by John Hook
“And they just stopped.”
“Yes. That’s when I discovered how deep my connection to you went. It took me almost until when you showed up again to heal my body. I was in pain all that time. I realized, despite the pain, I was grateful to not have become a proto. I would have forgotten everything. I would have forgotten you.”
“Might have been better off.”
“No, life might have been easier, but I would not have been better off.” She looked at me. “I need to know how this makes you feel.”
“Everything about this world makes me angry and tends to elicit the same response—I plan on killing demons until there are either no more demons or they decide that it isn’t in their interest to do these kinds of things where I can find out about it.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“I feel deep sorrow over your pain. I feel bad that I had to leave you to it. I do know that I had to. There was nothing good that would have been accomplished had they caught me. They did catch me eventually, and that also wouldn’t have been good if Izzy hadn’t have found me.”
“So you aren’t attracted to me out of guilt.”
“I’m attracted to you because you are hot. I love you because I have made a deep connection to you. If guilt is part of the mix, I can’t help that and don’t much care.”
Rox smiled warmly. She released a clasp and her clothes fell away from her. The winged jaguar tattoo shimmered across her—in my eyes—perfect body. What’s a little glamour and magic between friends?
“So I’m hot?”
I stepped out of my clothes, wondering if she saw me as I did. From her look, apparently she did. I was pleased to see that my glamour included fully functioning equipment.
“Apparently so.”
She lay down and drew me next to her.
11.
The next morning, Izzy, Kyo and I set out for a three-hour trek to see what had caused a glint in Kyo’s eye. I noticed that most of the time, we all showed up wearing the same things. This made sense since clothes were part of our glamour. Saripha was the most obvious exception. She changed every day, sometimes in the same day, which I found odd. Seeing us off today, she wore a long skirt of a fabric that could be made here from a cotton-like plant. She had shown me a loom she had constructed and on which she actually made things instead of depending on her glamour. The other exception was Izzy, who always wore the same outfit, but would change the color of his tee-shirt as well as the design printed on it. Today it was a black shirt depicting a smiley face with a bullet hole through the forehead and blood dripping down the face.
The trip gave me more of a look at the rapidly changing environment in Hell. We walked along forested ridges, then descended into wild meadows, down further into rocky desert. Along the way we would cautiously avoid various forms of wildlife, none of which was particularly cuddly. Fangs, claws and venom were the norm here. It drove home the message that hostility and aggression were the natural order, the key to survival, no matter what the scenery. At another point Kyo grabbed me just before I stepped off some rocks. The sandy soil was undulating slowly and, almost too late, I realized it was actually the motion of something just under the surface. One critter, looking like a wild boar only uglier was stubborn enough that Izzy brought it down with a couple of arrows.
“Ubergeek strikes again.”
“Geeks will inherit the Earth.”
“Or Hell, at least.”
“At least.”
“So where are the densely populated areas?”
“Most of them are far away from the ‘border towns,’” Kyo answered before Izzy had a chance. “Border towns are all in frontier areas where things are largely run by the demon tribes. They’re primitive. Once they accept their fate, people move on looking for something better.”
Do they find it? Better, I mean.”
Kyo shrugged. “Depends on what you mean. Hell is the land of illusion, so I suppose some of them do. Hell is also vast. I have traveled far and not begun to see everything. There are no authoritative maps.”
“We appear to be on a world—a planet, I guess? Any ideas about where we are relative to, well, where we were?”
Delighted to have the conversation return to his area, Izzy chimed in. “I’d love to find out. Are we in a place that exists in the physical universe as we know it or is this some metaphysical realm that has no real relationship to the universe we inhabited? There is a lot here that seems in line with normal physics, if you ignore the general idea that we are dead. Personally, I’m betting we are either still in the same universe or some very similar multiverse.”
“Guess it’s kind of hard to get grant money here. Have you ever thought about finding other scientists, building a community?”
“Thought about it, but you keep acting like this place is normal. Here, you find something that works for you, you stay put. That’s why you bother Paul so much.”
“I’m not that good at staying put.”
“Staying put has been fine. But eternity is a long time to stay put. What you remind me is that nothing ever happens unless you do it.”
Kyo froze and motioned us to silence. I could smell sulfur in the air. Now this was more like what I expected from Hell. Kyo remained motionless for about five minutes, listening. Then she motioned us forward, signaling us to be quiet. We came to the edge of an outcropping of rock and hunkered down. Below was a rocky, sandy ridge along which traveled a small party of demons. They were dressed in woven grass tunics; some of them carried spears. Izzy had already notched an arrow. I was impressed. He was fast and silent.
Below the parade of demons the elevation dropped into a deep chasm lined with rock. It was where the sulfur smell was coming from, as well as a bright red glow which reflected from the rock walls. Steam also rose up, making visibility difficult. The demons were all eyeing the chasm carefully as they passed.
We remained silent and still, protected from view by our higher elevation behind the outcropping. The demons were clearly looking for something and a couple of times looked back up at the rocks we were hiding in, but nothing made them more curious. Just seeing them made me want to rush down on them, but that would not have proved terribly useful. All of them against the three of us were not good odds without better weapons than we had.
