A Planet's Search For History Read online

  The floor was smooth cold rock. I could not see to either side, the spot of light was swallowed by the blackness. Like the ice, it felt unnatural and quite eerie.

  I continued forward and just as suddenly as it began, it disappeared. I was crawling into a room and as I moved inside, it instantly lit with light from an unknown source. I stood and slowly looked around—my rope materialized out of solid rock behind me. I moved back to it and held my hand out—it disappeared. Okay, it was something that made that black hole look like rock.

  I dropped a couple pitons, one to each side of me to mark this area. It looked just like the rest of the walls in the huge room. It had blank walls of rock, it was not square, it was six sided, the ceiling was twelve feet off the floor, and it was empty. I think I said, “Interesting,” as it echoed back. In the center was what looked like the leftovers of a campfire.

  I felt a few jerks on the rope, someone was nervous. I had to smile as I jerked back to let them know I was okay.

  The air was a bit stale but breathable so I turned and took off the rope. I set it on the floor and stepped back into the black again. I saw nothing, but I counted eight steps and I was back out by the door. I told the others, “Nine steps of eerie blackness, then an empty room. Lights came on as I entered it.”

  Loka tried to tape a note to the door-frame, nothing stuck so she set it on the floor by it with a piton for weight and we all stepped into the inky blackness holding hands.

  They were interested in the large empty room, especially after finding our tunnel looked like a plain wall from the inside. The remains of the fire weren’t that old. We felt it was one of our missing parties.

  Cullves decided we should see if there were any other magic doors like this one. We grabbed a few pitons and spread out, one to each of the walls. We worked our hands along, starting from a corner. I would say the room was sixty feet to a side. We came in about fifteen feet from a corner to the right. It took thirty minutes to cover the room. Each wall had two magic doors except the second one to the left, which had a third in the middle. All were evenly spaced, the same fifteen feet out from a corner.

  We returned outside and moved our equipment into the center of this room.

  Duranu said, “Interesting, it is like we are in an office building where the offices are spread around a central waiting area. I suspect that the extra one leads to other areas, but I feel from the design that all these others lead to more frozen ice blocks.”

  I checked out two and he was right, I ran into a door frame from the inside—there was a nine inch gap, the thickness of the frame. Where I could see, the smallest of light came through the ice block from the other side. I returned to the room.

  “Yes, each goes to another ice wall. Funny, the mountain only shows the one cube,” I told them.

  Loka said we better check the center hall. She pointed out that the compass pointed at that door. Duranu suggested we wait a bit. Sleep, eat and we would start later. He needed time to catch up on his notes.

  We ate a cold meal and soon I was asleep in my bedroll. When I woke I felt I had slept a long time, and the others were still asleep. I lit a small fire on the rock floor where the other had been and watched the smoke rise toward the ceiling and then be whisked away. Air was being moved near it.

  I made a pot of coffee, and just started sipping it when Cullves woke. “Wonderful smell when you don’t have to get up and make it.” She laughed and soon joined me with a cup of her own. Within fifteen minutes the other two were awake and sipped as well. I whipped up some powdered eggs and added some rehydrated meat bits to make some omelets. We had our first meal in weeks that was not in a howling wind or deathly cold.

  After we finished we, well I really, got to tackle the middle door. Rope attached I crawled on my hands and knees and, with light in hand, I moved into the nothing. Just like the other portals most of the light was swallowed, but unlike them it was only a couple feet until I was in a lit hallway. I untied the rope and set it down and stepped back through to the other team members.

  “Your assumption is correct, sir, a hallway, doors at the end, about forty feet away,” I reported to Duranu.

  They followed me through and we walked to the end with two options: left door or right, real doors, with handles. No writing or symbols on either.

  Duranu made a command decision. “Left one.”

  I had everyone go back down the hall a bit as I opened it slowly. It went to another hall bearing to the left on an angle. I closed it and went to the right one. I opened it—it did the same, only to the right.

  The rest joined me. Over the next hour we followed several hallways with doors to the side and a door at the end that led to more doors. I dropped pitons along each. We backed up and did it all again through the other door and as I suspected, we soon crossed paths with our pitons from the other direction. It all formed a large, multifaceted circle with doors that went to rooms along the inside, but only one door led to the outside of the ring in each hallway. After mapping it as best we could, we went through the door that was effectively directly across from the other hall with the two doors where we started.

  I knew what all the rooms were on the inside ring; each was the same, a bed, a small bathroom, a small table with two chairs. A small panel thing. All were empty, and dust accumulation indicated for a very long time.

  The single end door led to another large six-sided hall with more ‘hidden’ doors, and directly across from where we came in was the side with the third portal, pattern repeating itself two more times so we had four of these six-sided rooms linked by the hallways. Turns out the first had twelve of the doors that passed through to ice blocks, the second six-sided only had eight for a total of twenty possible cubes, at least based on the patterns. The next two six-sided just had the centered doors. I went through the center door at the last of them and it led into another large room full of strange equipment and regular doors. Behind one of those doors was a very long bright yellow hall that led to a small room; to its left was a mystery door.

