Alex The Inventor-(Chapter 1/Pt. 2)

Books 1 & 2 can also be read at: Deep Sky Stories

Chapter 1 (Part 2)

Halden's mouth fell open and stayed that way for a full Martian minute, which is quite a long time when compared to ours. What was his father thinking? Was he mad? What would be the purpose behind such an impossible challenge?But, before Halden could think of his first words to say in protest, the king went further still."We were not being capricious regarding the challenge that your mother and I decided upon, nor do we take it lightly, Hal'd because there is also a reason behind our challenge for you. We wish for you to be a scout for our clan - nay, for all our people," T'eir said."There has long been the need among our people to strive to climb free from the bonds of this Homeworld and branch away to new, uncharted places. It is true that our bravest fliers once gained footholds on nearby Phobos and Deimos," he added with a wave at each moon, "but their purpose for that was merely to wage a regrettable High-War using creatures who should have remained here as peaceful laborers.""Now, a time of serious change is upon us and we have need of your fresh and unique talent, Halden. Your mother and I have seen how you enjoy building and creating all manner of interesting machines since you were small, and now that you are older, I have seen how much you yearn to spread your wings and explore.""So now, here in this secret place and with the help of some of the most well versed thinkers of our clan, you will seek to attain your journey. The Craft-Book of our clan does not describe a vessel such as the one that you must build but we will lend our knowledge and secrets when need be.""It will be a dangerous journey, no doubt, Halden, but nothing beyond the safety of childhood is without risk."((To achieve this voyage to the Blue Waterworld, you will simply have to accept that there will be more risk – that is all)), T'eir finished with those gravely serious words from his mind.So began young Halden's journey into manhood and it was an arduous one to be sure. Yet once he set his mind to the goal and started working with the materials he had, one problem after the other, soon was solved. The designers and technicians who were supposed to assist Halden soon found that their help was only needed occasionally because the lad had such a sharp mind that he was able to quickly grasp the necessary teachings or skills and soon moved on to surpass even his tutors.Before long, a small, sturdy vessel began to take shape in the center of the cave and, with each passing day, Halden gained more and more certainty about how well all the pieces of the little spacecraft should fit into place.

There was, however, still one vital component to be added about which the boy simply had no clue. It was the propulsion system which would hopefully send the craft and him skyward when the navigational formulas were properly calculated.

He knew what he needed but did not know where to find any of the elements of the engine he was thinking about building. Even the scholars with whom he consulted had no idea where such elements could be found or even if they existed. Finally, in desperation, Halden went to see his father.

When Halden found the King, he noticed for the first time how much stress his father was under. T'eir was thinner than he had ever been before and his face was drawn and shadowed from constant concerns which Halden had no knowledge of.

His father was seldom seen inside the palace anymore because he was travelling constantly from one village to the next, from one end of the Valley to the other, to meet with the other Royals and Elders. Halden guessed though that all this extra work his father had to do was in response to attacks from the sky which were becoming more and more frequent.

The War Machines had apparently survived the kill-signals which his people had used to try shutting them down several years before. Now the machines had found the means to descend from their moon bases and land on his Homeworld, to wreak havoc among the vulnerable villages of the lowland plains far to the East. It was even rumored that preparations were being made to defend against a possible full invasion by the High-War Machines now known as the Others.

Those cold creatures which had been banished to the two moons, generations before, to do the bidding of their Masters below, were now returning with a vengeance beyond imagining. Everywhere there was a palpable tension in the air as practice battles among youthful Royals on their Dragonflies took place high above the valley floor.

Food and provisions were taken into the Royal Palace walls to prepare for a possible siege while makeshift shelters for the common folk were built down on the valley floor, nearby the palace. His father was indeed a very overburdened man at the moment, but even so, when the king was informed that his son wished to speak with him, he dropped all else immediately to see him.

"What may I help you with, Hal'd", he asked quietly as the boy entered the throne-room which the king had ordered cleared only a few minutes before.

