5 – Green
A tent is a very useful thing. It can provide shelter from the elements, a somewhat comfortable place to sleep, and even a level of protection.
A hang glider is a very useful thing. It can provide entertainment for those who like to take risks, and stop them from dying in the process.
Therefore, both tents and hang gliders are useful things.
However – and this is the key point – they don't fulfil the same functions.
Therefore, a tent should not be used as a hang glider.
These were the thoughts that chased each other through Jordan's head as he lay on the ground with several parts of his body saying that he should have just stayed at home today.
Something poked him. In such a diverse world as Haven, there was not enough data to determine whether this was a good or a bad thing. He opened his eyes.
Staring down at him was a monkey-like creature, with very large eyes and even larger ears. The expression on its face was one of baffled curiosity. Jordan blinked several times whilst his brain scrambled for the right action in this situation.
There was a sudden series of screeches – one high, one low, then high again. The creature looking down at Jordan looked up, suddenly alert, and let out a screeching cry of its own before bounding off into the trees. Jordan made to sit up, but was quickly forced back down when a large lion-like creature leapt over him with a growling roar and took off in pursuit of the monkey.
All in all, thought Jordan, as he sat up and helped Jane up, this has been a weird day.
The first thing that Rachel and Maddy thought as they climbed down Sirrus' crude rope ladder was – green. Lots of green.
This, incidentally, was not the first thing that Sirrus thought when he climbed down said ladder.
"Oh my -" Rachel's voice was lost – partly in her own awe, and partly in the fact that Maddy had just grabbed her arm rather tightly.
"No book, then," continued Rachel. (This is closer to what Sirrus thought.)
"No," replied Maddy, who was also looking green, not just due to the green light coming from below. "Can we go now?"
"Hang on..." said Rachel, her eyes falling on two devices. "Let me just..." She scurried over to the first one.
Maddy said a word. (This word is exactly what Sirrus thought.)
Rachel was pulling at a lever set into the rock, which appeared to be attached to a large wheel with chain wrapped around it. The lever was not moving, and Rachel's heels were precariously close to the edge of the beam they were standing on.
"Stop, Rach, you're going to fall," said Maddy, using as few words as she could to minimise the possibility of her throwing up. To her great relief, Rachel did stop.
"Hmmph," she grunted. "What does this do? I wish I could..." She pulled gently at the lever again, which still didn't move.
Maddy sighed, and looked at the wheel. "Piece of rock stuck there," she muttered, pointing. "Might be jamming it."
Rachel poked the rock shard out of the wheel. It floated away, as rocks generally don't do. This time, when Rachel pulled the lever, it moved easily, and the wheel spun with a clatter of chain.
"There we go."
"Awesome. Can we go now?"
"But I haven't even -"
"I'll wait up top."
Despite the potentially dangerous wildlife, Jordan thought, Haven's south jungle was one of the most breathtaking places he'd ever seen. He was a great lover of natural beauty, and this jungle was so diverse, bright and filled with sound that he thought it rivalled both Channelwood and Edanna in terms of beauty. I mean, the colours! The orange, the green, the -
"Dad?"
"Hmm?" Jordan snapped back to reality.
"You're talking out loud, you know."
"Oh." Jordan paused. "Sorry."
"I don't care," said Jane. "But you did say to be quiet in case one of those creatures hears us."
"Oh. Right."
Jordan and Jane had stopped near a break in the otherwise ubiquitous trees. The gap opened out into a vast clearing, filled with very long grass. Very long meaning, in this context, taller than Jane. Within the grass was a small network of worn paths, where the grass was either crushed underfoot or cut short. On one of these paths, directly in front of Jordan and Jane, stood two tall creatures, clearly of the same species of the one that came out of the tent. They were tall, taller than Jordan, and looked somewhat like a horse rearing up on its hind legs. Except they were completely bald, with dark pink skin.
"Well that's rubbish camoflague," muttered Jordan.
The creature closer to them heard. Its ears pricked up, and it looked up at them before giving a squeal and running away. The other creature also looked up, trying to see where its partner had gone, then it looked at Jordan and Jane as well, taking off with another squeal. Jane looked at Jordan, who shrugged slightly and proceeded forward cautiously.
The clearing was much brighter than the jungle had been, and the atmosphere was very dry, making it feel more like a savannah. The two creatures that ran off were walking somewhat majestically around in circles a few yards ahead, apparently oblivious to the presence of both Jordan and Jane.
Jordan's eye caught movement in the grass ahead, and he stopped. One of the lion-like creatures was slinking up through the long grass, approaching the blissfully unaware tall creatures. In a flash, it pounced, and one of the tall creatures pelted past Jordan and Jane. The other one probably didn't know what hit it, observed Jordan. Jane stifled a small noise.
