The Valley Beneath the World: The Fugitive Future - Book One Read online

  The Valley Beneath the World

  by

  Brian K. Lowe

  For Don, and for John, who knew I would make it someday

  even though they never got to see it.

  Foreward

  It happened late in the year, when it was getting so dark before I made it home from work every night that I had set my porch light on a timer so I wouldn't be fumbling blindly with my keys while someone hiding in the shadows crept up and knocked me over the head for my wallet. I had been hearing a lot about "porch pirates" stealing packages left for absent homeowners, and while I wasn't expecting violence, I didn't want to be taken by surprise if some enterprising thug decided to up his game.

  When I arrived home that night I saw the light was out. I took out my key ring while I was still in the car and selected my house key. No harm in being prepared. On the other hand, I'm not small, so I figured there was a good chance even if someone were waiting for me, when he saw me he might decide to chuck the whole idea and pick on the older couple across the street.

  Which means I was more wary than worried as I walked up to the door, shoulders back, side-eying the long porch where in the summer I like to sit and listen to ball games, but which now was cold and full of dark spaces. I couldn't see anything, and it wasn't until I was about to slip the key into the lock that I heard a shoe scuff on wood and nearly jumped out of my skin.

  "Sorry, Brian, I didn't mean to startle you."

  The sincere apology helped me get my heart rate under control. I didn't recognize his voice, but he had called me by name, so I thought it must be one of my neighbors. I peered into the dark, but I couldn't really make him out.

  "I'm sorry, do I know you?"

  "Well, yes and no. You're kind of my literary executor."

  "Charles?"

  You might wonder--as I do now--why I never questioned that this really was my great-uncle Charles Clee, a World War I hero who supposedly died in 1936. Only I knew for a fact what the rest of the world thought was fiction: that he had actually traveled--twice--to the 863rd century, experiencing adventures that would drive most men to drink. Once before, he had communicated with me, but only through a letter delivered by means he would not reveal. Yet here he was in the flesh, nor did I ever doubt it was he, dressed in a dark overall that seemed comfortably loose and yet form-fitting at the same time. At his hip, attached by no visible means, was the versatile Nuum baton-staff that had served him so well through his adventures.

  Charles was very patient, allowing me time to absorb the surprise, but at length he said, "You're probably wondering what I'm doing here."

  I gabbled out something on the order of that being an understatement.

  "I mean, you left me with a cliffhanger! What happened?"

  Charles laughed. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to lead you on. That was just how things worked out. But I really don't have much time. I don't want to cause any more space-time stresses." I nodded, remembering, from the last volume of the story he had left me, how too much time travel between any two points could eventually cause catastrophic tears in time itself. "Suffice it to say that I've had many adventures since then, and made many new friends. If I can find the time to write it all down, I'll try to send it along. But for right now…" He handed me a large, heavy envelope.

  "This is the story of a friend of mine. He wrote it down never intending to do anything with it, but when I heard about it I persuaded him you might like to see it. I transcribed it to paper for you. Do with it as you like; he'll never know the difference."

  I accepted the envelope, and then he was gone. Unlike his other time trips, no silver door shimmered in mid-air; he simply vanished, leaving me a lengthy manuscript. I have taken the liberty of dividing it into discrete parts for ease of reading; this is the first.

  As with the previous volumes over which I have assumed trusteeship and published, this is a story of adventure, heroism, and betrayal. As exotic as are the people and places described, I make no claims to imagination; except in those instances where I had translate to the best of my ability a confusing contemporary metaphor, the manuscript is presented here as it was given to me.

  And if you find this yarn too fantastic for your tastes, I can only say: Wait. Someday it will all come true.

  Brian K. Lowe

  Christmas, 2020

  Introduction

  A hero? Me? I didn't set out to be a hero any more than I planned to write a book. I mean, who does that? Heroes are the guys whose statues you see in the park; in other words, the dead ones. Back home in Tehana City (which is a secret, so don't ask), even my Uncle Balu isn't known as a "hero," and he's as close to a celebrity as we've got, being one of the few of us who's ever travelled much outside. He told me somebody tried to make him a hero once, and he got out while he still had a whole skin.

