[Original Novel] The Eternal Mysteries of Vril, part 7
I cringed at the thought of how I must’ve initially appeared to them. Even these ones, who now fully accepted me as a comrade. Who not only affirmed my core values, but were readying themselves to fight and die alongside me for the sake of those shared ideals.
I still resented them to some small degree. No matter how they bent over backwards to meet me on my level. To integrate me into their movement as an equal. It was still impossible not to occasionally be reminded of the ways in which they far exceeded me, and I just couldn’t help but hold that against them.
I wondered if she could detect that, but the fact that we’re vastly more readable to them than the reverse prevented sussing her out. She never gave any indication that she noticed, but that didn’t really mean anything one way or the other. She and the others would always have me at a loss in this respect.
Once training concluded for the day, I joined the rest for dinner. An empty table as it turned out, surrounded by expectant, hungry looking arns and gy-eis. I worked out that I was meant to demonstrate some of what I’d learned today by instantiating our meals.
“We don’t mean to impose, it’s just that we don’t really get to eat well except when there’s someone who can operate the staff. Of course our own healing staffs can regenerate the last thing we ate, but…” I stopped him there, about to gag at the idea.
The food turned out better than even I was expecting, although the fruit was hollow as I’d neglected to imagine anything but the outer appearance. I didn’t have to know the exact atomic structure or anything, just be explicit and precise about what I wanted the staff to do. Picturing something like a color three dimensional X-ray of the desired object did the trick, and the next round of fruit materialized with proper insides.
Just like anything else I’ve learned to do, it was only intimidating until I actually did it. After that, it’s totally demystified. I’d imagined it being much more complex and difficult than it actually wound up being. Just the mental equivalent of shouting extremely specific and detailed orders as hard as you can, but without words.
Partway through the meal, I saw fit to address the elephant in the room. “What happened to the others you trained?” Most stopped chewing or slowed down noticeably, looking first at one another, then at Tlalo.
“We don’t know. I’m sure that sounds dubious but the fact of the matter is that we sent many of them off alone on missions of infiltration and espionage, then never saw or heard from them again. Some didn’t even get that far, they fell in love with the enemy the first time they glimpsed one.
The last trainee to do that was some fellow named Fletcher Hanks. Couldn’t get their image out of his head. After we sent him back to the surface, he spent the rest of his life drawing crude, perverse depictions of them beating up swarthy men of small stature.
By now, you will not be surprised to learn how often we lose trainees to infatuation. But even those who completed their training and were sent into the field have all disappeared. It’s likely they’re dead, but there are other possibilities. The enemy has a few uses for humans that they do not find entirely disagreeable.”
He couldn’t be talking about what was planned for me. I know of nobody who would find the prospect of becoming a lab animal “not entirely disagreeable”. That reduced the number of plausible reasons for their disappearance to one, in my mind.
Still, the fact that they didn’t hide all of these prior attempts from me reinforced my confidence in them. In my choice to throw in with them, rather than seeking some means to escape to the surface.
With the meal concluded, I saved them the trouble of cleaning the dishes by simply annihilating, then reconstituting them while omitting organic matter. This labor saving party trick drew some approving comments, though I expect it would’ve been nothing special for one of them.
There is no sunrise deep underground, nor sunset. So as ever, it came as a surprise to me when I learned how late it was. The exhilaration of learning to use the staff concealed my own exhaustion from me, though the weight of a full belly soon restored it.
By the time I returned to my chambers, I was just about ready to pass out. My eyes were bigger than my stomach, and although training wasn’t physically strenuous, it nevertheless exhausted me for the same reason performing complex math problems or filling out detailed paperwork does.
That might’ve been the end of my day. I was certainly ready to turn in. It was only a distant echo catching my ear which diverted me from the bedroom...I could swear it sounded like screaming. I hesitated at the doorway, unsure whether to once again snoop through the home of my generous host.
