*
Night is just falling as I climb back out of the bag.
“That’s the planet I’m from,” I think, still nearly breathless with the emotions brought on by what I’ve just seen. “That childlike joy, the unhesitant embrace of life. The explosion of energy and caustic, lacerating beauty, the soaring enthusiasm of an infinite will that can countenance any suffering without an instant’s reservation.”
I’d had just enough time to get to a turn in the hallway and see a door closing between me and the High Rational ahead—closing and locking. This turns out to be one of a number of doors lining an elevated oval gallery that overlooks a patio with an elaborate mosaic and fountain. The fountain consists of two huge stone globes skinned with water, and somehow a curling liquorice-whip of clear water has been suspended in space between them, horizontally. Water from the basin, which is far narrower than the combined diameters of the elevated balls—and I can’t see what they stand on from up here—runs out in thirty-two narrow, crescent-shaped channels to a ring of little circular basins scooped into the floor. There are apparently living things in each basin, a different kind for each one. Without being able to say so for sure, it seems to me the whole floor is turning very slowly in place. The walls and the floor beyond the circle are lined in an even black velvet. The roof is a dome; even though there is plenty of light to see by, the apex of the dome is a sink of deep shadow, like a blot of smoke trapped in the ceiling.
Now I remember. A firefly lit up there, deep inside that shadow. It blinked, swerved, and went out.
There were fireflies blinking all over. The night was, and still is, muggy. It smells like a moldy old basement. I thought I might avail myself of the opportunity for a little confab with my bag about the High Rationals, and what I learned I have about as much use for as the bag, the spells, the prizes.
Walking always takes a long time. Just before I look up and see the derricks, the big machines, the barracks, the clock tower and whistle, and I don’t feel tired or glad, or anything at all, I have a momentary impression of that woman again, watching a lightning storm from a big window. The snow-colored flashes play over her still outline.
A man is making his way toward the barracks from the latrine, rubbing his hands. He has the solid build and what I imagine is the manner of a construction worker, not that I’ve ever known any. I call out to him.
He’s wearing wide leather suspenders and heavy workboots. There’s a closed fliptop notebook in his breast pocket and some pens, a strip of white undershirt inside the plain, heavy work tunic.
As I repeat the directions for the first time out loud since I was given them, I realize that there’s no mistake. These are exactly the directions I got from Toilet Brush.
When I finish, he says, “Huh.”
He stays quiet for a while, watching me.
“That was,” he says, eventually, “a location we considered using. The comonoschierces was bad. We found a different spot years ago. Your source is pretty badly out of date.”
Section Two:
a rummageprocess and a murmuringprocess
The man reels across the room, one hand pressed to his side where a dark stain is dimly spreading in the half-light, and collapses into a chair, turning in place and falling like a tree on a guideline. His skin is dark, turning grey beneath the dark, and his eyes are fixed on the air in front of him.
“...whiskey,” he gasps.
“No whiskey,” Maria says.
The other keeps staring into space.
“Hell,” he says softly, after a moment.
I go for my bandages, but he won’t take his hand away from his side. His arm is as rigid as iron. Little tendrils of blood seep over his fingers. I can hear the drops spit-spat on the plank floor.
“Move your hand,” I say, “I’m trying to bandage you.”
He shakes his head. By now I’ve noticed that his pant leg on that side, his left, is glistening with blood, soaked.
Pulling out the bandage, my hand brushes something unfamiliar. I withdraw it. It’s a little metal thermos, covered in stained old leather. It sloshes. I unscrew the cap and the pungent odor of rye comes out.
“This do?” I ask, putting it under his nose.
His eyes flutter shut for the first time in our acquaintance and his free hand makes a convulsive, feeble grab for the flask about half a foot too short.
“Hold on, I’ll dose you.”
I tip the thermos at his open mouth. His lips tremble, and I can hear the trickling in his jaws. There isn’t much in the flask and I empty it. The man gulps painfully, but he doesn’t spill. When he’s done, his breathing comes out harsh and rapid for a while. Then it stops. The grey has reached his lips. Inside his mouth is the color of an ash pit.
“I’ll signal the detail,” she says.
You always think death is something else, a scene, but it isn’t, it’s here. I hear her doing something behind me, sighing through her nose.
“Who’s shooting at you?” I ask.
“The bullets,” Maria says.
“I mean who’s shooting them?” I say.
“There is no gun, just the bullets,” she says.
“Who fires them?”
“No one fires them. They just travel on their own through the air.”
“I heard a shot.”
She nods emphatically.
“Yes, that’s right.”
Her hand traces a long, level path in the air across her body.
“Most of the time they travel slowly.”
She flicks her hand.
“It’s only when they get close to you, they go off.”
“You mean there’re just cartridges floating around in space?”
She shakes her head and shrugs.
“I don’t know. But this place is very attractive to them.”
Lifting the rug at her feet, she shows me bullet holes in the floor.
“There’s more there behind the filing cabinets. And in the roof.”