  Then, of course, there are authors, who usually write with the idea of seeing publication one day. Me, not so much. There are things I'm going to put down here that the world can't see. At least not yet. Maybe some day.

  It's all Keryl's fault, anyway, Keryl Clee, the human who got me out of the house and introduced me to the wide world, almost killing me several times over in the process--although to be fair, he did save my life a few times. He was a hero. Emphasis on was. He's gone now. I don't know if they'll ever get around to putting up a statue to him, but he proves my point. He may not be dead, but he sure as hell is gone. Without a trace. Which was what indirectly led to a whole lot of trouble for me, and in the end, probably a statue somewhere, a big titanium gorilla on a marble slab with a plaque reading: "Arlen Timash. He really should have known better."

  Yeah, yeah. You're right. I'm getting ahead of myself. Keryl, despite being a heroic kind of guy, would have had something sensible to say about that. He used to drive me crazy. One minute he'd be the most impulsive, fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants man I ever met, and the next minute he'd say something so damned down-to-earth it made you want to bang your head against a wall for being too stupid to come up with the same idea yourself.

  He would have said: "Timash, if you want to tell a story, start at the beginning." So that's what I'm going to do.

  I

  My name is Arlen Timash. Since in Tehana City we go by last names, you can call me Timash. And like I said, I'm a gorilla.

  Until I met Keryl Clee, I'd never been anywhere out of sight of the mountain that houses Tehana City, but I wanted to be. I'd been pestering my mother and my Uncle Balu about it for months, but while he was sympathetic, she was adamant.

  "There's nothing out there that you have to see. It's dangerous. We live in this mountain for a reason."

  The problem with that argument was that it was true, and nothing Uncle Balu or I could say would change it. Hundreds of years ago, the Nuum had come to Thora from outer space, lost colonists returning to the mother planet. Except that they didn't have a lot of respect for their mother, or their cousins who were still living here, and they took over fast and hard. Seeing what was coming, our elder council had closed the doors to the mountain and hunkered down. For three hundred years we've hidden from the outside world, but at least we saved our technology and culture. The other Thorans, the humans, hadn't been so lucky.

  Occasionally, a young buck like Uncle Balu strikes out on his own. The elders don't like it because gorillas are rare outside, and every one of us who leaves is at risk of revealing the city, but the council doesn't have the authority to stop anyone who wants to go. Eventually, they all return and settle down, and no warships have come smashing down on our doors, so no harm done.

  I had tried that a
rgument on my mother, for all the good it did me.

  Sure, I could have just up and left, but she was my mother. I didn't have a father, just Uncle Balu (whose familial relationship to me has never quite been explained, but he isn't my father). He had tried giving her the old, "I did it, and I came back okay," argument, but Mother had glared at him so hard he'd gone home and stayed out of our house for a week.

  Then… Keryl came along. I was just out ambling through the jungle, minding my own business--I think Mother hoped that would be enough adventure to satisfy me--when I stumbled onto him.

  At first I thought he was a Nuum, because he was big like them (they tower over most Thorans), so I tried to have a little fun with him. Some humans I'd met were running a guerilla (no pun intended) operation against a Nuum botanical research center nearby, and I figured Keryl was a staffer who'd gotten lost. I planned to put a scare into him, then turn him over to my friends for questioning. Boy, was I wrong.

  First, Keryl proved tougher than I thought. Most humans would soil their suits if they were surprised by a gorilla in the middle of the jungle. Keryl took his staff and planted it on my foot. Hard. We went around and around a little. Despite myself, I was starting to like him. Then he swung his staff at my head--and squashed a tiger spider that was about to drop onto my back from a tree. If he hadn't done that, I'd've been dead within thirty seconds.

