Robert Sawyer - Foreigner

The lifeboat began to move up the tower. Looking down through the floor, Novato could see Garios and Karshirl rapidly diminishing from view—father and daughter, although they probably didn’t know that. It was only because of the difference in their sizes, Garios being twice Karshirl’s age, that Novato could tell them apart.

After just a few moments, the lifeboat had passed through the apex of the blue pyramid and was now rising up in the open air. The pyramid was sitting in a hollow scooped out of the cliff. The strip of beach on either side of the pyramid’s base looked like a beige line.

The coastline of Fra’toolar was enjoying a rare day of reasonably clear skies. Novato’s view continued undiminished, except for the parts blocked by the four ladder-like sides of the tower. She could soon see huge tracts of Fra’toolar province and, stretching off to the south and east, the vast world-spanning body of water, each wave cap an actinic point reflecting back the fierce white sun.

The lifeboat had accelerated briefly, but now seemed to be moving at a steady rate: equal intervals elapsed between the passing of each rung of the ladders. Novato had seen ground from the air before, when flying aboard her glider, the Tak-Saleed, and its successor, the Lub-Kaden. But she’d never been this high up. Looking straight out, she could see that she was passing the levels of distant clouds. Looking up, the four sides of the tower converged infinitely far above her head.

Novato had worked with charcoal and graphite to capture images of planets and moons observed through her far-seers. But those illustrations had been made over daytenths, with objects crawling across her field of view. She wanted to sketch what she was seeing now, but with each moment the ground receded further and previously invisible parts of the landscape appeared at the edges.

Rivers and streams cut across Fra’toolar like arteries and veins. Tracts of forest and open fields were visible. And what was that? A series of rounded brown hills—hills that were moving! A thunderbeast stampede!

Novato felt dizzy as the heights grew greater. She could now see well into the interior of Fra’toolar, although clouds obscured much of it to the north, their tops fiercely bright with reflected sun.

A flock of wingfingers was moving by the tower: imperial jacks. judging by the colors. She hadn’t realized they flew this high up. But already they were disappearing below, although she could easily make out the flock’s distinctive tri-pronged flying pattern as it passed by, heading east.

Novato was high enough now that the blue tower itself vanished into nothingness before it reached the ground. Although she assumed the tower was of equal width all the way to the top, it was as though she were in the middle of an incredibly elongated blue diamond, a diamond that tapered to infinitely fine points above and below.

The sun had moved visibly toward the western horizon now. Looking down, Novato could see a thick black shadow at the eastern end of the forest tracts. The whole interior of the lifeboat darkened and brightened in turns as it passed the blue rungs of the ladders. Occasionally, she saw a puff of white gas erupt from one of the cones projecting from some of the ladders’ rungs.

Novato let her eyes wander out to the horizon line—which, she realized with a start, was no longer a line at all. Instead, it was bowing up. Her heart pounded. She was seeing—actually seeing —the curvature of the world she lived on. She’d long known that the Quintaglio moon was a sphere, but she’d known it indirectly—from seeing ship’s masts poke above the horizon before the ships themselves became visible, from seeing the circular shadow her world cast on the Face of God, from experiments done measuring the angles of shadows cast at different latitudes. But to actually see the curvature, to see the world’s roundness—that was spectacular.

And then, a short time later, she became aware of something even more spectacular. It was late afternoon, the sun still well above the horizon. Nonetheless, the sky was growing darker. It had started as lavender and, without Novato really noticing it, had deepened to violet. Now it was well on its way to black. What could make the sky black while the sun was still out? A flaw in the optical properties of the lifeboat’s metal hull, perhaps? Unlikely.

Novato mulled it over while the lifeboat continued its steady climb, Fra’toolar’s coastline now visible all the way to Shoveler’s Inlet. She knew that water droplets could refract sunlight, splitting it into a rainbow of colors, and she’d long suspected that the sky was purple because myriad droplets in the air scattered light. But if no such scattering was going on, then there was no humidity in the air this high up. Well, water was heavy, of course, so moisture would tend to settle toward the ground. She was well above the clouds now—perhaps they marked the highest level at which water vapor was a constituent of air.

Later that day, Novato watched the most spectacular sunset of her life: the brilliant point of light touched the curving limb of the world, the world-spanning body of water stained purple for hundreds of kilopaces along its edge. The sun’s setting was protracted by the lifeboat’s continual upward movement, and Novato savored every moment of it.

With the sun gone, moons blazed forth in full nocturnal glory. Myriad stars became visible, too. Soon, in fact, there were more stars than Novato had ever seen before. The great sky river was thick and bright, instead of the pale ghost she was used to, and the stars were so numerous that to count them all would be the work of a lifetime. She thought of Afsan, dear Afsan, who had enjoyed no sight more than the night sky. How he would have been moved to see stars in such profusion!

But once again Novato was puzzled. Why should so many more stars be visible? And suddenly she realized something else: the stars, all those glorious stars, were rock-steady, untwinkling. From the ground, stars flickered like distant lamp flames, but these stars burned steadily. With so many visible, it was hard to get her bearings; the normal patterns of constellations were all but lost amongst the countless points of light. But at last she found bright Kevpel, the next closest planet to the sun after the Face of God. She got out her far-seer and, steadying herself by leaning back on her tail, brought it to bear on that distant world.

Spectacular. Kevpel’s rings were visible with a clarity Novato had never before experienced. The planet’s disk was clearly striped, its latitudinal cloud bands more distinct than she’d ever seen, even with bigger far-seers. And Kevpel’s own coterie of moons—why, she could count six of them, two more than she’d ever glimpsed with an instrument this size.

Had this first day of her trip up the tower taken her that much closer to Kevpel? Nonsense. Indeed, the angle between the tower’s shaft and Kevpel’s position along the ecliptic was obtuse: she was in fact slightly farther away from that planet than if she’d observed it from the ground.

But, why, then, did the heavens blaze forth with such clarity?

And then it hit her: the black daytime sky, the incredible sharpness of the stars, the lack of distortion when viewing the planets.

No air.

This high above the world there was no air.

No air!

She felt her chest constricting, her breathing becoming ragged. But that was madness: she could hear the gentle hiss of the air in the lifeboat being recirculated and replenished. She was sure that at least some of the opaque equipment she could see in the transparent hull was somehow maintaining breathable air. She tried to calm down, but it was terrifying to think that only the clear walls around her separated her from, from… emptiness .