The Marriage of the Living Dark

T

And risk Mm thinking you mad?

Yes, even that. For she had never had a fit so strong, so... vivid.

Even with her eyes closed she could still see it, as if the image had been burned onto her retinas.

Like a snake, she thought, remembering what Kim had said. A great snake of fire, swattounng its tad.

Dcuro sat alone in his room, staring at the diagram on the screen. He had spent the last two hours designing what he was looking at and still he was not happy with it It looked vaguely like what he had seen in Kim’s workshop, but there was still something about it that was wrong. Something he’d overlooked. It was at times like this that he wished he had a memory like Kim’s, that once he had seen a thing he could not forget it. Eidetic they called that. But it wasn’t only that that made Kim a great man. He had watched him often these past six years and seen how - like a magician - he conjured answers from the air. Or from within himself, which was the same. Ikuro shivered. It was cold in the room. No doubt Tomoka had been turning down the heating once again. Getting up, he walked over to the cupboard and got down a sweater, pulling it on.

Better, he thought, sitting back in front of the screen, half frowning at it in his attempt to work out what he’d missed.

A spaceship with no engines and no hull. A craft that, in essence, was but an array of seats.

He laughed. Who else but a madman or a genius would think of such? There was a knock. Dcuro turned in the swivel chair, faring the door. “Who is it?” A head popped round the door. “Ikuro? Can I have a word with you?” It was Ebert Dcuro smiled and got up. “Of course. Come in.”

Ebert stopped, looking blindly at the screen, then nodded. “There. Thafs how I saw it” Dcuro shrugged. “It’s not quite right But I can’t figure out...” “No,” Ebert said, with a certainty Dcuro found strange. “Thafs it exactly. I saw it Like that, without the fans.”

“The fans!” Dcuro slapped his forehead, then went to sit down and change the image, but Ebert stopped him.

“No. Save that, as it is. Or better still, print up a copy. We’ll take it to show Kim.”

“Kim?” Dcuro turned back, looking up at Ebert “I don’t understand.”

“No,” Ebert said. “But you will. Just trust me, Dcuro. You will.”

Back in his study, Kim set to work at once, gripped by a sudden and immense excitement.

Going over to the big touch-screen in the corner of the room, he took the stylus and began to write down the three equations he had jotted on the blackboard by the pool, only this time he did not write them one atop the other, but spaced them out, so that they formed a triangle.

Three points on a circle. Or almost so, for he saw now that he had only half the picture. The rest...

Kim laughed aloud, surprised by the simplicity of it, amazed now that he had not seen it before. But that was always the way of things. What afterwards seemed obvious was - before that all-important moment of insight - as opaque as death itself: a barrier that no man’s mind could cross. But cross it he had.

Taking the first of the equations, he reversed it, changing two of its elements and transforming it in the process. Satisfied, he wrote it down to the right of the original, just below it Now that he’d done so, he could see how it linked directly to the second of his equations that lay at the next point clockwise about the emerging circle.Again he reversed the equation, changing two of its elements. Once more the new equation fitted like a link in a chain. And then the last, again more or less a reversal of what he already had, yet at the same time a total transformation of the original.

He stepped back, staring at the great circle of equations in wonder, seeing suddenly the connection not merely between each point on the circle’s edge, but between every single part It was not just a circle, it was a web. And each strand of that web contained a distorted mirror of each other strand, harmonics in a great chord.

Kim felt a shiver go through him. Whatever else he had done in his entire life, none of it matched what he had achieved here in this single diagram. “Save and store,” he said quietly, almost afraid to speak “Kim?”

He turned. Jelka was standing there, just inside the doorway.

“This is it,” he said. “What I’ve been looking for.” “A wheel of fire,” she said, looking at him, not the diagram. “I saw it, Kim. I saw it in the air above Kalevala. A great wheel of fire in the air, and you and Sampsa laughing and pointing up at it “You saw it?”

“Yes. And it vM happen. I know it will. I’ve seen things before Things that have subsequently come true.”

“Ahh ...” He didn’t know quite what to say.

“I know it seems like madness, Kim, but... it happens. It really does happen. If s to do with the sickness. At least, I think it is. I didn’t have them before.” “And the dream?”

Jelka shook her head. “No. The dream was something different” She walked across and stood before the screen.

“It’s like the Ywe Lung,” she said.

Kim nodded. He had not seen it before, but now that she had pointed it out to him, it was curiously like the great wheel of dragons of the Seven which had once been the symbol of their authority over Chung Kuo. “Maybe they knew,” he said. “Knew but... didn’t know.”

She laughed at that “How can you know but not know?” “If s easy,” he said. “I knew. But I didn’t know I knew until just now. Even so, it was there inside me. And you - if your vision was real - knew that it was.” “That’s too deep for me, Kim. But this... if this is true... if this works ... well, what does it mean?”

