Unless the trees down there are brown and tan, it’s not going to be a fun place to visit.
“Skipper,” Brent said, “maneuver to separation attitude ready at three plus oh five plus oh three.”
Punching his own numbers into the terminal in front of him, Maddox replied, “I read completion of maneuver at three-twenty-oh-niner…” He paused. “…and separation three plus fifteen hundred.”
“Aye, Skipper,” Brent acknowledged. Metallic clamps released. Resounding echoes penetrated the cabin. Brent began priming the secondary thrusters. Like its predecessor, Liberty 2 was modular, allowing for a variety of mission configurations without requiring the crew to leave the cockpit. The command capsule had a lander component attached in the rear. With the flick of a switch the shuttle, the command capsule, and the lander would disengage, leaving the bulk of Liberty 2 behind to await their return. “All booster functions are proceeding normally,” he continued. “The sequencing is in good shape. Standing by for the burn.”
Maddox stopped him. “Hold burn. Confirm the pitch gimbal motor number four is disabled. I read a questionable indication on the ECS on pitch one.”
Brent looked over the Environmental Control Subsystem display. All indicators looked good to him. For whatever reason, Maddox was stalling.
“ECS in the green, Skipper.”
With a heavy breath, Maddox finally gave the order.
“Go.”
Brent fired the shuttle thrusters. She slid deftly from her berth. The arrow-headed bird glided into low orbit and toward atmospheric entry.
Yet Brent couldn’t get his mind off the chronometer. While the skipper was content to let it blink zeroes forever, he wasn’t. As they approached the atmosphere, Brent quietly disconnected the main transfer circuit and rerouted power from the secondary line. Instantly the numbers on its face leapt to life, climbing at an incredible rate.
No…
It can’t be.
It just can’t.
Outside, the belly of the ship took on the pale orange glow of re-entry.
Lazenbe lied.
“Skipper,” he said. “You should have a look at th—”
BOOM!
* * *
Metal twisted as ceramic tiles danced into view. Something had slammed into Liberty 2, fast and hard.
That something was Oosa—USA-33. The errant satellite had met her end head-on. With the collision, Liberty 2’s chronometer stopped climbing—but the crew had bigger issues to address. The strike had sheared off the shuttle’s right wing.
Nearby, Liberty 2 dove into the planet’s atmosphere, spiraling toward oblivion.
CHAPTER 2
TRAPPED IN THE FORBIDDEN ZONE
Ape shall not kill ape.
It was the Lawgiver’s first testament.
However…
Ape could—and had, on occasion—make ape disappear in the night.
That addendum weighed heavily on Security Chief Cerek’s shoulders. It wasn’t the words of the Lawgiver. It was an unwritten rule among the ape establishment. True, there were executions, but they were few and far between and any citizen found guilty of so severe a crime was ceremonially stripped of his “ape” status by the clergy. The last words spoken to the damned were delivered by a minister.
“May the Lawgiver judge you kindly, for you are no ape.”
The newly appointed head of the Secret Security Police, Cerek was a godly gorilla. He attended all weekly ceremonies and said his prayers every night. The teachings of the Lawgiver had prompted him toward a life in law enforcement.
The enforcement of God’s will.
When he had achieved his goal, he had learned that some laws were meant to be bent. Much to his chagrin.
In truth, Ape City was supported by a relatively small constabulary. The much more substantial Secret Police were in fact no secret, and that was intentional. Hushed whispers and well-placed rumors ensured that the majority of apes remained law-abiding. No one wanted Cerek’s apes rapping on the door during dinner.
Fear kept the populace in line.
When Security Chief Marcus had been killed at the hands of a dirty human animal, Cerek had been tasked to take up the mantle. His first duty had been to close out any outstanding cases left by the previous administration. Clear out the jailhouses. Wipe the slate clean. For most offenders it had been a simple matter of letting them go with a slap on the wrist. For some it meant transfer to the Reef—Ape City’s island prison for thieves, apostates, adulterers, and assailants.
