Short Fiction Complete

by Fred Saberhagen

  “By all the veils!” Sorokin found that he was standing, his hand clutching as if instinctively toward Ramachandra, who brushed its irritation from him. Ramachandra had stopped time in the hologram, frozen its action.

  One hundred eighty-seven days after going down into the subduction zone, the recorder had somehow emerged among the stars, whose splendid images now filled the room.

  Only after staring at the scene before him for a few moments, did Sorokin make out that the stars in its lower half formed a slightly blurred mirror-image of those above, as if reflected in a frozen ocean of great smoothness. And all the stars were bluer than one would have expected a random selection of the galaxy to appear, as if these were being viewed from the bottom of some steep gravitational well.

  “I thought there was nowhere on Azlaroc from which one could see . . .” Sorokin sat down again and let the foolish words trail off. He knew there could be no such view from any point on Azlaroc.

  Ramachandra reached to push the speed control of the machine up to a real-time pace. At once all the depicted stars began to move, blurring into streaks with the speed at which they rose and set. Each star moved from horizon to horizon in less than two seconds, while its image simultaneously tracked across the unbelievable mirrorlike plain below. And the whole scene in its entirety was jumping, pulsing, at about one third the speed of a calm human heart. The innumerable speedstreaked star-images by which the plain was visible all jumped in unison with every pulse, the pulses being timed to coincide with . . .”

  “The pulsar, then, the neutron star. It recorded this scene from the pulsar’s surface . . . but wait. No, that’s . . .”

  “Impossible, my friend? Ha? Hey?” It was the first time Sorokin had seen the big man smile. Ramachandra was elated now. He stopped the action in the hologram, reversed it, ran it forward slowly from the point of the recorder’s entry onto the pulsar’s surface, savoring every moment.

  Sorokin had the feeling that he was the one who was being swindled here, shown a concocted show, gotten to believe in the unbelievable. But why should they take such pains to fool him?

  No, the recorder could not possibly have been planted out there in the wilderness for him to find. It had been half buried in the matter of the Azlarocean surface, and no one had known that he was going that way.

  But it was far more preposterous that the recorder could have snugly and smugly come to rest in a field of a hundred billion gravities, where not even an atom could remain intact. First the gross structure of any kind of matter would be whisked away, as if by some magician’s gesture, and then the relatively fragile electron-orbits would be bent in and collapsed, and then the nuclei themselves. From weak to strong, all the orders of physics bowing down in turn before the Great God Gravity. Electrons mashed brutally into positive nucleons, nothing left but the neutron soup that made a neutron star, and that could still hold against a hundred billion gravities in this last stand before the ultimate collapse, the ultimate abyss.

  What was left was a star (if one could call it that) maybe ten kilometers in diameter, with maybe the mass of the Sun. Radiating very little in the visible part of the spectrum, but an avalanche of radio waves and X rays and other wavelengths, in its furious searchlight beam that swept and pulsed with its rotation. Take up a cubic centimeter of its solid surface, if you can dig up what has some billions of times the strength of steel. Lift it on your thumbnail—yes, do that. Hundreds of millions of tons. Drop it off your imaginary thumbnail onto the surface of the Earth and it will fall all the way through the hard solid Earth, like a rock through a cloud of thin vapor, and then fall back again toward the center.

  Vet the recorder, wherever it had been, had obviously survived though its attendant robot had been lost.

  Ramachandra stopped the action again. “Diaphaneity reading?” he snapped.

  Calisto was peering at the hologram through another instrument. “Impossible to get a good one,” she answered, her voice tense and at the same time abstracted.

  “We’ve got to be looking out onto that surface through the veils. All the veils. Damn near forty million of them. Nothing breaks them, but they can be stretched. And the recorders that didn’t come back—some of them may have gotten out.”

