The all-is-lost moment they were pondering, they pondered separately.
But the dark night of the soul they were experiencing in the aftermath of those musings—that they shared in one another’s eyes.
ACT FOUR
THE MACHIAVELIAN SCHEME UNWINDS
TWENTY-FIVE
“Shit, it’s cold.” Lar could have told them—if anyone had asked—that Antarctica was never going to agree with him.
Now that he was here, he was startled to find that his worse-case-scenario, risk-assessment thinking was not as up to par as he thought it was. This place was even more of a death trap than he’d imagined—and that was before stepping into the pyramid.
The crevasses that opened up in the ice and swallowed you whole—that you couldn’t see, even as you were stepping on top of them—that descended to the center of the Earth…. The lack of traction on the ice— He couldn’t keep from falling on the bathroom floor, for Christ’s sake! And no one tells you, the spikes they put on the bottom of these shoes—they don’t do much to pierce the ice when you’re a featherweight and the ice is harder than rock!
As to the wild ride of a descent down here—some clever fellow had used a machine to bore out an ice tube that you could slide along like you do at a waterpark, only sans the water. Who needed water when the ice was smoother than the guy hitting on his girlfriend?
Did he tell them he was claustrophobic, too? Of course not, as no one had asked. If the tube ride getting here wasn’t torturous enough, these subterranean chambers were scarcely any better.
They were black as pitch, and only dimly lit where kerosene lamps were still burning. Some of the lamps were battery powered, like the one in his hand, but they kept flickering out at these temperatures, barely put out any light, and the batteries burned out really fast. Why bother adding those to the list of complaints? He couldn’t keep track of them all, even with alter ego Cypher’s eidetic memory.
“Try and keep up, Lar,” Ramon barked from someplace up ahead. “I don’t need you falling behind and getting lost down here.”
Lar had to admit that was the most motivational speech he’d heard in a long time. He picked up the pace, even if that meant tripping more, and bruising further.
“Shit!” Lar squawked. “My light went out. I’m dead, I tell you. Dead! Just look for the flash-frozen corpse with the ‘I’ll get you for bringing me down here’ expression on his face!”
And then there was light.
Ramon was shining it down on him from the mandala in his right palm chakra, throwing a colored pattern, like those stained glass windows in church, and from about the same elevation. When Lar gazed upward, Ramon was standing on a rock, right in front of him, just a few feet up.
“Oh. You sounded so far away. I guess there’s no judging sound down here.” He mumbled the last part, feeling like a damned ass.
Lar picked himself up and peered around at the chamber. It was a long hallway, a half-acre wide, whose floor was an obstacle course of fallen rock. “Looks like someone sprung all the booby traps before I got a chance to. Damned polite of them. But wait….”
Lar reached down to pick something up that caught his eye, held his lamp up to it. The seedpod looked suspiciously like— Before he got a chance to say anything, Ramon burst in with, “Yeah, this place was looted from back in a time when this was all tropical paradise.”
“No way.”
Ramon threw him down a frozen pineapple. Asides from looking like a pineapple, it also looked more than a bit prehistoric.
“Wait a second.”
“Yeah, that’s the seed,” Ramon informed him. It was bigger than a traditional pineapple, and even more armored-looking, if that was possible. Lar started to notice other telltale signs that this pyramid was once located in a tropical paradise, suggesting Ramon wasn’t talking out his ass. Too many remnants of diverse plant specimens that did not scream “frozen tundra” for one, even if he was no expert on tropical varieties.
Lar, unable to climb up the rock on his own, sighed, and grudgingly accepted Ramon’s assistance.
Lar kept saying, “A little closer, a little closer,” as he stretched for Ramon’s hand, and Ramon kept twisting his face up more, until Ramon was in reach. Lar then jumped, put his arm around Ramon’s neck and shoulders and threw his legs up, catching Ramon by surprise. Surely Ramon meant to carry him, right? Surely he didn’t think Lar was going to risk that ascent with just a hand up?
