Goblinopolis, The Tol Chronicles, Book 1 (22 page)

• 9
  Courage.
  

The deep carpeting kept noise to a minimum. The only sounds were his still somewhat ragged breathing and the soft ploof of his footsteps as he headed ever deeper into the monster’s belly. A sudden distant boom startled him, and he stopped to listen, senses suddenly on full alert. After a few seconds it rang out again—the far-off reverberating clang of very heavy machinery being operated. If he harbored any doubts about his host’s mechanical rather than biological origin, they lost their footing at this and slid into oblivion.

Aspet resumed his inward trek, keeping an ear cocked for the source of the metallic cacophony. It was definitely coming from ahead of him somewhere, and below his current level. It didn’t seem to be getting appreciably louder, though, so he decided not to worry too much about it for the time being. There were far more interesting diversions popping up all around him. Literally.

A large bulbous mass suddenly detached from the roof and hit the floor in front of him, squelching heavily as it bounced. Aspet grabbed a tasteful mahogany settee upholstered with combed bonggong fur to use as a shield and waited to see if anything emerged from the huge quivering sac.

After a minute of standing there waving a piece of furniture at a giant beach ball, Aspet began to feel slightly silly. He slowly lowered the settee and at last sat on it, legs crossed, waiting. More minutes passed in total silence. Even the gobs with the oversized wrenches seemed to have taken a beverage break. Finally he could resist no longer. He reached out and touched the squamous sphere, ever so gently. The reaction was not one he could have anticipated.

The surface of the sphere closed around his hand as soon as he made contact, and seemed to flow over his entire body before he could effectively react. Within a few seconds he was completely enclosed. Aspet gasped and struggled at first, but the interior of his prison gradually took on such an intriguing appearance that the adrenalin rush played itself out and he was left to goggle in wonder.

He was in a grand library; a room as big as the floating creature itself had seemed. He decided not to let the fact that he was in a place too big to be contained by the thing it was contained in worry him. The universe had obviously adopted, at least temporarily, a new set of rules and regulations that he would sort out later. He wandered along the edges of the opulent chamber, staring up at the endless shelves of books that stretched all the way to the ceiling towering far above him. There were hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of volumes here. He didn’t know that many books existed in the whole of Tragacanth, goblins not being voracious readers as a species. He was rather fond of books personally, though.

• 9
  Adaptability.
  

Aspet felt he could easily spend, if not all of his remaining days, at least a goodly chunk of them here in this bottomless well of knowledge. It occurred to him that there was so very much about life and existence he didn’t know. He had one of those annoying ‘hall of mirrors’ moments at this point, watching himself observing himself being depressed about his ignorance, to infinite recursion.

Shaking it off, he selected a tome at random and extracted it carefully from the shelf. The movement dislodged a fine particulate which dispersed and settled lazily on the enormous woven area rug that defined the center of the library. The dust made him sneeze; despite the cavernous size of the room the sound was absorbed almost immediately by a vast sea of organic bindings.

The book Aspet chose to peruse had a beautiful gold-tooled title on the spine that made no sense whatever to him. He just liked the craftsmanship and the soft pliable feel of the leather. He took it over to a richly appointed table seemingly carved from a single slab of some exotic xylem and opened it. The odor thus released reminded him of a long-forgotten banquet from his childhood. He tried to read the words, but instead of flowing into his brain via his eyes, the images and ideas seemed to be following other paths. He could feel, smell, taste, and even hear the events portrayed in the narrative, but the words themselves were meaningless.

He was trying to wrap his brain around this new form of literary exposition when the pages of the book began to dissolve. The sentences ran out onto the table and spilled down to the floor. He soon found himself crawling around on all fours under the furniture trying to keep up with the story. This was the hardest plot to follow he’d ever encountered, yet it was so completely engrossing that he couldn’t give it up without a fight.

Aspet never really stood a chance, though. Next the words and finally the individual letters all went their separate scurrying ways, like scavenger-bugs scattering in a sudden light. He got off his hands and knees and sat there on the floor, wondering what in the world had happened to his book.

• 9
  Persistence.
  

He stared down at his lap for a while, deep in thought. A slight but uncharacteristically chilly breeze eased him gradually back to the here and now. He looked around for the source and was quite surprised to discover that he was no longer in the library.

He was in a field of wildly dissimilar tallish plants, waving gently in the wind. The cool air was swirling with a complex mixture of scents: some vaguely familiar, some he never remembered smelling before. The table, the books, the library—even the creature itself—had vanished as though they had never existed at all. In their place was left a crazy botanical wilderness like none Aspet had ever conceived.

He stood there a long while, examining the curious plants, breathing in the heady atmosphere, and just generally not knowing what to do next. It was a situation to which he’d lately grown accustomed. Eventually he began to wander, pushing bizarrely-shaped, outrageously pigmented foliage aside as he moved. Occasionally a small creature would skitter or flap away when he disturbed it. Once he heard the throaty growl of a distinctly larger predatory-sounding thing, but it wasn’t close enough that he felt it to be directed at him. He had no idea where to run, even if he were attacked. He swallowed hard and hoped it wouldn’t come to that.

The plant community was thick and flamboyant, but penetrable. He found navigation relatively effortless, albeit he had no clue which way to go or what he would find when he got there. He just wandered aimlessly, pushing aside the huge leaves and ducking under the myriad multicolored flowers, seed pods, and fruits as he went.

He began to get peckish looking at all the fruits and vegetables hanging about everywhere, like the world’s largest and freshest produce market. Trouble was, he had never before seen
any
of these, so he had no idea which of them might be safe to eat. He remembered reading stories of the first goblin settlers of Tragacanth, thousands of years ago. They must have faced a similar conundrum. Not that goblin physiology was exactly delicate: goblins could, and frequently did, eat things other races aggressively avoided.

