Dark Tales Of Lost Civilizations (35 page)

“It was a simple matter for our undercover operatives to arrange,” said the collective behemoths with a hint of communal smugness.

“Just for the record, your whaleships have no intention of releasing us, do you?” said Henry.

“What are you saying?” demanded Commander Chatham-Smythe.

“He is obviously saying that since these creatures do not want humans to know about the Lower Kingdom, we can hardly expect them to return us to the surface with our own accounts of their secret underworld,” said Professor Boronsky.

“I want to go home!” wailed Geoffrey.

Censorious blasts hit the crystal shaft. “You cannot! And heed this warning—if you escape from our hidden realm, we’ll take the offensive, and the Lower Kingdom will erupt with a power that your simian minds cannot comprehend. The future of humankind depends on your compliancy,” said the Cetacean Council. “Now take them away!”

The clear glass darkened, the great tube hardened once more into a rock chasm, the floor carried us upwards, and then the fishmen marched us out of the pearly ziggurat and off to prison.

Chapter Seven: Want of Freedom

Our incarceration was devoid of any drama or pain.

We were kept in a compound, separated from the population of Embassy Island so as to not infect them with our progressive ideologies, and made very comfortable in sumptuous apartments. We lacked for nothing but our freedom. We were allowed out once a day for a stroll, but always under strict supervision. Henry and I walked about hand in hand, the very picture of a contented couple, while the others likewise affected a meek satisfaction with their lot.

For a week, I busied myself with writing accounts of our dealings with the Cetacean Council, sketching the outlay of Embassy Island, embroidering a handkerchief with a representation of the pearly ziggurat, and painting a series of miniature portraits depicting the varied denizens of the Lower Kingdom.

Secretly, however, I readied myself for escape, for as we had walked away from the crystal shaft after that initial meeting with the whales, Henry had put an arm about my waist as if to comfort me, but his true purpose had been to discretely rummage around in my bustle. He had pulled forth an unidentified object and quickly stowed it in his pocket. So I was not surprised when on our eighth night of captivity, I awoke to find a hand placed firmly over my mouth and Henry looking down upon me. Behind him loomed the figures of Captain Lightfoot, Commander Chatham-Smythe, St. John, and the Professor.

“Get dressed quickly. We have disposed of the guards,” whispered Henry.

I flung back my blanket to reveal myself as fully dressed. Henry smiled at me, offered a hand, and then gave me a quick kiss on the cheek once I was upright. Out in the corridor, Catherine and Geoffrey stood watch, each equipped with conch-guns. The gentlemen, I noticed then, were likewise armed.

“How did all this come about?” I asked.

“I called in the infantry,” said Henry, handing me a weapon of my own. He held up some sort of device, no doubt the object he had stashed in my bustle. When I frowned, Henry pointed at the door opposite mine, which was the guards’ room. A moment later, the door slid open and six familiar figures in striped jerseys emerged.

“Enemy secured, sir,” reported one of the crewbots from
Nautilus Revisited
.

A revelation came to me. “The changes you made to their programming the morning we . . . “

“Indeed,” said Henry. “Technological complexity has its advantages.”

We headed along the corridor at a brisk pace, our newly liberated spirits buoyant and our hearts bright with hope, but just as we reached the main entrance, the door was suddenly flung open to reveal the shape of Snapper and nine other fishmen, each of them pointing a conch-gun.

“We’re armed,” warned Catherine, waving her weapon.

“And we have crewbots,” added Geoffrey in a firm and very manly manner.

“Stand off,” said Snapper gleefully. “A good excuse to kill you.”

“Wrong again, Craaaya,” said a more cultivated voice from the darkness behind Snapper. The remark was immediately followed by shots.

Seizing the advantage offered by our unseen ally, we too fired our conch-guns, and the ten fishmen blocking our way soon fell down dead as they were caught in the ensuing crossfire. When it was over, Tallfish emerged from the shadows. He held up all his arms and tentacles in the universal gesture of surrender.

“I knew that we could not contain you for long, so I’ve kept watch here every night in anticipation of your departure. As did Craaaya, it seems,” said Tallfish, glancing at Snapper’s corpse.

“But why would you betray your own kind?” I asked.

“I wish to accompany you back to the Upper Kingdom,” said Tallfish.

“Why?” said Henry. “Is the Lower Kingdom not a pelagic paradise?”

“Anything but, sir,” said Tallfish. “The Cetacean Council rules without public consensus. I long with an artist’s soul for the freedom of the upper reaches.”

“I don’t trust him,” hissed Commander Chatham-Smythe.

“Without me, you cannot maneuver your vessel past the guardians of the secret entrances,” insisted Tallfish.

“Let’s kill him right now!” snarled Captain Lightfoot, raising his conch-gun.

Henry and I both stepped in front of Tallfish. We smiled at each other. More than anything that had hitherto happened, this confirmed our compatibility. One by one, after Henry and I made moving speeches about honor and indebtedness, our comrades came to their senses and lowered their conch-guns.

And so with Tallfish’s help, we fled the Lower Kingdom, glad to leave a place that was so inimical to humans.

Chapter Eight: The Great Conflict

We all know how the story progressed after that, for we live with the outcome of it every day.

True to their word, soon after our escape, the Cetacean Council declared war upon humanity. Whale scientists in hidden sub-Arctic bases commenced a program of accelerated evolution. They prodded dormant ancestral features back into duty and spliced genes from other life forms to create an army of invincible land-walking soldiers with which to conquer the Upper Kingdom. A month later, these gigantic monsters strode across the landscape incinerating buildings and crushing humans underfoot.

