“You have to take it easy going short distances,” Arthur went on, anticipating my next question. “You can’t do continuum jumps near big masses. I mean, you can do them, but it’s tricky. Even for me. And I’m pretty good at driving this thing.”
“You do a lot of flying?”
“Never. This is my first time.”
“I see.” I shrugged to myself.
The ship made its approach to Emerald City. Everything seemed to be going fine until we suddenly veered off. The world below us tilted crazily.
“What’s wrong, Arthur?” I said, fighting an attack of vertigo.
“Something’s coming our way.”
I searched the sky and found it. It was a yellow glowing ball trailing streamers of fire, streaking down at us.
“What the hell is that?” I shouted.
“I don’t know,” Arthur said calmly. “Some kind of weapon. Don’t worry.”
“Worry? Who, me?”
The ship made a dizzying turn and headed away from the green castle. The fireball executed the same maneuver and streaked after us, hot on our tail. Our speed increased rapidly, but there was no feeling of acceleration, no G-forces. We climbed swiftly, then leveled off. The fireball did the same, and it seemed to be gaining. Arthur appeared to be aware of this without having looked.
“Uh-oh,” he said. “Hang on, kids.”
Arthur proceeded to put the ship through some impossible maneuvers. We flipped, looped, dived, pulled up, then went into what would have been called a stall, had it been done by an airplane. Then we dropped like a stone, tumbling end over end.
I fought off vertigo, closing my eyes. There was absolutely no physical sensation of movement.
When I opened them again, we were flying close to the ground at tremendous speed. Behind us, the fireball was pulling out of a dive to match our altitude.
“Dearie me,” Arthur fretted. “I can’t seem to shake this thing off our tail.”
“Doesn’t this ship have any weapons?” I asked.
“Not much offensively, but a whole bunch defensively. The ship’s supposed to be invulnerable to just about any weapon ever created. Anyway, that’s how it was touted in its day. But I can’t take any chances. I have no idea of what technological culture that fireball may have come out of. It might have been specifically invented to challenge this ship’s claims to invulnerability. You know how arms races go.”
We shot up into the sky again and did a series of evasive maneuvers, these more improbable than the last. The fireball matched our every move.
“Dearie me!” Arthur exclaimed. “Now I’m starting to worry…”
“What about those defensive weapons?”
“I’ve already tried to neutralize it. Nothing worked.”
“Can’t you shoot it down?”
“Dogfight with it?” Arthur cringed. “You don’t know what you’re saying. Dogfighting is probably that thing’s trump suit. You never know what to expect with these standing-wave energy weapons, which is probably what it is. It might be able to absorb the energy of an attack and grow even more powerful.”
I looked ahead. The edge of the disk-planet was coming up fast.
“We’re running out of world, Arthur,” I said, trying to sound as composed as possible.
“That may be our only chance,” he replied.
Our speed must have been stupendous by then. The edge of Microcosmos swept past, and we streaked out into space. The planet shrank behind us, its disk tilting away, bringing the edge into view. Forty-five degrees along the rim of the world, the luminous sun-disk was falling below the horizon. Beneath us, the world-edge was rounded and looked metallic, busy with embossed geometric patterns which could have been mazes of pipelines, conduits, power stations, and other technological facilities. I estimated the edge’s thickness to be about two hundred kilometers. There very well could have been roads down there, but I couldn’t make any out.
The other face of the planet, still dark, flipped up toward us. Before long, though, the sun, now on the opposite side, peeked back over the horizon and sent long shadows across the land. It was magnificent to watch, even under the circumstances.
The fireball had dropped back. Suddenly, there was a split second of a blinding flash. The walls opaqued instantly, cutting it off. Purple spots swam in front of my eyes.
“Well, we outran it,” Arthur said, breathing a sigh. “It was losing energy, so it gave up and dissipated. Rather spectacularly, wouldn’t you say?”
“Anything else coming at us?” I asked.
“No.”
“Any idea who sent it?”
“There’s only one possibility.”
“The lady, the goddess in white?”
Arthur glanced at me over his shoulder. “I’ve never met her. Let me tell you, though, you should put quotes around lady. She’s no lady, any more than Prime is a man. Those are simply outward forms, adopted for the sake of convenience—and for facilitating communication with you people.”
“Can you guess why she’d want to give you trouble?”
“I can guess, but when you’re talking about the Culmination, dearie, you might as well be trying to figure out how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.”
“She’s part of the Culmination?”
“That’s right. And mortals like us can only dream about what’s really going on.”
I began, “But I thought—” And realized I didn’t know what to think.
“What you have to understand, dearie, is that Prime and the Goddess represent two aspects of the same being. They both share the same ontological base. Stop me if the vocabulary gets too stuffy.”
“I think I know what you mean.” I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about.
The walls faded again, and we saw that the land below had brightened up. Brilliant morning light fell across the face of the world. Our altitude had decreased to the point where we could pick out individual features of the landscape. There seemed to be more structures on this side. Sizable city complexes lay here and about. We swooped toward one of them.
