“The bottom must be miles down,” Kam noted.
“If those treetops are the same height as the ones up here,” Jill added.
“Should we just jump it?” Kam asked.
“Jump it?” Lee asked with terror. “Are you crazy?”
“He’s right,” Jill said. “In this gravity the fall wouldn’t be as harmful, maybe we could land on the treetops and climb down. One problem, though: the map they put in my head starts at a temple landing, not a treetop.”
“Then let’s start from the temple,” Amanda said. “Lead the way.”
“Correction, two problems,” Jill said. “They didn’t tell me where the temple is.”
Chapter 5
“Got your temple,” Amanda said, looking over the steep riverbank and slipping nearly to the water’s edge.
“I can see a group of stones coming from beneath the water entering a hollow where the bank stands higher.”
The rest of them hurried to join her.
“Over millions of years the water must have worn down to the solid rock bed near the cliff and the banks are nearly thirty feet above the falls on this side,” Jill noted. “Easy carving for our primitive, mind-reading friends.”
Where the water dove off the cliff, an opening in the river bank hid behind vines and plants, eking out a life with roots deep in the rock. The natural colors of fauna and cragged rock face contrasted with gleaming white stone on the barely hidden pathway.
“Looks like nothing has walked here for centuries,” Lee said.
“More like several millennia,” Kam corrected her. “From what they showed me, this was off-limits even before the bearantulas arrived.”
“The trail washed away,” Amanda pointed out. Arranged rocks had clearly once protruded through the rushing water at the edge of the cliff, but now most of them were long gone. With the rocks, the path would have been dangerous, but it now seemed impossible.
“Jumping off the cliff is starting to look better and better,” Kam said.
“Critical velocity is the same for your body as that water, going over the cliff in the waterfall isn’t much different. Without branches to grab onto you’ll smash at the bottom. Slower, but bone-breaking all the same.”
Kam peered over the sheer cliff, looking for some footholds on the face of the riverbank, but found none. “There is no way down.”
“It’s time we took you two to boot camp,” Lee said, slapping their shoulders. She started ripping vines from the rocks.
They toiled to create strong rappelling lines to hoist themselves down the bank of the river and swing under the waterfall to the shiny rock path on the other side.
An hour later they stood in the high cave opening under the beginning of the falls. The spray from the water lifted and filtered through the humid air. The scientists collapsed, tired after the slow and painful journey down the cliffside held only by tangled red and green vines and the ensuing leap across.
“This was where they made the sacrifices,” Jill realized, studying faint carvings on the wall, eroded by thousands of years of errant water drops.
“More importantly,” Kam noted, “they made a map!”
“Back here!” Amanda yelled from down the passage into the rock beneath the falls.
Despite its age and deterioration, the storytelling was not dulled in the art Amanda had found. Behind moss and calcium stains hid a terrifying scene strangely familiar to Kam.
“Just like the Mayans, they ritually sacrificed their own,” he said. “They told me this, but I doubt they knew the true extent.”
“You said you know the way from here,” Amanda reminded Jill.
Jill nodded and slowly crept further along the passage, never straying too far from the cliff facing the ravine. Light flickered through to the high curving walls, exposing new secrets of the ancient society that once flourished on the cliffs. Astronomy, games, and sacrifice seemed of primary importance.
“God,” Kam gasped. “They used to be in Vega. That’s only twenty-five light years from Earth. Well, where we used to be, anyway. Their radio signals would have hit the Earth when we were building the pyramids.”
Jill smiled and looked back. “Then at least one of my TED talks was accurate: SETI’s failure was only a timing problem. Perhaps the force that moved us both here is just trying to put us all together so we don’t miss any more calls. Let’s find their holy grail down there and phone home while we still can.”
The path wound down and around multiple times until they reached a high ledge built over the deepest part of the divide. Close to the waterfall again, rushing water echoed and mist seeped in the gateway to the open air in the ravine.
Only Lee was brave enough to step onto the ledge, kept nearly pristine by its hidden locale after thousands of years.
“It’s glorious!” she shouted back, but none of the others cared to join her.
Jill followed Lee halfway to the edge of the ledge and disappeared around the side.
The rest gulped, not wanting to climb under the waterfall. They tiptoed to follow Jill and stood outside on the lip, revealing a hidden passage of stone stairs, long overgrown but never used. The stairs, built for tall-ones, had ample width for human feet, but proved very far apart. To move from one step to another required a short hop down in the lower gravity, risking a fall over the side.
The steps curved on the cliff face until dipping behind the waterfall. The path beyond the waterfall was obscured by mist; they hoped they wouldn’t be trapped there, unable to climb up the tall slippery steps to come back.
“How did they show you this path?” Kam asked Jill.
“They shared an ancient tale. Legend holds if they behaved poorly the sacrificed would ascend to the village to haunt the living. Many stories exist of sacrifices rising from the dead and living on the outskirts of the forest, always coinciding with crop failures or bad weather.”
“So why build them steps to come back up?” Lee asked.
“These steps would only be visible to those who fell,” Jill pointed out. “To cross to the other side of the ravine was forbidden.”
