Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “A name?” Millbrae maintained his cultivated expression, but suddenly he thought he knew the name; it was the beginning of an awesome understanding. More people were coming into the tavern now, tourists or recent settlers, laughing. Their voices were slurred in Millbrae’s ears but still intelligible.

  “Ramachandra,” said Sorokin. And though he had not spoken, the name loudly, the happy group who had just entered were silent instantly. The contemporaneous bartender raised his head and then ceased to move, and all of them for a moment were quiet as statuary.

  It had been nearly an Azlarocean year earlier, one fewer veil draped upon them all, when Sorokin with his own hands had given the box to Ramachandra. It was a small black rhomboid box with sides of unequal size, and Sorokin had clung to it like a fanatic while passing secretaries, bodyguards, and functionaries of unknown function that the wealthy recluse had gathered about himself. Sorokin had sent word of his find ahead, and when he finally confronted Ramachandra himself in one of the city’s typical underground apartments, the potentate leaned forward in his thronelike chair, said: “Well?” and held out his hand.

  Half a dozen others had recently made the same gesture, almost as imperiously but in vain. This time Sorokin honored it, handing over the heavy black metal case, which was just about big enough to have contained a human heart or brain.

  One of the many chamberlains nearby made a disgusted sound as soon as he got a good look at the box. “Not even the right size or shape. Is it even a message carrier?”

  Ramachandra raised three imperious fingers. “Beside the distorted nameplate on this device is a mark that seems identical to one I put secretly on each unit that we sent out with the robots. Callisto? Come here and look. Could the very shape of the box have been changed? I see no sign that it’s been crushed.”

  The woman called Callisto was either a tourist or a very new settler, for the details of her face and garments were somewhat blurred in Sorokin’s vision by his veils; while Ramachandra himself seemed to belong to Sorokin’s own yeargroup of settlers, or to one very near to it in time, for they could behold each other with perfect clarity.

  Callisto was tall, and like most of the people to be seen on Azlaroc, of youthful bearing but indeterminate age. Now she was looking closely at the box as Ramachandra continued to turn it over in his brown, bejeweled, and powerful-seeming hands. “Sir,” she said finally, “I had not foreseen that its very shape might change, that it might carry back some residual alteration in the space within its atoms or its molecules. But I cannot say that such a change should be impossible.” She lifted black veil-blurred eyes to Sorokin. “Where did you find this thing?”

  “Along the peak of Ruler Ridge. Some twenty or twenty-two kilometers to the south of here.”

  “Which side of the ridge? And how near the top?” Callisto asked him sharply.

  “The east side, toward the city, milady.” There was some mockery perhaps in the honorific form of address. “And it was embedded in the ground not half a meter from the top. Just about half of the box was showing, fortunately with the little nameplate clear: ‘Finder please return to Rama—’ ”

  Ramachandra himself cut in: “They tell me you are always finding or reporting mysterious things out in the desert. Have you reported this to anyone else?”

  “I have not. As for my finding and seeing and knowing other things out there, why I suppose I’m there more than anyone else, except perhaps some of the original settlers.”

  “Are you amenable to being hired?” the man on the throne-chair asked. He named a sum that was half again as much as most jobs paid. “Plus food and quarters here in my suite as long as you’re employed, which will be for an indefinite period.”

  “My duties?”

  “Consultant. On the desert and its topography and its wonders, shall we say?” Ramachandra’s voice was dry. “I shall require that you remain usually in my suite, and communicate with the outside only as I direct, while you are in my employ. Can you start at once?”

  Sorokin appeared to take thought. “I can.”

  “Good. Now let’s see what our message carrier holds.”

  One of Ramachandra’s male aides was already leading a machine into the room. At a nod from his employer he tapped out on its input DAMAGED RECORDER/MESSAGE CARRIER TO BE READ, and then he took the black device from Ramachandra’s hand and gave it to the hand-like grippers of the machine.

