Planet of the Apes

by Rich Handley

  The next day, Garig had disappeared from the fireside. They knew that he had gone back to find Silat and guide her home to the west.

  Taul doubted they would be seen alive again. Two of them, one crippled, alone, without him to protect them. The desert would eat them.

  Pardel died about a month later.

  They had been crossing a canyon that split the wasteland, its sides as sheer as cathedral walls. They had made it down one cliff, an arduous descent that had taken a whole day, rested for the night, then picked their way across the cool shadows of the canyon floor. The next day, and the day after that, they had trekked along, looking for a way back up. Taul had been able to taste their anxiety. There seemed to be no way out, no way up. It had been a long time since pilgrims had followed the track. Wind, the heave of the earth, and the scorch-rains of winter had crumbled the route markers away.

  Taul had been resolved. He had found a way eventually.

  It was precarious. The ascent was slow. They were flushed with fear at every step, every scrabbled-for handhold. They had been forced to rest halfway up the cliff when night fell, perched like roosting birds on ledges no wider than their hips, waiting for daybreak when they could safely climb again.

  Taul made it to the top well ahead of the others. He knelt down, saying a little prayer to thank God for his success, even though he knew that he was unfired, and that God was no longer listening. He raised the rifle, its worn wooden stock couched in his armpit, and surveyed the landscape to see what other trials might be waiting for them.

  But there was nothing. The land beyond was empty waste. Taul slung his rifle across his shoulder and turned to help the others up the last of the way.

  Calio made it first, sweating and exhausted, but fired by the spirit that made him special. Then they pulled Arnia up onto the cliff head. She laughed and sang to the God that had brought her through.

  Kotte was next. Quiet, grim—stubborn, in Taul’s opinion—Kotte shook off their outstretched hands and refused their assistance. He was going to make it to the top without help.

  And he did. Then he lay on his back on the ground in the sun, panting.

  Pardel was the oldest of the travelers. He was a long way behind, clawing his way inch by inch.

  “You can do it, old soul!” Taul yelled down.

  The others were calling, too, shouting encouragement, but not with their voices, so Taul couldn’t hear them.

  Ten meters from the top, Pardel stopped for breath and looked up at them. He grinned, as if to say, “See? Not so old after all!”

  Then his hand fumbled, and a rock tore loose. Pardel tried to grip, but it was too late. They watched him fall, a bundle of rags and spindly limbs in a cascade of dust and clattering stones.

  Pardel did not fall all the way to the bottom of the canyon. He lodged, halfway down, caught on an outcrop of rock. They heard him weeping, and moaning in pain.

  The others started to talk. Taul saw them look at each other, eyes wide.

  “Aloud,” he reminded them. “With voices.”

  “Sorry, Taul,” Calio said. “I forget.”

  “What do we do?” Arnia asked, sadness wobbling her voice.

  “We leave him,” Kotte said. “We can’t help him. He will be broken—”

  “We can’t leave him!” Arnia exclaimed.

  “We left Silat,” Kotte said. “A weak link—”

  “She turned back,” Arnia said. “She turned back. We didn’t leave her.”

  “Same thing,” Kotte said. He shrugged, then smoothed his mask where the sweat was making it lift loose.

  Calio looked at Taul, who sighed.

  “Okay,” he said, reluctant. He took the rifle off his shoulder and held it out to Kotte. Kotte looked at the weapon with some alarm, but didn’t take it.

  “Just hold it for me,” Taul said. “I can climb faster without it.”

  Kotte took the rifle and held it gingerly, as if the violence of its purpose might somehow infect him.

  Taul climbed down to Pardel. It took a while. It was much harder going down than up. End-time heat, the blink of God, had transmuted the rock, and the face of the cliff was weak like powder.

  Taul heard the old man calling to him. Felt it, too. Unfired for his purpose by the scalpels of the elders, his mind was dull and his inmost self was mute. But a vestige of his inmost remained, and the old man’s distress was so great, Taul could feel the pressure of it in his head—a throb, a surge, a heat like fire behind a closed door.

