by Bill Schutt
The algae flipper’s three colleagues responded with what sounded very much like a hissing laugh, and though their expressions were anything but comforting (a return of the flashing fangs made that a certainty), the absurdity of what had just taken place caused Yanni and Mac to laugh as well.
Jerry responded by popping a chunk of the strange slime into his mouth. “Thi tuff ess great,” he managed.
Less than a minute later, they were all eating the white stuff and all agreeing that despite its mucus-like consistency, it was indeed quite palatable.
Another new species, Mac noted, though he knew he’d never be mistaken for an algae expert.
After quickly eating his fill, Mac stood up, eyeing a semicircular alcove just up ahead.
“Gotta see a man about a horse,” he said.
Jerry nodded, knowingly, while Yanni threw him a puzzled look.
Alerted by the movement, Mac’s personal bodyguard broke away from his own group and followed, uttering an angry grunt as he did. MacCready turned and held up his hands, in what he hoped was still the universal sign for peaceful guy. Then, making sure that Yanni wasn’t looking, he used a somewhat ruder gesture to explain why he had wandered off. The creature made no response except to move into its familiar position behind him.
“Hey, spread out, huh? Ya know how hard it is to pee when someone’s st—”
MacCready’s wisecrack was halted by the sight of a neat pile of unfamiliar bones in the alcove, sitting beside a small circular pool. As he moved in closer, the water was clear enough for him to see that a similar geometrically arranged mound sat submerged about two feet below the surface.
Mac wondered why anyone would create such an arrangement, but before he could get a better look, his hirsute shadow was back and a less-than-gentle shove (instead of a prod) followed. Adding to Mac’s annoyance was the fact that he had been forced to leave the alcove without carrying out his original mission.
Yanni was studying the cluster of Morlocks rather intently, so Mac took a seat next to Jerry. “There’s something over there on the ground that I really want you to see.”
Jerry responded by scrunching up his face in an odd way. “I’ll pass,” he said.
Mac threw him a puzzled look that ended with a head shake. What the hell’s wrong with him? he thought, before turning to see what had drawn Yanni’s attention.
Off to one side, the now-reunited Morlock quartet continued to converse in their vaguely birdlike language, and Mac noticed yet again that the giant who’d dodged guard duty was doing most of the whistling.
He’s definitely the jefé, Mac thought, wondering if his personal bodyguard was now taking flack from the boss for allowing one of the humans to poke his nose where it probably didn’t belong.
Yanni acknowledged MacCready’s return and gestured toward the Morlocks. “If you think about it, Mac, whistling’s the perfect means of communication over long distances and mountainous terrain. I wouldn’t be surprised if they were using low frequency as well.”
“Like your elephants?” Mac said.
“And those musky secretions are probably some kind of scent marker,” she added.
“Sounds about right,” Mac replied with a nod. “Hey, I saw an interesting arrangement of animal bones in that alcove.”
“An arrangement?”
“Yeah, one stack on the ground, another one submerged in a smaller pool.”
Yanni paused for a moment. “In the water?”
“Sittin’ there in a neat little pile.”
“Maybe they’re feedin’ their algae friends.”
Now it was Mac who hesitated. “Calcium, phosphorus, and protein. Could be,” he said. Then he gestured toward the lead Morlock, who seemed to be in monologue mode. “Can you make out what he’s saying?”
“Not yet,” Yanni replied, “but I’m workin’ on it.”
Chapter 5
The Shape of Things to Come
To be a naturalist is better than to be a king.
—William Beebe
The happier the moment, the shorter.
—Pliny the Elder
Metropolitan Museum of Natural History
Fifth Floor
July 10, 1946
Major Patrick Hendry was peering over Charles Knight’s shoulder—which provided no little annoyance to one half of the Army’s new Codex Translation Team.
“Can you make out what he’s saying?” Hendry asked.
Knight turned and shooed the officer back a few steps, having just worked on a particularly ratty-looking section of ancient papyrus. “Well, it’s not just strange primates they’ll need to be concerned with. As you’ve suspected, the bad news comes in a smaller package.”
“And that is?”
“It’s in the valley Pliny keeps talking about. That seems to be where the real trouble is.”
“Was,” Patricia chimed in. “Two thousand years is a long time. Who knows what’s going on there now?”
“Okay, ‘was,’” Knight said, relenting.
Patricia cleared her throat and, after a pause that went on a beat too long, Knight got the message. “So, Major,” he continued, “what about sending some additional men in there? In case half the stuff Pliny described turns out to be true.”
Patricia nodded in agreement, though it was obvious whose idea it had been.
Hendry simply folded his arms, assuming what had quickly become Knight’s least favorite example of body language. “This mission doesn’t exist, folks.”
“Yes, I know,” the artist said, struggling not to lose his temper. “But how do you expect our people to handle something that can reshape flora and fauna the way we shape modeling clay?”
“Especially when they have no road map to the source of that kind of power—no clue what they’re searching for?”
