by Arthur C.
“They’re my favorites, Johann,” she said. “The maskets are cute, of course, and I never saw that elevark thing you killed, but I like the tuskers the best.”
They walked around until Maria’s feet hurt and she started to complain. They did not see any tuskers. More importantly, Johann said to himself, for he did not want to disturb Maria with the conclusions he was reaching, we have not seen any sign that tuskers have recently been present. The meadows where they were grazing are now overgrown. And all the droppings are old.
The next day, on the way home, passing through a meadow with beautiful flowers, Johann and Maria nearly stepped on another of the dirt mounds that housed the long, skinny, multilegged creatures that looked like nails. After asking Johann’s permission, Maria dug into one side of the mound with her hands. She found what appeared to be a nursery compartment, with hundreds of eggs in neat little vestibules, but not a single living, moving creature. Johann considered this discovery to be additional evidence to support his inchoate theory.
That night, after Maria fell asleep, Johann lay on his back and considered the possibilities. Someone or something is removing all the fauna from this island, he said to himself Maria and I may be the only ones left. All this must be part of some general plan. But orchestrated by whom for what purpose?
For the umpteenth time since his arrival at the artificial worldlet now more than nine years ago, Johann was frustrated by his inability to either understand or control his destiny. He heard Sister Beatrice’s voice in his head. “Don’t analyze everything all the time, Johann,” she said sweetly. “Just accept and trust in God.”
Johann was not in a pleasant mood. “Bullshit,” he said to himself out loud.
TWO
IN HER FANTASY games with the figurines, Maria had developed an explanation for where the tuskers and the maskets had gone. “They’re on the far side of the island, Johann,” she said, “in yellow masket territory. A huge celebration is occurring. Who knows? Maybe that’s where Keiko and Beatrice and the others went also.”
Johann thought the chances were remote that all the animals in their proximity had suddenly migrated to another part of the island. But Maria kept pestering him until he agreed to go on another trek with her. “Besides,” she said with an impish grin the evening before they were planning to leave, “I’ve never seen the place where you killed the elevark.”
Johann noted to himself that the existence of the solitary elevark on their island was additional proof that they were in a managed situation, a zoo of some kind. But who are the zookeepers? he wondered. And where are they? He went to sleep imagining a fabulously advanced benign species who would soon show up to rescue Maria and him, just as they had all the others.
When daylight came Johann was already down at the beach, limbering up for his morning swim. Maria was still sleeping. Everything was ready for their journey to begin right after breakfast.
Johann swam out of the bay and into the main body of the lake. He turned to the right, following the shoreline, and covered about two kilometers before he turned around and headed back. Johann thought he saw an object of some kind, at the limit of his vision, when he was roughly halfway home, but he dismissed his sighting as a trick his old eyes were playing on him. By the time he reentered the bay, he had reached his state of exercise nirvana and was nearly oblivious to everything around him.
When Johann stopped swimming and stood up to walk onshore, he saw the raft immediately. He blinked his eyes twice, confirming that there was indeed a wooden raft sitting on the beach, and hastened out of the water. “Vivien,” he cried expectantly, looking in all directions. “Is that you, Vivien?”
There was no reply. Johann, totally confused by the silence, now yelled for Maria. Again there was no immediate answer.
“We have taken her away,” a voice said from the bushes closest to where the raft was grounded. “But don’t worry; she is safe.”
Johann spun around and felt his muscles tense. A dark-skinned man of medium height, who appeared to be about fifty, stepped forward from the bushes.
“Who the hell are you?” Johann asked.
“Greetings,” the man said without smiling. His hair was unkempt and his beard, mostly gray in color, was full. He was wearing blue shorts but no other clothing. “I have come to make your transition as easy as possible. The child is waiting, on a raft like this one, just outside the bay.”
Johann’s mind was exploding with questions. He stared at the man for several seconds, trying to organize his thoughts.
