Orbitsville

seven

Garamond’s sense of dislocation was almost complete.

He received an impression of grasslands and low hills running on for ever — and, although his mind was numbed, his thoughts contained an element of immediate acceptance, as if an event for which he had been preparing all his life had finally occurred. Garamond felt as though he had been born again. In that first moment, when his vision was swamped by the brilliance of the impossible landscape, he was able to look at the circular lake of blackness from which he had emerged and see it through alien eyes. The grass — the tall, lush grass grew right to the rim! — shimmered green and it was difficult to accept that there were stars down in that pool. It was impossible to comprehend that were he to lie at its edge and look downwards he would see sunken ships drifting in the black crystal waters…

Something was emerging from the lake. Something white, groping blindly upwards.

Garamond’s identity returned to him abruptly as he recognized the spacesuited figure of Lieutenant Kraemer struggling to an upright position. He moved to help the other man and became aware of yet another ‘impossibility’ — there was gravity sufficient to give him almost his normal Earth weight. Kraemer and he leaned against each other like drunk men, bemused, stunned, helpless because there were blue skies where there should have been only the hostile blackness of space, because they had stepped through the looking glass into a secret garden. The grass moved gently, reminding Garamond of perhaps the greatest miracle of all, of the presence of an atmosphere. He felt an insane but powerful urge to open his helmet, and was fighting it when his tear-blurred eyes focused on the buildings.

They were visible at several points around the rim of the aperture, ancient buildings, low and ruinous. The reason they had not registered immediately with Garamond was that time had robbed them of the appearance of artifacts, clothing the shattered walls with moss and climbing grasses. As he began to orient himself within the new reality, and the images being transmitted from eyes to brain became capable of interpretation, he saw amid the ruins the skeletons of what had once been great machines.

“Look over there,” he said. “What do you think?”

There was no reply from Kraemer. Garamond glanced at his companion, saw his lips moving silently behind his faceplate and remembered they were still on radio communication. Both men switched to the audio circuits which used small microphones and speakers on the chest panels.

“The suit radios seem to have packed up,” Kraemer said casually, then his professional composure cracked. “Is it a dream? Is it? Is it a dream?” His voice was hoarse.

“If it is, we’re all in it together. What do you think of the ruins over there?”

Kraemer shielded his eyes and studied the buildings, apparently seeing them for the first time. “They remind me of fortifications.”

“Me too.” Garamond’s mind made an intuitive leap. “It wasn’t always possible to stroll in here the way we just did.”

“All those dead ships?”

“I’d say a lot of people once tried to come through that opening, and other people tried to keep them out.”

“But why should they? I mean, if the whole inside of the sphere is like this…” Kraemer gestured at the sea of grass. “Oh, Christ! If it’s all like this there’s as much living room as you’d get on a million Earths.”

“More,” Garamond told him. “I’ve already done the sums. This sphere has a surface area equivalent to 625,000,000 times the total surface of Earth. If we allow for the fact that only a quarter of the Earth’s surface is land and perhaps only half of that is usable, it means the sphere is equivalent to five billion Earths.

“That’s one each for every man, woman and child in existence.”

“Provided one thing.”

“What’s that?”

“That we can breathe the air.”

“We’ll find that out right now.” Garamond felt a momentary dizziness. When he had been playing around with comparisons of the size of Earth and the sphere he had treated it as a purely mathematical exercise, his mind solely on the figures, but Kraemer had gone ahead of him to think in terms of people actually living on the sphere, arriving at the aperture in fleets sent from crowded and worn-out Earth, spreading outward across those prairies which promised to go on for ever. Trying to accommodate the vision along with his other speculations about the origins and purpose of the sphere brought Garamond an almost-physical pain behind his eyes. And superimposed on all his swirling thoughts, overriding every other consideration, a new concept of his personal status was struggling to be born. If he, Vance Garamond, gave humanity five billion Earths… then he, and not Elizabeth Lindstrom, would be the most important human being alive… then his wife and child would be safe.

“There’s an analyser kit in the buggy,” Kraemer said. “Shall I go for it?”

