Music is like a dream. One that I cannot hear.
—Conversations, Ludwig van Beethoven
Jia had been dreaming of Kong. When she was younger, she believed that he and she sometimes shared their dreams. Like dream was a land they both visited at night, just another place, like Skull Island or Hollow Earth. It had seemed so real and made total sense to her at the time. She had never questioned it.
Now, she wasn’t sure. At school they said dreams only happened in your own brain, that the other people in them were just created by your mind. It wasn’t just that, either. She wasn’t sure of anything anymore. Everything was different.
She felt a pain in her jaw and reached up to touch it, but when she did, she didn’t find anything that actually hurt. She sighed and looked at the clock. It was two in the morning. She needed to get back to sleep.
Instead she worried about school. She had a test today, didn’t she? She hadn’t studied for it. It hadn’t seemed worth doing. Maybe since she couldn’t sleep, she should do that now. She climbed out of bed and into her study hut, turned on the string lights, and pulled out her pre-algebra book. She stared at the sample test, and—of course—she was suddenly very tired.
Jia sat up in darkness, not sure what had woken her. But as she sat there, she began to feel as if a wind was moving on her skin and in her hair. Her palms and the soles of her feet tingled, and in those sensations she perceived a rising and falling motion, a pulse of rhythm that was not her heart but something outside of herself.
She knew the word singing. Her people sang sometimes, although of course she could not hear them. But sometimes, when they all sang together, she thought she could feel it, like this. Their songs on her skin and vibrating gently in her bones.
She rose and padded gently out into the night. Above, the familiar lights of the nocturnal sky blazed down. The stars, the White Sky River—and through the trees, the moon was rising, nearly full.
And in the light, something danced. Hundreds of small creatures with pearl-colored wings fluttered and drifted, glowing in the light of the moon and stars. And they weren’t just dancing. They were singing, too. It was what she’d felt. She stood, stock still, for a long time, afraid that if she did anything, they would leave.
After a while, someone came beside her. She could not see her face, but she knew it was Oa, her Iwi mother’s sister, who slept in their house with them.
Oa spoke to her in the ancient way, the way that needed no sound.
They only come every handful of years, Oa told her. They live as worms, high in the mountains, for all of that time. Then they wrap themselves in silk and become this. You are blessed to see them tonight.
What are they singing? Jia asked. It’s so beautiful.
Singing? Oa said. They do not sing. They do not have voices.
But I hear them, Jia said.
Jia, you cannot hear. And I hear nothing. I only see them flying in the moonlight.
There was much Jia did not know, but she knew Oa was wrong. Somehow, they were singing. And it was the most beautiful thing she had ever heard.
Jia woke again, this time in her study hut, her face buried in her schoolbook. She snorted, rubbed her eyes, and pushed herself up. For an instant she thought the song had followed her from her dream, and was here with her even now. But as she came ever more awake, she realized she didn’t feel anything.
She had forgotten that night, hadn’t she? It was so long ago, she had been so young. She could not remember Oa’s face at all, and now even the words from her memory-dream began to slip away.
Maybe it had never been real. Memory and dream were much the same, when you were that little. She thought she recalled other things that Ilene told her probably weren’t true. Maybe it had all been a wish in the night, that just once she could hear music, know what it really was to listen to a song. Just the longing of a girl to be like everyone else.
But she wasn’t, and she never would be. Once she’d been at peace with that. Once it hadn’t mattered at all, because it hadn’t mattered to Ilene or to Kong, or anyone else she knew.
That was before everything changed. Before school, and more strangers than she could count. Before she understood that she would never fit in.
She went back to her bed and tried to sleep again. She managed to, only an hour before she had to get up.
This, she thought, was likely to be a worse day than usual.
The air of Hollow Earth never quite smelled right to Jayne.
Her career had taken her many places: the highlands of Peru and Ecuador, the pampas of Argentina, the frozen coasts of Antarctica, the Congo Basin, the tropical forests of Yunnan, the Kaibab Plateau in southwestern North America. They had all smelled a little strange to her. She had mentioned that to her mother once, who just shook her head, smiled, and said something about her over-active olfactory glands and how they had made her a nightmare of a picky eater as a child. The conversation had been a bit of an epiphany for Jayne and helped explain why no one else she knew on her various assignments had ever mentioned the scents of those places.
Scent and taste were the two senses humans had that let them directly analyze the chemical content of the world around them. Of the two, scent was the more powerful, the more directly tied to emotion. It was also the least acute of the senses, at least in most people. Compared to, say, a dog, humans were virtually blind in the chemical senses. Humans were sight animals. Everything was about appearance to them.
And the appearance of Hollow Earth was, to say the least, weird. The plants were strange, the animals stranger. And there were things that were a little—or a lot—of both. The sky was more landscape. There were no stars at night, no moon, no true sunsets. There were clouds sometimes, but the shapes they came in didn’t look right, contorted as they were by the opposed gravitation forces of “up” and “down” and by the null-gravity zone between them.
