Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

“Reviving a work of performance is like thawing a frog out of ice,” Renato told me. “If it jumps, then it’s still alive.”

  “I get it,” I told him. “That’s just like playing an old campfire song.” Some songs were mighty old, yet still mighty sad.

  Renato opened a paper volume and showed me the archival description of his work of performance art. This was written in some lost European language that wasn’t even English.

  “What is a ‘Polaroid camera’?” I asked.

  “That was my own question, too,” said Renato, closing the book. “Those devices were extinct machines from a long-lost media technology. As part of my art practice, I re-created a working replica of a Polaroid camera.” Renato opened a cabinet with a key from his work pants.

  Renato pointed his strange device at me. He pressed its trigger. A whirring noise came, and a thin slice of plastic slid out. It was white and blank. Renato shook it around and slapped it.

  Then a picture blossomed out of it, like a colorful bruise under unbroken skin. This was a “photo-graph” of me. In the picture, I looked appropriately surprised.

  “Can I keep this?” I said.

  “Everybody asks that!” Renato smiled. “Of course you can keep it, my friend! I am an artist, and such is my gift!” He handed me the machine. “Here, try it yourself.”

  I pressed the red tab with my finger. The camera jumped. The blank slab of photo-graph came out.

  My photo-graph was crooked and cluttered, but it was a living piece of reality. I looked at the picture, and looked at the scene I had photo-graphed, and then I looked at the picture again.

  Who could ever think up such an amazing achievement? Humanity was the damnedest thing ever. “Your picture art is tremendous, Renato! I stand in awe.”

  “The camera is merely a technical instrument,” said Renato. “Performance art is of a different order of experience.”

  “It is?”

  Renato handed me a packet made of paper. The packet had a small poster stuck on it, with some old-time political leader, and a slogan in a dead language.

  I was bewildered by this time, there being so many fine things in the art world that I knew nothing about.

  “This was once called a ‘mailing envelope,’ ” said Renato. “People wrote their news on sheets of paper, with ink. Then they put their paper messages in these envelopes and sealed them. They wrote an address on the envelope and bought this special little emblem from a government. With this stamp attached, these mailing envelopes would be physically carried, by uniformed officials, anywhere on this planet!”

  I had never imagined such a thing. It was even more amazing than the photo-graph.

  “Think of those vast networks of moving paper!” Renato preached. “Billions of sealed letters carried from sender to receiver! The postal systems lasted for centuries, crossing huge expanses of space and time. That is history, and it’s all entirely true.”

  “I am a lucky man to see this,” I said. I had always thought that the Tall Tower was the grandest thing mankind had ever built—but now I realized that we were capable of other great things.

  Renato nodded at my compliment. “The art performance is as follows. Find a woman you might love, but never will love. Take her picture with the Polaroid camera. Before the image can develop, put the picture inside the envelope. Then seal the letter. Never send the letter to anyone.”

  For some dark time, I thought hard about this strange ritual. There was something deep, and holy, and even frightening about this ancient thing Renato had revealed to me. This performance art was more disturbing, in its own way, than the Parsees and their flesh-eating condors.

  There was something entirely Tall Tower about the situation in which I had found myself. This ritual was trying to speak to me. I stood upon the brink of understanding.

  Testing myself, I took up my photo-graph, and I slid it inside the mailing envelope. These two objects fit together perfectly. The two long-lost things, these two long-dead technologies, had been built for each other. They would never again be united.

  I looked at what I had done, held it in my own hand, and I understood performance art. I felt it in the sudden, painful, wordless way that a horse might feel a stick.

  Renato handed me the camera. “My friend, I have performed this work of art. You should perform it, too.”

  So, through this help from a generous colleague, I became a performance artist. The performance worked, too. It worked just as well as it had ever worked for any human being.

  MY TRIP TO THE peak with Levi became our act of performance art.