“The rock is four feet off the ground, and you were two feet off the ground on the rock you were on. Do the math, moron.”
“Fear fucks with your depth perception, okay? It’s a known fact. Total terror warps it even more. You were twenty feet up a moment ago, I swear it.”
Ramon sighed, but it could have been a pant. A pant was warranted. This was turning into quite the hike. “The scale of this thing,” Lar said, taking in the access way from his elevated perch as Ramon set him down. The ceiling was still a good ways above their heads, high enough for this connecting hall to be converted into a gothic cathedral without any problem.
“Yeah, this is definitely bigger than any known pyramid. And wait until you see what’s ahead.”
“Wait, you’ve been up ahead? You mean you left me in the dark, defenseless? In killer cold? Surrounded by killer bacteria no modern day human has ever faced before? And potential alien technology radiating at me? And if I slipped, I could have launched us into the sky!”
“This isn’t a spaceship, Lar.” Lar could swear he heard a tinge of impatience in Ramon’s deadpan. The nerve!
“Hell you say. I saw the Ancient Aliens episode that proves it!”
Ramon sighed again. “You wouldn’t happen to have sighing sickness, would you?” Lar asked. “I’m a bit of a carrier, I’m afraid. Immune to it myself, of course. About the one thing I am immune to.”
Ramon sighed again, the “infection” really digging in. “You’re lucky you’re not Victor’s apprentice. He’d have thrown you down some rabbit hole a lot worse than this.”
Lar barely heard him; he was examining a rock in his hands that had dislodged from the ceiling, or perhaps one of the walls. “The inscriptions…. I can read them. I can read them!” He shouted, jumping up and down.
Ramon backtracked to where he was standing, gazed at the rock in his hands. “There are no inscriptions on that rock, Lar.”
“What, are you blind? Shine your light on it, if you’re short-sighted.”
“The light isn’t the problem.”
It was Ramon’s tone that caused Lar to ignore his excitement and glance up from the rock. “We’re not alone down here,” Ramon whispered. “That entity wants you to doubt yourself, and your abilities to decode the messages in this temple, for whatever else it’s up to.”
“Nonsense. I get the heebie-jeebies when a car’s headlight passes in front of a window and throws shadows. If anyone would know it….” The hairs stood up on the back of Lar’s neck. “Shit, there’s something down here!” His voice communicated that realization a few octaves up in register from the one Ramon had delivered it in.
Lar observed Ramon shining the light from his right palm chakra again about the chamber, throwing the rainbow of colors in a complex geometric pattern over everything. “What are you doing?” Lar shout-whispered.
“I can expose entities not entirely incarnate in this dimension by calibrating the mandalas just so.”
“You mean like spirits and ghosts and…. I’m sorry, but that’s not going to do anything to calm me down.” Lar gasped and screamed in one as the beam exposed Soren’s face. No, that was the beast, definitely the beast. There was nothing recognizable of the old Soren in it.
“Run,” Ramon said.
“Run! I can barely walk over this terrain.”
Ramon didn’t have time to argue. He picked Lar up and allowed him to ride piggyback. “A positively sensible accommodation,” Lar mumbled. He lashed at Ramon’s right arm with his hand as if he were taking a whip to a hor
se. With his left arm, he was busy choking Ramon by the neck—probably not the wisest move; but he couldn’t help it if the part of him that wanted to make sure he didn’t slip was of a stronger opinion on the matter.
When Lar glanced back, over his shoulder, the beast had manifested fully, and was launching boulders at them. “I’m sorry, but getting rocks thrown at me is really contraindicated with my nervous disposition.”
“I’m betting getting hit with one in the head could do you some good, though,” Ramon snapped. Lar decided to let the dig pass, considering that Lar couldn’t even move his legs right now, he was so paralyzed with fear. So even walking was out of the question. Both his hands, now frozen about Ramon’s neck, weren’t going anywhere either.
“Why is he trying to kill us?” Lar shouted and pleaded for an answer at the same time.
