The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  “Wongama was a big man, fit and smart. He got this far despite your brothers. Suppose you arrived just after he used the stick.”

  “I did not kill him, the trooper did,” he said. “Examine the knife. You will find it standard Brotherhood issue.”

  “But so are you, Colonel. That doesn’t prove anything. I have to judge your protective skills by what I’ve seen—and I haven’t seen much. You ditched me back in the valley.”

  “I took a ninja star meant for you, and kept Principato pinned down long enough for you to escape. You know I did my duty, you just want me to feel guilty. You play a deep game. But don’t you still need me on your team?”

  “Are you worth more to me than Wongama?”

  “In combat⁠—⁠”

  “In combat I need men I can trust. Lagado has also survived. He shares my low opinion of your protection.”

  “I was teamed with him before you and I made our deal. It was nothing personal; if I had needed him, I would have looked after him. Please, do not underestimate me as I did him, and you. You need me.”

  “Maybe. There’s no way to know, now, how Wongama survived the team-ups he must have had with your brothers. He may have had to give them information. And the better the brothers understand what’s going on, the more likely we are to encounter them at the pole.” I told him what little I knew about the coming race across the sea. “It’s a golden opportunity for us to leave them all behind, but it’s also their best chance to catch us all in one spot. If we do meet them, what can you do for us? Can you order them to leave us alone?”

  He considered it, but finally had to shake his head. “I have no op codes, no password. The recognition routine I used with Principato is just a convenience for nonemergency situations. It’s not secure; we could have tortured it out of one of them by now, and they’ll know that.” I may have looked unconvinced, because he went on. “Principato wouldn’t have played along with it himself, except that he needed the antidote I was carrying. I could lie to you and tell you they’ll obey me—but there’s no chance. You need me to help kill them. There’s no other way.”

  “There will be seven or eight of them.”

  He shrugged. “Four for you, four for me.”

  “Maybe we should offer them odds, to make it interesting.”

  I’m not sure I’d ever seen him smile before. “A master’s joke. But you don’t fool me anymore. At the very beginning, you took out two of them in an elevator, unarmed. That’s you. And as for them, the confusion at the command level has been reflected in their performance; they’ve fumbled everything. We have a chance. The Foyle woman will be a help. But you need me.”

  I fixed his eyes with mine. “I require at least three scalps from you. That buys your life. A fourth clears your Brotherhood’s record with the Column. Is that absolutely clear?”

  He didn’t put his hand over his heart this time. But the way he looked at me, as if at a master, would have been reassuring—if there’d been a master anywhere near.

  ◆◆◆

  I stepped forward to the edge of the world. And fell off…The opening to a standard nightmare, Number 1.1, perhaps, with the addition of wings on my shoulders straight out of the mosaic of Daedalus and Icarus, a failed escape from the Labyrinth that ends in falling, falling, falling toward a metallic watery glitter. And now, with more realism than usual, I hear low moans from the leading edges of my wings, warning that my dive is too steep, that I am about to lose control. But this time the magic is on my side—I have but to straighten my hand backward, nothing up my sleeve, and the dive flattens. I roll out at a slight angle into level flight.

  And here’s the part that takes faith. Here’s the part I, like you, must resolutely pretend to believe, because otherwise the play fails both actor and audience:

  This time, it is not a dream.

  ◆◆◆

  I’d never even thought to wonder why we’d all been sent to the top of Arboria—how a race across the sea to the north pole could proceed from there. But the race was by air. We’d been given wings.

  ◆◆◆

  Mishima’s bloody arrival had completed our “reunion team.” Accordingly, the door to the imitation cabin in the topmost arbor had finally opened for us, revealing an equipment room and a small holo theater. A computer referee briefed us on our flying gear and the rules of the race we would fly against the merc team. With me to translate the Ur-Linguish, we would have an advantage over the mercs, though unfortunately many of the holograms were self-explanatory.