“Maria is out there, by herself, on a raft?” Johann exclaimed, pointing toward the lake.
“She is in no danger,” the man said. “The adoclynes are with her.”
“The adoclynes!” Johann shouted. “What is an adoclyne?”
The man answered evenly, in a monotone, as if Johann had asked the time of day. “The adoclynes are the reigning species in this world,” he said. “The rest of us are their subjects.”
Johann moved forward threateningly “Look, buddy,” he said, “I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you have harmed Maria in any way. I will personally tear you limb from limb.”
The man suddenly darted to his right, out into the water. He turned around and faced Johann again when he was waist deep. “They warned me that you might be violent,” he said.
“They?” shouted Johann, following the man into the water. “Who are you talking about now?”
The man slapped the water with his open palm three times. “These are the adoclynes,” he answered, as six blue tentacles with claws emerged from the water almost simultaneously. Moments later three turquoise heads with oval gray bulbous eyes appeared on the surface next to the man.
Johann was dumbfounded. He stood at the edge of the water, agape, as one of the nozzlers moved closer to him.
“You’d better move back,” the man said. “Those claws can inflict quite a wound.”
Johann stumbled backward. The man slapped the water and the nozzler stopped advancing. Instead, it turned its forward eyes toward the stranger and waved its pair of tentacles in some kind of pattern. The man made a few signs with his hands and fingers and the nozzler submerged.
Johann could not believe what he was seeing. “Did you just talk to that damn thing?” he asked.
The man nodded. “The adoclynes and I worked out a primitive means of communication four years ago. We have been improving it ever since.”
Johann was completely overwhelmed. He sat down on the beach, still staring at the man and the six lofted tentacles. “Well, I’ll be damned,” was all Johann could think of to say.
THE MAN’S VOICE was absolutely devoid of emotion. His face showed no expression. He waded over next to the raft, talking continuously to Johann. “Everyone else is with the adoclynes,” he repeated. “You and the girl are the only ones left… If you’ll climb on the raft, I’ll take you to her.”
Johann gazed fixedly at the stranger, trying to stifle his anger and frustration. Who was this man? Where had he come from? Why did he look vaguely familiar?
“Did Maria take anything with her?” Johann asked during one of the rare moments that the man was not talking.
He did not respond. He didn’t even indicate that he heard Johann’s question.
“Does Maria have her clothes and other personal things?” Johann said.
“Only those little figurines,” the man finally said. “She was playing when we found her.”
When you seized her, Johann said to himself, imagining how frightened Maria must have been. But how do I know this character is telling the truth? Johann wondered suddenly. What if Maria escaped and this is all some kind of trick?
“If you really have Maria in your custody,”Johann said, “then I will come with you. But you must show me some proof of your claim.”
The expressionless man nodded and slapped the water. Two of the turquoise heads of the adoclynes appeared immediately. Johann watched the man’s hand movements and the responding
motions of the blue tentacles. After several seconds, the two nozzlers swam off toward the entrance to the bay.
“It will be a few minutes,” the man said. “You have time to gather up a few things… But you won’t need your mats. And the adoclynes don’t allow fire in the grotto.”
When Johann returned to the beach with a pair of bundles on his shoulders, the man was again standing in waist-deep water beside the raft. He pointed along the shoreline in the direction of the cove where Maria liked to play “Look there,” he said. “You will see the girl.”
A raft similar to the one next to the man eased into view, coming around a bend in the shore over a hundred meters away Maria began yelling and waving her arms. Johann heard his name but could not understand anything else she was saying.
His reaction was automatic. He dropped the bundles on the sand and dove into the water, starting to swim toward Maria. He had only taken a few strokes when a pair of nozzlers grabbed his shorts with their claws.
“You will not be allowed to talk to her until we reach the grotto,” the man said as Johann treaded water, surrounded by the two nozzlers. “You will travel there with me, on this raft.”
