by Gary Gibson
There was a chorus of yes and da and nodding heads from me and the rest of the Soviets, our voices carrying far in the still air of the caverns. Even our whispers echoed back to us like the plaintive cries of ghosts.
It was the next morning, and our hosts had, as promised, brought us to one of the many post-extinction alternates they were engaged in exploring. Wherever the Hypersphere was, however, I felt sure it was not to be found here. Perhaps Borodin had got his information wrong.
Borodin himself was there, of course. I still hadn’t quite got over the shock of encountering him the previous evening. Fortunately, he had ignored me since arriving at the island’s transfer hangar that morning.
The man addressing us stood on top of a broad flat boulder pushing out of the floor of the cavern, a large rucksack resting by his foot. He and two women, who stood near the transfer stage on which we had materialized just minutes before, had been waiting for us on our arrival.
We were all dressed in heavy boots, hard hats and thick layers of waterproof clothing. Our breath frosted in air that smelled of damp and mould. A string of lights, supported on poles that stretched off into the distance, made it clear just how enormous the caverns were; past a bridge over a chasm, I could just make out shadowy ruins beneath a high, curving ceiling. They looked as if they’d been abandoned for centuries.
Suddenly, the man on the rock seemed to snap into focus and I realized where I had seen him and the two women before: in the photograph, standing in a line with several others, the undamaged Hypersphere visible behind them.
‘Before we get moving,’ the man continued, ‘just a reminder – we’ve only mapped a tiny fraction of these caverns, so if you do wander off or somehow get lost, that’s going to make it that little bit harder to find you.’ He took out a whistle and held it up. ‘You all got one of these?’
We held up our whistles, handily secured to our jackets by pieces of nylon cord.
‘Great. Anything happens and you get separated, just blow on that. And watch your step – there’s a lot of slippery moss and fungi growing basically everywhere, like on our friend back there. We’ve already had a few broken legs from people taking a tumble, so try not to add your neck to the list.’
As he said this, he jerked a thumb at the enormous statue of Christ behind him that rose almost to the roof of the cavern. Part of its face and a chunk of one shoulder were missing, and much of the body was hidden beneath a dense overcoat of moss.
‘Most of your work,’ he continued, ‘is going to involve analysing recovered technology and data, but one of our biggest discoveries in recent years is right here in these caverns, and it just might go a long way towards helping us figure out why the Stage-Builders disappeared so suddenly. That’s a big part of why we brought you here today – to see some of our current research. It’s just possible something you see here or in some of the other places we’ll be visiting later might help you form a connection or put things together in a way we haven’t thought of – and it’s just as important for you to have a solid idea of exactly what it is we’re up against every time we open up a new alternate for exploration. It’s not like we can just press a button and open up a door to some place we can all go and live in safely; if it was, we wouldn’t need to be here today.’
‘I don’t see anything here,’ said Damian Kuzakov, ‘apart from shadows and statues.’
‘We’ve got a little bit of a walk ahead of us first,’ said the man. He nodded towards a broad paved road that wound between the ruins on the far side of the chasm. ‘But it shouldn’t take more than twenty minutes. Sorry we couldn’t put you down any closer to where we’re going, but this is one of the few places in these caverns that’s got enough clear space for a stage.’
‘Excuse me,’ asked Damian, raising his hand. ‘What is your name, please?’
The man blinked. ‘Uh, sorry – I should have said. My name’s Jerry Beche.’
‘And you are a Pathfinder?’ asked Illyenna.
Beche dropped down from the boulder and began to hand out torches to each of us from his rucksack. ‘Guilty as charged.’ He glanced around, seeing the perplexed looks of some of the Soviets. ‘You did all read the orientation manuals, didn’t you?’
‘The manuals said that you are . . . last man on Earth?’ Illyenna sounded as if she was struggling to get the words out.
Beche laughed uneasily. ‘Well . . . the last man on one particular alternate Earth,’ he said. ‘Until the Authority rescued me.’