The floor is made of boards and thin, faded rugs with worn patches are flung here and there. There are a few computer screens carefully shielded against one wall with filing cabinets on either side of them, a ceramic water cooler with no bottle; the windows are Venetian blinded with planks nailed across at even intervals. I notice she’s ducked down with a small floor safe between her and the outer wall.
“Where do you think they come from?” I ask.
“The manufacturer,” she says.
“Is this reasonable?”
Bending low, I walk over to one of the windows and peer out through the gap. Not one single light. Only the blue ground and the other buildings and the construction artifact itself; it looks like a colossal, gaunt shoebox covered in tarps and dragnets, with scaffolding in a few spots. Here and there, the tarps are drawn out into tent-like annexes. The artifact towers over us, dwarfing the rest of the site, spanning the world from horizon to horizon, and looming deeply into the black sky. A cold wind pours down its sides from space.
*
So far, I haven’t been able to see anyone but Maria; she tells me she files the records around this time every night. A pair of arm-flapping night birds, neither penguins nor owls, but a pair of stony-faced men, came and carried off the dead man. His blood still stains the floor, and I can smell it. When the footsteps of the two men, who carry the body between them without a stretcher, recede into the shadows, there isn’t a single remaining sound out there, not even the wind.
I ask Maria who’s in charge around here.
“Mr. Guerrero,” she says, “is the foreman.”
“I have a delivery for him.”
Maria eyes the bag as I gesture at it.
“Oh!” she says suddenly, and looks at the watch on her wrist. “Five thirty almost. They’re about to start the next shift.”
“They work around the clock?”
She nods, “Twenty four hours. You could see Mr. Guerrero then, after they start the shift.”
“
Where?”
“No, stay inside. Just look out through here.”
She points me to a gap in the boards. I’ve already seen the light come on and I’m out the door. Beneath a lamp hung above the door of another bungalow there’s a man in a wheelchair, one leg elevated before him in a cast that reaches his groin, wheeling himself toward a crimson square on the bare ground. A tall woman stoops just outside the cone of light, pale as a ghost.
The door behind me slams shut.
Into the light steps a man who was dead last time I saw him, sprawling under a car. He’s much recovered now, although I can’t say he looks healthy, and with both his hands he’s groping something up in front of his chest. The whole set up is cinematic; the man in the wheelchair coming in more or less from the right, and my old associate from the left. Old associate is moving oddly, jerkily, and a glassy, strained grin has taken hold of his face.
Out of the gloom on the far side, directly opposite me, comes one of the old men with the wands; I don’t think I’ve seen him before. This one is clean shaven, with seamy cheeks and a bald head, iron grey curls stubbornly clinging to the scalp just above his ears. He carries his head down and his arms droop at his sides, swinging his long wand like a janitor’s mop in his left hand. Something sizeable in his right. It’s a pocket watch.
He stops, and the two other men look at him expectantly. The phantom in the shadows I don’t know about. Old man wand keeps his eyes on the watch.
“Time,” he says, his voice flat and perfunctory, turning immediately to go and going.
Old associate gleefully flings the ball he’d been groping high up in a curving pitch to the man in the wheelchair, who deftly catches it single handed.
This man is dressed in striped silk pajamas, maroon and silver. His narrow, coppery face is lean, even emaciated; the high cheekbones cast shadows on the cheeks, the nose is like a knife, the long straight moustache is like a knife, the forehead is scored as if it had been raked with a knife, and his black hair with a part in it that could have been cut with a you-know-what hangs down just past his ears. Holding the ball up to meet his glittering eyes, his long fingers turn it to and fro for a moment before it is abruptly flung upward again.
Very softly, so that I can barely hear it from where I am, he says the word “play.”
A raucous horn shatters the air over the camp and at once every light is lit and every door is open and people burst out like horses from a starting gate, stream into the lanes, form ranks, hurrying in the direction of the artifact.
With a crash, the air around me grows suddenly paler and the world beyond the confines of the camp vanishes in the contrast, leaving just us, an island in blackness. The nearer portion of the artifact is fully illuminated, the tarpaulins enshrouding it undulate majestically, giving it the solemn appearance of a spectre.
The crash is repeated—a sound like two enormous steel rams dashing against each other at intervals of about a second, and with such force the ground jumps under my feet with each stroke. Bright blue fireflies or miniature ghosts or something stream from glass vessels that hang like lamps from tall wooden posts and settle on the Operationals, who swarm over the artifact, climbing directly up the mesh. Their movements are exactly synchronized to the metronome’s crashes.
All sequined with tiny lights, the Operationals charge the structure in a frenzy. For a moment I imagine they’re going to tear it to pieces with their bare hands, like a wave of attackers battening on the ramparts of a besieged castle. A woman a few dozen yards from me goes to an orderly pile of steel girders, rolls one over and picks it up in the middle, carrying it against her hip as she runs up the streaked concrete ramp. I see others doing the same, upending girders as if they were no heavier than curtain rods and slamming them into place, while one squats nearby to secure them, driving in the huge bolts with bare hands.
It’s unreal—the human body can’t generate that kind of force, but I watch a man pushing a concrete block five times bigger than he is up the ramp at a run, like a cutter ant with a leaf, and then hammer it into position. A willowy, older woman whacks away at a huge upright steel cap or something and the cap shudders and leaps forward. Operationals hurl fifteen-foot long beams like javelins, straight up to their partners high in the scaffolding, who catch the beams one handed.
