Life in Deep Rock

Kassiter sat back from the computer and looked at him. "I think of these things like tangled webs of vibrations, shifting around from one set of nodes to another inside the solid rock, like apes swinging through the trees. They can go anywhere - anywhere the rock can reach - but they're stuck in that rock formation."

John blew on coffee that was long cold. "That's very nice, Ron. But what proof do you have? You ever seen one of these things? Ever have one sit up and beg?"

"I've heard them," Kassiter said. "Your wife did too. I've heard them in the rock, their signals, their waves. It's nothing natural. It's too perfect, too precise to be anything natural or random. They're standing waves, moving around in the rock. And they do things in there. They have enough acoustical energy to change things, manipulate them."

Kassiter reached into his pocket and pulled out something wrapped in tissue paper. "I had this sawed for me by a guy at the museum in Mayfield. I don't have my own rock saw, but you must. Why don't you try some yourself?"

He unwrapped the tissue and placed half an ammonite shell on the glass counter. It had been sawed along the plane of the shell into two halves, and he laid it down sliced side up.

"Where are the septa inside?" he asked. "The little chambers the thing lived in? You can see the sutures on the outside, but inside it's all blank, all smooth stone. It's a fake, a replica of the surface. All the lefties are like that. They're all fakes. These things just perceives the surfaces, and the recreate what they find."

"Why would they do that?"

"Who knows? These aren't human intelliogences. These are nothing like what we think of as intelligence. Who knows why they do anything? But they recreate what they find in the ground. They duplicate them in the only medium they have, which is solid rock."

John picked up the shell. The ammonite was a distant relative of the chambered nautilus. It grew along the spiral of its shell, adding another chamber every season, and a shell sawn in half like this would show the chambers. This one had none. It was one long, open tube.

"So? It's a mutant. A subspecies. It doesn't form chambers, or something ate them up before it fossilized. It's a long way from finding an ammy without chambers to believing in beasties in the rocks. And as for your noises..."

Kassiter typed some commands into the computer and an acoustical graph came up on the screen. He upped the volume and the line began to spike and shudder. John heard a wall of low, white noise, punctuated by creaks and groans and occasional sharp snaps.

"That's what it sound like inside the quarry, beneath the surface. In the rock itself. This was recorded at three AM, when the thermal expansion was minimal."

They listened to the sounds inside the rocks, dark, mysterious sounds, There was a sudden whine rising in volume and Kassiter turn down the volume till it passed.

"That's a truck on the highway. I think part of the reason they're in this quarry is because there's so little traffic. External acoustics bother them. Now listen. This one is filtered and enhanced."

A sharp, rich sound, like a little spring being snapped, with a fast echo. One snap, then two — three, five, then it repeated.

"Fibonacci series," Kassiter said. "That seems to be how they echo-locate, how they see their way around. Now here's what they sound like themselves."

A rushing, hissing sound, rich with overtones — totally unearthly and yet strangely soothing, like the sound of surf on gravel on an unimaginable beach, thick with rhythms and shot with little tonal spikes. If the earth breathed or sighed, it might sound like that.

"That's the standing wave," Kassiter said. "That's one of them — his mind, his very thought. I played back their echo location into the rock and one of them must have come to investigate, and I got his acoustical picture, his mind at work."

Despite his doubts, the hair on the back of John's neck stood up. The sound was eerie and almost suffocating.

"You're nuts, Ron! That could be anything! Sounds like someone holding a microphone over their shirt! How could anything live in solid rock? How could they move?"

"You don't understand! They're not 'things'. The don't have bodies. They're standing waves, collections of energy. The use ambient vibrations for food and incorporate them into their waveform. They're in the rock!"

"And where'd they come from? How'd they get here?"

"I have no idea. Maybe they're always been there. No one's ever listened to rock using high-resolution before. Maybe they're older than we are."

John made a face. He'd had enough.

"Where's your bathroom?" Kassiter asked, unplugging the laptop. "Let me show you one more thing before you throw me out."

"Right behind you. Through that door."

"Come with me."