“Of course.” Garamond was surprised by the lieutenant’s question, then with a flash of insight he understood that it had taken only a few minutes of exposure to the unbounded lebensraum of the sphere to alter a relationship which was part of the tight, closed society of the Two Worlds. Kraemer was actually reluctant to leave the secret garden by climbing down into the circular black lake, and — as the potential owner of a super-continent — he saw no reason why Garamond should not go instead. So quickly, Garamond thought. We’ll all be changed so quickly.

Aloud he said, “While you’re getting the kit you can break the news to the others — they’ll want to see for themselves.”

“Right.” Kraemer looked pleased at the idea of being first with the most sensational story of all time. He went to the edge of the aperture, lay down and lowered his head into the blackness, obviously straining to force the helmet through the membrane field which retained the sphere’s atmosphere. After wriggling sideways a little to obtain his grip on the buggy’s leg, Kraemer slid out of sight into the darkness. Garamond again felt a sense of dislocation. The fact that he had weight, that there was a natural-seeming gravity pulling him ‘downwards’ against the grassy soil created an illusion that he was standing on the surface of a planet. His instincts rebelled against the idea that he was standing on a thin shell of unknown metal, that below him was the hard vacuum of space, that the buggy was close underneath his feet, upside down, clinging to the sphere by the force of its drive.

Garamond moved away from the aperture a short distance, shocked by the incongruity of the heavy spacesuit which shut him off from what surely must be his natural element. He knelt for a closer look at the grass. It grew thickly, in mixed varieties which to his inexperienced eye had stems and laminae very similar to those of Earth. He parted the grass, pushed his gloved fingers into the matted roots and scooped up a handful of brown soil. Small crumbs of it clung to the material of his gloves, making moist smears. Garamond looked upwards and for the first time noticed the lacy white streamers of cloud. With the small sun positioned vertically overhead it was difficult to study the sky, but beyond the cloud he thought he could distinguish narrow bands of a lighter blue which created a delicate ribbed effect curving from horizon to horizon. He made a mental note to point it out to Chief Science Officer O’Hagan for early investigation, and returned his attention to the soil. Digging down into it a short distance he came to the ubiquitous grey metal of the shell, its surface unmarked by the damp earth. Garamond placed his hand against the metal and tried to imagine the building of the sphere, to visualize the creation of a seamless globe of metal with a circumference of a billion kilometres.

There could be only one source for such an inconceivable quantity of shell material, and that was in the sun itself. Matter is energy, and energy is matter. Every active star hurls the equivalent of millions of tons a day of its own substance into space in the form of light and other radiations. But in the case of Pengetty’s Star someone had set up a boundary, turned that energy back on itself, manipulating and modifying it, translating it into matter. With precise control over the most elemental forces of the universe they had created an impervious shell of exactly the sort of material they wanted — harder than diamond, immutable, eternal. When the sphere was complete, grown to the required thickness, they had again dipped their hands into the font of energy and wrought fresh miracles, coating the interior surface of the sphere with soil and water and air. Organic acids, even complete cells and seeds, had been constructed in the same way, because at the ultimate level of reality there is no difference between a blade of grass and one of steel…

“The air is good, sir.” Kraemer’s voice came from close behind. Garamond stood up, turned and saw the lieutenant had opened his faceplate.

“What was the reading like?”

“A shade low in oxygen, but everything else is about right.” Kraemer was grinning like a schoolboy. “You should try some.”

“I will.” Garamond opened his own helmet and took a deep breath. The air was soft and thick and pure. He discovered at that moment that he had never known truly fresh air before. Low shouts came from the direction of the aperture as other spacesuited figures emerged.

“I told the others they could come through,” Kraemer said. “All except Braunek — he’s holding the buggy in place. It’s all right, isn’t it?”

“It’s all right, yes. I’ll be setting up a rota system to let everybody on the ship have a look before we go back.” Again Garamond sensed a difference in Kraemer’s attitude — before the lieutenant had seen the interior of the sphere he would not have cleared the buggy without obtaining permission.

“Before we go back? But as soon as we signal Earth the traffic’s all going to be coming this way. Why go back?”

