Stories

The Sphere

John N. Crain

September, 1983. Headlights cut through the Chihuahuan desert. Fletcher glanced at the rearview mirror but only saw a roiling nebula of dust, glowing red in the taillights. He slammed the Blazer into third gear and accelerated down the single-track dirt road, his mild irritation with Eric’s delays dissipating as they neared the observatory. Fletcher had hoped to get there before sunset—he always liked the way the dome sparkled with the last rays of the sun, perched like a sentinel on the edge of its remote mesa west of Las Cruces—but now they’d be opening things up in the dark.

Fletcher sped along one of the smoother, straighter sections as fast as he could manage, knowing the last switch-backed, boulder-infested stretch up the north side of the mesa would slow them to a crawl.

            His right foot came down hard on the brake as Eric exclaimed "Perpendicular!" and a big jackrabbit shot across the road in front of the Blazer. Fletcher knew he'd missed the wayward jack, and was back on the accelerator long before coming to a complete stop.

Eric twisted to peer out the window and said, “I think that one had antlers.”

            Fletcher grinned, all remnants of his former irritation gone. He could never stay pissed at Eric. “Well, if it’s a jackalope it’ll have to be reclassified.”

For the astronomy grad students, dodging jackrabbits on the way to the observatory was routine, and they long ago started classifying the long-eared pedestrians as either Perpendiculars or Parallels, depending on which direction they ran with respect to the direction of the road. Astronomers have a strong tendency to classify things—like stars, galaxies, and rabbits. Fletcher’s fellow grad students adhered to a general belief that natural selection was doing its job, and the Parallels were starting to outnumber the Perpendiculars.

            Twenty minutes later, Fletcher stepped out of the truck, relishing the contrast between the rough, noisy ride up the mesa and the still, silent air at the top. Several dark structures clustered around him—the main dome, a generator shed and, about thirty yards north of the dome, a low, flat-roofed, stuccoed cement block dormitory with its kitchen, a bathroom, and several tiny bedrooms for extended stays. No phone, no radio, but a fifteen-hundred-gallon storage tank with enough water for copious quantities of coffee.

It took half an hour to unload the supplies and get everything running, then Eric shut himself in the darkroom to prepare the astrophotography camera, loading a glass photographic plate with care, while Fletcher opened the great slit of the dome. At the touch of a button, a powerful electric motor whirred into action and the tall, arching door moved aside, revealing a densely-packed rectangle of stars. The touch of another button filled the inside of the dome with a reverberating rumble as the entire metal structure rotated toward the eastern sky. Fletcher keyed in the coordinates of one of the gas nebulae they’d come to photograph then carefully centered it in the field of view of the tracking scope, stepping away as Eric mounted the camera on the back of the main telescope. Using a paddle control at the end of an electrical cable, Fletcher centered a guide star in the crosshairs of the smaller telescope. By maintaining that perfect alignment, the nebula could be accurately tracked throughout the long photographic exposure. The slightest deviation could make every star in the photograph look like a comma rather than a point source.

            They finished hours later, well before dawn could interfere with their photography, and headed for the dormitory, finding their way by flashlight. Fletcher paused before entering the dorm, turned to face the graying eastern horizon and said, “I always find the first twenty-four hours of any observing run to be the hardest.”

“Yeah, working through the night when your internal clock says you should be sleeping is bad enough—trying to sleep through the following day never goes well.”

Eric was right. As the day progressed, Fletcher tossed and turned, only managing to doze. He gave up sometime around midday and, moving as though underwater, stumbled into the kitchen. It was obvious Eric hadn't fared much better—Fletcher could hear him in the bathroom. When he came out, he turned bleary eyes to Fletcher and asked, “What time is it?”

            “A little after one.”

            “Can’t believe I chose astronomy. I still don’t get why we have to take pictures of all those nebulae for our Measurements class. You have to be a creature of the night.”

            “I know what you mean. Maybe you should switch to solar astronomy.”

            “Too parochial.”

            “So why’d you decide to become an astronomer, anyway?”

            Eric finished washing his hands, splashing water on his face, and said, “The damn recruiter told me I’d see the world. He lied. I think what he should’ve said was I’d see everything outside the world.”

