Light In the Cave
Page 2
agents from the Dome was sent to Metrozoid at the same time. Both teams were on the same mission. That team was to spend no more than one week in Metrozoid time. That meant that the team on Ophar-Holiqui could be there as long as ten weeks. Eldon and Salena found temporary shelter in the caves there. Some plant life or what looked like plants was still growing. This served as some sustenance. However, their physical needs were minimal because the SEF from the Dome energized them. The normal desires of a heterosexual couple living together were suppressed for them because of their SS mission. This was really to their advantage. Any needs or anxieties associated with life outside the Dome would not distract them now. This in no way made SS agents like automatons. It aided them to focus on their mission. Eldon and Salena had a partnership that was a true friendship. They valued their companionship immensely. This helped them to work together well.
The second day period on this bloomball world was no different than the first. On the third day however, they heard hissing and what sounded like distant screams. The fourth day they saw the first evidence of life. It was a large bug with wings that flew away when it sensed them. Finally, on the seventh day they came upon what looked like a biped body jumping or – could it be flying? When they got to the spot then they saw a horror they wish they had never seen. That body was not jumping or flying – it was thrown. It lay on top of a pile of other bodies, gray and losing form, as the sky. They had found a large pit where the Lilistan had put their dead. An entrance to a cave was nearby. They entered it. Slowly they walked downward into the darkness. A small lamp they had provided the only light now. Then a faint glow could be seen. It got brighter as they walked farther into the cave.
“I’m glad we finally found them,” Eldon said somewhat re-lieved. Salena looked at him and said,
“They all must have took refuge in-side.” Soon they entered a large cavern with glowing light emanating from the walls. All along the walls from floor to ceiling were various size openings. A buzzing sound started up and kept growing into a cascade of noise. Then bugs started buzzing around menacingly, with bodies as large as the visitors’ heads. Eldon and Salena started to run out of the cave chamber away from the attacking bugs. Eldon shouted out,
“We are here to help the Lilistan!”
All they could do was run and find shelter in another cave. Within an hour they were back at the entrance of the bug cave dis-cussing what to do about the bugs. From behind them came the sound of clicking and scratching. The visitors hid behind a rock. Then over a rise came a very large bug with a little person on its back. It appeared to be a biped dwarf. This was the first Lilistan they had seen. The bug took the dwarf down into the cave. Salena and Eldon followed as quietly as they could. The bug went into a side passage they had not noticed the first time. It then passed through some kind of translucent membrane into a small chamber. There was a faint glow coming from the chamber. Eldon called out to announce themselves, but no response. He reached through the membrane with little or no resistance. Then he stuck his head through it and said hello. Eldon heard the patter of small feet running, saw a very small dwarf enter the chamber, heard its high pitched scream, and then blacked out. He woke up on the floor with Salena calling his name. Eldon had been hit with a gummy ball – a toy of a dwarf child. The pieces of it rolled off of Eldon, then came back together as if pulled by invisible threads to form one ball again. The ball then immediately shot back into the chamber where it came from. Then they heard the tiny voice on the other side saying,
“Hello, hello,” repeating what Eldon said. Then other voices could be heard.
“That is what you get for sticking your head in someone’s door,” Salena said helping Eldon up.
“That must have been a frightened child,” Eldon said holding his head.
Suddenly they were grabbed by long thin vines or tentacles. They were sticky and wrapped around each of them in just a few seconds. They were yanked into the first chamber and then into a slightly larger one. The long tentacles came from a large bug in the center of the room. It held fast Eldon and Salena, each wrapped in a tentacle being dangled above the floor. As they were being waved around the room, and turned every direction, the Lilistan started to come in. They were smaller than the visitors and looked in wonder and amazement at them. Then the dwarf child bounced in unable to contain his excitement. He kept saying the word hello and ran from his parent dwarf. He jumped on the back of the big bug in the center of the room. He pointed at the visitors and did flips in his glee. The parent dwarf was able to restrain him with some kind of rope.
