The Source - Michael Cordy [94]
'Yes, I suppose we did.' But even as he said it, Ross thought of the light emanating from the tunnel of blood: the source. It was now clear that the garden and its unusual life forms were merely physical expressions of the miraculous powers that had drawn him here. The true source of the miraculous garden, and possibly life itself, was what Hackett had called the base genotype. And when he thought of its power and his desire to ensure Lauren's recovery, he realized that, despite the crystal in his bag, he might not have everything he had come for. Not yet, anyway.
55
The next morning Ross woke early and while the others slept he stole into the forbidden caves. He wasn't sure what he hoped to achieve, only that he had to explore the caves one last time before he left. As he entered, he wondered how old they were. He guessed that radioactive dating would place them at, or near, the dawn of creation.
In the half-light he saw two white figures in the pool, picking shards of crystal rock from the water and gnawing at them with small but impressively sharp teeth. Their translucent flesh seemed to pulse in the gloom. Immediately they saw him, they stopped and opened their mouths in song. Their voices filled the cave, building in a crescendo, then stopped abruptly. They didn't move, just watched him. So he mimicked their singing, note for note.
They opened their mouths again. This time they sang a higher, more complex sequence of notes.
Again Ross copied it.
One of the nymphs came closer. It had red flowers in its frondlike hair. Its mouth widened and a chattering sound came from it, like laughter. Close up the creature was disconcerting. Its large eyes reminded him of a Disney cartoon, but when he looked into them he couldn't see any emotion – any connection. Its mouth, full of sharp animal teeth, confirmed that it was no human. And yet, when he copied its sounds, it responded. He wondered if Orlando Falcon, the brilliant linguist and communicator, had done something similar all those centuries ago. Had he formed a bond with these creatures, especially after the conquistadors had been killed? Were they his only companions while he was stranded in this strange, dangerous paradise? Had he come to see them as a simpler, more innocent version of humanity, harking back to a time before we were corrupted?
Ross tried an experiment. He created his own sound – but as soon as he uttered the first note he knew it wasn't original. He was unconsciously reproducing the alien scales from Spielberg's Close Encounters of the Third Kind. But when he stopped, the nymph copied him. Perfectly.
He tried another tune: the James Bond theme. Again the nymph reproduced it immaculately. Now more of them were emerging from the gloom, all keen to watch the parlour game.
He waited and his new friend, the nymph with red flowers in its hair, made another series of sounds. Unlike Ross's movie scores, the nymph's notes sounded random with no discernible tune or melody, the difference between prose and poetry. Nevertheless, he repeated the sequence and the nymphs resumed their laughter-like chattering.
He had begun to hum the Pink Panther theme, when a scream stopped him. The short, piercing sound made his skin crawl. The nymphs fell silent and turned as one to the back of the cave. Ross followed their gaze. In the gloom, among the mass of tubular stems, he saw one of the pods open to reveal a nymph with a huge, distended belly. Between its spread legs, curled in a foetal ball, was another nymph, greyer in colour but not much smaller than the mother – if that was what it was. The 'child' moved, and three of the watching nymphs lifted it from the pod and carried it to one of the pools, where they ground up shards of crystal between their teeth and fed it to the newborn, mouth-to-mouth. As it swallowed their offerings, it brightened to the radiant white of the others.
Four other nymphs walked to the pod and lifted the mother. Its colour was also changing, darkening, like that of a dead fish losing