She camped on a ledge but not before she anchored herself to the rock face with a line attached to her belt. From force of habit, she went to sleep with her laser-knife in her hand, though if she had thought about it, she no longer had any reason not to rely on her stun guns alone.
She wasn’t sure how long she had slept, when she awoke to the rustling sound of small spidery creatures crawling all over her armour. In fact they were more like crabs than spiders, roughly the size of the palm of her hand, although some were bigger, some smaller. They had eight legs and two overgrown mandibles that acted like additional arms. They immediately shunned her light as if it was harmful to them, but she quickly realised that they weren’t at all harmful to her. She wondered if they were edible, but she was more curious about their behaviour.
Whilst they avoided her light as if it could burn them, they seemed to be attracted to the lighted crystals on the walls. She noticed, in fact, that they stroked them, thus eliciting some sort of sustenance from them in the form of an oozy liquid. Elvene realised that her previous cursory examination of these crystals had been misleading, and she now wondered if they weren’t in fact a life-form.
On closer examination, she realised that they performed a type of photosynthesis by generating their own light from mildly radioactive crystals. The ooze that the crustacean creatures elicited was a form of protein. This subterranean world had developed its own food chain, and she couldn’t help wondering where she might fit into it.
Elvene herself needed food and she found that the ooze was sticky and sweet, not unlike a nectar; it reminded her a bit of honey, though she had only ever tasted the synthetic variety. She had heard of people who kept bees for honey, but she had never tasted the product.
She killed one of the crab-like creatures with her laser-knife, though for some unknown reason, she felt guilty about it. However, when she examined the flesh with her analytic wand, she found it was toxic. Later on, she would realise how lucky she was to have made that discovery, and not just because they were poisonous. Having killed one, the others now kept a wide berth whereas previously they had only feared her light.
They seemed to congregate in a mass, not unlike a school of fish, and in fact, she was never to see one in isolation. As she got up to walk, they moved out of her way like water parting at her feet; she could hear the sound of their tiny feet scratching and clattering on the rock like a soft shuffling dance. After a few steps she realised that they were now all behind her like a shapeless animal that covered both the wall and floor. From a distance they simply looked like a piece of carpet, roughly the size of a blanket, that moved like an amorphous shadow and changed shape to match the topography. Elvene left them behind and they didn’t follow her.
Elvene moved from one cavern to another. Some she had to traverse with her rappelling equipment while others she had to crawl through. Her timepiece told her that another day had passed, yet from her perspective, her progress didn’t seem to reflect the time that had elapsed. It was of some concern, as her deadline to contact Alfa was approaching, yet she seemed no closer to finding daylight. She experienced, for the first time since she had been trapped, a sense of rising panic kindled by fear and uncertainty. She told herself that her fear was her greatest and only enemy; she resolved to keep moving and not to give in to sleep until she was physically exhausted.
She had read stories of shipwrecked survivors on Old Earth and knew that fate had played a hand in all those stories, but so did a will to live and survive. She told herself that her choices were simple and her options limited – it made it easier for her to continue.
Eventually she did stop from sheer exhaustion; her chronometer telling her it was two hours past midnight in the starlit world above ground. She had another day to find freedom, yet she didn’t even know if that was physically possible. She decided that a short sleep would further her progress, whereas none at all would lead to hallucinations and poor decision making, at the very least.
Sendra and Myka left the island and sailed around its northern side before heading east again. Myka noticed that there were presperas fishing on all sides of the island, and he was surprised that he had only seen the one on the island itself. He concluded that they must nest on the more exposed surfaces, perhaps on the cliff faces themselves that faced the ocean, and eschew the heavily forested areas that he and Sendra had visited. If that was the case, he realised, then his encounter with one in the treetops was even more extraordinary then he had thought.
He noticed that the top of the island was still wreathed in cloud and wondered if it was always like that, though he knew how easy it would be to make a false judgement based on a two-day visit. His own island home often suffered the same fate, but it didn’t have the same carnivorous trees, so comparisons were spurious at all levels.
Myka was only just beginning to understand that his world was much more varied than he had thought. He didn’t know that it was humankind’s inherent curiosity that led to extraordinary fields of discovery and exploration. He was partaking in a tradition that spanned the whole of human history and even its prehistory. His intimate relationship with Elvene had made him realise that humankind’s natural curiosity even stretched beyond the stars that hovered over his head at night. So his discoveries were nothing in comparison, yet they were huge leaps relative to his own origins.
Later in the day it rained, which always gave them an opportunity to collect water by funnelling it off the sail. When the sky cleared, it was mid-afternoon and Myka took a nap in anticipation of his upcoming night shift. He awoke just prior to the sun setting, so he was able to regain his bearings. In his head he kept a mental picture always of where they were, and the encounter with the island had allowed him to calibrate his orientation and position anew.