After T'eir listened intently to Halden's problem regarding the propulsion system for his vessel, he said, "come, I will now show you what you will need, for I knew that you would require two last elements for your craft if you were able to complete it as far as you now have."

The king led Halden down below the palace into the deepest and most secret of chambers. There he revealed to the boy that which he had not divulged to even his most educated scholars. For within a large clay box T'eir revealed a beautiful and delicate looking artifact to Halden; it was a glittering double-spiral of glass coils, one inside the other and tapered to a point three feet above the base which had the same diameter.

The handcrafted coils were made of a strange glass which the king said their ancestors had brought back from a mysterious and faraway place. The coils were hollow and the glass itself held properties of great and unusual power.

Even before they pushed back the heavy lid to the protective clay crypt containing the coils, they could sense the vibrant energy emanating from the glass artifact.

The crypt stood in the center of the underground chamber and carved out of the ceiling, above the coils was a wide, round opening which ascended high up into darkness. T’eir then led Halden into an adjacent chamber where he slowly withdrew a measured quantity of a strange, vaporous liquid from a subterranean reservoir.

Contact with the Martian atmosphere soon caused a chemical reaction that created more vapor as the liquid began quickly evaporating. These two unlikely elements, one a glass artifact taken from an unknown, faraway world and the other, a reactive, liquefied gas from beneath the ground of Mars would, when combined, cause time itself to blur away from anything which one would consider normal space-time.

"I do not know the why of all the alchemy which is unlocked by the combining of these two stranger elements, Halden", the king said, "but what I do know is that our fore-bearers guessed or imagined the unthinkable when they brought one together with the other."

And as he said those words, T'eir carefully ladled a small droplet of the burbling, vaporous liquid into the opening of one of the two spiraling glass coils. "Stand back," he ordered as, immediately, there arose from the coils a sparking, frizzing light-cloud of blurred, dimensionally imbalanced and state-shifted Time.

Within the boundaries of that small cloud, Time lost a very small amount of "density" or relevance compared to the 3-Dimensional space to which it was normally bound. The result was an unnatural and dangerous imbalance or shifting of Time away from normal Space.

Therefore, if the natural order was to be returned or reset for the Time within the Time-Fizz Cloud, then the alien-made glass coils would need to move a corresponding distance through Space to compensate for that Time Imbalance.

A spinning ring of pure energy suddenly materialized around the clay box, and with a crackling bang and a blinding flash of light, the box containing the alien glass coils shot straight up the large chimney-hole in the ceiling and disappeared.

Halden stared up after it, dumbfounded and amazed by what seemed to be pure magic. The sight and sound of the Dimensional Imbalance Virtual Engine being activated caused him to jump back several more steps as well.

"Where did it go?" he finally asked in a small, frightened voice.

"Why, up to the throne-room above us, of course," his father said with a slight twinkle of mischief in his deep blue eyes. "Come Hal'd, there is yet more to see and learn."

The king then showed Halden the third secret chamber below the throne-room and it was also the largest and most valuable one of all. For it was a Chamber of Knowledge and each of its four stone walls was written over with ancient carved symbols and prophetic pictures.

The entire length of one of the walls was devoted to a large, intricately carved map of the Valley as well. T'eir and Prince Halden spent the remainder of the day in that last chamber as the king sought to teach his son the solemn importance of the vital information on each wall.

The entire alphabet of their language was carved on the first wall, as well as the most important root-words which the rest were built upon. Halden knew all these letters and words, of course, yet for some reason, the king wished to impress upon his son each and every small detail of that chamber.

"Only after you have remembered all there is to know within this room will I then permit you to complete your ship and journey to the Blue Waterworld, Hal'd," said T'eir, "for this be all the foundational knowledge of our Homeworld and when I am no more, you must be able to pass it on to your children and all those who come after. Do you understand, Hal'd?"

The boy looked up at his father with different eyes then, and he noticed for the first time how very old the king was becoming. A pang of sadness caused him to look quickly away for fear that his thoughts would become known to the tall, proud man.

