Portal Jumpers

by Chloe Garner

  “Arrows are universal?” she asked.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Four arrows to two,” she said. “You want the big city or the little one?”

  “Big city, every time,” he said.

  “Four arrows it is,” she agreed. “You ever worry that they’ll kill you on sight?”

  “No. I’m harder to kill than that.”

  He looked at her, eyes cheerful.

  “I do worry about them killing you on sight, though.”

  “I’m insulted,” she said. He grinned.

  They walked for a few miles and Cassie began to wonder whether the transportation technology on the planet was high enough that they would die of dehydration before they found anything interesting. Nothing passed them on the road, though it did look well-used. The atmosphere had a certain level of heavy dust in it that blew in drifts like snow across the road before finding its way down into the porous rock fields on either side and disappearing. She guessed that only traffic would keep the road from getting covered over with ash, in the long term.

  “Is this really safe to breathe?” she asked at one point.

  “Would probably count as pollution, according to your government, and I wouldn’t sleep with your face uncovered, but you should cough it all up. Few days of it won’t hurt you, and I expect whoever made this road has the ability to keep it out of their buildings. Would be a nightmare to clean up, otherwise.”

  “Cough it all up,” she said. He flashed her a plastic grin and they kept on.

  A couple of hours later, a little over six miles, according to Cassie’s training, they came to a place where the road grew wider and the random field of pumice to either side changed.

  “This is it,” Jesse said.

  “This is what?”

  “This is the first, or the last, or… maybe the third thing on the list of places from the intersection.”

  Cassie looked around, recognizing that it was different, but unable to pull any specific shape out of what she saw in order to identify it.

  “I don’t see anything.”

  “Think, Lieutenant,” he said. “You live in a volcanic field. What is everything made out of?”

  She shrugged.

  “What do you want me to say?”

  “Ash, ashy rock, and glass.”

  “Okay.”

  “How do you build, using that?”

  She imagined trying to form construction materials out of the brittle rock and nodded.

  “They live underground.”

  “Easier to dig a hole than try to build,” Jesse agreed. “But you have to be able to keep lava out. Who knows how often they have eruptions, here.”

  “That’s comforting.”

  “It actually looks like they have some technique for controlling the flows,” he said. She raised an eyebrow and he gave her an exasperated look. “How do you think they make the streets?”

  She kicked a toe into the smooth surface and acknowledged that it did look like a controlled lava event more than something specially constructed.

  “Well, where is everyone?”

  “Let’s knock and find out.”

  He followed a narrow path off of the main road until it ended at a metal door. Cassie would have never spotted it at a distance; it was iron, and the same black as the pumice. Jesse knelt and knocked.

  “How do you know that’s the right way to get their attention?” Cassie asked.

  “Because most creatures are at least a little curious,” he said, standing. “Even if that isn’t how they announce themselves, most of them would come see what it is.”

  “And then?”

  “And then we make it up.”

  “What if they’re like the Gana?” she asked. He tipped his head to the side.

  “Does this look like the kind of place where muggers make a good living?”

  “Touché,” she answered.

  They stood and waited for a few minutes, and Jesse knocked again, then something hit the back of Cassie’s hand. She looked at it.

  “Jesse, is that rain?”

  He looked up at the clouds.

  “That’s why they live here,” he said quickly. “The air comes up over the volcanoes and the lava fields and gets hot, and when it hits this side of the volcanoes, it all cools at once and it rains. We need to get inside.” He stooped and pulled the door open. It swung up without resistance. Cassie looked up at the sky again.

  “Why?”

  “Look at your hand again.”

  She did. Where the small droplet of water had hit, there was a faint red circle and the smear from where she had brushed it off was pink.

  “Jesse, what’s going on?”

  “The clouds came in over the volcanoes. That water is going to be extremely acidic,” he said. “And we need to get out of it.”

  He walked down a set of stairs and disappeared. Another droplet hit Cassie in the face, and she heard the soft sounds of rain splashing against the pumice around her as she followed Jesse down into the cave.

  The walls were smooth under her fingertips as she went down the stairs, glassy in places and porous in others, but clearly created by a craftsman.

  “Pull the door behind you,” Jesse called.

  “It’s dark,” she answered, hesitating.

  “I’m working on it.”

  She waited another second, but the mist of rain was growing. She reached out and pulled the iron door closed, then made her way to the bottom of the stairs by touch. The people who had made this place were about human size, from the scale of the stairs and the height of the ceilings. She stretched her fingers over her head, unable to find the ceiling, but sensing from the air that it was close. She traced her way along the wall forward in the darkness, one arm out in front of her. She still ran into Jesse.

  “Sonar, you lack,” he muttered. “Just about got it.”

  “Got what?”

  There was a soft crackle, then green lines along the ceiling sprouted from where they stood and out, illuminating the front hallway and a warren of halls off of it.

  “Where is everyone?” she asked.

