Orbitsville Trilogy

by Bob Shaw

  He entered the studio at a run and had to edge through a cluster of people to see what was happening. Their attention was concentrated cm Silvia. She was gripping a long metal bar and was using it, swinging from one side and then the other, to destroy her glass mosaic screen.

  At each slicing impact another part of the unique creation ruptured and sagged, and brilliant motes of colour sprayed like water droplets. Galaxies and clusters of galaxies were annihilated at every stroke. Silvia laboured like an automaton, hewing and clubbing, sobbing aloud each time she overcame the inertia of the heavy bar. Her face was white, the eyes Samson-blind to the transient bright-hued fountains she was creating.

  Four years' work and a third of a million pieces of glass, Dallen recited in his head in a kind of dismayed chant. Please don't erase your own life.

  He wanted to dart forward and bring the destruction to an end, but was paralysed by a curious timidity, a fear of intruding on private torment. All he could do was stand and watch until Silvia's strength failed. She raised the bar high, aiming for the uppermost part of the trefoil design, but it wavered and circled in her grasp and she had to let it fall. She stood for a moment, head bowed, before turning to face the group.

  "It was a memorial," she said in a dazed, abstracted voice. "Karal doesn't need a memorial. He isn't dead." She stared at Dallen, breathing hard, and took a half-step in his direction.

  "You're coming with me," said Libby Ezzati as she stepped forward and put a motherly arm around Silvia's shoulders. "You're going to lie down."

  "It's the best thing," agreed Peter Ezzati, apparently having just arrived at the house. His rotund body was encased in a dark formal suit to which he had added a band of black crepe on one arm. He positioned himself beside Silvia to help usher her out of the studio and recoiled, comically startled, when she clawed at his armband.

  "Take that bloody thing off!" Her voice was shrill and unrecognisable. "Don't you understand? Are you too bloody stupid to understand?"

  "It's all right—everything is all right," Libby soothed and with a surprising show of strength half-lifted Silvia clear of the floor and bore her away into the main part of the house. It seemed to Dallen that Silvia's eyes again sought out his before two other women rallied to Libby's aid, closing in on Silvia and shutting her off from his view. He stared after them until a large petal of glass belatedly detached itself from the gutted screen and crashed to the floor. The sound of it triggered a crossfire of conversation in the group of watchers.

  "Spectacular, wasn't it?" Renard murmured to Dallen. "Electra herself couldn't have put on a better show."

  Dallen, baffled by the reference, saw that Renard was cool and untouched, perhaps even amused by the monumental act of destruction he had witnessed. "Rick, you're a real credit to the human race."

  "What are you trying to say, old son?"

  "That I don't like you and I'm getting dangerously close to doing something about it."

  Renard looked gratified. "Which one of us do you reckon it's dangerous for?"

  "Have a good trip to Orbitsville." Dallen turned to walk away and almost blundered into Peter Ezzati, who had removed his armband and was still looking flustered.

  "Everything is happening at once," Ezzati said.

  "Karal dying … the experiment … Silvia … And I was late getting here because I was following the news about Orbitsville. These green lights have to mean something, Garry. I'm starring to get a bad feeling about them."

  "What green lights?" Dallen felt he had reached saturation point as far as new information was concerned, but something in Ezzati's manner prompted him to make the enquiry.

  "Haven't you been following the news? They've discovered these bands of green light drifting across the shell, inside and out. At first they thought there was only going to be one, but more and more of them are showing up, getting closer together."

  "Is it some kind of ionisation effect? Something like an aurora?"

  Ezzati shook his head. "The Science Commission says the bands don't register on any type of detector they've got, except photographically. You can see them if you're looking directly at the shell, but that's all."

  "Then they can't amount to much."

  "I wish I could shrug them off like that," Ezzati said, frowning. "I don't like what's happening, Garry—the shell material is supposed to be totally stable."

