The traveler left behind a pot.
The villager hung it on a tree.
The traveler returned and said:
“This pot is your home.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The sky was a single band of light, sending vast waves of brilliance like nuclear flames to beat down upon the ground. To one who gazed through a polarized screen, however, the blazing torrent was distinguishable as a rush of countless particles. Some of these light fragments were enormous—bright enough that had they been placed in a starry night sky, they would have drowned out stars of the first magnitude, or even negative first.
For a while, Asura stood staring vacantly at the falling light, forgetting her purpose entirely.
“What do you think it is?” Siddhārtha whispered at her ear, bringing her back to the present. A vast glacier spread out before them, its ice harder than steel, its polished surface reflecting the forms of the three travelers where they stood.
Not far off to the right, cliffs of ice formed a continuous wall that stretched into the distance. The cliffs were steep and perfectly vertical, as though cut deliberately from the glacial ice. Their upper rims melted into the sea of light extending from the sky.
“What a sight!” Siddhārtha said. It seemed impossible for even a cloudless, star-filled sky to give off so much light. “It’s as though someone covered the sky with some stupendous sheet of electroluminescent material.”
Though the idea was outrageous, there were no better words to describe it.
“Where are we?”
“Where we intended to be,” Asura said, checking her readings. “Y=88.5711; X=43.026; Z=19.3920; T=n-n Δt—the eighth quadrant of the Andromeda galaxy, in other words. Roughly 130,000 light-years from the center of the galaxy, just outside the two spiral arms that pass near these coordinates.”
“Doesn’t seem to be much life here,” Siddhārtha noted. “Or perhaps it has all withered away, as it did on Earth and Mars and Astarta 50.”
Orionae looked around, taking in their surroundings. “Together with seven other planets, this planet we’re on orbits a single star. Judging from the deviations I’m reading in our coil, the star radiates sufficient energy to support life. It is about twice as massive as our own sun. And yet, we’re standing on a glacier—”
“Orionae. We have already seen another planet brought to ruin for reasons we do not understand, have we not?”
Orionae shook his head firmly. “That is not so. There have been reasons for all the devastation we have seen thus far. For example: our failure to take appropriate measures when the earth began to dry out or to revitalize the failing production in our cities. But there is nothing here, nothing at all. The sun gives off sufficient warmth, and it’s shining directly on this location.”
“Let’s climb those cliffs and see what we can see,” Asura suggested.
Orionae hefted the coil on his back, and the three set off single file across the glacier.
“I do not understand why our observations do not match the numbers,” Orionae muttered, frustrated.
Asura paused several times as they walked, staring out across the glacier, pursued by an unsettling feeling that something was eluding her. There was something here, something mysterious, suffusing the place and yet impossible to discern. It was growing thicker, wrapping more closely around them as they walked.
The light from the sky still streamed down onto the ice, reflecting off the cliffs with such intensity it was nearly painful to their eyes.
At length, they came to the base of the cliffs. Siddhārtha hesitated to study the wall of ice; then he released the safety switch on the maser in his arm. Orionae continued walking, still muttering formulae to himself. The strangely shaped coil he carried on his shoulder bobbed and swayed as though it were part of his body.
Asura stopped. She could feel something sweep across her body—a readiness for battle that came not from within, but from without.
“What is it, Asura?” Siddhārtha asked, following the line of her gaze. He stared in shock.
A giant city stood buried deep behind the crystalline surface of the icy cliffs. At first, they thought it was only a trick of the shadows created by light refracted through the wall of ice—but with all of the light on this world, there were no shadows.
Roughly two hundred meters beyond the surface of the ice, rectangular buildings, some hundreds of stories in height, stood so close together they almost touched. Beltways ran through translucent pipes that wove between the buildings’ enormous walls. Every surface in the city reflected prismatic sprays of light.
More surprisingly, the city was approaching them at roughly the speed of a man walking. It seemed to stretch all the way to the horizon on either side, and it was impossible to gauge how far back it might go. The glacier was as quiet as a coffin beneath the piercingly bright curtain of the sky. The phantasmal city approached without a sound, moving the way a tide sweeps in at sea, suggesting nothing so much as the approach of certain death.
“Asura! Maitreya knew we would come here—we’ve walked into his trap!” Siddhārtha cried, his voice ringing out from the bottom of his throat. A chill colder than ice ran down Asura’s back. She detected something far more dangerous in the advancing city than Maitreya’s assaults.
Turning back to Orionae, she shouted, “Quick—create a barrier with that coil! This is not one of Maitreya’s psychic attacks! Quickly, Orionae!”
In one smooth motion Orionae lowered the coil from his shoulder onto the ice. He manipulated the deflector until the instrument began to emit a calm blue light. The space around the three travelers grew keen with a noise like vibrating silver wire. Immediately, the shining sky dimmed, and an ultramarine shadow fell over the glacier. Wrapped in the barrier’s curtain, the three travelers shimmered like a mirage.
“Now, we each need to make our own barriers,” Asura said. “Orionae wrapped the coil in several gravitationally sealed spaces. You have to maintain the link to the Dirac sea via an imaginary numeric circuit.”
Standing in the middle of the shimmering blue light, the three companions shone with tremendous intensity. The heat entropy inside their barrier shot up rapidly before reaching a balance point.
Moments later, the moving city slid over the dome of their barrier.
The giant carved faces of the buildings, the countless rows of windows, beltways, and spires, passed soundlessly through their bodies, over their heads, and beneath their feet, continuing on to disappear behind them.
Beyond the city, the ice cliffs stretched like a dark shadow across the glacier. The translucent city continued to spill forth from the wall of ice, passing through them, gliding on and away until the buildings disappeared into the distance.
“What is this, Asura?” Siddhārtha asked from within the incandescence of his personal barrier. Asura was hanging upside down in her own sequestered space, looking like a minnow inside a shell.
“My guess, Siddhārtha, is that this planet is a gravitationally sealed imaginary numeric space. A ‘negative energy world.’ I’m sure you have a record of Noya’s Formula somewhere in your neural memory web.”
“Ah! You’re referring to the event in 3005, when Noya Clark of Jupiter suddenly found himself inescapably trapped in what appeared to be a two-dimensional space, like a screen. There were others present, but though they could see a path within the ‘screen,’ when they tried to enter it, they simply passed through.”