Melaarny did as she had been told, and was hauled back to her feet. She looked at the priest, at the two warriors, at Mykul and the other elders. They all smiled with varying degrees of smugness, and Melaarny suddenly realised that their confusion and haste had all been an act, merely something to distract her so that she would be surprised one more time.
She braced herself for it. She was ready for it. Her new life couldn’t come quick enough.
“You are about to see our world. Our whole world, as we know it – not just the fields and the caves and the borders of our land. Do you understand?”
Melaarny nodded.
“Answer me, child. Speak.”
“I understand,” she stammered.
“Good. Are you frightened?”
“No,” Melaarny answered, her voice barely shaking.
“Liar,” the priest accused.
“I am not!” Melaarny snapped back, surprising herself.
Mykul whispered in the priest’s ear, and she suddenly smiled wide and stepped aside. “Then you may look.”
A flat plain stretched out in front of them, only a few hundred metres long. Cratered and ruined, it was a pockmarked wasteland of earth and rock, wood and steel. And yet it teemed with life – electric-blue grass grew in thick patches, crowding bushes and shrubs that were spiked and serrated or covered in whips and grabbers; immature Tentacle Trees and Eucalyptus rose from the tangled undergrowth, lazily reaching for the sun; the clicking and clacking and calling of unseen insects filled the air, competing with sweet birdsong and the call of unseen animals. Beyond the edge of the plain was a smudge of brown and green and purple, the land to the far-west rising up to the horizon.
Melaarny’s jaw dropped. She let the Priest lead her to the plain’s edge. “Shit,” was all she said.
The Priest didn’t chide her or criticise her, she just let Melaarny take it all in. Far below, Melaarny could make out the fields she played and worked in, and the yawning mouth of the cave-system she called home. She realised that they were standing atop Bourke Mountain, and that the sheer drop before her was what she had always assumed was its peak. Something deep in her gut made her want to look back upon the enormous white cave that she guessed was the mountain’s true peak. She wanted to scratch the itch that this new knowledge had created. Instinctively, she started turning to do so.
“Be still,” the priest warned. “The time will come.”
Once again, Melaarny did as she was told. Beyond the narrow ribbon that had only moments earlier been everything she knew, she could see the scars and landmarks that served as its borders. Beyond them was a world she had never seen before. To the west, the far bank of Lizzie’s Creek became a steep hill topped with tangles of wire and vine. To the south, the land past the ravaged and ragged chasm was a fertile jungle, its skyline dotted with ancient Eucalyptus and Tentacle Trees. Other trees grew amongst them, none of which she had seen before – some were like living spikes and spires, some had overgrown canopies striped yellow and red, some were bulbous and drooping, some were scaled and glistening, some eerily waved their branches and limbs back and forth, and some kept perfectly still until an unwary bird drew close, after which they became a blur of predatory action.
Rising from the jungle and towering over the canopy was a strange and immense structure – a series of long curved poles, bleached-white and weathered, running in a vaguely straight line. Running parallel with them, maybe fifty metres distant, another series of poles that all curved in the opposite direction. Strange birds nested in the poles and even stranger bats hung from them, waiting for the night. The birds called, their song mixing with the faint noise that bled from the jungle, the cry of a horde of different animals all feasting and frolicking.
Melaarny looked to the north. The land there had literally been torn apart, furrowed with gouges and scrapes that exposed its innards, its eerie desolation butting up against the edge of the bottomless crater-pit. It was a horribly quiet and still place; nothing moved across it, not a single bird flew above it and not a single blade of grass broke its wasted monotony.
“What do you see?”
“I… Uh… I don’t know.”
“What do you see?” the priest asked again.
Melaarny looked harder, hoping that naming what she knew would satisfy the priest. “I see… a Fixed Bird,” she said, pointing it out.
The Priest folded her arms over her chest and looked decidedly unimpressed.
