The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “No argument. ‘Ingenuity or Endurance,’ the guidepost said. We’ve certainly had all the hiking we can endure. And this is pretty ingenious, if I say so myself.”

  “Funny,” she said. “I remembered it as being my plan.”

  “I thought up the gondola,” I pointed out.

  “True.”

  The breeze ruffled the feather trees; the river current chuckled around the eel-mass. We waited. And soon the central eel gave a whistle to announce that it was fully inflated, the bottom of its envelope touching our lowest cords on either side. Anchor eels began to drop off, and the balloon began to rise. But then it stopped.

  Feathery branches high above on either side of the river, laced together crisscrosswise like a corset, gently held the green globe down. That had been the hard part, the tension line—climbing up to loop it around a branch, throwing the free end across, and climbing down to catch the return throw, again and again. It had taken hours. But the snare worked; we’d captured the balloon.

  To the eels it could only seem as though there was still too much weight for the balloon to lift. Slowly, more and more of them dropped off.

  “A little too low for our purposes,” Foyle suggested. We untied the end of the tension line and, leaning landward against the resistance of the bent branches, allowed a little more slack before tying off again. The bottom of the eel-balloon was now two meters above the water, but as soon as it came to a halt more eels would have to do their duty.

  We waited. No matter how cleverly they’d been engineered, the Hellway animals couldn’t think. Instead, they followed rules. If the balloon won’t rise, it’s still too heavy. Drop off and swim on. The last few hangers-on seemed reluctant, but in the end they all left, looking for new masses, and the water beneath the balloon ran clear.

  We helped Helen Hogg-Smythe into the gondola, which was already loaded with our belongings. Once it had been a hex-ox, grazing the prairie. Then the vampire moths had changed it into a piñata gourd. The gourd had emptied, died, and dried out, the solid six-footed shape flattening and hardening and bowing upward. It had been easy to uproot, and had passed our tests of strength. Now, upside down in the edge of the water, it was a double-layered bowl with six straight handles, its bottom two meters in diameter—not too tight a fit for the three of us, especially while Foyle and I were standing. Between handles, the sides curled a meter higher than the bottom, but it was not a natural boat; we would have to be careful not to capsize it.

  I grabbed at the static line, Foyle the tension line, and we hauled our craft out between them, toward the center of the river. We stopped when we were directly under the balloon mouth and secured ourselves in place between the tree lines with temporary cords to the gondola’s legs.

  I inspected the balloon-eel’s head, which was intricately clamped into a valved protuberance on the lower envelope wall. The eyes were closed, and I began to wonder whether the creature was still conscious, or even alive. No knowing. From where I stood I could have reached the juncture of monstrous sphincter muscles where the inflated part of the body ended and the neck began. A darker mass, the rest of the body proper, could be dimly seen curled up within the semitransparent envelope. The neck’s bend, from the bottom of the balloon to where the head clamped on, formed a loop nearly a meter long. Now Helen Hogg-Smythe handed up the saddle we’d made for it.

  It was one of the blankets we’d been supplied, folded over and crudely sewn into a pillow. Braided lengths of cord ran in and out of slits in the top layer. I slipped the saddle between the eel’s neck and the balloon and connected the edges that flopped over. Then we tied the ends of the braided cord, eighteen in all, to holes drilled at intervals in the gondola’s legs, trying to maintain an even strain throughout. Finally we disconnected the temporary restraining cords and held the gondola against the current by hand instead. We looked at one another without speaking, unable to think of anything undone, but seeming to share a sense that it had been too easy. Time to go.

  Foyle cut the tension cord and we both sat down next to Hogg-Smythe, quickly, as the feathered limbs twenty meters above us sprang away from each other and the gondola lurched out of the water. There was a moment of suspense as the tension line snagged somewhere among the branches, a few of which still blocked the balloon’s ascent. Three overeducated voices said, “I was afraid of this!” at different speeds, and then a puff of wind shook the trees, the line ran free again, and we were aloft.

  ◆◆◆

  The eel was still alive.