"Yes, father," he said. Halden plunged right away into the task before him and devoted every minute of that day to absorbing and memorizing every detail of the Chamber of Knowledge. The Language Wall, which was the easiest of the four to read, did not take very long to study and retain.

Next, there was a smaller wall at the far end of the room which was divided down the middle into two separately engraved pictures by a single straight line. "This is the Wall of Chaos," T'eir said quietly. There were no words to describe each ancient picture because none were needed. Halden could clearly understand that each contained his Homeworld and its two moons.

On each picture as well was drawn a fiery ball representing the Centraorbal Flame and around each ball of flame was a perfectly carved circle indicating the orbit of Mars around it.

After those similarities though, the two pictures were drastically different from one another. The first picture showed Halden his Homeworld as it was now and its orbit was as it should be, but the second engraving contained what appeared to be many mistakes in the drawing.

The first mistake was the extra, much larger planet which cut downward across the orbit of Halden's world like a falling hammer. It was drawn so close to his Homeworld that there was barely any space between the two carved planets.

The second mistake was just as glaring because the orbital circle of Mars was now slightly off-center from the Centraorbal Flame. The implied cause of this "wrong" orbit was obvious at first glance: the sudden appearance of the dangerously close alien world and the massive upheaval, the chaos that it brought with it. Then, just below the second picture, were four small rectangular shapes which Halden hadn't noticed before.

"What are those?" he asked his father. The king seemed not to hear him but Halden noticed a shadow of dread fall briefly over his father's face. T'eir quickly regained his composure though because he then proceeded to teach Halden about the Great Change which would come to their Homeworld every 5,000 of their years.

"This is as we are now," he said, indicating the normal picture, "and this is what shall befall us again…someday." The king took care to sound matter-of-fact and to betray no signs of the dreadful worry which the second picture brought him. Let the boy know of it but let him think of the threat as a far-off one of many life-times yet to come.

"Come now to The Map of the Royals," he said evenly as he guided Halden to the other larger wall which stood across from the Language Wall.

"Come sit with me, Hal'd for this wall holds the Map of the Royals and must be more than only memorized, it must be sealed within your very soul," the king said gravely.

They sat on the floor in the center of the small, ancient room and there T'eir instructed Halden over and over, from mind to mind. Time and again the king gestured at each small dot which followed the other all along the length and breadth of the large map of the Valley.

The art work was exquisite in every fine detail and after a while of this continuous teaching and meditation, the map seemed to become detached from the wall and begin floating before Halden's entranced eyes. The lush river valley then seemed to take the boy into its vast wilderness and Halden knew a feeling of flying freely through each and every cleft and rill and up every towering cliff, then down again and again.

Halden breathed calmly and deeply as the beloved River Valley of his people flashed below his wonder-struck eyes. Would there have been a wind, he'd have thought himself to be a Dragonfly soaring higher and higher, seeing every single windswept tower which the River Styx had carved out from age to age as it grumbled down from the Tharsis Uplands faraway to the west.As the river flowed eastward, it grew ever wider until its northern and southern shores became lost from each other below their own horizons. So vast were the waters in the mid-regions of that greatest of all canyons that those who dwelt along its shores named it the The Sea Of Olympah. The river flowed very slowly there and during winter months, was a vast, frozen sea over which daring clans-people raced their Sand Skimmers, the sails of their swift, dangerous little crafts billowing and taught ropes thrumming in the strong, gusting winds.

Of course, there were thousands of such villages throughout the valley, with their own Royal Palaces. Seen from such a great height, they all took on the appearance of little dots as the tower of each Palace rose up majestically from its footing on the valley floor.((There, the Cly Royals)), said his father's voice in Halden's mind, ((there, the Tils Royals...yonder the Hok Royals)).

On and on the young prince flashed back and forth over the Map and each mile and every palace on the map was impressed forever into his subconscious and his soul. Although Halden felt he was soaring through thousands of miles within the map, he did not tire because his mind was completely alive and absorbed in each wondrous moment of discovery.

