Approaching Oblivion (Jezebel's Ladder Book 4)

by Scott Rhine

  Only after her feet were on the ground did Zeiss collapse to a sitting position in pain.

  “You were amazing. How did you do that?” Red asked.

  There was a ragged gash along his side, from knee to ribs. Nails or jagged beams had slashed his skin open. “Wasn’t me,” he said, wincing as he pulled out one of the large splinters jutting from his forearm.

  “Sojiro?” she asked over the emergency channel.

  “Not me,” the man in Olympus replied. “Mercy adjusted a gravity generator to slow your fall—set off all kind of alarms up here. I just watched. The waterfall hung in midair for a while, which was really freaky because she didn’t even bother with the voice interface this time.”

  Red looked up, and Stu followed her gaze. Standing above them on the cliff was Mercy. One hand was joined with Lou’s and the other raised in front of her like a movie poster of Moses parting the Red Sea. Her talent aura was blazing like a rum Molotov cocktail. Lou was limp on the ground.

  Stu reached his arm out to mirror his mother’s and said, “Again!”

  ****

  The women pulled the wagon carrying their husbands and an excited toddler downhill toward Olympus for medical treatment. Stu wore earphones and listened to something called the Wiggles. Lou had to be knocked out for the pain.

  Red asked, “What the hell just happened?”

  “Lou gave me too much through our link. He tastes blood, and his ears are ringing. He needs time in a healing pod,” Mercy replied. “Without a doctor, Z will, too. We have about forty left.”

  Red asked, “How were you able to float down off that cliff like a Hollywood angel?”

  “Lou couldn’t walk, and I couldn’t carry him.”

  “But how?” Red stressed.

  “I’ve been gradually growing more sensitive to the ship. I can hear it through the Collective Unconscious. With Lou’s help I could make Sanctuary hear me as well,” Mercy said, staring at her child in the wagon.

  “You mean Snowflake?”

  “No. I don’t need that interface anymore.”

  Red stared at her childhood friend. Was she still human? Swallowing, Red asked, “What does this mean?”

  “Sensei has been grooming me, all of us really.”

  “For?”

  “He said he’d give us this ship if we passed the test. What he failed to mention was that the ship requires dedicated personalities to operate it. Right now, there are three Magi in the second saucer. Together, they are the ship. Fortunately for us, only two humans will be necessary.” A tear rolled down Mercy’s cheek. She wiped it away and pasted on a smile before Stu noticed. “I volunteered to be one of them in order to save Stu.”

  Red envisioned Aztec sacrifices and Polynesian volcano gods. “Permanently?”

  “Until someone qualified takes my place,” Mercy replied. “The test could just be an elaborate ruse for us to spend time interfacing with the ship’s consciousness. On the bright side, my body won’t age. Sensei only wants me for my mind.”

  “There has to be another way,” Zeiss said from his place in the wagon. He helped push on the uphill portions of the journey.

  “It was supposed to be me,” Red whispered.

  “It was my choice. What would you do to save your family?” Mercy asked. When neither adult responded, she said, “I’ve had a good life, better than I thought possible. I would have died at Alcantara. Instead, Snowflake helped me secure Lou and our child. The Magi never lied to me.” Sniffing, she turned her head so her boy wouldn’t see. “I have until the test is over to take my place. Please let me tell Lou in my own way.”

  “Can we tell the others?” Red asked.

  “If we pass the test, then you can worry them,” Mercy said.

  Chapter 40 – Legacies

  The year passed in a blur of activity for the crew of Elysium. They gave the gifts of glass, linen, crop rotation, boiling, and addition. The smoother work went for everyone else, the more uneasy Herk became. His primary job was to worry while everyone else crafted. He kept adding layers to the mesa’s defenses. The bobcat pits were the most effective ‘do not disturb’ sign. Pandas who avoided those faced a stone fence overgrown with stinging nettles. The top of the fence was spiked with pottery shards. Similar defenses protected their wild rice fields.

