Human (21 page)

A massive subterranean chamber rose imperiously in a great arc above her, one hundred feet high and descending far back into the dim light. The ceiling was crowded with long stalactites; petrified minerals dripping like ancient candle wax from every conceivable space. They pointed sharp and foreboding into the great open cavern. Half-crumbled boulders crept down from the wall edges to a dirt floor rutted with rocks. The cool air tasted like damp earth on her tongue – musty, organic and suffused with jasmine flower. There were no scientists here. No help.

Dwarfed in their stone fortress, a hundred olive-skinned humans closed in upon her, alive with animated whispers. Not a single one stood higher than her chest. Some held the hands of adolescent children so small they would have seemed infantile were it not for the comprehension in their faces. The old man raised his arms and greeted them in a hushed voice. Then he stepped away, leaving Ivy exposed.

An explosion of voices broke out. Ivy was pushed deep through the crowd into the cave, clutching Kyah in her trembling arms. Spears and hands reached up to graze her skin as she stumbled forward. Small pitted fires scattered the earthen floor. Drawing close to the largest flames, the old man gestured to the dirt. Intimately aware of the presence of spears that had slain a much fiercer opponent than she already, Ivy complied, hugging Kyah tight in her lap. The bonobo’s head twitched convulsively and she picked at her scarred chest, her eyes darting, shoulders hunched. Ivy ran her fingers through Kyah’s matted black hair, shushing and comforting her.

If these people wanted me dead, surely they would have killed me by now.

“Right, what’s the craic?” Orrin tried to sound buoyant as he strode into the lab, an enthusiastic smile masking his frustration. His stormy mood had only worsened yesterday after Ivy's disappearance. Accelerated by the lack of progress in sourcing their hardware malfunctions, he'd given up early and left them to it.

Dale and Phil clicked studiously under a wall of flat-screened monitors. Phil raised his eyebrow.

“We're still working on it,” Phil said. “The systems were stuffed up pretty badly.”

Dale fidgeted in his chair and shifted closer to the screen. He seemed unwilling to meet Orrin's eyes.

Jaysus, I must have been a complete gobshite yesterday.
Dale's intense nervousness tended to increase with Orrin's bad mood. As did his habit of screwing things up. Dale was a good student, extremely intelligent and dedicated, albeit massively under confident. So dedicated that he'd transferred universities, along with Phil, so he could continue his research under Orrin’s supervision. Dale’s expertise in creating the mechanical components of their experiments made him indispensable. More than that though, Phil and Dale were Orrin’s friends.

Orrin whistled casually and dumped a box of doughnuts on the desk between them.

“Got you lads a couple of lattes. Sorry about yesterday.”

Phil appraised the lattes, then grabbed a doughnut.

“Whatever,” he said. “We can't all be as smooth with the ladies as the Phil-meister.” He swallowed half a doughnut without chewing, waggling his eyebrows.

“Fair play to you, man.” Orrin laughed, again resisting his rising frustration at the thought. Phil was an eternal bachelor that never-the-less seemed to have a constant flow of adoring women calling in on him.

Dale's shoulders relaxed and he smiled, reaching for a coffee.

Orrin sat down. “So what's the story?”

Dale finally spoke. “We've been recalibrating the measurement software. It's all back up and running now. There were some pretty intense readings recorded yesterday. Most of them cut out automatically but we've got data backups.”

“Thanks to you Dale,” said Orrin.

Dale reddened under the praise and took a swig of coffee.

“Take me through it,” Orrin said.

“Firstly, look at these diffraction patterns,” said Phil. He scooted his chair across the room, stopping expertly in front of a wide monitor. Green and red graphs scattered the screen. “Yesterday, about six pm, the laser system went ballistic. We've got sensor readings suggesting a period of extreme wavelength changes, short, constant fluctuations for about 30 seconds, then wavelength irregularity for another few minutes. The light intensity patterns too, totally haywire.” Phil pointed to a flashing graph. “There must have been a serious light show in here.”

Orrin glanced around the room. A series of diode lasers were wired at regular intervals around the centre space ceiling. Rotary motion sensors held them in place, unobtrusively gathering background energy fluctuations. They looked undisturbed.

“We were in the office at the time, I'm telling you, there was no light malfunction,” Dale interjected. It seemed as if he and Phil had had this argument before.

“The door was shut, remember?” Orrin said. “We wouldn’t have seen it if there was. What else Phil?” Phil's speciality lay in coding analysis programs to measure environmental variables. He knew his stuff.

“Okay, look at the general systems,” said Phil. He rolled back across the room and the others followed on foot. “Temp, increased by about 15 degrees, then straight back down to normal. That could explain why we had some shut-downs.” His index finger tapped a blue graph. “Relative humidity went up 50% in 15 seconds. Like a greenhouse.”

Orrin glanced around at the rack of plants on the wall, kept there for experimental response measurements. They looked greener, more vibrant.
Can’t be
, he decided. He rubbed his fingers into his eyes.

“Gauge pressure – dropped,” continued Phil. “Even the pH of our fertilisers increased.”

Orrin glanced again at the plants. Next to them, a slick laptop collected real time changes in physiological response. Tiny wires were prodded into the soil and clipped to leaves. Jars of shaded liquid below sported metal measurement rods.

“Did you check the plants?” Orrin asked.

“Yeah man, respiration rates went right up and have been higher than average since then. I think they liked it. This is some crazy shit….” Dale and Orrin shadowed Phil as he moved between monitors, typing quickly.

