by Gene Wolfe
"Then let's enjoy this while we can." Seeing the woman with the bough had recalled one of the ten thousand things the Outsider had shown him-a hero riding through some foreign city while a cheering crowd waved big fan-like leaves. Would Echidna and her children kill the Outsider too? With a flash of insight, he felt sure they were already trying.
"Look! There's Orchid, throwing out the house."
A light directed at the flag showed her plainly, leaning so far from the second-story window through which Kypris had called to him that it seemed she might fall any moment. They were floating down Lamp Street, clearly; the Alambrera could not be far.
As Hyacinth blew Orchid a kiss, something whizzed past Silk's ear, striking the foredeck like a gong. A high whine and a booming explosion were followed by the rattle of a buzz gun. Somebody shouted for someone to come down, and someone inside the floater caught his injured ankle and pulled.
He looked up instead, to where something new and enormous that was not a cloud at all filled the sky. Another whine, louder, mounting ever higher, until Lamp Street exploded in front of them, peppering his face and throwing something solid at his head.
Oosik shouted, "Faster!" and disappeared down his hatch, slamming it behind him.
"Inside, Patera Caldé!"
He scooped Hyacinth into his arms instead, dropping the cane into the floater. It was racing now, careering along Lamp Street and scattering people like chaff. She shrieked.
Here was Cage Street, overlooked by the despotic wall of the Alambrera. Hanging in the air in front of it was a single trooper with wings-a female trooper, from the bulge at her chest-who leveled a slug gun. He slid off the coaming and dropped, still holding Hyadnth, onto the men below.
They sprawled in a tangle of arms and legs, like beetles swept into a jar. Someone stepped on his shoulder and swarmed up the spidery ladder. The turret hatch banged shut. At the front of the floater Oosik snapped, "Faster, Sergeant!"
"We're getting a vector now, sir."
Silk tried to apologize, to tug Hyacinth's scarlet skirt (about which Hyacinth herself seemed to care not a cardbit) over her thighs, and to stand in a space in which he could not possibly have stood upright, all at once. Nothing succeeded.
Something struck the floater like a sledge, sending it yawing into something else solid; it rolled and plunged and righted itself, its straining engine roaring like a wounded bull. Reeking of fish, a wisp of oily black smoke writhed through the compartment.
"Faster!" Oosik shouted.
The turret gun spoke as if in response, a clatter that went on and on, as though the turret gunner were intent on massacring the whole city.
Scrambling across Xiphias and the surgeon, Silk peered over Oosik's shoulder. Fiery red letters danced across his glass: VECTOR UNACCEPTABLE.
Something banged the slanted foredeck above their heads, and the thunder of the engine rose to a deafening crescendo; Silk felt that he had been jerked backwards.
Abruptly, their motion changed.
The floater no longer rocked or raced. The noise of the engine waned until he could distinguish the high-pitched song of the blowers. It ascended to an agonized scream and faded away. A red light flared on the instrument panel.
For the second time in a floater, Silk felt that he was truly floating; it was, he thought, like the uncanny sensation of the moving room in which he had ridden with Mamelta.
Behind him, Hyacinth gasped. A strangely-shaped object had risen from Oosik's side. Before Silk recognized it, it had completed a leisurely quarter revolution, scarcely a span in front of his nose. It was a large needler, similar to the one in his own waistband; and it had bobbed up like a cork, unimpelled, from Oosik's holster.
"Look! Look! They're picking us up!" Hyacinth's full breasts pressed his back as she stared at the glass.
He plucked Oosik's needler out of the air and returned it to its holster. When he looked at the glass again, it showed a sprawling pattern of crooked lines, enlivened here and there by crimson sparks. It looked, he decided, like a city in the skylands, except that it seemed much closer. Intrigued, he undogged the hatcheover over Oosik's seat and threw it back. As he completed the motion, both his feet left the floor; he snatched at the hatch dog, missed it by a finger, and drifted up like Oosik's needler until someone inside caught his foot.
The pattern he had seen in the glass was spread before him without limit here: a twilit skyland city, ringed by sunbright brown fields and huddled villages; and to one side, a silver mirror anchored by a winding, dun-colored thread Oreb fluttered from his shoulder as he gaped and disappeared into the twilight.
