Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  Mayford took on a pose to explain further, which to me looked almost comically like a weight-lifter preparing to perform a feat of great strength. He set one leg in front of the other, rubbed his hands together, and bent his knees a bit. “To coordinate in any situation where three T’Neth need to communicate, the strongest among them needs to synchronize their thought patterns. Order from chaos, that sort of thing. This individual becomes their fundament, or an anchor you might say. Understand?” He continued excitedly without waiting for an answer. “When there are four T’Neth, they break up into two pairs. When there are five, they break up into a pair and a trio, or – rarely, mind you - a single group of five if one of them is strong enough to coordinate all their separate thought patterns. When there are six or more in one place, they break up into trios, and then the two fundaments communicate with each other, but the trios themselves are independent. So even a T’Neth fundament in large groups rarely need to manage more than a handful of distinct thought patterns. It’s the basis of their ternary hierarchical society and scales all the way up to their topmost tiers of leadership. It’s quite fascinating when you see the geometric progression of thought in their society!” He paused, his proud smile telling me that he expected us to understand what he had just said. “At any rate,” he concluded, “a mediator is one who, beyond coordinating the thoughts of others, can also interpret between their disparate forms of communication.”

  “Speaking of conversational anomalies,” I said. I looked at the others, who had decidedly baffled looks on their faces.

  Mayford looked crestfallen, and then sheepish. “I’m so sorry. I forget you outsiders haven’t been exposed to these concepts.”

  “Since it’s likely we’re being pursued by a T’Neth search party,” Hathan-Fen said dryly, “I doubt we have time for a complete education.”

  “That would surprise me greatly,” Mayford said. “What you said about being discovered, I mean. I suppose the T’Neth may stumble upon us someday, but the chances of that are extremely miniscule.”

  “There’s no place to hide,” Kate lamented. “The T’Neth know everything.”

  Mayford disagreed. “Believe it or not, young lady, the T’Neth do have blind spots.”

  “Nodes,” Norio interjected. “They are the T’Neth weakness.”

  “Aren’t they our weakness, too?” Brady asked. “Nobody is safe in one of those lightning traps.”

  “Your knowledge of nodes is incomplete, Sergeant,” Mayford said. “The nodes you are familiar with create magnetic disruption where the T’Neth network has short-circuited. In other places, the network is so disjointed that there are no sparks at all, for lack of a better term. That’s where Arion’s magnetic field remains, for all intents and purposes, zero.”

  “What is the T’Neth network?” I asked.

  “Tunnels,” Redland said.

  “Yes, that’s right,” Mayford said. “There are thousands of tunnels, maybe tens of thousands. The tunnels were designed by the T’Neth to…. well, make the world a smaller place. The meteor impact during the Great Cataclysm turned the planet sideways and destroyed the network, however. The T’Neth have been trying to fix the damage ever since.”

  “Ever since when?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “They settled this planet about ten-thousand years ago,” Mayford said. “The damage occurred two thousand years after that.”

  “You’re saying the tunnels cover the whole planet?” Hathan-Fen said.

  “Yes,” Mayford nodded. “The T’Neth can accomplish a lot over two millenia.”

  “Ridiculous,” Redland scoffed. “At most they have a hundred tunnels. More than that wouldn’t make any damn sense. It would be easier to fly around the planet than dig through it.”

  “We don’t know everything about the network, or the T’Neth culture for that matter,” Mayford admitted, “so there are plenty of holes in our theories. From what we’ve seen of their technology, it may have been just as simple to burrow as it was to fly. Or, perhaps they remained underground because they did not want to disrupt the ecosystems on the surface. At any rate, our T’Neth friends at the Sanctum are fairly tight-lipped about the whole matter.”

  “The cave entrance we came through is a node?” Brady said.

  “Very good, Sergeant,” Mayford said. “That is the northernmost favorable node in this hemisphere, at least that we know about. It is very small – just big enough to place a shielded door that even the T’Neth can’t detect.”

  “They wouldn’t need to detect the door,” I said. “One look at that picture window and they’d tear the cave apart looking for us.”

  “They would not see the window, either,” Norio said.

  Redland laughed. “The T’Neth aren’t blind, man.”

  “No, of course they’re not,” Mayford said, frowning at the mockery but continuing his explanation. “Those images are designed to project hypnotic signals that misdirect T’Neth thought patterns.”

  “What the hell does that mean?” Redland said. His undersized patience had begun to wear thin.

  “Kate,” Mayford said. “Please tell us what you saw in the cave entrance.”

  “What cave?” Kate asked.

  “The cave we’re in,” Redland snarled. “We were on the ice, then we were in the cave. Now we’re here. How did we get here?”

  Kate looked around, a confused look on her face. “I don’t know.”

  “Think hard, Kate,” Norio said. “What did you see in the window?”

  “What window?”

  “If you’re lookin’ to prove an intellectual point, Mayford, she ain’t exactly a star witness,” Redland said.

  “Actually, her reply is quite typical,” Mayford said. “The windows project a harmonic pattern of extreme indifference into T’Neth minds.”

  “Huh?”