  Next, Toby modified the red Magi choke moss to spray animal tranquilizer to deter trespassers. The fence and the river kept the moss contained to the island. No one was allowed to leave the mesa without gloves and a breather mask.

  Herk had the most trouble gaining approval for adding explosives. Lieutenant Rachael Eliezer, as Elysium leader, only signed off when the group’s original bugged obsidian spears and the decoration at the birthing village started disappearing one at a time. Even Pacino’s backpack had been left behind when slavers chased him out of town.

  If the pandas evaded all that, Herk had the sniper rifle, three needle-launching gauss guns, and the COIL beam weapon aimed at the steep path up to the base. He could singlehandedly hold off hundreds of aborigines.

  Olympus rarely spoke to the twelve members of the ground crew anymore, except in Mercy’s cheerful voice, and she was more social than work oriented. Because of distance and radiation bursts, they were out of touch most of the time, which gave the astronauts on Labyrinth time to pick the bones clean at the forerunner crash site in the high desert. Risa and Nadia were building two new stealth suits from the salvage.

  After days of excavation in the sand, Herk and Oleander discovered that the ceramic slabs on the surface had been from the eggshell of a vast alien landing bay. Scouting the ruins Out-of-body, Oleander found only the smashed remains of three empty decontamination pods. Any shuttle contained inside had certainly launched before the impact. Dressed in his exoskeleton, Herk collected a few meager samples. Worse than coming up empty-handed, the loose sand tunnel collapsed on his way out, and Oleander had to dig him free before he ran out of air. They barely made it back to the shelter of the Lincoln Copper Works by the time Sanctuary opened its shutters.

  The presence of the antigravity panels on his last visit to Crown Island convinced Toby that the control saucer might have survived. The nanobiologist asked to return for another look, but Rachael refused to risk any more lives.

  One day, Mercy asked to speak over the radio to the visiting Pacino, whom they now referred to by his native name Shuulagar. “Our newest version of the translator works a lot smoother. We just have a few linguistic and cultural questions to resolve before we can release the product.”

  At extreme range, the signal from Sanctuary had to be routed through the satellite. Sitting next to Herk in the spaceport, Yuki fiddled with the comm controls constantly to eliminate static and garbling. The gear still had a faint echo, but it was better than the alternatives. Accustomed to Mercy being the voice of the translator, Herk felt odd when Mercy spoke on her own to the natives, as if the computer had developed a mind of its own.

  The cave of secrets was across the river to the east. The only protection added there had been a tunnel to allow humans to sneak in and out of the cave from the slopes above. Herk also arranged for the cave entrance to be locked when no guests were expected.

  “Okay. Shuulagar is leaving his guards and the rest of his entourage outside the cave. The scribe was reluctant, but we convinced her to hang back. It’ll be just you and him,” Herk explained.

  “Scribe?” asked Mercy.

  “Yeah. How is this for irony? The godspeaker isn’t very good at writing because his paws are too big. He’s more of a talker, so he keeps a younger female with him to write down everything he says. She’s almost pure white. The darkest spots on her are the ink stains on her delicate, little fingers. She has a dozen students who copy what she writes. Everything we say is duplicated a hundred times and sent throughout the maze.”

  Mercy asked for photos. After several moments, she mailed one to Yuki’s pad. Herk heard Yuki reply, “You’re right. She could be a wide-nosed, teenaged, human girl
.”

  When the head panda in the revolution entered the cave, cameras recorded him from three angles. “He’s lost weight,” Yuki noted.

  “A price on your head will do that,” Herk replied. “He used to dye his fur to fool customers he cheated or blend in with locals. Now he does it to avoid assassins.”

  Over the cave speakers, Mercy said, “Greetings, noble partner Shuulagar. Long will your deeds be remembered.”

  The panda sat on the floor and sampled the food offerings. His first choice was the baklava drenched in honey. He rumbled, “Many times you have spoken to my people, each time a change.” The new program made him sound more sophisticated.

  “Seventeen gifts so far,” Mercy said. “Ten remain. Do you like them?”

  “Not all my people understand. Only few burn bright with delight at your words. So much change,” Shuulagar said.

