No sooner had he closed his eyes than he felt that something was different within him. Power—that was it. His concentration gathered, like a light through a magnifying glass, into a white-hot point. Intuitively he knew what to do. He moved the point along his spine—it left a white-hot trail—and into his head. Then he moved it out of his body, into the air directly in front of him, level with his eyes. He opened his eyes—carefully, in order not to disturb his concentration—and was pleased to see it existing independently of him. a germinal window identical to the ones he had seen the Lifestylers create. As he broadened his concentration the point expanded into a disc the size of a saucer. It had the unmistakable flickering border, and within he could see the cold gray fog of the other side. He expanded the window further, until it was a foot in diameter, two feet, a yard. Then he rose to his feet and crept through it.
PART VI
Through the
Transdimensional Window
PART VI
Through the Transdimensional Window
I
A chill penetrated like needles to his bone. He hugged himself for warmth, but it was no use; this chill was not of the body but of the soul. He was standing in the middle of a dense gray cloud and all around him, all he could see was gray. It had no depth to it; he could not tell where it began or where it ended or what, if anything, lay beyond it. He had heard that men maneuvering outside their ships in interstellar space, who had lost sight of their ships and later been recovered, had been driven insane by the endless, directionless void, and this possibility frightened him.
There was one sight, however, by which he could orient himself, and that was the window. It hung before him (though logically, having just passed through it, it should have been behind him) like a circular holovision screen filled with rich colors of sunlight and sky, swaying palms. Ever so cautiously he shrank the window to a pinpoint and opened it again, the way a mountain climber tests the rope by which swings his life. He dared not close it altogether.
He took a step toward it and the window receded. Scolpes had warned him of this peculiar effect, yet it still came as a shock. Right and left were reversed too; turning to the right, the window appeared to rush ahead of him; turning to the left, it returned twice as slowly to center.
Nick took another step toward the window and it moved farther away. He stepped away from it and it came closer. He giggled. Two more steps backward brought his head through the window so he was half in this world, half in the other. The hot wind of the Island Stream played across his face while the rest of his body suffered the awful chill. Then, the thought occurring to him that he might decapitate himself by accidentally closing the window in this position, he withdrew.
He walked toward the window until it was a bright coin of sunlight lying on the cotton grayness, and stopped. What to do next? He dared not turn his head for fear of losing view of the window, and the same reason stopped him from moving any farther away.
He had supposed, naively perhaps, that a Lifestyler would be waiting for him just this side of the window. After all, they saw the future; they would know Nick was on his way. He reminded himself that they were godlike, not gods; prescient but not omniscient. They couldn’t be expected to keep track of the whereabouts of everybody on Sifra Messa—and why should Nick assume that his own dilemma was of more importance than anyone else’s? Certainly we are the stars of our own lives, yet to turn the rest of the world into supporting players is to have delusions of grandeur.
If only he could find another point of orientation, then he would not be afraid of penetrating more deeply into this strange land. There had to be other landmarks, or else how could the Lifestylers navigate? He stared very hard at the grayness in front of him, trying to distinguish some irregularity in it. After a few moments he thought he saw a blur of color. Focusing on it, he gradually perceived that it was constituted of a rapid succession of images. Despite the speed with which they flashed by he found that his eyes could single out one image in particular and leisurely watch it unfold.
It was an image of people—no, they were robots; there was a stiffness, a mechanical regularity to their movements. The world they walked on had a black, airless sky and a surface swirled like volcanic glass. The landscape was flat as far as the eye could see, stripped of buildings and vegetation and people. The only motion was the motion of the robots marching at random back and forth and around in circles. Occasionally two or more stopped to converse, working their jaws, moving their hands in a parody of human conversation; yet Nick could hear no words.
All this came to him as a sort of waking dream, all totally vivid and real; at the same time he could feel the chill of the grayness and watch, from the corner of his eye, the distant, reassuring light of the transdimensional window.
Now the part of Nick’s consciousness which was synchronized with the “robot world” plunged down through the glassy surface beneath their ponderous mechanical feet, down through the earth, down to the very bowels of the planet. There he found, locked away like jewels in a vault, row after row of life-preserver jars. Floating in each of them was a naked body, soft and fragile and white as a worm. They were men and women and children, although the characteristics of sex and age had been dulled beyond distinction by so many years of soaking. And they constituted the entire humanity of the planet. Machines tended their life-support systems, other machines tended the machines tending them, and so forth and so on, an almost infinitely redundant system of maintenance.
Nick found it within his power to enter the mind of one of the bottlemen. The next instant Nick found himself back on the surface, viewing the world from within the spherical metal head of a robot. Apparently the robot was the bottleman’s representative, his eyes and ears, his arms and legs. The bottleman was living out his life through this steely surrogate.
Previously the machines had all looked alike, hardly human; now they appeared as people, vital and alive. Where before he had seen only a barren horizon, now, through the mind of the bottleman and the eyes of the robot, he beheld a city of pastel-tinted towers and lush green parks. Unassisted, men rose to the highest spires, weightless as soap bubbles; others rode across the land in seashell-shaped carriages drawn by serpents with shimmering skins. The bottleman must have created these lavish embellishments from his imagination, the way one doodles to fill a blank space of paper.
How, Nick wondered, could such a world have ever come into existence? He wished he could have spent more time investigating it, but he had loitered too long already. As he withdrew his consciousness, the world faded into a stream of images, the images into a blur of colors.
To his relief the transdimensional window still shone in the distance. Furthermore, the flow of colors, which was far more distinct now that his eyes had adjusted to the grayness, flowed nearby it. This might be the means of orientation he had been hoping for; he could follow it and later it would lead him back home, like the trail of bread crumbs in a fairy tale he had once heard.
He started along the colors, moving in the direction of the window, walking with an even pace and counting his steps to maintain some sense of time and distance. Due to direction reversal, the window soon vanished in the distance and Nick was forced to rely on the flow of colors alone. He prayed that it was a spatially stable phenomenon.
After three thousand steps Nick stopped to rest. For amusement he allowed himself to gaze into the flow, and once again his eyes fixed on an image, an image of people running. . . .