J
ust within the entrance, in an alcove, was a metal cabinet. The doors were fitted with a clasp, but the padlock hung loose from one fixture. Inside were half a dozen brass oil lamps. All were brand new, without a scratch or a speck of dirt. Forrester took one, found it full, and lit the wick using a box of matches he discovered tucked in one corner. Cheerful orange light spilled through the passage.
The convenience disturbed him: first the guard’s absence and then this cabinet left open, without which he couldn’t have hoped to continue. Could this be a trap? But to what purpose? If Forbes wanted to catch him, there was no need for subterfuge. More likely, the men here were simply not taking their roles seriously. He’d seen as much with the sentry outside Sherston and the searcher on the moors. If they knew the truth and hadn’t been fed the spy story given out to the public, then probably they were too busy congratulating themselves on an easy duty well away from the front to worry about properly secured locks.
The tunnel went on for a long way. Its downward slant was so slight that only when Forrester looked back toward the
entrance and saw the daylight pressed into a thin, high segment did he realise he’d been descending at all.
Then, so abruptly that he nearly stumbled, the floor’s angle steepened. Forrester paused. He’d been presuming this underground shaft was an abandoned mine, and the ruined buildings outside seemed to corroborate that theory. Yet he was coming to suspect that the tunnel was not man-made, or not in its original form. The walls were too irregular, and the ceiling was too high. There were signs of work, though, ancient scratches in the stone that must have been inflicted with picks, and in places the roof had been propped and reinforced.
Setting the lantern down to inspect the dirt at his feet, Forrester was surprised to note that the vehicle tracks he’d identified outside continued. Here, with nothing to disturb them, they were as clear as if they’d just been made. And there were other, older depressions, which after some consideration he put down to cart rails long since torn up.
What concerned him most, however, was his direction: inevitably he had to be heading beneath Sherston. For an instant, Forrester pictured this subterranean corridor depositing him outside his old room, and with that, the whole enterprise took on the surreality of a lucid dream.
But no, he wasn’t sleeping, or if he was, then his slumber was so deep that acknowledging it couldn’t draw him back to wakefulness. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling, not of being asleep as such, but of being upon the verge. He was filled with an almost narcotic calm, yet at the same time he didn’t feel drugged or even unalert. Forming worries was simply impossible. Even the knowledge that he’d retreated step by step toward the very spot he’d fought so vigorously to escape gave him only momentary pause.
Forrester took up the lantern, and the globe swung on its handle, casting his shadow in elongated distortions across walls
and ceiling. He hefted his stick and began down the steeper decline.
In this section, the passage did not run straight. Within a few feet, it swerved, once gently and then, soon after, quite conspicuously. Here, too, there were branching side tunnels: some were mere alcoves, while others ran on, though he couldn’t ascertain how far. Forrester had no inclination to explore. There was an obvious risk of becoming lost, but regardless, he felt he should be following the tire tracks, which were visible along the main shaft.
Again, he thought that the vehicle must have been heavy, to have dinted the hard ground so. And it appeared to have been towing a trailer: the second tracks were evident wherever the two had turned. At any rate, he doubted the automobile could have passed anywhere but at the centre of this largest passage. Already its roof must have been practically scraping the ceiling.
He carried on. After a minute, he became fully aware of something he’d been noticing half-consciously, a difference in the property of the light. He put it down to imagination at first, but as he passed through another gentle curve, the change grew more readily apparent. The effect was as though a gas flame were intensifying by degrees from yellow toward blue, and brightening all the while. As an experiment, Forrester took off his jacket and covered the lantern. Sure enough, he could still faintly discern the walls.
The glow was concentrated ahead. As he watched, its shade shifted subtly, from a fragile blue-green to a richer, more aquatic tint. He knew, with a thrill of stopped breath, where he’d seen its like before. This was the same light he’d witnessed during the raid, which he’d tried and failed to describe to Forbes.
Forrester reclaimed his jacket but left the lantern. There had been a decisive shift in his mind, though he couldn’t
explain its precise nature. He wasn’t mad; it was partly that insight. He wasn’t mad and never had been. All that he’d seen had been real. He had
encountered something, out there in No Man’s Land. A new weapon, or—
No. Not a weapon.
Because he had never in his life felt such tranquillity. Nothing built by man and intended to do harm could ever produce such a reaction. In fact, beneath the shroud of calm draping his thoughts, even to conceive of violence was discomforting.
As he continued, deeper into the earth and toward the brightening light, the effect only increased. He could appreciate why certain mystics devoted their every waking moment to the pursuit of inner peace, and understood that their successes could never match what he experienced now. It was like an inexorable and almost tangible current, as if he were being carried rather than walking—bathed and buoyed as in the womb.
Ahead, the tunnel opened onto a larger space where the light was brighter still, patterning the walls in shifting mosaics of blue and green. Forrester paused once more. Instinct assured him that there would be no way back from this. If he hadn’t yet been transformed irreparably, he would be if he passed this point. The conviction didn’t alarm him, since nothing could have. All the same, there remained a resisting part. And he recognised then that he was under no compulsion, that he could
leave. He could make a choice. He could choose not to know.
