Lunar Antipodes: The Second Book of Regenesis Page 2

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  This time, he leads Davina on a course parallel to the moraine ridge until it opens out onto the wider, deeper vista of the inland waterway. It forms an unbridgeable gulf between the shoreline path and the moraine ridge. Which here reaches toward a march of foothills from the opposite shore of the waterway to a low range of mountains beyond.

  Unwilling to remain on a path that will lead them back to the valley of the furry bipeds, Noah is determined to cross the inland waterway and pursue a new route he knows will take them directly to the cloudless tundra.

  From this point on, both keep their eyes peeled for the first opportunity to gain the waterway’s lee shore.

  It is a long trek, relieved finally by a revetment whose hidden opening is visible from one direction only. It is a legacy of ancient seas whose crashing waves carved it out of shoreline ages before receding to its present level.

  Walking briskly, Noah is intently scanning the waterway’s far shore when Davina squeezes his arm and points to the geologic feature he had passed by, unwitting, from the opposite direction.

  The revetment rises imperceptibly to a low mound whose unbroken profile from the other side conceals a crescent, slit-like aperture that smugly grins a sardonic greeting as they approach it from this side.

  Noah is first to crawl into its maw, cautioning Davina to follow at a safe distance. Dismissing his caution for her, she slithers quickly to his side and, together, they proceed along the declivity of a narrow, downward sloping tunnel.

  They are greatly encouraged by the dim light that suffuses the tunnel. Not only from the seaward opening they are entering but also in the distance ahead from an opening at its far end. Wherever that may lead them.

  As they delve deeper into the tunnel, a reek of rotting flesh assaults their nostrils and begins to thicken.

  It is not the only warning they fail to heed to turn back from this fell place!

  The floor is so slick they have to walk their palms along the low, dry walls to brake their descent. Proceeding slowly, hand-over-hand.

  The tunnel’s mouth is high and dry, and no moisture trickles down the bare walls within. Proof against dripping water as the source of the thick wetness they are sliding over.

  So intent is he to safeguard Davina’s descent, Noah gives only passing thought to the cause of the slick surface.

  That is an omission he will shortly regret!

  After several yards, the tunnel seems to level out. As it does, the narrow contours widen into a cave whose high ceiling allows them to walk upright. While its dry walls and smooth floor make travel easy despite the treacherous slick beneath their feet.

  Successive scatters of scree along the base of the cave are a valuable clue to the earth scientist, who readily solves the riddle of its genesis.

  This cave was carved into the moraine by glacial forces over many millennia. And he suspects it predates the intrusion of the inland waterway, which appears to be of much more recent geologic origin.

  The stench continues to thicken, and it becomes almost unbearable when the pair suddenly come upon a transverse opening to one side of the cave. Looking within, both freeze and shudder at the menace that is lurking in the faint gloom.

  There are a thousand points of light. Clusters of beady red pupils. Staring malevolently back at them like the pulsing embers of a consuming fire. As they watch in horror, the eyes . . .

  Creep closer!

  Barring escape in either direction of the cave.

  Noah is first to grasp the urgency of their plight and the realization that, since flight is not an option, they must stand and fight. He strikes swiftly into the sea of eyes and, impaling soft flesh, lifts a wriggling, screeching, rat-like creature from its pack.

  While the cave offers little light, he can make out some of the animal’s singular features. Its long, thin snout is flanked with wicked-looking fangs, while scythe-shaped claws extend from thick webbing on its feet.

  But its most distinctive feature hugs the ridge of its back. A single dorsal fin which the creature retracts when out of water. It is noticeable now only because the constant shaking of the spear whips it open and closed like the bellows of an accordion.

  About the size of a terrier in his world, the sea-rat is struggling frantically to get at its tormentor.

  Suffering a puncture of some vital organ, its struggles cease and Noah is left balancing the rat’s limp, lifeless form on the point of his lance.

  Meantime, Davina is poking and stabbing advancing sea-rats all around them. Trying desperately to keep them at bay.

  Shaking his spear, Noah dislodges the dead rat, hurling it into the writhing mass closing in on them.

  Then, something occurs he did not expect!

  Every pair of beady eyes turns away from the couple as, like chalk across a blackboard, many scurrying, scratching claws bear the rats toward their lifeless comrade. Soon, its body is being tossed in the air as its cannibal siblings rend fur from flesh and flesh from bone in a mass frenzy of gluttony.

  Their momentary distraction triggers flight response in Noah and Davina. Who race away from the sea-rats in a mad dash to gain the safety of the dim light at the end of the now-ascending cave.

  Soon, the couple are standing on the open, landward bank of the inland waterway. With no sound or sight of pursuit.

  Looking back across the surface of water, they see a black horde of moving forms, their wide dorsal fins fully extended. Pouring from the tunnel’s far entrance. Disappearing into the ocean on the other side.

  The tantalizing taste of their recent meal has whetted their appetite for more. Having dislodged the trespassers from their dank hole, they are returning to the sea, which is the source of their aquatic prey!

  Chapter 4. The Great Melt

  Turning inland, the couple follow the banks of the sinuous open waterway as it snakes away from the ocean in its journey toward the mountains.

