by Max Carver
“Um, hi,” Eric said, slowly approaching her. “Everything okay?” Stupid question. It was obvious everything was not.
“She coming?” Naomi asked, looking up over her fingers, her eyes shiny with tears.
“Not yet. Unless you want me to yell for her—”
“No.” She covered her face with her hands again.
Eric stood there uneasily for a minute, not sure what to say or do. This was not something he felt comfortable attempting. It made him think of Suzette's occasional “relationship talks” where she went on about her feelings and nothing he said was right, and any answer he gave to any question she asked was sure to make her erupt in fury.
This was similar, only he had no history of intimacy with Naomi, and she was much tougher than Suzette.
“So.” Eric sank onto the bench beside her. He reached out and hesitantly touched a hand to her back, not sure whether she was going to appreciate the gesture or turn and punch him in the mouth.
She did turn, but surprised him by embracing him tight—no punching at all—and resting her face against his neck. He patted her back a couple of times.
“What happened?” he asked.
Naomi pulled back, sniffling, and regarded him with her amber eyes.
“You don't know anything about me,” she said.
“That's mostly true. I know you're good at blowing things up. I know you like to listen to classical music like AC/DC while you do it.”
“I'm from Sylvania,” she said. Eric nodded; it was a watery green planet like Gideon, though not as large. “Lived in Foundertown. I worked as a...preschool teacher.”
Eric snickered without meaning to.
“What? Does that sound strange to you?” Naomi asked.
“Completely.”
“Is it so hard to picture me as maternal?” She glared at him like she'd break his arm if he answered wrong.
“Well...yeah.” Eric tried to conjure an image of Naomi finger-painting with kids and just couldn't.
“I guess so.” She lit a thin cigar. “I used to be very different. I...was married. Never officially got divorced, actually. I just left.”
“Why?”
She puffed out a cloud of cigar smoke and looked at him through it, as though trying to read him.
“Don't repeat this to anyone,” she said.
“Okay.”
She glanced toward the archway that led to the burial chamber, then the other one that led up the ramp to where the others waited. They were alone.
Naomi reached up to her collar and drew down the zipper of her tan coveralls. She pulled it down to her navel, revealing a worn pink bra with a tiny bow at the front, definitely not what he might have expected her to be wearing. She touched the area at her heart, indicating a tattoo that stood out in bright hues from the deep brown of her skin.
It was a butterfly.
“Do you know what this is?” she whispered.
“It's...” Eric wasn't sure what to say. It was obviously a tattoo, and obviously a butterfly, but both of these seemed so obvious that they couldn't possibly be the real answer to her question.
“I got pregnant when I was twenty-three,” she said. “We were ready for it. Married, house, jobs. My husband was an insurance adjuster. Not glamorous, but stable. He had an analytical kind of mind, you know. Anyway, we decided we'd name the boy Taryn, after my husband's grandfather.
“Then that night happened. We rushed to the hospital. He was six weeks premature. That's early, but compared to some of those babies on the ward, he had it easy. They said he'd almost certainly make it, he was really strong. That's what they told us. We spent the next three months pretty much living at the hospital...” She took a long drag on her cigar. “When a baby died in that unit, they'd put a butterfly outside the room. Just a little construction-paper cutout. When they put his up, I tore it off the wall. I crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. I lost my mind that night. Never got it back, right?” Naomi gave him a cold half-smile without a hint of humor. “That's when I left. I never went back to my house after the baby, didn't bother to pack. Never said good-bye to my husband or told him I was leaving. It took most of our savings for me to book passage off-planet. But I did. Now I don't nurture and I don't create. Now I blow things to pieces. Now I destroy.”
“I'm sorry.” Eric said. He sat quietly for a minute, not sure what else to say. Then he added, “You are good at destroying stuff, though.”
She gave him the slightest smile.
“How long has it been?” Eric asked.
