by Steve Alten
For now, the only things that mattered were the chamber hatch, which I yanked open, Dharma, who I dragged inside, and Oscar, who squeezed in after us even as he slammed the vault door closed, sealing us in.
Releasing Dharma, I bent over, gasping. “Thanks, pal.”
Refusing my hand — and another attempt to convince him to help Dharma, Oscar entered the escape chamber and was gone.
Exhausted, I lay down on the tiled floor and stared at the flickering recessed lighting. ABE had logically concluded that Oscar had freed me from my cryogenic tomb. If that were true, then there was more at play here than our attempted symbiotic relationship … a line of inquiry that placed a spotlight on a questionable assumption: Was twelve million years a suitable amount of time for a sea creature to adapt to land?
I stared at the beautiful nude before me. In contrast to my American huntress, Dharma was small and supple, her body taut from a mastery of yoga.
“Well, Jason Sloan, at least your programming is getting more interesting.”
Spreading out the blanket, I bundled Dharma up, then carried her into the next chamber. Oscar was gone, having left the escape hatch open. Ducking through, I stepped outside, then placed the girl on the ground in order to reseal Oceanus behind me.
The late afternoon sun cast long shadows across the cooling sand. Slinging Dharma over my right shoulder, I followed Oscar’s tracks, four zigzagging impressions resembling a serpent’s trail leading southeast. Despite the flat landscape, the cephaloped was nowhere in sight, a fact that quickened my step.
I felt the vibrations before — a distant pounding — like a quarter horse approaching the first turn. As I quickened my pace the sound became louder, the source clearly locked in on my presence. I spun around to see what my Omega dream had conjured up this time.
“Holy shit.”
Words cannot adequately describe the animal chasing me. ABE told me it was seventy-five feet, but even half a mile away all I could see was the crocodile’s head, which was green over yellow and as big and wide as my first-grade elementary school. Four powerful legs churned the sand into dust clouds, which were beaten aside by its prodigious tail, the appendage lashing back and forth behind its thickly scaled frame.
Panic summoned ABE, and the bio-chip unleashed an ocean of adrenaline that momentarily rendered me a world-class sprinter, perhaps delaying the inevitable death-in-one-bite scenario by a few meaningless seconds.
And then I saw what appeared to be a second monster, two hundred yards ahead and to my right, a titanic female oozing postal truck — size eggs into a shallow crater it had excavated using its hindquarters.
MALE CROCODILIAN CONTACT IN FIFTEEN SECONDS. RUN TO THE FEMALE CROCODILE.
“Vanilla sway!”
THE MALE CROCODILIAN IS TRACKING ROBERT EISENBRAUN BY SCENT. DIVERT TO THE NEST.
Registering the earth-shaking wallops behind me, I cut hard to my right, heading straight for the mountain of olive-green scales that was seeding its young before me.
I was sixty yards away when the female’s head turned in my direction.
Fifty yards from her nest when Mama Croc spotted the approaching male.
At thirty yards I froze, and all hell broke loose.
Smaller than her male counterpart, the hissing female passed within ten feet of stomping me into vanilla swirl as she instinctively charged the perceived threat to her young. Dropping to the ground to avoid her swishing thirty-foot tail, I watched her bound away, then slid down the near side of the steep hole into the nest.
EISENBRAUN, LEAVE THE NEST!
But you just said—
LEAVE THE NEST! GET TO THE CLIFFS.
A bone-chilling male reptilian roar met the female’s sizzling hot hiss as I dragged Dharma over a landscape of gooey ivory boulders and out the other side of the nest. I was so winded I could barely inhale, and my leg muscles felt like liquid lead.
Staggering twenty paces from the hole, I collapsed with Dharma in my arms, completely spent.
Having circled the nest, the male croc now stood between us and the cliffs, its raised head towering three stories, its golden-yellow eyes glistening in the late afternoon sun. Its jaws remained half open and motionless; its upper fangs, set below the snout, were twisted outside the mouth like a briar patch, each tooth as long as my arm. No longer downwind of us, the monster seemed unsure of our location, and though the tip of its twelve-foot skull remained poised less than one of its body lengths away, ABE warned me not to move, that its vision was sensitive to motion.