  While the alpine crests appear to be many leagues distant, they come surprisingly closer after only a few uneventful days’ travel.

  It is as if the mountains are marching toward them as they are marching toward the mountains, and it seems no time at all when they come together at the entrance to an immense fiord.

  Carved out of the high cliffs by submergence of a glaciated valley, it is a long, narrow, deep inlet. Not of the sea, but of the inland waterway.

  Mist issues from vertical clefts at many elevated levels along the cliffs’ sheer surface. It rises in swirling patterns before trailing away in wispy strands. They add to the haunting spell of magic and mystery pervading the fiord and its distant shadowed recesses.

  It is truly a place bewitched. Where gnomes might hide and leprechauns frolic.

  Entering the fiord, the travelers strain to make out the crests of the towering cliffs on either side of the inlet. While the cliffs rise sheer from the watery depths on the opposite side, there is a wide shore on this side. Providing the couple easy access to a gentle acclivity that will take them to a hidden plateau nestled between twin peaks of this mountain range.

  But that is a discovery yet to be made as they bivouac on the wide shore for much-needed sleep before scaling the heights above.

  The inland waterway is sweet and pure, and they are able easily to spear the few fish they require from its abundance. While they are physically fatigued, both are too excited by the prospect of exploring the unknown mountains to find sleep early.

  Thus it is that Davina shares a legend, handed down through generations of her people, that sheds new light on Noah’s understanding of the formation of this world.

  It is a tale of near-extinction of her race.

  It is a tale of narrow survival.

  It is the tale of what her people fearfully call ‘The Great Melt’.

  “Our scientist ancestors were so busy analyzing ice-cores and performing other climatic tests in pursuit of a way to help civilization survive,” Davina begins, “they failed to perceive a rising threat to their own survival.”

  This is the tale she tells:

  The southern polar colony had discovered deep caves cored into ice and bedrock by ancient seas. These caves had been home to large creatures which had abandoned them before the scientists arrived. And these caves bottomed out in deep wells of sea water, connecting them all to the ocean which flows beneath so much of the antarctic ice mass.

  The caves proved to be their early salvation.

  After the fires that consumed the wide world had burned themselves out, leaving a global pall of smoke that blotted out both suns and triggered a winter of darkness, temperatures in the antarctic plunged from frigid to cryogenic. And it happened suddenly. So suddenly, in fact, that the crystallized remains of the few scientists caught out in the open bore grim testimony to its lethality. Thankfully, most were within the caves, huddled together against the cold.

  The cryo-event passed quickly, and within a few days the scientists were able to emerge from the caves and resume their frantic efforts to find a solution to ward off the end of the world.

  Relieved that the worst was behind them, they did not anticipate the greater threat that even then was rising all around them!

  It was not until one of the ice-core analysts was unable to find her sampling equipment that the terrible truth dawned on them.

  She remembered leaving it next to the shoreline, between the open cylinders she had cored out of the ice, but they had disappeared. Sampling equipment and holes both. That is when she realized they had been swallowed by a rising tide of seawater that was rapidly surging higher.

  Sounding the alarm, she urged her fellow scientists to retreat to higher ground.

  Many objected, warning they might need the shelter of the caves should the cryogenic event recur. But she sensibly p
ointed out that, unless they miraculously sprouted gills, the caves would be of little use to them underwater.

  Meantime, the threat drew nigh as they confronted one alarming sign after another.

  The ice cores grew shorter as the ice thinned from the surface downward. The vanishing inches simply trickling into the ocean below.

  Even the snow blanketing the bedrock disappeared in rills running to the sea. Exposing rocky surfaces which had never known air.

  But the most ominous sign was the utter silence that crept over the land.

  Gone were the thundering cracking and rending of ice-mass.

  Gone were the slapping and splashing of ocean as bergs crashed noisily into its depth.

  The ice-shelves had stopped calving. Their liquefying edges sloughing soundlessly into the thirsty sea.

  And the ocean itself was rising, higher and higher. Threatening to swallow the land and all that were upon it.

  Trapped between sinking land and rising sea, the refugee scientists sought what dubious safety they could by climbing into the harsher and more exposed high sierras.

  What the fires could not burn, The Great Melt sought to wash away in the planet’s quest to cleanse itself of the life-form that threatened to destroy it.

  Just as revenge is a dish best served cold, the flooding of the frigid antarctic realm was this planet’s final act of vengeance in its war against a race at war against it.

  And it nearly extinguished that race. But for a valiant few who braved the most inaccessible and hostile reaches at the far end of the world.

  Morphing into myth, the legend claims that in those mountains, on a sheltered high plateau, the last of the refugees encountered the ghosts of life-forms cauterized out of existence by the firestorms raging in the world beyond the polar clouds. That the spirits of all the large land-dwellers resided there in all their crystalline splendor.

  “We regard that claim as fabulous,” Davina shrugs, “but the conclusion of The Great Melt carries the ring of truth.”

  This is the end of her tale:

  The scientists discovered higher caves looking out upon the elevated plateau from steep slopes climbing upward into the clouds. Which, at this elevation, seemed close enough for the survivors to touch.

