Raven Rise

THIRD EARTH

Patrick Mac knew something was wrong.

He knew it before he opened his eyes on that May morning in the Earth year of 5014. It was the smell. He couldn’t place it, mostly because he had rarely smelted anything like it before. It seemed to him like a mixture of foul chemicals and rotted garbage-two smells that weren’t often present on clean, green Third Earth. Whatever it was, it wasn’t good. It wasn’t natural. He opened his eyes to scan the bedroom of his small apartment. Nothing seemed out of place, other than the alien odor.

Patrick lived in the underground village of New York City known as Chelsea. It was the first subterranean complex built below Manhattan and served as a model for the others that had transformed the surface of New York from a crowded, environmental disaster area into a beautiful parklike community. Chelsea was made up of fifty levels of apartments, shops, museums, theaters, and just about every convenience needed to live belowground. There was even a large lake at its bottom level that was open most of the year for swimming and sailing. From November through January it was intentionally frozen for skating and ice hockey. Many thousands of people made their homes in the small community. Most of them worked there too. There was no reason to ever venture aboveground, unless you wanted to enjoy the beautiful, open countryside and feel the warmth of the sun.

Patrick thought that everything about Chelsea was perfect, except of course for this strange new smell that had so rudely forced him awake. He rolled out of bed, every sense on alert. Was he in danger? Was there a fire? No. It didn’t smell like that. He had received no warning through the communication system that ran throughout the underground village. If there was an emergency, people were notified immediately. Patrick had lived in Chelsea for most of his thirty years. He had only experienced one emergency. A water pipe had burst on the fifteenth level near his apartment. Everyone within three sectors was evacuated in minutes. The pipe was repaired and he returned home within the hour. Chelsea was an efficient place. If there were any real danger, Patrick felt certain he would know about it.

But what was the foul smell?

It was a Tuesday. Patrick had to be at work by eight. He was a teacher and the librarian at Chelsea High, five levels down from his apartment. He could make it from dead asleep to his classroom in fifteen minutes. Ten if he pushed. It was early. He didn’t need to push. He needed to find out what the putrid smell was. He sat up in bed, took a good whiff, and hacked out a cough. The smell tickled the back of his throat. He ran his hands through his long brown hair and scowled. The odd smell gave him a bad feeling that went beyond the throat tickle.

Patrick was the Traveler from Third Earth. He had already experienced the shock of seeing his territory change once; he didn’t want to go through it again. Events in the past had been altered, creating a ripple of events through time that led to the creation of a race of humanlike automatons called “dados.” One day all was normal; the next day Patrick woke to find these robots were suddenly part of the normal fabric of Third Earth life. They functioned as efficient worker bees who served the people of the territory. The dados may have been handy, but they were wrong. It wasn’t the way things were meant to be. Bobby Pendragon and his acolyte Courtney Chetwynde went back in time to First Earth to try and prevent the events that would lead to their creation. Had they succeeded? Did this odd smell have something to do with the past having been changed yet again? Was this foul odor a good sign? It sure didn’t smell like it. “Hello?” Patrick called out nervously.

He lived alone, but on the “new” Third Earth, he had a dado servant who made him breakfast and washed his clothes. Patrick thought it was creepy and cool at the same time. As much as the dados shouldn’t have existed, he had to admit that it was pretty nice to have a machine handle the more mundane chores around the apartment.

There was no answer. Were the dados no more?

Patrick decided to call his school to see if anybody knew what the strange smell was all about. He reached to his bedside table for his telemonitor, but his hand hung in the air. The device wasn’t there. Patrick quickly looked to the floor. Had he knocked it over in his sleep? No. It was just… gone. The hairs went up on the back of his neck. His pulse quickened. Something was definitely wrong.