“I’m guessing he really doesn’t want us decoding the glyphs in that chamber up ahead.” Ramon, more determined than ever, was carrying him now as if his weight were barely noticeable. Either he was really stoked on adrenaline or his fear response was even better than Lar’s.
Lar glanced over his shoulder again and noticed the monster was afraid to step any closer; as soon as he did, he lost corporealness. He could no longer pick up the rock because he became more ghostlike. He took a step back, so he could continue to launch the boulders at them. “He doesn’t seem able to go any further,” Lar said.
Ramon glanced back and observed the same phenomenon. “We may be out of range. That tank he’s frozen inside of is a hell of a long way from here.”
“It’s more than that,” Lar said. “The pyramid is built on a power spot. And he’s a chi master, which is what allowed him to manifest here in the first place. But the temple is warded with the cabbalistic magic. No doubt meant to keep out dark forces, and to ensure they didn’t use the power spot to beam themselves here to Earth.”
They seemed to be outside of the beast’s throwing distance so Ramon set Lar down, so he could study the phenomenon of the trapped Frankenstein’s monster as Ramon joined in the speculation.
“You think whatever alien civilization made it here, they were fleeing something out to destroy them?” Ramon asked. “And the cabbalistic images were meant to seal the gate behind them?” That mischievous smile of his imparted a Doubting Thomas attitude; surprise, delight, an eagerness for adventure, and a flurry of other emotions Lar couldn’t decode—except perhaps for a willingness to put this latest information to work toward nebulous ends.
“We’ll know more once we examine the runes in that chamber.”
“And now that the creature is catching his second wind, I would suggest there has never been a better time.” The boulders were landing closer to their feet now, and with enough force to shatter. So even if they didn’t make it all the way, any of the shards among the shrapnel could easily take them out.
They ran, side by side, the rest of the way. Ramon kept throwing Lar suspicious glances, perhaps wondering wherefrom the sudden dexterity. Lar was wondering the same thing himself. “Maybe every time I solve a riddle, I draw strength from the revelation,” Lar said.
“Maybe you just feel better about yourself, and that’s all it takes. You might have to be less of a brainiac to get yourself out of these fine messes if you just learned to chant ‘I love myself, I love myself,’ over and over again.”
“I’m entirely confident I’d swallow my tongue even trying.”
They were gasping as they were talking, understandably, and now that they’d arrived in the chamber, and Lar was resting up by supporting his upper-body weight on his knees, the gasping hadn’t exactly subsided. But then, aerobics was never his thing. At least the bitter cold, even down here, where they were well insulated from surface temperatures, felt less like it was peeling his skin off him now, and more like it was just trying to wake him up by slapping him in the face. The slaps coming from some current of air that Lar could not entirely explain, unless the temple’s engineers had built vents to ensure air movement, which he supposed, was entirely reasonable.
“I think this is a cypher room,” Ramon said, taking in the glyphs, “a key to the codex, if you will, regarding the symbols in the other chambers.”
Instantly suspicious, Lar studied the wall Ramon was running his hand over to clean up some of the engravings, in order to make them more legible, before stepping back to take in the big picture again. Ramon did that a few more times. As he did so, Lar, or rather his brainiac alter ego, Cypher, accomplished in linguistics, started to see patterns too. “I think you’re right,” Lar finally confessed, though he hated to be bested by this New Age geomancer.
“Note what happens to the humanoid figures the more they utilize the symbols,” Ramon coached, pointing to the various rows.
Each row, from the top of the wall down to the bottom, had a few more symbols in it. And the figures, working on some task in each row…. Well, those tasks grew more complex. By the time Ramon and Lar got to the bottom rows, the builders were no longer in a Stone Age, but appeared to be crafting machines… Von Neumann machines…what appeared to be primitive computers.
“The glyphs… meditating on the images…”
“More than that, saying them aloud and writing them down, or rather, drawing them out with the hand, I would think…” Ramon said. “They unlock the mind’s potential somehow.”
