Abaddon - Chapter 28

7: La Chute

The straps took the weight, leather pads transferring the shock gently to his shoulders. He reached up for the control ropes and found that, contrary to his fears, the great pyramidal tent of air that the parcel had billowed out into above him could indeed be steered. Laszlo the Fallschirmjäger and Leonardo the fifteenth-century madman had come through. The parachute, designed and built in the tunnel behind the falls of Cocytus out of reach of Milord's surveillance, was working perfectly. Percival grinned to remember how Laszlo had pricked the darning needle into his own face to illuminate his work whenever the primitive electric torches failed. Hundreds of square feet of human skin, donated by men who filed into Du Mont des Chênes' laboratory to be flayed on an assembly line basis, had been sewn together into a canopy above Percival.

It was a long way down.

It was no longer dark down here. The walls of the shaft burned with a thousand emerald torches. Around him, deep down in the dark, the bodies of those unable to climb back up to the warm world above made the Abyss crawl with resurrection light. The very walls were reforming into strange shapes under the pressure of a thousand eternally reconstituting corpses.

There were deep, smooth-sided fissures in the rock that glowed an evil green. Peering into their glassy-slick depths, he knew, without really wishing to know, that they had been worn by repeatedly dying Abyssonauts over years or even centuries, settling a little lower in the graves their resurrections ate out of the rock around them each time the nanobots extracted raw materials to rebuild their bodies. The fit, Percival imagined, would be snug, so snug that a man might not be able to move his legs or shoulders, so smooth-sided that no man grown so emaciated as to be able to squirm upright would be able to scramble out, not even in a million years. The holes had probably also, thinking logically, filled with water by now, so that as soon as a person resurrected, they would drown and die and resurrect again, and so ad infinitum.

Still, the resurrectees were working their way downward, by slow erosion, towards the Destination. Percival was falling faster, but who could say when that fall might not finish very quickly, very fatally?

Hands groped toward him out of the walls, like marine tubeworms waving blindly from geothermal vents. He steered away from them prudently, not wishing to snag his parachute either on the hands or on the walls they were imprisoned in.

"How can the Abyss stop a man falling to its bottom?", Laszlo had snorted. "There is a thing called gravity."

"We already know the Abyss distorts time", Percival had replied. "And if you distort time, you distort space, gravity, the whole big ugly Standard Model."

"It does stop a man falling", Kane had admonished. "At those depths, gravity, as you say, has very little hold on a man. It is like being underwater; one has very little idea of up or down. One finds oneself...climbing downwards in an upwardly direction."

"But what if you just jump off the rock and let yourself fall?" Percival had said.

"The Abyss at those depths is...fluid", Du Mont des Chênes had contributed with a shudder. "I've flown some of Milord's contraptions down it. As you fly, at times it seems the shaft writhes like the belly of a serpent to wrap its walls, its coils, around you. If your aircraft has an artificial horizon, it fails to function. Up and down are meaningless. At times you are circling down inside a vent, at others flying dead straight through a tube, at some moments climbing at a frightening angle at the extreme limit of your engine's pulling power. When I collided with the Abyss wall, I did it almost in a dream. I imagined I was setting down to land in a flat cylindrical valley. But", he'd added, his face twisting and grimacing, "as soon as my wheels touched stone, gravity took hold in the right direction, and I discovered myself diving vertically down a sheer drop with my landing gear snapped away. Don't bother asking how I survived. I didn't."

And now Percival, too, was lying full-length in the dark, rushing like an arse-about-face Superman down a tunnel the colour of greenscreens, the parachute billowing out behind him like the braking system on a dragster. The direction he was falling in seemed at odds with gravity; he could only maintain his downward drift by staring fixedly at his feet, and adjusting his grip on the steering cords to keep the parachute lined up with the dull cylinder of emerald luminescence. His way to the end of the tunnel lit by the burning bodies of those who had gone before him, he wafted down the Abyss with all the reckless speed of a dandelion clock drifting on the breeze, the cords that joined him to his canopy barely taut. His neck ached. His arms ached. His legs ached from being held out rigidly in front of him like dowsing rods.

After what seemed like a million years and for all he knew might have been, he came on the Flying Machines.

