by F P Adriani
My black food box was on the floor where I’d left it; I grabbed the bag of crackers and the bottle of blue stuff. My orange suit contained a few sealable pockets on the legs and torso, so I stuck the bag of crackers and the bottle into them, my head slowly turning around the room as my eyes searched it. “Where’d Upal go?”
“Upal requires a lot of sleep,” Kostas said as her fingers adjusted one of the sleeves of her worksuit. “And we must get going on our journey now.”
She walked across the room fast, and I was frowning as I followed her toward where the outside of the mountain waited.
*
We continued rising.
Unfortunately, my crew and I did indeed lose the mind-link, and there was indeed inclement weather outside—like, really inclement, like, the winds-are-too-fucking-fast-for-safety inclement.
“What the hell is going on out here?” I finally asked, a lock of my hair flying into my mouth.
Kostas was on the step above mine, and the wind was whipping at her orange suit so hard from on the right that the fabric was plastered to her there and billowing on her other side. “Some of this is normal—these are the air currents in this part of this planet and in this dimension. The rest—the forces are part of the stone-process, and there’s other dimensional interference—”
“Well if it gets any stronger, we might fall off the side!” I said. And of course the “side” was increasingly getting higher and more dangerous—so high and so dangerous, I hadn’t been able to look over it in a long while. We had been walking for a much longer while. “We’ve been going up for forever now. When is the next level?” My head shot round to the others behind me, who were also struggling with the wind and who had taken to occasionally clinging onto each other as they climbed the stairs. Gary had moved up to the step behind me—to help Steve help Shirley, who really had been having a difficult time this whole trip.
“Maybe we should go inside for now,” Kostas said. “It will make the whole process even longer, but we will temporarily use one of the internal stairs.”
“Great idea,” I said in a sarcastic voice, my hair still whipping around my head.
Kostas moved to the left, but there was no doorway in the dark stone there; there was, however, a white dot on the stone. When she pushed the dot now, the stone around it simply dropped away into nothingness. She motioned for me to go inside.
“Let’s go!” I said as I rushed through the new doorway.
My crew followed me, and then the workers and Kostas came in behind us. The space we were now in wasn’t as big as Upal’s space, and there was more than one robed Keeper inside here.
Kostas said that we could rest for a few minutes; then she disappeared down a corridor with one of The Keepers.
Gary and I sat together against one of the stone walls, and Shirley, Steve, Chen and May did the same farther down the wall—and, strangely, several of the workers sat down in front of them. They all began talking—about what, I didn’t know. The workers never seemed to have much to say to anyone, except for Kostas….
I felt Gary touch my left hand; I turned my head and smiled at him. He leaned forward, his lips finally pressing to mine. We were both kind of dusty and our hair was a mess, but he felt nice and solid when I slid my hands up his arms to over his shoulders and kissed him back. His mouth was warm, and it started making me warm.
I pulled back a little, said in a low voice, “You know, I wish they could give us that mind-linking ability, and you and me could get it on then—I mean, like right now.”
Gary laughed, quite hard. A few of the others looked at us, but they were far enough away that they’d probably only heard his laugh and not what I’d said.
Gary rested back against the wall and pulled out one of those red crackers: I wasn’t the only one who’d saved the food from before.
I looked around the huge room, where The Keepers seemed to be busy doing nothing. A few of them removed their robes, and they looked over at me and my crew then. But I had grown slightly used to the discomforting Keeper appearance; maybe the mind-link had a more permanent effect than Kostas had indicated—or even knew herself.
Now that I had seen more than one naked Keeper, I realized that they hadn’t all been created the same. The ones in this room had a larger stature than Upal, and this group weren’t quite as open to me and my crew as Upal had been; if Keepers each had individual personalities, maybe their hive ways weren’t as hive-ish as they seemed. Or, possibly, though The Keepers were much more powerful than humans, working with humans on Rintu here had affected at least some of The Keepers.
I liked to think that Upal would remember me in future when he was going in and out of wherever he was going, though I knew I was probably wishfully thinking.
*
My crew and I weren’t in that room for long before Kostas and the other workers began guiding us up a narrow stairway; we walked up those steps for a while, till we reached another level, which looked similar to Upal’s level.
There were two Keepers here and they had to insert the firestone into some kind of polishing machine—at least when the stone came out of it, it was shining brighter than ever, so bright that my eyes had trouble looking right at it, glasses or not.
Kostas must have noticed my discomfort. “An important layer has been newly exposed after lying dormant for thousands of years. It will fade in intensity.”
“I hope so,” I said as I put the stone back into my belt pocket, at the urging of one of the Keepers and her strange, it’s-here-it’s-not-here arm.
“Now what?” I asked Kostas.
Gary was on my left and he suddenly—and loudly—yawned. “I don’t know what’s going on with me, but I’m rapidly running out of energy.”
Kostas exchanged a few glances with one of the Keepers. When Kostas’ dark eyes swept back my way, she said, “The process already got interrupted for too long when we left the outside before, and we are not quite where we need to be at this point. We must go to the next level shortly, because of the energy state of Rintu’s moons. After that, you can rest for a few hours.”