“Two years. No. Three. Four?” She shook her head. “It's hard to tell years for some reason. It turns to fog when I look back. And I try not to look back.”
“Eric, could you give me a hand...” Iris emerged from the burial chamber. Her giant grin, which she'd been wearing since finding the secret passage beneath the spider, collapsed when she saw them on the bench, Naomi's coveralls unzipped down the front. “Oh. Wow. I didn't mean to interrupt a private...thing.”
“You didn't...and it's not a...” Eric stood while Naomi zipped up. “What's happening back with the burial chamber?”
“I just need your help.” Her voice sounded cooler to him now, losing the extra warmth it had gained after he'd sheltered her from the falling rocks.
He considered trying to explain that Naomi was just showing him a tattoo, but he supposed that would sound flimsy, even if it was true. And he definitely didn't want to repeat any of the personal things Naomi had told him. And who cared whether it was flimsy or true, anyway? There was nothing between him and Iris, just a look, just a feeling that was probably all in his head, caused by the abnormally long and stressful day, which was turning into a long and stressful night. The sun would have set outside already.
Eric kept quiet as all three of them returned to the burial chamber.
“Think about those four big statues,” Iris said, while pointing to the murals. “Spider, bat, bird, frog. What do they have in common?”
“They...all make great Halloween costumes?” Eric guessed.
Iris winced, as though his comment had been stupid enough to cause her physical pain.
“They all eat insects,” Naomi said.
“Right.” Iris appeared slightly relieved, as though taking comfort in not being completely surrounded by idiots. “If you're an insect, those are the Four Horsemen of your Apocalypse. These pictures show the same pharaoh-bug depicted on the sarcophagus defeating those four creatures. Here he steals the spider's web and uses it to tie up the frog...over here he steals the bird's eggs...see? He's like the trickster-hero of his culture. I think I'm starting to figure out the bug religion here. Take this huge butterfly on the wall, for instance—”
Naomi tensed up.
“These mantids were wingless. They weren't lepidopterans and definitely didn't turn into butterflies. But they observed butterflies and moths, and took a metaphor from them, the soul as a butterfly that leaves the cocoon of the body at death—”
“I think we get that,” Eric said quickly, worried Naomi would get upset. “Is this why you wanted us?”
“Oh, no. I need your help to open the sarcophagus. I'm certain what I'm looking for is in there, but the lid is too heavy.”
“In there?” Eric looked over the giant royal coffin, sculpted and colored to look like the great and powerful bug-pharaoh in all his golden glory, his gray skin made of silver.
The lid didn't budge at all when he first tried to move it, and he could barely fit his fingertips beneath the edge.
Eventually, he managed to pry it open by inserting the blade of a battle ax as a wedge and banging it in with a war hammer. Once the lid was lifted, the three of them managed to slide it to one side, enough to reveal the darkness within. The lid was much too heavy to actually lift away without equipment, or several strong people to help. Eric wasn't surprised to find the lid was solid stone underneath the layer of gold and silver on top.
“Okay.” Iris's voice was an excited whisper.
She looked both thrilled and nervous, as if they were all teenagers about to go skinny dipping together.
They looked inside, the lights of their mining helmets illuminating the sarcophagus interior.
Golden armor inset with gems colored most of the brown, shriveled body of another mantid. The bug's size surprised Eric; it was clearly double, maybe triple the size of the mummified warrior bugs in the other room.
“I guess we know why he was king,” Eric said. “He was just the biggest.”
“You mean she was the queen, more likely,” Naomi said. “Bug hives are ruled by queens. Everyone knows that. Females do all the working and fighting, too. The males just lay around the hive eating and occasionally having sex. Like my sister's husband.”
