Fata Morgana

by Steven R. Boyett

  Berne shook both hands at the dense tangle depicted on his com panel. “These aren’t wires the way you’re thinking of them,” he explained. “They’re microminiaturized optical filaments that transmit photon signals in a holographic medium.”

  Shorty reached over Berne’s shoulder and tapped a line on a diagram. It glowed green, highlighting a correct route through the incomprehensible maze. “This sends a signal from here to here, right?” Shorty asked.

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then it’s a wiring diagram. Who cares if there’s really wires?”

  “You … have a point.”

  Boney asked about physical connections. Berne explained that a layer of crawlspace ran between the hexagonal sky panels and the dome that housed the city.

  Boney frowned. “They built two domes?” he asked. “One inside the other?”

  “They didn’t build the Dome, they found it,” said Berne. “It’s a lava dome, a huge air bubble that was left after the lava cooled. They’re everywhere. It’s one reason it’s been hard for the Redoubt to locate us.”

  “Lava,” said Boney. “From when the crater was made?”

  Berne nodded. “They hung a framework shell inside the lava dome,” he said. “There’s crawlspace, access rungs, subsurface.”

  “And you’ve checked all the connections.”

  Berne drew himself upright. “Every piece of hardware and every line of code that has anything to do with how the sun panels work has been reviewed, repaired, replaced, rewired, or rewritten. It’s all in working order now, except for the eleven o’clock panel.”

  “How do you check your wiring?” Shorty asked.

  “Diagnostic applications,” said Berne.

  Shorty cocked his head. Berne waggled his com panel. “Cellophone,” he said, slowly and deliberately.

  “So that thing told you the other things are okay,” said Shorty.

  “We verified the diagnostic software, if that’s what you’re implying. We also checked the physical connections.”

  Shorty rubbed his hands. “Now we’re cooking with gas,” he said. “So how do you know when the voice that comes from the cellophone is on the level?”

  “We debug the source code,” Berne said wearily. His fingers drummed the desk. “We verify hard cabling with a tap. We test conductive filament with a circuit tracer.”

  “A circuit tracer?”

  “You only need one.”

  Shorty grinned. Even Boney had a bit of a smile going. Shorty put his hands behind his back and ducked his head and twisted a toe like a schoolgirl. “And could we see it?” he said coyly.

  Berne started to argue, then stopped. He threw his hands up. “Sure,” he said. “Why not? Like you said, what else do I have to do?”

  “That’s the spirit,” said Shorty.

  *

  The cable tester was the size of a key fob. It had a socket for bare wire and a clamp for insulated wire and it lit up when it got a good connection. Shorty wasn’t especially worried about the cable tester misreporting results—a dead wire wouldn’t make the light glow—but he checked it out anyway.

  The circuit tracer was another story. It was the size of a pack of cigarettes, with a slide-out zoomable screen for doing fine work with an attached stylus. Berne demonstrated, touching the conductive stylus to a circuit panel. The little screen immediately showed a schematic, then showed the tested connection as a bright green tracing in the pattern.

  “You do realize that the circuitry on holofilaments and microprocessors is too fine for human hands, yes?” Berne asked. “And there are millions and millions of them. We have to trust the diagnostics at some point.” He lifted the wand and the screen faded. “As you can see, this one’s good,” he said.

  “Put it on a bad connection,” said Shorty.

  “There are no bad connections on this board.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because—” He waggled the tracer stylus.

  “Because you checked ’em out already,” said Shorty.

  Berne nodded. “Really,” he said, “there are other things I could be—”

  “Here’s the thing,” said Shorty. “Any time I get a good reading on a tube I know for a solid fact is bad as a headline, I start wondering who fixes the tube checker.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Do you have another circuit tracer?” asked Boney.

  Berne raised his eyebrows. “Not here.”

  Shorty waved impatiently. “You got a spare one of these boards?” he asked.

  “The one I just tested is a backup.”