  “Mr. Ramachandra.” Dr. Callisto straightened. “I must in all conscience tell you I think it is far more likely that the other recorders were simply lost, destroyed, somewhere between here and the pulsar’s surface. The second most likely possibility, in my opinion, is that they reached the surface of the pulsar and were not protected by the veils as this one seems to have been. Remember, ten-to-the-eleventh standard gravities, approximately.”

  “And is there a third possibility? Have you calculated that far?”

  “All right. Yes, of course, I have as yet found no evidence that your theory is impossible. All the veils of Azlaroc were evidently shielding this recorder when it reached the pulsar’s surface, and they might be enough to protect a man as well. It is still my opinion that the veils cannot be pierced by any matter, or broken by any force.”

  “Excuse me,” Sorokin put in, “but in that case I do not see what all this has to do with getting a man out from under them.”

  Callisto’s gaze shifted to him. “Have you studied topology, Mr. Sorokin? In the field of—”

  “Don’t bury him in technicalities,” interrupted Ramachandra. “Sorokin, I asked you before if you know how the veils fall. What I meant was this: there is some disagreement among authorities, but it seems at least probable that now and again a veil falls in a looped manner, something like a sheet thrown carelessly upon a bed. In a sense we are still under it, but actually its outer surface, folded around, is what touches us; topologically we are still outside it. I think the veil of ‘476, your year and mine, fell in that manner; if that is so, it can be mathematically shown that all the people of our particular yeargroup are still outside it.”

  Sorokin knew a strange hollow feeling. “Then we might be able to leave.”

  “If we can locate the folding of the veil, and go around it.”

  . . . Until this very moment Sorokin had thought himself contented here in self-imposed imprisonment. Now . . . “But what of all the other veils that have fallen on us since our first year?”

  “You will be outside those, too,” Callisto said, “if you are really outside your first year’s veil, and can get around its folded edge.”

  “And where will the edge be?”

  “Perhaps somewhere just underground, almost in reach. Perhaps on the surface of the neutron star. Perhaps in the black hole.”

  Sorokin blinked. If he could believe that the recorder had survived the pulsar’s surface, why should he not swallow any other scientific incredibility? But, viewing matters the other way, he might do better to reject the recorder’s evidence if it required him to accept the proposition he now spoke aloud: “One end of an object is here and the other end there? One end inside a black hole and the other out?”

  “If the veils of Azlaroc are objects, yes.” Ramachandra was getting his locomotive look again. “I tell you, men need not quail before the seemingly infinite powers that oppose them. How does a mathematician manipulate an infinite number?” He turned his gaze briefly on Callisto. “Pick up another infinite number and beat it over the head with that. Force it into the shape you want. Right?”

  Her attitude seemed to say that she did not necessarily agree, but neither was she going to argue.

  “All right, don’t answer. But stripped of your scientist’s legalistic precision, that’s what it all comes down to. I know I’m dealing with physical reality here, not some mathematician’s invention. But the principle’s the same. If I can’t generate the power I need to pull me free from Azlaroc, I’ll put a harness on a greater power to do it.” The matter settled, not that it had ever been in doubt, he turned back to the hologram.

  After some eleven minutes on the surface of the neutron star, during which time it seemed to make several shifts at ins
tantaneous speed to different locations on the surface (with each shift the starstreaks and their reflections changing angles in the black, glistening mirror below), the recorder was somehow sucked back into the dark portal in space from which it had emerged, and thence back to the racing bands of light. Some three hundred and seventy standard days after it had left, it was back on the surface of Azlaroc. Its eye-positioner still functioned phototropically, and when Sorokin came into sight its eye was above ground and it centered the hologram on him. By that time it was some fifty or sixty centimeters down from the top of Ruler Ridge.

  “I’m going, then. I’m going to take the chance.” Ramachandra with a slap of his hand shut off the hologram, and the room’s lights restored themselves to normal. “I intend to view the rest of this later, Sorokin, to see if you really brought the device straight to me, as you said. For the moment I’ll assume you did, and ask you a question: Are you coming with me, away from Azlaroc and back to the great world?”

