by J D Cortese
“Vaxeer,” he said, “help me.”
As Vaxeer started to totter toward Agdinar, the closest guard fell on him. They twisted around what used to be a wall, and the officer tried to put restraining holders on Vaxeer’s wrists.
But they were both unsteady, and the guard fell backwards as Vaxeer stood trying to get away.
“Can you please let me go?” Vaxeer yelled, as he kicked the leg of the fallen guard. Vaxeer had plenty of guts to confront anyone.
Agdinar’s doubts, however, were hard to shake off. He was on his knees over the open door, and the green field was strong enough to sustain his weight. It wasn’t going to waver any time soon.
Vaxeer finally got to the edge of the door and helped his friend to pound it. But then the room's gravity started to slowly spin everything around them.
A maelstrom of white water swirled above them.
They were both standing over the opening now, clueless about how to penetrate the barrier.
They didn't see the other guard approaching, not until he fired one of his precision neuroinfusion arrows—a sophisticated dart loaded with neurotoxins—right into Vaxeer's right calf.
Agdinar turned and covered his friend's body with his own.
The two guards started to approach them from opposite directions, like they were prey. Before they got on top of them, the green field they all had forgotten vanished, making Agdinar and Vaxeer fall straight down.
And a million gallons of water above decided to follow them.
One of the guards looked up, just before the ocean punched him.
Chapter 33
Vaxeer pushed against the blast door, as if he could keep it in place. They were sequestered into an emergency containment partition. “Well, it was a good run,” he said.
“The door is shut; they can't reach us.”
“Don't be dumb. The Guards have access to Central in their helmets,” Vaxeer said, still watching the other side of the corridor through the partition’s window. “It'd only take them a few minutes to restart the room’s door and open it. As I said, it was good while it lasted.”
“They are after me, Vaxi. Only me.”
“I don't think we can convince them of this when they burst through and find us here, especially with this poison in my leg—I was a target too.”
“Why are you helping me?”
“You are my friend,” Vaxeer said, stretching his leg as if it were cramping.
“That's not usually enough to risk your life for someone.”
“My very good friend?”
“Vaxeer, please.”
“There's something wrong with us, Agdi.”
“I guess so. Look at how we've ended up.”
Vaxeer straightened himself, leaning on the wall. His voice sounded less regular, and soon the poison would start paralyzing his lungs. If the police didn't administer the antidote soon, Agdinar’s best friend was going to die.
“No,” Vaxeer said, trying to be forceful. “It's not us two; it is all of us.”
“Sorry, I don't get it.”
“There's something wrong with the Watchers,” Vaxeer said, and flinched after hearing noise just on the other side of the door. “Wrong with the watching itself. I might not be as paranoid as you are, but I've noticed things. Things that add up to something really rotten. We are not just watching, but also collecting information for a—”
“A what?” Agdinar had gone around Vaxeer, and he pounded a couple of times on the blast door, pointlessly calling for silence on the other side. But Agdinar could see how the guards had managed to open a switch panel on the tunnel’s wall. They were running out of time. “Please,” Agdinar said, “what is it?”
“I don't think we are just watching. We didn’t come here, make these many cities, just to write better history books for our students. We are here to enact a very precise plan.”
“To change the past? We're told one has to be very careful about that.”
“Sure,” Vaxeer said, the smile both fake and forced. His breathing was getting belabored. “Look at what you did,” he said. “If you, one person, inexperienced with the down-world, can change so much the outcomes of one, or two, or many attacks. And then, even kidnap civilians, let alone fight against groups of armed thugs like the Hawks, or the ground police...how much more can we do with our technology? Come on, we're like gods for the down-world.”
Vaxeer started to cough and couldn't stop. He was getting nauseous.
“I'm not sure, Vaxeer,” Agdinar said, his hand resting on Vaxeer’s shoulder. “It makes sense, but...”
The door started to rise, and smoke from the power blasts slipped into their walled cage.
Agdinar realized that this could have been the last true conversation he would ever have with his friend. He felt a twinge of deep sorrow as he considered that Vaxeer wasn't just a companion, but a true partner and the closest he had to family.
Agdinar wanted to tell this to his friend, and then he froze.
* * *
Agdinar had experienced many weird sensations in his world—using the elevator, engaging transiency—but now he felt something impossible to express. It was a change in the normal succession of events, to a point where that term ceased to have any meaning. He was suspended outside time—or out of his time, or from how time affected the closest parts of his world.
The door stopped moving. The smoke stopped moving. Vaxeer stood at an impossible angle, one that should had caused him to fall. For all those things, time wasn’t advancing. But Agdinar was still able to move away from the door. And an outside hatch was opening a man-size portal behind him.