The two of them crept past the lion-like creature, who was enjoying his freshly-caught lunch, and proceeded down the worn path. It dead-ended in a small cleared area containing two strange plants with strange bulbs growing off it.
"What are these things?" said Jordan under his breath. "I've never -"
There was a low growl from the other end of the small clearing, and the two of them looked up at its source – another one of the lion-like creatures was looking directly at the two of them, and advancing on them slowly.
"What do we do now?" hissed Jane.
"Uh... panic?" suggested Jordan.
Before they could execute their well-thought-out plan, however, the creature had advanced to next to the first bulbous plant. It appeared to inadvertently brush up against it. The plant recoiled, drawing up before letting out a rattling hiss and spewing green gas everywhere. The lion stopped in its tracks, before letting out a deep moaning growl and lurching forward. Jordan and Jane took two large steps backwards, but the lion was clearly not attacking them – it fell to the ground, unconscious, at their feet.
The second plant, which Jordan and Jane were standing fairly near to, recoiled as well. The creature had obviously knocked it on its way down. Before either Jordan or Jane had time to react, the plant let out a rattling hiss and expelled green gas. Immediately, Jordan and Jane both started feeling dizzy. It was a minute before Jordan's head cleared, and somewhat longer before Jane's did. Not wishing to hang around for the creature at their feet to wake up, Jordan half-carried Jane back to the relative safety of the jungle, where they sat down.
Jane groaned slightly. "I don't feel so great."
"Give it a minute," replied Jordan, offering her some water, "it should wear off."
It was two minutes before Jane recovered. They set off through the jungle again, commenting quietly on what had just happened. Jane was able to draw the parallel between this and the experience they had had with the gas in the bellows on the ship.
"These plants must produce that stunning gas as some sort of defence mechanism," theorised Jordan. "Achenar must have been trying to refine it into a sort of poison."
"Would he be able to eat the meat after poisoning it like that?"
"I dunno," replied Jordan, "but the gas knocked out that creature but only sort of stunned us – maybe it's less effective on us. Mind you, I don't know how often he actually ate it – I think he might just have done it for fun a lot of the time."
Jane grimaced at the idea of killing animals for fun. As far as she was concerned, shooting animals could only be called "sport" if the animals also had guns. It was an insight into Achenar's mind, though – he didn't see the need for intricate plans when force would work just as well. Sure, he could come up with plans when necessary, but if he didn't need to, he'd rather just whack you on the head and be done with it.
The chair.
It was one of the strangest things Rachel and Maddy had ever seen. Mounted on a slightly rasied circular section of floor, the chair itself was fairly plain. It was the spindly metal legs it sat on that made it bizarre – massive curving things, about three times as big as they needed to be, that stretched up over the top of the body of the chair and curved back down to the ground. Frankly, they made the chair look like a gigantic spider.
Throwing caution not quite to the wind but perhaps to the breeze, Rachel and Maddy sat down in the chair. It was wide enough to accommodate both of them, but they did have to get to know each other a bit better.
"This is cozy."
"Not quite the word I had in mind," muttered Rachel, reminding herself that she was happily married.
Maddy pressed a small blue button on the right arm of the chair. With a whirr and a clatter, a small control panel flicked over their heads and settled down in front of them. Around the edge were a lot of small green lights, which as they watched began to light up. Small icons down the side began to light up, each of which had numbers next to them. Four, then eleven, and finally thirty-six.
As the number 36 lit up with the last of the green lights, there was a sudden sparking and a splutter from a small device sitting not far from the chair, before the control panel went dead. Maddy poked at it, but it didn't respond. She pressed the blue button again, and it swung up back over their heads.
"What was that?"
"I don't know..." muttered Maddy. She lowered the panel again. This time, nothing happened at all. Little green lights, she mused. Thirty-six little green lights...
"I think," she continued slowly, "that for this chair to do whatever it is it does, we have to feed it 36 units of power. Remember the rocket on Myst? To get into it, we had to power it with 59 volts of power from the generators. I think this is the same sort of thing, but we need 36."
"So where's the power coming from?" asked Rachel. "From those lightning conductors we've been seeing?"
"I think so. You remember, there was the control box in the docking area? We lit up seven lights there."
"Oh!" said Rachel, catching on. "And in the upstairs garden, we turned on... three?"
"Two, I think," replied Maddy. "And then there was the third box, on the other spire. How many did we turn on there?"
"I have no idea," replied Rachel, "we were just messing around. There were a lot, though, weren't there?"
"Yeah, there were. So if we've got seven units of power coming from the dock, and two from the garden, we need to have..." she paused and counted on her fingers, "twenty-seven coming from there."
