“We failed,” Allel said.
“Huh?”
Allel pointed at the Shell above them. “Look. We must have fallen back. If we’d reached the Shell we’d see the world up there, a ball of rock, cupped by the Shell. And the land would tilt up at the horizon…”
Boyd grunted. Sensitive to her daughter’s mood, she drank in silence. She probed at her limbs. “At least we’re still whole,” she rumbled. She looked about. Then — unexpectedly — she grinned. “So we failed, did we? Eh?”
She dug her good hand into the ground, and then shook it in Allel’s face. “Look at that! Look!”
At the heart of the clump was a bright orange flower. A Shell flower.
Allel’s thoughts swam like fish. “Now I really don’t understand…”
“We made it. We’re on the Shell! That’s enough for me.” Then Boyd followed her daughter’s gaze upwards, to the roof over the world. Her eyes narrowed.
Allel said slowly, “Above us we see Home, not the Shell. Yet it looks as the Shell does. The two worlds are complete in themselves, yet they are — wrapped around each other. Symmetry. You see the same thing — a Shell — from whichever world you’re on.”
Boyd nodded shrewdly. “Well, that much I understand. Like us, eh? Two halves of the same whole. No weak center, no protecting Shell. Just the two of us.”
Allel dropped her eyes, hotly embarrassed. She went on doggedly: “But how? If we’re on the Shell, why doesn’t the land curve up like a saucer? Why don’t we see Home floating up there like a ball? How can it look like another Shell?”
Boyd made a little growling noise, and flung the shard of burner into the grass. A small flock of ice-blue birds clattered off, alarmed. “Well, you’re the dreamer. Dream up an answer.”
Allel lay flat. She rested her head on very ordinary loam and stared up through two layers of clouds. She thought of two worlds, each a ball yet each cupping the other like a shell round a nut. How could that be?
Her vision of her universe was crumbling, like the flaking planet-in-a-box milk painting on that museum wall. She imagined reaching into the box to the truth—
Boyd said gruffly: “Well, what now?”
Allel gestured vaguely. “Fix the balloon and get home. We’ve got to make people understand. Build more balloons and go to the old Cities. Find a way to turn back the glaciers, or fix the Sun…”
Boyd was staring past her shoulder. Allel turned — then sat up quickly.
The boy stood at the edge of the stand of cow-trees. He was no better dressed than they were; teeth flashed in a dark face as he jabbered at them, smiling and pointing and cupping his hands.
Allel watched, baffled. “What’s he saying?”
Boyd bellowed with laughter. “I think he’s asking what it’s like living in a saucer.”
Boyd stood up and, with some dignity, straightened the shreds of her quilted jacket. Allel got to her feet, stiffly. “Come on,” said Boyd. “Let’s see if his people can cook as well as your grandfather.”
They walked towards the boy across the meadow of bright orange flowers.
“Lethe. I can’t believe they fell so far. They’ve become utterly dependent on that artificial biosphere. They’re reduced to technologies of stone and wood—”
“But they survived,” Eve said. “Humans survived, even beyond the evacuation of the Xeelee. In a world that cared for them. You could argue this is a Utopian vision…”
“This world of theirs, with the Shell, is a four-dimensional sphere. No wonder they couldn’t figure it out.”
I thought of three-dimensional analogies. Allel’s people were like two-dimensional creatures, constrained to crawl over the surface of a three-dimensional globe. Home and Shell, the twin worlds, were like lines of latitude, above and below — each unbroken, each apparently cupping the other. Just as the diagrams in the “City” had tried to show them.
“But they were capable of understanding,” Eve said. “After a million years, humans had adapted in subtle ways. Allel had the capacity to visualize, to think in higher dimensions. She could have understood, if someone had explained it to her. As those diagrams in the place she called the City were meant to. And in time, she would figure out some of it…”
“They were trapped,” I said. “In a prison of folded space-time.”
“Perhaps,” said Eve. “Perhaps. But they didn’t give up…”
The Eighth Room
Teal slept through dawn.
He woke with a jolt. There was the faintest crack of red around the teepee’s leather flap.
After all his planning… it would be broad daylight by the time he reached the bridge anchor.
But, he reflected ruefully, there was a certain irony. The dawn had been too feeble to wake him — and that was the heart of the problem.
The Sun was going out. And today Teal was going to try to fix it.
With a fluid movement he slid off the pallet and stood in the darkness.
Erwal’s breathing was even and undisturbed. Teal hesitated; then he bent and touched his wife’s belly, his fingertips exploring the mummy-cow skin blanket to find the second heartbeat beneath.
Then he pulled on his clothes and slipped out of the teepee.
His breath steamed. Dawn was an icy glow; a roof of snow-laden cloud hid all sight of Home, the world in the sky.
He walked softly through the heart of the little village. The ground was corrugated by mummy-cow hooves. He stepped around piles of bone needles and broken stone tools, past heaps of lichen and moss gathered to feed the cows.
Frost crackled.
He glanced about uneasily. Nobody knew what he was planning today, and he didn’t want to be spotted by any early risers…
But all the dozen teepees were silent. Even the one belonging to Damen, Teal’s elder brother. If Damen knew what he was up to, he’d knock Teal senseless.
He found himself tip-toeing away like a naughty child.
He reached the border of the village and began to lope across the tundra, his breathing easier. His even pace ate up the silent miles and the sky was barely brighter when he came to the bridge anchor.
The anchor itself was an arch about the height of a man, made of something smooth and milky-white. The structure’s original purpose was long forgotten, dating from before the ice. It was unimaginably old.
Now, though, there was a rope tied to the crosspiece. The rope rose from the arch and pierced the clouds, as if it were tethering the sky… but, Teal knew, the rope looped on past the clouds and crossed space to another world.
He approached the anchor past tarpaulined bundles of balloon equipment. Huddled around the arch were five mummy-cows. Humming simple songs they picked at the rope’s knots with their articulated trunks.
“Get away from that rope.”
The great soft beasts cowered at his voice. In their agitation they bumped together, trembling. Their ears flapped and their food teats wobbled comically.
Finally one of the cows broke out of the group and approached nervously. “Pardon, ssir…”
The cow was a broad fur-covered cylinder supported on stumplike legs. Her rectangular head rotated mournfully around a single ball joint, and plate-sized eyes looked down at Teal. From the center of the blocky face sprouted a bifurcated trunk, and humanlike hands at the ends of the trunk’s forks pulled at each other nervously.