The Golden Space

by Pamela Sargent

  Merripen leaned back. Visions, glimpses of eternal truth— Domingo would have said that they were only remnants of their once divided minds, their former longing for authority. Once, the voices had spoken to them; they had lost them as they became conscious of themselves. Prayer was only a way of calling to such voices, which would never again answer them so clearly; Eline’s conviction that there was a life after death was another remnant of the past. He sighed. She was closer to Domingo’s people than she realized.

  “I wanted you to know,” she went on. “Domingo didn’t try to stop me. He must not have known what would happen. His reason was failing.”

  “He knew,” Merripen said. “He was waiting for it.” He could see that she was skeptical. He thought of telling her what Domingo had told him, but he doubted it would sway her. “They’re changing, they’re developing on their own now. They won’t forget Domingo so easily, and now that they know one god can fall, they may begin to think of toppling the new one themselves.”

  “They’ll follow me.” She laughed softly. “They might be our future. Think of that. Everything we’ve done just brings us back to the beginning again.”

  “No,” Merripen said. “You’re wrong.” Karim’s image winked out. Eline said her farewell and her face disappeared. The trees above him stirred and a strong wind gusted through the dark town below, scattering pale streamers of cloth.

  V

  They sent out Eline’s hovercraft at dawn. It floated south over the meadow below Harsville and on toward the low hills beyond before bearing west.

  They waited until it was out of sight, then began to track it. Andrew rode with Merripen. He jerked his head toward Karim’s craft, which was following close behind. “Something’s wrong with Karim. Did you notice?”

  “I’ve been noticing for a while,” Merripen replied.

  “He looked sick this morning. I watched him take a turn around Harsville while you were eating breakfast. He looked dizzy; he staggered a bit. He’s hiding something.”

  “I know.”

  “We’d better keep our immune systems working. It might be contagious.”

  The empty craft was traveling farther from them; Merripen turned on the screen and gazed through the vehicle’s eyes. It passed an empty wooden shack, still standing in a field.

  The spirit of the journey seemed to return to him; the calming lassitude, the anticipation of reaching his goal. He lost his impatience. The journey itself could be pleasurable, viewing the landscape, breaking up the trip with stops along the way. Then he thought of Domingo, and Harsville, and the hunters of Pine Point. The illusion vanished. He was traveling through a dead world; it was their graveyard. Were there others like Domingo? He was sure that there were. His impatience returned. He had waited too long.

  “Do you miss Terry?” he said to Andrew.

  “No. I always return to her, but I don’t miss her. Haven’t you noticed that you don’t really miss anyone unless it’s someone you think you might never see again?”

  “No, I haven’t noticed that. I can miss plenty of people I think I’ll see in a few hours if they’re close to me.”

  “But you don’t miss them. You feel their absence, you remember them, but you don’t miss them. The pain isn’t there.”

  By noon, patches of blue were appearing in the sky; the sun nestled between two clouds. Merripen had dozed, and then eaten; his muscles were stiff. They were traveling through a river valley, floating near one bank. On each side, the trees were thick; the land would soon be nothing but forest. He looked at the trees, at the dark shadows under their boughs. It wasn’t his world. They had somehow been carried through space without realizing it and were now somewhere else, not on Earth. He looked up at their familiar star and shook off the fantasy.

  If he traveled long enough, he might see the world. He could come to an ocean, cross it in a small airship, alight on an island, drift on after a rest. Once, he could have asked a satellite to transmit pictures of the land, the settlements and towns, before setting out, but the satellites were silent now. It did not matter; they would have shown him buildings, even people, but not Domingo’s dream.

  Ahead, the river curved, then widened. Gnarled and twisted trees clung to the edge of one bank, their snaky limbs almost touching the water. He looked at the screen. The empty hovercraft was crossing a field. Still tracking it, they moved away from the riverbank and toward the thinning trees. There had once been a road here; now it was overgrown with grass and green shoots which would one day be more trees. They followed the grassy road.

  A bright flash of light flickered on the screen; Merripen squinted and leaned forward. The light moved, becoming the metal of another craft which was now approaching the empty one. “Someone’s out there. Look.”

  Andrew leaned over and looked at the screen. The panel hummed; someone was trying to call the empty craft.

  “Should we answer?” Merripen asked.

  “I don’t see why not. We’re still far enough away to run for it.” Andrew smiled sourly. “We could always lead them toward Eline.”

  Merripen hesitated. The strange hovercraft was still approaching. At last he opened a channel.

  A round-faced, red-haired woman stared out of the screen at him. “Bonjour,” she said. “Salaam, do-briy d’en, kon- nichi wa, hello.”

  “Hello will do,” Merripen replied.

  “Hello, then. Isn’t there anyone in that thing?”

  “No, it’s our scout.”

  “Clever. My name’s Jorah. May I ask you why you’re traveling?”

  “We’re trying to find some friends.”

  “Trying to find? Don’t you know where they are?”

  “If we knew, we wouldn’t be wandering around here looking for them.” He felt irritated by her manner, even though he realized that she was probably just as suspicious of him as he was of her. “We didn’t know there was anyone out here. We have no intention of disturbing you.”

