Chapter 17: Understanding the Planet

Chapter 17:
Understanding the Planet

 

SUPER EVA FLEW LOW along the clifftop’s edge, keeping the drop-off to his right, until he came upon his own footprints at the place he’d started. The loop took two and a half days. Apparently, this was the full extent of this world.

Shinji thought back to a pre-medieval world map he’d seen in a history textbook. “I think the people living before the Age of Discovery had more reasonable ideas about the workings of the universe than this.”

Shinji seemed to be standing atop a flat expanse of arid land the size of a continent, about five thousand kilometers across at its widest.

“I wonder if there’s any way down,” he muttered.

He couldn’t help but wonder what was under the continent’s overhang, several thousand kilometers below.

“I feel like I can smell water. Can you?”

Apparently, Quatre thought the remark too illogical to be worth a reply.

But at least she seemed to be cooperating for the time being. Without her help, Shinji wouldn’t have been able to fully utilize the Q.R. Signum, and he wouldn’t have been able to get the lay of the land without her powering Super Eva’s flight.

They only had two days’ worth of emergency food and water left, give or take. But Shinji was hoping Rei Quatre might be more amenable to making the leap back home once her survival was at stake.

 

Super Eva once again looked over the impossible cliffside. Far, far below was the unidentifiable mass obscured by clouds.

The parasitic Q.R. Signum had increased Super Eva’s functions, and the Eva had begun to automatically repair its injuries. Shinji realized he could once again see with the giant’s left eye. With fully restored vision, he squinted down. Beyond the clouds and the dark mass, he saw the faint, jagged, rose-colored outline of something else.

He realized that their floating continent, the dark mass below it, and the distant red outline were all lined up on the same axis. He suddenly remembered that Kaji had called this place the “Apple’s Core.”

“An apple core…”

Shinji imagined a dumbbell-shaped planet. Except…that didn’t seem physically possible. Asteroids could possess unusual shapes, but this was a planet, with enough mass to experience 1 g of surface gravity. On that scale, even the strongest rocks behaved like liquid. The planet would deform under its own weight and become a sphere.

But, supposing this planet somehow has the shape of an eaten apple, then what am I looking at?

If the dark, cloud-covered area beneath the cliff was the leftover, uneaten and seeded core, then what was Shinji seeing even farther beyond?

“The opposite side of the core,” Shinji said. “Could there be another continent over there?”

Another continent, with rough edges like flower petals.

If this side was always illuminated by the sun, was the other side a world of eternal night?

“Quatre, do you think we could fly to the other side?”

“What would be the point?” Rei Quatre replied, as if she couldn’t care less.

“Er…”

Shinji recognized that he was going to have to get along with Quatre for the time being. Bossing her around wasn’t going to get him anywhere. He gathered his thoughts and chose his words carefully.

“You wanted to take me to the farthest place, right? Well, the farthest place might be over on that side, don’t you think?”

Come on, Shinji. That was the best you could come up with?

The suggestion was so transparent that Shinji regretted saying it almost immediately.

But Quatre replied, “That place in the middle, covered with clouds… There’s a spike in gravity there. Not a gravitational pull naturally arising from mass gathered together but from mass held in place by some other gravitational force.”

“What does that mean for us?”

“If we approach it, that gravity will pull at us stronger than the surface of the planet’s far side. And if we get pulled in, we might not be able to leave. If we’re going to fly across, we need to make sure we avoid the center.”

At least she thinks we can avoid it, Shinji thought.

“So let’s fly,” he said.

“Are you serious?”

“Yeah. Lend me your help?”

For a moment—too brief for Shinji to notice—she didn’t know what to do.

But in the end, she said, “Okay.”

From the moment Ayanami Rei Quatre gained self-awareness, she’d either been on the giving or receiving end of demand after demand. This was the first time—including when she’d been consolidated with the others in Trois—that she’d ever been asked for help.

 

Quatre measured the distances with Super Eva’s optical sensors, though, even at full functionality, they left a little to be desired. The quantum flux inclination sensors—the same sensors that had predicted the mutant Eva-0.0’s arrival—measured the distribution of the eccentric gravity near the core.

The cloud-covered center was a little more than 6,300 kilometers away, and the red continent on the opposite side was roughly the same distance again, for a total of about 12,700 kilometers—almost exactly the same as Earth’s diameter.

As far as Super Eva’s sensors could determine, the planet’s shape matched Kaji’s description—an apple eaten to the core.

Curiously, despite so much of the apple having been bitten off, the planet’s gravity and heliocentric orbit matched Earth’s.

As Quatre calculated a trajectory that would take them to the red land on the far side, without falling into the middle, she muttered, “This continent is like a five-thousand-kilometer-tall umbrella. I don’t understand how it doesn’t collapse.”

Then, she added, “We’ll fly. And we’ll fly true. But there’s no doubt about it. Some strange force is acting upon this entire planet.”