Chapter 104

In addition to the five janitors, Mark and Jada were greeted by Fatima and Lucia. The two friends were having lunch together when Fatima got a call from Emily asking if they could come to the end of Yellow Mall. The two arrived at the terminal store just seconds before Mark and Jada.

“So,” said Mark cheerfully, “the executive is in the building! What’s up?”

Emily laughed and kissed her husband on the cheek and then led him by the hand. “Right! It’s over here. Farideh saw it first.” The group of nine walked a short distance along the back wall of the store until coming to a slight indentation in the wall.

“Do you see what we see, Mark?” asked Farideh. “We measure the length across as exactly four meters. Does that suggest something to you?”

Mark nodded thoughtfully. “Well, it wouldn’t be the first trapdoor down here. But this is different. It’s not a closet area. This is flush with the wall.”

Aggie spoke up. “Farideh spotted this about an hour ago. She called Emily and Emily called me. Eventually all five of us janitors were down here.”

Kiyoko also spoke. “During the last hour we split up and searched the walls of all six terminal stores, both floors. None of the other stores has anything like this. This is unique.”

Mark nodded again. “Great work guys, and especially for you, Farideh. The indentation is so subtle, how did you notice it?”

“There was a vague reference to something unusual in my janitor training, something about a terminal information thread. I asked later and none of the other janitors remembered anything similar in their lessons. With all the excitement, I guess I parked the issue on the back burner. But last night in a dream I remembered the issue and had a thought. What if the word terminal meant the terminal store? Today is my free day, so I wandered over here after breakfast and just tried to give everything a close look. That’s when I found this.” Farideh finished with a gesture of her hand.

Mark locked eyes with Fatima for a brief confirmation and then gave an executive override command that would open a portal. The wall slid to the side at once, revealing not a trapdoor but a short corridor followed by a huge sparkling chamber that was beyond stunning in its beauty. The group slowly filed in and gazed about in wonder.

The chamber was a perfectly oval room with their entrance corridor at one end of the long axis. Emily’s expert eyes guessed the dimensions of the chamber’s two axes as sixteen by twenty-four meters. A double oval staircase spiraled up to the surface, starting at each end of the short axis to their left and right and following the oval curve up a quarter circumference to the opposite end of the long axis above. Emily judged the climb to be twenty meters, which from the second level of the terminal store would put the upper level of their chamber even with the surface area above the Mall.

Both staircases were wooden in appearance, a matched set and massively made, and the rich full-grained woods gleamed with a lacquer-like finish. And everywhere their eyes traveled, the group found new delights to behold. Pearl inlays within the wood, a mosaic floor of abstract patterns filled with riotous colors, and the vaulted ceiling far above seemed to be one gigantic rough amethyst crystal.

“This is magnificent,” Fatima whispered as the group walked to the left staircase across the mosaic floor. There were glowing crystals along the walls that softly sparkled and filled the chamber with flowing hues of light. The dominant color was a rich green light, and the net effect was overwhelming. They were in a chamber of exquisite beauty. After a while Aggie began climbing the stairs. The others followed. As they neared the top, Emily looked ahead and counted a total of 108 steps to the level above. “Remember the terminal stores are outside the footprint of the Great Hexagon. The perimeter wall will be about three-hundred meters to our southwest.”

“These green crystals in the walls,” asked Kiyoko, “do you think they’re real emeralds?”

“They certainly look like it,” replied Aggie as her hand glided along the glowing crystals. She gave a short laugh. “Wow! This would be a great place for our marriage ceremonies!”

At the top of the stairs they came to a small rectangular observation chamber with a transparent wall which contained an exit to the outside. Through the exit they could see a short grotto of rough rock, and beyond that was the great outdoors, a snow covered landscape that showed the forest outside the Great Hexagon. Far to their left they could see continuation of the northeast face of their great perimeter wall. The group stopped and stared. After a year of calling the great complex home, this was their first direct look of the landscape just outside.

The snow had stopped and the east wind had cleared the clouds at this location. The forest was sparkling in the day’s brief orange sunlight. Farideh walked slowly to a control panel by the transparent wall. “I was taught about this in my lessons,” she announced. “The wall to the outside is locked now, but I have the authority to release it.”

