A Soft Barren Aftershock

by F. Paul Wilson

  Perry gasped. “Don’t even think such a thing!”

  “Well, the Mahars build their cities underground. Do you see any structures? And imagine their fury at watching their evolutionary ancestors driven from their cities.”

  Perry was nodding. “It might even goad them to strike against the world below.”

  With that unpleasant thought spurring our efforts, we hauled on the anchor rope and forced the Dinosaur III to the smooth, alloy surface of the Dead World. Once the rope was securely cleated, I jumped out and checked the anchor. Koort had indeed found a good-size lip inside the opening. Since the Dead World had no winds to play tricks on us, I felt confident the anchor would remain fixed there.

  I was helping Perry out of the basket when I heard a sound echoing from the opening. Perry must have heard it, too. Without a word, he handed me my revolver and grabbed a double-barreled musket for himself. As the sound grew louder, we cocked our weapons and pointed them toward the opening, ready to fire. Suddenly Koort appeared, panting with exertion, his face paler than usual.

  “No one is inside, yet someone spoke to me—in Thurian!”

  “Those are contradictory statements,” Perry said. In response to Koort’s baffled expression, he added. “If no one is there, how can anyone be speaking to you?”

  Koort shrugged, grabbed his club and shoulder sack from the basket, then motioned us to follow. We glanced at each other—we both knew we couldn’t resist—and bent to it, crawling on our hands and knees through what appeared to be a sloping tunnel or chute.

  . . . someone spoke to me—in Thurian!

  Thurian? Most of Pellucidar’s human cultures had their own language and communicated with each other via a common tongue. Why would the voice Koort heard be speaking in Thurian? Then I reminded myself that Thuria lived in the Dead World’s shadow. A connection?

  The light from outside faded but enough filtered down to reveal that the chute ended in some sort of spring-loaded mechanism. A sliding panel revealed a short side channel. This dropped us into a narrow, curving hallway with smooth walls, almost Gothic in the way they arched to a point that glowed with a soft red light.

  I experienced a hint of vertigo as I tried to orient myself: my head was toward the outer surface, my feet were toward the center of the Dead World.

  “Welcome back,” said a voice. “We received your signal and began the protocol.”

  “See!” Koort said. “He speaks Thurian!”

  “Not in the least,” said Perry. “That’s English.”

  I’d heard English too.

  “Thurian! Thurian!” Koort said, becoming agitated.

  I was wondering, What signal? What protocol?

  “Because of the time interval, I will review what has gone before.”

  It occurred to me then that this wasn’t a voice at all. The words were echoing in my brain.

  “Telepathy!” I said. “He’s speaking directly to our minds!”

  “As your records surely show—”

  “Stick your fingers in your ears!” I cried, doing just as I’d said.

  “—the mining craft arrived here in the immediate post-war period.”

  No lowering of the volume. Perry had his fingers in his ears, and I could tell by his expression he’d come to the same conclusion.

  “Whoever that is, he’s projecting ideas, concepts, directly to the brain! We must be ‘hearing’ them—more accurately, translating them—into our own native tongues!”

  The voice droned on, and, as it related its story, the words were enhanced by mental images. Slowly a staggering, mind-numbing narrative began to emerge.

  When it was done, Perry looked as if he was about to collapse. He wobbled, and I caught him. As he leaned against me he said, “David! Did you hear? Do you see? Pellucidar didn’t just happen—it was created!”

  IX

  “They raped the Earth!” Perry cried.

  Or so it seemed. An ancient race—conical beings with a fringe of tentacles below an encircling ring of black eyes—had developed near the core of our galaxy. They mastered a method of leaping through space via multiple light-year jumps and had built an interstellar civilization with an insatiable appetite for raw materials. The name in my head for them was “Fashioners.”

