Asimov's SF, April-May 2009

by Dell Magazine Authors

  The insects were entirely visible and tangible, difficult to discern only because of their sheer profusion. They were an exceedingly solid and material threat, horrific in its simple brutality. Whatever came to blow away the insect swarm, by contrast, was visible and tangible only in its effects, and not in itself. It was more like a storm-wind than an entity, but it was a wind with intelligence and precision, which blew exactly where it willed. It tore the clinging insects away from Francis’ suit, and from Anthony's suit as well, but it plucked them away with an amazing delicacy, which inflicted hardly any force at all on Francis’ desperate arms and twisted body.

  But it's too late! Francis mourned—and would have screamed, had he not feared to witness the utter impotence of his voice. My suit is breached, and my skin too! I'm poisoned, no matter what punishment God has seen fit to inflict on my persecutors!

  He knew, though, that it was not God who was punishing the plague of stinging flies that had descended upon the orbital platform. He guessed readily enough that it was one or more ethereals, fully capable of denying the insects the power of ethereal flight. Kelley's Aristocles was probably among them; at any rate, they certainly had no love for murderous insects. They desired to protect humans from harm—but they had come too late! They had arrived, in all probability, no more than a few seconds after the attack had begun, but they had not come in time to save the humans’ lives.

  Or had they?

  As Francis’ thoughts ran on, he realized that he was not dead yet, nor even in terrible pain. He felt light-headed, to be sure, but he had felt light in every possible literal and metaphorical respect since he had first discovered himself weightless, and he did not think that he was becoming delirious, although he could not be entirely sure.

  He felt himself grabbed again, and assumed that Anthony was still by his side, ready to lend him succor—but there were two black-clad figures with him now, who were dragging him along, forcing his near-weightless feet to slide along the platform with increasing velocity, as the initial grip of friction yielded to momentum. He had no idea who was dragging him, but he could guess why they were doing it. In spite of everything, the golem had aligned the hyperetheric projector.

  In spite of everything the mission to the heart of the universe was still on course. If only he could remain alive, and find good air or honest ether at the far point of his extradimensional trajectory, he might yet see what he had intended to see, and might even contrive to return with intelligence of it.

  God have mercy, he thought. Faust and Low are doubtless worthier than I am, having prepared for this moment all their lives, and Patience Muffet still qualifies as one of those children to whom You try to extend tenderness, while I am merely a humble scholar who has dared to doubt Your goodness, but have mercy nevertheless.

  The stars were still shining as he formulated this prayer, and the storm-wind was still blowing all around him without buffeting him at all—but the stars suddenly ceased shining, and the storm-wind seemed suddenly to be within him, and one with him, as he was turned inside out. The sensation of inversion, and of compression of his three dimensions into a mere thread, was unpleasant, but he did not lose consciousness even for a moment, and he even contrived to keep track and account of his consciousness.

  As soon as the train of thought reached its terminus, he was delivered into confusion, not quite knowing where he was, or who, or even how—but he still had a precious inkling, albeit a terribly faint one, of why.

  * * * *

  7

  When Francis recovered full possession of himself he was already awake, with his eyes open, and he was immediately able to sit up. He had already been staring at the sky for an immeasurable length of time, and he continued to do so, but he was now able to take better stock of what he was looking at.

  The zenith was occupied by a black circle, about twice the size of the moon as seen from Earth. Around it, the greater part of the sky was filled by a vast coruscating wheel, which actually did seem to be turning, although its color and dazzle were so confused that the impression might have been an illusion. There were strange dark patches within the wheel, though, that were definitely moving, in various trajectories curved in a direction contrary to the wheel's apparent movement. There were thousands of them, and they gave the impression of being in flight, although they had no definite shapes. They might, Francis thought, have been a vast flock of gigantic bats, whose outlines were confused by the light dancing behind and around them—or fragments of the central well of darkness detaching themselves in sequence and finding a fragile freedom in the world of light.

  He knew that he would not have been able to contemplate the sight at all had it not been for the black glass in his helmet, so he assumed at first, when he tried to redirect his attention to the ground and look at his immediate surroundings, that his eyes had been overstrained, and that the devastation he beheld was a trick of injured perception. A few seconds passed before he realized that the ruination was real, and terrible.

  There had been something like a city where he stood, but there was only blackened debris now. The harsh light of the celestial wheel was brighter by far than any Earthly daylight, but the surface of the world was all but colorless; everything that had not been burned had been blackened by smoke. It was not merely buildings that had collapsed but other structures; the horizon was littered with twisted masses of metal that must once have been proud masts and pylons. Closer to his own position, the ground was pitted by craters and fissures. It was impossible to judge what most of the various heaps of rubble might have been, before they had been stamped flat by some brutal force, but it was possible to pick out various kinds of broken body-parts, most of them insectile but some eerily similar to human limbs and torsos. They were not flesh-fragments, though, but parts of smashed-up machines made in the form of insects or humanoids, replete with sinews of metal wire and arcane clockwork.

