by Paul Preuss
He had entered the chamber of air.
He had been inside the clouds, and now he was above them. Unlike the other rooms, this “room” had no walls except those immediately beside him, glassy smooth, curving away beneath him into invisibility like the interior of a giant bell jar. A few meters down, the cloudscape unfurled, moving layers of cirrus and alto-cumulus stretching everywhere to a far horizon. In the east, if it were the true east, the sun had risen clear and was sending rosy streams of light to illuminate dark towers of cumulo-nimbus.
The illusion of limitless space was perfect; the technology of this chamber had leapfrogged to the early 21st century.
Lightning forked through a far-off thunderhead. Distant thunder pealed and crumpled. The wind freshened. Blake stood naked on the threshold of a door into the storm, a diver on the highest of platforms. He wondered what was expected of him now. Unless some flying machine or great bird were to rise through the clouds, he could think of no way forward.
The wind continued to rise. It whipped at his hair and pushed him staggering away from the edge. He got to his hands and knees and crept back, pushing his face into the wind. It was a hard, steady wind, as steady as the blast from a giant wind tunnel.
Once, when Blake was little and a late summer hurricane had whipped New York, he had been taken outside on the top of the skyscraper tower to feel eighty-knot winds from the safety of his father’s arms. This wind was stronger.
The cloudscape continued to move serenely and majestically; its projected clouds were insubstantial creatures of light, unaffected by the fast-rising column of material air. The words of the invocation echoed in Blake’s mind—“…if he can master the fear of death, he will leave the Earth’s bosom…”
Then he knew what he was supposed to do.
He crept back from the edge. Once more he tried to reassure himself of his hosts’ sanity, or at least practicality. He raised his arms and ran forward. He dived away from the ledge as far as he could.
Skydiving was not one of his hobbies. He found himself tumbling and struggling, vainly beating the air with his arms and legs. The wind roared in his ears and the clouds rose past him at a terrifying rate—he fell through a layer of cirrus, plummeted haphazardly toward hazy stratus, saw himself drifting toward the skirts of a mushroom-capped thunderhead.
His athletic instincts came to his rescue, and he got his arms out and curved, his legs straightened and parted. Suddenly he found himself gliding like that great bird he had hoped would come to save him, although the roar of the wind reminded him that his speed through the vertical wind was still well over a hundred knots.
He scanned the clouds below. They were rising more slowly now—but it was all illusory. How far had he really fallen? How far down was the floor? What was down there, beside the whirling blades of a giant turbine?
A great canyon of cloud opened beneath him, its walls black with rain. As he gently descended into the airy canyon, he saw what he thought were birds spiraling on updrafts. But the shapes were not birdlike. With a start he realized they were human. They soared toward him, arms outstretched.
These were the initiates who had gone before him. They climbed and dived past him, grinning gleefully. He recognized Bruni, Lokele, Salome, Leo, others, swooping and circling and tumbling naked in the air.
Blake caught himself smiling back. This wasn’t so bad after all: in fact it was fun. He steered himself toward Lokele, who was climbing fast. At the last moment Blake veered and make a grab for Lokele’s outstretched hand, but he miscalculated—and flew right through the man’s body. Lokele kept grinning.
The fliers were as illusory as the clouds. Blake reminded himself of his true situation. He was suspended in a vast wind tunnel. He didn’t know where the walls or floor were, and he had no idea how he was going to get out.
Another naked figure swooped down out of the clouds above him—not an initiate this time, an adept. It was Catherine. She flew toward him, smiling, her hands outstretched. He watched her image impassively, noting its realism.
She touched his hand. A palpable touch. She was real indeed. Still smiling, she gestured to Blake to follow her. She turned and dived away, into the black flanks of the nearest thunderhead.
