Mindwarp

by James Follett

  More birds appeared but by now Jenine and Ewen were too distracted by the splendour of the coming dawn to notice them.

  Despite the terrors of their surroundings, the strengthening, reddish-golden glow captivated them. This was nothing like the dawns of Arama in which the entire interior of the domes brightened evenly as the zargon lights came on. Here the glorious light spread slowly from a horizon that seemed an impossible distance away. The strengthening glow gradually filled the dark, imagination-filled shadows of the mysterious terrain below. It was the vastness of this place that both defeated and challenged their imaginations. Hitherto the greatest distance either of them had ever seen was by standing at the edge of a large dome and looking across to the far side. In Ewen’s case, the greatest distance he had ever experienced had been in the battle caverns. Their perception of the universe, moulded by their culture and environment, was of an endless solid filled with bubbles that supported life. Now that perception was being torn from their souls by the harsh reality of the real outdoors. The images before them: spears of light from the still hidden sun dancing through a few strands of low cloud; great plumes of spray from the sea pounding against massive rocks; the swooping, scavenging birds - all this stood everything they knew and understood on its head. Had either of them been alone during this revelation, the chances were that their sanity would not have survived, but they had each other thus their sharing of the awesome phenomena unfolding before them tempered their fear with wonder.

  And then the sun appeared.

  In a way it was expected. Something startling was expected; the brilliant kaleidoscope of vibrant colours gathering their mysterious forces below the horizon had to herald something.

  They stared in awed silence straight at the bloated cancerous bulge that had appeared on the horizon. It became a brightening red disk that eventually separated from the clutches of the horizon and rose free into the sky, changing colour from crimson to a harsh yellow that began to hurt their eyes. Eventually they sat down, no longer clinging to each other in fear, the grip of each other’s hand as their only hold on reality was sufficient. With the waxing light came a gentle, welcome warmth that seeped into chilled limbs.

  Ewen rationalised the sun by thinking that the people who had built this place had engineered a massive zargon light battery that travelled up the inside of the dome. He pondered the problems involved.

  “No,” said Jenine quietly when he outlined the theory. “This place was not built by people. This is the work of something else.”

  She lay back and closed her eyes now that the light was too bright to look at. She unfastened her jacket and spread her legs to receive the blessing of the life-giving warmth. Ewen stared at her for some moments and then did likewise. For a while they were silent.

  “But there’s only people,” Ewen pointed out. “Who else could have built it?”

  “What about the Guardian of Destiny?”

  “We don’t believe in the GoD.”

  “Perhaps we should now. Perhaps we were wrong.”

  “Perhaps you’re right and we are dead,” Ewen mused objectively. The light was now harsh on the inside of his eyelids. “What was that tower called? Delight and Dreams?”

  “The Tower of Dreams and Delight and Discovery,” Jenine answered drowsily.

  “Perhaps when we entered that tower, we passed from life into death?”

  This time Jenine didn’t answer.

  The heat from the blinding disk increased steadily. Ewen dozed too, the boom of the surf on the rocks far below never far from his consciousness. As always, he rationalized: maybe there was a gigantic wave-making machine somewhere like they had in the big public leisure pool at Galthan where his mother had taught him to swim. He wondered if he would ever see his mother again. Thinking about her stirred his guilt and drove off the sleep. Suddenly he was uncomfortably hot, sweating profusely. He sat up. The mighty light had risen much higher. The residual crimson had vanished; now the entire globe was a blinding yellow. It was beating down with unrelenting ferocity. He was about to shake Jenine awake when he realised that the sky had changed colour.

  It was blue.

  The beautiful, deep, flawless azure of his dreams.

  2.

  The midday heat forced the couple to retreat deeper into the cave, but not too far. The bright light banished many of the cave’s shadows and encouraged them to explore, although they stayed away from the crooked passage at the end. Ewen found a flat area of the cave’s wall that was covered in scratch marks. He trained the discharge tube on it.

  “Look, Jenine - names.”