  Pardel’s legs were broken. An arm, too, from the unnatural twist of it. Blood stained his filthy robes and trickled down the rock face, drying in the hard sunlight. His mask had torn away during the fall, shredding to reveal his inmost self. Taul saw the pale, puckered beauty of Pardel’s true face.

  That was an indignity. A transgression. To die, so intimately and cruelly exposed. A man chose to show his true face to God. To have his mask stripped away, and to be left in death with his inmost self open to the sky and the carrion-eaters—that was wrong.

  “I’ll get a rope,” Taul said. “I’ll hoist you up.”

  “No,” Pardel replied. It was just a sigh. Injury had robbed him of the strength to speak in more than a whisper, though the throb of Pardel’s inner fire in Taul’s head let Taul know the old man was actually screaming.

  “Then what?” Taul asked.

  “Peace,” Pardel whispered. “And when you come to the place, remember my name to God.”

  Taul nodded. Gently, he sloughed Pardel’s torn mask off the old man’s head, averting his eyes. The carefully molded latex of the mask was beyond repair.

  He took his own mask off. Taul wasn’t sure why he had continued to wear it after the elders rendered him unfired. It meant nothing, because Taul had no inmost self anymore, and his true face thus had no significance.

  He fitted his mask onto the old man. Dignity in death.

  “How will you do it?” Pardel asked.

  Taul was strong. His build and physical power were among the reasons the elders had chosen him. He got his hands under Pardel, and moved him until the old man was sitting up on the ledge. Pardel shuddered as his broken bones ground against each other.

  Taul took out his knife and laid it on the ledge. The old man had looked at it, considering the instrument of his death, knowing Taul would make it swift.

  When the old man’s eyes lingered on the knife, Taul reached out quickly with his right hand and snapped Pardel’s neck. It broke like a twig, and he was gone in a moment.

  Taul tidied the old man up, tucking his robes around the body to stop them flapping in the canyon wind. Then he said goodbye and climbed back up the cliff to rejoin the others.

  Calio, Arnia, and Kotte looked at him cautiously when he reached the top and stood up beside them. Kotte handed back the rifle.

  “Pardel went quiet,” Calio said.

  “He’s gone,” Taul said. “His track has ended. Omega.”

  “Alpha and omega,” they all chanted.

  “Where is your face?” Kotte asked.

  “I didn’t need it anymore,” Taul said. “But Pardel did.”

  Arnia stared at him.

  “I had forgotten how beautiful you are,” she said.

  * * *

  They spent two weeks following the track through the craterland. By night, wild dogs barked in the distance, and Taul kept his rifle close. They skirted the rims of wide craters in the heat. The sun made the air buzz and click. Chemical lakes had formed in the basins of the craters, some vivid turquoise or blood-red. The wind stank of sulfur. Occasionally, they could see shapes down in the lakes: rusted, twisted, blackened masses half submerged, buckled metal leering at the sky, vague in the mists that lay across the toxic pools.

  They first saw the valley about three days later. The track had taken them down from the craterland across blast-heath where the air was parched dry, and into a place of blind tombs. The tombs were so old, so compressed by heat and pressure, they almost looked like n
atural rock formations, but Taul could see the spaces where windows had been, the holes of doorways, the gaps of skylights. There were fragile pipes of green metal that had once been gutters and downpipes. Corroded by time and acid, they flaked into papery ash at the merest touch. Between the tombs, the ground gleamed. Sand, transmuted by God into iridescent glass.

  Or, Taul considered, the glass that had once filled the window-gaps of the tombs, blown out in one immense instant of wrath, turning to rain, to fall and flow and fuse.

  “We’ll shelter here,” he told the others.

  “We’re low on water,” Kotte said.

  Food, too, Taul thought, though he didn’t say it.

  “That’s why we’ll shelter here,” Taul said. “Night soon. We’ll shelter here, then rise early, moving before dawn while it’s still cool.”

  They entered the ground floor of one of the tombs, and made camp in a blackened room. The light was dim enough for them to remove their tinted goggles.

