Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  My new hosts were hard to beat for industriousness. They had staked up a regular Hanging Babylon for themselves, with steel gardens of baths and troughs and tubes and pumps and shelves, for nigh on a vertical kilometer.

  My hosts had practical use for a horse on the Sabbath, when they forbade themselves electricity. So these farmers and I came to a cordial arrangement. They sheltered my horse, fed him his grain, and me my spinach, and also, they loaned me a cot. In return, I sought out new markets for their vegetable produce, among the other folks downtown.

  I made it my business to inquire among all the numerous cults, breeds, and creeds of tower dwellers. The Tall Tower had attracted every breed of mystic to itself, from the Amish to the Zoroastrian. Those of a spiritual bent clung to the tower like iron dust to a steel magnet.

  I made it my business to inquire among these believers. Mankind had always been perplexed about God, and life’s meaning, and the soul, and immortality, and human purpose in the world. Most of us had it figured that the Tall Tower had resolved these issues through sheer mechanical engineering.

  However, I soon learned of other ways of thought. These mystical creeds had many good answers ready for my heartfelt spiritual questions. They all had different answers to offer me, though.

  After we’d discussed spiritual matters for a few hours, I might change the subject and offer them some kosher vegetables. Commonly they would buy.

  My questions about superanimals were already known to these wise folk. I learned about supercanines and superfelines. Many tenderhearted pet owners had desired to share their spiritual aspirations with their family companions. Attempts were made, and some results were found.

  That news encouraged me. I followed up on every lead. My ambitions were rewarded.

  I learned about superbirds from the Parsees. The Parsees, too, were Tall Tower folk. For centuries on end, these Parsees had been the smallest of mankind’s great old-time religions.

  It had long been the sacred practice of the Parsees to expose their dead to vultures atop a great “Tower of Silence.” Thus the affinity, for such was the ancient Parsee ritual.

  Most everyone in the tower felt a deep respect for the Parsees. For the tower people, the presence of the Parsees among them was a touching validation of their chosen way of life.

  Unfortunately, the sacred vultures of the Parsees had all died out from Earth’s climate change. As the earth’s stricken skies cleared up somewhat, the Parsees had struggled to revive—or rather to reinvent—their extinct, sacred, corpse-eating birds.

  With much cleverness and effort, the Parsees had bred themselves a superbuzzard. These superbirds nested within the Tall Tower.

  These artificial Parsee supercondors were the size of small aircraft. The ultrabuzzards had become a common sight, drifting over the American Southwest, where they followed the bison herds for the sake of the carrion. Splendid creatures. A poetic sight, and truly a gift to the world.

  But to tell the truth, their Parsee hearts just weren’t in this achievement. The superbird project didn’t satisfy their deeper aims. So these genteel, noble people, who had an unbroken spiritual tradition of four millennia, had reached the end of their trail. The only direction left for the Parsees was up. One by one, they were all becoming superhuman space-folk. Soon the earth would know their faith no more.

  That tale well nigh broke my heart. I might have joined the Parsees, if they accepted converts. But these vanishing folk were a proud and dignified people, and just weren’t having any of that. So, instead, I just sold them some aquaponic rice and some saffron.

  Next, I tried out my vegetable wares with the tower’s big-time grocers. Businessmen are a practical people, so they sold modern scientific foods made from bugs and algae. I convinced the grocers to stock old-fashioned vegetables as window dressings. I threw in some pretty flowers to settle that deal.

  These antique displays made the shoppers stop and gawk. I would drop by the stores in my fancy cowboy gear and publicly devour some vegetables, for the sake of the show. That was a pretty good business.

  In return for this service of mine, a grateful grocer informed me about superhorse feed: a high-performance fuel, purpose-brewed for racehorses.

  This sticky, salty goop had every nutrient that the peak-performing athlete horse could require. Levi commenced to dine on that substance and began to perk up right away. I also arranged some regular blood filtering and growth-hormone management. Results were gratifying. Old Levi’s mortal horseliness began to visibly slough right off him.