Eldon tried to speak to them while being waved around by the bug.
“We have come … to help the Lilistan. Can we speak to your … your leader?”
The oldest Lilistan there, Fregban recognized the ancient language of his people. He said,
“Yer-yer yoora speeka old din-din old tongue. Yera are yera yoo ancestors yera din our ancestora din come back din yer --?”
That was a transliteration of his question which was asking if they were their ancestors that had returned. Eldon spoke to them in the last known lang-uage of the Lilistan. It evidently had changed over the many generations. Their appearance was something unexpected to the visitors as well. They were small, like dwarfs now.
Fregban commanded the bug to put them down. The Lilistan were not afraid now as they began to gather around the visitors. They inspected them up and down with their large eyes while various involuntary smiles donned their crooked little mouths. “Can you take us to your leader now?” Eldon urged again. From somewhere more little people came in and began to fill the room. They now lifted up the visitors and carried them over their heads from room to room. Finally they reached the large cavern that Eldon and Salena first found. They set them down on some kind of pillows. The swarm of little people now receded slowly toward the edges of the large chamber. The Lilistan elders now entered and took their little seats before the visitors. Fregban was one of them. The crowd now calmed down and the chatter faded out. After a few seconds of silent stares, Fregban asked,
“Are you an-cestors of ours – come back – you are?” Eldon did his best to understand their modified speech which was a ghost of the original Lilistan speech.
“No. We are not your ancestors. We are from a larger world outside.”
To the Lilistan, anything from the outside was a threat. One of the other elders, Haanbeg answered,
“Outside? Outside? Always hurt from outside –
Killing rays from sky they came – we hid inside – must live inside now.”
The third elder, Leowan now asked,
“Come you from outside? Why? Come you to hurt us – why?” Salena shook her head and said,
“No, not to hurt. We want to help you.” The elders found it hard to believe that anything good can come from outside. Eldon tried to convince them that they could live on the outside of their world soon. He explained that the threat to their existence from the outside was being eliminated. If they went back to the surface of their world, the energy field would return and restore the beauty it once had. This was just a crazy story to the Lilistan elders. So the conver-sation went back and forth, but the visitors felt as though they were getting nowhere. The present generation seemed to have no knowledge of their glorious past when thousands of bloomball worlds flourished on the pre-Met-rozoid planet. All they knew was the current state of underground grim ex-istence and the terror from the sky that brought death, destruction and des-pair upon them.
Some of the Lilistan were getting restless as the meeting dragged on. Then a faint buzzing got louder until ‘zooom - weee’ went a bug over their heads. A big bug was flying around the room with a strange squeal sound coming from it. As it came around again near their heads, everyone could see what was making that awful noise. It was the dwarf child sitting on the bug near its head. This was the same child that the visit
ors first encountered.
“Wiligan! Stop! Bad boy!” cried the father as he pointed to the flying boy on the bug. He caught the bug with a very fast net, grabbed the squealing child, and let the bug go. Then he immediately ran with the child in the net up to another chamber. An attempt was made to continue the meeting with the elders, but no one could concentrate on anything after that but the screaming child. Some laughs could be heard from the audience as the sound of the child being disciplined boomed out into the chamber. The many bumps and crashes sounded as if the child was bouncing off the walls. It was hard for Salena to contain herself as she tried to disguise a laugh as a cough. The Lilistan seemed to be ready now for any kind of diversion since they had grown tired of the meeting. So the visitors and the elders agreed to end it now and talk later.
As the days went by, Eldon and Salena felt like prisoners in a long nightmare. They were treated civilly in as much as they had living quarters and food. But they were constantly watched because of the continued distrust of the Lilistan and also the strangeness of the visitors.
Eldon talked with the Lilistan elders nearly every day. Salena no longer sat in on the discussions because it made her depressed.