  “Okay,” said Shorty. He picked it up and flexed it, testing its strength. Then he put it on the floor and set a foot on it and bent it until it snapped.

  “What if we need that?” Berne demanded.

  Shorty handed it to Berne. “Test it again.”

  Berne didn’t bother to hide his contempt as he touched the stylus to a thin silver line in the broken circuit board. The little screen glowed to life and a bright green path lit through the maze.

  Berne flinched. He touched it to the circuit board again. Another silver pathway glowed green. He tried again. The broken connection showed as good.

  Berne looked at the tracer stylus in a way that made Boney think the technician was considering stabbing Shorty in the eye with it. Then he set it down and covered his face with a hand and slumped in his chair. “False positives,” he said miserably. “I don’t believe it.”

  “And so,” Shorty said in his Announcer Voice, “at the end of a grueling inning it’s Cave Men one, Dome Men nothing. And now a word from our sponsor.”

  nineteen

  The room was small, clean, subtly lit. A crammed work cubicle took up one corner, with a desk that looked like a junior version of the dark glass conference-room table. Working before it was a balding, gray-bearded man, a little heavy, his loose-fitting khaki jumpsuit drawn with intricate designs and concentric patterns. He saw Wennda and beamed. Then he saw Plavitz behind her and his expression grew serious. It wouldn’t take a genius to figure that Plavitz must be one of the Helpful Savages from the Metal Sky God.

  “I was going to hug you,” the man told Wennda as he got up, “but this looks official.”

  “It is official,” she said. “But hug me anyway.”

  The man grinned and took her up in a bear hug. Plavitz was amused to note that he was a good four inches shorter than Wennda. He lifted her off the floor and she squealed and pretend-beat his shoulder. He set her down and let her go, and she stepped back, delighted as a six-year-old.

  Then she remembered Plavitz and blushed. “Uncle Jorn, this is Sergeant Plavitz,” Wennda said. “He’s the navigator on the aircraft that brought these men here.”

  “Oh, sure, blame me,” said Plavitz. He held out his hand. The man looked at it as if he were uncertain what to do, then shook it. “I’m really just a glorified map reader,” Plavitz told him.

  “Jorn is in charge of data storage and retrieval systems,” said Wennda.

  Jorn smiled. “I’m really just a glorified librarian,” he said.

  “That’s just ducky,” Plavitz replied. “Because I’m here to check out some maps.”

  “I’d be happy to show you,” said Jorn. “What maps would you like to see?”

  “Got one with a route back to New Bedford?” asked Plavitz.

  Jorn looked uncertainly at Wennda. “I’m not sure,” he said. “Maybe if you—”

  “He’s joking,” said Wennda. “They do that a lot.”

  “We do,” Plavitz admitted. “So, Uncle Jorn, huh? Are you the commander’s brother?”

  The ensuing silence was very awkward.

  “I’ve spent a lot of time here,” said Wennda.

  “She had a cot,” Jorn confirmed.

  Wennda colored again. “Jorn practically raised me,” she said.

  Plavitz sensed they were trying to back out of a thicket. “Yeah, I just saw him do that,” he joked.

 
They looked confused, and Plavitz felt his ears get hot. “Raise you,” he explained. He mimed lifting.

  “Ah,” said Jorn. He smiled. “You do joke a lot.”

  “Let’s get to that map,” said Wennda.

  *

  Plavitz’s hand flicked around on the lighted panel as if he were brushing off crumbs. He chuckled as items on the display slid on and off the desktop.

  “You seem to be enjoying our system,” Jorn said behind him.

  Plavitz grinned. “It’s a gasser once you get the hang of it,” he said.

  Jorn looked pleased. “It’s good to see someone who appreciates it. People take for granted that information like this is available, but storage and retrieval is quite difficult to maintain.” He shook his head. “So much has been lost.”

  “What happened? Your books get burned, or something?”

  Jorn smiled gently and shook his head. “We have very few books, in the sense that I think you mean. Information is stored digitally in centralized servers.”