  After declaring myself to be an artist, I was able to advance toward my goal. Step by step, I was able to map a route, and gather supplies, and create equipment. Those were engineering problems—but if I’d called myself an engineer, the tower people would have forbidden me to try my feat, and maybe even jailed me. Their politics required me to be artful. Art was good for people problems.

  The people of the Tall Tower were a subtle, complex, and long-established people. They were the citizens of a great monument, and the occupants of a great religious center. Therefore, they were a perverse people.

  They never told me everything they knew. They never meant everything that they said. They played fast and loose with things that shouldn’t be mocked. They made me promises that they never meant to keep.

  Some of them despised me. They wanted me to fail. They meant me harm. My worst enemies within the Tall Tower were people like myself.

  The worst people were interlopers like me, invaders like me, outsider people and wilderness people. These were people in the tower, but not of the tower.

  Up above the Neck, where the Tall Tower grew slender, but somewhat below the top, where the tower spread out in its crown—the tower had a wilderness.

  This distant zone of the tower was so icy and airless and hateful to human flesh that it had never pleased anybody. Those steely badlands had every disadvantage that the tower offered, and none of its joy or its glamour.

  It was deathly cold up there, airless, heavily radiated, and poorly maintained. It was always in motion, too. Up above the Neck, the tower swayed.

  Bad men fled up there, because they could hide and not be apprehended. Hidden, yet at a great height, they could see things they were not meant to see—they were eagle-eyed, these predatory men, the mountain bandits.

  Other men went up there because they were ordered to restore control. Rugged men, tough men, the alpine soldiers.

  Time passed, as is its habit. The men of the Tall Tower’s heights, those bandits and soldiers, they could not remain adversaries. The bandit who turns his coat becomes a thief-catcher. The soldier who disgraces his uniform becomes a warlord. Once they learn that they are feared by other men, they soon find their kinship and commonality.

  Women of bad intent went up there to seek evil men. Evil children were born.

  Those natives of the great heights cared nothing for what seemed good or bad by the standards of those below. They were a naked, rude, and simple people. Their bare steel homeland was poor and miserable, deprived of even the earth’s most basic riches, of water, air, and topsoil.

  Somebody had made them suffer. So somebody had to pay.

  The more subtle and courtly and complex people of the Tall Tower—they were afraid of those few wolfish predators who dwelled in the steel hinterlands high above their heads. But time passed, and they found themselves forced to pay the ones they feared. Mostly, the peaceful people paid to be left alone. This is the worst sort of payment, because it guarantees outlaws paid to stay outlaws.

  As more time passed, the tower people created social customs from their social problems. They paid these wicked people to do certain awful things that they themselves secretly wanted done. Most of those human crimes had very old human names.

  But some crimes were new crimes. The biggest had to do with a great device built within the structure of the tower. This was a working space-launch machine, but of an old-fashioned
, merely human sort. People called this tower machine “the Whip.”

  The Whip was a large and powerful contraption, installed into the tower well above the Neck. The Whip was like the free-spinning reel in a tall fishing rod.

  This Whip had a strong fishline, plus geared wheels and counterweights. The Whip was a human aerospace technology, built at great expense.

  The Whip was designed to claw up a small burden from the surface of the earth. Any modest object with the heft and the shape of a barrel, or a packing crate, or maybe an atomic bomb.

  Then it would reel that burden up at sudden crazy speed and “crack the Whip,” just toss its payload into the very heavens, at a lashing, supersonic speed.

  If this flung device was a rocket, it would ignite and fly into orbit. If that rocket carried steel nails aboard, that rocket could burst.

  A rocket full of orbiting nails was a cruel and deadly thing. A bucket full of steel nails, spreading out as stinging space junk, was a long-lived, ever-spreading nuisance that even the Ascended Masters would fear.

  What man can’t fear a man who doesn’t fear to make the gods afraid?

  The people of the Tall Tower direly feared the Whip. They were also immensely proud about it. They respected and adored anyone who dared to possess it. Their oppressor was always one of themselves—the underworld tyrant of their steely overworld.

