Book II – Ri'neref: The Narrow Gate to Paradise
Preliminaries
This text comes from the modern world, far beyond the Cavern of D'ni. Unlike Book I, it is not a devotional text. Narrow Gate to Paradise is the memoir of an unnamed female narrator, who describes in it her time working in the Cavern under the D'ni Restoration Council. Originally, it most likely had no title, given the personal nature of the work; the title "Narrow Gate to Paradise", a phrase from the Gospel of Matthew, seems to have been added by a later editor along with the opening quotations.
In Narrow Gate to Paradise, the narrator attempts to come to terms with her life-changing time in the Cavern by conducting a series of interviews with others like herself. We do not know the questions she asked; but her main topic seems to have concerned the heart, the soul, of D'ni, and the true nature and calling of Ri'neref its founder.
The text consists of five chapters and a conclusion, five being a number of religious significance to the D'ni. In each chapter, after a brief introduction by the narrator, a person connected to D'ni in some way gives an account of events there in the past, usually involving the DRC. The narrative then continues with the interviewee's convictions about Ri'neref and D'ni, and ends with a reflection by the narrator. A uniting factor in all five interviews is their critical view of the DRC, ranging from mild dislike to deep contempt.
All interviews seem to have been conducted within the space of one year, and centre around the Carthusian monastery at La Grande Chartreuse, France, an indication of the narrator's personal beliefs about Ri'neref as a monastic leader. Interestingly, the narrator spends very little time in the Cavern itself; after only two interviews, she leaves and vows never to return. The remaining interviewees seem to have contacted her themselves, without the narrator seeking them out. Her high-minded claims of searching around the world for the Truth about D'ni can, perhaps, be called into question.
The identity of the narrator, who introduces herself as a chemical technician, has never been discovered, nor have any traces of her interviewees been found at the modern Cavern site.
Narrator's introduction
"One late afternoon, we passed a strange city. Its buildings hinted of a past grandeur that had given way to a haunting evanescence. Its road were empty, its trees were leafless, it gates and windows closed like the eyelids of the dead. A city devoid of life, inert, possessed by silence, shadowed by gloom and the spirit of death. I was dismayed at the sight of it and asked: 'Father, what is wrong with this city?' And he answered: 'Meri-amun, that is the city of the heretic…'"
- Naguib Mahfouz, Akhenaten: Dweller in Truth
"…for the gate is narrow, and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are but few who find it."
- The Gospel of Matthew 7:14, NRSV
The snow has started falling again, obscuring the great massif outside my window in an icy curtain. Most of the other cabins are deserted at this time of year; the Grande Chartreuse is an inhospitable place at the best of times, and in winter the massif becomes a wall of solid ice and harsh, bare rock.
I have returned to this same cabin after a year of searching. La Grande Chartreuse may boast of a thousand years of silent history, but its memory pales in comparison with what lies hidden beneath the sands of New Mexico. Before the silence of the Cavern, even the Carthusians must bow.
For almost twenty years, I have worked as a flavour and food chemist. For almost twenty years, I have told everyone that once, as a young student, I worked with a group of archaeologists from New Mexico State University. Native American pottery, I would say. Chemical analysis of shards and dye samples. For almost twenty years, I have lied.
Today, I speak the truth. And the truth is this: that in the year 2004, I worked as an intern with the D'ni Restoration Council. I worked not in Santa Fe but in a Cavern filled with wonders. I analyzed not Native pottery, but the artifacts of a civilization that had once spread out across the Multiverse.
At the end of my internship, after a period of intense unrest in the Cavern, the DRC disbanded and I was driven from D'ni along with all the others. And I resolved to tell no one what had happened there. After all, who would believe this?
My time with the DRC was not a good one. They were conducting an archaeological project, and I was a chemistry student. Officially, I worked under Dr. Kodama, a stern Japanese historian; in practice, I was left unguided and alone, and was too shy to speak up for myself. Dr. Kodama kept me busy enough, burying me in samples of stone and glass and paper and other things which I did not recognize; but no one told me anything, and few even spoke to me at all.
The Cavern was far from empty, though. At that time, the ruined City of D'ni was bustling with activity. There were the archaeologists, of course, led by Dr. Watson; supporting them were contractors, engineers, volunteers, all helping with reconstruction efforts. Later, the explorers came: people with no contract and no affiliation, who came walking across the desert with a Calling in their hearts. And of course, there were other students: young men and women, as I was, doing fieldwork for theses in Archaeology, Anthropology, Fine Arts… it was from them that I learned of D'ni and its history, from them that I learned the true nature of the Cavern I worked in, from them that I learned what the DRC aimed to do.