  We’d only shot up the first fifty meters, still ascending, and already something had gone wrong. We barely had time to react to it—a strange creaking noise as the whole envelope above us visibly expanded against the decreasing air pressure—and then the eel vented hydrogen through one of its head valves to keep itself from bursting. At least that was how we reconstructed it, shaken, after the deafening whistle stopped.

  “Real balloons have to do that too,” Foyle assured us. “I forgot.”

  Soon the balloon reached an equilibrium height, something like the same hundred-odd meters we’d seen the other eels attain, despite our being a lighter-than-usual load. “So he adjusted his gas pressure to our weight,” Foyle observed. “Another indication that we were meant to fly him, I think.”

  ◆◆◆

  Ballooning is magical. You have a sudden appreciation for the phrase “Our spirits rose.” The world rolls by, but the best part is that you haven’t really left it—you stand in the open air, hearing the same sounds and smelling the same smells you’d experience if you were walking among the trees and grass below. There is no wind in your face or ears; you are one with the wind, and belong wherever you go.

  The great green envelope above our heads added to the illusion of naturalness by blotting out the ceilinged part of the sky. And as we watched our round shadow float across dun prairie and shiny water and violet treetops, the afternoon passed into a plausible imitation of cloudy sunset in the west. Hogg-Smythe dozed, reclining in the bottom of our basket. Foyle and I more often stood, leaning against the support lines and taking in the view. We didn’t talk much, though we felt obliged to estimate our speed—only six or seven k an hour—and to wonder how the flight would end.

  “I don’t doubt that this thing is bioprogrammed to land at a chosen spot somewhere in the north,” Foyle said. “But just for the sake of argument, suppose we saw our next t-station somewhere below instead? We can always go up by throwing out ballast, but how could we go down? We can’t release any hydrogen.”

  “There’s always a knife.”

  “Sometimes you astonish me, Commissioner.” She shook her head. “You can puncture a fabric balloon safely, but this one’s made of skin—elastic. Don’t children play with rubber balloons where you come from? Haven’t you ever stuck a pin in one?”

  “Without popping it, yes,” I said. “It’s an old magic trick. You put a piece of adhesive tape onto the balloon first, and drive the pin through that; the hole stays small. In our case, we have cloth, and flour and water to mix into paste. We could make a papier-mâché ‘tape’ if we had to, and prick through it with a knife. I’m not pushing the idea, mind you, but you did ask.”

  “Sorry.”

  “For what? Astonishment is no insult—to a magician.”

  “But you claim to be so many things, Commissioner. Civil servant, archaeologist, confidential agent, and magician, too. It’s hard to keep track.”

  “Ever hear the phrase ‘Renaissance man’?”

  Her smile, which had been mocking but not unfriendly, disappeared in an instant. “Not recently,” she said in a flat voice, and turned to face the view.

  Artificial twilight blurred the outlines below. But after darkness fell, bright and unblinking ‘stars’ appeared, and a few distant clouds lit themselves up from within, silvery, like huge moons. Helen Hogg-Smythe awoke from her ominously heavy sleep with a faint gasping sound, and we found we could see well enough to have our dinner.

  Evi
dently refreshed, the old woman leaned out between leg-posts to examine the changed landscape. As she remarked, the beams of silver light had a remarkable sharpness, bringing out the separate edge of every tree-leaf.

  “You make it sound like a beautiful world,” Foyle said with her new dead voice. “And you know better.”

  “That was then, and this is now, Foyle,” Helen answered gently. “This is a wonderful experience, and your own idea. Enjoy it while it lasts. What do you think, Commissioner? To take flight by hitching a dead cow to an electric eel—it’s like something out of Cyrano de Bergerac.”

  Foyle’s voice again, from over her shoulder, gravely:

  “I might construct a steel grasshopper-craft,

  Its hind legs triggered by explosives aft,

  And so, in fumes of nitre, by jumps and jars,

  Attain the bluegrass pastures of the stars.”

  When she turned, the strange mood appeared to have passed. She smiled when Hogg-Smythe said delightedly, “Committed to memory! This, from a young woman who badmouths the classics.”

  “Trick memory, no effort,” Foyle replied. “And I hate to break it to you, but that’s the Larkspur translation.”