“I’m not sure,” he said. “But if I’m even vaguely close with my guesses, then life is going to get a whole lot more complicated round here.” “Yes, but how?”

He hesitated, not wanting to tell her what had been going through his mind, then shrugged. “Lef s wait and see, huh? Lef s just wait and see.”

That night, as Jelka lay beside him, sleeping, Kim found himself returning to the thought he’d had while talking to her earlier. All the while he had thought only of the practical use of the equations - of how to find a power source for his craft Energy. It had all come down to energy. But now that he had the answer, all manner of other things - peripheral things - had popped into his mind.

He had thought only of using that surface between realities to launch his little ship. But if one could unlock the door to another universe, then what stopped one from stepping through and entering that other space? And what exactly would one find there?

MUeja, perhaps ... And my mother, Anna, too. Only a different Anna, an altogether different MUeja ...

The thought disturbed him.

Just how different would it be? Or would it be different at all? The truth was, he didn’t know. And he couldn’t begin to guess. Only by going there would he know.

The equations aside, he wasn’t even certain that he could just step through. Maybe something in the composition of himself - something beyond simple cell structure, something implicit in the reality in which he existed and of which he was a part - prevented him from slipping across that great dividing line. He did not know. Nor would he know, until he tried. But did he dare?

That was the big question. Did he dare? Was he confident enough to risk taking that single step that changed the rules of everything? I’ll sleep on it, he thought, conscious of Jelka’s soft breathing, of her warmth pressed against his side.

And as he slipped down into the dark well of sleep, he had a momentary vision of himself, elsewhere - in that other place, perhaps - tucked in beside another Jelka, the same and yet entirely different. Mirrors, he thought once more, and, yawning, turned onto his side. It’s all done with mirrors ...

It was night on Ganymede. Beyond the dome of Kalevala the stars burned down, peppering the interstellar blackness.

In the shadows of Kim’s study, the silence was profound. One moment the room was empty, the next two figures stood before the corner screen. The screen, which had been dark, now glowed with a low, dull light, in the midst of which Kim’s diagram burned with a strange dark brilliance. “Finally,” one of them said, speaking in a tongue that was unlike any that had been heard by human ears.

“Yes,” the other agreed, studying the elegant equations. The two figures seemed to flicker, like a film in which every second frame has been removed. They were unearthly tall - tall beyond human measure - and vague in the sense that a human eye would have found it hard to discern exactly where their outlines lay. Moreover, they seemed not merely colourless but without colour, though not transparent If colour there was, it was of a hue outside the normal spectrum. A colour out of space. The two looked to each other. “It’s almost time.”

“Almost.”

The screen glow died. The room was empty. Outside, beyond the silent dome, the eternal stars burned down as they had since time began - like a thousand million tiny windows breaching the living dark.

The darkness shimmered.

It was almost time.

CHAPTER-16

THE PLACE OF INNER DARK

“Friends! What an unexpected pleasure.”

Kim stood back, smiling broadly as the three men came into the room, Dcuro and Aluko Echewa first, Ebert the last to enter, the two tiny camera probes slowly circling his head.

“You’ve timed it well,” Kim went on, going over to the screen and switching it on. “I’ve something to show you.”

“We know,” Ebert said. “The equations.”

Kim turned, astonished. “You know?”

“I saw it In my dream.”

Kim blinked. “I don’t understand. First Jelka, then ...” “Here,” Ebert said, handing Kim a folded slip of paper. “This will explain.”

Kim unfolded the paper and looked. Slowly his eyes widened. He turned, looking to the circle of equations, then shook his head. “And there I was thinking it was complete.”

“No,” Ebert said. “There’s more. Much more. But that1 s the key. The key that unlocks the door.”

Kim’s mouth was open. He blinked, once, twice, then began to smile. “Yes ... I see it now.”

“Ifs breaking down,” Dcuro said. ‘The cloth is fraying. Hans thinks that we’re coming to a cusp.”

“A cusp?”

“A point where it all changes.”

“Ah ...” Kim looked at the screen again, then nodded. “Then this ...” He stopped and looked to Ebert. “I was going to make another craft,” he said. “Did you see that, too?”

Ebert nodded. “Doiro ... give Kim the printout.”

Dcuro handed Kim the diagram of the craft he’d drawn. Kim looked at it, then

laughed. “That there - where you’ve removed the fans - that’s exactly the

amendment I thought of this morning. But this and this ... these are new. That

looks like some kind of generator, and that... well, it could be a heater of

some kind. And these, underneath it...” He looked up at them. “But how ...?” Kim

stopped, staring fiercely into the air a moment, then he laughed. “Do you think

...?”

“What?” Dcuro asked, glancing at Echewa who stood beside him, concerned by Kim’s sudden strangeness.

“All of this. .. coming together like this. Dreams and clues and visions. It all seems ... well, like we’re being given this. And if we’re being given it, then someone is doing the giving. Someone higher than us, perhaps.” “Higher?” Dcuro looked perplexed.

But Ebert seemed to understand what Kim was saying perfectly. “Yes. I felt that too. We’re being directed. To go back and face DeVore. To determine our direction.”

“You think so?” Kim asked.

Ebert smiled. “Oh, I’m certain of it, Kim. As certain as of anything in my whole life.”

They decided to hold a meeting of all the colonists, to discuss the dreams and all that had arisen since. Kim scheduled it for that evening at eight, yet even as he prepared for it, events overtook him.

The first Kim knew of it was when Karr called him from the bridge of the New Hope.

“Kim? Where are you right now?”

“In my study, why?”

“Look out of the window.”

Kim turned and looked. For a moment he saw nothing. Then he gasped. Nothing. He really did see nothing.

“Gods ...”

The stars had gone. The sky was black, unblemished. His voice, when he spoke

again, was a whisper. “What’s happened?” “I don’t know,” Karr said. “One moment

they were there, the

next they weren’t”

“But they must be there. They have to be.” “Our sensors no longer register anything. The nearest star is an infinite distance away according to the figures on my screen. Which is another way of saying that there aren’t any stars.”

“Impossible.”

The machine had to be wrong. And their eyes... their eyes obviously weren’t seeing what was out there, because the alternative. ..

The alternative was mad. Madder than doors into other universes. Madder than shared dreams. Madder than people seeing things that hadn’t happened. Madder than .. .

He stopped and closed his eyes. It was possible, just possible, that he was hallucinating - dreaming all this even while he thought he was awake. Like Chuang Tzu and the butterfly. But if so, what did that mean? And besides, if this was a hallucination, it certainly didn’t feel like one. Unless it was a shell.

For a moment that possibility - that Shepherd had somehow tricked them all-dominated his thoughts. Then he opened his eyes. “Kim? Are you all right?”

“Am I dreaming, Gregor?”

Karr laughed. “Maybe. But if so, then we’re all dreaming the same dream. And that’s as good a definition of reality as I can think of.”

Kim nodded. So if it wasn’t a dream ...

The screen began to buzz. Someone was trying to get in touch with him urgently. Kim lifted the flap of skin and looked at the timer inset into his wrist It was five fourteen, Ganymede time.

“Okay,” he said. “Here’s what we’ll do. We’ll bring the meeting forward two hours. Something’s happening, and it won’t do to wait and see what it is.” “And the stars?”

Kim shrugged. “I don’t know, Gregor, but do you recall what you said, about the old cloth fraying.” “So?” “I’d say we’d just fallen through a tear in the cloth.”

They met just after six, gathering together in the Circles, the great meeting places that had been built at the centre of each of the fifteen domes. The colonists were frightened and not a little confused by events, but as yet they were calm. So it was that they watched - some in person, most on the great screens that surrounded them - as Kim Ward climbed up onto the platform in Fermi Circle to address them.

“Friends, fellow citizens ... I have asked you to gather because something is happening. Something strange. Something that even I can find no explanation for.”

He paused, letting the significance of that statement sink in. “The facts are simple. We are still travelling - or, at least, the engines are still firing as before, still pushing us on - but we are going nowhere. Eridani is no longer directly ahead of us. Indeed, from all we can make out, we are no longer within the relativistic universe.”

There was a strange collective sigh. Kim raised his hands, as if to fend off objections, even though there were none “I can think of no theory which would explain these facts, only a metaphor. It is as if we have fallen down a well. Yet even this is unsatisfactory, for a well has a bottom, and from the bottom of a well one might glimpse the sky, but we can see nothing.”

Ebert, standing just below the platform, now spoke up. “Is there anything we can do, Kim?”

Kim nodded. “There are several things we might do. For a start we might send out a probe. If we are still moving relativistically then the probe will quickly fall behind us at this speed. We might also consider closing down the engines.” There was a worried murmur at this suggestion and Kim, looking about him, could see that this troubled them almost asmuch as the situation itself. To close down the engines was a major step. To many it would seem like an admission of defeat. He could see they wanted to go on, even if they were going nowhere.

A big, grey-bearded man named Baker now spoke. “I say we do nothing. I say we wait and see what happens.”

Kim smiled. “I’d say that was a good suggestion, Jed. But how long do we wait? And what if this situation is permanent? What if we have fallen down a well in space?”

“Not a well. A pocket.”

Kim turned, surprised to find the old man behind him. Then, with a gasp of astonishment, he realised who it was.