“How is that possible? Everyone’s present and accounted for.” The crappy dynamic range of the ancient intercom that connected us with the bridge made everyone sound strained and tense, Tobias even more so. “There can’t be a corpse in LOAD/EVAC.”
I bit my lip and tried to forget my need to return to Earth. It was still a top priority, but I could only handle one thing at a time. “It’s Eadric,” I said.
“Come off it,” Tobias said wearily. “We all tried to save him. Stop him from throwing himself thousands of feet into the Pacific Ocean. But he did it anyway. We saw him fall.”
“I’m telling you, Tobias, he’s here … Tobias?” A crackle came over the speaker – dammit, I thought, even my run-of-the-mill cellphone has a better speaker than Sorcerer’s state-of-the-art (circa 1937) intercom system. In a moment, Tobias came crashing into LOAD/EVAC and stood aghast.
“Corpse,” he said. “A frigging corpse, for God’s sake.”
Once again, I explained that it was Eadric, and how I found him.
“Eadric’s not only back on Earth, he’s dead. We saw him go out the loading door. He would have hit the ocean like a bag of cement. I hope by now someone’s picked him up, pulled his body out of the water. So who’s this?”
Eadric was a white guy about five ten with a high forehead and a shaggy greying beard. This guy looked like he’d been shrink-wrapped to death. His naked body was gaunt, ribs pushing out through taut, brittle skin, lips pulled back in a permanent scream, fingers rigid and curved as cats’ claws. Still, it was Eadric.
“What happened to him?”
Tobias looked glumly at the corpse. “Now I understand,” he sighed.
“Understand what?”
“It is Eadric. This is why we’re alive.” Tobias paced restlessly over to the exit door, stood looking out its reinforced glass window plate.
“Tobias, I’m in the dark here.”
“We’ve got to get back to Earth right now.”
“Okay, now that makes sense.”
Finally, we might get a move on, but the shock of finding Eadric’s body extinguished any warm fuzzy “mission accomplished” feelings I might have about it. I lost hope again when he added that we had to make one more stop – a high-altitude village where Max’s hihyaghi friends could be safely delivered home.
I was hoping this would be right next door, but it turned out to be miles and miles – in fact, I gave up and went back to the bunk I’d used during Sorcerer’s cross-country trip. Outside the window, it was night. I lay down and slept. When I got up it was bright daylight outside. I checked my phone: I’d been out for nine hours. Nine hours times forty added up to … I didn’t want to think about it.
An airship, of course, is not very fast to begin with. Besides, Sorcerer followed the contours of the local terrain, following a trail of parallel pipes, each the size of a highway tunnel, ascending over eroded factories and around the sides of skyscrapers and smokestacks, which occasionally – despite the overall dilapidation – belched smoke from whatever fuel the society of the Great Old Ones still had left to burn. Antsy and frustrated as I was, I had to admit that up on the bridge they were doing a fairly amazing job. Despite the obstacles and the R’lyhni weather, Sorcerer remained stable. From time to time along our lengthwise axis, the airship would tilt ever so slightly upward, like a ship facing into a heavy sea. Brightness grew outside the windows as we rose gradually through the planet’s thinning mists.
Ten minutes later Leslie and I looked out the window of the loading doors. Suddenly I was surprised by a glimpse of green among the gloom.
Below us was a maze of cliffs jutting out of a fogbank that went on for miles, endless as an ocean. Occasionally, venturing close to a rocky promontory, we’d disturb a nest of horking thrals.
“Aren’t those your buddies?” Leslie pointed down at a nest. “Is it true that you made a free-fall jump off this thing clinging to the legs of one of those things?”
“I didn’t exactly jump. It was an accident. You’ll have to take my word for it. I’m not doing it again.”
“Don’t be so dour,” Leslie said. “Isn’t this the most amazing experience of your life?”
I tried to say nothing, then it all came out with a moan. “We’ve been here too long!”
Leslie, spirited to another planet still wearing her wetsuit, had changed into Sorcerer’s ubiquitous beige coveralls. “We only just got here.”
“Leslie, we need to go back now.”
She shook her head. “This is the chance of a lifetime. I want to stay a year.”
“Let me explain.” I took a deep breath. “If we stay a year, when we get back to Earth it’ll be twenty fifty-three.”
Leslie glanced at her very expensive and cool-looking waterproof wristwatch. It was just past noon.
“You mean … seven minutes to nine p.m.?”
“No. I mean the year twenty fifty-three. Flying cars, domed moon colonies, everybody’s augmented with awesome cybernetic body parts. Everybody but us, of course, because we’ll have spent the whole time here, gushing about what an amazing experience we’re having.”
“What are you talking about?”