They made their way back over to the other spire, where they found the vast array of conductors and their controlling box. A quick count revealed that they had activated 31 of the available 34 units.
"So we need 27," said Rachel. "That can't be too difficult."
As it turned out, it was. They struggled with the controls of the box for several minutes, coming up empty-handed several times, before stopping.
"This is ridiculous," muttered Maddy darkly. "Twenty-seven can't be that difficult. What's that we've got now? Twenty-nine. Close, but not close enough."
"Actually," said Rachel, "I think it might be close enough."
"Explain?"
"We need thirty-six, right? If we leave this on twenty-nine, we'll have thirty-eight. So, why don't we just go back over there and deactivate the box in the garden? That'll get rid of two and give us thirty-six."
Maddy paused to think about this. "Won't that disable the ship?"
"Well, yeah. But if we're back over there with everything set up all right, we won't need to use it again, will we?"
"That's true," replied Maddy. "Actually, yeah. That would work. Let's try that."
Back in the cavern with the chair, they sat down again and pulled the panel back over towards them. They were somewhat disappointed when nothing happened.
"Dammit," muttered Maddy, "but we've got it right, haven't we? Seven in the dock, twenty-nine on the far island... is thirty-six."
"When we first came down here," said Rachel slowly, "it started to light up then something sparked and it stopped. If this is like the rocket on Myst... maybe we tripped a breaker somewhere?"
Jordan slid the last glass tube upwards slightly. It settled into place with the softest of clicks. Jordan nodded at Jane, who pulled on the paddle. It moved down smoothly, unlike the last time they had tried it.
The glass tubes dropped slowly back into their housing, and there was a clattering of makeshift gears as a large counterweight crate of cannonballs slid upwards in its housing and the bridge came clattering down.
"Nice," said Jane.
"Clever," replied Jordan. "He kept going on about how those animals were getting into his things. He must have put this together to keep them out."
They had reached the hut on the lake. Close up, it didn't look quite as nice as it had from a distance. The window in the door was shattered, and the door itself hung from one hinge.
"Looks like he wasn't clever enough," said Jane.
They pulled the door open, then dodged it as it fell. The inside of the hut was rather messy as well, and there were bits of paper strewn everywhere. Sitting intact on the bed, however, was another journal, which Jordan and Jane examined with interest, noting the obvious change in Achenar's frame of mind between this and the last journal. The only other things they found that were of interest were tattered pieces of paper with pictures of the monkey-like creatures on them, which Jordan put into his pocket mainly because he thought the drawings were nice.
Further along, the wooden bridge gave way to a wooden pathway through the even more lush and brightly-lit north jungle, and the wooden path soon gave way to a strip on the ground with no grass. Finally, the path split in two – to the left, the path sloped up gently until it reached a large tree with crude steps set into its trunk; to the right, the path dropped over a small steep cliff with a ladder leaning up against it before continuing around a large clearing.
"So where now?"
"I think..." Jordan muttered, considering the dead end to the left, "that we go down the ladder."
"Check." Jane set her foot on the top rung of the ladder. There was a sudden growling roar, and one of the lion-like creatures came bounding towards the ladder. Jane jerked her foot back up, lost her balance and fell backwards onto Jordan. The lion, unable to climb the ladder or get up the steep slope, stood grumpily at the bottom of the ladder, snarling at Jordan and Jane.
"Okay... maybe not."
With no other option apart from backtracking, Jordan and Jane took the left fork, moving quickly up to the tree and climbing up into the crude treehouse that Achenar had constructed. It gave a perfect view of the clearing, and the five trees that bordered it. Each tree had what looked like a nest at the top of it. There were four of the monkey-like creatures ambling around, mostly carefree, down in the clearing near a small pit, which appeared to have one of the plants that gave off the poison gas in it.
As they watched from the treehouse, the lion creature came slinking back into the clearing, low to the ground and creeping up on the monkeys. One of them saw it, however, and let out a cry of warning. The monkeys scattered, bounding up the trees and into the nests. The lion attempted to run after all four of them at once, and failed. He leapt at one of the trees and scrabbled in vain, before laying off and waiting patiently at the bottom of the tree.
"We could probably sneak past him now."
"You've got to be kidding," replied Jane.
"Yeah... that was a pretty stupid idea. So... what do we do?"
Jane was looking down at the clearing, frowning slightly. "I think... I think we could get the monkeys to run back and forth a bit over those vines between the nests. The lion will chase them back and forth, right? If we can get him to fall into the pit, the plant should be able to stun him."
Jordan thought on this for a minute. "Sounds like it could work. And it's not like I have a better idea or anything. So how do we make them run back and forth?"
"These wheels," Jane indicated the three wheels on the wall of the treehouse. She turned one of them. A deep moaning noise echoed from underneath the treehouse. Jane turned another wheel. A higher-pitched noise pierced the air this time.