  We watched a planet from the huge mothership hovering in orbit. I didn’t recognize the planet as Earth—it had only one giant continent, after all—but the words in my head said this was our planet before it was mined. The mothership released smaller mining vessels that bored through the Earth’s crust into its molten heart. We saw huge pulses of glowing liquid iron and other elements jettison from the core into orbit, where they solidified into a ring of ragged moonlets. When the core had been stripped of its value, the mothership extended a magnetic field that drew the lumps into its gargantuan cargo hold. The process wasn’t perfect. A number of moonlets—one I estimated to be the size of Rhode Island—failed to achieve a stable orbit and crashed to Earth with catastrophic results. Huge volcanoes burst through the crust, boiling the seas and searing the land before enveloping the Earth in a stifling layer of cloud.

  “They had no right!” Perry said.

  “And they killed my lidi,” Koort added.

  We both glared at him. His sudden sheepish look said he’d gotten the message. He broke eye contact.

  “Well, they did,” he muttered.

  “They did more than kill your lidi, my Thurian friend,” Perry said, his expression grave. “Judging by the timing of their depredation, I believe the moonlets that fell to Earth triggered the great Permian extinction.”

  “How long ago was that?” I said.

  “Somewhere between two-hundred-fifty and three-hundred million years. That single landmass we saw was Pangaea, which later broke up into the continents of today. The cause of the Permian extinction has always been a mystery, but now you and I know what killed off ninety-five percent of the life forms on land and in the sea.”

  But robbing the planet of its iron core wasn’t enough. They liked to experiment with the hollow shells before they left them behind. In Earth’s case, they terraformed the inner surface.

  I turned to Perry. “What about the inner sun? The explanation is in my head, but my poor brain can’t quite grasp it.”

  “Neither can mine. Their science is so far ahead of ours it is almost magical. I feel like a caveman who has come across a working lightbulb. They created a reverse gravitational field in Pellucidar that negates the Earth’s natural field. Apparently they have an almost alchemical ability to transmute certain minerals. They used that technology to create the inner sun—powering it with some sort of renewable fusion that is beyond my ken—then suspended it in the center of the shell.”

  “But why a separate gravitational field for this place?”

  He shrugged. “Why not? They’d mastered gravity. They used the Dead World in the terraforming process and, unless they wanted to risk falling off the surface, its own gravitational field was not only a safety feature but a great convenience.”

  “Well, at least we have some answers as to how this impossible place came to be.”

  He frowned. “Answers? A few, perhaps. But they in turn have spawned so many more questions.”

  “I’m a little curious about the creatures they released onto the surface before they left.”

  “Yes,” Perry said, his expression grim. “You should be more than curious. You should be disturbed. They appeared to be protomammals.”

  “So?”

  “Hundreds of millions of years of evolution led from them to . . . us.”

  “You mean . . .?”

  He nodded. “The Fashioners rape a planet, virtually wipe out the existing flora and fauna, and then seed it with new life.”

  I was having a hard time swallowing this. “They created us?”

  “Not directly.” He shrugged. “Who knows how evolution is going to go? This may be an ongoing experiment: release the same life forms on different worlds in different en
vironments and see how they develop.”

  I found this a crushing revelation.

  “That means the human race is an experiment.”

  “It appears so.”

  My self-granted title of “emperor” now seemed even more ridiculous.

  “All right,” I said. “We can ponder that later. This thing we’re in, this . . . this moon . . . they used it in the terraforming, but why did they leave it behind?”

  And suddenly I knew, because the answer popped into my head. The Dead World was a “dock.”

  “It’s a dock,” Perry said, then frowned. “How do I know that?”

  “Because it’s all in our heads.” I closed my eyes. “I can visualize a whole schematic of the place.”

  Indeed, I saw a hollow sphere with a corridor—this corridor—running along its equator. And I knew without a doubt that we were the only living things here.

  I opened my eyes. “There’s some sort of control room—”

  Perry pointed east and said, “That way.” He smiled and shook his head. “This is wonderful. I feel as if I designed the place.”