Already Maria’s raft was headed out toward the lake. The girl was still yelling at him, but Johann couldn’t distinguish any of her words. He quickly concluded that he had no option except to comply with the man’s instructions. Johann swam back to the beach.
The simple raft, made from light wooden logs, was easily large enough for the bundles, Johann, and the strange man. It was pushed rapidly though the water by three of the nozzlers, whose six claws were attached to the back end. The raft on which Maria was riding alone remained a couple of hundred meters in front of them.
After they left the bay, the two rafts headed out into the open water of the lake. Within an hour, nothing but water could be seen in all directions. Early in the voyage Johann attempted to talk to the man with him, but almost all his questions were ignored. The man would not indicate how he happened to be inside this artificial world, or what he knew (or didn’t know) about the adoclynes. All he would say was that the two rafts were en route to “the grotto.”
At one point, Johann expressed his concern that Maria might be hungry. After first accepting some berries and fruit from Johann, the man leaned over and slapped the water. When a nozzler head appeared a few seconds later, the man spoke to the creature briefly and then placed the food in its claws. The nozzler, holding the food aloft, rolled over on its side and issued three short, bass blasts from its pulsating organ that looked like tiny pearl clusters. After a quick response from an adoclyne near Maria’s raft, Johann watched the elevated claws, carrying the food, head rapidly in her direction.
Since there was nothing to see and Johann’s companion discouraged conversation, Johann decided to stretch out on his back, using one of the bundles as a pillow, and close his eyes. As he relaxed and started to fall asleep, he was again struck by the feeling that he had seen the man on the raft with him before. Searching idly through his memories of his years at Valhalla, before he and the others had left Mars in the hatbox-shaped spacecraft, Johann recalled the Asian scientific team that had never returned from its expedition to recover core samples of the Martian polar ice. Could this man have been part of that group? he asked himself.
Johann remembered when he and his colleagues had found the dead, frozen body of the only female in the Asian team, a Dr. Won from Korea. The other three members of the team presumably perished in those labyrinthine caverns underneath the ice, but their bodies were never located. Could it be…?
Johann forced from his memory a picture of the small conference room where Narong and he had greeted their scientific visitors. He could not quite reconstruct the faces in the room, but when his companion on the raft broke a long silence by calling Johann’s attention to what appeared to be a mountain-sized, pointed rock on the horizon, Johann suddenly recognized the voice.
He opened his eyes to look at the man. “The grotto is located at the bottom of that rock,” the man said, still pointing.
Now Johann also remembered the face. “You’re Ismail Jailani, aren’t you?” Johann said excitedly. “We met briefly at Valhalla. I’m Johann Eberhardt. I was the director of the facility there.”
The man stared at him, blinking intermittently, for several seconds. Then a puzzled frown spread across his face and he looked away. “Ismail Jailani,” he said very slowly “Yes, yes, I am Dr. Ismail Jailani.”
He turned back to face Johann. His face was again expressionless but his body was trembling. He appeared to be looking beyond Johann. “Please do not hurt me,” he said in a timid voice. “I am a professor at the University of Kuala Lumpur. I have a wife and three children. I would like to return to them—”
At that moment one of the nozzlers accompanying their raft emitted another pair of bass blasts. Dr. Jailani put his hands over his ears and his face contorted in pain. “Yes, yes, I understand,” he shouted. His hands pulled away from his ears and went into motion. “I’ll do what you ask,” he said. “Just don’t hurt me again.”
Before the startled Johann could say anything, a sheath of brown seaweed landed on the side of the raft, dropped by a nozzler claw. Dr. Jailani crawled hurriedly over to the seaweed and began ripping it apart and stuffing pieces in his mouth. “Thank you, thank you,” he said. “I was so very hungry.”
Johann reflected a moment and then approached the man, who continued to eat with frenetic intensity. “Dr. Jailani,” he said in an even voice, “I have plenty of food in my pack. Would you perhaps prefer to eat some fruit or berries?”
