In his hotel room he tried opening the briefcase. It was locked. Some sort of composite material … he broke it by beating it with a chair. A few more stabs with the chair leg and it broke apart to the extent that he could pull out the papers it held. He spread them over the bed.
They were diagrams. Blueprints for Holywelkin’s Orchestra.
When he realized what they were, and what they implied, he became more frightened than he had been even during the attack on Red Whiskers. One of the documents named the Holywelkin Institute as contractor. And … his name was at the airport, on the reservation list for a flight to Nueva Brasilia.…
He packed his bag, checked out of the hotel, went back to the car rental, rented another car. The rental people provided him with maps; he told them he was going to Zurich, and then when he got out on the autobahn, he headed for Stuttgart.
the patagonian shore
The size of everything was wrong.
The people were too small. All his life Johannes had had to look up at people, and now looking down at the Terrans he felt odd. It was like visiting a nation of children. He stood on the bridge of their chartered hydroplane and watched them curiously day after day. Old wizened children.
And the sky was too big. Each hemisphere on Pluto, and each outer terra with its bubble of air, presented the observer on the ground with a small blue dome, sometimes one through which stars shone. On Earth, however, the sky was an immense solid blue dome which leaped overhead in a shape like the pointed end of an egg. And it was so blue! He who lived in a world of blues found the final blue at last, and from the bridge of the hydroplane he watched the sky and felt that there was a part of his brain that had been waiting all his life to see that color. He thought, I have stepped out of doors for the first time in my life! Or for the second; Mars with its violet sky had been a world, but a world made, while here was the world given.
And it was such a big world. A giant among Terrans, Johannes was dwarfed by Terra itself. The surface of the endless poster-blue sea seemed a perfectly flat plane. For the first time he saw how intelligent men in the earliest days of history could have thought the world flat. He watched, feeling as triumphant as Archimedes, as a rocky headland that the hydroplane had passed was pared away by the distant horizon, until it disappeared under the blue. A sphere, a sphere!
But not a Holywelkin sphere. The Earth’s own mass was enough to generate this oppressive gravity, and the bare bones of physics gave him the tools to calculate that such a gravity implied a very great mass indeed. “The Earth is big.”
He spent the days of their sea voyage on the bridge, and no one—not Margaret with her questions, nor Delia with her solicitude, nor Karna with his heavy jokes—climbed up to bother him. They planed over the waves until they came to a long bare shore: endless steep beaches, backed by low grassy hills. Here Johannes had the hydroplane stop (it rocked in the water like any barge), and they were ferried onto the Patagonian shore. It was late in the afternoon. While the others made camp Johannes walked south down the ridge of grassy dune at the top of the beach.
The sun was low over the westward hills, big and orange, flattened a little. It was possible to look briefly at it. The rush of an atmosphere over a world turning: a cool offshore wind held up choppy waves that approached the beach at an angle and pitched over just meters from the sand. Sunlight pierced the waves before they broke, making them green and translucent. He scuffed the thick beach grass. From the top of the beach dunes he could see up and down the bare shore for a long way; in both directions the beach extended to headlands made russet in the shadows of the hills. To the west the air was like honey, the hills were dark. The wind was picking up. The roar of white water sluiced up and down the steep shingle, rolling pebbles and fragments of shells that were pink and spiny: a music there, a perfect rhythm, range of pitches, rich timbre.… Toiling up the loose sand of a dune he felt the blood pound in his neck and thighs, flush through his skin. All in time together. In time …
From a dune somewhat taller than the rest he could see his friends to the north, scattered up and down the beach. They had just started a fire, and his eyes were drawn to the yellow spot in the dusk. Three of his people were clumped together, blue and green pantaloons flapping in the wind; they looked alien to the landscape, too tall and shiny for the long harsh shore. Europeans had landed here long ago; no doubt they had looked just as alien on this prehistoric beach as his friends did. The Europeans had met natives of the region living as they always had, wrapped in furs, black with grease, brandishing spears and yelling in fear and awe. Watching from their little ships the Europeans had thought them more beast than humankind. Johannes looked inland at the dusk-shadowed hills and considered what it would be like to live on this coast—up in one of the clefts in the hills, more likely, or next to one of the marshes tucked behind the beach. Going out every day to check snares and stalk small mammals and birds. Collecting shellfish, making nets, fishing in tidal ponds, tanning skins, building huts, weaving baskets, stringing ornaments of shell. He imagined them hunched around a beach fire, watching flames cast their glow on the breaking waves. The crackle of wood against the cyclic roar of water; the smell of salt and woodsmoke; faces burnt by radiant heat, backsides cold.…
And there, around the fires on the beach, among human beings who could be mistaken for beasts; there in the voices and hands of those short brown civilized creatures, with their minds as powerful and active as any in the Holywelkin age, music had begun. Around some small precious fire they talked in rhythms, at different pitches, and hit sticks together, and doing it they felt that old dust in the blood pick up and fly through their bodies, impelled as it had been only in moments of danger, fear, triumph, ecstasy—moving just as fast as they could chant, moved by the apprehension of beauty in sound. Sunken bloodshot eyes glittered in the firelight, gazes met with joy at a new world found, and cries of exultation joined the chant, became a part of it.…
The full moon was rising over the sea. How fat it appeared on the horizon, compared to the little white coin it was when overhead! Johannes stared at it, looked up and down the beach, looked behind him; he wanted to see everywhere at once. How he wished for his eyes.… In the moonlight the hills behind grew new shapes and shadows. The wet sand of the steep beach glittered white, and the headland to the south gleamed gray, visible again. Johannes stared and stared, his throat constricted, his face hurting: “How could they ever have left?” he whispered. Waves answered.