But he’d chosen already. He’d questioned; he had resisted. And finally, he’d turned his back on the apathy of those long months in France, the relinquishing of responsibility that he and so many others had committed to. Out there at the front, he had accepted that his existence was not in his own hands. But under the auspices of Sherston and Forbes’s ministration,
he had come to believe again that his life was his own, and that he was willing to fight for it.
That realisation had brought him here and nowhere else. He wanted the truth. Choosing to not know was no choice at all.
He didn’t have far to go. The cave was the size of a large village church, but the rippling light, in a thousand merging shades of green and blue, made him think of an indoor swimming pool on a bright day. A few steps beyond the tunnel’s mouth, he could see clearly.
The thing was near the centre of the cavern. Rings had been driven into the rock bed, and from them, a net of heavy chains overlapped its body, each link as big as Forrester’s fist. He thought of a fish: a tropical fish, except with a whale’s flattened head. And so huge, the size at least of an elephant. He wanted to reach out and touch its side, but he didn’t dare. He wanted more than anything to free it, for the sight of the creature bound by steel to the earth filled him with horror enough to resist even the serenity of that place. However, he had no key, nor any tools. There was another cabinet by one wall that might have contained what he needed, but this one was securely padlocked.
The thing was rising against its chains, dragging them to their fullest extent, though there was no indication that it was straining. It simply hovered, inches from the ground, the chains pressing its surface without making the least indentation. Forrester could hardly believe that it could support itself at all beneath that weight.
Or else, he speculated, it didn’t move in any normal way. He saw no means of propulsion upon its sleek flanks. He’d been considering the protrusion at one end as a fin of sorts, since its body was compressed and distended there, yet the manner in which the flesh sealed in a smooth curve made him think now of an amputated limb. Indeed, the more he stared, the more
the fish analogy came apart. Only the creature’s outline and something about its coloration warranted the comparison.
In every other respect, it was unlike any animal he’d seen. What made it seem most alien, or rather hardest to equate with any earthbound species, was its lack of features: he was not equipped to recognise intelligence in a being that was without even the indication of a face.
The thing was producing the blue-green light through its skin. The impression was of small plates of luminous glass shimmering beneath a pellucid outer surface, all in perpetual motion and sliding over and under each other. No wonder his subconscious mind had snagged on the metaphor of Mediterranean seas: if one were beneath those waters, staring unimpeded toward a distant sky, the perspective might well resemble this.
The urge to reach out his hand hadn’t gone away. He had crossed the intervening gap, though he’d no memory of doing so. He had abandoned his stick and had no recollection of doing that either. His fingers were splayed, inches from the creature’s side.
His hand never came to rest. A flash of intuition: the brush of his fingertips would distress it, and in any case, there was no need. The contact he sought could not be achieved that way.
Forrester closed his eyes—
And could still see.
Except that this was much more than seeing. His senses did not require light, and in fact, the constraint of sight was becoming a difficult abstraction: he hung within a sphere of perception, inside which everything could be known almost as intimately as he knew himself. He had no words to describe this mode of intellection, and that notion, of describing in words, seemed as archaic as the old, restrictive senses he’d sloughed off
.
At first he assumed he was beneath the ocean. But, insomuch as he now understood that concept, ocean
, it would not have felt like this: here there were tides and pressures, the brush of passing detritus, but all so subtle as to be easily mistaken for mere absence. Were his senses less intricate, this would have been nothing besides void.
Yet within that infinite-seeming abyss, billions of far-off infernos glittered, their radiation impacting endlessly against his sense-sphere. The spectacle was rapturous in its immensity and its unfeasible detail. And he was not alone. Encompassing him, he felt the presence of his shoal, silent because they had no need of anything but silence. They had memories upon memories, they’d experienced so abundantly, and so little was ever lost.
Now they were together. Sometimes they’d travel alone, but this was a season of journeying in unison. And out there were other life-forms also. Nearby he perceived one, colossal and fleeting, an inky blur that briefly blotted the approaching starlight and was gone. It offered no threat, and they could not have communicated, or interacted in any fashion, even had they desired to.
His shoal had been in the deep spaces, the almost-empty spaces, for a long time. He’d never knowingly found that desolation oppressive; nonetheless, he was relieved that their course was drawing them toward a region more vivid and teeming. Already, as they stole upon its edges, the ether was growing crowded. All around them was the rubble of pre-creation, left in the tenuous hold of far-flung gravities.
Slower they went, picking their way. Though still remote, there were points ahead in the darkness, one bright and colossal, the rest circling in its tow. The shoal could have taken any course, could have avoided that faraway sun with ease. He knew that they too had wearied of the void, as occasionally
must happen. Yet the distance remained great, even for them. His mind wandered, or sometimes idled.
