Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  Castine was staring in evident bewilderment at the string in her hand. “It’s,” she answered hoarsely, wonderingly, “I believe it’s one decade.”

  The word ‘decade,’ which she pronounced ‘deck-ed,’ coupled with the sight of the beads on the string, seemed to set off a depth charge below the automatic conscious level of Vickery’s mind.

  Spontaneous irrelevant memories bobbed to the surface: saying five decades of the rosary every morning in church with his eighth-grade class all in blue uniforms, the rosary said with his parents on the rainy night before the funeral of his grandmother . . . there had been no rosary said before the funeral of Amanda. A year or so ago he had found a rhinestone-beaded rosary in one of the taco trucks, and he had meant to say the prayers for the repose of her soul, but it belonged to somebody, and he had returned it before he could carry out the intention.

  Still sprawled on the cement pavement, Castine seemed to have momentarily forgotten the gun in Vickery’s hand. “But that’s all just spiritual,” she said in weak protest, perhaps to herself. “The knife might have been useful.”

  Vickery found himself suddenly wishing that his own string hadn’t turned into a bug. If he could hold it again it would be a connection to something he’d nearly forgotten here—something that had once been precious to him.

  But in spite of this delaying distraction, his conscious mind still intended to kill the Daedalus creature—and probably Castine too, depending on her reactions—and take the wings and somehow escape by means of them. Fly back to the world . . .

  The muscles of Vickery’s arm contracted, lifting the gun, and his eyes focused on the center of mass of the Daedalus thing.

  But the creature on the balcony made a sharp, chopping gesture, and the deep throbbing of some hidden engine stopped, and the high walls seemed to shudder as the whole building settled. The air was silent now, except for a faint sighing sound like distant freeway traffic.

  And before Vickery could aim the gun, he thought of Mary, his square-root-of-minus-one daughter, somewhere in the chaos down on the plain. Imagining the imaginary now, he let himself consider other possibilities besides pulling the trigger, as many possibilities as he could quickly think of—

  He could certainly shoot the winged figure; but he could instead preemptively shoot Castine, or shoot himself, or drop the gun, or run outside and leap off the cliff into the abyss—

  A multiplying cascade of choices! And he found that, in the silence of the machinery, he could decide which action to take.

  He opened his hand, letting the .45 fall and clank to the pavement.

  There was a note of resigned fatalism in the song that skirled from Daedalus then: “Thus to prevent the loss of life and blood, and, in effect, the action must be good.”

  The Daedalus spread its wings to their full extent, then leaped to the balcony rail and swept the wings strongly down; and the ornate aggregate body lifted into the crystal-clear air.

  Vickery automatically started to crouch toward the dropped gun, then reconsidered and straightened as the Daedalus thing flapped away upward, its multi-jointed legs swinging below the taut wings.

  Castine gave Vickery a puzzled glance. “I don’t know what I’m doing here,” she said.

  Vickery blinked around at the square, as if seeing it all for the first time. “Apparently,” he said slowly, “we’re deciding what to do.”

  “Oh, deciding.” She rubbed one hand across her face. “It was easier when it was automatic.”

  Vickery nodded, already missing the clarity of purpose he had felt before Daedalus had stopped the relentless machinery.

  “And we’re allies,” she said, and sighed. “I remember that now.”

  “Friends, even.” For a fading moment the notion still seemed irrational.

  “Yes, that too.” She touched the spot above her ear where the bandage had been. “Why were you going to shoot it? I apparently meant to stop you.”

  “It’s not irrational that we’re friends,” Vickery said, fully accepting the thought. He looked at Castine. “Why? I think I wanted its wings. Maybe you did too. But at best only one of us could have used them.”

  He looked up in time to see Daedalus disappear over the high roof, out of the now-rippling cone of clear air, in the direction away from the tornado.

  Castine too had watched the thing fly away; now she shook her head as if to clear it, and frowned at Vickery. “Used his wings? To go where?”

