//------------------------------// // 14. Through the Picture Frame // Story: Cross The Amazon // by Chatoyance //------------------------------// ══════════════════════ T H E C O N V E R S I O N B U R E A U : ══════════════════════ CROSS THE AMAZON By Chatoyance Chapter Fourteen: Through the Picture Frame "Calloway!" The music was a little loud. Kotani was listening to the Mamá Gansa's onboard music collection while he flew the airship. Currently filling the flight deck was some form of human entertainment called 'country music'. Waylan and Yauling and the Country Barn Cats were twanging out a fast-paced song unlike anything Dropspindle had heard in Equestria. Calloway had seemed excited by the available collection, which possessed 'obscure greats like the French Canadian singer LaBinda Gairboge!'. Kotani played some of the recorded songs much too loudly, and once he had tried to make the Mamá Gansa 'dance' in the sky with heedless manipulations of the controls - until Dropspindle had made it very clear that was not appropriate AT ALL. "CALLOWAY!" "What? Sorry... let me turn this down..." He adjusted the player and Waylan and Yauling began to whisper about how they had lost their favorite truck to the girlfriend that had somehow stomped their hearts flat. "Thank you." Dropspindle took a moment to regain her composure. "There are messages down there." "What?" "Writing. Made of dead tree trunks and rocks and things. Down there. I can't quite read it, but there are messages. Some are fairly long." "Hang on..." Calloway slowed the Mamá Gansa and caused her to hover. The onboard A.I. 'MarIA' held the ship with laser guided precision in locked position. "Does this help?" "It helps, but can we go lower? It's very tiny from up here." Calloway lowered the ship. Slowly it reduced in altitude until the letters below became easy to read. They had lost the dry Rio Amazon entirely, and had ended up crossing a vast and hilly zone composed of sand, gray patches of sun-baked tree stumps, scattered dead branches, and the occasional stone step-pyramid. Calloway had said that most of the pyramids had not been discovered until the forests were all removed. The structures were the remains of ancient civilizations that had lived and died ages in the past. The jungle had swallowed them up. Only total deforestation had made them visible to the modern age. "That low enough?" "Yes! Come see!" Calloway left the pilot chair and moved to the rail where it was possible to look nearly straight down from the curving gallery windows. He studied the patches of letters. They were indeed made of arrangements of dried out tree trunks, stones, and branches. It was clear they had been designed to be seen from very high altitudes overhead. The letters were large, each many meters high. They had been there for a very long time. The words were in English. Crude English, misspelled English, but English... and not Spanish. "Oh. Of course." Dropspindle's ears twitched. "Of course?" Calloway slid his hands along the rail, then returned them, as if cleaning the metal bar. "Natives. Forest aborigines. The tribes were studied for a while, before the Collapse. The scientists and explorers brought portable computers with them. They showed the tribal people this 'magic' from the Industrial World, and as part of that... they showed them Googlezon maps. I think it was just Google, back then. Satellite maps, taken from orbit." Calloway read out loud one of the dried-out tree-trunk messages below. HELP ϨTOP CUT ϨAVE AMAZOИA "They made hundreds - maybe thousands - of these. Kinda like the Nasca Lines, only... not. They didn't speak English themselves. They just knew the people who did could see them from above the sky, like gods. They probably begged the scientists to show them what symbols to write. These are prayers. Prayers to the magical Northamerizoners who lived in the sky and looked down at them from the clouds. Begging the rich white men to somehow stop the bulldozers the rich brown men were using to take the forest away. The tribals still lived in the forest, like Man did hundreds of thousands of years ago, you see. Off the land. To them, that forest was the world, the universe, and the brown men were taking it away. But the white men with the magic boxes could see it all from the sky. Surely they were powerful enough to save everything." "And did they?" Dropspindle looked beyond the letters, to the desert that stretched in every direction. "Sorry. Obviously not. It's just... it's such a sad thing to hear. Why? Why didn't you humans save them?" Calloway turned from the rail. "No Worldgovernment back then. Separate nations, separate flags, and all of them only concerned with their own benefit. Standing armies. If the prayers had been answered, it would have taken open warfare to stop the destruction of the forests. Remember our 'host?' He wasn't alone. Everybody wanted to be wealthy - or at least not in poverty - and everybody wanted the forests cut down and the land stripmined because that is where the money came from." "Not everypony! The aborigines didn't want the trees cut down!" Calloway sat in the pilot's chair and began to make the Mamá Gansa rise again. "Here's the deal... uh... you, in Equestria, you come in all colors of the rainbow. And three breeds too, all different as can be. And that's okay with you - you are all one people, one species, one... race, despite all of that. Humans aren't like that. Slightly different eyes, darker or lighter skin, curly or straight hair - these are things that divide humans. They are reasons to hate, to kill or be killed. Neither the white people nor the brown people thought the other, darker brown people - the aborigines - were people at all. So they didn't count. Besides, they were primitive, and should stop living like cave men and get proper jobs in the factories. Like real humans. That was the belief back then. The 'abos' didn't have any rights, because they lived like animals, and because they looked different. And... because they didn't salute the right flags. But mostly because there was money to be made." Dropspindle stared at Calloway. "But... I can barely even tell you creatures apart!" Calloway Kotani laughed, long and hard and loud. Then he laughed more softly, bitterly. "Yeah. Oh... yeah." Far, far below, a ruined, ancient stone temple passed silent and unnoticed beneath the soaring lifting-body airship. It would never be noticed again, even until the very end of the world. "There's a river!" Dropspindle was suddenly quite excited. Both she and Calloway had been sitting in silence for some time, watching the ambient glow of the setting sun fade from the now crimson smog layer just above them. Calloway was slumped in his seat, long since weary of playing music. He aimlessly ran his hand through the holodisplay, idly causing the floating images to wiggle and reform. "No rivers left. Mirage." Calloway seemed almost upset to be be awakened from his revere of boredom. "It's shiny, and wet-looking, and it reflects the light... honestly, I see a river! Come see!" Calloway looked up. There was literally nothing better to do. "Okay, what the hell." He made a great effort of escaping the simple confines of the pilot's chair and an even greater effort of forcing himself to a standing position. "Hurry up! You'll miss it!" Calloway ambled over. Riding inside the belly of a lifting-body airship was easily the most dull travel experience of his life. It felt like nothing. There was no sensation of movement, the entire craft seemed to remain perfectly still while the world moved around it. There was no sensation at all. Dropspindle claimed she heard and felt a hum or something, but... to human senses, he might as well have been standing on the upper floor of a very tall building. "Yeah, okay, let's see this..." A line of shining brightness gleamed far down from starboard. It was intensely bright, a laser red line that was somehow reflecting direct - and not diffuse - sunlight. "Um..." Calloway followed the line of brightness. There shouldn't be sunlight. There shouldn't be a river. It did look like a river. A very straight river... maybe a canal? "Something's... " He ran back to his chair. "Something's what?" Dropspindle followed, and clambered into the co-pilot's seat. She had adjusted it so that it conformed, just a little, to her pony body. It wasn't completely comfortable, but it was more padded than most human chairs, and it could recline somewhat. "I don't know what that is. But you found something, alright. It's a lot more interesting than endless sand and hopeless prayers, and... I think we should check it out." Calloway turned the Mamá Gansa to starboard and began a wide, slow, curving descent. "Damn, that's bright, where is the sunlight coming fr..." Out the side windows, as they continued to bank, they now could see behind them, toward the direction they had been moving away from. Sunlight shone brightly, streaming from behind a vast wall that stretched from horizon to horizon many kilometers away. The ceiling of the smog layer ended just shy of the immense transparent wall. It was being rolled up ahead of its advance. "That's not our sun setting. It's coincidence... Equestria's sun is setting at the very same time as our sun... only we can't see our sun, because Equestria is filling the view West. Damn... that's an alien sunset perfectly in time with sunset here, and... anyway!" Calloway returned to piloting the blimp. The bright line reflecting the light of the setting sun in Equestria began to become two lines as they drew nearer. "Rails! I know what that is!" Calloway lowered the airship even more. "That's the Trans-Southamerizone Railway or whatever it was called. The Chinese built it... back when there was a China... or maybe it was just one guy, some super rich elite... whatever. That thing is a 5300-kilometer long river all right - a river of steel! Or... some other metal. I'm no expert. But I read about it once, and it goes all the way across the entire continent! Think about that, Dropspindle! And not the thinnest part, either - fifty-three hundred kilometers of rail! High speed rail, too." Calloway paused. "Oh, that's a thought, isn't it? High speed rail to the coast. If only. If only." "It's hard for me sometimes... to grasp the scale of the things you humans do. A single railroad longer than the entire width of the original Equestria before the Exponentials. Everything is so big here. It's terrifying, sometimes." Dropspindle followed the parallel rails as far into the distance as she could. They just met and vanished as one infinitesimal line. "In our universe, it's go big, or go home baby! Or just go home and go big. A lot. Considering foodpaks and all." Calloway grinned while Dropspindle stuck her tongue out at him. "So, what say we follow this? We can't get lost with this thing... well, not that we could, considering what's behind us. Jesus... just look at that. Even so damn far away... if anything it seems even bigger this far away. Can't even see more than just a thin line of it, where it intersects the ground, but... that Barrier. My god Equestria is huge now. My fucking god." Calloway had the Mamá Gansa on hover now. He spent a few minutes just staring at the distant line where the smog layer ended and the Barrier let the light of an alien sunset illuminate the human world. It ran from horizon to horizon. To Calloway, it almost felt like he was peeking from under a smoggy blanket at the sunset through the windows. "Keep your eyes open for... buildings, train cars, anything of interest. It wouldn't hurt to find supplies or some tasty noms." Dropspindle, who had little love for prepackaged human foods, glared at him. "Well, for me, anyway." Calloway adjusted their heading. "I know it's hard on you. We'll get through this. You'll get real food again, one day. One day soon." Dropspindle almost seemed to sulk in the co-pilot's chair. "Really soon." The curved, flattened, oblate ovoid of the Mamá Gansa glided like a powered cloud ten meters above the gleaming rails. Each rail served a maglev train, one for going east, the other for going west. From the height of the Gansa, though, the two metal lines reminded Calloway of double train tracks from ancient cowboy movies, crossing the pre-Collapse West of the Northamerizone. The diffuse illumination from the global smog layer was very dim now, the Equestrian sunset likely at the very edge of twilight as they spotted buildings in the distance. There was a collection of structures up ahead - perhaps a town, perhaps merely a depot to collect the rewards of copper - and other - mining. The Southamerizone had once been an astonishingly abundant region for the acquisition of resources. But that was now in the past. There were still resources, of course, it was simply that all that was economical to take or scoop or drill or carve from the land was now gone. What was left was vast, but cost more to take than the value gained. Diminishing returns was the death knell of all exploitation. "That's the first... anything... we've seen in some time. I'd like to check it out. Equestria is a long ways behind us, we have time... whad'yah say?" Dropspindle pressed her muzzle to the glassite, her hooves over the railing. "I think it's a town. It reminds me of Appleoosa, or maybe Saddlemento. It seems nice! It will feel good to get our hooves on the ground for a while." "Feet, in my case, but I share the sentiment." Calloway moved his hands over the active surface display and the view out the window began to rotate as the Mamá Gansa circled the region, forward windows locked on the center of the cluster of now dark structures. "Oh... this should help!" Light beams appeared from various points on the airship, and formed bright cones in the deepening dark. Calloway focused the front beams on the buildings. "Running lights and searching spotlights! Just figured out the icons. I don't know Spanish, but I know a well-designed icon when I see it!" He grinned in the now red glow of the flight deck. MarIA had automatically adjusted the interior illumination to match the nighttime situation. The spotlights revealed not a town but an abandoned ore processing and transport station. The maglev system ran through two barn-like covered buildings, with clear and wide access areas for large vehicles to enter and leave. Ore chutes and several large piles of slag were visible. Buildings that looked like barracks or some similar structures gave the station its townish appearance. There was also, of course, a bar with a fairly elaborate sign. 'El Chupacabra' it read, with an image of a monstrous creature tossing back a cold one. It was a rough, frontier depot that had once served the mining community. "This doesn't look like a nice little village anymore." Dropspindle sighed at the run-down, weathered buildings. "Eh... in its day, it was probably the joy of the region. Hard working miners, bringing loads to the train, spending the entire trip thinking about the cool of the night and that very bar. A night on, well, not on the town, but the closest thing to one they had. Probably a hard life, and this would have been the highlight of their week, or maybe even their month." Calloway finally found what he was looking for - a wide, flat area large enough to accommodate the Mamá Gansa. The area in front of the vehicle entrance to the covered maglev station had served as a waiting zone for large trucks carrying ore. Empty now, it was a vast lot with nothing to cause trouble for the airship. "We're going to land?" Calloway looked surprised. "Um... yeah. That's why we're here. I admit it doesn't look like much, but there might be something useful down there. No hydrogen, obviously, but... snacks, food, maybe another paper map? A map would be pretty nice, wouldn't it?" "Of course. It's just..." Dropspindle stared at the dark shadows left by the spotlights. "Just what?" Calloway began the descent, the Mamá Gansa felt still as a rock while the world moved politely and slowly up to meet it. "Well, it just looks so... lonely, I guess. And sad. And somehow... angry, too." Dropspindle tapped the deck with her hoof. "I just get a strange... I don't remember the word. Feeling, anyway. A strange feeling about this place." "Looks alright to me. It's rustic, I'll grant you that. Real 'hard men in a hard land' kind of look to it, but... it's abandoned. The biggest threat for us is going to be scorpions, if they even still exist. I think they have scorpions in deserts." The Mamá Gansa was only two meters from the macadam. Calloway was taking it slow, to be safe. He hadn't been very cautious when he had rescued Dropspindle from the crane - the airship now had a large, ugly scrape along one side that he had pointedly not mentioned. "Hey - go grab the torches from that cabinet. And see if you can find any bags or satchels to use for scavenging. Let's use the cool of the evening to our advantage. Better than tromping around in the heat tomorrow." Dropspindle turned toward the door that opened into the central corridor that ran down the middle of the Gansa. The storage compartments were near the main hatchway. It was then that the incredibly ancient, antique, barely functional FIM-43C Redeye missile hit the port side of the Mamá Gansa, easily removing an entire heated hydrogen sac, most of the dorsal plating, and the rear port engine. The sound of the explosion was deafening, and the entire frame of the craft jerked and shuddered - throwing Calloway from his seat, and Dropspindle off her hooves. The incredible strength of the remaining nanocarbon mesh gas chambers was such that they were not perforated. As the airship listed and sank much more rapidly to the ground. The remains of the Gansa bounced slightly, before coming to a burning, slow-motion crash landing. The slow impact still managed to shatter two of the front windows. Through them, outside, over the din of internal alarms and MarIA intoning something severe in Spanish, the shouts of many loud, angry men severely berating one one of their own could be heard.