  The source of the magnetic field distortion and maybe the interference to the radio gear was clearly behind that door, and resting on its handle was the hand of a decomposing skeleton.

  In the middle of that special door was a large symbol. It was a weird one—it had a large yellow square lined in black and in its center was a small circle with three evenly spaced black pie wedges coming out from around it. Funny, kind of looked like a boat propeller.

  On the door’s frame was another, a triangle in red that showed the propeller in black at the top with beams shinning down, a skull with crossed bones was on the lower left and a human figure running with an arrow pointing away, I didn’t need to be a scientist to know it wasn’t something good.

  One of the missing teams was now accounted for. All four dead, one holding on the door handle, and through the doorway, the other three piles of decomposing bodies and gear. The stench was horrendous. We backed out of there. Duranu picked up some of the dead party’s gear and was going to bring it, but upon my insistence, he put it back. It made him mad at first, but he did. I told him until we knew what happened, I didn’t want anyone to touch anything. Something had killed them.

  Oh, there were black symbols across that door as well. I will copy them in our log for the next plane. DANGER :: REACTOR ran across the top of it. RADIATION :: HAZARD across the middle, right above the propeller symbol. Across the bottom was WARPFIELD :: GENERATOR. Whatever it said, it meant death.

  We moved back to the room of equipment and set up shop. After consulting with the rest of us, Duranu decided to go ahead and send the last plane off, if the ice door was still open. We loaded our recordings and picture data and rough maps and letters, and Loka and I went back to the entrance. It was still open, so we went to the edge and launched it.

  “Well, if we find anything else I guess we’ll have to carry it down,” she said, and laughed.

  We went back to the others. As we investigated other halls and
rooms I found the site was quite complex. Duranu became sick, very sick, and for no reason. He had nausea and vomiting; diarrhea; high fever; weakness; and some of his hair was falling out. All very strange. The door maybe? Who knows. His wife was very concerned.

