I had a pretty good idea where I might be, by now. I was down to my last hypothesis, and as Sherlock Holmes always used to remind us, when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains—however improbable—must be the truth.
I still wanted to get out of the tank. I don’t suffer from claustrophobia, but there was something about that perverse liquid that I didn’t relish. In addition to which, I was no longer deprived—I was conscious, and my mind was sharp and clear. A sensory deprivation tank is no place to be when you want to get on with your life.
I banged again on the inside of the lid, and suddenly felt it move beneath my hand. It was moving sideways, in an arc following its curvature. It was as if the upper, transparent half of the egg were being rotated about a central axis, disappearing into the lower, solid half.
I pulled myself free, not wet at all. I was naked, but the air was neither warm nor cold on my skin.
The light outside the tank was just as nebulous, just as grey. I could barely make out the shape of the room. The walls seemed utterly without colour, and were featureless. I looked back at the half-egg behind me, where the liquid had already become calm. Wires attached to the rim of the egg trailed in the liquid. There were more than I’d thought. They weren’t metallic; they looked to me as though they were organic. The egg-thing looked like a giant woodlouse tipped on its back, with spindly legs everywhere.
The only thing I could feel was my own body. That was lighter than it had been for a while. The gravity here was nowhere near Karth-normal, or what passed for Asgard- normal in the upper levels.
I was just wondering where I might start looking for a door when the greyness of the walls was disturbed. White clouds, vague and almost formless, began to appear—not on the walls but within and beyond them, as though the walls were windows looking out into a world of ghosts.
The clouds became humanoid faces, but in a strange unfocussed way. Their clarity was not enhanced by the fact that the faces overlapped, and passed through one another as they moved around the room. It was quite a fancy effect, but I wasn’t unduly upset or surprised by it. The walls were obviously screens, and the cloudy faces were some kind of video-holographic display. The holograms looked very primitive and rough-hewn, but I wasn’t convinced that it was poor technology that was responsible for their incoherency. There was something else . . . something not quite right.
The voice, when it came, was just as fuzzy. In a way, it was even more blurred, and multilayered—as if many people were trying to speak at once, and were not quite managing to synchronize their voices.
“R-r-rouss-ss-ss-eau,” they said.
“The ghost routine’s no good,” I told the walls, trying to inject some heavy contempt into my voice. “I know where I am, and I know who you are, too. What the hell are you trying to prove?”
The faces were huge—two metres tall from chin to crown—and the room seemed quite small as they drifted in and out of one another. They were becoming gradually more focussed. They seemed to me to be a creditable imitation of human faces—female human faces. But I couldn’t imagine what it was all for. Almost without meaning to, I counted the faces. There seemed to be nine. Nine didn’t seem to me to be a very round number, so I recounted, trying to make it ten, but there were nine.
“P-p-pleas-s-se w-w-wait-t-t,” they said. Their voice was slow and drawn-out. They were speaking in English. In spite of what I’d said, it really was rather spooky, not because of the nature of the apparitions, but because it didn’t make any sense.
“How long for?” I asked.
I paused for an answer, but when they spoke again, they were on a different wavelength.
“Ap-p-pologis-s-se,” they said. “S-s-sorr-rr-rry. W-w-will y-you ans-s-swer qu-qu-qu-quest-t-tion?”
Waiting for them to finish a sentence was distinctly tedious, but I decided that I probably had all the time in the world.
“Sure,” I said.
“Ar-r-re y-you l-l-lonel-l-ly?”
I blinked in surprise. It didn’t make any sense. I tried to concentrate on one of the faces, pretending that it was really looking at me, trying to meet its eye. I realised that it reminded me of someone. It wasn’t quite right, but the features were obviously modelled on Susarma Lear. I looked at the others, then, scanning them quickly to confirm the hypothesis. They weren’t all the same. Indeed, it was almost as if they were trying to be different—with difficulty, because they were all based on the same model. The pattern of modification wasn’t random, either. It was as if they were borrowing just a little from someone else’s face. I tried to remember what I looked like in a mirror, looking for bits of my own face, but that didn’t work. I had to think quite hard before I finally realised whose features they were borrowing from to make their Susarma Lear-faces look different.
They were borrowing bits of John Finn.
“Loneliness isn’t one of my vices,” I told them. “But I would appreciate a little company right now. I know you can arrange it. I’ll settle for Myrlin, or even one of your furry friends. I’ve been here before, I know, but you put on much better special effects then. Landscape with lions, bright and sharp—I couldn’t see the walls at all, remember? I guess this is where you live. You don’t have to put on human faces just for me. I don’t care if you look like giant spiders.”
Pause. Then: “M-m-must-t-t t-t-talk t-t-to y-you . . . int-t-teres-s-sted.”
I couldn’t quite work out where the voice was coming from. There was no obvious microphone, and it was diffuse, like everything else, as though they were having difficulty focusing it.
“I’m interested in you too,” I told them, “but I had the impression that you didn’t need to talk to me. I thought you picked my brain fairly thoroughly last time I was here—and all those wires suggest that you’ve been at it again.”
“C-c-can’t-t r-r-read m-m-minds,” they told me. “S-s-so m-m-much of p-p-person-n-n on-nly at c-c-conscious-s-s l- l-level-l-l. C-c-can’t-t und-derst-tand-d s-s-s-solit-t-tude.”
I didn’t get a chance to explain solitude to them. The door finally opened. I couldn’t see whether one section slid behind another, or whether the hole just appeared. One moment there was nothing, the next there was a black rectangle more than two metres high.
Even so, he had to duck as he came through it.
Mercifully, he had brought my clothes. He even had my comfortable boots.
“Small universe, isn’t it?” I said, as I pulled my pants on. The faces hadn’t disappeared; they were still floating around, merging and coming apart. They didn’t have to go around the door—they just disappeared at one edge and reappeared at the other. There was something very odd about their unseeing eyes. They had synthesized human features, but human expression was quite beyond them. They weren’t quite my idea of immortal supermen.
“Hello, Mr. Rousseau,” said Myrlin.
“You can call me Mike,” I told him, not for the first time. “Especially as you just saved my life. I deduce that you saved Susarma, too. Did Serne make it?”
“No. But we got one of the Tetrax.”
“994-Tulyar?”
“Yes. The other was 822-Vela. He was irredeemably dead when we got to him, like Serne.”
Not just dead, I noted, but irredeemably dead.
“I suppose Tulyar was the one you really wanted,” I observed. By this time I had my shirt and pants on, and I was pulling on my boots.
“In a manner of speaking,” he said. He stood aside and indicated that I should precede him through the door. I went out into a gloomy corridor, lit by tiny electric bulbs strung along a wire. It seemed strongly reminiscent of the makeshift lighting the invaders had rigged up, none too cleverly, in the dark corner of Skychain City where they’d captured me. The walls were black and featureless. The corridors meandered left and right, with curves, corners, and intersections, but Myrlin led me through the maze without hesitation.