The Filter Trap (42 page)

Jill stammered, “So you are resolved then: you will do nothing.”

The elders either wished not to respond or failed to understand the nature of rhetorical questions. The eldest moved her hand again, and the younger ones picked up the human scientists and whisked them back through the great doors, which slammed shut with finality behind them.

Lee, the consummate hard-ass, finally let down her guard. Her tears felt more alien than their strange surroundings. She didn’t cry when her bubbas perished, but Allan’s death was wholly unacceptable; he died attempting to rescue her. The other two scientists never told her on the ship, and the soldiers didn’t either, until they were alone in the alien atrium.

“I suppose it’s best that our smartest do the negotiating,” Lee admitted, eager to start a conversation to distract herself from the sorrowful news.

“I suspect the goal is an alliance, not a trade,” Amanda said.

“What do we have to offer such a culture?”

“Let the PhDs figure that out, I just wanna go home.”

Five tall ones burst through the door with Jill and Kam in their arms.

“You must leave,” the mind-tongue demanded.

“Are we not to stay here?” Amanda asked.

“Your fate is your own. The council has decided.”

“Fuck the council!” Lee screamed. “Those little furry bastards up there aren’t coming for us, they’re coming for
you
!

“Our council is upholding a generations-old vow of what you would call pacifism. You must accept your fate as it comes. So shall we. This is the way of the universe.”

“Where are we to go?” asked Amanda.

“We will provide you with as much knowledge of our world as we can.”

“You’re hiding something again,” Jill noticed.

“And you’re not any more accepting of this fate than we are,” Kam noted. “You’re afraid!”

“We will provide you with more,” one of them said, holding up a long-fingered hand. “You must be patient. As you would say, ‘the walls have ears.’”

“Do we have a choice?” Lee asked rhetorically.

The tall one turned suddenly and stooped down, putting her large black eyes inches from Lee’s.

“Yes. Though you seem not to appreciate it.”

Lee quieted for a moment, sharing some private thought with the tall one. Then she shivered in disgust.

“Okay, okay. We will do as you ask.”

“What did you see?” Amanda asked. “What did you show her?” she demanded of the tall one.

“What cannot be unseen,” Lee responded. “What I needed to see. She is right, we must leave this place.”

“Or she hypnotized you,” Amanda said.

“She had no need,” Lee answered, looking in awe at the tall one. “She reached into my mind, saw—felt—what it was like on that ship. I was alone for days. Not even her own people knew that, they had the comfort of each other. She knew I could handle what her elders foresaw upon the second coming.”

“The second coming?” Jill quipped. “It wasn’t the devil that was supposed to come back.”

“Depends who’s writing your Bible,” Lee said.

The other tall one knelt before the humans and sprawled her large hands on the floor.

“Come, we must go.”

“You are our envoys back to the surface?” Kam asked.

“Your official envoys will be here soon,” the tall one answered.

“So
we
must go now,” the other added.

They crawled up the ropey arms and clung to the ornamentation around the tall ones’ necks. The tall ones did their best to cover the humans with their robes, but they were more worried about mental questioning than visual observation.

“How can you hide your minds from them?” Jill whispered.

“You still do not understand our ways. In an open society, there are no secrets. They will know soon that we are not your escorts, they have only to think of it or think of us. We will stay a step ahead, though there is one way they can stop us.”

“Stop all of us,” the other noted.

The humans winced, feeling a mix of pure fear and pain from the tall ones for the first time. None wanted to imagine what agonies telekinetic beings could unleash on each other. Nobody asked the question the tall ones could read on all their minds. Instead, on the way through the dark labyrinthine tunnels under the pyramid, they sent images to their riders.

The darkness lit with descriptive visions of hundreds of plants and animals. The information arrived in chunks, too large for the human brain to process, but the tall ones hoped the brain would encode it as memory instead of a misremembered rush of visual stimuli. Passages through the forest opened before them. They were looking through those big eyes, hundreds of years passing in moments.

