by Martha Wells
“All right. I got this. Mostly.”
Gavin touched the controls, managed to move the plane, rock it along on its wheels, veer it to the right, away from the direction of the fire and the sea. Then he gunned it. It rolled and slid on the ice. As they rattled forward on the slick surface, it seemed as if the plane might come apart.
But there were worse things happening. They saw it coming across the ice, the star-heads united into one fat star-head, a hunk of dark meat coated in sun-glimmered slime with pulsing bladders and thrashing tentacles. Somehow it had found them, heard them perhaps, seen the fire. It was directly in their path.
“Ah hell,” Gavin said.
He worked the controls, turned the plane a little, moving to the left of the creature.
Now Gavin turned again, placing the creature at the rear of the plane. The plane slipped and wobbled, but continued to rush over the ice.
“I forget how to lift,” Gavin said.
“What?”
“I forget how to lift off. Damn. I just read it.”
Amelia grabbed the manual. “All right, let me see… No that’s how to land.”
“The ice ends.”
“What?”
Amelia looked up. The ice sheet had a drop off, and the drop off was jagged and deep.
“Turn,” she said. “Turn the goddamn plane.”
Gavin turned to his left, the wheels managing to stay on the ice, but not without sliding. They could see the creature again from this position, out the side window. It was rising up and smashing down on the ice, throwing up crushed sparkles like fragments of shattered glass, then it inched forward with the flexibility of a caterpillar, rising up again, smashing down, repeating the method, traveling at surprising speed. The plane was moving away from it, though, gaining speed and gaining space.
“Okay. The throttle,” Amelia said. “Listen to me, now. Do what I say.”
Slowly and loudly she read out the instruction booklet. Gavin following them as well as he understood them, the machine lifting up, then coming down on the wheels, bouncing, slipping, yet moving forward. Not too distantly in front of them were large snowbanks.
“It’s now or never,” Gavin said.
Amelia read from the manual, and Gavin, listening intently, did as he was told, trying to be careful about it, trying to cause the plane to rise.
The plane jumped up into the frosty air like a flame-red moth, into the richly dripping sunlight. Below, the white face of the earth shimmered and the montage monster hastened across it, lifted its great starred head toward the vanishing plane, its shadow falling down behind it to lie dark on the ice. It cried out loud enough to be heard even inside the speeding plane, then the beast fell apart. The creatures from which it had been constructed came unstuck and collapsed against the ice, their multitude of shadows falling with them.
The plane sailed on.
For a time, Amelia and Gavin coasted in the sun-rich sky, over the ice, toward a green haze drifting above jagged mountain peaks.
Gavin tipped the wheel, the nose lifted, and the plane sailed up. When he was as high as he felt he could comfortably go, he leveled out. The mist, white and foamy as mad-dog froth, parted gently. Below them were wet mountaintops, and straight before them were higher mountains tipped by clouds. To the right of those peaks was a V-shaped gap.
“There,” Amelia said, pointing at the gap. “Go there.”
“You know I don’t really know how to fly, right?”
“You know enough,” Amelia said. “You learned more from your dad than you thought, and that manual. We’re up here, aren’t we? Go there.”
Gavin tilted the plane to the right, then settled it, set a nose-aligned course for the gap in the mountains. Shortly, they were in the center of the gap, mountains on either side of them. When they came to the other side there was a valley of ice and snow, and far to the left there was the darkness of the great waters. Directly before them were more mountains, and above those a green mist shimmered with sunlight. They saw something on the ice directly below them that took their breath away.
There were spires, golden and silver, and what could have been thick glass or ice, great structural rises of wicked geometry. Littered before the structures, in a kind of avenue, were what looked to be white humps of stones.
“My god,” Gavin said. “A city. The place is enormous.”
“How could those things build this?”
“Most likely they didn’t,” Gavin said. “But whoever built it, built it while drunk.”
And on and on the city stretched, toward the blue-black mountains tipped by what looked like a green fungus.
