Or maybe I'm feeling easier about it because the barrier has already pushed me away toward the border—maybe without realizing it I've been defeated.
"Am I outside or inside?" he whispered to the Oversoul.
No answer came at all.
He felt a thrill of fear. The Oversoul couldn't see this area itself—what if, when he crossed the border, he simply disappeared from the Oversoul's sight?
Then it occurred to him that this could be precisely why the force of the resistance might be weaker now. Maybe, without the Oversoul realizing it, this barrier had combined its own strength with the Oversoul's power—at the border. But in here, where the Oversoul itself could not penetrate, the barrier had only its own aversive power to draw on, and that's why it was defeatable.
It made sense to Nafai, and so he continued to head eastward, toward the center of Vusadka.
Or had he been heading north? For suddenly, as he crested a hill, he saw a completely barren landscape before him. Not fifty yards away, it was as if someone had built an invisible wall. On one side was the verdance of the land of Dostatok, and on the other side was stark desert—the driest, most lifeless desert Nafai had ever seen. Not a bird, not a lizard, not a weed, nothing with life in it was beyond the line.
It was too artificial. It had to be a sign of another kind of barrier, another borderline, one that excluded all living things. Perhaps it was a barrier that killed anything that crossed it. Was Nafai expected to cross this?
"Is there a gateway somewhere?" he asked the Oversoul.
No answer came.
Carefully he approached the barrier. When he was near enough, he reached out a hand toward it.
Invisible it might be, but it was tangible—he could press his hand against it, and feel it sliding under his hand, as if it were faintly slimy and constantly in motion. In a way, though, the very tangibility of it was reassuring—if it kept living things out by blocking their passage, then perhaps it didn't have any mechanism for killing them.
Can I cross? If humans can't cross this boundary, then why bother to have the mental barrier so far back? True, it might be simply a way of preventing humans from seeing this clear borderline and making a famous legend out of it, attracting undue attention to this place. But it was just as possible, as far as Nafai knew, that the barrier of aversion was designed to keep humans away because a determined human being could cross this physical barrier. One barrier for humans, farther out; and another barrier for animals. It made sense.
Of course, there was no guarantee that just because something made sense to Nafai it would therefore have any relation to reality. For a moment he even thought of returning to Dostatok and telling them what he had discovered so far, so they could explore the Index and find out if there was some clever way to cross the barrier.
As far as Nafai knew, however, the very thought of returning to Dostatok might be a sign of the barrier working within his mind, trying to get him to find excuses to go away. And maybe the barrier had some kind of intelligence and was able to learn, in which case it might never be fooled again by his device of concentrating on his urgent need to feed the baboons rather than his real purpose of getting past the barrier. No, alone as he was, it was up to him to make a decision.
It will kill you.
What was that, the Oversoul talking in his mind? Or the barrier? Or just his own fear? Whatever the source, he knew that the fear was not irrational. Beyond that barrier nothing was alive—there must be a reason for that. Why should he imagine that he would be the exception, the one living thing that could cross? After all, when the barrier was built in the first place there must have been plants on both sides of the barrier, and even if it were impassable, life should have continued on both sides. Perhaps forty million years of evolution would have made the flora and fauna of the two sides quite different from each other, but life should have flourished, shouldn't it? Mere isolation couldn't kill off all life with such brutal thoroughness.
It will kill you.
Maybe it will, thought Nafai defiantly. Maybe I'll die. But the Oversoul brought us here for a purpose—to get us to Earth. Even though the Oversoul couldn't think directly of Vusadka, or at least could not speak of it to humans, nevertheless Vusadka had to be the reason the Oversoul had brought them here, so close to it. So, one way or another, we have to get past this barrier.
Only we are not here. Only I am here. And it's quite possible that no one will ever be here again, if I don't succeed this time. If I fail, then that's fine, we'll try then to seek another way in. And if I succeed in crossing the barrier and then find that something beyond it kills me before I can get back, well, the others will at least know, from the fact that I never return, that they have to be more careful about getting into this place.
Never return.
He thought of his children—quiet, brilliant Chveya; Zhatva, wise and compassionate; mischievous Motiga; bright-spirited Izuchaya; and the little twins, Serp and Spel. Can I leave them fatherless?
I can if I must. I can because they'll have Luet as their mother, and Shuya and Issya to help her, and Father and Mother too. I can leave them if I must because that would be better than returning to them, having failed to fulfil the purpose of our lives for no reason better than fear of my own death.
He pressed against the barrier. It seemed not to give at all under his hand. The harder he pressed, the more it seemed to slide around under his hand. Yet with all that illusion of sliding, his hand did not actually slip to the right or the left, up or down. In fact, the friction seemed almost perfect—while pressing inward he couldn't slide his hand across the surface, even though it felt like the surface was madly sliding in every direction under his hand.
He stepped back, picked up a rock, and lobbed it at the barrier. It hit the invisible wall, stuck for a moment, and then gradually slid downward.
