Hieroglyph

by Ed Finn

  At night, quantum launches rushed up the core of the Tall Tower. As we slept uneasily, stinking in our airtight suits, there would come a gut-wrenching sense of unnatural motion, of a space-time twisting speed that was so much more than any earthly speed—these awesome sensations rippled through my puckered skin and Levi’s horsehide, and I heard the horse bellow in the tainted, private atmosphere we shared.

  Sometimes, I would dismount. The suit seals worked, but we lost some good air by doing it. Still, I had to move to ease my body’s pain and stiffness, and also to set loose the emptied cylinders of oxygen, and lighten Levi’s load.

  We were lucky with the legendary winds of the heights. Those winds existed, and they direly wanted to blow us to hell, but we made haste, and the winds got weak on us faster than they could get vicious on us.

  After our windy ordeal, we plodded up into a strange, glaring, silent place, where the sun was round like a golden coin, and shone crazy bright, and the bare, scorched surfaces did odd tricks. Rust patinas that looked steel-solid popped off and chipped like fingernail polish. Electrostatic dust clung to us, then crept around on us in little waves of living grime, and leaped off us in eerie haste.

  Slow tremors ran through the great metal Tall Tower. Some of the shadowed cracks had dry ice in them, or some dirty, furry, frozen substance that wasn’t honest water. Things decayed up here—but they decayed through methods unknown to living organisms. An airless, spacey, mummified degeneration.

  There were metallic vibrations, and sometimes awful swaying rumbles, but no air to carry any audible noise. Every hut and pressured arch and citadel looked sun-scorched, gray, and entirely old.

  There were no warning signs above the Neck, where the hostiles dwelled. No sign of any life that a native of Earth’s surface would understand. But there were huge, archaic machineries, and there were death traps. At this height, even simple barbed wire could kill a man, for the barbs could rip his suit. There was barbed wire aplenty, in snaky tangles and coils.

  Once Levi snagged a thin tripwire, where a big tumbledown trap of concrete blocks was poised to crush us like bugs. But that trap had been set decades ago, and a grit of static dust had glued the deadly blocks together.

  There were mazes of fat white pipe, wrapped in shiny airtight tape. Slanted solar panels sat in tight nests of colored electrical wire. Sometimes I would see a gently steaming rivulet of icy sewage, in areas that should have no water at all. Machines were running up here, for I felt a rhythmic banging. Some of those bangs felt sinister and deliberate, like a drum-code conveyed by human hands.

  I would like to claim that it was bravery and skill that got us to the tower’s summit, but it was luck plus grim persistence. When we finally reached the peak, I was so weary, so chafed and stale in my own skin, that I had given up counting the oxygen bottles for our likely fatal trip down.

  Levi and I plodded up one last interior ramp to the tower’s flat summit. The Tall Tower was so huge that its great flat head was a desert plaza—an abandoned, airless ghost town.

  We knew we had reached the top through the simple fact that there was nothing left to climb. Just the blackened sky overhead, stars visible in daylight, and glowing satellites, chasing one another through the heavens, in their stately and abstract fashion.

  For a hard-breathing hour, Levi and I clomped around the airless streets of the long-dead casino, in a thin gritty film that seemed to be meteor dust. I was vaguely looking for some souvenir that I might loot, to prove to folks that I had really been up there.

  Then I noticed footprints. Naked, savage footprints, in that gritty dust, at the very summit of the Tall Tower.

  The horse and I followed that trail. I soon found many marks of toes and heels, even finger smears, of agile men running and falling, trampling one another in hasty steps.

  Then we came upon the savage ceremony. They were naked and ferocious, these young men covered head to foot in warpaint grease. In their sacred ceremony, their secret ritual performance, they were flinging their bare human bodies from the peak of the Tall Tower toward the distant earth so far below.