While tensions in the Cavern continued to escalate, Dr. Watson's students showed me translations of ancient texts, ten thousand years of history spread out before me. They showed me pictures and diagrams of objects they themselves barely understood. They told me of Linking Books, communication devices, the great neutrino emitter that was said to lie on an island in the glowing Lake; and they told me of the history of D'ni and its founder, who had come to Earth not only from another world, but another Universe.
After the collapse of the DRC I was glad to be free of that Cavern, lonely and cold as it had mostly been for me. I never saw those students again. But the story of D'ni, and of Ri'neref its founder, a man who led his people from the light into the silence and the darkness in order to save their souls, has never left me.
Several years ago, the Cavern was reopened. the DRC is long gone; the Cavern is a private affair, now. And for a long time, I ignored it. The City of D'ni lay behind me now, relic of a past life as it is a relic of a lost world. But visiting this Chartreuse Massif, looking up at the monastery of the Carthusians living in their profound silence, my thoughts went back to Ri'neref and his City, a Cavern of silence rather than a mountain, , an inverted Chartreuse.
What drove him? What drove his followers? What made this entire civilization remain in their Cavern, Links notwithstanding, for ten thousand years; when I could hardly bear the darkness for the single year I was there?
And so I returned to the Cavern one last time: not as an explorer, not as a researcher, but only as a seeker looking for answers. The following document contains my findings. I did not find a unified picture of Ri'neref or his people. but I found enough. And today, I look out at the silent monastery of the Carthusians, and understand Bruno its founder. And I look back at the gleaming alabaster of D'ni, and salute Ri'neref, for having had faith enough to bring to life an entire world from stone and gloom.
- Saint-Pierre-de-Chartreuse, France
Chapter I: Jeff Spencer
I arrived, after a long journey from Santa Fe, at an empty Cleft. No more Zandi, no more DRC… it was for the better. I don't know how I'd have explained myself, had Zandi asked me what I was doing in the Cavern without a Calling.
Ironically, the first person I spoke to in the Cavern was Called: a true believer, a follower of Yeesha. I never met Yeesha, myself. I was not Called, I did not belong, I had no part to play in the Great Restoration of D'ni. But towards the end I saw more and more of her followers in the Cavern, recognizable by her emblem and by the light in their eyes. They frightened me, they seemed mad, and I stayed away from them.
I met Jeff in the Kirel neighborhood, into which I'd wandered looking for the places where I used to work. He approached me, asked my name and whether I were new to D'ni. When I told him I'd returned here in search of answers, Jeff needed no convincing. He believed he had the answers, everything I need ever know about D'ni, and he wanted me to believe it, too. Jeff had been a Southern Baptist in a former life, and he had kept his Messianic faith and his evangelistic zeal. He imparted to me his message:
"You sound like you're sincerely looking for answers. For the Truth. No longer satisfied with the lies of the World. I was like you once. In fact, I was like you twice. First as a teenager, lost in sin, when I gave my heart to Christ. And then again later, when I went to look for answers about D'ni, and found Yeesha.
I came to D'ni because I was Called. Every man or woman who comes here arrives by Yeesha's Call. Even you, you just aren't aware of it yet. the DRC crowd, they thought they understood D'ni; but their wisdom was only of the World, lacking in the Spirit. I knew there was more and so I found Yeesha, and she showed me the truth about D'ni: that D'ni was steeped in evil and sin, a society that ran on slavery and pain.
I am convinced that every Christian, at least, should be a follower of Yeesha. It seems so obvious to me that the D'ni Maker and the God of the Bible are one and the same. The D'ni were clearly following a divine plan coming here. They escaped from a corrupted world, and their Terahnee cousins, who followed the World rather than the Spirit, ended up committing all the same sins again.
Ri'neref was still misguided, though. He was not a true prophet. He wanted D'ni to be something like a monastery, a place underground where people would live in seclusion from the world. That's not part of God's plan, not for us and not for the D'ni. I believe seclusion in the Cavern was wrong, and I believe it caused a lot of the corruption of D'ni later on. Already at the very start, ten thousand years ago, they went wrong.
I never gave up my Christian faith after following Yeesha. It is my salvation, I can't even think of leaving it behind. It's not always easy; I have to skip church when I'm in the Cavern or on one of the Ages. And no one else here shares my faith. I don't believe Yeesha is divine in any way, and I don't believe she can ever replace Jesus. I do think she's a redeemer of sorts for the D'ni. I don't know exactly how all of this fits together, D'ni and Yeesha and the Gospel. I trust that it is all part of God's plan, and that he has a plan for the Bahro and the D'ni no less than he does for us."