Then painful memories of their new shared enemy arose. The bearantulas carried a fear of heights from their home world, where they evolved to skitter through dark tunnels. The humans needed to make it to the high cliffs, ten miles east. Many thousands of years ago the tall ones sacrificed to long-forgotten gods, throwing bodies deep into a ravine that ran a hundred miles in each direction. Only the “lucky” sacrifices got to touch the bottom, making it a sacred place. The humans would be safe there.

“That was before the changing of Suns,” added the mind-tongue.

Kam saw a great silo in the ground, a bunker full of metal. The memory was intended only for him, something carried forward from the last tall ones to leave this world. Something stricken from thought among those living here now. A secret younger than the shame unveiled in the elder chamber, yet somehow more dangerous. The tall one insinuated that not even the elders knew this, and therefore had doubts of its existence at all. It would be up to the small band of humans to find what was hidden for so long in the sacred place.

“How have you kept this from the others?” Kam asked.

“In captivity we learned to hide our minds, fearing the Bearantulas could read us as well.”

“You five were also on the ship?”

“Yes, we were not prepared to learn that our ancestors have deliberately obscured our past. The past is the only thing that may save us in the present.”

“What do you mean?”

“Your kind must do this. The elders will understand we’ve hidden this soon enough. I fear what they will do. You only wish to go home, and so we have given you the power.”

“The power to do what?”

“I cannot share more, it is best you do not know, for you may turn back.”

“You intend to leave us?”

“We cannot follow where you must tread.”

“But you’re already disobeying, surely—”

“I see in the minds of the soldiers’ robots that enter debris to find bodies or bombs, going places you would not risk.”

“You’re sending us as canaries into some old coal mine?”

“Sort of, though the canary lives more often than not.”

“What’s in the mine?”

“I am not sure.”

“What!”

“When we learned how to hide our minds, we lost much. What we now send you to find was only known to few in the days before we came to live under a new Sun and the invaders came. Sadly, it was lost when the original memories perished. We only knew of it as a place or a thing. A rumor, a myth.”

The tall one paused, searching for something.

“Your culture has this as well. This is our . . .
spear of destiny
.”

“Great, religious artifacts, that’ll do us a lot of good. If yours work anything like ours, they’re usually cursed too.”

“You are one of the smartest humans, yet your limited lifespan makes for such crass generalizations. The universe has secrets your kind can’t fathom. Incredible tales to tell, if you know how to listen. I’m afraid I can impart no more, we are here.”

A cavernous, vaulted temple room spanned a thousand feet to either side. Columns with a swirling blue tendril held the roof aloft and presented a de facto barrier to the forest that the old ones hinted they could not cross.

“We wish you peace, for yourselves and for all of us,” they spoke as one in the mind-tongue.

“Thank you,” the humans uttered in their own way.

The tall ones crept back into the darkness and the hope that had comforted the human minds the last few minutes receded. In its place came dread and futility.

“Did we all receive separate instructions?” Kam asked.

“Who knows how to get to the river?” Jill asked.

Lee raised her hand. “It’s that way.” She pointed to the left of the edge of the temple complex. “Less than a mile from here.”

“What’s at the river, what did they tell you?” Amanda asked.

“I don’t know for sure,” Jill said.

“Something they think will help us,” Kam answered.

“I guess we won’t starve once we get there,” Amanda said. “They only showed me some plants to eat,” Amanda said.

“Best get going,” Lee said. “Follow me.”

As before, they bounced through the landscape in lower gravity. None of them could shake the dreamlike feeling, leaping through the ferns like Peter Pan. Then the ferns in front of them fell off their stems, but by an invisible sickle. A search party of bearantulas had found them.

“Make for the river!” Amanda commanded.

Trees fell in their path and plants cracked underfoot as they leapt. With their springier, larger legs and shock-absorbing spines the humans outpaced the stocky pursuers, but the river eluded them. When the forest stopped falling about them Amanda ordered a full stop.

“Where’s the river?” Amanda asked.

“We must have run five miles already,” Lee said. “I thought we’d be there by now.”

“Did they just tell you to turn left at the temple?” Amanda asked.

Lee tried to remember the implanted memory; the tall ones had regular night markets along the riverside by the temple. Lee realized her vision included a setting Sun and shadows falling. Assuming the river ran roughly straight through the jungle, she need only recalibrate by the growing shadows. She began to leap through the brush again.