  “Everyone out of the room, please.” Ramachandra had raised his voice slightly. “Except you, Callisto, I’ll want your opinion.” His eyes swiveled to Sorokin. “And you stay too. If this thing proves not to be authentic I’ll want you right on hand.”

  For what? Sorokin wondered uneasily. He had heard some strange stories about Ramachandra, who was a little-known man among Azlaroc’s small permanent population though he had been a settler here now for some fifty years. There were hints of violence in the stories, and more than hints of eccentricity. But Sorokin made no protest now, only took a seat at the powerful man’s right hand while Callisto sat just as formally at his left.

  The machine was now ready to display the contents of the message carrier, and it dimmed the ambient lighting and began to project a hologram into the middle of the room. The indoor space faced by the three seated people seemed to disappear, and they saw before them the desert, utterly lifeless. Not pure yellow as was the desert immediately surrounding the city, nor mottled gold and pink as on the high land of Ruter Ridge, but pale orange and mauve, as Sorokin had often seen it in the depression on the city’s other side. Ten or twelve thousand kilometers from the city in that direction the land began to run under blacksky, the sky of darkness, and into the uninhabitable zone.

  Two people, Ramachandra and Callisto, were foreground in the hologram, standing a few paces from the camera that had recorded it and looking toward the camera, which was evidently supported by some person—no, Ramachandra had mentioned robots, hadn’t he?—that was sinking slowly into the ground. With their eyes fixed studiously on a point near Sorokin, the images of Callisto and Ramachandra slid slowly upward, and the orange and mauve surface of the world rose too.

  Beginning in the extreme foreground of the image and zigzagging off between mathematical hills, to vanish at last in the far background beneath the blacksky zone, ran what might, on some more ordinary world, have been taken for a dried out watercourse. On some planet where it could rain and conditions were halfway reasonable for men to dwell, or even on some world where clouds dripped liquid lead to burn out channels in the landscape, the great crack might have been taken for a narrow, desiccated gully.

  But on mild Azlaroc it never rained, not even liquid lead. This purple-bottomed ditch into which the robot sank (By ail the veils, Sorokin hoped it was a robot not a human!) was made not by erosion but by subduction, the slow infolding of the outer surface of the world down into unexplored depths beneath.

  Men had not dug too deeply here, because they feared to break a balance of natural forces. Azlaroc was not a planet, and what lay beneath its crust was no mere molten rock. This world had a unique constitution, containing types of matter unknown elsewhere. It had a star-like mass, but zones of natural gravity inversion that had made partial human colonization possible; and it whirled through space in an intricate orbital dance with a fluid-core type pulsar and a small black hole. Even the pulsar was peculiar, having a rotation period of almost four seconds. So Azlaroc was a strange-enough world for anyone.

  Even without the veils that yearly formed and fell from space.

  The robot, assuming it to be about the size and shape of a man, was now about waist deep in the subduction trench. On Earth and elsewhere such trenches existed in the ocean bottoms, infolding rock and other matter from the sea floors into the planet’s mantle, and incidentally forming an impassable barrier to the spread of plant life along the bottom. On Earth, some ten centimeters of surface per year might be carried into the depths, with approximately the same amount being simultaneously evolved from s
ub-oceanic ridges. On Azlaroc the analogous process seemed capable of consuming, at least in some zones of rapid action, ten centimeters or more of surface per minute. Sorokin in his wanderings had sometimes seen some of the smaller geometric solids that were the landscape’s natural features borne down into the trenches and out of sight.

  Just as the robot making the recording was now about to go. Now the recorder itself was on the very bottom of the trench, level with the purple floor that looked solid and yet not. For a moment longer Ramachandra’s and Callisto’s eyes looking down at it could be seen, and beyond their imaged heads the yellowish sky-that-was-not-a-sky of Azlaroc with a tail asymptotic pinnacle of landscape breaking off in radiant fire against it at an altitude of a hundred meters or so. And then the hologram went dark with the absolute blackness of underground. Dark save for a digital display of hours and minutes, which was evidently generated within the recorder itself and now appeared projected near the floor of the room in which the three people watched. The display was running up from a zero hour, minute and second that had evidently been set as the time when the carrier machine began its descent into the trench.