He took a deep breath, walked around. Then back up the long beach toward the fire, feet sinking in the loose sand between clumps of black grass, hands in pockets for warmth. Silhouettes crossed the yellow spot of fire: small hard people in furs? Men in helmets and breastplates? Though he knew they were only his friends, goosebumps rippled over his arms; against the leaping yellow blaze they looked wild.
He rejoined them. As the moon rose, laying a path of broken moons over the sea, they talked and laughed, ate burnt food, sang chanting songs that made Johannes grin. He was congratulated more than once for the idea of coming there. He did not tell them that it was inevitable, out of his control and none of his doing; no need for that, in this time and place. (He saw how the Greys might have begun.) The fire bounced in the wind. Every transient lick of flame, he thought, burned by necessity; it was determined by all the history of the cosmos up to that point. That was what his vision on Icarus meant, if he believed it. And after Mars, how could he believe otherwise? Unless … but he knew it was so, he could feel it. Necessity ruled all. Even those first humans, inventing music on these bleak hills by the sea, had been moved to it by forces acting through them—the music had sung them. Patagonian, Portuguese, Plutonian, they were all the same in that. “Good night,” he said, and carried a sleeping bag up the beach. Sand for his bed, a tuft of grass for a pillow. The others sang on as the music continued to course through them. And yet …
interversion
They came just before dawn, as silent as those first primitive
s would have been. Johannes didn’t fully awaken until the tape was slapped over his mouth, and he was lifted up in his sleeping bag and slung over someone’s shoulder. Karna had been sleeping at his side, and they were forced to silence him too. Johannes saw him slump down suddenly, knocked out by a tranquilizer. Then they were off into the dark, both of them carried by pairs of dark figures. A rough jog down the beach, and then into a craft of some sort. It lifted into the air noiselessly. Two bulky figures, heads cropped—Greys!—lifted Karna up and tossed him out the door of the helicopter. It was difficult to breathe so hard through his nose.
They traveled for a long time. There were several figures in the dark around him, speaking an occasional phrase in a language he didn’t recognize.
They came down in high mountains; the Andes, he guessed. He was pulled from the craft, and the sleeping bag was stripped down and wrapped around his legs. It was cold. There was an orange gleam over a rise. At first he thought it was a big fire. They walked in that direction, carrying him. He lifted a hand to tear the tape away but was restrained.
The light came from a volcano in full eruption. Fiery lava leaped out of a roiling crater, ran in sinuous channels down a slope. He was carried to the rim, and he quaked with fear—they would toss him in—
On the rim’s edge was Zervan. Except he looked different in this light. “Well met,” Zervan said. “You must play for us at a certain time and place. No choice, no chance.” They moved along the rim to a large black catapult, holding in its arm a sphere generator like a great bomb. “Come,” said Zervan, climbing onto the large square top of the generator. Johannes was lifted onto it, and joined by a few more Greys. Zervan reached to his face and pulled the tape away with a single rip. “Prepare for the descent,” he said.
“A Holywelkin sphere will not withstand lava,” Johannes said, voice wavering.
