by Jay Lake
That was the same year that the Crown had opened and the blood bats had swirled down the pit. That was a bad time for everyone—nihlex, khilain, human, it didn’t matter, the blood bats were opportunistic hunters that could see even during the darkest part of the pit’s night and had tiny, scrabbling clawed fingers to pry open doors and unweave walls as they sought their prey.
He’d fought, alongside everyone else in Ortinoize, and seen them lose 42 of their 117 people before the scourge was beaten off for good. Attestation had managed some chemical packets that seemed to distress the blood bats—it was perhaps the only thing that saved the village in those days when shriveled bodies rained from above like dried fruits dropped from a careless child’s hand.
When he was forty-three, and thus an old man himself, Aoife-the-Only died of a rattling, drying-out illness that all the medicine in the world could not cure. Once she’d set out on the spirit path beyond sleep, Attestation cut the curled brown and gray hair from her corpse and set it aside to use as fiber in a very special paper, then very nearly threw himself into the pit in grief, saved only by Unswerving, as unpleasant an old man as he’d been when young.
“You had your chance to fly,” Unswerving told him as he pressed Attestation into a jagged groin in the pit wall, a dozen staring faces open-mouthed at what was practically a fistfight between the two oldest on the village council. “Don’t do it now like one of those damned blood bats, wings spread wide. You’ll never catch the air.”
“Hydrogen” was all that Attestation could say, gasping, until the tears took his words away and even Unswerving’s flinty heart was moved.
* * *
Later they sat in Attestation’s old workshop up high. His smaller test balloons were ragged, faded, and torn with the years. The last large framework had long since been dismantled and reused. Unswerving had brought a pot of plum wine.
“Never should have listened to you,” Attestation mumbled, drinking the sweet, sharp swill.
“Never did listen to me,” said Unswerving.
“Seventeen years on the council, all I ever did was listen to you, you talky bastard.”
“I talked, you never listened.”
There seemed to be no answer to that, so they both fell back to their drinking. Finally Attestation returned to the heart of the matter.
“She’s dead.”
“Everybody dies.”
“We had no children.” Not that they hadn’t giggled and slurped aplenty in their time.
“Me neither.” Unswerving hiccupped. “Never had the chance.”
Attestation peered out of the tunnel of his grief, dimly recognizing a fellow sufferer. “Why?”
“Never went the right way. Women … I…” He didn’t seem capable of making a better answer than that.
After a while, Attestation tried to restart the conversation. “I should go lay Young Aoife out.” Ortinoize buried its dead at the back of Pierre’s Cave, then eventually gave their bones to the soil pots, once they’d spent enough time in the dry air. Years, really. Even old Redoubtable wasn’t ready yet.
“Let her fly,” said Unswerving.
“What?” Attestation was shocked. “You never liked anything I did. You always hated my work with the bags-of-air and the lantern-plants.”
“Spent your time on the wrong things.” The other man’s voice was slurred with plum wine. He reached out for Attestation’s face. “Spent your time on the wrong people.” Then, suddenly, strangely, a kiss between them. Salty, prickly, tasting of old man sweat, nothing like kissing Young Aoife. Not wrong, not right, just different.
“I…” Attestation’s words ran out as he pulled away from Unswerving’s trembling grip. “I.”
Shivering to his feet, Unswerving essayed a smile. “Let’s go harvest some bamboo.”
Farewell Upward
Somehow Attestation had thought it would take a few weeks, a month or two at the most, to rebuild the bag-of-air to its full size. But there was always something else that needed doing. The children were younger than ever, and he hadn’t trained a new teacher yet, even after all these years, so he started that process with a bright girl named Millas. She didn’t much resemble Young Aoife in body, but in spirit she might have been his wife come again—bright-eyed, inquisitive, pleasant, with a hot iron core that one only disturbed at one’s peril.
Naturally Unswerving hated her.