  “Oh, but it’s not that Larkspur’s so bad, you know,” Hogg-Smythe said. “A good minor poet, with a gift for satire. It’s just that your generation has spoiled him for me. Like doting parents who make Junior recite his party piece every damned night.”

  Foyle laughed. “I know what you mean.” I did, too, actually. “I think that’s why I like Cyrano the best. His third play, a straight translation—the only one he did. Not so presumptuous as ‘adapting’ Shakespeare et al.”

  “Quite so,” Helen said firmly—and with good cheer, more alive than at any time since she’d been attacked.

  “The other plays have their moments, though,” Foyle went on. “I thought so once, anyway. My husband and I used to read them together. Roger was fascinated by Larkspur. Before we married—when he was still my Lit professor—he wrote a book on the legend of the Eighth Play, the one the Reform Kanalists are supposed to have suppressed.”

  “Oh yes,” Hogg-Smythe said. “Because Larkspur was an Old Rite Kanalist, or something?”

  “Yes, that’s the legend,” she replied. “And Roger had joined one of the underground Old Rite lodges, as a young man, just to emulate his hero.”

  I couldn’t help interrupting her. “Underground…Old Rite lodges?”

  “Oh, they exist.” She shrugged. “More of them, on more planets, than the authorities would like to believe. Or maybe the Column just doesn’t care. It’s not like the Old Rite constitutes an effective resistance. They just argue doctrine with each other, and wait for the Master of Masters to descend on them with the True Ring from Crete, and sweep the pretenders from the chapter houses—et cetera.”

  She was watching my face. I must not have concealed my emotions very well. “Anyway,” she said, “Roger eventually concluded that Larkspur had never actually been initiated himself. The Kanalist lore in The Enchanted Isle, he found, is full of inaccuracies.”

  “The hell you say!”

  “You sound so outraged, Commissioner. But then, as a Column official, you must belong to the Reform version of the order, don’t you? That’s one of the most interesting things about Larkspur, the way every party claims him for their own.

  “Reform Kanalism was invented by Larkspur’s classmates at Nexus University. And he knew the key figures in the cabal—Lucan Kostain, Domina Wintergrin, Alexei Von Bülow…but somehow, reading about the period, I can’t imagine he really fitted in with a wolf pack like that.

  “Of course, he wasn’t the fiery radical that the underground likes to believe in, either. More the clever but gauche provincial, the sort of boy who’d do card tricks at parties. Oh, pardon me, Commissioner, I forgot…He admired the ideal Kanalism celebrated in his plays, but he never risked the disillusionment of actually joining the society.”

  “You’re sure of that?” I said.

  “Roger was,” she replied. “You might read his book, As Strange A Maze. It’s about the final act of Larkspur’s Enchanted Isle.”

  “I’ve never seen that one,” Hogg-Smythe admitted.

  “The Enchanted Isle is an adaptation of The Tempest,” Foyle explained, “but it’s also the Kanalist Magic Flute, full of references to the lore and customs of the society. Their Labyrinth, for instance.”

  “A ritual maze?” Hogg-Smythe seemed fascinated with all things Kanalist.

  Foyle shrugged and grimaced while she went on, as if describing the disgusting symptoms of a disease she’d once had. “You know these mystery cults. At some point they like to lead their initiates through a symbolic maze of some kind. We’ve already been through the Elitist version of that, I guess, with the mirrors. Well, the Kanalists put theirs at the end of the ceremony. It’s allegedly based on the labyrinth of Knossos, in Minoan Crete. That’s nonsense, archeologically, of course. But anyway.

  “The walls of this Labyrinth were decorated with various scenes from Greek mythology. A cram course in early Western culture, with special emphasis on the Kanalist saints: Odysseus, Daedalus—the crafty people who follow their own course through life. But there was only one winding way to the staircase exit at the center of the Labyrinth. Kanalists called it the Shining Fare.

