Sitting calmly not far from Yunis is a round man with caramel skin and a fringe of black hair, smiling remotely, serenely, both his hands on a compact rucksack in front of him.
The fourth climber is a woman with bony hands sticking out of so many layers of clothes you’d think we were going to climb a glacier. Her puckish face emerges from between the thick collar of her bulbous down coat and the wool hat she’s tugged down over her ears.
Everyone’s keeping to themselves, so I don’t expect introductions. It may be that this trip isn’t above board and so we won’t use names. Butterball, the round one, is the first to acknowledge me, mouthing ‘hello’ behind the roar of the cement mixers and unhurriedly shaking my hand. Downy, the engulfed one, notices me then, giving me a flick of the eyes before she returns to her packing.
I go over to where Yunis stoops and kneel down beside him.
“So what’s in it for them, anyway?” I ask, twitching my thumb discreetly at the others.
“Visions,” Yunis says, sunnily. “Didn’t know, huh? People see all kinds of things when they get up there. Dead birds. Lions having sex in the sky. All type of machines. Weird gods and Kings and Queens.”
“Have you ever seen anything?”
“Sure,” he says. “They hope, too, they’ll see one of those. You know what I mean. You want to see them, too.”
“You think we’ll see one today?” I ask.
“Don’t know.”
“Is this a one-day trip?”
He looks at me soberly.
“Don’t know”
We set out. Yunis tells me to take up the rear. I’d rather go on questioning him, but I’m starting to feel like a nuisance—not that he shows any irritation, far from it. He’s happy and relaxed.
The darkness has thinned to a sapphire glow that seems to gather in a bowl around us, bringing the sky in closer. The artifact vanishes into a blue roof of smoke, and its resemblance to a mountain increases. Only when I come within a few feet of it do I hear the sighing sound it makes.
Yunis directs us to a spot where the scaffolding comes near enough to the ground to reach with a rope, and we shimmy up one by one. I ballast the rope as Downy worms up it, and she wheels at the top to give me a sharp look, as if to say she knew I’d been looking at her behind. I hadn’t.
The effort of climbing puts an end to conversation, although wooden face and droop lip mutter to each other breathlessly from time to time, peer avidly in all directions. Butterball puffs heavily, and sweats, but his equanimity is unaffected, and there’s plainly a good deal of muscle under that flab.
We move from scaffold to scaffold. The canopy is sandwiched between the artifact and the scaffolding, and there’s mesh webbing hanging down over the frames in many places as well, so that we climb inside a sleeve for much of the time. We use ladders mostly at first. Now we emerge onto a wide, exposed platform of boards, sticking out of the wall like a pier.
The sudden eruption of immensity on all sides sends me scrambling up against the wall. Humiliating weakness and fear sucks the blood out my skin. It’s the vertigo of being up high, and lost in immensity, and petrified with terror at the idea that I might suddenly come loose and fall up. I’ve always had it. I try to distract myself from it by dwelling on my embarrassment, and wring some strength from the handle of the bag.
Yunis glances over at me and grins. He holds me that way, from a distance, while the others are occupied with the view and catching their breath, choosing his time so no one else will notice the silent reassurance he gives me.
The sheer wall of the artifact, barnacled over with racks and tarps, extends to infinity in either direction. Up here, in the middle of its face, I have an entirely new and frightening sense of its size, or of my own microscopic smallness. It really is like a mountain. A mountain range. We overlook a landscape of blue hills that roll off in billows covered in fields of tall blue and stands of dark blue trees, monochromatically blue in the obstinately persistent dusk.
To get to the next flight, we’ll have to traverse a sloping set of fat pipes in a concrete cradle that forms a high rampart. The concrete is in pristine condition, but starred over with lichen. As we ascend, the scaffolding is older, and in worsening condition. The air grows thinner, too. We’re all laboring for breath now. Metal frames give way to fibrous bamboo, the planks desiccated and cracked, less and less regular in shape. The platforms are fewer, farther apart, creak and sway under us as we cross them one by one, not daring to put any more weight on them than necessary.
