Phoenix Without Ashes (11 page)

“Remove the helmet from its berth. Place the ends of the oxygen hoses into their sockets on the shoulders of the suit. Red into red, yellow into yellow. Now raise the helmet, set it onto the gasket seal, over your head, and give it a half-turn clockwise to lock.”

Devon turned the helmet one way, with no result, and then the other. It snapped into place with a solid
snick.
He began to panic as he realized he was completely sealed in. Then he heard a faint hiss; he drew air deep into his lungs.

The warning voice said, “Place left hand against the light plate and if you are properly sealed, pressure will be equalized in this access chamber. Thank you.”

The light panel on Viewport 874 began to blink imperatively. Devon brought up his left hand and touched the “Open” plate. This time the crimson square flashed to green immediately. The hatch began to cycle; through the helmet, Devon heard a louder hiss of escaping air.

He could feel his heart beating ever faster, as though it might pound a hole out through his chest. Devon willed himself to relax. He noticed that with each breath, the flexible material of the helmet indented slightly.

The light panel signaled:

PRESSURE EQUALIZED

ADMITTANCE PERMITTED

He was deafened by the sound of his own breathing. Devon could hear nothing from outside the suit as the hatch slowly cycled open. He moved to the side so as to watch the fissure between hatch and bulkhead gradually widen. When there was space enough, he stepped through.

At first all he saw was the room. The new chamber was huge, even larger than the main hall in the Place of Worship. This room took the form of a dome at least one hundred meters across. Devon crossed the threshold and his feet rose from the floor; again he was without weight.
What had the teacher Old Silas called it? Gravity. That mysterious command of the Creator which kept the directions “up” and “down” distinct.

He grabbed at the wall and found a smooth railing that had evidently been placed there for exactly that purpose. Devon hung suspended, surveying the chamber. He had to momentarily reorient himself. “Up” had now rotated ninety degrees. The hatch of the access chamber was part of the floor of Viewport 874. And the viewport chamber itself had been ruined.

Devon raised his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Staring, he murmured a prayer to the Creator.

It was all there.

As he had remembered it from the dreams.

He looked upon what lay before him; then passed within a hair of unconsciously and automatically making the decision to turn, retreat through the lockport, and hide screaming, limbs tucked into an instinctual ball. More than looked—he gaped, knowing instantly how futile his own knowledge was to explain everything he saw.

Devon felt like the savages in the Story of Enos from the Book; the benighted men of the wilderness who had never seen a horse, never seen a tree.

The chamber was littered with broken furniture and cratered, pitted consoles’. Faint lights glowed in wall mountings. Overhead yawned the remnant of what had been a great transparent dome. About a third of the hemisphere had been torn away in some ancient cataclysm. The opening was framed among jagged projections as sharp-pointed as serpent fangs. The dim interior lights reflected glints from the sharded edges. The dome’s ragged opening was flared outward as though from an explosion within.

What could cause such force?
But the thought fled and was forgotten as Devon looked to the alien sky.

Beyond the ruined bubble hung the unwinking stars of his dream. They had not changed from the brief impression he’d glimpsed during the abortive first attempt with the viewport hatch. Neither had they changed from his visions.

Why do they not blink? he asked himself. Are they stars like those in the sky? He recoiled from a nightmare thought: Could they be the savage animals’ eyes Rachel saw in the dark?

Devon forced himself to move hand-over-hand along the rail and across the floor of the chamber to the periphery of the dome. He discovered a network of thin, flexible lines crosshatching the near side of the bubble itself. He had
been
here, had
seen
all this; and not merely in the initial peek past the viewport hatch.
Old Silas would have called it a sense of deja vu, the feeling of having traveled here before, but knowing I couldn’t have.

Of course he could not have seen this place before, but he failed to convince himself.

