Mindwarp

by James Follett

  “So what does that prove?” Jenine asked.

  Ewen frowned and grinned. “I’ve no idea.” He became serious. “Supposing you wanted to create a vast dome - one that’s really huge. How would you set about it? Would you dig up, down, sideways or what?”

  “There is no “what”,” Calen observed caustically. “Up, down and sideways covers everything.”

  “So how would you build a massive dome?” Ewen inquired.

  The question seemed to sadden Calen. “I wouldn’t. Arama has just the right amount of space provided it’s used sensibly. But, no doubt, this is a hypothetical question about this hypothetical blue dome you’ve been boring us with. Correct?”

  “Maybe,” Ewen answered noncommittally.

  “I would dig down,” said Calen.

  “Why?”

  Calen looked pained. “Really, Ewen, it should be perfectly obvious even to a first year student. Digging down is much easier. You start at the top of your dome, working your way down and outwards, and removing the spoil through the top as you go down. Digging upwards would be impossible. As your dome gets bigger it would break sideways into other domes, and digging upwards means that you’d have the continuous problem of rock falls which would get worse as your dome got bigger.” He went back to his notes.

  Ewen sat back on his heels, thinking hard. “You’re right, Calen. If my dome is anywhere, it’s down.”

  “Perhaps. But you’re overlooking a fundamental law of the Guardian of Destiny. You can’t create space. You dig out a lot of spoil to make a new dome and you’ve got to put it somewhere. You dig your new dome, Ewen, and you’d end up with exactly the same amount of space as when you started. In fact a really vast dome like your wretched blue dome would fill all of Arama with spoil. Arama exists therefore your dome does not and cannot.” He tapped his datapad. “A pity you’re not doing your 11th year. The creation of space was the first act of creation by the GoD. Man cannot make space, which is a negative solid, he can only move it about.”

  Ewen glanced at Jenine and saw that she was as crushed as he was by Calen’s simple reasoning. “You’re right, of course, Calen,” he admitted. “I didn’t think,”

  Calen smiled smugly. “You’re a brilliant lateral thinker, Ewen, and yet you like to indulge in flawed logic.”

  Jenine looked at Calen in admiration. “You know, Calen, it takes a true genius to describe space as a negative solid. Now that’s what I call lateral thinking.”

  Ewen grabbed the hardcopy maps of Arama and searched through them for the lowest level. He brightened when his finger found their objective.

  A shopping centre in Steyning.

  3.

  Steyning was a law-abiding community of 10,000 GoD-fearing citizens who dressed modestly, worked hard, and went to church every Tenth Day. Its sole police officer and therefore chief of police had few duties, and they were not spelled out. But he instinctively felt that preventing students from drilling holes in his beautiful hexagonal block pavement was one of them. The six-sided blocks were expensive. Having a member of his family at the Centre meant that he was in greater awe of Steyning’s town hall accountants rather than Jenine’s and Ewen’s student medallions. A small crowd was gathering. Normally they would have stayed clear, but they were eager to share the interest of their beloved custodian of law and order in the activities of these technician-students.

  “It’ll only be a small hole,” Ewen reasoned.

  “But still a hole, sir,” the chief of police pointed out.

  “We’ll fill it in afterwards,” said Jenine.

  The police officer eyed the girl. Nicely rounded for female technician. Most of them were skin and bone. Good hips. He checked himself, and returned his mind smartly to its official duties. “I take it you’re this gentleman’s accomplice, miss?”

  Jenine bridled. “I’m helping him.”

  “Might I inquire as to the purpose of this hole?”

  “Well,” said Ewen, indicating the seismoscope and its accessories. “We want to make seismic reports to measure what’s below the ground here.”

  “What’s under the ground is more ground,” the custodian of law and order observed phlegmatically. “We like to keep all our underground under ground.”

  “We heard you had a flooding problem here when a reservoir tank burst last year,” said Jenine, making an effort to smile reassuringly at the circle of blank-faced onlookers.

