Back | Next
Contents

decorative symbolCHAPTER decorative symbol
THIRTY




I will teach you.

“You will what?” Gunther asked the voice inside his head.

The rest of the party, climbing stairs ahead of him, turned and shot him a collective quizzical look. Yotto had taken them to another set of stairs leading up to the spaceship, and this one had had no guard at the bottom. Maybe the guards had gone home after the vote, dispersing like everyone else, but Yotto hadn’t ventured any explanation. He’d simply let them up.

“Are you okay?” Lowanna asked him.

“Sorry, I was just thinking about something.” Gunther gave her a lopsided grin and motioned dismissively.

He focused on the voice and quietly asked, “Teach me what?”

The door. I can instruct you on its use.

The archaeologist-turned-healer clenched his jaw and wondered if he was going crazy. If that voice was attached to someone, how could it know about the portal they were approaching? Is that what it meant? Or was the voice part of some delusion?

I can teach you to use the portal. I want you to survive.

Survival was good. But the idea of trusting a voice in his head was literally a sign of clinical insanity.

But Kareem had reported seeing what might be a portal underneath the palace in Nesha. And Gunther had first heard the voice when they had transitioned from Egypt to Nesha. Something had happened within him, some channel had been opened or some receiver activated, so he’d been hearing the voice since.

What was going on?

You are mine.

Gunther felt a sudden, strong sensation of calm. It was almost like before his gall bladder surgery, when the anesthesiologist injected something into his IV to calm his nerves. His sudden peace felt exactly like what he’d felt in that moment, only there was no drug wending its way through an IV into his bloodstream. The strange calming sensation bloomed within his chest and he felt relaxation flow through his extremities. He took a deep breath and finished climbing the last of the steps. The party stood with Yotto at an open ramp in the underside of the saucer. Gollip stood slightly to the side, near the stone lip of the bluff, looking over the edge like a sentinel or a gargoyle.

From this vantage point, Gunther could see several sets of stairs that ascended the mountain to the ship, some joining on their way.

“This is not off-limits, exactly,” Yotto said, “but my people never come here. They would be . . . surprised to find I had let you in.”

“Worried we might turn the death ray on the city?” François grinned.

“There is no death ray,” Yotto said.

“Do you have a death ray?” Gollip asked. “Do you plan to build a death ray?”

“Put that on the list, François,” Surjan said.

“No,” François said, “that was a joke. No death rays. And we will be discreet about our visit here.”

Was discretion possible? There were so many paths up to this point, and surely some Edu in one of the open spaces below would look up at any moment and see them congregated on the ramp.

You just have to trust me.

Gunther shook himself, trying to cast off the voice.

The saucer was not level on the bluff. Up this close, Gunther could see that it rested on three metal legs, but one of them was crumpled, so part of the saucer had flexed and tilted at a shallow angle.

“There are usually no Edu in this section,” Yotto said. “You will not be harmed, but please be careful what you touch.”

The team entered, François and Marty leading the way with Yotto. Gunther waited, trying to empty his mind of conscious thought to escape the solicitation of the voice, until he and Kareem were last, with Gollip still standing watch at the rim.

Kareem fidgeted, both hands in his tunic pocket.

Gunther smiled at the young man. “Find something interesting?”

Kareem spat. “This is a cursed place, by God.” He climbed inside the saucer.

“That makes me feel good,” Gunther murmured.

I will teach you.

Gunther entered, leaving Gollip outside. A spiral staircase ran up through a column of the ship. The angle meant that on one side the stairs tilted back and you risked sliding off, and on the other side the stairs tilted forward and you had to raise your feet extra high and then put them down at an angle that stressed the ankles. The fact that the steps were made of a metal lattice made the climb possible at all. Gunther went up with considerable use of his hands.

The lower floor contained sleeping and storage compartments, the bunks too small for adult humans of ordinary size, the shelves bare. Gunther followed the others to the upper floor and found them at a semicircular central console. It was built like a podium, to be worked by someone standing inside it, and lights shone up onto the faces of the party. The controls consisted of various buttons, faders, levers, and joysticks.

Above them and to the left ballooned a domed chamber with white walls and floor. In its floor were a series of dark circles, and Gunther was reminded of the portal they’d entered together in the time of Narmer to be sent to this time.

I will teach you.

“Do you know the controls?” François asked Yotto.

