Mindwarp

by James Follett

  She thought about the different ways that fires started. The most common being GoD power shorting to earth or flowing through a low-resistance circuit. Then there were the mechanical causes such as bearings running hot - friction.

  She rubbed her hands together. Friction produced heat all right, but achieving a high-enough temperature to ignite vegetation was out of the question.

  The sun beat on her knee through the dark material of her trousers. The zargon light! Supposing the energy falling over a large area could focussed onto a small area?

  The cougane stiffened its tail so that the entire length of its spine was an arrow pointing straight at its prey. The light breeze was blowing off the sea, bearing the thing’s rich scent. Everything was right.

  Jenine turned out the holdall and sorted carefully through the tools that they had hurriedly snatched before fleeing from the GoD Centre. The little tubular microscope was designed for viewing miniature circuits. She unscrewed the eyepiece lens and used it to focus a point of sunlight on the back of her hand.

  “Ow!”

  The sudden cry and movement threw the cougane the instant it was about to launch itself. It relaxed and kept perfectly still, its gleaming pupils black, unblinking slits.

  Chiding herself for her stupidity, Jenine gathered together a heap of dried seaweed and trained a spot of sunlight on it through the lens. A tiny curl of smoke appeared almost immediately and was whipped away by the breeze.

  The cougane marshalled its powerful muscles…

  The bright sunlight and the black nature of seaweed made it difficult for Jenine to see what was happening. There was another twist of smoke. She bent over the pile of kindling and jerked her head back suddenly as the invisible flame stung her cheek.

  All the pent-up energies locked in the cougane’s muscles were unleashed in a single bound that carried it five body lengths and one third of the distance towards its prey. It landed lightly and soundlessly, throwing up puffs of sand. Even before it recovered full balance, its forelegs were outstretched, muscles rippling, claws unsheaved, ready to rip and tear, as its powerful hind legs drove it forwards on another spectacular leap.

  “Jenine!”

  The bonfire burst into flames as Jenine looked up. Ewen was sprinting towards her. She saw him and saw something else; something so terrible that nothing remotely like it had ever been dredged up in the very worst of her childhood nightmares. The flashing fangs, and yellow, staring eyes were almost upon her when she screamed.

  The cougane’s final leap took it straight into the dense cloud of billowing smoke that had sudden appeared. It was that and not the scream that caused it to panic. Fire was a scent that it knew well; a scent that had been the harbinger of terrible destruction on several occasions; the scent that had taken a former mate, and caused a wound that had taken many days to heal. It lashed its tail in mid-flight. That and the sharp twisting of its spine unbalanced its trajectory. It landed sideways, showering Jenine and the bonfire with sand, and became a tawny streak of bounding fur and muscles that vanished into the trees.

  Blinded by the sand, Jenine flailed her hands in a desperate attempt to beat the thing off. She screamed in near hysteria as it grabbed hold of her wrists.

  “Jenine! It’s all right! It’s me!”

  She threw herself sobbing into Ewen’s arms.

  “It’s all right. It’s gone… It’s gone…”

  They stayed like that for some moments, arms around each other until Jenine’s violent trembling subsided. She pushed Ewen away, wiped her eyes, looked fearfully around and forced her voice to sound natural. “Oh, Ewen. What was it?”

  “I don’t know. I saw it rushing towards you, then it suddenly changed its mind and raced off. There was smoke - I think that frightened it.”

  “Why were you gone such a time?”

  “I had some measurements to make.” He glanced at the smoldering remains of the short-lived bonfire. “Did you make that?”

  Jenine nodded, grateful that he was making her think about something else other than the apparition charging down the beach. “I experimented with the microscope so that we won’t be cold tonight. That stuff that’s washed up burns when it’s dry.” She blinked at him. “What’s that you’re wearing?”

  Ewen pulled off his makeshift sun hat, and showed her how he had made it by stretching the membrane leaves over a frame of bent reeds. “And something else.” He pulled a tear-shaped green bag from his jacket. It had been made from more of the membrane leaves. “They bond together under pressure. I found another water fountain just over there. Drink.”

  He showed Jenine how to squeeze the contents of the makeshift water bottle into her mouth. She drank greedily and paused.

  “It’s okay - finish it up. The fountain’s just through the trees.”

  “Clever,” she said examining the bag when she had quenched her thirst.

  Ewen grinned. “Not as clever as your fire.”

  Jenine looked at the sun, now well past its zenith, and jumped hurriedly to her feet. “We’ve got to make another one before the light goes.”

  There was no shortage of fuel. They experimented and discovered that the palm fronds burned slowly without too much smoke. The dried seaweed flared up too quickly but was ideal if they wanted the fire to recover rapidly. There was another type of seaweed with long, olive-drab streamer-like leaves. Islands of the stuff were beached, and more of the stuff was constantly coming ashore. When dried and burned, it seemed to give off a highly-inflammable smokeless gas resulting in such a fierce flame that they were unable to sit near their fire. They settled for the palm fronds as their main source of fuel.

