by F P Adriani
“Wha—” he said in dull voice, frowning. “What’re you saying?”
I lowered my voice. “That you wanted to see Hu alone.”
Now his eyes rolled to the tent’s top, his head lightly shook from side to side. Then his eyes finally slid back down, toward me. “Look. There’s no desire there anymore, so don’t worry. But if you keep it up with the jealousy, I might just believe you’re in love with me. Now wouldn’t that destroy your love-’em-and-leave-’em image?”
“Very funny.” I unfolded myself from the floor, stood and stretched.
“Come back here,” he said then, reaching up and wrapping his arms around my legs.
I was laughing as I collapsed back down to ground.
*
We were finally moving through the forest again.
This day’s drier trek seemed to go faster, only I sweated more than the day before. We were getting closer…to what?
I kept having a bad feeling, like the best part was over….
We eventually reached a ridge in the forest, where a pretty steep drop lay on the other side. And just as we were discussing how best to go over the bump, I heard a distant rumbling sound. The sky looked clear, the earth felt intact; the sound must have been something mechanical.
Pretty soon, the rumble turned into a buzz and then a metallic roar….
“Get down!” Chuck suddenly shouted.
So I did get down—we all did, scrambling to beneath some dark brush.
And now I was really sweating: up through the brush, up through the trees, I could see a black transport slowly going over the treetops. It wasn’t that close, but it wasn’t that far either. My head spun sharply to Tan, but he was staring where I had been staring.
“That’s not ours,” I heard Hu’s wary voice say from behind me.
Crouched beneath a big tangle of prickly plant parts, we waited for I didn’t know how long; the transport seemed to take forever to cross a small space. Maybe it was looking for something, or someone….
The thing finally disappeared from our view. But we didn’t move until the roar had totally ceased, and we could hear only the wind rustling through the trees. And our own heavy breathing.
Both Hu and Chuck finally pushed out of the brush.
I shouted to Hu then, “I thought you said transports can’t fly over here!”
“They’re not supposed to,” she said. “But some people are ignorant and other people don’t listen to the laws.”
I snorted.
“I meant the just laws that make sense.”
“This is a seismically sensitive area too,” said Chuck now.
I swallowed hard. “You mean what they did could be dangerous?”
“What else is new,” said Tan in a dry voice.
“It’s not just that,” Chuck continued. “The area’s watched by satellite. Someone’s just advertised there’s activity here.”
I wondered if that were a bad thing or a good thing. We were all basically stuck here. We couldn’t easily communicate with anyone—too dangerous. If we lost contact with Hu’s transport, we didn’t have enough food for more than a few days—
Suddenly I heard a beeping sound: a communicator. Someone must have taken one from the transport. Hu. Now she walked away from us a little, and I saw her hand shaking as she fumbled a bit with getting the box out of her jacket.
“I told you not to use this unless there’s an emergency,” she finally said into the communicator, her tight face looking really pissed off. I couldn’t make out what the other end was saying. She must have put that on very low.
She was silent for a bit. Then she said, “We know. We just saw it. Now maybe they can get a fix on us….” Her voice faded as she walked even farther away.
I turned back to the others and saw that Chuck looked agitated; Cal and Jeremy had their big guns drawn and pointed up to the sky; and Tan just stood looking as if he didn’t know what to do next, which was exactly how I felt.
*
About half-an-hour later, we were mentally recovered enough so that we could begin climbing down the ridge. Hu never told us what she’d discussed with the transport. But maybe she should have because now the atmosphere between all of us was too tense, too somber, too nerve-wracked. And when people are too nervous, they fuck up.
Like me.
So the rest of us could more safely make our way down the ridge, Chuck went first and set up a rope system for us to grab onto. Tan went along the rope next and made it down all right; then Hu also made it down.
But when my turn came, my nervous too-damp hands lost their grip on the rope, and I tumbled down the ridge, right onto a big flat rock.
That felt good…NOT.
As I’d fumbled and then twisted my left wrist against the ground, I heard both Tan and Hu shout, “Pia!”
But I didn’t have a chance to respond then. I responded now. “Fucking fuck!” I shouted at the pain spreading in my arm.
“Hang on—we’re coming to get you,” Chuck called.
“No! Let me get her,” Tan shouted as he grabbed onto the rope and started pulling himself back up the ridge.
But I only yelled “No!” back at him. “I’m all right. I don’t think anything’s broken. But don’t I feel like a dumbass now….”
I stood up, my good arm holding my wounded arm; I was able to wriggle my palm and fingers, but I felt a painful jab up my forearm then. “I think it’s just a bad sprain.”
Jeremy started coming down the rope now. And when he reached me, he offered me a big arm.
I pulled an ironic smiling face. “Aren’t you gallant,” I said sarcastically, but I still took his arm.
“Now grab onto my back with your good arm as I move down,” he said.
We made it the rest of the way, and when I got down to the bottom, both Tan’s fingers and eyes did a careful once-over of my arm, while Hu stood rubbing her own thigh area.
But her eyes were on us. “That looks swollen,” she said. “You should bandage that.”