John limped after him and Kassiter made him stand in the bathroom door as he went in and sat on the side of the tub. He pressed the case of the laptop against the spout, turned on the sound and adjusted the volume and held the computer pressed to the metal spigot as the hissing sound rose and filled the room, echoing off the tile.

"The pipes go right into the ground," Kassiter said, rasinging his voice above the sound. "You're in a little pocket of sand here, but this is close enough so they can hear it. Their 'hearing' is, of course, very very good. And they're very fast. Do you know what the speed of sound in rock is?"

"Haven't the slightest."

At that moment there was a tapping. A kind of prickling in the earth under the floor that bloomed into an exquisite, lush wave as if the basement were being licked by a huge, velvety tongue. The sound was in the walls, the windows, traveling up through the bones in John's legs till her felt it in his balls and belly.

He jumped, spilling his coffee. "Jesus God! What was that?"

"They're here. The pipes carry the sound into the rock. They've come to investigate."

John stared at him. The prickling sound started again, this time sweeping from one edge of the house to the other like the sound of waves gently rolling up on a gravelly beach and rolling back down with a muffled, harp-like resonance, a hiss from the rocks below, and then silence, a strange silence, as if all the sound had been sucked away.

"Turn it off! Jesus Christ! Turn it off!" John shouted. "What do they want? What are they doing here?"

Kassiter pulled the computer away from the tap "Want? I don't think they want anything. Why should they want something? People want. These things are something totally different. Alien like nothing else we can even think of. they don't eat. They don't sleep. They just are."

There was the sound of a great subterranean sigh and a few residual pops and creaks from beneath the house.

"See, all this time we've been looking to outer space for signs of life, on Mars, on the planets. No one ever thought to look in rock because we're always looking for flesh and blood creatures. No one ever thought to look at acoustical patterns. No one ever thought life could be like this — inorganic, pure energy."

"And the fossils? Why should they screw around duplicating fossils?"

Kassiter shrugged. "Don't know. With the kind of energy they have at their disposal, it wouldn't take much to reorder the mineral domains to duplicate whatever they find in their world. They find an ammonite, they duplicate it, only they get it backwards. I think it might be a kind of play, or just curiosity. Or maybe they're trying to communicate in the only way they know how."

"Communicate?"

"Look, I don't know. They're very sensitive to vibrations and noise. They must know there's something beyond their surface, something that comes and digs up fossils and takes them away. God knows what they make of that."

"So they know we're here?"

"Oh, I think so. I don't know how fast they think or sense. They can move much faster than we do — speed of sound in solid rock, I'd imagine — but I don't know much about their sensorium, what they can perceive. That's what I wanted to find out today. I wanted to set up some more mikes and try and make contact."

"Make contact?" John asked. He sat back and sighed. "Ron, you know how absolutely ridiculous this whole thing is, don't you?"

Kassiter's look said that he knew quite well. "Yeah, I know. Believe me, I know. But you know what'll happen if we do make contact? It would be the scientific discovery of the century, of the millenium. It'll change everything."

John had a vision of newspaper headlines, of reporters and crowds flocking to the quarry — money, interviews, fame; maybe a Nobel prize, Geraldo Rivera and Oprah Winfrey. Books and movie deals

"What's the next step?" John asked. "What are these experiments you got set up outside?"

"They're easy," Kassiter said. "We just seeded the rocks, buried some artifacts in holes and packed them in to see if they'd be replicated. I figured that if these things can imitate whatever they find in the rocks, they might imitate other things they find too."

He didn't mention that the original idea had been Maggie's.

John hesitated for a moment, his face growing suspicious. "Just where did you bury these artifacts?" he asked. "What part of the quarry?"

"Right near the house. About a hundred yards away in that weathered east face."

He thought for a moment and said, "All right. As long as we don't have to dig. And we stay away from the south face. There's all sorts of sink holes in there and that rock isn't stable. The public's not allowed back there."

"No problem," Kassiter said. "It'll take us ten minutes."