  Jenine peered at the faint markings. They were all illegible but she could make out at least twenty different scrawls. “All those people have found this escape route?” she wondered.

  “Could be more. The others wouldn’t be able to write.”

  Jenine nodded to the rear of the cave. “Do you suppose he… He was one of the others?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t see a medallion.” Ewen found a scrap of plastic wrapping paper and smoothed it out. It was a vending machine snack food bag. “Maybe he thought he could live on this junk?” He angrily screwed the wrapper into a ball and threw it out. “After all, he was the only one not to escape.” He looked at the roof. Something caught his attention. He held the light higher. More scratch marks.

  “Maybe they all jumped over the edge eventually?” Jenine suggested.

  Ewen didn’t answer. These markings were too legible to have been scratched on the roof. Someone had used a laser cutter. He realised that he was trying to read the legend upside-down.

  “Jenine - look.”

  She stood on her toes and examined Ewen’s find. Cut into the rock were two clear and unequivocal words:

  SIMO BELAN.

  It was three hours after sunrise and the heat near the cave’s opening became intolerable. It was cooler towards the rear of the cave but that wasn’t an option so far as Jenine was concerned. She peeled off all her clothes. It seemed a sensible thing to do so Ewen followed suit.

  “It’s not so much the heat that’s making us uncomfortable, it’s the humidity,” Jenine reasoned, trying to remember everything from their 4th year environment and air-conditioning studies. “It’s been set far too high. The result is that our sweat doesn’t get the chance to evaporate properly and so conduct excess heat away from our bodies.”

  “Which is just as well,” Ewen observed, sitting on his pile of clothes and staring out of the cave entrance at the sparkling sea and the haze-laden horizon.

  Jenine sat opposite him. Her pale body gleaming with perspiration, blonde curls matted against her temples. “Why’s that?”

  “If the humidity was much lower, we’d feel cooler because the evaporation rate of our sweat would be higher. Right?”

  She considered and nodded. Weighing up these seemingly mundane factors helped preserve their sanity.

  “Therefore we’d dehydrate much more rapidly than we are already,” said Ewen. He wiped his brow and looked at the trail of moisture on his forearm. “Even so, we’re still losing a lot of fluid. We’ve had nothing to drink for some hours. We’ve got to get out of here as soon as possible.”

  Two hours later the unrelenting sun had moved so that it no longer beat down into the cave’s entrance. The couple ignored their mounting thirst and moved to the opening to take careful stock of their surroundings. Their cave was set into a steeply sloping cliff face of the same grey and reddish-streaked rock of Arama. Clumps of gnarled thornbush trees grew at intervals all the way down to the restless sea. At that moment the strange moaning sound that they had heard during the night started again. In daylight it was not so frightening, but they listened to the rising and falling note in silent apprehension until it finally died away.

  “It’s definitely coming from outside - somewhere behind us,” Ewen muttered.

  “Some sort of machine?”

  “Has to be,” Ewen agreed uncertainly.

  “The water’s
gone back,” said Jenine, pointing down. “It was right up against the rocks before.”

  Ewen peered down. She was right - the sea had receded from the base of the cliff, exposing a narrow strip of wave-worn boulders and a belt of shingle that led to the left to a broad beach of golden-yellow sand. Was it sand? It had to be sand. His dream came back to him: his frantic attempts to bury Tarlan’s body; the blood soaking crimson and incriminating through the sand no matter how desperately he scrabbled with his hands to pile it over the corpse.

  They discussed their course of action and decided that the first thing was to learn as much about their surroundings as possible. Jenine helped fasten the length of rope around Ewen’s waist and held on while he leaned out to survey the cliff face above the cave.

  “Hopeless,” he reported. “It gets even steeper higher up. There’s no more of those trees. And the edge looks further up than the water is down. We have to go down.”

  A flock of black-headed seagulls, riding on a thermal, wheeled up the cliff face, uttering raucous cries. This time the couple made an effort to pay them scant attention having decided that the only way to come to terms with this bizarre place was to deal with one problem at a time. Besides, the strange living creatures did not seem to pose any threat.

