by Rich Handley
“If I might offer a third possibility,” Sun said, “my sense of direction is rather poor.”
Shor nodded thoughtfully. “Then let us see if we can sharpen it.”
He motioned for one of his gorillas.
“Cut one of his fingers off,” he said.
“Now, wait just a moment,” Sun said, as another soldier pushed him down and pinned his right arm. “I think I’m starting to remember—”
“I’m certain you will,” Shor said.
“I see now it’s a credible threat,” Sun said, his voice rising. “There’s no need to prove your point any further!”
The gorilla produced his knife and placed it on the second joint of his longest finger.
“So, I’ll just tell you—”
Sun was surprised at how much it hurt, and he yelped first from the shock and then screamed from the pain itself. His finger rolled away from his hand and lay there like a black caterpillar.
Sun screamed some more when they cauterized the wound, and then he lay whimpering.
“Well?” Shor said. “Shall we do that again?”
“No,” Sun said, quietly. “It is northeast, two days beyond the river. I’ll show you.”
“You see,” Shor grunted to his soldiers. “Even a dirty monkey can be made to see reason.”
* * *
By the next day, the pain in the stump of Sun’s finger had become a dull ache throughout his body. He tried to comfort himself by recalling the taste of Lai’s pastries, of sunning himself on a limb, of swinging from tree to tree.
None of it helped much.
On the second day after crossing the river, they came to a line of low hills.
“Travel east along that big mound there,” Sun told Shor.
As they grew nearer, Shor reined his mount to a stop.
“Those aren’t hills,” he said.
“No,” Sun replied.
It must have been a city of some size, at one time. Now it was mostly a pile of rubble and rust, but here and there one could make out the straight line of a wall, a skeleton of beams jutting up. The gorillas—who had somewhat overcome their terror of the Blighted Region—now fell again to grunting nervously and making superstitious signs against evil.
Sun led them on, until he spied a long crack in the edge of the rubble.
“Down there,” he said.
“Dismount,” Shor said, reaching for his rifle.
They kept Sun chained, but put a long lead on him.
“You walk ahead,” Shor commanded.
“I’m only too pleased to,” Sun said wearily.
A slope of rubble descended to a long corridor clearly shaped by human hands. The gorillas advanced timidly until Shor roared at them, but even then they did not make great speed. The light from their torches flickered and played upon the ancient walls and floor.
“You will warn me when we are near,” Shor said.
“I will,” Sun replied. “But I think you will know.”
“What was this?” the warlord wondered.
“Some sort of transportation system, I think,” Sun said. “Those rails down there, you see?”
“Ah,” Shor said. “Something like mine carts might ride on those.”
Sun didn’t answer. It was hard to walk without putting his hands down, but when he did, it hurt.
Presently, he heard the soft rushing of water.
“There’s light ahead,” one of the soldiers said.
It was true. It was an odd, inconstant light, and as they drew nearer it became obvious why. A sheet of falling water barred their way. Both the origin of the waterfall and its destination were hidden on the other side. On this side, the twisted remains of an immense valve still partly occluded a round portal.
“Through there,” Sun said.
Shor stared at the curtain of water for a moment.
“I can lead the way if you want,” Sun said.
“No,” Shor replied. He gestured at one of his soldiers. “Chog,” he said. “You go. Come back and report.”
He turned to Sun. “He will come back, won’t he? Because if he doesn’t…”
“It’s safe,” Sun said.
Chog sidled reluctantly up to the waterfall, pausing when he reached it.
“Chog!” Shor shouted.
The big ape squared his shoulders and stepped through.
A few heartbeats passed. Twenty. Shor’s expression became increasingly more dangerous.
Then Chog came back through, soaking wet.
“Well?” Shor demanded.
“It is amazing,” Chog said.
Shor nodded. “Come, all of you.” He strode up the waterfall and marched straight through it, cradling his gun protectively beneath his chest. Chog took Sun’s lead and dragged him through the falling water, to the place beyond.
Shor stood there, dripping, transfixed.
“It’s all true,” the warlord said. “All of it.”
The ceiling rose in a vast vault above them, glowing with a light that was not daylight, but which resembled it nearly exactly. That false sky overlooked a vast jungle, in which grew a tangle of apple and pear trees, bananas and mango and durian, loquat and peach, walnut and pecan. Grape vines climbed the lower reaches of the dome, and the river the waterfall fed flowed through all of it.
“You see?” Shor said. “The legend speaks of a cave within the Mountain of Fruit and Flowers. And yet, this is no natural cavern. This was built by man. But for what purpose?”
“I believe they hoped to survive down here,” Sun said. “Survive whatever happened, whatever created the Blighted Region.”
“And where is the Monkey King?”
Sun sighed.
“He is all around you. You had better drop your gun.”
As he said it, every tree in the vicinity rustled, and they appeared. Macaques and baboons, snub-nosed monkeys, lutungs and true langurs, lars and black-crested gibbons. Each was armed with a pistol, rifle, or shotgun.
“You made us outcasts,” Sun said. “So we found our own place. You shouldn’t have come here.”
Shor trained his rifle on Sun.