            “Hah! Well, if you’re lucky maybe you’ll get to work someplace like Mauna Kea, or Arecibo.”

            “Not likely. Blue Mesa is probably as exotic as it’ll get. I’ll probably end up teaching someplace like Cleveland.” Eric rummaged around in one of the kitchen cabinets. “So what makes you want to live a glamorous lifestyle of grueling work for little pay? And don’t tell me it’s for the astro-groupies.”

“Would you believe me if I said it’s because I want to know where the hell I am in the universe?”

            “Maybe. Do you think astronomy is going to tell you that?”

            “Maybe. Maybe not. If it doesn’t, maybe I’ll become a solar astronomer.” But deep inside, there was no ‘maybe’ about it—Fletcher held an unshakable conviction that he was on the right track. It was just a matter of time. Most people talked about the impossibility of imagining the scale of the universe, pointing to the abstractness of large numbers, but Fletcher’s mind understood how to scale things, and he already possessed mental images within mental images that encompassed the majority of the known types of physical objects in the universe. Someday he would be able to piece it all together.

            They settled in for a nice, afternoon breakfast of toaster pastries dipped in strong coffee. It was a typical, beautiful end-of-summer day so they opened the windows and front door of the dormitory and sat at the table, discussing the previous night's work and the next, and the levels and types of mental illnesses exhibited by their professors—the usual things grad students and good friends talk about. A lazy draft of air infused with aromas of the desert wafted through the dorm as though guiding their conversation.

            An unexpected movement outside the open door caught their attention. A man stood at the entrance, holding an empty, plastic, one-gallon milk container, a slight air of desperation about him. Alarmed, Eric and Fletcher hadn't heard the sound of a vehicle, which meant the man arrived on foot.

            Fletcher, apprehensive, went to the door. A second, younger man stood about ten feet away, looking a little uncomfortable. As soon as the second man saw Fletcher, his eyes widened, and he took one step sideways for no apparent reason. The man at the door held up the plastic jug and said with a thick Hispanic accent, “Buenos días, señor. Do you have any water?”

            Fletcher opened the screen door enough to accept the jug, and turned to meet Eric’s look of suspicion. But intuition told Fletcher everything was fine, so he filled the jug from the kitchen faucet and handed it back. The man said, “Muchas gracias,” took a long drink and passed the water to his friend. Eric, assured by Fletcher’s demeanor, joined him at the door. By the time the visitors were done drinking, half the container was empty, so Fletcher refilled it and asked, “Are you hungry?”

             The four of them sat on the benches outside the dormitory, eating sandwiches which disappeared quickly. Fletcher, Eric, and the older of the two men began shelling and eating peanuts in the early afternoon sun. The young man relaxed to a degree but his eyes never left Fletcher.

            The older man, Armando, spoke passable English, but the young man remained silent, and didn't give his name. As Fletcher suspected, they had illegally crossed the border and were making their way on foot to reunite with family in Santa Fe, far to the north.

Armando tossed an empty peanut shell and said, pointing to the south, “Bad country.”

Eric nodded and asked, “How come you’re not following the interstate?”

“Too many border patrol. But, this way, not enough water. We saw your building.”

 Fletcher turned to the younger man and asked, "¿Cómo se llama?" But he looked away and didn't reply.

            Armando seemed uneasy as he said, "He is Yaqui... a... brujo." Then in a lower tone, “... A shaman.” Armando stood, pulled his companion aside and spoke in quiet, fast Spanish. Returning to Fletcher, he apologized, saying, "He does not mean to offend, but he won't say his name to you. He says you are a dreamer. I don't know what that means. He said to give you this." Armando held out his open palm revealing an object with a strange multicolored sheen, metallic, but possibly mineral, and shaped into a perfect sphere about an inch in diameter. Fletcher accepted the gift. It was much lighter than expected, too light to be made of metal, stone, or glass. Fletcher stared at it for a moment then thanked the young brujo.

            A brief, awkward silence ended when Armando turned and squinted at the rugged country they planned to traverse, and asked, “Is there a road north?”