It was then that he noticed a faint sound. It wasn’t distinct or specific enough for him to guess what it could be. It was more like a distant rumble of white noise. Harmless, except for the fact that the sound in Chelsea was totally controlled. Nothing as intrusive or annoying as white noise existed in his home, or anywhere else on Third Earth for that matter. The only place he’d heard anything remotely like it was on a recorded bit of history that was stored in the massive computer data files of 5014.

Patrick forced himself to stand up. He shuffled slowly toward his bedroom door, fearing what he might find on the other side. He reached for the silver-handled doorknob, grasped it tightly, took a breath, and pulled the door open to see…

It wasn’t his apartment. At least it wasn’t the apartment he used to have. There was nothing unusual or sinister about the place, other than the fact that it wasn’t his. The furniture was different. The paintings on the walls were different. The appliances in the kitchen were different. For a moment he wondered if he had accidentally entered the wrong apartment the night before, but quickly dismissed that as being idiotic. There was less chance of that happening than all of history being transformed by Pendragon and the other Travelers. That’s how strange the reality of his life had become.

Patrick fought panic. It wasn’t easy waking up to discover your life had been turned inside out. Again. Still, panic would only make things worse. He was an orderly guy. He knew what he had to do. He had to determine exactly what had changed. After that, he would contact Pendragon to let him know about the changes and find out what had happened in the past to cause them. Yes. That’s what he had to do. One step at a time. As long as he didn’t let his mind shoot forward to all the unknown possibilities, he’d be okay. At least that’s what he told himself. He was the Traveler from Third Earth, a territory that up until then had not been targeted by Saint Dane. He realized it might very well be his turn. Running and hiding in the closet might have been tempting, but it wouldn’t change things. It was time for him to step into the show.

On the outer wall of his living room were two large windows covered by white horizontal blinds. They weren’t much different from the windows he had in his normal apartment, except that his regular blinds were vertical. No big deal. Vertical? Horizontal? Who cared? If this was the worst he’d see, he figured he could handle it. Normally the windows looked out onto the center atrium of Chelsea. He had a balcony outside where he spent many an afternoon reading and enjoying the happy sounds of people splashing and playing in the warm waters of the lake far below. He desperately wanted to open those blinds and see the familiar sites of his underground home.

The alien sounds and smells told him not to get his hopes up.

He walked slowly toward the windows. His bare feet felt cold on the tiled floor. No big deal, except that Patrick normally had carpet. The white tiles beneath his feet were cracked and grimy. He wondered why the broken tiles hadn’t been replaced. Or cleaned. Had he become a lazy load on the new Third Earth? In some ways that was more disturbing than knowing the whole world had changed.

He stopped at the window, his nose inches from the closed blinds. He knew in his heart that when he opened them he would see a changed world. The question was, how changed would it be? He already knew that it smelled bad. Maybe that would be the only difference.

He didn’t believe that any more than he believed the vertical blinds would be the only change.

Patrick found the string that ran down the side of the window. He grasped it, ready to pull. He took a second to catch his breath. As much as things had already changed, he figured he could handle the differences he’d seen so far. He didn’t know if the same would be said after he’d seen what lay beyond. He savored the last few seconds of his old life. He knew that once he pulled those blinds, it would all begin. Or end.

He thought of letting go of the string, leaving the blinds closed, and contacting Pendragon to find out what had happened in the past. Yes. Good idea. It might help him prepare for what was out there. He looked at his hand as he was about to let go of the string. On his finger was his Traveler ring. He heard all the stories of what Pendragon had been through in the battle against Saint Dane. He knew the sacrifices the Travelers had to make. Many had died trying to stop the demon from controlling Halla. He knew that he had had a relatively easy time of it. He suddenly felt guilty and a little ashamed for being so uncertain. For being afraid. It was his turn now. It was time.

He pulled the string.

The blinds twisted open, revealing a sight that made Patrick stumble backward, as if being repulsed by the impossible vision before him. He screamed. He couldn’t help it. It just came out.

