The dark green of the surrounding woods contrasted warmly with the azure-blue of the sky and gave a feeling of timelessness to the scene. Perhaps the air drew something from the entrance to a building on a low hill a little way away; a circular structure, very modern-looking, almost futuristic. A low white disc amidst the dark green trees, crowning the hill like an inverted saucer. It glistened in the morning light as sunbeams shot from mirrors of mica and quartz.
As Jim approached, he saw that its surface was faced in a stucco of white crystalline pebbles. Huge grey stones surrounded it, and on these were carved chevrons, spirals and other Neolithic designs.
Jim walked towards the sound of the river, hoping to find clear water to drink. A butterfly guided him erratically between two spreading beech trees, flew upwards and away, and he came almost at once upon a shallow race of water, flowing hurriedly over time-rounded pebbles and boulders.
The water was clear and sweet.
Jim knew that this was the place where he must descend. He could feel his heart quickening.
The common understanding of the people who lived on the upper plains was that their world was flat. This view was difficult to argue against and difficult to escape, since the horizon was no barrier to sight and holiday-makers would wave thoughtfully to friends and loved ones many thousands of miles away. Trains ran very near to the edges of each plain, and the view into the plains beyond and beneath could be breathtaking.
But Jim had just spoken with a man who had made a journey to a land beyond the horizon. He had been delighted to be able to relate his adventure to a sympathetic ear because most people were inclined to denounce him as a liar and to discount his claims as fantasy and the result of a poor telescope. His journey had taken him five years and nearly six hundred thousand miles from his home, and the impeded view of his homeland had caused him much distress. He had taken to climbing hills and glimpsing the tops of the highest buildings of his home city through his telescope, in order to gain the reassurance that he needed.
The great majority of people spent their lives on the upper levels, Jim had learned, and travelled only to distant corners of their own region. There were places upon the upper plains where the view could be unimaginably beautiful. One could look down to the levels of the lower worlds and see the sun glinting upon the tall columns supporting the worlds above them. Some moved upon the stairways and visited other plains, but many were afraid of the stairways.
'Nothing but evil and darkness lies beneath the ground,' a clergyman had told him. 'A most dreadful eternity of suffering!'
Jim began to walk down a stairway. On either side of him was an unguarded and precipitous drop which would mean certain death if he were to fall. The stairs were carpeted in green and blue and guided his footsteps between edges of silver. The stairway was not steep and the spacing was comfortable for his stride, which slowed somewhat as he peered over the edge of the unsupported ribbon upon which he stood, hanging like a tiny thread between two worlds.
Gathering his courage, he continued downwards. Far below were roads, houses and fields, people and animals. In the distance were the shadowlands. (It is difficult to explain to the plain dwellers, but the sun is actually many suns and each day brings a new sun into their sky. Night is never night but a twilit shadow between dusk and dawn.)
In the fields at the foot of the staircase, the sun was shining brightly as the light of the next dawn already played gently into the shadows. It was warm, and after following a leafy lane for a short way, Jim came to a bicycle shop. Selecting a bicycle, he peddled determinedly over a very flat and comfortable surface with the warm sun on his back for nearly an hour and made a detour around the foot of a great column that was tapering downwards and coloured blue and red. Soon the sky became overcast from the plain above and he entered the shadowlands. The fading light became dusk and dusk became night as he cycled further into the underworld. After a while, the road began to run downhill and Jim was able to freewheel on the smooth, wide surface for what seemed like another hour or more, until the dawn of an approaching lightplain began to cast some daylight onto the road ahead. He mused that in the course of his bicycle ride, over a million years had passed on Earth.
Jim came to the edge of a wood and rested the bicycle on the ground. Hermione had come this way, six weeks before, he knew, while he had stayed on the plain above, hesitating. She would be waiting for him; but now he was ready to make the journey. The road was level, but after a couple of hours of hard riding be was beginning to feel very tired. Shortly he came upon the entrance to a lift. He was sad to leave the bicycle but his legs were glad of the rest. The lift was comfortable and well-furnished and Jim found a book that interested him while he descended. Every once in a while the lift would pause briefly at another level and somebody would get on or get off. When the story in the book had nearly reached its conclusion, the lift attendants announced that the elevaor would soon be arriving at its terminus, only nine kilometres above the boundary.
