Journey of Rick Heiden Ch. 35-36

I sat in the left seat because I grew up American. The chair felt more comfortable than the bucket seat of any luxury car I'd ridden in. Once I sat, the black panel dashboard had a realistic depiction of the hatch door closing with the word "CLOSE" below it. I touched it, and the hatch closed. I saw then that Venn had done an exceptional job in his attempt to make the vehicle's interface as basic as possible. Once it closed, an almost uninterrupted 180° display came on, showing everything around the ship as if I looked through a window. A semitransparent blue holographic sphere appeared 18 inches before me.

"Must we do this? A great deal of time is passing."

Venn's voice came from the headrest. "If you had the specialized synthetic eyes, none of this would be necessary. As it stands, you cannot fly the vehicle without it, and believe me, you have plenty of time. Pearce is saving power with his slow progress. It's 70 kilometers to the industrial area, and he's not even halfway.

"Place your fingers into the sphere. Tell me when it turns green," said Venn.

I did so. "It's green."

"There," said Venn, "the ship is yours."

"Mine?" I asked. "You're giving me this ship?"

"It must go to someone," said Venn, "it's not a public vehicle."

"But it's the only one!"

"Not for long," said Venn. "I have a private forge of my own. It specializes in forging vehicles intact. The second one has been forging for two days."

"That sounds like the shipwright Laren College designed."

"It is," said Venn. "Amaré knew of mine and asked the college to design one for building larger ships, but mine came first, so I get the credit."

"You have a private forge of your own?"

"Of course," he said. "It's not unusual; many people have a private forge. I know of several in One City of varying sizes. Shall we go?"

The person claimed the ship when they placed their fingers inside the sphere. It read their fingerprints, and then the controls respond to no other fingers but theirs.

At first, it enters teaching mode. Venn understood how humans learned best. He made the visual cues simplistic. Images, whole words, and symbols surrounded me from my left to the center console before me, with every section labeled and color-coded. As a vehicle that flew, it had a yoke of sorts for maneuvering. This unique one, he made holographic. I used it as a guide for where to place my hands, it moved and acted like a physical yoke, except this one learned from me as much as I learned from it. It knew the difference between an intentional turn and a slip of the hand. If I let go of the holographic yoke, it disregarded that hand until I replaced it. The ship seemed intuitive and easy to fly.

I couldn't stop myself from smiling and gushing praise upon Venn for his brilliance in how much consideration went into it. He had me. I hadn't even driven a car in years, and to have that ship as my foray back into independent travel was something for which the emotional part of me couldn't help but feel overwhelmed. Venn had given me more than just a vehicle; he gave me more freedom. How could I not love him for that?

The ship's speed and range had astounded me the most. It could reach escape velocity, but it hadn't needed to because the propulsion remained constant. I could have made it into orbit by traveling 10 kilometers an hour if I had the time and the desire to go. In space, it could reach .5 light speed in an hour. Flying within the atmosphere, it could circumnavigate the planet in just a few hours at a higher elevation and could cruise at Mach 40. I wouldn't want to skim the surface at that speed, but it could fly at Mach 2 at near ground level.

I reached the industrial area at Mach .9 in four minutes, and even after all the discussion and teaching the ship put me through, I still managed to beat Pearce there. By turning off the exterior lighting and not breaking the sound barrier, he neither saw nor heard me.

I set the vehicle down near one of the warehouses with the help of Teaching Mode. Pearce's route brought him my direction, so I watched him pass in infrared on the monitor. He hadn't stopped in the area, which perplexed me. I switched to night vision and followed him.

I had come to the farthest east I had traveled, entering unknown territory, not counting the satellite view. It couldn't depict terrain at all, which left it useless. Beyond the industrial area, I saw a thicket of tall trees that grew off the lower plateau, down the elongated slope into the valley. I followed Pearce as he descended, he wouldn't travel any farther east.

"Venn, what's in the valley, besides the crops and the river?"

"Nothing of note," he said. "It's kilometers of meticulously managed fruits and vegetables farther than the eye can see."

"Well, what's Pearce doing then?"

"I cannot fathom."