  “Down into that subduction funnel? Across the neutron star, looking for a folding in that veil, just to see if we can rejoin the aging universe? And if we don’t find the folding on the pulsar, I suppose we’ll look into the black hole as well. How are we going to recognize a fold in the veil if we should come upon it?”

  “To answer your last objection first, we’ll have some specialized instruments along. And if we locate the edge of the fold, no matter where, we should be able to stretch it back with us into that space of blue light-bands, from which an exit into normal space can be arranged. To answer your other questions: yes, yes, and yes. Add another yes if I have left one out. Look here.” With a vast gesture he seemed to scatter machines and hired scientist out of his way and draw Sorokin into a close conference above the surface of a small table. “You and I are year-mates here, so one of us can go exactly where the other goes, as far as veils are concerned. Just coincidence? At this stage in my life I doubt if such a thing exists in a pure form, where human beings are concerned at any rate. Two people going will have a better chance than one of overcoming unforeseen obstacles. Besides . . . there is another reason why I don’t want to go alone.”

  “Will I come with you? Why, it seems insane, but yes.” Ever since the chance of leaving Azlaroc had acquired some reality, however tenuous, Sorokin had had the feeling that his own life was passing through a singularity, a condition where the old laws failed to hold, into a new stage where nothing was quite what it had been. Now he saw with bitter clarity that a man who spent his time roaming deserts and trying to be an adventurer had made a grave mistake to settle on all-but-changeless Azlaroc.

  He wanted to be an adventurer, but did he really want adventures? Already he perceived the difference. Later the perception would be much more forcible.

  He had surprised Ramachandra with his answer, stalled the locomotive for the moment. “Fine,” was all that Ramachandra said, and then reached out to shake his hand.

  They had the money to hire the best workshops and men available from ail the yeargroups on the world, and the suits of armor were got ready just in time. Ramachandra wanted to begin his attempt before the next veil fell, as Callisto’s calculations showed that their chances would be at least marginally improved thereby. A ship was kept waiting to carry her offworld at once, out of the veil’s path should it begin to fall prematurely as sometimes happened at this season, She had no intention of being trapped.

  Their custom built armor, as Ramachandra explained, was not to help them survive the neutron star, against the powers of which they could hone for no help save that which the veil’s themselves might give; and only partially was the armor meant to help them during their passage through Azlaroc’s solid underground. It had to do that, of course, keep them uncrushed and at a reasonable temperature, and supplied with air and water, while the inner layers of the world hugged them at a few thousand tons per square centimeter of the armor’s surface. But also the suits would have to see them through their hoped-for emergence into space, free of veils and at some planetary distance between Azlaroc and the pulsar, and of course outside the black hole’s lethal Schwarzschild radius. In space the armor must be proof against terrible onslaughts of radiation, and each suit would act as a miniature spaceship, to get the men down on Azlaroc again as safe and free as tourists. All these requirements for the suits were difficult, but not unreasonable, not after men had voyaged in space for thousands of years and had the knowledge gained in all that time to draw upon.

  As in all of his affairs, Ramachandra did his best to maintain secrecy. He wanted no gaping crowds to follow him across the desert and behold his immersion in the trench. Callisto was to announce the adventurers’ departure after it had been accomplished, and in half a year the ships routinely passing in and out from Azlaroc would be alerted to begin looking for their signals in space, that they might possibly be picked up there without having to get back down to the surface on their own. Also perhaps his employer had business or personal reasons for secrecy at this point; Sorokin never learned. For himself it did not matter. He realized that among the people he knew fairly well on Azlaroc there was no one whom he felt compelled to notify of what he was about to attempt. And the people outside, the people he knew elsewhere in the galaxy, the ones he had long ago despaired of ever seeing again . . . well, they would be changed by now, of course. People out there aged faster.

  Time enough to notify them when he was out, was free again.

