by Bill Schutt
July 12, 1946
R. J. MacCready held up his hands “peaceful-guy” style, waited a beat to gauge Alpha’s response, then knelt beside the machinery that the Morlock had dumped on the ground.
“This looks like part of a helicopter transmission,” he said, shifting the object onto its side. “Definitely American made.”
Yanni moved in beside him. “How can you tell?”
“Serial numbers are in Arabic numerals. But take a gander,” he said, pointing to a flat section of metal with a set of characters stamped in red.
“Well, that’s definitely not American,” she replied.
“Chinese, from what I can tell.”
“It is Chinese,” Jerry confirmed.
Yanni shot them a confused look. “But how did the Chinese get their mitts—”
“Lend-Lease,” Mac said. “Back in ’41, we started sendin’ shitloads of supplies to the Brits, French, and Soviets—trucks, railroad equipment, helicopters, and the like. Some of it went to China.”
The Morlock, who had been standing by silently, now took the opportunity to emit an impatient-sounding growl.
“I guess somebody needs to explain that to Alpha here,” Jerry suggested, doing his best imitation of “the least threatening human in Tibet.”
Mac pointed to the machinery, shot the creature a quizzical look, and then shrugged his shoulders. “No clue, big guy,” he said.
The Morlock emphasized his next growl with a facial display that caused Mac to momentarily imagine being driven into the ground like a screaming, six-foot-long tent peg.
Sensing calamity, Yanni stepped between her friend and the giant. “I’ve got this one,” she said to Mac and Jerry. Rather than speaking to the creature, or even looking it directly in the eye, she knelt down and smoothed a section of the dark loamy soil into a sort of canvas. Then, using only her index finger, she began to draw.
The figure was clearly meant to depict the face of a Morlock. Mac noted that Yanni correctly portrayed the long hair but had decided to leave out the snarl and the canines.
“Nice touch with the smiley kisser,” Mac said quietly, and by way of support.
Yanni did not bother to respond. Instead she pointed to the portrait and then to Alpha. She repeated the move, checking to make sure that the Morlock had made the connection. Apparently he did.
Next, she drew a rather decent facsimile of MacCready’s face and reenacted the pointing-from-picture-to-object pantomime, while Mac tried as hard as possible to resemble the caricature. Finally, she drew a third figure, this one with what appeared to be exaggerated Asian features. Completing it, she pointed at helicopter parts and then to the last section of her artwork.
The response by the Morlock, whose initial transition from jailer to art critic seemed to have diminished his anger, took an unexpected turn. With canines in full threat display again, the giant moved forward and used its foot to stamp out the last figure.
“Serr-rah!” Alpha growled.
“I’m guessing he’s not a big fan of Impressionism,” Jerry muttered. Mac and Yanni followed up by flashing him a matching pair of shut the hell up looks.
“SERR-RAH!” Alpha emphasized, in a tone that was simultaneously a roar, yet part of a curiously birdlike language.
“Sarah?” Mac wondered out loud. “Sure doesn’t sound Chinese.”
“Jesus,” Jerry said. “I don’t think he’s saying Sarah.”
“SERR-RAH!”
“Lemme guess,” Yanni said. “More bastardized Latin.”
“You got it. Sere is the Roman word for Chinese.”
“But how the hell do the Morlocks know Latin?”
The trio exchanged glances, each of them sharing the same thought: Pliny.
May, a.d. 67
For a creature of such short stature, the little doctor was astonishingly strong.
Moments after the female Ceran physician separated Severus from his two friends and led him indoors, she pushed him to the ground. Then she brought her face close to his—holding him spellbound, as if by the stare of a cobra. Severus found it impossible to determine, from the Ceran’s expression, what to expect. All he knew for certain was that, at any chosen instant, she could strike him dead.
Pliny, what did you get me into this time?