Curiosity had, after all, done me very few favors as of late. It’s what compelled me to chase Neil down those steps, through the looking glass into this world of madness. Even now some part of me denied it.
How could all of this be at the bottom of a narrow passage into the Earth? The proverbial tip of the iceberg, but in this case concealing an impossibly gargantuan whole. The more I thought about it, the more my head hurt.
As if it’s a dream I could still wake from at any moment. But because I didn’t, and because the distant echoes of what sounded like screaming persisted, I wound up following them to their source. I rationalized it as sensible concern for one of my new friends who might be in some sort of trouble.
Really just preparing the line I’d give them if I was caught sticking my nose where it didn’t belong, though. It could be both I decided, as I crept along the cool, dark corridor. The contrast with the chilly air alerted me to the fact that the interlocking metallic floor panels were heated. Some of them, anyway. Slipping off a sandal, I confirmed it.
Some were pleasantly warm, others were as cold as the air. Failing, bit by bit, in the absence of the parts and tools needed to repair them. Perhaps creature comforts like this weren’t considered high priority? The sound resolved more and more definitely as a screaming man the closer I got.
When I descended a short staircase off the main corridor, I arrived at a doorway I only just dared to peek around the edge of. What I saw rattled me to the core. In the dimly lit chamber before me, a nordic type arn was restrained by the wrists, ankles, waist and neck to an angled metal slab.
In the flickering light emitted by intermittent electrical arcs cascading across the nude, battered figure, I recognized the faces of Tlalo, Drena and Kembis. They looked on in apparent satisfaction as four others I did not recognized operated machinery responsible for electrocuting the restrained prisoner.
“This is tiresome. You must know I’ll never tell you anything. Even if I did, could you trust it?” Another surge of crackling electrical current sent him into convulsions, a foamy mixture of blood and spittle leaking from the corners of his mouth.
“Of course not” answered Tlalo. “But it is enough for me, simply to watch you suffer.” He gestured to the arns at the control panel, who once again applied current. Indifferent, by the looks of their faces, to the obvious agony they were inflicting.
When at last the Nordic went limp, Drena held up her silver healing staff. First taking readings, presumably, to ensure he wasn’t faking. Then healing whatever internal damage the repeated electrocution had caused, and restarting his heart.
His eyelids fluttered open. Seemingly disoriented, at first unsure where he was. Then he scowled the moment it all came back to him, as if all this was nothing but an annoyance. I wondered briefly whether generations of genetic engineering might have given them some degree of control over their own sensitivity to pain.
If so, this ordeal really was only for Tlalo’s sadistic enjoyment. Drena’s as well? Tlalo I could believe. I’d always faintly detected a ruthless streak beneath his carefully cultivated image of the wise, benevolent hero of the resistance.
But Drena? There was real softness in her. If not, she’d done an incredibly good job of fooling me during training. I couldn’t bring myself to believe that angle, though. Tlalo and Kembis, besides being a different species, were men. Men have always been somewhat inscrutable to me.
But I understood Drena on the level that I understand any other woman. She’d never given me any reason to believe that gy-ei are fundamentally different from human women in the most important respects. I couldn’t even seriously entertain the idea that she’d have shared such deeply personal details of her life with me for manipulative reasons.
Yet there she was, face contorted into a vicious grin as the Nordic squirmed and thrashed against his bonds. He let out another hoarse, gut wrenching scream I could not help but feel in my skeleton. There was only so much of it I could bear to watch.
I slipped off my sandals so as not to make any noise as I fled. Feet flattening against the alternating cool and warm metallic tiles as I scampered, stomach churning, up the stairs and back into the main corridor. Dare I believe what I’d just witnessed?
What sort of company was I really in? Every time I thought I’d figured them out, another crack appeared in their mask. Whether I’d like what’s underneath it was as much a mystery now as the day I arrived, despite my every effort to feel them out.
