I can make out the floor and walls of the ramp, not in my imagination, conjured by the echoes and the feel of the curve of the wall, but the pale grey of poured concrete. And the light grows as the smell deepens and, of all things, Wolf’s giant dog howls like the wolf it is and that sound is eerie and deep and stirs my fear.
And then I round the final curve in full light and see…
No, this can’t be real.
This is impossible.
Grass-covered hills roll away from the ramp, rising and falling under a hot noonday sky. The road leading from the ramp soon breaks up into a mosaic of concrete paving lifted and split by the tall grass. The land is sculpted like a broad valley, and in the valley the glittering blue of a lake reflects the sky. The land rolls on into a blued distance where mountains rise to touch the sky. No, not mountains—vast pillars like giant cliffs, with a more distant landscape visible beyond each pillar.
Chewie is leaping like a dog in the long grass. The air is fresh, stirred by a breeze. The distance is misted, and there are clouds about the giant pillars. Real clouds draw up from the lake water and are circulated by the breeze. The breeze brings grassland smells with it—Bluestem and Indian grass. In the distance beyond the lake, the hills are wooded.
It just can’t be, but there it is.
‘God damn! It’s Pellucidar.’
Wolf-man Ripley sounds awestruck, respectful even. Last time I heard him this cowed was when Sue-Anne had cussed him out for a full five minutes in front of the whole bar.
‘Where the hell are we, Boss?’
‘Half a mile underground, Sam. Ain’t right.’
Joe Pepper’s hackles are up; you can feel them from where I stand.
‘How? It’s impossible!’
‘No, Son, it’s just Oli. Bastard’s had more money than god and dumb as a bag of hammers, but they had some smart people and machines working for them,’ Wolf-man Ripley drawls.
‘Moni?’
Sam is way too young to know much about Oli economics. Hell, I’d only heard the stories about it when I was a kid—how it warped minds and killed the future. He only knows the Quota chain.
‘Never mind. Think of it as power. The ability to get people to do stupid stuff when they don’t want to,’ I said.
‘Was it a tech?’
‘You can think of it that way, but I highly recommend you forget all about it. It was evil tech, son.’
‘So how did they do all this?’
‘Bots, maybe. This here sky has to be a projection, a screen of some kind. Kind of amazing.’
My brother almost sounds like he approves.
‘But why build a world underground?’
‘It’s still a bunker, Sam. A mighty fine one, but just a hole in the ground.’
‘Those are oak in the distance, on the other side of the lake. That’s about a hundred years of growth right there.’ Joe is thinking out loud, trying to make sense of it all.
‘You said this is a hundred miles across, Tom—this… what did you call it, Wolf?’
‘Pellucidar. Name of a fantasy world. It was in a real old book about a hollow Earth.’
‘That’s pure Oli, making your dumb fantasies come real. There’s enough room down here for old-time cities. But they only ever thought of themselves.’ Joe spat on the ground.
‘So what do we do?’
Sam is asking, but all three look to me for orders. Truth is I don’t really know what to do. This place, this Pellucidar, is overwhelming. So I do what I usually do at times like this—make it up as I go along.
‘This country don’t tell us a thing. And there’s no sign of Coot or Spacegirl. We’ll go further in for a while and see what we can learn.’
There are flocks of birds wheeling over the lake, and wading birds near the shore, so there must be fish as well. The grass made for a tough walk, except for Wolf’s hound, who was in his element. I am hollow-bone tired, fragile, and I’m getting a return of that headache Coot gave me, but I want to get down to the lake before we rest up for the trek back. We are completely unprepared for the scale of this place, the madness of the people who designed it. I have a bad feeling about many things, but for now the top of my list is the shape of the land. Once I get to the lake I’ll know if my suspicion is right.
The sun drops lower as we walk. I wondered for a while if the sky was a copy of the real sky, but that can’t be. We breached the doors at about one in the morning, working on the idea a night breach would be easier to pull off, and we have walked for maybe five and a half hours, but this sun is low on the horizon and getting lower. If I wasn’t so weary, I’d guess at what the time difference is. Why would there be a time difference at all? That’s another thing that doesn’t make any sense.
Then Wolf swears, loudly. He bends over and stares into the grass.
‘What is it?’
‘Better come see for yourself.’
For a moment I thought it was just a very smooth white rock. But a rock doesn’t have holes for eyes, or teeth. The grass had grown through the skull, and it was crazed, like a cracked vase. Wolf tries to pick it up, but the skull breaks apart in his hand.
Joe Pepper unhooks his cannon of a pump rifle from his shoulder and starts to scan around. Sam just stands there with his mouth open.
