by Tom Hoffman
Orville directed his gaze toward the snowy peaks, the early morning light revealing the true ferocity of the winds tearing across the top of the mountains. His eyes traveled down the mountainous slopes to the foothills. “How are we supposed to climb a mountain with these crazy winds?”
Orville scanned the foothills, searching out possible routes for their ascent. “That’s weird. That big black rock doesn’t have any snow on it. It should be covered with snow.”
Sophia was sleeping, and Proto was in the tent reading one of the many books he’d brought with him. Orville buttoned up his winter coat and pulled the hood tight, curious about the peculiar black rock. As he slogged through the deep snow, he was once again reminded that things are seldom what they appear to be.
“It’s not a big black rock at all, it’s the entrance to a cave.” He groaned to himself. “I hate caves, especially ones filled with hungry snow bears. One quick peek, then I’ll head back.” A powerful sphere of defense popped up around him.
Orville approached the cave cautiously, listening closely for growling or slithering or the sound of snapping teeth. He crept up to the side of the entrance, peering around the rocks into the shadowy interior. The first ten feet of the cave was covered with windblown snow, beyond that lay dark and nebulous shadows. He sent an orb of light into the cave.
“It’s Tectar’s outer hull!” Orville stepped into the cave, his eyes on the pale green floor. He scrunched down and ran his paw across the smooth cool surface of the planet. “I can’t believe they built a whole world out of Morsennium. It looks brand new, not a scratch on it. I wish I knew what happened to all the Thaumatarians who came here.”
Orville pressed forward, deeper into the cave. “What is that?” He had spotted two glowing lights, one violet and one yellow. “It could be another airlock. Whoa, there could be a tunnel running under the mountain range!” Orville darted toward the lights, imagining Sophia’s expression when he told her he’d found a secret hidden passage beneath the mountains.
Orville was correct, the two small lights belonged to an airlock identical to the one they had used to reach the surface of Tectar. He tapped the violet light and a six foot wide transparent cylinder telescoped up from the floor, the door sliding silently open.
“I should go tell Sophia and Proto about this.” He looked back through the cave entrance to their distant campsite. He could make out the tent, but saw no sign of either Sophia or Proto. Orville studied the lift, weighing his next move.
“Creekers!” On the rocky wall next to the airlock was a coiled snake carving. “Haukesworth Mouse was here!” Orville stepped into the cylinder and pressed the violet tab. The door whirred shut, the cylinder descending into Tectar.
Orville crept out of the airlock, scanning for danger, but found only silence. He was in an enormous brightly lit tunnel, a tunnel running directly to the east.
“Yes! A tunnel under the mountains! I can’t believe I found it! They should call me Orville the Explorer. Orville the Explorer, the daring mouse who discovered the ancient passage lying far below the mysterious Obex Mountains. Maybe I’ll call it Orville Tunnel.” Orville froze when he saw the vaporous form floating out of a doorway fifty feet down the tunnel. The strange blue cloud was drifting toward him. His insides turned to ice. “What is that thing? I think it’s looking at me!”
Orville turned and ran from the churning amorphous horror. He raced back toward the airlock, his pounding footsteps reverberating through the empty tunnel. When he slapped the violet tab the door made a painful whining noise, but did not open.
“No!! Open up! Open up!!” Orville pounded with all his might on the airlock door but it did not respond. When he glanced back at the formless blue monstrosity, an involuntary shriek burst from his lips. The shapeless mass was hovering only inches away from him.
“Don’t eat me! Or… whatever it is you do. Wait, sphere of defense!” He popped up a wall of energy around him. “I can’t believe I forgot my sphere of defense. Sophia would kill me.” The dense blue cloud had not advanced any further, roiling and churning directly in front of him.
“It’s not trying to eat me. Maybe it’s not alive. It could just be some weird blue cloud, a weird blue cloud that stares at mice and follows them around.”
