by S. S. Taylor
You could take “vacations” on the Muller Machines, and see photographs of all kinds of amazing places, even feel the heat of the sun, or the chill of the snow, from the machines. Dad said that people would take time off from work, even put on their bathing suits or ski clothes in their living rooms, never realizing how ridiculous it was.
And then the machines were hacked. Over the course of three months, a series of coordinated attacks on the networks and the power stations that kept them running brought it all down and the “century of the Muller Machines” came to an end. No mail, no power, no trade. It had happened when Dad was eight, and for a couple of years there was no heat, no money, and very little food. Martial law was declared, but things were so bad that the government was overthrown the first winter, and when the new government came in, President Barbado outlawed the Muller Machines and anything that had been run by them, including the power stations. Engineers returned to what had worked in that distant past: steam and clockwork engines, old-fashioned to be sure, but safe as could be.
“Here’s the stuff about the New Lands,” I said, reading aloud.
“Little did the citizens of the world know that in the midst of a crisis of epic proportions, a light of hope and possibility was shining high on a cold and forbidding mountain.”
“The book says that?” M.K. asked. “That’s really corny.”
“No, that’s what I think. Of course that’s what the book says.” I crossed my eyes at her and went on.
R. Delorme Mountmorris detailed how one day, a couple of years after the failure of the Muller Machines, a young biologist and explorer named Harrison Arnoz, who had been living in a remote region of Eastern Europe near the Indorustan border, studying bear populations, discovered that where the “official” maps showed absolutely nothing, there was in fact an entire mountain range, new species of animals, and a group of tree-dwelling people who had never had contact with the outside world. Only a few months after Arnoz told the world about this new region, called Grygia, a commercial cargo ship got lost north of Denmark and came upon a small sea, obscured by a glacier, that appeared not to be on any of the official digital maps. The ship’s captain and crew had discovered the New North Polar Sea.
There was only one conclusion: the maps of the world were wrong.
Pretty soon the Explorers were heading out to discover what else had been hidden on the Muller Machine maps, and the discoveries from the New Lands started to trickle in: an ultra-strong metal in Grygia called Gryluminum that could be used to make fabric and armor; a breed of hearty, high-yield cattle in Deloia; disease-resistant bananas in Fazia. BNDL found itself in the position of governing the New Lands, and the American Newly Discovered Lands Corporation—or ANDLC—was started to run the mines and farms and factories and to send all the goods home. First President Barbado’s government and then President Hildreth’s had controlled everything very tightly, anxious to make sure that the United States and its allies owned all the new discoveries.
And that was when the Archaics—the “Archys”—had gotten going, making cars and airships and furnaces and dishwashers that were powered by steam and coal and clockwork gears, technologies that didn’t require gasoline or electricity. Dad was an Archy and I guess we were, too.
There were also the Neotechnologists—or “Neos”—who dreamed of wind power and solar batteries and dressed in their strange, bright, fabricated outfits—plastics and rubbers and odd fabrics, flashing lights embedded in their bodies. But the government suspected them of building secret Muller Machines and kept them from experimenting too much. Only a handful of Neo inventors had successfully developed new technologies, like gliders and electric autos. A lot of Archys refused to use these strange, silent machines, but Dad had always said that he didn’t care who had made his boat or plane, as long as it worked.
Mountmorris wrote all about it, about the new Explorers who went out to find the New Lands, about how they were celebrated for their discoveries, and about how, around the time M.K. was born, the new discoveries had trickled to a stop and the government had decided we’d found everything new there was to find.
The problem was that there wasn’t enough of anything to go around.
And so the people in the territories and colonies we’d claimed had started fighting back. And just as we started eyeing the territories claimed by the Indorustans, they started eyeing ours, too.
It was pretty likely that the uprisings in Simeria were just the beginning.
“We know all this,” M.K. said in an exasperated voice. “Why did Dad want us to see this?”
“I don’t know,” Zander said. “We don’t even know who this guy is.” He seemed annoyed, and I thought it might be because the Explorer had given the book to me and not to him. Zander always talked about how he was the one who was going to follow in Dad’s footsteps and go to the Academy for the Exploratory Sciences, how he was the one who was going to make a discovery and join the Expedition Society. I loved maps and understood them better than he did, but he didn’t care about that.
“The thing that I never got,” I said as I flipped through the pages of history, “is why it took so long for the New Lands to be discovered.”
“Because of the Muller Machines,” Zander said, still sounding annoyed. “They were wrong and people became so dependent on them that they didn’t question the maps. People just went to the places that were on the maps. They didn’t look for new places. The government didn’t let them.”
“But someone had to put the information into them, didn’t they? The coordinates and everything.” I had always wondered about this. Whenever I’d asked Dad, he’d just told me again about the Muller Machines and how the government hadn’t let anyone travel freely or use gasoline for anything but an approved purpose. I’d never found his answers satisfying.
“I don’t know, Kit,” Zander said. “See if there’s anything about Dad in there.”
I opened the book to the table of contents and sure enough, there was a chapter entitled “Alexander West: Mountains and Mapmaking.”