Was it not somehow blasphemous to be trespassing on a private preserve of the Creator?
Though he immediately discarded the thought, Devon hesitated. Then he kicked away from the edge of the dome and sailed toward the ragged hole. As he neared the shattered edges of the opening, Devon grabbed one of the snapped safety lines drifting free.

His fingers clenched convulsively on the line. It had suddenly occurred to him that this dome signified a clear demarcation between the
inside
and a larger
outside.
Should he drift beyond the hole in the bubble, he might not find a purchase enabling him to return inside.
Inside!

Inside is within Cypress Corners. There
is
no outside!
He fought back that particular demon while broken safety lines moved around him like logy snakes.

Delicately tethered, he hung in the center of the jagged break until his breathing again became a regular rhythm. But more importantly, he realized, he could again
think.
All across his new black sky the lights were suspended, flat and changeless: eyes of white, yellow, blue, orange, red.
Truly stars?
He stared and picked out what appeared to be several luminous clouds, light as milkweed pollen.

Transfixed by the wonder of it, he floated there for minutes, then hours, days...

... and returned to awareness of his own body only when that flesh collided uncomfortably with one of the broken spears of transparent dome.

Devon reluctantly lowered his eyes from the stars. There was even more, he saw...

Again, the deja vu:

... had never seen anything so huge. Even the hills themselves and all the fields and Cypress Corners itself, all were dwarfed to insignificance by this thing. Shapes and lines and structures dwindled away in a perspective Devon’s eyes had never before attempted to encompass. He stared with incomprehension as his motion continued and this thing began itself to shrink, diminishing with distance until it was even less than the other lights spangling the blackness.

Then Devon felt there was nothing to touch, nothing on which to stand. Nothing, ever again....

He found it was easier to trace a little at a time than to fill his entire field of vision with what lay below. The bubble in which he floated was a mere node on the outside of a tube; the tube was a stalk between two huge domes; the domes were bulbs on a greater cluster of spheres; the cluster was only one of many more. The line of spheres below Devon seemed to stretch away to infinity; yet an infinity paradoxically not so large as the infinity above which held the stars.

How can this world be? Is it the world? Could it be hell?
he thought, instantly denying the idea as he thought it.

Devon followed with his eyes the network of tubes leading away through vast, kilometers-wide spaces toward the other spheres of sky-stuff. The heretical thought finally forced itself to the surface:
Could Cypress Corners be out there somewhere? In one of those domes? Is this what lies beyond the sky?

The questions would not stop flowing; just as the universe would not stop pouring into his eyes. Finally he screwed his eyes tightly shut, screaming, “Stop it! Stop it!”

When at last he opened them again, Devon saw his face in a distorted reflection on the inside of the helmet. Tears gleamed in starlight.

FOURTEEN

Finally it was Devon’s body that drew him away from the universe. There came a time when he could drink no more energy from the stars. Tired, thirsty, hungry, his shoulder throbbing, bladder aching with pressure, Devon pulled himself back along the safety line to the edge of the ruined dome.

But to which hatch? There were three in a row. The hatch through which he had originally entered the viewport chamber had cycled shut.

Devon pressed the red panel on the hatch nearest him. The metal disc swung away from him easily; there was no outrush of air. Devon grasped the rim of the hatch opening and propelled himself through. He found himself in a narrow tunnel, illuminated by a dim, blue glow. He started to turn around, but the hatch behind him had sealed itself. The “Open” panel glowed red; Devon assumed the door would open if he touched it.

On impulse, he continued along the tunnel. Pipes and conduit lined the walls. Occasionally the smooth surfaces were raw and deformed as though the corridor had at one time been compressed and then wrenched straight again.

A dozen meters farther along, he saw something hanging in the blue gloom. Closer, he realized it was a dead woman lying on her back in mid-tunnel. Her light hair floated out around her head, her mouth was open, her eyes stared. She wore no helmet or protective suit, but was clad in a light blue coverall. A triangular insignia was stitched in the fabric over her right breast.