Orville had a sudden and remarkable flash of insight. He knew what the terrifying miasma was. He had been thrown off by its size, not recognizing it for what it was, nothing more than a thought cloud. Granted, it was an enormous thought cloud, a gargantuan one, the biggest one he’d ever seen, but at least now he knew it wasn’t going to eat him.
“Whoa, not even the Thirteenth Monk could create a cloud like this one. Maybe I can control it.” He focused on the thought cloud, imagining it floating away from him, back down the hallway.
“It works! I can move it around like a regular thought cloud. That’s not so scary.” He pulled the cloud back until it was hovering several yards away from him.
“I wonder whose thought cloud it is, and why it’s so big? I could draw it to me and find out what’s in it, but that’s kind of scary. Suppose it’s some creepy monster’s thought that turns me into a big moaning ghoul.” Orville burst out laughing, imagining himself returning to the campsite as a big green ghoul, chasing Sophia and Proto around the tent, tromping after them with big green clawed feet and burning yellow eyes.
“Okay, there’s no way that’s going to happen. It’s probably just some old thought that’s been floating around here for centuries. It came out of that doorway down the hall. I should see what’s in there, maybe there’s more thought clouds, maybe some little ones that aren’t so scary.”
Orville stepped around the blue cloud, walking toward the open doorway. When he peered into the room he gave a start, his eyes widening. “Creekers!!” Lying on the floor was a creepy old skeleton wearing a tattered, partially disintegrated gray uniform. Orville tried to calm his racing heart. He’d seen skeletons before. It was okay, just an old skeleton, a pile of bones. It wasn’t going to jump up, grab his neck with its bony paws and choke the life out of him. Unghh, bad thought, why did he think of things like that?? He forced himself to push his fear aside, just as Sophia had taught him.
“All right, the skeleton has to be a Thaumatarian. It has the same basic bone structure as a rabbit, and it’s only four feet tall, just like Copo. I wonder how he got here?” Orville noticed a small round silver pin attached to the gray uniform. “This is a good clue, it’s the same symbol we saw above the museum door. Maybe this was one of the engineers who built Tectar. Whoa, he could have been in that show we saw.” Orville gingerly removed the pin from the skeleton’s ragged uniform. “I wish I knew what the little symbol inside the circle meant.”
Orville was studying the silver pin as he stepped out of the room. He didn’t notice the enormous blue thought cloud until it was too late. He walked directly into it, gave a low groan and sank to the floor, his eyes closing as he fell.
Chapter 27
Chief Master Orville
Orville was gone before he hit the floor. As a shaper, he had drawn thousands of thought clouds to him and had a good idea of what to expect when they entered his mind. He knew what Sophia’s thoughts felt like, he knew that Master Marloh’s thoughts possessed slightly more power, and nothing compared to the power of the Thirteenth Monk’s thoughts. Nothing until his encounter with this thought.
Orville was staring at a group of gray uniformed rabbits huddled in whispered conversation at the end of a stark pale yellow room. It was a peculiar feeling, both knowing and not knowing who they were. He had no idea how he knew this, but he was looking at a group of Thaumatarian engineers, and he was the Chief Master. He looked down at his body. He wore a gray uniform with a round silver pin attached to the front pocket, the pin designating him as Chief Master Engineer of Tectar.
Orville eyed the engineers, a flurry of thoughts whirling through his mind. “This is weird. Okay, I need to use logic, just like Sophia does. I walked into the blue t
hought cloud, but instead of the thought cloud being absorbed by me, my awareness was pulled into the thought cloud, and now I’m experiencing the life of an ancient Tectarian engineer. That’s whose skeleton I found. That’s creepy, I’m walking around in a dead Thaumatarian’s skeleton. Wait, this is just like when I wore the memory ring on Varmoran. I’m experiencing an event from his life. Maybe it’s something he wanted me to see, something the universe wants me to see.”
Orville watched himself as he strode toward to the group of engineers. A few of them looked up. He turned to face a tall engineer, an old and trusted friend. “What do you have?”