The megacroc snorted the air, each inhalation accompanied by a hollow gurgling growl. I remained frozen in place, even as my eyes tracked something hovering in the air behind the creature—a glint of sunlight?
To my horror, Dharma expelled a low wail and it was Game Over.
The croc roared, its massive head turning toward us — as a shrill sound blotted out my hearing and caused the beast to tremble. As I watched in stunned confusion, the croc’s stomach expanded outward, its torso bloating, as if it were inflating … and then sixty tons of crocodilian insides suddenly, unexplainably, burst out of either side of its belly, the sonic detonation splattering internal organs across the beach.
What happened next? To be honest, I’m not sure. I was dazed, lying in blood and innards, my head buzzing, my hearing replaced with an incessant ringing. In the silent aftermath, a cavalry of tentacles snaked around my body and Dharma’s waist and suddenly we were bounding across the open beach, heading for the cliffs.
I must have lost consciousness, for when I reopened my eyes we were standing before the boulders marking the base of the rise. Oscar appeared to be engaging its breathing organ, tooting the device like a cephalopod ram’s horn, though I heard only my shrill silence.
In my delirium, I saw two unusually shaped rocks set in a natural recess animate into a whirlwind of tentacles. The three camouflaged cephalopeds quickly untangled, allowing Oscar to pass, my guardian squid hauling Dharma and me through the narrow cave entrance and into the darkness.
24
To be great is to go on. To go on to be far. To be far is to return.
— LAO TZU, Tao Te Ching
A howling wind blasted me full in the face, the cold air clearing my head. We were rising higher in a pitch-dark cave along what seemed to be a fairly steep incline. I could feel the cephaloped’s torso heaving as it strained to tow the two of us up the rocky path, the animal slowing as we progressed through the damp unseen elevation.
My ears were still ringing painfully from the blast.
The terrestrial squid stopped climbing. Cupping a handlike sucker pad over each one of my ears, Oscar applied suction to the ear canals — gentle oscillations that reduced the inflammation and calmed the eardrums. When the cephaloped removed its appendages the tinnitus was gone, sound returning in the form of rushing water.
After another hundred feet Oscar released me. We had reached the summit, the passage ahead now leveled off, the blanket of darkness yielding to a faint backlit archway marking the end of a short tunnel. Too tired to object, I allowed the land squid to lead me, my eyes widening in amazement as we approached the opening.
It was a subterranean chamber, so vast it could have enclosed a major city, its cavernous walls rivaling those of the Grand Canyon. Stalagmites as tall as skyscrapers were dwarfed by a ceiling drenched in the humidity of its own cloud bank. Petrified calcite enclosed either side of this titanic geological orifice, the grooved rock face bathed in emerald-green light originating from a torrent of river that split the vast underworld like a glowing serpent. Illuminated by the agitation of its triboluminescence mineral bed, the waterway seemed to run forever.
Standing by the banks of the rushing water, dwarfed on either side by the shimmering blue-green walls, I shared a perspective the Israelites must have experienced when Moses had parted the Red Sea.
And still, I had seen nothing.
We followed a rocky trail that paralleled the river, the echo of rushing wat
er reverberating along the canyon walls. Bound aloft in one of Oscar’s tentacles, I heard Dharma stirring. Despite the cephaloped’s earlier refusal to help, the creature’s prolonged physical contact with the human female appeared to be healing her damaged nervous system.
ABE, what made Oscar change his mind about touching Dharma?
OSCAR WAS FORCED TO ESTABLISH PHYSICAL CONTACT WITH DHARMA AFTER THE CROCODILIAN ATTACK.
The croc … In my delirium, I had completely forgotten about the monster and its mysterious demise. Searching for answers, I held out my hand to my gangly companion, hoping to reestablish communication.
After a moment, a tentacle reached out, suctioning my forearm.
Oscar, how did that croc … that four-legged monster with the big teeth die?
ABE took several moments before responding.
OSCAR’S RESPONSE TRANSLATES POORLY. THE HUMAN EQUIVALENT WOULD BE CLOSEST TO “BLESSED HEAVENLY ONES WHO NURTURE.”
What does that mean? Who are these Blessed Heavenly Ones? What are they?