I followed him to one of the temporary food storage sheds. I landed just out of sight and earshot, I opened the hatch and left the vehicle. I realized then that the swarms of tiny robotic pollinators and the bots caring for the plants and picking fruit would have covered any noise I might have made.

He stood in the shed with his back to me, stuffing his face with fruit. The nano-suspension he drank made him ravenous. With all the food he was consuming, I hadn't wished to interrupt him, so I watched. Pearce had more medical knowledge than a doctor on Earth, so he knew what would happen if he ate. Had he intended to let it happen there? Pearce ate one piece after the next, no pause in between. When it looked like he'd had his fill, I leaned against the doorframe.

"Sleepy yet?" I asked.

I hadn't startled him. Facing away from me, he just stopped what he was doing and looked up, staring straight at the back wall. He finished chewing the contents of his mouth, swallowed it, and wiped his face on his sleeve. He slowly turned to face me with his hands up; he thought I held the pistol on him.

"I had every intention of feeding you a civilized, sit-down meal at my home," I said.

"I asked you not to follow me," said Pearce.

"I took full responsibility for you, and you shot me!"

"I said I was sorry!"

"No, you didn't!"

"No, I didn't!" He realized. "Damn, I meant to."

He made me laugh.

"How did you get here so quickly?" he asked.

"Venn's help," I said. "What's in this valley of vegetation that might help you?"

"You read through my journals; don't you know?"

"The thing you wrote about in book eight."

"Yes," he said, "I had loaded book eight with that and the Sancy. I had an obsession, I think."

"Someone stole book eight from your mother's home," I said. "We have one through seven at the penthouse, and I get the impression someone else stole the leaf containing page 584 from number seven."

"Why didn't you tell me these details earlier?" he asked. "So, eight is gone, but Neal knew about page 584. So, he didn't read book eight? Who read my journals first? Oh, wait, Mother did, didn't she? Of course, and from Mother to the gossip's ears. She never could keep a secret. I placed dire warnings throughout them that no one should reveal them until after I die. By that time, things would blow over, but the truth would still become known to everyone."

"Why didn't you hide them?" I asked.

"I did! I hid them in the house Magnar said they demolished. I hadn't counted on her moving. I should have hidden them in the walls so the demolition crew would destroy them with the house. I would have preferred that to this."

"What's your plan?" I asked.

"They have my son. He must come first," Pearce said, "but I will not leave you dishonored."

"You're lucky no one found me on the floor," I said. "Magnar would hunt you down."

"I'm sorry, I apologize for what I did," he said. "I regretted it the instant I pulled the trigger."

I shrugged. "I'm uninjured, so provided you stop fighting me, I accept your apology. I don't like what Phalin and Major Palmer have done to you. I know David can be naïve, but I trust David. I think David knows you; I don't think you hid your real self from him. The things I know you've done are not you. I want to help you. What is it you need here?"

He hesitated. "I need Aurum's secret."

"Do you even know if that exists?"

He laughed. "I don't blame you for not believing me. It sounds like I'm saying I need King Author's sword, but it does exist. I know the passage to get there, or at least I believe I do. I had to see it for myself first."

"Where?"

"It's in the storm drain," he said. "I described it in book eight. Where it is, how far, what it looks like."

"No wonder someone stole the book."

"That would be sufficient enough, but I named names for other unrelated things."

"Neal said Meridia took the journal," I said, "He believes she's had it for thirty-six jears."

"Thirty-six jears? Oh, that's not good."

"How did you discover its location?"

"I have the memory of Aurum telling me," said Pearce.

"Interesting." I nodded. "Considering Aurum died hundreds of jears before your birth, that's quite a trick."

"It's something to do with Amaré."

"I see," I said. "From the look of the indicator on your shoulder strap, that pack's low on power."

"I know," he said, examining at it, "I thought I might have enough to get there, but if I had to walk out again, I would."

"How big is the storm drain?"

"It's the main trunk, so it's a monster. The Master Builder has hundreds of tributaries cut into the granite to take the water away from this side of the mountain. In the rainy season, I imagine it flooded a lot before it she built it."

"Did the Master Builder build the passage and wherever it takes you?"