Then there were the prisoners in the wagon below him—the gorilla-chimp crossbreed called Mungwortt, and the orangutan elder Zao. These two were different. Their cases required special consideration. Both had seen a human speak and—for different reasons—neither was likely to keep quiet about it. They couldn’t just be thrown into prison. They could tell their story there just as easily as they could in the town square.
Nor could they be publicly tried. Given the chance to speak out. No, with either of these ways, word would spread. In Mungwortt’s case he was too stupid to keep his snaggle-toothed mouth shut. In Zao’s, he was too defiant. The elder also knew… other things. Dangerous things that those in power wished to suppress, lest Ape City and all of Simia be turned on its head.
Cerek didn’t know what those things were. He didn’t want to.
There are some things best left buried in the dark. A preacher had said that, long ago. It had left an impression on his young mind, and now, that was exactly what he intended to do. Bury his problems.
It was the pitch of night, and he and four of his officers rode the two prisoners to the outskirts of ape territory. They had passed over the border of the Forbidden Zone and were just beyond its boundaries. There were no stars. Instead, the only light came from torches affixed to the wagon, and the ever-constant soft luminousness of the horizon. Light that came from a place where there should be none.
The wagon stopped and the chief regarded the two apes as they were pulled down, then forced to stand straight. Burlap sacks obscured their features. Behind them yawned the blackness of a great pit. They were a strange duo—the retired orangutan a former council member of great stature, the half-breed a lowly sanitation worker. Unlikely ever to have come into more than fleeting contact, they were now condemned to a shared fate.
High atop the cliff face, mute scarecrows stood as shadows and mocked them, hardly visible in the flickering torchlight. Cerek nodded and the sacks were ripped away.
Zao winced, his eyes adjusting to the torches.
“So is that it, Cerek?” he asked, showing no fear. “Is this what happens to dissidents who disappear in the middle of the night?” His voice rising, Zao shook with fury. “You take them to the Forbidden Zone and leave them to the mercy of the desert?”
Cerek was stone-faced, cold. “Not exactly.” He pulled out a scroll and unrolled it, moving closer to a torch.
“Zao and Mungwortt,” he said in his official voice. “You have been found guilty of treason and blasphemy. Your crimes are speaking out against The Sacred Scrolls, and causing malicious mischief against the betterment of apekind. You have been sentenced to exile from Ape City.”
A dimwit to the end, Mungwortt simply tilted his head.
“Exile?” Zao queried. “Is that all?”
Cerek rolled up the parchment, raised his hand, and nodded to the guards who flanked the prisoners.
“May God and the Lawgiver both have mercy on your souls.”
The guards shoved.
The exiles fell. One of them let loose a grunt.
Most likely the idiot.
They were quickly gobbled up by the pitch. Cerek listened and heard the sound of bodies bouncing along the sides of the pit on the way down. To their credit, neither screamed. Finally, a wet crunch echoed in his ears, followed by silence. Still he listened.
Then, another sound.
Steady, rhythmic, and it didn’t come from the pit. It was behind them. An ape on horseback entered the
circle of light cast by the torches. Young, he was a gorilla messenger.
Army, Cerek mused, from the looks of him.
“I have ridden since morning,” the newcomer said. “I carry a message for Security Chief Cerek. The message comes from General Ursus himself.” He held out a scroll.
Cerek took it. The writing upon it seemed alive with licking torchlight. That light danced in Cerek’s eyes as well. When he finished he rolled the scroll and tucked it into his leather tunic. Facing the messenger, he nodded.
“Message received and understood.”
The courier reciprocated, spun his horse, and started back toward the north. Cerek addressed his men.
“We ride back at once.” He unhitched a horse from the wagon. “General Ursus has returned from the highlands.” He threw a saddle over the horse, pausing to regard the gaping hole into which the two exiles had been dumped. Only for a moment.
“There is much work to be done.”
* * *
A few days earlier
“How will you survive?” Lucius asked the talking human called Taylor.
