The Pilgrims of Parthen Read online

lungs burned like the sun-scorched sand. I got close enough to see there was nothing between the domes except dunes crowned with tough, tall grass. A wide ramp leading below one of the domes. The city was underground. But I still couldn’t reach it. I collapsed and landed back in the apartment, panting for breath.

  “Can’t. We can’t make it.” My body shook from the drugs or exhaustion. “It’s too far.”

  Macy chuckled and kissed me. “There’s a secret. Some of the other pilgrims told me. Parthen can’t be conquered. You have to love her. She can only be taken through love.”

  “Huh? What?”

  “I’ll show you, don’t worry. But we need more mushrooms first.”

  The city ached to be taken, but only but those that loved her. Pilgrims didn’t always wake up at the lowest arch. You could arrive at any point you’d already been to, as long as you visualized that place while the drug flung you between the stars. You had to imagine every detail of it, though--the shape of the gate, the fall of the shadows, every detail from every angle. You had to love the place.

  Macy was better at seeing than I was, better at being aware. Sometimes, she took my hand and ran my fingers across the spiral-shelled fossils or the subtle fracture of colors in the stone. I thought, this is why she’s an artist. This is how she sees our world all the time.

  It worked. We awoke at the second arch, then the fourth, then the seventh. There was never any breeze. The raging red sun always hung in the same position in the sky, like we were traveling through a instant frozen in time. On Earth, websites cropped up to share stories about Parthen. On the biggest, The Elsewhere, people wrote long treatises on astral travel, Eden, and Shambhala. But really, nobody knew where Parthen was, or how we reached it. And mainly, we just had to know what lay within.

  Sometimes, Macy pushed ahead before I was able to. She always helped me though. On Earth, she’d whisper in my ear, “Remember the dune beside the arch? Remember how the sand falls down around your foot when you step?” Without Macy, I would have still been stuck at the lowest arch.

  The day we reached the thirty-first arch, we dropped back to Earth and Macy had a message on her phone. It was on of the design firms, wanting to set up an interview. I felt the old terror that she would leave, but Macy erased the message and said, “Where would I go? I’ve got Parthen and you, what else could I want?”

  I needed Macy to help me visualize my way to the city, and she needed me to harvest the mushroom from Cherokee Bluff. As long as I could offer her Parthen, she would stay.

  Two days later, walking hand-in-hand, we entered the closest dome. Macy gasped as the space opened before us. The Parthenians had lived underground in vast upside-down ziggurats. Terraced levels ringed a huge atrium, an inverted mountain of light and cool air. There were workshops and living spaces but also aqueducts and broad open arenas.

  The dome protected the subterranean village from the wind scouring the surface and the worst of the sun’s heat, but it let in enough light to see and grow crops. The lowest terraces were now-fallow fields.

  All through fall, we explored the ziggurat. There was enough wonder there to keep Macy happy for a lifetime. So much better at visualizing through the city, Macy continually pushed ahead of me; she couldn’t help it. It was okay, though. On Earth, she filled sketchbooks with landmarks to help me catch up. She stopped filling out resumes, and Parthen became out life. We discovered an avenue of bare-limbed trees. There, the light fell through the branches like fine lace onto Macy’s cheeks and arms, making the tiny hairs on the back of her neck burn like filaments. It became my favorite place in two worlds.

  Move squatters had moved into the half-finished houses at Cherokee Bluff. I was wading through a basement when two scarecrow-thin punks appeared in the doorway above me holding pipes. Thank God Everest showed up and told them I was a friend. After that, I always brought snacks for their kids--Oreos, Twinkies--to trade for the parthen. They were okay, really. All of them were pilgrims and told me about new places to look for in the faraway city.

  Following clues the squatters gave us, we found the barrel-vaulted tunnel leading to a second ziggurat, then a third. Macy posted some of her drawings on The Elsewhere and become sort of famous. Place names also emerged from The Elsewhere community--the Summer Ziggurat, the clover-shaped Four-Hearted Ziggurat, The Canal of Lethe, The Courthouse. The last was a palisade in the Summer Ziggurat surrounded by eighty-one columns. Eighty-one columns, four hearts, thirty-six arches--the Parthenians liked cube roots, but nobody knew why. Besides documenting what they’d left behind, discussions took place over the internet on exactly who the Parthenians had been.