  "It isn't going to explode, you know." As a native of Orbitsville, one who had flown millions of kilometres over its grasslands and mountains and seas, Dallen clearly understood the sheer immutability of the vast globe. Since coming to Earth he had found that people who had never been to Orbitsville were unable to cope with its scale, and tended to think of it as something like a large metal balloon. The inadequacy of their vision was often shown in the way they spoke of people living in Orbitsville, whereas those who had first-hand experience invariably said on Orbitsville.

  There could be no substitute for seeing the reality of the sphere from the direct observation area of a ship. Once was always enough. The Big O was daunting but somehow reassuring, and nobody who had ever looked on it could be quite the same person again.

  "I'm not suggesting it's going to explode, it's just that…" Ezzati paused and cocked his head like a bird.

  "I knew there was something else I had to tell you. With not coming into the office these days, I don't suppose you'll have heard about Gerald Mathieu."

  "Mathieu?" Dallen held his. voice steady. "What about him?"

  "He set out for the west coast this morning, but he didn't get very far—his ship went down somewhere near Montgomery."

  "Forced landing?"

  "Very forced. From the analysis of the way his beacons snuffed out it looks as though he flew smack into a hill."

  The words impacted on Dallen's mind like a bowling ball hurled with pin-splintering force, scattering all his preconceptions about the immediate future. Instead of satisfaction at the idea of Mathieu meeting a violent death, he felt an immediate sense of loss. It had to be wrong for the man who had casually destroyed a family to escape so easily, so quickly, without even knowing that he had been judged and condemned, without even looking into his executioner's eyes.

  "Is there any definite…?" Dallen swallowed to ease the dryness in his throat. "Is Mathieu dead?"

  "Don't let Silvia hear you use that word around here." Ezzati smiled broadly and patted Dallen's upper arm. "Discarnate is the accepted term. It looks as though young Mathieu is as discarnate as a dodo."

  "I find that … hard to believe," Dallen said, belatedly coming to terms with the new situation. Mathieu's death had relieved him of a terrible responsibility, freeing him to deal with other commitments which, thus far, he had avoided thinking about in detail.

  Ezzati looked up at him with some anxiety. "Look, Garry, I didn't mean to sound flippant. Was Mathieu close to you?"

  "Not really. I'm going home." Dallen was outside the house and walking to his car, the world around him a blur of shimmering colours and steamy warmth, before he realised that he really was going home. He and Cona and Mikel had wasted too much time on Earth.

  Chapter 13

  The universe consisted of a bowl of pure blue glass.

  Three objects had been tossed into the bowl and were lying, quite near each other, at the bottom of the azure curvature. Most prominent was a circular object which was intensely bright, so much so that it was painful to look directly at it. He classified it as a nearby sun. Next was a small, pale crescent, almost lost in the bombardment of light, and that had to be a non-radiant body—a planet or a moon.

  The third object differed from the others in that it was larger and did not have precise geometries. It was a misty and elongated patch of white, with traces of a feathery internal structure. After some thought he identified it as a cloud.

  The word initiated a rapid sequence of associations-atmosphere … moisture … rain … land … vegetation…

  I'm alive!

  The astonishing thought brou
ght Mathieu to his feet in a split second, gasping with shock. He made several little darting runs in different directions, like a wild creature which had been trapped, only coming to a standstill when he realised the terrors were ail in his mind, that no final calamity was about to overtake him. Nothing more could happen. He shaded his eyes and took his first near-rational look at the sunlit hillside.

  Crimson and gold tatters of his aircraft were strewn over a wide area, and far off to his right the power plant was sending up plumes of smoke as it tried to ignite the lush grass. The pointed nose, minus its canopy, was the largest fuselage section to have survived the impact. A short distance behind the cockpit it had the semblance of a mashed cigar, ragged pennants of alloy skin enclosing a profusion of spar stumps, broken pipes and cables. Much farther down the slope was a surprisingly neat scar in the earth, as though some giant plough had upturned a short straight furrow.