There are some old bones close to the skull. They are just as fragile as the skull.
‘What are the chances of us finding a skull in our path?’ Wolf is frowning.
‘We are on what was the road. Stands to reason,’ Sam tries to make sense of it but is shut down straight away.
‘Chances are high when you are walking through an open graveyard,’ Joe said, holding up another fragment of skull.
There are skulls and bones everywhere we look. Some are broken open like eggshells, some intact until you so much as look at them. They are well hidden by the tall grass, but Joe’s description of an open graveyard fits the scene.
‘What the hell happened here?’ Sam’s eyes are wide, his head scanning like Joe’s, but not slow and methodical. The boy’s near panicking.
‘Sam! These bones are old, real old. Whatever happened, happened a long time ago. There’s no need to think we are in danger.’
Joe snapped me one of his ‘where’s the stupid coming from today?’ looks, and he is right—I don’t believe it either. But the last thing I want is Sam running for the ramp and splitting the team.
‘What do you think, Joe?’ That’s Wolf making a unity call as well.
‘Safe enough for now. Ain’t seen anything bigger than a mouse, and I ain’t seen one of them either. Just keep your eyes open and your footfall soft. What are you going to do, Sheriff?’
‘I need to check out the lake, then we’ll head back.’
Joe looks past me at the run down to the water, about a mile.
‘What’s the lake going to tell you?’
‘That it’s a river.’
Joe looks surprised.
‘Didn’t think of that. Why does that worry you, Tom?’
‘You see the way the land curves. Standing where we are, the lie of the hills sends us left; it doesn’t head to the centre. And it’s not an open plain, it’s a valley.’
Joe looks again.
‘Take your word for it, Tom. Why’s that a problem?’
‘How do you make a circle last a long time, Joe?’
Joe frowns, shakes his head. It’s Sammy who sees it—all that time marking up and cutting sheet metal, watching the metal curl away from the shears.
‘You make it a spiral.’
‘You make a spiral. If I am right—and I may not be—that’s a river, not a lake, and its course is a spiral from the perimeter into the centre. It makes the place feel bigger, and it means you can support the roof. The cliffs lining the valley reduce the span of the roof but make it look natural, stopping the Oli shut in here from going mad all at once. It also means we are not equipped to get to the centre of this place. No way.’
‘Tommy, I’m good with animals, drink, and women. You’re gonna have to spell it out,’ Wolf growls.
‘If it’s a spiral, then the journey to the centre could be eight or nine times longer than a straight march across a plain—maybe more. It’s going to take weeks to get to the centre. We need to go back and gear up.’
‘What about catching those Oli?’
‘Look at the size of this place. They are long gone.’
‘Then why are we coming back?’ My brother is confused.
‘I need to tell you about a spacesuit.’
‘Let me get this straight…’
We are marching down to the lakeshore in single file, and Wolf is having trouble with the idea of autonomous spacesuits taking themselves for a walk.
‘…the suit used this High-Oli girl to escape High Ilium before it de-orbited, so it could survive the end of the Bright that the Oli had taken captive to protect their arses from the Bright. Does this make any damn sense in your head, Tom?’
‘That’s what happened, George. Joe saw it.’
‘Sitting on my barn roof staring at the stars,’ Joe adds.
‘And then, after it had watched the end, this robot suit collapsed?’
‘Folded up like an empty sack,’ Joe assured him, then added, ‘Saddest damn thing.’ He was right—there was something profoundly wrong about the way that autonomous suit just fell back. Can’t really say it died; it just feels like that.
‘I don’t get it. Was the suit using the girl, or was the girl using the suit? Doesn’t make any sense.’
‘It was the suit. You haven’t met her, Wolf; she’s Oli all the way through. Just as arrogant and dim as you’ve heard. The suit came down for a reason, and I think it was more than being a witness for the Bright.’
‘What then, Tommy?’
‘This is just a guess, but I think the captured Bright learnt about Haven, the bunker. It takes a lot of compute to run a world— maybe enough to run a Bright.’
We marched on in silence for a while. The sun was getting lower in the sky. Shadows rippled across the tall grass with the breeze like waves on a sea. But it was just light. There was no heat from the sun. The atmosphere remained summer-warm.
‘Shit!’ Wolf-man Ripley had worked it out. ‘They are both down here. Bright and Oli.’
‘I reckon. The suit affected the transfer of the Bright, or enough of it to start again.’
‘Another Trauma, Tom?’
‘Could be.’
‘What about the remains, Tom?’