He dived after her. As he flew into the cloud, rain brushed his skin and the light failed. A moment later he collided with a billowing surface that gave under him like an enormous breast. He bounced off it, into the air, but the roar of the wind dropped a notch and he fell back onto the fabric. Blake realized he was clinging to a huge, finemeshed net. In the darkness he scrambled over its collapsing folds. He felt firmer air cushions underfoot, and then a hard surface. The sound of the wind faded with a dying whine of great rotors.
He was standing in virtual darkness, his ears still ringing from the wind. As his eyes grew accustomed to the dark he saw Catherine’s figure ahead, rimmed in faint blue light. She beckoned, then turned and walked away.
His eyes straining, he followed her. As his hearing recovered he became conscious of another sound, the tremolo of a single note played on the organ.
As he walked, points of light appeared in the darkness, infinitely far away, above and below and on every side. The hard smooth surface on which he walked was invisible, giving off no reflection. Catherine’s figure ahead of him was a black silhouette against the stars. The celestial sphere was no random sprinkle of lights, but a true map of the sky; constellations of the galactic plane arched overhead, Vela, Crux, Centaurus…
The organ note increased in volume, became a swelling chord, was underlined by throbbing strings and woodwinds, all holding to the single dominant. The sound filled all space, so rich and wide that Blake’s chest reverberated as to the prolonged blast of a ship’s whistle.
A figure in flowing white robes emerged from the distant darkness, walking slowly toward them on a floor of empty space. A dozen or more people in simple white robes appeared behind the leader, and behind them a dozen more, and then a hundred more.
The ethereal symphony burst into melody. Blake smiled at the cliché and the rightness of the choice; perhaps they had a sense of humor after all. It was the final movement of Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3, the organ symphony—a joyful hymn, militant in its joy. The trumpets blazed, the piano rippled like falling water, the strings soared in triumph.
The white-robed man in the lead nodded to Catherine and walked on past her; she joined the line behind him and was handed a robe to slip around her body.
The man in the lead was Lequeu. He drew near and halted. His dark eyes regarded Blake sympathetically; a smile played at the corners of his refined mouth. Without speaking he lifted a folded robe from his arm and held it out wordlessly. Blake stepped to him and let him fold the robe around his shoulders.
“Welcome, my young friend,” Lequeu said then. Someone behind him handed him a bronze chalice surrounding a cup of carved amethyst, and he held it out with both hands. “Mnemosyne’s potion. To help you forget your former life. Here all is well.”
Blake took it and drank without hesitation. It tasted of nothing but cold water.
“Welcome to the sanctuary of the initiated, the content,” Lequeu announced, loud enough for all to hear; his rich voice was warm with praise.
A star burst overhead, flooding space with a shell of light. In the moment of ensuing brightness, all the stars vanished. Hundreds of voices laughed and cheered, and Blake felt himself surrounded and pummeled by encouraging hands. When the lights came on again he saw that they were inside a modest and rather plain neoclassical hall, its sandstone walls relieved only by Doric pilasters. One feature made of the hall something unusual: the far end of it was dominated by a statue of helmeted Athena, enthroned, towering almost to the roof ten meters above. Blake peered at the bronze giantess in momentary confusion before he confirmed that the pedestal on which the goddess of wisdom sat really was a pipe organ. Into this 18th-century hall the 21st century had briefly imported the Galaxy, but the supreme technology of the past mainta
ined its place.
He looked at the laughing faces closing in on him. Here were the real Leo, the real Salome, the real Lokele, the real Bruni, all showering him with congratulations, sincerely happy to see him—perhaps even a little madly happy to see him. Someone pressed a glass of wine into his hand.
His senses were already buzzing. The water in the cup had been more than water, and something more than alcohol had fired his nervous system. He grinned madly back at those who grinned madly at him. His fellow initiates talked about old times. Old-timers talked about older times, their own experiences and what the records revealed of the initiation rites when the secret society’s subterranean palace was new. Blake gathered that he had done no more or less than was expected of him—the society’s pre-screening was that thorough. He was fascinated by the legends of novel solutions, tales of drastic errors.
