by Chad Huskins
They shook hands briefly. “A pleasure,” Moira said.
“Yeah,” Desh replied.
“The two of you bring an eclectic mix of experience,” said Kalder. “I think we will need to call upon such diversity in the days ahead.”
“What exactly are we looking for?” said Desh, still holding the glass and playing with it as though he expected it to miraculously refill itself. “I’ve heard a lot of rhetoric in the Forum about a Crusade and I know you’ve got a thing for Scrolls left by the Worshippers, but I don’t know the first thing about what we’re doing.”
“Yes,” Moira said. “I would also like some clarification on that.”
Kalder nodded, downed his drink, and handed it over to Julian who was standing patiently nearby and speaking in low tones to someone on his whispertech holotab. “Would either of you be surprised if I said I’m not entirely sure?”
“Well,” Moira said, “what is it you hope to accomplish, then?”
“A much better question, and one I am finally prepared to answer.”
Kalder pointed at a point on the Dwimer globe, and the image zoomed in. But the holo-projector had misinterpreted his gesture, and so he had to scroll around the planet to get to the point he wanted. He tapped the spot, and this time the projector got it right and zoomed in on an area of the planet that had been mapped by old satellites.
“Some of this data came from human satellites, while other pieces came from ancient Isoshi and Faedyan explorers,” he told them. “At various times in its history, Dwimer has been a planet of some interest to different cultures. It seems all intelligent races, at some point, encounter the weirdness that is Dwimer and find it hard to release themselves from its allure.”
He pointed to a patch of uninteresting desert, with a couple of low hills.
“This region here,” he said. “That is where we are going.” He looked at Moira. “And it is where, I believe, the ‘Grazen’ site can be found.”
Moira nodded. “Where the recordings I’ve been listening to were made.”
“I believe so. Hard to be sure, though. A lot of information on it has been lost to the ages.”
“Why are we going there?” asked Desh, barely suppressing a belch.
“Because I believe the Worshippers left something there, something key in their own search for the Strangers. What it is, I cannot say. I only know the story I was told, and I believe the person who told it to me.”
“What story?” Moira asked.
And so Kalder peeled back the years, thinking back to a time before he had been a Zeroist, back to a point when he had been far more innocent, entrenched in a small but bloody war that had been quickly forgotten, and when the Fall of Man had still been an avoidable thing on the horizon.
And he told them the story.
THE PART THAT would always stay with him, no matter how long he lived, was the smell. It never quite washed off you. The blood and the bodies. It was amazing how fast a body let you know it was dead. Almost as soon as a person’s heart stopped beating, the death process began. The blood ceased pumping, became coagulated and lumpy, the body temperature dropped, and the muscles stiffened. Soon, the bacteria went to work, putrefying the body.
There had been piles of them. Bodies everywhere. All wearing the same STACsuit armor as him. Kalder moved trepidatiously across a field choked with smoke and bodies turned to mulch. He had already retched several times. His legs were weak as water. Above him, a single blue sun burned brightly through a clear sky. Skyrakes clawed at that sky, leaving him behind, saving their own asses.
He couldn’t blame them. He generally considered himself a coward, and would have left his comrades behind in a heartbeat if it meant leaving this hell.
Ebon shapes flitted this way and that through the smoke. He clambered up the side of the crater, stumbling across one of the enemy. The long, tenebrous arms reached out at him. He stabbed the alien to death using his tactical knife, screaming bloody murder the whole time.
He trudged over the bodies of his friends. Here was Dinick, his body torn asunder. There was Yorfan, the hand he had once used to pluck the samisen torn clear. Over there was Y’vosh, being slowly eaten by a faceless, eyeless drone-serpent. Kalder tried to save Y’vosh, but the drone-serpent saw Kalder coming and pulled his meal below the ground.
Then, he blacked out. Kalder would never be able to recall the steps that brought him to the med bay—he would never know who it was that rescued him—but he did recall waking up, blinking blearily, and looking around at the other wounded. Men screamed for their mothers as med bots slipped on the puddles of blood gathered on the floor. A priest hovered over him, a Christer by the look of his cloth. Then something else attacked them. An explosion that took out all the lights of the med bay. Kalder and everyone else was slammed against the walls as the hull cracked. Their ship was crashing. Back to the surface. Security foam filled the cracks of the hull and emergency jets and parachutes were activated to slow their fall.
The planet would not let him leave.
Kalder woke up in darkness. Everyone else around him was dead. He unstrapped himself and went walking, through a fog of pain and darkness and shock, following a single blade of light that came from a dark corner of the med bay. When he stepped outside, he discovered that he was indeed back on the alien world.
It appeared he could not escape it. He would die here.
More dead bodies littered the world. They were strewn for miles all around. A few lay screaming, arms and legs missing, bloody stumps pumping out rivers of blood. He clumsily tried to help. They all died. Behind the downed starship was a two-mile-long blackened gash in the soil where the ship had hit and skidded.
At some point, Kalder blacked out again.
