by Ken Liu
Abruptly, Luke stopped and held up a hand. We were now about a hundred meters beyond the point where we had first seen those letters on the wall.
A piece of wreckage barred our way. It was so old and deformed that it was hard to tell what kind of spacecraft or ground-based vehicle it had once been.
With Luke supporting me and carefully pointing out every foothold, we made our way over the wreck. Many of the components had dissolved away, leaving behind a mostly metal skeleton. I got the sense that it had been there for centuries, maybe even longer. We didn’t see any bodies.
“I think whoever wrote the glowing sign near the entrance came on this,” Luke said.
A chill went down my spine. “Why do you say that?”
Luke pointed to a few carved markings on the wreckage. “They’re in the same style.”
I couldn’t really tell, but I trusted that Luke knew what he was talking about. “But…if the wreck is here, doesn’t that mean they came but never left?”
Instead of answering, Luke pressed ahead determinedly.
The cave around us grew even more sinister in my eyes.
The rubbery film that we had encountered earlier turned out to be only the first of several similar barriers. The barriers got thicker as we went deeper into the exogorth, though all shared the same quality of self-sealing after we went through. We also passed by a few other signs of past victims: the metal remains of a helmet; a piece of some kind of erosion-resistant fabric; a pile of twisted electronic components, long decayed beyond use. I wondered how many others had followed the playful “fireflies” in here over the millennia and never returned.
Luke stopped again and let out a long whistle. Standing next to him, I was also rendered speechless by the sight.
We had emerged into an enormous cavern that was at least fifty meters tall and maybe half a kilometer in length and width. A few meters in from the entrance was the shore of a lake that filled the rest of the cavern.
The beams from our weak helmet lights should never have been enough to illuminate that vast space, and yet I could see the outlines of the distant walls on the other shore of the lake quite distinctly. As my eyes adjusted, I saw that the entire cavern was lit by a faint blue glow that came from the walls. Bright spots of light pulsed in the ceiling, and as they were reflected in the placid surface of the lake, it seemed as if we were floating in space, surrounded by stars.
A loud series of screeches pierced the absolute silence in the cavern, and the bright pulsing lights in the ceiling began to move. They dropped down, gathered into small groups, and headed straight for us.
Luke pushed me into a nook in the wall next to us. He ducked into it right after me and, standing with his back to me, got into a defensive crouch.
A lightsaber came to life in his hands.
In the bright glow of that torch, I saw monsters swooping out of the dark in swarms. Long, triangular wings; elongated heads, half of which were taken up with jaws filled with sharp fangs that glowed bright blue; loud shrieks that merged into one continuous blood-curdling howl.
I shuddered. They reminded me of the bat-like predators that hunted in swarms on the planet Touksingal, where my dissertation advisor had lost an arm to the bloodthirsty creatures. I was sure I was looking at a variety of mynocks that hadn’t been studied before.
(The scientific part of my mind realized that the presence of wings meant that the cavern was filled with air. I filed that information away to make use of later, when we weren’t under attack.)
Luke stood at the opening of our hideout and spun his lightsaber into a brilliant, impenetrable wheel of deadly beauty. I saw wings, heads, torsos being severed by the humming blade of that weapon, and though it seemed as if thousands of monsters were attacking us, not a single one made it through.
In the glow from the lightsaber, I was surprised to see no frown of rage or grimace of terror on Luke’s face; instead, his features were set in an expression of calm…sorrow, as though he was mourning the deaths of the monsters attacking us, as though he was reluctantly doing what had to be done, unswayed by anger, hatred, or fear.
As though they could sense Luke’s skill, the monsters suddenly changed tactics. Turning as one, the swarm swerved away from our nook and skimmed over the surface of the lake. Crisscrossing ripples from flying creatures dipping into the water disturbed the tranquil mirror.
What is the purpose of a lake in the middle of an exogorth? My mind churned in search of a solution.
Luke, taking advantage of the temporary relief, deactivated his lightsaber and stood at the opening to the nook, panting and watching our attackers. I crawled up next to him.
“Turn off your helmet light,” I whispered urgently.
“What?”
“They’re drawn to it!”
He hesitated. Even though the light from our helmets was weak, there was a psychological comfort in its presence that was hard to let go.
“Hurry! We have to move away as soon as you turn off your light. We can’t stay here.”
“But there’s no better cover—”
“We’ll die if we stay here!” I slowed down, articulating each word. “You have to trust me.”
We locked gazes, and the doubt in his eyes was replaced after a moment by resolution. He nodded and turned off the helmet light. Then he grabbed mine, flicked it on, and tossed it on the ground, right in front of the nook.
“What are you doing?” I hissed. “Give it back!”
“You have to trust me.”
Ducking down, he indicated that I should get on his back. I complied without complaining. Then he looked at the sheer cave wall to our right and jumped.
My heart leapt into my throat, but I bit down on my bottom lip to keep from screaming. In the light gravity, his jump took us up about four meters before he grabbed on to a ledge. Then, hand over hand, he shuffled to the right about twenty meters before he found another narrow ledge under his feet, where he set me down. I pushed back from the edge and pressed my back against the cave wall.
