Phoenix Without Ashes by Edward Bryant & Harlan Ellison

Author:Edward Bryant & Harlan Ellison [Bryant, Edward & Ellison, Harlan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, Science Fiction, ark, generation ship, starlost, enclosed universe
ISBN: 9780449140499
Google: 6C2uAAAACAAJ
Amazon: 1600108008
Publisher: Fawcett
Published: 1978-10-12T04:00:00+00:00

PRESSURE EQUALIZED

ADMITTANCE PERMITTED

He was deafened by the sound of his own breathing. Devon could hear nothing from outside the suit as the hatch slowly cycled open. He moved to the side so as to watch the fissure between hatch and bulkhead gradually widen. When there was space enough, he stepped through.

At first all he saw was the room. The new chamber was huge, even larger than the main hall in the Place of Worship. This room took the form of a dome at least one hundred meters across. Devon crossed the threshold and his feet rose from the floor; again he was without weight. What had the teacher Old Silas called it? Gravity. That mysterious command of the Creator which kept the directions “up” and “down” distinct.

He grabbed at the wall and found a smooth railing that had evidently been placed there for exactly that purpose. Devon hung suspended, surveying the chamber. He had to momentarily reorient himself. “Up” had now rotated ninety degrees. The hatch of the access chamber was part of the floor of Viewport 874. And the viewport chamber itself had been ruined.

Devon raised his eyes and drew in a deep breath. Staring, he murmured a prayer to the Creator.

It was all there.

As he had remembered it from the dreams.

He looked upon what lay before him; then passed within a hair of unconsciously and automatically making the decision to turn, retreat through the lockport, and hide screaming, limbs tucked into an instinctual ball. More than looked—he gaped, knowing instantly how futile his own knowledge was to explain everything he saw.

Devon felt like the savages in the Story of Enos from the Book; the benighted men of the wilderness who had never seen a horse, never seen a tree.

The chamber was littered with broken furniture and cratered, pitted consoles’. Faint lights glowed in wall mountings. Overhead yawned the remnant of what had been a great transparent dome. About a third of the hemisphere had been torn away in some ancient cataclysm. The opening was framed among jagged projections as sharp-pointed as serpent fangs. The dim interior lights reflected glints from the sharded edges. The dome’s ragged opening was flared outward as though from an explosion within.

What could cause such force? But the thought fled and was forgotten as Devon looked to the alien sky.

Beyond the ruined bubble hung the unwinking stars of his dream. They had not changed from the brief impression he’d glimpsed during the abortive first attempt with the viewport hatch. Neither had they changed from his visions.

Why do they not blink? he asked himself. Are they stars like those in the sky? He recoiled from a nightmare thought: Could they be the savage animals’ eyes Rachel saw in the dark?

Devon forced himself to move hand-over-hand along the rail and across the floor of the chamber to the periphery of the dome. He discovered a network of thin, flexible lines crosshatching the near side of the bubble itself. He had been here, had seen all this; and not merely in the initial peek past the viewport hatch.

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