Finally, near the top at last, there’s nothing but a pair of narrow boards stapled to the wall to form a ledge, and a slender guiderope attached in brackets. We pause, panting in the thin air, the wind whips our garments and numbs exposed skin; we waver in the blast, and below us is a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. Through the battering of air in my ears I can make out an exclamation, I think from droop lip, who draws wood face’s attention excitedly to something—a long, black filament, twirling in the wind, pinched in the tubing of a bamboo pole. Droop produces a kit, tweezes the filament out, and claps it in a sample case. Wooden, meanwhile, searches everywhere for other traces, even asking us, with gestures, to lift our feet and shuffle this way and that so he check under them.
The wind dies down a little, and Yunis gives the command to move again.
“Now or never,” I hear him say.
How old is this construction project? The slender wooden boards beneath my feet are bleached nearly white, and seem like bones. Ancient bones.
My palms sweat, hot and cold flashes burst through me, and my legs feel like buckling. The ledge projects out into space in a kinked line angling up, over a sheer drop. Yunis leads the others out first, and I take up the rear, moving my feet like blocks of wood, unable to tear my eyes from my feet. The ledge is only slightly wider than they are. A kind of billowing, anarchic feeling whips around me in the wind. I want to cling to the artifact, but somehow that makes it feel as if I’m priming to shove off from it and launch myself backwards into space and death. The others are a line of bobbing heads in the blue, with Yunis moving steadily, alertly forward, set directly against a sky of infinitely layered blue darkness.
One by one I hear them lunge forward, and I hurry the last few steps and fling myself on top of the artifact. Now I lie here, on my face, trying to collect myself. Wondering with terror about the trip down.
Even the top of this thing is tarped, but the fabric is battered, the weave is unravelling, and in places, one very near me, totally torn away. Why I want to be so furtive about it, I don’t know, but I creep a little sideways and bring my face right down next to the gap, to get my first look at the artifact itself. Actually, I touch it before I see it, having flung out my hand a little too far. As my fingers come to rest on the surface, I suddenly remember an ancient tree I used to pass by regularly in the old days; its massive trunk was flaky with scales of fungus, and there was one big white gill, half the size of a dinner plate, protruding from a shallow indentation in the bark. Once, I adventurously pushed it a little with my finger, and it was surprisingly firm, like hard rubber, and far colder than seemed natural, so that I was shocked at the cold, as if its life functions made it colder rather than warmer. The artifact’s touch is like that. Its cold is shocking without being intense; just a ghoulish, leeching cold, and a slightly rubbery yield, stiff upholstery covering something hard.
I bring my eye to the rip. The artifact is bruise-colored, or perhaps that’s an effect of this blue light, and it’s more red. There are ribbons of white in the red, too.
Yunis summons us quietly to gather together. I stand and turn to look the way we came, at the pitiful little plank ledge, and the huge blue expanse beyond. There’s still a little more of the artifact above us, but there’s a wide, flat space here before the last few dozen feet, which slope upward. Broken scaffolding, heaps and bolts of rope and wire, and other construction wreckage lies all around. The tarped upper reach of the artifact is notched at interv
als, but the notches might be cracks. They aren’t hard to climb—the tarps are well anchored, and hang in layers of rags that give us easy handholds. Everyone is so eager to get to the top that we charge up the slope more or less at random, our bodies lifted by a kind of exultation to be up so high. Panting, I claw my way up to the top, and over.
The top of the artifact is a trench. It’s about twenty feet down from this wall to the floor of the trench, which is flat. Another wall stands opposite, and it must be about the same height. Half a mile away. The trench extends in either direction as far as I can see, like a dry canal in the sky, its bed lined with light pebbles that form slopes against the walls.
Wooden face is the first over, his feet crashing into the pebbles and sending them down before him in a whoosh. I move then. It’s a short drop, and the activity makes me feel strong again. The pebbles are like pink pearl erasers, smooth and flat and striped dull red and cream. They thin out as I charge, only just keeping control, down the heap to the floor of the trench.