“The only certainty is uncertainty,” Pliny had said. Severus, however, was not so sure. One certainty did gnaw at him: that he was losing, forever, everything that his family had built for him back home. It occurred to the young Roman that Pliny had planned to seduce him away from art and engineering, into doomed expeditions such as this. By the time the voyage was planned, his family owned the Bay of Naples’s most educated and artistic slaves. They counted themselves among the city’s wealthiest architects and engineers.
All those carefully planned connections and all that hard work—wasted.
Looking back, he could see that once Pliny caught sight of an explorer’s uneasiness in him, he had begun stoking the fires of confusion. The older man had recognized in Severus a student torn between wanderlust and the desire to design great machines. Eventually Pliny convinced him that there was no need to choose one love over the other. Like a half-dozen others in the handpicked expedition team, Pliny had deceived him into believing that he could live out all of his dreams.
And how have those dreams rewarded me? Severus asked himself, and tried to avert his eyes from the beastly physician. But she would not let him turn his head away. I’m dead, the centurion thought. And for a single, nightmarish moment, true fear welled up like a punch against his heart. By the time the Roman shook aside that emotion, two other physicians had descended into the dwelling. They flitted in with such fluid and silent motion that he failed to notice their presence, or their exit. He simply realized, with a start, that someone else had draped a warm robe over his shoulders—incomparably soft to the touch and woven from a delicate fiber that was neither wool nor cotton.
Perhaps I will not be joining our honored dead quite yet, he thought.
He had no sooner realized how hungry he was when the physician who had apparently chosen him as her own personal captive produced a bowl of hot broth. Surprisingly tasty, it contained generous helpings of a strange grain that defied identification.
“Gratiam,” Severus said, thanking her in Latin.
The Ceran locked her large, almond-shaped eyes with his again, trying unsuccessfully to imitate the sound he had just made. She studied his expression, then raised a hand and shoved him hard on one shoulder.
Message received, Severus told himself. Repeat.
“Gratiam,” he said.
“Graaa-tee-yum,” she shot back at him, though far more accurately this time—even down to the parroting of his accent and the slight speech impediment that served to further bastardize his Latin. Again the physician struck his shoulder with the “repeat” signal.
He said the word again, slowly raising the bowl and sipping from it. This time she pronounced it even more precisely, though Severus wondered if the physician believed herself to have learned his word for the bowl of soup, or the thanks he had expressed for receiving it.
She motioned toward her eye and uttered a long, trilling whistle. After his third try at parroting it back to her, he began to realize that the word—if it was a word—contained multiple whistled inflections in more than six syllables. He tried . . . and failed. Then failed again. He hoped their words for a simple “yes” or “no” would prove easy enough to at least start something like a conversation. They were—just barely.
After mastering a handful of Latin words in only a few tries, it became clear that whatever passed for Roman language was far simpler (and perhaps more primitive) than the Ceran tongue.
The lessons continued until dawn. By then, only occasionally did she attempt to teach him her own words, and each time, he failed. At one point Severus became vaguely aware that the stench from the one he would henceforth refer to as “Teacher” had become a nearly tolerable background odor.
As daylight began flooding in, Teacher’s cobra stare was still horribly apparent, yet not quite so threatening as it had seemed to him at sunset. Now he noticed that when the pupils of her eyes narrowed, they revealed irises like those of an alpine wolf, flecked with speckles of blue-green. Those eyes, and the dyed stripes of the creature’s mane, were the only signs of pigment on her entire body.
Belonging to a people who could deliver death with both speed and cunning, Severus knew that this rendered Teacher was as fascinating as she was dangerous. He saw in her a being who was at once amazing and obscene, terrifying and wonderfully mysterious.
Chapter 9
The Missing
What seest thou else, in the dark backward and abysm of time?
—William Shakespeare, The Tempest (Act 1, Scene 2)
South Tibet
July 12, 1946
“This is some seriously perplexing shit,” Jerry said, after Morlock “Alpha” singled out and obliterated the last of the three caricatures Yanni had drawn in the soil, then left with the Chinese helicopter parts.
