Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten

Weissenbaum's Eye - Stetten - Chapter 41

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

Without understanding, Sand climbed unsteadily down the ladder into the hall. Finding his way to the tunnel, he followed it down to where the sliding door to the cathedral opened and closed with its own careless, crazy rhythm, exposing the dark interior filled with smoke. The whole place was dislodged, but then so was he. Lights flashed erratically, and the floor seemed to be swaying.

With some kind of magic balance, Sand staggered up to the door, and at just the right moment stepped in as it opened. The door closed behind him, leaving him in darkness, but then mindlessly the door opened again. He moved on. He could see very little, and think hardly at all, but finding a rack of spacesuits near the door, he managed to put one on.

By touch, he found his way around the cathedral wall until he reached the lever for the outer doors, the huge gates which opened onto the crater. He pulled the lever and they began to move.

The doors had opened most of the way when the flash came, reflected by the room around him without hitting him directly. It almost made him stop to think, to understand just where he was. But the light from the Culminate's departure dissipated, and Sand resumed his stroll. Passing near Don Andrews' body in the darkness, Sand walked to the edge of the cavernous opening, and stood before the surface of the mirror.

It could not be solid, this floating, depthless double sky, which leveled out before him so discrete and distant. An exhilarating sense of reality rushed through him as he strolled along the crater's edge. He could feel the crunch of the Moon's soil under his boots, and smell the filtered air, like the taste of distilled water. Now it seemed as sweet as summer rain.

Breathing deeply, he turned to the mirror. The voice in the suit's survival pack was chattering on about the temperature inside and out, and which of the possible paths was safest. Sand stood still at the mirror's edge. At his command the chattering ceased.

Silence. Only his breathing and the crystal scene through his visor. The vast expanse of stars around him had a pinpoint clarity impossible in simulation.

The emptiness surrounding this ball of rock could easily have swallowed him, but for the force of gravity. For just a moment he wanted claws on his feet, sharp metal talons that could hold on. But then he did not doubt the Moon would hold him. It was a law of the Universe, like the speed of light, or the indivisibility of the alpha quanton, or the fact that you are going to die.

Why didn't they make visors that were big glass bubbles? His limited vision through the curved plate gave him an enormous urge to look back behind himself. He knew if he surrendered once he would be turning around on every impulse, but somehow he could not stop himself.

Sand scanned his surroundings. Something had caught his eye. Was it that peak that seemed so familiar? Or had he seen something? Sand's feet were already moving in that direction.

However, by the time he reached the base of the peak, all sense of deja-vu had vanished. The crag and boulders held no familiarity, and were just more of the same anonymous landscape. Whatever he had seen up there, which a moment before had been so real, now seemed silly.

He wandered along the base of the ridge, until that sense of rightness hit him again. Breathing hard, Sand looked up the steep slope.

"Climb it," he found himself saying. "Climb it."

He grabbed at the lowest ledge with padded gloves and pulled himself up. His boots struggled to find a foothold. With his vision limited severely by the helmet, he could not see where to step. Worming his way up the cliff, he dragged the fibers of his suit across a sharp rock, and the voice came alive explosively.

"There's a leak in your suit! The pressure's dropping! Get inside immediately!"

Sand marveled at the emotional content of the voice. It really seemed to care about him. For too long he had been fooled by voices such as this. Now it struck him as bizarre. Even this spacesuit was a forgery, with no authentic human feeling behind it, the feigned emotion purely for his benefit.

"How long can I last?" Sand asked absently.

"Your suit can compensate for a half an hour, but you must get inside as quickly as possible!" came the panicky reply.

I don't must do anything.

Sand continued climbing at twice the pace, crawling and scraping over anything in his way, grasping onto nothing, taking chances. As the distance to the ground below him grew, so did the intensity of the voice. Sand tried commanding silence, but the survival pack had evidently decided it knew best, and would not shut up. Hanging precariously by one hand for a moment, Sand reached behind himself and ripped off the pack. He chucked it, sensing the slight shock as the pack hit the ground below, after what seemed an inordinately long time.

"Moon's gravity," he muttered in a detached way, turning back to climb in blessed silence.

Exhausted, Sand pulled himself up on a strangely flat plateau. The thrill and urgency of a moment before had left him, although he hadn't been aware of the transition. Now there was just emptiness inside to match the vast space all around him. His mother was dead.

A hard case of bitterness tightened somewhere inside his rib cage, as he turned slowly and raised his eyes across the crater. His fingers were too tired to make a fist to fit the way he felt. His jaw hurt as if from years of clenching his teeth together. And his lungs ached. In fact, he could barely breathe. The climb should not have tired him so much.

He had been looking right at it for a long time before he realized it was there. A hundred feet below him, down the outer rim was something small, glaring so intensely that he barely could make out its shape. Almost tucked under the cliff, a silvery something sparkled.

Dazed and without feeling he stumbled blindly down the slope, only slightly aware of the decreasing hiss of gasses from his suit. He saw it now more clearly, a spidery craft, raised on spindly legs so fragile that they should have bent under the weight of the giant jewel set into its center. Breathing painfully, he caught one last tilted view, blurred through hot stinging tears as his foot snagged on a rock and he lunged forward, over and down in slow motion, to the boulders at the base of the cliff.

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