The time passed in a blur. He retained a vague memory of encountering Catherine in a darkened room, with nothing between them but linen robes, and then nothing at all.
Later Blake could hardly recall coming up into the twilight air of the deserted Jardin des Plantes, whose gates had been closed when he had entered and were closed again. How many hours, days, had he been underground? Much less could he remember steering himself home to his rented room in Issy on his superped. He remembered only being summoned to Lequeu’s office when he woke from what must have been a long sleep.
“Ah, Guy, good of you to be so prompt. Please have a seat.” Lequeu, elegant as ever in gray summer-weight wool slacks and fine-checked cotton shirt, was seated on the edge of his desk, his customary casual perch. He pressed a finger lightly to his ear. “Join us, will you, Catherine?”
She entered from the adjacent office, demure in a floor-length green plastic skirt. She carried a large, thin portfolio.
“Guy, every initiate is honored to serve as he or she is best qualified,” Lequeu continued. “You have a unique combination of talents—physical ability, quickness, and daring, of course, like all of us—but you also have a knack for ancient languages, as I’ve been privileged to observe. The progress you’ve made with hieroglyphics is quite remarkable. And you are also an excellent … actor.” Lequeu held up a deprecating hand. “Meant as a compliment. I want you to join Catherine and me in one of our special projects.”
“Sure, how can I help you?” said Blake.
“There are thousands of papyri in the basement of the Louvre which have been seen once or twice by scholars but never published,” Lequeu said. “Some do not appear in the catalogues of Napoleon’s expedition or any later expedition. Some, like this one”—he gestured to a hand-drawn reproduction of a papyrus scroll that Catherine had withdrawn from her portfolio—“are vital to our mission. Our job is to locate them and remove them to safety.”
“Remove?” Guy asked. He peered curiously at the reproduction.
“To save them from mold and rot,” Lequeu said. “And so that they may be returned to their rightful inheritors. I want you to familiarize yourself with this reproduction so that you will recognize the original when you see it. We can give you an approximate idea of its location, but you will have to find it yourself.”
Blake bent over the engraving that Catherine had laid on the desk. It consisted of numerous triangular drawings together with lengthy notation. “What’s that supposed to be? It almost looks like instructions for building a pyramid.”
“You are partly right,” said Lequeu. “Pyramids were actually models of the heavens, and one of their functions was to act as observatories. This papyrus apparently gives instructions for a model pyramid that could be used to locate a particular place in the Egyptian sky.”
“What place?”
“We’re uncertain,” Catherine said, speaking for the first time. “This copy contains many errors, but if the original is intact, I’ll be able to reconstruct a star map from the information it contains.”
Blake looked at her curiously. “You’re a mathematician?”
She glanced at Lequeu, who smiled suavely. “As I said, Guy, we all have multiple talents. You will have to exercise several of yours in locating the original of this papyrus.”
“And when I find it?” Blake asked.
“Why then,” Lequeu said, “you will steal it.”
Blake hardly hesitated before he nodded. “I’ll be honored to help any way I can, sir.”
“Good man,” Lequeu said, and he began to give Blake the details of how the theft was to be accomplished.
The very next afternoon Blake walked across the Ponts des Arts, dressed as an ordinary tourist, intending to visit the Louvre. His purpose was to scout the place for the mission he would undertake within the next few weeks. Inside the famous museum’s crowded anteroom he stopped at a public information booth and made a quick transmission to his home in London. It had to be quick—any lengthy use of his home computer required cooling its central processor, and there was no way he could do that remotely.
There was a book in Blake’s private collection, and yesterday he’d found a chip copy of it in the Bibliothèque Nationale. From it he derived a list of numbers. What he transmitted to his computer was that list.
Then he asked his computer to send a one-sentence faxgram to Port Hesperus, return code encrypted: “Let’s play hide-and-seek…”
Blake thought he had been discreet. He also assumed that he was no longer under surveillance by the Athanasians. He was mistaken on both counts.
