Gaia's Brood

by Nick Travers

  Chapter 25

  We have already agreed to a tactic.

  Izzy walks straight up to the museum guard. “Hi, I think someone’s left a bag in one of the galleries.”

  Immediately, after a terrorist attack there is nothing guaranteed to grab security’s attention more than an abandoned bag.

  The guard jumps up like he’d been stung. “Where?”

  “I’ll show you,” Izzy helpfully leads him away from Mysteries and Folklore to where we deposited the bag. As soon as they are out of sight, the rest of us attack the eye of Gaia. Remembering the hairline cracks in Gaia’s stomach, I scan every surface with my fingertips. We must look like an outing from a blind school having a sensory art experience. Nothing.

  “Turn it over,” I order. It takes all of us to roll the heavy stone eye on to its side.

  “Here,” Scud calls. On the underside of the eye, there is a whole series of shapes and figures in neat lines, like an essay. We’ve found it.

  I slap on the thin paper I have brought for the task and start rubbing with charcoal to get a clear image of the text. The clue from the journal runs through my mind as I rub. “The eye of Gaia sits and thinks, the clue you shall find when she blinks.”

  The others are still searching every inch of the carving. “Anyone else got anything? The others have drawn blanks. “So how do we make her blink?”

  “I think we already have,” Fernando volunteers, “we’ve rolled the eyeball over so it’s kind of blinked.” Maybe.

  I look to Scud. “It’s a simple substitution code.”

  To me it looks anything but simple.

  “See,” he points out some figures, “this symbol occurs most often so this is an ‘e’ and this one occurs mostly on its own so it has to be an ‘i’ or an ‘a’.” It looks totally baffling to me, but I trust Scud, he is a genius with codes—numbers are his thing.

  I pace while Scud works his magic. I try to show interest in the other exhibits: a piece of shiny silver metal so thin you can fold is like paper. The caption reads, “In the folk tale of Hansel and Gretel, the children are said to wrap up their picnic lunch in tin foil, believed to be similar to the Aluminum Foil displayed here, which can indeed be folded to form a protective package.”

  Poppycock, who in their right minds would use such a valuable metal resource to wrap up their lunch?

  I turn to see Scud still processing.

  “You got it yet, Scud.”

  “Not yet.”

  Beside the foil, is a case containing a creepily proportioned doll made from some kind of resin. The most outstanding thing about her is her impossibly long legs, fully half the length of her body—they are hinged at the thighs, but curiously not hinged at the knee; her waist is tiny with a swivel hinge, her arms are oddly thin, the same width from shoulder to wrist—perhaps she has some muscle wasting disease that effects only her arms; her hands like her feet are minuscule; her neck is ridiculously long and thin, not like a human neck at all, and her face is that of a young child—large eyes and button nose; while her chest is that of an adult. She has blond hair. The child/adult doll sends shivers down my spine.

  The caption reads, “Statuettes like these are surprisingly common in the ruins of Late Industrial Age homes. They are believed to represent some sort of beauty cult. The cult was worshipped by most societies round the world. Female adolescents and women who belonged to the Barbie cult fanatically aspired to attain the impossible proportions of their deity.” Yuck. “Methods of emulation included dieting, exercising, and even surgery to permanently alter their body shapes.” Gross. How can such an innocent looking plaything have such a powerful hold over the world? The earth dwellers of old really were a weird bunch.

  I pace some more—I know the concerned the guard will return soon. “We’re running out of time, Scud.”

  “Nearly there.”

  Another case catches my eye while I wait. Inside are small white sticks about three inches long; some are colored orange at one end and others appear charred. The caption tells me that inside these uniformly sized sticks are dried herbs. “Similar to the herbs uses in Reaver peace pipes, but without the hallucinogenic qualities.” I shiver at the thought of the barbaric Reavers—not a group I want to meet on my travels.

  The caption continues, “Despite numerous references to the dangerous health hazards of inhaling smoke from the slow burning dried herbs contained in these Cigarette sticks, they appear to have been a common recreational past-time of people throughout the whole of the Industrial Age.” The caption doesn’t say whether they burned the orange end or the white end or both ends at once. I suppose they cupped their hands over the burning cigarette and inhaled the smoke through the hole formed between their thumbs. Odd.

  “I think I got it,” Scud calls at last. Actually, it has only been a few minutes.

  I rush over to the eye and join the others.

  Scud points to the figures on the underside of the stone eye. “It’s a lock. If I’ve got it right, we press this symbol, followed by this one, and then—’

  “What if you press them in the wrong order,” Trent interrupts.

  Scud shrugs. “Then I guess we never get in.”

  I rest my hand on Trent’s arm to restrain him, just in case he’s thinking of intervening. “Trust him, Scud’s brilliant at these sorts of things.”

  Trent looks me in the eye, then nods, once. “If you say so, Captain.”

  Scud continues, “—this one, and then this one.”

  There is a tiny click from the side of the eye.

  “Here,” Fernando shouts excitedly. He bends down. “The pupil of the eye has popped out. It’s a draw.” He straightens up holding a small plate made of the same stone as the eye. On it are six numbers in pairs, cleanly machined into the surface, as if they were produced yesterday—the draw in the eye must have been hermetically sealed.

  I jot down the numbers. “Ok, put it back.”

  The others stare at me in astonishment.

  “What? You think we’re taking it? What if they body search us on the way out? Or they check every day to see it’s still there? Do you want to get caught?”

  Fernando quickly places the tablet back in the draw and snaps it shut. Quietly, we roll the eye back into place and leave.

  Outside, Izzy joins us. “Have you got it?” Scud proudly shows her what we have found.

  “More numbers?” she says with disappointed. I don’t know what she expected to find, but it clearly wasn’t more numbers.

  Scud is the only one who looks really pleased, due to his affinity for numbers—in fact he likes them better than people. “There must be a pattern.” His eyes glaze over as he drifts off to process again. I know better than to disturb Scud while he’s thinking, so we steer him back to the Shonti Bloom, deposit him in the map room, then get the ship underway as quickly as we can.

  As I steer out of the dock I can’t stop thinking about the numbers. Something about them troubles me, but I can’t pin it down, it’s just a feeling that something is not quite right.

  I try to shake off the feeling and concentrate on putting Newtonsteign as far behind us as I can.