“But what about the storm?” I asked.
“It has died down,” Kostas said.
*
As soon as I stepped outside again, I thought that there was no way Kostas should ever get a job in weather forecasting: though the wind had died down some out here, a mist had begun slapping at the sides of the mountain. I still couldn’t look over the steep side, but even if I could bear looking, night had now fallen, so I probably wouldn’t have been able to see far.
Nevertheless, I could tell there was a new mistiness because of how wet the doorway I’d just walked through was. I gingerly stepped onto the wet platform outside the opening, but the stiff worksuit boots on my feet weren’t exactly a good match for damp stone; my footing was far too wobbly.
“We can’t safely walk up this!” I shouted through the misty wind.
Kostas was frowning when she walked out the doorway with Chen and Steve. Then she said, “We should be fine in the suits.”
“What are you—” I began, but I never finished asking her what she was smoking because the wind picked up behind me, and then I felt it push me aside as if I were a light leaf.
Screaming now, I crashed right into Chen, and then I felt my feet really sliding—along the platform to pull me right toward the edge and then over it till I was soaring through the wet black of the Rintu night….
*
I did not land where I thought I would land; in fact, I had no idea where I’d landed. I also had no idea how I was still goddamn alive.
I woke with my eyes closed and an intense heat pounding down on my face. My arms and legs were splayed out; I was on my back….
“Lydia…” I heard someone say.
I opened my eyes to find Chen staring down at me. He had tiny flecks of something red in his dark hair; his orange suit was torn, and he was sitting with his legs to one side, his left arm nursing his right. “Lydia, are you
all right?” he asked me through shaking lips.
My head felt like it was spinning in a lopsided way, but I managed to sit up more. “What happened—are you okay?”
“My forearm,” Chen said, a wavy expression around his mouth, which expression I now recognized as pain. “The sandy ground’s really soft here, but I must have hit my arm on the rocks over there because I woke up right near them. I’m pretty sure my arm’s broken.”
“Shit!” I said, fully sitting up as my eyes latched onto the arm he was nursing. His sleeve was torn there and I wanted to closely examine beneath it, but I was afraid that if I touched him, I would hurt him. “Did any bones break through?”
His head shook rapidly. “No, thankfully, but it still hurts like hell.”
“I’m so sorry, Chen—I’m sorry for everything.”
His head shook fast again, as if to say I shouldn’t worry. But then he told me, “I don’t know where the hell we are,” which of course did make me worry.
I turned my head and focused on our surroundings. The land here was covered in a red sandy soil, similar to Rintu’s landscape. But, the atmosphere here was more yellow than orange, and the land was rockier; nearby, behind Chen, a bunch of enormous red rocks lay scattered over the ground.
My body felt too stiff and a little achy, but I managed to rise to my feet to get an even better look around.
Then Chen said, “I woke up right before you. I wondered where everyone was, but I guess they’re just not here.”
I could have sworn I heard worry about May in his voice. They were still in the honeymoon phase of their marriage, and what a disaster this trek had been for them. I should have never agreed to their going up the mountain….
“Chen,” I said fast now, “do you feel something—like a vibration from the ground?”
A pause between us. Then he said in a low voice, “Yeah….”
An instant later, something small, fast and pale shot around the edge of one of the large red rocks, making both me and Chen jump. But, when the pale thing finally stopped nearby, I realized it was just a human—or maybe a humanoid would be more accurate. It had the features of a human child, except there was a bright blue ring around its red irises and a thumb on both sides of its two hands—and who knew what else might be different on the rest of its body, which was covered in a red jumper.
“Hello!” I said to it fast.
But there was only a barely detectable response, a small smile and a chirping sound, like from a bird—
A louder noise suddenly—a rumbling, and then something—someone came from around the same big rock and ran toward the pale little person.
But this someone looked like the complete antithesis—because this someone was HUGE.
Immediately I jumped backwards, and so did Chen, even though that jostling must have majorly hurt his arm.
However, I quickly realized that the huge red humanoid barreling toward us had really been barreling toward the little person. The bigger humanoid looked at me and Chen with its completely black eyes, then gently picked up the pale person in its huge hand, closing its six fingers around the little body, before finally continuing to run across the red sand.
Chen and I stared after them, both of us breathing hard in fear and shock.
“What the fuck were they?” Chen asked in a rush.
“I don’t know!” I said, unable to help the laugh that escaped from my lips. “Shit, what the hell is this place? It doesn’t feel right. We fell over the side on Rintu—”
“Yeah, but it seems we landed somewhere entirely different,” Chen said on a frustrated sigh.
*
In situations like the one I found myself in now, survival was the first order of business.
As soon as I recovered from the weird encounter with the even weirder humanoids, I asked Chen to let me see his right arm, and, going on the patchwork of bruising and degree of swelling I found there, it certainly looked broken.
