Stars Beneath My Feet

by D L Frizzell

  The others noticed us talking and veered in to join the conversation.

  “They’re both telepathic, though…right?” Redland asked.

  “That’s not quite the way T’Neth communication works,” Mayford answered. “The ambassador told me once that T’Neth communication skills and vocations are inextricably linked. If a child displays a talent for engineering, like Seku here, they will develop the ability to communicate through a kind of mathematical language. It doesn’t happen often, but there are T’Neth children who reach adolescence and lose their ability to communicate with their own parents on a telepathic level. They simply don’t have the same genetic predisposition for it, you see. This is why adolescent T’Neth are organized by syndicates. It’s also the reason they maintain a rudimentary spoken language, so that some communication remains possible, even if it is extremely limited.”

  “How do the different syndicates communicate with one another?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  Mayford sighed. “It’s like I explained earlier. A small percentage of T’Neth have the ability to communicate in more than one fashion,” Mayford said. “These are called mediators. We would compare them to translators, or even diplomats. They create the bond between the disparate groups, and thus keep their society functioning as a whole. The ambassador happens to be a mediator. I believe she understands three of their languages, if you will.”

  “How many of these mental languages do they have?” Hathan-Fen asked.

  “Three that I’m aware of,” Mayford said. “Languages vary over time, and I suspect mental abilities are no different. They could have dialects, or completely different abilities for all I know. Again, the ambassador does not share a great deal of information about their social structure.”

  “She is being cautious,” Norio said, “as any of us would be when there is uncertainty and distrust between peoples.”

  “Yes, quite,” Mayford agreed.

  Hathan-Fen turned to Kate. “Do you know which kind of telepathy you use, Miss Runaway?”

  Kate only shrugged in reply.

  “If she fled her home before her abilities matured,” Mayford theorized, “she may not understand the concept of languages.”

  The conversation waned again, and we continued onward. Later, as I found myself wishing for anything to disturb the boredom, even a magnetic quake, a faintly glowing line appeared below us, deep in the ice. It seemed little more than a mirage, but it was something new, at least. I pointed it out to the others, who seemed as glad as I was that there was something new to talk about. We made a few benign comments, but there wasn’t enough interest to keep the conversation going.

  Later, despite that fact that the temperature must have been a few hundred degrees below zero, the surface of the ice took on the sheen of liquid water. I thought we might be in danger of slipping, but our suits provided excellent traction. I felt a peculiar bubbling sensation under my boots and stopped. The others did as well.

  “Liquid nitrogen,” Mayford said, pre-empting our questions. “It condenses from the atmosphere and collects in puddles on the ice. Our suits raise the nitrogen’s temperature to just above its boiling point. Nothing to worry about. It turns back to liquid form as soon as we pass by.”

  “Beautiful,” Redland mumbled.

  “Isn’t it?” Mayford exclaimed. “I know you all don’t see much ice in the Plainsman Territory, but down here we have several different types – phases, if you will.”

  Redland held up his hands. “Stop talking.”

  “Oh,” Mayford said, and shut up.

  It seemed that Redland preferred mind-numbing silence over the sound of Mayford’s voice. I don’t think he was the only one who felt that way, either.

  The further along we went, the brighter the glow increased beneath us. At first, I thought it was an optical illusion where the light of the galaxy overhead was refracting back up at us in some sort of mirage. I soon doubted this explanation as a distinct yellow outline materialized in the far depths.

  “Did we just walk past a drop-off in the bedrock?” I asked, pointing at the now-distinct areas of light and darkness.

  “Drop-offs don’t get brighter, they get darker,” Redland said.

  Good point, I thought.

  “Mister Norio,” Mayford said. “Have you been this far south before?”

  “I have not,” Norio replied.

  “Then I am confident you are about to discover that your life’s work has not been in vain,” Mayford said.