“We strengthen the wave-weave,” Zervan replied. “Fear not—this will not be the first time we have made the descent. And now the Master of the Orchestra will play at the sacred singularity.” He indicated a guitarp, resting on its side on the generator. He looked at one of his assistants. “Downward!”
The sphere snapped into existence around them, holding them fast to the generator; the catapult flipped them into the lava.
The lava was held off, forming a bowl below them. Long arms of fiery molten rock leaped into the sky, splashed on the sphere, slid down its sides. Inside the sphere it was glarey orange, and faint shadows flickered over them. Zervan smiled at Johannes. “You see, the sphere is strong enough. As for propulsion—” He waved a hand, and they sank rapidly under the surface of the lava.
Now they stood on a box inside a bubble walled by varying shades of light orange; currents of white or of dark orange twisted over the sphere, making strange patterns. Two of the Greys sat before a computer screen, which presented them with a rainbow of colors. Zervan indicated it. “By this map we navigate down the channel of molten rock, and through the crust. Soon we will be in the mantle, where our passage is not so constricted.”
Johannes swallowed convulsively. Surrounded by crushing, chaotic, superheated liquid basalt, which was held away by nothing more than a discontinuity.… It was hot. Dazed, Johannes sat on the deck of the generator, legs still tangled in his sleeping bag, as they continued down, down, down. The magma swirling against the sphere became a yellow brighter than gold. The Greys talked among themselves. The color of their sun-sky continued to lighten. Time passed.
They were in a bubble of white light, blasted by it. Johannes could see deep into Zervan’s irises, and he saw through the tiny pupils to the pulsing retinas inside. He was pulled to his feet, and almost fell. The guitarp was thrust into his hands. Zervan’s white mouth was harsh in his white face.
“We stand now at the center of the Earth. On Icarus your destiny has been calculated, and here we give it to you, as you perform the music only you can perform, only at this time, in this place. Your destiny—”
“I don’t want to know!” Johannes cried, but all of the Greys were singing wildly in a language he suddenly understood, and filled with terror as if all his blood had turned to adrenaline, he knew, the concert in Brazil, the ceremony in Terminator, Ekern’s posturing—
He played to fight them off. The white bubble blazed around him and he struck the strings brutally, yanking strings out of tune, filling the dissonant runs and the fisted chords with all his fear and fury, striking at the singing Greys with bolts of musical lightning in revenge for Karna and for the unwanted knowledge of his fate (and still he knew it), making music appropriate to the place, filling it with all his wild fear and furious anger, with stark white power
“Fly!” Zervan stepped back, stumbled, fell off the generator, sprawled for a moment at the bottom of the sphere, only a discontinuity away from the white chaos. He scrambled back onto the box moaning at the deadly music Johannes bashed from the strings. “Flee!” he screamed at his Greys, but they were groveling on the deck, heads wrapped in their arms. Face twisted with terror, Zervan pulled himself up and struck the guitarp from Johannes’s hands. It clattered to the deck with a final twanging dischord. “Fly,” Zervan shrieked, striking the huddled navigators, “Fly, fly, fly!”
The navigators returned to their posts. They began the ascent. The sphere was spun and twirled, washed about in the huge tides of the mantle. The Greys crouched above the navigating screen, talking rapidly in their tongue. Johannes had already forgotten the language (if that had been the one he had understood), but he knew from their voices that they were lost. Of course it would be harder to ascend than descend; once they lost their bearings it would be impossible to find one of the pinpoint cracks leading up to an active volcano. They would bounce against the wall of the Earth’s crust until they died, trapped inside the molten Pellucidar.
After a long interval the flow around their bubble became orange again, its glow seeming almost dark after the brilliance of the core. The Greys chattered with excitement. Johannes could feel the pull; they were caught in an upward current. Dark streaks flashed by as they rose, the Earth was pushing them out with incredible velocity—
They shot out into the black night sky, up and out. Blackness, blind blackness, a sudden rush—the sphere crumpled, he was falling through air, over the edge of the world he could see the dawn approaching—falling, falling—he had a parachute, he was falling alone through the cool air of the predawn sky, hung under a white parachute, and below him was the coastline, the beach he had left, a pinpoint of fire.