We were lucky I hadn’t broken something too. We were very lucky we hadn’t died…or, for all I knew we were dead, and this was some weird kind of nirvana or heaven or something: we remained in that same area where we’d landed, and we periodically saw more creatures, though not necessarily humanoid ones. But, every creature we did see was very active and very boisterous, running across the red sand, playing or doing who knew what.
It seemed Chen and I had woken up in the middle of a damn highway in another dimension.
However we had arrived here, and wherever “here” was, Chen’s orange sleeve had been torn almost half the way off, so my two good arms and his one good arm now worked at tearing off the rest of his sleeve and making a crude sling with the material, which was no easy feat because the material was difficult to tear and tie.
We did the best we could to set his arm in a comfortable position in the sling. I tied the end of it to one of the tabs on his suit; then I told him to sit in the shade of the rocks.
I stood up and gazed around the area more; there was a lull in the “traffic,” so I used that time to try to visually locate water and plants we could live on, though who knew if anything here would be safe for us to consume.
Unfortunately, from where I was standing, I couldn’t see anything even resembling either water or plants. A full bottle of that blue liquid was thankfully still in my suit; so were most of my crackers, though they’d been crushed into bits inside the bag. Chen had told me that he had half a bottle of the liquid left in his suit, but the supply in both bottles wouldn’t last long—
I remembered my belt, which was still on my middle—unfortunately, it was either damaged or just incapable of working in wherever we now were, because when I repeatedly tried to turn on my belt’s scanning device and every other function, nothing happened.
I sighed, feeling sweat snaking along my scalp and down my neck; the sun above was an annoyingly hot presence. “I think we should drink a bit of the fluid. If our brains get too dehydrated, then we won’t be able to think straight.”
I walked over to Chen, and we removed our bottles and took some sips of the blue drink. For the first time, I realized that it was actually quite good-tasting; it had a delicate, sweet-and-sour aftertaste. But, I doubted the liquid would keep us hydrated for long.
I gazed around, with bare eyes: somewhere along the way here, both Chen and I had lost our glasses, not that the Rintu glasses would have necessarily shielded our eyes from this atmosphere….
I thought of the others; I had been avoiding thinking about them. For all I knew, they had fallen somewhere too and were now dead. Gary….
My heart seemed to collapse inside me and get lost in there. I felt both incredibly sad and incredibly numb. After all the things I’d seen and done in my life in space, would it amount to this—dying in some oddball place that would barely acknowledge my existence? The other creatures here—they did not seem to want to interact with either me or Chen, even while they seemed to be looking right at us.
“…Lydia, I’m feeling sleepy….”
My head spun toward Chen. “Do you think you hit your head when you fell—are you concussed?”
His head shook from side-to-side now, faster than I would have liked it to shake. “It’s just the heat.”
“Whatever—don’t move so fast. You need to rest. You might be in shock a little. Your break doesn’t look that bad, but a broken bone’s still a bad injury from the body’s perspective.”
His dark eyes were on my eyes. “Did you get anything…on your belt?”
Frowning, I slowly shook my head. But then I quickly straightened up more. “Stay right here. I’m going to look around, beyond the edge of the rocks, where everyone seems to be coming from.”
“Be careful,” Chen said as I walked away.
*
Because the “highway” had quieted so much, I took a chance that moving onto it now would be safer.
I carefully turned around the edge of that crop of big rocks, but not carefully enough: another massive creature
rushed out from beyond there and only just missed hitting me—or stomping on me. It had two tall blue legs and two big blue feet, and it seemed to almost lose its balance as it turned back around to look at me, its about-face instantly spewing a massive puff of dusty red dirt into the air around me.
But at least for the first time here, a lifeform seemed to really notice me. This one had a wide golden “face” made of two sets of two pale-blue eyeballs with white dots at the centers; the eyeballs were arranged in a square formation on a roundish golden body that looked like an egg on blue stilts. The creature’s high center of mass probably made its stances and motions unstable. But, its four eyes seemingly had no problem staring right down at me from its great height.
I tried smiling up at it, but the massive legs only slowly folded, till the egg-body was covering them and resting on the red ground.
“I’m looking for water!” I shouted toward the creature, though I couldn’t see anything on it that I’d call ears.
The creature looked perfectly content to just rest on the ground and stare at me.
I automatically tried broadening my smile, but that didn’t do anything to change my interaction with the creature either.
I sighed, wiping a hand across my sweaty forehead and glancing to my right at where the egg-being had come from. But the highway was so dusty and the sun so bright and hot—I just couldn’t see very far. If I kept walking that way, I’d have no way of seeing anything about to rush toward me. As it was now, I was a little too far in the road—what if something else ran out—
As if I were goddamn psychic, I heard a sharp growl, and then there was a rumbling, and then yet another massive creature charged out of the road’s red dust.
I screamed and jumped back toward the rocks. The big-egg-being quickly got up and oddly started running in place, sending more dust whipping into the air, which the roaring, running creature noticed. It came to a sharp stop; it looked like a giant, olive-green reptile from on Earth, but long, silky magenta hairs, similar to a horse’s mane, covered the back of the creature’s head and neck.