"She built everything," he said. "She's the oldest being in Jiyū. She knows all the secrets Jiyū holds. She protects them while they're in her care, and she would die before she tells anyone. She predates Aurum and more than a dozen other Primes."

I nodded. "You won't have to walk back out," I said. "I'll take you there if the drain is big enough."

"How?"

I took Pearce to the vehicle Venn gave me. It sat in the light from the building next to it, looking like the spaceship I knew it to be. I still couldn't believe it.

"Wow," he said, staring at it like a view more majestic than the Grand Canyon.

"So far, that's the top response."

"Jiyū's transports have changed," he said, touching it. "Hello Venn, you could have told me you had this earlier, you know."

"It's not Venn. I think it may be the first independent, privately-owned vehicle on Jiyū."

"How long have you had it?"

I shrugged. "An hour, maybe," I said. "Venn built it during the mission to Earth and gave it to me after you shot me."

He was taking off the pack. "Well, that's a consolation prize. I should take back my apology."

I laughed. "Open the hatches, please."

Both hatches opened, and Pearce began to inspect everything he could see.

"It has no windows," he said, "but it does have hatches with a dozen locking bolts and a pressure seal. This vehicle can fly into space." He sounded impressed. "Do you realize what you have here?"

"A culmination of every scientific advancement Jiyū has made in the last thousand jears?"

"I was thinking of a Jiyūvian hot rod."

"Magnar's right, Earth has had a bad influence on you."

He laughed and stowed the pack in a cupboard between the jumpseats. We climbed into the cockpit, buckled the seat harnesses, and I pressed the black and yellow striped button, which no longer had the image or the word. I realized the teacher was leaving me to remember on my own. Of course, when my memory enhancement kicked in, I wouldn't require the teacher to treat me like a ten-year-old.

I looked over at Pearce. "Wait for it," I said, as the hatches continued to slide closed.

The 180° screens, lit panels of touchscreen buttons in an array of colors, as well as the floating holographic yoke, lit the space around me. I saw the look on Pearce's face.

"Yeah," I said, "I had that thought too."

We made lift-off and rose above the storage buildings to maneuver.

"Woah! Will this make me sick?" he asked.

"It's pretty stable once we start traveling forward. Which way do we go?"

"It's just over there at the end of Central Avenue," he pointed down the slope to the south.

I saw the most massive storm drain I had ever seen, 20 meters in diameter. Given that the Arena side of the mountain had no dirt, and the lower plateau consisted of a slab of granite, the rainwater had to go somewhere. I could imagine how much water forced its way out the end and down the sluice into the river on heavy rain days. We sat hovering at the end. The lights of the vehicle shone brightly, but the Master Builder had built the drain so wide and deep that the beams touched nothing, vanishing into the darkness of the titanium-coated tunnel.

"How far do we go?"

"All the way back to the city," he said.

"That's seventy kilometers underground!"

"Well," he said, "it's either this or we start hacking away into an unknown amount of granite from above with a couple of jackhammers."

"Right and look like we've flipped."

We entered the drain.

CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

We sped through at 140 kilometers an hour so we could arrive in roughly half an hour, providing we encountered no obstacles. The ship came with a variety of scanning technologies radar, sonar, lidar, and echolocation. The vessel used lidar and echolocation to detect coming changes in the tube and would stop us well before we ran into anything with its collision avoidance abilities. The titanium walls didn't reflect much light. To see in the tunnel, I switched to color night-vision.

"What can we expect as we travel back up the drop?" I asked.

"Back up the drop?"

"All plumbing drains have a drop. It keeps the water flowing where you want it to go," I said. "My father used to work in the trades."

"I see. Well, I don't know. I've never done this before."

"What should I think of that, Pearce? How can you have the memory of a man telling you something if he died long before your birth?"

"I told you. I have the memory of Aurum telling me. I believe it has to do with an incident I had with Amaré at twelve years old."

"Fine," I said. "Describe what we're looking for. Is all of this metal ahead of us?"

"The Master Builder didn't make it titanium throughout. Metal covers only the lower half of the tube in the tributaries. Those begin at one of the many junction points. Junction three has a stone upper section where a remnant of track remains from the construction of the tunnel. We will find a square passage there, many meters in length, easy walking distance to the entryway."

