Beyond Ever Blue Skies

by Clive S. Johnson

  “Safe?” and he gently pushed them apart and gazed into her eyes.

  “Only us agris are supposed to know about The Promised Land, Morgan, not the fluis or the nutris, and certainly not you lecys. But I can’t tell you any more, not without Connie-Jays say-so. So, please, please trust me; for your own sake if not mine.”

  “All right, Steph, if you say so, but I don’t like it. I don’t like what I seem to be getting drawn into. And she’s not given me much to work with, has she? The single word ‘Blowball’.”

  “But it must be important, it took all her resolve to speak it aloud.”

  “Yeah, but she didn’t tell me what it means, or how to use it…or even whether I can.”

  “Only you can find that out, Morgan. It’s you who has access to the lecy network, not her.”

  “‘The most sacred word in the whole of Rundkern,’ was all she’d tell me.”

  “All she’s likely to know herself, to be fair, without Ken’s guidance.”

  “Well, that’s just great, isn’t it? That really helps a bunch! And we’re still no nearer sorting out the air.”

  “No, we’re not, but at least Connie-Jay knows about it now. She’ll chivvy Agri-Prod along, you’ll see. I reckon she’ll have some proper clout with their senior lot,” but Morgan didn’t hold out too much hope himself.

  “Atmos,” he mused, shaking his head and sighing as his gaze drifted to the sky. “‘KEN-Prohib’ it said.”

  “You what?”

  “I wonder.”

  Morgan blinked up the lecy network and quickly found the Atmos symbol, soon evoking the overlay box and its “Apply KEN” note.

  “Ken is Connie-Jay’s guide, right?”

  “Yes, or should be; should be the guide for all Colonuses, each section’s.”

  “A guide, eh? So, if I can find out how to ‘Apply KEN’ for access to Atmos, it might at least give us a clue as to whether he’s gone completely.”

  “Completely! Don’t say that.”

  He flicked to the other system screens, seeing his still unchanged message list, his notepad with its aborted ideas for combining failure heuristics, the last data sheet he’d consulted for Mrs. Toynbow’s job, the job-sheet itself, and the Rundkern map he’d used to find her address to link to the network diagram.

  He felt Stephanie squeeze his hand, knew she daren’t interrupt, but he sensed her keenness to know what he was up to. He squeezed hers back, but couldn’t draw his gaze from the map of their section.

  “No, it can’t be that simple, surely,” he whispered to himself when his attention fell on the familiar “Find Address” button. Swiftly, he narrowed his gaze and traced out the word “KEN”, then blinked at “Submit” and held his breath.

  “Password?” appeared in a new box, the space below impatiently waiting.

  “What the heck’s a ‘Password’?”

  “A what?”

  “Just a minute; a pass word,” and he grinned, broadly. This time he carefully scripted out the word “Blowball” and the box was replaced by a spinning wheel.

  Morgan again held his breath.

  What seemed like an age later, a red bordered and slowly pulsating box appeared, across which was written “An unexpected result has been returned”.

  “Shit,” he hissed, prompting Stephanie to ask what the heck was going on, but he ignored her, for below the message now free-floated the words “Place right index finger before right eye, nail away from you”.

  “What you doing?” Stephanie said as he did just that, but an image of his fingerprint appeared before his vision, steadily becoming littered with bright points. Then it vanished and “Apply Caelum” replaced it.

  “Oh, for Pete’s sake, now it’s something called ‘Caelum’.”

  “Morgan? Will you tell me what’s going on, or do you want me to kick you in the shins…or worse?”

  “Does ‘Caelum’ mean anything to you, Steph?”

  “No. Why?” and he quickly explained, after which she reaffirmed, “Never heard of it.”

  But Morgan had already switched to the lecy network diagram, had already entered “Caelum” into its own search facility and been delivered an address, one not that far from the lecy workshops.

  “Come on,” he said, “let’s go for a walk,” and before long he’d led her out of the park and across Rundkern to an alley that ran along the edge of the section. Number “41” turned out to be about a fifth of the way along, but the last door on the odd-numbered side.

