Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea gleaming not far to the west under a lemon sun. “It isn’t much farther,” the skull-faced man says. “You can make it. Step by step by step is how.”
“I’m winded,” Skein says. “Those hills—”
“I’m twice your age, and I’m doing fine.”
“You’re in better shape. I’ve been cooped up on spaceships for months and months.”
“Just a short way on,” says the skull-faced man. “About a hundred meters from the shore.”
Skein struggles on. The heat is frightful. He has trouble getting a footing in the shifting sand. Twice he trips over black vines whose fleshy runners form a mat a few centimeters under the surface; loops of the vines stick up here and there. He even suffers a brief fugue, a seven-second flashback to a day in Jerusalem. Somewhere at the core of his mind he is amused by that: a flashback within a flashforward. Encapsulated concentric hallucinations. When he comes out of it, he finds himself getting to his feet and brushing sand from his clothing. Ten steps onward the skull-faced man halts him and says, “There it is. Look there, in the pit.”
Skein sees a funnel-shaped crater right in front of him, perhaps five meters in diameter at ground level and dwindling to about half that width at its bottom, some six or seven meters down. The pit strikes him as a series of perfect circles making up a truncated cone. Its sides are smooth and firm, almost glazed, and the sand has a brown tinge. In the pit, resting peacefully on the flat floor, is something that looks like a golden amoeba the size of a large cat. A row of round blue-black eyes crosses the hump of its back. From the perimeter of its body comes a soft green radiance.
“Go down to it,” the skull-faced man says. “The force of its power falls off with the cube of the distance; from up here you can’t feel it. Go down. Let it take you over. Fuse with it. Make communion, Skein, make communion!”
“And will it heal me? So that I’ll function as I did before the trouble started?”
“If you let it heal you, it will. That’s what it wants to do. It’s a completely benign organism. It thrives on repairing broken souls. Let it into your head, let it find the damaged place. You can trust it. Go down.”
Skein trembles on the edge of the pit. The creature below flows and eddies, becoming first long and narrow, then high and squat, then resuming its basically circular form. Its color deepens almost to scarlet, and its radiance shifts toward yellow. As if preening and stretching itself. It seems to be waiting for him. It seems eager. This is what he has sought so long, going from planet to wearying planet. The skull-faced man, the purple sand, the pit, the creature. Skein slips his sandals off. What have I to lose? He sits for a moment on the pit’s rim; then he shimmies down, sliding part of the way, and lands softly, close beside the being that awaits him. And immediately feels its power.
He enters the huge desolate cavern that is the cathedral of Haghia Sophia. A few Turkish guides lounge hopefully against the vast marble pillars. Tourists shuffle about, reading to each other from cheap plastic guidebooks. A shaft of light enters from some improbable aperture and splinters against the Moslem pulpit. It seems to Skein that he hears the tolling of bells and feels incense prickling at his nostrils. But how can that be? No Christian rites have been performed here in a thousand years. A Turk looms before him. “Show you the mosyics?” he says. Mosyics. “Help you understand this marvelous building? A dollar. No? Maybe change money? A good rate. Dollars, marks, Eurocredits, what? You speak English? Show you the mosyics?” The Turk fades. The bells grow louder. A row of bowed priests in white silk robes files past the altar, chanting in—what? Greek? The ceiling is encrusted with gems. Gold plate gleams everywhere. Skein senses the terrible complexity of the cathedral, teeming now with life, a whole universe engulfed in this gloom, a thousand chapels packed with worshippers, long lines waiting to urinate in the crypts, a marketplace in the balcony, jeweled necklaces changing hands with low murmurs of negotiation, babies being born behind the alabaster sarcophagi, the bells tolling, dukes nodding to one another, clouds of incense swirling toward the dome, the figures in the mosaics alive, making the sign of the Cross, smiling, blowing kisses, the pillars moving now, becoming fat-middled as they bend from side to side, the entire colossal structure shifting and flowing and melting. And a ballet of Turks. “Show you the mosyics?” “Change money?” “Postcards? Souvenir of Istanbul?” A plump, pink American face: “You’re John Skein, aren’t you? The Communicator? We worked together on the big fusion-chamber merger in ‘53.” Skein shakes his head. “It must be that you are mistaken,” he says, speaking in Italian. “I am not he. Pardon. Pardon.” And joins the line of chanting priests.
Purple sand, blue-leaved trees. An orange sea under a lemon sun. Looking out from the top deck of the terminal, an hour after landing, Skein sees a row of towering hotels rising along the nearby beach. At once he feels the wrongness: there should be no hotels. The right planet has no such towers; therefore this is another of the wrong ones.
He suffers from complete disorientation as he attempts to place himself in sequence. Where am I? Aboard a liner heading toward Abbondanza VI. What do I see? A world I have previously visited. Which one? The one with the hotels. The third out of seven, isn’t it?
He has seen this planet before, in flashforwards. Long before he left Earth to begin his quest he glimpsed those hotels, that beach. Now he views it in flashback. That perplexes him. He must try to see himself as a moving point travelling through time, viewing the scenery now from this perspective, now from that.
He watches his earlier self at the terminal. Once it was his future self. How confusing, how needlessly muddling! “I’m looking for an old Earthman,” he says. “He must be a hundred, hundred-twenty years old. A face like a skull—no flesh at all, really. A brittle man. No? Well, can you tell me, does this planet have a life-form about this big, a kind of blob of golden jelly, that lives in pits down by the seashore, and—no? No? Ask someone else, you say? Of course. And perhaps a hotel room? As long as I’ve come all this way.”
He is getting tired of finding the wrong planets. What folly this is, squandering his last savings on a quest for a world seen in a dream! He would have expected planets with purple sand and blue-leaved trees to be uncommon, but no, in an infinite universe one can find a dozen of everything, and now he has wasted almost half his money and close to a year, visiting two planets and this one and not finding what he seeks.
He goes to the hotel they arrange for him.