Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 1

CHAPTER ONE

This was the town of Backdoor, this room they called the Cathedral, where the giant ships were built by those who were to leave each year. Each time our orbit pulled around the Sun, the colonists would wheel a giant ship out on the silver crater, Weissenbaum's Eye, they called it, in tribute to the wisest of all man's reign, who first had phrased that most elementary particle, the Alpha Quanton, where all the budding tips of Physics' tree are bound together and sealed off.

The Alpha Quanton is the one letter from which all the universe is written, and Weissenbaum held it in his fist, the fundamental law of science. And somehow it was right that he would be the one to come across the loophole, the unscientific fact. The Universe is slipping. Everywhere moves infinitely fast in one direction. Through blind space we chase after Orion and Orion flies on before us, and he who stops will disappear forever to where things remain after the Universe has passed.

This is a fact that cannot be explained. It slips right through science's grip, singeing all the laws. Indeed, the indivisibility of the Alpha Quanton, which fixes all the rest we know in place, demands that it not be so. But it is so.

And so Weissenbaum, who knew as much as any man can know about the things that can be proved, decided he would build himself a ship with engines that could lay an anchor down into whatever it is that we are flowing past. The ship would stop, and space would pass it by, and it would take whoever followed Weissenbaum to where the Universe isn't anymore, where the clear-eyed physicist promised us a new beginning.

Now Weissenbaum could not ignore the fact that as his ship resigned its birthright in our sliding universe, it would leave behind such a brilliant flash that cities would be melted into rock and crumbled earth would fill the planet's wounds.

And so he built a special town, Backdoor, he called it, where his and future vessels could be launched discreetly, without danger to the Earth. He built his town on the far side of the Moon, beside a crater that would melt deep down beneath the heat that followed his departure and form a sea of lava whose red glow would gradually fade before the stars. For as it cooled, the lighter metals of the molten crust came floating up to freeze in Luna's quiet vacuum to form the perfect mirror they call Weissenbaum's Eye.

On his last day in Backdoor, Weissenbaum stood among those he would leave behind and picked one man, Don Andrews was his name, to be left in command of Backdoor. Don Andrews was faithful to his trust. Each year that followed, he would oversee the building and launching of another ship. Fifteen times he witnessed the fading flash of another giant ship's departure and saw the crater melt and cool always to reform the perfect mirror that reflected space. And fifteen times Don Andrews had the choice to follow the silent gaze of Weissenbaum's Eye, but always he was full of second thoughts that seemed to need another year to settle.

Now he stood before the crew of the sixteenth ship, the fated Pinta, and those who were about to leave listened from the floor of the Cathedral. Their darkened faces may have watched him or perhaps they let their eyes float to where shadows swallowed the ceiling, and pendulum-still in oiled sleeves, claws hung that could swing entire spaceships across the cold stone floor.

If Don Andrews had been a mountain then his face would have been the final cliff that made the mountaineers turn back. Huddled together in his giant lap and gazing up they would have seen reptilian eagles nest in his black beard and tied back hair. Tilted peaks and gorges seemed to echo his haunted awareness, as he leaned into a dusty column of light. Behind him, two huge and sullen doors arched up and around into the darkness as if to draw the outside in where the night swam through the mirrored crater.

His fingers hovered gently on the podium of polished wood from Earth's own trees. Focused in the Cathedral, he spoke to them, his self it was that spoke, as it did not often do, and their attention hung on what he said.

"We have finished. It is done. The year's clamor and form which filled this room has slipped out past the doors, and waits to carry you through the flash that melts deep into the Moon's own rock and leaves the crater glowing red until it fades before the stars. Now is the last I see of you, the last you see of all you leave behind."

His voice was crisp and soft as the air which carried it to the sulking stone.

"Each day is less sure for those on Earth who remain our friends. Beneath the purple algae pools which bead like shimmering oil in the sunlight, the billions live in rows and columns of honeycombed apartments sucking for their sustenance from the purple skin that stretches over them. They are blind larvae spinning cocoons from which they will not emerge, and we, the last remaining butterflies, are powerless to reach them. Do not long for the Earth, the Earth has long forgotten you."

The colonists listened well. and when Don Andrews finished they rose and saw each other, without speaking, nor did they stand long in the Cathedral, but carried their private thoughts to rooms buried deep in the lip of Backdoor's crater to sleep in preparation for tomorrow's departure.

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