They were drifting like spacecraft in the dark, noses bashed in, wings amputated, fuselages shattered. Huge weightless globs of lubricant and propellant floated round them. Propellers the size of scimitar blades rotated in space like the cutting edges of blenders, and Percival was sailing towards them with virtually no capability to steer.

He managed to kick one freewheeling prop assembly away with the heel of his boot, then was pelted by a hail of free-floating turbine blades, each the size of his palm. But the big metal, turning over and over in the air like the grinding wheels of a bonemeal mill, looked far more frightening; and he was drifting into it attached to his parachute, with as much regard for safety as a man riding a rollercoaster with a noose wrapped around his neck and the rope trailing. He was no longer falling now - it seemed only to be inertia that was carrying him forward, and the heavy iron somersaulting in front of him was probably being turned by nothing more substantial than wind. But a collision at speed with a one-tonne aircraft fuselage was sure to kill him whatever had set him or it moving.

The knife was out of his bayonet sheath before he'd even consciously considered the problem; he was sawing away at the parachute cords. One by one they parted, and he was fallling no faster and no slower towards the moving metal. He collided with it like an animated bearing in a pinball machine, pushing himself off cockpits, fending off tailfins that swiped round at him like giant-sized scythes. A shower of metal fragments and disembodied aviation components was the worst thing, hitting him in the face like shrapnel. Much of the flying swarf was small enough to breathe, and he had to cover his mouth with his tunic. Incoming steel shavings sliced his corneas. He went blind at least once, then rehealed.

The strange thing about the tumbling hulks - though, oddly, one he had expected all along - was that he saw no human beings, alive or dead, inside them, as if some highly selective force had plucked the crews from their vehicles before leaving them here in a wrecked condition. Where were the pilots? The emerald luminescence issuing softly from the walls around him, the glow that had allowed him to see and avoid the black freefalling wrecks to begin with, probably answered this.

But things were no longer black and emerald. There was real light down here, light the colour of daytime, coming from somewhere up ahead. And the walls were widening, moving further apart. The wrecks were now specks, stretching out into a smoky cloud spread wide around him. Abaddon had been pouring aircrews down here for a long, long time.

He was now, inexplicably, in clear air again. There was something up ahead, silhouetted against the light. Something black and angular, moving very fast.

No - he was moving very fast.

Suddenly realizing he had to steer if he was not about to collide with the object, he attempted to spread his arms and legs like a skydiver, and succeeded only in flapping frantically like a decapitated chicken.

The object swung at him like a wrecking ball the size of a world, and bashed him unconscious. The last thing he remembered was that it had a paved surface.

***

He woke up feeling buoyant and refreshed. This usually meant that he had died recently. The floor that he was lying on - the paved surface he was lying on - was coated with what could only be his own blood. Even now that he was effectively immortal, it was still alarming to come across large quantities of the stuff. There also appeared to be teeth in the blood, and what looked like pieces of bone and brain.

He pulled himself up out of the remains of his own death, and clotting blood pulled on the fibres of his dinner jacket. The whole front of his clothing a purple blackening mass, he sat upright on the flagstones, attempting to convince his eyes to focus.

He realized abruptly that he was sitting. And sitting meant gravity. Whatever this little world he was sitting on was, it possessed a gravitational field of its very own far in excess of anything an object of its size deserved. Perhaps, he reasoned, some extraterrestrial engineer had sunk a mote of some incredibly dense material into the centre of it. Certainly either the entire worldlet had been made from scratch or someone had discovered some sort of natural gravitic sink and built on it. The flagstones he had collided with and died on had clearly been made by somebody.

The paved surface was square, maybe the size of a tennis court. His blood covered a quarter of it. He could see nothing else of the worldlet he was on, though he remembered it being much larger, roughly geometrically square, hardly a shape formed by nature. He reasoned that he must be on a high building or mountain on the worldlet's surface.

The paving stones were also decorated with a crude pattern of parallel scratches - groups of four scratches, each group slashed obliquely across with a fifth, arranged in perfect order up and down the flags, as if they had been laid that way. But the slashes were shallow and nowhere near as precise as the cuts that had dressed the stones to begin with, and although Percival could not find a stone that was not covered, the patterns of scratches did differ microscopically from stone to stone. If anything, they looked like very anal graffiti.