Out in the clearing, one of the nests flicked open. A monkey leapt out and bounded across one of the vines. The lion let out a snarl and leapt to the tree that the monkey had moved to.
"See?" said Jane. "And I think those papers you picked up will tell us how to use these wheels."
Jordan fished the papers out of his pocket. There were four of them, and they each bore a drawing of one of the monkeys, as well as a small grid underneath with long and short lines in it.
"Pattern of sounds?" muttered Jordan. He stepped over to the wheels and turned the left one for one second, then the right one for half a second. One of the monkeys leapt from a nest and bounded across the vines, with the lion hot in pursuit down on the ground.
Jordan and Jane struggled with the wheels for another five minutes, moving monkeys and moving the lion, until finally the lion slipped and landed in the pit. It struggled, heaving itself out of the pit, claws slipping, as the deadly plant next to it recoiled, ready to defend itself.
As Jordan and Jane watched on, enraptured, the lion pulled itself out of the pit and stumbled over towards the tree. Several seconds later, the plant hissed and gave off its green gas.
"Dammit," muttered Jordan, "too slow. So what now?"
"I don't -" Jane said as she turned around. There was another diagram on the back wall of the treehouse. This one, however, showed something slightly different – one of the monkeys was throwing some fruit. Jane recalled reading in Achenar's journal that the creatures loved throwing fruit.
"What if... what if we get them to throw some fruit at the plant? I think that might work."
With a little more manipulation, they managed to get the lion back in the pit. Hurriedly, Jane spun the wheels as shown on the drawing on the wall. One of the creatures opened its nest – but nothing happened.
"Why -"
"He didn't have anything to throw," said Jordan, anticipating the question. "That combination must make that creature specifically throw some fruit. But he didn't have any. There's some in that nest there." He pointed at the furthest left nest. A large vine of fruit was situated right next to it.
"So we've got to get him in that nest, and get the lion in the pit?" replied Jane. "Wow. That sounds tough."
It was, it turned out. It took the combined intellects of Jordan and Jane fifteen minutes to finally position everything correctly. The creature was in the nest with the fruit, the lion was lined up with the pit, and the next combination would send him in.
"Ready?" asked Jane. Jordan nodded, and Jane turned the wheels. The creature leapt across the vines, the lion landed in the pit. Struggling. Jane worked the wheels frantically. Nest opened. Grabbed some fruit. Took aim -
Jordan and Jane smiled and shared a high-five.
"So what you're saying is... we have to make them vibrate?"
"I think so," muttered Rachel. "See, he goes on about them in his notes. Blue crystal, quartz, rock and nara. Talks about how much electricity is needed to destabalise each one."
Maddy rummaged in her pocket and pulled out some of Sirrus' notes. Rachel did the same. There were at least half a dozen of them total, and they had bits of info and diagrams drawn on them in Sirrus' characteristic cursive scrawl.
"See, here," said Rachel. "He says rock needs no more than 20 units of power total."
"Right, I get you. Wait, wait, wait..." Maddy searched through her stack of paper, "here's one... quartz. He's written three numbers here."
"That must be how much power we have to put into each line to disrupt the quartz," replied Rachel. "What are the numbers?"
"Eight... twelve... and four."
"So if I..." Rachel slid the leftmost slider upwards. As she moved it up, she heard small clicks, and the green lights around the edge of the control panel winked off one by one. When eight lights had gone off, she moved to the middle slider. Twelve lights turned out to be right to the very top. Finally, she turned four lights off with the right slider.
A small rattling, clicking noise cut in over the rhythmic drone of electricity. Maddy pointed at one of the rock samples. It was rattling around in its casing.
"Nice. So... what else have we got?"
The two of them puzzled away for several minutes, deducing the appropriate combination of sliders for each sample. Some of it was a little bit of trial and error, some of it was more deductive, but eventually they worked out all four combinations.
"So... now what?"
"Knowing Sirrus," said Rachel, "I'd say we have to have all four samples vibrating at the same time. I think this is like a lock."
It was difficult. Although the samples stayed vibrating for a time after they repositioned the sliders, that time was different for all of them. They ended up timing how long it took each sample to stop vibrating, so they could do the longest first.
"Right, this time for sure. Ready?"
"Mhm."
"Okay. Quartz." They worked the sliders, and the quartz sample started to buzz. "Blue crystal." More sliders, more humming. "Rock..." The rattling of the rock sample. "And... nara."
More rattling, not just from the nara sample. Several of the floating rocks, tethered by chains, moved upwards, causing a large bridge to descend and slot into place in front of them, leading over to the small area beyond.
"Nice," said Rachel. "Now let's get out of this chair."