“He won’t survive,” Dr. Zaius assured them. He decided to appeal to the mutant human one last time. “Do you know what kind of life awaits you out there, Taylor?” When the astronaut offered no response, the doctor continued. “That of an animal. If you aren’t eventually hunted down and killed by apes, some jungle beast will devour you.”
At that Taylor’s eyes lit up. “Then there is another jungle.”
The orangutan shrugged. He suspected there was, but had no proof one way or another. He decided to bait Taylor and see if the human would bite.
“Of course, you could return with us.” He dangled the hook. “Our society might find a place for you and your mate.”
“Sure,” Taylor scoffed. “In a cage.”
Zaius smirked. Any false softness that had been there was gone. His stare was penetrating.
“Where else but in a cage does man belong?”
* * *
Zaius let them go.
The gorilla soldiers descended and were ready to overtake the human and his mate, but with a wave of his hand he stopped them. That no longer concerned him. Whether killed here or in the Forbidden Zone, today or within a week’s time, Taylor could do no more damage. There was another matter, however, with which he had to deal. Swiftly.
Zaius addressed the squad leader, Aurelios.
“Lieutenant, fetch your explosives. We’re going to seal up the cave.”
“Yes, sir!” Aurelios and his apes rushed back to their cart. As he did so, the chimpanzee Cornelius scrambled to Zaius’s side.
“Seal the cave?”
Zaius was adamant. “That is correct,” he declared, turning back and forth to address both Cornelius and Zira. “And you will both stand trial for heresy.”
Without responding Cornelius turned back to peer at the cave, while Zira interjected. All of her fiancé’s work was about to be destroyed. The most important discovery in all of ape history. As an archeologist, he had to be devastated.
“But the proof!” she argued. “The doll!”
“In a few minutes there will be no doll.” Zaius shook his head. “There can’t be. I’m sorry.”
“Dr. Zaius!” Cornelius said urgently. “Dr. Zaius, you mustn’t! You promised!”
Zaius stared silently at the young chimp scientist. So full of vigor over his discovery. Full of conviction. As was I, he thought. So many years ago. Zaius sympathized, yet there were greater issues at stake. Finally, he replied.
“What I do, I do with no pleasure.” Lieutenant Aurelios approached Cornelius from behind, and Zaius gave the order. “Silence him!”
“Doctor—?” Cornelius said, only to be cut off as the gorillas dragged him away. Zira tried to rush to her fiancé’s side. Zaius stopped her, and she watched helplessly as the soldiers covered the archeologist’s mouth with a leather muzzle meant for humans. The doctor held her fast, peering into the distance where Taylor and Nova sat astride their horse, diminishing in size as they rode along the beach.
Then Lucius spoke.
“Dr. Zaius, this is inexcusable!” the young chimp protested. “Why must knowledge stand still?”
Zaius looked the lad over. Youth. He sighed. The chimp was too young to understand. Perhaps Lucius’s generation would find a new way to deal with that which had burned in the hearts of Zaius and his forefathers.
Perhaps. For now, however—under Zaius’s watch—the old ways would stand firm.
The young ape waved his hands.
“What about the future?” he pressed.
Zaius looked again toward the indistinct shape of man, woman, and horse. Waves lapped at their footprints, dissolving them in the surf. Soon there would be no trace they had ever even existed.
What about it, indeed, he mused. Zaius was certain he had done the right thing. “I may just have saved it for you.”
Zira was watching the retreating humans, too. “What will he find out there, Doctor?” she asked.
Having travelled that way decades ago, Zaius knew what lay ahead for Taylor.
If he truly is a man out of his time…
Zaius frowned. “His destiny.”
* * *
The present
Lucius sat alone, scribbling his thoughts. The young chimp was perched high upon Carrion Hill, grease pencil laboriously marking the parchment.
This is the truth eternal.
Whatever thinks, can speak.
And whatever speaks… can murder.
With dusk falling, the expedition team had stopped to raise camp at the foot of a sharp incline, the top of which was crowned by a trio of tall curved boulders. Carrion Hill was so named because those rocks looked almost like the ribcage of some ancient gigantic beast, sun-dried and turned to stone. It was a known marker within the Forbidden Zone, and coming across the hill had given the party a sense of relief.