As they neared them, Amelia felt as if a great presence was moving behind the sky and sliding down and into her thoughts. It was the same as during her sleep in the plane, but more intense. In fact, it was painful, even nauseating. She felt stuffed with thought and information she couldn’t define.
They flew above the irregular city, watching with awe. When they finally passed over it and the rocky avenue, Gavin turned the plane for a return pass, and when he did, the plane coughed, sputtered, and started going down.
“Out of fuel,” Gavin said.
“Priceless,” Amelia said.
“I’ll try and glide it.”
There was a stretch of ice beyond the avenue, and as the plane began to spit and sputter and hurry down, Gavin leveled it, cruised over the avenue toward the ice. It was not a perfect plan, but they were less likely to catch the wheels in the rocks and flip.
Gavin said, “I’m pretty sure I can land it.” His hands trembled at the controls.
“No doubt, one way or another you will,” Amelia said.
The plane’s engines sputtered and died.
Gavin did his best to glide it down and smooth it out for a landing, but the plane was moving fast and he was uncertain what to do. Amelia read frantically aloud from the instruction manual. She was reading it when they came within twenty feet of the ice. She stopped reading then. There was nothing else left to say, and no time to say it.
The plane came down on the ice and the wheels touched. The plane bounced, way up, then back down, went into a sideways skid, and then Gavin lost control and the nose dipped and hit the ice, and the plane spun and started coming apart.
The cold brought Amelia around. She could see the sky. It was odd, that sky. She thought she was seeing reflections off the ice, but instead she was looking as through a transparent wall. She could see people walking, riding horses, clattering about in wagons, cars of all eras driving, boats sailing and planes flying. There was depth to her view. People stacked on top of one another as they walked, drove, flew, or sailed. People floated by, sleeping in their beds, and there were the star-head things, and monstrous, unidentifiable visions, and all the images collided and passed through one another like ghosts. She was flooded with the soul-crushing realization that she was less than a speck of dust in the cosmos. The knowledge of her insignificance in the chaotic universe overwhelmed her with sadness and self-pity. Whatever was out there not only had a physical presence, it had a powerful presence in her unconscious, a place where it revealed itself more and more.
She awoke with something warm and wet running down her face. She lifted her hand and opened her eyes. She saw blood was on her gloved fingers. There were tears in her eyes. She touched the wound on her head. Not bad she determined, a scrape.
The sensation passed. She tried to sit up, only to realize she was in the plane seat, and it was lying with its back on the ice, and she was lying in it. It had come free of the plane and she was sliding along the ice with it.
She rolled out of the chair, put her gloved hands on the ice, got her knees under her and stood up. She wobbled. There was wreckage strewn across the ice. There was a vast churn of rising black smoke. Gavin came walking out of the smoke and into the clear carrying the axe he had taken from the ship, and now recovered from the wreckage of the plane. His face was bloody and blackened from smoke, he had a limp, b
ut he was alive.
As they came together and embraced, Gavin said, “Told you I could land it.”
They both laughed. It was a hearty laugh, a bit insane really.
“What now?” Amelia said.
“I think we have no other choice than the city. Out here we’ll freeze. The wind is picking up, and it’s damp, so if nothing else we have to get out of the wind.”
“It’s chancy.”
“So is being out here. No shelter. No food. No plane.”
They looked toward one of the buildings, a scrambled design of spires and humps, silver and gold, or so it had seemed from the sky. Now they could see that the light had played on it in a peculiar way, giving it a sheen of colors it did not entirely possess.
“Very well, then,” Amelia said, and holding hands they started toward the structures.
They came to the rocky, white road, discovered the lumps were not stones, but skulls and bones, all of the skeletal parts pushed into the ice by time. There were animal skulls and bones amidst human bones and skulls, long and narrow skulls, wide and flat skulls, vertebrae of all manner were in the bone piles, many impossible to identify, some huge and dinosaur-like.