  We began walking, Koort trailing us. The gently curving hallway was devoid of decoration or design except for the large black rectangles, looking like polished onyx, set into the floor at regular intervals.

  Along the way, Koort offered us dintls—a Pellucidarian cross between an apple and an orange—but neither Perry nor I partook. I was too excited to eat. Koort, however, attacked his juicy dintl with relish.

  As we proceeded, I heard a rapid tapping behind us. We turned and the three of us gasped as one to see a gleaming metallic spider, perhaps a foot across, scuttling our way along the floor. It stopped maybe ten feet from us and something whirred on its underside. Then it scuttled a few feet closer, and again came the strange whirring.

  It looked less like a spider close up—it had a chromed, hemispheric body rimmed with black dots that appeared to be sensors, and fully a dozen jointed legs.

  As I studied it, I noticed a trail of droplets between us and the spider—dintl juice. The spider moved again, stopping over the farthest droplet to repeat its mysterious ritual. Then I knew.

  “It’s a cleaning machine! It’s mopping up after Koort.”

  Sure enough, it stopped over every droplet and left clean dry floor in its wake. It darted up to a spot directly before Koort’s feet where he had dripped more juice. Startled, he jumped back and dropped the dintl core.

  The spider clattered after it until it stopped rolling, then squirted it with a turquoise fluid. I watched in awe as the dintl core dissolved into a puddle, which the spider promptly sucked up into the underside of its body.

  It moved away, and I noticed a dull patch on the floor’s otherwise gleaming surface. It then ran around in a figure-eight pattern. As it completed its second circuit, a small rectangular slot opened in the base of the wall. It scuttled inside, but the slot remained open as another automaton emerged, this one the shape and size of a candy box. It hurried over to the dull patch, squatted over it for a few seconds, then returned to the slot, leaving gleaming, unmarred floor behind. The opening in the wall closed.

  “Cleaning automatons,” Perry said. “No wonder the place is spotless.”

  We continued our trek and soon came to a rectangular space that brightened as we entered.

  “Why all this red light?” I said.

  “I would imagine that’s the end of the spectrum where they see best.”

  The entire floor of the control room was the same black onyx as the rectangles in the hall. Half a dozen glassy panels were set in the wall over a large console ornamented with nodules and grooves. The panels lit with views of Pellucidar as we entered.

  Koort gravitated to those as I looked around.

  “Where is everyone?”

  “They left,” Perry said, articulating the answer just as it popped into my head. “The Dead World—and the name is so much more apt than we ever imagined—has hovered here, sleeping, empty for nearly three hundred million years—”

  “—awaiting the Fashioners’ return. Our entry must have triggered some sort of telepathic recording.”

  “Thuria!” Koort said, pointing to one of the illuminated panels.

  I approached and realized these glass screens were showing images transmitted from the Dead World’s surface. I saw the vine-choked circle of shadow that had once been Koort’s homeland. With a start I noticed that the foul green mist had crossed Lidi Plain and was lapping at the abandoned Mahar city that sat on its northern border.

  I was wondering how the image remained stable despite the Dead World’s rotation. The answer came to me but was too complex for my level of technological knowledge. And even if it weren’t, the explanation would have been blasted from my mind by the vision of the mist creeping eastward toward Sari . . . and Dian.

  “We’ve got to kill those vines!”

  “Yes!” Koort cried. “The mist has put all the lidi to sleep! How will I get a new one?”

  I wanted to punch him. “Forget your damn lidi! We—”

  “Seeding was successful,” said the voice in my head. “Initiating maneuver to increase habitable area.”

  A number of grooves and nodules lit on the console, and then a vibration ran through the floor and into my feet.

  “We’re moving!” Perry cried.

  I sensed it, too—the Dead World seemed to have released a brake, and was indeed moving. But where?

  X

  We crowded before the view of Thuria and the Land of Awful Shadow. I blinked. Thuria seemed to be shrinking. And then I realized—

  “We’re rising! What—?”