But the scents, they were arguably way stranger. Any other place she had ever been, there were whiffs of the familiar. The smell of cow dung, of diesel fumes, of rotting meat, of wet soil—these were similar everywhere up above. The Congo, the Antarctic, the dry uplands of Arizona: all had a shared biological history that went back more than a billion years, and thus a common chemical history.
That history was shared by the Hollow Earth, as well, but things here had gone their own way for a very long time. This was in every way interesting. The media played up the “monsters” of Hollow Earth—the macrofauna—while saying almost nothing about the microfauna. This was hardly surprising. Even above, much more attention was paid to elephants, whales, pandas, and rhinoceroses than to bacteria. But the true rulers of any ecosystem—by sheer mass, diversity, and ecological importance—were mostly unseen to the naked eye. And here, that invisible world was as different—maybe more different—than the big critters suggested. Both worlds had decay organisms, for instance. But they had evolved independently. Each set did the job, but in somewhat different ways, leading to different chemical outcomes. The same could be said for the dead things they turned back into soil. All vertebrates above ground had red, hemoglobin-based blood. Some in the Hollow Earth did, too, but many had extraordinarily exotic blood and tissue in a wide variety of colors and compositions.
So, of course, things smelled weird. Way stranger than anyplace she had ever been. She didn’t mind it, but she couldn’t help but notice. And maybe think about it too much, especially when Lewis took a notion to cook some of the local wildlife for their dinner. Which, fortunately, didn’t seem to be the plan tonight. She’d seen he had pulled out some shelf-stable tofu and rice, and he hadn’t been out “gathering” today.
She looked “up,” tracing her gaze along the mountains and valleys of the other side of the world, momentarily overcome by the wonder of it all. Being here was a privilege, one worth any number of funky smells.
It was also dangerous. There were plenty of things down here that thought she smelled just fine for dinner. It didn’t pay to stray far from the base alone. She hadn’t: it was only a few steps behind her, a blocky, utilitarian prefab that had replaced the first base about a year ago. She was turning back toward the entrance when something big moved at the perimeter, just past the screen of trees.
She ran. She jerked the outer door open and slammed it closed, then looked back out through the window while she waited for the lock to cycle. Despite all the toothy predators in Hollow Earth, they had so far not discovered any pathogens that affected humans in a big way. That wasn’t surprising, in evolutionary terms; pathogens usually evolved to affect a particular host, and if there were any homo sapiens living down here, they hadn’t met them yet—although there was evidence that there had once been at least one population of humans, or a very similar species.
As she watched, the trees shook, and suddenly several of them toppled as a creature came into view. It was big. Not Kong big, but bigger than an elephant. She nevertheless let out her breath, which she realized she had been holding. It had a stout, armored body that was pretty similar to that of an armadillo, but the long snakelike neck that coiled out of that ended in a small, somewhat otter-like head. As she watched, it extended its neck to nibble at the leaves of the forest canopy. When threatened, it could somehow tuck the entire neck and head into the protective shell. It had a scientific name, but they just usually called the beasts “dirraffs”. They weren’t exactly harmless—they had thick, two-hooved hind limbs that could deliver a crushing blow to anything the diraff perceived as threatening. But they didn’t seem bothered by humans, and there hadn’t been any incidents involving them.
The inner door cycled. She opened it and stepped in.
The outpost was heavily built and resembled a bunker more than anything. Of course it was also a workplace for… well, science nerds. The marks of human personalities were everywhere, from the portrait of Harris’s cat back home to the left-behinds from those who had come before. Her gaze lingered on the plastic figure of a spaceman. It had belonged to one of the first scientists down here, Dr. Nathan Lind. Jayne hadn’t known him all that well, but she had always been curious about the spaceman. She meant to ask her boss about it, but she didn’t know her boss that well, and it had never seemed like the right time. Anyway, the boss didn’t come down that often these days.
Human touches aside, the outpost was very much a working lab, busily monitoring seismic activity, electromagnetic and gravitational anomalies, weather patterns, and of course Titans, which the bunker had been built to—well, maybe not withstand, but at least to resist. The only windows were as thick as the walls and were basically just narrow strips near the ceiling. They didn’t provide much of a view. That came from the banks of screens monitoring the area around the outpost and more remote locations. Several of them, as usual—and as the name of the outpost suggested—were tasked with keeping track of Kong. A short while ago, they had increased the number of sensors, and were adding more after a recent incident in which Raymond Martin, a billionaire Titan-hunter, had entered Hollow Earth in his own version of a H.E.A.V and tried to bag Kong as a trophy. Monarch had missed the whole fight, but found the wrecked remains of the giant mech Martin had piloted in his attempt to kill the Great Ape. Of Martin himself, they only found blood, but enough to safely assume he was now deceased. Dr. Andrews was enraged, determined no further incidents like this would happen.
