Just as she was about to use the passage, Amarna paused and turned to face the director. “You’re familiar with the Aztecs.”
“Intimately.”
“Then you know that they were the most violent and murderous civilization Earth ever developed. They would kill tens of thousands of their slaves, pulling out their hearts and kicking the bodies back down the steps of their pyramids?”
Allambree didn’t respond. He regarded her with annoyance.
She continued, more excitedly. “Until the conquistadors came. History usually thinks of those religious zealots as the villains, but I say they destroyed a great monster. They obliterated the culture of the Aztecs. They burned their books, slaughtered their priests, and made sure that their crimes were never repeated ever again in history.”
Allambree still said nothing.
“I want you to follow me into this next room. Please try to understand what I’m saying. Imagine what would have happened if Cortez had converted and become an Aztec. Imagine if their evil had spread back to Europe.”
She ducked down and vanished through the gap.
Allambree was becoming quite disturbed, but he followed her in any case.
On the other side there was a vast chamber. Cathedral stone ceilings extended up for perhaps a hundred feet. They were standing on a balcony overlooking a space as large as a football stadium. That entire area was filled with long and tall structures which looked exactly like bookshelves.
“Welcome to the Great Library of Griffon,” Amarna said with disgust. “These books contain hell and it is your job to be certain it is never released.
“I’ll be dipped,” Allambree gasped. “This is the find. This is what humanity has been searching for. We’ll know their minds. With this many examples of their alphabet, we’ll be able to translate it. We’ll read books written by aliens.”
He started to laugh with joy.
Allambree descended an old crumbling stone stairway down to the library floor. He picked up the first book that he saw and carefully examined the cover. “The text. It’s three dimensional. There appear to be carvings on five sides of each letter.” He opened the heavy tome and saw that it was the same as the cover.
“It’s five dimensional,” Amarna stated matter-of-factly.
“Five? How can that be. Ah, I see. Each side is a single dimension. There are five visible sides, each of which can have different marks on them which change the meaning. Bloody brilliant. I wonder…. Is this phonetic? What if this represents the shape their voice-boxes have to assume in order to make each sound?”
She attempted to smack the book out of his hands, but he was stronger than her and held on.
“Don’t you see?” she shouted, her voice hot with desperation. “There are ideas in these books, ideas from aliens. They are a virus. They will invade everything that’s human, change us, and bring hell.”
He pulled the book to his chest, to protect it. “If a book tells me to kill, that doesn’t mean I have to kill. I read Mein Kampf, well part of it. That didn’t make me a Nazi. I had the choice to reject the ideas.”
He found himself awkwardly noticing her blonde hair again. How strange it was to see it growing, apparently naturally, from a dark-skinned woman’s head.
“If you’re not going to do the right thing, Director, I’m not going to be able to give you a choice. You could have been Cortez, slayer of monsters. Instead, I will be.”
She knelt down and removed an object from her bag. She bit her lip as she set it down on the floor and pressed a quick series of buttons, arming it. She stood up again, abruptly. “This room is going to explode in thirty seconds. I won’t be here when that happens, and neither will this alien virus of the mind.”
Allambree grabbed for her wrist, but she twisted and slipped out of his grasp. Still holding the ancient tome to his chest, he was unable to make a second attempt at the woman before she dashed past him and began racing up the stairway.
“I thought you’d understand!” she shouted as she ran, sounding like a teenage girl who had just had her heart broken.
Suddenly, Allambree became aware of the heat radiating from the device Amarna had left on the ground. A humming sound was high in his ears and seemed to be speeding up. He only had a few seconds to decide what to do. Could he run out of the room in time? Could he stop her and make her turn the device off?
He bent down and picked it up. It was substantial, but lighter than the book he held in his other hand.
Amarna was just ducking her head to slip out of the library.
The archeologist took aim. He spun his arm twice, as if he was pitching a cricket match, and he bowled the bomb up into the air and right at Amarna’s back. He watched as it hit her, and knocked her forward into the hall. And then the bomb exploded.