  Loka had been playing with a little box she found in the hall to the mystery room and it clicked and had a little meter thing that bounced around. As she came to show it to me it started jumping violently as she went past Duranu, then it quieted as she came to me. I took it and rechecked: all but Duranu were the same. For him it jumped all over. I turned it off. It detected something different, but I didn’t know what it did and it could be dangerous.

  ~~~

  We ate and slept; time had no meaning, all the watches had stopped during the climb up. Duranu seemed to recover after what I felt were a few days; he was back to figuring out what the various instruments did. After we were pretty sure nothing would explode, he started turning on and off various devices. Some we knew, just different than ours. Computers, scopes, all sorts of equipment. One switch he flipped had immediate results: it turned off the magic walls and we could see the doorframes from the inside. But just that one room. Loka and I went back to our original entry point and searched. Sure enough, there was a switch there that did the same thing. Each of the doorframes had the strange writing on them. A lot of it was the same but parts were different. Fine, but for now we left the switch turned on. I suspected there was some reason it was there.

  The scientists acted like it was First Day. The day that each year we gave each other presents; to celebrate our planet’s first Royal Family supposedly being founded at Castle Gods-Cut. Which we now think we are in.

  Cullves found something interesting, sixty-one little pen things, but they didn’t write. Each had a little sharp point and a couple small buttons, one red and one green. They were neatly arranged in a plastic tray that had room for eighty. I clipped one in my pocket to see if some idea came to mind of its use while the others snickered.

  Loka became fascinated with a computer thing that materialized some woman in thin air saying things. There were hundreds of these play sticks arranged in several drawers in the table beneath it. She would sit for hours and play them.

  We did little more than eat and sleep and study the strange devices we found; I did most of the exploring. I found a section of the place that had piles and piles of paper and metal boxes. After careful investigation, I ripped one of the paper boxes open. It was full of sealed tins that turned out to contain dehydrated food of. I added a little water and found some of it was quite tasty. I took some back to the others. Duranu, who recovered well from his strange sickness, said if it didn’t kill me we would not starve.

  I realized earlier we had been here almost a month and food was getting short. Water was not a problem as all the bathrooms had running taps; you just needed to let the stale water run a few minutes then, when it felt cool, taste it.

  Duranu, after almost a month of appearing to be fine, suddenly developed infections and had diarrhea again. He became dehydrated and was soon hemorrhaging blood. In less than two days, he was dead. Everyone was baffled, especially his wife.

  We sat and, in spite of her tears, we went over and over everything we did. The only thing he had done that we had not was pick up and examine the packs and equipment of the dead people by the yellow door.

  I placed his body there with the others, as good a mausoleum as any. Cullves brought the little box and checked the area, the needle pegged at almost everything in the room. We left. I didn’t know what it was, but the room was death.

  Cullves became sullen and withdrawn over the next several weeks. She lost all her enthusiasm; guess I couldn’t blame her. At one of the meals, she up and said, “I tested all the sticks we brought with us. All are empty, everything we recorded is empty. Those planes couldn’t have made it, the sticks couldn’t tell them where to go. All our work, all the work of the rest is useless, for nothing. I don’t know what this place is but it is not Castle Gods-Cut!” She started sobbing.

  It took her a few days to make up her mind. She packed up a few small items we found and announced she was going back. “I will bring what I have and tell what I know, but until we learn a lot more, I will tell them not to come back here. Do you two want to come, or stay on?”

  This caught Loka off guard, but I saw it coming.

  “I want to stay and see why the others died and why we didn’t,” I told her.

  “I want to stay as well. There is something—I don’t know, something I feel. I want to stay too,” Loka told her.

  “Fine, I will leave after some sleep. I will pull the pitons from the tunnel. If I get back, others will want to come and try to get in and see what there is to see, or steal, and I don’t want them to find that demon yellow door. You two know how to get back out when you wish.” She stated it as a fact. She was now the de facto head of the party so I said nothing of her decision.

  I gave her my best advice on getting down. “Follow the same route we came up. Anchor at as many of our pitons as you can find. Do not try to repel down, you won’t make it—even I would not try that.”

  We gathered as much food and fuel as she could carry. If she became stranded for even a few days, she would not make it without freezing to death. It would be close as it was. I talked to her, she knew it, but said it really didn’t matter. He was gone, little really mattered any more. That part I could understand.

  The time came for her to depart. She hugged us and left. Loka did not want to watch her leave so she stayed inside. I followed Cullves as she picked up all the pitons and made her way to the ledge. I told her to be careful and we’d see her when we came back. I felt in my soul that we would never meet again. This really was a very mean mountain. However, she already knew that. I went back inside; by tomorrow, this passage would be a block of ice again, seen only by the scopes.

  Loka was still in the lab room watching one of those sticks. She saw me and asked, “She won’t make it to the bottom alive, will she?”

  “I don’t know, she is a strong one, but if I had to place bets I would have to give her mighty long odds alone.”

  “Still, better to go that way than die inside over years. I sometimes think we are wrong in only having one mate forever. You know 99% of all our suicides are after the loss of your life mate?” She looked at me as I nodded, we all knew the facts, and people in the government were finally listening seriously to arguments for changing it.

  Loka said, “Dear, listen, these sticks, they have different people, but this one, she almost makes sense to me, she is almost speaking our language.” She had me come by her as she played a small part over and over. “Hear her? She is saying Queen something, King somebody, and Earth. The more I listen the more I know it. It is our language, but it is like the people on the islands, they talk so funny it is hard to understand them. Well, she talks very funny and I am trying hard to understand her. She is so close to making sense to me.”

  “Sorry dear, you have the tuned ear, but it just sounds like gibberish to me. However, her face looks vaguely familiar.” I kissed her forehead and left to find a new area to explore. I was pretty sure of whom the image was but I didn’t want to start rumors, she’d figure it out.

  I went down each tunnel from the six-sided rooms to the door. Door after door were the same block of ice at the end. After a meal one day I found one different from the others. Oh, it was all set up exactly the same, but this one had a bronze colored frame instead of the normal black hue. I told Loka about it and she came to see it herself. She studied the writings carefully and said, “Earth, come look.” She took me back to the stick viewer and found a stick she had marked. After a few minutes of searching through the video she said, “Listen,” and turned it up. I could almost hear the word ‘Earth’, as she said. Well, maybe I heard it, but the woman was standing in front of a bronze colored door for sure.

  ~~~

  The next day she called me over again. She found commu
nication earpieces that worked. You clipped it on and you could talk to anyone else wearing one. Interesting, no batteries that I could see, and small. “I saw it in one of the videos.”

  I think it was about three days later—we really had no way to tell time in here—we slept and ate when it seemed right to do so.

  Loka called over the earpiece, she sounded excited. “Please come at once, I think I found something important.” I was going through some boxes with odd clothing in them. This place had rooms full of all sorts of weird things, even one full of pots, pans, and utensils. I stopped my exploration and went to see what she found.

  It actually wasn’t a shattering discovery, but it did appear I was right about the pencil clip thing anyway.

  She backed up a bit of video and as that same woman talked, Loka said, “Watch her left hand.” I saw the device in it, she walked to an ice block with it straight out and just kept walking, the light followed as the dark vanished before her. Soon she was standing on a small ledge with jungle around it, and weird birds could be heard. Well, I think they were birds. Next, she was back in this room and talking.

  “These are all training videos of some sort. I have definitely heard words like food, clothes, home, King, Queen, baby and kill. The more I listen the more I am sure it is our language!” She seemed happy.

  “Well, let’s try it on our known door first,” I said.

  She followed as I came to the hidden door and held the pen thing out like in the video. I walked forward holding the little green button as the magic wall simply disappeared and the short hall was there. As we came to the door I just walked like in the video while holding the green button: sure enough, the ice disappeared and we were soon standing on the ledge. “Very interesting! I suppose it works both ways?”