  “You won’t disturb us,” she answered. “We won’t let you. Just a warning. I’m not out here alone. Tell your empty craft to stop a kilometer from here.”

  “We weren’t planning to stop.”

  “You have nothing to fear as long as you’re not Rescuers. You don’t look the type. They’re usually sneaky or blatant. We’re ready to protect ourselves.”

  “You made that clear.”

  “If you want to stop, you may. I’ll give you lunch. If you don’t, then I’ll stop wasting my time.”

  Merripen glanced at Andrew, who nodded a little. “All right,” Merripen answered. “We’ll accept your offer.”

  The empty craft sat outside a large, faceted dome. Through the dome’s clear sides, Merripen saw a pit and several tents. Jorah stood at the dome’s entrance; two men were with her. He waited inside the craft; Karim pulled up to his side. Jorah and the two men did not move; he noticed that they all carried wands. Karim got out of his craft. Merripen, surprised, motioned to him. Karim tapped on his door; Merripen opened it.

  “It’s all right,” Karim said. “I’ve seen one of the men before. He stayed in Pine Point some time ago.”

  Merripen and Andrew got out and followed Karim to the dome’s entrance. Merripen walked slowly, his body tensed for flight; he was still wary of strangers. Karim spoke to the smaller of the two men and introduced his companions; then Jorah led them inside.

  Here the air was not as humid. They walked near the edge of the pit. The pillared, stony façade of an old building jutted out from one side of the pit; tables piled with shards, trays, and papers stood in front of the building. “We’re archeologists,” Jorah said. “We just started digging here.” She led them to a tent; the two men left them and scampered down into the pit. Merripen and his friends sat outside the tent while Jorah went inside, coming out in a few moments with a tray of tea and bowls of rice and vegetables.

  She sat down while they ate. “Where are you from?”

  “I’m from a town in the north,” Karim said. “My friends
are from a Citadel near it.”

  Merripen peered over his cup and met Jorah’s amber eyes. “I suppose we’ll be excavating it one of these days,” she said. “Your Citadel, I mean.”

  “You’ll have to wait a long time.”

  “Not so long. Not so long as you think.”

  They finished their food in silence. Jorah watched them solemnly. “What are you excavating?” Merripen said at last.

  “A small pre-Transition town.” She waved a hand. “We’re working on the town hall, trying to dig out the records. We have to do most of the work ourselves. On my first dig, we got some kobolds from a Citadel, but they didn’t work out. They were too careless—it was too hard to train them to take care of the artifacts they found. We were so busy trying to make them do it right that we finally had to do it ourselves.” She paused. “There’s so much to do, and not enough people to do it. We were so confident when we started. I thought: We have all this time, we can recover the past—all of it. We can find every important site, build up nearly a complete record of the human past, record it all, analyze it.” She shook her head. “I was naive.”

  “Were you?” Merripen said.

  “People were very destructive during the Transition. It was as if everyone wanted to forget the dead past—dead in every sense of the word. Cities were torn up and rebuilt, some favorite sites were restored at the cost of others nearby, towns and farmhouses were cleared to make room for gardens and campsites and parks. Even before that, a lot of old sites had been destroyed by carelessness or greed, and then the materializers added to the problem, because many people duplicated artifacts from different times—I’ve found necklaces of Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt all over the world.” She shrugged. “Few people thought it mattered. The discontinuity between our world and the past was too great. The past was gone, and we had an endless future. Certainly we had nothing in common with those short-lived people.”

  “You should have an easier time of it now,” Andrew said.

  “Not really. Now nature is the enemy. As we dig here, other sites are crumbling away, or being flooded or buried. We’re just trying to save what we can.”

  “Maybe it doesn’t matter,” Andrew said. “The past, I mean. It doesn’t have the same meaning; it’s something that happened to another species, in a way.”

  “Perhaps. But I think if we could understand what happened then, we’d know more about ourselves, too. Maybe we’d understand what’s happening to us now. I want to know as much as I can about which societies died out, and why, and which ones could change and why. I don’t know—maybe I’m bringing too much of myself to this, maybe I’m not seeing what’s there. I look at these scraps and make up stories about them.” She sighed. “Enough. What about you? Who are you looking for?”

  Merripen explained as briefly as he could; Jorah nodded and did not interrupt. She frowned when he finished and looked uneasily toward the pit.

  “This may have nothing to do with the ones you’re trying to find,” Jorah said softly. “But about ten years ago, six or seven hundred kilometers from here, I did see something strange. We’d been digging at a site that had seemed promising but didn’t pan out. I was tired and discouraged, so I went out alone in a hovercraft. The land’s flat there, I would have seen anyone coming for a long way, so I wasn’t really being reckless. My craft was driving and I wasn’t paying too much attention to where it was going, but after a while, I noticed that it was going in the wrong direction.”

  She glanced at the pit again, as if afraid someone would overhear her. “I checked it. There was nothing wrong. I reset it—I was going north—but it kept bearing east. So I got out and stretched out my arm. I felt a field, an invisible field. I couldn’t penetrate it, and my craft couldn’t go through it.”

