“She was only fighting to save her man. And since you did not hit me, there is no insult. Though there is plenty of injury.”
“I think you’ll be all right,” Burton said.
He forebore to say that he had hit Gilgamesh in the face. Truth could be sacrificed in this situation. He’d gone through his life making enemies because he didn’t care if he did and even got a certain satisfaction from it. But during the past twenty years he’d seen that he was behaving irrationally in this respect. Nur, the Sufi, had taught him that, though not directly. Burton had learned while listening to Nur’s conversations with his disciple Frigate.
“I think,” Burton said, “that X took a lift of some sort. I don’t see any, though. Nor do I see any controls to bring one up or down to here.”
“Maybe that’s because there isn’t any cage,” Frigate said.
Burton stared at him.
Frigate took a plastic bullet out of the bag that hung from his belt. He threw it twenty feet into the emptiness. It stopped as if it were in jelly at the level of the floor.
“Well, I’ll be damned! I didn’t think it was so, but it is!”
“What is?”
“There’s some kind of field in the shaft. So… how do you go where you want to? Maybe the field moves you according to a codeword.”
“That is good thinking,” Nur said.
“Thank you, master. Only… if one person wants to go down at the same time another wants to go up… ? Maybe the field can do both simultaneously.”
If the shafts—there must be others—were the only way to get from one floor to another, they were trapped. All the Ethical had to do was to let them starve.
Burton became angry. All his life he’d felt caged and he had broken out of some of the cages, though the big ones had restrained him. Now he was on the verge of solving this great mystery, and he was trapped again. This one, he might not escape from.
He stepped out into openness, putting one foot down slowly until he felt resistance. When he’d determined that his weight was going to be held, he moved entirely into the shaft. He was near panic; anybody unfamiliar with the setup would be. But here he was, standing on nothing, apparently, and an abyss below him.
He stopped, picked up the bullet, and threw it to Frigate.
“Now what?” Nur said.
Burton looked up and then down.
“I don’t know. It’s not just like being in air only. There’s a slight resistance to my movements. I don’t have any trouble breathing, however.”
Since it made him more than just uneasy to stand there, he walked back to the solid floor.
“It’s not like standing on something hard. There is a slight give to my weight.”
They were silent for a while. Burton finally said, “We might as well go on.”
46
THEY CAME TO ANOTHER BAY MARKED BY CHARACTERS IN BAS-relief and containing a lift-shaft. Burton looked up and down this, hoping that he might see something to help them. It was as empty as the other.
When they had left this, Frigate said, “I wonder if Piscator is still alive? If only he’d come by…”
“If only!” Burton said. “We can’t live by if only, even if you do most of the time.”
Frigate looked hurt.
Nur said, “Piscator, as I understand it, was a Sufi. That may explain why he got through the gateway on top of the tower. From what I’ve heard, I’d venture that there’s sort of force, analogous to an electromagnetic field, perhaps, that prevents those who haven’t attained a certain ethical level from entering.”
“He must have been different from most Sufis I’ve seen, yourself excepted,” Burton said. “Those I knew in Egypt were rogues.”
“There are true Sufis and false Sufis,” Nur said, paying no attention to the sneer in Burton’s voice. “Anyway, I suspect that the wathan reflects the ethical or spiritual development of the individuals and what it shows would make the repulsion field admit or deny entrance to a person.”
“Then how would X get in that way? He’s obviously not as ethically developed as the others.”