  Those caves were the abandoned lairs of life-forms whose ghostly presence still haunted them. And they sheltered the remaining scientists while they waited for the rising sea to engulf the high plateau and sweep them away.

  But they waited in vain, for the waters receded and the land rose once more!

  The Great Melt had run its course, and a race targeted for extinction survived to colonize the southern polar region. Devoting all their energies to preserving the land beneath the clouds as asylum for their posterity.

  “Does the legend reveal where the high plateau is located?” Noah wonders.

  “Unfortunately, no,” Davina admits. “And our scientists now are a timorous and incurious lot where anything beyond their city, lake or gardens is concerned.

  “If anyone dared venture to distant mountains,” she confesses, “it would be I and I alone. The others do not look kindly on my venturesome nature. I am very glad, Noah, that you are like me and not like them!”

  With that, they curl up to sleep and recharge their energy for the daunting climb ahead.

  The next day finds the travelers toiling up the gentle acclivity leading to the mountain heights at the end of the fiord. The ground is solid, and they have little difficulty picking their way among the scree. Deposited by the departing glacier on its descent to the inland waters.

  Nonetheless, it is not the work of a single day. They are forced to sleep three times as they scale the towering heights.

  It is on the fourth day that they reach their goal.

  Cresting the top tier of the acclivity, they look upon a scene that astonishes both!

  Chapter 5. Wheel of Extinction

  Surrounded by sheer cliffs, it is a level mountain plateau. Approachable only by the acclivity that brought them here. So high is this place they feel they can touch the very clouds at the top of the polar range.

  The plateau and the mountain slopes enclosing it are a world of brilliant, crystal-clear ice.

  The surface of the plateau is smooth as glass. A vast placid pool of solid clarity.

  And the surrounding slopes circumscribe a nearly perfect circle.

  It is what radiates within that circle that astounds Noah and Davina.

  It is a clockwork of symmetrical spokes of blue-green ice. Radiating from every direction toward the center of the plateau.

  Every spoke emanates from the yawning height of a cave’s mouth. Gradually descending to a terminus that disappears into the smooth surface at the middle of the plateau. So identical is the orientation of the randomly spaced spokes, one to another, they appear to be joined at a common hub.

  Like the clear surface they flow into, the blue-green ice is so thick and so pure that every surface reveals several feet of depth before fading into a milky opaqueness the observer cannot see beyond.

  The eerily transparent depth creates the impression that there are no plane surfaces here. That the viewer has entered a dimension beyond reality.

  That is their first unsettling sensation in this place. It will not be their last!

  The distant mouths of smaller caves call to them from every direction between the spokes. As their deep black shadows pock every stretch of stony surface at the base of the cliffs.

  While they cannot yet make out any real detail, they are intrigued by the caves that are everywhere. And by the towering columns of blue-green ice that reach across from the highest of them.

  Eager to explore both, Noah marvels at the wondrous geometry of ice and stone displayed before them.

  But the final leg of their ascent has been an exhausting climb and, so, he readily agrees with Davina’s suggestion to halt now and thoroughly explore the plateau rested and refreshed after a much-needed sleep.

  Even their most fanciful dreams could not prepare them for what they will discover when they wake!

  Fully rested, they boldly set out across the smooth surface of the plateau the following day.

  Wending their way between the towering ribs of blue-green ice-spokes on either side, they keep their eyes glued to the clear ice beneath their feet.

  As it reveals many titanic forms imprisoned within its translucent depth.

  There are gigantic mollusks. Colossal squid-like cephalopods. Amphipods whose length seems beyond measure. And finned leviathans that dwarf the great whales of Noah’s world.

  All denizens of an ancient sea that once washed over this mountain plateau. Stranding these primeval aquatic life-forms in its frozen depth. All staring up at the couple through unblinking eyes.

  Looking over toward Davina, Noah is about to remark on an enormous oceanic ray suspended beneath them when an image over her shoulder stops him in mid-sentence.

  Words escape him in his astonishment, and all he can do is point.

  There, encased in the blue-green ice of the nearest spoke, is a giant cave bear. It is standing erect. Its arms extended. Its face contorted into a hideous snarl.

  The creature is identical to the coal-black, short-nosed bear Noah encountered in the dark recess along the high desert ravine. But that shy cave-dweller would not reach the height of his ancient cousin’s knee-socket.

  Startled, Davina cries out in terror and starts to back away. But Noah quickly reassures her this bear is no threat to them. And he motions her to join him in a more systematic examination of the blue-green ice.

  As they walk its length, they encounter ancient goliath prototypes. Identical in all but size to land-dwelling animals Noah encountered on his previous journey. In the temperate zones of this strange world.

  Here are the ghosts of mega-fauna of this planet’s antediluvian past. Forever locked in the icy embrace of this frozen blue-green sepulcher.

  Sea-rats the size of elephants in his world. Aurochs-like bison that dwarf their modern descendants. Dire wolves larger than the ancient sea-rats, their snarling jaws frozen in a rictus grin like the hyenas of his world. Even crocodilians, here many times the size of the monster Noah encountered in the glade.