John turned and walked out and Kassiter followed. As they passed the den, Kassiter glanced inside. There was the daybed with the same green coverlet on it, now drawn smooth and unwrinkled. The was the red pillow she'd rested her head on, and the old easy chair where his pants had ended up. It was too dark to see if there was a stain on the cover, but he doubted it. She hadn't been as careful as he'd hoped, but apparently John still didn't know, and that was a great relief.

*****

She had been helpful—very helpful—and she hadn't laughed or sent him away as he explained his theories to her. She'd listened to him as only a young, bored housewife would, desperate for some novelty or excitement, and the things she told him confirmed his ideas—the noises at night, the strange swishing under the house.

Her husband was away, where or why she wouldn't say, but after Ron's first visit, after he'd spent hours in the lonely shop telling her about his ideas, she'd called him as he was on the road and told him she was frightened now, frightened of these noises in the quarry and the subtle vibrations in the empty house, the sudden explosions of the spalling rock. She couldn't go into the front room where the museum was because the fossils frightened her too—strange, twisted alien shapes made by God knows what now. It was his fault she was frightened, and he had to come back that very night. Either that or she was leaving herself and the hell with the whole place. She wasn't going to stay there at night among these invisible monsters.

She was nervous and she was frightened, and she was beautiful too, in her way. An early bloomer, over ripe, married too young to a man too old. She had needs of her own, needs her husband couldn't satisfy, and she wasn't meant to live like this, running a stupid fossil shop in an abandoned quarry in a backwater part of the state. Ron knew all that, but she'd been so helpful and friendly, and she'd been on his side.

She'd met him outside beneath the winter moon—a strange, unnaturally warm winter—waiting by the main road that ran past the quarry. She held an axe for protection. Her hair was dyed red, but in the moonlight it looked gold, and she wore tight jeans and a sweater and a jean jacket that could barely close over her chest. She wanted to go into the house immediately but he wanted to listen to the rocks first, so they went to the weathered east face where he inserted his microphones into old test-bore holes and plugged the holes with rock chips and spoil. He put on the earphones and listened but he hadn't worked out his filtering system yet and all he heard was random hisses and pops and groans—the sounds of the rocks themselves, cooling, contracting, rubbing against one another. Even so, the weirdness of what he was doing—standing in the autumn moonlight listening for sounds of life in the rock—gave him chills and got him unaccountably aroused. Maggie didn't help when she crowded against him to share the earphones, pressing her warm and heavy breasts against his shoulder. They stood there in the shadows of the quarry with their cheeks almost touching as they tried to share the headpiece, listening to the strange eerie sounds of the earth's winter sleep.

In the house she poured them both whiskey from her husband's cabinet and then turned off the lights in the kitchen so the neighbors wouldn't see she was still awake, and then he was kissing her and she was in his lap, pressing her tits against him as his glass of liquor dangled in his hand. Her lips were soft and hungry, and he realized that she wasn't as scared as she'd said—not of the creatures, anyhow—and had called him back here for something else. But by that time, he didn't care anymore'

She got off his lap and then straddled him in her tight jeans, leaving no doubt as to what she wanted. Her jacket fell to the floor and she put his hands under her sweater then put her arms around his neck and rocked against him, showing him. She knew what she wanted. She'd done this before, he was sure, but he didn't care about that either. She was beautiful in the pale light that reflected from the moon and off the ghostly white walls of the quarry, painting her features in luminous intensity. He was confused and exhausted and this was all he wanted too.

She led him into the den, the house dark and silent now—no pops, no hisses, no spalling—as if everything were holding its breath and waiting. She reminded him how to undress and he threw his clothes on the easy chair, and she stripped off her sweater and jeans but left her underwear for him to remove. She seemed to enjoy that part, as if that proved that he was seducing her and not the other way around. Kassiter was thin and slight, but he was endowed, and she appreciated that, fawning and cooing over him, eager to use her hands and mouth to show him how good she was.

He remembered those pert and eager lips, the upturned nose. She had a butterfly tattoos on her breast and a compass rose on her left shoulder. She loved touching his face as she kissed, and licking the inside of his mouth.

