The smile she gave him certainly wasn’t hollow, but he detected a hint of pity in it that sat uneasily with his newfound surety.
“Your ‘Honeycomb’, Steph, is the sky I looked up at when seeing those patches—I’m convinced of it. The sky we’ve all looked up at every day of our lives.” He drew his mouth to a taut line and closely watched her reaction.
Eventually, she said, “Maybe you are mad, Morgan. It certainly sounds that way.”
They stared at each other, their faces devoid of expression, until Stephanie’s cheeks lifted and lines creased out from the corners of her eyes. Then they both laughed, but uneasily and only for a short while.
“The trouble is, Steph: now I genuinely don’t think so.” He looked out at the challenging view and shook his head. “What we’re seeing only goes to prove it.”
“But what if all that,” and she swung her arm out, expansively, “isn’t real? What if it’s a false image itself, cleverly formed on the other side of this glass,” and she rapped her knuckles against the sphere.
“But why?”
“I don’t know. Some form of entertainment maybe; a training simulator; a million and one other possibilities.”
“Then why… Why have we been led here, Steph? Why here?”
“Led here? By who?”
“Ah…well; you know the messages I got, telling me to look at my finger: so its print could be read?” She nodded. “What I didn’t tell you was that they weren’t lecy system messages. They didn’t come up in the usual dialogue boxes.”
“I don’t follow.”
“They were crudely superimposed on my vision, Steph, by some other—”
“Ken! You think it’s Ken guiding us, don’t you?” and wonder and some relief filled her face.
“If it is, then everything we see from here is definitely real. If we have been guided here, then that means the reason’s more important than everyone in Rundkern finding out they’ve been living under an illusion—literally; that when we’ve looked up at the stars, we’ve seen nothing but a fabricated image.” She stood and stared out. Morgan followed her gaze.
The yellow pool of light was now little more than a thin arc across the distant “Honeycomb”, quickly shrinking until it was gone. The blackness its absence brought let a sliver of doubt slip into his thoughts. He reached out and pressed his palm to the glass.
Stephanie’s voice sounded like a child’s when she quietly said, “Then this really is the Path; Ken’s Path to The Promised Land,” and a soft breath slipped her dark-hidden lips.
“Well, if it is, then The Promised Land’s not up to much: a sphere big enough for two, because it seems this is as far as we’re going,” and he felt in the darkness for her hand.
They both remained silent for some time, Morgan trying to see some sense in why they’d been brought here. Then he remembered the chair, got to his feet and blindly fumbled for it.
“What are you doing?” Stephanie asked.
“The only thing in here before we entered was this chair,” he remarked as his fingers traced out a narrow padded seat. “Maybe it’ll give us a clue as to why we’re here.”
When he steadied himself against it, it moved with him and he unbalanced, stumbling over Stephanie.
“Woah, I didn’t expect that. Sorry, Steph,” and he extricated his legs from hers, banging his head against something as he tried to stand. Once apart, his feet firmly planted against the lower curve of the sphere, he carefully found what felt like the back of the chair, but its seat wasn’t where he’d expected.
“I think this thing pivots,” and he asked her to keep her head low before swinging the chair round to face where he reckoned the yellow pool of light had last been seen. The chair jarred to a halt with a click and a bright glow momentarily blinded Morgan. Then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw a small display panel at eyelevel, Stephanie’s surprised face slowly rising beyond it.
“You’re good at this sort of thing, aren’t you?” she said, wide-eyed but grinning. “What is it?”
Morgan had to feel around, the glow blinding him to everything else. To either side he found a handle. “Of course, the handlebars I saw.”
He soon clambered up the now more firmly fixed chair and shuffled onto its narrow seat, leaning forward over the screen, the stem of the handlebars between his knees. Three separate words, black on a glowing grey background, stared back at him: “SEAL”, “POWER” and “OPEN”.
“What do you reckon,” Stephanie asked, but Morgan shrugged.
“Who knows?”
