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Save Point: Infang Journal

The Island Of Infang, Somewhere In The Pacific

First Day Of Expedition (See associated schedule)

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The first day of the expedition, and we begin to make our way inland over the low grassy hills on the borderland of Infang Island.

A preliminary pit dug in the crumbling sediments uplifted by the formation of the island reveals a number of interesting things, including ancient fossils uplifted from the shallow seabed. We spend most of the morning digging near the shore, an area about six feet wide and three deep, and find a number of new or unidentifiable examples, the most interesting of which is a remobilised fossil, eroded from somewhere else and introduced into the sediments. It is made of a hard black stone, rich in traces of metals and pyrites, and resembles two cylinders of different sizes partly connected together along one edge.

As we travel further into the hills after lunch, the nature of the expedition being as it is, the students find the path, spreading out but keeping in sight. There are no detailed maps of Infang, although one of the students has been assigned to draw up a rough one as we progress.

Each of the students carries one or more special items for the expedition, all listed long before as part of the ships manifest. Many are carrying the parts of a set, numbered in advance, of wooden boards and canvas tenting which will be used to set up a more permanent base camp halfway inland.

The secrets of Infang await us!

Collecting Topaz Crystals (Time and date not listed)

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We climb the dry riverbed, toward the centre of Infang, but there is no sun and only the grey sky above. The sand is dark and moist underfoot, finely broken black stone.

The students have found large and well-formed topaz crystals in the washed sands, and we linger so that they can collect some. Nonetheless, something dark seems to have fallen over the day.

Partial Transcript of Speech Given At Royal Society

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"...initially intends to undertake excavations at the site known in local legend as the Cold Pool, due to the fact that the water temperature remains constant all year round, as does its colour, which is a remarkable shade of greenish-blue resembling that of copper oxide.

"The pool was supposedly first named by the original indigenous population, now long gone, who seem to have been talented at carving natural mineral materials and stone. The greatest evidence of this art can be seen in the well-attested Infang Statue, of which some photographs currently exist. The statue is carved of green agate and represents no other known school of design, being of an abstract style considerably in advance of its known origin.

"According to the myth associated with it, although the statue is seemingly impervious to both damage and the elements, and is carved into solid rock, the statue will one day be separated from its base and cast into the Cold Pool, with unknowable consequences..."

Near the Cold Pool

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When I arrive the Infang Statue is gone from the place where it should be, overlooking the waters down near the beach. Somehow it has been cleanly twisted from its plinth to leave an elegant, circle-shaped socket that looks precisely artificial.

The Cold Pool is several kilometers away, and the shortest route to it is directly over a ridge that is bare and hard-scrabble, like a recent lava flow, despite the fact that there is no evidence of such activity at any time in the recent past. I struggle up the slope, trying to make haste towards the pool.

There is something subtly horrible about the Cold Pool as I approach it. There is a curious rusty patination to its steep and circular walls, and the water within is the menacing shade of green-blue promised by the legend, as though it is not a pool at all but some sort of industrial remnant.

Standing beside the pool is the self-proclaimed 'Mistress of Modern Archaeology', who has the Infang Statue in her grasp and is about to test the story to her own satisfaction by reaching down and drowning the strange greenish stone cylinder beneath the oily waters.

Revolting as it seems, it appears I will have to dive into the Cold Pool to stop her. She bends, and the Infang Statue desires the waters.

She sees me and freezes as I dive into the horrible waters of the Cold Pool, lunging for the as yet fractionally submerged statue. Unbalanced as she is, I am able to pull the statue from her hands, but the Cold Pool has tasted it and will not let go. I try desperately to hold it above the slimy waters and swim for the side as the Cold Pool tries to suck me down beneath them.

After what can be no more than a few nightmarish seconds, I manage to throw an arm out over the sharp rim of the Cold Pool, isolating the statue completely from the waters. The draw of the pool thus diminished, I tear myself from its cold grasp and cast the statue safely away from the edge. The waters are already being sucked down to an unknown depth.

Instead of falling down, the statue falls in an upward curve, drawn back toward the pool, but then starts spinning like a compass magnet above it, faster and faster, until it suddenly comes apart and explodes in a spray of fragments. Pieces that are metal edged or of glistening crystal rain to earth around the edges of the pool, any special properties the statue may have had having left it the instant it broke apart.

The 'Mistress of Modern Archaelogy' screams some impressively foul swear-words at me and beats at my chest with considerable skill.

A Theory About The Pool

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"The Cold Pool is not just a body of water, it's one part of what's left of a machine. A very large one, that's been rusting away practically since the start of eternity. You would have figured it out yourself if you'd had a little longer to examine it, rather than rushing straight into making a practical experiment.

"The Infang Statue was also a part of the machine. You might have noticed that it was precision tooled out of a perfect cylinder, and that the elaborate and detailed shape of it was perfectly symmetrical. It wasn't art, it was engineering."