I admit that I found Jeff rather frightening, alone with him in Kirel. He had the same glint in his eye that I remember seeing in Yeesha's followers from the DRC days, although in Jeff's case, he was a True Believer long before he ever met Yeesha.
I did not see her during my brief return to the Cavern. I do not even know if she is still alive, and if all the things they said about her were true. I am glad I never met her. Yeesha's followers frightened me then, and they frighten me now. True Believer all too often become inhuman, and Yeesha's Believers are no exception.
Just before I left Kirel, Jeff invited me to Link to his Relto, a private instance-Link to a world that Yeesha was said to have given to each of her followers. Jeff said that Relto was what convinced him of Yeesha's powers and of the safety and power of Linking, and that after visiting Relto, he Linked to many more places.
I refused. Although Dr. Kodama never let me access Linking Books in 2004, I had no desire to Link and be expected to convert to a religion. I left Jeff and Kirel and went away to find more answers, hopefully from a less biased source.
Chapter II: Michael Tombaugh
My experience with Jeff, along with my observation that the Cavern, though open, was mostly deserted, made me hesitant to go down and explore without a plan. Instead, I found a message board in Bevin and wrote on it that I was interested in the earliest history of D'ni from an academic perspective, leaving me email address as contact. Within days, I received an email from Michael Tombaugh, and we agreed to meet at the Grand Central Library in Ae'gura.
Michael was a historian by training and involved himself with D'ni in 2003, after an archaeologist in his network joined the DRC. Michael specialized in the histories of construction and engineering, and was fascinated in particular by the technological marvels of D'ni.
Though asked many times by the DRC, Michael never joined, mainly due to disagreements with Dr. Watson on professional grounds. He remained in the Cavern as a freelancer, cataloguing and studying D'ni technology, and publishing his findings in a blog. Michael was eager, driven, and knowledgeable; and in his own way as zealous as Jeff had been, though with a very different meaning.
"I first came to the Cavern when Watson and the DRC were just setting up the Restoration. Everyone still thought it would be an actual reconstruction back then, with people living in D'ni the way its original inhabitants had done. I was an academic, not an engineer, so I decided to remain on the sidelines until my expertise could be put to use.
Soon, however, it became clear to me that Restoration was not going to happen. The project needed civil engineers, construction crews, materials, but Watson either wasn't interested or did not understand what he'd started. He brought in students and fellow academics, who spent their time translating D'ni royal poetry and not restoring the City. After that, they hired external contractors who did more harm than good.
Later, towards the end, stranger people arrived. The landowner, Zandi, started letting in people from all over saying he was fulfilling some 'Call'. There were rumours of a woman, Yeesha, who was venerated by some of the newcomers as a Messiah figure, though I never understood why. Many people who had been perfectly rational before, even some DRC scholars, would disappear for days and then return half mad. It looked and sounded like a cult.
And then one day the DRC announced they were packing up. They claimed a lack of funding, which I'm sure played a role. But I also know that Watson disappeared on that day. Some said he'd killed himself. Some said he'd Linked to some world and had left his research group behind. Others said he'd gone with Yeesha to God knows where. I don't believe we'll ever know.
Yet I could not let go of D'ni. The technology from this place could change the world! Just imagine what we could do with anti-grav, with the D'ni use of solar and wind and hydropower, imagine what we could achieve if we found a way to reverse-engineer Descriptive Books!
This City is the greatest treasure this planet has ever seen. We should have restored D'ni, lived in it, dedicated our lives to studying it. Yet Watson, fool that he was, he never saw it. D'ni was to him so sacred he dared not even consider using any invention of theirs to improve our own lives. And the Zandi people were no better. They either joined Yeesha's little cult, or they had no interest in learning about D'ni and what it could mean for us here on Earth. At least, after all these years, someone finally cares to learn.
The history of D'ni began on Garternay, their original home world. There, they see to have had a highly advanced sort of theocratic society, with a king and a powerful priesthood whose influence extended through the Guild system.
The official doctrine held that the people of Garternay were specially chose by God, who had given them ownership of the Multiverse.
Linking, a technology kept under strict control by the ruling classes, was conceived of as a divine gift, though I am sure said ruling classes knew better. This powerful technology, combined with the belief in themselves as a divine elect, resulted in serious supremacist attitudes among the people of Garternay, a failing which they unfortunately took with them to their other worlds.