OSCAR HAS NO COMPREHENSION AS TO WHAT THE ENTITY IS.
Are these Blessed Ones responsible for killing that super croc?
YES. THEY ARE ALSO THE ONES THAT INSTRUCTED OSCAR TO FREE ROBERT EISENBRAUN.
* * *
Our destination was upstream. We followed the river for miles, from its more sedentary low course to its white-water middle course, the flow picking up noticeably as we progressed along on our journey to God knows where. Every so often a silverfish the size of a piranha would flit out of the water onto the bank, its indigo-blue fins whirling like a bumblebee’s wings as it fed on crawling insects.
ABE calculated that we were 2,970 feet below the surface, heading in a southeasterly direction. After nearly two hours of walking, I no longer cared, having barely eaten in the last eighteen hours. And yet as hungry as I was, I would have traded a four-course meal for a king-size bed and some aspirin.
Exhausted and hungry, I yelled out, “Vanilla sway, vanilla sway, vanilla sway.” My voice reverberated through the cavern, the echo causing the words of the useless phrase to overlap.
OSCAR WISHES TO KNOW THE PURPOSE OF YOUR ROAR.
Tell our friend the roar refers to a persuasive deception. A well-crafted lie. Sort of like this dream.
ROBERT EISENBRAUN IS NOT DREAMING.
Yeah, yeah … tell it to the judge.
The river twisted to the northeast, its rocky borders forming a serene pool of water. Oscar paused at a flat stretch of limestone and laid down my grunting female colleague.
ATTENTION: DHARMA YUAN HAS REGAINED CONSCIOUSNESS.
I knelt by her side, adjusting her blanket to conceal her breasts. The sickly pallor was gone, replaced by a healthy flush. Her brown almond-shaped eyes were open … staring at me, as if her brain knew who I was only her vocal cords hadn’t quite caught up.
“Good morning.”
INCORRECT. IT IS EVENING, 19:22 HOURS.
ABE, silent mode. “Dharma, squeeze my hand if you can understand me.”
She power-gripped my fingers until I had to pry them loose. “Stay calm, we just thawed you from your cryogenic pod. Does everything seem to be working, other than your voice?”
She nodded, then attempted to move. I helped her sit up, watching as she tested each limb — never noticing Oscar, who had slipped into the river, the ceph’s camouflaging hide disappearing among the rocks.
Refusing my assistance, Dharma stood on wobbly legs, the action causing the blanket to fall away, exposing her nakedness. The Chinese-Indian beauty accepted her sudden nudity as something completely natural, lacking ego or embarrassment.
My response was typically Western male, although I did avert my gaze until after she turned her back. She treated me to quite the show, performing several yoga stretches before she began a tai chi movement, each form flowing from one position to the next, freeing up her blocked neural pathways like an internal massage.
Was I aroused? Hell, yes. But Dharma’s allure was something far more than sex, the grace and simplicity of her maneuvers unencumbered by her nakedness, her serene expression exuding an inner peace that had always eluded me … or my past lives, if the Buddhist therapist was to be believed.
Dharma stretched until her muscles shook. Turning to me she spoke, her voice scratchy but strong. “I have questions, but first I must bathe.”
She waded chest-deep into the river, her swaying hips clearly sending a message. As I watched, she massaged the tetrodotoxin gel from her skin before submerging to cleanse the residue from her long ebony hair, her features luminescent in the riverbed’s soft emerald glow.
After just a minute or so she surfaced, her hands smoothing her silky hair back over her forehead. “Join me.”
My heart pounded, the increased blood flow registering in my groin. “Don’t you want to know where we are?”
“Are we safe?”
“For the moment.”
“Then be in the moment and join me.”
I disrobed like a clumsy teen on prom night and took two strides into the river, the cold water (reported by ABE to be 52°F) blasting the air out of my lungs while shriveling my manhood into something more deserving of a diaper. “Gee … zus, it’s like ice! How can you stand it?”
“The meditation of g-Tum-mo frees the mind to control the central nervous system.”
ABE, redistribute my body heat by—
“Wait. Before you use your bio-chip, allow me to guide you.”