The flash of light was blinding. He heard rock falling. He felt stone scraping across his face and crushing his arm.
When they finally dug him out, Allambree was blind. His right arm had to be amputated and large pieces of shrapnel had to be removed from his face, chest, and stomach. But he survived, and so did the library.
5
PRESENT DAY
As they walked into the arena, Charlie turned to Kalligeneia. “Who’s on duty in the Genesis Chamber?”
“Umbra,” Kalligeneia answered.
“Good. She’ll take care of Gwei.”
The arena was made more competently than the rest of the village. The stones looked like they had either been worked with machines, or at the very least more advanced techniques. There was a large crack down the middle of one of the walls which the villagers had attempted to fill in more primitively with with rubble and loose stones.
Towering over the seats there was a series of thirteen statues. Each one had been carefully and skillfully created. They each stood about fifteen feet tall. They were all portrayed wearing jewels and ornate robes decorated with complicated patterns. Three of the statues had been smashed and it was impossible to see what they had looked like originally. The others were clearly images of Charlie Daemon, David Aelfwyrd, Mew Tse, Umbra Farah, Gloryannana Mellifluous, Sally Brightly, Veronika Zavada, Allambree Alawa, Wu Gwei, and Avraam Fock. Avraam’s statue had a large fissure in it, but was still more or less intact. The faces were a little stylized and exaggerated, but their identities were undeniable.
Nayara Borges and Kalligeneia Athanas were missing.
“Thirteen statues, but we only have a crew of twelve,” Gloryannana pointed out.
“These are like the statues on Primus,” Charlie commented. “Except there we couldn’t recognize the faces.”
“Yes, but there are thirteen, Charlie. Ten of us are accounted for. Nayara and Kalligeneia are missing. Who’s the extra?”
“A local hero?” Avraam guessed.
“The snakes couldn’t have made these. Look at how primitive their houses are.” The Queen said.
“Well, they couldn’t have made them in a different solar system, that’s for sure.” Charlie walked up to his own statue and rubbed his chin. The statue of him didn’t have a third eye.
Charlie pointed at the rocks which had been stuck into the arena’s crack. “We’re going to have to go through the rubble and see if we can reconstruct the statues. I want to know who the extra is.”
The statue of Wu Gwei was of him as human. It didn’t have any electronic parts.
“Where’s mine? This isn’t fair. I want a giant stone me,” Kalligeneia pouted.
“Eh, it’s not all it’s cracked up to be,” Avraam teased her.
“We’ve been here before.” Charlie was suddenly gripped with inspiration. “Don’t you get it? We put these here! We were their kings or Gods. Aelfwyrd, Kalligeneia, maybe the two of you created these creatures in a lab somewhere? Maybe you created all these red tubes too? There’s no one else who could be traveling from solar system to solar system and putting up statues of us, except… us.”
“They’re too old,” Gloryannana objected. “They lo
ok like they’re hundreds of years old.”
“We would notice if we’d been living in the same buildings for centuries,” Aelfwyrd added.
“Yeah, I don’t know the answers to all of that. But we did this. It’s the only answer. We’ve been on this mission a lot longer than we think. We may have all lived hundreds of lives.”
Aelfwyrd stopped and thought for a moment. Then he turned and walked back into the shuttle.
“What if we wanted to hide the truth from ourselves for some reason?” The Queen mused. “We could clean up the ship and make it all look new for the next crew, if we wanted to.”
“There’s no one else to do it. Unless…. Unless it’s part of the ship’s program. Our ship could re-set itself every so often, just like the way our words all get erased when we die. If they can do that, they can do anything they want to us and we can’t resist,” Kalligeneia said. When she finished the sentence, she let her jaw hang open in shock. Her eyes went wide.
“The rules of our reality,” Gloryannana said, nodding.
“What if Nayara did all of this? She could have built the statues. She could have told the natives what to do, yes?” Avraam suggested.
“But, why would she do that?” Charlie asked.