  By sunset they had established the beginnings of a permanent camp on the broad beach. It consisted of a wide, neatly squared-off trough dug in the sand with a seashell. The sides were built-up with sand and partly overlaid with a palm frond pitched roof that was supported down the centre by a stout reed lashed with vines to driftwood uprights that Ewen drove deep into the sand with a rock. The trough widened out at the opposite end to accommodate a small, but well-established fire. Nearby they stacked up a generous pile of fuel.

  While foraging for vines, Ewen had discovered that the birds liked a sweet, yellow fruit that grew in profusion. After a tentative tasting session, they had decided to add it to their diet. Jenine made some more bags out of membrane leaves so that they had a plentiful supply of fresh water. The simple cups she made by moulding some clay scooped from the bed of a pool proved remarkably effective once they had been baked in the fire’s hot ashes.

  At dusk they stopped work and settled thankfully in front of their fire to eat a meal of berries, fruit and biscuits. The temperature dropped rapidly as the sun sank below the horizon, but the friendly warmth from the fire was reflected cosily from the sides of their simple camp. It had been a long, tiring day.

  “So what did you see?” Jenine asked, biting into one of the fruits and relishing the nectar that filled her mouth. They had been so busy preparing for nightfall that there had been no time to discuss Ewen’s lone expedition.

  “The buildings were there again.”

  Jenine stopped eating. “But how could they be? I couldn’t see them from here.”

  “Also they were much clearer. And there were other shapes further away, like sections of a vast cylinder.”

  Jenine thought about that. “There has to be some sort of wall that holds the water back. The buildings are the other side of the wall on a much lower level. That’s why they’re visible from high up, but not here.”

  “I don’t think so, Jenine.”

  Something in his tone caused her to look sharply at him. “Why not? It makes sense.”

  Ewen watched sparks and smoke dancing into the darkening sky to be whipped away by the breeze in the direction of the far off land. She would scoff, of course. That was only to be expected. Best to put his theory forward one step at a time. “At first I thought the same as you. But I could see a beach, just like this one. The buildin
gs were built on ground that was higher than the beach.”

  “That’s impossible otherwise we’d be able to see them from here.”

  Ewen smoothed an area of sand in front of them and started drawing a diagram with a stick by the light from the fire. “Not if the surface of the water is curved.”

  Jenine threw away the remains of the fruit and smiled impishly at Ewen. “That’s your lateral thinking at work is it, Ewen? Bent water?”

  Ewen was too intent on his diagram to answer. “Look. That’s our vantage point here, and that was our vantage point on top of the hill.” He pointed with the stick to a curved line. “And that’s the surface of the water.”

  “Bent?”

  “Curved,” Ewen amended patiently.

  “Same thing.”

  “Not the way you say it. From here we can’t see the buildings, but we can from the hilltop because we’re high enough to see over the water’s curvature.”

  “That’s crazy.”

  “That’s logical.” Ewen had been prepared for her scorn therefore he didn’t get angry. He pulled the folded membrane leaves from his pocket and spread them out. They were covered in neatly-penned calculations. Jenine looked at them in surprise.

  “You can write on them?”

  “They mark easily with a fine-pointed instrument. I used a bit of a dead bird. A feather.”

  Jenine shuddered at the thought of touching any part of a bird, dead or alive. “So what have you worked out?”

  “I measured out two level points near the top of the hill as far apart as possible. I used my height as a base unit because I know exactly how tall I am. For a baseline I used those long, string-like things that I used to lash the roof supports together - thin ones knotted together and pulled tight. I tied them around bits of tree that I knocked into the ground with a rock. Then I used templates made by folding these leaves to give me the angle between the tallest building and each end of the base line.” He paused, waiting for ridicule. To his surprise, instead of mocking him, Jenine studied his calculations, holding the leaves at an angle to read them in the light from the fire. She pointed to the last line.

  “That’s the distance to the tallest building?”

  “Yes.”

  There was a long silence.

  “But that’s at least a tenth of the distance from one end of Arama to the other!”

  “It’s a very rough estimate,” Ewen admitted. “Tomorrow we could use a longer baseline. It’ll be much easier with two of us. We could devise a method of hand signalling.”

  Jenine didn’t answer. Mathematics had been one of her strongest subjects. She went slowly and carefully over Ewen’s methodology and could find no flaw in his approach. “It’s crazy,” she muttered. “Such a distance is beyond belief unless you made a serious mistake with your triangulations.”

  Ewen shook his head. “I don’t think I did.”

  “No… I don’t think you did either… But that still doesn’t explain your theory about the water being ben-curved.”

  Ewen chuckled at her correction. “Think back to our fourth year. Can you remember that experiment in mass attraction with a large boulder and small ball hanging beside it on a long thread?”

  Jenine nodded. “Oh, yes. Father Silavan. He showed us that the ball didn’t hang perpendicular because it was pulled very slightly towards the boulder by its mass. I can’t remember what the point of experiment was, but it was interesting. Why?”

  “The bigger the boulder, the greater the attraction,” Ewen replied. “It was something we were supposed to take into account when calibrating density instruments. But the force was so small that we never bothered.”