  There had been many of these tyrants in the Tall Tower. These bold desperados wore a crown of blood. Every gangster king had a fancy name and an epithet, the Tall Tower’s heartfelt folk poetry. The Head of All Heads, the Flying Ace, the Signor of the Skies, the Man of Steel, the Chief Engineer, maybe you catch my drift.

  Nobody bluntly admitted that this dark business was the state of affairs within the Tall Tower. This was no simple matter of bad engineering. This was a darkly human, civilized complication. Everybody was implicated. Nobody had clean hands.

  Rather than decry the situation, the victims wrote ironic, knowing songs about their plight. Every clean and simple solution to this grave problem had already been tried, and had failed. Repeatedly.

  Once every other generation, some stout-hearted group of younger folk would rebel, and unify, and march to the heights, and depose the bloody tyrant at some cost in their own blood.

  Once these adventurers were up there themselves, though, and in command of the heights, they would realize that they themselves now held the Whip over other people. The Whip was the Tall Tower’s noblest human achievement. Nobody ever dismantled the Whip.

  To reach the Tall Tower’s summit, and to complete our quest, Levi and I had to gallop through these adversaries. They were many, while Levi and I were just a man and a horse.

  I tried to beg an audience with the famous bandit chief who held the Whip. This brigand was called “the Astronaut.” To grant this wicked man his due, the Astronaut was a man of supreme physical courage.

  The Astronaut had climbed into a crude rocket attached to the Whip. The Whip had flung the Astronaut into orbit around Earth. So the Astronaut had seen outer space personally. He had even survived the descent back to earthly soil. The Astronaut had ventured into outer space and yet remained a human being.

  This stunning feat sure made my sideshow with my horse look pretty small. The Astronaut had ridden a rocket into orbit, while I was trying to climb the Tall Tower by riding a horse. My request was modest—but the Astronaut was jealous about his prestige. He refused to hear from me. I was beneath his notice.

  Mankind can build a Great Thing. Sometimes we do it. But then we have to live with the consequences of greatness. What does a Great Thing tell us about ourselves? Not that we are great, but that our Great Things are so rare, and so much abused. So many in our dreams, so few to loom like towers in the light of day.

  After learning of this dark and decadent business, in its many secret scraps and sinful hints, and in taking that bad news to heart, I realized I was becoming a Tall Tower man. Through my intimacy with them, I was joining their civilization. I had come to think, feel, and live just as they did. Since I saw so much of this darkness within myself, I even came to love them for it.

  Yet I persisted in my desire to ride to the top of the Tall Tower. This quest was about the union of me and my horse—and Levi was rarin’ to go.

  Ever the good listener to my troubles, the superequine horse had become all a horse could be, and more. Levi had become a living force of supernature. If I had my human doubts and fears, Levi had none of those.

  To see Levi in his present state was to realize the potential of warm blood and a beating heart. Levi was noble. He was magnificent.

  Having failed at my all-too-human problems, I let Levi take the lead for both of us. Levi was ready for adventure. He was eager. He was a great beast rearing and tramping in a suit of shining steel.

  When we embarked for the top of the Tall Tower, Levi and I, we had a pretty good crowd to cheer us onward and upward.

  Levi made no fine departing speech to the people, so neither did I. Anyway, I was all sealed up, just like him, in a homemade space suit. Levi, in his overlapping steel plates sealed with rubber rings, was every bit as big as a steel rhinoceros.

  We cantered upward that glorious first day, with gangs of happy kids jumping and yelling at us, and my dear local friends placing some wily bets against my survival.

  We left the lower city streets and commenced to climb.

  There were lots of streets, then fewer streets, then more and more vacant air.

  By sunset, we were up into a neighborhood of great refinement. In this cooler, cleaner air, the tower was graced with many fine villas and chalets. Every national tradition of architecture had conjoined up here and reached some final and humane agreement. These were the places of refined dwelling within mankind’s last great human monument. They possessed taste and elegance.