The bright swarm, which had skimmed all the way to the other side of the lake, turned around and headed back for the spot where we had been hiding.
I found the wall I was leaning against covered by a layer of slimy mud. I grabbed handfuls of it and began to slather the mud over Luke’s suit. After a moment, he understood what I was after and began to slather the mud over mine. Soon we were both completely covered by the slime, which hopefully masked our smells and heat signatures.
Something wriggled in my fist as I dug for another handful of mud. Without thinking, I tossed whatever it was into the lake below. With a gentle hiss, I watched as a white, larva-like creature the size of my forearm writhed in the water, its skin bubbling and dissolving. A few seconds later, it was completely gone.
“Probably strong acid,” I whispered into the comm. “Could also be filled with aggressive microorganisms.”
The bright glowing swarm had arrived at the nook, still illuminated by my left-behind helmet light. Wave after wave of the winged monsters dove at where Luke had been standing but a moment earlier, and we heard spitting noises and splashes, as though it were raining in the cave.
After a few seconds, the helmet light went out.
Luke pressed his helmet visor against mine. We both nodded, finally understanding each other.
“We’re in the stomach of the slug,” I whispered.
The monsters had moved away into the lake to fill their mouths and bellies with the deadly corrosive liquid, which they spat out as a kind of venom. If we had remained where we were, no matter how skillfully Luke wielded his weapon, he couldn’t possibly have protected both of us from a pouring acid rain. My realization that we were inside the digestive organ of the space slug had prompted me to insist on moving away.
“I didn’t want us to be killed,” Luke said, “but I also didn’t want to keep on killing them.” There was a compassionate strength in his voice that felt comforting. “I had to leave a lure in pl
ace so they wouldn’t keep on looking for us.”
Learning from the trick the slug had used against us, he had left my helmet light behind to draw the attention of the mynocks so we could save ourselves—as well as save them.
We drifted across the deadly lake. I gazed by turns up at the pulsing lights on the ceiling—the monsters had gone back to sleep after failing to find us—and down at dim shadows swimming in the depths below.
Our macabre raft was made from the skulls and wings of the mynocks Luke had killed earlier. The hollow skulls provided buoyancy, and the wings, tied together into a large sheet laid on top, made a platform on which we huddled. Since we couldn’t be sure that any other material we had with us would withstand the acid in the lake, using the bodies of creatures who lived and hunted with the acid seemed the best choice.
“Who knew there would be a whole other world in here?” said Luke. He was oaring us across the lake, using a paddle made from the bones and wings of the flying monsters.
I said nothing. The stress and excitement from the attack of the killer mynocks had made me forget the reality of our situation for a moment. But now that the crisis was past, I was feeling despondent. My right leg throbbed. I was trapped in the belly of a monster.
“I’m getting used to the smells,” said Luke. “Wonder if we can tell if something is edible by our noses.”
Even seemingly good news about our situation could not cheer me up. Since finding out that the inside of the slug’s stomach was filled with air and life, Luke and I had cautiously taken off our helmets; it was also an experiment partly driven by desperation, as our suits’ air supplies couldn’t have lasted much longer. The self-sealing barriers we had passed through evidently acted as airlocks. The air was indeed breathable, though it was filled with strange, fetid smells. It was also quite cold, and I shivered as our breath misted.
“I really wish I knew more about biology,” Luke said. “Maybe you could give me some lessons as long as we’re in here.”
I wanted to scream at him to shut up. His relentless patter was driving me crazy. We were going to die, and he was talking about eating and biology lessons!
“You should stop the raft here, and I’ll just roll into the lake,” I said. My voice sounded dull, already dead. “Would be quicker to go that way rather than waiting to starve slowly after days of wandering around in this place.”
“Sure,” Luke’s voice was calm, as if my suggestion was perfectly reasonable. “But you should probably strip off your suit first. I’m not sure that the synthetic materials would be healthy for our host. Might give it indigestion.”
I was outraged at this suggestion. “I’m sure it wouldn’t be bothered by something like that—”
“Why would there be all these creatures living in here?” Luke asked. “They’re parasites, aren’t they? That can’t be healthy. Maybe it’s having stomach trouble.”
“They’re not necessarily ‘parasites.’ I’m not completely surprised that there’s a whole ecosystem in here. You have a whole ecosystem of microorganisms living inside you, too, some of them helping you with digestion, others necessary for regulating your body chemistry.”
“I have monsters living inside me?”
“If you swallowed something small and foreign, it would probably think so,” I said. Luke’s questions had triggered the professorial side of me. “The slug has to digest carbon-based prey as well as silicon-based food, and the creatures who live in here probably exist in symbiosis with their host. Over time, they help break down the bodies of prey and intruders into forms that can be more easily absorbed by the host.”
“So each of us is as complicated as this slug,” he said. “We’re entire systems living in balance, not self-contained individuals.”
I nodded.
“The universe is full of wonders,” he said, his voice full of…joy.
I looked around me, and everything appeared in a new light. I was no longer in a hopeless tale of terror but being given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. I could probably devote my career to studying the ecosystem in there, an environment no other scientist had explored.