  After the briefing and my translations, the only hard part was the actual moment of jump-off. The wings would not unfurl until their wearer was already in midair. Meanwhile they rode my shoulders, intricately folded back and forth across the small but supercharged electric motor whose blower pointed up and down my spine. To add to the feeling that I might fall like a stone, my legs were shackled, locked into metal braces extending from a rigid plastic corselet. My whole lower body was under the rig’s computer control, just barely permitting a stiff-legged little walk to the edge of the wooden jump platform.

  Of course, there was an out. If necessary, I could twist the palm-sized silver disk strapped across my solar plexus; once a twist unlocked it, one hard slap would cause the whole apparatus to peel itself away from me, revealing the underlying parachute ready at my stomach. And my arms, at least, were free enough to make that movement. But it still took faith to jump—blind, unwarranted faith that the mind quite rightly rebelled at. To any creature that thinks and feels and imagines, there is nothing harder than falling off a log.

  And so I stood, the rest of the party lined up behind me in similar gear, with Mishima and Foyle at the end to provide a little push if one of the others balked. Ruy Lagado in particular had seemed reluctant, despite our assurances that the devices had always been intended for first-timers just like us.

  So of course it would be Ruy we had to stop at the last moment: he hadn’t locked his harness in completely, the red tags around the solar plexus disk showing it was only a slap away from ejecting the wings. Foyle twisted it into place with a click.

  We were ready to go.

  Most of Arboria was invisible from its top rung, the world all sky and breeze. Maybe that was just as well. There was no perspective, no sense of our true height. Just one moment of empty-bellied doubt.

  But the strange contraption worked flawlessly. I pitched forward in the advised lateral dive. The wings unfolded behind and above and to either side. Servomotors in the lower braces reshaped my body to trim as the tailrudder unscrolled to join my legs together. And when I tried the hand control, it worked.

  Floating on my stomach in midair, I banked cautiously into a wide circle around the supertrellis. For the first time I noticed that it cast no shadow on the sea—because, of course, this bright sky had no sun. And I’d been right, cables did connect Arboria to the ceiling, though they were slender enough that the eye couldn’t follow them very far. I heard the cries of the others only dimly, concentrating on the pull of the wing harness upward, the breeze breaking against my thrown-back head.

  I was flying—soon we all were—and in surprisingly little time all sense of the mechanism fell away. The control was simple and intuitive, a glove on the left hand. It responded to the same gesture children use to pantomime the flight of an aircraft: with fingers parallel to the forearm, you fly level; rotate the wrist to bank left or right; pull the fingers back or push them forward to go up or down. Or use the other hand to hit the red button on the back of the glove and go to autopilot, free to use both arms for other purposes while continuing in your last set course.

  It was also possible to set a course verbally using the helmet of the rig, whose microphone communicated with a guidance computer. The helmet’s clear visor was actually a sophisticated scanner, which could superimpose on your current view magnified images of other fliers along with cues to their current location relative to you. Not that the helmets had radar or cameras; the images were clever
computer animations, based on information beamed from somewhere else—hidden sensors in the sky.

  The helmet automatically scanned for the nearest objects in the general direction it was pointed, the level of zoom adjusting to the frame of the visor, with a scale reading below. You could get other views with a few verbal commands, as well as lock the wing’s guidance computer onto the object pictured. But these features required repetition of the tricky Ur-Linguish consonants in the words we’d been taught. That elected me flight leader.

  The glove and the helmet would have been wildly inadequate for controlling a flitter, or even a glider, but this was a different kind of flying. The winged exoskeleton’s computers decided how literally to take our commands, keeping us from excessive dive speeds or total stalls, and never even consulted us on the throttle control of the turbines on our backs or the trim of our legs and the jointed wings. But control did not feel secondhand; we went unthinkingly where we wanted to go, as in a dream. Despite a few details that never come up in dream flights—the queasy feeling of the dives, the stiffness in the neck from holding the head back all the time—it was exhilarating. Our low speeds permitted wondrous aerobatics, tight turns and quick rolls, an almost birdlike freedom.