“Hey!” Amanda shouted.

“You got a better idea?” Kam said, leaping ahead.

A half hour of leaping brought them to a rushing river. The trees parted and a wide gully opened before them. The chasm ran from one edge of the horizon to the next with a few bends and dips here and there. The ravine looked more like a valley between two nearly vertical flat-topped mountains. It sunk so far that the light changed at the bottom, in that there was precious little of it when the Sun wasn’t at apex above.

“The bottom must be miles down,” Kam noted.

“If those treetops are the same height as the ones up here,” Jill added.

“Should we just jump it?” Kam asked.

“Jump it?” Lee asked with terror. “Are you crazy?”

“He’s right,” Jill said. “In this gravity the fall wouldn’t be as harmful, maybe we could land on the treetops and climb down. One problem, though: the map they put in my head starts at a temple landing, not a treetop.”

“Then let’s start from the temple,” Amanda said. “Lead the way.”

“Correction, two problems,” Jill said. “They didn’t tell me where the temple is.”

“Got your temple,” Amanda said, looking over the steep riverbank and slipping nearly to the water’s edge.

“I can see a group of stones coming from beneath the water entering a hollow where the bank stands higher.”

The rest of them hurried to join her.

“Over millions of years the water must have worn down to the solid rock bed near the cliff and the banks are nearly thirty feet above the falls on this side,” Jill noted. “Easy carving for our primitive, mind-reading friends.”

Where the water dove off the cliff, an opening in the river bank hid behind vines and plants, eking out a life with roots deep in the rock. The natural colors of fauna and cragged rock face contrasted with gleaming white stone on the barely hidden pathway.

“Looks like nothing has walked here for centuries,” Lee said.

“More like several millennia,” Kam corrected her. “From what they showed me, this was off-limits even before the bearantulas arrived.”

“The trail washed away,” Amanda pointed out. Arranged rocks had clearly once protruded through the rushing water at the edge of the cliff, but now most of them were long gone. With the rocks, the path would have been dangerous, but it now seemed impossible.

“Jumping off the cliff is starting to look better and better,” Kam said.

“Critical velocity is the same for your body as that water, going over the cliff in the waterfall isn’t much different. Without branches to grab onto you’ll smash at the bottom. Slower, but bone-breaking all the same.”

Kam peered over the sheer cliff, looking for some footholds on the face of the riverbank, but found none. “There is no way down.”

“It’s time we took you two to boot camp,” Lee said, slapping their shoulders. She started ripping vines from the rocks.

They toiled to create strong rappelling lines to hoist themselves down the bank of the river and swing under the waterfall to the shiny rock path on the other side.

An hour later they stood in the high cave opening under the beginning of the falls. The spray from the water lifted and filtered through the humid air. The scientists collapsed, tired after the slow and painful journey down the cliffside held only by tangled red and green vines and the ensuing leap across.

“This was where they made the sacrifices,” Jill realized, studying faint carvings on the wall, eroded by thousands of years of errant water drops.

“More importantly,” Kam noted, “they made a map!”

“Back here!” Amanda yelled from down the passage into the rock beneath the falls.

Despite its age and deterioration, the storytelling was not dulled in the art Amanda had found. Behind moss and calcium stains hid a terrifying scene strangely familiar to Kam.

“Just like the Mayans, they ritually sacrificed their own,” he said. “They told me this, but I doubt they knew the true extent.”

“You said you know the way from here,” Amanda reminded Jill.

Jill nodded and slowly crept further along the passage, never straying too far from the cliff facing the ravine. Light flickered through to the high curving walls, exposing new secrets of the ancient society that once flourished on the cliffs. Astronomy, games, and sacrifice seemed of primary importance.

“God,” Kam gasped. “They used to be in Vega. That’s only twenty-five light years from Earth. Well, where we used to be, anyway. Their radio signals would have hit the Earth when we were building the pyramids.”

Jill smiled and looked back. “Then at least
one
of my TED talks was accurate: SETI’s failure was only a timing problem. Perhaps the force that moved us both here is just trying to put us all together so we don’t miss any more calls. Let’s find their holy grail down there and phone home while we still can.”

