At the Edge

by Lee Murray

  He’d lasted two days in the hospital before he’d died. He was strong, so strong.

  I took a step towards Dad, and Pete stepped with me.

  Dad’s eyes were even wider now, his breath coming in shallow gulps. We walked, my dead brother and I, and Dad looking at me, then at Pete, then back at me again. His knees started to shake.

  I heard something I didn’t expect, couldn’t have expected. Cheers. Cheers, and people chanting.

  Chanting my name.

  Chanting my name.

  Another step, and another. Dad was transfixed.

  ‘For Pete,’ I said calmly, though my blood was singing in my veins.

  Is it? Pete asked, concern in his dead voice. Fear. Is it really for me now?

  I ignored him.

  Dad looked back and forth between us, over and over again. Then he said one word, softly.

  ‘Pete?’

  I punched him, just once, under his left cheekbone. It wasn’t a particularly hard punch, but his eyes rolled back into his skull and he collapsed to his knees. I watched him fall, and saw it there, in the dirt beside him. The rock. The blood-stained rock that had been removed last year, but there it was, on the ground, waiting. Thirsty.

  Dad fell sideways, hard, and the rock bit into his head. He didn’t move. Blood pooled beneath him. Silence.

  Then pandemonium as Blairs swarmed the ring, grabbing me and pulling me away, kneeling beside my father’s body. Screams and yells. I was carried out of the ring by half a dozen men, their hands all over me, but I didn’t care, barely felt them. Carried back to the house, where my mother and sisters were waiting. I let myself be carried.

  And, all the way, Pete was beside me.

  It’s over, he murmured, let it be over.

  I didn’t reply. All I could hear was my name on the lips of my family. My living family.

  *

  It was early morning, but already the ground was starting to shimmer with summer heat. I sat on the verandah in Dad’s chair, the wicker one that was coming apart, and watched the cars approaching up our driveway. On one side of the chair, Pete watched with me, looking concerned. On the other side, my dad. He smiled, and I smiled too, that tight, expectant smile. Violence on the horizon, the impending storm.

  ‘They’re coming,’ I said, and drank a mouthful from my can of beer. ‘We can start soon.’

  Yes we can, Pete said sadly. Dad just laughed, and so did I.

  It was Boxing Day. It was tradition.

  The Architect

  Phillip Mann

  PART 1

  The image reflected back from the inscription mirror was of a moon-faced man with a shiny bald head and a frizz of short white hair. It was one of those faces which, apart from its maturity, was difficult to age: a rubbery face, full of unexpected expressions, and with sharp blue eyes that could be impish one minute and angry the next. Now the eyes were bloodshot and tired.

  This was the Architect and his lips moved as he talked to himself. ‘Come on. Come on.’ Despite the years he had spent alone at his work, the Architect had never learned patience. He stood at the bench, hands flat on the counter, fingers drumming. The technology he controlled was old and slow: as indeed was he. The Architect had forgotten how many times he had stripped down his machines and repaired them, poring over the bulky manuals until he knew parts of them by heart – or how many times he had requested upgrades – only to receive the answer from ‘up-top’ that supplies were short or that there were other priorities. That is, if he received a reply at all.

  Slowly the mirrors became pearly white: the reflection of his face faded. Bright green graph lines appeared and quickly traced the complex image of a building. It could have been the setting for some Gothic romance. The walls were high with many buttresses. Dark alcoves set well back in the walls enclosed narrow windows. The roof was steep, with a walkway running round its edge – inviting suicide perhaps? The whole was completed with a spire like a witch’s hat – but squat. ‘Good God! What was I thinking?’ he murmured. The Architect had designed and constructed this building many years earlier, shortly after he had arrived to work on the frozen planet called Meredith. It had been one of his first creations in the days when he was still experimenting in using ice as a building material.