  Everything was dust, except for a distorted metal bowl that Taul thought might once have been a cooking pan. Calio led prayers, then they ate, trying not to notice how little remained in the ration bags. Then Kotte slept, while Calio sat in a corner. He took the relic from his satchel and turned through the holy pages, puzzling over passages in which the leaves were incomplete, or age had faded the laminated paper white.

  Abandoning his mask had been a mistake, Taul realized less than a day after they had left Pardel at the cliff. The bare skin of his scalp, his nose, his cheeks, and the tops of his ears had burned raw in the sun. They carried salves and oils to treat skin outbreaks, and they all shared them with him willingly when they saw him start to crack and blister, but the supply was limited.

  They were all used to living beneath, in the caves and tunnels of the sect’s home underground. Daylight and open air were strangers to them. The elders had warned that surface exposure was one of the foremost struggles of a pilgrim’s track.

  Arnia, sifting through the dust, found a doll’s head. It was bald and eyeless, and the plastic, which Taul assumed had once been flesh-colored, had bleached bone-white. The plastic was cruder than the stuff their masks were made of, hard and brittle, not supple at all. Even so, Taul saw Arnia look inside it, through the neck hole, to see if it had an inmost self.

  Taul took his rifle and went up onto the roof of the tomb. There were stairwells, and the fragile remains of stairs. He trod carefully, testing the safety of each step. Where the steps failed, they fell away in showers of dust and debris.

  When he reached the roof, the sun was setting, whirring like an angry beetle as it slipped below the horizon. Its bloated red disk seemed to melt into a bar of light where it met the limit of the landscape.

  He looked out across the tombs. The walls still facing the sun were washed with peach light, and those at an angle a darker mauve. The shadows were blue, then purple, then soot-black.

  Taul looked east, trying to spot the markers of the track. In the very last of the daylight, he saw an outcrop of dark green foliage where the valley began.

  * * *

  They set out before dawn. Taul had told them about the green to lift their spirits. From the tombs, they crossed a mile or two of barrens, and then reached coarse grasses that hissed and swished as they waded through them.

  The air had changed. The dryness had gone. There was a scent of something wet and organic.

  “Trees,” Arnia said, delighted.

  Taul nodded.

  There were trees. As the valley opened below them, they saw more than trees. There was a forest, deep and thick, tangled, a place of emerald canopies and dense shadow.

  There was so much life, more than any of them had ever seen. There was so much life it felt obscene.

  Taul led them in, rifle ready. They entered dappled shade and thickets where the sunlight speared in through the leaves. The ground was moist and dark. The fresh air smelled ripe with resin and sap. Small insects chirred and buzzed, and the sight of each small bug droning past made them marvel and laugh, even Kotte.

  Taul felt his tension rising. The forest was noisy. Leaves hissed and whispered, stirred by the breeze. Branches creaked. There was the occasional odd crack, or stranger sounds of knocking or tapping. Taul presumed these were the sounds of insects, burrowing and building, or even birds, which he had heard about but never seen.

  The noises made it hard for him to maintain alertness. He jumped at sounds. He wished the forest would fall silent so that he could hear the sounds that really mattered.

  The sounds of threat approaching.

  For the forest would be dangerous. The elders had told him this. A forest was a place of life, and thus resources. Food, wood, soil, water. All three races would frequent the forest to draw on its bounty. The chance of encounter here was higher than anywhere else.

  “Go slowly,” he told his pilgrims. “Go slowly and watch my lead.”

  He checked the action and clip of his rifle. He’d done it every day since they had left the west, but now he did it knowing it was likely to be more than just a routine precaution.

  They walked in silence for an hour. Then Arnia said, “I hear talking.”

  They stopped and listened. They all heard a distant babble, but could discern no clear words.

  “Wait here,” Taul said.

  Rifle raised to his shoulder, he advanced, using the trees as cover. He followed the sound of the talking. A voice, or voices—it was hard to tell.

  Then he realized it wasn’t voices. It was the ripple of running water.

