The Days of Peleg (2 page)

Equipped with his five senses, man explores the universe
around him and calls the adventure Science.

Edwin Hubble

In the beginning did Darkness, black as Erebus, inhabit an eternal, infinite void. In the growing confusion of colliding elements, an unconscious Desire emerged, which was the origin of all existence.

Though it knew not itself, Desire formed a union with Darkness and brought forth a great shiny cosmic egg, and when it was broken, it spewed forth a slimy, viscous Mot into the void, out of which came forth the stars and sun.

The air, now heated from the glow of land and sea, formed great lightning and winds, and a vast downpour of heavenly waters mixed with Mot, forming the first simple creatures, both visible and invisible, from which came more complex animals—first those without, and then those with sensation.

By the heat of the sun, things were made to split off and clash with one another, causing thunder and lightning, and thus awoke beings endowed with intelligence who began to stir on the earth and took fright on land and sea as males and females—who could now ponder the heavens: the sun, moon, stars, and planets.

Thus arose consciousness.

Ancient Phoenician Origins Myth

Chapter 1

Failure

“Knowledge of one’s present is impossible without knowledge of one’s past.”

H
e held his breath so he could listen better. If only his pounding heart would stop making so much noise! Tipping his head forward, he tried to sense any movement from his pursuers—if they were still there.

Satisfied that he was alone for the moment, he continued creeping forward in the darkness, trying to determine the incline of the coarse stone floor with his fingertips.
Keep moving upward.
A bad plan was better than no plan, he thought. Anything to reassure himself.

He heard faint wisps of air being pumped from the lower levels. Some kind of geo-thermal heating system. The fingers on his right hand caught on the rough edges of a small floor-vent at the edge of the room. Now he had a wall.

He stood up slowly, with his left hand over his head to check for clearance. Keeping his palm along the wall, he began walking slowly in the direction that seemed most upward. His eyes ached from their fruitless straining in the pitch-black of the underground labyrinth, and he forced them closed for the thousandth time. Other than contributing to his headache, they were useless to him at the moment.

The wall under his hand suddenly made a ninety-degree angle to the right, and he continued to follow it. The ambient sound had changed and he clicked his tongue softly. Listening for the echo, he realized he had moved from a large chamber into a much smaller area—probably a hall or corridor. The floor also seemed to be rising faster.

He heard movement behind him and froze. It was very distant, but there were definitely two or three of them. Their quiet pursuit was pushing subtle drafts of cold air into the space behind him. He resumed a quicker pace, feeling the ground before him with his toes, and keeping a hand above and in front to avoid any collisions.

Suddenly the floor disappeared in front of him and his eyes snapped open. He tipped forward, pressing his hand as hard as possible against the wall. His sweating palm slipped and he twisted to his right, crouching. His right foot flew out from under him and he tumbled into the wall, banging his left knee. Extending his legs forward, he sprawled out, face down and caught the edge with his hands. With relief, he realized that he had almost stumbled down a flight of stairs. His knee had caught the top step and torn his leggings. He rolled over and sat on the steps, exploring his knee with his fingers. He didn’t feel any blood.

Voices. He cursed his heat-blindness. He knew he was giving off a signature, but he was unsure whether his pursuers could see it. Since he had seen no light source, it was best to assume they could. Back home, he knew that Mentors had clear infrared vision, and just about everyone else could sense heat to some extent. But to him, infrared was just as black as everything else in this underground community.

Straining to see up over the edge of the stairs, he heard them moving in his direction. He ducked down behind the lip, and began a slow, feet-first descent, sliding on his stomach. After a few steps, he reached a new level. He didn’t have time to determine the incline of the floor, so he stood up, reached for the wall, and continued to follow it. Perhaps he would find an air vent that he could fit into, and climb up through the levels.

The wall made another right angle, and he entered into a much larger room. He continued around the edge, expecting at any moment to collide with a chair or shelf. Suddenly, he heard more rustling coming towards him. The sounds seemed to originate from a point thirty meters in front of him and at least four meters above his head. As he listened, he determined that four or five additional searchers were descending a long stone staircase in front of him.

He got down on all fours and scrambled across the coarse floor directly toward where he guessed the middle of the room was. At about the point where he thought he was near the center, his head suddenly thumped into something made of stone. Feeling around, he discovered what seemed to be a leg for a large stone table. He found his way under the table and crouched, hoping he would not be discovered.

The two groups of pursuers acknowledged each other as they entered the room from opposite directions. They began to speak quietly, and Peleg tried to hear what was being said. Aboard the
Urbat
, his primary position was Chief Cartographer (and replacement Navigator), but his other area of expertise was linguistics. Although he was not a Mentor, he had been born within months of the Great Awakening, and his resulting language skills had afforded him good positions and some privileges.

He could make out the syllables okay, but the words were nothing like he had ever heard before. Again he wondered, as he had often done over the past twelve years,
How many languages are there, anyway?
Suddenly, they stopped talking, and he could sense them scanning the room. One of them gave a sharp cry, and in the resulting commotion, he could only assume he had been spotted.

He had one magnesium button left. The ship’s chemist, Mentor Thaxad, claimed he had ‘
calcined
’ it from dolomite, along with some other strange words. It was not something Peleg had been trained in, but he knew these buttons were used for signaling and starting fires. Thaxad’s “secret mix” was coated in some kind of oxide, and sealed in a waterproof ceramic shell with casein. A small, second chamber was on top of the button, and Peleg began to generate as much saliva as he could muster while his pursuers closed in on him.