The attendants were husband and wife and told Jim, as the lift slowed, that such job-sharing was common beneath the higher plains, in order that one partner did not age inconveniently for the other. Their daughter had been about to go on a fortnight's holiday when they had left for work and she would be back before they returned from their shift.
The new lift was smaller and Jim descended swiftly. After a journey of about three quarters of an hour, Jim alighted into a dimly-lit auditorium, only three kilometres above the boundary. He could feel the increasing attraction. A clapping came in waves from the audience below, but Jim could not see the object of the entertainment and walked around the inner edge of a vast hall, past an office, where he came to a passage and out into the cool fresh air of night.
Jim walked for an hour along a brightly lit street, pausing to look into windows, and came at last to a railway station entrance. Inside was a warren of shops and food vendors. He ordered some items from various stalls and, having collected all the courses together, sat down at a bench to eat. In the short time it had taken him to walk from the auditorium, he mused, another million years had elapsed on Earth.
The light ebbed and flowed with the train's patient urgency; and the sun was shining brightly overhead as he walked from the station into a countryside of fields and meadows, surrounded by the distant and looming edifices of the higher levels and plains, towering around him like immense mountains - higher than mountains; as though surrounded by the balconies of a vast labyrinthine building that stretched for hundreds of thousands of miles in every direction! In the distance a black shadow raced towards him with the speed of the wind as the sun set, and he found himself walking in the shade of dusk. Shortly, as a new dawn approached, he came to a staircase. The attraction of the stairs took away all thoughts of delay.
As the darkness grew, a dim purple light revealed the enormity of the void beneath him. Jim was very thankful when, eventually, the stairway came upon a landing and he found himself in well-lit surroundings again. He entered a lift and became weightless for an instant.
The land in which Jim has found himself is truly vast. It is difficult for him to grasp, and yet, perhaps not so difficult; if he pictures the Earth inflated like a balloon, larger and larger and larger still, expanded and expanded, stretched and stretched until it encloses the orbit of the planet Neptune, so many millions of miles away. This is the size of the land in which Jim has found himself.
Only six hundred metres above the boundary, a path led into a dark country lane. An urgency overcame Jim, an urgency to descend. Within a temple, stairs spiralled downwards and he followed them past landing after landing until he found himself in a large hall. Across the hall, and beyond some glass doors, a path wound down a steep, floodlit hillside. At the bottom were green lights shining up into trees. Jim was breathless from the urgent descent as he entered another large hall. The lift arrived and the doors closed. When they opened again, he found himself looking out into a plush lounge bar, three hundred metres above the boundary.
Jim lingered briefly in order to refresh his thirst and calm his nerves before continuing through a cosy and warmly-lit catacomb of bars.
A flight of stairs led downwards. He jogged, flight after flight, past landing after landing of softly-lit spaces, forty identical floors. Forty! There was no going back. He reached a dark passage which led to another small flight of stairs. At the bottom of these was a long, broad corridor and at the other end stood Hermione.
'I have been waiting for you for nearly an hour!' she said when Jim reached her. 'Where have you been?'
·
In a lounge, fifty metres above the boundary, Hermione nervously watched a screen while Jim leafed through a book that seemed able only to hint at the vastness of this underworld and of the immense library that it contained. It was as though past, present and future existed together in this place; as though the whole range and succession of human biography had been gathered together into one moment. The picture on the screen showed a nearby galaxy, a spiral, rotating slowly. Hermione watched spellbound as, in the space of three or four minutes the galaxy made a complete revolution before her eyes.
Jim noticed that the clocks on the wall were all moving at different speeds and in opposite directions.
ETERNITY, where past and future are eternally present. At the still point of the turning world.
Jim left Hermione and went to explore some of the rooms nearby. He descended a long flight of stairs to a landing, skipped down another three flights and at once came into a large gallery filled with books; a part of the immense library he was sure. Pulling a book from a shelf he found that it was a biography. He replaced it and took another one from its position on a shelf a short distance away. Another biography. On the cover of one was an image of a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Jim took it down and opened it. The book contained an account of how a white bull had emergerd from the seas around the island of Crete and how Pasiphae had fallen in love with it and persuaded the clever artisan Daedalus to construct a device that would allow it to mate with her. The result of their union had been the Minotaur.