“What’s up?” Mac said, though clearly preoccupied with his own thoughts.
“I’m still wondering what they’ve got against the Chinese.”
Mac shrugged, and looked through the curved wall of ice at the swarming field of inchworm grass just beyond. Distracted by it, he thought aloud, “Some sort of hive organism—like wasps.”
“Huh?” Jerry said, puzzled. Then he turned his gaze to the seething, carnivorous lawn. “Oh, them. Gotcha.”
Together the two men watched silently, lost in thought, until Jerry spoke. “So here I am, Mac, thinking you’ve already been through enough strange shit to last a lifetime. Like that little adventure you had in Brazil.”
“And?”
“So do you ever get the feeling that we’re being dragged down Alice’s rabbit hole?”
MacCready paused for a moment. “I suppose it feels like that sometimes, although that ‘adventure’ in Brazil was certainly no fantasy.” Then he gestured to the activity taking place just outside. “And neither is this one.”
“I guess what I mean is . . . do you ever get used to it?”
MacCready thought about it for a moment, and then for another. “I don’t know if ‘get used to it’ is the right phrase,” he said at last. “You travel to incredible places—dangerous places—and too often you don’t come back with as many people as you went in with. But somehow you feel honored to be there.”
“Even though the story can end badly,” Yanni added, before falling into stony silence.
Mac knew that her thoughts were drifting back to another time and another place.
Ashamed that he’d done something to upset the only person in the world he never wanted to upset, Mac backpedaled. “Jerry, have I told you about Bob Thorne’s diaper invention?”
Jerry, who also noticed what had just occurred, shook his head.
“Sparties!” Yanni blurted out, with a laugh.
Now Mac’s face broke into a wide grin. He supposed that this might have been the first time since Bob’s death that Yanni could recall something about him more with laughter rather than pain.
“Sparties?”
“Yeah, Jerry—a diaper you only have to change every month!” Mac announced proudly.
“The Spartan thirty-day diaper,” said Yanni, picking up the story. “The baby fits inside—”
“—except for their head,” Mac added, with a laugh.
“Right,” Yanni continued, “and you kind of secure it around the kid’s neck.” She made a string-tying motion around her own neck. “Done!”
Jerry threw his friends a skeptical look. “Then what?”
Mac continued the pitch. “Then thirty days later, you take Junior out of his diaper, hose him down, and leave ’em out in the sun to dry.”
Yanni finished up, “Then ya stick ’em into a new Spartie and he’s good to go.”
Jerry laughed before shaking his head at the imagery. “Sparties, huh? Sounds like your Bob was a real hoot.”
Yanni nodded, and gave Jerry a rare compliment, a showing of respect that would have gone over the heads of most outside observers. “I’m sure you two woulda become great friends,” she said. “I’m startin’ to think you’re our kind of stupid.”
The trio lapsed into silence as the here-again, gone-again white shapes they had been watching converged menacingly outside the igloo.
The ice-sculpted door slid open. This time Alpha and two other giants entered without uttering any sounds. Each took a prisoner under an arm, exited, then started off at a fast jog—the sea of grass mimics parting before the three Morlocks. Mac glanced around in every direction, trying to get his bearings. His best guess was that they were headed back toward the cave system they had passed through earlier. He tried to take in more details but “the armpit express” was moving with such haste that there was time enough only to think he had seen something large and white foraging in the mist—but the moment passed so quickly that now he could not be sure.
Soon they were once again in among the tunnels and cathedral-like caverns, the supporting ribs and buttresses lit brightly by heatless fire. After passing through a chamber system so large that St. Patrick’s Cathedral could easily have been contained in one of its side branches, the prisoners were taken into an alcove and unceremoniously dropped to the floor.
What Mac saw confirmed beyond all doubt that the Morlocks had been the architects of this undiscovered realm. But of morality and wisdom, no matter how intelligent these beings might be, they could easily match humanity’s own savage impulses, black for black. The stalagmites told it so—row upon row of polished ice columns.
