Hollow Earth Read online

  Strangely, for such a go-getter, the Robber Baron had a battery of Old Professors supporting him, who argued the evidence had long been in the literature – they called the conjectured forbidden space Hollow Earth, and said agents from below had come to the surface as prophets over the millennia to ward off surface dwellers and warn them not to pry too deep. They have infiltrated our religions, our literature, and hoodwinked our science, they warned. Revenge was in the air, the beautiful polluted air of the surface. And they appreciated and admired a mega capitalist like HLH, who donated such vast amounts of money to their universities, who should speak warmly of them in public and subscribe to their social views. They saw themselves as part of the Underworld-to-be. They would be the brains behind the invasion. And with the surface so distressing to life, the concept of an underworld had become elaborate with the cultural treasures of civilising, and the underworld universities the jewels in the crown of artificial life. In this future, it would be a case of those who dwelt on the surface being nothing more than barbarians, or up-and-down (the future fly-in, fly-out) miners who would only spend one week up for every three weeks back down in the safer, cleaner and more profitable realms of the underworld. But this is far in the future, when the surface is so eroded by climate change that the beast capitalists went out to the moon and Mars and down into the earth itself to extract what they could at the death. Our tale concerns a slightly earlier period, when Manfred acted on a deeply ingrained belief that there was a way through into the truths of the earth and found an entry point – one of a number scattered around the globe – into Hollow Earth.

  2.

  Hollow Earth

  The Hollow Earthers, as they came to be called by the Underworlders, were far fewer in number, but otherwise much the same in body and mind as surface dwellers. Their religions were different, but not so different (with the stunning exception that Hollow Earthers overtly eschewed violence and persecution in any form); they had fewer languages, which were largely shared and known by all from an early age. The one major difference was their shorter and thicker bodies (as a general rule, because there were actually many exceptions). Underworlders attributed this to Hollow Earthers being closer to the core of the planet. And it was the molten core (which did really exist) that was the monotheistic point in common among the various religions practised by Hollow Earthers. Their life expectancy was roughly the same, and they were actually at a similar level of technological awareness, though their existent material technology did minimal damage to their natural environment. All waste went into ‘black holes’ and all materials used for making were taken from hills that were naturally bare of vegetation and even microscopic animal life and were in a constant state of renewal.

  Hollow Earthers had long been aware of the surface-dwelling ages of the human, and the damage they’d inflicted on the biosphere of surface earth. Early on, rather than warfare, the technological impetus of the Hollow Earthers went towards masking their existence and the existence of the Hollow Earth from the topsiders, the surface-dwellers.

  3.

  The Underworlders were brutal colonists. How much of Manfred’s knowledge, how much of the intelligence from the interrogations of Zest and Ari by immigration authorities around the world – mocked and disbelieved though their accounts were at the time – were used as part of the Underworlders’ preparation, their invasion plans? It’s difficult to tell, because at the time the responses given by Zest and Ari – who other than a green tinge looked like surface dwellers, being tall and ‘willowy’ by Hollow Earth standards – were taken as signs of psychological disturbance or as attempts to undermine the authorities. But the Robber Baron’s minions, the Old Professors, were highly adept at tracking down records of such conversations and data.

  4.

  As a child Manfred suffered from severe headaches. He spent a lot of time in the sick room of one particular school. He did not like its white walls and antiseptic smell, but it was safer in there. Through the vents, which had little fans that clacked away to keep the place from being too restful, he could hear birds making lives between buildings and kids. Magpies, especially, which swooped at nesting time. Once, the school had a magpie euthanased and Manfred, though thirteen, cried. He was given Chinese burns and ended up back in the sick room, where the nurse told him to toughen up.

  5.

  The Robber Baron was influenced by Citizen Kane.

  6.