She was very beautiful. Devon wondered who she was, where had she come from, what had happened to her? He edged past the corpse and pushed off from the bulkhead.

Farther along the tunnel he encountered a broken conduit and great globules of water hanging suspended. They hung like jewels; and then, as Devon sailed through them, they dispersed, shattered against him, clubbed up again. His thirst asserted itself and his hands moved to the juncture of helmet and suit. Then he remembered the dead woman’s face and continued resolutely along the passage.

The end of the tunnel brought a console covered with dials and gauges. Beside the console was another circular hatch. The light panel read:

MEMORY BANK TERMINAL 1123-L

ACCESS LOCKPORT

Devon reached to touch the familiar square. Another crimson warning plate flashed on:

EQUALIZE PRESSURE

BEFORE ADMITTANCE

He touched that plate instead. It blinked green and air hissed into the tunnel. The lockport swung open.

Devon remembered his experience with the first lockport; he entered the opening feet-first. He had guessed correctly—gravity in the next chamber had not been cut off. He felt the uncomfortable tug of weight as he dropped beyond the threshold.

He was awed by the room in which he found himself. At least a hundred and fifty meters across, had it been plowed ground it could have provided corn and potatoes for a single family for an entire cycle. The chamber was fitted with clusters of comfortable-appearing chairs, which looked as though they could mold themselves to the form of his body. One wall was lined solely with racks of metal cubes, each cube about half the size of Devon’s fist. A blocky instrument, the shape and size of a kitchen table, stood a few meters away. It was made of some translucent substance; Devon saw movement from within, waves of color swirling like oil on water. The top of the device was honeycombed with square depressions.

Devon started toward the racks of cubes, but his bladder reminded him of bodily priorities. He surveyed the chamber again, but there was no private place for proper urination.

He raised his hands to the gasket around his neck; the helmet clicked, easily rotated half a turn, and he lifted it off. He touched the suit at the base of his throat. The bluestrips unsealed, separating just ahead of his finger as he traced a line down the front.

Devon looked for the least conspicuous area of the chamber. Finally he left a yellow puddle in the far corner. At the last moment he had nearly been unable to relieve himself; shamed and sure that here, unlike in the hills of Cypress Corners, someone was watching him. The chamber and its furnishings were immaculately clean. It seemed a virtual sacrilege to foul this sterile place.

Still Devon released a sigh of comfortable relief when the deed was accomplished. He pulled the straps of the coveralls up over his shoulders and crossed to the racked ranks of metal cubes. He selected a cube at random and carried it back to the device with the honeycombed top. The cube was obviously of a shape and size to fit into one of the depressions. Devon inserted it and a voice filled the chamber:

“Erik Satie, AD 1866 to 1925, was commissioned to compose
Mercure, poses plastiques en trois tableaux,
by the fashionable Count Etienne de Beaumont for a series of avant-garde theatrical performances, Les Soirees de Paris, to be held, in 1924, at the tiny Theatre de la Cigale.”

The words meant nothing. Devon stared bemusedly at the cube machine.

The voice continued, “And now, here is Satie’s
Mercure.”

The music swelled commandingly through the chamber. Devon staggered back against the wall, thunderstruck. He had never heard music like this before. Cypress Corners had its few hymns, all of which were to be sung without accompaniment. And nearly every child, at one time or another, had been reproved by the Elders for whistling, humming, or tapping a foot in time with some natural rhythm.

He stood there for a while, bathed by the brilliant sounds of what the machine had called “Satie’s
Mercure.”
After a time the music stopped; but it played far longer in Devon’s mind.

The lengthy rows of cubes bore labels indicating sections and sub-sections: PHILOSOPHY, MUSIC, LANGUAGES, BIOCHEMISTRY, RELIGION, FICTION, and one entire row set apart and tagged BASIC HISTORICAL INFORMATION. Devon picked out the first of these and had started to turn back to the cube machine when a lighted panel caught his attention. It flashed the words: