His ankle was giving him sour hell, and the first-aid box would be back in through the hatch, over to the left. He could find it with his fingers. But he didn’t go back inside.
The hair at the back of his neck tingled and stood up like grass as the wind passes through it.
“I,” he said, to the starlit landscape, but his voice was half-cracked, so he cleared his throat and spoke out loudly and clearly: “I know you’re there. Whoever you are.”
He turned. There was nobody.
He turned again. Nobody.
“Come out from where you’re hiding,” he said. “Is that you, Murphy? That would be
like
your idea of practical japery, you hairy old fool.”
He turned, and there was a silhouette against the blackness. Too tall to be Murphy, much too tall to be Edwards or Sinclair. Taller than any person in fact.
Vins stood. The sound of his own breathing was ratchety and intrusive, as if something had malfunctioned somewhere. “Who are you?” he asked. “What do you want? Who are you?”
The silhouette shifted and moved. It hummed a little, a surprisingly high-pitched noise—surprising because of its height. It was a person, clearly, tall but oddly thin, like a putty person stretched between long-boned head and flipperlike feet.
“What are you doing?” Vins repeated.
“You’re not supposed to be here,” said the figure: a man, though one with a voice high-pitched enough almost to sound womanly.
“We’re not supposed to—we
crashed
,” returned Vins, his ankle biting at the base of his leg a little. He had to sit down. He could see a little more now, as his eyes dark-adapted; but with no moon, and with no moonlight, it was still a meager sort of seeing. Vins moved toward where a rock stood, its occasional embedded spots of mica glinting in the light. This was the same rock Sinclair had been lying upon when Vins had last seen him.
“I got to sit down,” he said, by way of explanation.
He could see that this long thin person was carrying something in his right hand, but he couldn’t see what.
“Sit down, OK? Do you mind if I sit down, OK? Is that OK?”
“Sure,” said the stranger.
Vins sat, heavily, lifted his frozen-sore ankle, and picked at the dressing. He needed a new one. This one wasn’t giving him any benefit anymore. The first-aid box would be in through the hatch and to the left.
“You’re trespassing,” asked the stranger. “You’ve no right to be here. This world is forbidden to you.”
“Is it death?” said Vins, feeling a spurt of fear-adrenalin, which is also recklessness-adrenalin, in his chest at the words. Did he dare say such a thing? What if this stranger were the King of the Land of the Dead, and what if he, Vins, were disrespecting him? “Are we all dead? That was one theory we had, as to why the sun rises awry, and why the stars don’t move—and—and,” he added, hurriedly, remembering the previous day, “why the map is so wrong.”
“Wrong?”
“An England-shaped sea where England-land should be. An Atlantic-shaped landmass where the ocean should be.
You
know what I’m talking about.”
“Of course I do. This is my world. Of course I do.”
“My ankle is hurting fit to scream,” said Vins.
The stranger moved his arm in the darkness. “This,” he said, “will have to go.” Vins assumed he was pointing at the shuttle. “You’ve no right to dump this junk here. I’ll have it moved, I tell you. And you—you are trespassing on a forbidden world. You, sir, have incurred the penalty for trespassing.”
“You can see pretty well for such a dark night,” said Vins.
“You can’t?” said the stranger, and he sounded puzzled. “Old eyes, is it?”
“I’m thirty-three,” said Vins, bridling.
“I didn’t mean
old
in that sense.”
There was a silence. The quiet between them was devoid of cricket noise; no blackbird sang. The air was blank and perfectly dark, and only the meanest dribble of starlight illuminated it. Then with a new warmth, as if he had finally understood, the stranger said, “You’re a
homo neanderthalis
?”
“And I suppose,” replied Vins, as if jesting, “that you’re a
homo sapiens
?” But as he said it, even as he gave the words their sarcastic playground spin, he knew it was true. Of course it was true. A creature from the
spiritus mundi
and from dreams and childhood games, standing right here in front of him.
“You’re from Earth, of course,” the
sapiens
was saying. “You recognized the map of Europe. You steered this craft here. I don’t understand why you came here. You boys aren’t supposed to know this place even exists.”
Vins felt a hard knot of something in his chest, like an elbow trying to come out from inside his ribs. It was intensely uncomfortable. This being from myth and legend, and the race of Homer and Shakespeare and Mohammed and Jesus, was
standing right in front of him now
. He didn’t know what to say. There wasn’t anything for him to say.
“You want,” the human prompted, “to answer my question?”
“You’re
actually
a
homo sapiens
?”
“You never met one?”
“Not in the flesh.”
“I lose track of time,” said the
homo sapiens
. “It’s probably been, I don’t know. Centuries. It’s like that, out here. The time—drifts. You got a name?”
“Vins.”
“Well, you’re a handsome fellow, Vins. My name is Ramon Harburg Guthrie, a fine old human name, a thousand years old, like me. As I am myself. And no older.” He chuckled, though Vins couldn’t see what was funny.
“A thousand years?” Vins repeated.
“Give or take. It’s been half that time since your lot were shaped, I’ll tell you that.”
“The last human removed herself four centuries ago,” said Vins, feeling foolish that he had to speak such kindergarten sentences.
Ramon Harburg Guthrie laughed. “Shouldn’t you be worshiping me as a god?” he asked. “Or something along those lines?”
“Worship you as a god? Why would I want to be doing a thing like that? You’re species
homo
and I’m species
homo
. What’s to worship?”
“We uplifted you,” Ramon Harburg Guthrie pointed out. “Recombined you and backed you out of the evolutionary cul-de-sac, and primed you with—” He stopped. “Listen to
me
!” he said. “I’m probably giving entirely the wrong impression. I don’t want to be worshiped as a god.”
