The stone on which we stood sank under us. In an instant the floor of the Chamber of Examination closed above our heads. We dropped, or so it seemed, into a vast pit filled with harsh yellow light, a pit a thousand times wider than the square of stone. Its sides were mighty mechanisms of green and silver metals, before which men and women hovered and darted like so many flies, and across which titanic scarabs of blue and gold clambered like ants.
Chapter XXIII — The Ship
WHILE WE fell I could not speak. I gripped Gunnie’s hand and Apheta’s, not because I feared they might be lost, but because I feared I might; and there was no room left in my mind for any thought but that.
At last we slowed — or rather, we seemed to be dropping no more rapidly. I recalled my leaps among the rigging, for it seemed that here too the insensate hunger for matter had been abated. I saw my own expression of relief upon Gunnie’s face when she turned to Apheta to ask where we were.
“In our world — our ship, if you are more comfortable calling it so, though it only circles our sun and requires no sails.”
A door had opened in the wall of the well, and though it seemed we fell still, we did not leave this door behind. Apheta drew us there, into a dark and narrow corridor I blessed when I felt its firm floor beneath my feet. Gunnie managed to say, “On our ship, we don’t have water on deck.”
“Where do you have it?” Apheta asked absently. It was not until I noticed how much stronger her voice was here that I was aware of the noise, a humming like the song of bees (how well I remembered it!) and distant clatterings and clickings, as though destriers galloped down a plank road while locusts trilled unseen in trees that surely could not flourish in this place.
“Inside,” Gunnie told Apheta. “In tanks.”
“It must be terrible to go to the surface of such a world. Here it is something we look forward to very much.”
A woman who looked rather like Apheta was striding toward us. She traveled a great deal faster than her walk should have carried her, so that she rushed past in an instant. I turned to stare after her, suddenly reminded of the way the green man had vanished down the Corridors of Time. When she had passed from sight, I said, “You do not come to the surface often, do you? I should have guessed; all of you are so pale.”
“It is a reward for us, for working long and hard. On your Urth, women who look as I do, do no work at all — or so I have heard.”
Gunnie said, “Some do.”
The corridor divided, and divided again. We too rushed along, and it seemed to me that our path swung in a long curve, counterclockwise and descending. Apheta had said her people loved the spiral; perhaps they favor the helix as well.
Just as a wave rises abruptly before the bow of a storm-tossed carrack, double doors of tarnished argent rose before us. We halted in a way that made it seem we had never moved save at a walk. Apheta motioned toward the doors, which groaned like clients but would not swing back until I helped her push them.
Gunnie looked up at the lintel and, as though she read the words there, recited, “No hope for those who enter here.”
“No, no,” Apheta murmured. “Every hope.” The hum and the clickings had been left behind.
I asked, “Is this where I will be taught to bring the New Sun?”
“You will not have to be taught,” she told me. “You are gravid with the knowledge, and it will be born as soon as you approach the White Fountain sufficiently for you to be aware of it.”
I would have laughed at her figure of speech, had not the utter emptiness of the chamber to which we had come stilled all amusement. It was wider than the Chamber of Examination, with silver walls that rose to a great arch in that curve one sees traced by a stone hurled into the air; but it was empty, utterly empty save for us, who whispered in its doorway.
Gunnie repeated, “No hope,” and I realized she had been too frightened to pay heed to Apheta or me. I put an arm around her shoulders (though the gesture seemed strange directed toward a woman who was as tall as I) and tried to comfort her, thinking all the while what a fool she would be to accept the comfort when it was clear I could do no more here than she herself.
She continued, “We used to have a sailor who said that. She was always hoping to go home, but we never landed in her time again, and after a while she died.”
I asked Apheta how I came to carry such knowledge without being aware of it.
“Tzadkiel gave it to you as you slept,” she said.
“You mean he came to your chamber last night?” I had spoken before I realized it would give Gunnie pain. I felt her muscles tighten as she shrugged my arm away.
“No,” Apheta told me. “On the ship, I believe. I cannot tell you the precise moment.”
I recalled then how Zak had bent over me in that hidden corner Gunnie had found for us — Tzadkiel become the savage that we, his paradigms, had once been.
“Come now,” Apheta was saying. She led us forward. I had been wrong in thinking there was nothing in the chamber; there was a wide area of black upon the floor. Some of the flaking silver of the arched ceiling had fallen there, where it was most visible.
“You have, both of you, those necklaces sailors carry?”
In some astonishment, I felt for mine and nodded. Gunnie did the same.
“Put them on. You will be without air soon.”
Only then did I realize what that sparkling darkness was. I drew out the necklace, wondering, I confess, whether each of its linked prisms functioned still, put it on, and went forward to look. My cloak of air came with me, so that I was conscious of no wind; but I saw Gunnie’s hair tossed by a gale I could not feel, streaming before her until she had her own necklace in place, and Apheta’s strange hair, which did not flutter as a human woman’s does, but stood out like a banner.
That blackness was the void; yet as I walked, it rose as though it sensed my approach, and before I reached it, it had become a sphere.
I tried to stop.
In a moment Gunnie was beside me, struggling too and grasping my arm. The sphere was like a wall. At its center, just as I had seen it pictured on board, was the ship.
I have written that I sought to stop. It was difficult, and soon I could not resist. It may be that the void held some attraction like that of a world. Or perhaps it was only that the pressure of the wind on the air held static around me was so strong that I was driven forward.
Or perhaps the ship had some hold upon us both. If I dared, I would say that my destiny drew me, yet Gunnie cannot have been drawn by the same destiny, though perhaps her quite different fate drew her toward the same place. For if it were merely the wind, or the insensate hunger of matter for matter, why was Apheta not drawn with us?
I will leave it to you to explain these things. Drawn I was, and Gunnie too I saw her flying through the void behind me, twisting and whirling as the universe twisted and whirled, saw her just as one leaf twirling in a spring storm might see another. Somewhere behind or before us, above us or below us, was a wide circle of light, spinning, frantically spinning, a thing like Lune, if such a thing as a moon of the most brilliant white can be imagined. Gunnie fluttered across it once or twice before she was lost in the diamond-decked blackness. (And once it seemed to me — and still seems when I call that frantic memory forth — that I saw Apheta’s face as she leaned from that moon.)
With the next wild spin, it was not Gunnie who was lost but that spot of shining white, lost somewhere among the billions of staring suns. Gunnie was not far off, and I saw her turn her head to look at me.