Lanier, dressed in his usual priest's collar and long black coat, had concealed on his person the usual packet of stimulants and depressants, including sodium pentothal and Baktropol. His Malachi rested under his armpit; three clips hung at his waist. He was prepared for every kind of emergency, and then some. He often felt like a deep-sea diver, he carried so much equipment. But one couldn't be too careful.
He threw back his head and closed his eyes. He started to cleanse his mind, calm his body down. Properly speaking, it was a meditation without a mantra: he listened to the tiny humming in his head, the millions of synapses that vibrated at their own shifting frequencies. And when he was deep enough into a near
samadhi
-state, Christy would begin the music.
Lanier breathed deeply and slowly. His fingers, curled in his palms, twitched. Christy slotted the sonic-wafer of Barber's
Second Essay for Orchestra
, careful not to turn the audio onto the loudspeakers of the library. She still felt shaky at times, especially those times when Francis went under. Like now.
The miniaturized receiver imbedded in Lanier's earlobe softly began transmitting. And Lanier began feeling what it must've been like for Perry Eventide.
Love
. Troublesome, complex, enchanting. A lost love unlike any that a man had ever known.
And darkness swelled around him as the vibrations filled his quiet mind then shimmered down his spinal cord. His skin tingled.
Letting go, letting go
, he told himself.
Become Perry Eventide. Search him out
. Breathing in and out. One breath at a time. Let the darkness fill.
Christy jumped in her chair. The muted
pop
! came as Lanier vanished from his position on the floor of his workroom. It seemed unnatural for a living being to do such a thing, and it always startled her.
The sonic-wafer had run its course.
Dizzy, he dropped to his knees, shaking his head as if he hadn't gotten enough air. He sat down promptly in the slender, pale yellow grass and looked around, orienting himself. His confusions only lasted a few seconds, but when he cleared his mind, letting the music generate a sense of the vision, he always knew where he was. And why.
Ascertaining the time of day, he looked up at the sun. But there was no sun. Instead, a bright strip, extending the length of the sky, like the surface of a single mirror, glistened brightly. The sky itself was blue and cloudless, but there was nothing resembling a sun anywhere in the heavens above him.
At first he thought it was some kind of illusion, but glancing to either side of him, he observed that the light which draped the prairie on which he had "landed" seemed just the slightest bit drab.
Artificial
, he reasoned.
Artificial light
.
He rose slowly, brushing off bits of grass and dirt from his long coat, staring up at the long track of "sunlight." Ahead of him sat a low range of sparse hills. Catalpa trees, bent at odd angles, dotted the countryside.
Then he noticed that, through the haze, the horizon seemed to curve upward in the soft daylight. He turned around. Behind him, at a distance of about twenty kilometers, the end of the world seemed to lift upward into obscurity as well, as if the earth curved upward rather than down. Yet, he could see a thin vein of a river, or a stream, bending up with the curve of the land. The haze of dust or mild pollution made it difficult to see any further up along the horizon.
The wind riffled his hair, tugging at the folds of his long coat at his feet. He knew then just exactly where he was. He was on the inside surface of an immense O'Neill space cylinder. Only this one seemed infinitely more sophisticated than the two now in existence orbiting the moon's Lagrange points.
It seemed more
real
, much more functional and less barren than the ones men were currently working on in space. The grasses swayed in the slight breeze, and Lanier could make out a flock of blackbirds rushing through a small cluster of sycamores in a wash below him. He grasped a handful of dirt, and not only did its texture seem real, it broke freely and appeared quite healthy in this fragile and highly artificial environment. Up ahead, he noticed deer droppings, and in several spots on the hillside it seemed as if the turf had taken on a bit of overgrazing.
Sheep
, he realized.
Lanier turned his inner ear toward the music, and listened. Yes, he could see it now. He pictured the whole craft spinning in space as graceful as a prima ballerina in a slow pirouette on a stage surrounded by darkness and iridescent faces. The faces were the stars.