"We're flying." Incredulity and dismay turned the words to a sigh that dwindled with the black bird. Silk coughed, spat congealed blood, and tried again. "We are flying upside down. I see Viron and the lake, even the road to the lake."
Quetzal spoke from inside the floater. "Look behind us, Patera Caldé."
They were nearer now, so near that the vast dark belly of the thing roofed out the sky. Beneath it, suspended by cables that appeared no thicker than gossamer, dangled a structure like a boat with many short oars; Silk's lungs had filled and emptied before he realized that the oars were the barrels of guns, and half a minute crept by before he made out the blood-red triangle on its bottom. "Your Cognizance…"
"You don't understand why they're not shooting at us." Quetzal shook himself. "I imagine it's only that they haven't noticed us yet. A wind is forcing them to hold their airship parallel to the sun, so they're peering down at a dark city. At the moment our floater's presenting its narrowest aspect to them. But we're turning, and soon they'll be looking straight down at us. Let's duck inside and shut the hatch."
The glass showed Lake Limna now. Watching its shoreline creep from one corner to the other, Silk thought of Oosik's needler; their floater seemed to be tumbling through the sky in the same dilatory fashion.
Clinging to him, Hyacinth whispered, "You're not afraid at all, are you? Are we up terribly high?" She trembled.
"Of course I am; when I was out there, I was terrified." He examined his emotional state. "I'm still badly frightened; but thinking about what's happening-how it can possibly have come about except by a miracle-keeps my mind off my fear." Watching the glass, he tried to describe the airship.
"Pulling us up, lad! That's what she said! Think we could cut it?"
"There's nothing to cut; if there were, they'd know where we were and shoot us, I believe. This is something else. Was it you who held my foot, by the way? Thank you."
Xiphias shook his head and indicated the surgeon.
"Thank you," Silk repeated. "Thank you very much indeed, Doctor." He grasped the operator's shoulder. "You said we were getting a vector. Exactly what does that mean?"
"It's a message you get if you float too fast, My Caldé, either north or south. You're supposed to slow down. The monitor's supposed to make you if you don't, but that doesn't work any more on this floater."
"I see." Silk nodded, encouragingly he hoped. "Why are you supposed to slow down?"
Oosik put in, "Going too fast north makes you feel as if someone were shoveling sand on you. It is not good for you, and makes everyone in the floater slow to react. Going south too fast makes you giddy. It feels like swimming."
Almost too softly to be heard, Quetzal inquired, "Do you know the shape of the whorl, Patera Caldé?"
"The whorl? Why, it's cylindrical, Your Cognizance."
"Are we on the outside of the cylinder, Patera Caldé? Or on the inside?"
"We're inside, Your Cognizance. If we were outside, we'd fall off."
"Exactly. What is it that holds us down? What makes a book fall if you drop it?"
"I can't remember the name, Your Cognizance," Silk said, "but it's the tendency that keeps a stone in a sling until it is thrown."
Hyacinth had released him; now her hand found his, and he squeezed it. "As long as the boy keeps twirling his sling, the stone in it can't fall out. The Whorl turns-I see! If t
he stone were a-a mouse and the mouse ran in the direction the sling was going, it would be held in place more securely, as though the sling were being twirled faster. But if the mouse were to run the other way, it would be as if the sling weren't twirling fast enough. It would fall out."
"Gunner!" Oosik was staring at the glass. "Your gun should bear." As he flicked off his own buzz gun's safety, the red triangle crept into view.
"Trivigaunte," Hyacinth whispered. "Sphigx won't let them make pictures of anything. That mark's on their flag."
Auk stood, unable for a moment to recall where he was or why he had come. Had he fallen off a roof? Salt blood from his lips trickled into his mouth. A man with arms and legs no thicker than kindling and a face like a bearded skull dashed past him. Then another and another.
"Don't be afraid," the blind god whispered. "Be brave and act wisely, and I will protect you." He took Auk's hand, not as Hyacinth had put her own hand into Silk's a few minutes before, but as an older man clasps a younger's at a crisis.