Above him, the sky was blue. Dead aircraft were still circling in it - he could clearly make out a number of the larger ones - but it was the colour skies should be. Percival reflected that he had not seen a proper sky for some months - maybe even some years.

This side of his world appeared to be in shadow. He was seeing only by ambient light. He was cold. Almost directly above his head, a square shadow that he at first took for some sort of massive approaching vehicle was swooping across the aircraft hulks. From this, he deduced that whatever source of light and heat this inner world possessed was currently on the other side of the worldlet from himself.

This, more than anything else, decided him to attempt a circumnavigation of his planet.

He rose up gently, staying on all fours in what he realized was still dangerously low gravity. One over-exuberant spring in his step and he might sail clean off this overgrown meteoroid and starve to death in free fall. Luckily, his own dried blood on the soles of his wingtips was holding him fast to the floor.

He moved, like a man in a rubber ring trying to walk across a swimming pool, to the edge of his tennis court of space, and looked down.

Someone had helpfully provided steps for him, all around the edge of the platform, as if on a Mayan pyramid. With every step downwards, his world would grow one step larger. Beyond the end of the pyramid stair, however - about twenty steps down - he could not see any ground, only more sky. Almost certainly that was where a tower wall dropped away to the planetoid's surface proper. He started gingerly down the steps, almost prevented from moving by the deliberate delicacy of his own footwork and the thick coating of his own congealed blood on the soles of his shoes. Eventually, he kicked off the shoes and proceeded in socks. Finding the stone underfoot was wet as well as cold, he took off his socks too and proceeded in bare feet.

The steps were also covered in a carpet of parallel scratches. The pattern was the same, four vertical crossed by one oblique. Each step was half as high as a man, suggesting a structure made by giants. Grumbling, he eased himself down them, certain they had actually been made by dinky little aliens with height complexes.

He was so engrossed in his cursing that he nearly continued on past the last step and sailed on into space. His inertia hadn’t decreased in tune with his weight. He’d have to watch that.

He gaped over the edge. There was nothing underneath the pyramid but sky.

But there was a sun down there. Or something that looked like a sun. A credible imitation, at any rate. He felt warm ultraviolet on his face, and felt the breeze as hot air rushed from the sunny side of his worldlet to the shady.

Experimentally, he eased himself forwards on newly remade forearms, and sneaked a peek over the edge at the Antipodes. Curiously, it was physically easier to do this than he'd imagined, as if some invisible force was supporting his neck and spine. There was a single final layer of foundation stones around the very base of the pyramid. He kept a careful hold of it, both from above and below, in case gravity decided suddenly to reverse itself without warning.

His head rose over the brickwork of another pyramid, the mirror image of the first. This one, however, was sunkissed, positively bleached by sunlight, and playing host to whatever plant life was able to thrive under direct and constant UV. Some enterprising flora had begun to worm out their own cracks in the paving. The plant life was a riot of colours - not just green, but all the colours of silly string, presumably using not just chlorophylls, but also carotenoids and whatever other chemicals would convert sunlight into cellulose. He was certain none of it could have evolved on Earth, until he noticed a single snow-white Edelweiss, heliographing at him out of hiding in a crack.

The paving stones were also covered with a carpet of parallel scratches.

Gravity had, indeed, kicked in without warning, but not in the direction he'd expected. It was trying to force his head back down over the parapet, as if it didn't want him on the forbidden sunny side of its nice clean pyramid.

(Not pyramid. Octahedron. Two Mayan pyramids glued together, one in the light, one in the dark - permanently, from the look of the native vegetation -)

Well, no poncy universal force was going to deny the sunny side of a pyramid to him. Particularly not gravity, the ninety pound weakling of all universal forces. With what he proudly imagined to be a herculean effort, he hauled himself round the vegetation-festooned rim of the pyramid onto the dayside, collapsing finally like a beached seal on some far Patagonian shore.

Much further, he reflected, from home than Patagonia.

This sunside world was warm and dry. Possibly, after a couple of hours or so, it might get too warm and dry. Sunburn, or even sunstroke, were bizarre possibilities - there were no clouds, and he could see the entire sky. Once, he saw a particularly large piece of flight debris drift behind the sun.