The two old men were living in the workshop, sleeping close on cold nights and sometimes holding one another. But it was Attestation who carefully made his way down the steps and ladders and chains every day to work with the children, to sit in the village council as it all-too-slowly spun away from him, to hear cases from those who would be judged by no one else.
And though he kept meaning to work on the bag-of-air, there was the matter of Ferocity’s beating of his son to be judged. Then the khilain came from Clings-Too-Low complaining of nihlex harassment in the matter of the paper trade, which they controlled up-pit from Ortinoize for the most obvious reasons, but for which only Attestation would do as an expert in the affairs of paper. He’d refused to travel any farther than Clings-Too-Low, and the only reason he even agreed to go that far was in hopes of harvesting more lantern-plants for his long-neglected growing trays.
A month among the khilain with the acrid smokes of their cooking amid the wattle bulbs of their pitside houses and the strange, thumping music they played on instruments made of rock and rope and bone and hide was more than he ever needed. As for the nihlex, the less said the better. They could fly. Watching them come and go reopened jealousies he’d left slumbering for decades.
When he came back, well, then Unswerving was ill. Some complaint of the lungs that would not go away, so the old man, unpleasant as ever, coughed away his nights in the workshop and refused to come down at all, even to stand at the pledging of the newest councilors. So it fell to Attestation to care for his oldest detractor as he had once cared for his wife, and still wasn’t he old, too? Who cared for him?
At least the children of their little school brought water up each day, and took away his night soil, and ran those errands that could be run without the apparent never-ending need for his personal oversight.
Still, Attestation worked on the bag-of-air as Unswerving coughed and choked. He made new, thinner paper, mixing Young Aoife’s carefully hoarded hair into the fibers, and in a pique of vanity throwing a little of his own white, brittle straw there as well. One night when Unswerving was actually sound asleep, Attestation even stole a bit of his hair with a flick of one of his rare steel knives.
As he worked, the lantern-plants grew as they’d never done before. Runners sought new trays, so Attestation time and again interrupted the interruptions of his labors to set more out. They were faster, somehow, than he recalled from earlier years, as if the plants themselves felt some primal urgency. As Unswerving grew weaker and more vague, he seemed to take comfort from the trefoil leaves dangling on their little green extensions from the bulbous bases of the plants.
The frame of the bag-of-air was done long before the paper, of course. Attestation continued to despair of the brazier, experimenting with beaten tin—which had cost him a good portion of his hoarded khilain coins—as well as fire-hardened bamboo, and even thin-walled pottery traded down for the paper on his special request. Slowly he filled out the proportions of the bag-of-air, making this one big enough for even a small man such as himself. Slowly he helped Unswerving toward the final tumble that everyone must take someday. Slowly he wandered up and down the steps and ladders and chains, doing what was asked of him, what was needed. Slowly he wondered how he had turned into his father, and why he was not more like old Redoubtable.
One day Unswerving sat up straight, for the first time in a month, and there was a bit of the old, bright malice in his gray eyes.
“You’ve turned this place into a lantern-plant farm,” he said sharply.
Attestation stood, hands on his aching hips, and looked around. Unswerving w
as right. The entire workshop was crowded with the bobbing, pinkish-translucent bulbs of the lantern-plants’ bags-of-air. Their strange smell, sort of like rock and water mixed together with old metal, seemed thick enough to bottle and sell. He stood amid green and pink and the scent of growth as strong as any of the bamboo pots down below. The spherical frame of his own bag-of-air filled the room at the center like the king of plants holding court over his retainers. He realized it was nearly covered with the special, thin paper that carried a bit of his wife in every sheet.
“I have no brazier,” Attestation said sadly. The tin hadn’t held enough oil for what he needed. The pottery was too heavy. Wood wouldn’t burn fast enough, and besides only a fool burned wood.
Unswerving coughed. “Put the lantern-plants inside. They carry your precious hydrogen. Just use them.”
Attestation blinked. He’d never considered that. For one thing, there were never enough lantern-plants.
Except there were now. His trip to Clings-Too-Low had brought back a bountiful harvest of seeds and seedlings. Here in his workshop, they’d seemed to grow in unison, as if their proximity to one another brought out their inner nature.