‘And the other Pathfinders?’ asked Vissarion, chipping in.
‘The same,’ said Beche. ‘All of us were rescued by the Authority from various post-apocalyptic alternates.’
‘I just thought . . .’ Illyenna’s voice trailed off.
That it was all some elaborate joke, I suspected she had been about to say.
‘And you?’ asked Vissarion, turning around to look at the two women accompanying Beche. ‘This is true of you too?’
‘Yep,’ said the dark-skinned woman. ‘Although I’m obviously not the last man. I’m Rozalia, by the way.’
‘I’m Chloe,’ said the second woman. ‘And ditto what both of them said.’
Beche looked back at Vissarion. ‘This was all in the manual, Mr Chakviani,’ he said.
Vissarion just stared around at the three Pathfinders as if he’d swallowed a live frog. Clearly, some of the Soviets were still struggling to come to terms with the reality of living in a multiverse. I, by contrast, had grown up with the concept as a daily reality.
‘Well, anyway,’ Jerry said into the uneasy silence that followed, ‘there’s a lot to see, so we’d better get going!’
I could hardly take my eyes from the statue as we skirted past it: in any populated alternate, it would surely have ranked as one of the greatest works of art ever made, yet it presided over an abyssal graveyard, with no one left to witness its lonely vigil but visitors from another universe. It must have been at least thirteen metres in height, and to my admittedly untrained eye appeared to have been carved from a single piece of unbroken stone. Skulls in their thousands had been piled all around its feet, rising in great mounds to its shins – and all, Pathfinder Chloe informed us as we traipsed past, quite real.
‘Quite a sight, huh?’ asked Jerry, coming abreast of me and nodding back at the statue.
I nodded. ‘But haunting, yes? To think of it lost down here in the darkness for so many centuries . . .’ I shivered, and not merely because it was so very cold.
‘Still, heck of a story how this place came about.’
I looked blankly at him, as did one or two of the others.
‘Okay,’ he said, ‘I know for a fact they briefed you this morning before you transferred here.’
I winced. ‘I . . . was feeling a little under the weather. Perhaps I did not pay as much attention as I should have.’
He gave me a knowing look as we moved on, following the string of lights deeper into the caves. ‘Partied too hard last night?’
I didn’t quite understand his choice of words. ‘Excuse me?’
We had drifted to the rear of the group. He angled his head closer to mine as if sharing a confidence. ‘Looked to me from up on that boulder like some of your colleagues were nursing major hangovers.’
I had not failed to notice this myself, although in my own case my inattentiveness had more to do with a lack of sleep following my unexpected encounter with Borodin. Elena had decided the engineers should join us for breakfast that same morning, and Illyenna had bolted from the kitchen the moment a plate of sausage and eggs was placed before her. Boris and Aleksi had sniggered like schoolboys at the sound of her retching.
I gave the Pathfinder a faint smile. ‘Yes – a little too much indulging. So what did happen here?’
‘The sun expanded, starting sometime in the early twelfth century, and by the time the seventeenth rolled around, most of the surface was a baked and lifeless desert. The few people still alive had spent nearly half a millennia digging
way, way down – either starting with existing underground complexes, like this one, or constructing brand new warrens.’
‘But they didn’t survive, did they?’
He shook his head. ‘Nope. They were just delaying the inevitable. I—’
We came to a halt as a faint tremor rolled through the ground beneath our feet. It lasted for several seconds, then faded away.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Rozalia called back. ‘Tremors aren’t unknown here. Everyone just keep moving.’
Chloe came to a stop until Jerry and I caught up with her. ‘Try not to get left behind,’ she said, flashing me a taut smile. ‘This is a group expedition, remember?’
‘We’re fine, Chloe,’ said Jerry, with an edge to his voice. ‘I’ve been here like a hundred times.’
‘Sure.’ She nodded and regarded him with narrowed eyes before stalking ahead to walk with Rozalia.
