“Yes.” She crossed her legs and let out a breath. “I didn’t have much time to think this through. But I suppose the only thing to do is rush for the communications room and get off the transmission as quickly as possible. After that the only thing we can do is hide in one of the tunnels.”
“Where they’d have us neatly cornered.”
“True.” Her purplish-blue eyes rolled. “I suppose it’s useless.”
“Don’t give up yet.”
Gene approached the door and eyed it up and down.
“Do you have any ideas?” she asked.
“This security system you mentioned, the way you phrased it —” He ran a hand over the smooth yellow- painted metal of the door. “Is it controlled by an Artificial Intelligence?”
“Of course,” she said. “How else could a security system know friend from foe?”
“Right. If we did get in, we’d have to contend with it. True?”
“We’d have to take it out.”
“Hmm. First we have to get in. I’m going to try something.”
“What?”
“Little magic trick I know.”
Gene squared himself in front of the door and extended his right hand, bringing the palm up flush with the metal plate.
She watched with interest.
““Cottleston, Cottleston, Cottleston pie,”” he began.
She was very interested. One pale eyebrow rose.
““
He repeated the couplet several times, keeping perfectly still, fixing his gaze straight ahead.
Presently the door emitted a high-pitched tone. It emitted several more in a complex harmonic sequence, then beeped dissonantly. After a few more seconds it slid aside with a hiss.
“Amazing,” she said.
“Nothing to it.”
“Whatever was that?”
“A little facilitation spell. I can’t do much in the way of hocus-pocus, but I can do a door-opener in worlds with manageable indigenous magic. Fortunately, this is such a world.”
She guffawed. “You’re a magician?”
“An inept one. Please, I’m very sensitive about it.”
She laughed.
“Don’t you have any compassion for the handicapped?”
“I have no idea who you are or what you’re up to,” she said, “but you do have style, that much I’ll say.”
“Style is the last refuge,” he replied as he helped her up, “of those who are short in the substance department.”
The strange building was dark inside. They entered cautiously.
Six
Plane
The horizon had lightened a bit, he thought. But he could not be sure. He had been walking for … how long? But there was no time, of course. Nothing, except …
Was it that he had a better conception of himself? Not a conception, exactly. It might best be said that he had a firmer grasp on his own reality. The situation had been touch and go for a while. (Timelike words again! No avoiding them, try as he might.) He had felt that he would dissolve, fade away. But now he was fairly sure that his existence, such as it was, would continue for an indefinite time into an indeterminate future. That was something. Not much, but something.
There was not much else, however. His name still eluded him. He had no memories to speak of. Only, now, a vague sense that much had gone on before.
Well, that was more than he had possessed on his arrival here.…
Again, the persistence of time. Perhaps time did have a meaning here. Things were changing, albeit imperceptibly. Conditions were … improving. No. That was exaggeration. It was enough that things were changing, and perhaps changing in an important way.
But on the other hand …
Did he have two hands? He looked at them. Yes.
But on the other hand, not much about this place had changed. It was barely a place at all. There was a nothingness about it that was disquieting, that defeated him. There was too much nothingness here. In fact, there was almost no “here” in which to contain a nothingness. There was absolutely nothing to distinguish any one point on this plane from any other …
Until now.
He stopped. Far ahead, something rose above the horizon. It wasn’t much of anything but a line, a spike, a rise of something that had no characteristics save that it was perpendicular to the line of the horizon. It seemed very far away.
A goal! He had a goal! He strode forward eagerly.
Unlike the horizon, this new feature of the universe got closer the more one walked toward it. As he neared, it got bigger, and he began to notice that it was thicker at its base. It was a tall, thin pyramid — an obelisk, and there was something at the top, an irregular shape, but he still could not distinguish it.
He hurried toward it.
He arrived at the column’s base and found that he could barely see the top. It was almost lost in the darkness. Yet he could make out a shape.
It looked like a man up there. Yes, very definitely, though the features were indiscernible. The man seemed to be sitting atop the obelisk, seated in a wing chair. The chair rested on a capital that crowned the shaft.
He stared up at the figure. It did not move. He continued watching. Before long he could have sworn that he detected movement, perhaps a slight shifting of the figure. But no more than that. Whatever or whoever it was preferred not to move.
But as time (yes!) passed he began to see that there was more to the figure, and became convinced that the small platform at the apex of the obelisk held more than just the figure and the seat. The figure … yes, it was a man, a man dressed in a long gown and a pointed cap … was bent over a small writing desk or lectern. He was writing, slowly and methodically, with a quill in a large ledger, his attention to detail fastidious, the tip of the quill precessing equinoctially, in slow circles.[5]
Time passed.
Below, the one who looked up waited. He stood completely still, eyes on the figure above. Waiting. Waiting.
A further duration ran its course. At some point in a moving stream of time that was now well-established, a few moments later or several hours later — no one could say — the man on high laid the quill aside and settled within the wings of his high-backed chair.
Something had changed in the interim. The obelisk was not so much an obelisk as a high bench — a very high bench, such as that from which a judge might deliberate.
The man in the gown and pointed cap looked down. The face was vague in shadows, but a flowing beard could be discerned, its color perhaps a silver-gray. The eyes, under a dark lowered brow, were pools of deeper shadow.
He spoke. He said, “Ah.” His voice was deep and resonant.
