“What is your relationship to Executive Delegate Gossup?”
He did know something about her role here—how, she could not fathom. “He was my graduate advisor at UIC,” Sara said. “He keeps in touch with a lot of former students. In fact, I gave him a visit just before coming here. Why?”
“Your contract,” he said. “Is it with Epco?”
“Who I’m working for is a matter of record. What I want to know is, who are you working for?”
She said it impulsively, and as soon as it was out of her mouth she half regretted it, since it precluded subtlety forever. But it was on tape now; there was no going back.
He cut off the interview quickly after that. She was grateful to leave. The room had gotten altogether too small and too hot.
* * *
After leaving the security offices, Sara went looking for Touli, to compare notes. He was easy to locate—all she had to do was go to the Descriptive Sciences section and listen. When she heard a laugh like an earthquake, she homed in on it, and soon found him in a cluttered back office with Magister Sarcodan and Emile Begoya, a theoretical physicist.
Sarcodan was in his usual state of simmering dissatisfaction. As she came to the door he cut off what he was saying till he saw it was only her, then continued. “We’d get carte blanche to deploy our equipment if we could just announce a new use for toilet paper,” he said. “As it is, we could have found how to surf on gravity waves, and we couldn’t get permission to study it. Unless it looked like a tourist attraction.”
“Come on in, Sara,” said Touli. “We’re trying to figure out how to get back down to the planet.”
Sara found a chair in a corner and pulled it up to the worktable, whose erasable surface was covered with sketches, equations, and doodles. “What’s the rush?” she said.
Sarcodan answered. “The rush is, we think we may have a genuine discovery on our hands, only we can’t confirm it or argue it’s going to improve the lives of ordinary Capellans.” He said “ordinary Capellans” in a tone only an overeducated person could use.
Ignoring his tone, Sara said, “What discovery?”
Both Sarcodan and Touli looked at Emile Begoya. Emile was a brilliant little man, perfectly at ease with an equation, who seemed perpetually baffled by the actions of vertebrates. “Well,” he said to Sara, “are you familiar with the theory of gravity?”
“Sure. Things fall down,” Sara said. “Or did you mean something more complicated?”
“No, no,” said Begoya, flustered, “I had the theory of fractional dimensions in mind.”
“You’d better explain it,” Touli said.
Begoya blinked rapidly, but continued: “Well, there has been a theory for a long time that space has a fractal structure at the smallest scale. At the scale where space becomes grainy rather than continuous, there are openings into cavities that have fractional dimensions, and which may open on the other side into other whole dimensions. The graininess of space is not evenly distributed; it’s clumped. Gravity occurs where space is more complex—there is simply more of it, which makes it curve. This attracts matter, making it look as if the matter were creating the gravity well, when it’s actually a property of the space itself.”
“Cool,” Sara said. “But what does this have to do with us?”
“Well, as you know, there seems to be more gravity than the observable matter accounts for, so we talk about dark matter to explain it.”
“Like here, for example,” Touli put in.
Begoya nodded. “According to this theory, there is no such thing as dark matter—just complex space.”
“Get to the forest,” Touli prompted.
“Right,” said Begoya. “Well, the first thing is, it’s not a forest. It’s an area of complex topology that has many characteristics of fractal space.”
“Oh, of course,” said Sara, ironically hitting her temple as if to kick-start her brain. “Why didn’t I see that?”
Undeterred, Begoya went on, “The exciting thing is, it’s not on a sub-quantum scale. It’s on a macro scale—something we never dreamed to be possible. It’s as if something has folded our four-dimensional space into shapes that intersect a fifth dimension. Imagine you were a two-dimensional being living on a sheet of tinfoil, and something crinkled it up in the third dimension. The result would seem very complex to you, but only because you couldn’t see the true simplicity of the shape in the higher dimension.”
“So we were in a spot of five-dimensional crinkle?” Sara said.