This thing isn't a wall at all, realized Nafai, not if it can grab the stone and then let it slide down. Could it even sense what the thing is that struck it, and respond differently for stones than for, say, birds?
Nafai picked up a clod of turf. He saw with satisfaction that there were several grubs and an earthworm in it. He heaved it at the barrier.
Again it stuck for a moment and then began to slide downward. But not at the same rate. The dirt went first, cleanly separated from the roots. Then all the vegetable matter slid down, leaving only the grubs and the earthworm on the face of the barrier. At last they, too, slid down.
This barrier is able to sort out what strikes it, thought Nafai.
It is able to tell the difference between living and dead, between animal and vegetable. Why not between human and nonhuman?
Nafai looked down at his own clothing. What would the barrier make of that? He had no idea how the barrier sensed the nature of the things that struck it. Perhaps it could tell before he touched it that he was human. But there was also the chance that the clothing would disguise him a little. Of course, he had no idea whether that would be good or bad.
Again he picked up a rock, but this time he didn't lob it, he threw it as hard as he could. Again it stuck on the barrier.
No, this time it stuck in the barrier. Nafai could see by pressing his hands to the barrier on either side of the stone, as it slid downward, that the stone had actually embedded itself in the barrier.
Nafai took his sling from his belt, laid a stone in the pocket, swung it vigorously, and hurled it at the barrier.
It stuck, and for a moment Nafai thought that it was going to behave like the other items.
Instead, the rock clung for a moment and then dropped down inside the barrier.
It had crossed! It had had enough momentum and it had passed through. The barrier had slowed it so much that it almost didn't make it, but it had kept just enough momentum to make it through. The only trouble was that Nafai had no idea how to hurl himself at the barrier with anything like the force that the stone had had. Even if he could, the force of striking it might kill him.
Oh, yes, of course it will, Nafai, you fool. The whole barrier system was set up to exclude humans, so of course it will let you pass through.
Nafai leaned back against the barrier to think. To his surprise, after a couple of moments the barrier began to slide him down toward the ground. Or rather, it slid his clothing toward the ground, taking him with it. It had done nothing of the kind to his hands. When he touched the wall with bare skin, it had let him stay in place and did not move him at all.
With difficulty he pulled himself away from the invisible wall. It clung to his clothing as it had held the rocks, the dirt, the grass, the grubs and the worm. There are different rules for humans, he realized. This wall does know the difference between me and my clothing.
Impulsively he stripped off his tunic, baring his arms. Then he swung his arm as fast as he could, hurling his fist into the barrier. It stung like hitting a brick wall—but it passed through.
It passed through! His fist was on the other side of the barrier, just like the stone that had passed. And where his arm stuck through the barrier he couldn't feel anything unusual at all. He could unflex his fist on the other side and wiggle his fingers, and though the air was perhaps a bit cooler there, there was no pain, no distortion, no obvious problem at all.
Can I follow my hand through the wall?
He pushed forward, and was able to slowly push his arm in right to the shoulder. But when his chest reached the barrier, he was blocked; when he twisted for a better angle, his head also came up against the barrier and stopped.
What if I'm stuck here forever—half in and half out?
In alarm he pulled away, and his arm came out easily enough. He could feel some resistance, but nothing painful, and nothing pressed against his skin to hold him. In a few moments he was free.
He touched the arm and hand that had been on the other side and couldn't find anything wrong with them. Whatever kept life from thriving on the other side hadn't killed him yet— if it was a poison, it wasn't immediate, and it certainly wasn't the barrier itself.
He reviewed the rules he had learned for crossing the wall. It had to be bare skin. He had to strike it with some force. And if he wanted his whole body through, he'd have to strike the barrier with his whole body at once.
He stripped off his clothing, folding it neatly and laying it on top of his bow and arrows. Then he piled some rocks on top of them so they wouldn't blow away. Silently he hoped that he would indeed need these clothes again.
For a moment he contemplated leaping face first against the wall, but didn't like the idea—striking it with his fist had felt like hitting a wall, after all, and he didn't relish doing that with his face or his groin. Not that it would feel wonderful to do it back-first either, but it was the lesser of two evils.
He walked a ways along the edge of the barrier until he came to a place where there was a fairly steep hill. He walked to the top and then, after a few deep breaths and a whispered farewell to his family, he ran headlong down the hill. Within moments his running was completely out of control, except that when he neared the wall he planted a foot and flung his body in a wild spin designed to lay him flat against the barrier.
Flat was not what he achieved at all. Instead his buttocks passed through first, and then, as he slowed, his thighs and his body up to the shoulders. His arms and head remained outside the barrier, even as his feet fell through and struck the stony ground on the other side. His heels hurt, but he hardly cared about that, because here he stood, his body inside, his arms and head outside.
I've got to get back outside, he thought, and try it again.