“I’m glad to hear it,” said Vins. “There’s nothing subcapacity about my
neanderthalis
brain pan. I speak from experience but also from scientific research into the matter, using some of the many
homo sapiens sapiens
skulls that litter the soil of the Earth. I’ve spent twelve years studying science.”
“Our science,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie.
“Science is science, and who cares who discovered it? And if you care who discovered it, then it’s not
your
science, Ramon Harburg Guthrie, it’s Newton’s and Einstein’s.”
But his tone had wandered the wrong side of angry. The
homo sapiens
lifted whatever it was he was holding in his right hand. When he spoke again, his high voice was harder-edged. “I built this place,” he said. “It’s mine. It’s a private world, and visitors are not allowed. I don’t care about your brain pan, or about my brain pan, I only care about my privacy. You—go. Are there others?”
“We crashed,” said Vins, feeling a sense of panic growing now, though he wasn’t sure exactly why. It was more than just the mysterious
something
the man was holding in his right hand. It was something else.
“I don’t care how you came here. You’re trespassing. Not welcome.”
“It’s hardly fair. It’s not as if you put up a sign saying no entry.”
He scoffed. “That’d be tantamount to shouting aloud to the whole system,
here I am
! That’d be like putting a parsec-wide neon arrow pointing at my home. And why would I want to do that? I built my world away from the ecliptic and down, it’s as flat as a coin and its slender edge is angled toward Earth. You can’t see me, you inheritors of that polluted old world. You
don’t know
I’m here. There are similar ruses used all about this solar system. Similar eyries and haunts, radio-blanked bubbles and curves of habitable landscape tucked away. A thousand baubles and twists of landscape. Built by the old guard, the last of the
truly
wealthy and
truly
well-bred individuals. Who’d trade true breeding for a mere enhanced physical strength and endurance?” He spoke these last five words with a mocking intonation, as if the very idea were absurd. “And yes I know your brain pans are the same size. But size isn’t everything, my dearie.”
Vins was shivering, or perhaps trembling with fear, but he summoned his courage. “I’m no dearie of yours,” he said. “What’s that in your hand anyway? A weapon, is it?”
“How many were there in your crew.”
Of course Vins couldn’t lie, not when asked a direct question like that. He tried one more wriggle. “A severely spoken and impolite question,” he said.
“How many in your
crew
?”
“Four,” he said. “Including me.”
“Inside?”
“Are
they
inside? The ship?”
“Are they inside, yes.”
“No. They wandered off. They were seduced by this world, I think. It’s a beautiful place, especially when you’ve been tanked up in a spaceship for three months. It’s a beautiful, beautiful place”
“Thank you!” said the
homo sapiens
Ramon Harburg Guthrie. And there was genuine pleasure in his voice. He was actually flattered. “It’s my big dumb object. Big and dumb but
I
like it.”
The sky, minutely and almost imperceptibly, was starting to pale over to the west. The silhouette had taken on the intimations of solidity; more than just a 2D gap in the blackness, it was starting to bulk. Dark gray face propped on dark gray body, but there was a perceptible difference in tone between the two things, one smooth and one the rougher texture of fabric.
“
You
didn’t build this,” said Vins. “I’m not being disrespectful, but. I’m not. Only—who can build a whole world? You’re not a god. Sure, the legacy of
homo sapiens
is a wonderful thing, the language and the culture and so on. But
build
a whole world?”
“Indeed, I did build it,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie levelly.
“How many trillions of tons of matter, to pull one g?” asked Vins. “And how do you hide an Earth-sized object from observation by . . .”
“You’ve done well,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie, “if you’ve taken the twentieth-century science with which we left you and built spacecraft capable of coming all the way out here.” He sounded indulgent. “But that’s not to say that you’ve caught up with us. We’ve been at it millennia. You’ve only been independent a handful of centuries. Left to your own devices for a handful of centuries.”
The light was growing behind the western horizon. The human’s face was still indistinct. The object he held in his right hand was still indistinct. But in a moment it would be clearer. Vins was shivering hard now. It was very cold.
“That’s no explanation, if you don’t mind me saying so,” he said, with little heaves of misemphasis on account of his shivering chest and his chattery teeth. The human didn’t seem in the least incommoded by the cold.
“It’s not a globe,” he said. “It’s my world, and I built it as I liked. It’s not for you; it’s
me
-topia. You’re not supposed to be here.”
“It’s beautiful, and its empty; it’s void. There aren’t even deer or antelope or cows. How is that utopia?”
He was expecting the human to say
each to his own
, or
I prefer solitude
, or something like that. But he didn’t. He said, “Oh, my dearie, it’s void on
this
side. I haven’t gotten round to doing anything with this side. There’s world enough and time for that. But on the
other
side of the coin, it’s crowded with fun and interest.”
“The other side,” said Vins.
“It’s a little over a thousand miles across,” said Ramon Harburg Guthrie. “So it’s pretty much the biggest coin ever minted. But it’s not trillions of tons of matter; it’s a thin circular sheet of dense-stuff, threaded with gravity wiring. There’s some distortion; it appears to go up at the rim, highlands in all directions, and on both sides, which is odd.”
“Which is odd,” repeated Vins. He didn’t know why it was odd.
“It’s odd because it’s a gravitational effect. It’s not that the
rim
is any thicker than any other place on the disk. But the gravitational bias helps keep the atmosphere from spilling over the sides, I suppose. I lost interest in that a while ago. And the central territories are flat enough to preserve the landscape almost exactly.”