“I understand, Miss Wynters,” Hendry replied. “Even looking at the sketches of these weird apes, I can see as well as you, that . . . that . . .” The major did not know what to say next. The words did not exist yet, to articulate how, nearly two thousand years ago, someone had discovered and used an advanced genetic engineering system.
Hendry continued—slowly this time, as if measuring each word. “From what I can gather,” he said, “some as-of-yet-unknown people in ancient Tibet learned how to fiddle around with their plants and animals—like those monkeys and apes that Pliny drew. And they used this . . . whatever it is . . . to make ’em smarter and nastier.”
Now Knight stood, turning to face the much larger man. “First of all, Major, you don’t understand—any better than any of us can really understand, yet. But more importantly, those are our friends and colleagues you sent in there.”
“Mac’s my friend, too, Knight,” Hendry shot back. “And he knew exactly what he was getting into. So did his two pals.”
“Did you not just hear me?” The artist held up a yellow legal pad filled with their recent translations. “They knew, you say? Well, according to this, they didn’t.”
Knight handed the note pad to the major, who began reading immediately.
“I hate worms,” the officer muttered. “Shit.”
“Yeah, shit,” the Codex Translation Team replied in unison. It was the first time that Charles Knight had ever heard his old friend utter a curse.
In the Valley of the Cerae
May, a.d. 67
When Pliny turned his open mouth into the gale, the just-past-his-prime and slightly asthmatic Roman discovered that the wind brought a certain amount of relief, for it squeezed higher-pressure air into his lungs. But he also felt the cold air biting deep within and knew that if the Cerae did not allow him shelter by nightfall, he would be a frozen corpse—with Proculus to follow, despite his outward defiance.
Too many deaths, Pliny thought. Forty in the Ceran trap. Almost twenty more today. I’m the leader of a ghost expedition.
Gasping and now mute, Pliny tried to peer over the heads of his shadowy captors and through the whiteout conditions. There was l
ittle to see. His other senses told him only that their trek had veered gradually and more sharply to one side of the mountain pass before turning downhill. Trying to drive thoughts of a death march out of his head, Pliny stiffened his spine, coughed, and, with renewed determination, picked up his pace. I’ve visited dangerous new lands all my life and I’ve always survived. And somehow I always will.
Pliny tried to search through the storm—hoping to see some additional hint of Ceran architecture, and the possibility of shelter. But though the wind stalled from time to time, the light remained dull and gray, the air itself still angry and driving a billion tiny needles of ice.
“Maggot!” Proculus cried out against another prod. Though his call was muffled and distant, it served to bring Pliny back to a new concern: even in the soldier’s wounded condition, he and his escort were now a full hundred strides or more ahead of his own slog.
Pliny exerted all his strength to keep moving forward, quickening his pace trying to catch up. His short and lanky guard kept up as well. A sharpened spear point, formerly one of their own, remained within jabbing distance of Pliny’s spine, following his motions with remarkable precision.
“What in Hades?” It was Proculus, again—nearer, this time, though his shout conveyed surprise, not anger. “Stop, you mother of whores!”
Now he is angry, Pliny thought, wondering what the man had seen.
“Poseidon’s teeth!” Severus called, also from somewhere ahead.
Though his lungs ached and he felt his own heartbeat throbbing against his temples, Pliny threw each leg more quickly before the other until he was closing the distance at a trot. The gale, as he advanced through it, shuddered, stalled, rose strong again. His vision reeled, coming and going with the on-again, off-again blasts of blinding snow, until finally he stumbled and rolled forward into clear air, as if tumbled out through a ghostly white lens.
Immediately, Pliny glanced backward. The wind and snow were abandoning him, racing back up the hills and along the mountain pass through which the three survivors had marched.
Pliny’s Ceran captor allowed him to approach his men, who were on their knees in the snowfield, both of them staring in the same direction. Pliny put a hand upon Severus’s shoulder and gripped. The centurion’s breathing was hard and fast, not so much from exertion as from astonishment.
“Do my eyes deceive me?” Severus asked.
Pliny ignored the question, for the sight that lay before them had replaced all other words and all other thoughts.
Spanning the entirety of a wide valley floor, what appeared to be a frozen lake was in fact a form of frozen mist. Though the mist lake was strange and beautiful to the point of being spellbinding, it was the enormous spire extending upward through its center that had stolen Pliny’s voice. Seemingly constructed out of crystal and stone, the glittering tower stood far higher than anything he had expected to see in this part of the world—a cyclopean spire assembled from stacked terraces, narrowing at each successive tier. Adding another facet to the power of this landscape came the revelation that the crystalline tower was clearly inhabited, for Pliny could detect movement—figures within the structure itself as well as on the outside of it, the latter clambering acrobatically between the terraces on a meshwork of branchlike supports.
Although the tower alone could easily have held Pliny rooted to the spot, his attention was drawn back across the mist to a wider view of the valley, where scores of less lofty though no less impressive structures were clustered—elongated domes, each taller than the Imperial Palace in Rome.