  “A shield,” Merripen said.

  “Like the ones around Citadels? But this one was huge. Whatever generated it was a lot more powerful than anything I know about.” A tall woman hurried past, toward the pit; Jorah stopped talking and toyed with the teapot until the woman disappeared into the pit.

  “I got a little nervous,” Jorah continued. “I took out my binoculars. All I could see was flat ground reaching toward the horizon. Finally I thought I saw something move, but it might have been my eyes playing tricks. I was scared, but still curious. I decided to measure the diameter of the shield. I rode around it. It was at least fifty kilometers wide, maybe more. I’ve forgotten. Something had to be in there, but I didn’t see it.”

  Merripen clutched his cup. Karim raised his eyebrows; Andrew put down his bowl. “Maybe I should have stayed there,” Jorah said. “Maybe I should have brought my friends to check it. I left. I went back to our site and I didn’t say a word. I had bad dreams about it. Once I thought that there might have been people inside it from out there.” She waved at the sky. “I dreamed that they’d come here to make the earth over, to tear it apart. We left our site soon after that. I never went back, and I didn’t report it. It was obvious that whoever left the shield there didn’t want intruders, and I was afraid of what it might mean.”

  “Tell us how to get there.” After he spoke, Merripen felt surprised. He could be heading toward something even more dangerous than Domingo’s village. Andrew was nodding; Karim seemed oddly indifferent.

  Jorah said, “So you’re going to go.”

  “We might as well. We have no other leads.”

  “I don’t think you should.”

  “Then you shouldn’t have told us about it.”

  She grimaced. “I’m just resentful, I suppose. You’re going to go there, and I was too frightened to stay. I guess I’m not used to dealing with anything that’s still alive. I sometimes feel like a grave robber.” She gazed toward the pit. “And sometimes I don’t know whether I’m digging here or burrowing through my mind.” She lifted her head. “When will you leave?”

  “Right away,” Merripen said.

  “I’d better give you directions, then.”

  By the next day, the hills had given way to flat land. A sea of grass rippled before them to the horizon; darker bands flowed over the grass as it swayed. Under the wide sky, Merripen felt small and exposed; the small fluffy clouds overhead were so low it seemed he could touch them, while those in the distance appeared to be thousands of kilometers away.

  He was riding with Andrew, Karim’s craft at their side. Far ahead, the empty craft was a fat insect swimming in a green and brown sea. Merripen thought about Karim. The man no longer seemed ill, but he had been keeping to himself ever since their departure from Jorah’s site.

  Merripen had awakened in the night, while they were resting near the side of an old road, and had noticed that Karim was not in his craft, though his light was on. Peering into the darkness, he had at last spied Karim standing in the road, arms out, face turned toward the stars. Merripen had pretended he was still asleep when Karim returned. He had said nothing to Andrew.

  Karim’s craft floated ahead, then settled on the ground. The high grass bowed under it. Merripen stopped behind it and signaled to the other man. There was no answer.

  Merripen was out of his craft and walking toward Karim’s when the other man emerged, a wand at his waist and a pack on his back. His dark eyes were clear; he smiled. “It’s done,” Karim said, and his voice was deep and full again. “I’m going to leave you here.”

  Merripen shook his head. Andrew had come to his side. “What are you talking about?” Merripen said.

  “Surely you can guess. It must have occurred to you earlier. I’d done my work with viruses, using them to transmit certain traits, to change genes, to transplant new ones. I became my own subject. I considered this for a long time; I knew what I was doing. That’s why I had to leave Pine Point. I’m not as I was.”

  Merripen stepped back. Karim looked as he had, yet his eyes seemed lost in the contemplation of a vision Merripen could not see. “What have you done to yourself?”

  Karim opened his hands, flexing his fingers. “All my senses are s
harper. The air itself can nourish me; I’ll need little food. I can live in the world. I no longer have to hide from it.” He lifted his head. “I carry a symbiote—its cells are replacing my own even as I speak. I taste the wind, I see its sound. It blows from the south now—I smell the ferns and the traces of moss, the swamp air. I’m stronger. I can heal myself almost instantly.”

  “But why did you do it?”

  “Because I want to live in the world, out here. I thought about it so many times as I went out hunting or hiking—it’s time for us to return to that. But we can’t as long as we cling to our devices, the things we need to stay alive, the things that separate us from the world. You think I’m mad.” Karim shook his head. “But I can be fed by sunlight, I can pluck that weed”—he waved at a leafy green plant—“and be nourished by it, because my body will change it to food. I can live as we were meant to live. We made a mistake when we set ourselves up as Earth’s rulers—we are only part of it, and perhaps not the most important part, either.”

  Karim looked down at the Bond on his wrist. “I no longer need this.” He removed it and dropped it on the ground, crushing it under his foot. “This is where I’ll leave you. Take my hovercraft—I left a record of my work in its computer, in case anyone wishes to join me. Perhaps you will if you don’t find your friends.”

  “No,” Merripen said. “You don’t know what you’re doing.”

  “I know exactly what I’m doing. I feel my mind shedding its doubts and intellections as a snake sheds its skin. Farewell.” Karim turned and walked away.