“Sound sensor - off the scale,” Phil continued with his back to the others. “I'm not just talking loud; I’m talking high range frequency, upwards of 80,000 Hertz. That's where we lost it. A god-damn dog couldn't even hear that. And it's localised in this room, the outer sensors didn't pick it up.” He scooted to the next monitor, reaching for another doughnut.

“And here's the
piece de resistance
.” Bent over the keyboard, a series of brightly coloured graphs appeared, and then flicked to the wide flat screen overhead for added effect. “Check that out.” Phil sat back in his chair and fell silent.

Orrin caught his breath. To his trained eye, the whips and plateaus of the giant graphs told a bizarre tale. The electromagnetic fields in the room coursed and waned, increasing to dizzying levels, the axial and radial fields were both volatile and unnatural. It was unlike anything he had ever seen. Along the base, the earth's natural magnetic field held a steady reference, increasing only slightly in the centre.

“Holy Mary and babby Jesus,” Orrin breathed.

Even Phil, who had uncovered the devastating anomaly, was speechless.

Ivy sat, clutching Kyah in her lap. She was
surrounded
. Whispers echoed off the cave walls and pierced her like arrows.

The oldest man, who had led her to the cave, broke purposefully through the crowd. He reached out and tugged at Ivy’s arm encircling Kyah. His fingers were thin and felt slightly curved in the bone. It felt familiar. Kyah’s fingers, though more pronounced, had the same curve.

Ivy let him pull her hand toward his own chest where a black stone hung from a leather strip around his neck. The old man pushed her fingers onto the amulet,
her
amulet. Ivy felt its peculiar warmth against her fingertips.

“That’s mine,” she breathed.

“Yes.”

Ivy jerked her hand back, eyes wide.
What the hell?
The words that came from his mouth were unrecognisable, but their meaning was loud and clear.
He spoke to me. Inside my head.

Ivy scrunched her fingers deep into Kyah’s hair, squeezing her eyes shut tight.
No! No no no! I did that. It was me.
Ivy opened her eyes. She took a deep breath, then another.
You’re braver than this.
She gritted her teeth, took another deep breath and reached for the amulet again.

“Welcome, Hiranah.”

Ivy scrambled to her feet, hauling Kyah up with her.
This is insane!
She spun around, trying to find an escape route.
There are too many!
Most had weapons. She hugged Kyah closer.

The man reached up to her, and pulled her fingers back to the amulet with surprising force.

“You can’t leave,” he said.

“Why?” She whispered. Her voice cracked from lack of use.

“Because we need you,” he replied.

A wave of goosebumps prickled her skin. His words out-loud, in that foreign, whispered tongue, were harsh and truncated, but those in Ivy’s mind seemed whole. Like a repaired translation.

Ivy struggled to remain calm. The man held her hand tightly against the stone.
How?
How can I hear you?
There were no words this time, only a desperate thought.

“The stone speaks for us,” he answered.

“How?” Ivy said aloud.

“I don't know.”

“Well I need to know!” Ivy yelled. She could feel the tingling of adrenaline racing through her blood. Even her fingertips twitched.

The old man frowned. “Then you must find the answer yourself.”

Ivy bristled in spite of the danger around her.

“You took it from me, didn’t you? That stone was mine.” Although the silver chain was gone, the amulet was most certainly hers.
He must have been watching me, touching me even, while I lay unconscious.
It felt like a violation.

“No,” he said. “My people carried this stone for many lifetimes, waiting for you to arrive.” The man hesitated, narrowing his eyes. For a long moment, he just stood there, watching her. Ivy shivered. Around them, the whispers started again. Slowly, as if summoning trust he didn’t have, the old man pulled the leather strip over his head and knotted it around Ivy's wrist. “But it is yours again, Hiranah. It always was.”

Ivy pulled her hand away.
Many lifetimes?
Apart from the leather, the stone looked identical to the last time she’d seen it. Even her initials, or rather, those of Iris Chapman, were still engraved on the face.

The man gestured and Ivy reluctantly sat back down, clutching Kyah. The bonobo cried anxiously in Ivy’s lap, twitching her head sharply.

“Oh, honey,” Ivy soothed, “It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Ivy gently held the bonobo’s chin and pulled her face close.

“Sharp- sticks- Kyah- hurt-” the bonobo signed. Ivy dragged her fingers through Kyah’s hair, down the side of her face, hushing her.

“I won’t let them hurt you.” But Ivy’s own vulnerability burned in her gut.

The old man curled his hand around Ivy’s wrist, covering the stone and forcing the reconnection between them.

“We shouldn’t be here,” Ivy whispered. She reflexively used her free hand to pull the bonobo's fingers from the scar on her chest.

The old man noticed. “We won’t hurt her,” he said.

“You
stole
her,” Ivy accused.

“We called
you
, Hiranah.” The man lifted his jaw defiantly. “This one fell too. We did not call her. Only you.”

“You stole
me
?!”

The man’s eyes hardened and his chest drew wider.

“You should be here, Hiranah. You
must
be here. You may not know it yet, but you
chose
to come.”

“I chose to save Kyah!”

Something about that statement made the old man’s eyes soften.

“Of course you did.”

Ivy didn’t know how to respond.

“Who are you?” she asked instead.

“My name is Gihn.” He gestured to the hobbits that pressed in around her, listening intently. “We saw you fall so we came to find you.”