By Brian Biswas
Because the surface of Mercury is as hot as molten lead, its inhabitants live underground. It has an atmosphere, though, and properly suited up one can live on the surface for brief periods of time.
The planet is heavily cratered, much like Earth's moon. It has cliffs the colour of ochre that extend as much as a mile into the sky. Evidence of ancient lava flows are everywhere. There are shallow basins and ringed craters. A good percentage of Mercury's surface is covered by plains.
Mercury has its oddities, as well. And they are bizarre! I observe the Sun setting in the west, a small red disk. And then — almost immediately — it rises and increases in size as it reverses course. At its zenith it stops and changes direction, growing smaller until it disappears from view. The stars come out and speed across the sky at three times their normal rate. I spy Earth, a small, pale-blue disk about the size of my thumb. I feel sad that it is no longer my home, this third planet from the Sun.
Eventually, I find what I am looking for: one of the many entrance holes that lead underground. This one is nearly four-feet wide, partially obscured by fallen rock. It is built into the side of a cliff fronted by windswept blue-grey boulders. I noticed it only because I thought I saw something moving amongst the rocks.
The entrance is surrounded by yellow vegetation and tall stalks made of a material that looks like petrified wood. I see a swift-moving stream of boiling water that flows beyond the entrance, and I watch in fascination as steam rises, condenses against the cliff wall, and trickles to the ground.
From out of nowhere the brown body of a Mercurian rat shoots across my path and disappears into the hole. I jump back, startled. I thought Mercury was too hot for anything to live on the surface. Or was this animal but an illusion?
I enter and find myself in a maze of tunnels. Everywhere I look there are veins of gold, diamond, sapphire. A miner's paradise!
The tunnel is suffused with light which glows red like the embers of a dying fire. Try as I might I cannot discern the source.
I walk on through damp, serpentine passages. I hear the drip, drip of water falling over polished rocks. More than once I slip, scattering stones in all directions. The tunnel opens and I am walking along a ridge, the escarpment of an underground cliff. I watch my step lest I plunge to what surely would be a gruesome death. (I imagine myself as a bloodied corpse, a prisoner down here forever.) Eventually, tunnel walls close in and I breathe a sigh of relief.
An hour later I find myself a mile below the surface. The passage ends and I am facing a melancholy landscape with no sign of life. The soil has a bluish hue and is compact like hardened clay. The air is cool, still, and deathly silent. If I lived down here I surely would go mad!
I notice six passageways and pick one at random. I walk for another mile or so, but encounter nothing. The passage descends, narrows, and I am conscious of thick, musky air pressing down upon me. My lungs feel as if they are about to burst. My heart pounds, I am sweating about my neck and forehead. And then everything goes black.
I must have fainted, for the next thing I know I am lying on my back. The pressure on my chest is overwhelming. I gasp for breath.
Perhaps I've miscalculated and I am closer to Mercury's core than I'd imagined? To be honest, it's possible I've been walking for days, not hours. I've lost all sense of time.
With a Herculean effort I rise and start off once again. How to describe what I see? — or more precisely, what I think I see, for now the light in the tunnel is virtually nonexistent.
I detect amorphous shapes which hover before me with appendages like the talons of a hawk. They want to claw out my eyes, I know. There are ghosts down here. I see shadows of forms that once were, grinning, toothless faces. I feel fiery breaths. I raise my arms — a pathetic shield — and scream in terror. Yet the ghosts, too, must be afraid for they scurry into the shadows.
No, I will not find an inhabitant of Mercury today and probably never will. It is far more likely that I have descended into the underworld and am now walking among the skeletons of the damned.
About the Author
Brian Biswas
Brian has published over sixty short stories in the United States as well as internationally.
His short story "A Betrayal" was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and anthologized in The Irreal Reader.
A collection, A Betrayal and Other Stories, was published by Rogue Star Press in 2018, and his novel, The Astronomer, will be published by Whiskey Tit Press later this year.
Brian is listed in the International Writers and Authors Who's Who, Marquis Who's Who, and the Internet Speculative Fiction Database.
You can read more of Brian's work at his website: <www.brianbiswas.com>.
Or follow him on Twitter: @brianbiswas
"Mercury" is an extract from Brian's upcoming novel The Astronomer.
Ion Newcombe is the editor and publisher of AntipodeanSF, Australia’s longest running online speculative fiction magazine, regularly issued since January 1998, and conceived back around November 2007. He has been a zealous reader and occasional writer of SF since his childhood in the 1960s, and even sold a few stories here and there back in the '90s.
Mark Webb's midlife crisis came in the form of attempting to write speculative fiction at a very slow pace. His wife maintains this is a good outcome considering the more expensive and cliched alternatives. Evidence of Mark's attempts to procrastinate in his writing, including general musings and reviews of books he has been reading, can be found at www.markwebb.name.
Geraldine Borella writes adult short stories and stories for children and has been published in anthologies for both. In 2018, one of her children’s short stories placed second in The Buzz Words Short Story Prize and she won an ASA Emerging Writer’s Mentorship. She currently works part-time as a hospital pharmacist and as an online creative writing tutor.
Mark is an astrophysicist and space scientist who worked on the Cassini/Huygens mission to Saturn. Following this he worked in computer consultancy, engineering, and high energy research (with a stint at the JET Fusion Torus).
Laurie Bell lives in Melbourne, Australia. She was that girl you found with her nose always buried in a book. She has been writing ever since she was a little girl and first picked up a pen. From books to short stories, radio plays to snippets of ideas and reading them aloud to anyone who will listen.
Garry Dean lives on the Mid Coast of New South Wales Australia, and has been a fan of SF for most of his natural life. Being vision impaired, he makes good use of voice recognition and text to speech in order to write. Many of his stories have appeared in AntipodeanSF over the years, and his love of all things audio led him to join the narration team in 2017.
Alistair Lloyd is a Melbourne based writer and narrator who has been consuming good quality science fiction and fantasy most of his life.
Pixie is a voice actor, cabaret performer & slam poet From the Blue Mountains in NSW.
Sarah Pratt is an avid fiction writer and a Marketing Consultant.
Although a writer of the baby boom persuasion, Ed has not boomed for quite a while.
Timothy Gwyn is a professional pilot in Canada, where he flies to remote communities. During a lull in his flying career, he was a radio announcer for three years, and he is also an author.
Nick works as a freelance writer out of Perth, Western Australia, where he likes to read unsettling fiction and complain about the sun.
Callan J. Mulligan was born in Melbourne, Australia, in 1988.
Louis Evans is a sci-fi writer living in Brooklyn with his partner and two cats named after fictional European detectives, Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey.
Kaoru Sakasaki lives with his family in Yokohama, south of Tokyo.
Neil A. Hogan has been writing space fiction on and off since the '80s.
João Ventura writes short fiction, which has appeared in several websites (AntipodeanSF and Bewildering Stories among them), and also in printed form: Somnium, in Brazil; Dragão Quântico, Hyperdrivezine, Phantastes (Portuguese fanzines); Universe Pathways (in both the English and the Greek versions).
An emerging writer, James Patrik enjoys exploring the existential themes.
Steven Fritz graduated from the University of Maryland, became a Naval Aviator and flew helicopters and maritime patrol aircraft in the US Navy.
Pretty much a life-long fan of speculative fiction, Edwina Harvey is a writer, editor, silk painter and ceramic artist.
Old enough to just remember the first manned Moon landing, Kevin was so impressed he made science his life.