  Ramachandra’s voice in the darkened room was tense as he leaned forward to make an adjustment to the machine, “We’ll speed it up a little. No telling how long this phase of darkness lasts.” The digital chronometer figures blurred into a faster flow. One hour. Two. Three.

  “Why shouldn’t the darkness last the whole time the camera’s underground?” Sorokin asked. He had gotten himself involved in this now, for better or worse, and he decided he had better learn all he could of what was going on. “I mean, I assume this recorder was somehow carried through the interior of the world and brought up again by natural forces at Ruler Ridge. How long ago did you put it into the trench?”

  Ramachandra was leaning forward in his throne-like chair, staring absorbedly into the darkness of the hologram, and did not answer. “About one year,” said Callisto, abstractedly. Sorokin had almost expected the answer, having come to note the same periodicity in all sorts of apparently unrelated Azlarocean events. Years elsewhere might be based on some seasonal or astronomical cycle of little importance to society, or on the mere borrowed standard year of Earth. But systemic years here, each marked by the falling of its veil from space, were a central fact of human life.

  Callisto went on: “We put down more than twenty recorders in all, at different points along different subduction trenches. This is the first to be recovered, and I rather suspect it may also be the last.”

  “Why?” Sorokin asked. In the hologram there was still only darkness, accented rather than relieved by the flicker of time (one hundred twenty days now on the chronometer, one hundred twenty-one . . .) and by the signals that the watching eye and brain began to generate within themselves. “I mean, I get the impression that this isn’t an ordinary research project, and . . . it’s Doctor Callisto, isn’t it? Haven’t you been involved in physics research on Azlaroc for some time? I’ve seen or heard your name in that connection, now that I think about it.”

  She looked at him more closely than before. “Yes, I have been involved in such research. And you’re also right that this is something a little different.”

  Ramachandra had reached, out again to slow the machine, reverse it briefly, and now with a scowl he was letting it run forward again, somewhat more slowly this time. “Thought I saw something there—but no. This is engineering, Mr. Sorokin. We’re going to achieve something specific aside from any gain of knowledge.”

  “What are we out to achieve, Mr. Ramachandra?”

  The other man shifted his position but remained intent on the hologram and did not look round as he spoke. “I intend to leave Azlaroc.”

  For a moment Sorokin thought that the other was saying euphemistically that he was soon to die; settlers spoke of leaving Azlaroc in that sense when they spoke of it at all. But death could be easily managed without so straining one’s eyes after stray gleams of enlightenment issuing from very strangely mangled and very expensive recorders; and this was not a man for euphemisms.

  “But you’re a settler here,” Sorokin said, as he thought, reasonably enough.

  It had been written of one of the old king-capitalists of Earth that facing his stare was like standing in the path of an oncoming locomotive. Locomotives, transport devices of the time, had evidently been (like some of the men who owned them) exceedingly powerful and very crudely controlled, ready to push through human flesh as indifferently as air. Sorokin was reminded of this now when Ramachandra stopped the machine. momentarily and turned to give him a full glance.

  “I settled here by free choice some forty-nine years ago, Mr. Sorokin. And now it is my equally free choice to leave.”

  Sorokin could only look at him dumbly. Forty-nine of the impenetrable veils of Azlaroc were bound around the atoms of this man’s body, and now he had decided to depart. Even if there had been only a single veil to hold him down, not all the power of all the engines ever built by man could lift a single atom of his body free.