I’d seen enough down in that chamber to know I wanted out. However vital the cause, however terrible the enemy, I could no longer convince myself that the conflict was between clearly defined good and evil. It now seemed to instead be between bad and worse, with the winner probably destined to conquer the surface at some point regardless.
None of my concern anymore. I thought I was uniquely positioned to strike a blow for everything good and decent in my own estimation. But only because they cultivated that impression from the very moment they pulled me out of the saucer wreckage. I felt sure of that now.
I’d done the one thing professor Travigan told me never to do. I’d trusted the Vril-ya. I’d been suckered into believing only some of them were duplicitous, that these few were uniquely trustworthy by virtue of being an oppressed minority with physical features I must have subconsciously associated with innocence and virtue.
They must’ve known about my educational background. But how? Neil knew, but I could scarcely imagine he ever had any dealings with these rebels. No, terrorists. I resolved to call them what they were from that point forward, if ever I found reason to speak to anybody about all this after escaping.
But I was taking for granted that I would escape. It occurred to me as I ran that I could not recall the route Neil brought me here through. Nor did I know of any way back to the hangar full of obsolete saucers. The only saucer I knew of…
I slowed as the realization hit me. If I took their cobbled together Vril saucer, their plans would be irretrievably ruined. Whatever small chance they ever had of striking at the heart of the hollow Earth, forever halting production of the Vril on which the Nordics depended, would be reduced to zero should I steal it in order to escape to the surface.
It was one thing to remove myself from the equation. To bow out of this blood feud and allow it to continue on its original course without me. But could I justify all but delivering these few surviving natives into the hands of their brutal oppressors, simply in order to return to my old life?
The more I contemplated it, the more difficult it became to justify. To steal the fruits of their hard work, what Tlalo described as the culmination of their dreams...it went beyond simple self-preservation and verged on cruelty.
They seemed so elegant. So noble and peaceful. What a fool I was to take it all at face value. Yet I still hesitated to steal something so precious to them after all the hospitality they’d shown me. Even if it was all just stagecraft, to secure my cooperation.
In the end, I didn’t have to make that decision. When I arrived in the little workshop where Tlalo first showed me the dodgy little saucer, there he was, cast in silhouette by light pouring out of the vessel’s open hatch.
“Don’t run.” He had no klystron laser that I could see. He didn’t even have one of the neutered staffs in his hands. It wasn’t an implicit threat, then. But what else could it be? “H-how did you know I would be here?” I stammered, out of breath from the combination of prolonged running and the chilly air.
He withdrew a familiar pair of sandals from within his robe and dangled them by the straps from the end of his finger. “You forgot these. Do you want them? Your feet must be terribly cold.” I tensed up, still unsure whether to book it back the way I came.
But if he knew, then surely the rest did as well. Where could I go at this point? I didn’t bother lying to him. “Alright. You got me. Now what? You gonna tie me up and torture me too?” He looked wounded but I didn’t take it to mean anything other than that he wanted me to believe he felt that way.
“Of course not. Don’t you remember when I said you were free to go at any time? You still are.” He stepped out of the light and gestured to the opening, hatch folded down beneath it to form a short boarding ramp.
This couldn’t be what it looked like. There was no way, in my mind, that he would simply hand the vessel over to me given what it represented to him and his comrades. Given how vital it was to their plans. Indeed, he didn’t.
“Of course I can’t let you take our dream machine from us. You must know that. But I’m only too happy to accompany you to the surface, then return here in the saucer. It will sadden my heart if that’s what you desire, but I’m not going to confine you here. Your involvement was always voluntary.”
Like hell it was. I felt certain that if I called his bluff, the fangs would come out. He’d incapacitate me with some concealed gadget, then set about reconditioning my mind by less diplomatic means similar to what I glimpsed in that dimly lit chamber.
“Alright. Let’s go.” My voice faltered, despite my every effort to sound calm and confident. Every second that went by on my way to, then into the saucer, I expected him to make his move. He just never did. Once inside, a new problem presented itself.
