CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
Marty craned his neck upward and couldn’t see the top of the glacier even though it was miles ahead of them. He knew this was where they were meant to go, but he didn’t sense any hint of a glow coming from the ice, as he had seen in his visions. It was a bluish-white behemoth and ahead of them was the opening to a magma tube that seemed to burrow into the icy expanse between them and the glacier itself. He pointed at the volcanic structure and said, “I guess this is it.”
“This looks like it would be a slippery slope into the ocean,” Lowanna said. “That’s all we need, for us to all end up drowning in a cold pool.”
Marty had the same concern, but others had descended into the magma tube ahead of them and there’d been no obvious screams or yelling from within. “Here goes nothing . . .”
They walked into the magma tube.
The tube descended at a steep incline. Marty worried that they’d soon be plunged into darkness, but as the light of day gave out, a glowing line appeared on the right-hand wall.
Ahead of them he spotted more glowing splotches appearing at regular intervals.
The light hadn’t been formed by luck and taken advantage of, it had been created deliberately, by someone with the know-how to do it.
“You’re all seeing what I’m seeing,” François said. “Artificial light.”
“These people keep talking about a healer. I’m wondering exactly what kind of medical equipment the healer uses,” Marty said. “It would be ironic if the only magical healer in this place is the one we brought with us.”
They followed a woman who led three alpacas. One carried a child on its back, strapped into a wooden seat with leather thongs and bearing on its head a crown woven of golden strips. The other two carried leather saddlebags, two per alpaca, balancing each other on opposite sides of the beasts. The woman wore wool leggings and a wool serape, all dyed red and green, with the images of trees stained into the fibers.
Behind them in turn came three old men in furs. They had long white hair tied in loose braids down their backs and complexions the color of milk chocolate. The one in the middle leaned heavily on a staff and the other two sang droning modal melodies, watching his every step.
“We have to be below the level of the water now,” Lowanna suggested.
“You’re jealous of my bath with Gunther,” Marty said. “You were hoping for a swim.”
She punched him playfully in the arm. “I am worried that a small tectonic shift could flood this tunnel with water and kill us instantly.”
“Oh, that,” François said. “Large numbers of humanity live their entire lives right on top of fault lines, where a small tectonic shift could kill them all instantly with no notice whatsoever.”
“Yes,” Lowanna agreed, “and are you saying that’s a good thing?”
“I’m saying we’ll be through this tunnel soon enough,” François said. “And I’ll trust you to keep a sharp eye out for water, and let me know if you see signs of flooding.”
They walked for nearly a mile. The strip of phosphorescence on the right wall threw soft greenish light across them, illuminating their steps well enough and creating deep, shifting pockets of darkness on their left, below a ceiling and upper wall with a faint pond-scum glow.
Ahead, the magma tube reached a bottleneck, and a short line waited. As they stood behind the alpacas, Marty looked up and saw a crack in the ceiling. Above the crack hung bulging boulders massed as if poised to leap down and attack. Water trickled down between the stones and ran across the tunnel floor.
“It wouldn’t take very much seismic activity at all to drop those right on our heads,” Lowanna said.
“And flood our corpses all out, to boot,” François agreed cheerfully.
The woman with the alpacas moved ahead, and the party found themselves standing in the entrance to a wide, low chamber. The phosphorescent strip was painted on all the walls here, giving the room a green insectoid glow that tended to pool all the shadows together in the center. Another magma tube led out the far side, but in this room a long counter of carved stone barred the way forward. People in furs and wool helped their sick comrades forward to the counter, where they explained the woes of the ill and negotiated for treatment, plunking bars of iron and nuggets of iron ore onto simple scales on the countertop.
Marty’s eyes widened as he looked behind the counter and spotted the first of the Grays. They wore knee-length tunics that looked surprisingly similar to lab coats. Following successful negotiation, the alien creatures produced modern-looking syringes, bandages, tablets, and ointments from underneath the counter and administered to the sick.
To the right and left side, passages led into other chambers. Marty saw Grays helping sick people into and out of those passages. Were those treatment rooms for more serious problems, or illnesses requiring specialist help?
Marty didn’t see anyone who was turned away.
“I’m not excited to see those guys,” Surjan said. “Do you think they have a Guardian here?”