  Once we’d pulled away from the great green column of Arboria, most of the others couldn’t help playing around a little, veering farther and farther apart to avoid collisions. I yelled at Harry or Foyle when I thought they were swooping and curving too far away, but they rarely heard me. It was partly the white noise of the impeller fans on our backs and partly the thinner air, but voices just didn’t carry. Too late now, I wished we’d worked out more hand signals.

  It was all happening too fast. While my left hand kept me level, my right tightened on the grip of my loaded crossbow. In the briefing cabin, I’d lectured the party only as long as I dared, afraid of letting the mercs get a lead on us. Had it been enough? Did we really know what we were doing?

  ◆◆◆

  “The trick is to remember all the things that I can translate for you, but which none of the mercs will have understood. The warnings, in particular. Stay out of clouds—they’re full of dangerous turbulence. Avoid the birds who nest on the pylons we’re supposed to be racing around; they’ll get aggressive if you come too near. And most important—the referee voice put a lot of stress on this one—check your altitude buckle at all times! If it flashes red, you’re in danger of going too high.”

  “Does the air get too thin or something?” Harry had asked.

  “No, that’s not a problem here. The danger’s more basic than that. Have you noticed that the sky is different over Arboria, more lifelike? Well, in fact that’s just another kind of ceiling, and you can crash right into it without seeing how close you are; that buckle is your only warning, so don’t forget it.”

  “Why don’t the computers in the wings protect us against these things, if they protect us from falling?” Lagado had complained.

  “It’s not supposed to be entirely safe,” I’d said. “It’s an obstacle course. There are hazards, and goals, too. If we were taking this seriously as a race, we would be competing to see who could collect the gold hoops that dangle off the pylons, and so forth. Only the mechanics of staying in the air have been simplified, so that they won’t distract us.”

  ◆◆◆

  But it was distracting, all the same, as much fun as perhaps it had been meant to be. Now I tried to put the layout back in perspective. The Hellway was an elongated cavern and we were finally approaching its V-shaped northern limit. Our Arboria had stood at one end of an east-west starting line; there was another Arboria at the other end, out of sight over the horizon. We were racing north-northeast and the mercs were racing north-northwest toward the point of the V.

  The intended line of flight wasn’t hard to guess, though we had no compasses. There were a few islands in the sea below, dun and green, dappled with rocks and guano, as real as anything in the Hellway—but shaped like the arrows on a street sign. Which is more or less what they were.

  Each party would pass six “pylons” along the way to the finish line, and then the two paths would converge just past a common seventh one near the end. No party would officially finish until it had collected six gold hoops from the pylons, and the party that returned with the seventh would be the winner of the race, irrespective of finishing time. But of course we didn’t give a damn about that part.

  The wind sang past me. Not like ballooning, but just as big a kick. Especially now that the others had eased my mind, having found the formation we’d planned. I rested my neck a moment, taking in the unshadowed sea.

  Aside from the arrow islands, it was almost featureless, no color bands of varying depths. But it was a real ocean; there was life in it. Shoals of fish could be half-seen sometimes, once the big diving birds had whitely pointed them out. The birds had the wings of Terran fishhawks, but their heads and beaks were square-cornered and ugly, and the calls they threw back and forth were articulated into something like angry words. I hoped the others remembered all my warnings.

  Twenty minutes later we caught our first sight of the second type of island we’d been told about. An imitation volcano. The cone shape looked authentic, but it was too small to be the real thing, nor did it smoke at all—real volcanoes are poisonous with flying ash. But there was a red glow inside it, and a visible ripple of heated air dangling above.

  ◆◆◆

  “What’s the point of them, then?” Ariel had asked. “Just local color?”

  “Another hazard,” Foyle speculated. “The thermal updrafts?”