  The dingy hair of his dappled palomino hide fell out in clumps. A spry new superhorse fur grew in, thick and shiny. His gnarled yellow teeth turned white at the roots. His cracked hooves grew in hard and smooth.

  The Jewish folk grew somewhat afraid of Levi. So I had to rent Levi a fresh stall in an old metal foundry, where he could buck, kick, and crash into things without hurting anybody.

  Through these incidents, I came to know the men of steel who repaired and maintained the Tall Tower. These high-steel roughnecks faced a tough situation. I understood and I sympathized.

  Back when the tower was first built, it had been a prestigious undertaking to acquire millions of tons of high-performance construction steel. But in our own more modern day, we had so many abandoned cities that steel was a pestilence to us. We had to pay people to haul steel away.

  These roughnecks and I enjoyed a few drinking sessions at their favorite cantina. I convinced them that they should rethink their public image and take due pride in their historic steel.

  The best way to do that, said I, was to throw some big heritage banquets, where the people ate old-fashioned vegetables. These civic festivals would restore public appreciation of old-fashioned materials like steel. The steel men could ensure that their Tall Tower was maintained only with authentic metal.

  It took some doing to bring my idea to fruition. Nobody changes Rome in a day. Bit by bit, though, Tall Tower sentiment turned against newfangled rubbish like silicon nitride and foamed carbon nanotubes, and back to the real deal of steel.

  Every city is an open conspiracy between the politicians who run it and the technicians who build it and maintain it. A million tons of steel is a whole lot of city business. Once a city has a good steady business, the city’s people want to buy into that. Our cities shape us, and then we shape our cities. The people of Desconocido had hearts of steel. As a stranger, I always knew that about them, and after a while, they agreed with me.

  The locals took a shine to me after that episode, and I found myself mixing with the Tall Tower’s higher circles.

  The Tall Tower’s jet set traveled by private plane. The finer folk had always lived it up in the heights.

  Rich folks have all the human troubles, just richer ones. The Tall Tower itself had been built by some hugely rich guy—a computer lunatic, or so the story went.

  The original builder of the Tall Tower wasn’t much remembered in my own day—I’d never even heard his last name. But he’d been a typical old-timer, because he’d built himself a Vegas-style gambling casino way up the top of the tower. He had also built an air-conditioned toy train that could spiral up the tower’s sides, to reach this neon utopia at the peak.

  That brash casino was sorely doomed. Every day it suffered harsh blasts of raw, paint-peeling Arizona sunshine, unfiltered by the earth’s atmosphere. That ordeal commenced long before the local dawn at ground level, and it lasted till way after sunset.

  The casino had fried and gone bust, and the toy train followed suit. That little train had to run through killer jet-stream winds at nine kilometers. Up around twelve kilometers was a lightning-blasted “death zone.” Above that menace, the Tall Tower narrowed down into “the Neck.” Nobody lived “above the Neck” except surveillance spies and the military: grumpy, secretive folk.

  The tower folk had adapted to reality in their always colorful fashion. They tore down their broken old train. They found new means of traveling their tower. Drone taxis
and helicopters were the commonest. A spiderweb of cable cars was popular for a while. Pneumatic tubes like big blowpipes worked for some folks. Magnetic limousines ran silently up the steel girders. Big catapults were built, and by “big” I mean levers big enough to throw vacation houses due upward.

  On ceremonious occasions, the tower people visited their tower’s peak. Important tower rituals occurred up there—some public, some secret.

  To reach the peak, the pilgrims flew halfway to the summit, then took airtight pods through a creaky series of derricks, cable cars, and elevators, all owned by a variety of greedy interests, all of them with their hands out.

  This cumbersome arrangement struck me as decadent, frankly.

  Why not ride a horse to the top of the Tall Tower? It seemed to me that a horse and rider should be able to venture, from the ground level, all the way to the tower’s summit, through the main strength of man and beast.