“You’re not the king anymore,” Lowanna said. “You don’t have to fight anyone.”
“True,” Surjan said.
“They should not be excited to see us, by God,” Kareem said. His hand rested at his side, very close to where his ankh hung.
“Easy, Kareem,” François said.
“Be grateful we don’t have to fight those things.” Gunther pointed, swinging his arm around to include most of the room’s walls. Petroglyphs of monsters covered all the stone surfaces. Marty saw gaping, tooth-filled jaws, spiderlike things with a dozen limbs, serpents that ran for yards, creatures that were humanoid but seemed to be on fire, monsters with eyes on stalks, a man that was headless but had eyes and a mouth in his belly, trees with teeth, swarms of dwarves, men with their arms and legs swapped, winged lions, disembodied laughing heads, bubbling masses of yeast with feet, and more.
“It looks like the Lascaux cave paintings,” François said, “if they had been a joint art project by H. P. Lovecraft and Hieronymus Bosch.”
“Somehow that doesn’t strike me as something the Grays would paint,” Lowanna said.
“Maybe they made the paintings to frighten people away,” Kareem suggested.
“These Grays seem friendly,” Marty said. “More than that, they seem benevolent. Look what they’re doing.”
“We don’t know if those injections really help people,” Surjan said.
“Sure we do,” Marty said. “If they didn’t heal people, people wouldn’t keep coming back, bringing them the iron they want, and calling them ‘the healer.’”
“Why do they want iron, anyway?” Lowanna asked. “Oh yuck, are we going to find out that these guys eat human livers?”
Marty shook his head. “Relax. If they’re trading for iron because they need it to live, then the trade allows them to avoid eating other creatures for the iron.”
“Don’t relax totally,” Surjan said. “The Grays at Nesha ate humans.”
A man with a small pack donkey and pink blotches on his face turned from the counter and walked away. The Gray who had been talking to him beckoned the party forward.
Marty walked forward immediately, to encourage his comrades.
The Gray standing behind the counter spread his hands on the countertop, fingers splayed out, and smiled liplessly at Marty. At the same time, his nasal slits twitched.
“Do I smell funny to you?” Marty asked.
“I did not say that,” the Gray said.
Marty’s friends straggled forward.
“But your nose twitched.”
The Gray bobbled his head. “It would be rude to tell you that you smelled strange.”
“My name’s Marty,” Marty said.
“I am Gollip,” the Gray answered. “What ails you?”
“I smell bad,” Marty said.
“Probably a peculiarity of diet,” Gollip said. “I can give you a tablet for halitosis.”
“We’re not sick,” Marty said. “We’ve come looking for a portal.”
Gollip froze. He blinked his eyes, the eyelids snapping over the glossy blacks horizontally rather than vertically. “What do you mean? You have come through a portal to get here.”
“You know that’s not what I mean,” Marty said. “I know you’re not from this world, and I think you know it. And if you yourself don’t know the portals I’m talking about, then someone in your . . . city does. Can I talk to a scientist or a librarian or something?”
“I don’t think what I am smelling is you,” Gollip said slowly. “I think you are carrying something.”
It took Marty a moment to realize he was being asked to show a sign. Raising a flap of fur to expose the ankh hanging from his belt, he drew it out slowly and laid it on the counter. To his left, the woman with the alpacas heard the clink of metal on stone and turned to look. She stared at the shimmering ankh.
So did Gollip. “Where did you get this?”
“You are not from this world,” Marty said. “I am not from this time. In a time thousands of years in the future, on a land far to the north and east of here, I encountered a being who was not of this world. It attacked me and tried to kill me. In defending myself, I slew this being and took this as a trophy.”
Gollip pointed. “Was the tip sharpened to a point like this?”
“I did that,” Marty said. “I think this device was a badge of office, and also healed the being who carried it. I sharpened the tip to turn it into a weapon, to defend myself against others of its kind.”
Gollip looked to each of the party in turn, sniffing experimentally at the air. “You all carry these insignia?”
“Yes,” Surjan admitted. “We’re very attached to them, so don’t try to take them away.”
“Not that you could,” Lowanna purred. “Not even if you really wanted to.”