Suvarna came over and studied the controls and nodded. “Do you think it’s safe? Should we go out? There’s lots of winter sporting clothes down below if we do.”

Farideh studied the control too. “I can authorize a permanent release, not to open the door but to release the lock. Then anybody can use this passage at any time.” Without further thought she gave the release command as janitor of Yellow Mall.

The side wall perpendicular to the exit glowed with a sharp light, and everyone turned to see. Mark felt he was in the presence of immense insect-like creatures, an outlandish combination of spiders and bees with the largest the size of a small car. And then his mind ... And then his mind...

Mark lay gasping on the floor. Others around him were also down and struggling to recover. Did he dare look at the terrible wall again? He couldn’t resist the challenge. A blink of an eye glance, and then another, longer this time. It was okay. The great mural that covered the wall was not grabbing his mind again. That was good. The first ride had captured him with shattering intensity. Slowly Mark and the others stood up and gazed at the picture.

Mark was too emotionally distraught to speak. The eight women with him were silent as well. It was just so much to take in. They had all been given a glimpse of what mental ability could truly be, a glimpse perhaps of how humans would think after another billion years of evolution.

So vast! The power, the complexity, the overwhelming greatness of it all! And in some sense, so obvious! Their newfound linking ability was a real physical phenomenon. Why couldn’t a device be created that would project information to them through a mind link? The mural had done just that. It was multiplexed thoughts and information flows beyond anything they ever imagined possible, hours of teaching presented as a single integrated matrix, a quantum burst of information. Mark thought it would be weeks before all the fine points of his lesson would finally sink in.

But the major points had already been hammered home. The largest creative in the mural had no name, nothing a human would consider a name anyway. The insect creatures used distinctive pheromones as names, and thus the names of the three creatures before them had no translation into human speech. The largest was the mother, and the two smaller creatures were her children. All three were female. The species was bisexual but the males were much smaller and used only for breeding. Male intelligence had been genetically eliminated from the species long before dinosaurs walked the Earth.

The younger of the two sisters was very young indeed, one of numerous hatchlings from the most recent brood cycle. Mark stared at the infant insect and shuddered. She was playing with their infamous ivy plant, and the plant completely subdued by the infant’s mind control. A minor branch of the information matrix revealed that the ivy was roughly the equivalent of a baby rattle, an amusement toy which also had the secondary function of eliminating mentally deficient hatchlings.

The second child in the mural was much older. Through competitive elimination, she was the last living member of her mother’s older brood cycle. And as the sole survivor, she was receiving her adult training and was at the threshold of the mind drugs that would forever change her and carry her to full adulthood. She stood by her mother’s side, and as her image gazed at the humans before her, Mark realized that it was this child who had created the mural and its information matrix. And the child had created so much more. She had created everything.

The insect child offered the humans a name for herself. Her complex pheromone name was based on the distinctive odors of the twelve eyes that orbited her head. The eyes were also an unusual shade, bright blue. Eye color was an ignored attribute in her species, but child knew humans made much of it, so to the humans she offered her name as Sapphire.

Sapphire’s mother, Mark struggled to understand the concepts. The mother’s title was, Survey Under-Lady? Something like that anyway, the job concept just didn’t translate well. The mother was responsible for monitoring a vast region of space, one that included Earth’s entire Milky Way galaxy and more.

A previous scan of Earth had been done on schedule six-to-the-ninth-power years ago, years as measured by Sapphire’s home planet. It was the same as the orbital period of the planet Mark was on now. In Earth years, the insect species had surveyed Earth 4.6 million years ago, at the dawn of the age of Dinofelis. In the old survey, no problem was found after much genetic information had been taken, analyzed, and cataloged. Through her mother, Sapphire had access to the data banks.

But then Earth was visited again, a routine recheck early in Earth’s year 2018. The scan of course went unnoticed by Earth, but what the Survey Under-Lady found was shocking, an abomination and an unforgivable affront to her species’ God. Another species, a mammalian quadrupod no less!, was on the verge of developing mind linking abilities. Such insult to the natural order of the cosmos could not and would not be borne. The Survey Under-Lady knew with absolute certainty that it was her species alone that had been chosen to receive the gift of the linked mind. The mother’s authority, power, and obligations were clear and unquestioned. The universe must be and would be returned to God’s desired state.