  I believed that feat could be achieved. Of course it would be difficult. The brave horse would require an airtight space suit of some kind, with an oxygen helmet and an intravenous feed. The rider would have to guide his beast through the killer jet-stream winds at nine kilometers.

  Past twelve kilometers was the Neck, where the Tall Tower narrowed down in a near vacuum, with deadly cold and blinding solar radiation. The Neck was the tower’s dangerous choke point, full of defunct giant turbofans, lidar surveillance devices from forgotten national spy agencies, weather modification efforts that had never worked out—a historical junkyard.

  The final stage, beneath the tower’s peak, was rumored to be especially dreadful. Strange breeds of lightning chewed at that dry, icy steel: sprites, blue-devils, black ball-lightning clusters, and space-weather things with no human names.

  The worst obstacles the horse and I would confront would be human beings. Desperados lurked up in the stratospheric badlands. I’d heard thrilling tales of vacuum robberies and ambushes, with airless arrows flying hither and yon, and tomahawks, and Bowie knives. Nobody dared to venture to the tower’s summit without native escorts and uniformed guards.

  I knew that these Wild West tall tales must outpace the reality. But those who meet reality may not live to tell the truth.

  I decided to go through with this adventure because I thought it was best for my horse. In climbing to the peak of the Tall Tower, my horse would perform a superequine feat. Levi would become a famous horse, with a name that would live to posterity.

  That prospect made every kind of sense to me—and I even had a vision that stretched a ways beyond that.

  If the two of us survived the trip, maybe we could make a regular tour business out of a Tall Tower climb. We had once led tourist mule trains deep into a giant copper pit. Why not climb steel ledges to the roof of the world?

  This adventure was a spiritual quest. To carry it through, Levi and I needed a generous and sympathetic patron. Someone with deep pockets, who understood the idealistic nature of our mission.

  Since Fortune favors the bold, Lady Luck smiled on me and my horse. It turned out that I already knew my patroness. Louisa was from the Dakotas, just like me. We’d known each other as kids.

  The last time I’d seen my childhood friend Louisa, she’d been the prettiest girl in the wreck of a Dakota shale-oil boomtown. Even at age six, Louisa been a girl to sit on the swing with a simper, so some big boy would come along and push her higher. She always had her eye fixed toward the top.

  Nowadays, my childhood friend Louisa had become a rich widow. Louisa had done hair, scarlet lipstick, smoldering eyes, clattering heaps of turquoise jewelry, and a tailored jacket of the finest buckskin. The pretty girl was a pretty fine lady now, and she owned a big airtight spread six kilometers up.

  Inside, Louisa’s palace was full of aerospace curios—racing trophies, parasails, quadcopters, ornithopters, and suchlike. The rich businessman who’d made Louisa a lucky widow was one of those hard-driving, overachiever types. When his heart blew out, he left Louisa as a Tall Tower dame in fine standing, a famous patroness of local culture and the arts.

  I explained to her my aspirations for the horse.

  Well, no ten-year-old girl could have been more eager to see Levi. In short order, Louisa swanned into the derelict foundry where I’d hidden old Levi away. Levi had grown mighty restless. His superequine qualities were itching at the palomino. Levi was bigger and more muscular in every horsely dimension. He was glowing like a stove.

  I feared that Levi might take a big bloody nip out of Louisa, but Louisa had never lacked for dainty charm over man and beast. In short order that horse was eating right out of her hand.

  “I know just the artistic craftsman to design a space suit for this noble animal,” Louisa declared, tipping up the brim of her velvet sombrero. “For his great adventure, he’ll wear steel plate armor, airtight, like a deep-sea diver! Then he’ll charge right up my tower like a battle horse for knights and ladies, in the days of goddamned yore!”

  I allowed that it might be hard to fit a growing horse into airtight steel plates.

  “You can let me take care of the costuming,” said Louisa, having at my horse’s spiky hide with a steel-toothed currycomb. “Veterinary medicine is one of the fine arts! Let’s get this beast out of this rusty place and into a proper spa!”

  The kindly friendship of this tower lady made my special mission so easy—but then things got personal.