When he woke up, he was sitting across from the monk. A man of the Buddha. He gave Kalder food and water. He told him not to worry, for there was plenty. The starship was full of supplies, enough for a hundred men to survive a five-year mission. Since it was just the two of them, they could dwell here for decades, especially if they rationed and repaired the ship’s hydroponics lab.
And for the first decade, that’s exactly what they did. They spent their days calling out for help from the sensor station they patched together. They took shifts at the station, waiting and listening and hoping. They set aside days for housekeeping, such as burying the corpses of the fallen, organizing the food, patching pieces of the hull, and cleaning their living environs. Day in and day out, they sat and they talked on every conceivable subject. Kalder lost his mind a dozen times, wept uncontrollably, and was consoled by the Buddha man. They endured. They told jokes and became familiar with each other.
The Buddha man taught him the tenets of Buddhism, the “Four Noble Truths”: the truth of dukkha, or suffering; the truth of the cause of dukkha, the truth of the end of dukkha, and the truth of the path one must follow in order to end dukkha. In the years to come, while he felt emotional pain at being stranded, cut off from everyone he knew, from a life that gave him purpose, Kalder would learn much about enduring dukkha.
Kalder could not say how many nights he sat and listened to the Buddha man while acid rain spat against the empty hull. He could not count how many storms they had endured. He vaguely recalled all the instructions on breathing exercises. He lost count of the times he lost hope and the Buddha man restored it.
There was always dukkha, though. Sicknesses that arose. Food poisoning, an ulcer in his gut, strange rashes on his genitals and feet. Not many medical supplies had survived. They were forced to endure dukkha on a planet that spat acid rain, separated from any women to fuck, any gourmet meals to devour, any saunas or swimming pools to indulge in.
Kalder recalled the Buddha man breaking his leg one day while they were searching for other survivors—something they often did just to pass the time. The Buddha man fell through a patch of brittle earth that led twenty feet down into a concealed cavern. They spent all day trying to figure out how to get him out, but at last Kalder
used his soldierly know-how to improvise a rope and harness made out of spare materials. The Buddha man had once been a pediatrician, and taught Kalder a great deal about first aid, and walked him through how to splint the broken leg.
That experience bonded them like no other, and, without realizing it, they adopted a formal teacher-student relationship. The Buddha man mentored Kalder, and Kalder attended his every need, for the Buddha man was much older than him and they had no access to regen meds.
The years rolled by. The acid rain continued to pour and the world continued to revolve around its single blue star. The planet had no moon, only vast fields of stars, unmolested by the light pollution of any civilization. The planet had no life to speak of, even the xenos they had come here to kill had been from someplace else, and had fled here with key intelligence data they had stolen from PI. Kalder, the Buddha man, and all the others had only chased them as a warning, and to perhaps recover unknown government secrets. And for that, they were marooned here, on a world that had no name, forced to endure dukkha.
Kalder was taught how acts of kindness brought about happiness, how it encouraged the universe to repay you for all such acts. However, the universe also repayed evil deeds, the Buddha man warned. This was how he learned of karma.
They went about their work, cleaning and checking in on the sensor station, telling tales and laughing, consoling one another when the need arose. The Buddha man only wept once that Kalder saw, and when Kalder asked him the reason, he said that he was merely contemplating the beauty of this world, of all worlds, of all stars, and all grains of dust in the universe.
The Buddha man’s wisdom and positivity was what kept him going. The Buddha man’s words were a torch leading him down an endlessly dark corridor, always exploring, always in search of some knew granule of wisdom. He taught Kalder the search for truth, how to find an expression of oneself in the universe as a whole, and how to find the universe within oneself. He taught him meditation and breathing techniques.
And then the day came when the Buddha man died. Kalder woke up one day to find him lying in his cot, still as a stone and not breathing, no apparent cause of death. Just…gone.
Kalder could barely conceive of a life without the Buddha man, without someone to talk to. He walked away from their camp, shaking his head repeatedly, weeping, occasionally screaming up at the blue, indifferent sun hovering above his head. He could not bring himself to bury the Buddha man, at least not for a while. First he had to go through all the stages of grief, starting with denial and then moving into anger and bargaining. He considered killing himself—it was not the first time he had floated the idea. Indeed, the Buddha man had talked him out of it twice.
The depression passed surprisingly quick, and once Kalder had accepted that the Buddha man was gone, and that he was really, truly, finally alone, he buried his last friend in the universe. He didn’t know why, but it seemed appropriate that he bury the man in the same place where he felt their friendship had truly blossomed, in the hole in the ground where the Buddha man had fallen through and broken his leg.
The hole was different when he returned with the body of his friend. Over the years, acid rain had poured into the opening, washing away the floor at the bottom of the cavern inside. Kneeling, Kalder saw strange designs engraved on the floor. Carefully lowering himself down by rope, he set his feet gingerly down on what had once appeared to be a stone floor, but the years of acid rain had eroded it to reveal a metallic surface, one etched with gorgeous designs, not unlike Chinese calligraphy.
Kalder decided to bury his friend elsewhere, and left the cavern for later exploring. After many days of mourning his loss, he set back out, with food, flashlights, and what few fresh batteries he had remaining, and made a base camp by the cave entrance.