He shrugged and reached out to break a small section off a particularly succulent-looking fleshy fruit. Before he could pop it into his mouth, however, there was a shrill sound and a large leafy stalk crashed rather hard across his neck.

“Arrrooo, now. Don’t be pullin’ and pickin’ at that. It ain’t ripe yet. When it’s ripe it’ll fall off, and ye can nibble on it then.”

Aspet dropped the fruit fragment and rubbed his neck where the stalk had caught it. He looked around stiffly for the source of the voice. It had come, apparently, from the plant itself.

There was a sort of bulge near the top of the center stalk of the enormous plant, with a horizontal slit in it that might pass for a mouth. Aspet immediately began puzzling over why and how a plant would evolve vocal chords and some means of operating them when the plant spoke again. The noise did, in fact, seem to come from the little slit.

“Y’ think...tooo much. Not goood t’ think sooo much.” The voice was thin and raspy, but still pretty intelligible for a plant, he thought.

“Don’t plants think? It seems to me there’s not a lot else for you to do.”

“Nooo brain,” replied the plant, a little sadly, it seemed to Aspet, “Nooo thinkin’ wi’out a brain. Jest drinkin’ and rootin,’ bloomin’ and fruitin’.”

Aspet frowned. “Now, wait a minute,” he replied, hands on hips, “If you can’t think, how are you able to talk?”

“There’s nay connection atween think and talk, nubbly. If y’ were thinkin,’ fer example, would y’ be talkin’ to a plant right now?”

“Hey, I didn’t start this little discussion:
you
did. I’m just responding to you.”

“Ah, but are y’ thinkin’ about it? I mean, if y’ think about it, could y’
really
be conversin’ wi’ a plant wi’ nae vocal apparatus?”

Aspet considered this. “No, I suppose not. But since you
are
talking, either you
do
possess such an apparatus or you’re not really a plant, per se.”

“Or, y’ anly
think
I’m talkin’ t’ y’. I tol’ y’, thinkin’ is bad for y’.”

“Ha, ha. I hope I’m not so far gone mentally that I’m imagining debating a giant globe-root.”

Silence.

“Okay, okay, I apologize for calling you a globe-root. It was just a joke. What, you got something against globe-roots?”

• 9
  Benevolence.
  

He looked carefully at the erstwhile interlocutor. It was for all appearances just a common garden-variety giant plant now. Even the little mouth slit had seemingly disappeared. He shrugged. Giant reptiles that contain impressive libraries full of dissolving books and now talking plants that may or may not be actual talking plants...if this was a dream—and he very much hoped it was (the alternative being that he had gone firmly off the deep end)—it was a doozie. Not at all like his usual oneiric forays into mucky landscapes that clung to his feet, falling from a great height, or not being able to remember where his house/clothing was.

Pressing on, after a little while he came into a clearing. At first appearances it was perfectly pristine, but as he approached the center a ring of stones broke through the soil and grew with rather alarming rapidity. After a few seconds they were at least twice as tall as Aspet himself. He followed the line around a full 360 degrees. There was no break, no gap, no opening. He was trapped. Again.

It was a long while before anything else happened. Aspet was alone, enclosed in a lithic arena about twenty meters across, give or take a couple. Nothing stirred, not even the air. There were no animal or insect noises; no clouds scuttled across the visible sky. It was as though the rest of the universe had dropped away, leaving only his little circular island. He wandered along the impenetrable stone barrier, checking for even the slightest crack. Finding none, eventually he grew despondent and sat down sadly on the bare ground, wondering what he would do for food and water in such a place.

He leaned against a stone and closed his inner false eyelids that were usually only employed to keep out light when sleeping. Rather than the customary swirling darkness, however, the scene before his eyes remained unchanged. He opened his lids and tried it again. The overall light intensity was slightly diminished with his eyes shut, but otherwise nothing was altered. Had his inner eyelids also suddenly gone transparent? He waved his hand in front of his face. He couldn’t see it unless the lids were retracted, but the backdrop of stones and empty arena implacably remained, taunting him with staunch immutability.

Not being able to seek refuge from the world behind closed eyes was far more disturbing than he would have guessed. It was maddening, in fact, and he realized that madness was a very real possibility if he couldn’t lean to cope, and quickly. But how exactly does one cope with a landscape that leaks directly into the brain?

As he was puzzling over this, Aspet noticed one of the stones glowing softly. Excited, he nevertheless approached it somewhat cautiously. A diffuse bluish radiance shimmered over the surface of the monolith. As he drew nearer, a finger of blue projected itself from the aura in his direction. The closer he came, the longer the protrusion extended. Hesitantly, he edged nearer until the finger came in contact with his chest. At that moment the stone circle vanished and he was in free fall from an inestimable height.

• 9
  Logic.
  

After he got over the initial shock, he realized that he wasn’t really falling: it was more like being suspended in midair. There were no visual clues as to
where
, precisely, he was suspended, however. The atmosphere around him was a uniform dull silvery-gray. He discovered that he could walk normally, even though there was no apparent surface supporting him. Occasional wisps of white floated past, but otherwise nothing moved. He was no longer trapped in a ring of stones, but Aspet soon came to realize that he was as much a prisoner in this new location as in the old. He could move about freely, but there was nowhere to go. The only reasonable thing he could think of to do was to pick a direction and set out.

Locomotion here wasn’t elegant. One can’t simply walk where there is no solid surface to push off from. One must, shall we say,
flounder
. Floundering, or at least competence thereat, was not a skill Aspet had so far managed to acquire in his journey through life. By dint of thrashing and flapping his limbs, he eventually began to move along a more or less constant vector, albeit seemingly a vector to nowhere.