Ri'neref was the leader of a religious minority who rejected supremacist beliefs and preached a life of simplicity and devotion. His was an essentially monastic vision, comparable to St. Benedict or the Essene community at Qumran.
Celibacy was, of course, not a part of Ri'neref's vision, but asceticism very much was. Ri'neref and his followers believed that the people of Garternay had become corrupted through luxury and through using what they believed were god-given Ages for personal gain. Their goal, in founding D'ni, was to live in humility and religious devotion, eschewing luxury in favour of harshness, plenty in favour of deprivation, empire in favour of isolation. Linking was to become once again a sacred act, and Ages were to be devoted to God alone.
Faithful till the end to his own convictions, Ri'neref refused to allow his followers to build him a palace or accord him special honours, choosing instead to live as an example to his people.
How did the D'ni whose remains we see around us end up so different from Ri'neref's ascetic vision? For the same reason the desert community founded by Benedict ended up giving rise to such things as the wealth of Cluny and the First Crusade. Much time passed in the Cavern, and later generations lost their enthusiasm for religious life. They did not remember Garternay, had not been exposed to the charisma of Ri'neref's personal influence, and wanted more from life than what a monastic community had to offer.
And I cannot blame them: an ascetic community is fine for those who choose it, but having new generations be born into such a group always ends in disaster. ISKCON tried something similar in our world, and it, too, ended in slavery and abuse.
Could a Reformation, a Martin Luther of sorts, have set D'ni onto a different path, away from the Fall? I have read the occasional argument for that. But I doubt it. D'ni had much more religious and ideological diversity than its official records are willing to admit, and all that changed nothing. Even among us the ideologies come and go, yet none of them have succeeded in changing human nature.
The question still remains of why D'ni became so hateful, paranoid, and supremacist in the end, why they became hardly different from their Terahnee cousins whom they held as examples of sin and impurity. I don't really know… But I suspect that life in the Cavern, isolated from other cultures and from any world that did not belong to them, had much to do with it. That and the sheer power of Linking, of possessing the keys to the Multiverse. The life of a desert monk only works if one's life remains simple.
Though I respect Ri'neref for founding this great City, as an agnostic and a scholar I cannot but believe he was naive. His ideas were incompatible with modern civilization, and even more so with a civilization as advanced as that of Garternay."
After speaking to Michael, I took down my notice from Bevin and withdrew to the shadows. I was impressed with Michael's dedication and his knowledge of D'ni. But I also saw the effects that two decades of life in the Cavern had had on him. Did Michael still have any life outside of D'ni? Did he even remember? What right did D'ni have, long dead D'ni fallen by its own hand, to claim people's lives like this?
For a while I wandered D'ni, its hallways and bridges, its libraries and memorials. I read translations of official histories which the DRC in its haste had left behind. I entered offices and school buildings. I explored the ruined ferry port. I even Linked to some Ages, a thing I was never allowed to do as a student, and in those Ages I found again the same D'ni, the same buildings, the same values.
Finally I decided that even though the DRC was gone, I still did not belong in the Cavern. I was not willing to devote my life to that place, the way it demanded I did. Ri'neref may have been a formidable religious leader, but I did not follow his religion, nor agree with Yeesha's. D'ni was, and would always be, too alien for me, too incompatible. Even its technological marvels could not persuade me to stay; unlike Michael, I do not believe we could ever learn to use or value them.
After all, if the D'ni turned to evil by cultural isolation and the power of Linking, how much worse would we fare, if we devoted our lives to their Cavern and took their Linking powers for our own?
Chapter III: A Bahro
Having made up my mind to leave the Cavern, I returned to the Surface. I remember it was early evening, and I wondered at what time I would arrive in Santa Fe, and whether I should have booked an AirBnB before leaving D'ni. I went off into the desert until I felt eyes watching me; turning around, I found myself face to face with a Bahro.
Speaking with this alien presence, if speech is the right word, remains to this day the strangest, most incomprehensible event I have ever experienced. I was rooted to the spot; whether by fear or by some external force, I could not say.
The Bahro and I had communion of some sort, though I could not tell whether the creature were actually speaking or putting his thoughts directly into my mind. I had heard rumours of the Bahro being telepathic, back in the Cavern; but I had no idea the experience would be this overwhelming. In the laboratory I learned to work with forces of Nature; this was the only time I could honestly say I spoke to one.