The Martian boy had no sense of the passage of time for he was at once enthralled and captivated by his spirit-journey through the ancient map on the wall.

It is said that an entire lifetime can be lived in only a few moments of greatest pleasure or excitement, for those are the moments in one's life which are of utmost importance; so it was with Halden. He had such a delicious feeling of joy as every detail, every peak and valley and every exotic palace in his valley was ingrained into every fiber of his being.

In the process of being so fully immersed in the map for those long minutes, all the priceless gems of knowledge of the Valley became a part of Halden's identity and lineage. Thus he would never forget the precious secrets of his Homeworld and they would flow beyond him to his children and their children as well.

After every fine detail and substance of the Valley had been saturated into the boy's mind and soul, he grew blissfully tired as though having finished a very strenuous yet important task that he could be forever proud of. His arms which had been spread out like wings throughout his long, exciting journey, drooped lazily and Halden slowly closed his eyes. The Valley below slowly blurred and receded farther and farther from him.

The last sensation though was most curious because it was not a sight but a sound that he heard. It was a single high, clear musical note which he had heard only once before in his life. It was the sound that his Luss had made only moments after it was placed in his hands for the first time by its crafter. Every significant moment in Halden's life after that was marked by a "song" from his Luss.

In that same fashion, the vision of the Map of the Royals in the Chamber of Knowledge was sealed within him forever. Halden awoke from his quiet meditation still sitting beside his father, on the dusty chamber floor and he knew that a special gift had just been passed on to him.

Something warm and glowing fell from his brow and into his waiting hand. The spell was nearly finished. His father's strong, guiding voice still echoed in his mind though as he continued reciting all the family names of the Royals who lived peacefully with them in the Styx River Valley. Halden looked up at his father and noticed contentment in him that he hadn't seen in many months. His eyes were still closed in blissful meditation and a calm smile touched his lips.

((Thank you, father)), Halden whispered into the king's happy mind. T'eir lifted his head just a bit higher and prouder then turned and looked over at his son with that same Royal pride. It was a simple, piercing gaze which caused Halden's heart to skip a beat because he knew that his father was considering him more of a man now than a boy.

When they were finished with their meditations, T'eir and Halden stood up and the boy assumed that it was time to leave the Chamber of Knowledge. Although he could not see the outside world above them, Halden was very hungry and so he figured that dinner time was not far off.

As he turned to leave however, he realized that he was now facing the fourth and last wall of the chamber. He had not noticed it before because it was the wall that they had passed through when they first walked into the chamber, entering under a low archway. His father's strong, heavy hand came down on his shoulder to stop him from leaving. The king and his son stood together now, facing the fourth wall which was divided in two by the low, narrow archway.

((We cannot yet leave, Halden)), the king telepathed, ((there is a last wall to study, and it is also the most difficult of all.))

Halden looked on this final wall which held the last two engraved pictographs on either side of the crumbling archway. The left half of the divided wall was engraved with a picture that stood out from the others in the room in the harshest manner.

It was an image which was created with crudely drawn scrapes and scratches over the dusty sandstone wall. Indeed, the scratch marks were so numerous as to make the whole picture, and the people drawn in it, very difficult to see.

Halden got the impression that the artist who etched this corner of the Chamber of Knowledge was a person torn between two very strong emotions. One was the strong desire, perhaps even a feeling of obligation to record that moment in time, while the second of the two emotions was one of sadness and shame. Perhaps even anger...

Next: Chapter 1 (Remaining Part)

Halden must come to grips with a new revelation from the Chamber of Knowledge: a terrible decision from the past that has long burdened the psyche of his people; that being a monstrous act of violence that was perpetrated by their distant ancestors - and with it, the ongoing and destructive consequences of that act.But, there is also one last secret to be revealed before Halden departs on his journey. And it is a gift both wondrous and frightening. As of 2017-07-20, this chapter will be at: Deepskystories.com