Alternate Routes

by Tim Powers

  “Those even already have little wings on them,” said Castine.

  “Well, I’d have to break those off. We’re going to make our own wing.”

  “Maybe he—” She stopped, and gave Vickery a startled look. “You said he probably carried one of the fishing rods with him when he was flying . . . and he has this map, and he drops whistles. I bet you anything he hovers, then, and listens for a signal in return. Ready to lower a line.” Vickery opened his mouth to say something, but she waved him to silence. “I bet IKAPYΣ is the Greek spelling of Icarus! He’s searching for his son. Still.”

  Vickery thought of Mary, his imaginary daughter, on her own somewhere out in that vast malignant delirium. The fact that she didn’t exist, which was his fault, didn’t make it any more tolerable.

  “We can do some of the work in here,” he said gruffly. “I’ll fetch a sword and a saw so we can cut up his map.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  After walking around on the vellum sheet for a couple of tense minutes, Vickery used the point of one of the rapiers to lightly scratch lines in its surface, and then Castine gripped handfuls of it and pulled it taut; the saws quickly proved to be of little use, snagging and tearing rather than cutting, so he tugged the rapier’s edge through the tough, thin leather. When he had cut out the shapes for the wing and a lot of extra strips of varying lengths and widths, he and Castine tied the lot together in a bundle and dragged it all back to the octagonal room.

  The crazy flagpole-tall fishing rods would obviously not fit down the stairs, but one of the eight windows overlooked the courtyard, and Vickery tied lengths of the vellum to the rods and pitched them down. He tossed out both of the rapiers and several of the saws too.

  The building shook then—and not as if machinery were working somewhere in it. When it subsided, Vickery was aware of a soft, nearby droning sound, and he saw several fat houseflies looping around over the tables.

  “Out the way we came,” Vickery said, starting toward the arch that led to the descending stairs. Castine waved him ahead, and he took two careful steps down into the darkness, bracing his hands against the rough stone walls on either side, and he extended his left foot for the next step—

  And the building shook again, and he pitched forward, and the next step wasn’t there. His arms flexed as he pressed his palms very hard against the stone walls. A sudden draft fluttered his hair, and, in a suddenly bigger volume in the darkness under his dangling foot, he heard echoes as the stones of the stairway knocked and clattered away far below.

  He was tilted too far forward to push himself back; and after a tense moment his left hand slid an inch across the wall, though he was pressing so hard that he thought his bones must break through his flesh to abrade the stone.

  And then Castine had grabbed the back of his belt, and was tugging him back—but he could hear fabric grinding against the stone, and he realized that she herself was braced precariously in the stairway, probably with a foot against one wall and her shoulder against the other, and slowly starting to slide. He got his left shoe back onto the second step, but to push against it would only tip him further down. Sweat ran into his eyes.

  “Let,” he said hoarsely, “go. You’ll go too.”

  She didn’t answer, but somehow forced her body to exert what must have been all her strength against the walls to hold herself steady, and pulled harder at his belt.

  He was able to slide one hand up a few inches, and press; and then the other. He could hear the breath rasping through her teeth behind him.

  Then, with a groan that became a short, strangled cry, she hauled him up with one last convulsive effort, and he was tilted back enough to shove his left foot strongly down, and they both pitched over backward onto the stone floor of the chamber. Vickery rolled off of her onto the cold stone, face down.

  The floor was still shifting perceptibly, but for twenty seconds they both simply lay there and dragged breath in and out of their lungs. Finally Vickery rolled over and sat up, still panting, flexing his abraded hands.

  “Thank you,” he croaked; then he cleared his throat and said, “That was insane—but—thank you.”

  She had sat up too, and was rubbing her shoulder. “I don’t—know how to make a hang-glider.” She folded one leg under herself and then got to her feet, wincing. “I’m glad your belt didn’t break.”

  Vickery stood up too, and ran his fingers through his sweaty hair. “I’d just as soon not think about it.”