  I know that under normal circumstances, Norio would’ve commented that no worthwhile endeavor is ever done in vain, even if one never sees the fruits of their labor. He didn’t say it, though. No one said anything.

  My earlier thought about growing immune to amazement on the ice was premature. The brightness of the ice’s reflection was not caused by the stars. It was caused by something underneath the ice. As we continued walking, and looking more intently, I saw how waves of yellow light defined the contours of what I now identified as a massive drop-off beneath us. Only the shelf wasn’t jagged like I would expect from an ocean floor. It had a straight edge which only appeared slightly distorted through the ice.

  “This is the crater at the South Pole?” Hathan-Fen said.

  “Yes and no,” Mayford said without elaborating. He kept walking and we followed him.

  There was no longer interest in looking up at the stars. Instead, all of us humans looked down. From the direction we came, the ice was dark. In the direction we were going, the light under the ice was radiant. I had no way of telling how far down the ice went, as the light was so intense that it rivaled the permanent sunlight I had lived in my whole life.

  An odd visual effect presented itself as we moved further across the ocean of ice. The light dimmed almost to nothing in some places. Further on, it brightened again. From certain angles, it looked as if there were multiple sources of light, each with the same intensity and color. The lights elongated, joined with other irregular patches, or split into golden halos. I’d seen something called a lava lamp once, which produced the same distorted effects with blobs of molten wax. “Is there liquid water under the ice?” I asked.

  “No,” Mayford said excitedly. “Can you think of anything else it might be?”

  “It appears there is only a single source of light,” Norio commented. “The ice must be diffracting it the way a lens would.”

  “Spoken like a true scientist,” Mayford smiled.

  “It is breathtaking,” Norio added.

  “Spoken like a true poet,” Hathan-Fen said, an edge to her voice.

  The rest of us milled around, leaning this way and that to see the lights at different angles. Our faces were lit from below like people gathered around a campfire in the dark. Hathan-Fen, who did not have any reservations about walking on to the ice to that point, became stone-faced and silent. She moved away from us, stepping gingerly back the way we came, and even seemed to be sweating.

  “What’s wrong, Major?” I asked.

  “That’s the planet core, isn’t it?” Hathan-Fen asked. “It’s the goddamn, molten core of Arion and we’re standing on a block of ice above it.”

  Redland laughed. “Darlin’, you ever hear the old sayin’ about snowballs and hell? If that’s lava down there, we’d have no ice up here.”

  “Then what is it?” Hathan-Fen demanded.

  I scarcely thought about it before giving her an answer. “That’s Kithara.”

  “The sun?” Redland laughed. “That’s crazier than her theory!”

  “It is the sun,” Mayford said plainly.

  “Bullshit,” Redland said.

  “It has to be,” Norio said. “I recognize the color, just as Alex has.”

  “You never thought that there could be more than one sun with that color?” Redland snapped, switching from good humor directly to anger as he too often did. “I see yellow above us, too, maybe a million specks of it.” He gave a flustered wave toward the galaxy overhead. “That’s wher
e it comes from. It just ricochets back up from the ice in funny ways, that’s all.”

  Seku spoke a single word as she pointed down at the light. “Corridor.”

  “What does that mean?” Norio asked.

  Mayford said, “That is where the T’Neth builders live, in the hole they drilled through the center of the planet.”

  “So…we are looking at the sun?” Hathan-Fen stammered.

  “Yes.”

  “Holy fuck,” Redland said, his mouth agape.

  “That’s what I said the first time I saw it,” Mayford admitted.

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  We stared at the sun for quite a while, taking in the enormity of it all. Even Hathan-Fen stopped moving away from the light. I had appreciated the T’Neth train, despite the fact that I couldn’t comprehend the complex engineering that made it work. Maybe that was because I had a basis of comparison with our own maglev train that made the cognitive leap possible. This, looking through a hole that must have been a hundred kilometers across – a hole that went all the way through the planet! – boggled my mind. The T’Neth weren’t just an advanced race of colonists, they were planet-builders. I thought to myself, is it any wonder the captains of the Founding Fleet thought it necessary to land on this planet?