Our civilization proved to be but a fragile edifice when challenged by the superior firepower of those cetacean behemoths.

Humankind didn’t know what hit it. Or rather they did know, because we, the former crew of the
Nautilus Revisited
, had forewarned the World Government and the media of the imminent invasion, using my diaries, notebooks, embroidery, and watercolors as evidence. Humanity, however, had chosen to ignore the peril.

Too late, the Real World came to understand that it should not have so hastily dismissed our claims as a collective Lifestyle delusion. Too late, a delegation of World Governors visited our band of adventurers in the secluded asylum to which we had been unfairly consigned and pressed us for counsel. Too late, our armed forces realized they should not have dissected Tallfish, the one creature who might have provided them with valuable strategic information.

Given that we, the former crew of
Nautilus Revisited
, had suffered weeks of embarrassment at the hands of unsympathetic physicians, you can well imagine that we felt a great satisfaction when those World Governors and generals suddenly turned to ash before our eyes, their demise caused by a passing battalion of whale behemoths which destroyed half of the asylum around us as we endured yet another cross-examination.

How we all cheered at that convenient event. Henry scooped me up in his arms and swung me about amidst the rubble. And so we were free and no one cared to recapture us, for human civilization had been reduced to anarchy and ruins.

On the first anniversary of what they called Subjugation Day, the Cetacean Council published a twelve point restructuring plan. Point four announced that humans had been deemed incompatible with the long-term aspirations of a whale-centric world.

Point five, as we all know, ordered humankind to build a space fleet and vacate the planet.

Chapter Nine: Epilogue

The tragedy of this tale, of course, is the part played by humankind’s epic ignorance.

For it was eventually revealed that “our” whales, the creatures which for millions of years had once plied the waters of the Upper Kingdom, had in fact been the political rebels and the freethinking artists of the whale world who, like Tallfish, had fled from the despotic rule of the Cetacean Council. Had we not slaughtered them, these outcasts might have warned us of the danger hidden beneath the mantle of our world, something ERNIURC’s fourteen resurrected whales could never have done, cut off as they were from classical cetacean history, culture, and traditions.

But I will now end this tome on a brighter note. For though it is true that we humans are now a dispossessed species, and that we endlessly sail upon vast starry seas in search of a new world to call home, it is a grand adventure that we’re living. I, for one, with my stalwart radar man at my side, watching for any cosmic krakens that might lurk out here amongst the nebulae, am happy to have swapped my skirts for a spacesuit, and I recommend that morose souls weighted down by what we have lost let themselves be guided by the best aspects of the Wellesvernian credo.

So be not afraid of the future. Instead, let us all go bravely forth into this most exciting and most original of Lifestyles, and carry the flame of human civilization to another galaxy.

=[]=

Gitte Christensen
was born and raised in Australia, but also lived in Denmark for 12 years before returning to study journalism at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology. Her speculative fiction has appeared in
Aurealis, Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine, Moonlight Tuber,
and other publications, as well as the anthologies
The Tangled Bank: Love, Wonder and Evolution
and
The Year’s Best Australian Fantasy and Horror 2010
. To escape keyboards, she regularly grabs a tent and a horse and goes trailing riding through distant mountains.

Wendra Chambers

=[]=

So many of the stories in this anthology discuss aspects of eras long ago lost, be it relics of land uncovered by exploring hands or tales passed down through fireside lore. But in this next selection,
Sins of our Fathers
, it is a youth’s own past that is discovered. Finding a centuries-old diary, he learns that his own life is not what he thought it was. Rich and provocative, Wendra Chambers has crafted a story which is multi-layered and leisurely peels away to unravel each underlying mystery. Whether seventeenth century Ireland or twenty-first century Massachusetts, human nature has not much changed.

=[]=

The first clue came on my ninth birthday. Though I was his only son, it was the first time Dr. Phillips, as my father insisted on being called, had given his blessing to a party. One of the servants had solemnly given each of my young guests a unique little poem to start us on a scavenger hunt. Because of what happened, I remember everything leading up to it, including the first poem:

Over the wall

And into the trees

You’ll find flowers

The color of bees

An adventure over the wall! In my eagerness, I overlooked the low wall surrounding our elaborate garden with blooming black-and-gold pansies. Instead, I excitedly ran beyond the centuries-old iron gate that stretched across our long drive. It was usually locked, but not that day; it stood open to welcome all of my guests, a rainbow of balloons waving across the top. Outside the gate, a forest ran on the right side of our property where the servants lived. For as long as I could remember, I had been forbidden to play in the forest, but that day I was convinced that the poem had given me permission.

I slowed my pace abruptly in the forest as its darkness closed in on me. I felt uneasy and shortly realized why—I did not hear any birds. Twigs crunched under my feet, disturbing the strangely silent forest as I cautiously edged my way around, looking for flowers. As I neared a copse of trees, my right foot struck something hard and I pitched forward onto my hands and knees. I twisted around to see what had tripped me and saw a long piece of stone. When I scrambled closer, I realized part of it was buried.

As I pawed at the dirt and leaves, it became clear that I was unearthing some sort of headstone. I had never been to a graveyard, not even to my mother’s grave, but I’d seen headstones in the scary movies I loved to watch back then. Perhaps because the sun didn’t penetrate strongly there, the soil gave away easily and in no time I was brushing off the front of the slab to reveal the etching on the front. I squinted at the one word that emerged from beneath my dirty fingers: