Able Zeller could not wait—but should he?
No! He must plunge through the menacing morass below—simply must. This was the last expedition. There would be no second chances. No one back at Aero-Marx—since that great man’s passing—had the ability to build another zeppelin. They would succeed to sublime adulation from the aristocracy and wild applause from the people, or they would fail, and become less than a whisper in the world.
Not only was this the last zeppelin, but it was operated by the last crew worthy of the name.
Able Zeller Siegfried was the only member of the Royal Geophysical Society in possession of both the physicality and intellect to accomplish the task at hand. Below, under 10,000 years of growth, languished the Idol, a supposedly living artifact known to be there only from a reading of the ancient books, books that had perished in the cataclysm, books that existed now only in the minds of the Footfallers, eager to begin a new life beyond the walls of Ceres. The books were gone and only the Idol knew the ancient secrets.
Had that much sought after Idol been a person, or something more?
Was he simply the last of a greater race, entombed in this fragrant tropical embrace?
“Able, our descent is being compromised!” came the voice of his sexy pilot, Mildred, graduated prettiest in her class and snapped up by Able as his pilot—she was the most qualified, was she not?
“Able! Get up here!”
Able had found himself falling sleep, hanging limply from the rigging beneath the cabin, which hung basket-like beneath the vast bulk of the lighter-than-air zeppelin. The fragrant breeze wafting up from below was beckoning him, lulling him to sleep. As he came to full consciousness—something he was not now convinced that he would ever experience again—he sensed a slight rotation of the craft, could see the distant mountains coming into view were the bed of the extinct ocean should be.
He wondered, How does a vine-choked forest drain an ocean?
“Able! Asshole, get back up here, now!” came the voice of the woman of his dreams, the woman he would pass over for a life alone, so she could be with their engineer, Adlerode—if they survived this fragrant breeze.
Here shrill call became a half-hoarse scream as he climbed the ropes and was dragged through the door of the cabin by Adlerode’s nervous hands. The engineer’s face was pinched and hurried, fear dilating his pupils from behind his mask as he strapped an oxygen mask over Able’s face, secured the tank to his back, opened the valve, and then fell back to the deck with a sigh of relief.
“Wew, Captain. We thought we lost you out there.”
As his mind cleared he realized that he was half-entranced, still dreamily wanting to freefall into the cleft like gap in the canopy below, edged erotically with red and pink flowers from buds to wide gaping blossoms, waving on ivory stalks, beckoning them earthward.
As his mind cleared he saw that Mildred and Adlerode were struggling to maintain their course, no, their elevation. Launching himself upright from the deck, he demanded, “What is happening?”
Mildred was engrossed as she consulted her instrument panel, which seemed such a crude array of devices when one considered the human mind—which begged the question, did they have a means of communicating with the ancient Idol, should they wake him, should he still reach for the imperishable stars with his mind, as it was once said, had, eons ago, been the singular purpose of his grasping kind?
“Oh no!” exclaimed Mildred with a sense of hysteria—we’re caught, we got too close. I don’t know—what do we do, Captain—shit! The engines—Adlerode!”
He put his hands on her shoulder to calm her and said, “Mildred, cut off the engines. We will need them to return. She’s not letting us go.”
He turned to Adlerode who was opening his tool box and pulling out his cable cutters. Able calmed him with a hand on his forearm and spoke into his face through their nearly touching masks, “No, don’t. If you anger her, we’ll be torn apart on the descent. Where is Mandy?”
Adlerode looked over Able’s shoulder with a wide-eyed gasp and pointed feebly to something behind him. A chill played down his spine as he directed Adlerode to the co-pilot’s chair and turned to see his secret weapon, the one chance he had of getting through the haunted forest of willful carnivorous plants that had devoured the previous expedition—all except for Mandy, who would respond to nothing else, although her name was Moramote.
Here she stood, naked except for the parasitic vines that sprouted from her hips and ribs, and the sensuously rustling yellow flowers that grew from her head in place of the hair that had once sprouted there. Mandy had been out on the balcony drinking in the air and swaying, seemingly in ecstasy. The clover petals that grew where eyelashes should, fluttered, and her sweet smelling pollen-caked lips whistled as she walked past Able to the window, and opened it, much to the horror of the pilot and engineer, who cringed in their seats.
Mandy then blew a kiss to the world, and as greenish yellow pollen billowed out from her lips, a massive bumblebee, the size of a human head, came buzzing like a saw to the window. The bee then let go a length of gooey something, like spider silk, coming from its abdomen in a reaching strand. Mandy reached out and grabbed the alien strand and the bee departed like a falling saw.
The engines of the zeppelin then sputtered out, Mildred in her panic having forgotten to cut them off. Mandy then looped the gooey honey silk strand around her wrist and turned to Able, with a wild erotic light in her eyes and syrupy words spilling from her enlarged pollinated lips, “Harness up Captain Zeller. Mommy likes your scent. You are invited to visit Her Bean. She is worried about him and wonders if you can help. I have told her that you are well-versed in the ways of the Stone Men.”
Able harnessed up and looked worriedly at Adelrode, who was shivering in fright, arms intertwined with Mildred.
Mandy’s liquid voice then came to him, “Your meatspacers will not be harmed. They may live here, above, until Her Bean is healed, and then they may leave. You, though, must stay.”
He felt helpless and dread-sodden as he sweated a day’s worth of hydrants and harnessed up. Standing over the hatch, he kicked the lever and the view of the jungle grown oh so close, its tendrils having latched onto the undercarriage and rigging, tethering his spectacular soaring zeppelin, his one means of escape, to the very roots of the fecund world below.
The buzz saw bee hummed somewhere above, unseen, a force that did not make sense, that did not compute…
Mandy walked up to him, the silky moist petals of the stalks sprouting from her head caressing his curly hair, the disconcertingly strung vines growing in thick profusion reaching about his hips and drawing them together as she spread her legs and leaped on him, entwining ivory arms around his neck. As her weight came to rest on his hips, her eyes formed a magnetic bond with his, and her pouty pollen-caked lips whispered into his mask, all but kissing the plexi-shield, “Jump, Captain, Mommy and Her Bean are waiting.”
Like a dying puppet on some nightmare stage, Able Zeller stepped out onto nothing and plunged to his death, wondering how bad it was going to hurt when the whining winch above had let out all of its cable, for it would surely rip his body from his legs and send his spine through the base of his skull.
Amazed at how rapidly this profusion of waving flower stalks, reaching vines, wagging branches and their rustling leaves had grown in mere—was it hours or ages—Able Zeller breathed deeply of his oxygen supply, which was, he knew, an act that would irrevocably shorten his life, but one he took nonetheless as they fell at the speed of a dropped stone, to the whine of the angry winch above, into the cleft of a five canopy jungle, that seemed to have opened to receive them, flowers and honey suckles in pink and red profusion lining the gap through which he now plummeted to his doom, a wicked flowering creature clinging lithely to him, a dreamy lust growing in her green eyes.
