cowlark.com

My Diary, 2002-11-28

The sullen red flame of the ship's engines (or whatever it is) is still dominating the view upwards.

Green and Black spent the night in my apartment again, this time sleeping in the pseudo-sand over by the window. I don't think they slept much. I certainly didn't; the red glow through the window and the psychic pressure of the vast bulk of the ship above us didn't lend themselves to relaxation. I was relieved when dawn finally came around and I could get up again. I found the sealin already awake.

Currently we're down on the beach. Green and Black took to the water a while ago and are investigating the force wall, seeing if it's still up. I don't blame them; I'm safe from the storms, and they have a family to go to. I don't think they'll have a lot of luck, however. I can see swell breaking against empty air, off in the distance. The water in the bay is like a millpond and the air is still and oppressive.

[break]

The wall is there. The floor to the water to the sky. It is like rock. We cannot go.

How far around the island did you go?

All around the island. It is there all around the island.

They could just be being cautious and leaving it up until they know there won't be any more storms.

Yes.

What do the spines do when they reach the bottom?

They go down to the floor and more go. There are more rocks around the spines. More, more rocks. The water is dark and it is dead.

Dead?

The fish and the plants are dead.

Just by the spines?

Yes. The spines come to the water. They are more big and more fast. The water can not go fast. The spines go the water more fast.

A shock wave? The spines hit the water and cause a shock wave that killed everything?

Yes.

I wonder how deep they go beyond the sea floor.

I do not know.

[break]

Late morning. The ship's done something; that red flame in its heart suddenly flared up, and then shrank to a piercingly white pinpoint. We were out on the beach, and at this point started sprinting for the Hotel foyer, but before we could get there, the pinpoint expanded to a sun-like disc, and stayed like that. All this in complete silence.

We cowered in the foyer before Black suggested, via Green, that it was a sun. It makes sense; it's so bright and hot that you can feel the heat against your outstretched hand... and, with the real suns somewhere beyond the ship, it's doing a pretty good job of illuminating the island.

But we're not going to go outside for a while.

[break]

Lunch. No change since the sun came on.

Just for a change we went to the sealin's apartment. I'd never seen it; I was wondering what it was like. Cold and wet, the answer was. It was still based on a sea-shore theme, but where mine was based on an idealised tropical coast, theirs was based on some godforsaken rock in the North Atlantic. Half the room was one big pool, with thirty-centimetre waves (coming from nowhere I could spot), and the rest of it was rock and gravel. Three of the sealin's machines-in-a-bubble floated in the pool.

In deference to my delicate skin, they did turn off the wind and the spray and put the temperature up a good ten degrees or so, and it actually turned out to be quite comfortable. The gravel was made of the same non-stuff that my pseudo-sand was, and if I sat on it it moulded itself to my shape quite effectively. But it still felt like having lunch inside a water reservoir.

Oh, yes, the food; Black manipulated what appeared to be their version of the food widget, and three fish materialised, rather like salmon with too many fins. Mine came grilled with chips and a side salad, and was extremely good, although Green did eat quite a lot of it. She was very interested in the grilled part of it, and asked me a lot of largely incomprehensible questions about, I think, cooking.

[break]

Something's happened.

The force barrier flashed with that web of orange flame again. We thought perhaps it was the barrier going down, so we headed outside... it wasn't.

Just as we got outside the ground shook. Well, lurched. Once. I hate earthquakes. I picked myself off the ground and sprinted for an open space, terrified that the Hotel might fall on me, shouting over the sudden rustling crash from the forests for Green and Black to follow me. I stopped and turned round just in time to see a single, two-metre high wave cream its way up the beach and die back.

Nothing else happened. We stayed out for a while before eventually heading back to the Hotel. Green argued with the pedestal again in Builder, trying to get some information out of the computer that ran the place; I gathered it wasn't being particularly helpful. Eventually she said that the Hotel was undamaged ('not pain'). I should have expected that.

[break]

Well, I did ask to be taken off the planet.

We're flying.

We probably took off shortly after the lurch, which I guess was the artificial gravity coming on. But in the Hotel we're a long way from the force barrier, and today our rooms are fairly low, and when the sea dropped away beyond the barrier we just... didn't notice.