7
Two weeks later: after a fortnight’s fast trip on a Space Board cutter, Sparta rode a shrieking shuttle into the atmosphere of Earth. The space plane winged out of its hot ionization blanket into a sky like a clear blue ballroom paved with veined marble.
Sparta peered out the passenger window. You could say a few things for Earth, she mused. It was bigger than Port Hesperus and had more trees, if less good living space per capita. It was cooler than Venus and warmer than most other places in the solar system, and it had air you could breathe—most of the time. But as the shuttle swiftly descended toward the cloud deck, the clouds that looked like milky marble came to resemble clotted cream, floating on weak coffee; the smog layer rose quickly, cutting off visibility.
Sparta’s badge and her orders took her swiftly through customs. In twenty minutes she was on a magneplane, heading across the smoking Jersey marshes toward Manhattan. Its towers gleamed through the murk like the Emerald City.
Manhattan in August would test any space-wondering human’s affection for the home world. Not that North America’s premier demonstration city was dirty or inefficient; that would no more have been tolerated in 21st century Manhattan than in 20th century Disney World. It was the season, the latitude, the natural climate of the place that turned it into a late-summer steam bath.
Civilization made it worse: on the east coast of North America, as all over the globe, air pollution continued unabated into the fourth century of the industrial revolution, despite “clean” power from fusion reactors and orbiting solar-microwave stations. Many small nations were still dependent on coal and oil, and everywhere factory smoke-stacks continued to mainline carbon into the atmosphere. Light from the sun streamed in, but reradiant heat from the Earth was trapped; global temperatures inched upward, in a planetary greenhouse not unlike that which had melted and seared Venus a billion years ago.
There weren’t many people in the canyons of midtown this afternoon; everybody was staying inside, where the climate was quite unnatural, and the temperature—traditional for summer in Manhattan—was near freezing. Calculate the power loss from all that heat exchange, convert it to its waste carbon equivalent, and observe the positive feedback loop: watch Earth trying to imitate Venus.
Sparta, stepping fresh from the air-conditioned magneplane, was sweat-soaked and giddy before she had made it through the revolving doors into the marble reception hall of the Board of Space Control’s Earth Central headquarters. Inside, she shivered involuntarily. She had been in this building—the old United Nation
s building, overlooking the East River—just once before, the day the commander had packed her off to Port Hesperus.
That time too she’d come straight from Newark, where she’d been working undercover on the shuttleport docks as an agent for C & I branch—customs and immigration. That time, when she’d finally tracked down the commander, he’d been wearing his dress blues; she’d been wearing a dock rat’s overalls. She hadn’t been able to climb out of them until she was on her way to Venus. This time she was wearing her dress blues, determined to meet him on more nearly equal terms—even though the armpits of her blue worsted jacket were showing wet black patches.
She rode an elevator to the fortieth floor. She flashed her badge at the sergeant who guarded the commander’s door. “Troy to see the commander.”
“He’s in the sports hall,” said the sergeant, a rawboned Russian woman with a blond haystack hairdo. “Forty-four floors down. Ask at the desk.”
“I’ll wait here until he’s through,” Sparta said.
“Troy, yes? He specially wants to see you, as soon as you enter—‘no matter what I am doing,’ he said.” The sergeant smirked at her. She was the type who enjoyed other people’s troubles. “You had better go down now, Inspector.”
When she got off the elevator in the basement, Sparta had to pause a moment to quell her rebellious stomach. The underground gym was rank with the odor of sweat and fungus, and the air was full of steam where the cold of the air conditioner met the heat of the saunas and pool and steam room.
The locker attendant pointed her in the direction of the pool. She walked down the corridor past dripping glass-walled handball and squash courts, where men and women were hurling themselves at the walls, trying to keep little black and blue rubber balls in the air. The tiled passageway turned a right angle and opened on the pool.