I sketched out for her, as well as I could, the facts of life re: the hub-rim differential. “When I met my mother for the first time in ten years, she said she’d been gone only three months, even though she disappeared when I was six, and now I’m sixteen. The H.P. Lovecraft you met isn’t a nutcase. Okay, maybe he is a nutcase, but he’s also the real H.P. Lovecraft. Everyone thinks he died in 1937, the year Sorcerer was launched, but actually Sorcerer rescued him and brought him here. And look at Sorcerer itself: sure, it’s funky and antiquated, but isn’t it in awfully good shape for being, uh …” Let’s see, from 1937, sixty-three years till the end of the century; it was now 2013 so plus thirteen. “… seventy-six years old?”
“This is incredible,” Leslie said.
“Look at Tobias. He was born in 1906! Like everyone else on Sorcerer, he’s been back and forth between Earth and this part of the galaxy, R’lyhnygoth. He still talks about ‘transistor radios’ and ‘colour TVs’ as if they’re groovy new things. The hub-rim differential is real. We’ve got to try to get back to Earth as soon –”
“Ohmigod …” Leslie turned pale. “I’m teaching in San Diego this summer.” She picked up the intercom receiver and called the bridge. No one answered.
We’d left behind the sprawling post-industrial megalopolis. Now, from above, R’lyhnygoth was canyons of darkening mist, mountains of cascading waterfalls and tall spires widening into miles-wide plateaus, some yellow and lifeless, others green with plant life and dotted with lakes.
It seemed that we were heading for one of the plateaus, and although they all looked the same from up here, it had to be just the right plateau – a plateau controlled by the hihyaghi.
Evidently, the atmosphere at the level of their higher plateaux didn’t agree with human visitors because it was thin on oxygen. If you went lower down, there was more oxygen, but also more carbon dioxide. I’d asked around to find out what it was like to travel beyond that brief and deadly touchdown we’d made, to explore the mist-filled valleys of the industrial mega-wasteland, but no one wanted to talk about the lands of the Great Old Ones.
Still restless and frustrated, I left LOAD/EVAC and skipped across the hall to PRESSURE where I climbed a ladder to a trap door that, I figured, led to the access passageways that my mother had shown me. I braced myself and pushed on the trap door. With a loud creak, like a horror-movie coffin lid, it tottered back onto the service corridor floor. It made just as much racket when I closed it after me. There’s something I could do, I thought, find some WD-40, tweak those hinges. I headed down the service corridor under the gas cells, counting steps along the gangway until I reached the cell my mother and I had gone into. I stopped, listening to the sounds of the gas shifting, expanding, contracting in the enormous cells, and looked up into the breathing dark. I wondered how our patch was holding up; since I’d been back on board there hadn’t been much time for small talk, but at least nobody had complained about stowaway thrals.
I was about to walk around a hatch in the gangway floor, then I decided to see where it led. I peered closely in the dim maintenance lighting, but there was no lock or warning sign.
I threw back the latch and opened it, looking down at an expanse of black. Light, however, poured from every side, and I could hear distant voices: some talking and joking, some arguing. Where was I? I stuck my head through the hatch, and suddenly the whole ship, and the gangway, lurched under my feet. I tried to push myself up, lost my grip and slid through the hatch.
Stretching out my arms to break the fall, I landed on a firm padded surface of black quilted fabric. The voices around me stopped. I blinked against the bright sunlight of a bank of windows.
“Better get off there, chico,” some guy said. “If Margrit sees you climbing around on her baby, she’ll whup your ass.”
I had landed on the covered top of the grand piano in the main lounge. Above me the hatch still gaped. I jumped up, grabbed the rim and pulled myself up. Hoping to do it in a quick, athletic movement … instead I swung by my hands, grunted as I got an elbow up, weaved sideways, whacking my hip on the rim as I regained the gangway and, panting with the exertion, looked back down through the hatch. A few people had gathered to watch.
“Why’d the ship shake like that?” I asked. “That’s why I fell. Is there a storm?”
“We’ve landed,” a woman said.
“If we’ve landed” – I cleared my throat and prepared to make a speech – “and we’ve got Max back, and Magnus is dumped back on its home planet, isn’t it time to fire up the Raumspalter?” Whether they agreed with me or not, the crowd in the lounge dispersed and moved out of sight.
It was beyond me why they would want to venture onto the surface of a planet that I’d pictured, many times, as a sort of medieval hell with demons and burning souls. In fact, my brief excursion had proved it to be that and more. At its worst, R’lyhnygoth was even darker and foggier and nastier than I’d feared, so why would they want more? But I dropped back onto the piano, reached up to close the hatch and a few minutes later, I was out there too.