Golgota (a science-fiction novel)

Chapter 12

Golgotha.

Because the wind is blowing so hard, a mother animal has sought shelter in a cave. It is only a hole in a hill, over which the green sediment is swept with high pressure, but it is big enough for the mother animal. All over lies the putrid green light like a heavy blanket. The fat, white loaf is a blur in the rain. And yet, if you look closely, you can see the babies writhing on the teats. Seeking the mother's closeness.

And the wind sweeps on, up to the black crystal walls of the mountains, and everything becomes blurred in the Nubii. In the distance shone the red eye of a pumping station.

And there, in the shelter, the mother animal and her brood, and all is silent.

It is a strange sight of peace.

After half a day, they took a rest by the great steps. Kovacs closed his eyes briefly, even though he knew he would not sleep. It was quiet down here. But that didn't mean anything. They were in the halls of the god.

Blurred, just a shade lighter than the darkness around them, Kovacs thought he could make out the floor. A smooth expanse of dark stone as far as the eye could see. Here and there - Kovacs wasn't sure if it was just his imagination - he could see massive steel beams reaching to the distant ceiling.

"Enough resting," he heard Ellison's voice echo through the darkness. "We need to keep moving."

Kovacs wasn't sure, but he thought he heard nervousness in Ellison's voice. Why shouldn't we, he then thought. They worship the Great Machine God, and although he hasn't woken up yet, any of us would feel safer once we got past this place.

It's very lonely down here. Even a machine could go insane there at some point.

They continued to descend the stairs. The stairs, like everything else in the labyrinth, were adjusted to the massive size of the firstborn. It always took two men to carry a man down a flight of stairs. They supported him from below while he still clung to the edge of the top step.

It was tiring, monotonous.

Macey said, "If the Firstborn were so advanced with their technology, why didn't they ever build elevators?"

Kovacs searched his memory for the word "elevator," but found nothing. Bobby Kovacs had never seen an elevator in his life. He knew what it was - a car that carried someone to another floor - but there was no concrete image.

By the end of the day, they had finally reached the floor. They walked across an empty space. There were no clues for the eyes to cling to, nothing that gave any exclusion about which direction they had to move.

They decided to stick to the direction in which the steps had pointed. They marched another half day, and although the landscape remained dreary and monotonous, it became increasingly grotesque. Steel chains reached out from the ground and were lost in the darkness above their heads. Between the massive steel beams and the chains lay creatures of metal here and there, often rudimentary debris: Severed heads of steel with large, dark eyes; torsos, without arms or legs; a severed grasping arm with sharp-edged claws. One of the machine creatures was nearly complete and lying sideways. The machine-being's head was attached to some kind of hydraulic hose and loomed above them, so far that it could not be seen in the blackness.

A graveyard, Kovacs thought.

He wondered if Ska Azath had killed all those machine creatures.

Then he must be a very angry god, Kovacs thought, but actually he had not expected anything else.