I saw the grin on Luke’s face, and suddenly I understood. He had seen the despair in me, and reminding me of what I loved and why I had become a biologist was how he gave me hope again.
“Thank you,” I said.
“We’re going to get out of here,” he said. “Just learn as much as you can while you’re still inside. I certainly want to learn all I can about those glowing letters—” He pointed to the wall we were approaching.
I was squinting to make out what he was pointing at when something massive bumped at us from below, hard. Everything exploded into chaos: Luke and I rolled off the raft; a massive tentacle broke through the surface and slammed down, breaking the raft apart; a bright glow lit the length of the tentacle looming over us like a spacecraft from some unknown world; the pulsing lights of the flying monsters hanging on the ceiling scattered, screeching all the while.
The cold solvent chilled me instantly, and then, a second later, a burning sensation covered every inch of my face. I closed my eyes and mouth, but I had already swallowed some of the deadly liquid, and I could feel my throat burn as I struggled to suppress the desire to scream and swallow more. The burning liquid seeped into my cuffs and collar, and pain like I had never felt before burned my hands and neck, traveling up my arms and down my chest.
I wasn’t going to make it out after all.
A powerful arm grabbed me around my waist and pushed me through the icy lake.
I blacked out.
“You’ll be all right.…We’re past the stomach now….”
Luke’s visage floated in and out of focus. His face was full of scars, and the deadly digestive juices of the space slug had eaten away his beard. Our suits had offered some protection for the rest of our bodies, but the exposed parts were burned. He looked haggard, worn, but still unbowed.
“Water…” I croaked. But the pain was so overwhelming that my feverish brain shut down again.
When I regained consciousness, I felt something sweet and refreshing being poured into my mouth. I forced my parched tongue to separate from the roof of my mouth and swallowed the life-giving water gratefully.
After I finally stopped drinking, Luke fed me bite-size pieces of something soft and cream-colored. It tasted like roasted flesh. I felt strength returning to my limbs. Even my right leg, which was tied to a splint, seemed to throb less.
“What…what am I eating?” I asked.
“You don’t want to know,” Luke said, chuckling. “There are fungi growing in the gut of the space slug, along with small creatures that I’ve never even seen pictures of. I tried to eat small pieces of each and see how my body reacted. There were a few that made me sick, but this is safe.”
“And the water? How did you get the water?”
“I was once a moisture farmer,” he said. “I can get water out of anything.”
Somehow his smile and upbeat tone, despite the fact that we were both injured, made me feel as though being trapped inside a space slug wasn’t the worst thing in the world.
“I guess we keep on going?” I asked. “I want to see what’s in this thing’s gut before I die.”
“Of course,” Luke said. “And I’m going to find out who wrote those glowing messages. Oh, and we’re not going to die. I don’t have a bad feeling about this.”
Time inside the exogorth didn’t work the same way it did outside. Without a spinning planet under our feet or automatically synced chronos on a spaceship, our circadian rhythms soon went awry. We slept when we were tired, ate when we were hungry, drank when we were thirsty, and explored every path open to us. I had no idea how many days we spent inside the slug, whose interior offered a whole universe to explore.
Perpetually feverish, racked with pain and discomfort, and facing danger at every turn, Luke and I nonetheless managed to map out practically every square meter of space that we could reach. The exogorth
was a maze of tunnels and interconnecting chambers. Some of the chambers were mired in perpetual darkness, while others were lit with various kinds of luminescence, biologically generated and otherwise.
The glowing signs appeared several more times. Sometimes they consisted of writing that Luke pored over for hours, trying to decipher its mystery. Other times they were paintings, abstract curlicues and starbursts and crosshatching woven together to present awe-inspiring scenes that took up a whole wall. We gazed at them as though looking at the swirling, churning galaxy itself. These tapestries of light were both map and territory.
“Whoever they were, they were fantastic artists,” said Luke.
I had to agree. But I was admiring a great artist myself: the laws of nature that made the exogorth possible.
The chambers presented a variety of climates and fauna and flora, as though they were individual worlds connected by hyperspace jumps. We passed through mist-filled chambers populated by silicon animal-plants that seemed to ooze as well as walk; we crawled through wet, almost tropical tunnels that were densely carpeted by mosslike fungi that tasted of spices and gave us lurid dreams; we trudged through swampy caverns where giant serpentlike creatures peeked out of the muck from time to time, gazing at us with glowing eyes on top of stalks.
“Nobody is going to believe any of this,” I said. “No one ever thought to look inside an exogorth for life.”
“Nobody believed me when I set out to recover the knowledge of the Jedi, either,” said Luke.
“Aren’t the Jedi mostly a myth?” I asked.
“As much as new worlds waiting inside space slugs,” he said.
“But magic isn’t the same as science.”
He laughed at that. “Real magic is always knowledge. The galaxy is knowable, and that’s what makes it wondrous.”
Time after time, we fell into traps or monsters came after us. Whether the creatures we encountered were parasites or simply semi-independent organs of the space slug, Luke always managed to get us out of those scrapes. The space slug must have been so sick of the stomachache we were giving it as we continuously defied its attempts to kill and digest us.