  Manfred went to many schools in many countries. In Mount Vernon, Ohio, he listened to a pileated woodpecker knocking holes through the bark and wondered if he might crawl through the openings. In Schull, West Cork, he stopped at the corner outside the church and looked out over the harbour, and watched the seabirds twisting and turning. There is a cave down there, an old man told him, where swallows nested for half a century. They are gone now. The old man often sat outside the church, on the concrete wall, talking to the children about his own childhood. Remember what I tell you, he said. And to Manfred: You have a strange accent, where are you from? I am from here, said Manfred. You haven’t been here long. My mother is doing research – we will be here for six months. What year are you in at school? I am in Fifth Year, said Manfred. The old man picked at the perished rubber at the top of his gumboots and said, Up there where the radar domes are, up on Mount Gabriel – they call those domes Gabriel’s Balls – there’s a cave, a Neolithic mine, that’s a path through to the other world. But it’s only one-way – they can only come out that way. Are those birds skuas? asked Manfred, wanting to move on.

  7.

  Truth be told. The first entry into Hollow Earth from above was actually through a Neolithic copper mine on Mount Gabriel near the village of Schull in 2014. Manfred Thomas Murphy, alone and miserable without his long-lost Aisling, staggered around the cow fields and into peat drifts and made his bare arms bloody with staggering and scraping against the old red sandstone, lifted his noggin to watch the dark storm clouds clotting overhead and then out to Fastnet lighthouse on its rock hurled there millennia ago, Fastnet still in rays of sun but with a white lace of wave action encircling it, and yelled his pain so loud it was heard down on Schull pier.

  8.

  This is the story of Manfred’s journey into Hollow Earth, or rather, the consequences of his being back on the surface again. He once said (to Boog): Hollow Earthers are connected to surface dwellers, and not just an evolutionary inevitability as mirror. [Boog came back with: What a fucking mouthful, Manfred! but Manfred warbled on and on ... ] But the fundamental differences of ontology and conservation indicate to me a coincidence of evolution, of progress. That we are much the same physically is as the case may be, [he paused at this point, as if confused, but then, looking sure of himself, launched back into his disquisition ... ] for all other creatures of Hollow Earth are different. And the souls of Hollow Earth humans, the Hollow Earthers as I call them, are certainly different. But Manfred was addled when he said this, falling back into drugs and dissolute behaviours.

  9.

  Kaleidoscope is the telescope of Hollow Earth

  There was depth to Hollow Earth, as the molten wave flux around the solid core of the world was still thousands of kilometres down from the lowest point of its habitable zones, and even the bottoms of its watery places. Mines had penetrated to ten kilometres below the surface in the zones of the regrowing hills, and drills had gone much deeper, but the rock got hot. The volcanoes were not as large nor as active as on the surface, but there were many ‘magma lakes’ and ‘magma springs’ that fed fronts of sulphurous air, which had sculpted life in so many ways. But fresh air vented from the sky above, from the ‘roof’, and the vast ocean lakes made air in conjunction with algae and forests. In fact, the air was generally fresher than Manfred had ever experienced ‘above’, though the water tasted acidic and, indeed, was often drunk in conjunction with a powder of lime to make it more neutral.

  The roof, or the night sky – for translations equate with ‘sky’ – was alive with colour. To
look through a telescope was to look through a kaleidoscope. Manfred spent many a lonely and fretful evening thinking of the universe, which in Hollow Earth was as expansive as the micro world, as expansive as imagination, as expansive as the coming and going of life, thinking of the night sky of the surface world. One ‘star’ he noted on one of his exploratory journeys across Hollow Earth geo-located with the Great Pyramid of the surface, a geographical centre he transcribed into his personal mythology of presence.

  But Manfred found solace in the world of Hollow Earth weather forecasting. Reading the papers, he delighted in their maps and charts of rain plumes, wind erosion, stillness, and colour showers. Sulphur clouds and electrical storms on a scale beyond anything the surface world offered, although the lightning conducted through the copper seams of the Mizen and Beara peninsulas of West Cork that fused electrics and made the sky a circuit board erupting in its death knell was his point of reference. Electrical storms in Hollow Earth were so intense because the roof connected with the ground. It was like the laser beam security systems of surface military installations – there was no getting through without being zapped. It was said that electrical storms had kept the population of Hollow Earth suppressed, and technology was in their thrall. There were long periods, sometimes years, without such storms, but when they came they came in bouts and changed everything.