  He pointed at the feathery top of the tornado. “That round black hole up there? I’m pretty sure that’s our own night sky—and right over the Pasadena Freeway, I bet. It may still be possible for us to . . . fly through it.”

  For ten long seconds neither of them spoke.

  “Fly,” she said at last, in a tone flat with disbelief. “Through it. To Pasadena.”

  “Well, LA.”

  She gave him a hesitant smile and touched his hand. “Let’s find a way back down to the river, or highway, or whatever it is now. Come on. We can both look at my rosary—I mean my abacus—”

  “Which would right away turn into something else, damn it. And leave us wandering around in, in dementia, till the whole place blows up. We have to go by air.”

  “For sure the air is free,” she muttered; she went on more clearly, “It’s crazy. He took the wings.”

  “His wings were made of thin leather, and I’ll bet he had more of it here somewhere. And lengths of wood. Let’s start searching.” When she shook her head doubtfully, he said, “I can make a tandem hang-glider.”

  “You’re serious? And sane?” When he nodded, she sighed shakily and held up the beaded string. “I’ll say some prayers.”

  “If they can be heard from this place.”

  “Sure, they can go out through that hole in the sky.”

  Vickery gave her a grudging smile and walked across the paving stones to the only open arch in the courtyard wall. Beyond it, spiral stone steps descended out of sight, fitfully lit by electric arcs snapping in niches in the close brick walls. A cold draft welled up from the depths, carrying a subsonic vibration and the oily scent of ozone.

  Castine looked at him and shrugged, then started down the steps. He followed her, several times glancing back up at the diminishing light from the courtyard arch.

  The old stone risers were about a foot high, and Vickery counted forty of them before the floor leveled out in a wide, low-ceilinged basement, likewise lit by flaring electric arcs inset in niches in the otherwise shadowed walls.

  There was nothing in the basement but a stout steel frame, bolted to the walls in four places, supporting and enclosing an enormous steel disk, easily a dozen yards in diameter, that spun horizontally on a vertical axle mounted in the low ceiling and the floor. A long pole with a car-tire-sized rubber wheel on the end of it hung over the rushing rim of the disk without touching it, and Vickery thought the whole thing looked like a Gargantuan platinum record on a turntable, complete with tone-arm.

  Castine thought of the same thing, for she whispered, nervously, “Where are the speakers?”

  But Vickery’s chest had gone cold.

  “It’s a gyroscope,” he said. He pointed at a loop of leather strap that hung slack from the hub of the rubber wheel. “I think the arm is supposed to be lowered, and that strap’s supposed to spin the smaller wheel to keep the big gyroscope wheel turning.”

  She nodded. “Well, it is turning. Pretty fast.”

  “Coasting now,” said Vickery, “with the arm lifted and the little wheel stopped.” She gave him a blank look, and he went on, flatly, “The gyroscope is probably keeping this place level. With luck, that little wheel only disengaged a couple of minutes ago, when Daedalus turned off the . . . the determinism engine.”

  She took a step back, toward the stairs. “You think—what, the factory will tip over, if that wheel stops?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe this place will stop being the opposite of the rest of the Labyrinth.” He shrugged. “Or maybe this
was just a circular treadmill so the Daedalus thing could practice roller-skating in place. But I’d like to be out of here before that wheel finally slows to a stop.”

  Castine was hugging herself, gripping her elbows. “Out of here? How, again?”

  Vickery was peering past the gyroscope’s massive steel housing. “There’s another door on the far side. We’ve got to find a lot of leather, or vinyl, or something like that.”

  He led the way around the huge humming wheel, stepping wide as he shuffled past the snapping arcs in their niches. The arch in the wall on the far side of the wheel was completely dark, but he could see far enough through it to make out steps leading upward.

  The risers of this stairway were a good foot-and-a-half high, though the steps were no wider than before.He began groping his way in complete darkness up the stone stairs, brushing the close walls with his fingertips, sliding a shoe carefully up onto each step and then slowly letting his weight settle onto it before moving on to the next one, and listening to make sure Castine was coming up behind him.