Now we lost a little time while Tan removed the first-aid kit from my pack and did what Hu had suggested.
Once he’d put on a flexible bandage, my wrist didn’t hurt so much. At least I could move my hand feeling no more than a hot throb. “I hope we don’t have to do anymore of that rope-shit.”
“You know we do on the way back,” said Hu.
I didn’t have a response to that. I didn’t want to think about it. Instead, I said, “Well, maybe I should be more worried about my case because I fell on it.” I looked over my shoulder, trying to get a view of my backpack. I realized then that it had saved me even more hurting: if I hadn’t been wearing it, my back would have hit the flat rock directly.
“What on Diamond do you have in there?” Hu asked now, eyeing me with curiosity. “A magician’s bag of tricks?”
“Something like that,” I said, another thought popping into my head. “That transport—you think someone could be waiting for us when we get there….?”
“No way to know. But that’s why Cal and Jeremy are here—with their friends.”
They had their “friends” drawn as we continued on our way.
*
Three hours later we came to another ridge. Luckily this one wasn’t anywhere near as steep as the other one. This one was like a bump on a semi-plateau. It was also a much more significant find because Chuck finally looked down at his digital equipment and said, “This is it—should be right around here somewhere.”
I peered down over the edge and studied the more open area there—the most open we’d encountered so far. The ground was sandier here, and only an occasional tree pocked the landscape. On the right, another slope fell away to a lightly forested area. On the left, the ridge seemed to continue down and around to somewhere not visible from here because a projection in the ridge blocked the view.
Cal and Jeremy still had their guns drawn, and now Hu told them to go look around. Their bodies sort of slid down the ridge; they scanned the
area for a few moments, first forward, then left and right.
When they finally walked back toward us, they were shaking their heads.
Now we all went down, very nervously and very carefully on my end because I didn’t want to agitate my wrist again or any of my other parts…. Great. I suddenly remembered that I now had an old knee injury, an old shoulder injury, and a new wrist injury. I really hoped I wouldn’t wind up with a new head injury by the time this crazy trip was over.
However, my body’s state wasn’t the only cause of my nervousness; the situation’s unknowns were too. Before we’d reached here, I’d kind of expected a big sign saying, AMY CASTANO WUZ HERE. But now all I saw was sand and ground, a tree here and there, a hummock of earth before us, a higher hummock of earth behind us, the pale blue-purple sky above….
I moved along the plateau, looking more carefully, looking more slowly, but I saw nothing noteworthy.
“Well, what the hell are we supposed to be looking for here?” I finally asked in a frustrated voice.
“I don’t know,” said Hu, her lopsided mouth seeming pretty frustrated too.
“Don’t tell me we came all this way just to see a deserted plateau.”
No one responded.
“Well, look, I’ve got to sit.” I had been standing near the smaller hummock. So I plopped down right there, intending to rub at my sore swollen wrist over the bandage.
But as soon as I leaned back against the hummock, it collapsed beneath me.
My hands scrambled beside me trying to grab onto something. Only they found nothing to grab.
*
Once again, my case saved my spine: I fell back into a hard shaft. At first I thought it was an old abandoned mine shaft. But then I remembered nothing but sand had seemed to be covering the opening. Dry sand. How had it remained as a hard vertical covering over a large hole…?
Now I heard Tan’s voice screaming, “Pia!”
“I’m all right! Thought it was a shaft hole, but it’s not—it’s a corridor. It’s just high-ceilinged. Climb down. I guess this is it—what we came for!” I assumed because when I looked around me, something was wrong with the walls—at least I’d never seen cave walls like these. They were half-sandy-looking, half-marble-looking, with silver and red veins of color running through their flat shiny parts. Same thing with the floor.
My eyes slid farther down the shaft. Sunlight shone in from the outside, but, far beyond, the corridor seemed perfectly dark, like a black hole residing within the earth.
I swallowed. I could start walking or I could wait for the others….
I waited for the others.
Except for Cal, they soon joined me, only they came down more methodically and gracefully than I had. And when almost everyone had passed through, they’d knocked some of the corridor’s entry area loose at the bottom.
“The sand seems to have made some kind of cement here,” Chuck said, walking in more easily than everyone else. By then, he only had to step over a knee-high ridge of sand-cement.
“Mm,” I murmured at him now. But I wasn’t convinced. I felt something—I had no idea what. The air just didn’t seem…normal. A static moved along it or maybe a chemical heaviness—something wasn’t quite air-right. I could breathe it fine, but the texture seemingly had never passed through my system before.
Tan came up beside me, his eyes fixed on the walls. “Wow, what kind of mineral is that?”
“That’s a good question,” Hu said. “Let’s keep moving, but slowly….”
We did as she said and the walls gradually changed; they became higher, they became harder-looking, glossier, that same red and silver color making up more and more of their structure. However, along the corridor path I saw numerous spots where chunks of wall and ceiling had fallen. It seemed that recently the place had been disturbed somehow.
Chuck moved his big light as we moved, and then, from her pack, Hu suddenly pulled out a videocamera.