“Our only chance is to create a habitable surface environment for the population.”
“They’re not going to go up. They feel safe down here. Safe from the asteroids.”
“It’s either that or…”
Orville gave a long sigh. “He’s out of control. He’ll destroy us all if we don’t do something and do it quickly. If we’re caught, it’s a death sentence for all of us.”
One of the engineers raised his paw. “The number of asteroid impacts has been decreasing every year, each time we pass through the field. There weren’t any strikes last year. We have mountains and rivers and something resembling an ocean.”
“What about the atmosphere?”
“Not quite enough to support life, but we’re close. We have a plan. It requires the use of a Mark XVII Distortion Thruster.”
Orville eyed the engineer. “That’s not going to be easy.”
“Who better than us to allocate one?”
“How much water will it take? How long?”
“That’s the beauty of it, we don’t use water.”
“Wait, you’re not thinking of–“
“It’s the only way to get it done quickly.”
Orville ran his paw over his chin, deep in thought. “We need to think about this. It could go very wrong. We might not have time, you do realize that?”
“What other choice do we have?”
“How do we get everyone up to the surface?”
“We make it impossible for them to stay down here.”
“How?”
“Trobesium tactate vapor.”
“The automatons aren’t going to like that.”
“They’ll recover.”
“After a hundred years or so. You’re right though, we don’t have the luxury of time. Using the Mark XVII carries a high degree of risk. How long to produce a sustainable atmosphere?”
“A week at most. Trobesium vapor will clear out the population in a few days. They won’t have any choice. We’ll do one sector at a time, starting with 113.”
“What about the Consul? He’ll know we’re the only ones capable of conducting an operation like this. He has a lot of followers.”
The engineer gave Orville a grim look. “It’s being handled. You don’t need to know about it.”
Orville nodded. “I hope we’re doing the right thing. They’ll be without tech. No automatons, no comms, no engines, no plantonium converters.”
“No one knows what happened back on Thaumatar. Everyone is gone. Everyone. How do you explain that? It had to be something the big rabs were working on, something that went wrong. That’s where technology has taken us. More tech isn’t the answer, less tech is. We’ll be giving them a fresh start. Maybe this time they’ll get it right.”
“Go ahead with your plans. We’ll let the history books decide whether we were right or wrong.”
Orville turned and strode out of the room. He headed down the long hallway toward the tunnel entrance. It was time for the second part of his plan, the part the other engineers knew nothing about, the part which would save their lives. Orville felt queasy. He knew what came next and there was nothing he could do to stop it.
He stepped into the small room near the tunnel entrance and took a seat. He wouldn’t have to wait very long. He was remembering the day he had decided to become an engineer when he heard the footsteps. All his fear vanished. He knew enough about deep physics to know there was more to life than this world, more to a rabbit than its physical body.
The rabbit who entered the room wore a dark green cape and a furious scowl. “Did you think we were stupid, that we wouldn’t discover your treasonous scheme? We found your papers, we know all about your pitiful little plan, the plan the other engineers all laughed at. How does it feel to know you failed, to know you lost, to know I won?”
The smile that appeared on the Chief Master’s face filled the Consul with a blinding rage. He would suffer many insults, but to be laughed at was not one of them. Orville knew why the Chief Master smiled. He had seen through the Consul’s mask of rage to the desperate fear hidden beneath it, seen through to the terrible aching emptiness the Consul could never fill, no matter how powerful he became, no matter how many rabbits feared and obeyed him.
The Consul pulled a silver cylinder from his pocket, pointing it at the Chief Master Engineer. There was a brilliant flash of purple light and a terrible pain shot through Orville’s chest. As he was falling he let go of his world, let go of his thoughts, merging with his true inner self. His last act on Tectar was to send a powerful thought cloud into the world, knowing that one day a young shaper named Orville Wellington Mouse would find it.