Melaarny pointed again. “I see the chasm that marks our southern border.” She pointed again. “The crater-pit.” She pointed again and again and again. “Bubble-boulders, the rubble slopes, Eucalyptus trees.”
“Enough,” the priest said. She kneeled beside Melaarny and looked her in the eye. “Listen, now. Listen well.”
She looked out at the land and pointed at a Fixed Bird.
“Aeroplane.”
She pointed at the chasm to the south.
“The Yarra River.”
She pointed at a bubble-boulder.
“Helicopter.”
She pointed at the crater-pit.
“Shopping centre.”
She pointed at the rubble slopes of Bourke Mountain.
“Buildings.”
Melaarny strained to take in these new words, as if matching them to things she had once naively thought known and understood required more effort and will than she possessed. She repeated them to herself, chewing over them like a cow does cud.
The priest smiled softly, pleased with Melaarny’s diligence. “There’ll be plenty of time for you to take it all in,” she said, standing back up. “You’ll learn not just their names, but what those names mean. You’ll learn how our world once was. And as you learn, you will begin to make your choice. But there is one more thing you need to see before you leave your childhood behind.”
She looked down at Melaarny and her face assumed a sombre expression.
“You may now…”
But Melaarny was already turning around, eager to see the enormous white cave from the outside. It wasn’t that a view of three horizons was insufficient; she was just desperate to see what made this last mystery worth saving.
“…turn around,” the Priest said with amused futility.
Melaarny looked upon the white cave and realised that she was looking at an enormous skull. It towered over her, almost touching the sky, taller than any tree. She was struck cold by the sudden awareness that she had been standing inside it. The thought made her feel somehow insignificant and weak. She started to put the puzzle together: what she had thought were distant walls and a high domed-ceiling had once housed its brain, and that what she had offhandedly thought of as the ‘teeth’ of the gate-wall were in fact actual teeth. She knew that the skull must have once been attached to a body; it just made sense, despite how wrong it felt. Her stomach flip-flopped at the thought of how tremendous such a thing must have been; she took an involuntary step back, the priest quickly steadying her. The skull didn’t seem to have any obvious eye sockets, and yet somehow it seemed to stare at them; its crocodile-like jaws almost grinned, stretching back for a hundred metres or more.
Dead and bleached, the skull mocked them still.
“What is it?” Melaarny asked, her voice little more than a whisper.
All of her excitement had drained away, leaving her with nothing but fear. This was a thing only seen in nightmares, a bringer of horror and death. It was wrong, so deeply wrong that this knowledge was ingrained into the world and everything that walked upon it.
“We call it monster.”
The End
Read on for a free sample of Kaijunaut
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks must first go to Mia, my beautiful Mia. Without your encouragement, feedback and love – and your support for what started out as a pretty left-of-centre idea – We Call It Monster wouldn’t be here.
Thanks must also go out to Rose and Steve, who have always tolerated and encouraged my love of monsters both “real” and fiction
al, which emerged when I was a little boy. And thanks as well to Lucy – the best little sister a brother could have – who read numerous drafts and gave invaluable feedback.
An extra special “thank you” to all the fine folk at Severed Press, whose attention to detail and editorial suggestions sharpened the book immensely, and made me see it with fresh eyes.
As always, thanks to Matt for being my brother in science fiction – I don’t know where I’d be without you.
It goes without saying that thanks are due to the titans of the Kaiju field: Ishirō Honda and Eiji Tsuburaya; Merian C. Cooper, Willis O'Brien and Marcel Delgado; Ray Harryhausen; Rob Bottin and Rick Baker.
Lastly, thanks go out to you, dear reader. Without your interest in Kaiju fiction and Australian science fiction, we wouldn’t have our own particular Antipodean take on this underappreciated sub-genre.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Lachlan Walter is a writer, science-fiction critic and nursery-hand (the garden kind, not the baby kind). He is the author of two books: the deeply Australian post-apocalyptic tale The Rain Never Came, and the Kaiju story-cycle We Call It Monster. He also writes science fiction criticism for Aurealis magazine and reviews for the independent ‘weird music’ website Cyclic Defrost, his short fiction can be found floating around online, and he has completed a PhD that critically and creatively explored the relationship between Australian post-apocalyptic fiction and Australian notions of national identity.
