And what do I see out there. Down there? Nothing. Bright blue nothing. Day sky hanging under the night, two sheets of differentiated light stretching out to... to nowhere.
Flat tableland up here, millions of hectares of flat, bare gray rock. White domes nearby, at the head of the cog railway. Familiar slit observatory domes, big tubes poking out of them, some looking up, others looking... away. Ling, pointing, said, “And that?”
Shapes in the distance, tens of kilometers away, dark, skeletal shapes, cast in shadow. Edgar said, “Ah, the Krautmeister Empire.”
Tousle-haired Al, gazing soberly out at the infinite distance below, said, “You really shouldn’t call them that, Ed.” Voice disapproving, reproving in a distant sort of way.
“Why the Hell not? I’ve been calling them that for two, three hundred years now...”
“Still...” Al said, “That’s Wernher’s bailiwick. He and his friend Krafft have been... building a rocket.”
Ling sitting forward now. “A rocket.”
Wan smile from Edgar. “Even I knew you couldn’t put something in orbit here...” Of course not. Flat. The World Without End is flat.
Al said, “They brought the designs with them in their heads when they died.”
Edgar: “And they’ve been arguing, ever since. Wormer wants to call it the Saturn C-8, Krafty keeps plumping for Nova.”
“Please.” Al said, “They think its a quick way to fill in local exploration, fill in gaps left by the scopes. The vehicle can reach one million kilometers altitude, or two million fired for range.”
Edgar said: “In about six months, they’re going to put a robot probe down on Orange East. A small, teleoperated dirigible, with a couple of retrievable surface probes. Little tanks. Hell. Maybe they’ll even find out what happened to old Bill and Merry.”
Al: “They were old-fashioned, Edgar. They preferred to be called William and Merriweather.” He said, “Some time next year, they’re going to lift one of our telescopes straight up on a sounding flight. That’ll give us a much better perspective on some of the more distant objects...”
Eventually, the train took them through the airlock of a pressurized terminal.
o0o
Ling said, “I should’ve anticipated this. Somehow, I was visualizing old-style astronomers, bundled up in greatcoats, huddling over eyepieces, working with glass plates, maybe.”
Al said, “Is that the way they do things in your Green China?”
“Well, no, but this place is so... antique.”
Edgar said, “In any case, there’s no air up in the dome. Even if we didn’t want to keep the mirrors clean, it’d still rush out every time...” Image of the dome sliding open and greatcoated astronomers blowing right out.
Now, they sat before a two-meter wide television screen, a relatively-crude projection affair, while Al and Edgar worked a control panel, some joysticks, mainly, and an alphanumeric keyboard. Edgar said, “Some fellows showed up in High America a couple of months ago. Told us they can build some kind of mind-brain interface for computers. Hard for me to imagine.”
Kincaid said, “Even in the Fortress, immortals sometimes get killed.”
Al said, “We were starting to wonder. Pickings have gotten rather... slim, these last few decades. We were quite overjoyed when one of our agents radioed home that rumors were circulating about you folks having arrived at the River.”
Edgar said, “There. This is an island, out on the Western Sea, maybe forty thousand miles from here.”
Island rising from the sea. Something like a volcano. Not a volcano though, jagged cone more like a regular mountain, with the top ripped open, blue-violet light spilling out.
Edgar: “Just an ordinary little island, maybe the size of Sicily, mountain no more than sixty thousand feet. No sweat at all for the good, old 36.”
Al said, “We’re stopping here so I can take a few readings with our newer instruments before going on. Some of the earlier measurements suggested more intense ionizing radiation than we’d be comfortable with.”
Kincaid: “So what? We’re dead.”
Edgar laughed: “Getting used to the idea, are you?”
Al: “Your tissues would melt away eventually. You’d wind up reifying somewhere else.”
Edgar: “Besides which, 36 is neither immortal nor invulnerable.”
Ling: “What do you think it is?”
Edgar: “Symmes’ Hole.”
Al: “Foolishness.”
