Seahorse in the Sky

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

“LOOK UP, CHILDREN,” continued the voice. “Look up at the last Sphere of Creation in the known worlds. It is beautiful, is it not?”

Russell’s mind was reeling. He was no longer aware of Anna and Farn zem Marur. They might never have existed—except perhaps as phantoms in some half-forgotten dream. He was alone in a world of aliens. He was alone with sea-horses, fairies, demons, dragonflies and the secret of the ages. He knew that he was on the verge of madness, and the knowledge made him unnaturally calm. It was as if someone had poured iced water into his brain. As if someone—or something—had taken control of volition, emotion, reasoning, acceptance, credulity. As if someone—or something— was holding him in case he should fall.

He looked up the great column—smooth, hypnotic, awe-inspiring, beautiful. He looked up the great column at the green translucent bubble, the Sphere of Creation that seemed now to cast its green penumbra over the entire world.

“It is beautiful,” whispered Russell, unaware even of his whispering. “It is surely the most beautiful thing there is.”

“It is the last of the great machines,” went on the voice, “the last refuge of the Vruvyir. When the kinetic fails, the ghosts of the ghosts will fail, one by one, and the Vruvyir will live only in those who come after… Be afraid, little ones, but not too much afraid. The burden of knowledge is heavy.”

Russell tried desperately to marshal his tumbling thoughts. “You say the Vruvyir are dead. Yet we have seen them—or what is left of them. They—you—are here, speaking to us, telling us the strangest of all the stories of creation. You are presuming to be gods, yet you also say that the gods are dead.”

The laughter—touched now, so Russell thought, with an immense sadness—rolled once more.

“Little one, we are ghosts speaking to ghosts. Thus far, you have come. There is a little farther to go. The price you must pay is measured in biological time. Are you willing to pay such a price?”

“We wish to know,” said Russell, almost hysterically. “We wish to know. We have endured much, we have risked death to discover why we are here and what you, our jailers, are like… We wish to know!

How did we come here? Why do you say that we are ghosts also?”

“Children, you have presumed. But your presumption is interesting. The answers you seek lie in the Sphere of Creation. Find them, and be content.” Suddenly, momentarily, the world became dark. Then the darkness lifted.

It lifted upon a soft green light. It lifted upon a soft green hum of energy. It lifted in the Sphere of Creation.

Russell was falling or drifting or swimming. He had no sense of direction, no sense of time, and little sense of identity. He was in a green ocean or a green cloud or a green void. He did not know whether he was alone or not alone. He knew only that he existed.

He could not see himself—his hands, his arms, his body. He could not see his companions. He knew only that he existed.

The greenness deepened. It became a blueness. The blueness deepened. It became a blackness.

And there were stars—known stars. The constellations seen from Earth.

And then the constellations were blotted out as a great discus—black in shadow, blinding in sunlight—swung silently out of the void.

He was inside the discus, and it was not a discus but some tremendous vehicle of space, cavernous, complex, alien. He was in a chamber where strange machinery seemed to produce a muted, melancholy throb of music. He was in a chamber where spider robots scuttled about their tasks oblivious of his invisible and insubstantial presence.

Suddenly, part of the floor of the chamber turned to glass—or so it seemed. There, spread out below, still and colourful as a contour map lay Northern Europe, the North Sea and the islands of Britain.

The discus fell like a stone. The North Sea zoomed up to swallow it. Then, instantly, without shock or vibration the fantastic fall was annihilated. Beneath the transparent floor, a hundred metres below, a passenger aircraft hung as if suspended from the discus by invisible wires.

The sea moved. The jet seemed motionless. Velocities had been matched.

The transparent floor rolled noiselessly away. The spider robots hauled a mounted tube, oddly like a small astronomical telescope, into position. The tube was depressed on its mounting until it was aligned with the aircraft.

He recognized the aircraft.

The passenger jet from Stockholm to London.

A green radiance, a bar of radiance that seemed as solid as a rod of crystal, shot down to the aircraft, danced about it, englobed it.

The Stockholm to London jet was caught in a green bubble.

The bubble grew, shimmered and grew. The sphere became an egg. The egg developed a waist.

The waist narrowed. And then there were two bubbles, translucent, touching, one poised on top of the other. Alien soap bubbles blown above the world of man.

In the lower bubble, the aircraft was held frozen, captive.

In the top bubble there was… There was a vortex of light, a whirlpool of energy, a dervish dance of shadows, a ripple of condensing outlines, a shiver of forms, a freeze of patterns.

An act of recreation.

And now there were two identical aircraft locked in great green bubbles. And now the spider robots, with the exhausts from jet attachments on their pseudo-limbs writing brief vapour messages in the sky, drifted lazily down and into the top bubble, coming to rest upon the skin of the duplicate aircraft. And after them, like surrealist sausages, drifted a string of sixteen green plastic containers. Man sized.

The spider robots opened the door into the plane. Two of them entered it. Presently they began to hand out life-size dolls, stiff, immobile. The dolls were laid carefully into the containers. The lids were closed. The containers, each nursed by a spider robot, were lifted out of the green bubble and brought up to the great discus that hung over the world.

Presently, sixteen containers and sixteen spider robots had entered the discus. Presently the top bubble popped, exploded, imploded, disappeared. And there was no duplicate aircraft. Nothing.

Presently the lower bubble popped silently.

And the jet from Stockholm to London continued unconcernedly on its way.

The opening in the great space vehicle closed, and it rose towards the stars.

Then the stars dissolved, and Russell was lost once more in the green void of the Sphere of Creation. He was neither living nor dead… He was no more than a green thought in a green shade—a thread of consciousness in the profound, impossible silence of unbeing.

The thread shivered, and the movement became clothed in whispers…

“Thus do ghosts create ghosts. Thus were the facsimiles obtained. As it was with the aircraft travelling from Stockholm to London, so also was it with the red spice caravan journeying from the Kingdom of Ullos to the Upper and Lower Kingdoms of Gren Li. So, too, with the settlement of those you call the People of the River. They, like you and your companions, were englobed by projected Spheres of Creation. The replicas were made, though the originals were unaware of their manufacture. The replicas were made— molecule for molecule, heartbeat for heartbeat, thought for thought… Thus, Russell Grahame, Member of Parliament for Middleport North, has returned to London and has resigned from the Parliamentary Labour Party. Thus Anna Markova, privileged now and then to journey from Moscow to Western Europe, continues to write her features for the Russian Press. Thus Farn zem Marur serves Absu mes Marur, gonfalonier of the western keeps, in a far country and in the name of the white queen and the black…

“The burden of knowledge is heavy, is it not?” went on the whispering voice. “Little one, how will you face the realization that you and your companions are no more than replicas of those who knew not that the very pattern of their bodies and minds would be infused into an alien world? Russell Grahame is elsewhere. Anna Markova is elsewhere. Farn zem Marur is elsewhere. All who live behind the barrier of mist are duplicates of those who exist elsewhere. Duplicates with slight modification of the language areas.

Duplicates supplied with duplicate foods, duplicate animals, duplicate habitations. Have the Vruvyir then abducted you from your own world? Demonstrably, they have not. They created you. Surely, you are their property?”

There was silence. A green silence. Time was demolished. Minutes, hours, days, years, centuries drowned in the opaque green ocean that existed in the Sphere of Creation. The being who had thought of himself as Russell Grahame almost drowned with them.

But somewhere… Somewhere there was a cry of defiance, a courageous rearguard action of sanity, a surge of affirmation.

“I am!” shouted a disembodied voice. “I am myself! I exist! I think! I sorrow! I hope! I am no one’s property! I am a man!”

Came the whisper once more. “Little one, is it greatness or is it madness? You have seen what you have seen.”

“I am myself!” shouted the voice. “Let who can destroy me! None shall possess me!”

“Child,” said the whisper, “truly you are alive. That much you may know. You are alive and with the ability to create new life. And in this, you are greater than those who crossed the light-years to fashion you in the image of a man. The Vruvyir are dead. They have played their part since the dawn of creation. But now they are dead. You are the living, creative image of a man. They are no more than ghosts of ghosts, duplicated as you were—but not from the image itself, only from the image of an image of an image through unimaginable epochs. They reach to you from the past. Their greatness and their skills are almost spent. You and your kind—their children indeed—are an act of faith, an offering to the future… Child, tomorrow, or the day after, or the year after, or the century or the millennium after, the mnemonic will fail, the kinetic will fail, and the last Sphere of Creation will be no more than a legend in the minds of children.

Let the children of your children’s children live to demonstrate that the Vruvyir, leaping from their parent star, did not leap in vain… Rest now, for the burden is heavy. Rest now, and prepare to pay the price for reaching out into the deeps.”

The greenness rippled, became deeper. There was nothing in all eternity but the drunkenness of an absolute fatigue. There was nothing in all eternity but the blackness of oblivion.