No, Mac reminded himself. Not merely polished—planned and constructed.
From the floor up, it was an atrocity of rare design. In this most brilliantly illuminated of subterranean chambers, the pinnacles spoke, in crystal clarity, of the savage brain. There were hundreds of the artificial stalagmites, each cut into a perfect cylinder, each enclosing and preserving one or more “specimens.” Some were zoological, some were botanical, while others were clearly man-made. But by far most of the shapes entombed in ice were human—sometimes dozens of people in a single enormous column.
“Like—”
“—flies trapped in amber.” Yanni completed Mac’s thought.
The Morlocks prodded their three human captives, as if to say, Go and see.
And so they did.
“Holy shit!” Jerry blurted out. “Their equipment is here, too!”
“Who?” Mac asked, trying to keep up with Jerry as he ran from one pillar to the next, barely pausing at each for more than a glance. To Mac it seemed as if his friend was trying to fill his mind with everything he could glimpse before the Morlocks stopped him—and he looked that way because, in fact, he was. Jerry finally came to a momentary halt at one of the tallest cylinders. Inside, no fewer than twenty soldiers were arranged in a semicircle amid broken pieces of military equipment—artillery, firearms, and swords.
Mac could see, in at least a dozen of the pillars standing nearby, that all the bodies encased within were wearing the same uniforms.
Jerry, who had resumed his flitting back and forth between columns, followed silently by the trio of Morlocks, finally came to a stop.
“Chinese,” he said, pointing to one of the icy displays, then turning to his captors. Their expressions seemed to be wavering somewhere between mild amusement and annoyance, but Jerry appeared unconcerned. He repeated the word, then shrugged, clearly hoping that the gesture conveyed three truths to the Morlocks: confusion, surprise—and finally, a message: We are not Chinese and we are not your enemies (the latter Jerry emphasized with some hand-waving that reminded Mac of an interpretive dance).
Jerry turned to his friends. “Ever heard of the Yangtze disappearance?”
Mac and Yanni both shook their heads.
“You mean the Nanking disappearance?” Mac asked.
“No,�
� Jerry said, quite unable to hide his excitement. “Although it did happen around the time Nanking fell to Japan back in ’37.”
“And?”
“And there’s even less known about this one. Nothing but rumors, really. What we do know is that the Chinese sent a large force up into the mountains, beyond the source of the Yangtze. Tremendous undertaking—with all sorts of equipment. Huge generators. Cannons. They hauled it all up there.”
“The proverbial ‘force to be reckoned with,’” Mac said.
“Exactly. Something like three thousand men. Anyway—”
Mac held up his hand. “Jerry.”
“Yeah, Mac?”
“Take a breath.”
“Oh, right,” Jerry said, looking slightly embarrassed. “At any rate, from the way Alpha responded to Yanni’s drawing, I’m guessing these Yangtze guys must have killed more than a few Morlocks before they fell.”
Yanni looked around. “And there were three thousand of ’em, huh?”
“I know what you’re thinking,” Jerry responded quickly, and, as Mac and Yanni exchanged glances, he made a quick recount of the Chinese-laden columns. “There’s not nearly enough bodies here, right?”
“War trophies?” Yanni suggested.
“Or maybe museum pieces?” Mac said with a shrug. “Who can tell what’s really going on here?”
“They can,” Yanni said, gesturing toward the Morlocks. “If we can learn to speak their language.”
She paused at a particularly gruesome pillar that seemed to tell the fate of a similarly armed group, though these were wearing different uniforms. Young men had been tied in a circle with their feet at the axis—and above them, another layer had been tied likewise, with their heads facing outward. There were twenty such layers, encased one upon another within the column of ice. Yanni could see that those on the lower layers had the life crushed out of them by the layers above. A Japanese war flag left no mystery as to their origin.
Yanni pointed to the banner. “Maybe these guys tracked the Chinese up into the mountains?”