  After a few minutes there was no further movement and the green construction lines held still. The building was complete. Had he wished, the Architect could now have made a virtual tour of the whole structure. He could have inspected any point of the grim construction. It was well built – he had to admit that – and there were no tell-tale pin-points of red light which would have indicated an over-stressed joint or a weakness through melting. All was as it should be, solid and firm and unbending, as it had been for over two generations.

  The Architect reached out and touched a small blue disk which glowed on the front of the control panel. Immediately the bright green construction lines vanished and the tower adjusted, becoming more solid, more real, more the true image of a building than a concept. Slowly it began to turn, offering itself for aesthetic rather than engineering inspection.

  The Architect stood back from the screen and surveyed it. Analysing it again after so many years, the Architect’s lips screwed up like someone who had suddenly encountered a disagreeable smell. Returning to this early construction, he found he did not like it. ‘Too heavy by far … marred by the ostentatious dreams of youth,’ he murmured. ‘Too serious, too! Fiat lux! Fiat gaudium.’

  As he aged, and became more skilful, so the Architect’s designs had become gentler, more rounded; sensual, even, and whimsical. Brighter too. If this were to be the final building in the city, the crowning glory of his vision and his final affirmation, as it were, it would have to be re-designed … nay, re-made. Totally. From foundation to spire. No question!

  He rubbed his hands, and breathed on his fingers. Then he slipped his hands into the soft round mouths of the design gauntlets which rested on the wide desk amid all the control switches which rose in a bank before him, almost like the keys of an organ.

  As soon as he flexed his fingers, a point of light, bright and cherry-red, appeared in the middle of the tower. Without shifting his gaze from the image, the Architect began to manipulate the light. Within the gauntlets, his fingers moved, as though independent of the rest of his body. Like many artists before him, he was now destroying his earlier work.

  Obediently, the grandiose arches and baroque incrustations he had once favoured began to melt away. Literally! Scorched by millions of micro lasers, normally only used for final annealing and polishing, the tower began to melt from within. Drips became drizzle. Finally, cascades of water poured down and were quickly sluiced away. The demolition work was done carefully. There was no sudden collapse, and nothing would be wasted. The water would again be stored in the vast pressure caverns beneath the construction hall and maintained at exactly 5.5 degrees above freezing, available to be reused when the Architect designed a new tower.

  Satisfied all parameters were exact, ensuring that only the tower would be defrosted and not the surrounding buildings, the Architect left the machine to do its work. It would take just over an hour.

  He crossed the hall, limping slightly, for he had many ailments, including dizziness which caused him to stumble and fall. Slowly he climbed the spiral staircase leading to his private quarters. It was, he recalled, time for his medication, his Aqua Mirabilis as he called it. This was the potion which had kept him alive and active for many years and to which he was now wholly and happily addicted.

  In his room, the light above the communication panel was flashing red, indicating that an urgent message had been received from the Icelander Station above. The Architect chose to ignore it as he had many times before. He threw a towel over the light to stop it filling his room with its irritating flash. After all, he reasoned, how many messages had he sent to the surfa
ce over the years asking for necessary supplies, demanding assistance when he fell ill and pleading for news of the wider world … only to have them all ignored? No, they could wait a bit. He was busy, and if they wanted to see him that urgently they could take the lift down through the ‘shaft’ and knock on his door politely. The ‘shaft’ was a 300-metre-long tunnel which connected his quarters and all the deep-freeze machines he controlled with the surface platform where the managers lived. He did not envy their luxury; well, not anymore. Over the years he had come to love his solitude. Events in the world beyond the city he was building had little meaning to him.

  The Architect stretched out on his untidy bed. Above him, suspended from the ceiling, was a clear plastic reservoir containing a pink liquid. A fine catheter dangled, its coils within easy reach. He took this and connected its pressure tap to a tube which emerged from the side of his throat. Immediately, he felt a warm glow spread through all his limbs and he relaxed, breathing deeply. His eyelids fluttered as the drug took effect. When he finally closed his eyes, he was already deep in his dream of a blue sky above a green hillside where wild flowers bobbed in a summer breeze. A pretty young woman in a white dress was unpacking a hamper and setting the food out on a plaid blanket – a world he had not seen for many years, and a woman he had never known.