Jerry looked at me and shrugged amiably. ‘C’mon. Don’t want to set a bad example.’
We came to a Bailey bridge the Authority had constructed over the chasm, beyond which lay the long-abandoned ruins of a subterranean city. I glanced over the side of the bridge and saw the tumbled remains of what must have been the original stone bridge, far below.
We picked up our pace and for the next few minutes we walked in silence. Something made me think Jerry Beche and Chloe might be more than merely colleagues – not that this was any of my concern.
By now, the statue had slipped into the shadows behind us, but there was no lack of fresh wonders to catch our attention. The Pathfinders directed us to look upwards, and I saw vast murals painted across the cavern ceiling, barely visible by the string of lights that marked our route through the city: angels, armed with swords and with capes flowing around their shoulders, battled demons all across a curving expanse of stone that stretched far off into the darkness. I saw images of demons casting men and women into vast pits of sand littered with the wrecks of ships. Jerry became talkative once more, explaining that the oceans on the surface above had by now largely evaporated.
‘I knew I’d seen something like this before,’ exclaimed Aleksi Chulkov at one point. ‘I once visited the salt mines at Wieliczka. They had something like this there too.’
‘That’s just about where we are right now,’ Rozalia informed him, sounding pleased. ‘They dug cathedrals and halls out of the rock salt hundreds of years ago. Except here, they went further. A lot further.’
‘How many people did they manage to get in here?’ asked Damian.
‘Up to half a million when things got really bad,’ said Rozalia.
‘But how did they eat?’ Damian persisted. ‘And what about water?’
The Pathfinder smiled tautly. ‘You’ll see.’
We passed clusters of houses – hovels, really, and wretched ones at that – apparently constructed from clay and, if my eyes did not deceive me, bone. There was no apparent order to their construction, and as we passed I took a glance inside one, seeing small pits dug into the floor where once, presumably, cooking fires would have burned.
The cavern broadened the farther we went, and our guides directed our attention to balconies carved into the nearest walls, reaching all the way to the ceiling. I also saw the rusting skeletons of iron chandeliers hanging far above, appearing blood-red in the dim light.
Then the ground began to rise, and we ascended a slope.
At first, when I looked down the other side, I thought we had stumbled across the edge of some abyssal void – reaching, perhaps, all the way to the Earth’s core: the string of lights that had guided us this far came to a halt at the very edge of the void. But as I looked closer my perspective shifted, and I realized I was in fact looking at the shore of a subterranean lake, its waters as still and perfectly smooth as a black mirror. Farther out, beyond the point where our lights reached, bioluminescent fungus clinging to parts of the ceiling revealed the outlines of enormous stone pillars rising out of the waters.
We fell quiet, staring around us. It was an astonishing sight.
‘Just remember,’ said Jerry, breaking the silence, ‘pretty much everything you see they dug out of the rock with their bare hands. That lake down there is artificial. As for what they ate . . . well, you have to remember these people were living in the Middle Ages when the surface got too hot to inhabit. There’s no way to sustain crops and livestock down here in the dark, even with access to underground springs. They really didn’t know a damn thing about staying alive in a place like this. Once farming on the surface finally became impossible, things down here got very bad, very quickly.’
‘So they . . .’ Elena began.
‘They ate each other, yes,’ Rozalia finished for her.
‘All right,’ said Chloe, ‘this way, folks.’ She beckoned us to follow her along a narrow, winding alley that snaked between buildings that looked to my eyes to be on the verge of collapse. ‘This is what you’re here to see.’
We followed her down the alley. It broadened at its far end, then angled suddenly to the right. We turned a corner to find ourselves in a cul-de-sac, most of which was occupied by a white rectangular tent with translucent walls and a zippered opening, brightly lit from within.
Chloe unzipped the tent door and beckoned us to enter. ‘But don’t touch anything inside, hear? Spread out around the walls once you go in.’