Amelia glanced at the city buildings, which stretched to one side as far as the eye could see, and to the other until they reached the sea. She stared at the building before them, saw it was connected to others by random design. It was hard to figure a pattern.
The wind whistled and hit them like a scythe of ice.
“You’re right,“ she said. “We have to go inside.”
They made their way inside the city.
It was warmer inside. No wind, and there seemed to be a source of heat. They didn’t notice that until they were well inside and found the path beneath the structure divided and twisted into a multitude of narrow avenues, like a maze. The floor was smooth, but not slick, and the walls were the same.
Gavin marked the walls with the axe as they went, forming a Hansel and Gretel escape path. Soon they unwound their scarves and let them hang, they removed their gloves and stuffed them in coat pockets and loosed the top buttons on their shirts. It was comfortably warm.
They were eventually overtaken by exhaustion. Amelia said, “We should rest while we have the opportunity. I think I may be more banged-up than I first realized.”
“We don’t know what’s inside this place,” Gavin said.
“We know that right this minute we are okay. There is nothing more we can know in this place, and I don’t know about you, but being in the cold, flying in an airplane with an untrained pilot, crash landing on the ice, has tuckered me a little.”
Gavin chuckled. “Yeah. I’m pretty worn.”
They stopped and leaned against the wall, stuck their feet out. The warmth inside the structure was pleasurable. It was like a nice down blanket, though there was a faint foul smell.
“I had this vision, of sorts,” Amelia said. “Or maybe I actually saw something.”
“Vision? Worlds and animals and people and things stacked on one another, flowing through one another. A feeling of… miasma.”
“You too?”
“Yeah. I don’t know what I was seeing exactly, but when I awoke it was in my head. I feel better awake than asleep, like out here I can see what is happening, but inside of my dreams I can feel what is happening, and it’s worse.”
“Like a truth was trying to be revealed?”
“Yeah,” Gavin said. “Like that, and it was like my primitive brain understood it, but my logical brain couldn’t wrap itself around it. Like the answer was in sight, but on a shelf too high for my mind to reach.”
“Oh, I think I know. I think you know. Our minds know what’s there on that shelf now, they just don’t want to reach up and take hold of it. Don’t want to know that truth. You see, Gavin, I think we saw a glimpse of the in-betweens.”
“In-betweens?” he said, but she could tell it was mostly a rhetorical question. He knew exactly what she was talking about. She could see it in his eyes.
“Talking out loud,” she said, “it’s like finding a footstool and being able to reach that high shelf. What if there’s a crack in our subconscious that allows us, from time to time, to slip from what we perceive as our own life, into a nightmare of sorts. One that’s real. Not dream logic altogether, but a real place that we perceive as a nightmare, but sometimes it’s more than that. A dimensional hole, like you suggested. We sometimes pass through it, like the people and things you saw in your dream. Not by choice, but by chance. The hole is there, and the right dream and the right time, well, we fall through. Or we’re pulled through.”
“Yeah,” Gavin said, picking up where she left off, really feeling it now. “We get pulled in. Our world, the one where we’re lying in bed, is now the dream, and we can’t get back. The hole closes, or we just can’t find it. Maybe on our old world, we’re one of those who unexpectedly dies in their sleep. But what is us now, the us in this dimension, we stay here and experience whatever it is we find here, and our other self truly dies. We have left the building back home, so to speak.”
“Exactly,” Amelia said. “The things that people see in nightmares, monsters. Perhaps they really see them. At a distance sometimes. See them, and then the dreamer slides back to where they belong. Sometimes they don’t. And perhaps, sometimes it works the other way. What’s on the other side seeps into our world like a kind of cosmic sewage.”
Gavin interrupted her before she could speak another word.