  Plavitz shrugged. “Too rich for my blood.”

  “A long time ago we learned how to store information electronically,” Jorn explained. “It takes up almost no physical space, and it can be duplicated or accessed with very little effort. But the system crashed in the first decades of the Dome and the data archive was lost. They managed to retrieve half of it, but—” he spread his hands

  “—the damage still affects us. So much information gone. Engineering. Science. History. Almost all literature and entertainment.” He shook his head. “The power fluctuates, a conductor overheats, a memory card fails at exactly the wrong time, and half of what your race has fought and sacrificed for a hundred thousand years to learn is simply gone. And the only way to get it back is to learn it all over again.”

  “I can’t imagine,” Plavitz said, largely because he had no idea what the man was talking about.

  Jorn nodded. “That absence is so much a part of our lives that it’s become invisible to most of us, but I stumble over it every day.” He shook his head. “My apologies. I’m complaining about my work and keeping you from yours.” His smile was a little sad. “I’m alone here quite often, and I tend to save up conversation. And a new person, well—it’s very exciting.”

  “Likewise, I’m sure.” Plavitz swiveled back to the desk, where a solid-looking model of the crater occupied half the desktop. “Man, if we had maps like this I could put us over Hitler’s kiddie pool and Boney could drop an egg on his moustache.” He gave a descending whistle and drummed the table. “Bam—war’s over, here’s your medal and your ticker-tape parade, everybody pack up and go home.”

  “I’m delighted you find it so useful.”

  “It’s so useful it’s spooky.”

  Plavitz went back to looking for routes on foot to and from the Redoubt, best routes to elevation above the crater rim, ground they could use for landing fields, even places to stash the bomber, if it came to that.

  At one point he halted the scrolling landscape and frowned. The scene on the table looked directly down on the well at the center of the crater. Most of it was in shadow. What walls he could see were not a smooth bore. There were faint concentric lines and sloping diagonals, large rectangular panels, and a speck that might have been a light.

  Plavitz looked back at Jorn. “What’s the story with this well?” he asked. “It doesn’t look like any bomb crater I ever saw.”

  Jorn peered at the com table. “We’re fairly sure it’s the central shaft of an underground complex,” he said. “What remains of a complex, anyway.”

  “They would have had to dig down for miles.”

  “It’s clear they were trying to protect something from enemy attack. Possibly whatever the Typhon is still guarding.”

  Plavitz frowned and turned back to the hole that seemed to sink below the table. Absently he drummed patterns on his chair.

  A few minutes he turned back again. “Say, how come I can’t find the Aquarium on this thing?” he asked.

  Jorn looked up from his handheld com panel. “Aquarium?” he said.

  “The whatsit, you know. The Redoubt.”

  “Ah.” Jorn smiled. “Aquarium, that’s very good. Quite funny, really. I doubt anyone here has ever seen an actual aquarium, you know. Or a fish, for that matter.”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “We used to have fish in the ocean, but they died out long ago.” He missed Plavitz’s incredulous expression as he touched his com panel to the table, then dragged a finger across the handheld device. On the table the well slid out of sight and the landscape blurred by until they were looking down at one of the vast fissures. Jorn pointed to where it tapered to a halt. “That’s where your Aquarium is,” he said.

  Plavitz leaned forward. “I don’t see it.”

  “It hadn’t been built yet when this image was taken.” Jorn spread two fingers on his com panel and the image on the table enlarged.

  Plavitz gaped as he appeared to dive headlong into the fissure. “You can make it bigger? I’ve just been going back and forth.”

  “Of course. You can zoom in and out.” He demonstrated.

  “Holy jeez. I could read a newspaper on the ground.”

  “I believe the resolution is ten centimeters,” said Jorn.

  “Wait, the whatsit wasn’t built yet? The Redoubt?” said Plavitz. “This map’s a couple hundred years old?”

  “Like everything else here, I’m afraid.”