  “Only a hazard if you go into them without thinking,” I said. “Actually, they’re meant as a convenience. The referees assume we’ll be doing a lot of diving—for fun, I guess. Flying back up under power is slow, so the volcano updrafts are provided as a quick alternative. You spiral around the outside, see—careful to peel away before you get too high.”

  Harry had laughed. “They’re ski lifts!”

  “That’s about the size of it.”

  ◆◆◆

  The next tourist attraction did not come from the sea, but from the sky. First it was just a hazy blue shape in the distance, like a child’s top. Then it became a small hill, upside down. Then a top-heavy mountain of rock and steel, terraced with plants—but still floating in midair. From its downward-pointing peak, a gold hoop dangled like an elephant’s earring.

  So this was a pylon, actually a huge artificial stalactite hanging down from the underworld’s true ceiling. But the bright blue plane of false sky cut off sight of the connection above.

  Of all the wonders of the Hellway, this seemed most surreal and poetic, this inverted aerial island. Here the universe had shrunk to the scale it had had in my childhood. When my parents had told me of other planets, I’d imagined them something like this, as if I could sail a catboat to one, and dock there.

  And that was only the first pylon. The next, twenty minutes further on, was just as extensive but less massy, full of cutouts, wide caves you could see through to the other side. More elaborate plant life filled the outer terraces, and within the holes the big birds had made nests over a meter across, where we could see and hear their young squalling for food like human babies. Here the gold hoop did not dangle from the bottom, but from the end of a pole that jutted to one side so that a flier could hook it without disturbing the birds.

  ◆◆◆

  “These hooks are works of art,” Foyle had said sadly. “Robots didn’t carve these.”

  It was true. The hooks were wrought of a black hardwood, each nearly the size of an umbrella. The catching ends were carved with the heads of birds and snakes, lighting bolts, and other decorative motifs, each one different. They were tail ends of a folk history, and it was cruel, what Mishima and I were asking the archaeologists to do.

  But we had too few weapons, and so the hunting knives were brought out to whittle the curved ends down and make them weapon-sharp. After she had thought it over
a moment, Foyle also suggested putting grooves in the handles and tying towlines to them; she’d salvaged several spools of supercord from Mothland. “Swinging these things like flails would be useless. And we don’t want to fight in that close, anyway. We want to throw or tow the hooks into their wings.”

  “Do we?” Ruy Lagado had asked softly. In the end, I had given him Foyle’s spear for last-ditch defense; no flyer, he knew he’d never be able to maneuver one of the tow-hooks. Surprisingly, Ariel had felt the same way, and had taken the other ski pole. “These things aren’t like flitters,” she’d said, shaking her head. “Not my kind of flying.” And in a way, Harry’s misplaced boot-camp enthusiasm for his wings and hook was even more alarming, more desperate. But I had to make the most of it.

  “We have to be prepared for the worst,” I had said. “With luck, with our superior understanding of the game, we’ll reach the exit long before they do, no problem. But remember what Colonel Mishima said: if we do encounter them, they’ll show no mercy. They’ve gone through a worse hell than we have—no idea what’s going on, half their party slaughtered, and all our fault, sort of. The only thing they do know is this: if we reach that exit first, we’ll raise an alarm against their military operation and have them put on trial for treason on top of everything else.”

  “No quarter. No prisoners,” Mishima had said—of them, or us. He’d been given the most powerful weapons, mainly because they were also going to be the trickiest to handle. Foyle had learned from my use of her chemical pack; when she’d left most of her things behind, she’d kept two of the vials, filling them with an especially incendiary mixture of the celluloid and acetone combination she’d had to take such care of back at the dig. Mishima had been able to rig them as grenades with fuses from his utility belt, but they were untested and quite possibly worthless.

  I had found myself staring into his eyes. And how would he kill the other two he’d promised me? I was suddenly sure that the extra twenty minutes we’d spent preparing for this fight weren’t just wasted, but fatal; that we would have avoided the enemy entirely if we’d simply flown.