  They looked longingly down at the water.

  Jenine eyed the sturdy trunk of the nearby thornbush tree that was growing horizontally out of the cliff face. “We could tie the rope to that and climb down to the next clump of trees,” she suggested. “But there’s a slight flaw in the idea that your laterally thinking will pounce on.”

  Ewen smiled at the understatement, pleased that she had recovered her acerbic sense of humour. “Once we’re both down, how do we untie the rope?”

  Jenine caught his mood and smiled.

  “Even so,” said Ewen thoughtfully, “I reckon the idea has some merit. Hang onto the rope.” He knelt down and reached out to grasp the stunted tree. With Jenine hanging grimly onto the rope to support him, he tested his weight on the trunk. It was unyielding.

  “Give me some slack.” Before Jenine could object, Ewen swung himself onto the trunk and sat on it. He bounced his weight up and down. “Absolutely solid,” he declared. He untied the rope from around his waist, found its centre and made two turns around the trunk so that the two ends of the rope lay down the steep slope, ending near the clump of thornbushes. “Right. We’re both about the same weight. We climb down together, one on each end to counterbalance each other. When we reach that lower tree, we shake the rope free, and repeat the process all the way down to the water. Simple.”

  Jenine looked over the edge. “And supposing the gap between those trees lower down is greater than half the length of the rope? What then? We won’t be able to climb up again.”

  Ewen tried judging the intervals between the trees lower down, but it was impossible, especially where an outcrop about halfway down hid some of the proposed route.

  “We’ll just have to take a chance,” he decided. “We can’t stay here and die of thirst.”

  The first stage of the climb was easier than expected. After an initial experiment, they discovered that the easiest way to descend the rope was to walk backwards, paying out the rope side-by-side until they reached the first clump of trees. Jenine carried the holdall lashed to her back because she was lighter than Ewen. Taking their weight off the rope simultaneously required careful timing. Once the thornbushes were supporting them, Ewen shook the rope free of the tree above. The coils fell about him.

  Jenine experienced a surge of relief. There could be no returning to the cave and its gruesome contents now.

  Ewen looped the centre of the rope around the tree they were sitting on, making certain that the turn was hard against the cliff to minimize the leverage of their combined weight. The next descent stage was a short climb down to a stout, wind-stunted bristle cone tree where they were able to rest in the fork of its lower branches. Ewen jerked the rope free and repeated the procedure of looping it in the centre around the bristle cone.

  “A problem,” he murmured in a matter-of-fact tone, jabbing his thumb down.

  So far Jenine had avoided looking down at the seething sea. Now she was forced to do so. About three body lengths below, the two lengths of rope disappeared over the edge of the outcrop. Until they climbed down together, they had no way of knowing if the ends of the rope would be hanging in space or lying against the side of the cliff.

  “Time for some of your lateral thinking, Ewen. How do we find out what’s over that edge before we climb down?”

  Ewen thought for a moment and gave her an encouraging grin. “Easy. I reconnoitre first.”

  “How?”

  Ewen pulled the rope up, tied one end securely around the bristle cone’s trunk and other around his waist so that he had the use of the rope’s entire length. “Back in a few moments,” he said, and climbed down the rope.

  Jenine felt sick with fear when he disappeared from sight. She planted her foot on the rope and was reassured by the vibrations caused by his exertions. Suddenly the rope went slack and the vibrations ceased.

  “Ewen!”

  A gull answered her scream.

  She thought it was a cry from Ewen. Panic nearly strangled her vocal cords. “EWEN!”

  Her voice echoed off the cliff in the hot, still air of the long afternoon.

  “EWEN!”

  A voice carried up to her, sounding far off. “It’s all right! I’m on a sort of ledge!”