“Ken, I imagine.”
“Hmm, well, he’s keeping schtum,” and he tried to think what to do next as he tapped absently on the first word.
A hiss came from below them, then a clank and a further hiss, and the letters of the word “SEAL” turned grey.
“Ah, well, that’s clearly done something,” he said, looking across at Stephanie. “So, what do you reckon? The next one?” and she nodded.
When he tapped “POWER”, the word turned red, a whirring sound filling the sphere. Then it stopped as everything juddered before settling to a short-lived sway.
“I must say: I expected something more,” he told her, returning his hand to the handlebar grip. It now felt loose. He tested it with a sharp twist.
Abruptly, he felt twice his weight, nearly falling from the seat as Stephanie’s face vanished from sight. A thud and a clatter came from below and his hand slipped from the grip. Just as abruptly, he went light, his stomach going queasy.
“Shit,” Stephanie gasped from somewhere below him, a groan accompanying what sounded like her getting to her feet again. Her face once more came into the glow of the screen, her expression unsettling.
“Sorry,” he was quick to say, “but I was only seeing if the grip had come loose.”
“Well, warn me next time, you prick.”
“Sorr… I tell you what, you’re probably best off up here with me,” and he shuffled against the back of the seat to make room, his hearing for some reason becoming muffled.
Stephanie sighed but clambered up nonetheless, squeezing in in front of Morgan, pushing him hard against the chair’s back. When he tried to look past her at the screen, the side of his head struck something soft, the same on the other side. His investigating fingers found a cowl or helmet of some sort, wrapped around the back of his head.
Before he could work out what it was, a narrow band of yellow light appeared, not far from them, and steadily swept away across the “Honeycomb”. He peered past Stephanie’s head and watched the patch fill out to the size they’d seen before. It continued to move away, as it had before, into the vast space its dimly reflected light once more made real. Then Morgan realised all the angles were wrong, the hexagons no longer as foreshortened. When he looked down, he could only gulp.
The black shapes could no longer be seen and the hexagonal cells looked much smaller. He glanced up, shocked to see that the roof was now almost within spitting-distance.
Only when Stephanie asked “Where did those come from?” did Morgan dare to look down again, following her gaze. His stomach lurched. What he’d not noticed before were three legs, now jutting out from beneath the chair, each resting a wheeled foot against the lower part of the sphere—against the glass that did nothing to obscure the now vertiginous view.
Morgan slipped his arms around Stephanie and hugged her tightly, but still trembled all over. He quietly mewled, “I feel sick, Steph,” then closed his eyes and rested his face against her back, trying to steady his breathing.
“Hey, not so tight; I can hardly breathe. And what do you mean sick? You’re not going to puke up in here, are you?”
“I’ve… I’ve never been this…this high before.”
“Oh, right, well, neither have I, I suppose, but we seem pretty secure, and we can’t fall out. Look, the glass hatch is back sealing the hole.”
“I’ll take your word for it, but I’d prefer… Just a minute. ‘SEAL’. Of course.”
/> “Was it this you twisted?”
“Eh?”
“To get us up here?”
“Oh, er, yeah. The right grip. Why?” They shot up yet further still and Morgan clamped his eyes even tighter shut.
“Hey, this is fun, Morgan,” then they stopped before rapidly dropping. Morgan squealed, a sharp breath issuing from Stephanie as his grip tightened the more. Bile then rose to his throat.
“Don’t, Steph. Please, or I will be sick, and it’ll be all down your back if I do,” at which they came to an abrupt halt.
Morgan quietly gipped, then swallowed back a trace of stomach acid before sighing. “I don’t think I can take this, Steph, I really don’t. Even with my eyes shut I can still sense there’s nothing beneath… Oh, shit,” and he tried to think of something else.
“But don’t you want to find out what’s at the end of this track?”
“Track?” he mumbled, intrigue now somehow overcoming trepidation. “What track?”
