A pair of corpses lay in an infinite embrace in the one bedroom. Two skeletons under a blanket, their arms about each other and their foreheads touching. Ana had wept at the sight and broke into quiet sobs a few more times throughout the evening. He’d tried to hold her in the darkness that night, but she’d turned away, said it didn’t seem right. Skyler had not argued, but after her breathing became deep and even, he reached out and held her hand. The elderly couple in that room affected him only a little. He’d come across similar situations hundreds of times. Well after midnight he realized the scene might have reminded her of the first time they’d seen each other. The courtyard in Belém, where she’d danced with total abandon for the world around her, in front of an audience of two skeletons locked in an embrace, with Skyler hiding in the shadows.
She’d tried to shoot him for that. In the dark Skyler took his earlobe between two fingers and rubbed it where the bullet’s wake had tickled the skin. A few more centimeters over and everything would be different now.
When Skyler stepped outside he saw the flicker of firelight coming from the barn. Pablo waved at him when he entered and handed him a plate of roast hen and some potatoes grilled with a heavy dust of garlic powder. Before Skyler could say thanks, a mug of coffee was shoved into his hand and he raised it in cheers. Pablo nodded and returned to the portable stove.
Vanessa emerged from La Gaza Ladra a little later, and without being asked she went into the house and woke Ana. Skyler had been caught between his desire to let the girl sleep and his burning interest in the alien dome. Waking Ana was not something he ever looked forward to doing, and when the two women entered the barn he gave Vanessa a quick wink.
As if some pact had been made, no one spoke all morning. Fed and caffeinated, Skyler stood first and went to the aircraft. The others trailed in behind him and began to strap on their gear. Skyler opted for a light, comfortable load: his compact rifle with grenade launcher, a Sonton pistol, and a light backpack stocked with a medical kit and one day’s water and food.
The others took their cues from him and equipped similarly.
Ana powered up the cockpit and tried the comm before departing. It had become one of her daily tasks to try to raise the colony as Karl had requested. As of yet, they’d heard nothing, and assumed their transmissions fell on deaf ears in turn. Still, she rattled off a message giving the location of their landing, the presence of the purple bubble, and the fact that the crew was setting off to investigate it now.
“If we run into any of those armored subs,” Skyler said as the team set out, “we retreat. Understood? We come back here and bring the big guns with us next time. Today is just a scouting mission, nothing more.”
No one debated him. They were all staring at the purple hemisphere on the horizon.
Up close, the presence of the object made Skyler’s breath catch in his throat.
It defied description. He’d look at part of it and imagined it as a diamond-hard mass, as if some alien moon had suddenly winked into existence on this field in Ireland. Then he’d glance at another portion and imagine that he could reach out and pop the thing with his fingernail.
The four immunes stood side by side on the path carved by the purple-lit aura towers, perhaps a hundred meters from the dome.
“What now?” Vanessa asked.
“Let’s just,” Skyler said, “watch, for a bit.”
Pablo took a long draw from his canteen. The pleasant warmth of the day had worn out its welcome after an hour of marching in combat gear. Skyler took a swig of his own and poured a little on his head.
“That thing,” Ana said, with a nod toward the dome, as if anyone might doubt what she was looking at, “it’s so simple. Beautiful. It terrifies me. I think I’d rather face that fog in Belém, and the dark ones.”
Vanessa nodded agreement.
No one spoke for a time. Skyler began to notice flecks of slightly darker areas in the dome’s coloration. He leaned to one side and then the other, and decided it wasn’t an illusion. The small dark patches were inside the dome, not on its surface.
“Someone else has been here,” Pablo said suddenly, in his deadpan way.
Everyone looked at him. Pablo crouched down, focused on the ground in front of him. He pointed. “Campfire.”
Skyler crouched next to it and studied the charred wood. The blackened remnants were waterlogged, and crumbled into an ash mulch in his fingers. “It’s old,” he said. “But not that old. Months old, a year maybe. An immune, then.” He felt a tingle along his arms, and felt the queer sensation of being watched.
“Okay,” Skyler said. “Let’s walk around the perimeter. Maybe there’s a … door or something.”