  *

  Exactly an hour later he woke up and detached the catheter. He felt refreshed. Rejuvenated. Ready for the act of re-creation. He ate a food capsule, cracking it between his teeth and sucking hard to extract all the nutrient before chewing the plastic to the consistency of soft toffee, which melted away in his mouth.

  He removed the towel from the communication panel. The light was still flashing its red-alert message. Instead of opening contact, he tapped out a message of his own – ‘Gonfishin, Don’t disturb!!!’ – and sent it off with a chuckle. And indeed, he had work to do: a tower to build. He set off down the spiral stairway. He wasn’t even holding the rail, and the limp was forgotten.

  All was well in the design studio. The melting demolition was complete. Where the tower had once stood was now a bare piazza – strange amid the gleaming walls of the buildings which surrounded it.

  Donning the design gauntlets again, the Architect made various quick adjustments and the view of the piazza began to change. The viewer now seemed to be rising above the city while moving away at the same time. More buildings appeared. The piazza became smaller, but it remained special too because it was at the very centre of the entire city. It was the focus of many avenues and brightly coloured buildings. Some of these had been sculpted to suggest the fanciful shapes of terrestrial animals – a giant hare, for example, sitting back on its haunches, ears erect; or a giraffe stretching to feed on the leaves of a tree.

  Other buildings were clearly based on ancient monuments of Earth. A serene Taj Mahal with its clear lake stood just beyond a comic and tipsy Leaning Tower of Pisa. In a distant quarter of the city, erect in its own park, was Stonehenge. The Sphinx too, now with a handsome male face and blue painted eyes, stared at the naked and relaxed David by Michelangelo. The two monuments stood looking at one another as though in mutual admiration. And beyond both, her flame held aloft, was the Statue of Liberty, naked in this rendition … and all were carved from ice.

  Surrounding the city were trees imported from Earth. And spaced among these was an orchard, a brewery and some vineyards.

  Beyond, in the hazy distance, rose the interior walls of a giant dome. They arched over and enclosed the entire city. Lights hidden in the dome’s construction sent ever-changing patterns across its surface. No blue sky or bright sun were here, but a dazzle of light all the same. And, outside the dome, faintly invisible to anyone looking from within, was a grey mottled sky, with turbulent winds and racing clouds. Anyone who ventured through the air lock and walked outside encountered dark frost-bitten rock faces, sheer cliffs and dunes of driven snow. This was the surface of the planet Meredith, where the temperature never rose above freezing.

  ‘Why build here?’ had been the Architect’s first question years ago when he came to Meredith. Only then had he been told of the vast network of mines that was planned to burrow into the mountains and dig deep below the planet’s surface. The company would extract the rare earths and minerals: the uranium, the platinum, the gold, the cinnabar, the silver and in some places the diamonds – all found in abundance. Meredith was also home to certain useful microbes, but innocent of advanced life. Meredith, cold and grim, swinging round its pale sun … Meredith, the richest by far of all the known planets to date. It was so rich the company which owned it had decided they would make it a showplace with a city to rival fabled Xanadu. That was the Architect’s job.

  Crazy, sublime, inspired, surreal – those were some of the words used by those who chanced to visit the Architect in the early stages of his creative work. Others coined a new word and called it Escheresque. The word reminded the Architect of a sneeze. He was aware it was not necessarily intended as a compliment, but to him it was high praise. He replied with a cough of his own: ‘Hundertvassarian! Do excuse me!’