Agdinar couldn’t understand how time could be frozen on one side of the room and moving on the other. It wasn’t just extraordinary but beyond all the science he knew, even the science that had brought them fifty centuries back in time. Rather than traveling through a wormhole that connected two points in time, he was witnessing the essence of time being manipulated.
Agdinar knew that he had to step out, but he also felt what humans in the down-world would when confronted with Watchers’ technology—that they were in the presence of an alien, ineffable power, somewhere between magical and miraculous.
The first few steps outside were the worst. It felt as if he were floating over the city, without body protection, near the outside fire escape ladder of a modern building.
Agdinar couldn't feel the obvious freezing cold of the metal handrail, and distractedly examined his right hand, to see how. There was a transparent, slightly hazy coat over his hands, like a glove made from fog.
He was now wearing some sort of spacesuit, barely visible. It was something more advanced than anything they had.
Agdinar had a terrifying thought: as they were future people watching the present world, someone from an even more distant future might have been watching them.
It was an absurd idea, and he felt unease and a chilling cold on his back, and not from the outside air. A thought inside his head shook him hard enough to almost make him let go of the rails.
See through me...
See what? he thought.
See through me...
Agdinar wanted to deny the message but, before he could think anything clearly, he was blinded by a purple flash that eclipsed the sun. He swung away and almost fell, part by the steep inclination but also because something was growing ahead of him.
It wasn't really growing; it was unveiling itself.
Other stairs floated in the air, all around him.
And the stairs kept going away from the Towers, as it did the one he was holding.
All over the sky and over New York's midtown, the stairs joined in a single spot.
And there, an enormous set of objects appeared: two perfect geometric figures that floated without any visible gravitation engine.
They were two perfect pyramids, whose opposite tips pointed to the origin of the visible surge of light.
A purple sun.
And like with th
e sun, by squinting Agdinar could distinguish a brilliant circle.
The Great Eye.
They had lied to him—and to all the Watchers—about the Eye. It wasn't a meshwork of quantum computers connected with the multiverse to gain more power, and it wasn't stored in the Central Core, a facility Management kept secret.
It was there, outside, sustained by structures made by its own alien intelligence.
And it was immense, overflowing with energy that was both blinding and invisible.
The Eye had been there, near them.
But the Eye was invisible, even to the invisible people in the invisible cities.
The Great Eye was beyond them, in all senses outside their world. And if they were—as his friend had said—like gods for the people below, that thing was closer to being the God humans had worshipped than anything else in the universe.
The current of thought hit him again, shaking his body and the stairs like an earthquake in the sky; and then, it got completely focused on him. Adginar shivered, trembled, twitched, and jerked, electrocuted by the invisible power.
I am the Eye, the Seer, the only one that sees...
Everything was now shaking powerfully, and the pyramids shimmered as if made of water.
Come to see me...
Agdinar regained his hold, and decided he had to keep going, no matter what. Not every day is one called to the presence of God—by God Himself.
* * *
As Agdinar reached the midpoint of the space staircase, his heart was pounding. He felt the enormous height and the vibrations on the steps, and it made his hold on the ladder wobbly. But he didn't feel the supernatural wind, or the inclination of the whole world around the Eye.
In fact, he was having opposite feelings: of being on all fours on those steps, while also hanging upside down and being pulled by the globe above him.
Agdinar was slowly climbing toward the Eye, but in doing so his body violated all the laws of the physical world.
The way ahead—whether above or below—was like a mirage, and the impossibly bright sphere appeared both close and far away; very blindingly lighted but also sharply silhouetted.
It resembled a purple globe, irregularly colored and surrounded by a shroud of light, and it rotated with uneven speed.
Agdinar saw himself, ahead of his own body, entering the orb.
And he saw Vaxeer, overtaken by the guards.
Time lost meaning, and he saw both what had happened and what was going to. He thought, incoherently, that prophecies of the future were containing his past.
Time finally stopped, and all the moments before and after his present bunched together in a single tick of the clock.
The vision is ahead...
Agdinar grabbed the rail tightly, as the turning pull of gravity stretched his body down to the bones.
Come and see it...
In a last desperate effort to stay away from the purple sphere, Agdinar tried to backtrack his steps, only succeeding in creating multiple versions of himself—selves that he could frighteningly feel within. Those versions of him started to move away, falling down, raising to the sky, or sinking into a dark purple sun.
See with my eyes...
With my eyes as yours...
He surrendered and let go of his hold, not knowing which way the windless pull would take him.
He fell through the membrane of the Eye, its solid iris, and plunged not into a sun but a barren, hollow iceberg.
The cold took away his breath first, and then his consciousness.
