The Eye of Zuebrihn, page 26
part #1 of Eldenworld Series
Occasionally he would glimpse goblin scouts in the wreckage, or peering down on him from the broken stump of a building. Luckily, he didn’t have a thing to worry about. He repeated that particular phrase to himself about once every ten minutes, as a sort of mantra to calm his nerves. As Gareth plodded through dead dusty streets, discrete goblin scouts watched his movements with some distrust, despite what their commander had told them of this human ‘friend.’
Chiu flared her wings, and was suddenly walking at his side. She shook her head. “It’s as Crox Statak told us; other than a few scouts, we’re free to go. No forces are following us.”
“Does that surprise you?” Gareth asked, giving her a thin smile.
“Truthfully, yes,” she admitted. “This isn’t how we were taught to think of ‘cruel dim-witted’ goblins. Now I find they are talented tacticians, and honorable people.”
Gareth studied a goblin moving effortlessly through the top of a leaning building. “It’s sort of like the tales they pass around about shapeshifters being sneaky, untrustworthy, baby stealers.” He chuckled. “Or werewolves being slavering bloodthirsty beasts, or ogres being as dumb as a box of rocks.” He threw her a quick glance. “I’ve listened to the stories being told in the taverns, and after a while they begin to have a similar ring. Dragons are big and fierce animals, and care only for gold and their young.” He snorted a laugh. “Can you think of a better way for a race to not be taken seriously, and therefore not targeted? Get people to think of them as simply dumb, dangerous animals.” Chiu stopped and was staring at him with wide eyes. “I’d say the dragons did a very good job, considering what they had to work with.”
“But…” Chiu stuttered, unable to put her thoughts into words.
“My guess,” Gareth continued, “is that the best and the brightest, like the engineers, the military, and the explorers all left for the stars. The people who stayed held a particular affinity for the world, and could see past the bad to the good and the beautiful. The dreamers stayed behind, along with the artists and all the other creative thinkers. Others stayed too, ones that couldn’t see the good but could see the profit to be made.”
“The humans.” Chiu whispered; her eyes stricken.
“The humans.” Gareth agreed. “The dragons set up the tall tales in order to protect all the other, non-human races.”
“So that’s why Athena wants you to save the non-humans particularly. They are the dreamers and the lovers.” When Gareth glanced her way, she was giving him a very direct look. They walked along in a comfortable silence, hand in hand until, as the sun passed midday, she pointed. “There is the Tower of the Eye,” she said, with no embellishment.
Gareth stopped the pack horse. The base of the tower was the size of a football stadium, tapering to a jagged broken tower that still stood twice the height of the other surrounding buildings. From his position he could see the ragged broken roof that somebody, in the dim past had attempted to repair. The digital scope on the new Colt informed him that the building was two hundred and fifteen meters tall. With the help of the scope he was also able to see, a few meters below the broken top, a large window, lit in red. When he showed it to Chiu, she replied calmly, that this was the room of the Eye. Gareth hoped to hell the elevators were working.
They weren’t. The lobby of the tower had been thoroughly ransacked, leaving only peeling metallic wallpaper, and mounds of unidentifiable trash lying about. When he pried open an elevator door, he discovered an empty shaft. Gareth looked at the stairwell on the side of the room and groaned, before opening his rucksack and changing into his Marine digicams. The third iteration of the original digicams, they were made from a chameleon-like material that changed somewhat to match the background. Since they were designed specifically for urban combat, Gareth knew that they would be ideal for the long climb through the tower. As he dressed, it felt to Gareth as if he were stepping back in time to his arrival in Eldenworld. At the very bottom of the rucksack he pulled out his slightly battered eight-point cover with the black Marine Corps emblem. He stared at it for a long while before he slipped it on. “Oorah!” He murmured under his breath.
“Semper Fi.” The equally soft voice of Athena came from the ceiling, and Chiu, Lyndra and Wokeg looked about in concern. Gareth let out a satisfied smile.