Transcribing the thoughts and ideas the Bahro manifested in my mind was no easy task, and I fear I may have done him injustice by making him appear too human. I can only hope he forgives me; if Bahro have a concept of forgiveness.
"You are leaving. You will not return. Hear our voice. Hear Noloben's voice. Hear our voice.
You wonder about D'ni. About the beginning. You have learned, yet still you wonder. We have seen the beginning and the end. We shall tell you what you will not forget.
They came to this world in the beginning, as did we. Their leader-prophet was a pious man, and we rejoiced. Where their world had been sinful, he opposed their sin. A faithful prophet, he led his people to their God.
But the sin of their ancestors clung to them. In their greed, they took the Stone Seed. This was unforgivable sin. No prophet could redeem them. Not even we.
We cannot redeem from sin. Only the Stone Seed can. The Stone Seed is the source of the Spiral, the Serpent. We must dance among its coils. and the Universe shall dance again. But these things are not for the impure. You are like them. The same silence in your hearts. You are impure. But you may be cleansed.
Their leader-prophet failed to lead them. Their redeemer-desert bird failed to redeem them. But the Stone Seed is free, and by it the impure cleanse themselves. We watch. We do not hate. We do not forget.
We watch. We sing. We dance. The Universe-Nature-Possibility dances. The Stone Seed is free. We need nothing else. We are whole. You are lacking."
After transmitting to me his words, the Bahro released me, and Linked away I know not where, leaving me alone in the desert. Is it any wonder that I never told a living soul about any of this? I had direct, personal contact with a truly alien life form, stranger and more powerful than anything I had ever dreamed of. And I understood so little… The Bahro was a deeply spiritual creature, perhaps even more so than the D'ni had been, and he seemed constrained by religious taboos involving purity (perhaps an initiation rite? Or perhaps one has to be Bahro to be allowed their knowledge).
But what did he mean? What did he mean by sin? What did he mean by his judgement of both the D'ni and us humans as impure and lacking? What gave him the right to judge? How much do his people really know of us? Have they been watching? are they active, in secret, outside the Cavern? What drives them?
My interlocutor Linked away without giving me a chance to speak, much less ask him questions. and even had he stayed, I was too overwhelmed to speak. Yet there is so much more to learn about these fascinating beings.
Looking back, I wonder how much my lack of understanding was due to the Bahro hiding things he considered sacred Mystery, and how much was simply my inability to understand so alien a mind. And I wonder… a creature that powerful, with instinctive biological power of the Link: if it had been us who made first contact with them, instead of the D'ni, would we have behaved any differently?
Chapter IV: Sanna Koskelainen
I never returned to the Cavern after that night with the Bahro. I thought my search was over; and I almost succeeded in letting it go. The Cavern, the DRC, even the Bahro, were all things of the past.
Then one day I received an email, sent from a Finnish address. The sender introduced herself as Sanna Koskelainen, a former student of Dr. Watson's in the DRC days. She told me she now worked at the Finnish National Museum in Helsinki; but that like me, she had never truly let go of her experiences in the Cavern, decades ago.
I never knew Sanna by name when I was in the cavern, nor she me. I was aware of the archaeology students working with the DRC, but I only spoke to a few of them. Like myself, Sanna was kept working continuously, in her case on cataloguing and dating finds. However, being older than I was, and trained in archaeology, Sanna learned a great deal more of the Cavern and the D'ni than I ever did. I agreed to a video call with her hoping not only to have my questions answered, but also to find, in Sanna's testimony, some vindication of my feelings about the Cavern.
"I came to the Cavern as a foreign exchange student. I was in the final year of a Master's programme in Archaeology when I first learned of D'ni. It was online somewhere; one of those old-time messaging boards it must have been.
This would have been around 2003. I remember being enchanted by the idea: and underground city, and entire newly-discovered civilization… I immediately got in touch with New Mexico State University and applied to an internship position. I did not hear back from them; but soon afterwards, I received an email from Dr. Watson inviting me to the Cavern. I never hesitated.
Right from the start it was difficult. There was a lot of chaos and uncertainty even about the purpose of our project. I was an archaeology student; I had come to study an ancient civilization, but others seemed intent on 'restoring' the City, whatever that meant to them, while again others spoke of a 'spiritual restoration'. Dr. Watson seemed greatly troubled, and became increasingly paranoid about safety the more people joined. Finally he became less and less involved with the running of the project, becoming preoccupied with something only he seemed to know.