  “The story is that Larkspur somehow broke into the Labyrinth a week before his play was to be performed.” As she spoke, an electric flicker of images passed before me: Domina naked in the Black Chamber. The mosaic of Odysseus about to fire through the axes. The wall etched with gold letters that said:

  YOU HAVE CHOSEN THE RIGHT PASSAGE

  HERE ENDS THE SHINING FARE

  and then the staircase leading out to the roof. But there was none of the trauma sickness to it, and I could still follow what Foyle was saying:

  “He mapped and memorized the correct path, which even Masters weren’t supposed to do, and wrote it into his play, in code.”

  “Some sort of mnemonic?”

  Foyle nodded. “It’s become one of those tiresome Baconian Cipher controversies. Anyone can play, since people can’t even agree on the details of the Old Rite maze design. Only the underground lodges know the pattern, and they’re still outlawed, technically, for anti-Column activities.

  “But Roger risked a treason charge to publish his thesis. He was the only scholar in his field with authentic Old Rite experience; he was able to point out the places where Larkspur had faked the details. The mnemonic map of the Shining Fare, for instance. It’s not quite right.”

  The last straw.

  “Possibly your, uh, teacher is the one who got his details wrong,” I suggested. “Lots of them. For instance, the Cyrano translation wasn’t Larkspur’s third play, but his first—a student exercise he revised after his first two successes.”

  “I’ve heard that theory, too,” Foyle said, yawning, “but the bulk of critical opinion is⁠—⁠”

  “Critics! Don’t tell me about⁠—⁠”

  “Commissioner, please,” Helen Hogg-Smythe said, “don’t work yourself up so. It’s hardly important. Only Larkspur, after all.”

  “Quite right,” Foyle agreed. I took a deep breath and let it go.

  We swept on through the night. The luminous clouds turned different colors. A meteor shower was simulated to the east. Helen Hogg-Smythe went back to sleep. Her breathing turned so stertorous that Foyle knelt by her side to make sure she was all right.

  When she stood again, we spoke in whispers. “I just don’t know what to think,” she said. “If the moth toxins were going to kill her, it probably would have happened by now. Our omniphylaxis treatments were renewed just a few days before you arrived on the planet. Maybe that’s saved her, but then again, maybe it’s only delayed the crisis.”

  “She has a strong constitution.”

  “For her age, you mean.” She swore softly to herself, a lament. “She’s been so many places, seen and done so much. Married six ti
mes. Survived the Siege of Pfennigbricht. Sang professional opera as a girl. And a hundred other things I would have liked to hear about, could have learned from. But no, not me. I wouldn’t let her get too close. Too threatening to my precious independence.”

  “A professional teacher. Like your husband.”

  She didn’t look at me. “Yes. Roger was a full professor, with degrees in six disciplines. And a fencer and a horseman and a painter. A Renaissance man, you see. He had an ideal of what humans could be. ‘Whole-souled,’ like Larkspur heroes. He didn’t know if he would ever achieve it, but he was sure that I could. He…created me. He was⁠…⁠” She let it trail off, and shook her head.

  “What happened to him?”

  I didn’t think at first that she would answer, but then the words came, flat, impersonal. “We were quite a little community of demigods, back on the Vesper Preserve. We looked to Roger for leadership. His ideals got everyone killed, in the end. Him, too. Everyone but me.”

  Now she did face me. “That’s why I was so sure Helen was wrong about the Elitists. I knew. The idealistic stage never lasts long. Your group seizes power, or the group in power snuffs yours out, and that’s all. Just as we will be snuffed out, if we can’t rise to every Hellway challenge like true Hitler Youths.”

  “I can’t say I disagree.”

  “Of course you don’t. You keep in with every camp, don’t you? I know your kind. You joined the Column government to get it off your back, but not to change it. And now you’re safe to nod at my seditious views, because you’re in no danger of acting on them. I don’t know why I should blame you; we all have to get by somehow. But you seem to be a man of parts, Commissioner. You could have been⁠—⁠”

  She broke off suddenly, and pointed over my head. I turned and looked.

  The eel had opened an eye.

  The larger-than-human pupil rolled slowly right and left, passing over us incuriously to take in the ground on either side. A strange sound began to issue from the head, rhythmic and bellows-like. Bulges moved through the series of sphincter muscles in its neck, rippling the saddlecloth.