, then who is?”
“You shame us, sir. If truth were known, we are to be counted among the basest of the base.”
“Hmm. Would’ve preferred someone a little more karmically advanced, but, howsoever—we do try aboard this vessel to ignore the rivalries going on above us whenever we may, and anyone that’s after our results is more than welcome to them—they can read the whole story, right there in the papers, when we get back home at last, ‘Heroes of the Sands Discover Lost City!’ Ministerial speeches and archiepiscopal homilies, not to mention an opera girl on either arm, shaved ice by the ton, day or night at the touch of an annunciator, never-failing fountains of vintage Champagne, jewel-studded Victoria Crosses designed by Monsieur Fabergé himself—well . . . except that, of course, if anyone ever did actually discover a City sacred as that, he might not wish to wallow all that much among the secular pleasures, appealing though they be or, shall I say, as they are.”
If any sinister meaning was hidden here, it either escaped the attention of the Chums or they had heard it just fine, and artfully concealed that recognition.
On the futuristic frigate glided, through the subarenaceous world, its exotically shaped steering-blades extended, its augers ever in finely-calibrated rotation clockwise and counterclockwise, among loomings of forbidding pinnacles and ominous grottoes never quite fully revealed by the searchlight beams. Such to the dead might appear the world of the living—charged with information, with meaning, yet somehow always just, terribly, beyond that fateful limen where any lamp of comprehension might beam forth. The hum of the viscosity equipment rose and fell, in what had come to sound more and more like purposeful melody, reminding veterans of duty on the Himalayan station, of transmundane melody performed upon ancient horns fashioned from the thigh-bones of long-departed priests, in wind-beaten lamaseries miles above the level of a sea at this distance belonging more to legend than geography.
Randolph St. Cosmo, who had been gazing nearly mesmerized out the viewing windows, now gave a sort of stifled gasp—”There! isn’t that a . . . watchtower of some sort? Have we been sighted?”
“Torriform Inclusion,” chuckled Captain Toadflax soothingly, “easy to mistake. The whole trick down here’s distinguishing man-made from God-made. That,” he added, “and a head for the extra dimension. Urban terrain doesn’t mean quite what it does up above—not if we can approach a town from below as easily as any other direction. Foundations, for example, become more like entry-ways. But I imagine you’ll be eager to have a look at the map you’ve so kindly brought us. Least we can do in our all-but-boundless gratitude, you know.”
Installed in the Navigation Room—a space so secret half the crew didn’t even know it was there much less how to get to it—was one of the few Paramorphoscopes remaining in the world.
All paramorphoscopical activities aboard the Saksaul had been placed in charge of a civilian passenger, Stilton Gaspereaux, who proved to be a scholarly adventurer in the Inner Asian tradition of Sven Hedin and Aurel Stein, though beyond the Navigation Room chores his status on the ship was unclear. Unforthcoming about himself, he appeared more than willing to talk about Shambhala, and the Sfinciuno Itinerary.
“Among historians you’ll find a theory that crusades begin as holy pilgrimages. One defines a destination, proceeds through a series of stations—diagrams of which were among the first known maps, as you see from this Sfinciuno document before you—and at last, after penitential acts and personal discomforts, you arrive, you perform there what your faith indicates you must, you go home again.
“But introduce to your sacred project the element of weaponry and everything changes. Now you need not only a destination but an enemy as well. The European Crusaders who went to the Holy Land to fight Saracens found themselves, when Saracens were not immediately available, fighting each other.
“We must therefore not exclude from this search for Shambhala an unavoidable military element. All the Powers have a lively interest. The stakes are too high.”
The cryptic civilian had placed the Itinerary beneath an optically-perfect sheet of Iceland spar, deployed various lenses, and made some fine adjustments to the Nernst lamps. “Here it is, lads. Have a look.”
The only one not flabbergasted, naturally, was Miles. He saw in the device immediately a skyship application as a range-finder and navigational aid. To look through it at the strangely-distorted and only partly-visible document the Chums had delivered to Captain Toadflax was like experiencing a low-level aerial swoop—indeed, engaging the proper controls on the viewing device could easily produce a long and fearful plunge straight down into the map, revealing the terrain at finer and finer scales, perhaps in some asymptotic way, as in dreams of falling, where the dreamer wakes just before impact.
“And this will take us straight to Shambhala,” said Randolph.
“Well. . . .” Gaspereaux seemed embarrassed. “Yes I thought so too, at first. But there seem to be further complications.”
“I knew it!” Darby exploded. “That ‘Zo Meatman was setting us up for suckers all along!”