  All that adorned it was its number plate, no reader or call buttons beside. Morgan remembered how Connie-Jay had got into Erebus, and so lifted his right index finger and placed it squarely on the “41”. The door quietly unlocked and swung inwards.

  “Maybe things are going our way; at last,” he said, but Stephanie shook her head and rolled her eyes.

  “Now you’ve done it!”

  “Done what?”

  “Just get in, before the door gets bored of waiting and closes,” and so he did, Stephanie close on his heels before it slammed shut behind them.

  Small, dark and low-ceilinged, the room in which they now stood, waiting for their eyes to adjust, appeared littered with machinery. Most of it seemed somnolent, just the glow of something hidden bathing one corner in an eerie blue light.

  Morgan cautiously threaded his way towards it, cursing when he stubbed a toe. Amidst rising pipes and cable conduits, and at the end of a long run of crowded shelving, he found a busy-looking screen affixed to the wall at head height, no seat before it. It largely depicted a meshwork of hexagonal cells, dots of various colours scattered about it, many of them moving. Across the top ran a calendar and a clock, a square of blue overlaid in one corner.

  As a memory nudged at the edge of Morgan’s mind, Stephanie gasped then swore: a steady stream of colourful words he’d never heard strung together before. When he dragged his gaze from the screen, it took his eyes a moment to see her in the gloom. Her head was thrown back, her stare held by something above her, something he must have walked beneath on his way through the room.

  A circle of diffuse yellow light, the size of one of The Pi-Eyed’s small, round tables, bowed down slightly from the centre of the ceiling. As Morgan carefully retraced his steps, it became clear he was looking at some kind of window. Only when he came beside Stephanie, his head now likewise craned up, did he too gasp.

  How high above them Morgan couldn’t rightly say, but through the window and directly over their heads, he saw a gently bowed ceiling or roof that swept away ever more steeply towards blackness. Beyond this towered a vast but dimly yellow-lit structure. He looked back at the roof, its surface appearing mottled and streaked by a plethora of pipes and boxes and other unfathomable shapes.

  “It can’t be real,” he found himself saying, almost gasping out the words.

  “But what is it?”

  “I haven’t the foggiest, but it can’t possibly be as far above us as it looks; it just can’t. If it were…”

  “If it were? Then what, Morgan?”

  He dragged his gaze from the impossible view and stared at Stephanie. “But… But it just can’t be. It doesn’t make sense.” He shuffled to one side, trying to angle his view, but could see little more.

  Morgan again stared at Stephanie, his mouth feeling numb. “But… But it’s all above Rundkern, Steph…directly above it. So… So why…why can’t it be seen from there? Tell me that, Steph. Why is all that,” and he thrust his arm up, pointing through the glass, “not plain to see out there?” and this time he pointed towards the room’s door, towards the clear blue sky he knew would still be overarching Rundkern’s bustling thoroughfares.

  10 As Busy as Bees

  As Morgan stood and stared up through the glass, as he tried his hardest to fathom out the impossible, he became aware of Stephanie moving about nearby. When he tore his gaze from what still failed to make any sense, he saw she’d clambered onto a slanting desk. She teetered on its edge, clearly avoiding an array of
what looked like small screens, a row of stubby rods sticking out beneath each.

  “What’re you doing?” he asked.

  By now she was propping herself on one arm, its hand pressed against an adjacent pipe to stop her from tipping over as she leant out, peering at an acute angle through the glass. “There’s something up there, just to one side of the glass. Come up and have a look.”

  He too clambered onto the desk, his bigger feet knocking one of the rods near the edge. It toggled with a click and a beeping sound drifted through the room.

  “Shit; what have I done now?”

  Seeing where the toe of his shoe currently rested, he hastily reached down and flicked the nearest rod back to where he supposed it to have been. The beeping stopped.