“Absolutely,” Begoya said happily. “You kept on seeing reflections, true? Or at least that is what you took them for. In fact, space was curving around through the fifth dimension, as if light were making a U-turn, and showing you yourself. It wasn’t a reflection you saw. It was yourself.”
Sara felt as if her brain were going to explode. “This is way beyond weird,” she said. “I can’t fit this into my head.”
“What we need to do now,” continued Begoya, “is to map the dimensional folds, in order to find out what the shape really is, five-dimensionally speaking. We need more data, more sensors, more measurements. We need lasers, radar, sonar, whatever we can point at this anomaly.”
Sara saw Sarcodan’s problem. The chances of conveying the excitement of fractal space to Mr. Gibb seemed vanishingly slim. But there was another possibility. “What would happen to a person who walked into a patch of crinkled space?” she asked.
Begoya blinked at her in bemusement. “We have no idea. Of course, on the quantum scale, particles go through all the time, which is why tunneling works, and instantaneous communication like the PPC. But on the macro scale? We’ve never observed such a thing.”
Touli saw what Sara was thinking. “If someone walked into a space fold, there’s no telling where she might end up. We couldn’t send in a search party after her, in case they got crinkled.”
“But mapping the folds might help trace where they lead,” Sara said. “You could argue that your research was part of the rescue mission.”
Sarcodan was still glowering. “We shouldn’t have to come up with excuses for doing what we were sent here to do.”
People who stood on principle were a mystery to Sara. “But the fact is, you do have to, so why not do it skillfully? Manipulate the system, Sarcodan. And who knows? You might find Thora and be a hero.”
“It’s worth a try,” said Touli.
* * *
The discovery that changed everything they thought they knew about Iris came not from any of the scientists, but from Security.
Sara was in her berth, listening to more of Thora’s diary, when the emergency message alert on her terminal sounded. She sat up, dragging off the earphones, and answered. She was surprised to see David’s assistant, Bakai, on the screen. She had a voice that made Sara think of pink, soft things, which in fact Bakai was.
“David asked me to call you,” she said in a breathless rush. “He’s heading up to the lightbeam receiver. There’s been an accident on the planet, someone injured. The party’s coming back right now.”
“Who is it?” Sara asked, unable to think of any reason why she was being notified. “Did they find Thora?”
“No. David wanted you there because you’re the only exoethnologist on staff.” She paused, looking utterly at a loss. “Sara, it’s a native.”
chapter five
from the audio diary of thora lassiter:
I am in darkness. Not the dark of space, shot through with starlight. Absolute dark, so thick it almost has weight and texture.
I need to create a record in case I am ever found, or this recording device survives me. I need to talk to keep the panic from taking over. It will help me distance myself from my situation. I am not really here; I am simply an intelligence observing.
So, what do I perceive? I am sitting on a cold, hard surface, very smooth, like glass or polished stone. From the echoes I can tell that I am in a large space, a great chamber with hard walls. Far away, I can hea
r a slight trickle of water. The air is cold and humid, and smells subterranean. If it were not for the regularity of the surfaces around me, I would conclude that I was in a cave. To my right is a wall of columns, cubic and smooth. To my left is a drop-off, an edge beyond which I have not ventured.
How I got here is harder to describe. My memories seem unreliable, based on sensory perceptions that make no sense. But they are all I have to go on, so let me try to be as objective as possible.
I was with Sara, Touli, and Atlabatlow in the forest—no, I should not call it that. Truthfully, I was never able to see the phenomenon as a forest. From the way the others spoke, I realized that it was a metaphor they found helpful, in order to make sense of the incomprehensible, but on repetition it began to assume a reality of its own, obscuring the true nature of what they were seeing. Everything became a “tree” or a “plant,” regardless of how unlike trees and plants they were. The explanatory convention replaced the reality.