He chided himself for thinking rationally about a warm bright sun he had not seen for months as he wondered suddenly how Abaddon had managed to cope with the effects of sunlight deprivation on his subjects. Surely they ought all to suffer from rickets as well as Seasonal Affective Disorder? But whatever damage malnutrition did, he reasoned, would be immediately repaired by helpful nanobots.

But nanobots didn't work under radioactive conditions. What if this imitation sun wasn't an exact match for the Sun of Earth? What if it gave out more ultraviolet, more X rays, or more gamma? What if the builders of this artificial world hadn't also built in artificial Van Allen Belts and a faux Ozone Layer?

At the moment, the deadly artificial sunlight was sinking into his bones like benign phenol. He had to cover his eyes with his elbow; it was directly overhead. But it felt, to his skin, like pepper steak felt on his tongue.

After a little while, a voice yelled down the pyramid steps at him in Latin:

"YOU GOING TO LIE DOWN THERE ALL DAY?"

Taken aback, Percival thought a moment before yelling back:

"PROBABLY. THERE DOESN'T SEEM TO BE MUCH IN THE WAY OF NIGHT DOWN HERE."

The owner of the voice also seemed to consider for a second before replying:

"CORRECT. YOU ARE LIEUTENANT GAVIN PERCIVAL, AND I CLAIM MY ONE SQUILLION SESTERCES." Although speaking Latin, he actually used the word 'squillion'.

Percival heaved himself upright, his head swimming with the effort of it in the hot sun. He clambered unsteadily up the massive blocks of the sunside pyramid, warm as hearthstones beneath his hands and feet.

The top of the dayside was another square platform made of stone blocks. Percival was not entirely sure what sort of stone it was. It was almost as much a treat as seeing sunshine, however, since whatever mineral it was, it wasn't Abyssite.

The platform was occupied by a man - a man in the last stages of death, lying flat on the stone, his skin burnt cherry-red by the sun, blistering and peeling like paint under a blowtorch.

The man looked up at Percival - or rather, in the general direction of Percival - and grinned a mouthful of intermittent teeth.

"You're in my light", he said.

"You", said Percival, "are Saint Vladimir Nyctophagus of Na, and I claim my squillion sesterces back. And I am only guessing."

Vladimir laughed, and coughed, and coughed blood. "Precisely. You are having to anticipate the future, whereas to me it is no more difficult to see than the end of my arm. Like Ginger Rogers to my Fred Astaire, you are doing everything I do, only backwards and in heels."

"You are a mediaeval hermit who spent your life on earth in a hole in the ground. What do you know about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire?"

"I foresaw that we would speak about them here today." Vladimir attempted to squirm up onto his elbow, but collapsed, evidently from the sheer pain of movement. "Could you be a dear and kill me? You really aren't going to get much sense out of me in my current state. I feel I may be suffering from sunstroke. I also fear you may be a mere hallucination. I have hallucinated about you many times before. I've been waiting for you for a while, you know."

“I know. I saw your count of days scratched into the rock.”

Vladimir blinked with huge blue truthful eyes. “That’s not days I’m counting. It’s lifetimes.”

Percival shrugged, pulled out his bayonet, and counted down the ribs below the left nipple. Gently, he leaned on the knife, and a gentle trickle of blood seeped out of the other man's chest. He left the bayonet in the wound. The bayonet popped back out of the wound like a cork out of a bottle; Percival, who had been expecting it, caught it by the handle. The Russian's entire body glittered. His wound closed miraculously. He rose to a sitting position and took a huge breath, like a man who has been underwater for a long time.

"Ahhh, that's better. I would kill myself, you know, but I lost my only weapon ages ago. Lost my temper trying to put a scratch in a rock, flung it away, and forgot not to fling it too hard. It's still in orbit up there somewhere, I've no doubt. It'll collide with some poor unfortunate some day." Vladimir rose to his feet and began performing desultory arm-swinging exercises. "These days, I kill myself by staking myself out under the sun. It doesn't hurt too much, once you become unafraid of the damage you're doing. All that's left is the pain, and the pain can be overcome." He stared at his hand and flexed and unflexed it triumphantly.

He looked up at Percival oddly. "You're not a hallucination", he said. "You're still here."

"I'm not stopping", said Percival. "I've got to go on."