“Normally, I'd agree,” Iris said. “But if you look at this mural, you'll see our oversized bug king here copulating with groups of females, including some of the captive red mantids from the war. Then in the next panel, these females are filling caves with eggs. Interesting. The alpha-and-harem model is usually found in mammals, not insects.” Iris passed her hands over the dead bug's armor as she spoke. He'd been buried with a different item clutched in each of his six claws, including ceremonial weapons and a scepter. “Under his armor, he's wrapped in silk. That could relate to the butterfly symbolism—”
“So we're leaving now, right?” Naomi asked. “This concludes today's meeting of the dead-bug archaeological society. Yeah?”
Iris had fallen silent, staring at the mummified insect king. Her hands floated above the battle helmet, which had spikes to protect the insect's antennae and a mask that concealed its face. The helmet showed exquisite craftsmanship, with different metals—gold, silver, platinum, bronze, and steel—interwoven like cloth.
“That's it,” Iris whispered. Her hand trembled above the helmet. She reached toward the mask, which might have been an elaborate armor faceplate or a funerary mask. It depicted a mantid face, the skin made of silver, the big black eyes of obsidian.
Then she hissed and recoiled, as if the mask were intensely hot, though Eric felt no heat radiating from that direction.
“Everything okay?” he asked.
“Eric, I need you to take the helmet off.” Iris glanced down at her hands, then she looked up at him, her dark eyes wide and desperate.
“Why him?” Naomi asked. “You dragged us down here searching for this thing. I still say the rainbow tunnel was the fastest way up, and you led us down here anyway. Now, after all that, you're scared to touch it?”
“It's too heavy for me. Eric, please?”
Eric glanced between the two women. Another rumble sounded overhead, close enough to rattle the floor. The sarcophagus shuddered as though the mummified bug-pharaoh was trying to rise from the dead.
“Okay.” He took a deep breath, then reached for it with both hands.
He felt a kind of electrical resistance as his fingers reached the helmet. When his fingers touched the mask—unexpectedly warm for metal that had been in a dark underground vault for untold years—hairs stood up all over his body, and an electric tingle raced over the surface of his skin.
“You sure that's safe?” Naomi asked.
“It is for him,” Iris replied.
Eric wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. But he was here on Caldera searching for treasure, so he could get rich and get home. Back to Suzette. The relic, according to Iris, was worth far more than any other treasures this gold-rich planet had to offer.
Eric's fingers traced the surface of the helmet, feeling that electric hum in his fingertips. Flower-insect writing in tiny, ornate calligraphy seemed to swim up out of the metal as his gaze moved from one spot to another, as if too subtly engraved to even see, except when staring at it from just the right angle. It was like an optical illusion. The writing was small and dense enough to hold a complete Bible, maybe two.
For a moment, he slipped away into a memory, one of the strongest of his life.
He and Suzette had once gone into town together to get some supplies for her father, Eric driving the rattling farm truck. He was only fifteen, but things like driver's licenses weren't strictly regulated out in the country, or on Gideon generally.
They weren't just going to the general store in the tiny hamlet of Wellspring, though. They drove all the way to Sanctuary Grove, an hour away, a relatively big town of fifteen thousand people. Suzette's father needed some tractor parts that weren't available anywhere closer. Eric had been trying to fix the tractor himself, to impress her father. One day he planned to ask the man for his daughter's hand, after all.
They'd walked the raised wooden sidewalk of the big town, looking into store windows, and Suzette had been excited to explore a shop that sold fine dresses, shoes, and jewelry. There was no such shop in Wellspring, where people made some of their own clothes and ordered most of everything else by catalog.
Suzette had all but drooled over a gold bracelet in the jewelry case, one that coiled three times. Eric joked that it looked like a snake, and she'd scowled and called him a lowbrow.
She'd talked about the bracelet on the way home. And mentioned it again the next day.
Eric spent the summer working extra chores at the Chandler farm down the road, repairing their fence and painting their barn, weeding their gardens.
After four months, he'd finally saved up enough to buy the gold bracelet for her.
He'd surprised her with it for her sixteenth birthday, in the fall, after they'd drunk cider and wandered into the woods to kiss.