  “Possible they consider it night,” Jesse said. “I expect there isn’t much sign from the sun to go on.”

  “So we’re nighttime burglars,” she grunted. “Awesome.”

  “Relax,” he said.

  She followed him down the hallway, missing her duffel. Bullet-proof aliens or not, she felt better more armed than she was.

  They turned at a large open room and Jesse found a downslope off of that. They followed it, the green strips giving enough light to see well, but without being intrusive like lightbulbs were.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I’ve got a theory,” Jesse said.

  “Of course. That clears it up completely.”

  “You lack trust.”

  “You lack trustworthiness.”

  “Said the one who pulled me out of a productive brainstorming session with a metallurgist to come here.”

  “Like you were ever going to make progress with him,” she said. Jesse snorted.

  “He means well.”

  “Scientists who mean well are categorically dangerous,” she answered, looking around. There wasn’t a lot to see, but she didn’t want to miss it, all the same.

  “Wish someone had said that to me about a decade ago,” Jesse said. “Actually, everyone did. Wish someone I’d listened to had said it.”

  “Not that you would ever listen.”

  “Nope.”

  The ramp flattened out and the room expanded. The strips of green branched and split, forming wild patterns on the walls of the large room.

  “What is this?”

  “A shrine, if I’m right.”

  “To what?”

  “Water.”

  She narrowed her eyes, then nodded. There was a great pool at the center of the room, underlit with green. She had thought it was just another part of the lights, at first. She stumbled, hittin
g the first spot on the floor anywhere where it was uneven, and found a spout with water trickling down it.

  Jesse knelt next to the pool and put his hands into the water, cupping it up to his face.

  “Is that safe?” Cassie asked, eyes picking out the spidery paths the water was following down to the pool. Jesse slurped loudly.

  “This will be the best water you ever have,” he told her, splashing it over his face.

  “How would you know?”

  “We’re twenty-five feet underground,” he said. “That water has been filtered through at least that much volcanic rock. Pure carbon filter.”

  Cassie knelt next to Jesse and put her hands into the water. It was cool, and it tasted of… nothing. Nothing but cold and wet. She looked at Jesse and he nodded.

  “It’s a rough planet, but if you know where to look, life can make it.”

  “What do they do for energy?” she asked, looking around.

  “Heat, I expect,” he said. “The lights are chemical. You wouldn’t recognize the formula.”

  “Tell me something that surprises me.”

  “They aren’t here.”

  “Why not?”

  “Wish I knew,” Jesse said. “It’s a cozy little place to live. The kind of place where everyone knows everyone, and they all get along. Probably trade their kids between towns when they get old enough to be grown ups.”

  “Foreign terrestrials do that?”

  “Some,” he said. “Social structure is like swarm theory. You have a few rules that work, and you can see pretty quickly which ones any particular group uses.”

  “It’s a town,” she said, standing and looking around.

  “Thought we knew that, headed this way.”

  “No,” she said, feeling surrounded and very alone in the same instant. “This is where they lived. For generations, probably. With water at the center of their lives…”

  “This is probably where they would hold any ceremonies of importance,” he said. “Everything else is familiar. This is intended to invoke awe.”

  The green patterns in the black rock were intricate and pattern-less. It was beautiful. She nodded.

  “What happened to them?”

  It was rhetorical, and he heard it, not answering. Suddenly she recognized the shapes.

  “It’s the sky,” she said.

  “Hmm?”

  “The shapes,” she said. “If you just sat and stared up at the sky for hours, that’s what you would draw.”

  “If your entire life was governed by lava flows,” Jesse said. “Yes.”

  “Wow.”

  She rubbed her arms and Jesse started back for the doorway.

  “I’d say we could stay here, but without knowing why they abandoned it, I’d prefer to keep moving.”

  “I want to meet them,” she murmured, almost not hearing him.

  “I know,” he said. “I want to meet all of them.” He rubbed her back, then picked up his pace. “We should probably get moving.”

  “What about the rain?”

  “Estimating the number of individuals who might have lived here and the region they’re probably draining water out of, I expect the rain is an every-few-days thing, and that it’s already done.”

  “You can guess how much water they use?” she asked. He nodded.

  “Within a factor of two or so. Look at the size of the pool they have, then ask yourself how many days of back up you’d want to have, in case of drought. There’s no more water anywhere.”

  She nodded.

  “What a frightening existence.”

  “I expect they’re a lot tougher than a lot of the species you’ve met.”

  “The Gana were invincible,” she said.

  “And completely soft,” Jesse said, looking back at the long front hall before he shut the lights back off. They started toward the outer door in darkness. “Some of the toughest species you’ll meet are the easiest to kill. They’re tough because they find a way to form a society and be happy, anyway.”

  “Happy?” Cassie asked. “They’re all happy?”

  Jesse made an ambivalent noise, pushing open the door. There was a whoosh of cool air that came up from behind them.