Vladimir's face split into exactly the same clamour of decaying teeth as before. "Quite, quite." He reached out and touched Percival, grabbing him by the arms, feeling the muscle. "Well, I must say, you're very convincing as delusions go. Tactile as well as audiovisual." He leaned in to Percival's chest and actually licked his skin. "And the taste of real sweat and blood!" He looked around himself as if afraid of being overheard, and whispered: "And just between the two of us, you stink just like a real saviour too."

He settled himself down into sunbathing position yet again.

"How long will it take for you to die again?" said Percival.

"It feels like about two days", said Vladimir. "Though it might be two weeks, or two months or two years for all I know. It's the sunstroke that finishes me off. It's quicker than starving to death. You'll find there's not enough food to feed a grown man here. I did originally hack off the occasional arm or leg or finger for something to nibble on, but it takes so long to saw through the bone. Far less painful to let the sun do the work for you, and then on the third day you're remade again." He winked, and settled back against the stone.

"Is there any way off this, this place?" said Percival.

"Go have a look around", said Vladimir chirpily, without opening his eyes. "It isn't too big. I looked for secret passages and entrances and doorways for quite a while. Didn't find any."

"Quite a while", said Percival. "How long's quite a while?"

"It felt like about two days", said Vladimir. "Though it might have been longer, hey."

"What about ways out that lead upward, rather than inward?" said Percival. "Do any other, erm, celestial bodies, moonlets, vehicles ever come past here?"

"Nah", said Vladimir. "This rock is in a stable orbit inside the shell formed by orbiting aircraft debris. It orbits around its sun much in the manner of our own solar system."

"Who told you what an orbit is?"

"You explain it to me in about two days' time. Get quite obsessed with it, as I recall. Draw diagrams, write out big complex mathematical formulae, make this whole island in the sky your easel."

Percival turned and looked down at Vladimir. "And do I manage to find a way off it?"

"Oh, you will; the real you, I mean. I've long foreseen it. But you probably won't, as you're in all probability a hallucination. I've seen your sort before, you know." He wagged a finger meaningfully at Percival.

Percival nodded, and looked directly upwards at the sun.

"Oh, just in case you are real", called out the hermit, "when I start screaming and raving at things that aren't there that aren't you, could you be a gem and open my throat again? That part of the dying process has always been a terrible ordeal."

Percival nodded, and strolled off down the pyramid in the direction of the dark antipodes.

***

He searched the stone octohedron for secret doors and passageways. It took him a length of time that might indeed have been two days, as, at about the point when he was beginning to give up, Saint Vladimir began raving and required to be killed and resurrected. After having planted his knife upright in the pavement on the sunside of the world, and after having observed that the knife had virtually no shadow, and that that little shadow he could convince it to have by fixing it into the cracks at a slant did not move a millimetre all the time he watched it, Percival had decided that astronomical observation would be little use in telling the time locally. His world's sun stayed put, and little else seemed to be clearly visible in the sky. For the time being, he resolved to use Vladimir's resurrections to mark out time - after all, this was the method Vladimir himself had settled on, and the man had been living here longer than he had.

