That is hell.
Indeed, for all he knew, that statement might be more than figurative. He trembled as he considered how much an educated, experienced man like himself did not know and for that reason, he could not turn back. To live with his ignorance was a worse fate than destruction or damnation.
But then as soon as he took a step forward, the strange, subterranean wind suddenly seemed to have a voice. It was a new voice, a woman’s voice. It seemed to whisper a single word:
Gene… gene…
“What?” he said through his mask.
The wind was just wind again. And then it wasn’t.
Gene… ah…
“Oh, God,” he muttered. “Lord God.”
The voice was saying “Jina.” The name of the Antarctic researcher who had gone missing. Was she now, somehow, part of this place? Was her mind, her soul, her knowledge of English now present in the tiles? Is that how he understood what was being said?
“Release… me… please!”
The utterance was followed by a blast not unlike the one he had heard earlier, only this one was much nearer. It rocked the world around him, on all sides, shaking pebbles from above, and brought with it a fireball that blazed toward him like a hot, red comet until it suddenly came apart. It didn’t explode; it simply seemed to come apart, as though it lacked cohesion. There were no embers raining down; the flaming fist simply vanished taking the ghostly voice with it.
Mikel’s first thought was that there was some kind of gas leak down here, and that he was hallucinating. His second thought was that he had to get out, whether it was to get answers or to escape, he just had to move. He adjusted the lamp on his head and, holding the rim of the tower’s mouth, lowered himself in.
At a catastrophic tilt, the stairs no longer functioned as such, so Mikel clambered down them using both hands and feet. He moved very, very fast, concerned about being trapped with any additional fireballs. His peripheral vision caught glimpses of olivine tiles on the walls but this wasn’t the time to stop and look at them.
Minutes later—maybe a hundred feet down, Mikel propelled himself through the first opening he found. Pressing himself against a wall and briefly shutting his eyes, he was relieved to find solid ground. When he reopened his eyes, he let out a little laugh. He was inside what looked like a man-made tunnel, not a lava tube, and he could feel that the movement of air was stronger now, even through his balaclava.
The tunnel seemed sculpted, because the walls and arched ceiling were smooth except for two long, raised parallel lines that ran along the rock ceiling like tracks—though he couldn’t imagine why tracks would exist anywhere but a floor. They appeared to have bubbled from the overhead rock, as though vacuuformed, and there was a spiral twist to them, like a corkscrew. Had they suspended carriages of some kind?
No, he thought. Spiral tracks don’t make sense.
Still looking up, he realized that the basalt he’d crouched upon above must have, in its molten state, simply flowed along on top of this tunnel. Was this a part of a system that once fueled the Source that they were discussing… poured molten lava from one place to another?
He stood upright and was about to step forward to search for the origin of the breeze when an inner voice stopped him. Over the years, he had learned to listen to that voice. This time, though, it insisted. He stayed by the wall and looked around for whatever was causing the internal alarm.
Just over an arm’s length away was a mass of olivine tiles placed in the wall roughly at eye level, and a small bubble of rock like those he’d seen in the chamber. The olivine was glowing. With half of his body still edged to the wall, he stepped to the mosaic. To the right he saw an arched entrance, clearly a designed opening and not a lava crack. However, the opening was sealed shut with a mass of basaltic stone—hardened magma.
That didn’t make sense, though.
If lava flowed over the tunnel, it should have kept flowing, poured down, and filled much more of this space. Instead, it simply stopped with a curious edge as if heaped against something—but there was nothing to heap against.
Maybe there was a barrier that has since collapsed? he thought. But what kind of structure could have withstood volcanic heat, other than volcanic rock itself?
The olivine mosaic was just as mysterious—not just its chemistry but its design. Given the position of the tiles on the wall, Mikel thought they bore a distinct resemblance to an exit sign in a theater—a cautionary or emergency notice of some kind. Could it have been put there by the mysterious Source-tapping Technologists just in case something went wrong? He was habitually on guard against the unscientific impulse to assume one’s own culture could automatically explicate another. But upon closer examination the drawings etched into the olivine clearly showed gestures. If he was interpreting the drawings correctly, it looked as though the viewer or reader should retrieve something from the bubble of rock and put it on their face.
Mikel touched a small quartz panel on the bubble of rock. The arched entrance immediately opened like the door of a cabinet. Inside, he found a row of hooks holding four sagging, beige bits of what appeared to be remarkably well-preserved cloth masks. He set his teeth against the cold and pulled off a glove to touch one. It didn’t feel like fabric. The swatch had an unrecognizable smoothness, definitely not plastic. He would have compared it to skin but it didn’t move like skin when he lifted it. Somehow it felt flexible and then oddly structured, but the structure disappeared as soon as he moved it again.
Technologist gear? he wondered.
As Mikel pulled down his balaclava and cautiously placed the mask to his face, its edges cinched themselves to his skin. With some effort he could pry it loose again, but it was designed to be airtight, and suddenly Mikel felt why. His lungs felt full and remained that way, holding a flex like a bodybuilder ballooning a muscle. The mask hadn’t appeared to do anything—yet what else could have caused this?
He tried to stay calm, rational, as he contemplated the truly foreign technology… something so alien it was beyond his ability to analyze or understand. He reminded himself that he was here to catalog and move on. Perhaps the larger picture would help to explain these magnificent parts.
The olivine mosaic provided no other clues. Their pulse seemed slightly faster than before, but he had no way of quantifying that. Mikel carefully turned to face the tunnel again. He could see that several feet ahead, there was a larger, closet-size panel with the same olivine design, yet this mosaic was dark and could not be read. Inching himself along the wall, he reached out to open it and discovered within upright stacks of what looked like bobsleds made of Persian rugs, ribbed with some kind of wicker.
Flying carpets, he thought jokingly, reaching for one of them. But who could say whether or not this was where the legend began—carried away by surviving Galderkhaani?
He tugged on it several times, putting real muscle into it, but the contraptions were stuck fast. He shined his light all around them and fumbled between them and around to the back. Although his fingertips sensed protrusions from the wall, there were no vises or hooks. Apparently these could not be obtained as easily as the masks. Perhaps they’d been considered more valuable or, considering that the mosaic wasn’t lit, less crucial.
Mikel spent a good ten minutes trying to figure out the attachment mechanism, wiggling the contraptions in every direction but coming up with nothing. Finally, with a grunt of frustration, he gave up. The ancient locks, whatever they were, had worked. He was starting to feel like a bit of an idiot, like an alien discovering New York City, and spending all its time fooling with a broom closet. He closed the panel and turned back to the tunnel.