We watched them pass and move on over the next ridge. Still we waited, silent and motionless for what felt like at least ten minutes. Kyo breathed out softly. It was like watching a statue come back to life.
“They were looking for something.”
“Luckily, they don’t know what they are looking for.” Kyo showed a slight smile from one corner of her mouth. “Apparently, they’ve picked up on activity here. We’ll have to be careful.”
We moved to the edge of the ridge. Kyo got down on all fours and reached down, pulling up a loop of rope that had been secured by one end to the rocks. The smell of sulfur was pretty strong. Actually, I had no idea what sulfur smells like, but the smell lived up to my expectations, accurate or not. There was too much cloudiness, steam, something, to see what was below.
“We’re going down there?”
“C’mon, tough guy.” Kyo smiled. “This part is easy. Coming back up is a bitch.”
Kyo went down first. I followed, with Izzy coming right after. It wasn’t actually that far, maybe 100 feet straight down. The bottom of the chasm was rock. Flowing through, the source of both the vapors and the smell, was a river of hot molten rock with a narrow shore on either side. Rock cliffs rose up sharply, riddled with gaps and what might have been caves. Everything was rock, no plants in sight.
“Now, this is what I would expect Hell to look like.”
“Some of it does. There are vast areas where the ground is split open deeply and lava flows freely. The demons use it for light and heat.”
“I use it to fill clay warheads on my fancier arrows.” Izzy grinned.
“I don’t get it. How can clay pots contain molten lava?”
; “It’s a property of the clay. Wet, it is soft and malleable. Dry, it is lightweight and nearly unbreakable and must have an excessively high melting point. You could use it for armor as long as no one hosed you down.”
“Never mind the clay. I have something better to show you.” Kyo interrupted Izzy. Too bad. I could see he liked playing Mr. Wizard.
We followed Kyo. She carefully jumped over the molten stream and then entered a cave. Inside, the chamber was lit by molten torches. There were several practice dummies woven out of long field grasses. They were mounted on log poles that passed through roughly where their spines would be and into a clay base that helped them stand up.
“Martial arts practice?”
“Watch,” Kyo ordered. Whatever she was about to do, she was really excited.
She unstrapped what I thought was a wooden staff from her back where she always wore it. She went fluidly into a perfectly balanced stance, ready with the staff in one hand, her other hand poised in the air, motionless, but seeming to float at the same time. Her face became very quiet and expressionless, but her eyes burned with awareness. Then, in a single motion that was too fast to follow, she spun around. Something happened with the staff, there was a glint of steel, and she came to rest again. In one hand was part of her staff. In the other hand, the one that had been floating, was a short steel blade, finely honed, with a short wooden handle that had obviously been part of the staff. At her feet, still rolling from the fall, was the “head” of the straw dummy.
“Yikes!” Izzy said next to me.
“Nice moves. I want one of those.”
“Here!” A voice from an opening into the rest of the cave chambers spun me around. Something was flying at me. My arm snapped out and caught it. It was another staff like Kyo’s. Looking closely, I could see the seam where it pulled apart. I pulled and revealed a fine—and very sharp—polished blade. I looked up to see a young oriental man smiling.
“Ask and you shall receive.” He laughed. He looked young with short-cropped black hair, a smooth face, yellow tee shirt, tan pants, sandals. He looked like he worked out. So did I. You couldn’t tell anything by just looking in this world. However, he carried himself like he knew how to work out. I probably carried myself like someone who knew how to spend hours at a typewriter.
“This is Taka. We have traveled together a long time. He holds down the hidden workshop we have here.”
Izzy couldn’t take his eyes off the blade I was still holding in front of me. “Kyo, you’ve discovered manufacturing!”
“Sadly, no. Consider these painfully handmade prototypes. Top quality craftsmanship, we’ve figured out how to extract limited quantities of metals, but it is labor intensive and very slow. We have no manufacturing process.”
“Well, it’s a start. The other problem is it might be harder to hide manufacturing resources from the demons.” Izzy was thinking out loud.
“Looked to me like we are having some trouble hiding even this from them.” I was still marveling at the beauty of the hand polished blade.
“We’ve been spotted out here coming and going a couple of times, but they haven’t figured out where we disappear to yet.” Kyo had reassembled her staff and returned it to where she carried it on her back. “Luckily, aside from being gutless and lazy, demons don’t like lava.”
“Go figure.” Sometimes I felt angry, but sometimes the absurdity of the world we were in, despite the ferocious danger of it, struck me. This was one of those times.
I slid the sword back into the staff that served as its sheath and stuck it in my belt.
“Thanks for this, Kyo. I’m honored that you chose to share it with me—I assume you don’t have too many.”
“Only the two. Yours was just made—why I had to come back here to get it.”
“Wish you could as easily give me your moves.”
“In time, maybe, though playing the wise sensei isn’t my thing.”
“That’s okay. I make a pretty lousy young grasshopper. I write action fantasy and have probably seen too many movies. Like a lot of people, I think I know how to fight. And like a lot of people, I’m probably wrong. But I will do what I can when I have to.”