  The vibrations resumed and, to Jenine’s immense relief, Ewen’s head reappeared over the outcrop. Sweat streamed off his face as he hauled himself up the rope and sat on the branch beside Jenine. His face was lined with concentration. “There’s a ledge down there,” he said when he had rested. “Wide enough for two. Then there’s a short drop from the ledge, and than it’s an easy climb down because the cliff flattens out to a steep slope. But getting to the ledge is going to be a problem.”

  “Why?”

  Ewen gathered up the rope and measured off several hanks using his outstretched arms. “This is the amount of slack I had when I reached the ledge. About a third of the rope’s length.”

  Jenine saw the problem immediately. For the rope to be long enough for both of them to climb down together, Ewen should have had half the rope’s length or more as slack when he arrived at the ledge.

  “Do we need the rope after the ledge?” she asked. “Couldn’t we tie it here?”

  Ewen shook his head and wiped his dripping brow on his forearm. “We’ll need it. There’s a short but sheer drop below the ledge. But once we’re down that, we’ll be able to climb down the rest of the way without the rope.” He struggled out of his jacket. “There’s only one way to make the rope longer. Get undressed.”

  They undressed, and knotted their trousers and jackets to their respective ends of the rope. The material their clothes were made from was a tough polyester that seemed to take Ewen’s weight well when he tested it.

  “The material may be okay,” Jenine observed. “But what happens if a seam suddenly gives?”

  “Then we climb back up to the cave and think of something else.”

  Jenine was nonplussed until she saw Ewen’s mischievous grin. Her playful punch ended in a long kiss. Ewen was keen to take matters further but Jenine wisely decided that perched naked on a tree halfway down a cliff, just above an awesome overhang, was neither the time nor the place. She pushed him away without a word, adjusted the strap that secured the holdall to her back, and together they began the slow, frightening climb down their respective halves of the rope.

  The rough rockface grazed painfully against Jenine’s stomach and chest as she lowered herself down the rope and over the edge. The sea booming against the rocks was now almost directly below and much louder. Mercifully, they were now out of the direct rays of the sun. Ewen dangled beside her, the veins standing out on his neck. At one point his feet lost their grip on the rope. He swung wildly as he struggled to regain
a foothold and barged into Jenine.

  “Sorry!” he gasped.

  Jenine’s hands encountered her trousers. The material was harder to grip than the coarse fibres of the rope. She chanced a quick glance down and saw the ledge that Ewen had found. It looked barely wide enough and deep enough for one person. Also they were hanging too far away from the cliff face to be able to reach it. She went down a little faster to keep level with Ewen. Maintaining a good grip on their stretched clothing was proving difficult. Sweat streamed into her eyes. She wished she had thought to make a sweatband from the lining of her jacket.

  The sudden shock of the loud scream in Jenine’s ear nearly caused her to lose her hold. The black-headed gull darted its murderous stiletto beak straight at her eyes. She caught a glimpse of black, gimlet eyes, and then the creature was gone, wheeling down the cliff face. The second seabird went for Ewen. Its wings flogged the air in his face while the wicked talons lashed at his shoulder, drawing blood. He spun on the makeshift part of the rope, trying to dislodge the bird that was threatening to peck his eyes out. A well-aimed kick from Jenine caught the bird on the back and produced a scream of avian frustration and rage. The bird dropped away in a wide, seemingly lazy circle. It picked up height and speed in the rising thermal, and seemed to be intent on renewing the attack. The couple moved down the rope. They were now hanging grimly onto their jackets, and there was no more rope for their feet and knees to grip. They were slightly above the ledge and its doubtful safety, but what alarmed Jenine was distance of at least two body lengths that they were hanging from the refuge.

  “Start swinging!” Ewen urged.

  The seagull homed-in with another loud scream. The razor-like beak flashed at Ewen’s eyes. Jenine performed a dangerous manoeuvre that possessed an accuracy borne of desperation. She jerked her body into a near somersault on the straining rope and slammed her heels together on the bird’s neck, breaking its neck. It uttered a dying croak and its body fluttered down towards the rocks.