  A swarm of flies now whirled up from the darkness where the stairs had been; they tapped against Vickery’s hands and face.

  “We gotta get out of here,” he said, covering his mouth against them.

  “Ugh,” said Castine, batting at the things, “yes!”

  Vickery looked at the window and then at the arch that led to the two rooms they’d seen, and he wished bitterly that he had not thrown both swords out the window—it would take several long, precious minutes, using just the remaining saws, to cut and knot a strip of the remaining vellum lengthy enough to reach from the window to a point not too far above the courtyard pavement. How quickly might they find another stairway?

  “There’ll be another way down,” Vickery decided, taking her hand and loping across the floor and through the two rooms they’d already seen. Flies buzzed around their heads.

  The arch at the far side of the map chamber opened on a wide corridor, lit by more of the electric arcs in recessed niches—and the snapping arcs had already lost some of their glaring brightness.

  Vickery and Castine began running down the corridor. Through broad openings to the side, he glimpsed a library of suitcase-size books, racks of big Danish-freehand-style smoking pipes, an automobile like a 1930 Duesenberg Phaeton studded everywhere with shattered headlights . . .

  The floor was perceptibly shifting back and forth under their feet, and they had to skip and shuffle to keep their balance.

  “We should have made a rope out of what was left of the vellum,” said Castine breathlessly, after glancing into a low chamber filled with aquariums.

  Vickery glanced back at her. “Should have lots of things.”

  Suddenly Castine threw an arm across his chest to stop him. The flagstone floor ahead was rippling—and as they watched, it sagged, gratingly broke up, and fell away into darkness. The twenty feet of corridor ahead of them was now a ragged-edged hole.

  “Back,” Vickery said, waving flies away from his face, “make a rope.”

  “Wait.” Castine got down on her hands and knees and crept to the edge of the hole, and, though one of the flagstones broke free when she touched it, she craned her neck to peer down past the uneven edge; then she backed up six feet and sat down. “Take a look,” she said. “There’s water down there.”

  Vickery got down and crawled forward, and he took a quick look over the unsteady rim. Far below, oblique amber light glittered on a surface of liquid agitated by the fall of the hallway stones moments ago.

  “Let’s jump,” said Castine.

  Vickery pushed himself back across the flagstones and crouched beside her. “It might be only a couple of feet deep. And who says it’s water? It could be sulfuric acid.”

  “We’d smell that.”

  A thundering crash echoed up the corridor from behind them, and a puff of air flicked at Vickery’s hair and shirt. It was followed by another crash, louder and more jarring, as if a giant were stamping the place flat.

  Vickery and Castine both hurried forward to the yawning gap in the floor, and jumped.

  For two long seconds cold wind whipped up past Vickery’s clothes and face, and then he crashed feet-first into icy water; he immediately kicked and spread his arms, and a moment later he was at the surface, blowing salt water out of his nose and swimming furiously toward a blurrily perceived light, confident that Castine would be doing the same. In a moment of catching a breath, he glimpsed the tan-colored sky of the Labyrinth between the blades of a big fan mounted in a circular opening in a wall. The
fan didn’t appear to be moving.

  An instant later a loud multiple splash behind him was followed by a surging wave that threw him forward and sprawled him across one of the fan blades; the wave subsided and he slid down into the water, and he quickly splashed back to the surface and gripped the cement edge of the round opening.

  The fan, like the rest of the machinery in the factory, was stalled and motionless. Castine was already crouched above him on the curved inner surface of the opening in the wall, bracing herself on one of the motionless blades. She nodded a breathless acknowledgment and then swung her legs outside and hiked herself out of the cement ring; Vickery heard her shoes hit gravel.

  Vickery paused to take a few deep breaths and let his heart slow down before he jackknifed up and sprawled across the yard-wide inner surface of the opening, one shoulder braced against a downward-pointing blade of the stalled fan.

  His head and shoulders were outside, in the open air, and he was looking across the gravel plateau toward the spot where the stairs up from the Labyrinth had been. The gravel was glisteningly wet now, with puddles in the low spots, and Castine stood shivering in her wet jeans and sweatshirt a few yards away.