  “We’ve since installed a drainage system,” the police officer informed her.

  “It’s a simple test that uses explos-vibrations to measure what’s under ground,” said Ewen patiently. “It’ll only take a few minutes.”

  “Vibrations?”

  “Yes.”

  “We don’t hold with such things in Steyning, sir. This is a very respectable community. These good people have paid good money for these hexagon paving blocks.”

  “I’m sure it is and they have. Look - it’s a project as part of our training. If you wish, we’ll take up some of these paving blocks, make the hole underneath, and put the blocks back just as we found them. No one will know.”

  The police officer gestured to the circle of shoppers whose numbers had swelled. “A lot of people will know, sir.”

  After a few minutes further discussion, the police officer grudgingly allowed the test to go ahead. “But only one burst of vibrations,” he warned as he ushered the onlookers away.

  “We’ll make it a big one,” Ewen muttered to Jenine. “A wide-angle beam at full power.”

  The resulting report from the seismic transducer broke several windows, showering temporarily deafened passers-by with shards of plastic. Several of the six-sided paving blocks were cracked.

  Ewen gritted his teeth and paid the on-the-spot fine plus expenses. He assured Steyning’s chief of police that he and his accomplice had every intention of making immediate use of their return chord-metro tickets and never setting foot in Steyning again.

  4.

  Ewen pushed the datapad away in disgust. “Nothing,” he said bitterly. “A waste of time and money. Maybe it is just a stupid dream.”

  Jenine cradled her chin on hands and looked at him quizzically. “That just about sums up your philosophy. If at first you don’t succeed, give up. What about Simo Belan?”

  Ewen rolled onto his back on the floor of the study and stared at the ceiling. “What about him?”

  “Didn’t he find the blue dome?”

  “How should I know.” He lapsed into a brooding silence.

  Jenine pulled the datapad towards her and looked at the result of the Steyning test. The echo traces went deep over a wide area. The little streaks of grey were evenly distributed, indicating solid rock. She sighed. “It looks like the lecturers are right. Rock is infinite. And that the GoD has created a very small amount of space for us to live in.”

  “What do you mean, “looks like”? Are you saying that you’ve not been going along with the official teachings?”

  “Would I be helping you if I were?” Jenine countered. She paused and added: “It’s been fun sharing a dream with you, Ewen.” It was a major admission for her. She swallowed. There were other things she wanted to say but she was as afraid of her emotional turmoil as she was of confessing the full depth of her feelings for Ewen.

  “You’ve tried to understand it, but you haven’t shared it,” was Ewen ungracious retort.

  “I think I have. The way you’ve described it…” She groped for the right words and blurted out: “I want to share everything with you, Ewen. The rest of our lives. And if you think there’s a life other than in Arama, then I want to be with you to help you find it.”

  There. She had said it. But there was so much more she had left unsaid.

  Ewen rolled back onto his stomach and met her gaze. In her way she was beautiful… like his mother. A sudden feeling of guilt overwhelmed him, and he looked quickly away. “You mustn’t have anything to do with me, Jenine.”

  She covered his hand. “Why not?
”

  “Because…” He tried to utter the dread words but they seized in his throat. “Because I don’t want to be a technician! I don’t want to be ordained!” He had finally admitted it, even to himself.

  Instead of looking shocked, as he had expected, Jenine wriggled forward on her elbows. She cupped her hands against his temples and kissed him. “I don’t want to be ordained either,” she said softly.

  He stared at her, the shock of the kiss forgotten. “But you must, Jenine! I have to escape. I have to get away from… from…” He almost said “my mother’. “From here… From everything.”

  “But not from me?”

  He heard himself saying, “No not from you. Especially not from you.”

  “Then there’s no problem.”

  “I don’t want to be responsible for what might happen to you.”

  “I’m the only one responsible for me,” said Jenine firmly.