"All right," Auk told him. "I ain't scared, only kind of shook up." The blind god's hand felt good in his own, big and strong, with long powerful fingers; he could not think of the blind god's name and was embarrassed by his failure.
"I am Tartaros, and your friend. Tell me everything you see. You may speak or not, as you wish."
"There's a big hole with smoke coming out in the middle of the wall," Auk reported. "That wasn't there before, I'm pretty sure. There's some dead culls around besides the ones Patera killed and the one I killed. One's a trooper, like, only a mort it looks like. Her wings broke, I guess, maybe when she hit the ground. Everything's brown, the wings and pants and a kind of a bandage, like, over her boobs."
"Brown?"
Auk looked more closely. "Not exactly. Yellowy-brown, more like. Dirt color. Here comes Chenille."
"That is well. Comfort her, Auk my noctolater. Is the airship still overhead?"
"Sure," Auk said, implying by his tone that he did not require a god to coach him in such elementary things. "Yeah, it is." Chenille rushed into his arms.
"It's all right, Jugs," he told her. "Going to be candy. You'll see. Tartaros is a dimber mate of mine." To Tartaros himself, Auk added, "There's this hoppy floater that's falling in the pit, only slow, while it shoots. That's up there, too. And there's maybe a couple hundred troopers like the dead mort flying around, way up."
The blind god gave his hand a gentle tug. "We emerged from a smaller pit into this one, Auk. If you see no other way out, it would be well to return to the tunnel. There are other egresses, and I know them all."
"Just a minute. I lost my whin. I see it." Releasing Chenille, Auk hurried over, jerked his hanger from the mire, and wiped the blade on his tunic.
"Auk, my son-"
He shooed Incus with the hanger. "You get back in the tunnel, Patera, before you get hurt. That's what Tartaros says, and he's right."
The floater was descending faster now, almost as though it were really falling. Watching it, Auk got the feeling it was, only not straight down the way other things fell. Until the last moment, it seemed it might come to rest upright; but it landed on the side of its cowling and tumbled over.
Something much higher was falling much faster, a tiny dot of black that seemed almost an arrow by the time it struck the ruined battlement of the Alambrera's wall, which again erupted in a gout of flame and smoke. This time masses of shiprock as big as cottages were flung up like chaff. Auk thought it the finest sight he had seen in his life.
"Silk here!" Oreb announced proudly, dropping onto his shoulder. "Bird bring!" A hatch opened at the front of the fallen floater.
"Hackum!" Chenille shouted. "Hackum, come on! We're going back in the tunnel!"
Auk waved to silence her. The wall of the Alambrera had taken its death blow. As he watched, cracks raced down it to reappear as though by magic in the shiprock side of the pit. There came a growl deeper than any thunder. With a roar that shook the ground on which he struggled to stand, the wall and the side of the pit came down together. Half the pit vanished under a scree of stones, earth, and shattered slabs. Coughing at the dust, Auk backed away.
"Hole break," Oreb informed him.
When he looked again, several men and a slender woman in scarlet were emerging from the overturned floater; its turret gun, unnaturally canted but pointing skyward, was firing burst after burst at the flying troopers.
"Return to the woman," the blind god told him. "You must protect her. A woman is vital. This is not."
He looked for Chenille, but she was gone. A few skeletal figures were disappearing into the hole from which he and she had emerged into the pit. Men from the floater followed them; through the billowing dust he could make out a white-bearded man in rusty black and a taller one in a green tunic.
"Silk here!" Oreb circled above two fleeing figures.
Auk caught up with them as they started down the helical track; Silk was hobbling fast, helped by a cane and the woman in scarlet. Auk caught her by the hair. "Sorry, Patera, but I got to do this." Silk's hand went to his waistband, but Auk was too quick-a push on his chest sent him reeling backward into the lesser pit.
"Listen!" urged the blind god beside Auk; he did, and heard the rising whine of the next bomb a full second before it struck the ground.
Silk looked down upon the dying augur's body with joy and regret. It was-had been-himself, after all. Quetzal and a smaller, younger augur knelt beside it, with a woman in an augur's cloak and a third man nearly as old as Quetzal.
Beads swung in sign after sign of addition: "I convey to you, Patera Silk my son, the forgiveness of all the gods."