Which, he realized, made a certain sense. You never saw one lantern-plant bag-of-air floating in the pit. When they flew, they flew in dozens, and sometimes hundreds.
He had his hundreds. And each lantern-plant weighed less than the air itself, thanks to the miracles of hydrogen and gravity.
“You are a genius,” he said to Unswerving.
“No, I am just old and tired.”
* * *
Three days later the bag-of-air was fully papered, and the lantern-plants were beginning to separate from their root masses. Attestation had finally recruited several young men from his recent students to keep everyone else away from his door. Unswerving had coughed day and night, but managed to hobble to his feet and assist in the careful harvesting of the lantern-plants so their bags-of-air could be slipped inside Attestation’s bag-of-air from the opening beneath, without tearing either the paper or the fragile plants themselves.
Slowly the bag bobbed upward, no longer resting on its cradle. Attestation checked and rechecked his precious ropes anchoring the balloon to his worktables. It tugged up, the plants within squeaking slightly as they rubbed together. A few popped with a strange, sharp scent, but most held together. They stuffed the bag until it was straining, and watched fearfully up-pit through the missing ceiling for any last-minute catastrophe to come down upon them, or even just a mischievous nihlex.
Voices outside, late on that third day, finally penetrated Attestation’s increasingly distracted attention. The mayor and the hetman had both climbed to the top of Ortinoize seeking their wayward elders. Someone shouted about a problem with the paper quality, complaints coming down from up-pit. Another voice complained about the lessons neglected because even Millas had joined Attestation’s little troupe of door wardens.
Judgment was needed.
Aid.
Help.
Experience.
Testimony.
Please come.
Do this.
Find that.
We need.
You must.
Attestation looked at the boys outside his door, and the larger, older adults clinging to the ladder beyond, and shook his head. He turned to Unswerving, who had lain down again, but his fellow old man was asleep.
No, Attestation realized, not asleep. Unswerving was finished with sleep now.
He knelt beside his longest-lived adversary and kissed the crinkled, rheumy eyes and the cracked lips. Then he crossed Unswerving’s hands across his belly and pulled the ragged blanket over his face.
“Tell Young Aoife I’m sorry I could not fetch her bones,” he said quietly.
After that, he took up his punk pot and his steel knife and bound himself into the load-bearing ropes that hung below the bag-of-air, that had been meant for the bamboo basket that would hang below. Why bring a basket now, when he was not coming back? He would fly all the better without it.
One by one, Attestation cut the tie ropes with his knife of infallen steel, careful to alternate as he went around. The bag-of-air bobbed, the lantern-plants within rustling. He kept the last three tie ropes together, each a third of a circle apart, so he could cut them at once and not tip his balloon.
When he was ready, he clutched the punk pot close, made the final cut, and cast the steel knife away.
The balloon shot up, lurched, and caught on the edge of one of the open-roofed workshop’s walls. The Sunstrip was waning out in the middle of the pit, and so he and the balloon cast a huge, reddening shadow. The children guarding his door shrieked, but Attestation told himself it was joy, not terror.
Then he and the balloon broke free, bouncing up and off the pit wall before twirling out into the open air.
For the first time in his life, Attestation was flying. For the first time in his life, he truly opened his eyes and looked at the world. The pit gaped beneath him, Sunstrip off to one side, shadowed far below even in the glowing light of the fading day, but from here he could see Ortinoize, Mossyrock, and a dozen more villages he did not know. A pair of nihlex spun perhaps a thousand feet below him, indifferent and unknowing to what passed above them. A flight of lantern-plants caught the Sunstrip’s reddening light in their translucent bags-of-air, so each became a bright jewel held up against the onset of darkness.
Just as he himself was a bright jewel held up against the onset of the darkness at the end of life.
Carefully Attestation looked over his shoulder, but the bag-of-air obscured most of his upward view. He thought he could see Clings-Too-Low. He could certainly see his own village, dozens of faces wide-eyed and round-mouthed staring at him as he bobbed toward the center of the pit and the Sunstrip.