‘I don’t know, Joe. That doesn’t make any sense to me yet.’
‘But what’s that got to do with us, Boss? I mean, they can’t hurt Haven, can they?’
‘The Bright and the Oli broke the world, Sam.’
‘You’re right, Tom, it’s slow, but there is a flow to it. How did you know?’
We have made it to the river’s edge where Joe has thrown some grass into the water. It drifts away from us. There are no obvious feeder streams, so I am guessing there’s some kind of plumbing under the surface.
‘Has to be, Joe. A lake will stagnate without fresh water. I’m guessing there’s not a lot of rain here, although it’s big enough for circulation. I don’t know, I’m just guessing—and I have been up all night.’
‘Can I make an observation, Tommy?’
‘Have I ever been able to stop you, Wolf?’
‘You look like shit. You need to rest up. We all do.’
‘Ain’t going back tonight, Tom. Too big a climb.’ So that is Joe’s view too.
I can’t argue. Instead, I sit down in the long grass by the river-lake. I do feel bad. Bone-weary, yes, but my head beats hard and slow like a big pulse. I am glad to stop—not just stop walking, but stop thinking for a while.
‘I reckon there’s fish in there. Sam, you look around for wood. We need to eat, and I don’t plan to eat my fish raw. You may have to walk around to the other side, which will take a while, so hustle.’ Joe is giving the orders now.
I lay back in the grass and close my eyes for a bit. I feel, rather than see, a shape over me. It’s Wolf-man Ripley.
‘You ok, Bro?’ He never calls me that unless he is really worried.
‘Just too damn tired, Bro.’
‘Rest up. We got this for now.’
I guess I dropped off, because the next time I open my eyes, I am under the stars and firelight is warming the grass and splashing onto the river close by. There’s the smell of roasted fish, and Wolf has his hand deep in Chewie’s ruff to stop the wolf from stealing all the food.
The stars overhead are brilliant, but this is a sky I don’t recognise. The Chaff is a thin, tight line—not a river of stars but a neat procession of cities in space. There are bright lights in the dark half of the Moon. There had been cities on the Moon. I never knew that. The Oli preferred their artificial world pre-Trauma. Can’t say I can fault them for that.
‘Welcome back, Boss. We ain’t got any coffee, but the water’s clean and the fish is good. Want me to get you some?’
Sam is a dark shape against the sky. I hold out my hand and he helps me up.
‘You should have seen the sun go down, Boss. The whole sky went red and gold. It was awesome to see.’
‘At last! Getting kinda old whispering. You good?’
‘Better, thanks.’
‘Here you go, fish on a stick. It’s Bass. There are some monster fish in the river; the water’s warmer than it should be.’ This is an entire novel from Joe, and he is smiling, which is a rare thing.
I feel a little stiff from lying on the ground, but my head is clear.
‘We got a night watch organized. I reckon the Oli didn’t let anything harmful down here, and Chewie is primed to take out anything that does show up. Got enough fish for the morning, providing this old boy don’t help himself in the night. Should have seen the sunset, Tommy. It was a glory.’
‘So we stay for a while?’
‘We got food. I guess it doesn’t hurt to explore a bit longer. But we are going to walk the other side of the river to save Sam having to swim across every day to get wood for the fire.’
‘We got a rota on that, Mr Ripley.’
‘No we ain’t. And Joe’s gonna teach you how to spear fish too, Cookie.’
‘He’ll just spear his foot,’ Joe joins in.
I settle down at the fire and eat fish from a stick, listening to my posse ride one another. We could be out on the prairie at night—the real prairie. The Oli may have been evil sons of bitches, but my god, they built on a grand scale. The world could have been glorious. Had been glorious for a while, I guess, before the Trauma. There had been good Oli as well as bad, Coot had said. They tried to stop the evil. But the evil was built into civilisation, built into its design, or there would have been no Oli.
And now they are back, both Oli and Bright, to tear it apart again.
So how are you going to stop that, Sheriff?
I am woken by a burst of sound, like something tearing. My brother is on his feet. Joe is standing, rifle in his hand. They are looking in the same direction. Sam is joining them. The wolf-hound has gone. That must have been the noise that woke me.
‘What is it?’
‘There’s somebody on the ridge. Just standing there, staring at us.’ Sam replies
But Joe lifts his bull stopper to his shoulder.
‘That’s not somebody, that’s a machine.’
Also this week for Sci-Friday the very last instalment of ‘The Pattern Mafia’,
and as a bonus, a look at the first chapter of the second novel in the series
‘Brahmin Blues’
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Great stuff Steve! Well done 👏🏻