There did prove, though, to be more in the sky than just the sun. Some of the larger pieces of debris were visible with the naked eye, although they also moved very quickly. There were also dark patches on the blue that he became more than ever convinced must be the openings of other Abysses, maybe from other worlds, from other times in the Earth's history, from the Abyss builders' homeworld - who could tell? But if they were Abyss openings, and if each one really did represent another world, then Abaddon's people were living in a very crowded sky. There were so many branch lines to other worlds that they were packed in to Percival's firmament like pits on a golf ball. The dark patches in the sky were so numerous, and looked so alike, that it was almost impossible to track them. But he was able to draw out markings on the stone that recorded the motion of the debris pieces. At first, he convinced himself that they orbited in a rough circle about the little sun that was the centre of this universe. Then, faced with evidence that their motion wasn't circular, he managed to remember Kepler, and convinced himself that the debris was orbiting in a rough ellipse with a diameter of perhaps thirty kilometres. He worked this out by parallax, measuring out the length of the sunside platform using a length of his own hair plaited together, which he arbitrarily decided was thirty centimetres long. Then, ripping a square of fabric from his own clothing, he drew straight lines on it with the back of the bayonet blade, and using a pen tied into further lengths of his own hair twined together as a set of compasses, he bisected the straight lines until he had drawn enough angles to make a serviceable protractor. The pen had been supplied him by Du Mont des Chênes, and was essentially a steel stylus which he jabbed into his arm to fill its ink reservoir with its own blood. The reservoir did not last long, and it was necessary to jab repeatedly, but he was his own inexhaustible ink supply. Using the protractor, he was able to take bearings on the constantly circling debris particles from either side of his observation platform and work out their positions. Trigonometrical tables were unavailable to him; he had to create his own by drawing out triangles on the stone and measuring the ratios of their sides. Minute calculations were scratched out on the top of the pyramid, until every single one of Vladimir's death-and-resurrection slashes had Arabic numerals scrawled between it. At intervals, when hunger and thirst attacked him, he walked to the far side of the flying island and killed himself with the bayonet. He only once made the mistake of killing himself on the sunside, and woke up with all of his carefully scratched-out calculations erased from the stones around him by nanorobots who had mined the rock for material to remake him. Vladimir was prohibited on pain of Percival never again killing him from dying whilst lying on top of Percival's trigonometrical tables.

Over time, as the bayonet became blunter, it became more and more difficult to kill himself with it. He began to appreciate the wisdom of Vladimir's submission to death by sunstroke.

"What are you accomplishing, o figment of my imagination?" said Vladimir in a particularly irritating moment, having wandered across from where he had just, apparently, died peacefully in his sleep. "You are merely measuring the dimensions of your prison. How will this help you to leave it?"

"I don't know", said Percival, attempting to retain a six-digit string of figures in his head whilst talking. "But you do. Why don't you tell me?"

"Telling you would upset the principles of causality", said Vladimir. "And whilst I do not personally give a hang for the principles of causality, you explain them to me in intricate detail tomorrow, and it is quite apparent to me that you put great store by them. Therefore, it is only polite for me to let you work the problem out for yourself." With that, he rose to his feet, and strode off towards the nightside, whistling Let's Face the Music and Dance.

Percival glared after Vladimir, making a mental note to make his explanation of the laws of causality both lengthy and extremely tiresome.

His sightings on the debris clouds, it was true, had become something of a way of passing the time rather than a genuine attempt to escape the octohedron. However, even more frustrating than this, as his methods of sighting had steadily become more sophisticated, it had become more and more apparent that the debris clouds were not doing what they were supposed to. They were not, for example, orbiting in ellipses. This was not true simply for one or two of them, but for every single one he had observed, making him quite despair of his skills as an astronomer. No matter how exactly he carried out his sightings and his computations, he could not get any of the particles to sit on a perfect ellipse. Instead, they weaved backwards and forwards like serpents, sometimes ten kilometres closer than they really should be, sometimes ten kilometres further, in a way that was not only wrong but also -

Regular.

He stared at the calculations in consternation. If they were regular, then some force, some aspect of the system he was examining, was making them behave in such a manner. They were not visibly moving closer and further away, however - there were no undulations or inconsistencies in the cloud of circling debris, which appeared perfectly uniform, so -

He stretched himself out full length and crocodile-walked down the pyramid to poke his head over the equator and yell to Vladimir. "I'VE WORKED OUT WHY THE DEBRIS IS MOVING CLOSER AND FURTHER AWAY."

The voice sounded terminally bored. "DO TELL"

"IT'S NOT MOVING. WE ARE. I RECKON THE SURFACE GRAVITY OF THIS WORLDLET TO BE ABOUT EQUIVALENT TO A TEN-KILOMETRE-WIDE ASTEROID, LORD ALONE KNOWS HOW ON A THING ONLY A HUNDRED METRES END TO END, BUT THERE YOU HAVE IT. AND OUR LITTLE ASTEROID SHOULD BY RIGHTS BE ORBITING IN ITS OWN LITTLE ELLIPSE AROUND ITS SUN. EXCEPT IT DOESN'T HAVE TO. WHAT IF ITS SUN ISN'T THE SIZE OF OUR OWN? WHAT IF ITS SUN IS ONLY TEN KILOMETRES OR SO WIDE TOO? OR AT LEAST HAS SOMETHING APPROXIMATING THE SAME MASS. THAT WOULD MEAN NEITHER WE NOR THE SUN ORBIT ROUND EACH OTHER - WE BOTH ORBIT ROUND A POINT ROUGHLY HALFWAY BETWEEN US, CALLED A BARYCENTRE."