  When he too then braced himself against the pipe, his hand above Stephanie’s, and leant his head near hers, what looked like the thin spindly back of a chair could be seen beyond and to one side of the glass. Once on tiptoes, he saw what looked like the handlebars of a child’s scooter rising before it. Then it struck him how distorted things beyond them both appeared. He moved his head back and forth, then his hand slipped and he had to jump to the floor.

  “You know what, Steph?” he said as he regained his balance.

  “What?”

  “I reckon that’s the bottom of a glass sphere,” and he pointed accusingly at what he’d taken to be a window.

  “A sphere?” She now moved her own head about as she peered through the glass.

  Morgan had stretched his neck forward to relieve the stiffness craning it up had caused and now noticed something odd about the floor. Directly beneath the sphere, if that was indeed what it was, a circular section of scored metal disrupted the repetitive array of floor tiles.

  “And I think this is how you’re supposed to get up there.”

  Stephanie clambered off the desk. “What is?”

  “This; see? This metal disk.”

  They both looked from it to the circle of glass above.

  “Could be,” she said. “So, how—”

  “The desk; it faces in to both of them,” but the poor light made it hard to see much detail when Morgan bent over it. “I wonder if I can get some more light.”

  He blinked up the lecy network and searched for “Caelum”, surprised not only when he found it, but by it not being marked as “Supply only”.

  “Seems we have a lecy circuit in here,” but when he went to draw up the relevant data sheets, an overlaid box gave him a now all too familiar message: “Apply KEN”.

  “Argh, not again,” which drew him into having to explain to Stephanie. Part way through, though, the free-floating text “Show me your right index finger” flickered before his vision. When he raised his finger to his eye, the desk burst into life, all the small screens glowing with various symbols, all the rods circled by their own small, dull-red ring of light.

  “Blimey, Morgan, that’s impressive; neat trick,” but at first he could only stare in wonder at the desk.

  “But I… I didn’t do anything,” then he narrowed his eyes, fascinated by what it now displayed.

  For a long while, Morgan lost all awareness of anything but the puzzle the desk presented. He flicked in and out of the lecy system, searching out clues and explanations, and eventually it all started to fall into place.

  “You have a dumb-looking grin on your face, Morgan. I take it you’ve finally got somewhere.”

  She came into focus before his previously unseeing stare, her features now so familiar, so enticing—so precious. He nodded, slowly, then stared back down at the desk, cracking his knuckles back before him.

  “That’s horrible, Morgan. I wish you wouldn’t do that.”

  “Now, let’s see. Keep away from the circle, Steph,” and as she stepped back he flicked one of the rods below a small screen that displayed the image of stick figures standing either side of a circle. The red ring around the rod turned blue and the screen above it dimmed.

  Step by step, he went through what he’d deduced, occasionally checking back with the lecy system, until only the last screen glowed its image of an up-pointing arrow.

  “Here we go,” he said as he gave Stephanie a tentative smile and flicked one of the few remaining red-rimmed rods.

  Stephanie followed Morgan’s stare towards the circle on the floor. Silently, it broke into segments, each sliding out of the way like an expanding iris. A wide glass column rose from the revealed hole, swiftly and smoothly mating with the glass circle in the ceiling, a thud, a ratcheting sound and a trailing hiss emanating from their union.

  The desk beeped, and Morgan looked down at the only glowing screen. It now displayed a stick figure entering two parallel vertical lines.

  “It looks like a tight squeeze, but are you ready?” Morgan asked, and without hesitation, Stephanie nodded.

  He flicked one of two remaining red-rimmed rods and the glass column silently rose above head height, the rod now blue lit. He held out his arm towards a platform that had risen to fill the hole left by the rising column, and Stephanie stepped onto it.

  “I’m pretty sure the operator isn’t meant to go along,” he warned her, “so I’m going to have to be quick, but…here goes,” and he flicked the last red-lit rod and leapt to her side as the glass column steadily descended about them.

  When, once sealed within, nothing further happened, Morgan looked up. Above them, the base of the glass sphere remained firmly in place.