“You betrayed me,” he said.
“I did exactly what you asked me to,” Sun said. “How is that betrayal?”
“Don’t try to be clever,” Shor grunted. “The elixir of immortality. Where is it?”
“There is no elixir,” Sun said. “And you are a buffoon.”
Shor’s face twisted in fury. “You’re lying.” His finger twitched on the trigger.
The roar of a hundred guns filled the dome. Shor staggered back, his expression one of purest incredulity. The other gorillas turned to flee. Two made it through the waterfall. None of them made it outside.
Only then did Sun realize he had a sharp pain in his ribs. He looked down and saw blood there.
“That’s unfortunate,” he said. Then he fell face-down in the water.
* * *
A month later, Sun climbed a mountain, stopping now and then to munch on one of the pastries he had stolen in the village of Five Swans. He hooted a long, slow song, just for the pleasure of hearing his own voice as he swung through the cloud forest. Eventually, he came to the ancient, crumbling temple, where he found Shalang the sage.
Shalang’s flat, moon-shaped face was fissured with age and his cheek pads were bloated to absurd proportions. His orange hair was matted and dirty, and he bore a beatific expression.
“There you are,” the aged orangutan said. “I was expecting you a month ago.”
“Yes, I know,” Sun said. “I incurred a gunshot wound, which somewhat delayed my trip.”
“I see,” Shalang said. He closed his eyes. “I sense that you have a question to ask me.”
“You bloody well know I do,” Sun said.
“Why did I tell the warlord where you were?” Shalang said.
“Indeed, your reputation for prescience is much deserved,” Sun said.
“I knew you would do the right thing,” Shalang
told him.
“They cut off one of my fingers!”
“Yes, but I see it has nearly grown back,” the orangutan pointed out.
Sun looked at his hand and the half-sized pink digit protruding from it.
“It hurt,” he said.
“You could avoid such pain by remaining with your subjects, safe in your cave,” Shalang pointed out. “And yet you do not.”
“I’m old,” Sun said. “I get bored. Besides, it’s best to keep abreast of things. What if Shor had come upon us unawares? With a bigger army and more guns?”
“That is my point,” Shalang said. “I told him the legend so he would seek you out, and you would know of him.”
“You could have just sent word,” Sun said. “And the legend—”
“Shall I tell the legend?” Shalang asked. “Not as Shor understood it, but as I do?”
“Why not?” Sun sighed.
“In the time before, before the fall of cities, when apes were slaves, there was a siamang held in a place where humans did their science. They did something to him that made him—if not an immortal—at least very long-lived. And then the battle between ape and man began, and the siamang changed as all apes did, just as the stone in the ancient legend was touched by heaven and quickened into the Stone Monkey.
“After the wars, after the Blighted Regions scarred the land, this siamang found that his kind—the siamangs, the gibbons—were mistreated by humans and other apes alike. They were lumped in with monkeys, who also were victimized. And so this very long-lived siamang took it upon himself to find his brothers and sisters and lead them to a safe place. A place of their own.”
Sun was silent for a moment. Then he hooted a little laugh.
“Shor thought it was a serum, something I drink or inject. They always think it’s something like that.”
“Do you know what they did to you?”
“No,” Sun said. “As you say, my mind was different then. I was… less complicated. All I remember from the lab is pain, all sorts of pain. And then one day, some chimps came in and let everybody go. I went as far from humans as I could get. After a while, I figured out that I heal faster than everyone else. Eventually, I realized I wasn’t aging, either. It really was as if someone had gone to Hell and taken my name from the Book of Life and Death.”
“How old are you?” Shalang asked.
“Over a hundred,” Sun said. “I quit counting long ago. I also stopped spreading my legend a long time ago. I actually cribbed most of it from an old human legend. It just attracts trouble. And yet you just keep it going.”
“The world is better off without the likes of Shor,” Shalang said. “Those determined enough to find you—well, they discover the only eternity for which they are destined. It’s as you said—better to know they’re coming before they arrive.”
“I suppose,” Sun grumbled, looking at his regenerating finger. “But it still hurt. And I can tell you’re delighted.”
“Well,” Shalang said, “I am not as ancient as you, but I am old, and there isn’t much to do up here. I get bored, too.”
“Perhaps,” Sun said, “you should take up calligraphy.”
* * *
The wondrous inventor companion of Cornelius and Zira in Escape from the Planet of the Apes tells his incredible personal story of triumph and tragedy in Ty Templeton’s “Milo’s Tale”…
* * *
MILO’S TALE
by
TY TEMPLETON
Doctor Milo stood in the surf and watched Lieutenant Soror and his expert team of chimpanzees unload equipment from the large ocean vessel anchored just off-shore. Milo’s mood leaned neither toward excitement nor scientific curiosity, as was so often the case during expeditions into strange lands. Instead, today, Milo felt fear. Fear that he was too late. Fear that the gorillas had already beaten him to the object from the sky. Fear of gorillas in general.