Too late. In the last moments before he stopped moving at all, his shoulders had passed inside. He was stuck again as he had been before, unable to bring his body along to follow his arms. The key difference this time was that his head was outside the barrier, and his chin and ears seemed to be reluctant to follow him inside. Worse, he couldn't even bring his arms all the way inside, because he needed the full weight of his body to pull them through, and with his chin hung up on the barrier he couldn't do it.
This has got to be the stupidest way anyone ever found to die, thought Nafai.
Remember your geometry, he told himself. Remember anatomy. My chin may be at too sharp an angle from my neck for me to pull it through, but at the top of my head there's a smooth, continuous curve. If I can just jut my chin forward and pull my head back… assuming that I don't rip my ears off in the process… but those can flex, can't they?
Slowly, laboriously, he tilted his head back and felt himself pulling through. I can do it, he thought. And then my arms will be easy enough.
His head came through all at once, at the end, his face fully inside the barrier. Only his arms continued to protrude through to the outside.
He meant to pull his arms through at once, after resting for just a moment, but as he rested, panting from the exertion, he realized that his need to breathe only increased, and was growing desperate. He was suffocating somehow, even as he drew great draughts of strange-smelling air into his lungs.
Strange-smelling air, dry and cool, and he wasn't getting any oxygen. Even as the panic of suffocation rose within him, his rational mind realized what he should have known all along: The reason that nothing lived behind the barrier was that there was no oxygen in here. It was a place designed to eliminate all decay—and most decay, the rapidest of it, was linked to the presence of oxygen, or oxygen and hydrogen joined to form water. There could be no life, and therefore not even microbes to eat away at surfaces; no water to condense or freeze or flow; no oxidation of metals. And if the atmosphere also failed to support anaerobic life-forms, there'd be little within the barrier to cause decay except sunlight, cosmic radiation, and atomic decay. The barrier had been set up to preserve everything within it, so it could last for forty million years.
This sudden comprehension of the purpose of the barrier was no comfort. For his rational mind was not particularly in control right now. No sooner had he realized that he could not breathe than his hands, still sticking through the barrier, began clutching for air, trying to pull him back through the barrier. But he was in exactly the same situation he had been in before, on the outside, when only an arm was through the wall. He could push his arms deeper into the barrier, but when his face and chest reached the wall, he could go no farther. His hands could touch the breathable air on the other side, but that was all.
Made savage by fear, he beat his head against the barrier, but there simply wasn't leverage—even with panic driving his muscles—to get force enough to push his face through to the breathable air. He really was going to die. Yet he still struck his head against the barrier, again, again, harder.
Perhaps with the last blow he stunned himself; perhaps he was simply weakening from lack of oxygen, or merely losing his balance. Whatever happened, he fell backward, the resistance of the barrier slowing his fall as his arms slipped inside through the invisible wall.
This is fine, thought Nafai. If I can just get to where the slope goes the other way, I can run down toward the barrier and get through again, only this time face first. Even as he thought of this cheerful plan, he knew it wouldn't work. He had spent too long already trying to get through the barrier right here—he had used up too much oxygen inside his own body, and there was no way he had enough left to climb another hill and make another downward run before he blacked out.
His hands came free and he fell backward onto the stony ground.
He must have struck very hard, for to him it sounded like the loudest, longest thunderclap he had ever heard. And then wind tore across his body, picking him up, rolling him, twisting him.
As he gasped in the wind, he could feel that somehow, miraculously, his breathing was working again. He was getting oxygen. He was also getting bruised as the wind tossed him here and there. On the stones. On the grass.
On the grass.
The wind had died down to a gusty breeze—he opened his eyes. He had been flung every which way, perhaps fifty yards. It took him a while to orient himself. But, lying on grass, he knew he was outside the barrier. Was the wind another defense mechanism, then, hurling intruders through the wall? Certainly his body was scraped and bruised enough to bear that interpretation. He could still see a few dust devils whirling in the distance, far within the dead land.
He got up and walked to the barrier. He reached out for it, but it wasn't there. The barrier was gone.
That was the cause of the wind. Atmospheres that had not mixed in forty million years had suddenly combined again, and the pressure must not have been equal on both sides of the barrier. It was like a balloon popping, and he had been tossed about like a scrap of the balloon's skin.
Why had the barrier disappeared?
Because a human passed through it completely. Because if the barrier had not come down, you would have died.
To Nafai it seemed like the voice of the Oversoul inside his head.
(Yes, I'm here, you know me.)
"I destroyed the barrier?"
(No, I did. As soon as you passed all the way through, the perimeter systems informed me that a human being had penetrated. All at once I became aware of parts of myself that had been hidden from me for forty million years. I could see all the barriers, knew at once all their history and understood their purpose and how to control them. If you had been some exceptionally determined intruder who didn't belong here, I would have told the perimeter systems to let you die; they would have immediately been hidden from me again. That has happened twice before, in all these years. But you were the very one I meant to bring here, and so the purpose of the barrier was finished. I ordered its collapse, bringing oxygen to you and, therefore, to the rest of this place.)
THE SHIPS OF EARTH Page 32