“This is an industrial arcology built by a race known as the Mumble-mumble,” Arthur informed us. “Like most alien names, you can’t say it in human.”
Below us lay an aggregation of multicolored domes, spires, and polyhedral buildings. The ship angled toward an octagonal structure with a wide flat roof.
Arthur smiled at me over his shoulder. “I’m in contact with the Artificial Intelligence that runs the complex. It wants to know if we’re technicians on our way to work. I’m telling it yes. When we land, try to look proletarian.”
“What are we doing here?” I asked.
“Laying low for a while. We don’t dare try making the trip back to Emerald City until we find out what’s going on.”
It made sense. I nodded.
Our craft swooped in over the roof and hovered over a circular area outlined in red. Then it set gently down. Arthur made a few swipes at the control panel, then turned away. The wall opaqued again.
“Nice landing,” I told him.
“All in a day’s work.”
He led us back into the connecting tube. We passed the valve-door of the chamber where the truck was, following the curving corridor around to another valve. Arthur touched an area of the wall beside the bulge, and the sphincter dilated.
We were descending.
“Elevator,” Arthur said, pointing up.
The hole in the roof was being sealed off by a secondary sliding door. The platform on which we rode came down into a large machinery-clogged chamber and merged with the floor. The door-valve distended itself, seeking ground, met it, and dilated a bit more. While all this was going on, I examined the seemingly monolithic material of which the ship was constructed. Its color was a very dark olive drab, not really black. The texture was grainy, and there was something else going on across the surface, an ingrained pattern of tiny lines and geometric shapes, barely visible. I tapped the wall. It rang
hollowly.
We stepped out and got our first chance to get a good look at the ship. It was essentially an irregular grouping of curving tubes with nipple-shaped ends. Breast-shaped protuberances stuck out here and there. Rather erotic, this ship, in a way. I wondered what symbolism it had had for its nonhuman builders.
The big valve, the one we’d gotten sucked up by, was open.
“Jake, would you get your truck out of there, please?” Arthur asked.
I did, backing it out carefully. By the time I had parked and powered the rig’s engine down, something startling was happening to the ship.
It was shrinking like a balloon with a fast leak. It didn’t hiss. It just got smaller.
And smaller. And…
When it had shrunk to a diameter of about two thirds of a meter, Arthur picked the damned thing up and held it in both arms. It looked like a model of itself. It was a model of itself.
“Arthur!” I screamed. “That’s impossible!”
“Why?” Arthur asked.
I looked at Darla, Carl, and Lori. They were dumbfounded, staring at me as if I had the answer.
“Why?” I said. “Because you couldn’t possibly pick it up. It’s got to weigh—”
“Oh, no,” Arthur said, “its mass isn’t very much at all. Here.”
He tossed the thing at me. I lurched and managed to balance it. It was heavy as hell, but it should have weighed at least a hundred tons. More, maybe.
He looked at Carl, Darla, and Lori, then back at me. “Satisfied?”
“Very,” I said, stepping forward to give him his ship back.
“Oof,” Arthur said, struggling with it, though he obviously had three times my strength. “Just don’t ask me about the power source.”
“Don’t worry, I won’t,” I told him.
Arthur waddled over to the middle of the red circular platform, set the ship down and walked back. “When it’s deflated it’s kind of inert, and can’t be detected at all.”
“What now?” I said.
“Now I get in touch with Prime.” He stared off into space for a moment. “Except he’s not available, damn it. He never is, when I want him. Dearie me.” He sighed. “We’ll have to wait.”
Bruce’s voice came from the rig’s exterior speaker. “Jake?”
“Yeah?”
“Jake, there is some sort of attempt being made to communicate with me. My guess is that it is a computer system indigenous to this structure.”
“Oh, I forgot,” Arthur said. “That’s the … I guess you’d call it the plant foreman.”
“I am making an attempt to establish contact. Is this permissible?”
“Go ahead, Bruce, do your best,” I told him, then turned to Arthur. “Now, before anything else, what was it you were trying to tell me about Sam?”
“Oh, yes. Well, he’s been … loaded into another machine.”
“By whom, and for what reason?”
Arthur’s tone was apologetic. “I’m afraid Prime is the culprit, Jake. And the reason, as far as I can understand it, was that Prime determined that Sam, as an Artificial Intelligence, was sufficiently advanced enough to warrant special consideration.”
“You mean he’s to be a Culmination candidate?”
“You got it.”
I scowled, shaking my head. “Why is it that Prime’s motives always seem to be as pure as the driven snow, no matter how underhanded his methods are?”
“Good public relations?” Arthur suggested.
“You ought to know.”
“It’s a living, dearie. The employment situation here is tight.”
“Yeah. One other thing. You said that Sam looks like me. How could you know what he looks like?”
“From your memories of him, Jake. I have a pretty clear picture of Sam in my data files.”
I nodded. Somehow Arthur’s answer didn’t satisfy me. “Jake?”
It was Bruce again. “Yeah?”
“Jake, I have managed to establish a rudimentary form of communication with the unknown A.I. It has put a number of questions to us. Do you wish to reply?”
“Well, what’s it asking?”