He wondered if the underwater lights had led him to land; he had the feeling that whatever they were, they were on his side. When night came and Sendra customarily went to sleep, the underwater lights returned. They had become Myka’s nighttime companions, and whether they followed him or he followed them, did not seem to matter; they provided him with some sort of reassurance that he was not alone in his endeavour.
He was also greatly relieved that Sendra had joined him. He knew how difficult it would have been to do this on his own, especially the first time. It wasn’t just a matter of having someone to share the work, but simply to have someone whom he could trust and provide friendship, made an enormous difference in maintaining his confidence.
The night passed uneventfully, and after their sojourn on the island, he and Sendra quickly fell back into their raft-bound routine.
When Elvene awoke this time, she was surprised and somewhat alarmed to realise that she had slept non-stop for over nine hours. She knew that without diurnal cues, a person’s body clock often developed rhythms that were longer than normal. She realised that her decision to sleep may have been her biggest and most costly mistake, but she couldn’t change that now; she could only continue her journey through this seemingly endless underground labyrinth.
She realised, what’s more, that the caverns were getting bigger and more difficult to cross. On one occasion she thought she heard the trickle of water but she had to lower herself down a chimney in order to investigate. She found an underground stream that momentarily broke the surface before plummeting through a hole. She was able to fill a gourd she carried, and she took some hope from the fact that the current was going in the opposite direction to herself. At some point, she ventured, the water must be entering from above and that may be her way out.
She climbed back up the chimney and continued into another cavern. She was reminded of Coleridge’s poem, “Xanadu”, and ‘caverns measureless to man’. She wondered if Coleridge had envisioned this place in one of his opiate dreams. She wondered too if the lack of proper sustenance and daylight was affecting her own senses. She felt she was reaching a stage where survival and its absence was becoming an absurdly thin line. She didn’t even use the word death
in these personal conversations with herself, because if entombment was the alternative, then death itself would prove an escape.
Whenever she reached a small tunnel at the end of a cavern, she was torn between an apprehension as to what it might hold and the necessity to explore it in the hope it would lead to freedom. Other than the miniature crabs, and the ever-present crystals on the cavern walls, she had seen no other signs of life, yet she had no doubt there were other life-forms present in this subterranean world.
She passed through the tunnel like it was a portal, and to her surprise she encountered something underfoot that felt familiarly like mud. She looked down to see she was standing in a viscous goo; her first reaction was to step back, but her sense of surprise quickly turned to fear when she realised that she couldn’t. She realised that this was the same substance that Myka had once showed her, but she would never have expected to get caught in it herself. It was a nightmare situation she had never anticipated, that she would be unable to proceed simply by being stuck to the ground under her feet.
For Elvene, fright instinctively turned to fight. She unshouldered her rappelling gun and shot a line above her and slightly behind, but it was to no avail. The gooey mixture under her feet had turned into quick-setting concrete. The only way she would be able to extricate herself would be to take her boots off, but common sense told her that was a last resort and very soon it became impossible anyway. She pulled out her laser-knife but she realised that she couldn’t cut the substance without cutting her own armoured foot, as the substance had welled up over her toes and heels and held her effectively rooted in the rock. It was a very strange substance: it was liquid and sticky until it was disturbed, and then it solidified with movement. The more one struggled the more viscous it became until it finally metamorphosed into a glassy rock.
She realised that she was in a similar situation to what she had faced with the night render. This was a trap for some predator she hadn’t yet met, only this time she felt she was better armed and psychologically better prepared.
Unlike the night render, it did not take long to make its presence known. The size of the animal surprised her. It had an exoskin like the crabs she had seen earlier but quite a different shape. It had many legs and a tail like a scorpion’s. She wondered how it would even fit into the tunnel but its size was in its length and not its girth. It had long antennae and Elvene believed it was probably blind as she could see no eyes and it was unaffected by her light. It had two long claw-like limbs, similar to a praying mantis, and they now groped towards her. She cut the animal’s antennae with her laser and burned one of its claws, which stopped it dead in its tracks. It had many legs, probably six, although there may have been more holding up its long tail. As it took up the whole tunnel, she couldn’t tell.
Elvene unleashed her stun guns in a volley of plasma and blue lightning bolts. The animal reeled under the onslaught, then collapsed on its folded legs, filling up the opening in front of her. Elvene felt that history had repeated itself. She had killed her nemesis but was still trapped by it. Any imagined rendezvous with Alfa was virtually impossible now. She couldn’t see any way of releasing herself without cutting off her toes, which would make walking impossible. She was truly stuck in more ways than one. She could not remember a more hopeless situation in her entire life. Killing the giant crustacean in front of her had lifted her spirits, but she could not see any possibility of further escape.
As a last resort she pulled out the ceramic knife in her boot and started to scrape at the glassy substance around her right foot. It had frozen in a crystalline form and the blade made little indentation, but it was possible to wear a shallow groove. She persevered, as one does when there is nothing else one can do. Not being able to change her position made it doubly difficult and it wasn’t long before she started to cramp. The situation seemed to mock her every attempt.