“That one, there,” she said, and he half opened one eye to see she’d twisted round, looking behind them.
Studiously avoiding any sight of the empty space below, Morgan leant forward enough to see around the cowl behind his head. A shiny rail rose past the back of the sphere, straight up towards the roof, now well beyond how far he could ever have spit.
“Can you see where it goes?” he asked, feeling a little better for looking up.
“I think it curves to run along the roof, though it’s hard to tell in this light. Yes, there. Do you see? I’m sure that’s a glint of it, bending away where the roof sharply curves out of sight.”
Morgan felt too ill to look, too insecure to argue, Stephanie clearly too enthusiastic to listen. All he really wanted to do was stand on a solid floor again, down there, down where he still couldn’t nerve himself to look. Had he done so, though, he’d have seen all such yearned-for floors now rapidly being left behind as they once again shot towards the roof.
12 Can You Hear Me?
Even as they approached it, the roof above them retained much of its mystery in the now more distant reflected glow of yellow light. Morgan yelped at their breakneck speed, though, and Stephanie slowed the sphere. Only the rail on which they were clearly suspended stood out, a sharp glint of the curve it took to run beneath the roof.
When they reached it and followed its steady arc, Morgan noticed the hand smears he’d left on the sphere’s glass roll forward. He and Stephanie, and the chair on which they sat, all stayed level, though, and he braved a look down. The sphere silently rolled beneath the chair’s wheeled legs.
“Clever,” he told himself and again looked up. As they came level with the roof, a mechanical arm angled into view above and to their rear, its bulbous fist gripping the rail. Then Stephanie shot them forward, Morgan’s heart again leaping into his mouth as a squeal of delight escaped her.
“I could get well used to this, Morgan,” she enthused over her shoulder. “I really could,” but he still couldn’t share her enthusiasm. Having the roof pass by so close above went some way to helping: its solid appearance, its gentle rise not leaving his stomach behind. But the way they progressively drew nearer the roof’s vanishing point suggested it would be a short-lived reprieve.
The arm from which the sphere hung increasingly angled out of sight once more behind and below them as the roof curved up more steeply, that awful tug at his stomach returning. It spurred him to take a distracting look around.
This time, when he snatched a glance down, he no longer felt sick. The individual cells of the “Honeycomb” could only just be made out, more like a plan laid out on a table than a hard surface beneath a great void, a void through which he’d been all too ready to imagine himself falling.
At last he had space in his mind to take in how the upper side of the sky—as he now regarded the “Honeycomb”—seemed gently to curve up as it vanished into the darkness to either side. In both cases, the lowering sweeps of the vast roof almost seemed to reach down to touch it.
As they climbed more steeply, however, the roof became more a wall, up which Morgan soon stared in wonder. They appeared to be rising into a broad bell-mouthed opening to a huge and almost dark-hidden shaft above—almost, but for a large ragged circle of glittering yellow light on the far side, still well above them.
“Strewth,” Morgan gasped, and Stephanie too looked up, following his stare.
“Wow,” she said, then they both lifted well clear of the seat as she brought them to a hurried halt, after which they gently settled back.
She turned and they stared at each other for a moment.
“That was weird,” she said, and Morgan had to agree.
“Do you feel a bit lightheaded, Steph?” and she nodded, then looked even more puzzled.
“I feel dizzy.”
“Maybe it’s all the zipping around you’ve put us through,” to which she looked affronted before turning to face forward again.
“Well, what’s that, then?” she changed the subject by saying, and pointed up at the glittering ring.
Morgan looked from it to the pool of yellow light below, then back up again. “I reckon it’s a hole, where the light’s getting in.”
“No, it can’t be, otherwise we’d see its yellow shaft stretching between them?” which only made Morgan wonder what it was about air that made light visible as it passed through it.
It took them longer than expected to gain anywhere near the same height, despite Stephanie again insisting on pushing the sphere on at a rapid pace. But it proved so hard to judge distances, for it all looked just so entirely alien. As best he could judge, Morgan reckoned they must already have been a good mile above Rundkern’s sky, and now less than a quarter of a mile from the hole.