  “I,” said Castine through chattering teeth, “would give up the whole rest of my life, if there is any, for five minutes in a hot bath. Are you going to come out?”

  The gravel was only a few feet below him. Vickery considered rearranging his posture and stepping down, then just shoved himself forward out of the opening, landed on his palms and rolled. He had forgotten about the gun at the back of his belt, and the grip jabbed a rib painfully; he forced himself not to wince or groan as he got slowly to his feet. The breeze was witheringly cold, and he could again hear the textured background note that was like the muted roar from a distant crowded stadium.

  He plodded out across the gravel and then looked back at the factory. Under the brass letters that spelled out asciate ogne scelta voi ch’entrate, the iron door in the courtyard gate was still open.

  “Let’s drag our stuff out here,” he said, flexing his cold-numbed hands and dreading the effort. “And I’ll give you a boost so you can pull another one of those letters down. We can take it back with us, like Laquedem did with the L in 1960.”

  “If I take the next one,” she said wearily, “the A, it becomes complete nonsense. Sciate just means ski.”

  “‘Ski all choice.’ Oh well—the whole thing’s likely to collapse soon. Let’s get busy.”

  The sodium vapor radiance of a streetlight on Avenue 43 contended with the glow of a dust-fringed whirlpool that had now engulfed a twenty-foot patch of the triangular traffic island off the Pasadena Freeway.

  Emilio Benedetti was standing back by the freeway-side boundary, under the blue tarpaulin draped over the pair of ladders, and he watched the tiny lizards glitter as they appeared and disappeared in the circular agitation; and in the amber glow he could also dimly see translucent human forms bursting up like spray from the middle of the vortex. And there were others, too, angling in from the direction of the nearby freeway, and these were disappearing into the edges of the broad round gap like curls of hair going down a drain. Aside from the perpetual pulse of traffic beyond the freeway fence behind him, the only sound was leaves shaking in the trees overhead.

  Then he jumped in surprise, for he was not alone—someone was standing at the near edge of the rushing dust, only a couple of yards away, silhouetted by the streetlight on the far side of the gap—an old man in a tattered suit, with scanty white-lit hair blowing around his gleaming scalp.

  Benedetti gasped, and choked—and even before he recognized the figure, his throat and mouth were forming words: “The key my father keeps; ah! there’s my grief; ’tis he obstructs all hopes of my relief. Gods, that this hated sight I’d never seen! Or all my life without a father been!”

  Dimly he knew that what he had found himself saying was part of the malmeme, the Dryden translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses—apparently he was already within the boundaries of the Labyrinth, and very close to the artificer’s factory.

  His father’s ghost was shaking its head, and waving its arms as if to push him back, and it began shuffling toward him.

  Benedetti knew there was enough left of himself to obey the old man one more time—to turn and walk away in the night, and remain at least somewhat a distinct person.

  The ghost’s face was visible now, and in spite of all of Benedetti’s sins, it was smiling warmly. Benedetti found that he had taken a step toward it, but in that moment the ghost’s expression changed—fond recognition became evident bafflement. The ghost’s head shifted from left to right, as if Benedetti had disappeared; then the face of his father turned to look at him again, and this time the ectoplasmic eyes widened in alarm, and the ghost vanished.

  Involuntarily, Benedetti’s hand rose to touch his own face. What, he thought, I’m not recognizable anymore?

  But the ghost had fled as if Benedetti was not even a human, just a deceiving simulacrum, and the falseness scared it.

  Into his mind floated the thought he’d had moments ago—the idea that he might still be able to walk away from this imminent communion. But he had long ago surrendered to the insistent gaze of the abyss, and he couldn’t now even imagine mustering the will to turn away.

  His eyes swung toward the dusty, glowing whirlpool, and he saw that it was a hole—a hole out of the world.

  He stepped across the dirt to the edge. The revolving wind plucked at his clothes and hair. Down in that other place, he knew, was the being that could entirely consume his abdicated identity.