“To be their queen.” Gloryannana beamed a knowing smile. “I imagine she’s living down here in a palace somewhere having her toes suckled by her slithering and humble subjects. Well, that’s what I did when I ruled England.”
Aelfwyrd walked down from the shuttle again. He was holding a device like Wu Gwei had used to cut through the biomass and scan for the missing ship. He took a moment to activate and program it. “The signal is still down here. It’s not far. We came to this planet for a reason. I recommend we finish the job.”
“Exactly right,” Kalligeneia said, with relish.
Queen Gloryannana took Aelfwyrd’s place on the shuttle with Sally. Charlie, Aelfwyrd, Avraam, and Kalligeneia set out on foot to track down the signal, and hopefully find their lost crewmember: Nayara Borges. Aelfwyrd wore a protective field around himself, just as the rest of the crew had at the beginning of the journey. His was aqua-marine. He had taken a moment to set and bandage Kalligeneia’s finger. Despite his recommendation, she insisted on coming.
As they walked out of the arena, Kalligeneia took one last look back at the statues, the ruined ones specifically. “Why smash mine?”
Aelfwyrd led the way, holding the scanner. It was large and hung down low in front of him. He didn’t carry it as easily as Wu Gwei had. He was sweating badly, but insisted that he was alright.
The group walked through the rest of the serpents’ stone village. It was quite small and they only saw a couple cowering snake-men as they made their way together. The rest had run off into hiding.
There was a circular stone well, which was perhaps the best made object the serpents had managed beyond the arena. Past the well, there was another section of town in which all of the buildings had collapsed. It was not clear if this had happened all at once, or over many years.
Beyond the village, the biomass hung down low, but not quite to the ground. Thin veins of red and orange draped the path, like beaded curtains. They felt like velvet against the skin as the crew passed through.
The ground beneath them had been dusty and filled with rocks, but once they cleared the perimeter of the village, it began to be replaced with a yellow fungus. It looked like off-color moss, but to the touch it was actually as hard as stone. In some places, the fungus grew up to touch the red biomass above, and they had to walk around massive xeno-stalagmites.
It became clear that the light they were seeing by was actually coming from the biomass, but it didn’t travel in a normal way. There was no visible shining, no rays of light. Kalligeneia explained that the most likely scenario was that as the biomass shed dying cells, those cells released light at a microscopic level, and created an ambient light. Wherever the dying cells fell, there would be light. In those places where very few of the cells went, it would be darker.
They traveled through the strange jungle/cavern for about ten minutes. Then the biomass began to lift up and away from the ground again. The yellow rock-fungus however was getting bigger and bigger. They had to climb over an increasingly uneven and unpredictable floor to move forward. Some of the patterns it made were quite beautiful. In places the ground looked like the inside of an ancient limestone cavern. In others the fungus resembled frozen fountains of bright lemonade.
They saw a few of the black fuzzy insects, which they had seen before in the biomass, scurrying about, but no other living creatures as the team climbed up and down the petrified formations.
About ten minutes after that, they came to a road which had been carved out from the fungus. There were broken rocks and gravel on the sides and a nice smooth path to walk. The left path might have ended up back near the stone village somewhere. The path to the right was exactly where the scanner said that they needed to go. The road looked to be made of the same mundane rocks as the buildings in the serpents’ village. Here and there, a few stray red vines lay upon the rocks, fallen from a great height.
“This is the most alien world we’ve seen yet,” Avraam commented.
“I love it. I want to just lie back against the red velvet and spend a month here writing,” Kalligeneia replied. “I wonder what the predators look like.”
Charlie turned to Kalligeneia. “If you were going to design creatures to live on this world, what would they be like?”
“Oh ho ho ho!” She replied, rubbing her hands together eagerly at the thought.
They walked on. She thought about it for roughly thirty seconds before replying. “I’d want them to be just as comfortable in the biomass as on the stone fungus. I’m imagining a glider.”
“Like a flying fox?” Charlie asked.
