Tribulation

by Kaz Morran

  On the next landing?

  Fuck me.

  The third tier hadn’t been the final one after all.

  He heard Ronin’s voice cleaving at the walls of this fart-stained inner sanctum. “Getting bored up here, hafu. Hurry up already … but don’t forget the drone.”

  Fuck you.

  The final tier—the for-real final tier—looked a little easier to get to than the last ones. No troll parts in his face, anyway. He turned around and squatted; ready to slide down backward. He aimed his leg down off the third tier, and a moment of doubt clutched his right foot midair.

  Don’t hesitate. An astronaut had to be decisive.

  He hovered there, gripping tiny indents in the step with his fingertips. He stretched his leg down farther, feeling for a flat surface to land on. He dropped to his left knee and slid it to the ridge of the third tier. He held on—the nails of his fingers grinding into rock—and dragged his left shin against the moist, jagged ridge, searching for the soft groove between the kneecap and top of the shin for something to lock the ridge into. With finding it, in spite of the pain, he gained new leverage to stretch his right foot a precious two or three centimeters closer to the step below, but still not close enough to touch.

  His thigh, neck, and arm muscles burned against gravity’s sadism. Just a little more. He exerted his foot downward, daring the slippery rock to flick his fingers off its surface. Stretching and straining, he fished and prodded black air with the toe of his boot, desperate for solid ground but finding nothing.

  Now back on the third tier, panting and curled into a squat, he looked down with his flashlight and spotted the drone. It didn’t look very far. He fought off a coughing spell and nausea, and switched legs and tried again. Dangling and straining like before, he got the same result—of course. Idiot. Come on. Think!

  It occurred to him the fourth ledge might drop off into oblivion everywhere except for a tiny outcrop holding the drone. He thought about turning back, but he couldn’t show up empty-handed. Not after getting so close. So he kept trying.

  Amid full muscular dissonance and the shredding of the skin above his fingernails, he imagined something down there beyond the screen of darkness. Something in the water. Something floating, waterlogged, and bloated with the gasses of its own decay. A dead body. Or worse: something alive.

  His bowels hiccupped. He pulled himself back upright, toes pointing to his sides and chest to the wall. Breathing heavily, he pressed his cheek to stone and gasped at the stinging air. He rubbed his burning eyes on his shoulders. Then he listened. He listened to the dripping sounds. The drops pinged the water several seconds apart, each plop a single note of an ageless chorus, and a cry of finality as they bled sulfuric acid back into the lagoon that spawned them. Nothing could live down there, he thought. The water and air would kill anything that tried. The air would kill him if he didn’t hurry. He felt dizzy. Nauseous.

  The inside of his head began to strobe.

  “What’s the matter, hafu?” Ronin sounded clear but far more distant than he was, like ASMR, as if speaking down a long pipe into Taiyo’s ear. “You get lost? Too scary down there for you?”

  He was not scared of dark places, and he didn't think he was frightened of water. And yet, he could not deny the ominous presence the water implied.

  So, what then? Just slide down and hope the last ledge caught him? He could land on the drone where he knew level ground existed. He might break it. Or he could call up to Ronin that he couldn’t reach it. It might be worth facing Ronin’s ridicule. But it wouldn’t be worth the ridicule in his own head for having failed his task because of an irrational fear that something was going to pull him into the water.

  Stop pissing around. You have a job to do. Now do it!

  With that thought, he dropped both legs down and gave up his hold on the ledge. A knot formed in his testicles and plunged into his chest as the acceleration of gravity took over. But there’d be no sensation of freefall. Seemingly before the fall had even begun, his right foot landed on the buoyant shell of the Zeel-5. All along, it had hardly been a toenail away. He balanced a foot on the back of the drone, held onto the neck-level ledge, and let his forehead come to rest against the cold, damp rock while he tried to catch his breath, though the bad air would not allow the pressure in his head to deflate.