At the moment, however, one of the screens was playing a television program from up top.
“…taxpayer dollars going to Hollow Earth and classified technologies like the mysterious Project Powerhouse,” the host was saying. “Well, here to discuss, Monarch’s own Doctor Ilene Andrews.”
It’s the boss, Jayne thought.
“Let’s start with Godzilla,” the interviewer said. “He stopped the attack in Rome, but he’s still in the city. Should we be worried?”
“First of all, no, nobody’s in danger,” Andrews replied. “It’s clear to us now that Godzilla is a Titan that protects us from other malicious Titan threats. When he is dormant, there’s no threat. It’s as simple as that.”
The view changed to an aerial shot of the Roman Colosseum. The huge reptilian frame of Godzilla was curled up inside it, apparently in peaceful slumber. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said something about the Titan taking over the ancient landmark, and the tourists being in awe. Of course they were. She would bet the locals had somewhat… mixed feelings.
The host looked skeptical. “He takes out all challengers and then just decides to take a nap? Are we sure he’s not hurt? Because this is a real long nap.”
“We’re… not entirely sure why Godzilla has gone dormant—whether it’s part of a natural hibernation cycle or something else. All we know is his vital signs are stable and he doesn’t appear to be hurt.”
Godzilla was actually known for taking long naps, Jayne mused. Like for decades or centuries. Just not in obvious places where anybody or anything could easily find him. And he preferred places with sources of energy, like deep-sea thermal vents and such. What was unusual wasn’t the length of his nap, but that he was doing it in public.
Someone suddenly turned the sound down on the program. Harris, at his station, glanced over at her.
“Kong’s heading in for the night,” Harris said, nodding at another screen, on which the Great Ape was making his way back to the cave he had been using for a home. “Looks like another rough one.”
Jayne came closer, leaned forward with her hands on the back of Harris’s swivel chair, looking at the tracking data.
“That’s the furthest he’s gone yet,” she noticed.
“Maybe he’s looking for a date,” Harris said, dryly.
“Good luck with that,” Lewis chimed in, from across the room where he was lining up a putt on the little green he’d brought down with him. His wavy, graying hair stuck out from beneath a red baseball cap. His putter clicked against the ball. “Hope he’s up for some interspecies romance.”
Jayne nodded. It had become a sort of running joke about Kong’s search for his own kind. Early signs had been hopeful enough. It was clear that there had been more Great—great-great-great?—Apes in Hollow Earth. But so far, all that evidence was centuries old, or older. The current theory was that Kong’s species had gotten into some kind of war with Godzilla and maybe other Titans subservient to Godzilla. It was hard to watch footage of the spectacular fight between Godzilla and Kong in Hong Kong without the feeling that there was some long-standing antipathy between the two Titans, although in the end they had parted on what one could anthropomorphize as “amicable” terms.
Whatever was going on with Kong and Godzilla, it seemed as if the only survivors of Kong’s kind had been the ones upstairs on Skull Island. If so, that made Kong the last of his species.
But Hollow Earth was a big place. Most of it was still terra incognita. There could be a thousand Kongs down here. They just weren’t in the area they had surveyed yet.
Tell that to Kong, she thought. She knew she might be reading in her human feelings, but the big guy looked dejected.
Harris frowned, and tracked his gaze across the screens, as one of the indicators started beeping.
“Hey,” he said. “The monitor’s showing a pretty substantial sinkhole in sector five.”
Jayne frowned. “That’s Kong’s hunting ground.”
But it wasn’t that surprising, really. Hollow Earth was—to say the least—tectonically active, and sector five was heavily monitored precisely because Kong was there. She focused on the monitor, which was now displaying a graphic representation of the sinkhole. It looked like it had opened down into a much larger cave system. The computer had labeled it an “uncharted” area.
Before she could properly absorb that, the frequency sensor also started putting up a squawk. Lewis stopped golfing and glanced over at the screen.
“Whoa,” he murmured. Dragging his putter across the floor, he walked over to man the station. Jayne joined him.
“More electrical anomalies?” Harris asked.
“No, I don’t think so, man,” Lewis said. ”I haven’t seen anything like this before.”
Jayne studied the wave patterns on the screen. She couldn’t make head nor tail of them either. But it strained credulity to think a sinkhole and these weird readings happening at exactly the same time was coincidence.
“Maybe we should tell them topside,” Harris said.
“I’ll type it up,” Jayne said. “This whole place is an anomaly.”
* * *
Almost back to his cave, Kong was startled as dozens of flying things filled the sky. They seemed frantic, as if something was coming after them. But whatever had scared them, he felt it too. Or maybe he heard it. He wasn’t sure. But something was happening, something he didn’t understand.
Something had changed. Something big.