“No need to worry, folks. It’s a Marine thing.” He took a deep breath and turned for the stairs. “Shall we go?”
It took them three hours and twenty-eight minutes to reach the room of the Eye on the hundredth floor of the Tower. By then Lyndra’s wolfen form was limping, and Gareth’s feet hurt all the way up to his shoulders. Chiu had mumbled something untranslatable when they reached the fiftieth floor, and had transformed to a falcon. Wokeg had also followed suit, but being able to understand ogre language, Gareth found, had its drawbacks. Wokeg’s curses were grimly biological when he too transformed back to an ogre and jogged off up the stairs, ducking only slightly as he passed under ancient hanging ceiling fixtures. Gareth, being a mere human, limped after him.
Now Chiu and Wokeg looked rested and refreshed. Chiu in particular, had a serene smile on her face.
The circular room of the Eye was nothing like what Gareth had envisioned. He pictured banks of ancient computers, glowing with racks of data crystals and incomprehensible equipment. Instead the domed ceiling of the room bulged down, festooned with tubes and wires. Tiny crablike creatures darted about the tubes and wires, dusting and polishing. In one area several small crabs were working in conjunction to remove and replace a leaking section of piping. Red light came from flickering fluorescent fixtures mounted at irregular intervals on the walls. A wide polished brass stairway started to their left and wound around the room, before finally disappearing through a heavy brass door to the next level up.
Gareth raised an eyebrow at the other three who were sitting. “Well?”
“Can we go tomorrow?” Lyndra asked in a little-girl voice.
Despite his ache and pains, Gareth chuckled. “Sorry. I came this far. I’m going to see what’s up top. Come if you want.” Raising his leg and taking that first step was the hardest thing he’d ever done. His muscles screamed. But he took the second step, and then the third. Under the ogre’s gentle touch, the brass door bent and squealed open. Gareth took a few steps across the threshold, turned and stopped. He’d expected the Eye of Zuebrihn to be one of many things, but he did not expect a six-meter blue eye floating in an eight-meter wide, clear tank of nutrient solution. The roof of the room was a clear dome, with the sky visible beyond. Fingers of steam rising from the solution attested to the warmth of the tank. A ripple swept the liquid in the tank, and the Eye shifted to regard them.
It’s about time. A woman’s mezzo soprano voice said in their minds, with a slightly southern accent; Gareth guessed at Alabama or Mississippi. His former wife had originally been from Alabama, and the accents were similar. What kept y’all?
Gareth groaned. Chiu, Lyndra and Wokeg were all pressed against the far wall, their eyes wide. “Can any of you understand what she’s saying?” The three shook their heads negative.
“Can you?” Chiu whispered.
“Yeah.” Gareth replied dryly. “She sounds like my former wife.”
“What?” Chiu’s eyebrows threatened to crawl into her hairline.
Gareth shook his head. “Never mind,” he said, turning back to the Eye. What are you?
In his mind the Eye actually sighed. You might as well have a seat, hon. Your friends can nap right where they are. Chiu, Lyndra and Wokeg slid to the floor and a comfortable chair appeared behind Gareth. What you see before you is my Eye. My brain, the bio-electronic part that is actually communicating with you is ten stories down, in an armored tank the size of this one.
Gareth nodded. Cool. First of all cut the cutesy southern crap. It doesn’t relax me. If you have to choose an accent choose mid-twenty-first century British English, female, approximately twenty-five years old.
Hmmm. I thought I was doing quite well. The Eye murmured, the voice subtly shifting timbre.
That’s better. Gareth commented with relief. You were doing fine, but I had bad associations with the other accent. My fault, not yours. Now tell me about this world threatening problem I’ve come so far to find. I really need to discharge this géis I’m stuck with.
Hmmm. The pupil on the Eye contracted so that Gareth imagined the Eye was staring at his right nostril. It was an uncomfortable feeling. Let me ask you a question first…who sent you? Your comment about the mid-twenty-first century kind of gave it away.
Athena.
