Shadow of Heaven

Chapter Nineteen

There had been three mud tremors during the nightmare ride to the He’s western rim and the subsequent five-mile march to the elevator head. Each time, Stirling had closed his eyes to wait it out and, each time, had seen a familiar face, stern and accusing. When we reach that elevator, he told himself, I’m going down below with all the others. Nobody could expect me to do anything else, not even my—another part of his mind had sent up a frightened clamor, trying to obliterate the thought, but Stirling had forced it through—not even my father. Completion of the thought brought a feeling of catharsis, of release; and at the same time, the certain knowledge he was caught in a trap which had been sprung on him a thousand years earlier.

Now he was looking at Melissa across two sets of ice-encrusted barriers: one on the elevator car, the other on the lip of the docking bay. The wind made irregular moaning sounds in the light-spewing gap between the two structures. Stirling turned in the direction of the monitor cameras and waved both arms. Red lights glowed suddenly on the corners of the freight car, and caused the villagers inside it to glance around them uneasily.

“Melissa,” he called above the wind. “Don’t worry. It’s going to work out.”

She smiled wanly and nodded, making him aware of how inane his words must have sounded. How could it work out? Melissa’s personality had already begun to crumple, and the jaws of the Compression were scarcely beginning to close. When the car dropped away, he kept his eyes on her face until the cold, brilliant air blurred his vision; then he turned in the direction of the power station,

Stirling could have traveled faster by running down the center of a strip; but the risk of being seen from the station would have been too great, and he kept at track level. His heavy rifle seemed to become more awkward with every mile he covered, but he jogged along the track bed determinedly by stiffening his ankles to prevent them turning on the uneven surfaces. The air seemed to have become colder and thinner, stinging his throat and lungs as he labored to keep up the pace. There was no movement of aircraft near the power station, but dark specks disturbed the He’s milky canopy far away to the southeast. He guessed the Air Force was lifting the wounded villagers to safety, and the load of bis self-imposed responsibility eased slightly.

The act of moving quickly, without overbalancing or acquiring a broken leg, left little capacity to spare for thinking; but stray thoughts occasionally leaped into the forefront of his mind and hovered there, dancing, like targets supported on a spray of water. Why am I this? Where is Melissa right now? What am I doing, anyway? Where is Melissa right now? Can my brother survive this? Where is Melissa?

The second major ripple almost took Stirling unawares.

He was less than two miles from the power station and sinking deeper into his maelstrom of repetitious thoughts, when the channel in which he was moving suddenly glinted with daylight far ahead, like the surface mirages on a sun-baked road. The patch of brilliance raced towards him like a pool of quicksilver speeding down an incline; then he realized it was being carried along a massive wave front. Daylight was spilling up between the soil beds as the structural distortions associated with the wave pulled them apart. Stirling looked blankly down at his feet. There was one on each track, and in a matter of seconds there was going to be nothing except thin air right where he was standing.

He hurled the rifle up onto the soil bed on his right and tried to vault up after it, but his foot slipped on the dewy metal. Instead of rolling easily into the green-gold wall of winter wheat, he scrabbled ineffectually at the edge of the huge pan and slid back down onto the tracks. The vast groaning sound he had heard once before caught up with him, and the rails beneath his body began to stir like live creatures. He leaped upwards just as the surface between the rails opened up into a broad highway of light and space. His hands caught two slim bundles of wheat stalks which promptly uprooted themselves and allowed him to slide backwards into the lethal fountain of brilliance. The edge of the pan raked across his wrists; he gripped it and hung on while hell’s legions battled around him. He was lifted upwards so violently he was almost separated from his metal life line, and at the same time a fierce rush of air blasted downwards past him into the low pressure zone outside the He’s shell field.

Stirling clung on, at the center of the inhuman power contest, while the steel forests of the substructure shrieked in torment. As abruptly as it had arrived, the wave passed by on its journey to the rim; and the adjoining strips dropped back together again with a sound like two moons colliding. Stirling was driven down onto the tracks with a blow that paralyzed his solar plexus and shut off his breath. He lay on his back between the rails. He was aware that a secondary ripple might part them at any second, but was completely unable to do anything about it. No breath, no movement, he thought with a sense of having been relieved of an irksome duty. It was not until the ability to gulp air had returned fully that he felt any compulsion to get to his feet and retrieve the rifle.

A low, whistling noise accompanied him as he moved off. He discovered that the previously invisible joint between the strips could now be seen as a hair-crack in the surface, and the He’s air was escaping through it. The structure had withstood its punishment remarkably well, but it was nearing the limits of the redundancy which had been designed into it. Stirling put his head down and tried to move faster, anxious for the ground not to drop away beneath his feet.