  This stairway was much longer than the one that had led them down to the basement—he counted sixty of these higher steps before he even began to see light above, and there were thirty more to be climbed before the stairs ended.

  Neither of them called for a rest.

  Vickery stumbled out at last through another arch into a wide octagonal chamber lit by tall windows overlooking the smog and remote hills of the Labyrinth.

  He and Castine both leaned against the wall beside the arch and slid down to sit on the stone floor, panting. Vickery’s legs throbbed with bone-deep fatigue; his muscles had already been aching from the swim in the unnatural river and the stressful hike across the sand, and the long, tense climb up these stairs had his heart pounding in his chest. Beside him, Castine had drawn up her knees and lowered her head onto them.

  He rocked his head back. The ceiling far overhead was a dome, and the frescoes on the curving inner surface of it reminded him for a moment of the entry hall at the Griffith Park Observatory, though the frescoes here just seemed to be images of vague, curling, winged forms.

  Castine had got her breathing under control, and raised her head. She looked around at the walls and windows and dome, and then at Vickery and herself. She exhaled, then said, “We’re a mess. And whatever that river was, we smell awful.”

  “Stressful day,” said Vickery, getting to his feet. Castine sighed and stood up beside him.

  Half a dozen long wooden tables stood in two rows across the tile floor of the chamber, their surfaces crowded with various pieces of machinery—he saw an iron bar fixed on an axle inside a ring of fine coiled wire, a steel ball with curved spouts at opposite ends on a rotisserie over a charred tray, a rack festooned with strings and little pulleys, lenses and prisms arranged in rows, a couple of rapiers with helicopter-like vanes instead of bell guards . . .

  “The artificer,” he said. “These must be some of his inventions.”

  Castine made her way over to a cluster of stout poles, each three times the height of a man, that leaned against the wall between two of the windows.

  “These are fishing rods!” she said. “With gunsights!”

  Vickery stepped up beside her and looked the things up and down. They were clearly meant to be fishing rods, tapering toward the tops, with standing guide rings mounted at intervals along one side, but they seemed far too unwieldy to use, and he couldn’t see the point of the telescopic sights that stood up on posts just forward of the giant reels, nor of the short, wing-like stabilizers a few inches further up. The line wound around the reels looked like fine woven steel.

  “I bet he fished out of these windows,” Castine said.

  “I think he fished while he was flying,” Vickery said, pointing at the stabilizers. He turned away and started toward another arched doorway. “Come on.” In his mind was the image of the gyroscope wheel—it had still been spinning rapidly and smoothly, and it was massive, but it couldn’t keep spinning forever, unassisted.

  The next room was smaller, with fish skeletons and handsaws mounted on the tapestried walls; Castine paused to peer at the figures embroidered in the hanging fabric—a man leaning out from a castle turret, and a partridge flying away from him—but Vickery pulled her on into the next room, which was lit by a row of small square windows.

  On one wall was a painting of a medieval-looking peasant guiding a plow behind a donkey, with an ocean bay and a square-rigged ship in the background. The stone floor of this room was wide, but the only object on it was a what appeared at first glance to be a tall stack of old pulp magazines.

  At the far end of this chamber a yard-wide leather conveyor belt extended from an opening in the left-side wall, ran twenty feet along a shelf, and disappeared into a similar opening in the wall on the other side. The belt wasn’t moving.

  “Whistles,” said Castine, who had walked over to the conveyor belt. She held up a little metal cylinder.

  Vickery joined her by that wall. A dozen tin whistles lay evenly spaced along the belt; at the left end were three flat pieces of tin, similarly spaced, each a little bigger than a playing card. He picked up one of the tin pieces and one of the whistles and held them up next to each other.

  “Before and after,” he said. “These flat ones didn’t get stamped into cylinders like the others.”

  “Well, the machinery is all stopped.”

  “Mary—” Vickery cleared his throat. “Mary said the winged man drops whistles, out in the Labyrinth.”

  “With letters stamped on them,” she said. She peered more closely at the whistle she held, then nodded. “ikapyΣ, all in capitals, with that squiggly Greek E at the end.”