  “So many in ignorance and bondage who need the light,” Mercy countered.

  The panda tapped his forehead with his right paw in the sign of his new religion. “I spread your words to my pupils, but many resist.”

  “Your words will last beyond any who complain. What has been your favorite message?”

  The Shuulagar rocked as he thought. “The duty of the strong. This is the heart of what it means to be lah-zay.”

  “Indeed.” Mercy had been particularly proud of that translation. “I wondered if you could clarify a few things for me.” Then she proceeded to grill him about a list of words Lou couldn’t define, which led to several obscure aspects of panda culture.

  ‘Giving him the other end’ was shorthand for a popular joke. A merchant gets trapped in swamp mud. He asks his lifelong rival for help. The rival throws him one end of a rope, and the trapped man ties it around his waist. He asks for help again, and the rival throws him the other end with a heavy rock.

  Particularly fat pandas needed a third support in the center of a ladder. The name of this extra pole was a synonym for waste and self-indulgence.

  Panda travelers could start a fire with sparks, but that was a lot of work. Traders preferred to keep a bit of smolder weed in their pouch in a nut husk or gourd. Work crews carried torches for easy fire starting and to keep the cats away.

  As pandas became warmer and more relaxed, their ears and finger pads transitioned to a darker shade of pink—especially the white ones. Mercy gave a particularly lilting, “Mmm-hmm,” when he added this detail.

  When in heat, females sang and males would fight to mount them. During other times, pandas could still have sex, but the process was more civilized, involving food offerings.

  When a male lost in combat, the winner sometimes cut the loser’s mane to shame him. Fatal encounters were rare, usually from males who had gone mad from chewing the wrong kind of herb. Shuulagar refused to sell this sort of product on principle—he wanted repeat business.

  He was helpful about everything except the roots of the word Bloo—the slave lords of the great lake. After half an hour, Mercy wandered back to an earlier topic. “Tell me about your scribe.”

  “Pear Blossom is a dessert without rival. She recalls my every word, and her writing is the most precise I have ever seen. She was thrown out of her home after she learned to read—she was one of the first to learn. Her mother worried that such knowledge spoiled her for proper cub bearing.”

  This put the female at six to seven Earth years in age, about eighteen to twenty-one in equivalent maturity.

  “How do you feel about her?”

  “Writing has not affected the girth of her hips nor the downy white of her fur,” he said, swallowing a handful of cucumber sandwiches. “The whites are a rare tribe because they cannot hide well in the jungle.”

  “Why does she follow you through so much danger?”

  “Huh?”

  “Are there any other women in your retinue?”

  “No.”

  “Is it rare for women to show such bravery?”

  “Yes,” grunted the panda, picking up a plate of deer meat with mint jelly. “Many of the men we meet sniff around her rudely. I have to defend her even among other . . . merchants.”

  Yuki chuckled. “Shuulagar is being pretty dense.”

  “What do you mean?” Herk asked.

  “Hello! Pear Blossom is still a virgin, has been crushing on him for years, and she sounds cute,” Yuki explained. She showed him the portrait Mercy had e-mailed—a white female gazing with rapt devotion as the great teacher lectured in the background. The caption read, ‘A girl’s unrequited love.’

  As Shuulagar chewed food and smacked his lips, Mercy said, “Perhaps when you leave with the scroll for the saw, you could take her one of the leftover desserts and ask her why she follows you.” They elected to use the English word for the tool, as the Pandanese had nothing close to the concept. The team decided that paper was redundant since parchment and cloth already existed, but pandas still toppled big trees with controlled fires.

  “She is too fine for the likes of me. You know what I came from.”

  Mercy replied, “Not only the granith give gifts. Tell her one way she makes your life better.”

  The panda belched and picked his teeth. “Tell me of this saw.”