  “I remember,” said Jenine. “But what’s that got to do with your theory?”

  “I was able to work out the height of the tallest building by counting the windows. Thirty floors. When I was roughly halfway down the hill, I could only make out ten floors visible above the water.” He broke off and wrote a long number in the sand. “Jenine… I think this entire world is like that boulder only huge. Really huge. It’s so vast that everything is attracted to it like that boulder in Father Silavan’s experiment. Water… Air… Everything. It all stays in place.”

  There was a long silence which Jenine broke at length. “A round boulder?”

  “Like a sphere - yes.”

  “And you think that you were able to work out the diameter of this… this sphere we’re sitting on?” Her voice was strangely flat, unchallenging.

  “Yes.”

  “And what is the diameter?”

  Ewen pointed to the number he had written in the sand. Jenine stared at it. The peel of laughter that he half-expected never came.

  “What do you think?” he asked tentatively.

  Jenine said nothing. She kissed him without warning and lay back and closing her eyes. “I’m too tired to think of anything, Ewen.”

  He rose and made up the fire. It burned hot and comforting on his face. He stood for some minutes, contemplating the rising column of smoke and sparks being borne on the wind towards the distant land. The stars shone coldly down. Were they worlds too? Gargantuan balls of rock drifting in space? The concepts were too awesome to pile on top of those he was already formulating and struggling to come to terms with. He settled down beside Jenine and slipped an arm around her. Soon, he too was sound asleep.

  9.

  “Ewen!”

  He opened his eyes. Jenine was shaking him. His first thought was for the fire, but its reassuring warmth played on his face when he sat up. It was still dark.

  “What’s the matter?”

  “That ventilator thing woke me. I got up to make up the fire. Look!

  He followed her finger to the east where the coming dawn was paling the sky. “What?”

  “Look!”

  He saw it: a thin, luminous crescent shining through a break in the cloud. The image wavered and was extinguished briefly. He rubbed the sleep from his eyes.

  “What is it, Jenine?”

  She was kneeling, gazing at the sky in rapt attention. “You can see it?”

  “Of course I can see it. A crescent of light.”

  Jenine gave a sigh of relief. “I thought I was dreaming.”

  “What is it?”

  “You’d know if you hadn’t ducked out of your final year. It’s the moon! It’s not some crazy abstract aspect of heaven that they used to tell us it was. It’s real! It’s crescent-shaped because the zargon light is lighting it up from one side, and because it’s round!”

  Her excitement was infectious although Ewen’s brain was still too befuddled with sleep for him to be sure what there was to be excited about.

  “Let’s take a look at it in the morning,” he suggested.

  “We won’t be able to see it then!” Jenine retorted. “The light will be too bright. That’s why we haven’t seen it until now! It means that you’re right! That Blader Zallen’s theories about a negative universe are right! I’ve worked it all out, Ewen. You’re right - we’re on sphere drifting in space. The zargon light is a star! So is that light, and that!” She jabbed her finger at the brightest constellations in turn. “They’re all stars, Ewen, but the zargon light is the nearest! We have to go back to Arama! We have to go back and tell the people!”

  Ewen’s brain caught up with her reasoning. “Tell them what?”

  “That we’ve found heaven, of course!”

  “Jenine - we may have discovered the truth, but we don’t really know for sure yet. A few rough measurements and calculations with no proper instruments. And even if we were believed, will anyone thank us for telling them that they’ve been living a lie? That their entire culture and religion is founded on lies? Of course not.”

  “We must return, Ewen. We must! We owe it to everyone.”

  “No one will listen to couple of fugitives. Anyway, how do we get back?”

  “The same way we came in,” Jenine retorted.

  “Past steel grilles?”

 
“They were open when we crawled through the tunnel. Maybe they’re open again now.”

  “How do we get back to the cave?”

  “Where’s your stupid lateral thinking?” she flared. “We recover the rope and climb down from above!”

  The surf boiled white around Ewen’s waist. He struggled to retain his balance in the strong undertow. It was high tide; entering the sea was the only way he get back far enough to see the cave opening and Jenine who was at standing at the top of the tree-lined cliff.

  “Left! Left!” he bellowed, waving his left arm. Jenine dragged sideways on the rope that was hanging down the cliff face.

  A roller nearly sent him sprawling in the surf.

  “Too far!”

  He signalled frantically with his right arm. Jenine twitched on the rope. It fell against the narrow ledge outside the cave’s opening. A surprisingly short distance below it was the ledge on which they had nearly died. Ewen held up both hands to indicate that the position was okay. He saw Jenine tying the rope to a tree and was about to wade out of the sea when a vicious wave hurled him forward. He surfaced, spluttering, coughing out the foul-tasting salt water. He staggered up the beach, wiped his eyes and looked up. To his horror and surprise, Jenine was already halfway down the rope.

  “Jenine! No! Wait for me!”

  His voice echoed off the granite cliff face. The plan had been that he should signal the correct position of the rope and then join Jenine so that they could climb down to the cave together.

  She reached the entrance, waved to Ewen without looking down at him, and disappeared into the gloomy opening.

  “Jenine!”