  The stream was broad and fast-flowing. It coursed down the hillside under the trees and emptied into a wide pool. The pool was calm. Large, flat rocks stood in the water like islands, sunlit. The trees surrounded the pool, but their bowing canopy did not extend entirely across its width, and the sunlight was bright. Taul saw insects flitting through the light, darting across the surface of the water. He heard splashes and saw slowly expanding circles of ripples on the green mirror of the water.

  He knelt at the edge of the pool, pulled off one leather glove, and cupped his hand.

  The water was cold and bitter. He tasted minerals and weeds. But it was clean and fresh.

  He made his way back to get the others.

  * * *

  They filled their water flasks, washing out the dregs of stale residue. Arnia hummed a hymn as she stooped, praising God for his kindness, alpha and omega. Calio took off his gloves and bathed his sore hands, then turned his back on them so he could remove his mask and baptize his true face. Kotte found berries and some nuts that looked edible, and began to fill his knapsack.

  Taul kept watch.

  “Someone’s coming,” Arnia said.

  She was suddenly standing beside him. Taul frowned at her.

  She touched her forehead. “Felt them,” she said.

  “Warn the others,” he said. She used her inmost fire to alert Calio and Kotte without words. All four of them hurried back into the cover of the trees and huddled down. Fear had returned.

  Calio was breathing hard, anxiously. He had been in the middle of his ablutions, and had withdrawn in haste. He was still trying to fit his mask back on to preserve his dignity. His hands were wet, and the cuffs of his robe were dripping.

  Figures appeared through the trees on the far side of the pool. Wild humans, dirty and ragged in animal pelts. None of them had seen humans much during their lives in the west. Here, humans were said to be more numerous. They were creatures of the First Race, the first makers who had lost their way. From their lineage had sprung the Second Race, to which Taul and his brethren all belonged—those who had come after, who knew and remembered, who had retained thought, and had gained the gift of fire and, through that, inmost selves that were beautiful to God.

  The humans came to the pool. Three males and a female. They carried spears, just poles with sharpened ends. They did not speak, neither inmost nor outmost, for they could not. They were mute. The stream had more voice than t
hey did.

  They came out along the bank furtively, and then two of the males hopped and leapt out onto the flat rocks in the water, where they stood, staring down into the pool.

  “What are they doing?” Arnia whispered.

  Taul shrugged.

  “Should I drive them off?” Kotte asked. Taul knew what he meant. Those of the First Race were highly susceptible to raptures. With a focus of his fire, Kotte could make them see a pillar of flame or a flash of lightning, or worse. Taul knew Kotte had quite an imagination. He could conjure a vision with his inmost fire that would terrify the primitives and set them to flight.

  “Wait,” Taul said.

  One of the humans lunged with his pole into the water, and brought it out with something silver flapping on the end. He had speared a fish. His companions showed their approval with squeals and clapping hands.

  “They’re hunting,” Calio said.

  “Can you eat fish?” Arnia asked, disgusted.

  “I think so,” Taul said. “They can.”

  Patiently, the humans scanned the pool, silent and still. Another sudden thrust brought out a second fish. The third male and the female, who had remained on the bank, were moving around the edge of the pool, gathering berries and fruit. The female cried out. She had found something. The male went over to her. The two spearmen on the rock dropped into the water and waded to her side of the pool, inquisitive.

  “Oh, no,” Calio murmured. “Oh, God, forgive me.”

  Taul saw what the female had found. In his hurry to withdraw, busy with his mask, Calio had left his satchel on the rocks beside the pool. His satchel. The relic.

  “Oh, Calio!” Arnia whispered.

  “Now we scare them,” Kotte said.

  “And make them flee?” Taul said. “With the book?”

  Taul rose. He took aim. He felt sick, but a clean shot would drop the female and the book, and the sound of it would send the others running. He was a good shot. The elders in the west had given him four whole clips of ammunition with which to practice before the party had set out. Taul had used them to train, to become proficient with the rifle, so that he could fulfill his duty as one unfired, his hands and eyes trained to kill, his mind surgically neutered to free him from the prohibitions against killing. That was the sacrifice he had made in order to serve God: to be made unholy and invisible to God, to have his fire put out so that he could serve God more selflessly than any before him.