The caverns became his home, and Kalder only returned to their old base camp once a day to check the sensor station and see if his distress signal had been picked up. Inside the cavern he found collapsed tunnels and, day after day, rock by rock, he uncovered them. He spoke aloud, sometimes to himself, sometimes to the Buddha man’s ghost, sometimes to the rocks themselves.
Another decade rolled by like this. Him in his tunnels, and the blue sun in the sky, and the stars unmolested by any moonlight, and the acid rain pouring down. In that silent and dead world, there toiled Holace Adamik Fuller Kalder. He uncovered more metal walls and floors, and traced his fingers over the mysterious looping letters.
The rocks weren’t just objects he needed to move out of his way, he also used them for building. Kalder erected monuments on the surface, and used tools from the wrecked starship to begin a hobby of chiseling and sculpting. Some holotabs from the ship still had battery life, and there were how-to vids he could watch to enhance his skills.
The surface around the cave entrance soon resembled a village, with markings that looked sort of like the ones he had seen in the cave floors and walls. Some nights, he dreamed about those markings, and when he did, he often dreamed of his friend the Buddha man pointing at the symbols and weeping at their beauty, and instructing Kalder to look more deeply at them.
Then, one day, he removed the last stone of one collapsed tunnel that had been particularly intriguing to him for its markings. On the other side, he found a long, long corridor made of unmolested, shimmering, green steel, one etched with the same beautiful alphabet. Kalder traveled deeply with flashlights and glow-globes, treading carefully because if he got injured down here there was no one coming to save him. This tunnel went on for untold miles, and it soon became clear that this would be an expedition all its own.
Kalder made preparations for a long journey into the depths. He gathered enough food and supplies for three days and put them into an old military duffel bag, which had once served to carry his spare ammo through countless other wars, any of one of which might have been his last, and yet he and the duffel bag had survived together, to meet this moment of discovery.
The tunnels were about as varied as one could imagine. The passages were sometimes narrow, sometimes wide. The ceilings were perfectly flat at times, rounded at others. Some of the walls were rough and made of some sort of ceramic, but in other places they were smooth and attained an elegance that one usually only granted the most ostentatious of architecture. And there were offshoots. Doorway after doorway, leading to more tunnels. And each tunnel promised to lead to untold miles of more corridors, more offshoots.
There were things on the ground coated in dust, things that looked sharp and hard, and might have once been the bones of some ancient explorer, but just as likely could have been some rodent whose species was long extinct.
There were steps, and they were oddly shaped. Rather than being horizontal protrutions that ran parallel to one another and went up or down, they were randomly jutting pegs that extended from either side of the wall, like knives that had been plunged into he walls with only their handles sticking out. Kalder moved carefully, gingerly down these steps. Here and there he spied ebon shapes moving through the tunnels, and privately he regretted having brought no weapon of any kind. For what else might be down here? What else might have been in mid-hibernation, only to awaken at the sound of a lonesome human fumbling in the dark?
Eventually, Kalder came upon a sepulcher. With walls built far apart from one another, it gave a semblance, in the dark, of stretching on into forever. His flashlight’s beam could find no ceiling. That struck him as strange at first, because he did not think he had been traveling deep beneath the surface, but then realized he had been going down a slow, steady incline.
Kalder stood at the threshold of the doorway leading into the sepulcher, wondering at its size and beauty, taking some time to sketch the engravings on paper notebooks he’d found inside the crashed ship.
When he finally stepped further inside, he became afraid. The whole room trembled, and he believed that he had made a terrible mistake in coming here. Sections of the wall opened, like windows, only instead of looking into the outside world, they
revealed dusty lenses. Light emitted from them, stuttered, then died out. There was a whirring noise coming from behind the walls, like machinery trying to cue up, but unable.
Kalder realized that his presence had activated some ancient motion detectors, and that some screens had been meant to light up, perhaps in a formal greeting, but time and neglect had rendered the mechanisms unable to fully initiate.
If only the Buddha man had lived to see this! What would he have made of it?
The next several years were marked by more discoveries, both large and small. Kalder endured dukkha, meditated on its causes and how to master them, and plumbed the depths of every corridor of the cave. Even as he discovered new levels of the alien sepulcher, so too did he find new truths about himself.
He found mechanical items that still worked if cranked. He discovered a single holographic imager that projected strange wriggly things into the air, and Kalder realized he was looking at some alien culture’s version of a microscope, an image of viruses and cells at work. Was it a recording, or an analysis of some pathogen present in the room with him? Had this been some sort of science lab? Impossible to tell.
Most things had long since collapsed and turned to dust. The things in the best condition, though, were the sepulchers. Kalder found more of them, about two each year of exploration. Some of the tunnels around them were collapsed, but many opened onto old roads and avenues, remarkably preserved. Kalder came to believe that all of this had once been aboveground, but that ages of dust and windstorms, and perhaps tectonic activity, had shuffled it lower into the planet’s crust. Or perhaps the race that built this had indeed been a subterranean people who did not like marring the surface of their world.
Markings on one wall appeared to be a map of a night sky. Kalder ran his fingers over those engravings, wondering who the person was that made them, and what significance they had attached to the stars.