“Scholars have claimed as much about Aramaic and Hebrew and Latin, insisting the further back in time you go with the language, the more they’re able to attune the mind to the hither self, foster a communion with God. I had dismissed such notions as part and parcel of the fervor of religious scholars.”
“There’s more going on here, though.” Ramon was back at the wall again, this time chiseling out the dust and dirt obscuring some of the figures. He seemed able to tell when the figures just weren’t right, even if his eye couldn’t detect the muck in the wall, obscuring the carving.
And he kept stepping back to take in the big picture, unable to divine the missing piece. Lar, feeling competitive, was determined to get to the answer first.
“I’ve got it,” he said.
Ramon gave him a look of anger, before he calmed himself. “Sorry, I guess I get competitive.”
“It’s okay,” Lar said, dropping his guard as well, and feeling even more ridiculous. As he was the older of the two, he should have known better.
“This language isn’t just a way to expand the mind. It’s far more specific than that. It’s written for chess masters, who need to see many, many moves ahead on the board.”
Ramon returned his eyes to the wall. “Yes, of course. Why didn’t I see that?”
“The message is easily lost because as minds develop, they tend to naturally tackle more complex problems. The rows at the very bottom are the true code breakers,” Lar said pointing and running his finger along the wall from left to right.
“Yes, of course. A return to the agrarian age farming depicted in the first row above, only now, the farmer portrayed in the picture-writing is able, with the aid of the symbols forever-most in his mind, to anticipate seasonal variance, when the rivers will overflow, making the soil richer; contrastingly, when fertilizer will be needed, when there will be drought; hell, even when astronomical movements like solar eclipses, solar flares, or asteroid bombardment…. Christ, by the time you get to the bottom, Nostradamus couldn’t keep up with the predictions.”
“They were studying the language of their oppressors—” Lar said, “aliens with far superior minds, who it was impossible for them to think around or to ever escape.”
“Until they’d absorbed enough of their language and their methods to catch them napping, perhaps,” Ramon said, finishing Lar’s thought for him. Ramon had his hands raised to either side of his head in amazement; his mouth hung wide in awe, and still it couldn’t entirely erase that overdetermined smile. His body amplified and transmitted emotions a lot better than Lar’s did; right now he seemed like a gold miner that had been pannin
g for gold for a long, long time before hitting pay dirt.
“Woo hoo!” Ramon erupted, fist-pumping the air above his head. Next, he was running around the chamber, faster and faster—until he was rising up the sides of the walls, running parallel to the ground.
Lar, embarrassed at his loss of decorum let his outburst of energy play out without interruption. A positive outcome of Ramon’s energetic response was he seemed to be dislodging more of the dust, which helped the cabbalistic etchings to stand out still more clearly.
When Ramon finally calmed back down enough to plant his feet beside Lar again, he seemed not only more sober, but his eyes had welled up.
Wiping his eyes, he said, “So, they were a captured people, perhaps not originating from the world of their captors.”
“Definitely not arising from the same world.”
Ramon craned his head away from the wall, regarding Lar with a suspicious look on his face. “How can you know?”
“The book I found the original cabbalistic patterns in that I used to implant Soren with…. It was written by a 17th Century scientist and spiritualist, who we believe was a channeler. We think he learned to tap the Akashic records—the memory of God—to access information from alien civilizations, their technology. We believed he was simply as determined to transcend human limitations as any transhumanist. In fact, he was the first transhumanist worthy of the name.”
“And now…?”
“And now I think his wife may have been the first one abducted by aliens, at least that we know of, from written records. I think he was determined to get her back from the race which had snatched her. And he was evidently getting close to the mark, before age caught up with him.”
Ramon stared at Lar, slack-jawed. “Do you have anything to back that up besides…?”
“No, not really,” Lar said. “If there were mass abductions going on during medieval times, it would have been easy enough for them to get lost in the background noise of plagues, famines, and pestilence, and any amount of reasons people disappeared wholesale in those days. Not to mention the ones whisked away to dungeons, or slaughtered en masse, and in private, by nobility looking to win over more property for themselves by whatever illegal means suited them.”
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