The dust settled, the tremors stopped, the giant dissolved into the distant haze. Gone. Imagined. A vision, a hallucination, madness.
My spirits lifted a bit. Phew! What had I been thinking about before Veronika Sergeyevna showed up? Remembered! Lying down and dying, turning into a slab of meat, becoming basturma.
I looked around. Untouched ground stretched out ahead of me. No tracks at all — not mine, not the giant’s, nobody’s!!!
Cheered up and hopeful, I took a step, a second, a third…
The sky was red. The world enormous. My mood combative.
My feet didn’t sink in, they pushed off confidently against something solid.
I glanced down and noticed a glint. «Interesting,» I thought, bent down, and touched the sand. Underneath lay something hard and cold. I brushed the sand aside and saw myself. A swarm of guesses foamed up in my head and vanished.
I laughed: under the sand lay a mirror. It reflected everything a mirror should. I smiled and looked again at the exhausted, grimacing reflection. Well. Now I understood what my smile looked like.
I stood up, walked about twenty meters, and brushed the sand away beneath me. Found the same dazed stare. A mirror again. And fifty meters further, the same thing.
Everywhere, under the sand, lay the same mirror.
Well, well.
For miles around lay a mirror, dusted with sand. Interesting!
Though no reasonably sensible conclusions followed from it. The mirror just lay there under the sand, no purpose, no grand design. Lay there and mocked my mind with the sheer fact of its existence.
Ah, well. I walked, sighed, looked around, stopped, sighed again. Basically, pondered the elaborate absurdities of frail human existence. The pointless thoughts led nowhere. I noticed something odd: with every step, the horizon crept ten meters closer. It soon turned out that the points that had glittered in the distance were thirteen enormous spheres, each the height of a fifty-story building. Well, would you look at that!
The smooth, spherical surfaces gleamed in the sun — no, wait, reflected the light of the many-sided shape. No windows, no doors. Made sense. This wasn’t exactly a residential block found in the desert. More like a giant billiard table. «What if they start rolling?» flashed through my mind.
Really, though. What kept the spheres motionless? Did these circular structures even have a foundation? Maybe they were resting on a mirror… speaking of which, there’s a mirror, without any sand this time.
I laughed. The line of the horizon, which had rushed toward me so fast, turned out to be the edge of the sand. Where the sand ended, the mirror reflected the sky. The horizon, as advertised!
There was no sand behind the spheres. Just a mirror, flooded with red sky, which was itself a mirror. I looked into the distance, and a grand feeling swept over me, as if the heavens, boundless and bottomless, stretched out above me, ahead of me, and beneath me all at once. What had Anton called it? The universe’s ripped-open belly?
I moved my gaze from one cloud to another, right, left, up, down, and felt like the ruler of the world, soaring above reality in a silent height. I looked down and saw a haggard, ragged man with burning eyes.
— Well, hello there, master of the universe, — I smirked, and turned around. On the surface of the nearest sphere, about a meter and a half off the ground, something dark was visible, something that looked like an opening.
«A hatch just opened in the wall, don’t worry, it’s just a glitch,» some childhood rhyme crept into my head. I felt a surge of adrenaline. I wanted to be a hero, to charge into the unknown, and, grabbing luck by the tail, find my happiness. Or, well, a happy ending like in the movies, the kind where they live happily ever after. Had to take a look.
On closer inspection, the opening turned out to be a round window- or door-shaped hole, about three-quarters of a meter across.
I stuck my head inside. The blue space within the sphere turned out to be empty: bare walls, floor, ceiling, and nothing else. If it hadn’t been for the music that reached my ears, I’d have been bitterly disappointed — in the opening, in the sphere, and in any heroic future. But the sound of a harpsichord made me climb inside without a shred of doubt, grunting and straining as I went.