  “But how?” said Perry. “We have no engines, no—”

  The answer must have flashed into his head as it did into mine: gravity manipulation. The Dead World stayed suspended by partially negating the artificial gravity of the Fashioners. It stayed fixed in position over the Land of Awful Shadow by dual means: cinched a set distance from the sun above and locked on to a beacon buried in Thuria below.

  “It’s attenuating the gravitational field’s hold, allowing it to rise.”

  I estimated its distance from Thuria must have doubled by now—to two miles.

  “Maybe we’d better return to our balloon,” I said. “If we get too close to the sun—”

  Perry was staring at the screen. “I don’t think that’s the purpose. Besides, the sun here is thirty-five hundred miles away—minuscule in astronomical terms but still quite far off.” He turned to me, his expression grim. “Look at the surface. Tell me what you see.”

  At first I saw nothing I hadn’t seen before: the circle of vines, the spreading green mist, the—

  I gasped. “The shadow! It’s expanding onto Lidi Plain!”

  “It’s expanding in all directions.”

  He was right. With the Dead World sitting only a mile above Thuria, the umbra and penumbra of its eclipse were virtually identical. But now that it was increasing its distance from the surface, the penumbra was expanding.

  “That means—”

  He nodded. “Direct sunlight appears toxic to the vine. But now, with the area of shadow increasing almost exponentially, it will undergo an explosive growth spurt.”

  “Doubling—tripling the volume of poison mist it can produce!”

  “Exactly.”

  The clock counting down to Pellucidar’s doom had just accelerated.

  “We’ve got to do something!”

  And just as I said that, the Dead World stopped rising. I prayed for it to descend again, but it did not. I stared at the widened shadow on the surface. Although I couldn’t see the vines expanding their territory, I could almost feel them growing.

  My gaze wandered to the other screens, each displaying a different vantage. One was focused directly on the miniature sun, the others at various angles. I noticed movement on the one that was angled due north, east of the abandoned Mahar city and west of the Great Peak . . . it resembled a balloon emerging
from the haze. I was about to mention it, when the voice spoke again.

  “Preparing for docking.”

  “Docking?” Perry said. “Where on Earth—or rather, Pellucidar—are we going to dock?”

  As if in answer, the black panels under our feet lit with red light. I knelt for a better look and quickly realized that these were not image screens but rather windows into the Dead World’s interior—its hollow interior.

  Suddenly a beam of white light lanced into the vast empty space. Gradually it widened. I craned my neck and saw one of the Dead World’s poles irising open.

  “That’s sunlight!”

  And then I remembered the balloon I’d seen on the north-facing screen. I ran back to it and saw that it wasn’t a balloon at all.

  “Look!”

  Perry and Koort joined me. In silence we watched a sphere, a duplicate of the Dead World, only smaller, glide toward us.

  “The Fashioners,” Perry said in a hushed tone. “They’re back.”

  “They must have come through the polar opening. That was why it was left open—for their return.”

  “I’m beginning to see,” Perry said, stroking his chin.

  “See what?”

  “The Dead World . . . its very existence has mystified me, especially its fixed position in Pellucidar’s sky. Now I think I understand.” He pointed to the screen showing Thuria. “Don’t you see? This was the plan all along. The shadowed area was designed as the perfect garden for the light-sensitive vine. The stunted vegetation there offered little competition, allowing the vine to spread like wildfire. Remember the first thing the voice said after it welcomed us?”

  How could I forget? “‘We received your signal and began the protocol.’ ”

  He nodded. “The ‘signal’ must have been an alert as to the Fashioners’ imminent arrival. And the ‘protocol’ was the seeding of the Land of Awful Shadow to create the toxic gas. This whole scenario was planned three hundred million years ago!”

  “To put Pellucidar into suspended animation? Why?”

  He gazed at the approaching sphere. “I fear we are about to find out.”