Chapter 34
Agdinar was floating in what felt like a liquid by its viscosity but resembled vacuum by its absolute transparency. An intensely pink clarity suffused the chamber, while its walls fell into darkness under him, increasing the feeling of being suspended at the center of an enormous cavern.
He tried to move his hands, which were outside his field of view, but he couldn't.
He tried to move around; his clear suit was now as hard as a rock. He could breathe, and that was all.
Then, the show began.
Several clusters of light started to approach him; they appeared granulated, as if made by illuminated grains of sand.
Some of the brilliant globes collided and merged; others sprung away from each other like rebounding solid balls.
Many of them divided, animated like overgrown cells from a world of lights. And they also multiplied, copying themselves over and over.
They kept getting closer to Agdinar, and he was frightened as the meaning of those orbs became clear to him.
The lighted grains of sand were stars.
And the immense shifting spheres they made were the closest universes to theirs.
The Computer-God was showing him her heart full of universes.
But Agdinar was too small to feel its beat.
Infinite views came crashing over him, the pasts and futures of everything that ever was.
His mind tried to hold on to the present, but it couldn't. The forgetting was easier than the holding, and soon most of his vision was gone, before his eyes could grab any of its parts.
By seeing everything, he saw nothing, and his mind finally failed and shut down again.
* * *
He was standing in a room on the upper levels of Tower City. The windowpanes on its walls returned an outside that was familiar to him, and even in his vivid dream he recognized it as an early version of their aerial city.
It was like watching Rome being built.
After some time trying to figure out how to move a body unable to remember the operation of its muscles, he was able to turn to his right and discover he was sitting at the end of a long table, near a man of indefinable age.
This was the Overseer, dressed in a dark tunic and with an iridescent cape draped over his shoulder; the cape seemed to float, animated by an internal life. His face was clean of wrinkles and had enough hair on top to cover the shiny cranium, and his body showed none of the girth it would one day possess. Agdinar was taken by the man's smile, great warmth from someone who would be so stern as to terrorize professional politicians.
The Overseer’s voice came to Agdinar as if bubbling through water, both from the outside and a recess in his brain.
None of that was real—Agdinar knew it—but there was restrained power in the scene.
“I have brought something for you,” the Overseer said, putting a strange object on the table, a dark disk with a glass-covered chamber. The case was beautifully inscribed in old characters, and centuries old.
It was something ancient Agdinar had only seen in history-views: a magnetic compass.
Agdinar had been always fascinated by how the invisible power of the planet's magnetic field could make a needle point in a certain direction.
The needle vibrated and kept pointing straight to him.
He understood the meaning of the old names on the object—North and South, East and West, but also North-West and the likes of them—directions that had guided explorers well before the Watchers came to study the past.
There should have been eight points discernible on the instrument, but, underneath the needle, there was a black background that said otherwise. It had three inter-crossed white triangles, which ended in nine arrowheads.
He reflected on the strangeness of the nine-point star and then found himself turning away.
The vision vanished as if he had entered a revolving door of time.
* * *
He was standing at the entrance of a building, confronting a poorly illuminated hall. It was a familiar sight, but his mind was too confused to recognize it.
The building was apparently empty or abandoned. He felt fear about being alone there and had a sensation of wanting to look around for something.
Or someone.
It was all so real. His shoes felt wet, and when he looked down, the floor was filling with water that surged from several vents at the edges of the immense room.
The vision crashed, smashed l
ike a crystal being hit by an invisible fist. It kept imploding away from him, and the fragments got smaller, forming a suspended fog of points of light.
Stardust.
And then, silence. Blackness, and a loneliness that froze the soul.
He welcomed the nothingness when it came over him.
* * *
When Agdinar opened his eyes a third time, he was standing by the window of the space door he'd exited to reach the Eye. Outside, Tower City remained unperturbed and a white mantle of clouds was slowly covering the view of the city underneath.
There was no purple globe, nor the opposing pyramids that had bookmarked it before. And he could no longer see the jungle of ancient staircases leading to the Eye.
But the nearest of those stairs was still out there, within his reach and extending only a dozen steps in the bare emptiness.
And then it dissolved and became a ghost.
The view of the outside also flickered between white flashes, and the door reformed itself, leaving Agdinar's hand touching a perfectly smooth piece of windowless violet wall.
He revised his own breathing, barely regular, and with his heart still rushing, concluded that none of what he'd experienced could have been an illusion.
His judgment was reinforced when he finally had the strength to turn and face the tunnel. Vaxeer was semiconscious on the floor, and the blast door was still rising. He could even see the same two swaths of black smoke swirling up to the ceiling and spreading away above them as dark plumes.
He couldn't have been looking away for more than a few seconds, and his rational mind was trying to dismiss what he'd seen as a hallucination.