By now my teeth were chattering, my body shaking uncontrollably as she waded over and hugged me. The sensation was incredible, her torso exuding the heat of a stoked fireplace on a winter’s night, and I clung to her like an addict.
“Do not just feed off of me, create your own heat. Close your eyes. Now imagine your belly is a furnace, your lungs the bellows that brings the flame. Breathe in slowly and inflate your stomach. Feel your heart move the liquid heat into your extremities.”
With each breath I inhaled, she exhaled; with each exhalation she inhaled. After seven breaths I stopped shaking. After three minutes the feeling returned to my fingers and toes.
When I reopened my eyes, I was fully aroused.
She smiled her approval. “What a good student you are. Tell me, Robert, how long has it been since you have engaged in the art of lovemaking?”
“About twelve million years.”
* * *
We exited the river forty-five minutes later, my body tingling more from the wild Kama Sutra ride than from the cold. Dharma allowed me to wrap the blanket around her, then she sat on a rock and watched me dress.
“So, Robert, now it is time to fill in the blanks, as you Americans like to say. Since we are in Vietnam, I must assume the cryogenic process caused serious damage to my memory. It has been many years since I last set foot in Hang Son Doong cave; the first time my uncle brought me here was on my eighteenth birthday. But of course you knew that from my bio. I love the underwater lights — what a beautiful effect. How long has it been since I was unfrozen?”
ABE fed me the answer. “Six hours, twenty-eight minutes.”
Her smile cracked. “I don’t understand.”
“Dharma, this isn’t Vietnam, we’re still in Antarctica. Something terrible happened shortly after we were put to sleep … a cataclysm.”
Tears formed and her throat constricted. “What sort of cataclysm?”
“An asteroid. It struck the moon so hard it altered its orbit, blasting away massive city-size chunks of rock that would have been caught in Earth’s gravity. The impacts must have been horrible … planetwide firestorms; debris clouds that clogged the atmosphere, essentially cutting off photosynthesis and the sun’s heat. We’re talking major Ice Age, the end of humanity. I know it’s hard to fathom—”
“How long?”
“Honestly, it’s still all conjecture. ABE was frozen. I suspect the bio-chip was damaged.”
“How long were we asleep, Robert?”
“The A answ
er is twelve million years and change. Trust me, you don’t want to know the B answer.”
“Twelve million years? Then my family … everyone I knew—”
“There’s more. From the evidence back on Oceanus, it appears that GOLEM may have gone a bit stir-crazy. The rest of the crew … we found some serious genetic mutations.”
“We? Who else was with you?”
“A friend. Another species.”
She smiled. And then she giggled a half-mad, half-adorable giggle. “Bravo. You actually had me, the whole thing … it feels so real.”
“You think this is an Omega-wave dream? Hate to tell you, but that would make it my dream, not yours.”
“So sorry to remind you, Robert, but Hang Son Doong cave is my memory, as are you. Our lovemaking just now … it traces back to a desire I felt for you on the first day we met. I can understand your confusion. These Omega waves … they’re really quite powerful, how they mine the subconscious.”
She was practically giddy.
“So this friendly species, when may I meet it?”
“It doesn’t like human females. Apparently there’s a few genetic clones of Andria prowling the forests, hunting down cephs.”
“Cephs?”
“Short for cephalopeds — my name for Oscar’s species, not his. Oscar, come join us please.”
Dharma followed my gaze to the river. “Robert, there is no one out there.”
I waited another thirty seconds, then peeved, waded back into the freezing river and tapped the nearest rock formation — which materialized into a maze of hairy tentacles and an oblong head whose stalked yellow eyes looked at Dharma with malice.
“Dharma Yuan, meet Oscar.”
Oscar rose to his imposing nine-foot height, towering above the five-foot-four-inch China doll — my own heart skipping a beat as every rock formation in and out of the water suddenly melted into a pack of cephalopeds! Adults and juveniles, males and females, some holding squirming infants — all advancing on poor Dharma, who was a stone’s breath from fainting dead away.
Fearing for her life, I waded to shore, only to find my path blocked by a gyrating wall of gelatinous bodies. Swimming to a limestone ledge, I dragged myself out of the river and climbed onto a boulder, looking down upon what I construed to be the cephaloped equivalent of a Texas lynch mob.