  “They’re happy the way all humans are happy,” he said. “The high civilizations carry kind of a constant level of malaise because they’ve got no purpose, and the ones that are scratching an existence out of the dirt like this will kill for the tiniest thing when things get tough, because it’s the only way to survive, but at the same time, the moment an entire race stops hoping, stops having anything to hope for… That’s when they go extinct.”

  “Or when a meteor hits the planet,” Cassie said. He snorted.

  “Or when a meteor hits the planet.”

  They walked.

  The next town was much like the first. They knocked and waited, then went down into the maze of green-lit hallways to find it abandoned.

  “This isn’t good,” Jesse said. “They shouldn’t just leave behind good water sources like this.”

  The cistern in this town was flooding, the water all the way to the walls, where it was beginning to seep back into the rock. They drank, grateful for the water after the dry warmth outside.

  “Do you have another stretch in you today?” Jesse asked. “It’s getting late.”

  “I don’t want to stay here,” Cassie said. “I feel fine.”

  Her snot was black, but she didn’t mention that.

  They went back out into the red-lit world and kept moving. They passed intersections, but Jesse recognized the name of the city they had been heading toward from the beginning, and they continued toward it.

  “They’re distances,” he said, pointing at a specific pair of characters on the signpost. Cassie couldn’t tell them from the other characters, but she believed him.

  “How far are we?”

  “Not a clue; I didn’t say I could read them,” he told her. She grunted at him and he wiggled his eyebrows, though both of them were clearly worried.

  It was strange, not to be worried about herself in this land of volcanic destruction and no sunlight. She was worried about the people who had built the caves. They had families and communities and a sense of artistic wonder, and she didn’t want them to be dead. She’d never held much more than an academic, scientific interest in the species she had studied, before, and she wasn’t sure if she enjoyed being invested in them or not.

  They walked.

  The gap to the next town was much, much longer. Cassie’s stomach gurgled.

  “What do they eat?” she asked, unable to help herself. The lava fields just continued on as far as the eye could see, though she had figured out about an hour before that there was the slightest grade to them. They were headed away from the nearest volcanoes.

  “I haven’t noticed any signs,” Jesse said.

  “Guesses?”

  “There are a lot of different kind of edible life forms that would thrive here,” Jesse said. “Plants, animals, fungi, life structures you haven’t seen or considered before. They just need heat and nutrients, and since there are sentient organisms here, I assume they’ve found a way to corral the right nutrients.”

  Cassie shook her head.

  “Can’t imagine any cycle that works without solar input.”

  “Technically, all of the solar input already happened. This would be a cold, dead planet if it weren’t orbiting a star. The sun keeps the core hot, and the core keeps spitting up all over the crust. Not that special.”

  “Where did they come from?” Cassie asked.

  “Who?”

  “The foreign terrestrials who live here.”

  “Where did you come from?”

  “Dude with a portal,” she said. He laughed.

  “I deserved that. I’ve heard your origin myths, but the truth is you haven’t got a clue where you came from. Neither do they.”

  “But… There’s no glide path to generating high-level life,” she said. “It requires wat
er, and water requires high-level life.”

  “The mysteries of the universe,” Jesse said.

  “Seriously?”

  “Look, I don’t know. I don’t study life on the level of time you’re talking about. I’ve seen stuff that was not yet completely self-aware that might be someday, and then again it might not. By the time you have a written history telling you who you are, odds are very good you’ve forgotten all about how you got there.”

  “Says the leading mind of the greatest race of scientists in the known universe.”

  “Says the greatest scientist in the known universe.”

  Cassie gave Jesse a little mocking frown and he shrugged.

  “You’re gonna stand by that?”

  “It’s hard to measure, but I’ve never met anyone close.”

  Cassie nodded, letting her gaze drift off to the side.

  “I’m traveling with a megalomaniac.”

  “You don’t even know what that means.”

  “No, but it’s an awesome word.”

  “No arguments here.”

  “What does it mean, then?”

  “Narcissist with an over-inflated sense of power and importance.”

  “That’s you exactly.”

  “I didn’t say you were wrong. Just that you didn’t know what it meant.”

  “Obviously I did.”

  She watched him try to smother the smile and then put her hand over her stomach as it growled again.

  “This is why I carry food,” she said.

  “I never told you not to bring it,” he answered.

  “You made fun of me endlessly last time.”

  “So? You do everything anyone who mocks you implies you should do?”

  “You’re a jerk.”

  “Everyone says so.”

  She laughed to herself, then frowned, raising her head.

  “Is that…?”

  “That has the distinct markings of a city, compared to the towns we’ve been visiting,” Jesse said.

  The flat section of black ahead went as far as Cassie could see, and she recognized the doors in the ripples of black glass. Hundreds of them.

  And one of them was open.

  A pair of creatures climbed out of the tunnel and started away from them, but the two pink-skinned figures at the edge of the city caught their attention. One of them yelled back down into the tunnel and the other started toward Jessie and Cassie.