Not just bobbed, but rose. Flew. On wings of hydrogen and bamboo and the hair of his beloved wife he flew.
Attestation knew he would never see a more perfect moment than this. Young Aoife was long lost to him. Unswerving had just now walked down the spirit path into the darkness beyond sleep. He’d brought no ropes nor water nor any way to go beyond this point of flying.
This was what he’d lived for all his life, hoarding coins and stirring the sludge to make paper and teaching old Sammael’s lessons to the children. “That which rises ever upward can never die,” he said aloud.
Smiling, he opened his punk pot and blew its tiny flame into a more robust life.
Smiling, he waved a fond farewell to the people he’d always known.
Smiling, he set the flame among the hydrogen of the lantern-plant bags-of-air.
Smiling, Attestation stepped down the spirit path in a burst of flame and light that wrapped him in glory.
Angels iii: A Feast of Angels
* * *
Yet more angels. The sarcastic kind, this time.
* * *
Saint Peter made Friedrich Nietzsche coroner of Heaven. Though Heaven stands outside time, all things there both concurrent and infinite, being human Nietzsche had perceptions that were perforce more or less sequential. Heaven’s coroner was a stultifying job, as death was unknown there.
“I am convinced,” Nietzsche told Origen of Alexandria over a six-pack of Stroh’s, “that this is my punishment.” They sat at a picnic table on a small, isolated cloud.
The little Egyptian’s hand spasmed, crinkling his own can of beer. “This is hell,” he whispered. Lately they spoke American English, equally foreign to both. Also equally offensive in its colloquial imprecision. “The Adversary has crafted this eternity for such as us.”
“Could be worse.” Nietzsche stared down off their cloud at a bus loaded with joyful Charismatics bound for Branson, Missouri, on a three-day pass. “We could be with them.”
“Though all days in Heaven are the same, still I have been here a very long time.” Origen tugged another Stroh’s off the six-pack. “There have been worse things. Old Hermes Trismegistus got it wrong. A
s below, so above.”
Nietzsche shuddered, imagining the Heaven of the Inquisition, or John Calvin. Origen had lived through them both. Aimee Semple McPherson had been bad enough for him.
Saint Peter appeared, potbellied and irritated. His robes were askew and his halo appeared to have developed a crack. “We’ve got a problem.”
“This is Heaven,” said Nietzsche. “There are no problems.”
Origen burped for emphasis, the yeasty odor of recycled Stroh’s disturbing Heaven’s usual pine-scented freshness.
Peter frowned, obviously picking his words with care. “This problem has always existed, but now I wish to address it.”
“Sh-sh-shimultaneity,” said Origen, who had been talking to Einstein lately. “No shuch thing.”
Nietzsche shot Origen a hard glare. “What kind of trouble?”
“Coroner trouble,” said Peter.
“In Heaven? I thought you were just yanking my chain.”
“Consider yourself yanked,” said Peter darkly. “We need you now.”
“Now is the same as then in Heaven,” muttered Nietzsche, disentangling himself from the picnic table. “Where are we going?”
“Other end of time,” said Peter.
“Hot dog,” Origen shouted. He vaulted over the table after Nietzsche and Saint Peter. “I always wanted to see Creation.”
* * *
They stood on nothing, slightly above a rough-textured plain receding into darkness. Scattered vegetation struggled from the surface; thin, sword-like plants. The only light was from Saint Peter’s Heavenly effulgence. Somewhere nearby, water lapped against an unseen shore. Unlike the rest of Heaven, this place stank of mold and rust and an odor of damp rock.
“I’m impressed,” observed Nietzsche. “What is this? The root cellar?”
“Foundations, more like it,” Peter said.
They both glanced at Origen, who looked intently into the darkness.
Peter waved his staff and the three of them, still standing on nothing, began to cruise over the landscape. Nietzsche found this far more unnerving than Heaven’s usual cloudscape.