“And us, and all the people on the ship, the others who came here, the pilot of the plane, we all fell through the same hole. We were having different dreams, but we all fell through, and then we were all having a similar dream. Some of us dreamed of a ship, and we all were on board, and the dream ship slipped through. Same for the plane, the other ships, and dog sleds. Say someone was traveling over the ice, an explorer for example, pulled by sled dogs, and that night he makes his tent and he dreams. Dreams himself into another dimension, this dimension, and the dogs go with him. Imagination becomes flesh and blood because he and his dream have passed through that dimensional hole. We’ve collectively dreamed ourselves into another reality. We’ve fallen into our subconscious and we can’t get out. We have all found the same pit on the other side of the hole.”
Amelia was silent for a long time before she spoke.
“As much as it can be explained, that’s it. I feel it in my bones. Whatever is here in this horrid world is not just those star-heads, but something else of greater intelligence. Something that stands here waiting at the hole in our dreams, waiting for something or someone to slip through.”
“To what purpose?”
Amelia reflected a moment, then, “It’s like we’re experiencing some eternal truth, and the horrid thing about it is, it’s nothing wonderful. It’s merely a place where we go and suffer. A sort of hell inside the mind that becomes solid. The Christian hell may not be Christian, but it may not be myth. And in our case, it’s not fire on the other side, but ice.”
“Maybe we can dream ourselves out,” Gavin said.
“Do you feel that you can?”
Gavin shook his head. “No. I feel the gap to the other side has winked closed, and dreaming doesn’t open it. Dreaming just makes you susceptible when the gap is open, is my guess. Dreaming here you just get tapped into by this intelligence, as you called it. It wants us, for whatever reason, but the reason isn’t reasonable.”
Amelia laughed. “That makes no sense.”
“Because it isn’t within our concept of logic. It wants what we can’t understand. Things that would make no sense whatsoever to us. It feels hopeless.”
“It’s giving us the knowledge it wants us to have,” Amelia said. “And only because it’s a knowledge that fills us with defeat. And here’s another thing, who says that knowledge is real? That may be part of its powers. It effects the mind, lets you imagine what it wants you to imagine. You can control it to a certain extent, but the closer you are
to it, and we must be right on top of it, the stronger that power is. We have to decide not to let it defeat us with negative thoughts and uncomfortable revelations, because they may all be projection, and not reality.”
“All right,” Gavin said. “All right. We won’t let it win.”
They rested a while, and without meaning to, they slept. It came over them as if they had been drugged. They fought it but it won, and they dreamed. A dream of great darkness rising up to overwhelm them, swallow them down and take them away, chewing up flesh and sucking out souls, their little sparks of life force being sucked away into some horrid eternity even worse than where they were.
When they awoke, they saw no remedy to their problem other than to explore, plotting together to see if they could find and kill this thing that was wiggling in their brains. That was the plan. They would kill it. They had a gun and an axe, and Gavin still had the flare gun and flares in his coat pocket. They had something to fight with, and that meant they had a chance.
There was an array of irregular pathways that twisted and turned, and there were spears of light coming in through gaps in the structure, and the sunlight lit the halls and walls with enough intermittent illumination they could see clearly. They chose one of the pathways and followed it. It became narrow and low, and to exit it, they had to crawl on their hands and knees for some distance before it opened into a larger chamber. A smell like all the death and rot that had ever occurred wafted toward them in a hot, sticky stench. Gavin was overwhelmed by it, and threw up against the wall.
“Might want to step around that,” he said, wiping his mouth.
“May have some to add to it,” Amelia said.
They pulled their scarves around their noses and mouths and kept going. The chamber went wide, and then it went small. The stink intensified. They came to narrow halls again, and they kept going, not searching for anything in particular, but searching.
They arrived at a great drop off, wide and deep and full of stink, lit by cracks of light from above. Hanging over the pit, fastened there by a scarf to what looked like a dry hose running above her, was a woman. She was wearing khaki pants and a leather jacket. She wore pilot gear, goggles pushed up on her head, and tight on her skull was a leather cap with ear flaps. Her skin was yellow, and her neck was long. The meat was beginning to rot, speeded up by the hot stink rising from the pit beneath her. Her feet dangled over the great and stinking pit, and one boot was slipping free of her rotting flesh, soon to fall into the pit below.