"Recall now the words of Pas-"
It was good; and when it was over, he could go. Where? It didn't matter. Anywhere he wished. He was free at last, and though he would miss his old cell now and then, freedom was best. He looked up through the shiprock ceiling and saw only earth, but knew that the whole Whorl was above it, and the open sky.
"I pray you to forgive us, the living," the smaller augur said, and again traced the sign of addition, which could not-now that he came to think of it-ever have been Pas's. A sign of addition was a cross; he remembered Maytera drawing one on the chalkboard when he was a boy learning to do sums. Pas's sign was not the cross but the voided cross. He reached for his own at his neck, but it was gone.
The older augur: "I speak here for Great Pas, for Divine Echidna, for Scalding Scylla."
The younger augur: "For Marvelous Molpe, for Tenebrous Tartaros, for Highest Hierax, for Thoughtful Thelxiepeia, for Fierce Phaea, and for Strong Sphigx."
The older augur: "Also for all lesser gods."
The shiprock gave way to earth, the earth to a clearer, purer air than he had ever known. Hyacinth was there with Auk; in a slanting mass of stones, broken shiprock rolled and slid to reveal a groping steel hand. Glorying, he soared.
The Trivigaunti airship was a brown beetle, infinitely remote, the Aureate Path so near he knew it could not be his final destination.
He lighted upon it, and found it a road of tinsel down a whorl no bigger than an egg. Where were the lowing beasts? The spirits of the other dead? There! Two men and two women. He blinked and stared and blinked again.
"Oh, Silk! My son! Oh, son!" She was in his arms and he in hers, melting in tears of joy. "Mother!" "Silk, my son!"
The Whorl was filth and stink, futility and betrayal; this was everything-joy and love, freedom and purity.
"You must go back, Silk. He sends us to tell you."
"You must, my lad." A man's voice, the voice of which Lemur's had been a species of mockery. Looking up he saw the carved brown face from his mother's closet.
"We're your parents." He was tall and blue-eyed. "Your fathers and your mothers."
The other woman did not speak, but her eyes spoke truth.
"You were my mother," he said. "I understand."
He looked down at his own beautiful mother. "You will always be my mother. Always!
"
"We'll be waiting, Silk my son. All of us. Remember."
***
Something was fanning his face.
He opened his eyes. Quetzal was seated beside him, one long, bloodless hand swinging as regularly and effortlessly as a pendulum. "Good afternoon, Patera Caldé. I would guess, at least, that it may be afternoon by now."
He lay on dirt, staring up at a shiprock ceiling. Pain stabbed his neck; his head, both arms, his chest, both legs, and his lower torso ached, each in its separate, painful way.
"Lie quietly. I wish I had water to offer you. How are you feeling?"
"I'm back in my dirty cage." Too late, he remembered to add Your Cognizance. "I didn't know it was a cage, before."
Quetzal pressed down on his shoulder. "Don't sit up yet, Patera Caldé. I'm going to ask a question, but you are not to put it to the test. It is to be a matter for discussion only. Do you agree?"
"Yes, Your Cognizance." He nodded, although nodding took immense effort.
"This is my question. We are only to speak of it. If I were to help you up, could you walk?"
"I believe so, Your Cognizance."
"Your voice is very weak. I've examined you and found no broken bones. There are four of us besides yourself, but-"
"We fell, didn't we? We were in a Civil Guard floater, spinning over the city. Did I dream that?"
Quetzal shook his head.
"You and I and Hyacinth. And Colonel Oosik and Oreb. And…"
"Yes, Patera Caldé?"
"A trooper-two troopers-and an old fencing master that someone had introduced me to. I can't remember his name, but I must have dreamed that he was there as well. It's too fantastic."
"He is some distance down the tunnel now, Patera Caldé. We have been troubled by the convicts you freed."
"Hyacinth?" Silk struggled to sit up.
Quetzal held him down, his hands on both shoulders. "Lie quietly or I'll tell you nothing."
"Hyacinth? For-for the sake of all the gods! I've got to know!"
"I dislike them, Patera Caldé. So do you. Why should either of us tell anyone anything for their sake? I don't know. I wish I did. She may be dead. I can't say."