They rush around me on all sides, never out of tempo, and their faces all have the same tense, drawn expression, the eyes staring, nearly popping out of the sockets, and tight mouths. Sweat gushes down their bodies, slops from their feet as they walk. Steam trails from them, and their sopping clothes hang heavily down. They tremble with something like rage, exasperation. Every now and then one of them is balked at something—an impediment suddenly drops between them and a destination, or they get pinned temporarily by a huge block of concrete or maybe a gigantic pulley. Then they nearly go crazy, lash out in convulsions eyes bulging, electrified froth at their mouths.
The tiny lights whir around me like snowflakes, and I can hear their voices, speaking quietly to each other. One of them lands on my shoulder and my whole body goes cold. There’s a sensation just there, like an icy scrap of elastic cinching around the joint. I drag my suddenly heavy hand up to my shoulder trying to rip the thing off—and more of them settle on me.
Suddenly I’m staring. My face, my body are stiff, my mouth stiff. Beads of sweat pop out all over me; I’m cold on the inside, so cold it scares me, but my outside is hot as a furnace. I move without wanting to. I head over to the pile of beams hearing that beat drum inside me; taking hold of one of the beams, my hands tear fruitlessly at the metal. The crashes won’t let me be still and won’t let me fail.
My legs rise and fall as if I were wading in tar, steering me to the end of the pile. There’s a withering flow going sadly through my arms, and when I seize the end of a girder, my hands grip it so firmly I can actually see the outline of what my fingers and palms hold in my mind, like a black object floating in darkness and outlined like in an eclipse. My legs get going again and I drag the girder out of the heap; when the end falls free and hits the concrete with a clang I nearly topple over, but I hug the end to my chest and haul, my eyes riveted to an opening in the tarps, the spot where this thing belongs.
My body is numb, so I’m only abstractly aware of the heaving in my chest, my heart pounding. I know from sounds that my muscles and joints are bursting apart. I barely move. I’m like a statue tearing itself to pieces from the inside out. I don’t know how long it’s been, but the others flash by me, back and forth I don’t know how many times, up and around me in a flying circus of maniacally precise work. A group of them approaches, carrying a concrete cylinder that must be twenty feet in diameter and dozens of yards long. It’s like a huge insect with Operationals for legs, and each one of them lifts and lowers their feet in exact time, without so much as a glance at each other.
Someone is near me, staying near me. I can’t turn my head, or look away from the spot between two uprights where this girder I’m holding onto for dear life belongs.
Now, all at once:
—the deafening burst of a horn in the air above me
—the immediate cessation of the beat, which only hums once in the surrounding world
—an explosion of pain in every inch of my body
—and a flash of motion, coming from behind me; a shaggy black arm.
*
For a brief moment, I see, hovering over me, the face of an intrepid-looking woman. It’s terra-cotta red, tight and flat, like a drumhead; she has black hair and bangs, hawk nose, wide thin mouth, bulked up shaggy black shoulders. She’s a Galvanophone, or phore, or whatever it was. I’m lying supine and she’s kneeling by me.
Then come disjointed moments from a white day—white sun, white sky, white clouds, white smoke floating around me in white air, white dust, white pain all over me.
I wake up. I’ve been moved, and I can dimly remember being moved. This looks like the infirmary. Two short rows of beds in a bungalow. The door h
as been left hanging open, for ventilation I suppose, and light streams in over the threshold.
No one seems to be on duty. When I try to get up, my muscles and joints erupt in a falsetto chorus and I find myself studiously replacing my anatomy in exactly the same disposition in which I found it.
Eventually, I’m able to look around again and I notice I’m not alone. My old chum of the bandages, my formerly dead associate, grins at me from the corner bed.
“You got mixed up,” he purrs.
His sheets and blankets are all over the place; he’s wearing blue pyjamas with ships on them, over what might be a completely bandaged body. He jerks and starts as he settles back into a mound of six pillows, in a bizarre mixture of luxuriation and minor convulsions, then, once he’s still, he beams with contentment.
“You decided to switch careers,” he says smugly.
My consciousness is finally starting to generate new ideas again. Those lights settling on me.
From where I am, I can see out through the many small panes in the window, which is longer than it is tall. There’s the artifact, and Operationals are going by in the pathway, clambering up the rigging and the nets, carrying long, brightly-colored pennants. The top of the artifact is like a ribbon fire of kite-tail flags that lick the blue sky, the fluffy white clouds out there, like the whole world were one delicacy.
Jerky-Lurky catches me looking and guesses my thought.
“It’s the Festival of Technical Laborers today,” he says. “They work triple shifts!”
“Triple shifts? You mean they celebrate by being made to work three times harder? That doesn’t seem right.”
He wriggles, and seems to want to wipe his wet mouth on the pillows by his ear.
“They enjoy their work. How better to celebrate them than by letting them do it? That’s what they say. I don’t care. But they do get time off. I think they do.”
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