            Eric answered, “Yeah, but it’s just as bad as the desert south of here… Hang on.” He disappeared into the dorm for a few minutes and returned with a set of topographical maps. Together they traced the best possible route, and within minutes the two travelers resumed their journey down the access road to the north. Before they disappeared, the nameless brujo gazed over his shoulder at Fletcher. Then he was gone.

            Fletcher couldn't shake the encounter with the Yaqui shaman until later that night, when his thoughts were dominated by their second observing run. However, everything went much as expected, and again, they finished well before dawn, shut everything down and went straight to their bunks.

As Fletcher pulled off his jeans in the darkness before hitting the sheets, he felt the odd little sphere in his right front pocket and pulled it out to place it on the writing table next to the bed. It seemed a bit larger than he remembered. But there was another feature he hadn’t noticed in the daylight—the sphere gave off a faint glow. He thought perhaps traces of phosphorescent minerals might be present, but when he held it up close for inspection the light shifted slowly from one hue to another, and he could detect almost-invisible lines on the surface. He examined the lines, rotating the sphere. At first he refused to believe his eyes, but the straight lines were too straight and the curved lines connecting them were too perfectly geometrical to have occurred by any natural process. The thought sprang to mind that they resembled a kind of three dimensional rune, but he dismissed it at once as too ludicrous to consider. He came to a reluctant conclusion—the sophisticated orb was an artifact, and probably not made by a Yaqui indian.

Fletcher set the thing on the table, and it immediately began rolling toward the edge. Before it could fall to the floor he slipped it into the table’s shallow drawer. A sliver of dawn light crept past the opaque curtain, reminding him of the need to get some sleep before the next night’s work, so he tried to put the sphere out of his mind as he crawled into bed.

He slept poorly again and gave up the attempt by three in the afternoon. Fletcher wandered out to the kitchen to make something to eat and found Eric already at the table assembling a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.

Fletcher glanced at the jar of peanut butter and said, “I thought you would have had enough of peanuts yesterday.”

Halfway through troweling some chunky peanut butter on a slice of bread, Eric stopped and put aside the knife. “Yeah, you’re right. I knew there was something wrong with this sandwich. So much for brunch,” he mumbled.

Fletcher picked up the knife. “Well, no sense in letting good food go to waste.” As he continued where Eric left off with the peanut butter, Eric said, “I hope those two guys are doing okay.”

“That reminds me—I want to show you that weird little marble the brujo gave me. I’ll get it.”

Fletcher went to his room, tried opening the drawer of the writing table, and was surprised to meet resistance, as though the drawer was stuck. He gave a good yank and discovered the cause of the sticking drawer—the diameter of the sphere now spanned more than two inches. With trepidation, he picked the thing up, and though it now filled his hand it still seemed to weigh the same as when he first received it—almost insubstantial despite its increased size.

When Fletcher returned to the kitchen and handed the sphere to Eric, his friend’s brow knitted as he said, “This isn’t what he gave you… it’s too big.”

“Wrong. It is what he gave me. It’s gotten bigger.”

“You’re putting me on. But where’d you get this?”

“I’m telling you, it is the thing he gave me.”

Eric held the Yaqui’s gift up to the late afternoon sunlight streaming through the kitchen window. “It looks kind of translucent, but light doesn’t pass through it—just from inside. I think I can see some faint lines on the surface...”

            “Yeah, I noticed those last night. Definitely man-made. Some lines are perfectly parallel, others form right angles. There’s one that looks like part of a logarithmic spiral. Let’s see.” Fletcher peered at the small globe, turning it in the light and said, “Even though it’s translucent I can’t see anything inside. This thing is bizarre…” He found a small juice glass in the cupboard, placed it in the center of the kitchen table, and perched the sphere on top.

            Eric shook himself and said, “Well, bizarre or not, we’d better finish eating and start prep’ing for tonight’s work. We’ve got some photos that need developing too, and that should be done before nightfall.”

            “I don’t know, man. This thing’s freaky. I say we head back to campus and take it to the physics department.”

            “No way. It’s not that urgent, and if we don’t get the rest of our photos done, we’ll have wasted our time here. I say we stay.”