  Plavitz touched the control pane with thumb and forefinger. He pinched. The landscape on the table rushed away from him. He pinched again. Now he was looking down on the gaping fissure. He zoomed again, and there was the vast crater on the left side of the panel. Once more, and he was looking down on a scene that belonged on the Moon: An enormous divot torn out of the world and radiating cracks so long and deep that entire cities could be hidden within them. From this vantage point the crater floor looked smooth as a lake. Faint concentric rings marked where spreading lava waves had cooled and hardened, a shock wave frozen in place as it had spread from an unimaginable explosion hundreds of years ago. The land around the crater and its radiating fissures was flat and featureless. Not even a ruin.

  “What’s the scale here?” asked Plavitz. He indicated the panel. “How big am I looking at?”

  “I should think it’s a fifty-kilometer field of view,” said Jorn. “We can find out exactly, if you like.”

  “Fifty kilometers.” Plavitz squinted, calculating. He sat up straight and pointed at the crater and its radiating cracks. “This thing is thirty miles wide?”

  “Well, the initial explosion was comparable to an asteroid strike,” said Jorn. “Literally extinction-level.”

  “It cracked this ball like an egg! I can’t even picture—” Plavitz frowned. “Hey, wait a minute,” he said. He leaned forward and stared at the massive scar before him. “I’m looking at thirty miles? Fifty kilometers?” He swiveled back to Jorn. “Nothing on earth could get a shot that wide. It’d have to be up in—”

  He stopped. Turned back to the panel and reached toward the devastation spread across the glass-topped desk. Hesitated. And pinched. And pinched. And pinched. And sat looking in wonder and in fear at a broken world floating in the air before him, the whole scarred ball a murk of muddy browns, ochre yellow, burnt rust.

  “You took this picture from outer space?” said Plavitz.

  “From a reconnaissance satellite in geosynchronous orbit,” Jorn affirmed. “They’re all offline by now. But for some time they transmitted—”

  “This is all just one big picture?” Plavitz interrupted, staring at the dead globe floating in the empty before him.

  “It’s an ultra-high resolution composite,” Jorn said behind him. “That’s why you can navigate it to that degree.”

  Plavitz watched his own arm reach out to the panel once again. Watched himself enlarge the image. Saw the broken world expand as if he plummeted toward the crater. He stopped the rush still very
high above the world. He frowned and felt something akin to the awful thing that clawed its way up from deep down whenever he flew into a flak field and the 88s were thudding off outside the insubstantial hull.

  Plavitz’s chair shot back as he bolted to his feet. “We’re still here,” he heard himself say. His own voice sounded very far away. A frayed signal breaking up. Coming in from over some horizon. From an isolated outpost. From unknown space.

  “Are you all right, young man?” Jorn asked.

  Numbly Plavitz turned to him and pointed without looking at the ruined world hovering behind him. Like some eidolon indicating the route that all would one day follow. “It’s Europe,” he said. His tone a strange flat calm. “We didn’t go anywhere.”

  twenty

  Back in their reconfigurable barracks that evening the crew brought Farley up to speed about their day’s Good Deeds—what they’d observed, what they’d learned, what they’d contributed. They listened to each other’s accounts like citizens of some ancient country silent before returned travelers’ stories of foreign peoples, strange customs, unlikely beasts, miraculous achievements.

  Then Plavitz told them they were still in Europe.

  Most of the crew scoffed outright. “I think we’d have heard about a crater the size of New Jersey in the middle of France, don’t you?” said Broben.

  Plavitz folded his arms and dug in. “My job is reading maps,” he said. “What I saw was a map of Europe that was mostly hole where the N in Germany ought to be.”

  “Nobody on earth could take a picture from outer space,” Broben insisted.

  Boney cleared his throat. He was looking at the unlit pipe in his hand. “Nobody on earth in 1943 could,” he said.

  “Oh, come on,” Garrett said after the silence became uncomfortable. “You saw what it’s like out there. It’s not Earth, it’s a whole different planet.”

  “They speak English,” Boney pointed out. “They grow peanuts.”