Roger Allen - The Shattered Sphere

Then came that blissful moment when her knees half-buckled and her weight suddenly spiked high and then slowly reduced itself to normal. The elevator car decelerated to a smooth and perfect stop, once again not dropping like a stone and smashing into the bottom of the shaft, once again not reducing Sianna to a shapeless, hideous blob the consistency of strawberry jam.

That was the rule. Sianna smiled weakly to herself as the doors opened and her ears popped with the change in pressure. Jam tomorrow and jam yesterday — but never jam to-day .

Well, maybe not—but she never would trust that damned elevator.

With a distinct sense of relief, Sianna stepped out of the car and onto the observation platform. The elevator banks opened up onto a raised stonework observation platform ten meters above the main level. Two long, wide stairways in front and two long swooping ramps at the sides led down to “ground” level. The MRI designers had been deeply concerned no one be reminded of the endless megatons of rock overhead, of the fact that this grand, well-lit place was in reality an artificial cave deep in the Earth.

But for Sianna, who had no illusions about MRI’s location, something was still tickling the back of her head, telling her that this was it, today was the day. Today things were going to happen . She felt obliged to approach the day with a certain sense of occasion. Sianna forced herself to savor the moment, the view. Somehow, she knew that she would want to remember this day hereafter. She would want to remember what this place looked like now, today .

The MRI Main Level was not in and of itself a building. It was only a shell, a container to hold the actual labs and offices, a dome 150 meters wide and 300 meters long.

The ceiling of the chamber was done up in an absurd and deeply comforting imitation of a blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. A combination of active-matrix paint and hidden projectors allowed the clouds to move across the sky. A brilliant yellow-white dazzle of light, too bright to look upon, tracked across the ceiling in place of the Sun. Now it hung in the eastern end of the ceiling, a bit redder than it would be when closer to the middle.

At night, the dome was lit up with the night sky of the Solar System, with the Moon and stars and planets all precisely as they would be as seen from New York City—if New York were back in the Solar System, and if New York City produced no light pollution. Illusions within illusions. No one had seen that many stars in New York’s night sky since the invention of the light bulb.

Endless effort and design had gone into making the stone sky seem to lift away toward infinity. None of it fooled Sianna, however.

She did not, did not, did not like enclosed places. Maybe that was why she hated the Charonians so much—they had put the Earth in a box, closed it off from the Universe, sealed the whole world off from the outside.

Sianna had been to Cambridge in England and wandered the ancient quadrangles of King’s College, Queens’ College, Jesus College and all the rest, and been fascinated by how they all conformed to the same basic design, the same layout of student rooms, dining hull, library, office and chapel laid out around a quadrangle. She had loved the feel of age and centuries hanging off the colleges, the sense that they had stayed the same here while all else had changed. She had loved the worn stones of the walkway, the way the present had been set down in whatever odd corners the past was not taking up. MRI had been laid out to the same pattern, a new and strange change rung on the same pattern twelve hundred years later. But was it conscious praise of the past, or self-deceptive denial of present reality? No centuries had molded this place. It was artificial.

Sianna had heard someone describe MRI as a campus-under-glass, and that was pretty close. The buildings themselves ranged from the ivy-covered brick of the Simulation Center to the mushroom-shaped biocrete of the Main Operations Building. Sianna could almost imagine Alice’s Caterpillar sitting on top of the Ops Building, gravely smoking his hookah. She smiled to herself. She had Carroll on the brain this morning, she did.

One side of the campus was given over to a fair-sized lawn, and most incongruous of all, a duck pond. A mama duck and her ducklings were moving across the water. The two swans were still snoozing in the shade of one of the pondside trees.

Sianna turned and made her way down the stairs and onto the pathway that led past the pond to the Main Ops building.

The unreality of the place suddenly seemed the most palpable thing about it. Piped-in air treated to smell like fresh air, the errant breeze created by computer-controlled ductwork, the springiness of the thick-growing, robot-tended lawn beneath her feet all suddenly seemed too real, like the over-vivid hallucinations of a fever-dream.

Somehow the real things suddenly felt false. The quacking and fussing of the ducks as they splashed about in the water, the slight residual queasiness in her stomach, even the distant echo of a human voice from some unseen conversation elsewhere in the dome—all seemed part of some grand illusion.

Everything is fine , the dome of the main level told all who came there. Everything is under control. You are safe here, and all is as it should be .

Except the only reason the place existed was that the Earth had been stolen by aliens and nothing was as it should be.

Sianna frowned as she made her way toward the Main Ops building. She entered the place through one of the glass doors in the base of the mushroom stem, and got into one of the elevators that led up to the main body of the building. If the main center for the study of the enemy was so deeply immersed in denial of the situation, if the people researching the problem insisted on seeing the night sky as it ought to be, not as it was —then what hope could there truly be?

Ten minutes later, a mug of good, strong, steaming-hot tea in her hand, her face directed toward the largest and blankest of the windowless walls that made up her cubicle, Sianna felt better. She was alone, her mind was clear, the problem was in front of her.

Quiet and alone, she allowed her mind the pleasure of wrapping itself up in the mystery of those missing thirty-seven minutes. Let’s see , she told herself. Assume there was nothing at all wrong with the Saint Anthony ‘s clock. If so, then those thirty-seven minutes were real. So what could cause the probe to jump around in time when —

“Hello, Sianna. Good morning,” a quiet voice said from behind her.

Sianna jumped, splashing tea on the desk. It was Wally, of course.

Damnation, couldn’t he ever make some noise? Or knock? She cursed under her breath and set the mug down. No, he never would change. If she wanted to quit jumping out of her skin, she would have to rearrange the furniture in here so her back wasn’t to the door, or, worse, shut the door. Sianna did not relish being in an enclosed space that small. Besides, she was damned if she would change her space and the way she did things in it to suit someone else.

“Hello, Wally,” she said, her back still to the doorway as she calmed herself, trying to compose her face as she blotted up the spilled tea with a piece of tissue from the dispenser. She felt a strong impulse to bite his head off, but there was no point in scaring the poor guy to death. Wally did not deal well with anger.

Throwing the tissue into the recycle bin, she swiveled her chair around to face the doorway, her expression blandly polite.

Wally Sturgis was standing nervously just outside her door. God only knew how he managed to look shy and nervous without moving a muscle, but he managed it. “Hello Sianna. What brings you, ah— in —so early this morning?” he asked, still not quite daring to make eye contact with her.