Edgar said, “It’s just a bit of shorthand. We think it’s the way out. We’ve been looking at it for some time now. Planning what to do, arguing about... well, ways and means, ifs and whens.”
“The way out to where?”
A smile, “Well, that was the question, until you folks showed up. Murray kept insisting it was just a crustal rip, exposing the underlayers of the event horizon. Hawking Backscatter leaking through maybe.”
“And now?”
A shrug. “I’ve listened to your tale. We all have. If there are things like your stargates here, we haven’t found them. If there’s a way out, out into your Multiverse, it’d have to be something like this.”
“Pipe dream,” said Al.
“Maybe so. Maybe everything is an accident. But if it’s not... Hell. There’s got to be a watchmaker somewhere.”
Kincaid: “What if you’re wrong? What if it’s just a radioactive hole in the ground?”
Another shrug. “That’s been the argument all along! Hell, we’ve been shouting at each other for decades, Hell, centuries, about whether this is it. If I’m wrong, if this is it, the End of the Road, the Final Place, what have you, if we’re just fucking vaporized when we fly down that glowing hole, then, when I reify, I’ll walk back home to High America and take my lumps. Then try something else. Hell, people, we’ve got fucking forever to screw around in!”
Al murmured, “Spoken like a true American.”
Ling said, “What if it does go... somewhere else? What then?”
Long silence. Then Gerry whispered, “Well, I always was upset about dying just when I did. Maybe...”
Al, German accent very soft, said, “It doesn’t matter where it goes. So long as it goes. None of us wants to spend Eternity here. It’s why we were looking for the... for the Egress, you see, all along.”
Ling thought, Of course.
o0o
Now, below, the silver ocean was a featureless blue venue only a little darker than the sky. If there were clouds above, Rahman thought, it would reflect them. Then... Not really so different. Sky over sky still. But at least the moving cloud images would lend some feeling of progress. Thirty thousand English miles from the western shores of vast, nameless continent — I still think of it as Heaven — to the glowing island. Close to fifty thousand kilometers.
A hundred hours. Only a hundred hours over the trackless waste. Four days and a little bit. If we still had days. She’d been spending more and more time alone, crawling back through the heavily-shielded tunnel that bypassed the reactor amidships, crawling over the cargo stores, the humming machinery of the airplane’s primitive life-support system, back to the tail gunner’s blister.
Heavy equipment here. A quad of 50-caliber machine guns that could be aimed slightly upward, as well as aft. A single, long-barreled aerial cannon that could fire downward.
Edgar smiling when she asked. We’ve got a ball turret in the belly, side mounted weaponpacks, a chin turret, one ventral... You never know.
Laing sat and watched the empty sea recede. And waited. Down the hole. Down the Rabbit Hole. Is that what we’re doing? Why? Because some people can never be... content? A crawling sense of unease, but... that’s why I’m here, isn’t it? Why I went to University, pretended to be a Lesbian, never married, joined the space program, went on up to the Moon and...
In the Name of God. I’m the one who led us through the stargate. I’m the one who turned it on, stepped through to another world, led us on out into the Multiverse and... what was I looki
ng for?
I remember the crawling sense of raw excitement I felt when the first stargate opened on that impossible new world, Mars-Plus, yellow hills under a red sky. I remember thinking, This now. This is what you’ve been looking for all along.
Mars-Plus. The Permian. Crimson Desert. Hesperidia. God’s Machine. This strange and so-absurd World Without End.
Now, down the hole, and away again. To where? To yet another Multiversal world where things will be strange and different, yet forever the same. No way to know. Only wondering left inside.
She sat and watched the sea recede. And waited.
o0o
Plane banking in over the coast of the blue island now, slopes of the mountain clad in turquoise forest, blue water lapping at silver-white beaches, Ling Erhshan looking out of the cockpit window, entranced. Like paradise? No. Like an alien world, like I...
Sharp reality intruding. As if it’s all new, myself reborn, the alien worlds I’ve really seen almost forgotten. I’ve been to the Moon, traveled through time to the Permian, fallen down through endless dimensions, died the real death from which no one returns and...