"AS ALL ASTRONOMICAL BODIES DO", reminded Vladimir.

"YES, BUT IN THE CASE OF EARTH’S SUN THE SUN IS SO MUCH BIGGER THAN US THAT THE BARYCENTRE IS SOMEWHERE INSIDE THE CIRCUMFERENCE OF THE SUN ITSELF, AND IN ANY CASE YOU WOULDN'T HAVE KNOWN THAT IF I HADN'T TOLD YOU. ANYWAY, THIS WOULD CAUSE US TO MOVE BACK AND FORTH, CLOSER TO AND FURTHER FROM THE DEBRIS FIELD, WHICH IS RELATIVELY INSUBSTANTIAL IN MASS AND IS ALSO ORBITING AROUND THE BARYCENTRE."

"IF YOU SAY SO."

"PAY ATTENTION. THIS IS INTRIGUING NEWS. IT MEANS THAT OUR LITTLE PLANETOID WEIGHS ROUGHLY AS MUCH AS ITS OWN SUN DOES."

"HOOP DE DOOP AND DICKORY DOCK."

"THIS MEANS THAT WITH A FEW MORE CALCULATIONS, I MIGHT BE ABLE TO WORK OUT THE LOCATION OF THE BARYCENTRE."

"AND THEN WHAT WILL YOU DO?"

Percival frowned. "I'LL GO THERE."

"WHY? WHY GO TO AN EMPTY PATCH OF SPACE?"

"WE ALREADY KNOW THAT THE ABYSS ALTERS TIME, WARPS SPACE, AND SO ON. THIS IS STUFF THAT, AS FAR AS OUR SCIENTIFIC UNDERSTANDING GOES, CAN ONLY BE DONE BY IMMENSE CONCENTRATIONS OF MASS. COLLAPSARS. DARK STARS. BLACK HOLES."

"ABADDON", said Vladimir, "HAS TALKED TO ME OF BLACK HOLES. HE, TOO, MENTIONED THAT THE ABYSS BEHAVED IN SUCH A MANNER."

"AT THE GRAVITATIONAL CENTRE OF A BLACK HOLE", said Percival, "THERE IS A POINT CALLED A SINGULARITY. THE SINGULARITY IS A POINT WHERE LOGIC BREAKS DOWN. WHERE THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN. WHERE WATER FLOWS UPHILL. WHERE TWO PLUS TWO EQUALS FIVE. IF OUR ABYSS BUILDERS ARE ANYWHERE", he said, hoping he sounded more confident than he felt, "THEY WILL BE THERE."

Vladimir did not sound fooled. "YOU'RE ONLY GOING THERE", he shouted, "BECAUSE IT'S THE ONLY DIRECTION YOU CAN STILL GO IN THAT'S DOWN."

"AND BECAUSE", said Percival, "YOU HAVE SAID YOURSELF THAT I'M THE CHOSEN ONE. I'M THE HARROWER OF HELL, THE ONE WHO GOES THROUGH THE ABYSS AND COMES BACK. SO WHATEVER I DO IS THE CORRECT DECISION. THEREFORE, IF I GO TO THE BARYCENTRE, GOING TO THE BARYCENTRE IS THE CORRECT THING TO DO." He pulled back from the brink, and began hauling himself up the stone terraces towards the apex of the sunside.

"YOU ARE NOT", yelled Vladimir, "ANY SORT OF CHOSEN ONE. YOU ARE MERELY LUCKY. I, ON THE OTHER HAND, WAS UNLUCKY. THE INHABITANTS OF ALL THOSE BROKEN THINGS CIRCLING UP THERE", he said, waving a hand in the general direction of the heavens, "WERE ALSO UNLUCKY. AND IF I'M WRONG AND MY PREDICTIONS OF THE FUTURE ARE JUST THE RAVINGS OF A MADMAN, AND IF YOU'RE WRONG", he continued, "AND THE BARYCENTRE IS JUST AN EMPTY POINT IN SPACE, YOU'LL DIE REPEATEDLY OF SUNSTROKE FLOATING IN NOTHINGNESS FOREVER."