Kyo and Taka gave us a tour of their metal smelting and blacksmithing process. Izzy had put on his engineering hat and was doing a lot of very excited thinking out loud. He and Taka hit it off on this common ground and were getting very excited together.
Finally, smiling, Kyo said to Taka, “Show them our other prototype.”
Taka, looking a bit pleased with himself, took us back to another chamber in the cave. Sitting on a small flat rock was a handmade device made of wood, unmistakably intended to shoot something, with an arrow held in the firing passage. I suspect Izzy knew instantly what it was because I could see the excitement on his face. He and Taka exchanged glances and each fed off the excitement of the other.
It took me a bit longer to put it together. It was clearly some kind of mounted crossbow, but it was not portable and its mechanisms were quite complex. It had been exquisitely hand-carved out of wood. There was a wooden crank near the rear where the shooter would be. Pulled through the machine was a belt of tightly woven grasses that held arrows—presumably how the crossbow was loaded, but it looked large and unwieldy for a hand weapon.
Taka noticed my puzzled expression and laughed. “Here, let me show you.” He swung the device around to point at a straw dummy. “I’ve been working on this for months. When you turn the crank, an arm sweeps down. Tiny sharpened stone edges I fashioned cut away the grassweave holding the arrow, freeing it. The arrow is rotated into firing position and the firing mechanism provides tension and launches it. At the same time the belt is advanced so that the next arrow is in position for the next round on the crank. Watch!”
Taka turned the crank rapidly as multiple arrows loaded and were shot at high velocity, filling the straw dummy with arrows in a matter of seconds. Some of the arrows missed, but it didn’t matter considering the volley you could produce.
“A machine gun. For arrows?”
“Yes, and like a machine gun, it fires too rapidly for accuracy.”
“Who cares, as long as you have a good supply of arrows.”
“We do. I am working on building a stockpile. Each belt holds one thousand arrows. I can create a thousand arrows in about a month and belt them in about two days. I probably have thirty belts stockpiled.”
“So you are saying you have something like thirty thousand arrows?” I was excited. This was the first weapon technology I had seen that looked like it could go up against the demons. Long-range mass destruction.
“How many of these do you have?”
Taka flushed, embarrassed.
“Only the one. I am starting to work on the second, but it is a very labor-intensive, hand-crafted device. It takes real precision in the wood carving to get smooth movements and a gun that doesn’t vibrate itself apart while firing.”
I was disappointed, but Taka had no reason for embarrassment. This was a work of engineering genius.
“You are doing incredible things here, Taka.” I shook his hand. “Keep it coming.”
“Don’t get too excited. It’s really a concept design, even though it functions. Unfortunately, it is a logistically difficult weapon for this world—or at least for our situation. It is heavy and, though it can be backpacked, it would have to be locked to make sure the more precise parts would remain in alignment. If you were discovered lugging it, you’d never be able to pull it out and start using it in time. It’s really a battlefield weapon. It would be ideal if we could mount it in the back of a buckboard, like in an old Western, but we don’t have pack or transport animals like horses. Manitors have some forms of transport, but the demons don’t.”
“Any good news in any of this?”
“It’s the old joke about having two chances, slim and none. On the slim side, I have built a rickshaw. Assuming the pulleys I have rigged up can get both items out of this gorge at a tim
e when the demons aren’t sniffing us out, the weapon can be mounted on the rickshaw in a functioning state and pulled by a strong human. Or a few strong humans. The bad news is you would have to keep to fairly easy terrain which is the same terrain on which you would be most likely to be spotted by demon patrols.”
“Okay, I get it. This can’t be employed without a good strategy for transporting it safely. Nonetheless, this is pretty exciting.”
We hung out for a while longer. Kyo showed me some moves with the blade, how to use counter motion with the left hand on the slightly longer handle to deliver more power to the cut, how to cut at an angle to maximize damage without hitting bone as well as balancing footwork. She said I had a good natural stance, keeping my elbows in, moving with my hips, using economy of motion. I don’t know if she was just flattering me, but I felt pretty good at the end of the session. Izzy and Taka were happily geeking out, two engineers sharing ideas and designs. Then we headed back.
Kyo was right: getting out of the gorge was a bit more of a workout than descending into it. The Marines would have loved it.
We detoured pretty far out of our way to run over and do a damage assessment of Izzy’s place. We were taking a risk exposing ourselves so much, but both Kyo and Izzy knew these hills well and we were careful.
Izzy’s place was a pile of smoldering rubble. They had been thorough. They had known pretty quickly I wasn’t there. This was a message. I looked down, seeing purple and white patches of some substance, like powdered chemical residue. I scraped at it with my fingers. It was hard and crusty. I rubbed some of the grains between my fingers. I don’t know what I was expecting to find out. It just felt like the thing to do.
“What is this stuff?”
Izzy looked. “Offhand, I’d say it’s a sodium carbon deposit.”
“Shade,” Kyo said the word with disdain.
“In my brief observation, this was a pretty powerful shade. He had a floating platform.” Izzy shook his head, surveying the damage.