The path wound down and around multiple times until they reached a high ledge built over the deepest part of the divide. Close to the waterfall again, rushing water echoed and mist seeped in the gateway to the open air in the ravine.

Only Lee was brave enough to step onto the ledge, kept nearly pristine by its hidden locale after thousands of years.

“It’s glorious!” she shouted back, but none of the others cared to join her.

Jill followed Lee halfway to the edge of the ledge and disappeared around the side.

The rest gulped, not wanting to climb under the waterfall. They tiptoed to follow Jill and stood outside on the lip, revealing a hidden passage of stone stairs, long overgrown but never used. The stairs, built for tall-ones, had ample width for human feet, but proved very far apart. To move from one step to another required a short hop down in the lower gravity, risking a fall over the side.

The steps curved on the cliff face until dipping behind the waterfall. The path beyond the waterfall was obscured by mist; they hoped they wouldn’t be trapped there, unable to climb up the tall slippery steps to come back.

“How did they show you this path?” Kam asked Jill.

“They shared an ancient tale. Legend holds if they behaved poorly the sacrificed would ascend to the village to haunt the living. Many stories exist of sacrifices rising from the dead and living on the outskirts of the forest, always coinciding with crop failures or bad weather.”

“So why build them steps to come back up?” Lee asked.

“These steps would only be visible to those who fell,” Jill pointed out. “To cross to the other side of the ravine was forbidden.”

“So this was just a ruse to control the will of the people?” Amanda surmised.

“Don’t be quick to judge,” Kam said. “Mayans were still sacrificing Christian Spaniards in the 17th century.”

“Didn’t they have archaeologists?” asked Amanda.

“Based on what we saw in the council room, I think they were intent on covering up anything like this,” Kam said.

“We’re walking into a forgotten history of an alien world,” Jill stated. “Watch your step.”

As they descended behind the waterfall, steps became more deliberate on stones covered in slippery algae. The path grew darker, the waterfall blocking the still-setting sunlight. They held tight to the branches growing between rocks.

After descending two miles down the cliff face, the mammoth waterfall roaring arm’s length in front, they approached the base of the cliff.

“Now what?” Amanda fretted. “Is there supposed to be something or someone here waiting for us?”

“There is,” Jill said, looking up at the cliff wall at a stone gateway, forty feet high and nearly invisible after strangulation from eons of vines. It broke the water’s path and allowed safe passage under, with a veil of mist falling on the far side. Where it may lead would remain a mystery until they passed through.

“The
Passage of the Dead
!” Amanda exclaimed. “I didn’t know how it would be useful until now, but they shared with me their legend of the dead passing through a great gateway to the afterlife. Looking at this arch, I remember the story as if it was my own.”

“I have a feeling we’ll remember more when we reach the other side,” Kam said.

“These aliens sure do love scavenger hunts,” Lee quipped.

With renewed vigor they hastened their descent. As they cleared closer to the base of the falls, the wall of water moved farther away, spilling over the great arch, pulled towards the pool that ran to the valley river.

A vibration halted their steps.

“Something’s moving inside the rock,” Lee guessed.

“No, look!” Amanda said, pointing at a dark spot on the other side of the waterfall, hard to see through the wall of water against the dying embers of a sunset reflected along canyon walls.

The waters pulled back, and the nose of a bearantula delta ship burst forth, firing a new weapon that crumbled the rock under their feet. Soldiers farther out on the ledge fell into the canyon, scrambling to grab onto something.

The rest jumped down close to the rock wall, glad the still-light gravity softened their landing. With rock tumbling from above, they made a mad dash to pass through the passage of the dead, hoping the name wouldn’t catch up with them. Many more of the soldiers didn’t make it through, but anyone who stopped to offer assistance would have met the same fate.

The ship, too large to follow into the passage, set down under the cursing water, just ahead of the entrance. Its clumsy landing clanged on the rock and echoed to the humans running in the dark.

“Where are we going?” Lee shouted.

“Away from trouble!” Amanda shouted back.

“Don’t be so sure,” Kam said, slowing to a halt as the tunnel ended.