We filed in, one by one, and I saw the tent housed a ring of Syllogikos field-pillars – the main components of a portable transfer stage, identical to the one by which we had arrived on this alternate. Several of the pillars had been kicked over, however. A control unit lay next to one, smashed beyond repair.
In one corner of the tent stood a pair of metal tables supporting a centrifuge, microscope and several racks of chemicals. Once we were all packed in, it began to feel very crowded. Jerry and Rozalia stepped carefully into the centre of the stage, then squatted by a mound of bones and rags on the ground.
‘So what is this?’ asked Damian.
‘This,’ said Jerry, ‘is the body of a Stage-Builder. One who got away.’
‘Got away from what?’ asked Elena.
‘From whatever made the rest of the Stage-Builders disappear,’ he said. ‘Not that it seems to have done him much good. Until we came to this alternate, we’d never managed to find even so much as a single body, so finding this was a really big deal.’
Elena stared at the forlorn little pile of bones. ‘But how can you know he’s a Stage-Builder? I saw plenty of bones on the way here.’
‘For a start,’ said Rozalia, pointing at the skull by her feet, ‘a forensics analysis showed that this guy died centuries after the people who dug out these caves all starved to death.’
‘Not to mention,’ said Chloe, ‘we found him lying in the middle of a transfer stage, which is a pretty big clue all in itself.’
‘But that’s not all,’ said Rozalia, pulling a small torch out of one pocket and shining it directly on the skull. ‘Look closer.’
The bone glittered, giving off a faint sheen of rainbow colours.
‘See that?’ she asked, looking around at us. ‘Like a very fine metal filigree, fused with the bone of the skull.’
‘What is it?’ asked Aleksi, gaping in wonder.
‘We think it’s some kind of bionic computer implant,’ said Jerry. ‘And there are other bodies nearby, all with implant technology that’s far too advanced to be native to this alternate.’
Nina stepped closer and peered down. ‘The skull has a deep indentation in it. Perhaps that was the cause of death?’
Rozalia nodded, turning her torch on a dark grey chunk of masonry lying nearby. ‘And that, we think, is the murder weapon.’
‘Murder?’ I echoed.
‘Sure looks like it,’ said Chloe, standing by one of the tables. ‘That rock has blood on it. After we analysed everything we put it back where we found it in case we could figure out what might have led one of them to murder another.’
‘And did you?’
asked Elena. ‘Work out what happened?’
The Pathfinder shrugged her shoulders. ‘Beats me.’
‘My theory,’ said Jerry, pointing at the ruined stage components, ‘is that one of them decided to smash up the transfer stage, and another of them objected strenuously by bashing the first guy to death with a rock.’
‘But why would anyone choose to deliberately strand themselves in such a dreadful place?’ asked Boris, sounding appalled.
‘All we have are questions,’ said Jerry. ‘And not much in the way of answers. But sometimes we’ve been able to pull coordinates even out of damaged equipment, and this time we got lucky. We discovered the last couple of alternates these people visited before they arrived here. One of those was the island back on Alternate Alpha Zero.’ He grinned. ‘And the other one we’re taking you to later today. But we’ve got a couple of pit stops to make first.’ He stood and brushed dirt from his knees. ‘Trust me, we’re saving the best for last.’
The full import of what I had learned was only just beginning to sink in. The Novaya Empire had never found so much as a single body belonging to the Syllogikos, yet these people had apparently found several. It was, indeed, a find of huge significance.
The ground once again trembled very slightly. I tensed with alarm, but the tremor passed quickly. I glanced around the tent, seeing anxious expressions, then heard a crack, echoing through the cavern. A few seconds later it was followed by a booming, rushing sound.
‘What the hell was that?’ demanded Boris.
‘I don’t think it’s anything to worry about,’ said Jerry with a tight grin.
‘You don’t think?’ Boris spat, his voice rich with disbelief.
‘It happens not infrequently,’ said Jerry. ‘Sometimes bits break off from the cavern roof and land in the lake. They built this place in a hurry, and it hasn’t been maintained in centuries.’
