It was night. Instead of stars, the darkness was criscrossed by straight, sharp lines, as if an incredibly busy constellation map had been filled out on the night sky itself. Most of these were white, the same color as the column of light, and in fact it seemed to ascend into the sky to become one of them. A few were other colors, blue and red and turquoise. The effect was quite beautiful and, to Caroline's knowledge, unique.
There were four copies of the stone tablet, so it was impossible to leave Stonehenge without seeing one. They all said:
YOU ARE NAKED AND ALONE BECAUSE YOU WANTED TO SEE ME, AND I DON'T WANT TO BE SEEN. WELCOME TO MY WORLD. YOU ARE AT THE SOUTH POLE. I AM AT THE NORTH. THE REST OF THE JOURNEY IS YOUR PROBLEM. IT IS MY SINCERE HOPE THAT YOU FAIL.
Caroline, who had come to Lawrence's Task naked and alone anyway, had already missed the first of his environment's supposedly disorienting influences. Now she shook her head in disgust at the second. "Fuck you, Doctor L. I'm calling this the north pole, and you're at the south."
No answer. She hadn't really expected any.
Outside of Stonehenge, the landscape looked the same in every direction. Well, Lawrence had given her valuable information; if they were at opposite poles of a spherical planet, then it didn't matter which way she went. She struck out at random and began to explore.
A couple of hours later Caroline knew quite a bit more. She was on the top of a high mesa, and she had found what seemed to be the only path down. She regarded this with suspicion; she knew enough about the game-playing mentality to know the most obvious solution often got you killed. Beyond the mesa she could easily see she was on an island, an almost circular island about twice as wide as the mesa. She paced off the mesa's diameter, circling around Stonehenge, and decided it was about two kilometers across. That made the island four kilometers across, with the «beach» about one kilometer wide.
As far as she could tell without descending, the landscape at the bottom was no different from the landscape at the top. The only feature of interest was some kind of structure which emerged from the water a kilometer or so offshore.
She set about carefully searching the top of the mesa, because she wasn't sure she would be able to get back up once she was down, and there might be something hidden up there she would later need.
She verified that the vault of the sky was, indeed, rotating about the column of light. It seemed as if the entire planet were spitted on it. She was not expecting the sun or whatever passed for it here to rise, so she was almost taken by surprise when, after several hours, one corner of the sky began to glow. The sky-lines quickly faded out on that segment of the horizon.
It got bright, and it got bright fast.
The air had been chilly — not uncomfortable, particularly to someone like Caroline who was used to nudity — but it warmed quickly. And still no sign of the sun itself. Suddenly it peeked over the horizon, a thin sliver of impossible white-hot brightness, and Caroline knew with certainty she had made her first mistake.
Now to survive it.
She dove for the nearest cover, one of the larger boulders, and crouched in its rapidly shortening shadow. From the fuzziness of the shadow's edge she could tell the sun was huge, ten or twenty times bigger than on Earth and probably that much hotter. No wonder nothing grew here! She watched the shadow retreat toward her and wondered what she would do when it reached her. There was no longer any chill; the landscape around her was being baked, and it was so hot she could barely breathe. Fortunately, or unfortunately depending on how she looked at it, the shadow was moving fast. She wouldn't have to last long to survive the "day." But «noon» was fast approaching, and with it her boulder's protective shadow would be almost gone.
The boulder was half-buried; it had nothing resembling an overhang. She was way too far from Stonehenge. Not far away she could see through the shimmering heat-haze another, slightly smaller boulder with a second rock propped awkwardly beside it. This offered a slight overhang, but it was more than thirty meters away. Caroline calculated her chances furiously, estimating that she would be exposed for two or three minutes while the sun was directly overhead, when there would be no shadow on either side of her rock. She'd never survive that; the overhang was her only chance. She'd have to risk a dash for it.
Caroline drew quick breaths of hot air, then sprinted.
Everything was heat. Heat on her back, heat on her arms, the hot ground blistering the soles of her feet. She thought only of her destination: Twenty meters, fifteen, ten, five. She slammed into it without slowing, then collapsed. Her hair, exposed so briefly, had become dry and stiff. She knew with awful certaintly that it would have ignited if she had been exposed much longer.
Fortunately, mercifully, the sheltered area extended through the two rocks. She wouldn't have to expose herself again to get to the other side.
In the unearthly brightness she could see her skin reddening. Her face had been protected by her hair, the front of her body by her crouching stance. But her back and legs and arms all had varying degrees of sunburn. She knew her back and legs and her right side would blister and peel, but she wasn't sure about the other burns, or the soles of her feet.
The sun sailed majestically over the horizon, setting as quickly as it had arrived. It took long minutes for her vision to return; the subtle illumination of the light-column could not compete with the terrible brightness of that compressed day. Caroline noted the position of the star-lines, and hoped that day and night were synchronized with the rotation of the planet. But she couldn't take that for granted; the sun obviously moved in its own orbit, and there was no reason for one period to have anything at all to do with the other.
She limped back toward Stonehenge and the light column, and noted the arrangement of stones. Stonehenge would be safe, she finally decided. She planned to stay there and recover from her burns until an old, familiar feeling manifested itself, and she knew a brief moment of rage.
She was hungry.
Her body was not being powered directly by Prime Intellect, as she and most citizens of Cyberspace had come to take for granted. She would have to eat to stay in the Challenge, if not "alive."
And there was nothing, nothing at all, to eat in this barren sun-blasted land. So how was she supposed to deal with this? Shaking her head, she made for the pathway. She had found nothing on the top of the mesa. Her options were few and bad; she could stay and starve, or worse dehydrate, or go out and risk the sun again. Near-certain endgame out there was better than certain endgame by starvation.
There was nothing obviously treacherous about the path down. It was wide and shallow, and even with the blisters forming on her feet not a difficult downhill walk.
The mesa was high, though, several hundred meters high. The pathway spiralled gently around the side. There was no shelter, and Caroline realized with a shudder that she would have been fried if she had been caught on the path at sunrise. Well, caution had served her well, if not well enough to avoid a sunburn.
It was much darker at the base of the mesa, and she lost track of the sky's position. She knew it must have taken her most of a day to walk down, though, and there was no telling from which direction the sun might reappear. Even though the mesa itself was the most obvious source of shelter, Caroline walked to the beach. She tasted the water, and to her immense relief found it fresh instead of salty. Then she bathed, soothing the itch of her burned skin a little. She wondered for a moment if there might be life in the water, and then realized that the shallows at least were probably sterile. From the sun.