He climbed a nearby hill. He couldn't see any cities or prominent structures from where he stood. This strip of the cylinder seemed hilly and rugged. Little could be seen. He snapped out his amplified binoculars. Above him, almost to the zenith, he scanned the terrain overhead for any sign of cities or villages. Eventide was
somewhere
. But Lanier could see nothing but the blurred dreams of lakes and mountains. A puff of green indicated a dense forest. There was nothing resembling a human habitation anywhere. But on the soil beneath his own feet he could see the small crescents of hoofprints. Game trails threaded through the bent grasses.
Where could Eventide be in all of this
? It would take him months to explore the inside of the rotating cylinder by foot. There must be hundreds of square kilometers of surface area. Much too much to cover.
Gravely, Lanier realized that Eventide might have created a vacant world. A private solitude given no man, an empty fantasy, a perfect place in which to be alone.
Then an explosion knocked him off his feet, face first into the sod.
"Someone's here," he said sardonically to no one but himself.
The ground shook for a few minutes after the jolt. He jumped up to his feet and began to run toward the "north," where the horizon didn't curve up but stretched forward to the end of the cylinder.
It was rough going across the prairie. Prairie dog towers and snake holes kept appearing, and he kept tripping in them. He topped a small rise and saw beneath him a grove of cottonwoods, their green leaves shuddering in the slight afternoon wind.
Afternoon
? he pondered, realizing that the dimness in the light—perhaps a flexing or angling of the exterior mirrors that provided the light for the cylinder—made it seem like afternoon.
He stopped short of the cottonwoods, breathing heavily. He couldn't possibly be out of shape, but he seemed to be, considering the pain in his lungs, and the giddiness. He bent over. The air was much thinner than it should have been. The ground shuddered once again, but it was something quite different from an earthquake.
A rending, deep and resonant.
My God, he thought suddenly,
this world is falling apart
! The air was getting thinner because it was leaking out through the walls of the cylinder into outer space! The wind kicked up a fuss through the trees.
This wasn't in the music, he realized. This had something to do with Eventide's mind. Where was he? Lanier dove through the cottonwoods. Just beyond the cottonwood stand he came to a large meadow. He popped his priest's collar and removed his coat. In the center of the meadow, as if fused by lightning, was a flat circle of crystal.
Lanier then recognized what this particular world had come to: the inner surface area was for animal and plant life. The people who maintained the cylinder lived below the surface. This enormous cylinder held wilderness areas, farms, and lakes ranging over hundreds, if not thousands, of kilometers. And this was an entrance to the world below his feet.
He stepped out onto the smooth surface just as another quake shook the ground. This time a slight crack followed the joining of the crystal area to the cottonwoods. It was almost as if he could hear the roots of the trees and grass scream as they were torn apart. But his hearing was beginning to fail. Lack of atmosphere. He felt light-headed.
Standing in the center of the crystal shield, he was jerked to his knees suddenly as the entire crystal area began lowering. It was an elevator!
He reached for his Malachi, but thought against it. He would wait, for he felt as if Eventide was very near. The music—for he could still hear it clearly—was quite intense. And Eventide must be feeling some sense of danger, because something was conveyed to him in the music that let him know that more than just this world was falling apart.
Another jolt. If there was an explosion, he couldn't hear it. But the elevator stopped, locked between floors in the shaft. He had descended about thirty-five meters. In the glass cylinder of the elevator shaft, he had seen that the previous floors—the inner floors—were empty of life.
He climbed up onto the floor he had just passed. He stood in silence, the floor extending for a great distance before him, filled with fleeing technicians.
Dreamlings
, he realized. And even though the wind rushed about him, everything retained an eerie sense of quiet. He checked his equipment.
His Malachi, suspended underneath his armpit, was set on rapid-fire. But more important to him now was the suit beneath his clothing. It resembled more a scuba diver's outfit than anything else, but it lacked flippers and bulky tanks. He had used it twice before, a long time ago, once in a firestorm in a city that seemed like Berlin, built to the tune of Richard Strauss's tone poem,
Tod und Verklārung
, Death and Transfiguration, and once after that in a bubble dome beneath the Sarasso Sea that had suddenly collapsed in the final sections of Respighi's
Feste Romane
. He had been lucky to survive that one.