  There were no images anywhere in the city. The Parthenians might have been blind; they only needed sunlight for their crops. Even without pictures, though, it was clear the Parthenians had been far from human. There were no stairs, only ramps. There were no beds or clothes, and all tools had stubby handles. They’d been vegetarians, or at least, nobody had found any animal bones or slaughterhouses.

  Squiggling patterns of different metals were hammered into stone walls in some places. One theory was that they were some sort of tactile language. Maybe the Parthenians could feel the difference between the different types of metal, maybe even detect their unique chemical signatures. However, if it was a language, nobody had been able to decipher it.

  The Parthenians principle science had been chemistry--workshops and multi-level laboratories were everywhere. And instead of being built of mortared stone like most places, they were always carved from the bedrock. One night, we went looking for the passage connecting the Summer Ziggurat to the one called Whoville. I got separated from Macy again and spent the time exploring a workshop filled with elaborate glassware and braziers. Standing amid jars of clumped powders and oily liquids, I thought maybe the Parthenians had mastered alchemy instead of chemistry, some blend of science and magic that couldn’t exist on our world.

  When I slipped back to Earth, Macy was crying softly. “How can they all be gone? They must have been beautiful, peaceful people. How could they all just vanish?”

  I held her, thinking about the workroom. After a long time, I said, “Maybe they knew they were dying out and made parthen so they’d be remembered. They created a drug that lets other people visit their home, sent it to Earth somehow. So, when we explore the city, we’re not just doing it for us. We’re doing it for them too.”

  Macy wiped her eyes. “You think, maybe, they wanted to inspire us? Maybe they wanted to show us what we could become.”

  “Sure.” I kissed her. Our lips were chapped, a side effect of the parthen. “They had faith that we could become as amazing as them someday.”

  Things were falling apart on Earth, though. The country’s hairline cracks were widening. Politicians used reports of parthen--of the wonderful, strange city it revealed--to keep people frightened and stupid. They checked for parthen at the airport now, and congress rammed through a law that said you could go to jail just for having spores on your clothes. Local police tore down buildings where parthen was discovered and filled basements with concrete. Me and Macy watched the state attorney general defend the government’s right to flatten homes. She declared, “People pretend this drug is harmless, but it’s not. We have reports of users leaving their jobs, their families, just vanishing. We’re raising a generation that does nothing but dream of an imaginary city.”

  Except Parthen wasn’t imaginary, no matter how much they insisted it was. And the pilgrims weren’t dreaming anymore; we were waking up. We felt like pioneers from back before the country was sucked dry and flattened out, back when it was wild and green and full of possibility.

  By February, the pilgrims had discovered eight ziggurats, forming a ring. There had to be a ninth--the Parthenites did everything in square roots. Finally, a regular on The Elsewhere posted directions to the ninth ziggurat. It wasn’t in the center of the ring like everyone had assumed. Instead, it jutted off the Birdsong Ziggurat like a spur.


  After the directions, the poster wrote, “There are permanent bridges between our world and Parthen. You can find them from the last ziggurat.”

  “Permanent, like. . . permanent?” Macy asked, reading over my shoulder.

  “That’s what he says.” I skimmed the replies following the main post. Most were asking if it was for real. The original poster never answered back. “It might be a joke, though.”

  “But what if it’s not?” Macy squeezed my arm. “What if we could live in Parthen forever?”

  What if we could start over? What if we could start a new society full of wonder and love and community, finally out from under the shitheel lawyers and fear-merchant politicians? That idea drew pilgrims like sugar drew ants. Before long, people started leaving. They reached the last ziggurat and learned some secret. When they returned to Earth, they would get in their car or on a plane and head. . . somewhere. . . never coming back.

  Me and Macy worked out way toward the Birdsong Ziggurat, and then hopefully, the last ziggurat beyond it. Macy raced ahead like always. She loved Parthen more than she loved me, I guess, but at least she kept drawing landmarks to help me follow. After she reached the Birdsong Ziggurat, she showed me pictures of the great arcade