            Thirty minutes later Fletcher tried to put the sphere out of his thoughts, concentrating on the demands of the night’s observing run. Their third night of observations didn’t go as well as hoped, and before dawn, he and Eric trudged back toward the dorm. Eric, in a bad mood for once, said, “I still can’t believe we have to spend another night. My one exposure of the Helix Nebula, messed up.”

Fletcher opened the front door and stopped dead in his tracks, staring into the room. A sphere more than two feet in diameter dwarfed the supporting juice glass. The same soft glow emanated from the interior, making the geometric lines on the surface more obvious.

            “Oh, man,” Eric exhaled. “What the fuck is that thing? Fletch, I think you’re right about getting it to the physics department...”

            But Fletcher was no longer so sure. His intellect agreed, but something held him back. “What about getting your shot of the Helix?” When Eric didn’t answer, Fletcher added, “Look, most likely the physics guys will just tell us it’s some kind of geological freak—after all, this mesa was originally formed by volcanic activity millions of years ago…”

            “But what about the way it gets bigger?”

            “You think they’re gonna believe us about that? I don’t. And it’s probably not likely to get any bigger. The most likely scenario is that we end up looking like idiots and you come away without even a decent image to analyze. One more night won’t hurt.”

            “Alright, alright! But I’d still feel better if it were outside. Come on.”

            They got on either side of the table, and reached almost simultaneously for the sphere. Eric touched the globe first, and it promptly fell off the juice glass with an almost inaudible thud. His reflexes kicked in and he grabbed the sphere to keep it from rolling off the table. To his surprise, he handled the object with ease, looked at Fletcher and said, “It hardly weighs a thing!”

            “I have a feeling it weighs exactly what it did when I first showed it to you—and exactly what it did when the brujo gave it to me.”

            Eric shook his head. “I’ve heard Yaqui shamans can do some pretty weird stuff, but this is crazy.” He carried the sphere out of the dormitory and stopped with a sudden realization. “What’ll we do with it? If we just set it down, a slight breeze could send it right off the edge of the mesa…”

            “I think there’s a tarp in the generator shed. We could put the tarp over it and weigh it down with rocks. I’ll go get it.”

            When Fletcher returned he had the tarp under one arm and a flimsy lawn chair under the other.

            Eric asked, “What’s with the chair?”

            “I think I’ll keep an eye on it for a while. Don’t feel much like sleeping anyway.”

            “I know what you mean. But we’ve still got one more night of observing ahead—are you sure?”

            “Yeah.”

            “Okay… Well… I’m hitting the bunk.”

            Fletcher spread the tarp over the sphere and placed rocks to hold down the edges. He unfolded the lawn chair in the shade of a stunted juniper and settled in as the morning sun climbed above the horizon. Despite his best efforts, his eyelids drooped and he fell asleep, and the shadow of the juniper shortened until Fletcher’s chair stood in direct sunlight. A clatter of rocks woke him.

            The sphere measured more than seven feet in diameter, only the edges of the tarp touched the ground. Fletcher sprang from his chair and dragged the tarp from the sphere, causing it to roll soundlessly a few feet. He stepped back, opened his mouth to yell for Eric, but hesitated as though hypnotized by the thing before him. The sphere rose a few feet off the ground, the black lines covering the surface appeared to be crawling, rearranging themselves and turning a uniform red. A wisp of vapor accompanied by a brief sizzling sound emanated from the lines, and the segments of the sphere separated, moving outward as though it were exploding in slow motion. Instead of falling to the ground, each segment floated straight out, suspended in mid air, and Fletcher could see the interior of the sphere. It shimmered and swirled like chaos contained.

The outward progress of the segments ceased, the shimmering ended, and a strange odor, like burned cloves, washed over Fletcher and dissipated. But some of the segments closest to him continued floating toward and past him, and it seemed obvious to Fletcher that the movement was directed by intelligence, not random. In unison, they tilted into a horizontal configuration but each one stopped moving at a different level, the lowest at Fletcher’s feet. Fletcher stared at the array, which seemed to form a staircase, leading up and into the sphere. Despite his misgivings, he stepped forward until he came to the last segment, the one at the bottom of the sphere, the only segment that hadn’t moved.