  I have always been a weather person, Manfred told Zest, his Hollow Earth significant other. Zest thought his stories of the surface were delusion, and as a state-of-mind therapist thought she might make her career out of recording every word he said. She didn’t think him mad, just elaborate in whatever it was he was smoke-screening. But Manfred, we are the surface, we are not kwedges! [Kwedges were mole-like creatures common in Hollow-Earth and often referred to as ‘burrowers of the soul’.]

  Zest was a Demi-Extrovert. Manfred was a Total Introvert, she said. Cross-relationships were common, but the divisions held in both society and legally. Manfred couldn’t be bothered with them, didn’t get them, and rarely referred to them. This in itself fascinated Zest, who beneath it all (her joke referring to his delusion, not this joke referring to her inability to see the truth) was quite conservative.

  Manfred pondered, There’s nothing bizarre about Hollow Earth. Nothing steampunk or even unexpected. It is what it is. The differences are because there is difference. And the people of Hollow Earth find the unfamiliar of their own world as odd or bizarre as I find the peculiarities of different zones and cultures and personal desires and wants on the surface. Hollow Earth is not entertainment for the surface; reports back from an alien world to excite and entice potential colonists. No way, not happening. I speak to myself. The people of Hollow Earth don’t crave the surface, and when they send emissaries it is to sidetrack potential colonists, to thwart miners and Exploiters, to keep Hollow Earth intact, safe, immune. But they generally don’t return. Their job done, they are absorbed into the excesses of the surface and adapt, feeling taller, lighter. As if the limb of Hollow Earth dwindles and drops off, the only memory a phantom.

  10.

  Manfred reflected over the months in Schull before he submerged, before he went subterranean. Back in late May he had sat on the pier watching Harvey, the resident seal, dive and resurface, a flotilla of leisure yachts bobbing at their moorings. He had endured the tourist summer, being of Schull and not, an insider-outsider. In trying to piece his early life into some sort of picture, he only came up with a jigsaw puzzle that wouldn’t add up. Country after country, his mother searching for pieces of a code she believed would unlock communications with ‘the aliens’. He still didn’t understand how she’d supported them, made ends meet. It bothered him. Yes, yes … when he passed through that mine, that cave on Mount Gabriel, it was the 31st of October and the town was frenetic with ghosts and death, a desire for fear. Yes, it was close to the time when the membrane between worlds was at its thinnest, wasn’t it? Yes yes yes. And the streets were full of witches and demons, and ghouls were roaming the streets. Yes yes yes.

  11.

  Emerald Island – another entry point (from the surface down into) that was closed by the Guardians of Hollow Earth. It had been detected by the Emerald sealing ship (the horror) in 1821, and was still there (as seen) as late as 1890, but vanished some time between that and the search by Captain Davis and the crew of the Nimrod in 1908. Manfred was intrigued by the mention of this in the closed archives he was given access to – a funnel to the cold heat of the surface world, through which birds flew and thus many waterbirds of the massive salt lakes were in common with those of the surface. As Manfred researched, Ari, another Extrovert and sometime lover of Zest, came and placed her hand on his shoulder and said, I would like to hear the birds of the surface world.

  12.

  Being inside Hollow Earth might bring you fear, like having to be inside your own head. It’s not weird being inside your own head, but if it is, weird is good. All constructive moments of connection seem to me, said Manfred, to happen inside the head first before they can happen without causing damage in the outside world. So some of us have long envisaged Hollow Earth – we were born with Hollow Earth inside our heads. My mother, said Manfred, said the aliens were within us but we had to find the code to break through to them. I remember sitting next to her in the old Holden station wagon, bumping along a firebreak on my uncle’s farm late at night, chasing a light in the sky. She said, The mothership has arrived. As she swerved into the paddock we hit a burnt-out stump – my uncle was planning to grub it out that winter – and the vehicle rolled. Neither of us was hurt beyond a few scratches. My mother crawled out, helped me out through the broken windscreen, and pointed to the light in the sky and said, No matter what happens, never give up on the search. I think she loved me.