“You know,” he said, peering at the blackness framed by its bright yellow rim, “I’m sure I can see speckles of—”
A faint, disembodied voice drifted to his ears, the words unclear, fragmented but close.
“Speckles of what, Morgan?” Stephanie asked.
He went to stick a finger in his ears, to clear them, but his hand stubbed against the cowl instead. Then the voice came again: “This is…can you…” followed by silence.
“Can you hear anything, Steph?”
She stilled for a moment. “Like what?”
“A voice.”
“No. No, it’s just as quiet as…”
“...moving, immediately,” startled Morgan.
He shushed Stephanie. “There’s a voice in my ears.”
“Now you are going mad.”
“No, it’s coming from this thing around my head.”
It came again: “…is urgent. Can you hear…”
“I think it’s trying to speak to me, Steph,” and he cleared his throat. “I…can…hear…you,” he carefully enunciated, but all he got back were a few more broken words.
“What’s it saying?” Stephanie whispered.
“It just seems to be repeating something,” then his ears rang as the voice came through loud and clear.
“This is urgent: stop moving, immediately.”
“STOP, Steph; stop us, now. NOW! Steph,” and out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of a jagged, faintly blue-lit terrain appearing above, one they were fast approaching. At Stephanie’s hesitation, he knocked her hand from the handlebar grip and they both sailed effortlessly into the air, thumping against the top of the sphere, a stream of invective already spilling from Stephanie’s lips.
The sphere now stationary, they gently floated down into a tumble of limbs around the feet of the chair, some part of Stephanie striking eye-wateringly at Morgan’s groin.
“Argh,” he gasped, his breath leaving him. “Did you…” he spluttered after sucking in air. “Did you do…that intentionally, Steph?” and he carefully massaged his tender parts as his breath finally returned.
“I should’ve. What the blazes were you doing, knocking my hand like that?”
“I suggest you take a look abov
e us, Steph,” he managed to say more levelly now as he painfully extricated his limbs. “A close look.”
They got to their feet with little real effort and stood, unsteadily, one each side of the chair, and peered up.
A dimly lit mess of jagged metal and pipes and who-knew-what loomed above them, all festooned with a tangle of hanging cables—the whole lot blocking their way. Morgan tried to spot the rail they’d been following but it disappeared into the chaos.
“Close call,” he barely breathed.
“Ah, right. Er, well, suppose it’s my turn to say sorry. I didn’t…”
Morgan heard the voice again, fainter now, and almost pushed himself clear over the chair in his haste to get back onto its seat and his head beneath the cowl. Once there, a repeat of “Stop moving, immediately” came clearly to his ears.
Raising his voice, Morgan began: “Can you—”
“Yes, I can hear you well enough, now,” the voice said in a strangely oily and measured tone, one that reminded him of Perry. “Have you stopped?”.
“Yes, but—”
“I trust you remain uninjured?”
“Er, yeah…I’m fine. But…who are you?”
“Do not go any further; do you understand? It is far too dangerous.”
“Yeah, don’t worry; I can see why, now. But who—”
“This is Ken. We do not have much time, and I have an important task for you; a crucially important task.”
A thousand-and-one questions jostled against Morgan’s numb lips, the shock on his face clearly worrying Stephanie.
“Who is it?” she mouthed, but he had no chance to explain.
“Are you still there?” finally jolted him into finding his voice.
“Er, yeah. Yes, I am.”
“Your service pod has a limited supply of air, and I calculate you have already used more than half. You must return to the Caelum docking station as soon as you have heard me out. Do you understand what I am saying?”
Morgan’s mouth dropped open and Stephanie, now clearly more alarmed, urgently shook his arm and whispered, “What’s going on?”
He held a finger up to stay her as he told Ken he understood and was listening.
Beyond Ever Blue Skies Page 7