The power station’s single door, above the He’s surface, was on the north side. Stirling began cutting diagonally across strips to approach it from the rear. He was checking the mechanism of the rad-rifle as he went. The air was noticeably colder and thinner; and smoke from the guttering perma-flares was drifting low across the soil in insubstantial black ribbons and creating the atmosphere of a winter battlefield. He got into the station’s shadow, activated the rifle, and slowly moved towards the entrance. It occurred to him that he had gotten there very easily— which was faintly surprising, considering how careful Johnny had been about posting look-outs earlier.. Ignoring the flickerings of unease, he stepped around the corner and saw the blunt nose of a machine gun projected from the central doorway. Noting the silvery bullet splashes on the metal, Stirling kept his back against the wall and moved towards the door until he could hear voices inside the building.

“… last time, Jaycee, there’s not enough control. Unless we take a month and go for a system with infinite resolution—and I mean infinite—we’re going to rip this plant right out of the raft.”

“We haven’t got a month, and we don’t need a month.” Johnny’s voice was shrill, rapid, like a speeded-up recording.

“Well, I don’t see how it’s going to work, that’s all.” The voice was both surly and dubious. Stirling recognized it as belonging to Theo.

“I’m not asking you to see anything. Just do what we agreed we could do.”

“The original plan gave me a couple of months or more. You know, Jaycee, you’d fall too—just like the rest of us.”

“Meaning what, Theo? Meaning what?” Johnny’s voice was like glass shattering.

“Meaning, Mr. Jesus Christ, that you really can’t walk on water, or on air.”

Don’t say things like that, Stirling thought, don’t ever … A man sobbed with pain, and the sound was followed by a series of sickening, meaty thuds. Stirling put the muzzle of the rad-rifle through the doorway and looked inside. Theo was lying on the cable-strewn floor; Johnny was standing over him and staring reprovingly at his own fists. Four other villagers were looking on with carefully expressionless faces.

“Now what made me do that?” Johnny smiled sadly and was stooping to lift Theo when he saw Stirling. He shook his head disbelievingly. “Do you know what made me do that?”

“You had to do it, Johnny.” Stirling stepped inside, past the unattended machine gun. “You couldn’t overlook a case of lese-majeste. Or was it blasphemy?”

“You shouldn’t have come back, Victor.”

“Let’s not go through all that again,” Stirling said with a weariness he really felt. He looked at the other men in the gloomy, stinking room. “You’re all going down below, and you’ve a choice of two ways. Run for the elevator, or stay here and shake the He to bits. Which is it to be?”

One of the villagers, a red-haired man named Hewitt, stepped forward immediately. “All we needed was time. It would have worked, you know. We could have flown this thing anywhere.”

“Perhaps,” Stirling said. “Take Theo with you when you leave.”

Hewitt shrugged, then nodded to the others; and they began to gather the unconscious man off the floor.

“You fools,” Johnny squawked. “He’s the one who robbed you of that time.” In his anger he overloaded the prosthetic in his throat, and some of the words were almost lost in a querulous whine. “Our own city on the Moon. There’s nothing to stop us.”

Stirling ignored him and addressed himself to Hewitt. “The He has been evacuated, so you have no hostages. If you move it an inch—especially if anyone gets the idea you would like to get it over a city—Raddall won’t hesitate to vaporize the lot. As well as that, the He’s leaking air at every joint… .”

“Come on you guys,” Hewitt interrupted. “What are we waiting for?” They raised Theo clear of the floor and carried him out.

The last man hesitated at the door. “Jaycee, I …”

Johnny silenced him with one shrill obscenity, turned his back, and swaggered further into the room.

“You too, Johnny,” Stirling said curtly. “We’re all going down together. You’re the main reason I came back.”

“I’ll say.” Johnny kept walking; and Stirling, following behind him, saw he was heading for the master circuit breakers, the ones from which he had burned the locks On his first day in the power station.

“Johnny!” Stirling spoke huskily. “Don’t go near that panel.”

“If you’re going to burn me, you’d better do it now because I’m … there!”

Johnny leaped forward and laid his hands on the red-glowing handles. Stirling squeezed the trigger of the rifle, but nothing happened. For a second he thought the weapon had failed to function; then he realized the fault had been in his finger. It had refused to move. Johnny looked back over his shoulder, read Stirling’s eyes, and smiled triumphantly.