A bird called overhead. Skyler looked up in time to see the small black creature fly overhead, straight into the side of the dome. He winced, expecting it to crumple and fall down the curved side as if it had hit a plate-glass window. Instead the purple surface dented inward like a balloon. The pearlescent sheen formed a rainbow swirl around the indent.
The indent warped and, with a sudden pop, returned to its original shape. Skyler caught a faint ripple of rainbow light along the surface of the dome, fading as it radiated outward.
The bird vanished inside.
The whole thing had lasted a fraction of a second. Skyler glanced at his companions, only to find them all still focused on the campfire. “Did you see that?” he asked them.
Ana looked up first, a puzzled expression on her face.
“A bird,” Skyler said. He chuckled. “It was a magpie, I think. It just flew in. It pushed through and went inside.”
“Magpie?” Ana asked. “A good omen.”
Skyler walked closer, until he stood five meters from the dome.
The others hadn’t moved. “Not too close, Sky!” Ana called out.
He leaned, picked up a rock, and tossed it underhand at the milky purple wall in front of him.
The rock clapped against the side as if it had hit solid marble, and fell to the ground with a soft thud.
“What the hell?” Skyler walked closer and reached out his hand.
“Be careful …,” Ana said from behind him.
When his fingertips brushed the surface, Skyler felt a tingle of cold rush up his arm, followed instantly by the sensation of heat. The pattern repeated like some resonating frequency, and when taken as a whole felt pleasant. He watched in fascination as the dome’s surface bent inward. A growing ring of rainbow refraction stretched outward along the purple face. He tried to pause his hand but couldn’t. The current of cold and warm pulses filled his entire body, and his mind seemed to turn to mush. Thoughts mixed, until one was indiscernible from the other. The ring of rainbow light continued to grow as if his finger had touched a star and sent it into a supernova explosion.
I should stop. I should stop. I should stop.
He must have been repeating that thought because it seemed to crop up among all the thousand others that swam through his mind, as milky as the surface of the dome. His brain told him the dome was enveloping him. That he’d already entered the place. That he was still outside. All seemed valid and without contradiction.
Some thoughts began to stretch on and on, played back in some ultra-slow motion. Shapes before his eyes began to hover in place. He tried to look down at his feet and found his head would only move a millimeter at a time.
The slow thoughts began to multiply. They pushed against his mind as if fighting a war against the parts of his mind that wanted to work correctly. The slow thoughts became the norm, the tables turned. Suddenly he found there were corners of his mind working in overdrive, unleashing a dizzying avalanche of ideas, memories, and desires. They raced and raced until they blurred into infinity.
Then all at once everything rushed back into normalcy.
He was inside, and felt as if someone had been spinning him in circles for a week straight, and then rolled him through a pasta press. A wave of nausea drove him to his knees. Cold sweat erupted from every pore on his body. All Skyler could do was stare at the purple-tinged dirt and shiver while the reaction passed.
A minute later he rose to his feet, stumbled, and righted himself. He found it hard to breathe. The air smelled of ozone and felt humid and still around him, like Darwin on the worst of days. He turned and glanced back the way he’d come. Or, the way he thought he’d come. Everything behind him looked the same. A dark, purple wall that ended a few meters away from him, evenly colored. No milky rainbow sheen. No bands of light and dark shades. He could see where it met the soil a few meters away, and yet when he looked straight ahead the purple barrier seemed as far away as the horizon. There was no hint of the outside, no way to see his friends, to see Ana. He waved anyway, in case they could detect some hint of him within the dome.
Skyler looked up. A sensation of vertigo crossed over him as he followed the soaring dome to its zenith. Taking in the entire “sky,” he saw that it seemed to pulse. A slow shift from light to dark and back, less than ten seconds for each perfectly rhythmic cycle.
Above him a magpie darted and wheeled. It chittered, as if saying, “We both made it through!” The harsh sound echoed queerly off the interior of the otherwise silent space.
Finally, Skyler looked toward the center of the dome.