  The surfaces of the worlds at the heart of the galaxy, Francis Drake had told him, were no longer the province of living flesh; they were places where machines worked tirelessly. Here, the arena of machine labor had been very thoroughly devastated by some kind of cosmic disaster, natural or artificial. That did not necessarily mean, however, that the living components of the world—the fleshcore and its myriad attendants—had been destroyed, or even damaged. Francis continued looking around, peering through black glass at the blacker landscape.

  At first, he thought that there was nothing moving at all, but then he felt a flash of panic as he realized that there was something very close to him, whose movement had been camouflaged at first by the fact that it was almost entirely black itself, moving against a similar background. He might not have seen it at all but for a glint of light reflected from something smooth and rounded.

  His panic faded as abruptly as it had arisen when he realized that the round object was a helmet similar to his own. His eyes became slightly better adjusted then, and he was able to pick out the whole figure. The other bent down to him—he was still sitting—and the other helmet made contact with his own. That enabled him to hear a voice—Patience Muffet's voice—saying: “Who are you?” Her tone was anxious, but full of courage and determination.

  “Francis Bacon,” he told her.

  “How badly are you injured?”

  That was a good question, he thought. He moved his hands over his body. His suit had certainly been torn and penetrated in half a dozen places, but the rents seemed to have sealed themselves. The sore points on his body where he had been stabbed or grazed responded to his probing fingers, but the pain was dull. No bones seemed to be broken. He appeared to be breathing normally.

  “Very slightly,” he informed her, “unless I've been injected with some slow-acting poison. I'm not even in pain, although I know that I was stung and slashed several times over. You?”

  “The same,” she said.

  “What about the others?” He moved his head slightly as he spoke, careful not to lose the contact, hopeful that he mi
ght now be able to pick out other moving figures against the dark backcloth.

  “I've only found one,” she told him, her voice betraying a new emotion. “It's Low. He's dead.”

  “Then where...?”

  “I don't know,” she said. “When the insects attacked, he and Walter tried to shield me—to protect me. They drew me to the departure-point, the focal plane of the transmitter. One was still holding me tightly when the transmission was activated—I had assumed that it was Walter, but apparently it was not.”

  “I was dragged too,” Francis told her. “One of the two was Anthony, but I could not identify the other. The others must be here, must they not? It's simply that we can't see them while they're lying still. We have to find them. The golem...”

  “We were betrayed,” Patience told him, cutting him off peremptorily. “Faust. It had to be Faust.”

  “Why...?” Francis began—but she cut him off again.

  “The insects came from the hyperetheric apparatus,” she told him. “The Selenites had a fix on the platform before the slug could get the apparatus aligned. They would have captured it for sure if the ethereals hadn't intervened. Perhaps they took it anyway. If this really is our intended destination, there must have been treason here too. It's possible that the others are here, or very slightly displaced from here ... but it's more probable that only three of us came through before the transmission was cut off. I suppose it's possible, too, that the slug has already returned, abandoning us here—but Walter would never have gone back without me.” She paused, but hardly had time to draw breath before resuming: “We need to get underground, if we can. The air here is very thin and bad. We need to get to the fleshcore ... if the fleshcore is still alive.”

  “Is that thing above us the Black Pit to which the golem referred?” Francis asked, feeling unable to imitate the young woman in referring to the fleshcore-fragment as a “slug.”

  “I presume so,” she said. “The radiant matter swirling around it is falling into it, dissolving as it falls—but I didn't expect the Shadows. Nothing is supposed to be able to escape the Pit, so they cannot really be emerging from it, as they seem to be. They might be forming in the matter that is being torn apart, in which case they might be ethereals of some sort in the process of being born—the one that Kelley talks to describes itself as nascent, does it not? I don't know. We have to descend into the underworld, Master Bacon.” The way she pronounced his name implied that she would rather have found one of her other companions—one more capable of judging the situation, and more adept at handling it.

  Francis got to his feet, breaking contact briefly. By the time he tried to press his helmet to her again, though, she was already moving off. She paused just long enough to take his hand and say: “Come on.” Then she set off, evidently expecting him to follow her meekly. He was in no position to challenge her assumption of authority, so that was what he did. He had no alternative thereafter but to try to answer his own questions while he stumbled along in her wake, not even knowing how she was conducting her search for a way into the interior of the devastated world.

  They had been betrayed, she reckoned—by Faust, she suspected, although she had no evidence for that, and no way of knowing what kinds of spies might have been watching the golem's party for far longer than her faithful Agamemnon. In any case, the Selenites had been prepared in advance for the emergence of the hyperetheric link from its fold in space, and had been ready to seize it, perhaps for use as a staging-post in their impending invasion—in which case, the golem's attempt to go home had made things worse for Earth and humankind, not better. The fleshcore-fragment's scheme had gone badly awry—but so had the Selenites’ scheme. One or more ethereals had come to their aid, perhaps having also been forewarned of the golem's plan.