“As you said, Victor—we’re all going down together.” He again spoke without moving his lips, and Stirling suddenly appreciated that the action had a peculiar relevance to the situation. They were boys again, and terrible things were about to be said between them. Things which, to the savage, boyish mind, could not be said without all the outward manifestations of menace and hatred. The speaking without moving lips; the grotesque imitation of a World War II Gestapo officer; the ritual ripping open of the fly, which placed the other boy at a shameful disadvantage; the threatening with fists or weapons; Johnny wearing his father’s boots, the symbols of virility, of male aggression, of invading strength.

“I’ll say I was the real reason you came back, big brother.”

This has all happened before, Stirling thought, and he backed away in fear. Are you going to do it? His father’s voice was real, accusing. Or are you going to let me down again? You must realize . . .

“I don’t want to hear it,” Stirling shouted, still backing away.

“But you must,” Johnny said reasonably. “I can see you’ve blocked it all out again, Victor, and that’s not good. It’s important for you to know why you ran away from the fam-apt at the first opportunity, why you had to come here after me, why you had to take away everything I had, and why—even now—you couldn’t burn me to save your life.”

“I’m warning you, Johnny.”

“But there’s nothing for you to feel guilty about, Victor. You were only a kid when your father disappeared. You couldn’t have been expected to defend your mother’s bed; so there’s no need for you to feel anything at all when you look at me. The only connection between us is that my father took your mother to bed and … “

Stirling threw the rifle aside and dived for Johnny’s throat with clawing fingers; he caught the metal disc of the prosthetic and ripped it away from the flesh. Try to say it now! Johnny made a thick choking sound, and crimson bubbles appeared on the side of his throat. He thrust Stirling away with one hand, and with the other pulled all the circuit breakers. Stirling and his brother locked eyes for one frozen minute.

Then Heaven fell away beneath them.

The fall began slowly; the huge structure continued to support itself for a few seconds, until its output-smoothing reservoirs discharged the last of their stored energy into the power grid. Stirling turned and ran blindly from the power station; he found himself bounding across the surface in gigantic dream-leaps, making a nightmare escape where no escape was possible. His steps grew longer and longer as gravity appeared to vanish, and instinct told him he would part company with the soil beds forever unless he stopped moving. He arced headfirst into the uncaring wheat and held on, as if trying to steal some of its blithe immortality.

Full weightlessness arrived an instant later, and with it the now familiar sounds of Armageddon: groans so deep and vast that each separate vibration was a thunderclap in its own right; near-human shrieks; ear-splitting reports as structural members went beyond their limits of elasticity, and snapped clean, or were torn apart at their laser-welded seams. Some of the negative-gravity booster units patterned across the grid used their dregs of power more efficiently than others, thereby imposing even greater strains on the substructure; and the He broke up into immense flat sections. Stirling, looking up in fascinated horror, saw the ruler-straight horizons writhe and shiver themselves into misty fragments. The sky darkened above him as the segment to which he was clinging dipped one edge and slid in below others. Blurred backdrops of triangulated girders moved by in slow motion—rocking, spinning, receding—while the up-rushing wind roared and chanted in his ears.

Stirling screamed once, heard nothing, and found himself, incredibly, looking at the power station across a cloud-streaming gap. Although it was on a separate fragment, it appeared to remain fixed for a moment through a chance matching of velocities and directions. Johnny, his bare torso streaked with blood, appeared in the doorway. He gripped the doorframe with one hand and held something dark aloft with the other, waving it triumphantly in the air like a battle trophy. Then the power station canted ponderously and went into a slow rotation which carried it out of sight.

Stirling closed his eyes. Johnny had been holding his father’s ancient flying boots.

Eons later he felt the return of gravity starting gradually, and increasing to a fierce pressure which drove him down into the matted roots. Stirling opened his eyes to a scene of aerial majesty. The flat segment, to which he was clinging, had side-slipped until it was almost clear of the melee; and it was now slicing upwards. Beyond its lower edge, mile-long fragments of the He descended towards the ocean in a lazy, spinning, countermarching, colliding swarm. Many of them trailed swirling black streamers of earth and yellow motes, which were agricultural robots plummeting vertically through the swarm, while military drift-ships hovered outside it against a brilliant background of sunlit ocean, monolithic clouds, and the seriate towers along the coast.

As Stirling watched, his own segment completed its upward sweep and curved into the chaos again like a fighter plane returning to a dogfight. The falling-leaf motion carried it deep into the swarm and miraculously back out again—once, twice, three times—before it reached the ocean. When the grazing impact came, Stirling cut an untidy furrow through the wheat strip for over a hundred yards—squandering a fortune in kinetic energy in the process—and then he was treading the icy waters of the North Atlantic in clear sunlight.

The shadow of Heaven had been lifted.