And he knew that with the vanishing atmosphere—for that was what the wind was all about—he would probably need it.
The only problem was Eventide. If Perry Eventide perished here, his death would be just as real as if he were on the surface of the earth. Liu Shan's Syndrome was more detrimental than most people who survived it realized. That's why Lanier carried the Malachi.
And
why he wore the suit, which was extremely uncomfortable and restrictive. Someone had to survive.
Along either side of the sloping corridor were huge open areas, passageways to rooms that held all sorts of unrecognizable equipment. People spilled from these, and many were screaming. Smoke followed them down the halls.
A man with grease on his face came running out of a side corridor off to Lanier's right, shouting, "It's breaking up! Oh, my God! It's breaking up!" Terrified, his words choked on smoke. He ran past Lanier frantically.
Over a loudspeaker someone shouted, "We have a major breach in Sector B! Breakup in Sector B! This is a condition Red! Evacuate! I repeat, evacuate! Everyone is ordered to the nearest shuttle ports!"
Then came a fiery hiss of static over the loudspeaker, and the voice stopped. The lights began to flicker and dim. Power was draining. And the power, Lanier thought, could either be nuclear or solar—very likely a combination of both, But if it was nuclear, fission or fusion, it could be very messy. Eventide had thought of everything.
But did he think of this
? Lanier ducked when sparks showered from a ruptured conduit overhead.
These were the factory decks, the maintenance and reserve quarters. The guts of the cylinder.
But where is Eventide
? Crew members in jerseys of multiple colors scurried to the elevator shafts and stairwells. Some were already in space suits. Eventide would be here if he was aware of the crisis, unless the breakup was intentional, which Lanier doubted.
Then he realized that if this world was created for its solitude and beauty, then Eventide would not be down here in the evacuation bays, but topside on the prairie.
Yet
, he wondered,
why the breakup in the first place
? Was Eventide suicidal?
A pang in the music rose in his mind as he turned down a vacant corridor. But what he saw surprised him. Glass splintered from the window casings as the steel of the floors slowly buckled as if in the hands of a titan. These things didn't concern him: the vibrations suddenly, momentarily, phased into a vision of the purest love a man had ever possessed for a woman. Then, Lanier was struck with such profound grief that he knew that Perry Eventide was definitely not down here with the others trying to flee this brittle paradise. He was up on the surface, in love, and unaware,
totally
unaware of the situation.
The lights in the corridor winked out. Screaming poured down the passageway. Another explosion flashed with jagged edges of fire. Its reddish glow seemed to him like a lantern hung on the doorway into Hell itself.
Lanier ran down the hall, passing people, until he found a small workshaft elevator that was not being used for anything.
He lifted the canvas strap that held the vertical doors together. He paused when he noticed that in a recess in the wall hung various sorts of worksuits and maneuvering packs for work outside the cylinder. Piled neatly beneath these items were laminite rescue balls, as they were called, coiled in tight portable cases. They were man-sized balloons in which an astronaut without the benefit of a space suit could sit enclosed, like an embryo, and be towed to safety outside in space for a short time. They had already seen use on a number of occasions, and were the equivalent of life preservers on board a luxury liner.
But there was no luxury here. It was getting harder to breathe by the minute.
Lanier grabbed the small package that contained one of the rescue balls and got into the elevator, punching the vertical button. In the pitch dark, the glow light on his chest illuminated the shaft as the elevator car rose upward on auxiliary power.
He shook his head in amazement. He was always surprised at just how complete were the "worlds" he entered under the Syndrome. He never thought Eventide to be so mentally adept or imaginative. But the music set it up, and Eventide's imagination gave it the sense of reality.
When he broke to the surface, he found himself emerging beside a creekbed that had lost its water into a fissure. Carp and rainbow trout floundered helplessly in the silt and drapes of fallen lilies. The shaft opening was in a little outbuilding structure that decorously blended into the surrounding junipers.