  Hathan-Fen didn’t feel the same sense of awe that I did. She felt the opposite. “I can’t do this anymore,” she muttered, and marched hastily back the way we had come.

  We all watched her retreat. I think she would have broken into a dead run if there was a dignified, military code that defined the procedure to flee in terror.

  “Afraid of heights?” Mayford asked.

  “Apparently,” Redland said.

  Engineer Seku shambled after Major Hathan-Fen, although her pace was more sedate. The rest of us decided there wouldn’t be anything new to look at, so we followed as well. To my surprise, Redland trotted after Hathan-Fen until he caught up with her, and then walked alongside her the rest of the way.

  I took the occasion of our long walk back to the train to consider what I’d just seen. The T’Neth were colonists, just like we were. Wherever they came from, they recognized Arion as the type of planet they could live on, the same way Earth scientists had in the Solar System. In that regard, maybe we weren’t so different.

  Maybe our similarities with the T’Neth went further than that, I thought as continued toward the canyon and the awaiting train. I let my mind wander, imagining the possibilities at such length that I was sure Mister Mayford would approve of my internal long-windedness. Our founding fathers left the Solar System because all of their resources were running out. It was only a matter of providence that the Vortex drive was developed at that time, which is how they finally broke their planetary chains and made it to interstellar space. With this new technology, not only would humanity be able to cross the stars in ships that each carried a million passengers in calmed comfort, but they could do it at a thousand times the speed of light. On Earth, where tiny ships once took weeks to plow across an ocean, a rocket could bypass the water and reach its destination in minutes. The vortex drive had been a similar paradigm change. Where spacecraft had once been limited by the speed of light, a vortex-driven ship bypassed the fabric of space altogether.

  The new space-faring systems opened a grand vista of possibilities, so much that the leaders of the Solar system’s governments decided that they would not be satisfied with colonizing a single new star system. They wanted to colonize a hundred systems. That’s what Arion promised. It was the most Earth-like planet on the edge of a cluster of Sol-like stars. While many of those potential worlds were hidden from sight at such a great distance, Arion would provide a beachhead for expansion. From there, Mankind would never run out of resources again because the entire galaxy would be within our reach. The only flaw in their plan was that Arion was ten thousand light years away. Because of this, when the Founding Fleet spun up its Vortex drives at the edge of the Solar System and began their journey, they had no idea what kind of devastation they would find.

  I waved to get Seku’s attention and borrowed the snow-cone maker, as Redland had called it. I knelt to carve a drink of water out of the ice, making sure I wasn’t getting any liquid nitrogen with it, and came to a sudden, dawning realization. I remembered something, a piece of the puzzle that I hadn’t been looking for. I mulled over the old riddle, which had never made sense to me before, but suddenly did now.

  When you see the stars beneath your feet. I repeated those words in my mind over and over, until finally Norio asked if I was okay.

  “Yeah,” I said, and stood up. I drank from the suits drinking tube absentmindedly, and then gave it to Norio.

  Norio stared at me, and then the snow-cone maker. He frowned and followed me.

  From that point, time meant nothing to me as I trudged back toward the train. I was lost in thought, unable to remember the other half of the riddle. What was important, and somehow vitally so, was not just what the riddle said, but where I’d heard it. Redland had used it once. It was the code phrase he used to betray the Plainsman Territory to The Guile and his agents. As maddening as that was, it wasn’t the source of this vague recollection that eluded me. Had Norio told this riddle to me? He was ever speaking in riddles and metaphors, but I didn’t think that was it, either. I stared downward as Kithara’s light morphed through the uneven lens of Arion’s polar ice cap. Eventually, I passed the terminator line, beyond which the planet’s crust blocked the sunlight, and found that my memory darkened as well. I took a single look back, seeing the glow beneath the ice for the last time, and kept walking.