“No reason, I suppose.” Garamond had been thinking about Aileen’s reluctance ever to travel more than a few kilometres from their apartment. He had been planning to return her to the old familiar surroundings as soon as possible, but perhaps there was no need. Standing on the interior surface of the sphere was as close as one could get to being on the infinite plane of the geometer, yet there was nothing in the experience to inspire agoraphobia. The line of sight did not tangent away from the downward curve of a planet and so the uniform density of the air set a limit to the distance a man could see. Garamond studied the horizon. It appeared to curve upwards slightly, in contrast to that of Earth, but it did not seem much further away. There was no sense of peering into immensities.

Kraemer put the toe of one boot down into the small hole Garamond had made and tapped the metal at the bottom. “Did you find anything?”

“Such as?”

“Circuits. For this synthetic gravity.”

“No. I don’t think we’ll find any circuits in our sense of the word.”

“What then?”

“Atoms with their interiors rearranged or specially designed to do a job. Perfect machines.”

“It sounds incredible.”

“We’ve taken the first step in that direction ourselves with our magnetic resonance engines. Anyway, what could be more incredible than all this?” Some instinct prompted Garamond to push the soil back into the hole and tamp it down with his foot, repairing the damage he had done to the grassy surface. In the region close to the aperture the soil was thinly distributed, but there were hills in the distance which looked as though they could have been formed by drifting. “As soon as your men have got over the shock tell them to gather vegetation and soil samples,” he said.

“I already have,” Kraemer replied carelessly. “By the way — none of the suit radios is working, though mine was all right again when I went back out through the aperture.”

“There must be a damping effect — that’s something else for O’Hagan to investigate when he gets here. Let’s have a look at some of those ruins.”

They walked to the nearest of the indistinct mounds. Under the blanket of climbing grasses there was just enough remaining structure to suggest a floor plan of massive walls and simple square rooms. Here and there, close to the black lake of stars, were distorted metallic stumps which had once been parts of machines. They had a sagging, lava-flow appearance as though they had been destroyed by intense heat.

Kraemer gave a low whistle. “Who do you think won? The people who were trying to get in, or the ones who were trying to keep them out?”

“I’d say the invaders won, Lieutenant. I’ve been thinking about all those dead ships hanging out there. They can’t be in their battle stations because even if they had been stationary during the fight the forces used against them would have kicked them adrift and there would have been nothing for us to find. It looks as though they were rounded up and carefully parked just outside the aperture.”

“Why?”

“For salvage, perhaps. There may be no metals available within the sphere.”

“For beating into ploughshares? It’s good farming country, all right — but where are the farmers?”

“Nomads? Perhaps you don’t have to till the soil. Maybe you just keep moving for ever, following the seasons, with the grain always ripening just ahead of you.”

Kraemer laughed. “What seasons? It must always be high summer here — and high noon, too. It can’t even get dark with that sun right above your head.”

“But it is getting dark, Lieutenant.” Garamond spoke peacefully, all capacity for surprise exhausted. “Look over there.”

He pointed at the horizon beyond the black ellipse of the aperture to where the shimmering blue-greens of the distance had begun to deepen. There was an unmistakable gathering of shade.

“That’s impossible,” Kraemer protested. He looked up at the sun.“Oh, no!”

Garamond looked up and saw that the sun was no longer circular. It had one straight side, like a gold coin from which somebody had clipped a generous segment. Shouts from the other men indicated that they had noticed the event. While they watched, the still-brilliant area of the sun’s disc grew progressively smaller as though a shutter were being drawn across it. At the same time, keeping pace, the darkness increased on the corresponding horizon and a new phenomenon made itself apparent. The delicate ribbed effect which Garamond had noticed in the sky earlier became clearer, the alternating bands of lighter and darker blue now standing out vividly. In the space of a minute, as the sun began to disappear completely, the slim curving ribs became the dominant feature of the sky, swirling across it from two foci, sharply defined as the striations in polished agate. Near the horizon, where they dipped behind denser levels of air, the bands blurred and dispersed into a prismatic haze. The last searing sliver of sun vanished and Garamond glimpsed a wall of shadow rushing over the landscape towards him at orbital speed, then it was night, beneath a canopy of stratified sapphire. Garamond stayed beside the lake of stars for an hour before returning to his ship and sending a tachyonic signal to Starflight House.