  Ewen hesitated. “You know what will happen to us if they find out?”

  She nodded and continued to hold his head, her fingers played with his hair. “We’ll be mindwarped, and left to cope as ordinary citizens as best we can. I could bear that if I was with you, Ewen. Our selection was a mistake. It has to be otherwise why have our bodies changed the way that they have? Why do I feel about you the way that I’m sure you feel about me?”

  There was a long silence.

  Jenine kissed Ewen again. He returned the kiss because he discovered that this time he was able to thrust his guilt aside. Her touch, her scent and the sheer delight of her closeness felt right.

  Perfectly right.

  It was dark when Jenine woke. She experienced a moment of disorientation until the pieces fell into place. She was in Ewen’s bed and he was asleep beside her. Something was worrying her; not what had happened with Ewen - she had no regrets about that - but something else. She slipped quietly from the bed to avoid waking him and got dressed. She hated having to wind the bandage around her breasts. They now quite large - the bandage a painful constriction, but there was a chance that Calen would be working late in the study. She was relieved to find that he had gone to bed. She gathered up all the hardcopy maps and seismographs that she and Ewen had left scattered on the floor, and sat at the table with the datapad to study them. Ten minutes slipped by. Ewen entered looking dishevelled. He came up behind her and slipped his arms around her waist, resting his chin on her shoulder. They were silent for a while, savouring the closeness of each other.

  “So what have you found?” Ewen asked at length.

  “It’s more a case of what I haven’t found. We haven’t done any proper tests directing the seismic beam upwards.”

  “What about the tunnel tests?”

  Jenine sorted out the printouts. “We used a wide angle beam so that we could calibrate the seismoscope. We needed to plot the position of known tunnels therefore we found a suitable spot in the chord-metro system where there were plenty of spurs and junctions. Right?”

  “So?”

  “So the place we selected is quite low. Not as low as Steyning, but still low. See?”

  Ewen studied the seismograph and agreed that Jenine was right. “Okay. So what are you saying?”

  “We’ve not gone high up and carried out upward tests using a narrow-angle beam to give us a long range.”

  “But there won’t be anything upwards,” Ewen objected. “We’d be wasting our time.”

  “Because of what Calen said about a large dome having to be down?”

  “Yes - his reasoning made sense.”

  “But we haven’t tried searching upwards,” Jenine persisted. She hunted through the maps of Arama. “Look - Keltro is high up.” She pointed. “And look… There’s a short pedestrian tunnel linking two industrial domes. It would be easy to close the tunnel for the few minutes that a test would take.”

  5.

  The narrowness of the pedestrian tunnel at Keltro played on Jenine’s fears of confined spaces but she kept her feelings to herself. Closing the tunnel was simply a matter of placing a pedestal-mounted GoD symbol sign at each end. It was a low tunnel therefore there was no need to use a platform to reach the roof. Nevertheless, Ewen’s arms were aching by the time the laser cutter had done its job.

  The couple took several full-power soundings in rapid succession, making slight alterations to the upward direction of the narrow-angle beam between each firing to obtain the maximum coverage. They stowed their gear, reopened the tunnel, and hurried back to the Centre to evaluate the results.

  “Come on,” said Ewen impatiently as the wipe bar edged down from the top of the datapad’s screen. Transferring the captured seismograph images from the seismoscope’s memory to the datapad was reasonably fast, but not fast enough for Ewen.

  The wipe bar progressed a quarter of the way down the screen but the picture remained blank. There was none of the usual “clutter” they had come to associate with seismographs.

  “Something’s gone wrong with it,” Ewen moaned. “That’s what comes of using maximum power. I knew that that transducer couldn’t take it.”

  Jenine clutched his arm and pointed mutely. A speckling of familiar traces had appeared beneath the crawling wipe bar when it was halfway down the screen. The specking continued to the extreme edges of the screen and were steadily increasing in density in the normal manner as the wipe bar descended.

