Beyond The Tomorrow Mountains by Sylvia Engdahl Page A

had become infinite.
    Once again fear stirred in Noren. A black shadow cut sharply across the wall, coming ever closer; if he kept going he would soon re-enter darkness. And he had no choice. He had no volition as far as the actions of his body were concerned; when he tried to control them, he discovered that the Dream Machine was doing so after all. His only freedom was in his personal inner response. To be sure, that had been the case in the previous dreams, but always before there had been the compensation of shared thought. He had not been compelled to proceed into the unknown with no idea of what his alter ego’s goal had been. Then too, he had not been so alone. There had been people around, talking to him, listening to words that came from his lips and by their reaction guiding his adjustment. Here he was isolated; it was all taking place in utter silence.
    He approached the shadow, thinking how very odd it was that the tower, when first seen from a short distance, had been fully illuminated. Something behind him must be casting that shadow, some monstrous thing that was advancing… If only he could turn his head! His heart thudded painfully and he felt chills permeate his flesh, yet his hands were firm as he moved them from grip to grip. The physical symptoms of fear must be his own, he realized; they were occurring in his sleeping body, while the recording contained only the confident motions of a man who had not trembled. He held to that thought as his right arm disappeared into the dark.
    Then, without any foreknowledge of the intent, he did turn for an instant, looking back over his shoulder toward the source of light he was leaving behind; and it so startled Noren that he felt he was not only falling, but spinning. Though the tower was still there, he was sure that he’d lost contact with it, that he would fall forever toward a fire that was worse than darkness. There was no shape to cast a shadow. There was only a vast black sky dominated by a sun, immense and horribly brilliant, that looked much as it had on film and in his first controlled dream and in all too many of his natural ones; but he had no shelter from it now. He was in the presence of the nova…
    One glance was enough. It was a relief to creep on into the dark where that intolerable flame could not reach him. Why couldn’t it? Noren wondered, momentarily baffled. A sun, when it shone, shone everywhere. Why wasn’t it shining on the whole tower? His head and shoulders were by this time enveloped in blackness; he raised his free hand to turn a knob on the helmet he hadn’t realized he was wearing. Instantly there was light again: not sunlight, but innumerable swarms of blazing points that could be nothing but stars.
    Awestruck, Noren clung to the wall of the tower, facing outward, while comprehension flooded into his mind. It came not from the recorder’s thoughts, to which he still had no access, but from his own power of reason; the pieces at last began to fit. He’d been climbing not up, but around—around the circular tower to the side opposite from the sun. And it wasn’t really a tower yet; it was still a starship. He was in space!
    Noren had seen space from the viewport of the First Scholar’s starship during the first controlled dreams he had experienced, but that was not at all the same as being outside such a ship. Aboard the starship there had been artificial gravity; he had encountered neither weightlessness nor the absence of “up” and “down,” although he’d since been told of these conditions. He had also been told that stars would appear abnormally bright outside the atmosphere of the planet on which he’d been born, which was even thicker than the Six Worlds’ atmospheres, and that the sun, too, would be brighter—but mere words had not prepared him for the actuality.
    It was not the nova he’d just glimpsed, he perceived. The nova had been observed only from the escaping fleet, which had gone into stardrive