Once he had a mouthful, he filled the reservoir with spit and tore a small piece of cloth from his shirt with his teeth. They were almost to the table now, and he could sense them crouching down. He plugged the chamber with the cloth, and rushed out from under the table, ramming into their knees. He plowed through them, their hands reaching for him as they turned from the table. He raised the button and flung it as hard as he could against the wall, burying his face inside of his other elbow.

A sideways jet of white-hot flame erupted from the wall as the container crashed and the contents of the two chambers mingled. The pursuers screamed in agony and threw their arms over their faces as the wall which they had been looking at became incandescent. Peleg uncovered his eyes, and in the afterglow he saw the long staircase from which the second group had descended. Glancing around the room he saw books, maps and even some charts. He even thought he recognized some
Aenochian
script! If only he had time….

His pursuers were in pain, but temporary blindness was not going to stop them. Peleg took one last look around, and bolted for the long staircase on the far side of the room. He looked up, and in the last dying light, he noted the top of the staircase and ran, taking them two steps at a time.

Upon reaching the top, the pitch-black had returned, and he resumed his mission:
Keep moving upward
. Some kind of alarm-siren sequence began to sound, and he didn’t need to be a linguist to know what it was announcing:

The escaped prisoner is in this corridor!

He sought frantically for the best way upward. He
would
not allow himself to be captured again!

The primary objective of these people seemed to be preventing any knowledge of their existence from entering the outside world. And, of course,
his
mission was to report it. He must also be on the lookout for the possibility that these underground dwellers might be a link to the Race of Semyaz, from before the Great Calamity! From what he had seen earlier, they might even provide the hereditary resources needed to reverse the degeneration that was threatening the rest of humanity.

But that was his
other
mission.

A blast of warm air hit him on the left side of his face, and he turned towards an air duct. Feeling his way to the other side of the corridor, he followed the breeze until he located the opening. He reached inside and found a grate which he grabbed onto. He tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge. The warm air roared around him as he kept struggling. Finally, in desperation, he gave it a huge push, and the grate snapped out of place and fell tumbling down the shaft. He couldn’t hear when it hit bottom, but he immediately grabbed the upper lip and lifted his legs to push them through the opening. The inside of the shaft should be rough stone, and he had certainly done his share of mountain climbing. The speed of the air rushing past him convinced him that
this
shaft would go all the way to the surface. He was on his way.

Strong arms grabbed him from behind. He hadn’t heard their approach because of the wind. As they hauled him out onto the floor, he instinctively crossed his arms, protecting the documents, maps, and instruments which were secured away in his chest pack. He wiggled his shoulders, trying to get back up, but he was pinned. Someone began tying his feet together. Then there was a hand in his face. A sharp ‘
Snap!
’ and a foul odor from a broken capsule filled his nostrils. His one last fading thought:

Who Are You?

Fog. Green fog. Translucent damp green vapors intruded on his murky thoughts, shivering and climbing, attempting to break into consciousness.

A pale green light seeped through his eyelids. Peleg opened his eyes and tried to bring the far wall into focus, but couldn’t.

That must have been some drug. The wall is moving!

The surface of the wall was wavering and shimmering, but as he finally forced his eyes to clear and focus, he realized that the wall really
was
moving.

The foggy, dampness in the room was due to the quiet waterfall that flowed down the face of the far wall; its surface shimmering and refracting the light from a glowing, green, bioluminescent light panel which was attached near the doorway. He had seen such panels before. He wasn’t sure whether these people collected luminescent marine life and contained them, or if the panel was some kind of plant that had been force-fed luciferin—a chemical found in many bioluminescent insects.

He had seen experiments like this at home, and often the altered plants would glow with an ebb and flow in response to their circadian rhythm. He would have to ask Thaxad—if the tall, brooding chemist had survived.

His previous room had been cold and dry. This one was cold and
wet
. A perfect environment for hypothermia. His ankles were fastened in a type of stone stockade, and his wrists were clamped securely to the frame where he and his mat were laying. He realized with dismay that he had been stripped down to his undergarments, and that all of his charts, documents, and instruments were gone. Of course, the bulk of his research had gone down with the ship, but the items that he always carried with him, and always used when communicating, had been removed.

Twelve years. For twelve years he had been the Chief Cartographer, sent out on a Global Mission by the High Minister of
Knowledge
himself. He had been part of an elite scientific team; an expedition to explore and research the paths that humanity had taken since the Great Awakening. He had cataloged new languages, charted new continents, and even (serendipitously) discovered amazing water routes which would be of enormous commercial value. His official mission had been an overwhelming success. However, if he didn’t escape from this place, it would all be for nothing. He had every reason to assume the rest of the crew of the
Urbat
had perished.

A short, but muscular male with a large, protruding forehead, powerful forearms, and wide shoulders entered the room, carrying a second glow panel.

The forehead perplexed Peleg. Such foreheads were only seen on Mentors, but Mentors were usually much taller than this person.

This man had a long nose, was clean-shaven with long, well-groomed hair, and was wearing a fur kilt with leather boots. A thin leather sash draped across his powerful chest and he wore a small seashell necklace. Wrapped around his head was a thin headband, or perhaps a small skullcap. (It was difficult to tell in the dim green light.) He attached the panel to the wall next to the first, and then bent down and released Peleg’s wrists. Peleg tried to speak, but the man deliberately ignored him, turned, and exited the room.

When the man turned away, Peleg’s heart jumped. When he had raised his arm to attach the light panel, Peleg had clearly seen small rippling muscle-knots just under his rhomboids.

This was one of the indicators that Felpag had spoken of! He sat up on his “bed”, a crazy idea entering his mind. Perhaps the Watchers were
not
destroyed after all, but were now hiding in these underground communities?