  The drone cracked under his weight. His boot lost its grip, and he slipped off the back of the drone. Once again, he damn near ate his testicles, and unnecessarily so. His feet hit the landing beside the drone, but his weakened legs staggered across the ledge and sent his steps backward into the water knee deep. The submerged ground at his feet sloped sharply downward, and he slipped several times before regaining his balance back on the dry land beside the drone.

  Though the passage down to the water resembled an ear canal, the calls from the others now came to him muffled. “I’m still fine,” he called back after a few pants to calm his pulse. He straightened the headlamp and watched the water, now disturbed, jostle and lick the toes of his boots.

  He was safe and sturdy on the shore with the drone at his side.

  He stared out into the blackness. Squeezed between the water at his feet and the rock precipice at his back, and he felt the temperature plunge. He gasped at the rotten egg stench, forcing his lungs to consume it. And despite his heaving chest and urge to vomit, through the silt and pall of subterranean night, he could see a pair of glowing eyes, a toothy grin, a slithering tail—or was it a hand?—creeping out of the water, enticed by the pheromones of human fear.

  The chill climbed up the dripping legs of his jumpsuit, making the fabric cling to his skin. The smell, he knew, was of air cooked deep within the planet, discharged up through the fissures and cracks, released as gas bubbles through the water, and trapped between the ceiling and stagnant pit of water. The headlamp lit the yellow moisture that festered on the walls—the same substance pestering his airways.

  He shuddered.

  The rising bumps and hairs on his arms and neck were beyond his control. The wet pants and socks, the cold, the sound of dripping, and the odors all merged with his sweat and triggered a flash in his mind. Not an image. More of a feeling. The feeling of being in the cannery after the tsunami, shivering, clinging to the doorframe behind the gantry, waiting for his dad while at least one decomposing body floated face up around him, hidden by the black water and dark, foul air.

  The smell in the cannery had been the unmistakable smell of death, and he smelled it now, too. Now pinned between the wall of hardened lava and the water, and compressed from above by boney tendrils of pumice, the smell deepened, and he knew no matter how rational, the rational mind, on occasion, overlooked things or made erroneous assumptions. Taiyo had assumed nothing of significance could live in such a tomblike realm. Certainly nothing capable of reaching out of the water and snagging him by the ankle.

  The light of his headlamp reflected off the black surface of the water, revealing nothing. The walls looked to narrow for the water to extend much farther, but it could’ve been an illusion cast by the shadows of the ceiling spikes. He looked up at the lavacicles, and his shuffling feet made a sound like sandpaper. The acoustics played across the unknown expanse of the water like muffled conversations. The words came back to him indistinct, the product of his mind trying to form familiar patterns where none existed. The voices contained laughter. Perhaps, they were real, then. Maybe they were the voices from the others above making fun of him, egged on by Ronin.

  Splash!

  Taiyo jolted, pressing his back tightly to the wall and extending his arms in defense. Bloody hell. He had to laugh at himself. Rings rippled outward in the water from where a lavacicle must have hit. The echo from the voices had knocked one loose. That was all.

  “Are you getting it or not?” Ronin might have said.

  He began to shake. Shivering to retain body heat. It was a good sign. He didn’t really know but deduced that cool air meant that in spite of the stench, the hydrogen su
lfide content was thin, having dispersed and cooled along its journey from the deep.

  Under the beam of the headlamp, Taiyo looked down at the wounded device he’d come to reclaim. A Y-shaped crack scarred its back, and the propellers had all busted off. He opened and closed his hands, and rubbed them together to get the blood flowing before crouching down to pick up the drone. On his haunches, he held it in both hands and took several short-winded breaths.

  “I got it,” he yelled up to the others. “Coming back now.”

  He set the drone up on the ledge and braced his hands so his arms could hoist the rest of his body back up.

  “Did you get the samples?” Kristen called, her voice faint.

  Shit.

  He took out the flashlight, shut off the headlamp, and examined the water. The surface didn’t look right. Too calm. Too silent. The light didn’t shimmer or refract; the water simply swallowed the beam. Not a ripple remained to indicate he’d ever been there or that anything but a photon had ever struck the liquid mirror.