Milo had good reason to fear them. His chimpanzee nation had been at war with gorillas for centuries. He had been born in the occupied Westlands before the liberation and, unlike most of the chimpanzees Milo knew and worked with today, he’d seen gorillas as a child, and remembered them well. They were massive, ugly things, and they smelled like death. They bullied his family and killed his friends. As a youngling, Milo had trouble believing that gorillas were part of God’s plan. They seemed so purely evil, it made no sense that a loving God had made them.
But that was thirty-five years ago, before the liberation. Milo had not seen a gorilla since. He’d grown to be an ape of some importance in his home nation, a well-known professor of history, electronics, engineering, physics, and so much more, at Highlands Chimpanzee University.
It was this precise set of qualifications that had made Milo the perfect candidate to lead this expedition across the Great Northern Sea, thousands of miles from his tropical home. Milo was honored to be asked, and happy to serve, right up until he was told to be prepared to encounter gorillas.
“If chimpanzee astronomers could spot a strange object in the heavens, track its descent, and plot a likely location for landfall up there in the Northern Dead Areas, then so could the gorillas,” Milo’s mission commander had told him. “They have spy glasses and ocean ships, just like chimps do, perhaps not so precise a spy glass, or so fast a boat, but gorillas have them. And they will be coming to examine that object from the sky—hoping it might be ancient human technology—just like we hope it is.”
The briefing had ended on a grim note. “The gorillas will be behind you, Doctor, by perhaps days, or weeks. No more than a month, but they’ll be there.”
Doctor Milo was nudged from this anxious memory by something down the shore, a reflection off something large and metal. Was it another boat? Milo raised binoculars and brought into focus a giant metal statue half-buried in the sand. It was the likeness of a human woman with a crown, no doubt a long-forgotten queen of this long-dead land.
Milo smiled. He didn’t mind human signs up here. He expected them in the Dead Areas, where no one had existed to disturb them since the wars. Human statues, he could live with. What Milo didn’t want to see was gorillas.
He knew what gorillas were capable of.
* * *
“How can we trust Doctor Zaius?” Cornelius hissed to his fiancée, Zira, as soon as they were out of earshot of the courthouse. “First he had us arrested for heresy, then he insisted on clemency at the trial he presided over. It was all nonsense.”
“But this was nonsense with promotions, Cornelius!” Zira whispered back, barely containing the grin widening across her pretty chimpanzee face. “I’m made head of veterinary science, while you’ve been given a chair on the Science Council for all of Ape City. That’s rare for a chimpanzee. It’s usually the redheads.”
The pair continued through the bustling streets on this lovely day. Zira looked upward, drinking in the sun while Cornelius fretted and fussed. “We get to keep those promotions provided we remain silent, Zira,” he said. “Zaius has chosen bribery over punishment as a way to keep us quiet about what we learned in the Forbidden Zone—of this world’s true history… about mankind.”
“I prefer bribery,” Zira sang back. “It’s so much more civilized.” As they found themselves in front of their modest home, she added, “Who needs all this talk of punishment when we’re going to be married?”
“Zira, we haven’t set a date.”
“The trial is over. You just got a big promotion. You’ve run out of excuses, Cornelius. This is good for you. I’m good for you. Learn to be quiet and the world gets better. Trust me.”
“I do trust you, Zira dear. It’s Doctor Zaius I don’t trust…”
* * *
Doctor Milo flew his auto-gyro five hundred yards above the barren landscape. The solar-powered battery kept the small craft aloft for only short bursts, but it was useful for aerial reconnaissance and mapping out the direction his team would travel that day.
The expedition into the Dead Areas had been m
oving inland for three weeks. They were close to the projected landing site of the mysterious object, and Milo was hoping to spot it either today or tomorrow.
As he had done for the last few weeks, the chimpanzee academic ritually noted the landmarks, the geographical features, the evidence of ancient settlements hinted at in the eroded formations below. He mapped the abandoned roadways, unseen since the human wars that led to this wasteland long ago.
Milo suddenly wanted to be home, anywhere but here. The thought of being the first creature in centuries to see this once-thriving continent filled him with a palpable dread.
But he forced down the feeling and continued flying beyond a ridge of cliffs, where he came across an isolated lake. He flew over the top of the shallow, clear waters and saw a grey object the size of a house—a triangle of metal, like a giant spear tip under the water—less than fifty feet from land. Unlike the colossus Milo had seen back at the ocean shore, this object was free of moss, rust, or wear. It had not lain in the water for years. It might be the object from the sky.
Milo took a quick look around before landing, scanning for miles in every direction. There was no sign of life. He was the first one here, and so he breathed a sigh of relief.
He’d beaten the gorillas.
* * *
“It was a wall of fire, reaching up to the sky,” the gorilla soldier wailed, his eyes wide and darting around General Ursus’ office. His commanding officer was a giant gorilla, seated majestically behind his equally imposing desk, a permanent snarl frozen on his dark sinewy mouth. Ursus wore the buckled straps and ornate leather hat signifying his rank, which served to make him all the more impressive. Across the room, sitting in the alcove of a window, was Doctor Zaius, the smallish orangutan head of the Science Council, also wearing the trappings of his office, splendid orange robes and a golden chain.