  Mathieu gave a shaky laugh which faded quickly into the surrounding stillness. To his own ears it had sounded insane. He examined himself and found that his tan suit was torn in places and was liberally smeared with soil and grass. A pulsing stiffness in his limbs told him he was extensively bruised, that in a day or two he would scarcely be able to move, but otherwise he was miraculously unharmed. A sudden weakness, engendered by awe rather than anything physical, caused him to sink to his knees.

  I'm supposed to be dead!

  The realisation that he had tried to commit suicide astonished Mathieu almost as much as his survival of the crash. He could think of nothing more stupid and pointless than ending his life, especially as the future had so much to offer. The only explanation he could suggest for his still being alive was that he had regained his sanity in the last hurtling seconds and had hauled back on the control column just in time—but what had prompted him to try killing himself in the first place?

  A picture of Garry Dallen ghosted through Mathieu's consciousness—a swarthy Nemesis, hard-muscled, running in tireless pursuit, the handsome face cold and unforgiving, the eyes murderous…

  Could that have been the reason? Fear of Garry Dallen, coupled with his own nagging remorse over what he had done to Dallen's wife and child?

  Mathieu considered the matter carefully and felt his bafflement increase. Surely, no matter how much nervous stress he had been under, he would have needed better motives than those for committing suicide. He had nothing to fear from Dallen—for the straightforward reason that Dallen had no way to connect him with what had happened to his family. Mathieu had been very careful all along to cover his traces, to make sure that nobody in authority could find out about his private disposal of Metagov property. That had been the whole point in his blanking out of the Department of Supply monitor, and with its memory successfully obliterated he was doubly safe.

  True, there had been the incident with Cona Dallen and her baby on the north stair, but Dallen had no way to link him with that, and it had not been premeditated. Sheer back luck had brought all three of them together at that crucial moment, and he had done only what he had to do to protect himself, no more and no less. It was regrettable that two other people had become involved in that way, but it was not as if he had committed murder. Two new personalities would emerge to replace those which had been lost—so, in a way, the books were balanced. Certainly, there was no reason for him to go through life burdened with remorse or guilt.

  If anybody was to blame it was the crooked chemists and their dealers who charged such iniquitous prices for minute quantities of…

  Mathieu stood up, plunged a hand into his inner pocket and withdrew his gold pen. It was undamaged. He clicked the barrel into the special position, priming it to dispense its magical ink, then paused and frowned down at the sunglittering cylinder. Upheavals were taking place within him; mental landscapes were undergoing cataclysmic change.

  In a single movement he snapped the pen in half and hurled it away from him. He turned so that he was unable to note where the pieces fell and considered what he had just done, half-expecting an onslaught of panic. Instead he felt a sweet emptiness, a total lack of concern.

  "Maybe I am dead," he said aloud, shaking his head in wonderment over the knowledge—so different from the vagrant hopes of the past—that he would never again have to use felicitin. So novel was the state of mind that it took him an appreciable time to interpret it, but he was no longer a user!

  The feeling of certainty persisted even when he reviewed the medical facts. There was a distinct personality profile common to those who became dependent on the drug, and he had never heard of spontaneous remissions or unaided escapes. His entire future had been predicted around the fact that he was hooked on felicitin … (Was "hooked" a sufficiently graphic word? How about skewered? Or impaled?) … and now, suddenly, the drug was irrelevant.

  A sputtering sound from the aircraft's power plant drew Mathieu's attention to the scattered wreckage, and his sense of wonder over his survival returned. The contours of the ground must have exactly matched the ship's line of flight, giving it seconds instead of microseconds in which to shed its kinetic energy, and thereby saving his life. Such events were not unknown in aviation lore—a similar thing had happened to St. Exupery in North Africa—but still he had a distinct sense of the miraculous. A religious man would have been down on his knees giving thanks to God. Mathieu, however, had more earthly concerns, among them the question of how long it would take him to get back to Madison City so that he could proceed with the important business of being alive.