  Then the rest of the spider's pack came after us and all of a sudden Keryl was teaching me how to swing through the trees like a common monkey. It was scary, but it was better than being eaten by a horde of giant poisonous spiders.

  And as if that hadn't been enough to bind us together, a few minutes later Keryl was attacked by a telepathic virus that almost killed him. I took him to my house, and Mother (also known as Doctor Chala), devised a serum to deactivate the virus using the remnant of tiger spider venom splattered on Keryl's staff. And then we found out another reason why I'd been so wrong about him: He wasn't a Nuum at all, he was a time traveler from about a million years ago, in the dawn of human history. Well, when I found that out, there was no way I was going to let him get away!

  Keryl was trying to find a girl who had been kidnapped by a Nuum named Farren and taken to his home in Dure, the Invisible City. We took off for Dure, had some adventures, almost lost our lives in ways that would have made Uncle Balu think twice, met some friends and made some enemies. One of those friends was the Nuum Lady Maire por Foret, heir to the throne of Dure. She'd been stranded in a dead city by agents working against her father, the duke. We rescued her, saved her from the Vulsteen, the breen, and some other nasty types, returned her to Dure, and that was when Keryl engineered the coup.

  The coup was five years ago now. If you could call it a "coup," since we were trying to hoist Maire into the seat that had been stolen from her father. Her father had gone missing, leaving the "noble" Lord Farren to try to convince the Nuum's governing Council of Nobles that he should be the new duke. Of course, Farren was the reason the duke had gone missing in the first place. Maire had other plans, which is why five years ago we were all skulking through the back halls of the Durean council headquarters, one Nuum and a bunch of Thorans armed with weapons we could be executed just for carrying.

  Keryl had sent us--Maire, the crew of her sky barge The Dark Lady, and me--to cut off any attempt at escape by Lord Farren after Keryl confronted him and accused him of treason before the Council. That was assuming he tried to escape, that Keryl and the rest of our friends succeeded in controlling the council chamber instead of being cut down by the guards.

  We burst through the door behind the stage, yelling like crazy because, well, I, at least, was scared out of my wits. But not as scared as Farren and the Council were when they found us blocking their escape, just as Keryl had planned. We herded them all back the way they'd come, but the fighting wasn't quite over, and by the time Keryl unveiled his masterstroke--bringing breen into the council chamber--Farren had somehow found his way around us, out of the room, and gone.

  Other than that, it had been a total success: We rescued Maire's father, sat the Council down until things could be straightened out, and Keryl finally found the girl he'd been trying to track over half the planet--only to discover she'd spent the last few months getting chummy with one of Farren's officers, who had already decided where his loyalties lay. And that was when Keryl finally realized that it was Maire he'd fallen in love with, and she with him. Personally, I thought they'd gone about it in a ridiculously roundabout way, but that's humans for you. At least they figured it out in the end, and they were happy.

  Until Keryl disappeared.

  A few hours after the fight in the council chamber, we found Maire unconscious on the roof of the building, where she and Keryl had gone to be alone. Keryl was nowhere to be seen. Of course we thought that Farren was behind it. We couldn't rouse Maire, so we put her in her room at home, under guard, while we started searching the grounds, then all of Dure, and eventually, the entire hemisphere. We came up with nothing.

  Maire woke up twelve hours later, with no side effects except that she had no idea what had happened. In fact, she had very little idea about anything, including Keryl. Something about the drug or whatever was used on her had an amnesiac effect; before we could get anything out of her about Keryl's disappearance, we had to remind her who he was. Whatever was used on her, it was bad.

  As soon as she recovered, she took over the search, promising anyone who would listen that if it turned out that Farren had anything to do with Keryl's disappearance, she would personally drop him off the deck of The Dark Lady into a nest of thunder lizards. To make it worse, she couldn't go out looking herself, because her father was in a terrible way after being kidnapped and imprisoned by Farren, and he needed her attention. Then he announced his plans to abdicate in her favor, which meant there was no way that she could leave. That meant a lot of things fell on me.