  In the hologram the images of bright numbers were poised in darkness. “Mr. Sorokin. Since you are going to be working for me, let me make sure you understand me, as Doctor Callisto here has come to do.” Ramachandra gestured economically toward a corner of the room where a set of carved pieces waited on a mosaic table. “We are playing chess. You tell me it is impossible for me to move my pawn from the second rank back to the first, and I have no choice but to agree, since I have bound myself to abide by the rules of chess. Now it is a common misconception that leaving Azlaroc after getting caught under a veil is impossible in the same sense as is moving one’s pawn backward. It is not, though of course it has never yet been accomplished. I for one have not agreed to any such rule.” With the air of one who has made a point to his own complete satisfaction, he turned back to his machine and started the numbers piling up again.

  Sorokin raised his eyes to Cailisto’s; the look she returned refused any agreement that her employer was mad.

  Sorokin asked them both: “Do you expect that this recorder will give you some clue toward getting through the veils?”

  The others exchanged a quick look. “Getting through them in the usual sense may riot be necessary,” said Ramachandra. “Have you ever studied the way in which the veils contract about this world?”

  Before he could reply, Sorokin’s eyes were dazzled by a burst of blue-white radiance from the hologram. The projector would of course create no image of an intensity injurious to human eyes, but the blurred brightness of this one suggested that its original might well have been of such power. There was no longer any up or down perceptible in the image, which was of layers of blue and white in many shadings and combinations, layers and stripes of light and seeming fire that riffled past first horizontally and then diagonally as the robot or whatever was left of it changed attitudes during its speeding passage through—what? What medium was it traversing now, at some unknown depth beneath the habitable zone?

  Azlaroc was as round as a planet or a star, and beneath its cloudy pseudo-sky, which was really the upper boundary of a thin but stable region of gravity-inversion, it had greater habitable area by far than Earth. Its surface was warmed gently by internal heat, lighted by harmless radiation that several causes splashed across the seeming sky, and covered by air and moisture that men with their elegant machinery had generated for themselves and continued to recycle as required. After a veil fell the next thing men had to do was produce new air and water for the next season’s tourists; otherwise those coming down would have quickly died amid air of ample pressure, as each atom of the air of other years was bound unusably inside its portion of that year’s veil. The partial pressures of the various co-existing atmospheres never added up to more than unity; the same effect that made settlers warp farther from present reality with every year that passed, each veil that fell, was even more marked at the molecular and atomic levels.

  Sorokin had seen, from time to time a
nd with no particular interest, scientists’ descriptions of their careful probings into Azlaroc’s rlnysterious interior. Jargony recitals of numbers and pressures and phases, densities and more numbers and relativistic effects and still more numbers and mathematics, with suggestions that space near the core of Azlaroc might connect directly somehow with space at the crystalline surface of the companion pulsar. This fact or possibility of course had some connection with the veils . . .

  The famed veils of Azlaroc were formed out of material that the triple system gathered to itself as it swung on its way through space. They were the stuff between the stars, worked on by the unimaginable gravitation and radiation, the electric and magnetic fields that obtained within the belts of space that all ships had to avoid when traveling within this system. Once every systemic year a veil of this transformed matter fell on Azlaroc. The first veil that men ever saw took an exploring party—who thus became the first old settlers—by surprise. They saw it as a net of gossamer that fell toward them from a sky gone mad. After discovering that they could not leave, they discovered that life here was not uncomfortable, and healthy life was considerably prolonged. Since that time some thousands of other settlers had come, voluntarily.

  Sorokin had seen the scientists’ estimates that about forty million of the impervious, indestructible veils had fallen on Azlaroc and made themselves part of its fabric since the unique triple system had reached its present apparently stable state. Forty million years . . . not long, on the time scale of astronomy, but imagine forty million of those veils, all gathered somewhere . . .

  The speeding blue stripes of the hologram ran through a complex sequence of change in which they first narrowed, then widened out again, before contracting abruptly into a singularity of darkness that exploded outward into light, this time the bold glory of a star-filled universe.