  “Sanctum.”

  I emerged from my distracted thoughts long enough to acknowledge Seku, who stood by the train.

  “How long ‘til we get there?” Redland asked. When Hathan-Fen gave him a questioning look, he explained, “I’m hungry.”

  “Soon,” Engineer Seku replied. She ushered the others in while I stood there, still contemplating.

  Beside me, Kate touched my elbow. “You are troubled, Alex. Do not be. Answers will come soon enough.”

  I stared at Kate. Waxing philosophical was not her style. Come to think of it, she didn’t usually show empathy, either.

  “Marshal,” Hathan-Fen called impatiently from the door of the train. I nodded, and nudged Kate on board. As I brought up the rear and the door closed behind us, I kept my eye on her.

  Seku brought the blue wisps back to life, starting with her pilot’s chair. It glided to the opposite end of the cabin from its previous location. Once it had assumed its position at what would be the new front of the train, she brought the couches back into being with the same mathematical precision she had used before.

  The others sat, but Redland remained standing for a moment. He kicked lightly at the broken remains of his old hat, stopping only when he noticed us watching him. “What?” he asked gruffly, and then sat down next to Norio.

  “Do not be discouraged, Marshal,” Kate told Redland. “You will get a new hat.”

  “Damn straight,” Redland said.

  Kate smiled gently at him, to which he responded by looking away.

  A moment later, I felt my ears pop. It was the same feeling I got whenever I climbed a mountain. I worked my jaw to ease the pressure, and noticed the others doing the same. As the feeling subsided, I felt my helmet disengage from the suit. I raised the helmet off my head and sniffed. “It’s okay,” I said, and watched the others respond with relief. Once they were all off, Mayford collected them and piled them up next to one of the couches. By that time, we had all been so overstimulated with new concepts that we hardly noticed the suits deflating and melting into the floor.

  Seku revved up the blue wisps and got the train underway again. Not knowing how long it would take us to reach the Sanctum, I caught Hathan-Fen’s eye and gestured toward the rear of the cabin. When we were both out of earshot of the others, I leaned in close to whisper. “Did you bring any of that sedative with you?” I asked.


  Hathan-Fen frowned. “No,” she whispered back. “We traveled light, remember? Why?”

  “Something’s wrong with Kate,” I whispered, glancing over my shoulder to see if we were being watched. “She’s acting strange, as if she’s under T’Neth mind control again.”

  “Could Seku be controlling her?” Hathan-Fen whispered. “I thought you could only hear Kate.”

  I hesitated. I didn’t want anybody to know how far my awareness of T’Neth minds extended. “Engineer Seku isn’t like other T’Neth,” I whispered. “I don’t think Kate connects with her any better than I do.” That wasn’t a lie, but it was an omission. I could understand Seku just fine. She thought in terms of dimension and design, where the only true expression was the transformation of matter. Hardly a language I could – or would – explain to the others. But that also indicated that Kate’s thought processes were just as foreign to Seku, and anything that didn’t concern the manipulation of the physical world didn’t concern her.

  “Hmm,” Hathan-Fen said. “Do you feel okay?”

  “I’m fine,” I said. “Just a little suspicious.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Hathan-Fen whispered, and gave me an honest smile. “Keep an eye on her for me, if you would.”

  I nodded. Heading back to the couches, we joined a conversation that had picked up in the brief time we were away from the others.

  “Perspective,” Redland muttered to Norio, his eyes darting from Seku to Kate out of the corner of his eye. “They want us to know what they are capable of.”

  Norio cocked his head. “You think the T’Neth invited us here to intimidate us?”

  “Hell yes,” Redland said. “Look at Mayford; he’s the perfect lap dog for the T’Neth. He sings their praises and follows them around like he’s gonna get a treat for lickin’ their feet.” He waved a hand toward the back of the train. “And then they show us they can squash us like bugs if we don’t do the same.”