Edgar said, “Over there.” Pointing.
Others turning to look.
Kincaid said, “Some kind of aircraft, climbing up toward us...”
Al: “They’d have to be... pretty sophisticated to reach this altitude.”
“Sophisticated or not,” said Edgar, “those are the first aircraft we’ve seen in the World other than our own.” Frowning now, watching them climb.
Ling picked up a pair of binoculars kept handy in the cockpit and focused them on the climbing planes. Two of them. Small. Single-engine. Prop drive. Open cockpits... “An antique design, I think. Older than this one.”
Edgar took the binoculars and looked. “A little like a P-shooter, maybe. They’ll never get up here.” The floor was tilting under them now as Edgar turned into a long, spiraling climb, up toward the mouth of the glowing mountain.
Kincaid, watching the little planes circle helplessly, far below, said, “P-shooter. That would be the pre-World War II P-26?”
Edgar said, “I keep forgetting you were born not long after my time.”
Brilliant flashes from around the edge of the mountain, hundreds of kilometers away. “Over there.”
Edgar leveled the binoculars and looked. “I’ll be damned. Aircraft attacking a city by the sea. No, not the city. Ships in its harbor. I’ll be damned.”
“Can we take a look?”
Edgar said, “We don’t have time for that.” Handing him the binoculars. “This’ll have to do.”
Time? Why is there no time? We have all the time there is. But the sense of... hurry remains.
He put the binoculars to his eyes and looked. Little prop-driven airplanes swooping low out of the water. Black objects falling. Dropping into the sea, going on, leaving white trails of submerged foam, white trails ending at the hulls of big black ships, ships exploding, great gouts of fire, black smoke rising toward the pale blue sky.
I wonder who they are? I wonder why they’re fighting? I’ll never know.
The B-36 leveled off, circled once out over the sea, turned back toward the mountain, banking, begin a slow, shallow dive. Ling Erhshan looked up, startled, into the mountain’s brilliant, empty mouth.
What if this is Heaven? He thought. What if that’s Hell? But the people below, fighting, trying to kill each other in a place where no one could die. Heaven? No. Better that we go on.
o0o
One last view, Sergeant-Major Astrid Kincaid, leaning forward in her jumpseat, pulling at the harness she’d only just remembered to fasten, leaning close, pressing her face to the cold plexiglass of the cockpit window, looking down into featureless, blue-violet nothing.
One more, final, stupid act. Somewhere along the way, I lost my sense of what was real. There’s nothing down there. Nothing but white light and death. In a moment, I will feel the fire burn me up. A moment after that and I’ll awaken, back on the high plains of Great Achaea. What then? Walk back to High America? Why? There nothing there. Go down the River of No Return? Nothing there either. Nothing anywhere.
One God-damned almighty cold realization: No matter what I do, I can’t escape this. I go on and on and on. No way to end it now, for I’ve already died. Remote, cold wish, forlorn hope: Maybe I will wake up. Maybe it’s all been a dream. Maybe I’m still in...
No. Not in Fortress America. Nothing there but more useless eternity. Pray you wake up in your bed again, wake up once more a little girl, with a whole, finite life ahead of you. Pray it comes out differently, this time.
Pray that you live your one life well.
Pray that nothing goes to waste.
Al pulled back on his control yoke, heeled the plane over on one wing, chopped the throttle, opened the speed brakes, pushed the yoke down again and nosed them over in the direction of bright blue hell.
One final, stark thought, as the mountain’s mouth opened to engulf them: What if he’s behind me now, wandering the world without end? And what if I don’t come back?
Ten. The End of the Passage.
Elements of a final theory.
It has been, is, will be, forever and ever frustrating to realize that, though I seem to be, really feel that I am, all knowing and all powerful, there remain things beyond my reach.
What sort of things could be beyond the reach of God Almighty?
Well. I am not God Almighty, merely the infinitely lesser being who sits in the Command Module, parks his fat ass on the Throne and operates the light show, blows the smoke and tilts the mirrors. Like a poor man driving a rusted out old Cadillac Coupe de Ville with a quarter-million miles on the odometer, all I can do is imagine elegance, while the old gas-guzzler eats up my meager pay.