Staring back at him was an eye. A giant sideways eye. His brain couldn’t compute what he was seeing. Did giants now roam Earth? Or did he somehow pull an “Alice in Wonderland” and shrink to action-figure size? He couldn’t catch his breath. His heart raced. What was this giant going to do? Eat him? How did it get underground in the first place?

The eye didn’t move. It stared in at Patrick, unblinking. Patrick had to force himself to look back. His terror slowly gave way to confusion. The eye was green. Completely green. The white, the pupil, even the skin around it was the same dull green color. It took Patrick a few seconds to realize that it wasn’t a living creature and never had been. It was a sculpture. It was so immense that he couldn’t see it all, but it seemed to be a statue of a head lying on its side, staring in at him.

Patrick stood on shaky legs. Though he no longer feared being eaten by a gargantuan one-eyed monster, he was still left breathless at the idea that such an immense sculpture could be right outside his window in the atrium of Chelsea.

Unless…

A sickening thought hit. His mind had trouble accepting the idea, but it seemed like the only logical explanation. He knew how to find out for sure. He had to go outside. He had to face the face. It didn’t matter that he was still in bare feet and pajamas. He had to go outside because he couldn’t see it all through the windows. Patrick moved toward the front door. It was the portal that led out onto the balcony on the fifteenth level of the underground village of Chelsea beneath New York City in the year 5014. With every bit of courage he could conjure, Patrick reached for the doorknob and pulled. The white noise grew louder. The strange odor grew stronger. Being inside the apartment had kept the worst of it away. Patrick now understood why. He didn’t need his eyes to tell him what his nose and ears already understood.

He no longer lived underground. He was hearing sounds that he had only experienced before through the holographic images stored in the data drives of the computers in the library. He was smelling the smells of a city above the ground. A city that hadn’t solved the problems of pollution. Of housing. Of overpopulation. The scientific advances that the people of Earth had made in order to save their planet never happened. Patrick stood there stunned. This was the new Earth of 5014. He had only caught a small glimpse, but he knew what he would find. No, he feared what he would find. He would have to explore this city. He would have to try and figure out what went wrong. What had changed. What Saint Dane had done to win Third Earth without ever having set foot on the territory.

Afoul wind blew down the street, ruffling his hair and kicking up a cloud of filthy papers that swirled around him. He was standing on a fourth-floor balcony on the surface of a city that had been transformed. He understood that the foul odor wasn’t anything unusual in this new environment. It was simply what the city smelled like. Same with the white noise-this was the new, normal sound of the city. The tranquility was gone. The faint citrus aroma was gone. The grassy meadows were gone. The sky was gray. Was it cloudy? Or something more sinister? Maybe that looming gray ceiling was what he was sucking into his lungs as it tickled the back of his throat.

Almost nothing was familiar. Almost. Patrick could have convinced himself that he had been transported to an alien city anywhere in Halla, except for an undeniable reality that was staring him right in the face. It was the green sculpture. Now that he was outside he saw it for what it really was. He saw that he’d been right-the eye was actually sideways and the face was on its side. The sculpture was so huge that the uppermost eye was on the level of his fourth-floor balcony. The rest of the statue stretched down the cracked pavement of the wide street in front of his new home. He was almost close enough to reach out and touch its nose. He saw through the dull green patina that there were signs of rust and corrosion spread over its surface. This sculpture was made of metal.

Patrick was in shock. Maybe that was a good thing. If not, he surely would have crumbled under the weight of the reality he was faced with. Literally. He was having trouble breathing. He wasn’t sure if that was due to the foul air, or because the sight in front of him had taken his breath away. He felt weak. He had to lean against the building or he would have fallen down.

He tried to swallow. He couldn’t. His mouth was too dry.

“So?” he croaked hoarsely at the lifeless statue. “What happened?”

The statue didn’t answer, of course. It wasn’t alive. It had never been alive, though it could not have looked more dead. As much as Patrick wanted to deny it, he was definitely in a new New York City, staring into the eye of the Statue of Liberty.