  Francis felt a slight pang of relief, by virtue of the fact he had been recruited to the expedition at the last moment precisely to avoid the possibility that he might give anything away in advance, accidentally or deliberately, and was thus liberated from Patience Muffet's suspicions. Anthony's “firebird” had, at least, assured her that he was harmless, although she was unable to deem him useful. She was still holding his hand, still drawing him forward, searching for something.

  Francis drew breath, and was alarmed to find that he had some small difficulty in doing so. The air inside his suit seemed to be changing in its quality, as if its vital essence were being gradually drained, and it was taking on a foul odor. He had to force himself to resume his train of thought.

  If this world really was their intended destination, he thought—and it was presumably not impossible that the golem had been unable to align the hyperetheric transmitter correctly—then it had suffered a holocaust far more terrible than anything the Selenites intended to afflict on Earth. If this had been done deliberately, who could have been responsible? There was a new war in “Heaven,” according to Kelley—a war between the natives of the ether, Francis supposed—and warfare in the True Civilization too, where insects allied with the Selenites had rebelled, and where there might also have been a revolt of the machines. One of these wars, if they were not merely facets of the same war, had reduced the surface of this world to a burned-out wreck. Could that be anything to do with the shadowy forms in the wheel of light? Might they, in fact, be nascent ethereals?

  He took another deep breath, and found it nauseating, but that only forced him to concentrate all the harder. What had happened here, and what did it portend with respect to his own fate, and that of the Earth? That question brought Francis back, at last, to the issue he had been unconsciously trying to escape: the fact that he was all but alone, unimaginably far from home, with the jaws of death gaping wide in anticipation of swallowing him. His heartbeat fluttered—but then Patience Muffet touched her helmet to his again, and said: “Here. I doubt that we can activate the trap-door, but if there's anyone within who can detect us, I think we can make our presence known.”

  He looked down, and was able to make out a circular metal plate set in the ground, some ten feet in diameter. It was blackened, like everything else, but seemed reassuringly intact. There were various structures set around it that had suffered far worse, but there were numerous plaques inscribed with unreadable symbols, and a number of buttons seemingly intended to be pressed. Patience was already busy pressing them at random.

  Francis moved on to the plate. It could not be iron, because his soles did not stick to it; he was anchored there by weight alone, and did not feel significantly heavier or lighter than he had on Earth. When he stamped his foot the plate rang hollow, suggesting that it was indeed the entrance to a shaft. While Patience tested the periphery, therefore, Francis began to stamp his feet more forcefully and rhythmically, hoping that he might attract attention in the simplest way of all.

  After ten minutes or so, they both sat down to rest. Francis felt that all the strength was draining out of him, and that the interior of his suit was becoming unbearable. The various wounds he had sustained before the transition were still remarkably painless, but he felt thoroughly miserable. He touched his helmet to the young woman's, in order to say: “Don't despair. God would not send us half way across his universe merely to let us perish.”

  “Even the slug would not do that,” she told him. “It seems, though, that all good intentions might have been thwarted by the unexpected, God's included.”

  Francis had to take his helmet away in order to shake his head—but his head, oddly enough, refused to be shaken. He found himself standing up again, although his volition seemed quite uninvolved in the action. He felt himself move to one side; then his arm reached out, entirely of its own accord. He could not make out what it was that his fingers did, not because it was too dark for his eyes to see, but simply because his sight was so startled by the impossibility of what was happening. After thirty seconds or so, however, there was a grinding sound and the plate began to slide sideways into a slot in the surrounding wall.

  Patience made contact just long en
ough to say: “How did you do that?”

  Francis did not answer, not merely because he did not know but because he could not activate his vocal cords. At first, it seemed that they had gained nothing. Beneath the plate that had moved aside was another, seemingly not much different, although its surface was not blackened. It was a pale grey, insufficiently polished to gleam in the excessive light. Francis’ hand took Patience Muffet's, as she had earlier taken his, and his legs led her on to the plate. She followed meekly, just as he had, although he could feel the mistrust and anxiety in her grip.

  “Don't be afraid,” he said, glad to be operating his own vocal cords—although he was quite incapable of following his own advice.

  * * * *

  8

  The inner platform began to descend through a smooth-walled shaft, heading for the bowels of the world. The dwindling circle of light above their heads was eclipsed as the upper plate slid back into place again, leaving them in total darkness.

  Patience contrived another contact and repeated: “How did you do that?”

  Still able to formulate his own reply, Francis said: “I didn't. Something else took control of my body. Perhaps that was the response to our appeal for help. May we take our helmets off now, do you think?”

  “Best not,” she replied, seemingly unamazed by his denial of responsibility for his own actions. “If they can operate our limbs like those of marionettes they'll likely do that for us when it's safe.” After a moment's silence, she said: “I feel lost without Agamemnon.” It was the first time she had addressed him as if he were a friend rather than a stranger, and he took a certain comfort in her acceptance.

  “The world is not dead, save for its surface,” he said, as much for his own benefit as hers. “Its fleshcore is alive, and likely to be accompanied by many other creatures. It is not beyond the bounds of possibility that we might still be able to return home, carrying a message to the golem.”