“By experimentation, a few,” the engineer said. “That fader disperses heat via multiple external vents. Space is cold, but the inside of a vessel traveling in space may become quite hot. Those buttons activate lights; don’t touch, it will alert my people to our presence in this section. These controls affect the air circulation, that one empties the latrine reserve. These would activate a travel field around the vessel to escape gravity’s effects, but those fuel cells have long ago been depleted.”

“The ship has some other energy source for life support systems?” François asked.

“Yes, there are thermoelectric generators that power the critical support features of the vessel.” Yotto tapped on a console in front of him. “This console has access to the vessel’s database, or at least what portion of it we had locally stored prior to having our communication systems isolated from the mother ship.” He touched a button, and one of the walls that had been a flat, blank, dark screen suddenly lit up.


map


It showed a map. The map was a detailed Mercator projection of the Earth. Gunther recognized the continents, except that they were all too large and their shapes weren’t quite right—though the map might have been accurate to what Earth looked like during the most recent ice age. During the ice age, Gunther reminded himself, that was ending this very moment. And there were small clusters of vertical lines tucked inside neat circles at various spots around the globe—including, in particular, spots the party had been to.

“There’s Nesha,” Marty said. “Number five. And we’re at number seven here. And look, we started at number four.”

“The numbers are written Egyptian-style,” Gunther murmured.

“Not especially clever,” Marty said, “since the Egyptians wrote single digits by just drawing a number of lines equal to the number they wished to express. But yes.”

“Isn’t it interesting that where we started isn’t number one?” Gunther announced.

“Actually number one looks like it’s near Jebel Mudawwar,” Lowanna said. “And if you think about it, that actually is where we started. Why is it marked? You’d sort of expect something major if a portal is there.”

“If you recall, we didn’t exactly look hard in that area,” François said. “And even at the time we were transported there, anything substantial could have been swallowed in the sand.”

“We weren’t there in the twenty-first century,” Lowanna said. “We were there in the fourth millennium B.C.E.”

“By that time that part of the world had seen a significant climate shift,” François said as he crossed his arms and tapped his chin with his pointer finger. “What if it was Atlantis that was the city Yotto’s referring to? For all we know, Atlantis was the ice age capital of our species.”

“You’ve made this suggestion before,” Marty remarked. “Atlantis as the City of the Gods on Earth. This is sounding a lot like when I first met you and you kept talking about aliens.”

François gestured at Yotto and gave Marty a triumphant smile. “I was right then, and I’m telling you now, I’m probably still right on this.”

Marty shrugged. “Maybe . . . I guess it doesn’t really matter what we call it, we have the here and now to focus on.”

François grunted in exasperation and pointed at the map. “Yotto—number one on the map, is that a place knows as the City of the Gods?”

“I’m not sure I’ve heard that name,” Yotto said.

“The humans from number five referred to a City of the Gods on Earth in their legends,” Lowanna noted. “François, think about it . . . if there was some early human city—”

“Atlantis,” François interjected.

“Fine, called it whatever you want. But if there was an early city with advanced technology that had maybe reached out to various places, they probably would come off as gods to the primitive cultures in other parts of the world.”

“True,” Francois said. “Sort of a spin on the Arthur C. Clarke quote that states that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, or in this case, miracles of the gods.”

“Why the numbers?” Marty asked. “Are these numbered in the order in which the locations were built? That seems randomly scattered, unless this map is some kind of outline of the development of the civilization.”

“Maybe it is also that,” François said.

“What do you mean ‘also’?” Marty asked. “What’s the other thing? Why are these locations numbered?”

François shrugged. “It seems obvious to me. We started at number one. The numbers are the gauntlet. They’re the test we’re being put through in order.”

“We emerged first at number one and walked to, what, number four?” Marty asked. “Is the test we’re going through broken, or did we cheat?”

“Maybe neither,” François said. “Maybe we accidentally played our knight like a rook.”

“I don’t know that mixing metaphors helps,” Surjan growled.

“Playing your knight like a rook would be cheating,” Lowanna said. “Has no one taught you how to play chess?”

“Maybe it isn’t like chess,” François said. “Maybe no one is enforcing the rules. Or maybe it’s more like a psychological experiment. We’re in a cage, being observed. Maybe the great psychologist of the universe has left a bunch of game pieces sitting here and is watching us to see what we make of them.”

“And if we solve the puzzle,” Lowanna said with a frown, “we get a monkey pellet?”

“Are you thinking we were sent to one in the first instance,” Marty asked, “and our job there was to find a portal and get to site two, but instead we accidentally took a shortcut?”

“Or accidentally went off the rails, depending on how you look at it,” François said.

