Photo courtest of DJMcCrady on Flickr.
The Face of the Deep
By Fred Saberhagen, first published in If: Worlds of Science Fiction, September, 1966.
part 2
Even a slight change in his orbit would have been immediately visible to him, for his bubble was somehow locked in position within a narrow belt of rocks and dust that stretched like a threat to girdle the vastness below him. Before the thread could bend perceptibly on its great circle it lost its identity in distance, merging with other threads into a thicker strand. This in turn was braided with other strands into a heavier belt, and so on, order above order of size, until at last (a hundred thousand miles ahead? A million?) the first bending of the great ring-pattern was perceptible; and then the arc, rainbow-colored at that point by lightning, deepened swiftly, plunging out of sight before the terrible horizon of the hypermass’s shroud of dust. The fantastic cloud-shapes of that horizon, which Karlsen knew must be millions of miles from him, grew closer while he looked at them. Such was the speed of his orbit.
His orbit, he guessed, must be roughly the size of Earth’s path around Sol. But judging by the way the surface of clouds was turning beneath him, he would complete a full circuit every fifteen minutes or so. This was madness, to out speed light in normal space — but then of course space was not normal here. It could not be. These insane orbiting threads of dust and rock suggested that here gravity had formed itself into lines of force, like magnetism.
The orbiting threads of debris above Karlsen’s traveled less rapidly than his. In the nearer threads below him, he could distinguish individual rocks, passing him up like the teeth of a buzz saw. His mind recoiled form those teeth, from the sheer grandeur of speed and distance and size.
He sat in his chair looking up at the stars. Distantly he wondered if he might be growing younger, moving backward in the time of the universe from which he had fallen … . he was no professional mathematician of physicist, but he thought not. That was one trick the universe could not pull, even here. But the chances were that in this orbit he was aging quite slowly compared with the rest of the human race.
He realized that he was huddling in his chair like an awed child, his fingers cramping painfully inside their gauntlets with the intensity of his grip on the chair arms. He forced himself to try to relax, to begin thinking of routine matters. He had survived worse things than this display of nature, if none more awful.
He had air and water and food enough, and power to keep recycling them as long as necessary. His engine was good for that much.
He studied the line of force, or whatever it was, that held him prisoner. The larger the rocks within it, some of which approached his bubble in size, seemed never to change their relative positions. But smaller chunks drifted with some freedom backward and forward, at very low velocities.
In this Sunday series of posts I will be “re-publishing” pulp science fiction short stories that have long since gone out of print. When possible I will seek out author’s and estates for permission.