"You would have been dragged down and drowned."

"The purpose of the machine was to change realities and to travel between them. That's what it was for. The reason why no-one can ever find Infang in the same place, why it's sometimes not there or gets retroactively erased from history, is that parts of the machine still work, after a fashion, and when people make changes, it ripples outward.

"You pulled a lever off the machine and threw it into the gears. Not a good idea."

"You would have been dragged down and drowned!"

Leaving the Island

_ _

The expedition has progressed into the green lowlands around the edges of the island.

We are on the riverbed, where the blue water flows cold between the tumbled dark stones. The whole is set within a river valley and I watch from the paler orange and gold fired bricks of the bridge above as the students go mad with enthusiasm below, seeking amongst the stones. I decide that it might be interesting to investigate myself, and I find several fragments that are part of a large geode, smashed open in its progress downriver. There aren't enough pieces to assemble a complete sphere, but as the students point out, you can't display an intact geode to maximum effect.

Once we have finished our investigations for the site, our guide takes us further downstream. The guide is from another island and hasn't actually been here before, but it's proven almost impossible to find someone who's actually been to Infang and come back, despite the fact that there's an extensive and well-detailed body of local myth about the place.

The river valley narrows and deepens steadily until the rock closes over us above, and we find ourselves in a waterway that more and more resembles a mine shaft. For a while the river runs through through with a well-defined ledge to one side, although relatively narrow and cramped, and only really wide enough for use to proceed single-file.

Discussions with the guide suggest that at some point, in the past, there has been some limited mining on Infang, although it never seems to have progressed beyond digging with hammers and shovels and he's not sure precisely where it occurred. The riverbed seems to be safe enough, although one or two of the students incautiously crack their heads against the low underhang of the roof, to various degrees of discomfort.

At a suitable widening, where water flows freely from cracks in the stone of the tunnel walls to add a small waterfall to the main flow, we stop to carefully hunt for fossil content. Little is forthcoming except for a few of what look like novel local variations on belemnites and small ammonites, the remains of small ancient squids, although an overly enthusiastic attack on the partly submerged wall causes a small face to shear away, revealing a colorful display of topaz and tourmaline borosilicates. This and other deposits like it presumably account for the other pieces we have found up and down stream.

The students share out the big, brightly shaded broken fragments. I'm reluctant to damage the large fixed crystals that are still part of the rock, as our guide expresses important feelings about them that are difficult to translate. They seem to be important in some way.

The shaft is considerably long and about halfway in it diverges from the water and explores outward into the surrounding stone, to come out on the beach some considerable distance from the river waterfall that terminates the stream.

It is now time to make our way to the slow boat that has been chartered to wait for us and take us away from Infang when the time comes. At this location, as distinct from around the rest of Infang generally, the shore is shallow and composed entirely of a dark earth which is held together by a verdant green moss that binds its way luxuriantly around the soil. Despite this, the verge often crumbles, the students frequently slipping ankle deep into the sea.

Shallow hills rise upward to the west, forested thinly in bush of the same bright green as the moss. I take a sample of the moss and earth, placing it with a suitable amount of moisture into a small glass terrarium jar to simulate its natural environment and protect it from the rigors of travel. There is something unusual about the soil, and the moss that grows on it, which would not be expected under such saline conditions.

On the dock platform, pulleys are being used to winch upward and load into the ships hold the strange metal relict we found half-buried amongst the trees some distance from the Cold Pool, still partially embedded in the gravel. It seems to be part of some much greater device and heavily corroded, but could with some imagination be considered to comprise a slender wing on each side and a central nacelle. It seems to have once been made of a basically white metal, before oxidation set in, and certainly retains considerable structural strength, as several of the lazier students have seated themselves atop it and are letting the winch give them and their packs a free ride onto the deck.

We are taking the relict back for further study.

Many of the students are working on their papers, so when a leaf escapes into the breeze, I retrieve it. It in no way concerns the geology of Infang, but seems to be an homage by one of the older students to his favorite doxy, comparing her favorably to some sort of feline, a cat or maybe a lioness, by way of a scandalous and very complicated rhyming scheme.

The student in question does not seem in any way embarrassed to have been caught out, and offers the justification that nothing is explicitly stated, only forcefully implied. He seems quite cheerful about it and makes it openly clear that he is enthusiastic about knowing the pleasures of his lady the very instant we get back, possibly after they've both had a few. The younger students whistle and cat-call, seemingly knowing quite well who she is.

I confiscate the verse and he does nothing to stop me. It seems he's memorized it complete with revisions, because he starts declaiming it aloud until I'm sufficiently embarrassed to order him to stop, and give it back.

Only once we are fully laden does the boat begin to make its way out into the suddenly deeper waters that drop abruptly off the coastal shelf just beyond the beach. Behind us, the tremors begin.