Other people started appearing in the Cavern, too. At first I thought they were all with the project. Then I noticed none of them really knew the DRC, and the project leadership itself was very dismissive of them. They were random people, it seemed, who claimed to be there to 'explore'. Dr. Watson nearly had a fit over how unsafe it was! Apparently, a man named Jeff Zandi, who lived in a caravan nearby, was letting them all in. The DRC even threatened to sue him, but since he owned the land we were on, there was nothing they could do. After some time, some explorers began to say they were 'Called' to the Cavern. They looked strange and dreamy, and sometimes people disappeared. I tried to tell my supervisors, but none of them would talk about it.
I ended up staying in the Cavern for a little under a year. I am not happy about the way it ended, no, and I am not happy about the entire way the project was run. Towards the end I saw more and more of these strange cult people, and the project leaders became angry and difficult to work with. There was even one man I heard, I never knew his name, who people said had disappeared for weeks. And when he came back some external employees said that the DRC had been holding him prisoner! And then Dr. Watson went off somewhere, and nobody could find him, people were saying he'd fallen to his death down the big Central Shaft…
By that time I only wanted to leave. It was all so different from how archaeological field work should be. I complained to New Mexico State University, but they claimed not to know who the DRC were. I only felt sorry for the New Mexico students, and the contractors still waiting for payment; they didn't even have another home to return to. I still wonder to this day whether the entire thing was a cult.
But for all the bad memories, I did learn something of D'ni down in the Cavern. This was a highly literate, advanced civilization; we found more journals and documents than we knew what to do with! I was buried over my head in artifacts, working with D'ni translators. that was how I learned who the people of D'ni had been, what their lives had been like.
To start with, the D'ni came from another world. This fact alone took me some time to accept! It thought it metaphorical at first. Their founder, Ri'neref, led them away as a small religious group, dedicated to purity and asceticism, and as such the D'ni wrote rather unkindly of their 'impure' Ronay ancestors. From what I have found, their invectives were mostly propaganda; no doubt the Ronay were flawed, but nothing in the archaeological record suggests they were any worse than the D'ni.
Ri'neref was an interesting sort of religious leader. He was an ascetic; he believed that his people had grown soft and corrupted and had lost the path God had set for them. He valued simplicity and a life of religious devotion. and unlike many such figures, who become despots after being in power for a time, Ri'neref never stopped being an example to his people. He shunned all honours and luxuries, living a simple monk's life to the last.
It is no wonder that Ri'neref continued to inspire the D'ni for the ten thousand years that they lived here. His only fault, in my view, was his overly harsh attitude and his exacting demands of his own people; more Ronay might perhaps have joined him, had Ri'neref been less dismissive of them.
An underground volcano is an odd choice of settlement, even for ascetics. Ri'neref could have followed the path of his human counterparts, and built his City in the desert on the Surface.
Aside from security concerns, I believe Ri'neref had ideological reasons for his founding of D'ni inside its own closed world. D'ni was never meant to be a place of punishment or even purification, the way the desert was. D'ni was meant to be an earthly Paradise, the Paradise Ri'neref believed would materialize once his people followed their God.
It was a Paradise in the Stoic sense: not based on mere sensual pleasure, which was inferior and fleeting, but the pleasures of the mind and the soul, right religion and philosophy. And being Paradise, of course, D'ni needed protection from corrupting outside influences, a guard against the unworthy. Even the Garden of Eden had its angel.
Unfortunately, that very isolation would become D'ni's undoing. Even monastic communities were aware of the outside world, and lived in proximity to others. D'ni was guarded too well. For ten thousand years, Ri'neref followers lived without any contact with worlds they did not regard as their own, without ever trading, ever sharing, ever learning to adapt.
Over time, despite access to multiple worlds, their own world became ever smaller, ever more insular. Ri'neref's vision of a multitude of worlds all serving the glory of one God became, first an empire, then a prison, as the D'ni's profound isolation led to to a violent hatred of outsiders, and even of one another. And finally, after much violence and upheaval, D'ni turned from Ri'neref's Paradise into the Hell of the Fall.
Ri'neref ultimately failed in building his Paradise, as his people failed in overcoming the sins of their ancestors. But I cannot fault him for that. Ri'neref's vision remains powerful to this day, as it continues to inspire after the reopening of the Cavern. And Ri'neref was the only reason why D'ni is even here today for us to study, the only reason why the history of D'ni differs at all from that of its Terahnee cousin. My one regret, at the end of it all, is that I could never study the latter."