There was plant life as well. Most of it was ghostly white, but the pattern was occasionally broken by more familiar-appearing cables of thick greenish vine, climbing into the hills surrounding the valley. Pliny noted that the latter very much resembled the outer architectural elements of the tower, which the Cerans used to move with ease from level to level.
“What is this place and who are these . . . people?” It was Proculus, and once again, Pliny could not and did not respond.
Despite the difficulty of breathing the thin air, Pliny was able to concentrate on the details of the level overlook onto which they had been led. He began to suspect that the Cerae had reshaped the entire valley. Out there, in the center of the fog lake, the tower’s lower terraces were awash in gently rising and falling swells of white. He wondered how much deeper below the mist the actual foundation must stand. The portion that stood above the strange vapor was taller than the lighthouse at Alexandria, and yet the abrupt cessation of the blizzard revealed even nearer wonders.
Here, along the “shore” of what he would come to call “the Opal Sea,” one of the domes appeared to be undergoing the final phase of construction. Once their captors decided that their rest period was over and marched them forward toward shelter, the astonishments continued to add up. Overhead, dozens of Cerae were moving busily to and fro along handholds and footholds set into branches and ribs that served as buttresses. Pliny noted that these were members of a leaner and more graceful race than their captors.
They seem as different from those brutes as we are different from the people of Asia or Nubia. Perhaps even more different.
Within the mountains of southern Tibet
July 10, 1946
“I think I see daylight,” Mac said, noting that several hundred feet ahead the passageway became suddenly brighter. This seemed impossible. By everything he knew, nightfall had certainly overtaken the world above. So he was surprised but not completely shocked to discover that the impression of daylight was illusory—nothing more (or less) than an intensely bioluminescent, cathedral-like chamber. All around, crystalline arches and carefully hewn rock walls bore the marks of being shaped in the recent geologic past. Whoever the Morlocks were, they had obviously chosen to hide at least a portion of their civilization deep beneath snow and rock.
As they moved toward the center of the immense space, they passed below rows of thick glassy pillars that were strangely organic. Each of them soared a hundred feet upward before splitting into branches that reinforced an arched ceiling, which was itself shaped from sections that resembled leaves.
“Feel familiar?” Mac said to Yanni.
“I feel like I’m in a forest,” she replied.
“No forests up here though, right?” Jerry asked.
Yanni continued to stare upward. “Not anymore.”
Jerry rapped gently on a column base. The Morlocks did not stop him.
“It’s mostly ice,” he said, “mixed in with some sort of plant matter. Cute trick. I’ve heard of experiments with this sort of stuff in the Aleutians, during the war.”
Yanni gave him a quizzical look. “Where?”
“Off the coast of Alaska,” Jerry replied, and she shot him a nod. “So anyway, you mix ice with the right material—even cotton balls or sawdust—and you can make it as flexible as steel beams and strong enough to take a direct hit from a cannon.”
“Or from an earthquake,” Yanni suggested.
“Definitely a high likelihood of quakes round here,” Jerry said, without looking away from the architecture.
“Well, whoever built this was thinking long-term,” Mac said. “Perfectly functional yet—”
“—constructed with an eye for beauty, too,” Yanni finished, for him.
Jerry nodded toward their escorts. “Do you think they built these?”
Mac shrugged. “I don’t know. But I’m bettin’ their origin story turns out to be a real doozie.”
“Mac, your breath,” Yanni said.
“What?”
“Your breath,” she repeated, more forcefully this time, before turning to Jerry. “Yours, too.”
“Jeez, I’m sorry,” Jerry snapped back, clearly annoyed now. “This has all been a bit too stressful for me to worry about brushing my—”
“No, you ninnies,” Yanni said, shaking her head. “Your breath—you’ve gotten it back.”
Jerry stopped in mid-rant. “Hey, she’s right,” he sai
d. “No more wheezing.”
“Now that is odd,” Mac followed. “Especially since we haven’t been up here long enough to crank out the extra red blood cells that mountain types have in their bloodstreams.”
“You mean Sherpas and the like,” Jerry chimed in.
“You got it. More erythrocytes equals more hemoglobin.”
“Then what coulda—”
“Wait a minute!” Mac interrupted. “When Pliny mentioned the reshaping of life itself, we were all thinking about speeding up evolution by skipping over a few steps. Maybe cutting down on the number of generations required to develop new adaptations.”
“So?”
“What if this works a lot faster than generations?”
“You mean evolutionary change within an individual?” Yanni asked.
“Hold on,” Jerry interjected. “Didn’t a guy named Lamarck get hung out to dry for that one?”
“You lost me,” Yanni said, with a shrug. “La-who?”
“Early-nineteenth-century Frenchie,” Mac said, picking up the story. “Lamarck believed in evolution but thought it worked when individuals needed or desired specific adaptations. He even incorporated environmental change.”
Jerry jumped in. “When the ground foliage died, short-necked giraffes stretched their necks to feed from higher branches. Then they passed those longer necks on to their progeny.”
“Exactly,” Mac followed. “Only evolution doesn’t work like that.”