When I looked at the anomaly, I saw not leaves, but edges in the air, like shattered glass or crushed tinfoil. I saw fissures and angles that intersected in ways that violated the rules of dimensionality, as a Klein bottle or a Möbius strip does. Most of the time it was a geometric jumble that my mind strained to make sense of. It was exhausting to see.
At any rate, we had finished setting up the monitor equipment when we simultaneously became concerned about finding our way back. Atlabatlow left us to verify which way was correct. Sara, who evidently disagreed with him, went to scout a different path. Touli worked on his monitors for a short time, then set out to find Sara and bring her back, leaving me alone in the clearing.
Frankly, I was glad of the solitude, because it gave me a chance to truly study the place. At first I simply listened. The wind-chime music that came from the anomaly had changed since we had scouted its edge. Here, deep inside, it seemed less random. For a moment I thought I picked up the shadow of a melody, sweet as childhood. It was the water-pipes playing in my cousin Bdiwa Ral’s formal garden on Vindahar.
But of course, it was not. I took my goggles off to better see the phenomenon, but it was like trying to make sense of a scene in a kaleidoscope. I saw myself reflected a thousand ways: receding and approaching at the same time, magnified and diminished, shattered on a lattice of mirrors. I was seized by disorientation at the topological absurdities I was witnessing, and put out a hand before me, no longer able to distinguish near from far, or surface from space.
Suddenly, I felt that I was standing on the edge of a precipice, gazing down into immense depths. The ground was no longer level, but tilting underneath me. The shifting screens parted till I saw an azure hole gaping below me. What had been near enough to touch was now so far it would take days of travel to reach it. I fell to my knees, clutching the ground to keep from falling into that well. But the ground had grown too steep, and I had no handhold to keep from pitching forward.
“Sara! Touli!” I screamed, but the gonging chimes echoed my voice, obliterating the meaning from the sound.
Then I was in free fall, with nothing to stop me.
The moment of falling was a mere blink, but in it I felt the presence of a great structure around me—a cathedral of alcoves, infinitely complex. Every micrometer dot held echoing chambers, all connected to one another. Revelation rushed into me; this structure explained everything. For an instant that could have lasted a century, I was filled with joy; I was connected, the circuit was complete. And then my mind pulled back, an instinctive flinch. Suddenly terrified, I recoiled into my own self, my own solidity, and I dropped out of that wondrous place into darkness, into this paltry, limited existence.
At first, the memory was so overwhelming that I sat and wept. I felt empty, like a cinder that had once known God. It was so moving that it was some time before I noticed that I could no longer see.
I thought it was my eyes that had ceased to work. The panic that flooded me then was almost incapacitating: my heart was whamming against my ribs, my hands shook. I called out for Sara and Touli again, and the echoes came back, telling me I was no longer in the same place.
I forced myself then to focus on my dova, hanging like a plumb bob inside me. Flow smoothly, like a river, I recited to myself. All control is ultimately self-control. No matter what has happened, I have a place where proportion, duty, and serenity prevail.
Once my mind was no longer blundering around in fear, I commanded it to examine my situation. Amid all the useful equipment I had brought in my pockets, there was no such thing as a flashlight. Setting out into the blinding brilliance of Iris, light had seemed like the last thing I would need. Moreover, I could think of no way to generate any. I had the batteries in my recorder, but no bulb or filament, and no fire-generating tools. There was not even an indicator light on the recorder.
I began to explore my surroundings with my hands. When I discovered the glazed surfaces that surrounded me, the thought came that perhaps I had passed out, and had been transported back to the ship, because it seemed so manifestly man-made. So I called out again, but the echoes convinced me that I was not on the ship. There is no space this large on the ship, unless the whole thing were gutted, and even then it would not have this feeling of … solidity.
So I must be in a cave, surrounded by some sort of natural crystalline formation. If this is so, then my locator beacon will be of no use, since its signal cannot reach through rock. Rescue seems unlikely, then. I am on my own. Somehow, I must find my way out.