  These initiates of a mystical fraternity were casting themselves, headlong and gasping, into free fall toward our mother planet. They had built a BASE-jumping ramp, a skeletal tangle of cordage and lumber. They were scampering straight off that, naked but for odd little parachutes.

  These fierce, savage teens, in order to attain the awesome privilege of jumping into emptiness, had to run through a gauntlet of their fellows.

  These older, wiser brutes wore diving suits and homemade tanks like aqualungs. They also carried long canes, which they cheerfully deployed to beat the daylights out of the naked kids, whose bare ribs heaved convulsively at empty vacuum, before they flung themselves off in their frantic pursuit of the living sea of air far below.

  These barbarians of the airless heights, born and raised within sealed chambers and as pale as ghosts, were performing this strange feat, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

  This soulful agony was a noble performance, and I had spoiled the art of it, for the medicine men saw my intrusion, and they were furious. Instant confusion reigned. The remaining naked daredevils convulsed and fainted beneath their warpaint. The older warriors, those who wore the breathing masks, didn’t know whether to kill me right away, or to rescue their smothering fellows.

  It was Levi who proved my salvation. We had committed a grave offense, but not even the most reckless brave wanted to face this beast of mine, this uncanny rhinoceros clad all in steel.

  To these natives of the heights, a creature like Levi was a wonderment.

  The natives and I couldn’t speak to each other—for there was no air for us to speak with—but I made it clear to the savages by hand signs that, whatever fate we met, my horse and I would meet that fate together.

  Levi and I deserved punishment for the insult we had delivered—but to the eyes of these savages, our misdeed, so strange and unexpected to them, bore a mystical significance. Our intrusion was a sign.

  We had to leave the sacred ground of the tower in one of two directions: down or up. As our savage judges saw the situation, up would be all right, and down would be all right, too. As long as we left, and we never returned.

  The horse and I didn’t care to leap to our deaths by walking that BASE-jumping plank. I allowed that we would prefer to be flung together upward into outer space.

  It took some negotiations with the Astronaut—and his chief lieutenants Robur, Wernher, and Yuri—to settle this tangled situation.

  But, through the passage of time, I’d become accustomed to the ways of the tower people. I had found the knack to befriend them. Sometimes, I could make these people see certain things that they could not see about themselves.

  Levi and I chose to be thrown together into orbit. Let the Whip do its worst to us both, man and beast, I declared. Unlike most tower people, I was unafraid of the Whip. Because I knew that the Whip, this wicked device they all cherished so much, was really just some rickety contraption. They adored it, but it had weaknesses they never perceived.

  The Whip might well throw me into orbit. Or it might throw Levi, if Levi was cut into separate horsemeat chunks and thrown repeatedly. But the Whip had never been designed or built to launch a man riding a horse. No matter how fearsome they are, machines can only do what is physically possible.

  Superstition can decree whatever it wants: but physics is a science. An artwork can symbolize most anything—but engineering meets hard constraints.

  BEING WHO THEY WERE, the tower people set to work to build a Whip big enough for both man and horse. Taxes were raised, and everybody cheerfully collaborated. A construction program arose within the Tall Tower. Everyone got busy and was forward-looking again.

  I was solemnly sworn to become the sacrificial victim in the embrace of this spacey device. But I thought: Let them try. Let them build this instrument of my doom, if they think they can doom me. Me, and my horse.


  To tell the truth, I was willing enough to die for the Tall Tower. Many have died for otherworldly aspirations. To perish as an old man, who has known his own worldly experience, that is not such a big, dreadful thing. Billions of us men have done it, cheerful and unflinching. The fear of dying is way overblown.

  The people of the Tall Tower still work at that space program today. Like most great public works of mankind, it never seems to conclude. However, most everybody inside the tower has some cut of that action. The new prosperity has been spun off and spread around, with all the cunning of the locals.

  While they plot and scheme and build their bigger, grander Whip, their older Whip, the original one, no longer works at all. They had to dismantle it to prepare for something grander, and I can’t say it’s much missed. The human race commonly substitutes big dreams for actual, existent engineering. Luckily, the tower people are long accustomed to overlooking the obvious.