“Presumably this means we can’t win,” Lowanna said. “There’s some kind of flag we need to go back to Jebel Mudawwar to capture, and then go on to site two. Or can we take them in any order? For that matter, if there was a flag to capture in Egypt, we didn’t do it.”

“If there’s another team playing against us,” Surjan said, “we’re losing.”

“Maybe it’s not capture the flag,” François said. “Or a race.”

“And as you said, if it’s not chess,” Lowanna asked, “what game are we playing?”

François scratched his chin. “I’m not sure.”

“You are clearly extraordinary Shnipara, as Gollip said,” Yotto said, shaking his head and blinking rapidly. “I have no idea what you are talking about.”

“Honestly, we probably don’t, either,” François told him.

You do not need to run the gauntlet.

“We don’t need to run the gauntlet,” Gunther said.

Everyone turned to look at him.

“Why do you think that?” Marty asked.

Gunther opened his mouth to speak and made a sharp yelping sound instead. He took a deep breath, steadied himself. “I don’t think it. I don’t know why I said that.”

Marty looked at Yotto, then back at Gunther. “The voice again?”

Gunther nodded.

I will teach you to control your arrival portal. To choose. To act, and not to be acted upon.

“I think we’re in the right place.” Marty shrugged. “Beyond that . . .”

“Perfect,” Surjan said. “So we figure out who we’re supposed to save here, we save them, and then we . . . do the thing with Gunther.”

“I don’t know whether we should or not,” Gunther admitted.

“Who do we save?” Lowanna asked.

“The Edu,” François said. He spun slowly, gesturing to take in all the machinery. “We secure their food supply, which is the basic prerequisite for peace. Then if there are other things we can help, we do what we can.” He turned to Yotto and asked, “I assume you can get me whatever other supplies that are needed.”

“I can do that,” Yotto confirmed. “But some items may be locked away and nobody knows how to open it. Some things never got repaired since the crash.”

“We’ll figure out the rest.” François beamed. “My young friend Kareem there is very clever, he’s a budding engineer. He’s very good at elaborate mechanical devices, locks and such. He and I will set you right in a heartbeat.”

“No,” Kareem said.

François gave Kareem a stern look.

Marty clapped his hands together and said, “Let’s all maybe take a break and think about our next steps.”


“Come with me, Kareem.” François tried to keep his voice calm, but his hands shook and his feet were unsteady as he rattled down the tilting staircase and onto the bluff.

Gollip remained there, crouched now at the edge to watch over. He looked down on the Grays below.

François switched deliberately to French, forcing himself to adopt his native Gallic insouciance along with the words he knew Kareem understood.

“Kareem, my young friend, it’s not enough to avoid killing innocent people. Just not being a murderer is not enough righteousness and decency for a civilized man.”

Kareem looked back and forth between François and the Gray. “You mean you want me to help you fix their engines.”

François smiled. “Yes. And graciously.”

“I can’t do it,” Kareem said. He seemed to understand François’s tactic and was also smiling. Something was making him feel angry or shaken, though, because his smile was the worst pasted-on grin François had ever seen.

“You can.”

“I don’t want to. You won’t want to, either, once I tell you about that bone I showed you.”

François’s frustration ebbed as his mind flashed back to the chewed bone that Kareem had shown him. The kid’s heart was in the right place, and he hated anything alien at the moment. “Go ahead, tell me.”

“A mound of skulls,” Kareem said. “In a prison, beneath this very ridge.”

“What kind of skulls?” François asked. “Human?”

Kareem nodded. “There were thousands and thousands of bones. All of them with bite marks like the one I showed you. Needle-sharp teeth, the same as these things have.” He tilted his head toward Gollip. “We know the Grays eat human flesh. The ones living under Nesha did, and there is a group of them here that wants to eat us.”

François sighed, his heart sinking. “But there is a group that doesn’t.”

“The engineer says. Do you trust him?”

François hesitated, but then nodded slowly. “I believe I do.”

“Then ask him to tell you the truth,” Kareem said. “There’s a dungeon under his precious engine works, that held hundreds of prisoners, and a massive pile of gnawed-on human bones.”

“You think they eat people who come here seeking healing?” François asked.

Kareem shook his head. “The bones are too old, and there are no prisoners down there now, and the door was jammed shut.” He hesitated. “Maybe Yotto doesn’t know. Maybe this has been a secret for a long time. I think those bones down there belong to the humans who sailed here with the Grays. I think when the city hit its first crisis, the Grays ate all the humans.”



Back | Next
Framed