  “Brains operate on electric signals,” Mayford explained. “Each part has a different function. One part operates the nervous system – lungs, heart, and whatnot – while others focus on cognitive powers. T’Neth use a part of their brains that humans do not, the part that regulates what we call teleheuristics.”

  Redland had clearly reached his limit. “Tele-what?”

  “Well.” Mayford dialed back the technical jargon. “Everybody has a sense of curiosity, right? We learn through observing those things that interests us. For that, we humans rely on our five senses. The T’Neth possess a sixth sense of telepathy, which isn’t just their basis for communication, it’s their foundation of consciousness itself.”

  Redland crossed his arms and leaned against the wall.

  “Telepathy isn’t an extra sense for the T’Neth,” Mayford explained. “It’s their primary one. Their entire perception of the world starts with that mental link. The other senses – sight, hearing, taste, touch, smell – are all secondary. “They’re slaves to telepathy. Even before adolescence engages this ability, they have an instinctual telepathic link.”

  “The picture window is invisible to the T’Neth?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “Not literally invisible,” Mayford said. “It’s just so uninteresting to them that they don’t notice it. They don’t even acknowledge its existence on a subconscious level. The harmonic pattern is that powerful.”

  “How long have you had this tele-hiding technology?” Redland asked.

  “I don’t know,” Mayford said. “A thousand years, maybe.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” Hathan-Fen said. “The Founders landed here five hundred years ago. People only learned about the T’Neth in the past thirty years. How did we figure this out before we even knew they existed?”

  “T’Neth and human minds are remarkably similar,” Mayford replied. “The window you saw in the cave was designed to instill a sense of calm on the Founders’ colony ships. Earth is ten thousand light years away. Did you know it took a whole decade for the Founders to reach Arion?”

  “That’s common knowledge,” Hathan-Fen said.

  “Right. Sorry,” Mayf
ord said. “I’ll explain. The Earth engineers didn’t want millions of passengers going space-crazy on their long journey across the galaxy, so they gave them windows to their homeworlds. They aren’t really windows, of course, but they are very realistic, yes?”

  Everybody except Kate nodded.

  “Those windows, which are just 3D interpretations, broadcast a signal that reduces cortisol production in the brain and creates a feeling of relaxation. It’s really an ingenious technology, developed back in the thirtieth century, and I doubt many passengers on the ships knew that they were being influenced by them. Here’s the amazing part: Where humans have no practical telepathic power, the signal is subtle. They go about their business, a little happier than they would normally feel. However, for beings whose reality is linked through a shared consciousness, the effect is a hundred times greater. It neutralizes their observational skills, creates apathy, even memory loss. They could bump their heads against one of those windows and not remember it.”

  “I didn’t feel any different when we were there,” I said.

  “It doesn’t work on a conscious level,” Mayford said. “You wouldn’t know you were being calmed, just like the T’Neth wouldn’t realize they’re standing in the midst of advanced Founders’ Tech. They wouldn’t notice us standing right in front of them for that matter. They might later wonder why they can’t remember where they were or what they were doing at the time, but they would rationalize that whatever they missed, it wasn’t important. It’s really the perfect camouflage.”

  “What kind of range do the picture windows have?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “A hundred meters on open ground. The cave walls severely limit the signal, however.”

  “That’s what we need,” Redland said. “We’ll take it with us.”

  “You can’t,” Mayford said. “The picture devices are susceptible to magnetic interference, just like any other Founders’ Tech; they would cease to function if they left the node. Plus, they’re our only protection from being discovered.”

  “Then how did they build the tunnel to begin with?” Ofsalle asked.

  We all turned around to see him, standing there with a heavy book in his hands in the door of Mayford’s library.

  “What?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “It’s a classic chicken-and-the-egg scenario,” Ofsalle explained, raising his hand to rub his eye, but thinking better of it at the last moment. “If you can’t take the pictures beyond the node without ruining them, then how did you get them there in the first place?”

  “We didn’t,” Mayford shrugged. “The Founders did.”

  Redland swore. “Well ain’t that just a tack in the crack.”

  I didn’t think Redland caught the hidden meaning in Mayford’s statement. No one else gave any indication that they noticed, either. The Founders wouldn’t have put calming devices in the node unless they had a reason to. “There’s a paradox in your explanation,” I told Mayford.

  “Which is?” he smiled knowingly.

  “The Founders put this technology here five hundred years ago when they landed, so how did your T’Neth runaways find out about the caves if they have no way to detect them?”

  “Well, young man,” he said, “that’s an excellent question. The answer is simple: they helped us build it.”

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Mayford ignored the ensuing barrage of questions as he waved us to sit down at the table. We sat down while he produced cups of steaming pot of coffee and a plate of fresh muffins, clearly enjoying the suspense he’d created. “Don’t fill up on bread,” he warned. “I’m taking you all out to dinner as soon as we get the imperatives out of the way.”

  I watched as Redland and the sergeants dug into the muffins greedily. Kate and Hathan-Fen took one each, while I declined the offer politely.