For the next half hour, we turned the pages of the book, reading about all of his famous expeditions and discoveries during the New Modern Age: his ascent of Mount Anamata, the tallest of the mountains in the New Lands; his discovery of St. Helena, a new volcanic island in the Caribbean; all of his scientific and mapping expeditions to the New Lands. I’d heard about all of it before, of course, but it was interesting reading someone else’s account of Dad’s bravery; he hadn’t been one for bragging about his expeditions and had always made it sound like he’d lucked into whatever record it was he’d set. There were chapters about other Explorers too: Leo Nackley, Jacob Omboodo, Delilah Neville, and all the names we’d come to know.
The book was full of photographs of Dad with his best friend, Raleigh McAdam. In all of them he was wearing his Krakoan alligator hat, which had been made for him during an expedition to Krakoa, and his Explorer’s vest, which he was never without. The vest had been as much a part of him as his right arm; it was made of patches of different hides: multi-colored Krakoan alligator, green Fazian anaconda, reddish-brown Juboodan whizrat, and other skins I couldn’t remember the names of. But Dad, who didn’t have most Archy Explorers’ aversion to synthetics, had also included patches of Gryluminum and plastics, the Gryluminum forming a sort of breastplate over his heart and vital organs. The vest was lined with the soft, incredibly warm fur of the blue Arctic namwee, a weasel-like creature discovered around the New North Polar Sea. The namwee’s fur had been discovered to be both extremely warm in cold climates and extremely cooling in warm ones.
And, of course, the vest was embedded with gadgets, its pockets filled with his expedition “utilities”—small brass gadget boxes the size of a pack of playing cards or a lighter that might transform into a knife or an inflatable sled at the touch of a button.
“Why,” Zander asked, leaning over my shoulder, “would anyone risk his life to give you that? It’s just a book.”
/> “I don’t know.” I really didn’t. It didn’t make any sense to me. I flipped through the book and was reading about Leo Nackley, who had gone to school with Dad and had gone on some expeditions with him, too, when I noticed some symbols scrawled in the margin of the page, in the bright red India ink that Dad had always used in his mapmaking.
“What are those?” M.K. asked, pointing to them.
“Beats me.” They looked like Native American symbols to me, little birds and feathers and animals and suns and moons and trees. Dad had loved doodling when he was reading or writing, so it didn’t seem strange that they were there. But there was something about the way they were arranged that made me look more closely.
They appeared to be random, but that was what seemed strange to me. If they were doodles, wouldn’t Dad have arranged them in some sort of pattern? A bird, a feather, a frog, a turtle, a bird, a feather, a frog, a turtle? I hesitated. Maybe I was overthinking this. But when I looked again, I saw what was really bothering me. The symbols were grouped together like… well, like… words.
“What are you doing?” M.K. asked.
Ignoring her, I found an old magnifying glass on the mantel and used it to study the symbols in the thin, late-spring light coming through the library window. The glass wasn’t bad: I could see the little turns Dad’s pen had taken, where he’d made a false start or gone back to correct something. He’d been very careful, separating the symbols so it was clear where one word ended and another began. And suddenly I understood.
It was a code.
Four
“Remember the treasure hunts he used to set up for us?” I asked them, jumping up from the table. I got my leather-bound journal and a pen and sat down again.
“Of course,” Zander said. “You think he left us a code?”
I didn’t answer. I was already searching the little doodles.
The first thing to do was find a word I could use as a key, that is, a word I could identify because of its length or because of the repetition of a particular letter or letters. For example, a word like Mississippi was a good key. Say you’d created a code where a different letter stood in for each letter. If you saw Tfjjfjjfyyf, you could figure out that T stood in for m and f stood in for i and so forth, because there were no other words with that exact pattern of repetition.
But Mississippi was a dead giveaway. Anyone who knew anything about codes would recognize it. Dad—if in fact Dad had written the message—would have used something that only we would understand. And this code didn’t replace letters with letters, it replaced them with symbols.
I pushed my glasses back up on my nose, wrote the whole thing out on a clean page in the journal, and started studying the combinations of symbols.
“I’m looking for the key,” I told them.
“Maybe it’s one of our names,” M.K. suggested.
My name and Zander’s wouldn’t be much help, as they didn’t contain any repetition of letters and weren’t abnormally long or short. M.K.’s full name was Mary Kingsley, after a famous English explorer. That might help, because of the rarer combination of a four-letter word and an eight-letter one with only the repeated y, but I didn’t see anything that fit.
And then suddenly I thought of Dad in the yard, saying goodbye.
“I think I’ve got it,” I told them. “What did Dad call us? What did he say when he was leaving for Fazia?”
“The Expeditioners,” they said together. The Expeditioners. That had to be it. I had to find a thirteen-symbol word.
I read over the symbols I’d copied and, sure enough, the sixth word formed by the symbols was thirteen symbols long, with the first symbol repeated in the fourth and then again in the eleventh place. So the little eagle symbol was e. I wrote that down. Then I wrote down the symbols for the rest of the letters included in the word.
Now I knew the symbols for e, x, p, d, i, t, o, n, r and s. Slowly, I started working the code, using the same process of elimination you use to solve a difficult crossword puzzle.