  The two of them, Ramachandra and Sorokin, headed west across the desert from the city in a flying machine, some weeks after Sorokin’s new employment had begun. Already in the vehicle when they boarded it, besides their bulky armor and a few small items, was a shape covered by cloth and as big as a sizable table. Ramachandra said nothing about it and Sorokin did not ask.

  The most dustless, trackless plain unrolled behind them as their flyer hurtled westward under the low sky at a speed that rapidly mounted to thousands of kilometers per hour. Automatic baffles ran out on its airfoils to deaden the shock wave it dragged along the narrow space between the land and sky. Callisto had remained behind in the city, spaceships near, refusing to take the chance of being marooned on Azlaroc by a possible early falling of the veil. She remained in television contact with Ramachandra as he flew, briefing him on the results of last-minute tests on the armor, and the results Of her latest calculations.

  The three principal bodies in the Azlaroc system were approaching nearly the same relative positions they had been in when the surviving recorder was carried down into the trench by a robot.

  “And be sure to send some dead mass of a few hundred kilograms ahead of you,” Callisto cautioned. “I know I told you that before, but I reiterate because it seems to be very important. Did you provide yourself with something?”

  “I did.” Ramachandra glanced once over his shoulder at the massive slab, with a draped, uneven upper surface, that rode behind them in the cabin. “It won’t be long now. I think I see blacksky ahead.”

  Only unusual wanderers like Sorokin ever came this far across the plains. There was no physical reason why men could not live in sight of the blacksky, or even live directly under it if they brought lights of their own. The air and temperature beneath it were the same as those beneath the sky of light. But psychologically, to live under blacksky seemed to be practically impossible. Imagine the darkest, most ominous thunderstorm of Earth. Imagine the totality of Sol’s eclipse, and the deepest night beneath a cloud of poisonous volcanic ash. Multiply the effect of terror by whatever factor will overload your nerves. Thus the blacksky, cutting off about half of Azlaroc’s vast surface from the use of men.

  Once, in a period of something akin to suicidal madness, Sorokin had journeyed toward it and under it. First in a wheeled vehicle that took days to race him this far across the plains; then by foot, his vehicle left waiting, open-doored, in the lifeless and silent wilderness where no one was going to come along to bother it.

  He had kept repeating to himself that there was n
othing in or under blacksky that would be intrinsically harmful or especially dangerous. What looked like terrible cloud, was only a failure, for various well-understood reasons, of the radiation that otherwise caused the “sky” of Azlaroc to give the impression of yellow and mildly overcast daylight. Blacksky was barely in sight ahead of him when he stopped the vehicle, but it seemed to leap closer with every stride as he began to walk toward it.

  He had no light with him. He had no light.

  He kept on walking until the appalling pall of it was up to his zenith, stretching to his right and left in a fuzzy boundary of mild collision with the living glow. And then he faced on into the dark and walked some more. He was terrified, and didn’t understand why he was making himself do this. Through sheer fascination with his own terror. And the knowledge that he could go back, yes, he could turn around at any time.

  The faint diffuse bandwork of his own shadow strode ahead of him, cast by the light of living sky behind. But beyond a short distance ahead he could see nothing. He moved beyond terror to—something else.

  He walked thus for a distance that under ordinary circumstances would have exhausted him, stumbling over the smaller spheres and pyramids of the landscape when the light grew too bad to see at all. For a long time he was afraid to turn back and see how far he was getting from the light. When at last he turned, there seemed hardly more thin a sliver of brightness along the base of the eastern sky.

  It was enough. He had satisfied whatever demon had driven him to this remote edge of the humanly habitable. Now almost relaxed and able to feel his exhaustion, he walked toward the light. After a while, as the light grew high in the sky again, some feeling of terror returned, and he had to run with the pressure of the Night behind him, as if it could pursue him . . .

  Now in the flyer, he and Ramachandra didn’t need to go under blacksky to reach the subduction trench. Sorokin supposed it would have made no difference whatever to Ramachandra if they had. Why should it, to a man who was willing to try the surface of the neutron star?