  “Ick-a-poe,” echoed Vickery. He shrugged. “Let’s hit the next room.”

  But the stack of tan rectangles caught his eye, and after a moment’s hesitation he walked over to look at it.

  On the top sheet, solid and broken lines had been drawn in variously colored inks. He tried to flip it over, but only one corner lifted; it was just the top flap of a much bigger, many-times-folded sheet; and the resilient smoothness of it told him that it was not paper.

  “Hey,” he said, and the tautness in his voice made Castine put down the whistle and join him.

  He slid the surprisingly heavy stack to a wall, then pulled the top end of it out across the floor, and it accordioned out as it unfolded. When he had stretched the thick sheet out in a line from one wall to the other, he saw an overlapping edge along the entire length of it—before it had been folded crosswise into a zig-zag stack, the sheet had been folded up lengthwise.

  “You flip that end,” Vickery told Castine as he walked to the opposite wall. When they had both knelt on the floor and turned over the top edge, and Vickery had shuffled on his knees to turn over the entire middle section of it, they flipped the whole heavy sheet, exposing more of the long edge. They did it again, and then again, and the still-folded remainder of the sheet didn’t seem any thinner. Moving more quickly, they flipped the folded sheet out several more times, both of them scuttling back and forth on their knees to attend to the entire length.

  Castine had been looking at the inked lines on it as their efforts revealed more and more of the sheet, and now she sat back and blew a stiff strand of hair from her forehead. “It’s a map.”

  “Who cares,” said Vickery. “Keep unrolling it—it’s vellum.”

  Castine was still staring at the yards-wide strip of the map that they’d exposed. “I think it’s a map of the Labyrinth—look, that black line would be the highway, or river.”

  Vickery wiped grimy sweat from his forehead. “Which line? There’s six or eight of them just in what we’ve unfolded already.”

  “I’m sure when we unfold the whole thing we’ll see it’s all one line, looped around and around. The Labyrinth is way bigger than I imagined.”

  “Why would he have made a map of it? It would have taken him . . .” Vickery let his gaze travel from one end of t
he still-mostly-folded map to the other, “years. And gallons of ink.”

  She slid a finger across the surface of it. “I think these blue brushstrokes with arrows are wind currents. Look, they cross the black line in bigger curves.”

  “Well, he flies. Come on, we’ve got to get this thing spread out.”

  “Is this your hang-glider?”

  “With luck. This stuff seems pretty durable.” The unfolded map now covered more than half of the floor.

  Castine looked up. “Vellum is what, sheepskin?”

  “Or calfskin.” Vickery flexed his hands and took a deep breath. “That gyroscope is slowing down,” he reminded her.

  They hurriedly unrolled a couple more yards of the huge vellum map. They were now kneeling close to the arch by which they’d entered, and they paused to catch their breaths.

  “This seems to be all one piece,” Castine said. “Where was there ever a sheep or a calf this big?”

  Vickery thought about that. “Well, the Labyrinth is insanely expanded possibility, right?—and you noticed that the loading docks of this factory were outside the cone of clear air.” He nodded back toward the other rooms. “That’s probably how he got the raw material for all this junk. And it becomes real—hyper-real—when he gets it inside the cone, this pocket of counter-chaos.”

  Castine looked out across the extent of the map that they’d unfolded. “How much of this do you need?”

  “This is enough,” he said, getting to his feet. He stared at the expanse of vellum, recalling how he had built hang-gliders in years past. “I figure about a thirty-seven foot wingspan, roughly two hundred and thirty square feet altogether, plus a bit more for overlapping at the leading edges, and for harnesses and hang-straps. We can cut it up with the swords or the saws in the other rooms.”

  Castine sat against the wall, rubbing a fold of the vellum between finger and thumb. “It, your hang-glider, is going to need some kind of framework, isn’t it?”

  “There’s those fishing poles in the first room,” he said. He was picturing the frame of a tandem hang-glider, figuring lengths and stresses.