Once on level ground, I have to double forward to get my breath. The others near me are in the same condition. It’s not the thin air; being up here is so emotionally unsettling I want to get a grip on what life there is in me and keep it there. Breathing hard is just a way to pin it in place.
I get a look at droopy, who took a few steps further out than the rest of us, then stopped, panting, his breath steaming. His face is like a silver mask. My own clammy, numbed hands are living snow. Yunis has become a statue of animated oil, his eyes dimly ablaze like fogbound stars. There’s nothing to see either to the right or the left, along the top of the artifact. We’re standing in the middle of a dry riverbed, or an abandoned superhighway. No vegetation, not even lichen, no apertures, and no structures. Only, here and there, low heaps of these pebbles. I’d say the wind blew them this way and that, if there was any wind, but the air up here is still.
Part of me wants to stay here forever, part wants to leave immediately, and a third wants to strike a deal between the other two, greatly favoring the second one. Judging by the general, spasmodic rush, I’d say we’ve nearly all of us hit on the same objective: that eerie wall opposite us. Down jacket is making right for it, and Yunis coming after. Butterball plants himself a few dozen feet from the slope of pebbles we charged down and takes a meditative posture, drawing out a pipe and lighting it. The brief flicker of orange flame is the only spot of color in all the blue.
Droop lip and wooden face raise binoculars and turn in circles, advancing a few paces and stopping. The latter is also peering around for tracks, but the floor is wispy, and beneath that is a humming, soapy metal which won’t show marks. Now he turns briefly in my direction and I can see geometrical wire forms glowing through his skin, pale gold enveloped in blue, like dimly electrified filaments. Droop is just darkness now, a three-dimensional shadow wearing clothes, and a kind of floating, blood-colored scum hovers over his exposed skin, like clouds hanging over a red desert, lit from below by a sun under the horizon. I glance back at Butterball, now only a marble-sized dot behind us. A filmy plume of translucent, peach-colored tissue surrounds him where he sits, and seethes out into a long, trailing cone with a fraying tip.
I stop and kneel, waving my hands over the floor of the trench. They glow faintly. I can see the frail illumination buff the sand and the metal. When I close my eyes, I can still see them moving in the obscurity. Whipping the bag around from behind me, I take a long look at it, but, apart from what might be a slightly exaggerated sharpness of details, I don’t notice anything different in its appearance. Impetuously, I try to open the bag, but intense nausea battens on me instantly. When I stop fumbling with the catches, the nausea stops. I peel back my pant legs. The bandages twinkle with the backs of minuscule pink whales that dive into the gauze and surface again with jets of mist.
The others are ahead of me now. The whole thing is getting funnier and funnier, but the impulse to laugh lodges in my midsection and won’t come out. A lithe, heavy animal, a hairless, muscular little ape with a cat’s hind legs, and a long body, hangs on the back of Downy jacket, with both its forepaws on her right shoulder and its head, to which are stuck large old man’s ears, just in the right spot to whisper into one of hers. The thing is compact, and looks heavy. Off-balance, she struggles to keep up her pace. Yunis sticks near to her, the fibrokinetic threads gathered into thirty-two distinct tendrils that radiate from his head in an exactly symmetrical distribution, each one forming a bulb at the end. They orbit his head, and, as they pass between me and his face, they plough through his features, disarranging them. After a moment, the eyes, mouth, nose, eyebrows gradually de-cubismate themselves and resume their original positions.
The opposite wall, which looks like the one we came down, rises in front of me. More than anything else, I want to get up there and have a look past it. There’s some atmospherics going on over there—I can see wisps of smoke race to and fro above the wall. A sailboat becalmed on a windless sea yearns for wind, and that’s how I yearn to get past this annihilating stillness of mummifying lungs, to feel air billow over me again, see clouds whirl by, get some weather.
I scramble up toward the top of the wall on all fours. It doesn’t slope down again, like the other did; instead, there’s a flat, level area on top, whose forward edge still obscures much of the view of what lies on the other side of the artifact. Until I get closer, but I already know more or less what I’m going to see. I’ve seen it before, as it turns out.