Know all things, direct all paths?
Nonsense.
I know the byways of the Multiverse and nothing more.
What lies beyond, out of sight, far, far beyond my limited reach... nothing, not even a void. The lightless, unreal blind spot of total ignorance. Sometimes, I imagine getting out there, getting out of here, following in what I presume are the footsteps of the Old Man and, before Him, the Great Mother, going on out into the void, finding out the Truth.
And I have a terrible fear. That same old fear. Going out of the Multiverse, giving up what I know, going on beyond the blank veil into... my God, the one I used to imagine as a child. Isn’t that the same thing as death?
That’s not the worst of it, though. The Great Mother, the Old Man God... I know they didn’t create the Multiverse. I know they were just part of the Machine, wherever they’ve gone. No more than my predecessors, I suppose.
Somewhere. Somewhere beyond all knowledge, I image some Thing I call, for lack of a better term, simply the Other. The one great Eka-God, the One Who Makes All the Rules and Is Allowed to Change Them. The one who sets parameters for what I’ve called the Probability Manager, in line with the software Toolbox terminology made up when we thought we understood what the Gates and Scavengers and Colonials and the whole impossible tapestry of the Multiverse was all about.
Sometimes I imagine, horribly, that the Other is no more than some lost wayfarer, just like me, some Being wandering the byways of his larger eka-Multiverse, looking for the exit, looking for some way home. Would that be a satisfactory answer? Of course not. Great Gods have Bigger Gods upon Their Backs to Bite ‘em, and Bigger Gods larger still...
What does it mean for something to have no beginning and no end?
Even now, I don’t know.
Where do Almighty Gods go when their Time is up?
I’m terribly frightened that one day I’ll find out.
Terrible groaning, shuddery, echoing through the byways of the Multiverse now, Archangel Bob trying to get the Jug started, cursing the trillion-year-old junk that’s all we have to work with. Billions, trillions, quadrillions of adoring helpers fluttering round his ectoplasm, all useless.
A great cl
ashing of time-frames, universes destroyed in a squealing of meshed probabilities. The Jug rumbles to life, is backed out of its storage quantum, goes scraping off to the task of Rectification. Over the noise and racket and commotion, you can hear the Archangel Bob singing lustily to himself. It’s the Seven Dwarves’ Song.
Now I hunker down to begin the work of Judgment Day.
Edgar, little Edgar, like a bright, shining seed out there, shining against the twisting black backdrop of the Multiverse. Edgar the Rebellious Angel, walking in the footsteps of old Lucifer, thinking he brought light and life to the world but... there was a reason for Prometheus’s punishment. It wasn’t because the gods were jealous of his gift. It was because he committed a crime, because he brought down evil on the innocent.
I’ve always despised the way the Old Man punished Adam and Eve for succumbing to the temptation he laid in their way. Entrapment is an ugly thing.
Well, Archangel Edgar, you sought the Job for yourself, fought with Archangel Bob when he came on the scene, lost the battle, Fell. And now, out in the Multiverse, you covet and scheme and labor to rise, rise again into Heaven and cast down all of God’s Work, the Opus Dei you thought to own.
Won’t you be surprised when you find out whose got your spot?
Edgar laboring away, all those many iterations slowly gathering together, absorbed into one another. Absorbed and re-emitted, bouncing back and forth, gathering force like a primitive laser beam bouncing back and forth in its ruby rod... but we’re only waiting, Edgar. Waiting patiently for you to come.
And, of course, now I must consider the matter of lovely little Astrid Astride. Loose in the Multiverse though no fault of her own, responding merely to a temptation laid in her path by some Almighty villain. Me.
Must I punish her?
The rules say yes.
And I’m not the one who writes the rules.
It’d be nice if I could think of a way out.
Look around you, Mister God Almighty Probability Manager.
Ah.
Of course.
Eleven. Down the Rabbit Hole.
The Transmigration of Souls Page 37