“So this was just a ruse to control the will of the people?” Amanda surmised.
“Don’t be quick to judge,” Kam said. “Mayans were still sacrificing Christian Spaniards in the 17th century.”
“Didn’t they have archaeologists?” asked Amanda.
“Based on what we saw in the council room, I think they were intent on covering up anything like this,” Kam said.
“We’re walking into a forgotten history of an alien world,” Jill stated. “Watch your step.”
As they descended behind the waterfall, steps became more deliberate on stones covered in slippery algae. The path grew darker, the waterfall blocking the still-setting sunlight. They held tight to the branches growing between rocks.
After descending two miles down the cliff face, the mammoth waterfall roaring arm’s length in front, they approached the base of the cliff.
“Now what?” Amanda fretted. “Is there supposed to be something or someone here waiting for us?”
“There is,” Jill said, looking up at the cliff wall at a stone gateway, forty feet high and nearly invisible after strangulation from eons of vines. It broke the water’s path and allowed safe passage under, with a veil of mist falling on the far side. Where it may lead would remain a mystery until they passed through.
“The Passage of the Dead!” Amanda exclaimed. “I didn’t know how it would be useful until now, but they shared with me their legend of the dead passing through a great gateway to the afterlife. Looking at this arch, I remember the story as if it was my own.”
“I have a feeling we’ll remember more when we reach the other side,” Kam said.
“These aliens sure do love scavenger hunts,” Lee quipped.
With renewed vigor they hastened their descent. As they cleared closer to the base of the falls, the wall of water moved farther away, spilling over the great arch, pulled towards the p
ool that ran to the valley river.
A vibration halted their steps.
“Something’s moving inside the rock,” Lee guessed.
“No, look!” Amanda said, pointing at a dark spot on the other side of the waterfall, hard to see through the wall of water against the dying embers of a sunset reflected along canyon walls.
The waters pulled back, and the nose of a bearantula delta ship burst forth, firing a new weapon that crumbled the rock under their feet. Soldiers farther out on the ledge fell into the canyon, scrambling to grab onto something.
The rest jumped down close to the rock wall, glad the still-light gravity softened their landing. With rock tumbling from above, they made a mad dash to pass through the passage of the dead, hoping the name wouldn’t catch up with them. Many more of the soldiers didn’t make it through, but anyone who stopped to offer assistance would have met the same fate.
The ship, too large to follow into the passage, set down under the cursing water, just ahead of the entrance. Its clumsy landing clanged on the rock and echoed to the humans running in the dark.
“Where are we going?” Lee shouted.
“Away from trouble!” Amanda shouted back.
“Don’t be so sure,” Kam said, slowing to a halt as the tunnel ended.
Although there was nowhere else to go, the door stood out of place. A twenty-five-foot high metallic wall reflected what little light whispered down the passage from the waterfall. Far behind at the beginning of the tunnel they heard the clinks and flitters of the bearantulas scuttling on all fours.
Lines of directed heat sizzled through the waterfall and struck the back wall, melting little pools of igneous slag and dotting it with embers. Soldiers melted too, staring into the hazy wafting mist, yearning for a rifle to fire back until tiny pockets of waterfall turned to gas and less-tiny pockets of strong men vanished only to be replaced by volcanoes of blood.
Most died from blood loss almost immediately, but one, missing only a foot and a chunk of arm, called to Amanda for help.
“Jesus! Even in Iraq I could put a soldier out of his misery,” she pined as she searched the cave floor for a rock to finish the jobs the bearantulas started. The air heated where her chest had been moments before.
“Get down!” Lee screamed at the scientists, who had been fumbling at the far wall of the cave, caressing the ancient cracks for a nascent clue to their escape.
Frantically, Jill searched the remaining faces in the dim light. “They gave one of us the key, right?”
“Hopefully one of us still alive,” Amanda said as she and Lee crawled to the wall.
“If it’s like any of their other secrets we gotta find the keyhole before we’ll remember,” Lee noted. “Or speak friend and enter.”
“What?” Amanda asked, then scraped her hands along the adjacent rock wall. “There has to be another way out of here.”
“Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks,” Lee whispered to herself. “Hope it’s Durin’s Day.” She knocked on the door and mockingly said in her best deep Gandalf voice, “Mellon.” She tipped her body upright in surprise.
“What is it?” the others asked.
“It’s in my head,” she said. “Asking me for a password, a combination of images I think.”
“Anybody?” Amanda asked.
They waited, hoping someone else knew. Their thoughts returned to one thing, the ever-closer clattering of the approaching bearantulas.
“Wait, listen . . .” Amanda implored. “They’re retreating.”
The hum of the delta ship began again as it lifted off the rock floor outside.
“Do they know something we don’t?” Jill asked.
“Maybe they could read the tall ones’ minds after all,” Kam grimaced, looking at the door with new dread.
“What’s in there anyway?” Lee asked Kam. “Cthulhu?”
“They just gave me hints,” he answered. “Metal. Glass. Symbols. Things that glow. Long shards of black and silver.”
“Oh, so just Shoggoths, then,” Lee sarcastically sighed.