  “Ah,” he said, screwing his face up in thought.

  “What do you mean “Ah’?” but all Morgan could do was tap thoughtfully on the inner surface of the glass column, studiously avoiding Stephanie’s eyes.

  “Morgan?”

  “Hmm?”

  “What have you gone and—” but then a loud hiss filled the limited air about them and they slowly rose on the platform as the glass of the sphere above swivelled out of the way.

  Morgan breathed in a deep breath, pushing a smile of sorts hastily onto his face as Stephanie narrowed her eyes and drew her mouth to a very thin line.

  “For a minute there,” she carefully said, but then the approaching top of the column silenced them both, their eyes growing wider by the second.

  The rapidly expanding view they gained, as they went up into what was most definitely a glass sphere, proved sickeningly distorted, until they came to an oppressively silent halt. Their eyes now near the centre of the sphere, they could see a clear, undistorted but dimly lit vista that took Morgan’s breath away.

  A faint pool of blue light picked out an otherwise barely yellow-lit, far distant and sheer-rising wall, one that curved more acutely inwards as it vanished into the higher and darker reaches. Morgan found it impossible to judge just how far away it was, maybe half a mile, maybe more. His gaze followed the walls descent to where it slipped away yet further still, there into utter blackness as a sloping roof—a mirror image of the one directly above them.

  Stephanie’s “Wow” finally turned him back, and he stared at where she now stared, down at a vast and distantly vanishing surface close below. Not far away, a spill of yellow light lay upon it as a large bright patch. “It’s like some kind of enormous honeycomb,” she marvelled.

  “Honeycomb?” Morgan at last managed to say, his voice cracked but seeming as deafening as hers had been. “What’s a…” but then he noticed movement.

  All across the surface crawled small black shapes, yet more stationary ones evident when Morgan peered even closer. Stephanie had clearly seen them too: “Those can’t be bees, surely, and this can’t all be honey.”

  He almost yelped, his breath catching in his throat, his mouth hanging open.

  “What is it?” she asked, turning him a worried look. “Morgan? Are you all right? You look like you’ve—”

  “Oh, my giddy aunts; of course,” and he leant forward, pressing his forehead and palms against the sphere’s cold glass. “Of course; I knew it reminded me of something when I saw it all depicted on the screen b
elow. Why didn’t I think then?”

  He remembered back to the last occasion, to when he’d been outside Josh’s breakfast bar and the sound of the Galgeve’s closing window blinds had lifted his gaze. He remembered the brief stain he’d seen then on the morning sky’s otherwise blue expanse.

  “A six-sided stain, Steph, that’s what I saw, what I’ve seen before, on and off over the years.”

  She placed her warm hand on the back of one of his own, a stark contrast to how cold the glass had made it.

  “I saw its repair, Steph. That’s what I saw: its being made good. But now… Ha! Now I know what effected that repair,” and he stared down at one of the black shapes currently scuttling past across the “Honeycomb”, so palpably close beneath the sphere.

  11 A Few Ups and Downs

  Morgan slumped down on the platform that still filled the hole in the base of the sphere. Stephanie squatted beside him. From there he could no longer see the dark shapes moving about on the “Honeycomb”, but their import lay uppermost in his mind.

  Stephanie placed her hand on his shoulder, a couple of gentle squeezes. “What did you see being repaired, Morgan? You weren’t making much sense.”

  When he swung his head to look at her, he realised how much confidence her simple presence gave him. But, he wondered, would it be enough to face this new knowledge head-on? He smiled at her, knowing full well it would appear hollow.

  “Ever since I was a kid,” he quietly confessed, “I’ve noticed the occasional dark patch in the sky, lingering briefly before turning blue again.”

  “In the sky?”

  “Hmm. I began, though, to wonder if it was just me, if other people didn’t see them.”

  “Why didn’t you just ask?”

  He narrowed his gaze as he looked through her. “I don’t really know. Maybe I was frightened of finding out it was just me, that I really was…”

  “What? Mad?”

  “Maybe.”