Harry Harrison - Captive Universe

“Do you understand what has happened?” he asked.

“I don’t know, I have heard about these things but I have never seen them before. Dealing with these matters is not my work.”

“I know. You’re a watchman and that is all you know, and you won’t tell me about that either.”

She shook her head no, her lips clamped shut in a tight line. He sat, pulling her down next to him, with his back to that opening and the inexplicable mystery of the stars.

“I am thirsty,” she said. “There is supposed to be emergency rations at these places so far distant. Those must be cupboards, over there.”

“We’ll look together.”

Behind a thick metal door were packages of rations and transparent containers of water. She showed him how to open a container and he drank his fill before handing it to her. The food was just as tasteless, and just as filling, as before. While he ate he was conscious of a great and overwhelming tiredness. In his mind as well as his body, because the thought of the sun passing close to him and the stars crawling at his feet was so inconceivable that it did not bear thinking about. He wanted to ask the girl more questions but now, for the first time, he was afraid to hear the answers.

“I am going to sleep,” he told her, “and I want to find you and the car here when I wake up.” He thought for a moment and then, ignoring her feeble bleatings and resistance, he took the box, on its chain of metal beads from around her neck, and weighed it in his hand. “What do you call this?” he asked.

“It is my deus. Please give it back to me.”

“I don’t want the thing, but I do want you here. Give me your hand.” He wrapped the chain around her wrist, and then about his own hand with the deus held inside against his palm. The stone looked hard but he did not care: almost as soon as he closed his eyes he was asleep.

When he awoke the girl was asleep next to him ,her arm outstretched and bent so that her body would be as far away from his as possible, and sunlight was streaming through the opening at the top of the ramp. Could the sun be coming again? He had a moment of intense fear and shook the girl rudely awake. Once he was fully awake himself he saw there was no immediate danger and, after unwinding the chain from his stiff fingers, went to get food and water for them both.

“We’re going out there again,” he said when they were finished, and pushed her up the ramp ahead of him.

They stepped out of the opening onto the blue sky. It felt hard under foot and, when Chimal hit it with the back of the killing thing, a patch of blue chipped away revealing the stone underneath. It made no sense — yet it was the sky. He followed it up and away from him with his eyes, up to the zenith and back down to the mountains on the distant horizon. As his gaze reached them he cried out and staggered back, his sense of balance suddenly disrupted.

The mountains, all of them, were facing toward him, tilted up into the sky at a 45 degree angle.

It was as though the entire world had been pushed up from behind, tipped up on its near edge. He did not know what to think: these events were too impossible. Unable to bear the vertigo he staggered back down the ramp to the solid safety of the hewn chamber. Watchman Steel followed after him.

“What does all this mean?” he asked her. “I can’t make myself understand what is happening.”

“I can’t tell you, this time because I don’t know. This isn’t my work, I’m a watchman and the maintenance people never talked about this. They must know what it means.”

Chimal looked down the darkened tunnel into which the sun had vanished, and could not understand. “We must go on,” he said. “I must find out what these things mean. Where does the other car tunnel go?” he asked, pointing to the opening on the far side of the large chamber.

“I don’t know. I’m not maintenance.”

“You’re not much of anything,” he told her, with unconscious cruelty. “We’ll go on.”

He brought the car slowly out of the tunnel and stopped it while she loaded food and water aboard. Now that he was beginning to distrust reality he wanted his own supplies with him. Then they crossed the cavern and plunged into the tunnel opposite. It was flat and straight though, for some reason, the row of lights ahead appeared to be going up hill. Yet they never came to the hill: the tunnel remained perfectly flat. Some difference in the texture of the tunnel appeared ahead and Chimal slowed the car until it was barely moving and crept forward, stopping when he came up the ladder rungs that were set into the solid rock of the tunnel wall. They went up the wall and into a pipe-like opening that had been cut through the ceiling.

We’re going to find out where this goes,” Chimal said, forcing her out of the car. He stood back while Steel started up the ladder ahead of him. It was about a twenty foot climb up the hole, which was just a bit wider than his shoulders, and two lights were set into it to show the way. The uppermost light was just under a metal lid that covered the top of the shaft

“Push up against it,” he said. “It doesn’t seem to be sealed.”

It was thin metal, hinged at one side and she opened it easily as she climbed up and through. Chimal followed, up and out of the solid rock and onto the blue sky. He looked up, first at the small white clouds that drifted overhead, and then past them at the valley, with the thin cut of the river and the two brown villages, one on each side, which hung directly over his head.

This time he did fall, pressing himself to the solid surface of the sky and grasping at the edge of the hole. He had the sensation that he was faffing straight down, plunging from the sky down to broken death in the fields by the river. When he closed his eyes to cut out the fearful vision it was much better. He felt the solid rock beneath him and the weight of his body pressing against it. After getting slowly to his hands and knees he opened his eyes and looked down. Blue paint of some kind over solid rock; it chipped when he picked at it around the edge of the hole. There were even dusty footprints on it where others had walked, and metal tracks passed close by. Wide-spaced tracks like those that had carried the sun. He went over to them, still on his knees, and clutched the solidity of the blue metal bar. It was worn on the top and shiny. Raising his eyes slowly he followed the tracks across the sky, as they grew closer and closer and finally vanished into a black opening high above, up the smooth curve of the sky. He tried not to think about this or to understand it. Not yet. He had to see everything first. Then, slowly, he rolled onto his back, still clutching the rail.

Above him was the valley, visible from end to end just as he knew it should look. On both sides were mountains, pointing straight up at him, and more mountains beyond the valley ends. There was the barrier of rock and the swamp at the north end, the wandering path of the river between the fields, the brown buildings and the dark splotches of the two temples, the trees in the south and a glint of silver from the pond. The waterfall was barely visible; but there was no sign of a river leading to it. There were a few mountains there and the blue bowl of the sky began directly behind them.

A flicker of motion caught his eye and he turned just as Steel vanished down the shaft in the rock.

His vertigo was forgotten now as he jumped to his feet and ran to the opening. She was climbing down fast, faster than he would have thought, not looking up. As he started down behind her she reached the tunnel below and jumped from the ladder. He went a few more rungs, then let go and dropped the rest of the way, landing heavily on the solid rock below. Fire washed over his head.