by Rich Horton
“Roseblood,” the sinker shouted.
We were close enough now to see a ring of huts and tents gathered in clumps outside the high wall. In both directions, the wall climbed up along the rock’s edge until it vanished into the distance. From the top, three bright plumes were headed toward us.
“Centurions,” the sinker shouted. “Just do as they say.”
Three Centurions were suddenly floating around us, backpacks strapped on that shot fire and in each hand some sort of control. All three had swords like the sinker’s, in sheaths along their sides. “Do not enter the city,” one shouted. “Stay only on the trader’s side of the wall.”
The sinker nodded and the centurions were gone, hurtling back to the top of the wall to continue their watch.
We landed on the very edge of the rock. From there, the wall was just a wall, no way to know that something so endless was on the other side. Along its top, centurions marched back and forth, glancing down. On the ground, I could see now that the lights were not fires, but little glass balls with small fires inside, all connected by strings that ran back to the top of the wall. The lights made a web which hung over all the people scattered on the trader’s side, sitting at fires or clumped in the front flaps of tents, none reacting as we walked through.
After more than a day of the constant friction of sinking, walking on flat rock again felt somehow incomplete. It was a half sensation. I was relieved to reach Roseblood, but part of me wanted to leave again. To dive off the edge and head down. Back to the great sink.
We made our way to a cluster of open-faced tents. The sinker traded a few small things for food which we took to a fire. Around the fire, others were cooking similar food, meat in links on sticks and cups of boiling juices.
I asked the Sinker, “Where are our beds?”
A grimy looking man showed me where all his teeth had been broken out. “Got beds on your rock, huh?”
“Don’t you?”
He laughed. “I’ll have to stop there on my way by.”
The sinker revealed just enough sword to reflect a golden rectangle of fire light onto the skin between his eyes. “You stop there and you stop forever.” She glanced at the others, each separately. “Goes for all of you.”
“You rising or sinking?” an old man asked me.
I could tell the sinker had no intention and so I answered for myself. “Sinking, I guess, for now anyway.”
A younger man, not much older than me, a boy I guess, leaned over. “Better decide one way or the other. Lest you don’t plan on getting anywhere your whole life. Sink or rise. Me, I’ve been sinking since I came to. First chance I got.”
“Are you sinking too?” I asked the old man.
He nodded, once for me and then once at the boy. “Since just about this one’s age.”
I asked him, “Where are you going?”
Everyone at the fire laughed at this, but the old man’s smile was kind and genuine. “Just down,” he said.
“Did you come from Center City?”
His eyes narrowed but he didn’t say anything.
The boy was talking again. “Never heard of no Central City. Maybe you mean the Big Ghost.”
“Old scavenger legend.” It was a thin man across the fire. He was glancing around under the brim of a furry helmet. “Legend they would tell families on small cities and these people used to give over their stuff out of fear at just the mention. The mention of Center City. They let you sleep in their daughter’s beds too.” He laughed.
“Why you want to go to a place like Center City for?” the old man asked.
“So it is real?”
“Oh yes. It’s real.”
All through this, the sinker said nothing, just looked into the fire as she ate. Across, the skinny man was laughing. “And I suppose there’s an end too?” He pointed into the air above Roseblood, then down. Then he smiled his with huge broken face. “A place where all the cities land, all piled up, one on top of another, broken to bits. And everything on them.”
“The Great Flat,” someone whispered.
“What?” I asked. “What’s The Great Flat?”
The old man was pulling over an odd shaped case which he opened and inside was a thing shaped like the case. “Never mind about The Great Flat,” he said. “Or Center City.” He put the thing in his lap and with his fingers, he plucked strings along its front and singing came out of a hole as if it was a mouth. And the old man started singing too.
“Don’t you know anything but scavenger ballads old man?”
He looked at the kid. “This ain’t no scavenger ballad, son. This is a song from Before.” That quieted them. He waited a moment and then went on, “And you’d best listen and remember it.”
“Great,” the kid said. “Just what I need.”
But I did listen, to every word. Tried as best I could to remember them exactly. When the old man finished, he plucked each string once more and the song was over.
The kid was the first to talk. “Where did you steal that old thing?”
The old man was putting it back in its case. “Was passed down,” he said, and I wasn’t sure if he meant the song or the case and what was in it.
“Nothing wasn’t stolen at some point.” And now the kid took a small wooden man out of his pocket and showed it to me. “What you want to give me for this?” But it was not wood, when I held it, it was light and cold to the touch.
“I don’t have anything,” I said.
He took it back. “Well, take what you can find. Cuz someday, you’re not going to be wanting something, but needing it. And you better have a few things to trade.”
I looked to the old man, but he didn’t seem like he was about to disagree.
“So you steal too?”
His head tilted to one side. “You steal a little, have to, scavenge a bit. It’s how I’ve got so far. But it’s the sink that’s important, not things. Things are just a means to keep sinking.”
The kid chuckled. “All these years, old man, and you and I, we’re in the same place.”
“It’s not where you are, son, but how far you’ve sunk from where you started.”
Into the air above us, three centurions rose from the top of the wall and skirted low above the web of lights. Each left a tube of dark smoke, milky and opaque against the pure black above. They congregated in the air where the rock edge ended, there to meet a riser coming up, just as they had come out to meet us as we approached. There was a shout. All eyes looked up as a bright plume of sparks flowered out. One of the centurions had killed the riser and off he went, rising now in no direction.
The kid was getting up.
“Let it be,” the old man said.
The kid smiled, “Must be something on that riser worth checking for.” A few seconds later, I could see him, rising expertly. I’d never seen anyone rise so fast. But before he could reach the limp body, a single centurion swooped by, sword out and sliced the boy clean in half. Simple as that.
“Come on, time for us to retire.” The sinker reached into the fire and took out a small log burning at one end.
“Take care of this little one,” the old man told her.
“Why did they do it?” I asked.
The old man looked up at the bodies, two in three pieces. “No scavenging allowed in sight of Roseblood.”
“I have to go for a little while and you can’t come with me.”
I watched the sinker strap on her belt and sword. Our little fire was a single smoldering log. She also had a small knife, which she slid into her boot.
“Where do you have to go?”
She looked over at the wall and I looked too. “Inside,” she said.
“What will I do?”
“Stay here and wait.”
“By myself?”
“Here,” and she pulled an object from her bag like I had never seen before and have never seen another since. “You sit here and if someone comes near you, you show them this.”
“But how
’s it used?”
“You won’t need to use it. You just show them, that’s all. For now, though, keep it out of sight.”
I took it from her and put it under the flap of my jacket. She stood up, between me and the high wall. Just then a centurion was rising up toward a speck coming down. I thought of the sinker, chopped in half like the boy from the fire. But it didn’t seem possible.
“Just remember what I told you.” And off she went, weaving between the fires and tents until I could no longer see her.
When the sinker returned, she had with her a little jar which she held up and said, “You put this on your brother’s wound. And then you put this,” and she held up another jar, rattling what was inside, “into his food. One per meal until they’re all gone. Did anyone bother you?”
I shook my head. “When do we go back?”
Now the sinker looked right at me. “Not we.”
And I knew then that I would have to find my own way back to my rock. “These will cure my brother?”
She sat down on the ground beside me.
“You had to steal them?”
“No, but I stole some of the things I traded for them.”
“All of the things back home, the things we trade for from the risers going past. It was all stolen, huh? Stuff they’d killed people and took. Or landed on a small rock and just took it all.”
The sinker was digging in her bag. “Probably not all.”
“You were a riser once.”
“Yep.” She went still a moment, then back to digging. “Rose further than anyone I’ve ever met. Left when I was younger than you.”
“But why?”
“Same reason your brother chose to. Same reason people choose whatever it is they choose.” She shrugged. The map was out now and she was comparing it to another piece of paper.
“But then you realized it was wrong?”
She didn’t answer me so I asked her, “Do you kill people, to take their things?”
“Did we take anything from the risers who tried to kill us?” She was looking from one page to the next, marking up the clean sheet with a pen.
“I thought it was because they wouldn’t let us land on Roseblood if you’d had all three swords.”
The sinker glanced up at me. “Good, kid,” she said. Then she was back at the maps. Back to whatever it was she was doing.
“What then?” I asked her. “What happened?”
“One day I realized I forgot to do something. Spent every day since trying to get back. Just hope there’s time.”
Maybe I felt a kiss on my forehead. Or maybe I dreamed that part. In my dream, it was my mother kissing my forehead, but in the dream, my mother was the sinker and my real mother was a lady I had never known or even met.
This was the end of my dream. In the beginning, I was sinking, but not toward something. More like I was floating, like one of the milk cows out on its tether. Below me was water, more water than I had ever imagined there could be, water bigger than Roseblood or anything else, as endless as the void around my little rock back home. It was moving under me as I floated there. And just when it seemed like it would never end, the edge of a rock appeared in the distance, coming toward me. Except this rock wasn’t floating in space. It was in the water; the water actually surrounded the rock. In my dream, the rock was getting closer and closer and as it swept under me, I felt the kiss and I opened my eyes and the sinker was tossing dirt on the last embers of the fire.
“I don’t have to go back,” I said.
She looked at me. “If you want to save your brother, you do.”
“But if I never see him again, what does it matter either way?”
The sinker didn’t answer. She had got down on her knees and was readying her pack.
“Can I come with you?”
She looked right in my eyes and shook her head. “Too far to go. You’ll slow me down too much.”
“I understand.”
“Good.” She handed me a rolled up paper.
“What is it?”
“A map. When you get a chance, make a copy. You always have a copy, packed separate from the other.”
“But now you’ll only have one.”
“That’s a copy I made for you.”
She unrolled the map so a small section lay spread between my hands. “We’re here. And here’s your pueblo. A quarter day’s rise.” She pointed at a place in the darkness above Roseblood. “A straight shot. Don’t second guess and you’ll be fine.”
“If I go back.”
“That’s up to you.” She picked up her pack and strapped it on beside her sword. She looked back at me once more, walked to the very edge and then she was gone.
The old rock felt haunted, by some sort of never ending. Children ran by the window in loops, my brother there with them. He was oblivious to how close he had come to being not a boy at all, but nothing. Ashes held out over the edge and let go. Our father was a riser. Rose up to the rock we live on now. His father and his father before. “The family has risen far, my son.” And they would gaze upward, toward the distant rocks above.
Again, my brother would have a chance to decide. Thanks to the sinker. And to me for coming back. His leg looked bruised, but the black was gone, the swelling. The puss and the fever were gone too and no one on the rock could believe it. They’d been coming to the house since I got back, asking where the medicine had come from. There was talk of training sinkers, sending them off for more.
My mother had treated my brother’s recovery as some sort of dark trick. As she watched him climb out of bed, her face revealed this possibility to me: maybe she would have preferred him to die than be saved through something she didn’t understand. Me, I hadn’t left my room the entire time, all through his healing. I sat alone, at work on a copy of the map. You must have two copies, packed separate from each other.
When my father came to see me, I was seated on the floor with the new map unrolled all the way, the last parts drying so it could be permanent. As I worked, I hummed the old man’s song. The song from Before. At least I was humming how I remembered it, hoping it was right.
“What’s this here?” he asked me. He was standing over the object the sinker told me I would never have to use.
“Don’t look at it,” I told him.
“But I already did.”
I got up and covered it completely.
“That sinker gave you that, didn’t she?”
“It’s for protection.”
“How so?” but he had wandered away, didn’t really want an answer, I suppose. Then he was stopped again, looking down at the map.
“It’s finished,” I told him.
He looked at my pack, at the map again, and finally at me. “When are you leaving?”
The original map was already rolled into a tight cylinder. I took it from the table and slid it into my pack. “Tomorrow,” I said.
My father seemed to say the word over again a few times in his head. “I think it’s best you don’t tell you mother.”
The pack was tight and small. I was proud of how compact it looked, how light and simple.
My father was digging in his pockets. “You’ll need at least a few things to trade.”
The entire rock behind me was lost in the roar of the edge. Only one or two people were up and about. The animals were asleep, out at the ends of their tethers, their fur revealing the natural currents of the sink.
I had said goodbye to my father, there in my room, with the map drying. My mother would wake in a few hours and find her daughter gone.
I stood on the same spot Kyle had left from to rise, the spot from which all boys leave the rock. I did not look back, only out, directly parallel from the surface of the rock. And then I leaned forward. I could feel the weight of what I had packed. The truth is, I had not decided, not until that very moment.
The Long Haul
From the ANNALS OF TRANSPORTATION,
The Pacific Monthly, May 2009
Ke
n Liu
Twenty-five years ago on this day, the Hindenburg crossed the Atlantic for the first time. Today, it will cross it for the last time. Six hundred times it has accomplished this feat, and in so doing it has covered the same distance as more than eight roundtrips to the Moon. Its perfect safety record is a testament to the ingenuity of the German people.
There is always some sorrow in seeing a thing of beauty age, decline, and finally fade, no matter how gracefully it is done. But so long as men still sail the open skies, none shall forget the glory of the Hindenburg.
—John F. Kennedy, March 31, 1962, Berlin.
It was easy to see the zeppelins moored half a mile away from the terminal. They were a motley collection of about forty Peterbilts, Aereons, Macks, Zeppelins (both the real thing and the ones from Goodyear-Zeppelin), and Dongfengs, arranged around and with their noses tied to ten mooring masts, like crouching cats having tête-à-tête tea parties.
I went through customs at Lanzhou’s Yantan Airport, and found Barry Icke’s long-hauler, a gleaming silver Dongfeng Feimaotui—the model usually known in America, among the less-than-politically-correct society of zeppeliners, as the “Flying Chinaman”—at the farthest mooring mast. As soon as I saw it, I understood why he called it the American Dragon.
White clouds drifted in the dark mirror of the polished solar panels covering the upper half of the zeppelin like a turtle’s shell. Large, waving American flags trailing red and blue flames and white stars were airbrushed onto each side of the elongated silver teardrop hull, which gradually tapered towards the back, ending in a cruciform tail striped in red, white, and blue. A pair of predatory, reptilian eyes were painted above the nose cone and a grinning mouth full of sharp teeth under it. A petite Chinese woman was suspended by ropes below the nose cone, painting over the blood-red tongue in the mouth with a brush.