“Sure. Something which could quickly climb up the tubes, and then fly over the rough ground. But they would have to have hands. A true bird would have trouble with the tubes. And it would have to be able to secrete a powerful acid, both for defense and to burrow into the hard rock.”
“You do create monsters,” Charlie said.
“She is the mother of monsters,” Avraam laughed. “Her peaceful dreams are worse than your nightmares.”
“I’m an optimist.” Kalligeneia blushed and smirked. She didn’t take the title history gave her as the insult it was intended to be.
She continued. “And then, false vines covered with the thinnest and thinnest of needles. The needles would swim into the prey’s skin to lay eggs in the deeper layers of their flesh.”
“Wow.” Avraam recoiled.
She went on, “A butterfly, something quite like a butterfly. She would make the rocks slippery. Her victims would fall and crack their heads open and she would feed gently and gracefully.”
“They’re all predators, aren’t they? All your babies eat meat,” Charlie asked.
“None of them are defenseless.” She smiled sweetly, but her bright red skin made her look like she was covered in blood. She had been sweating, and so the blood appeared to glisten. “And, oh, I just thought. I would create a creature who lives in the cracks between the yellow rocks. She would shoot out a flexible mouth and use it to suck at her prey’s ankles with tremendous force – enough to break the bones of her food’s feet. Once they fall over, her partner would use the same attack on the face and the throat. Maybe suck the soft tissues out through the aural and nasal openings?”
“Jeez, Kalli, why are they all so horrible?” Charlie asked, frowning.
“Horrible?” She looked confused. “How do you know they’re horrible? I didn’t tell you about the songs they sing, or what they do with their children, what they do when they’re in love. I always make wonderful creatures. But what’s the point of a wonderful creature that can’t defend itself? Cats have claws. Have you ever seen one playing with a dying mouse? It’s good fun. Then he licks your face and purrs in your lap.”
“Your pussy cat
sounds like me. You will have to introduce me sometime.” Avraam smiled a gigantic smile.
“Maybe,” Kalligeneia flirted.
The stone walkway led them to a palace. It was made of vast Arabian spires and great round domes. The domes and spires were all painted with intricate and gigantic murals. At first Charlie thought they reminded him of a Celtic tapestry, but it was more than that. This was a style he had never seen. It took his breath away.
Aelfwyrd held up the scanner. “I’d say we’ve found her. The signal is coming from within that old shack.”
“This must be the Emerald City,” Charlie mumbled.
They walked up closer and they could see a vast sea of yellow waves beyond the palace. Thick crimson pseudopods rose up from the waters and threaded into the string-sky above. Some of the tubes were as wide as the palace itself. Some were no wider than a human being, but reached up a hundred feet or more into the red organism.
Looking up at the biomass from so far below, it almost looked like a massive head of hair which went on flowing for miles and miles. The sea smelled of sulfur. A noise exactly like a seagull’s complaint echoed across the waters.
The entrance to the city was a black metal gate drilled into the living yellow rock. On either side of the gate there was a snake man. One of them was unconscious. He slept with the back of his head flat on the ground, his mouth wide open, and his tongue flapping in the breeze of his own breath. The second sat slumped on the ground, barely able to hold his long coiled body up off of the floor. Holding his eyelids open was apparently a great effort for him. There were no bottles around, but he certainly looked drunk.
The procession walked carefully but peacefully past the guards. The sitting one stared at them each in turn, but did not say a word or try to interfere.
Avraam said, “You’d need a Geft machine. You’d need a Geft machine or you would need an army of workers for years to make a palace like this.”
The stonework was cool to the touch and undeniably stone, but it had been shaped into wild and bombastic shapes: curves and swooping lines, massive impressionistic designs that must have weighed many tonnes. All were perfectly in place. There were no cracks. Nothing was less than perfectly formed. The color choices were varied and artistic. It seemed that the rocks had never been colored, but in fact formed in the desired shades and patterns.
The Secrets of the Universe (Farther Than We Dreamed Book 1) Page 30