The Hollow Earth by Rudy Rucker

Author:Rudy Rucker [Rucker, Rudy]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Fantasy, Edgar Allan Poe, Steampunk, Science Fiction, Hollow Earth, Historical
ISBN: 9781932265200
Publisher: Creative Commons Release of Monkeybrains Books edition
Published: 2006-12-25T08:00:00+00:00

10: Seela

It took me a while to fall asleep. Down in the center of the planet, huge vague fingers of energy wandered and branched, filling our deep jungle with shaking light. To my solitary fancy, the flickers came in rhythm with the sounds: the buzzings of insects, the stealthy rustles of unseen crawling things, and—most unsettling of all—the plops and wallowings of great creatures slipping in and out of the ponds. Now and then would come a distant howl or shriek to set my hair on end. So wet was the air that jiggling gobbets of water kept landing on my face and oozing into my nose. I tossed this way and that, fretting at my tether while Arf and the three men snored.

I thought of Virginia. It was incredible that Eddie’s possessiveness and folly had killed her. Sis had been an odd duck, but I felt I’d loved her. The remembered feel of her chalky flesh up in Mrs. Clemm’s dark garret haunted me in complex ways. More purely pleasant were my memories of Sukie, and of my two visits to a woman named Lupe in Rio. Sukie, Virginia, Lupe. Would I ever meet a girl to truly love? Love... love was a maze, a heavenly city...

Otha woke me, who knows how many hours later. “Hsst, Mason! I hears somethin!” I rubbed the sleep out of my eyes and tried to listen. The cries and rustles of the jungle beasts were unchanged but, yes, there was something new—a roaring, almost human sound, oddly warped and amplified.

“You think there be giants here?” asked Otha. The far-off garbled yelling went on and on. “Sound like he hungry, too!”

Flesh-eating giants? I woke Eddie and Jeremiah. “There’s some kind of monster,” I told them. “Over there!”

Jeremiah cocked his head as alertly as Arf. “Let’s go investigate!” said he.

“What if he eats us?”

“We’ll sneak and mayhap steal his treasures. Stout heart now, Mason!”

So sneak we did. The direction of our travel lay crosswise rather than inward or outward. Now and then the giant voice—for a human voice it surely was—stopped its droning blabber, but never for long, and as we drew closer it got ever louder. As the end of an hour approached, the light became brighter, and then we found ourselves at the jungle’s far edge, peeping out of the immense thicket like anxious wrens.

A huge ocean spread across the Earth’s inner curve, hanging in the distance like a great, never-breaking wave. The jungle’s limit was as a huge wall that stretched miles outward to the edge of the sea and mounted miles inward toward the center of the Hollow Earth. Great vines thrust immense flowers out into the free, light-filled air above the sea. Rather than facing inward toward the Earth’s center, the flowers pointed toward the sea, and each of them cradled a huge central glob of water. The voice was clear enough so that we could make out individual nonsense words—yet no giant was to be seen.

Turning our heads this way and that we finally determined that the voice came from the nearest flower, just inward from us.

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