“Where are the controls?” The question confused him until I explained that the saucers I came across in the immense hangar had all sorts of physical controls. Knobs, switches, dials, and nixie tube numerical readouts adorning a dozen or so control panels around the inner wall of the crew cabin.
“That’s because the saucers you saw were built for humans of a generation accustomed to those control mechanisms” he explained, before producing my golden Vril staff from a sheath strapped to his leg. I balked, but did not get a chance to ask.
“I retrieved it from your room after I found your sandals. Would you care to do the honors?” I wondered at his meaning until he pointed to a new opening in the central column which occupied the center of the crew cabin.
“It won’t fly without it. Flight control operates by the same telepathic link you used to materialize dinner.” Ever the affable, helpful guide. Even this late in the game, after his cover is blown. I kept expecting him to mount some defense of torture. To tell me I was just a sheltered little girl who didn’t understand the brutal reality of war.
He never did. Everything proceeded as if he actually meant to facilitate my escape to the surface. I couldn’t believe it, even as the ungainly patchwork craft took off. I felt it shudder beneath my feet on our way out of the cliffside workshop, and glimpsed a brief worried expression on Tlalo’s face.
No backseat driving, though. Not a word of it. I imagine in his position I’d be terrified that someone with zero experience piloting any sort of aircraft, let alone a flying saucer, now held my life in their hands. Even my own mother used to grip the armrest with white knuckles, clenching her teeth any time I drove her someplace.
I felt a pang of guilt at the amount of unqualified trust Tlalo was putting in me, before realizing that was exactly how he must’ve intended me to feel. I couldn’t tell for sure whether I was seeing through his act, or being unreasonably cynical...but after what I saw back in that chamber, I was no longer inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt.
The craft shuddered again. When I asked why, fearing that I’d done something wrong or was damaging it, he assured me it had simply adjusted course on its own to avoid grazing a stalactite. It did comfort me somewhat to know the ship’s software wouldn’t let me wreck it, but probably not more than it comforted him.
With some direction from Tlalo, I was able to locate and fly us through an opening in the cavern ceiling that he claimed was the beginning of a circuitous route to the surface. “Every new trainee helps frustrate the efforts of our enemies to find our hideout by re-arranging the tunnels somewhat. It doubles as a lesson in using the staff to burrow through rock and other dense materials.”
There was a subtle mournful inflection. No doubt meant to induce guilt, as I’d not yet gotten that far in my training. I nevertheless offered to re-arrange the tunnels on our way out. Tlalo advised against it, as he was liable to then become lost on the way back.
External lights activated as we silently made our way through the winding tunnel. Unexpectedly smooth, but then it was neither naturally occurring nor excavated by any human method. It looked as if it had simply been “subtracted” from solid rock.
Any minute, I thought. Any minute he’ll begin his spiel about how war is hell. About how what I saw was “necessary”, and par for the course when defending the very existence of your people. I glanced over at him but he only stood there, patient and resolute.
Why? Surely this was just an extended bluff to restore my trust in him. But even as the saucer at last emerged from a cave in the side of a mountain, soaring into the starry night sky, he didn’t start in about “collateral damage”. Nothing about the “duties of a leader” or anything along those lines.
He gave every appearance, start to finish, of actually being every bit the magnanimous leader he wanted me to believe he was. Which aroused in me the nagging fear that perhaps that was the truth all along, and my suspicions were misplaced. How could I distinguish between the two, when in either scenario he’d have done and said the exact same things he already has?
Perhaps he was manipulating me after all, but still had fundamentally righteous goals? I couldn’t even count the number of times I’ve done the right thing not because of who I am, but because of who I want to be. Believing that if I go through the motions for long enough, it will eventually become real...the old me will pass away and be replaced with the ideal me I’m trying to build through those actions.
That's all for now, stay tuned for part 8!