  “This planet,” Mayford explained as the plate was emptied and cups were filled, “wasn’t supposed to be have a ninety-degree axial tilt when the Founders arrived. From Earth, it looked perfectly suited for colonization. In fact – if they still have radio telescopes that can see this far - they won’t even know about the Great Cataclysm for another couple thousand years. One of the drawbacks of faster-than-light travel is that your destination can look very different than what you see at your starting point.” He grinned, and then saw the consternation on our faces. He waved his hands in apology. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to get sidetracked. I teach science classes in my free time, so I tend to veer off into my lessons now and again. Our children will take us back to the stars someday if we remember what brought us here, you know.”

  “Of course,” Hathan-Fen said. “If we could stay on topic then?”

  Mayford paused for a moment, and then continued with great patience. “What you need to understand is that the T’Neth colonized Arion before that meteor struck the south pole. They were working on some kind of planetary grid at the time – the tunnels, you know - but the impact caused all kinds of tectonic upheaval. You’ve seen the results in your travels; Arion’s fractured crust, Plutonic Ridge formed on one side of the planet with the Volcanic Riftlands on the other, and so on. Based on the Founders’ best scientific estimates, the planet should have been destroyed, but it wasn’t. As it was, the shockwave’s destructive path was extremely narrow and focused. Both poles were decimated. If it weren’t for amplified lateral waves of kinetic energy that traveled through the planet’s crust, the damage might not have been so bad. It’s like this: imagine crushing a hard-boiled egg in your hands. Cracks everywhere, some pieces falling off, even the yolk and the egg white sustaining damage. I’m sure many T’Neth died when this happened on a planetary scale.”

  “Skip to the part that concerns the cave entrance.” Redland said.

  “Yes, yes, I’ll get to it,” Mayford replied. “The Founders saw the devastation from orbit when they arrived. They were very disappointed in what they found, you would rightfully conclude. Arion had been rolled onto its side and the north pole was tidally locked on the sun. Instead of a pristine ecosystem like Earth had before the Industrial Age, only a third of this planet would support life. The northern latitudes were a radiated wasteland, and the entire southern hemisphere was so cold as to be uninhabitable. Only a fixed temperate zone north of the equator is conducive to life.”

  Thinking back to my time in Avaria when Xiv saved my life, I recalled him mentioning life underground. At the time I assumed he was just using the confused speech patterns that everybody expected from the T’Neth, but in retrospect it made more sense. The T’Neth were considered desert dwellers in the deep north, but did they all just live in underground caves?

  “The T’Neth were already here,” Norio said, “but the Founders’ technology could not detect them through the magnetic interference. The T’Neth could not sense the humans because we had no telepathic presence.”

  “That is not to say that we weren’t noticed,” Mayford wagged a sly finger. “Some did see our vessels and started watching us from a distance. It didn’t take long for them to opine that since they could not ‘hear us’ in their minds, that humans were some kind of non-sentient passengers who either hitched a ride on robotic exploration vehicles or were laboratory experiments done by some unnamed species.”

  “They thought we were rats on a ship?” Traore said.

  “That is an appropriate analogy,” Mayford replied. “If you think of Mankind’s history of travels, it makes perfect sense that the T’Neth would come to that conclusion because their civilization evolved the same way ours did.”

  “Can you possibly get to the point, Mayford?” Redland growled. He picked at some crumbs on the empty plate in the middle of the table.

  “The Ambassador visited one of the original settlements,” Mayford said. “Even up close, she could not connect with their minds. However, she perceived them as something more than mindless animals, recognizing the hallmarks of intelligence and sentience even though she couldn’t communicate on their level. She took her observations to her
superiors and requested further study. Unfortunately, their collective judgment was that humans weren’t worth the effort. They had much bigger troubles, with all the damage to their planetary infrastructure, you see.”

  “Why doesn’t anybody in the daylight hemisphere know about this?” I asked. “Surely the news of non-human life on Arion would come up in conversation at some point.”

  Mayford shrugged. “The captains of the six founding vessels decided to cover up their knowledge of the T’Neth from the colonial governors, whom they were subordinate to. They also withheld the risks of getting stranded on Arion, which they would later regret. The captains thought all the abandoned relics on Arion would be free for the taking and would unlock vast new technologies. In their estimation, that opportunity outweighed all the risks of getting stranded. Unfortunately, their technology began to fail as soon as they unsealed the hatches on their landing craft. Their deception was revealed after two of the large colony ships landed, and colonizing operations were immediately halted. The rest of the fleet…well, they stripped the captains of their commands and exiled them here on the planet. After that, they took the other four colony ships to a contingency star system.”

  “In other words, we got left behind, screwed from the get-go,” Redland said flatly.

  “I thought the Founders were united in all their efforts,” Hathan-Fen said disbelievingly.

  “Major,” Mayford said with a sad shake of his head, “Mankind has never been united, despite the fact that history books tell us otherwise. At any rate, the founding captains managed to keep their knowledge of the T’Neth to themselves and a chosen few after they landed.”

  “A chosen few in Dolina,” I stated, “where human technology was preserved.”

  “The T’Neth knew about us from the beginning, but did nothing?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “They didn’t see us as a threat,” Mayford said. “We were unintelligent, lower lifeforms to them, remember?”