  Trouble was, as much as I wanted to find Keryl, I'm not a leader. I could help, but I couldn't direct anybody, captain a ship, or interrogate prisoners. Truthfully, I felt like a bewildered child. At times I actually wanted my mother--although Uncle Balu probably would have been more help.

  And then Farren came back.

  Maire wanted to shoot him on sight, and her father would have let her had the Council not overruled him. Farren knew how to play his cards. He persuaded the Council that there was no evidence that he'd ever done anything wrong, that Keryl was some kind of Thoran agitator, or worse, an assassin, and that both Farren and the Council had been lucky to get away with their lives. I'm sure he convinced them that the only reason they were still breathing was that he had escaped.

  With Farren on scene, things went from bad to worse. Dure had been restless since Keryl's "revolution," and although Maire's proposed reforms were too popular to dismiss them outright, the Council could do a lot. It said the Duke could abdicate, but not in Maire's favor. The Duke tried to reverse his decision, but he was obviously in no condition to continue in office. At last the Council agreed to allow Farren and Maire to act as co-regents, neither in charge, but both acting as a check on the other. Since this satisfied no one, the Council thought it was the perfect solution.

  As I said, that was nearly five years ago. No trace of Keryl has ever been found. I long ago came to the conclusion that he'd gone back to his own time, and I suspected it wasn't his choice, but we'll never know. Maire… Maire isn't convinced. If Keryl did go back, that means he's been dead for over 800,000 years, and she can't accept that.

  On the other hand, if Farren was responsible, then Keryl is either dead or being held prisoner, which has meant Maire spending every day treating the only man who knows her lover's fate as an equal while he laughs at her behind his face. I don't know how she manages to hang on. If I'd had a shred of proof to show Farren was guilty, I'd've fed him to the breen myself. But I didn't have any proof, and neither did any of the rest of us, and knowing he was legally lording it over the city that he had failed to take by
force was starting to wear on our nerves.

  I'm going to pretend that explains why we did what we did.

  II

  As a rule, you don't hear a lot of funny stories that begin: "A gorilla walks into a bar…," but this is my story, and that's what happened. A gorilla walked into a bar. Unfortunately, the rest of the story wasn't so funny. It could've been worse; we could have been armed, in which case, I wouldn't be telling anybody anything.

  The Dark Lady being crewed by Thorans who had fought to keep Farren from power, Maire had decided years ago it should spend as much time away from Dure as possible. Not only did Farren hold a grudge really well, but it gave Maire the feeling that someone was still looking for Keryl. So we travelled a vaguely-outlined route trading with city-states, towns, and Thoran settlements within a two thousand-mile radius. We provided them with food and supplies and what limited technology the Nuum allowed them, and they paid us with whatever they had which was in demand in Dure or one of our other stops. All perfectly legal.

  What was perfectly illegal were the forbidden pieces of tech we furnished to certain carefully-vetted Thorans who could be counted on to use them quietly and not sell us out to the Nuum. A Thoran possessing outlawed technology was an automatic death sentence, and the Nuum weren't known for their even-handed--or fair--justice. Execute a violator, wipe out a town, it was all the same to them. Flying under Maire's flag, we could bend the rules, but the settlers couldn't, and if we were found cooperating with them, all of us would be shot.

  There were no trade goods valuable enough to make that kind of transaction worthwhile--the only currency we accepted for our under-the-table deals was information. The Nuum were infamous not only for their brutal repression of Thorans, but for their constant veiled infighting. Mostly economic, it was almost never allowed to proceed to outright violence, but knowledge of what the neighbors were doing what was always in demand. And in time-honored fashion, the ruling class was never as careful as it should have been not to allow the servants to overhear private conversations. Of course, information about Keryl would have warranted the highest price, but nothing of that nature had ever come our way.