“Whatever’s in there died long before Lovecraft was born,” Jill reminded her.
“Don’t be so sure about that,” Kam said. “The ‘dead’ part, I mean. I also remember something strange hidden away in there. Something older and wiser than the tall ones, not really alive or dead. More like . . . sleeping. A bubble with many small shapes.”
“Atomic structures?” Jill guessed.
The metal of the door began a timid glow and it began to retract.
“Ingenious!” Jill exclaimed. “Only a mental picture of what’s inside gives access. Even if some sacrilegious youth scampered down here, the secrets would stay hidden.”
“And they would have forever if the original memories weren’t carried back home,” Kam noted.
They staggered into a cacophonous interior space as big as the hangar at Area 51 several times over in every direction. Bioluminescence dimly lit the side walls, illuminating walkways through the cavern.
“I can’t see a ceiling,” Lee said. “You could store a Saturn V rocket upright.”
“Please, oh please, let that mean there’s a spaceship in here,” Amanda said under her breath.
The hallway shook and a troubling sound echoed from the open door. Rocks tumbled into place and blotted the sound of the rushing waterfall at the entrance of the passageway of the dead.
Jill whispered in the increasing dark, “They weren’t leaving; they were just going back to their ship to blast away the cave and seal us in!”
“They’d rather close us in here to suffocate than come in after us,” Kam said.
“Or they don’t want what’s in here to escape,” Jill said.
“They used the tall ones. Used us,” Lee realized. “We escaped from that ship too easily. They knew the tall ones would take us to their city and send us here. The bearantulas got a two-for-one deal: we led them to the only thing that could stop them and now they’re free to take more slaves with us left down here to suffocate!”
“If they fear whatever is in here,” Amanda said. “Let’s find out why.”
They walked through the alien warehouse, finding everything Kam described. Glass and metal shards were clearly bits and pieces of speeders and ships. All kinds of mechanical equipment, relics from the tall ones’ technological age came to rest in the cool dry space. There were a plethora of the grey, stretched carbon-fiber-looking speeders from the earlier vision in the forest. There were stranger things, although most shared the touch-sense that allowed transferable memories from within.
The cavern held mundanery too, stores of eating utensils, four times the size of those used by human hands. Knives and cutlery were bandied about by the remaining few soldiers like swords to relieve their nervousness, happy to have some semblance of a weapon again.
“Anybody see anything familiar yet?” Kam asked.
“Everything in here makes itself familiar once you touch it,” Lee shouted back.
They kept walking, the space so large they walked for hours in the same direction without reaching a back wall. Their progress was slowed by the intake of new information about their host planet. The space functioned like an abandoned natural history museum, educating them about everything the tall ones used to make or do. What they really wanted to find, a means of escape from this planet, eluded them though.
“Why did they lock this all away?” Jill shouted.
“Same reason we sign nuclear nonproliferation treaties, but never get rid of all our nukes,” Lee answered.
While the soldiers looked for ships equipped for interplanetary travel, Kam and Jill were on entirely different business, guided by some unconscious premonition. Eventually they reached a sealed chamber covered with a kind of film. They coordinated to rip the film away from the school bus-sized capsule, hollering for the others to come help.
The contents were unclear at first look. And second look. The closest resemblance was a sleeping elephant; gray, w
rinkled, and silent. The mass of rumpled skin or material floated inside something similar to a transparent hyperbaric chamber.
“Pressurized atmosphere,” Kam said.
“That thing must be hollow then,” Lee said.
“Is this thing going to show us the way out?” Amanda asked.
“The way in,” Kam corrected her, realizing the answers to many questions since the Event were before them. Kam could feel the importance of the object in the chamber. It almost lured him in like a hypnotic suggestion. He’d felt this way before, in his dreams, though it seemed the source of those visions was now the slumbering mind.
“In?” Jill asked. Kam didn’t respond, too deep in thought.
The lump of flesh inside the chamber stirred and lights lit on the periphery. The machinery around the capsule whirred to life, but the flesh did not move again.
“Life support system for something long dead?” Jill asked. “An alien mummy?”
An image appeared in all their minds simultaneously. Not from mind-tongue, something older, more refined, and instantly relatable. If God ever answered prayers directly, it would sound like this. The feeling of a great awaking, a warmth, a welcoming.
Within minutes the communication moved from feelings to conjugated verbs, echoing their own thoughts. It was studying them, scanning minds and memories.
“It’s like a baby,” Lee said. “Repeating its parents until it learns the words.”
Before long the information ran at a dizzying pace until binding together into a purity, a singularity of data. In one instant they knew the entirety of the universe, new avenues of being evolved, lived and died. Stars swirled together, burst forth and grew life on infinite worlds, then swapped places with just as infinitely-abundant dark matter. Energy expanded and collapsed, bubbles in a froth, fluctuated by great waves rushing again and again. The strings of existence were plucked in extremis, then an abrupt stop. The fleeting knowledge vanishing like a teacher realizing she’d been in the wrong classroom, leaving pupils grasping at straws, clues beyond what they could understand.
The Filter Trap Page 40