  And indeed, the clash of artistic styles could have been a jumble, a clutter, a farrago, a mish-mash. But it wasn’t. Somehow the Architect had managed to create harmony in diversity. Wherever you looked was contrast and audacity. The entire city was knitted together by high, soaring walkways which joined curved buildings. It could be traversed by a lone man on foot in a single hour even though there was hardly a straight line to be found anywhere. Cloisters led off thoroughfares. Houses, no two of them alike, stood cheek by jowl amid flower gardens. Simple gravity-driven waterfalls spilled their water into a single artificial river which meandered peacefully, but with occasional rapids, through the city until it poured away into a cistern … there to be cleansed before being pumped back up the hill to begin its journey again.

  As the years passed and the city grew, senior members of the mining company came to see what progress had been made. They wandered in the streets, marvelling at the shapes. They stayed overnight at the guest-house, the only building which was fully functional with warmed floors, a tennis court and small concert hall. After they had got over their initial astonishment, they were intrigued to learn that every building was made of ice – simple H2O!

  Water in the form of snow and ice was abundant on Meredith. This material had simply been melted. As water, it was channelled into moulds. These were then clamped and coated with a strong laminate which hardened as it cooled giving each block, arch or column perfect insulation from outside heat, and the strength of stone. This near perfect insulation allowed the temperature within the dome to be held at a comfortable 22 degrees. Once frozen, the blocks would never melt unless the laminate were attacked with a laser. Even then they could be quickly repaired. It was the Architect’s private intention that when the last block was in place, every laser except those used for construction would be buried deep. The city would survive.

  The Architect ran his hands through his frizz of white hair.

  Incredible! After all these years he was about to create the last building. Within a few hours everything would be complete. What an extraordinary moment. What would he do then?

  Ah. Then he would call the people who dwelled in their prefabricated huts on the surface and invite them down to his city – The City – for a grand party. He would let them picnic in the parks, swim in the canals and climb among the buildings – and he would acknowledge their accolades with a modest smile.

  Settling in to his work, perched birdlike on a stool, the Architect reached out and made certain adjustments. The image in the screen vanished. When the screen next came alive it showed the bare piazza. A quick touch and the screen transformed smoothly to design mode. With his eyes fixed on the screen, the Architect began to draw, his fingers moving deftly within the warm gauntlets.

  He worked until he fell asleep and his head rested on the control panel.

&nbs
p; He dragged himself up to his bed, sipped his Aqua and slept.

  *

  That became the pattern of his days. Work, Aqua, Sleep, Aqua. Work…

  Never once did he think to check the communication board which continued flashing. He had far more important things to do.

  A spiral began to grow from the ground. Day and night, blocks of ice were formed, laminated and sent on their way down the gravity chutes to the waiting construction monitors who, following their strict schedule, identified the blocks and forwarded them in sequence to the construction cranes. The work never stopped and day by day the tower grew. The booms coming from the freezing pits were a constant reminder of the work, but the Architect no longer heard them.

  The new tower was slim in comparison to the bulky gothic building it was replacing, but it was much taller. The diameter at its base was no more than ten metres. It soared upwards gracefully and when complete, it would be the highest of all the buildings in the city. Within its walls there were no steps or windows or passages. They were not necessary, as no one would live there. But it was not solid either. In the centre was a column of open space – like the hole in the zero.

  At its very top the Architect had crafted a space which looked like interlocking diamonds. This would be the final resting place for the ceremonial ‘last block’. It was a cube of clear ice, 2.5 metres on each side. It would be hoisted up into the Diamond Room – as the Architect called it – and then anchored to the roof. Beneath it would be a flat, circular platform of ice which could be raised and lowered using a pressure column – one of the Architect’s inventions.

  *

  The days slipped past, and then came a moment when finally the Architect sat still, his gaze unwavering as he studied the finished work. The ceremonial ‘last block’ was designed and ready for the Freezing Chamber. With a sigh – which might almost have been interpreted as regret – the Architect touched his fingers together and the screen facing him became opaque. The final design was being assessed, coded, calculated and saved.