He loves all things music-related, the Australian environment, overlooked genres and playing in the garden, and he hopes that you’re having a nice day.
For more information, check out www.lachlanwalter.com
Chapter One: Crashing into the Cosmos
1
“This is totally ridiculous. I’m gonna die.”
Cole followed his wife, Emily, and C.C. into the DSMU dock. He hoped he wouldn’t die. He didn’t want to die. He had so much to live for: a beautiful and highly intelligent wife, his family, his xenolinguistic studies, and a vintage collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Maybe it wasn’t a life for everyone, but it was one he enjoyed, and he didn’t like the idea of how dying would negatively impact his ability to enjoy that life.
The rest of the crew, Mathieu and Anna, were already in the dock and suited up in their Advanced eXploration Environmental Survival (AXES) suits. The closed-in room was full of large, floor-to-ceiling, white-and-black domed structures set into concave platforms. Cole thought they looked like giant dinosaur eggs set into satellite dishes.
The airlock shut and sealed behind them. From this point forward, there was only one way out of this room: exploding out of the spacecraft.
Cole took a deep breath. He pulled on his AXES suit. The AXES suits were full-body suits with protective padding for the joints. They also came with a full-filtration helmet and a small distiller tank. Each suit was highlighted in bright blue markings.
Emily said, “Take it easy, baby. This will be just like the simulators.”
“I failed the simulators.”
“How do you fail the simulator?” C.C. asked. “Isn’t it autonomous? You press a button and then you sit back.”
Anna said, “Cole pressed the wrong button and ejected himself from the EDLS before we left the ship.”
“Oh, that’s right…”
“Ignore them,” Emily said. “You’ll be fine.”
“Right. Except for the part where I’m about to be jettisoned out of a ship that is itself orbiting an alien planet at about, what—six and a half kilometers per second? That’s three hundred ninety kilometers per minute, which is roughly twenty three thousand kilometers an hour.”
“Twenty three thousand forty, to be exact,” Mathieu added.
“Twenty three thousand four hundred,” Emily corrected.
“You and numbers,” Cole said to Emily.
“You and letters.”
Emily continued. “Taking into account the DSMU’s burn rate, that means in the low gravity of the planet, the thrust-to-weight ratio is roughly 500:1. It is the safest landing possible. See, if you have a problem, you do the math, and the math will solve it.”
“Erratic winds, alien planet with an unstable atmosphere. My words trump your math.”
“I thought you were looking forward to this, hey” Mathieu said. “‘Exploration is the destiny of mankind,’ you said.”
“I am. I’m just not looking forward to being dropped into an alien planet’s upper atmosphere.” He rubbed his stomach.
“Did you take the antacid?” Emily asked.
Cole nodded. “But I’m not sure it was enough.”
“You’re cute when you’re nervous. Do you need help into the EDLS?”
He shook his head. Emily kissed him tenderly. For a brief moment, he held her lips to his, like he could hold her safe and close to him. Like he could hold their lives together.
She pushed away and crossed the room to her Entry, Descent, and Landing Shell (EDLS), where she pulled herself into the polished metal structure. Like butterflies reverse-engineering themselves into their cocoons, the astronauts pulled themselves into the domed EDL structures.
“This way to the EDLS, sir,” JEVS said to Cole. JEVS, which was short for “JPL EVA System,” was the robot custodian of the Anchor while the astronauts were away.
“Thank you, JEVS.”
Cole had a little more trouble than his compatriots with climbing backwards into the EDLS. Granted, he hadn’t had half their training.
“Here we sit like birds in the wilderness,” C.C. sang. “Birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness! Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, waiting on Cole Thomas Musgrove.”