And when he awoke from the dream (sand in his eyes, bitter taste in his mouth, the smell of cold charcoal in his hair, his side stiff and cold, the sleeping bag twisted and wet with sea dew), he got out of the bag and crouched down by their dead fire, knees in his armpits. His face hurt, his throat squeezed shut, tears ran down his cheeks. The sun was not yet up, but the immense vault of the sky was lit. There was a chill onshore breeze, and small waves swept in at a sharp angle to the beach, breaking swiftly across it. Shivering, Johannes snapped twigs for a fire and stared out at the broad ocean. He knew the dream had been more than a dream. And he knew all his future: he remembered it just like his past, rolling out before him like a tapestry in a spiral gallery, on and on and on to its end in the sun.
“a world lost, a world unsuspected”
Dent Ios arrived in Nueva Brasilia after nearly a full day of traveling, with only an hour to spare before the concert’s beginning. During the entire flight from Stuttgart, across Europe, the Mediterranean, Africa, the Atlantic, and the Amazon basin, he had been desperately afraid that he would be late, as he had been on Pluto; between that fear and increasing motion sickness it had been a miserable trip. But the flight was on time and from the airport to the the city center was a quick trip by taxi. Once there he had no trouble finding the amphitheater to get a ticket to the concert from Marie-Jeanne. He was set. And in his luggage were the plans for a second Holywelkin Orchestra, commissioned by the Institute. Ekern’s doing. So as Dent wal
ked out into the great complex of central plazas he was tired but triumphant—and a little frightened. His body still vibrated from the long jet journey, and everything looked wrong. The proportions of the city were wrong. The buildings were done in an ugly imitation Martian style, white marble towers that were much too tall, separated by plazas of white marble that were much too wide. Ugly city of the bureaucrat aristocracy. Banks of lights had been placed on top of some buildings, and in big rows against the bases of others, and now they snapped on one by one. The white slabs of the buildings were perfect mirrors for spectralite and polychrome, and as Dent watched a broken Cubist city of light sprang up around him, assaulting his jangled nerves and his precarious sense of balance, so that he went into the nearest floor level bar and fought through the crowd to order a bulb of some calming drug. The bartender had not heard of any of the drugs Dent suggested, and he had to describe the effect he wanted, all over the loud clamor of the excited Terran customers, who were raucously preparing for the concert. He went back outside, closed his eyes so that only the Infra lights fenced in his sight, and sniffed deeply as he pushed the bulb up one nostril. The plazas pulsed with radiant color, everything was badly distorted; Dent hated it. Between the disorientation and the heavy gravity he could barely walk. Something wrong with this dead city, he thought. Trees look like shrubs, the people like ants … who built this place, and for whom?
He negotiated the crowd as best he could and relocated the concert site; there was a bowl the volume of a very large building, hollowed out of one of the central plazas. Throngs of people were descending into this bowl, to sit on curving benches. Some sort of giant imitation Greek amphitheater, Dent thought, lit by altered light of all description, so that his perspective bounced with every blink and sometimes it even seemed the bowl was a mound that was somehow (violet, green, pink) still below him. There was time still and he wandered away again, feeling sick. Perhaps the bartender had misunderstood … in fact it was obvious he had—some sort of hallucinogen or … Terrans swept by him as if in the grip of invisible tides, laughing, dressed in single-piece suits of ersatz silk (or perhaps it was real), suits that were belted anywhere from armpit to thigh, with flaring puffs of silk at ankle and wrist. Their hair was in every case short and glossy, every face was carefully made up with cosmetics—mannequins, slightly too small! Dent gawked like a fool at all the painted laughing faces. There was a speaker; they were … yes, distributed around the outside perimeter of the big bowl, and then elsewhere in the plaza. The slab towers were sure to echo badly. The effect would be somewhat like that on Olympus Mons—but no. Inversion of that soundscape, with the sunken bowl in the middle. They’d never get that acoustic configuration again. But the speakers would be surrounding them; that was something. Still, a concert depended so much on its setting. And Olympus Mons … they wouldn’t see anything like it again. Terrans thronging, Dent had to dodge one merry group, throng throng, damned throngers. “All you governors of Earth, damn throngers,” he muttered. “In this Age, to think there’s an aristocracy still…” It disgusted him. It was like static electricity in the air, the careless disdain these rulers of Earth had for the concert, and suddenly all the fear of Earth—yes, fear!—that everyone on the tour had felt, washed through Dent at last; it was such a huge place, and so old—its sheer precedence was overwhelming. Perhaps if he were to sit down—feel better. Into the bowl. He sat in one of the upper tiers. An usher came and ushered him to his correct seat (trouble finding his ticket), still in the upper tier but on the other side. He sat with relief.
The Memory of Whiteness Page 27