  13.

  Plato’s Cave was a bar in Newark, Licking County. You could see the golden dome of the town hall from there, and the Gothic aspirations of local industry fused with the sky during thunderstorms as lightning strikes the rod. I went looking for my mother in there one weekend when we were on an ‘excursion’. She was deep in discussion with an old man, hunched over beers. He said, Here’s a couple of quarters, son, go and pick something on the jukebox. I played an Elvis number, I can’t remember which one, but I remember him saying, That’s a strange choice for a kid your age – now get out of here, you shouldn’t be in a saloon! I waited outside for Mum, and when she emerged she was excited and shaking and a week later we were back in Australia.

  14.

  Patriotic fervour is alien to Hollow Earth. They do not have missile silos, but they do have grain silos. ‘Gathering areas’ are a major part of their farming – areas left as close to natural as possible, where people can forage for plant food. No animals are eaten by the humans of Hollow Earth. There are fewer animals than on the surface, but greater diversity. All the vitamin D needed for healthy life is fed from the ‘roof’ of the world: a regular showering of life-enhancing products. It is not the Truman Show. Algae, laden with B12 and found in lakes and ‘oceans’, is a major part of all diets across cultures.

  15.

  Appropriate mockery of masculinity and the counter-response for what it’s worth. Zest says of her sometimes partner, Ari (as it translates into something we surface readers can get hold off – a truism for all translations in this book of record) …

  16.

  Looking to the future, when refugees from the surface began filtering through before the final push and consolidation of the Big Miners (and the internment camps for Hollow Earthers and ‘aberrant’ surface dwellers they created), driven from Ireland where they were refugees from conflict in the Middle East, and then driven through a conduit opened briefly on the Nullarbor Plain – a water cave that collapsed and gaped and attracted the abused and put-upon to find a way down and away from the surface ... Zest and Ari, who had some influence on their local life enhancement committee, asked Manfred if he’d act as liaison officer to help house and clothe the new arrivals.
No, that can’t be correct – this happened after, long after Manfred was in Hollow Earth. But narratives loop, surely, and who can say which ends we’re working with? It’s possible, really, isn’t it?

  As language was instant, with the rock properties of the sky roof imbuing a telekinetic empathy that made all speech universal and all differences cherished, there were fewer problems than imagined. They understood Manfred, Manfred understood them. Something that would irritate the Underworlders, who brought linguists to collect, collate, preserve and display. To make recordings, to open wormholes in the slippages. But all was clear and understood while maintaining difference and integrity. We have our own, they said, but we perfectly understand you. The one-sidedness sent the invaders into a fury, especially as Hollow Earthers never spoke their own languages [it all came out as ‘translationese’, of course] in front of the invaders, in front of the(ir) linguists. And because the air had not been made violent with the pollution of acquisitiveness and power, nor even the industrial fallout of the surface, religious and cultural differences could be accommodated without engendering hate or suspicion. The Hollow Earthers were fully accepting of new gods, new ways, as long as they left Hollow Earth’s substance itself undamaged. Nor did the beliefs of the new arrivals create a sense of threat, for whatever their religion, the fact of Hollow Earth shifted even the most entrenched beliefs. The absence of sun and the presence of sunlight stirred an understanding in the cells of the bodies themselves. They thought with their presence, increasingly. And though they had spent millennia trying to keep the invaders out, once the new arrivals were there, especially those seeking refuge, the Hollow Earthers accommodated them. They even communed with the miners, trying to reason with them. But soon they were rounded up and their cultures attacked and crushed.