“I am not hostile to you.” Gollip nodded. “Put that away now. I’ll take you to see someone who will be very interested in you.”
“Interested in me?” Marty asked. “Or excited to see the device?” He took the ankh and slid it back into place under his furs.
“Both, as it happens.” Gollip bobbled his head, then pointed. “Walk to the end of the counter. Then follow me.”
Marty paced parallel to Gollip, toward the end of the counter, where he’d be able to walk around. Gollip moved nonchalantly, as if doing nothing extraordinary, and the other Grays ignored him. The party followed, and at the end of the counter, they squeezed between it and the wall and trailed Gollip back through an open passage.
As they passed, a rustle of disturbance passed along the line of Grays. They turned to look at Gollip, and Marty had no idea how to read their glossy black eyes or leathery faces. Gollip raised a hand, and the Grays went back to their previous conversations.
“Humans do not come where I am taking you,” Gollip said.
“But your friends aren’t trying to stop you,” Marty said.
“I have taken responsibility,” Gollip said. “Besides, these colleagues are . . . all of a certain point of view. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be working with me here. And they are predisposed to like humans.”
“That suggests,” Surjan growled, “that there are some members of your species who might be predisposed to disliking humans.”
“Oh, yes.” Gollip giggled. “Oh my, yes.”
The magma tube opened shortly into a much larger space and light flooded Marty’s eyes. It took him a moment to process what he was seeing, but there was open sky above him. They stood no longer in a chamber of a cave, but in a massive amphitheater, a box canyon of grayish stone that branched in several directions, all its walls pierced by windows and doors, and hacked into ledges and passages. The network of dead-end canyons had been carved, maybe by brute strength, into a small city of cave dwellings.
Above the rock walls, tall enough in their own right, loomed even taller walls of ice. Gray compounded with gray upon gray and the entire scene was monochromatic to the point of madness, but the ice loomed in overhead and almost touched, leaving a narrow zigzag of sky through which light and air, but little else, could travel. Marty saw side canyons that may once have climbed to a plateau above, but now ended in plugs of gray frozen water.
“Marty!” François grabbed his arm and dragged him around to face left. On a high saddle of rock in the fork between two branching canyons, weighed down from above by a massive plate of ice, lay a metallic object Marty’s brain took long seconds to process. He saw antennas, an open hatch on the underside, steps carved in stone ascending to the hatch, and a greenish light leaking from inside.
“It’s a flying saucer,” Lowanna murmured.
“Exactly!” François cried.
It looked like a UFO from a 1950s monster movie. It was a silver disc, topside and underside both curving gently to meet in the middle, like two hubcaps pressed together. Marty saw windows around the lower half of the disc. Were there counterpart windows around the upper part, where he couldn’t see?
“We did indeed come from another world,” Gollip said. “This is the vehicle that brought us here.”
François shook his head and whistled.
“I am impressed by this craft,” Marty said, trying to sound diplomatic. “Do you also have a portal, as we discussed?”
“You trade for iron,” François said. “Have you tried mining it?”
“Are there no living things here but your people?” Lowanna seemed repulsed. “I don’t see so much as a tree. You’re outdoors in some theoretical sense, but it is as barren as South Side Chicago in here.”
“All of your questions are interesting.” Gollip bobbled his head, then bowed. “I am taking you to someone who can better answer them.”
“Let me ask one more question,” Marty said. The Gray was being deluged by demands and accusations, and he didn’t want his ally to get burned out. He wanted to hand Gollip a win. “What do you call yourselves?”
“My people?” Gollip asked.
“We have encountered others like you before,” Marty said, “in the far north, but we were unable to speak to them. So we have no words to talk about you, except outsider words. We have called your people the Grays.”
“We call ourselves the People,” Gollip said.
Lowanna chuckled. “Everyone does.”
“Our word for people is ‘Edu,’” Gollip said. “We are the Edu. But I don’t think ‘Grays’ is offensive, and you may call us that.”
“If you call yourselves ‘the People,’” Surjan asked, “what’s your word for us? You must have one, you deal with us every day.”
“Oh yes.” Gollip bobbled his head. “We call your kind ‘Shnipara.’ It means something like ‘two-legged cattle.’ Come this way.”
He turned and marched up one of the side canyons.