  It was as if the pool, or what lurked inside it, was playing dead.

  The inexplicable, irrational sensation of a presence made Taiyo do something he hadn’t done since he was little. He didn’t know why he did it. Certainly not because he believed it had any effect. Or maybe it did—a kind of placebo perhaps. He tucked the drone under one arm, and with a finger, he drew three little stickmen on the palm of his hand and pretended to swallow them. It was something kids did before speaking in front of an audience, a symbol of dominance over the crowd. Taiyo’s mother had tried—unsuccessfully, for the most part—to teach him to do it anytime he needed to summon courage.

  He shook his head at himself for being so foolish, but he did feel a little more composed now. He indulged in a deep breath. That had been a mistake—he spent the next several minute coughing and spitting up phlegm.

  He had to hurry.

  Taiyo left the drone and hopped back down to the water. Kneeling at the edge, he kept the light of the headlamp trained on the motionless water while he pulled a baggie from a pocket. He paused, convinced something was watching. His head hurt and chest hurt more. A drip into the water startled him. He saw the ripple, though faint, and it put him at ease. Still, he kept his light and his eyes on the murky lagoon and not on his hands as he reached down and dredged the baggie through the water to collect silt and scum—for something that might contain traces of biology.

  The temperature of the water felt warmer than the air. Thick like oil. He filled three of the little sample pouches, sealed, labeled, and returned them to his pocket, and then began his climb back up with the drone. Ducking the stalactites, he turned back and admired the hidden cove one last time. He squinted into the darkness and shook his head at himself for having ever entertained the idea of something prowling down there, beneath the thin liquid surface.

  Idiot.

  23

  I will love the light for it shows me the way, yet I will endure the darkness because it shows me the stars.

  —Og Mandino

  The swarm of headlamps and flashlights muddled around an opening the size and shape of a space capsule crew hatch.

  “This must be the entrance,” said Anton.

  The past three days exploring and camping in the lava tubes had seen the candidates squeeze through sinuous passages, scale cliffs, repel down columns of twisted black lava, dive into subterranean lakes, and wade through black water rapids. They’d documented flow edges and soda-straw tubes, stalactites forests and fields of stalagmites, pillars and splash formations, primordial fossils, sulfuric moss, cannibalizing microbes, bioluminescent algae, and arachnids with no eyes.

  And Taiyo had rescued a drone.

  He might have lamented all that coming to an end, if not for the thrill of the new phase of the mission about to begin. He wrinkled his nose as if sniffing the air would bring the awaiting discoveries closer. They’d have plenty to do over the coming seven days of isolation besides exploring their confines, however.

  While the others sat, knelt, or sipped from their bottles and recouped from the last leg of the day’s march, Taiyo leaned into the meter-wide entrance for a preview.

  “How far back does it go?” he heard Anton ask, the voice muffled and distant.

  It occurred to Taiyo, as the reality of their next challenge stared him in the face, that the differences they’d had as a team over the last three days in the cave and on the trek had all been rather trivial. Whether engrossed in the adventure of it all, distracted by the hardship, or too exhausted, the conflict between them had been limited to minor bickering and Ronin’s assholery. It followed then that the next seven days caged together inside whatever lied on the other side of this portal probably wouldn’t present them with much hardship. Probably.

  With these thoughts swimming in his head, Taiyo volunteered to squeeze through the 220-meter-long passage first. At least if he got stuck, he wouldn’t be downwind of anyone.

  Taiyo got to his hands an knees and began to crawl. He might have felt like toothpaste pinched through the tube if the confines hadn’t been so jagged and spikey. An hour in, the tube flattened to a sandwich. The route widened, perhaps enough to turn around and go back, but brought the ceiling and floor so close he now had to belly-crawl commando style and push the backpack along the ground ahead of himself. If he got lazy and shifted to his knees, a thud on the helmet or jab in the back reminded him to stay down, down where barnacle-like pumice broke through the crests of mini dunes of silt. He felt like Gulliver getting swarmed by hundreds of little spear-wielding bastards.

