| 16: Alice Quatermain The world was odd, was strange, was deceitful. She woke up in a strange, unfamiliar land-an experience all too familiar for her. Only this time, instead of being surrounded by wasteland, the savanna surrounded her. "What happened this time?" she wondered out loud. Then it came back to her-the firefight, the portal, all of it. She found that there was a rabbit licking her face. "Virgil?" The rabbit just looked at her, uncomprehending. However, there were voices in the distance, voices speaking in strange tongues and accents. There was a rapid guttural-yet-musical speech, and then a booming, stilted voice. As the voice grew closer, she recognized that both voices spoke the English tongue. "My heavens, where could that rabbit have gone off too?" the booming voice wondered, speaking with a distinctly British accent. "And why say you that it is of much import?" "The rabbit took a bit of my taduki, Allan-I must see what it has done with it." "Ah, yes yes-that damnable yet wonderful essence of yours. Here it-oh dear." She saw a white man wearing adventurer's gear from about the 19th century accompanied by a nearly-naked African woman with arcane markings carved all over her flesh. "What is a European girl doing here unconscious, so far from the colonies?" mused the one known as Allan. "Perhaps she is a... how you say... missionary?" postulated the woman. "Who are you people?" the girl asked, getting to her feet. The rabbit hopped onto her shoulder, still licking her cheek. The man quite proudly doffed his hat and bowed. "My name is Allan, and I am on assignment for Her Majesty Queen Victoria in the name of the Empire." "I am Ibukun, a priestess of the Ibo people far to the north. I have journeyed far in search of the secrets of the legendary drug taduki, and I chanced upon Allan in most fortunate circumstances. Who might you be? The girl scratched the back of her neck and chuckled. "Um... I'm Alice." "This girl-she does not speak English as you do," Ibukun noted to Allan as she picked the rabbit up off of Alice's shoulder. "Where are you from, girl?" "Colum-er, I mean, America," Alice answered. "The state of Virginia." "Highly queer... all the Virginians I have met speak hardly as you do," informed Allan. Alice stared at him for a while, and then something clicked in her head. "Wait a minute... who did you say was Queen?" "Her Majesty Queen Victoria of the British Empire, of course!" "Not Elizabeth the Second?" Allan was taken aback. "That's preposterous...! Are you meaning to say that the Queen has died without a male heir since I left Cape Town?" "No... I think the machine sent me backwards in time when it took me to Earth," Alice realized. "It's not 2003, is it?" "It's 1852, my girl-are you mad?!" "Perhaps we should take her with us-a girl that says such... interesting things may not be safe on her own," Ibukun suggested. "I concur," Allan said. "Will you accompany us?" "Where are we going?" Alice asked. "To the Lost City of Ophir!" declared Allan. "The city of splendour mentioned in the Good Book, where King Solomon got the gold for the Temple. I obtained a map to it from an information broker in Pretoria three months ago." "That sounds believable... I think I heard someone say once that it was in India." "And this from a girl who claims to be from one-hundred and fifty years in the future, and wears such shocking clothes!" chortled Allan. "In any case, you shant be safer on your own, so you might as well come along." For the moment, not knowing how to make it back to Columnia, let alone her own time, she decided to tag along. *** It was now 1853. She had been separated from Allan in a quest to find the Philosopher's Stone in the French colony of Tunis. Nonetheless, she now went by the pseudonym Alice Quatermain, having been treated like a daughter by the legendary adventurer. Indeed, she had learned everything she needed to know about adventuring from him. Not that she liked the life one bit-but now she knew how to fend for herself and get by in a male-dominated world. She had learned some French, Swahili and Arabic, and had learned to feign a British accent so that her American accent (which was apparently ahead of its time-evidently native-born Americans still spoke with a good deal of the Queen's English in the 1850s) did not raise questions. She careened from port to port, looking for work as a mercenary when a war broke out, or looking for rumors of lost treasure in some God-forsaken place that Western civilization had never seen. It was in the port of Valetta in the British dependency of Malta that she first heard about the Ethereal Gate. It was a magical gateway that was said to lead to the world of dreams. The emperor Q'in of ancient China supposedly had his court magicians create the Gate, so that the control-obsessed ruler could see what his subjects dreamt about. After his death, however, his advisors decided to make the location of the Gate a secret from the next emperor, fearing the return of the tyranny of Q'in. She had heard this rumor in an unsavoury opium den near the port, and she signed on to a frigate bound for the British colony of Ceylon. From there, she worked on a junk headed for French Annam, and from there she found a Dutch steamer headed for the treaty port of Shanghai. She then went up to the Imperial Capital of Peking, knowing that the Gate would be nearby. After substantial bribes and discreet questioning, she discovered that the Gate lay behind a sealed-off archway in the sewers, and that one merely had to call out to the gate in the Chinese where in the ethereal world one wished to go. So she memorized "Take me to Columnia" in Chinese, traipsed around in the sewers of Peking one night, and after breaking the bricks away with a pickaxe and getting past some traps set by the royal advisors, she was at the Ethereal Gate. Before jumping in, however, she took a dagger from her belt and carved the words "A. Quatermain was here" into the stone wall before saying the words and going through. *** A girl in nineteenth-century adventuring garb materialized in the streets of a dark city, and saw a massive skyship fly overhead. On the bottom, lighted up, were the words "ISS Stellemort". |