  “So when are you ascending into outer space?” she asked me, fitting the bridle bit between Levi’s big new tusky teeth.

  “I hadn’t thought that out yet,” I told her.

  “Well, you must be flying into outer space! That’s what people do, who come to the Tall Tower. Don’t you have your launch date set yet? I could help out with the waiting list.”

  “I hadn’t made up my mind about it.”

  “You are a mortal human being, Cody Jennings! You could slip on the soap in the shower! Then you’ll never turn extraterrestrial!”

  “Well, you see, ma’am, my special mission here is all about my horse.”

  “You are a hick,” Louisa decided, knitting her pretty eyebrows. “You’re a long, tall drink of water straight off the range. Life sure hasn’t changed you much, Cody. You’ve got a whole lot to learn about civilization.”

  All that might be true, but I didn’t much care for the lesson. “Well,” I countered, “why haven’t you gone off into outer space your own self, then, Louisa?”

  “I’m waiting here on Earth to find my one true love,” said Louisa. She commenced to lament about that subject, all through the length of the day and well into the scarlet evening.

  Louisa confessed that her search for true love was the meaning of her womanly existence. So she couldn’t possibly ascend up to outer space, and go all floaty and brainy and stellar and celibate, without first finding and uniting with her true earthly soul mate.

  Fine ladies do like the cowboys. It had been quite a while for me. So we had at it.

  At first, it was lovely. We had some nice fun, and we saw eye to eye about the horse business. We made good progress arranging the mission to the top of the Tall Tower.

  Slowly, it dawned on me that I wouldn’t be numero uno on Louisa’s checklist. A beauty queen already has a steady guy: the mirror.

  Levi and I found ourselves caught in Louisa’s stable. Levi was all cyborged up with his new monitoring systems, implants and sensors and drip feeds. I was like some bronze statue of a cowpoke, kept inside a glass jar.

  We had company, too. Louisa was a kindly soul, even after she got bored in the bedroom. The grand dame had a regular mule train of the beautiful people, traipsing in and out of her palace.

  I had to share the far end of the mahogany dining table with a character named Renato. Renato and I were manly rivals for our lady’s charms, so likely we should have knifed each other. However, we got to sharing the crystal wine decanter. We both saw the humor in our situation.

  I took a good liking to him, for Renato was a lively
, talented, clever character with a sideways eye. This artist could see certain things that I couldn’t see and do things that I couldn’t do. A man like that has a value.

  “We live in a unique period of art history,” Renato confided one day, as we killed some time drinking vintage whiskey in Louisa’s airtight study. This handsome trophy room was chock-full of fine leather-bound art books. Nobody had opened them in four hundred years.

  “Even in artistic prehistory,” said Renato, “prehuman beings made petroglyphs. Nowadays, we human beings remain on this planet as a thin and temporary remnant. Few in number, we dwindle away toward the stars. We humans persist between our remote past as primates and some unknowable state of transcendent being.”

  “So, Renato, what’s that all mean?” I said.

  He sipped his whiskey. “In terms of art practice, it’s not much different. Just cut out some studio space and get the work done. Ship it while you can still feel it. And never trust a critic.”

  I asked Renato what he’d been working on lately. I had learned that this was always a good question for artists.

  Renato needed to show me that personally. So we made a break for it, left Louisa’s fine mansion, and ran along, breathless and freezing, up a long, crooked set of corrugated metal stairs.

  We broke through the creaky airlock of his artist’s studio. Renato’s atelier was a rust-stained garage pod, where everything stank of paint, solder, plastic, and Renato’s unwashed clothes. Still, his studio had excellent lighting and a mighty fine view.

  “I have found a way to make an authentic human gesture, even in the present day,” said Renato. He sat on a stool and plugged in his work lamp and teakettle. “I do this by re-creating ancient works of performance art. These performances date to an era when every human was mortal, and there were no superhumans.”

  “Okay,” I said, coughing into my fist. That thin, cold air had brought up the dirt from the bottom of my lungs.