“ORVILLE!” Sophia screamed, racing down the long corridor. She blinked the last hundred feet, appearing in a flash of light next to Orville. He was unconscious but still breathing. She grabbed his arms, dragging him out of the blue thought cloud. “What did you do?? Why did you come down here??” She pressed her paw against his chest, sensing his vital signs. He hadn’t been injured. She put her arms around him. “Orville, wake up! It’s time to wake up! You need to come back to us. Please, Orville!”
Orville let out a low moan. “Unhh…what? He killed me. I can’t believe he really killed me. Who does something like that?”
“No one killed you, you’re fine. You need to wake up.”
“The other engineers? Are they okay? Did the plan work?”
Sophia glanced at the swirling blue thought cloud. She’d never seen one like it. “Orville, it’s me, Sophia.”
“Sophia? Wait…umm… I was… I found a tunnel that goes under the Obex Mountains.”
“I know you did.” Sophia kissed Orville.
“What was that for?”
“You scared me. I was afraid I’d lost you. We need to go. Proto saw an entire village appear out of nowhere. Things are getting worse.”
Chapter 28
Under the Mountain
Orville had a silly grin plastered across his face as they strolled down the long tunnel. “You didn’t know where I was, and when you found me you were so glad to see me that you kissed me? So, if I ran off and hid for an hour, then came back, you’d–”
“I’d pound your arm till it turned purple, that’s what I’d do. Tell me about the Chief Master Engineer. You said they were trying to get all the passengers up to the surface of Tectar, to live there. Why was that so important?”
“After they lost all contact with Thaumatar, everything changed. Over time their Consul assumed more and more power, until he had become nothing more than a ruthless dictator, killing anyone who opposed him. If the engineers could move everyone up to the surface, the population could scatter to the four winds and the Consul would lose his control over them.”
“You said the Chief Master Engineer sacrificed his own life to protect the other engineers?”
“He planted information he knew the Consul would find, papers revealing him as the sole conspirator of a treasonous but fictitious plot. He made it clear the other engineers wanted no part of his treacherous plan. I was there when the Consul killed him. It was awful.”
“I can’t imagine what that must have been like. There must be some reason why the universe sent you down here to find the Chief Master Engineer’s thought cloud. You’re certain he knew you would be the one to find it?”
“I’m sure of it. As he was falli
ng, he merged with his inner self. I was a little disoriented, but he said my name, said I would be the one to find his thought cloud.”
“I’ve never seen anything like this, it’s incredible he knew you would find it. I don’t know why you were brought here, but you were. All we can do now is continue on and let the events unfold.”
The three adventurers pressed eastward through the tunnel beneath the Obex Mountains, the corridor illuminated by a warm ambient light emanating from the walls and ceiling. Other than the curious lighting and the tunnel’s vast dimensions, the structure was relatively unremarkable.
“There’s another door, a big one. I’m going to see what’s in there. Maybe the room is filled with giant boxes of gold coins. It would be okay to keep them because we didn’t shape them, we just found them.”
Sophia looked at him curiously. “What would you do with a giant chest of gold coins?”
“I’d buy stuff. Anything I wanted.”
“What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know, just stuff. I’d get Papa and Mum a lot of nice things, maybe a big house, and I’d probably get a really nice adventurers hat. One like Haukesworth’s.” Orville took off the hat and held it up for Sophia to see. “It has the really long purple feather. Probably very expensive.”
“You’re saying you’d use your giant chest of gold coins to buy a new hat?”
“What’s wrong with that? Every adventurer needs a snappy looking hat. I hope there’s tons of gold.” Orville dashed down the corridor and slapped the purple tab. The door whirred open, the interior lights blinking on. “Whoa! What is that thing? It has seats but no wheels.”
Proto peered into the room, a grin appearing on his face. “I think you’re going to like this.” He stepped over to the oval shaped craft, reaching in and tapping a grid of disks on the control console. The sparkling blue metallic vehicle rose six inches off the ground, hovering silently. “I believe this will prove to be far more useful than a crate of gold coins.”