  After Shuulagar left the cave, Herk followed the panda’s progress with every surveillance device he had. Every woman in the camp watched as the panda chatted with his female scribe. The revelation of her feelings for him left him speechless—fearless abolitionist, rebel, educator, and speaker to the unseen, he was reduced to single-syllable responses. Fortunately, the spear from Toby continued to broadcast. Pear Blossom remarked how beautiful the lights in the sky had been that evening. He could only echo the word “beautiful.” That night, when his followers raised his linen sleeping pavilion, Pear Blossom joined him inside. Shuulagar waxed eloquent in his descriptions of her white flanks and nap. After she disconnected the feed, Yuki voted that they make Mercy an honorary love goddess.

  ****

  The satellite began malfunctioning in the flares. First, the zoom lens stopped working. A week after that, Zeus’ eagle wouldn’t take any commands from the ground crew. Weather reports, however, still transmitted at random. Instrument blind except for the rover’s cameras, Rachael recalled everyone to the main camp.

  Seven weeks after that, a wounded Pear Blossom made her way back to the cave of secrets. They agreed to offer her sanctuary in exchange for her story.

  As she entered estrus, one of the guards fought Shuulagar and lost. That guard left the entourage out of jealousy and went straight to their enemies. Soon after, raiders swarmed Shuulagar’s camp. Shuulagar died protecting Pear Blossom and getting her to safety. Of all people, Herk arranged a memorial service on the mesa for the leader of the panda resistance.

  Rafael Herkemer delivered the elegy in his civilian clothes. “We showed Shuulagar the way to be human, but he walked the path better than we imagined. He died upholding every aspect of the code of strength—protecting women and children against slavers. The enemy chopped his head off with a sword made of copper that he taught them how to work, and they mounted his head by the roadside with a message written in the alphabet that he delivered to this world. He has changed this planet in ways we never anticipated, and I will never forget him.”

  After a pause, he continued. “But we didn’t lose our link to him. According to Toby, Pear Blossom is carrying the godspeaker’s child. They’ll die without us. I say it’s our turn to step up and live the code we preach. It’s the duty of the strong to protect the weak.”

  The team allowed Pear Blossom to stay in the cave in safety until she gave birth to twin boys: Voice who Shines, and Memory that Endures. The team felt so bad about Shuulagar’s sacrifice that they allowed her to remain under their shelter to nurse in safety. Soon, her cave became the hub of the anti-Bloo rebellion and the biggest school on Labyrinth. Her teaching transformed Shuulagar from a profane drug dealer into a wise Socrates or Confucius. Among students, rumors circulated about the ghosts of S
huulagar’s Mesa.

  By the end of that year, Pear Blossom had copied scrolls for tin, the latrine, cheese, and multiplication tables. Very few pandas grasped the mathematical gift, so Sojiro had to explain the concept several times. The artist had elected to stay unfrozen for the year in order to work on his paintings; however, no one on Elysium trusted him after Yuki’s warnings. Herk noticed that Sojiro was even more withdrawn than normal. The only duty he responded to was teaching art class for Stu.

  As Pear Blossom’s pale children grew, the spirits taught her bread, antibiotics, and preserving food with salt. Lou took her tribute and converted it into metered verse. With artistic advice from several on Sanctuary, he created Labyrinth’s first epic poem. The term godspeaker was replaced with benefactor. Poetry made the story easier to remember, and tales of Shuulagar’s martyrdom spread, along with the location of the home of the sky spirits. Not to be outdone, the crew of Elysium etched the poem on a shining bronze plaque as part of the presentation of the twenty-sixth gift—the alloy that represented Risa’s crowning achievement.

  By Herk’s count, this milestone meant that the team only had one gift left and only ten more weeks of worry till they left this rock.

  Soon after, the Meteoropolis district was hit hard by storms and massive waves. Remote cameras recorded scores of pandas floating on the lake in the aftermath. The rebels hailed this disaster as the judgment of the gods. During this huge loss of life, the crew of Elysium debated whether they should send aid. They asked Pear Blossom to use her influence in the region to minimize looting and to spread the teaching of clean water.

  In the chaos, Herk was the first to notice that Toby had slipped his leash and departed the mesa.

  Nothing was ever easy.

  Chapter 41 – Cover of Darkness