They slowed further. They were near now, and there was plenty to observe, to be wary of: these tremendous spheres of rock and gas and fluid placed in eternal cycle by the star at their heart, some of them ringed as the system itself was by the waste of their creation. There were consciousnesses as well, tiny, barely cognizant organisms slaving at their hazardous existence upon inapt worlds.
Then he noticed, at the edge of his awareness, one planet unlike the others: suited as so few were to be a crucible for the engines of biology, extruding a richness of signals into the vacuum. He exerted his will, shifting his shoal’s course somewhat, so that they would pass closer. The life-mass intrigued him. It was an age since he’d beheld anything of such complexity.
His shoal didn’t pause as he had. They were already nearing the edge of his sense-sphere.
He almost followed.
But he was curious. He was younger than they, and though he had their experience as they had his, of himself he’d experienced less. He was hardly moving now; at his current speed he’d have required a lifetime to pass between stars. He dove steeply downward: with this mass to orientate against, there was a direction to be called down. He slipped through the planet’s outermost membrane.
There was atmosphere here, and it troubled him. He was unused to its heaviness. But he pushed on, confident that he would only need a moment. Forgetting nothing, he would have eternities to digest what he learned. He pressed lower, adjusting as he went, thrilled by the rush of knowing and the promise of more.
Then—threat
. Such an enormity of it, beyond his ability to process. There were living beings on this world, as he’d
predicted, and in vast multitudes. One species in particular drew his notice, for they had shaped their environment with a determination that none of their cohabitants had. They’d made themselves dangerous—and as he encountered them anew, part of him found them familiar.
The piece of his mind not his own, that was other than memory reproduced, was dizzied by a shock of recognition. That’s us
, it thought, from so high above.
The land there was barren, deformed. Where elsewhere life swarmed in multiplicity, here there was wrack and rot, the stench of decay lying like a pall.
Could we really have done that
, the Forrester part asked, scarred the very earth?
He readied to leave. There was too much to assimilate; he would need the peace of travel to begin to comprehend it. Yet he struggled. He’d drifted too close to the planet’s innermost casing, and to the frenzied brutality playing out there. Its influence was a shrill mental alarm sounding from everywhere at once. He doubted his course. Was he truly rising, or falling farther? Around him, the air churned with projectiles. They arced from the surface, each one flinging searing fragments in its wake. So much to avoid, so much to interpret, so much to—
He could have diverted the meteor-thing. He could have evaded it easily, had he not been afraid. The proximity of so many hazards on different trajectories, the barrage of undirected rage, had disorientated him.
Even then, the damage wasn’t severe. His substance was able to let such projectiles pass through with negligible harm. The explosion, however, he hadn’t anticipated, though there were detonations all about. The impact, the incursion, the scorching pressure, all of them together, they were enough to stun him and to erase any remaining sense of direction.
He couldn’t feel his shoal. They’d passed too far. He cried out regardless, not caring who or what should hear, expecting
no answer. There were minds in his vicinity, possessed of an intelligence he could approximately understand, but they were filled with such fury, and a terror that outweighed his own.
Nevertheless, and he could scarcely believe it, there was an answering consciousness out there. Impossible as it seemed, one mind, though almost unfathomably disparate, had responded slightly and unknowingly to his touch. But it was
a response, and he clutched it, preserved it, even as his senses screamed of catastrophe.
Only when he struck the planet’s crust did the true pain come. His substance was conditioned to the most delicate contact, the brush of microscopic debris in the near-nothing of deep space. He had never in the course of his existence been surrounded as he was now: matter before him, beneath him, over
him. And there was no way to move, no way to judge his orientation or to commune with the myriad forces by which he navigated.
He’d always accepted that his existence would end, that an end was the very condition of existence. But he’d never imagined it would come like this. He lay still: frightened, submerged, paralysed. He clung to the one consciousness that had responded to his call, concentrating all his energies into reinforcing that tenuous connection.
If he must end, at least he might not be utterly alone.
Forrester opened his eyes with a jolt.
He didn’t know how much time had passed. It might have been minutes or days.
His body felt like an unfamiliar garment, stiff and ill-fitting. He was sprawled on the cold stone, his cheek to the ground. A trickle of spit ran from his lips, and he was incapable of moving to brush the saliva away. His hand was a dead weight
.
He had seen nothing, heard nothing, and couldn’t have done so. His own senses were returning slowly and in pieces, so that for a moment he couldn’t say why he didn’t feel the stagnant air or smell the stone above or taste the radiating light.
Certainly he hadn’t heard the march of approaching feet.
There were six of them. They didn’t carry guns. Surely they knew as well as Forrester himself how ineffectual such weapons would be down here, near to that thing. But they were in uniform, and even that display of martial conformity sent judders of wrongness through his aching brain.
Their leader, by contrast, wore a plain black suit, and was looking at Forrester with what might have been satisfaction, or vague amusement, or just conceivably pity.
“Good evening, Lieutenant Forrester,” Forbes said. “I’d tell you to stay calm, but I doubt that will be a problem.”