Within Its Labyrinth
I have landed. I am alone on your frozen world. Ice is what we call it for lack of a name.
Except this isn’t your world. Your world is not frozen. Your world flows. Your world has a name.
We don’t know its name to call it. We who have watched its lifeless surface from orbit call it Ice. We who fall into the desolation of its too-thin atmosphere and too-frigid cold call it Ice. Ice is the face it shows us.
Its true face looks only inward. It looks to you who are within it. You will tell me your world’s name when I find my way to you. If I do.
I have landed alone. My environment suit chafes. My pod lies behind me, a broken egg in a snow drift. A litter of countless other broken pods surrounds me. I am one of many and lonely as all of them. One at a time. That’s how it is. That’s how it’s done.
Like the others before me, I follow my compass to the nearest pole. It is no great distance through the unbroken blue of the ground and sky, darker than dark blue, hazeless.
It isn’t long until I come to what I came to find. The mouth of your world, big as the mouth of a hungry god. Do you have a god? The god of the surface is Ice. It has the power of stillness. Does your god have the power of quickening?
The mouth of your world is big enough to swallow me and ten like me again. But we come one by one by one. Just like you instruct us.
I sit on the edge of the crevasse, roughly circular. I take a deep inhale of my limited air. It is a little luxury I afford myself for courage.
This is all the air I have left. When it runs out, I won’t need it. Or else, I will. Either way, this is the only air I will ever breathe again. It’s old air, cleaned to sharpness. It isn’t the green air, wet air I can barely remember.
I let myself slip feet first into the darkest blue. I slide down a leveling slope, growing slower as I go until I come to rest at the base. Mechanical sensors detect an increase in gravity, which is not insignificant, but I barely notice it with my dull and stupid senses.
I stand upright. I check that my suit has no damage. All is well. My heart beats. I am in the antechamber. I will be changed. Either way, I will die. The question is whether I can be reborn.
The entrance to the passage is open just ahead. To my left and my right, the walls are covered in marks. Each one made by others who passed already. By others who went where I am going.
And there is the mark of the first with a note beside it. It says: “I am the body and blood of a new covenant.”
And each of us who comes after? Did you consent for us? Is it really you who calls to us in a tongue so changed we have to decode it? Is it really you? Or is it the hungry god calling out for more food? Did the god digest you whole? Even your memories? Is it really you who calls and who is wholly and inexcapably changed?
It’s too late either way. I am here, with my last few breaths in my lungs and my last meal in my belly. The taste of the familiar spices remains on my tongue as I take my first step into the ice labyrinth.
Another step, and I am walking. I don’t know how long the passage will wander or me within it. I don’t know how many branches it breaks into or which is the correct passage. I don’t know if there is a correct passage.
I am walking. You gave us no map. Each turn is as good as the last: left, right, asunder, etc.
I am walking. The mist has begun twirling. The air grows thicker.
I am walking. I see sparks within the transparent ice: red, orange, green, purple, colors with no names, etc. I don’t know their names, yet.
I am walking. The atmosphere has changed. The air is sticky. My body is heavy. My body has changed. Altered or digested. You didn’t tell us how we’d be changed or how the change is accomplished.
It’s all too unscientific. Still, the call urges us on. It is an urge as strong as living.
I’m crawling. Each breath is difficult and loud. It is an urge which makes trust meaningless, and truth, too.
I’m wriggling and wringing my way through the milky gelatin. I can’t breathe. I must be dying. A deep thrumming vibrates through the viscous matter around and in me. A rumble in the hungry god’s bowels.
I am gasping. I must get this off of me. This suit, unsuitable, unnecessary, unwelcome, distasteful. I unclasp my helmet. I unzip myself from the advanced fabric, so expensive and intricate, and I discard it.
I am drowning. It’s thick as honey. It chokes me. It fills me.
I am dissolving. I am becoming honey within honey. I am being pulled along by the undulating walls and unseen limbs within the opaqueness.
I am. Somehow, I still am.
I am flowing. I am within the thinning substance. The walls slip away swiftly.
I am swimming. I am solid within the liquid. I am breathing in an unfamiliar way. I move by unfamiliar methods. It’s natural. It’s intuitive. It’s instinctual, inherent, intrinsic.
None of these words make sense.
I am out of the tunnel. I am in your world. Your world is flowing. It is my world. I belong to it.
You’ve come to meet me. I already understand your language more than my own mind, which is slow to catch up to my alteration.
It is a tremble in the liquid, which I sense with new organs.
I am trembling. The name of our world trembles in my new flesh.
This story is a part of the TunnelBridge cycle of stories.
Also see TunnelBridge