"MAYBE THIS IS THE LAST TEST, THEN", said Percival. "A LEAP OF FAITH." He squinted up at the world's little sun through his fingers. Although he believed he had proved it to be only hundreds of metres across at the very most, it seemed no less fiercely hot than the million-mile primary he was used to.

"REMEMBER, YOU CAN'T JUST JUMP UP INTO THE SUN AND HOPE TO GET THERE", said Vladimir. "THERE ARE ORBITAL MECHANICS TO CONSIDER."

Percival stared at his own calculations in the flagstones. They had spilled off the top platform and onto the upper stairs. "I HAVEN'T EXPLAINED ORBITAL MECHANICS TO YOU YET. WHAT ABOUT THE LAWS OF CAUSALITY?"

"OH, FUCK THE LAWS OF CAUSALITY. THE SOONER I GET YOU OUT OF HERE, THE SOONER I GET OUT OF THIS BASTARD PLACE. IF", he added hastily, "YOU'RE REAL. I'VE BEEN FOOLED BY TANGIBLE HALLUCINATIONS BEFORE."

Percival had fixed the point at which he had to stand. The precise bearing was marked out with an especially thick line of blood, drawn heavy in order to be visible from orbit, still bright crimson in the sunshine. He had to jump along that bearing in order to maximise the assistance he'd receive from the tetrahedron's angular momentum. The elevation was marked with the bayonet blade, stuck into a crack in the flags, cemented firm with enough clotted blood to bleed an elephant dry.

"USUALLY HALLUCINATIONS TEND TO TURN INTO NAKED WOMEN OR SPIDER DEMONS AT SOME POINT, THOUGH, YEAH?"

"YOU DO HAVE ME THERE. AS DELUSIONS GO, YOU ARE CONVINCING, AND SO, JUST IN CASE YOU'RE REAL, I HAVE TO WISH YOU LUCK." Vladimir's voice was coming from behind him now. He turned to see a dark figure sitting, legs crossed, lounging backwards on its hands. Vladimir waved.

Escape velocity should be achievable with nothing more than human muscles. He stripped off his remaining clothes; they were excess payload. "I APPRECIATE IT. BUT I DON'T NEED IT."

Vladimir stared at him from under a cupped hand. "IF THERE IS A SINGULARITY, IT'LL JUST BE A TINY POINT. HOW WILL YOU KNOW IT'S THERE? AND EVEN IF YOU DO KNOW IT'S THERE, HOW CAN YOU BE SURE OF HITTING IT DEAD CENTRE?"

Percival grinned. "I'LL SEE IT. IT'S A POINT WHERE SCIENTIFICALLY PERCEIVED REALITY BREAKS DOWN. IT'S GOT TO LOOK LIKE SOMETHING. AND IF I DON'T HIT IT FIRST TIME, I'LL OPEN MY FEMORAL AND USE IT AS A ROCKET MOTOR.”

“ABADDON WOULD GIVE HIS EYE TEETH TO HAVE A VIDEO FEED INSIDE YOU.”

“HE PROBABLY DOES. BASTARD’S REBUILT MY BODY ENOUGH TIMES. THOUGH I DOUBT HE HAS EYE TEETH. EYE TENTACLES, MAYBE.” Percival grinned. “JUST IN CASE YOU’RE WATCHING, BASTARD, I’M COMING BACK. AND THE HUMAN SPECIES WILL BE THE LAST ONE YOU FIND SCIENTIFICALLY INTERESTING.

“BE SEEING YOU.”

He ran bow-legged down the platform, hit the edge, and soared into space, arms and legs trimmed tight together, cutting through the air like a swimmer. The octohedron's gravitational field was so weak he actually felt its pull on him diminish as he rose. The sun was heavy on his back, bright even behind his eyelids.

And I order you not to aim towards Bootes, the Herdsman, or Helice, the Great Bear, or towards the drawn sword of Orion – take the course I show you!

Soon he would begin to have visions, and his skin would start to blister. His journey would take him very close to the sun, perhaps even dangerously close. But he had no wings of wax to melt. He wasn't flying.

He was falling.

© Dominic Green 2008