  “Hurry,” he whispered. “Take me away from me.”

  And he crouched, and jumped.

  Standing on Vickery’s aching shoulders, Castine had managed to wrench the big brass A from the words over the gate, and now it lay on the gravel.

  Vickery had sawn two long sections of the giant fishing rods for the leading edges of the wing, arranged them on the gravel in what looked like a proper delta angle, and cut another couple of lengths for the keel and crossbar. To attach the lengths of wood to one another, he had sawn notches into the poles and secured the joints with many turns of the woven-steel fishing line.

  More rumblings and crashes echoed from the courtyard and shivered out between the motionless blades of the exhaust fans in the wall behind them. Vickery’s wet clothes clung to him in the cold breeze, but his face was sweating as he made himself work fast but with careful calculation. Castine had her string in her hand, rolling the beads between thumb and forefinger.

  “Do we,” she ventured, “circle around the tornado?”

  “Probably not,” he said, cutting a length of the fishing line with the forte edge of the rapier. “It’s all downdraft outside the funnel, if this is anything like a normal tornado. Likely we’ve got to go up in the spiral, with the ghosts.”

  She had no reply, and he was too busy to note any expression on her face.

  With her help, he laid the biggest sheet of vellum over the wing frame, holding it all down against the wind with strategically placed piles of gravel, and he trimmed it to shape with one of the rapiers, leaving enough margin so that the vellum at the leading edges could be folded back on itself around the poles and sewn with more fishing line. The guide rings of the fishing poles were covered, but when holes were poked through the vellum on either side of each one and a short length of wire was knotted through them and the guide ring, the rings worked like mast hoops to keep the vellum firmly attached to the frame. The broad, billowing surface of the wing was featureless—the blue lines and black spirals were on the underside.

  Vickery lashed together an extra-big triangular control frame and had Castine crouch under the wing and lift the whole thing slightly, with the windward trailing edge firmly weighted down with mounds of gravel, so that he could run strut wires from the bottom corners of the outsize triangle to the nose and the points where the leading edges were attached to the crossbar.

  He had just
finished wiring it up when the whole plateau shuddered and began rocking back and forth. Vickery looked up—several of the brass letters had now simply fallen off the wall; and as he watched, the top of the wall over the gate curled inward, then separated into dozens of pieces of masonry and disappeared, and with a roar a billow of dust burst out through the gate and was torn away by the wind.

  Squinting upward, he saw that the cone of clear air was gone; and he guessed that the gyroscope wheel had slowed to a stop.

  “We gotta go now,” he yelled to Castine. She started toward the brass A that lay on the gravel, but a crack split the plateau surface between her and the letter; and within seconds the crack was too wide to jump across.

  “Now!” Vickery shouted.

  She hurried back to where he crouched beside the wing. “Harnesses?”

  “No time! I made the control frame big enough for us to stand in.” He began dragging the nose around into the wind, digging in with his heels to keep the whole thing from blowing away. “You take the left side—hold it up, hang on tight, and run. When she lifts, step up onto the crossbar.”

  Vickery took hold of the right side of the frame, one hand on the diagonal bar of the triangle and the other on the horizontal control bar, and he began running across the unsteady gravel into the wind, toward the cliff edge where the stairway from the Labyrinth had been. Castine was pounding along right beside him, and the broad wing over their heads bellied taut.

  In a moment their feet were just brushing the gravel, and then it had receded away below them and their weight was entirely on their gripping hands. Vickery heaved himself up and got his knees onto the horizontal bar, then pulled one foot onto it and stood up on it, clinging to the right-side diagonal bar as the wind whipped at his hair and the cliff edge swept past several yards below.

  Then Castine had pulled herself up to stand beside him on the control bar, and they clasped their free arms around each other’s waists. Vickery said, “Lean left,” and the wing banked in that direction. He had to force himself to concentrate, and he added, “And give me some math! We’re out in the Labyrinth!”