            Looking down at that segment, he noticed two oblong, smooth patches side by side, about twelve inches long and five inches wide. His natural curiosity overruling caution, he placed a foot in each. A slight vibration traveled up through the soles of his feet. Fletcher couldn’t move. Though he tried stepping out of the sphere, he realized every muscle, every fiber of his being had been immobilized. Even his heart had stopped beating, and it immediately occurred to him that he had entered a state of suspended animation, yet one that did not affect his mental processes. Under ordinary circumstances, he would have panicked, but these circumstances were far from ordinary. He wondered if he’d stepped into a kind of trap, but if so, no pain was involved, and because he had no choice he resolved to observe and experience every detail of the phenomenon.

            Fletcher realized he was not using his physical eyes to observe what was happening. Everything was seen with his mind’s eye. That part of his brain associated with vision was being directly stimulated in the same way one sees things while dreaming. And yet he knew it was real.

As one, the scattered segments began to move again. With a spiraling motion they swirled around him, coming closer until their edges reconnected, reforming the contiguous surface of the sphere with him in the center. And as it formed, the air inside congealed, first around his ankles then rising until Fletcher was encased like an insect in amber, leaving him in a mottled, deep red glow of light from the lines where the segments joined. Seen from the inside of the sphere, the pattern formed by the glowing lines registered as having some specific meaning. With Fletcher’s enhanced mental capacity for vision, he realized with a mild shock that he could visualize the entire three-dimensional pattern and commit its complex configuration to memory.

The lines began moving over the surface of the sphere again, rearranging, pausing every now and then before changing, and with each new configuration Fletcher sensed a message he couldn’t yet decipher. The speed of change increased, patterns shifting with such rapidity that the inner surface of the sphere became a uniform red glow. The shifting stopped, leaving a final, glowing red pattern of lines that faded until absolute darkness prevailed, holding reign for what seemed a mere few seconds, though only Fletcher’s thought processes filled the void, providing the measure of time.

            Out of the blackness stars began to appear in every direction, slowly at first, until the entire galaxy filled the sphere. None of the constellations familiar to Fletcher from his astronomical training could be seen, and he understood it to be the way interstellar space would appear from a vantage point far from earth.

            The stars began to shift, flowing around him, leaving empty space in one direction, converging to a single point in the opposite, until he was left in darkness yet again, but not for long. Another three-dimensional pattern of glowing red lines appeared, and when it too faded it was replaced by a view of his home galaxy in its entirety, seen from beyond its borders. It was soon replaced again with another pattern of lines, followed by a view of another galaxy, and Fletcher understood the connection between the patterns and the physical objects—as he had suspected when he’d first acquired the sphere and inspected it in the dormitory, the patterns were indeed a kind of rune. And each rune contained information about the object presented.

            Shapes, vistas formed around him, each preceded by a rune, and one after another, Fletcher witnessed events on worlds not Earth. Yet it was all viewed as though in a dream, real but not real, because imprisoned in the center of the sphere he could not interact with the things and beings beyond. He could only observe. And the universe was revealed in a living tableau, traveling through star systems of other galaxies, nebulae, passing in close proximity to objects beyond the reach of telescopes, visiting surfaces of planets teeming with life. It was a series of revelations that Fletcher pieced together into a mental image of which he was a part. And Fletcher knew his earthly astronomical pursuits would no longer have meaning for him.

September, 1993. Fletcher put the tiny sphere in the pocket of his jeans and pivoted on his heel to take in the desolate panorama of Blue Mesa. Early afternoon sun shone on the observatory with a clarity that almost hurt the eyes. The sounds of feet on rocky soil and voices came from the other side of the dormitory, and two men came into view—Armando and his companion, the Yaqui brujo. Fletcher was surprised by how much older they both looked. Armando stopped abruptly when he caught sight of Fletcher, but the brujo smiled as though the encounter was expected and approached to within arm’s length, not saying a word. They looked at each other for several long moments before the brujo spoke.

            “My name is Preciliano. Do you still have it?” Fletcher held out his hand, palm open. Preciliano gazed at the sphere through half-open eyelids, and said, “As you know now, this was not the gift—the gift was what it can do.” He took the sphere between his thumb and forefinger, and said, “I will pass it on to another. There are other dreamers in the world.”

End