Sanna and I spoke a long time about our experiences in the Cavern. I still find it difficult to see how that cold, dark place could ever have been anyone's Paradise. But Sanna's story helped me see D'ni as a real, living place, a place where people lived, a place people believed in. And though I could not agree with Ri'neref's ideas, I felt that I understood him.
To put all one's hopes in a Cavern on an alien world; to leave everything and move there with no hope of return and only hardship ahead; to look upon that dark cave and see Paradise. I shudder at the desperation, unmentioned in the official texts, that must have driven those first D'ni settlers.
And I wonder if some among the D'ni, remembering Ri'neref, mourned in those ten thousand years for what his Paradise had become. Perhaps Sanna and I were not the only ones for whom the Cavern was a place of cold and darkness.
Chapter V: Tom
My meeting with Sanna had made me aware of people outside the Cavern, who had left as I had, with stories to tell. I wanted vindication at this point even more than knowledge, confirmation that what had happened all those years ago was real. And so I tried LinkedIn to see if my network knew of the Cavern.
Not long afterwards, I received a response from a Tom (he asked that his name and nationality be withheld), who had worked for a short time as a freelance contractor in the Cavern with the DRC. He left shortly before the DRC collapsed, amid regret and bitterness.
Tom was hesitant initially; he seemed to associate the Cavern with religious extremism and cult-like behavior. Nevertheless, his curiosity must have won over his wariness, as he agreed to meet, face to face, at a local Starbucks in Santa Fe.
"I understand you were in the Cavern, way back, and you stayed on till the end. I also understand that you want to know the truth about D'ni: what it was, what it became, what it believed in. I don't know if I'm the right man to answer those questions. I'm an engineer; not an archaeologist or an academic. like so many of the others were, back then. But I have eyes to see; and I can tell you what I believed about that place, and about our place in it.
I have never made a secret of my differences with my client at the time, the DRC. Nor of my disdain for the others, the stragglers and cultists who had started turning up in the City around the time I left.
The DRC was an atypical client for me; I usually work for local governments, cities, big festival organizers, the like. I agreed to it because of their promise of an underground, alien city waiting for restoration. In this, they did not disappoint: D'ni was, and still remains, the greatest marvel I ever laid eyes on. However, once inside I found out just how unprofessional and downright unrealistic they really were.
Looking with an engineer's eye, there was just so much we could have learned from D'ni. Alternative energy, new materials, innovations in architecture that could have saved us a thousand years' worth of development… and to think they built all this when we were still stuck in the Copper Age! And we'd not uncovered one-tenth of what that City had to offer. We should have learned from the D'ni: used their technologies, brought them to the Surface, reverse-engineered and adapted them. That would have been the proper way to honour their legacy, to let their light shine on.
But Watson wanted none of it. Even his own academics he wouldn't let publish their findings in the proper journals. No one from outside was to be brought in except through him, and he just brought students. I told him that if he wanted to restore the City he's need civil engineers, electricians, the works… but Watson always refused, saying it was 'unsafe'. That bizarre obsession of his…! As though ribbons and safety cones were a better bet to entrust your life to than a solidly rebuilt bridge. I felt I'd been hired for nothing.
Then weirder stuff started happening. The landowner showed up and picked a fight with Watson; it turned out that Watson, with his obsessive secrecy, never got the proper permits. Then these new people arrived. They didn't belong to anything; they would just drop out of the sky.
Some of them started saying they were 'Called' to the Cavern; they seemed to worship some old local woman called Yeesha. It reminded me of the Hare Krishna folks from old times. I told Watson, and he just brushed me off. When people started disappearing and no one in the DRC was willing to call the cops, or get help, or at least report them missing, I decided I'd had enough.
Later, I learned that a few months after that, the entire operation folded. I'm not surprised, and honestly, good riddance to them. Nothing came out of any of it. That City still stands just as ruinous as before, and all its treasures of knowledge remain unknown. I won't go down there anymore to find them. I've had it with that place; and besides, an alien underground city in New Mexico? Who'd believe me?
And so, what could have been the greatest find in all of mankind's history was reduced to a mere rumour in the desert, some old bit of internet folklore.
Like I said, I'm no historian, but I did keep my ears open down there in the Cavern. The archaeology folks used to say that Ri'neref, the founder of D'ni, had intended his City as a sort of monastery. Bullshit, I say. D'ni was no monastery. D'ni was a magnificent City, the greatest wonder of culture and engineering this planet has ever seen, and Ri'neref was surely no timid monk but a great leader and innovator.
I don't know what the D'ni were like on their old home world and frankly, neither did the archaeologists, try as they might; but judging by what he accomplished here, in a dark, wet Cavern, Ri'neref was nothing short of a genius. I still regret that I was never able to learn from him.