Zander and M.K. were absolutely silent while I worked. I wasn’t sure how much time had passed, but when I finally looked up from my work, my stomach was rumbling with hunger. I didn’t care, though. My heart racing, my skin prickling all over with the excitement you feel when something’s about to happen, I read aloud the fragment of the message sitting in front of me:
CAN YOU CRACK THE CODE, EXPEDITIONERS?
THE THIRD OLD OAK ON THE RIGHT FLIPPED
Five
The three of us stared at the nonsensical words. What could they mean? The message was from Dad. There was no doubt about that. No one else knew that he’d called us the Expeditioners. But what was this about the third old oak—?
“The oak,” Zander said, reading the words over my shoulder. “It has to be the—”
“Desk,” I said.
M.K. rushed over to Dad’s big desk, sitting in a corner of the room. It had been made from the wood of the sixth old oak in front of the house after it had fallen. Dad had built the desk himself and secured the drawers with his ingenious locks, difficult things with combinations that were hard to figure out. The BNDL agents had gone all through the house, looking for maps and documents, but they hadn’t been able to get into the desk.
“The rest is easy,” I told Zander and M.K. “The third old oak on the right is the third drawer down on the right.” I tried it and of course it was locked, the seven brass rotating disks showing different letters. I spun them around. What was the combination that would open the lock?
I studied the coded message. THE THIRD OLD OAK ON THE RIGHT FLIPPED.
“Flipped?” Zander suggested. “F-l-i-p-p-e-d.”
Flipped ? Could that be it? It was the only word left. I spun the disks so that they read flipped and tried the drawer. Still locked.
What could it be? I felt a flash of annoyance. We were so close.
Zander looked excited now, his blue eyes wide and curious, just like Dad’s when he’d been on the scent of something. “M.K.,” he said, “do you think you could get in, with your tools?”
“I could try,” she said. “But I’d probably have to destroy the desk. His locks are unpickable. You know that.”
Sitting behind the desk, I couldn’t help but think of Dad, his smile, the way his eyes turned up at the corners when he joked with us about something or other. He’d loved riddles and word puzzles and codes and ciphers, and he’d sometimes leave little notes for us that we had to figure out.
The polished oak was smooth under my hand. Flipped. Flipped. Suddenly I had it. I had to flip flipped.
“I’ve got it,” I told them.
I turned the disks so that they read deppilf.
The drawer opened.
Even all these years after he’d built the desk, the inside of the drawer smelled of wood, varnish, and sawdust. The drawer was fairly shallow; a rectangle of green velvet lay in the bottom, and when I lifted it up, I saw a piece of thick paper, facedown in the bottom of the drawer. I lifted it out, turned it over, and found myself staring at a large and beautiful map.
Six
To be precise, it was half a map. It had been neatly torn in half so that it ended abruptly on the left-hand side. The title, written in red ink at the bottom in Dad’s handwriting, was cut off so that it read “ed Man’s Canyon and Environs.”
“Is it one of his?” M.K. asked in a quiet voice.
“I think so,” Zander said. “I think that’s his handwriting.”
“Of course it’s his handwriting,” I told them. Even if I hadn’t recognized the handwriting I would have known that Dad had made the map. It was beautifully done, the graceful, wavelike contour lines describing the depth of the canyons and mesas, the words written in his distinctive, scrolling handwriting. The map was obviously of a desert region, probably in the American Southwest. I made note of a town called Azure City and crossed the room to search for it in the big atlas on the windowsill; I found it not far from the Grand Canyon. So it was northern A
rizona. The legend was missing; it must have been on the other side.
I took the map over to the window to look at it in the bright spring sunlight coming in the library windows. I looked through the magnifying glass and the tiny lines seemed nearer.
“We’re missing part of it,” I told Zander and M.K.
Pucci had been dozing up on the curtain rod, but now he flew down and perched on the windowsill, looking at the map and bobbing his head. “Canyon,” he squawked. “Azure Canyon.” We all looked at him. It was weird; I could never tell if Pucci was just repeating something he’d heard or actually talking. Zander said that black knight parrots had been known to put sentences together using words they knew, but he wasn’t sure, either.
“He’s right,” I said. It was hard to tell without the rest of it, but the map seemed to focus on Azure Canyon. I knew that this part of Arizona was full of deep, winding canyons, carved out of the bedrock by rivers over thousands and thousands of years. Some of them were now dry or wet for only part of the year, and others—like the Grand Canyon—had rivers running through them still. By reading Dad’s carefully drawn contour lines, I could tell that Azure Canyon was quite deep, dropping at least half a mile down into the earth—the thin lines crowded together to show the sheer drop of the canyon’s walls. Like all of Dad’s maps, this one was easy to read and beautiful. From the arrangement of the contour lines, it seemed like maybe another canyon branched off from Azure Canyon, but it must have been on the other half of the map.
I looked up at my brother and sister, who seemed as confused as I was. “But why was it hidden in the desk?” M.K. asked.
“And why did he cut it in half?” Zander ran his finger along the rough edge.
“How did he get the book to the man with the clockwork hand?” I asked the silent room.
None of us had any answers.