And she was appreciative—wildly appreciative. He knew he wasn't the first and wouldn't be the last. She just loved it too much, like she was born to it. Kassiter had never been with a woman like her, who squeezed him with her thighs and rocked against him, put his hand in her mouth and sucked his fingers. She ended up on top, riding him and laying her tits against his lips, taking his hand and pressing his fingers between her legs so that he felt themselves conjoined—his hardness moving into the tightness of her body. He finished first but she didn't stop, grinding slowly and insistently against him with feminine urgency till she got what she wanted, coming in great, wracking, waves. She was so generous in her pleasure, so joyous that she made him feel much more than himself. It occurred to him that if ever a woman were made for sex, Maggie was it, and even if he wasn't the first and probably wouldn't be the last, he could hardly hold it against her. It was the just the way she was.

He could hardly believe it. She was so simple and innocent on the outside, yet with such depths of passion within. He lay there beneath her as she squeezed his deflating member in the aftershocks of her pleasure and felt himself hardening again, as if she summoned it forth from him, and before long he was hard inside her again, reaching for her in her darkness.

Somehow they ended up on the floor and this time she let him take all the initiative, clinging to him and whispering in his ear as he took her with a passionate intensity like he'd never known. before he came he levered himself up on his arms and looked down at her girlish face. She had a smile of pure pleasure, almost religious in its blissfulness and surrender, and that smile, coupled with the lewd and obscene movement of her hips, drove him over the edge. It was like she was an angel on top and the very devil below. He'd never had anyone like her.

After that the routine was the same—the quarry, the kitchen, the den. She would never let it be anything more than physical, though the physicality itself was more than enough for him, and soon she was more obsessed with his work than even he was. She was never afraid of the quarry again, and she had no doubts that the creatures existed. In fact, she became almost affectionate towards them and motherly.

It was Maggie who gave him the idea for the seeding experiment. Innocent as she was, she'd started writing notes to the things and burying them in the holes and cracks of the rock, and on one visit she'd shown him a chunk of limestone from the quarry with a perfect replica of a note she'd left on it, complete with her handwriting—only a fragment, though, because the fossil was so thin, paper-thin. He was astonished.

"Where's the rest of it, Maggie? Did they replicate the whole note?"

"I can't show that to you, Ronnie. It's kind of private. I smashed it."

"Smashed it? But Maggie, this is the proof we're looking for! There's no way this could have happened through natural forces. Do you have any more?"

Maggie took the fossil back from him and pressed her thumb against it, crushing the delicate face of the note into dust..

"No, I can't let you see. This is just between them and me. I tell them all sorts of personal stuff, just write up my thoughts and put them in the rocks."

"But there's no way they can read these, Maggie. There's no way they can understand."

She pursed her lips stubbornly. "Well maybe that's what you think, but I think different. I think they can understand, and you know, sometimes they even come and visit. Late at night I can feel them coming by the house, like to see if I'm okay. I think they can even understand me when I talk, like if I go and whisper in a crack in the quarry? They can hear. I can feel them with my fingers on the rock swimming around in there. They know me, Ronnie. They know a lot more than you think. They listen and they know what goes on up here."

And she told him more. She told him about her husband's temper and about her fear of him. She told him that he was in the hospital in Mayfield not for his hip, but for his mental state, and she was afraid of what might happen when he got out. She never asked Kassiter for help though, never asked him to take her away or lend her money. She knew some people in California and she already had her bus ticket. If John tried anything, she'd be gone like that. She urged Kassiter to be careful too.

And then work and his investigations took him farther afield as he wandered the highways, tracing the Monee formation as it snaked through the state, a hump appearing above ground here, or limestone beds exposed by a road cut there. he got better at listening and could hear them everywhere, but nowhere so clear as at the quarry, and never so strong as when Maggie was with him, whispering into the rock and calling to her friends.

And now she was gone, without so much as a note. He wished her well wherever she was. He wished she were here to see the results of the experiments.

*****

It was raining and getting dark but they didn't want to wait. Kassiter got a poncho from his truck and John found a long slicker and fishing hat and some picks and shovels and they walked out to the east wall of the quarry using flashlights to see the way, John moving slowly and favoring his hip.