A desert landscape of ridges and mesas, streaming with smoke that forms into heavy colloidal ropes and globules of distinct colors while oozing swiftly along the ground. A palpitating ceiling of luminous blue clouds high over it all. One powerful wind crossing the world from my right to my left, without ceasing. A plain populated by species of turbine vegetation that live by converting not sunlight but windpower into metabolic energy.
Against the far horizon, the vibrating outline of an undead, colossal head that spins in vegetable machinery, and a huge sac gushing sperm in long, kinked chains that remind me of the plank ledge we took to get up here; there are chains of sperm and of bone and of half-digested white paste, dangling like slouched picket fences, combing the smoke. The ghosts of what look like factories appear and disappear in the alterations of the smoke, colored in bands like the atmosphere of Jupiter; the factories are silhouettes dotted with lights, and some of them swathed in blue glazes like ectoplasm that drips dry ice steam glow trickling from the smokestacks.
A voice shouts. Wooden face’s, I think. It only takes me a moment to catch sight of them, too—black figures that lope along the brink, so far off they’re not much bigger than specks. But these specks not only move, they extend and recall distinct limbs. They flip up into the air and dive in sweeping curves from the edge of the artifact, while others come hurtling in on the fantastic wind and land with a sudden and total alteration of outline, bristling out instantly with a long comet-fringe of filaments. I count seven, although they are constantly leaving, coming back, or being joined by new ones, gathered on a part of the wall that must rest on rising ground relative to us, since the surface is tilted toward us.
Wooden and droop lip run past me, nearly knocking me down in their desperation as they rush in the direction of the creatures. Yunis passes me a moment later, as solid as a car passing in the street. As he goes by, he turns to me a face that looks like shiny sealskin and those weird, smouldering ice-cave eyes of his, and says:
“Give me a hand with them.”
“All right.”
I’m grateful for something intelligible to do, and I follow as best I can, but my own words, “all right,” strike me so funny that I can barely breathe, I’m laughing. The sound of my laughter, too, strikes me funny. This could go on all night. I don’t much favor the idea of trying to tackle one or the other on these precarious heights.
Droop is closest to me, or at least I suppose it’s him because his head is obscured by a black triangle with faintly glowin
g purple edges and as he runs the corners of the triangle are snorkling out streams of smaller triangles or fish scales that rapidly fill the air all around me like the walls of a tent. Each triangle is sharp and distinct and framed in sizzling purple wire.
“Hold him, will you?” Yunis shouts to me from somewhere.
“How am I supposed to find him in all these damned triangles?”
It’s like I have a thick fringe of electrified ivy hanging in front of my eyes. There are a few ragged, parenthesis-shaped openings I can still see through, and what I see through them is too close and confused to make out. There’s the sole of a shoe as the runner lifts his leg. That’s a hand flashing back.
“Stop! Stop! You’re at the edge!” Yunis bellows.
I stop, and I’m going so fast that I bend forward at the waist, windmilling my arms. I can’t tell if the warning was addressed to me or not but Yunis wasn’t turned away from me when he shouted it and now I feel my momentum isn’t quite persuaded to quit so I bend my legs and fling myself backwards and land early and the back of my head knocks against the artifact so hard my vision goes all white then all black. I’m blinking and groaning, clutching at the back of my head.
As I blink, the darkness in my eyes fizzles and I can see the indigo of the sky over me again, veering drunkenly to and fro as I writhe in pain. The edge is close. I was running toward it. The triangles are beginning to creep in again around the rim of my sight, and they’re smaller now than before. They bubble and spread across my field of vision like foam, each one clear and distinct.
Off to my right, I can sort of make out what must be Down jacket, crouched down very low. She’s pulled the creature off her back and now it lies supine in front of her; she’s pulled its body cavity open and is building something in it that looks like an armature of short, needle-like thermometers, which draws from inside the animal. The structure is now about two feet high, and she’s busily putting together what might be an optical device up at the top.
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