  Just when every muscle, and half his brain, screamed to go back, Nel tapped the side of his boot. “Right behind you,” she said. “Everything okay up there?”

  “Yeah, I was just thinking what to name this place.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Any ideas?”

  “How about the Wormhole?”

  “Because it leads to another dimension?”

  “Don’t know yet.”

  “Well, it is pretty wormy.”

  “What do you think is on the other end?”

  “Something easier on the knees.”

  The better half of Taiyo’s brain prevailed, commanding his body to press on.

  Once through, he brushed the grit from his palms, stood and took several minutes to stretched his legs and back. For the first time in three days, his footsteps failed to echo back, and he didn’t feel like he was breathing in somebody else’s exhalations. The chamber must have been big.

  He shone his flashlight into the expanse of darkness, revealing nothing. And into the profound nothingness, he stared, overtaken by an eternal and unworldly silence. The planet might well have been cut away into oblivion leaving only his consciousness in its place. In such a state, he could only observe himself. He took a step, unwittingly, then reached forward with his free hand several times as if something should’ve been there to touch. He had not been prepared for such ambiguity. It was almost as if he’d entered a virtual reality without graphics.

  His own words snuck up on him and breathed in his ear. He whispered, “Welcome to the Asylum.”

  His heart froze and then accelerated at the sound of rustling clothes coming up from behind. “The name doesn’t exactly inspire confidence, does it?” Nel said. Her voice came out deafening compared to the sound of his own respiration in his ears.

  At her request, while they waited for the others to come through the tunnel, they shut off the lights and confronted the vacuity. Taiyo heard her boots crunch on the ropy, gravel-strewn mass that was the basaltic lava bed. And then silence. The euphoria faded into disorientation. Suddenly, the only thing in the world his senses could perceive outside his body was the ground beneath his feet. It made him feel like a plastic army man, poised to march but unable to dislodge his feet from the platform.

  Though unsure if the next step ended in a wall, pit, or flat open space, he forced a heavy leg to rise and trod down. Then the other, until his joi
nts gained trust in the commands sent by his brain.

  The passage amplified the voices of the other AsCans' as they emerged one-by-one from the Wormhole into a halo of their own light.

  “Maybe the Asylum was named ironically,” Taiyo said to Nel.

  She turned on her headlamp. “Maybe not.” A thin, colorless face had replaced her usual baby cheeks and bright eyes. She looked tired. The past two weeks had chipped away at them all.

  As soon as the glow and trodden footfalls of the other four candidates arrived at Nel and Taiyo, all six of their phones chimed at once. Kambi Mission Control—the hab over their heads—had sent them each a 3D, green-on-black rendering of the Asylum. The diagram of the shoebox-shaped chamber was annotated with about five times the dimensions of a soccer field: 900 meters long, 330 wide, and 25 high.

  Taiyo rotated the view as if playing with a naked CAD template. The only features were the opening to the 220-meter Wormhole at the south end of the chamber, and the mouth of the chimney, which linked from the ceiling up to the shed-structure on the surface that the Aviator had called the emergency exit. Zooming in showed that the chimney resembled the pipe beneath a kitchen sink, but with a few extra twists, and a meter in diameter.

  If the Wormhole and the chimney were the only entry points, then T3 must’ve had a hell of a time getting in supplies. Just as awkward, would be when T3 tried to weave ropes down to pull the candidates out at the end of the week, or earlier should the need arise.

  Taiyo looked up from the phone to the darkness at the center of the ceiling to where the chimney ought to be. 25 meters from the floor to the mouth of the chimney, and another fifteen meters of rock to turn and twist through to reach the outside world. Not one particle of daylight made it through.

  Taiyo flicked on his headlamp and flashlight and, aided by the lights of the others, scanned his surroundings. The deletion of his periphery made him focus on each individually illuminated detail rather than on the mind’s default mode of sweeping generalities. He ventured a few steps from the group and found the floor was made up of flows that folded over and under each other, twisting like braids or fanning like fossilized deltas.