I won't dispute that Ri'neref and his bunch were a religious lot, though. I've seen their shrines, or what's left of them, their religious mosaics, their memorials… I'm not a religious man, myself, but that official religion looked innocent enough. I wouldn't care for it, but at least the buildings were pretty.
The later stuff, though… that's something else. I remember the gallery belonging to that Kadish guy, some late D'ni fellow who thought he was a Messiah of sorts. Beautiful place, but the way he and his followers believed and behaved was just insane. And that old woman Yeesha was just the same.
All these people, normal people, you know, not Branch Davidians straight from the compound, I saw them turn all glassy-eyed and proclaim this madwoman the 'Grower of D'ni', whatever that meant. Scary, really. And then the way Watson responded by turning the DRC as paranoid and cult-like as Yeesha was…
The archaeologists said that D'ni fell in an act of terrorism, bred from a hatred and mistrust that had been brewing beneath the surface for centuries. I find it sad really, how an advanced civilization like D'ni succumbed to the same nonsensical hatred that divides us here.
But what is even sadder is that we did not learn from it. We went down into that Cavern and broke up into the same religious extremism and factional strife that had destroyed D'ni. And in the end, it destroyed our accomplishments, too.
Yeesha I can forgive; I believe she was genuinely delusional. She truly believed in all that Grower nonsense. But I expected better of Watson and the DRC. I've not worked with any academic projects since; and I don't think I ever will again. I expected scholars to appreciate the importance of D'ni knowledge to mankind. But I was wrong; and D'ni stands empty and ruined, of use to no one at all."
Tom was by far the bitterest person I spoke to about D'ni. So deep was his aversion that though I agreed with much of what he said, I wondered if something more than a bad experience in the Cavern lay beneath it.
Tom almost worshipped D'ni: he seemed to believe that D'ni technology could transform the entire world, solve all humanity's problems. Yet D'ni could never belong to him. First he had to work within the limits set by the DRC, his client. Later, Yeesha and the explorers arrived, with their own religious claim to D'ni.
I wondered why Tom never went back himself, if D'ni technology were truly so important to him. what prevented him from returning to the Cavern and taking for himself what the DRC never let him have? What prevented him from stealing Linking Books and showing them to the world, along with the Paper and the Ink?
I now believe that Tom's bitterness was never about the DRC at all. I believe that Tom knew Linking would transform the world, and was afraid, too afraid of the consequences of giving that technology to mankind, too afraid of being the one responsible for all the good and all the evil. He had hoped the DRC would do it, instead; but they were scholars, interested in learning and translating and cataloguing, not in transforming the world. Dr. Watson had wanted to restore D'ni as a place people would come and visit, not as a centre of research and engineering.
Yeesha, meanwhile, was not concerned with Earth at all; born on this planet, she belonged to a different world. And so Tom's bitterness, expressed against the DRC and Yeesha, was really aimed at his own heart, his own perceived failure of humanity due to a lack of courage. If only the D'ni survivors, moving to Releeshahn long ago, had known what their cast-off ruins would do to human hearts.
Conclusions
The snow has long since stopped falling. Night has fallen over La Grande Chartreuse; I can no longer see the monastery in the distance. If I look only at the rocks and ignore the trees, I can almost believe myself in the Cavern.
Writing all this down, I have had time to reflect on D'ni, on Ri'neref. So many things he had been, to so many people: misguided hero, virtuous leader, religious visionary, great innovator. Just as Alexander was a greedy conqueror to some and a wondrous incarnation of a god to others, so too Ri'neref was many different things to those who came after him. And likewise also D'ni itself: evil empire, monastic community, and high technological civilization all in one.
I have come to realize that, as there is no one truth to any of our civilizations, so too was there no one truth to D'ni. But I have seen and felt the force of its influence, even dead; I am changed by D'ni forever, and I have seen the same change in the eyes of all those I spoke with.
The force of Ri'neref's inspiration, across ten thousand years, drove me to La Grande Chartreuse, the Bahro to bondage and freedom, the DRC to failure, the others all on their paths. and for good or ill, I know that none of us would have it any other way. Having been seduced by D'ni as Persephone by the pomegranate seed, we would not want to do without it, would not wish we had never gone.
We may never have restored D'ni, obtained salvation, or transformed the Earth with D'ni marvels; but it was always worth it. Ri'neref may have failed to build his Paradise; but the flawed City he did build was something immeasurably greater.