Then to her surprise she heard the shuffling sound of the crabs she had encountered much earlier. They came from in front of her and to her surprise they started swarming over the dead creature and prying at its shell in order to reach the flesh inside. She realised that they were the scavengers in this enclosed ecosystem, but they had another surprise for her.
They approached her as if she too may be a source of food, but instead of attacking her armour they started to work away at the substance surrounding her feet. To her amazement they secreted a saliva that allowed them to eat it away. She wondered now, if she had eaten them as a source of food,whether they would have avoided her and left her to die.
It was strange to feel such affection towards these miniature and apparently simple creatures, but they had saved her life. Now she only had to find a way out. Her chronometer told her her that she had less than two hours to find an exit, and whilst she was lucky to be alive, actual escape seemed no closer.
But she couldn’t help feeling that fate was on her side, and she took a lot of fortitude from these lowliest of creatures living in this darkest of worlds, that had given her another chance at freedom and life. It was up to her now not to waste the opportunity they had given her.
She managed to clamber past the dead animal in front of her, the scavenger crabs making way for her as if they understood her mission, but in reality just avoiding harm to themselves.
She made her way through the lair of the creature she had killed, seeing remnants of its prey. She realised now that it had a symbiotic relationship with the crabs who cleaned up the scraps not to mention the animals left trapped at its entrance.
Not long after, she heard the sound of running water again and this time traced it to a waterfall. She could hear it from a long way off and it took considerable time before she found it. Its noise was deafening when she entered the cavern where it was cascading down some rocks. She rappelled her way to the top and for the first time saw light reflected from its uppermost surface. It seemed to take an age before she finally reached the opening. She could see grass and even sky tantalisingly peeping through a crevice in the ground above. It seemed barely large enough for a rabbit but she was determined to squeeze through.
When she poked her head through she was on the side of a hill, and looking behind her she saw a huge mountain with snow on its peaks. She realised that she must have traversed under it in the previous three days. To see a vista bathed in daylight and smell fresh, cold air was like being reborn. She immediately sent a signal to Alfa but there was no response.
She crawled out; it was late afternoon already, and she tried many times to contact Alfa but there was still no response. When the sun disappeared, she scavenged some wood and built herself a fire. She had nothing to eat but her rations, but the fire was like company to her and hunger was pushed to the edge of consciousness. Now that she had survived her subterranean ordeal, not being able to contact Alfa was her greatest concern.
Gradually the night surrounded her until the small area lit by her fire became her entire universe, yet she was conscious of the sky and the air about her, as if she had just been released from prison. It was now well past the deadline she had set for Alfa, and she finally had to admit that either he had already left the planet, or been discovered by marauders and destroyed.
13. Journey’s End
AFTER THE STORM AND THE VISIT TO THE ISLAND, Myka and Sendra’s voyage was largely uneventful. Within days they came across another group of islands, populated by flying animals as well as amphibious creatures like giant lizards with six legs, but there was no sign of human habitation.
Sendra and Myka went ashore on one of these islands and found that the lizards lived in burrows which they were able to raid for eggs. It rained most of the time they were there, and in fact the weather seemed to be the result of a changing pattern they were experiencing at sea. There was a sense of changing seasons with the sun travelling lower across the sky and the prevailing winds changing from south to north and bringing ever more rain-bearing clouds.
It had been many days, more than Myka could count, since th
ey’d left their home, yet all the islands in his mental map had been passed. He now knew that the next land he saw would most likely be a continent, though he had no such word in his vocabulary.
The weather was getting colder, in fact, colder than anything he had experienced. They had travelled a good deal north. Elvene had told him that the more north or the more south he travelled the colder it would get, although it also depended on the time of year. She explained that when it was cold in the north it would be hot in the south and vice versa. She explained that the sun moved from north to south and back in a yearly cycle, creating the seasons. In a similar fashion the stars moved lower or higher on the horizon as his craft took him north or south. They only remained consistent when he travelled east and west, though the night sky also changed with the seasons. This had been hard for him to understand, but once he started travelling on the ocean, it made sense and it even made it easier for him to navigate. Seeing the stars change with the time of year gave him a sense of time at sea and therefore distance travelled; he could see how the two were connected.
It was only towards the very end of their long journey that they saw the strangest creatures they had ever encountered, and the ones that had the deepest impact on Myka. It was partly because of their size and their obvious power, but also because he felt a connection to them right from the start.
It started off as a cloud on the horizon about mid-morning. In fact, Myka first thought that it was a land-form, appearing, as it was, grey and amorphous. It was such a strange sight that he even wondered if it was some sort of alien spacecraft like Elvene’s, only much larger, like the mothership she had mentioned, remembering that she had arrived by sea, even though she returned via the sky.
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