“It would like to know the purpose of our visit.”
“Jeez, I don’t know.”
Arthur said, “Tell it that we’re on an inspection tour.”
“Jake?”
“Huh? Yeah, go ahead.”
A few moments later Bruce reported, “The Intelligence says it is happy to receive us and wishes to know what aspect of the plant’s operations would be of greatest interest to us.”
“Research and development,” Arthur said.
After another pause, Bruce relayed, “Very well. Would you like to begin the inspection immediately?”
“Tell it no,” I said. “Tell it… um, say that we have had a long journey and would like to rest first. We will begin the inspection in approximately eight hours.”
“Very well.”
“That ought to hold it,” I said. “I don’t plan to stay here for eight hours.”
“I can’t guarantee that I’ll be able to contact Prime within that time,” Arthur informed me.
“No? What’s he doing?”
“I don’t know. All I know is that he’s not available and there’s no telling when he will be.”
I thought of something. “Then who’s looking after the rest of my crew?”
“I activated another servant. They’ll be fine.”
“Another servant?”
“A multipurpose robot about half my size. Nice kid, but not much personality.”
“Great.” I yawned. “It’s been an exciting day. Much too exciting.”
“Yeah,” Arthur said snidely, “chewing up vast stretches of parkland can take a lot out of you.”
13
I sleep. No dreams came.
But there was something out there, a sense of conflict, of opposing forces coming into contact, a tension. It was like picking up distant radio signals, listening in on field communications of a faraway battle—a burst of static, a word or phrase, an interruption, a few hazy images, waves of interference … jamming …
There came a sense of an overwhelming presence. A being vast and ineffable, a pervading Oneness whose dimensions bestrode the length and breadth of spacetime. But its Oneness was threatened. Something had gone wrong, and the root of the problem lay hidden in darkness. That which had been created to be One had split, polarized. The conflict raged up and down the corridors of time.
The road must be built.
No, it is folly.
We must tap the resources of time…
We cannot allow it.
We are not an elite, just the culmination of all that was…
That which is past is dead.
We cannot forget that our roots are in dust!
We must forget, else there is no hope…
I woke up suddenly.
I sat up on the bunk and swung my feet out onto the floor. Beside me, Darla lay in fitful, troubled sleep. She tossed and moaned, a fine film of sweat covering her forehead.
“Darla … Darla, wake up.”
Her eyes flicked open, wide with fear. She sprang up into my arms and crushed her face into my chest, her breathing labored. She trembled.
I held her for a long time.
When she was okay again, she asked, “Did you dream it, too?”
“Bits and pieces. I don’t know why. I told Prime that I didn’t want the dream-teaching. I guess I was passed over, but I picked up some kind of leakage.” I rubbed my eyes and took a few deep breaths. “Tell me about it.”
Darla crossed her legs and pulled the ratty blanket up around her. “It was awful. It started like the first dream—like a documentary. There was more about the project—the creation of the new form of consciousness. Not much I could understand … but then, there was an interruption.”
“The Goddess?”
“Yes, it was her, but she didn’t appear in that form. I can’t explain it. It was
horrible. It was like being witness to the conflicts that went on in Heaven between God and Satan. I can’t explain it, Jake. All I know is that I want no part of it.”
“But we’re caught in the middle.”
She looked down. “Yes. We must get back … somehow. Back to the real world.”
“The worlds, you mean. The worlds of the Skyway that the Culmination created.”
“Caused to be created. The Roadbugs built it, and maintain it. They’re a race that didn’t contribute to the Culmination. They declined to participate, but thought the project was a good idea.”
“What, the Skyway?”
“No, the Culmination itself. When the Culmination came to be, they became a servant race. Willingly, I think. They built the road at the Culmination’s request.”
“I caught a little bit of that. Why did the Culmination want the road built?”
She shook her head. “I’m not sure I understood. That’s what part of the conflict is about. Do you remember the first dream? When the various races discussed the project? There were opposing factions, and somehow those conflicts were never resolved. This … this new form of consciousness was supposed to be uniform, monolithic, one thing only. A unity. But it didn’t work out that way. Now there’s this godlike being, this immortal, powerful thing loose in the universe … and it’s partly insane. Schizophrenic! There’s no telling what it will do. It transcends time and space. It can effect changes on the stream of time itself.”
“Create paradoxes?”
She looked at me with a sudden new awareness. “Yes. Yes, it can do that. It can do anything. Oh, Jake!” She threw her arms around me. “We’ve been pawns! We’ve been manipulated! I don’t know how or why or what the purpose is, but we’re puppets, nothing more. All of this has been for no understandable reason. No reason we can fathom. We don’t have a chance of comprehending these forces that insist on pushing us around. I’m tired of it! I want them to stop, Jake! I want to be left alone!”
She sobbed, and I held her.
Presently, I asked, “Are you going to be okay?”
“Yes.”
“Are you sure?”
“I’m fine.”
She dried her eyes, swung her legs out, got up. I noticed that her abdomen bulged. I put my hand on it and pressed gently. She smiled and put her hand over mine.
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