  He was alone in a sea of verdant green which shaded into blue as it reached the vaporous blur of the horizon. This area of what had once been Alabama had been deregistered more than a century earlier and now it looked as though it had never been touched, as though the first boats had yet to come straggling across the Pacific.

  The nearest population centre was probably Madison City itself, hundreds of kilometres to the east, so there was no point in straying from the wreckage of his aircraft. With the gradual emptying of the country's airspace, all the paraphernalia of traffic control had been abandoned in favour of a system using computers in each aircraft. The transport department computer in Madison would have known about the crash as soon as it had happened, and in theory an emergency team should already be on its way to him.

  Deciding that he should get some gentle exercise while waiting to be picked up, Mathieu began walking along the hillside. He had taken only a few paces when his attention was caught by a pulsing speck of ruby light which appeared low above the eastern horizon. It was the beacon of an aircraft which seemed to be heading in his direction.

  He watched the approaching flier for a minute or more before realising it was a rescue ship.

  The discovery was yet another shock in what seemed to be an endless series. He had assumed, in view of his sense of relative well-being, that he had been only lightly stunned in the crash—but the arrival of the recovery craft implied that he had been unconscious for a considerable time, perhaps as much as thirty minutes. In that case, according to his admittedly sketchy medical knowledge, he should have been suffering an intense headache and nausea. He prodded in a gingerly fashion around his skull, almost expecting to find a severe but previously unnoticed wound, and confirmed that he was basically uninjured.

  The thunderous arrival of the high-speed ship cut short his speculations. It swooped down out of the sky, chunky fuselage bristling with cranes and other recovery gear, came to a halt at a height of some fifty metres and made a vertical descent on screaming reaction tubes. Grass blasted outwards from the touchdown point before the engines died, then a hatch in the ship's belly slid open. Four men, one of them carrying a stretcher, dropped out of it and came running towards Mathieu.

  He gave an oddly self-conscious wave and walked to meet them, repressing the urge to chuckle as he got his first glimpse of their pop-eyed, slack-jawed expressions of pure astonishment.

  The brandy was the first he had tasted in months, and Mathieu found it unusually satisfyi
ng. He took sip after sip of the neat liquor, relishing its warmth and flavour while he watched the countryside drift by beneath the rescue ship.

  Even after they had checked him out with handheld body scanners, confirming that he had no internal injuries, the medics had wanted to put him in a bunk for the return trip to Madison. Eventually, however, he had got his way and had been allowed to occupy a passenger seat in lordly isolation at the rear of the cabin. The medics and salvage experts were clustered at the front, and the frequency with which they glanced in his direction was a sign they had not from the shock of finding him in the land of the living.

  Aided by the relaxing effect of the brandy, he amused himself by picturing how they would have taken the news of the second miracle, the private one. Almost a full hour had passed since he regained consciousness on the hillside, but there had been no wavering in his new attitude towards felicitin. He knew he was free of the addiction which had so grotesquely distorted his life, and now anything seemed possible…

  The door to the flight deck slid open and a crewman came aft carrying a radiophone. He handed it to Mathieu, told him that Mayor Bryceland was calling and returned to his station. Bryceland was already speaking when Mathieu raised the instrument to his ear.

  "…only thing that matters is that you are all right, Gerald. That goes without saying. It's a big relief to all of us that you haven't been injured. My God, I mean … When I heard the ship had been wrecked!"

  "You heard right, Frank," Mathieu said peacefully, having divined the real purpose of the call. "The ship doesn't exist any more."

  "But if you're only bruised…"

  "I was very lucky, Frank—I'm all right, but the ship is metal confetti." Mathieu paused, visualising the consternation on the mayor's puffy features, and decided to turn the screw a little more. "I'm glad things didn't work out the other way round."