The Zone itself had a way of turning an ape around, and it wasn’t uncommon for the curious and the foolish to find themselves wandering its wastes for weeks on end. Now, at least, they knew they were about half a day’s journey from Ape City.
At the base of the hill, four gorillas hastily assembled the one tent they had brought with them—the one in which Zaius himself would sleep. Others tended to the horses, while two more built a fire near a petrified tree that had died upright centuries ago, its arms forever raised in surrender to the harsh cruelty of the land. The earth here was dried and cracked and thirsty for water.
The camp lay in the creeping shadow of the three stone ribs. The setting sun cast a dazzling array of light between the massive monoliths.
Cornelius had been bound and gagged ever since the morning’s fiasco at the pit, but the orangutan Minister of Science hadn’t considered Zira or her nephew Lucius as a threat. He had allowed them to travel with the group on word of honor that they would not try to escape.
Footsteps crunched in the gravel and sand. Zaius climbed the hill, determined to make peace with the young chimpanzee at its zenith. Still preoccupied with his writings, Lucius almost didn’t notice the minister’s approach. As Zaius crested the hill, however, the chimp dropped the pencil and tucked the parchment into his sleeve.
“Doctor,” Lucius said without looking up. Zaius simply nodded and sat down on the rock next to the boy. He scanned the horizon. The desert floor had turned orange and purple as the sun fell beyond the mountains.
“Even out here, amongst all this death, there is beauty,” Zaius reflected.
Lucius looked to the same sky and nodded.
“I first found out about man when I was much younger than you,” Zaius continued. “My father took me out to the shoreline, not too far from the cave.” Zaius remembered the cracked ruins of that gargantuan statue. “He showed me what they had done to their own civilization, and told me then why we must never let the secret be told. Apekind would be thrown into chaos, and life as we know it would be irreparably changed.”
<
br /> Lucius crossed his arms and turned away. The sun finally gave up its gaudy display and sulked away below the horizon. Realizing his cause was hopeless, Zaius prepared to do the same.
“Very well,” the doctor said. He leaned forward, putting his weight on his cane before rising. At his feet lay the grease pencil.
“What is this?” Zaius demanded. Looking up, he noticed the hastily hidden scroll that jutted from Lucius’s sleeve. The orangutan grabbed the startled boy’s arm and snatched the parchment. Before the chimp could protest, Zaius was reading it. His eyes widened.
When the astronaut, Taylor, first came amongst us from a voyage in outermost space, he perceived that his ship had passed through a fold in the fourth dimension…
That dimension is time, and Taylor knew he had aged beyond the elapsed time of his voyage by two thousand years.
Taylor did not know the name of the strange planet on which he had set foot, where apes—risen to great estate—had acquired the power of tongues, while man—fallen from his zenith to become a beast of the earth—had lost the means of speech and was… ignorant.
“He may have once dominated this planet,” Zaius said, and he trembled, “but man has always been ignorant!” He lifted the parchment and waved it in accusation. “Taylor was nothing more than a mutant, do you understand?”
“This is for my personal journal,” Lucius insisted. “You have no right—”
Zaius crumpled the paper in his hands. “This is science fiction, not science fact!” Pointing at the chimpanzee, the doctor dropped his voice menacingly. “You’d best keep these mad ramblings to yourself, Lucius, or—”
“Or what?” Lucius spat, defiant. He motioned toward the cart below, where Cornelius was bound. “You’ll gag me, too?”
Zaius didn’t reply.
Gathering himself, the doctor sighed the boy’s name. “Lucius. I can forgive the vagaries of youth, but only so much. You are old enough to be tried as an adult, remember that. I’d hate to see you working in a labor force with your aunt and her fiancé.” He paused for effect. “Or hanging beside them.” Stuffing the scrunched parchment in his pocket, he turned and moved back toward the camp, speaking over his shoulder.
Death of the Planet of the Apes Page 3