I am totally unable to be scared about this. It is just completely outside my experience. The ship's a few hundred kilometres up and rotating. In the gap between the ceiling and the sea is framed, brilliant blue and white and with every cloud picked out in startlingly three-dimension black, the planet.

The ship has lifted the entire island, air, water, bedrock and all, off the planet and we're now in orbit.

We only noticed when the sky outside started to darken. Black saw it first, what with the way he keeps staring out to sea. I don't know what he said, but he and Green argued for a while before Green pointed it out to me.

At first I thought it was just night falling outside the realm of our little artificial sun, but my watch still said it was the middle of the afternoon (once I converted to local time). Even when it became completely black, we didn't catch on. It was only until the planet started rolling past outside that we finally realised.

Black and Green are frantic. They never asked to be taken off-world.

I wonder where it's taking us?

[break]

Green's in a bad way.

Black's fine; scared, but still with us. I think his attack yesterday has left him much more able to deal with stuff like this. Green, though, is repeatedly flinging herself from one side of the window to the other, jabbering away at high speed in incomprehensibly mangled English and sealin to both of us indiscriminately. She uses the word 'down' a lot. I suspect she gets vertigo.

(I'm not bad with heights. But when I think of the way the sea stops against the force barrier, with nothing on the other side but the rest of the universe, I feel... uneasy. When I think about how I don't really know how the force barrier works, I feel really uneasy.)

Without Green, I can't talk to Black. I can tell he's worried. He keeps looking at me beseechingly, as if I knew what to do ---- although it could just be those big black eyes. I have no idea what to do. I wouldn't know what to do if Green were human. Is she hysterical? If so, would throwing a bucket of water in her face help? Yeah, right.

Damn it, Green, quit it! Calm down!

This isn't helping. I do not like this.

[break]

We got Green calmed down. I think. I'm not entirely sure how, but...

I'm not sure exactly why we did it, but after a while with Green showing no sign of stopping her ranting and, if anything, getting more hysterical, I suddenly found myself throwing myself on top of her. Green weighs about half as much again as I do and is a lot stronger, so this wouldn't have helped had Black not also decided to do the same thing.

We got her pinned to the ground, with my hands over her eyes. Useful thing, hands. She thrashed around for a few seconds and then lay still, shaking gently while Black talk to her in what I assumed was a soothing tone of voice.

After I while I let go and found that her eyes were closed and she was breathing regularly, but I don't think she was asleep. Black gave me a look in what I think was gratitude, and kept talking.

I don't know anything about psychology. Has she gone from hysterical to catatonic? Is that good? Bad? Does that even apply to sealin?

[break]

About half an hour ago the fake sun outside went out. This coincided roughly with sunset back on the planet, if I can trust my calculations (I never did get round to setting my watch to local time).

Without the competition of the light, I can see the stars out the other side of the force barrier. I can see a lot more than that, too. Do you remember those odd striations or saw on the little ship that brought me here? Well, they're back, with a vengeance. Where the little ship's striations were only just visible with the cabin light out, here they're bright enough to drown out some of the stars. And from the way those stars are moving, I'd say we were going about ten times faster than the little ship.

So it's big and fast. Pity I still don't know who's running it. The Builders? The Enemy? Some independent? (The ship's big enough that I suspect that it, alone, could be considered a major player.)

There's only one thing I'm sure of, and that's that regardless of any local politics, the only people whose side I'm sure about are the sealin. They just want to go home. Well, I'm a hundred percent behind them on that one.

They're currently curled in an a corner away from the window. I think they're asleep. Black managed to talk Green around, as far as I can tell; she made her way over under her own power. I'm keeping as quiet as possible, whispering this to the dictaphone under the blankets in my own bed.

I haven't pointed out the striations. I think they're having a hard enough time coping with the idea of being in space as it is, without introducing them to FTL.

If this ship goes ten times fast then the little ship, then it can cover the distance the little ship took five days to cross in half a day. This also means that if the big ship moves one day's flight, the little ship would take ten days to catch up with it. I think it's a fair assumption that anyone chasing us in ships like the little one will never catch us.

Where is it taking us?

Ship, if you're listening to this transmission... please talk to us. Please.

[transmit]