Inherit the Earth - Brian Stableford [81]
The impact would probably have hurt a good deal worse if Damon hadn’t sucked in just enough smoke to make him gag and befuddle his senses. As it was, he felt almost completely numb as he reeled backward.
The next breath he took was so fully impregnated with smoke that he must have passed out immediately—or so, at least, it seemed when he woke up with a sick headache and found himself lying prone on a ledge, looking down the sheer slope of an incredibly high mountain.
Eighteen
D
amon was no more sensitive to heights than the average man, but the sight confronting him would have shocked anyone into instant acrophobia. He looked downward at a face of bare gray rock that plummeted for miles. The bottom of the chasm was visible because it was lit up like the face of a full moon on a clear night, but it seemed so very far away that the notion of it’s being connected to his present station by an actual wall of rock was so incredible as to be horrible.
He felt cold sweat break out on his face as terror grabbed him, and he recoiled convulsively, squeezing his eyes shut and pulling his head back from the rim. He rolled over without even caring what might be behind him, but when he was supine he opened his eyes again to look up, and gasped once again in alarm.
The steep slope extending upward from the left-hand edge of the narrow ledge on which he lay was not as extensive as the chasm that lay to his right, and it posed no threat, but there was a certain sinister malignity in its frank impossibility. The mountain was topped by a building that was lit as brightly and as strangely as the chasm floor, so that every detail of its construction stood out sharp and clear against a cloudless and starless sky.
It was a castle of sorts, with clustered towers and winding battlements, but it was compounded out of crystals, as if it had been gantzed from tiny shards of glass and the litter of a jeweler’s workshop. The walls were not transparent, nor were they even straightforwardly translucent; they were shining brightly, but the manner of their shining was an outrage to logic which played tricks with his mind’s procedures of visual analysis. As he stared at the amazing structure he saw that its towers were linked by crisscrossing bridges whose spans were impossibly knotted, and that its ramparts were decorated with ascending and descending staircases which faded into one another in perspective-defying fashion. It was magnificent—all the more so because it was so far above him, separated by a slope so sheer and forbidding.
There was no path up the mountain—no way the castle could be approached without climbing several kilometers of hostile rock face. Its existence was no more plausible than that awful abyss, which would have plunged halfway to Earth’s molten core had it been in the world he knew: the real world.
Damon shut his eyes again. Safe in that darkness, he pulled himself together.
It’s just a VE, he assured himself. It’s clever, but it’s just a VE full of optical illusions.
Carefully, he began to run his fingers over his limbs. His fingers registered the texture of his suitskinned flesh; the muscles of his belly and his thighs registered the passage of his fingers. He assumed that the suitskin must be an illusion and that he must really be wearing a synthesuit delicately wired to reproduce the sensations of touch. It was obviously state-of-the-art, given that the movement of his fingers seemed so very natural, but all such suits had limitations of which he was very well aware.
He put his right forefinger into his mouth, running it back and forth over his teeth and tongue. Then he touched his closed eye and gently depressed the eyeball. Then he passed his hand back over the crown of his head, feeling the texture of his hair and the vertebrae of his neck. Finally, he put his hand inside the collar of the virtual suitskin and shoved his hand into his armpit; when he withdrew it he sniffed his fingers.
None of these sensations were capable of synthesuit