* * *
I am resting now. My muscles are exhausted but still quivering with the tension of trying to move through this hellish blackness, and I am bruised and scraped from banging into rocks. I cannot move normally, for fear of plunging off some precipice or catching my ankle between tumbled boulders—for I have encountered both. At times I have had to feel my way forward on hands and knees, nearly reduced to tears with frustration. And the worst part is knowing that I may simply be moving aimlessly, or becoming more trapped than I was already.
My first instinct was to return back the way I had come. I tried, and failed, to find any chute or slope down which I might have fallen. In fact, I could not even find a path off the narrow ledge on which I was trapped, with columnar cliffs on one side and a precipice on the other. When I decided the only way off was over the drop, I scoured the ledge for pebbles, but everything was smooth and sheer. At last I searched my pockets for something to sacrifice, and chose my pen, since the likelihood of my taking notes here seems remote. From the sound when it fell, I determined that it was a shallow drop, but when I lowered myself over the edge I found that I was a poor judge of heights in the dark, for my feet could not touch ground, so I had to let go and trust.
The drop could not have been more than a few feet, though it felt much longer. At the base of the cliff were tumbled blocks of smooth material that reminded me of enormous ice cubes. Making my way through this talus slope was dangerous and exhausting, and I moved at a crawl. At last I came to a more level spot where I could walk on a slippery stone textured with ripples. I edged forward until my foot landed in water, and I knelt to find myself at the edge of a cold, invisible puddle. Here there were some pebbles, so I tossed one out. In this way, I determined that I was at the shore of a silent underground lake.
This at least gave me some orientation. Water, I reasoned, must come from somewhere, and go somewhere. If it had carved this cavern in the first place, then perhaps it would lead me to its outlet. The sound of trickling water that had been present since I first arrived was clearer now; I could discern its direction. So I made for it, following the edge of the lake.
My way was soon blocked by a rock wall that ran out into the lake. I felt along it, searching for a broken section where I could clamber up. But when I tried, I knocked my head painfully against a solid overhang. The thought of the tons of rock over me, waiting to fall and crush me at the slightest shift, made my muscles so weak and trembling that I was forced to climb back down to the level spot near
the lake.
My world has contracted to what I can feel in front of me; I have no way of grasping the overall shape of the chamber or plotting a sensible route through it. But I have to do something, so I have decided to go along the lakeshore in the other direction. The only evidence that I have made progress is that the sound of falling water has grown fainter. This makes me uneasy, since it is the only landmark I have. Ahead lies only undifferentiated silence.
* * *
I must have been here for hours, perhaps as much as a day. Hours of exhausting effort, and I have no evidence that I have even left the chamber in which I started. There is no way to know; I have become so thoroughly disoriented, I could not find my way back if I wanted to. The futility of my efforts weighs on my spirits. I cannot allow that. If I let myself think of how trapped I am, how hopeless it is to find my way to daylight, then it is all over. I must remain calm, and not expend energy in panic.
Hunger is beginning to trouble me. I have a meal bar in my pocket, but I do not want to use it, since it may have to sustain me for a long time. On the other hand, why put off the inevitable? But I must not think like that.
Several times I have seen phantom lights floating ahead of me and made toward them, only to realize that they were just photisms generated by my straining, light-starved brain. This darkness is so oppressive, I want to rip it to shreds, to revenge myself on it. It presses in on all sides, suffocating and impenetrable. Sometimes I find it difficult to breathe, the darkness is so thick. Nothing could keep me prisoner more effectively. I am perfectly free to move, to escape, and yet completely unable to act. No sadist could have invented a more infuriating captivity.
I have to acknowledge that I may not escape. This is not despair speaking; it is anger. To die this way seems so random, so trivial. I have been robbed of meaning before being robbed of life. To die in darkness, alone—for what purpose was I ever alive? It is as if I emerged from darkness into delusion, then sank back into darkness forever.
Dark Orbit Page 9