I figured as much. She’s the only one I can think of who can diddle with time this way. You’re sophisticated enough to know about supernovas, right?
I’m not an astronomer, but yeah, I know about supernovas. A red supergiant sun goes through its lifecycle and eventually goes supernova.
Good. A red supergiant about two hundred light years from here went supernova a hundred years ago. The radiation wave will strike in full force in another hundred years. The radiation wave will begin to affect Earth in six years, with levels peaking in another fifty years. Ten years after that the cockroaches will still be alive, with a few plants. Ten years later earth will be a sterile ball of dirt. Gareth shut his eyes, wondering why he was here in the first place. If you’re wondering why you’re here, the former inhabitants knew of the impending supernova and took certain steps. They moved the moon into a position in the path of the oncoming radiation. Rigged with carefully placed explosives, the moon can be reduced to a cloud of dust that will block the oncoming radiation. It took them one hundred years to calculate the amount and position of the explosives to do the job. When the lunar dust cloud finally dissipates after one hundred and sixty years the radiation threat will be gone. Unfortunately, the designers of the project have left, and nobody remains who can detonate the explosives.
Gareth felt the beginnings of a truly epic headache coming on. But what about our sun and the damage done to it by the Ecothiax?
That’s another problem. If you can solve the radiation problem, we’ll have a few hundred years to think of something to do about our sun.
Athena said there is going to be a problem with the tectonic plates soon.
So those are the vibrations I’ve been noticing. I’m not sure we can do anything about those, except hang on and try to survive.
You really are full of good advice, you know. Gareth sighed, giving in to the inevitable. How do I go about blowing up the moon?
He sensed a certain hesitation. I don’t know. The last war began as the final charges were set on the moon. The ancients were thorough, if nothing else. I’m sure that they put all the information into the central computer before they departed.
That’s what Athena said too. Where did they run off to?
In his mind the Eye actually laughed. They went all over this arm of the galaxy, in hundreds of great colony vessels. By now, if they survived, there should be a great galactic civilization of humans. You see, they culled the race; leaving only the undesirable humans on Earth.
That is total bullshit and you know it! Gareth swore. They left the creative types behind, the artists and the dreamers. Those people are as important to a race as the engineers, if not more so. Even the undesirables, as you call them, with their anger and prejudices have something to offer. They have a passion that is often missing in the engineers.
The voice of the Eye was silent for some time, and Gareth wondered if he’d offended it somehow. What are you? The voice in his mind finally asked. Gareth rolled up his sleeve, holding the arm with its jeweled embedded dragon for the Eye to see. The jewels glowed in the semi-darkness. I begin to see now. The Eye said slowly. The ancients made a grave error, and it may be up to you to save all mankind, both here and across the stars.
Gareth rolled down his sleeve, his mind whirling. Save the human race across the stars? Was the Eye insane? First things first. He managed to get out. What next?
The Eye seemed to be mumbling to itself, and the fluid in the tank was churning. I’ll have to get in touch with the others right away to let them know, of course, and then I’ll have to…
First things first. He repeated, interrupting the Eye’s ramblings. What next?
Oh! The Eye seemed surprised at the interruption. You will have to go to the central computer, of course, for more detailed instructions on how to detonate the moon.
Gareth frowned. Is that the same central computer that controls the matter replicator?
Yes, why do you ask?
Simple curiosity. Please continue.
You will have to go to the central computer for further instructions. The Eye repeated primly in his mind.
Gareth wanted to scream. And the central computer is located where… exactly?
The Eye sniffed in his mind. Access to the central computer is located in the City that Time Forgot.
He shut his eyes. And where is the City that Time Forgot? He knew the answer before the Eye ever said it.
I’m sorry. That information is above your pay grade. The Eye said it so softly he almost missed it.
Gareth sat down on the cold metal floor and held his head in his hands. “Scheiße!” He cursed aloud.
This is the end of this journey, but not of the story, as the adventure continues in:
Eldenworld Book 2 – The City that Time Forgot
Patrick McClafferty, The Eye of Zuebrihn