Returning from a brief exploration of the surrounding spaces, Jim ascended the final flight of stairs to find that Hermione was nowhere to be seen. But there was a note on a sheet of paper sellotaped on a door with the words 'I can't wait for you any longer!' with an arrow drawn on it in pencil. Perhaps Hermione had grown tired of waiting for him. There seemed to be an urgency about the instruction. Jim opened the door to find a dark space in which sat, a little distance away, a disconsolate figure. He was seated in front of a device in which a dim red glow emerged from a number of shapes and cracks. The white light from the open door bathed this figure in brilliance and he looked towards Jim with sudden terror, raised himself quickly from the chair and staggered clumsily away. As Jim moved further across the dark floor, beneath a low ceiling, and as his eyes became accustomed to the gloom, he could see that the hall was immense and stretched away in a forest of square pillars. A large number of similar devices illuminated the darkness with a starry spatter of coloured pinpoints, like a huge cluster of small galaxies receding away into a supercluster of universal proportions. Some of those nearby exuded a green constellation, others red, still others blue. The figure who had bolted from the light slumped again onto a chair of a red device a little further away and clothed himself once more, as though ashamed of his nakedness. Jim walked deeper into the vast room, knowing that Hermione was here somewhere. There seemed to be no end to it. A notice on a pillar caught his eye. It read -
'A lifetime in .004 of a second.'
Jim sat in front of the green lights of the terminal and clothed himself in the device. Immediately:
A cold and dark sky sat heavily upon its barren landscape. There was no moon and no stars, and no turbidity to hide the flatland and the cobblescape. Only darkness. But now, a timid creature darted, fish-like, away from the dim light that Jim exuded and into a safer blackness, seeking the protection of disappearance. He gathered his strength and soared upwards into the sky, towards marvellous creatures hidden from view, unseen but there, now, glimpsed only as shadows that moved away into a darker blackness.
Upwards, through a cloud of little creatures, of living fingers and whiskers, towards the dawn; the incandescent light of approaching dawn, a glowing light,
a diffuse light,
a blue-green light, reflecting everywhere, silver and black darting everywhere.
Suddenly - white violence - floating.
·
Jim lived an active life, but one day, whilst basking at the surface of a smooth ocean in a tropical sun, a sudden pain shot through his whole body, gripped him for a while in its clenched jaws, then the pain disappeared and he became aware of the rediscovery of something at once long-forgotten and very familiar. The hall was immense, and stretched away in a forest of square pillars into a milky way of coloured points of light. Jim rose and wandered further into this immense space, remembering Hermione as though for the first time, searching amongst all the devices for her, but soon wearied of the concentration it required and sat down to rest.
Immediately —
— the light played warmly, joyfully, in patterns of shifting signs, and as he moved his small arm forwards, reaching and swaying with a new confidence and a sense of space that he had not felt before, the patterns twinkled and swung. Jim rejoiced at this sight and as he waved his arm again, blissfully and so nearly controllable, the dancing patterns moved once more to his command and their touch rippled through his fingers. It was heavenly. Then, with an even greater excitement, Jim saw with growing comprehension that something about the dancing objects was similar to the light that illuminated them from a bright square in the distance, suddenly so intensely bright. He had no name for this similarity and no name even for the square of light that he could see. But such beauty needed no name.
And yellow became his favourite colour...
Jim removed the device. He was getting a little tired of this.
A long walk at last brought him to the far end of the hall filled with devices and he found a door that led into a gallery filled with books, a continuation of the library that he had visited already. Perhaps the floor of devices he had passed through was only a tiny island within the vastness of this library and that this level extended outwards, perhaps beneath the entire surface of this strange world in which he found himself. Jim could not begin to calculate the number of rooms and galleries that it might therefore contain, but he knew that it would be impossible for him to visit more than a tiny fraction of them on this one floor alone, in a single lifetime. And there might be hundreds of floors above him.
A sudden recollection suffused him with a feeling that he ought to be wary of something, but he could not remember what. All he could recall with any clarity was that a short while ago he had been with Hermione, and that she had now vanished. And he felt suddenly very alone, and vulnerable.
Well, if that was the way she wanted to play it, he would make his way back up into the sunlight.
He jogged through the galleries of the library, looking for a lift.