The man did not reply When Johann touched him on the shoulder and called his name again, Dr. Jailani spun around, seaweed dangling from his mouth and a wild look in his eyes. “No,” he said in a loud voice. “I don’t want your food… And stop calling me that stupid name. Just leave me alone and let me eat.”
Johann retreated to the other side of the raft. As he moved, he noticed the pair of turquoise heads with a total of six gray eyes no more than ten meters away from where Dr. Jailani was eating. Were you watching us that entire time?Johann wondered. And could you understand any of our conversation?
THE TWO MEN did not talk to each other again during the time that the pair of rafts drew inexorably nearer to the gigantic, pointed rock in the middle of the lake. From time to time Dr. Jailani muttered to himself or slapped the water and had a conversation with the adoclynes, but whenever Johann looked across the raft at him, Dr. Jailani averted his eyes.
In the bottom center of the rock was a large, dark opening shaped like an arch. Johann watched Maria’s raft approach this archway and then disappear from view. Several minutes later his raft also entered the world inside the rock.
At first Johann could not see anything in front of him but darkness. Turning around, and looking back at the light beyond the opening through which they had passed, Johann observed that the rock ceiling was at least ten meters in height, and that the archway was wide enough for roughly three rafts similar to theirs to traverse at the same time. The canal on which they were riding now divided, and the nozzlers guiding their raft took the right fork, down the narrower of the two canals. At this point there were no more than ten or twelve meters separating the rock walls on either side of Johann.
The canal was also turning slowly, causing the light behind them to fade away. However, in front of them it was no longer dark. High upon the left rock wall, just beneath the ceiling, Johann saw the first of the light sources that provided dim illumination inside the grotto. It was a strange light, teeming with movement. As the canal meandered inside the rock, these light sources appeared at widely spaced intervals, some larger and brighter than others. Straining his eyes, and wishing that age had not reduced his visual acuity, Johann concluded that nests of some kind, inhabited by glowing creatures, had been placed in eyries hollowed out of the rock to provide light to this otherwise dark world.
When they had first entered the grotto, t
he only sound that Johann had heard was the sound of the raft slipping through the water. As they penetrated deeper into the interior, however, occasional bass blasts from the steering adoclynes reverberated off the walls. The lighting increased as well, for the density of the glowing nests became greater near the heart of the grotto.
A narrow boat with sides, resembling a canoe, squeezed by the raft going the opposite direction. It was carrying stacks of seaweed sheaths as well as crude baskets containing fish and other sea creatures. The nozzler claws and the familiar blue tentacles were attached to the rear, the only indication of the boat’s method of propulsion.
Johann watched the boat until it had cleared the back side of the raft, where Dr. Jailani was busily slapping the water and gesturing with his hands. When Johann finally turned around, and looked again in the direction they were moving, the raft was approaching a major canal intersection, in the center of which was a large, transparent dodecahedron mounted on a slowly rotating base plate.
As the raft drew closer and the dodecahedron turned to present an optimal view to Johann, his immediate astonishment was so great that he nearly lost his balance and fell from the raft. Inside the dodecahedron was a glowing ribbon, or at least a faithful representation of one, complete with changing boundaries and tiny particles drifting from side to side within its structure.
Johann continued to study the ribbon as the raft entered the traffic flow moving clockwise around the dodecahedron. After perhaps half a minute, the motions of the ribbon began to repeat, convincing Johann that what he was seeing was simply the work of skillful artisans and not a real ribbon somehow imprisoned in the unusual structure.
Pushing aside his desire to speculate on the meaning and purpose of the encased ribbon, Johann focused his attention on the circular pool surrounding the rotating structure. Four canals, separated from each other by ninety degrees, emanated from the intersection. Small, curious watercraft were everywhere—moving with the raft around the dodecahedron, heading in and out of the intersection, and standing at what appeared to be a nozzler dock or marina a hundred meters down one of the canals. Many of the craft were carrying cargo, but Johann had no idea what most of the items were.