While the others chuckled, JEVS buckled Cole into his seat in the DSMU. Cole shot back, “I’m late cause I got to kiss the commander. She’s a damn good kisser, by the way.”
“Stop it,” Emily said.
Cole said, “I want that on the record before we plummet into history, or to death. My wife’s a damn good kisser and I would follow her to the ends of the galaxy if she asked.”
“Got it,” C.C. said while the rest of the crew chuckled.
Emily checked the status of her equipment. The screens and joysticks were all operating normally. She stretched her arms into the DSMU’s revolutionary dynamic chair. It was a multi-axis gimbal chair that allowed the user to sit in virtually any position and move freely while communicating with the DSMU.
While she completed her status checks, C.C. said, “Hey, you’re not in charge yet. I’m still the commander of the Anchor.”
Emily exhaled sharply. “C.C., are you going to give me any crap?” Her tone implied a cornucopia of bad things if C.C. responded incorrectly.
“Not giving you any crap, sir. Just not ready to relinquish my command, I guess.” He cleared this throat and said to everyone: “Ahem. It’s been three years that I’ve been your commander onboard the Anchor. I want you all to know that it was an honor and a pleasure serving you. Thank you for flying with Titan Space. Please place your trays in the forward upright position. Bad jokes aside, I’d like to thank Mr. Dan Deerfield, the CEO of Titan Space, as well as the board of directors, chief engineer Rick Render, and all the hard-working engineers at Titan Space and NASA who developed and tested the Anchor.”
“Gracias, C.C.,” Anna said.
“Yeah, thanks, man,” Cole said.
“Three big cheers for C.C.,” Mathieu said over the communications network, clapping.
C.C. said, “Commander Musgrove, the mission is yours.”
“Thank you, Commander Crenshaw. Crew, prepare for EDL.”
“Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Anna said. “I want to get off this ship. It’s time to see some wide open spaces.”
“At least as much as you can from inside a DSMU,” Mathieu said.
“I’ll take it.”
Emily pulled up her crew’s vitals. Everybody looked good except her husband, whose heart rate was elevated. “Cole, I need you to breath sl
ow and deep. Your vitals are too high.”
“I guess I’m nervous. I’ve never jumped from orbit before.”
“Neither have any of us.”
“Technically, I have,” Mathieu said.
“Except Mathieu,” Emily said. “Mathieu’s done it all. He could probably do this all without any of us, but NASA won’t let him work alone.”
“She’s right, you know. I met with Director Craft about it. He said NASA policy hasn’t caught up with me yet. Cole, let me give you some advice. The trick is to not throw up on the way down, hey. Because if you do, your vomit will first hit the ceiling, but then eventually gravity will suck it right back down onto your face.”
“Not helping,” Cole said.
“Come on, Cole,” Anna said. “It’s ten minutes of the best thrill ride ever invented. Think of it like being on a roller coaster dreamed up by the best minds on earth. It is perfectly safe.”
“So long as all one hundred pyrotechnics go off according to plan and nobody was sleeping on the job when they installed them,” C.C. said. “Also, there are the five hundred thousand lines of code that—fingers crossed—all work and haven’t been affected by radiation.”
“Those codes have been checked and double-checked by JPL,” Emily interjected. “Not to mention, we have radiation recovery protocols in place.”
“Don’t forget, it’s all built by the lowest bidder,” C.C. added.
“Really not helping, C.C.,” Cole said.
“I don’t want to make you nervous, Cole, but there’s basically a zero percent margin of error or we die,” Mathieu said.
“Mathieu, do you want to stay on this ship while the rest of us explore a world never before visited by mankind?” Emily barked. “Zip it. Cole, your blood pressure is elevated. I cannot start the EDL sequences until your blood pressure has gone down. So I need you to find a happy place. Use the words the brain trust at JSC gave you. The rest of you, I appreciate you taking the chance to get back at my husband’s humor, God knows I’ve wanted a little vengeance there myself. But you’ve had your fun. Enough.”
We Call It Monster Page 25