“It’s strange, really. Distances, referred back to an origin point at Venice, are painstakingly accurate for the earth’s surface and the various depths below. But somehow these three coördinates have not been enough. The farther we follow the Itinerary, the more . . . somehow . . . out of focus the details seem to drift, until at last,” shaking his head in perplexity, “they actually become invisible. Almost as if there were some . . .additional level of encryption.”
“Perhaps a fourth coördinate axis is needed,” Chick suggested.
“I feel the difficulty may lie here,” directing their attention to the center of the display, where, visible only at intervals, stood a mountain peak, blinding white, seeming lit from within, light pouring from it, bursting continually, illuminating transient clouds and even the empty sky. . . .
“Thought at first to be Mount Kailash in Tibet,” said Gaspereaux, “a destination for Hindu pilgrims for whom it is the paradise of Shiva, their most holy spot, as well as the traditional starting point for seekers of Shambhala. But I’ve been out to Kailash and some of the others, and I’m not sure this one on the map is it. This one can also be seen at considerable distance, but not all the time. As if it were made of some variety of Iceland spar that can polarize light not only in space but in time as well.
“The ancient Manichæans out here worshipped light, loved it the way Crusaders claimed to love God, for its own sake, and in whose service no crime was too extreme. This was their counter-Crusade. No matter what transformations might occur—and they expected anything, travel backward or forward through Time, lateral jumps from one continuum to another, metamorphosis from one form of matter, living or otherwise, to another—the one fact to remain invariant under any of these must always be light, the light we see as well as the expanded sense of it prophesied by Maxwell, confirmed by Hertz. Along with that went a refusal of all forms of what they defined as ‘darkness.’
“Everything you appreciate with your senses, all there is in the given world to hold dear, the faces of your children, sunsets, rain, fragrances of earth, a good laugh, the touch of a lover, the blood of an enemy, your mother’s cooking, wine, music, athletic triumphs, desirable strangers, the body you feel at home in, a sea-breeze flowing over unclothed skin—all these for the devout Manichæan are evil, creations of an evil deity, phantoms and masks that have always belonged to time and excrement and darkness.”
“But it’s everything that matters,” protested Chick Counterfly.
“And a true follower of this faith had to give all of it up. No sex, not even marriage, no children, no family ties. These being only tricks of the Darkness, there to distract us from seeking union with the Light.”
“That’s the choice? Light or pussy? What kind of a choice is that?”
“Suckling!”
“Sorry Lindsay,
I meant ‘vagina,’ of course!”
“Sounds a little,” Chick scratching his beard, “I don’t know, puritanical somehow, doesn’t it?”
“That’s what they believed in.”
“Then how’d they keep from dying out after the first generation?”
“Most of them went on about the business of what you’d call their normal lives, kept on having children, so forth, it depended what level of imperfection they could accept. The ones who kept strictly to the discipline were called ‘Perfects.’ The rest were welcome to study the Mysteries and try to join the small company of the Elect. But if they ever reached a point where they knew that’s what they wanted, that’s where they’d have to give everything up.”
“And there are descendants living down here?”
“Oh, I expect you’ll find it quite populated indeed.”
Presently the optical-offset detectors of the Saksaul revealed in the near distance scattered but unmistakable ruins in the Græco-Buddhist and Italo-Islamic styles and, moving among these, other subdesertine vehicles, whose courses, upon being roughly plotted, appeared to converge with the Saksaul’s own, somewhere in the obscurities ahead. From above, below, and either side, structures more complex than geology could account for began gathering closer—domes and minarets, columned arches, statuary, finely filigreed balustrades, windowless towers, ruins written on by combat ancient and modern.
“We shall put in at Nuovo Rialto,” the Captain announced. “Port and starboard liberty sections.” This news was received ambiguously by the crew, “N.R.” being a good liberty town for some needs but not others. The long-submerged port had been settled around 1300 on the ruins, by then already half swept below by the unappeasable sands, of a Manichæan city, which dated from the third century and according to tradition had been founded by Mani himself in his wanderings beyond the farther banks of the Oxus. There it remained and flourished for nearly a thousand years until Jenghiz Khan and his armies overran that part of Inner Asia, leaving as little as they could either standing or breathing. By the time the Venetians found it, little remained that had not succumbed to wind, gravity, and an excruciating departure of faith. In the brief time they occupied Nuovo Rialto, the Westerners managed to put in a network of cisterns to collect what rainwater came that way, run some pipe, even sink a few wells. Inexplicably, as if attending to ancient voices somehow preserved in the crystallography of the silica medium which was so mercilessly engulfing the town—as if secret knowledge had once been written that permanently into its very substance—they began to fall year by year under the influence of the old para-Christian doctrines. The first under-sand explorers here had identified Manichæan shrines dating from no earlier than the fourteenth century, clearly a thousand years more recent than they ought to have been.
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