  They stared in silence at the picture, trying to make sense of it. The top half of the image was completely blank whereas the lower half showed the presence of solid matter. The boundary between the two was an uneven line, irregular and even wavy in places, but very definite.

  “Maybe we’ve got the screen aspect ratio wrong?” Jenine suggested. “Maybe the whole image is shifted down too far?”

  Ewen reset the screen parameters to be doubly certain. He checked them twice and Jenine did likewise.

  “Nothing wrong there,” Jenine commented. “Now download it again.”

  Ewen copied the image from the seismoscope’s memory again. The result on the datapad’s screen was exactly the same. Ewen swapped the screen image for one of the ordinary pages in the datapad’s memory. The text display was perfectly centred.

  “Well there’s nothing wrong with the datapad,” he remarked despondently. “It’s got to be the seismoscope. Fault-finding our way around that piece of ancient GoD technology is going to be fun and games.”

  “Download another image,” Jenine suggested.

  “What’s the point? The thing’s faulty.”

  Jenine worked the controls to send another picture to the datapad. The phenomenon was repeated: a blank top half of the screen, and a solid lower half.

  “Told you,” Ewen muttered.

  “Don’t be so hasty,” said Jenine, peering closely at the screen. “Yes look. There’s a match. That jagged bit of the boundary in the middle of this picture is identical with a jagged bit that was on the edge of the last picture. That’s been normal with the tunnels. We’ve been able to match-up overlaps to get a continuous picture.”

  Ewen sat staring in stunned disbelieve at the screen as the full import of Jenine’s discovery sank in. “You don’t think-”

  Jenine switched the datapad off. “We don’t do anymore thinking until we’re had some proper sleep and then downloaded all the seismographs and printed some hardcopies.”

  “But I won’t be able to sleep,” Ewen protested.

  “No - I don’t suppose I will either.”

  Ewen kissed her and held her at arms’ length. “When I look at you like this, I can still see that pretty little girl singing that nursery rhyme at the selection centre.”

  Jenine smiled and tugged at his hair, uncertain what to say.

  He pulled her close. “Sing it for me now.”

  “Why?”

  “Just sing it please. Like you did all those years ago.”

  So she sang in low, gentle voice:

  Outdoors… Outdoors…

  Full of fire and fear,


  Outdoors… Outdoors…

  Where sinners disappear!

  Ewen nestled his head against her breasts. They were flattened by the bandage, but he didn’t mind. It was her warmth and closeness that mattered.

  Outdoors… Outdoors…

  Hell fires burn within,

  Outdoors… Outdoors

  Throw the wicked in

  6.

  At lunchtime the following day, Calen wandered into the study eating his midday meal. He surveyed the mess that confronted him with profound distaste. Strips of paper were strewn all over the floor. Ewen and Jenine were sitting cross-legged staring at the wall.

  “You two may think it perfectly all right to live in squalor,” Calen complained. “But I come from an old and distinguished family, and feel that I have a duty to myself and my illustrious ancestors to maintain civilised standards. The world is falling apart.”

  Ewen advised him what he could do with his illustrious ancestors and civilised standards.

  Calen was about to respond with a suitably cutting riposte when his cynical eye fell on what Ewen and Jenine were gazing at. Taped along the length of the wall was a banner-like seismograph that had been made by pasting several together.

  “May I ask what that is?”

  “Certainly.”

  “What is it?”

  Jenine shook her head. “We don’t know, Calen. We simply don’t know.”

  The older student crossed to the wall and examined the elongated seismograph with disdain. “What does the blank upper half mean?”

  “You tell us,” said Ewen.

  “I thought you two had turned yourselves into experts on this sort of thing?”

  “So did we,” Ewen replied.

  “Well I trust you’re not planning to frame it. It simply doesn’t go with the decor.”

  Jenine explained what the banner was and how she and Ewen had obtained the strange results that it depicted. “The point is, Calen,” she concluded. “That the blank upper half represents nothing.”