He’d expected to find another shell ship on the ground, but if such a thing existed here he couldn’t see it. The ground within the dome had been altered. From the edge toward the center, the earth curled upward. Imperceptibly where Skyler stood, the curved floor grew ever steeper until forming a circular pillar in the very center. The pinnacle rose a full hundred meters or more from the floor where Skyler stood, so tall it even began to curve back outward before an abrupt end at a flat surface.
A giant pedestal, he mused, exactly half the height of the dome. The top appeared to be a disk just a few meters in diameter. If something sat atop it, he couldn’t see. Certainly the spot was too small to hold a shell ship, but he felt sure something must be there.
The earth that formed the curved floor was uneven and fractured. Large jagged mounds of varying size made a straight path to the center impossible. The mounds were complemented by cavities where chunks of the earth seemed to have just vanished, leaving steep-sided miniature craters of a depth he couldn’t discern from his position. He thought they were ponds at first, filled in with rainwater perhaps, but when he looked closer he realized that the surface did not ripple. No, what filled these craters was just like that of the dome itself, as viewed from outside: that same milky, almost oily sheen, although their colors varied from red all the way to a brilliant topaz blue within one small hole near him.
“Bizarre,” he whispered aloud. The magpie chirped as if in agreement.
With an effort Skyler shifted his focus away from the multihued “ponds” and tried to take in the entire scene again, hoping to spot an easy path to the center. Laced through all the mounds and depressions were cracks of indeterminate depth, akin to earthquake damage. As if in defiance of this tortured landscape, clumps of grass still held on here and there. Wild-flowers dotted the mounds and poked up from the crater edges. None, Skyler noted, broke through from below the domelike surfaces within the craters. A squirrel darted across the ground nearby, from one patch of scrub grass to another before disappearing again.
All the while the dome gently pulsed. Light to dark to light, every ten seconds. The pattern lulled him. He shook his head and walked forward.
A strange sound rippled through the domed space. It sounded like an earthquake, except lighter, and came from everywhere at once. The ground did not shake, and as quickly as the crackling sound emerged it receded. Skyler waited until it disappeared completely before he moved on.
The first canyon proved only a meter deep and half that across. He stepped over it and continued. Every few steps he glanced up at that disk at the top of the earthen pillar. Fogged as his mind was, he had no doubt that he must reach that pinnacle and see what the Builders had placed there. The shape could not be an accident.
Part of him wondered why the others had not followed him inside. Another part felt grateful they had not. Crossing through the dome’s surface had been the strangest, least pleasant experience in his life. Even worse, he thought, than his fall into that glowing iris so deep below Nightcliff. That had felt like his mind had been laid bare, every neuron exposed. This felt like his memories had been thrown into a blender and run at maximum speed for an hour. His head felt like scrambled eggs.
Another canyon appeared before him. He couldn’t remember walking to it, but he felt sure it hadn’t just formed in front of him. Indeed, when he took in his surroundings he realized he had indeed moved farther toward the center. As if sensing his confusion, the memory of walking forward emerged.
Again he heard a rattling sound from above, across the entire domed surface. It lasted a few seconds this time and then abruptly ended.
There were other noises, too, he realized. Noises coming from outside. Muffled, scratchy sounds all high-pitched and brief as a drumbeat, at once familiar and alien.
“I need a stiff drink,” he said aloud. “No. Coffee.”
He had neither on hand, but he did have water. Skyler sat in the dirt and opened his backpack. Normally he carried a canteen at his hip, but today he’d thrown everything in the pack so that he’d be able to shrug it off at a moment’s notice. He’d wanted to be able to run away.
Still the sky pulsed, as if a child stood at a sliding dimmer switch, dragging it up and down in even intervals, fascinated by the effect. It was starting to annoy the hell out of him. Sensing a headache coming on, Skyler popped two pills between swigs of cool water.
His aviator’s watch showed the wrong time, the wrong date. Every few seconds the numbers would jump ahead by almost an hour, as if the self-correction mechanism couldn’t get a fix on one of the satellite time beacons. Crossing through that barrier scrambled the electronics, he decided, and he made a mental note to scavenge a new one. At least the compass on it still worked.