Although there was nowhere else to go, the door stood out of place. A twenty-five-foot high metallic wall reflected what little light whispered down the passage from the waterfall. Far behind at the beginning of the tunnel they heard the clinks and flitters of the bearantulas scuttling on all fours.

Lines of directed heat sizzled through the waterfall and struck the back wall, melting little pools of igneous slag and dotting it with embers. Soldiers melted too, staring into the hazy wafting mist, yearning for a rifle to fire back until tiny pockets of waterfall turned to gas and less-tiny pockets of strong men vanished only to be replaced by volcanoes of blood.

Most died from blood loss almost immediately, but one, missing only a foot and a chunk of arm, called to Amanda for help.

“Jesus! Even in Iraq I could put a soldier out of his misery,” she pined as she searched the cave floor for a rock to finish the jobs the bearantulas started. The air heated where her chest had been moments before.

“Get down!” Lee screamed at the scientists, who had been fumbling at the far wall of the cave, caressing the ancient cracks for a nascent clue to their escape.

Frantically, Jill searched the remaining faces in the dim light. “They gave one of us the key, right?”

“Hopefully one of us still alive,” Amanda said as she and Lee crawled to the wall.

“If it’s like any of their other secrets we gotta find the keyhole before we’ll remember,” Lee noted. “Or speak friend and enter.”

“What?” Amanda asked, then scraped her hands along the adjacent rock wall. “There has to be another way out of here.”

“Stand by the gray stone when the thrush knocks,” Lee whispered to herself. “Hope it’s Durin’s Day.” She knocked on the door and mockingly said in her best deep Gandalf voice, “
Mellon
.” She tipped her body upright in surprise.

“What is it?” the others asked.

“It’s in my head,” she said. “Asking me for a password, a combination of images I think.”

“Anybody?” Amanda asked.

They waited, hoping someone else knew. Their thoughts returned to one thing, the ever-closer clattering of the approaching bearantulas.

“Wait, listen . . .” Amanda implored. “They’re retreating.”

The hum of the delta ship began again as it lifted off the rock floor outside.

“Do they know something we don’t?” Jill asked.

“Maybe they could read the tall ones’ minds after all,” Kam grimaced, looking at the door with new dread.

“What’s in there anyway?” Lee asked Kam. “Cthulhu?”

“They just gave me hints,” he answered. “Metal. Glass. Symbols. Things that glow. Long shards of black and silver.”

“Oh, so just Shoggoths, then,” Lee sarcastically sighed.

“Whatever’s in there died long before Lovecraft was born,” Jill reminded her.

“Don’t be so sure about that,” Kam said. “The ‘dead’ part, I mean. I also remember something strange hidden away in there. Something older and wiser than the tall ones, not really alive or dead. More like . . . sleeping. A bubble with many small shapes.”

“Atomic structures?” Jill guessed.

The metal of the door began a timid glow and it began to retract.

“Ingenious!” Jill exclaimed. “Only a mental picture of what’s inside gives access. Even if some sacrilegious youth scampered down here, the secrets would stay hidden.”

“And they would have forever if the original memories weren’t carried back home,” Kam noted.

They staggered into a cacophonous interior space as big as the hangar at Area 51 several times over in every direction. Bioluminescence dimly lit the side walls, illuminating walkways through the cavern.

“I can’t see a ceiling,” Lee said. “You could store a Saturn V rocket upright.”

“Please, oh please, let that mean there’s a spaceship in here,” Amanda said under her breath.

The hallway shook and a troubling sound echoed from the open door. Rocks tumbled into place and blotted the sound of the rushing waterfall at the entrance of the passageway of the dead.

Jill whispered in the increasing dark, “They weren’t leaving; they were just going back to their ship to blast away the cave and seal us in!”

“They’d rather close us in here to suffocate than come in after us,” Kam said.

“Or they don’t want what’s in here to escape,” Jill said.

“They used the tall ones. Used us,” Lee realized. “We escaped from that ship too easily. They
knew
the tall ones would take us to their city and send us here. The bearantulas got a two-for-one deal: we led them to the only thing that could stop them and now they’re free to take more slaves with us left down here to suffocate!”