Prasp flew again—but this time he rose farther than he ever had before. His muscles were stronger, his lungs more capacious. All that running had had the desired result.
Prasp was close enough now to the roof to see the circular lights, each wider than his body was long. Of course, it was night now; the lights were glowing dimly. Only a fool would strap on wings and try to fly toward the lights when they were burning with their daytime intensity.
Still, this close, there was enough illumination to make out things he’d never noticed from the ground. He could see that the roof was slightly curved, slightly concave, arching up and away. He continued to fly along, but everything was the same—massive cords, circular lights, and, supporting them, a thick, clear membrane—and beyond that, he couldn’t say, for all was dark. The lights all faced down toward the ground, far below.
Prasp thought that if there were an exit anywhere, it might be at the very center of the roof—easy enough to spot, for all the radial cords converged at that point. He knew there was no exit around the edges of the roof, for others had long ago climbed the steep, rocky terraces that surrounded the valley, concentric shelves each wider and higher than the one below it. They’d circumnavigated the world, hiking around its edge, examining the entire seal between the roof and the rocky walls—but there was nothing; no break, no passage, no tunnel.
Finally, Prasp reached the exact center—and there was something special there. Prasp’s heart began pounding even faster than it already had been. There was a platform hanging from the roof, a wide square, attached at its four corners by cylinders that rose to the sky. The platform was large, and Prasp was able to glide between two of the cylinders, his belly scraping along the platforms inner surface. He skidded along, thinking that the skin on his chest would soon be flayed from his ribs, and—
Gods, no!
There was a giant cube in the middle of the platform, a building of some sort as big as a multifamily hut. Prasp wanted to throw his hands up in front of his face to shield it from the crash, but he couldn’t; his arms were strapped to the wings. He continued to skid forward, and he twisted his body sideways, finally slamming into the building.
He lay on the platform, catching his breath, supported from beneath for the first time since he’d taken flight.
Finally, he moved again. The building had a door in its side. Prasp had rarely seen doors before; some members of his tribe had tried to make them for their huts—vertical walls of sticks that articulated on gut ties down one side. This one was simpler and more elegant, but it was a door just the same.
Still, there was no way to get through it without shedding his wings— and he had to go through that door; he had to see what was on the other side of it. Prasp normally had his woman’s help in strapping his wings on before each flight, but surely he’d be able to reattach the wings on his own when it came time to return to the valley. It would be tricky, but he was confident he could do it.
Prasp struggled to divest himself of the great elephant-hide membranes, and at last he was free of them. He rose to his feet and walked toward the door. There was something like a crooked arm attached to it. Prasp grabbed hold of it and pulled, and the door swung open, revealing the inside of the cube.
Prasp’s heart immediately sank. There was no other door in the cube, no opening in its roof. He’d thought for sure he’d found the way out, but clearly that was not the case. Still, the room contained things the likes of which Prasp had never seen before: angled panels made of something that wasn’t wood or stone, with lights glowing upon them. Most were green, but a few were red. He stared at them in wonder.
We had access to the plans for the Copernicus refuge, of course. After all, it was we who had built that habitat prior to taking The Next Step. We’d put the computers controlling the habitat high above the ground, hanging from the center of the roof, where the primitives could never reach them. Indeed, from the ground, some 3.8 kilometers below, the computing room and its surrounding platform would be all but invisible.
We’d tried to figure out what exactly had gone wrong. Our best guess was that the computers had failed when February 28, 3000, had rolled around—certainly, the two-week long lunar day that straddled that Earth date had been the one in which the polarizing film had gone dark for the last time. We’d tested the computers for behavior at leap years, but it hadn’t occurred to us to check millennial years, with their arcane and sometimes conflicting rules about whether the day after February 28 was February 29 or March 1.
We’d called ourselves humane. Every conceivable programming error, every possible bug, every potential infinite loop, had been tracked down in the systems that now hosted us. But somehow the computers that were to look after those not taking The Next Step were given less rigorous testing.
Yes, we’d been humane—and human; all too human, it seemed.
In the cubical structure at the roof of the world Prasp found the most remarkable thing: a vertical rectangular panel that had symbols glowing on it, and, resting on a horizontal surface in front of it, a—something—that looked like packed animal teeth, white and concave.
Prasp counted them; there were 107, divided into one large cluster and four smaller ones. Most of the teeth had single symbols on them. One whole row of them, plus a few others, had two symbols, one above and one below. A few had strings of symbols. He tried to match the symbols glowing on the panel with those on the teeth. Some of them did have matches; others did not. The glowing strings on the panel made no sense to him, although he looked at each one carefully: “System halted. Press Enter to reinitialize.”
On the rack of teeth he could find the S symbol—although why the panel showed it in two different sizes, he had no idea. He also found the P symbol, and the E, and the z, and two teeth marked with circles that might be the o symbol, and two others marked with vertical lines that might be the I symbol. Some of the other symbols had loose counterparts amongst the teeth: the m seemed similar to, but less angular, than one of the tooth markings, for instance. But many of the others shown on the panel—e, h, a, d, r, n, and i—seemed to have no counterparts among the teeth, and—
“Enter.” Right in the middle of the glowing characters was the string “Enter.” And that entire string was reproduced on an extra large tooth at the far right of the main collection; that tooth also was marked by a left-pointing arrow with a right-angle bend in its shaft.
Prasp ran his index finger over that large tooth, and was surprised to find it wobbling, almost like a child’s tooth about to come out. Very strange. He pressed down on the tooth to see just how much play it had, and it collapsed inward, and then, as soon as Prasp pulled his finger back in disgust, it popped back out again.
But the symbols on the screen disappeared! Whatever Prasp had done clearly had been a mistake; he’d ruined everything.
Fourteen sleep periods later, Prasp, his woman Kari, Dalba and the other elders, and the rest of the tribe all watched in awe as something incredible happened. The sky turned clear, and high in the sky, there was a giant blue-and-white light, shaped like half a circle, set against a black background.