When Suzette saw it, she'd made a hissing, gasping sound like he'd never heard from her.
They'd done much more than kiss that night. She'd awed him by reaching into his pants, stroking him to climax, the gold bracelet on her wrist pressed against his lower belly the whole time.
“Eric? You all right?” Naomi asked.
“Huh?” He looked around, jarred from his strange reverie, to see Naomi and Iris staring at him. He felt himself blush hard. “I'm fine. Just...trying to figure this thing out.” He looked down at the dead bug's helmet again, working hard to clear his mind of the intense memory.
He found a clasp on the helmet's side, and then he swung open the silver-coated face mask.
He half-expected the mummified bug to chomp its dead mandibles into his hand, but the corpse remained still. The eyes seemed remarkably well-preserved, oily and black, very much as if they were somehow still alive after all this time. The mandibles looked sharp and ready to snap.
It only appeared alive, though. The dead insect did nothing to resist as Eric slid the helmet up and off as carefully as he could, trying not to damage the dry sticks of the dead insect's antenna. He was already robbing the bug-king's grave; desecrating its corpse would just add injury to that insult.
He had trouble pulling it free of the antennae, though. He tried to gently shake it loose, but it felt as though the antennae were wired to the inside of the ornate helm somehow. Maybe they'd done it for the funeral and burial, the way the eyes and mouths of human bodies were glued or stitched shut before a viewing. Eric shivered and tried not to think of thousands of insects attending the funeral, mourning the loss of their god-king.
“Everything okay?” Iris asked him.
“We need to get going,” Naomi said.
“Okay. I might have to get a little destructive here.” Eric pulled the helmet as hard as he could, giving up on his attempts to preserve the body.
The antennae didn't break, exactly, but they stretched and then crumbled to dust, revealing fine strands of white metal threads that had been hidden within them. Eric kept pulling, walking backwards from the sarcophagus, and the two metal threads kept growing longer and longer, connected from the inside of the helmet to the crown of the dead bug's shriveled head.
“What is this new thing we don't have time for?” Naomi asked, watching him continue to pull the white-metal threads out.
“I don't understand, either—” Iris began.
Then the huge insect-ph
araoh lurched inside his sarcophagus, as if trying to leap free. Its bulk slammed upward against the sarcophagus lid.
All three of them ran back and away. Eric dropped the helmet and picked up the war hammer he'd used to help open the lid. Beside him, Naomi raised the antique battle ax.
Nothing else happened. The dead thing lay still in its coffin, as it likely had for decades, maybe even centuries.
Eric and Iris approached for a closer look.
“What's happening?” Eric asked.
“I'm...not sure,” Iris whispered back.
The brown corpse of the dead bug was shrinking. Even stranger, the suit of armor covering its immense body shrank with it, staying proportional as the bug-pharaoh's body grew smaller and smaller.
Eventually, the dead pharaoh shrank until he was smaller than the dead bug warriors they'd passed. When he was as small as one of the servant-bugs that had been chained down on the floor, he finally stopped shrinking.
The two threads of metal, white as polished platinum, detached from the shrunken body and crawled up inside the helmet, behind the mask, where Eric had left it on the floor.
When he turned over the helmet to look inside, the two strands were gone. The helmet felt heavier than it had before.
“What was that?” Naomi asked. “What just happened?”
Then a huge blast sounded out, much too close by, and the ceiling above shook harder than ever. Bartley's voice rang out, amplified electronically by a speaker on his exoskeleton: “We are under attack! Everybody hear that? We are under attack!”
The burial chamber shuddered again, and cracks opened across the walls and ceiling.
The three of them ran out together through the treasure room, which was also shaking apart, overturned urns spilling gold and jewels, clay jars shattering and spilling withered leaves and fossilized honey. Weapons tumbled from the cracking walls.
They barely made it out of the secret tunnel before the roof caved in.
Chapter Fourteen