"Alright, you said you wrote all this in journal number eight. Since we seem to have time, I have a few questions about number eight. If Meridia has it, would she have kept it to herself or shared it, based on what you know?"

"I don't know," he said.

"Given it to Amaré, perhaps?"

"It's possible, if she shared it at all, or perhaps with any or all of their core group."

"Who are they?" I asked.

"The core group," he said, "in order of age, consists of Amaré, Meridia, Dmitry, Gabe, Dai, and Ruby. We have many other elders like Cadmar's mate Tamika, but they don't count as a member of the core group."

"So, Gabe is an elder," I said. "That figures. He wouldn't tell me why the population dropped after Aurum invented the Forever Young enhancement."

"Oh, I know why. I would call that one of the juicier, historical secrets."

"So, what happened?" I asked.

"The elders and adults of the time thought the Forever Young enhancement was abominable, so they stopped having children," he said, "and those who received the youth enhancement felt disinclined to have their own."

"Why would the elders refuse to have children?" I asked.

"I suspect they didn't want any of their future children to remain young for thousands of jears until they died one day."

"Okay..." I shook my head. "I don't get it."

"I don't know why they chose that," he said. "Well, you have a captive audience, would you like to ask me anything more personal?"

"I have many questions of you, personal and otherwise. I don't want you to feel as though I'm bombarding you. They'll keep."

"I do admire a man with restraint."

We sat in silence for a few minutes, looking about, marveling over the ship, the drain, and thinking of what might lay ahead.

"If I'm reading this right, we have traveled 20 kilometers into the drain."

"What is our depth?"

"103 meters and rising," I said, "but I think Echo is showing a junction ahead."

I slowed the ship and stopped when we reached it. We were surrounded by a cube-like structure, and on both sides of the ship, a single drain vanished into the depths of the rock, which most likely branched into smaller and smaller sets of tributaries, creating an enormous network of tributaries that eventually reached the surface where we would find drains built into the rock.

"I can't see high enough," I said. "How can we see higher?"

The ship's teacher revealed more controls for the screens. Venn built displays into the entire upper portion of the interior. It could show us the exterior of the ship as though we sat under a transparent bubble.

"When I come back with my son," said Pearce, "I want one of these."

"Do you see anything?" I asked.

Pearce and I searched but couldn't find anything. Then Pearce found it behind us.

"We passed it. It says 142."

"142. Alright, onward then."

Going forward, every so often, we came across another junction. They looked much the same, but when we arrived, we saw that the Master Builder had built junction number three differently. Along with the meters of granite above us, as well as the tube drain for air and rain from the road above, junction three had a stone second story. Just as Pearce described, the bots left a bit of metal I-beam track, but I also saw a hand ladder attached to the wall. I checked the ground beneath us for landing. It looked empty and flat enough to land according to the internal indicator. I returned the screens to normal mode and turned on all the exterior lighting. I tried to open the hatches, but the computer warned me of excessive moisture, telling me that, after our exit, it would close the hatch and purge the humidity to protect its systems. When I opened them, we met a great deal of air moisture and the odor of lichen or what smelled to me like old mushrooms. I found its pungency rather sickening.

As we exited, and the hatches slid closed behind us, I heard air expelling from a valve of some kind. Pearce ascended the ladder like a shot, and I followed. When he reached the top, he began yelling, making an uncomfortable reverberating echo throughout the drain. Once I reached the top, I saw why. The Master Builder had walled off the path with stone blocks, so massive only thewsbots could have moved them. Pearce pounded his fists on the wall, shouting. Eventually, he fell against it, sliding his back down the surface until he sat crying.

I inspected the track that curved up over the edge of the gallery we stood upon. It ran straight into the block wall where someone had cut it off. Pearce's memories were right; a tunnel existed there. I looked at the track to see the cut metal. Even in the dim light from the ship, it didn't look as corroded as the rest of the beam. I had never studied metallurgy, but it appeared cut as recently as the beginning of summer after the rainy season. I put my ear close to a crevice in the stone. I couldn't hear anything. Pearce said the passage had a short walk of many meters. I got the impression they hadn't stopped with those few stones we could see. I felt sure that they filled the entire path, preventing access without the bots who did the job.