I flashed her a hard what-the-hell? look.
“This is very significant,” she said. “It may be important for me to have later….”
We all kept moving, Tan and I in front now. And the corridor looked like it would go on forever and forever, deeper and deeper, but, gradually, the area strangely seemed to grow brighter.
“Is there more light now?” I heard Jeremy ask.
“Yeah,” Tan and I responded at the same time. We smiled at each other, and as I was smiling at him, I glanced at the wall behind him—and saw that the red there was semi-glowing now. And, not only that, but the red and silver veins of color in this spot no longer looked random. Now they had a purpose, now they held an image.
“Omigod,” I said, my mouth falling open.
“What—” Tan said, his head spinning around to the wall.
Then he too was left speechless at the image there: a very complex star chart in red and silver with such fine detail and specific symbols, the whole seemed to have been scratched by an artist’s hand—but not a human artist’s hand. And not a human mind’s language.
It was scary. It was beautiful. And it wasn’t the only wall image.
Now we encountered image after image as we moved, like a narrative of some part of the Universe, or, for all I knew, a narrative of the whole damn Universe. I was so nervous and so awed and so lacking in knowledge of the Universe, I couldn’t be sure of what I was looking at. But we all seemed to feel it: the presence of something immensely alien.
No one spoke. We all kept silently staring as the panels increasingly contained more of the color spectrum, and the images gradually became even more detailed, covering a larger and larger surface area of the high walls. The history depicted seemed so vast, we couldn’t possibly ever view the whole at once. Feeling a bit frustrated, I wondered what lay all the way up there, I wondered how much we’d never know….
The light suddenly brightened into a dull glow. It was coming from the distance, from around a bend of corridor. And now the visual story started clearly changing into nebulae and close-ups of stars, some being born, others dying, going nova in brilliant bursts of colors. Other panels depicted planets and landscapes I didn’t recognize. In still others I saw giant scooping lengths of bright colors dipping into what looked like cold celestial bodies, possibly old or dead stars; then in the next panels down, the lengths dropped bits of color onto enormous solid-looking surfaces in space.
The narrative now appeared to flow forward in time only, the closer we got to the glow, which reached its peak of brightness when we finally passed the corridor’s bend—and I saw the most amazing thing I’d ever seen in my whole life.
A huge sphere of light hung in the distance.
At first it looked like a giant light bulb’s emissions, but as I approached it, I realized that the consistency of the light actually wasn’t so nebulous and the sphere was really a solid—a solid giant sphere of diamond, brilliantly faceted with an uncountable number of planes, each one glowing a different color than the next, as if every color in the Universe owned real-estate on that sphere.
I moved even closer, and now I saw that in six spots the sphere was actually webbing-like tethered to the side walls by gossamer pale strands of something. Yet the strands held up what appeared to be such a dense mass in the corridor’s center. Was the sphere equivalent to gem or egg? Or perhaps it was both?
Silently, beautifully, the sphere reigned over the space, while those of us below just stared as if we were looking at creation itself…and maybe we were.
We began speaking now. But the sounds we made seemed muted compared to the corridor’s immense visual presence.
“It’s like a creation, a history of the Universe, of Diamond—” someone said, I think it was Chuck but it might have been Tan.
“Were those stars?” I said. “In the images—were they mining stars?”
“Yes, that’s what it looked like to me,” said Hu.
I imagined her nodding her head then, but I couldn’t take my eyes from the sphere-egg
or the panels beside it. They seemed to go on even further down the corridor. Were there more spheres behind this one? And if there were, did those spheres extend so far down that they eventually led into the very core of Diamond?
“Can you imagine the power they must have?” I said, staring at the panels again. “Pulling mass from such dense bodies and such strong gravitational fields? Are they a single species of Starminers—from another part of the Universe? A layer we haven’t encountered yet? Another dimension? A way of life there? But then why come here?”
“Even if we could figure out any of that, it would take years of studying this place,” Tan said.
And then an uncomfortable silence instantly filled the area. We all knew it: we had no idea what to do about this. No one could really be trusted around it. It held answers, it stimulated questions. But danger lay in pursuing this knowledge. Danger to Diamond.
To me it seemed clear now that this was the key to Diamond, the key to the density and strength here: strategically placed chunks of diamond and who-knew-what-else mined from stars. This apparently generated some type of force. In the notebooks Amy had mentioned The A-force. A for astral, apparently. This was the Diamond force some people had postulated but could never pinpoint. This astral force held Diamond together, and that meant that Diamond hadn’t been an accident. Diamond had been created by something, possibly with a purpose in mind….
I suddenly realized that the closer we’d gotten to the sphere, the less I could feel my surroundings. And I could barely feel them now because that static I’d felt earlier, that heaviness, was now in full force.
And my wrist…it now felt…better. A lot better. My whole body—I felt healthier, stronger. I didn’t know how long this effect would last, but clearly the chunk of old star must have been doing something to my body.
All of this must have been what Amy Castano had found out. All of this must have been why someone had killed her….
And what on Diamond could any of us in the corridor really do about here? We had no power to protect this.