Enry, pale, said, “How wide is the rim? It still looks like a one-dimensional line from here.”
“About fifty miles,” Jao said. “Talk about thin! We wouldn’t see it at all from this angle if it wasn’t for scattered light from over the edge.”
Ame said, with a trace of awe, “The former human race was efficient. “Just about all the working surface is on the fiat sides.”
Jao nodded. “But don’t forget, even a fifty-mile width gives a surface area on the rim alone of thirteen and a half billion square miles. That’s equivalent to the surface areas of seventy of your normal, terrestroid-style planets like the Father World. That’s a lot of elbow room, even if it is all east and west.”
“I’m glad we don’t have to dig it all up,” Ame said, with a glance at Enry to see how he was taking her presence.
Enry rose to the occasion. He was stuffy but nice. “I could use a little help,” he said.
A perfunctory laugh went around. Bram asked Lydis for a magnified view through the ship’s telescope and got nothing more than a fuzzier line topped by a blurred speck that might have been construed as a crescent.
“It’s going to be a very strange place,” he said.
Part II
TESTAMENT
CHAPTER 7
The diskworld was a very strange place indeed.
Bram, weighing no more than an ounce or two, stood at the front of the landing ladder and looked out across the red twilight at a thin slice of landscape that stretched away into darkness.
Its edges were sharply defined against the starry night. Strictly speaking, there was no horizon at the end of it; the bleak, uniform vista dwindled to a vanishing point long before the eye could reach that hypothetical sykline some millions of miles beyond.
It gave Bram the illusion of standing on a very high, infinitely long ridge. Ahead was a flat, narrow plain of rubble that turned into a needle point piercing the black sky. On either side of him, not many miles away, was a sheer cliff that dropped down ninety million miles to a chasm filled with stars.
His weightlessness contributed to the dreamlike feeling of the place. The next person down the ladder jostled him unintentionally, and they both drifted a foot into the air before settling to the ground again.
Bram glanced into the other’s faceplate and saw by the blue glow of the helmet telltales that it was Jao. For once the red-bearded physicist was speechless. Both of them turned by common consent to look at the inner rim of their thin-sliced world.
The universe of stars gave way to a sky erased by stray luminescence, over what appeared to be a geometrically straight edge with no hint of curvature.
The brink of the world.
The great disks rose like goblin faces peering over the precipice, glowing a dull red of dying embers. As this queer world turned, they would rise in unison until they filled the sky. Even now, the big one ahead of them in orbit showed an angular diameter of fifty degrees, a hundred times wider than the sun would have been had it been visible.
From the present angle of view, almost forty million miles above the plane of the sun, one looked down on the inner disks. The three in the next orbit inward faced each other in a circle, like a conference of goblin children. Only one of these showed its glowing face; the other two were circular blots of darkness. Still farther inward hung more disks, getting smaller and smaller.
“I think I figured it out,” Jao said.
“Figured what out?”
“How to manufacture a diskworld.”
“How?”
Jao affected jauntiness, but his voice shook a little. “Oh, spin-up, foamed materials, superfilament, anchoring masses. I’ll tell you more when the geologist’s report is in.”
Bram looked across to where a squarish space-suited figure on its hands and knees was chipping away at rock with a little hammer. Each blow tended to lift him into the air, and then there would be a wait until he was sufficiently anchored to strike again; it must have been a maddeningly frustrating way to work. Enry had wasted no time. He had started collecting his samples only a few yards from the ship.
“What do you say, Enry?” Bram said.
His radio crackled. “Looks like ordinary rock so far,” Enry’s voice said. “Under a layer of dust.”
“Yar, from the spin-up,” Jao countered. “Plus seventy million years’ worth of micrometeorites. You’re going to have to dig a lot deeper before you get to what this planet’s made of.”
“Which is?”
“Mostly nothing. Wrapped around gases—oxygen, mostly, I’d guess. Combined with aluminum and probably carbon. You’ll have to get a chemist. But I’ll tell you this, Enry-peng-yu, when you get to it, it’s going to be a job taking the sample.”
Enry grunted and continued his chipping. He was gradually working out a low-gravity technique—striking his little outcropping from one side, then quickly reaching around to strike it from the other, and staying more or less in orbit around it.
“The rest of the answer’s there,” Jao went on, pointing at the moon overhead.
Bram raised his eyes to the zenith and instinctively wanted to duck his head. Everybody did. The ellipsoidal moon was so close—only a few diameters away—that it seemed in danger of falling.
You didn’t have to look up to be conscious of it. You could almost feel it hanging there with its pointed end aimed at your head. Feel it literally, perhaps. Its gravitational pull would not be insignificant compared with the diskworld’s feeble tug at the rim. Perhaps the fluids of the cells sent a message to the brain.
The pockmarked body measured scarcely a hundred fifty miles through the long axis. It might once have been an asteroid towed here by Original Man, Jun Davd had suggested, or a smaller moon of one of the dismantled gas giants.
There were artificial structures on the underside of the moon, visible even to the naked eye—a distinctly geometric jumble at the lower tip, with four enigmatic hairlines converging on it from the satellite’s waistline. The airless clarity brought it tantalizingly near.
“It makes you feel that you could almost jump up and touch it,” Bram said.
Jao chewed a hairy lip. “You know … I bet a space-suited man could reach the moon by jumping,” he said in a serious tone. “Assuming he could jump with an initial velocity of, oh, sixteen feet per second. Escape velocity ought to be somewhere around there. The surface gravity here’s about like a small asteroid. Like that comet head we visited.” His eyes almost clicked as he started doing calculations in his head. “Suit jets would help,” he conceded. “The trick would be landing safely on the moon, with only a pair of legs to come down on.”
“It might be quite a crash,” Bram said. “How far would he have to fall after capture—about a thousand miles?”
“Less than that.”
“We’ll visit the moon after we get organized here, I promise you. But I think we’ll do it in workpods.”
“There might be an alternative.”
“Huh?”
“We might be able to get there in climbers. We’ll know after we get to the ruins.”
The ruins—or their apparent focus—lay directly underneath the lower tip of the ellipsoidal moon. Lydis had wanted to land closer to them, but Jao had insisted that she land at least fifty miles away. “It might be dangerous,” he had said, but he had refused to say why. Bram had taken him seriously enough to order Lydis to comply. The distance would be inconvenient, but they had brought along a pair of walkers adapted to airlessness and low gravity.