  I reached my chosen base camp at the estate of an obliging lady friend. I spent a day repairing leaks and tending to a blistered sore on Levi’s fetlock. This was a marathon, and the hardest part was ahead of us.

  On the third day, we climbed relentlessly, and the human habitations dwindled away beneath us. We found ourselves in an area of bared machinery, strangely overgrown with thriving alpine weeds. These hardy plants of the Rocky Mountains had been brought to the tower by the dung of migrating birds.

  By the evening of day four, we had climbed well above the tower’s snowline. Air was gently hissing through a dozen holes in our suits.

  I made lavish use of an epoxy I’d brought. It cured without air, but it cured up mighty stiff. With every kilometer of height that we gained, Levi and I lost flexibility. His noble shining armor looked as patched as his palomino hide.

  In these sparser surroundings, we still saw rich folks living in their pressure pods, waving a greeting from behind their exclusive plate glass.

  For a few kilometers, some roughneck steel men kept us company in their sealed tractor. Sometimes a drone airplane would putter by with a pennant for us, some wisecrack from a skeptic, or a mash note from a lady fan.

  After that, our climb got hard and lonely. Most people just plain gave up at these heights. Living without air is far worse than living without water, while the lack of water will destroy all living things.

  As my horse and I gallantly ventured on, I could see all kinds of strange, haphazard methods and inventions. Big rubber bubbles. Hairy garages like soda-straw haystacks. Wheeled caravans that retreated downward to suck up fresh air and then returned to the heights. Cryogenic air conditioners that froze oxygen in steel pails of air, then reeled that air up all spiderlike, so that folks could somehow breathe.

  There were lichen shelters, and barnacle shelters, that sucked in traces of air through a foamy lacquer and wouldn’t let the air back out. These dogged human settlers of vacuum weren’t beaten yet. After two hundred years of the tower’s existence, the great steel aerial desert still had its die-hards. Every once in a great distance, tucked into some steel niche, I would see a pale, sunles
s, bearded, crazy face at a porthole . . .

  I, too, found myself engaged in fateful struggle with my own overlarge ambitions.

  My horse and I, intimately joined at the saddle, had become two bloated bubbles of imperiled air. A swift death by freezing suffocation surrounded our every step. Our glassy helmets steamed up with our labored breathing.

  With an effort, I could pull my bare hand out of my space-suit sleeve, squinch it down, and scratch the dew off my faceplate. So I could see to guide the horse—but then, frost formed all over my helmet. This was my human warmth and moisture, adhering to me.

  Frosted up as we were, we were hard put to see the obstacles—even those directly in front of Levi’s big airtight rubber horseshoes.

  I had made a paper map to the heights, based on the best advice from past explorers. At kilometer six, a cruel gust of wind caught my map and bore it off like a tumbleweed.

  Then I had to depend on Levi’s instincts. To give him his due praise, the superequine horse was bold and tireless. Fed intravenously while huffing pure oxygen, Levi climbed as deftly as a mountain goat.

  I could tell from the airtight reek of his heavy sweat that the beast was suffering, yet Levi understood our goal. If I died in his saddle, he would carry my corpse to the heights.

  The broken guardrails, the half-collapsing ramps, the piles of defunct machinery, the dizzying aerial vistas of desert—they didn’t daunt my horse. Iron stairs, he took two at a time. Burdened though he was by his steel armor, he didn’t hesitate to jump.

  Sometimes, when rounding some desolate iron corner, we would catch a vista from the awesome height we had achieved. We saw the curvature of the earth, and layers of haze in the atmosphere. We saw aircraft flying below us, small and bright as fireflies, and we saw the Tall Tower’s long gray pennant clouds, wreathing and writhing in the tower’s mighty slipstream.

  The homely features of the planet’s surface had gone all abstract with our distance. Homes were mere dots, roads were sore red scratches, gullies were crooked little veins, everything gone remote in the blended shades of planetary hues, olive, rust, dusty hazes.