  I am pretty well known in the Tall Tower nowadays, although I am merely a white-haired old figurehead. It’s my famous horse who is truly adored by the tower’s people. Everyone is engrossed by this mighty, public task of lofting Levi into orbit—the first horse ever launched to outer space.

  Being a mute beast of the earth, Levi doesn’t make a fuss about it. This ageless beast has sired colts, the spindly-legged creatures of futurity, who are stabled far aloft in their vacuum stables. If my horse could write as I do, I think he would announce his satisfaction.

  Clearly, this situation can’t last forever. I know that, and you know that. But let’s face it: nothing lasts forever, no matter how big it is. A man and a horse have to act within their own span of days. If not us, whom? If not now, when?

  Makc/Shutterstock, Inc.

  SADDLING THE FUTURE—Ron Broglio

  Ron Broglio, a scholar of literature and sustainability at Arizona State University, responds to “Tall Tower” in the context of spirituality and human-animal relationships at hieroglyph.asu.edu/cowboy-tower.

  FORUM DISCUSSION—Contemporary Skyscraper Construction

  Bruce Sterling, Neal Stephenson, and other Hieroglyph community members search for the ideal location for the Tall Tower at hieroglyph.asu.edu/cowboy-tower.

  SCIENCE AND SCIENCE FICTION: AN INTERVIEW WITH PAUL DAVIES

  Ed Finn sat down to discuss Project Hieroglyph with physicist and cosmologist Paul Davies, director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science in Arizona State University.

  EF: I’m going to start with a very simple question: why do you write books?

  PD: As a much younger man I came in for a lot of criticism from my peers. The feeling was that if you were writing what we might today call a popular book as opposed to textbook, that this somehow meant that you couldn’t be taken seriously as a scientist. Indeed, one colleague of mine said for every book you write, you should subtract ten from your journal publication list. That was the feeling in those days.

  Why did I do it? I think partly because I discovered quite unexpectedly that I had a talent for communicating in plain language, using analogies, mathematics, and so on, quite advanced and subtle concepts in physics in particular. People seemed to like it when I did it, and there’s nothing like having an appreciative audience out there to make you carry on.

  I’m such a passionate scientist. I find science so deeply exciting and important and significant that I want to tell people the good news. When I talk to nonscientists, then I realize that they have no idea about things like quantum reality or the Higgs boson or what happened before the big bang or any of these sorts of really important things or even stuff about the nature of time that we’ve known for a hundred years.

  They’re missing out on this vast universe of excitement. I just want to share this, my own sense of excitement, and not just excitement of science, but its significance for what it means to be human and what it means to be living in this universe. A bit of a sort of missionary zeal. Then it all changed in the 1980s, partly because physics, which is really my discipline, was beginning to wither.

  Students found it hard. They found it too abstract. Girls seemed to hate it. The whole subject was really in decline. Universities began to wake up to the fact that if they had someone writing really good, exciting popular physics books that that might improve student recruitment. Then Stephen Hawking wrote his famous book, A Brief History of Time, reaching parts of the reading public that the rest of us had been unable to reach.

  Suddenly it was okay to write popular books. Then all my colleagues began doing it. Now I think it’s almost part of the job description. It’s obviously not obligatory, and not everybody can do it or do it well. The days when it was frowned upon are long gone, and I’m thankful for that. Although I think there are probably rather too many popular science books on the market at the moment.

  EF: Would you say that’s true primarily in physics or do you also see that happening in other scientific disciplines? Is there now a broader expectation of this kind of public communication?

  PD: Biology has really stolen a march on physics. When I was first embarking on this, there weren’t very many people doing popular science. Most of those were from physics or cosmology backgrounds. It’s easy to talk about astronomy and cosmology because you can discuss objects that are out there like stars and black holes. Biology was rather the poor relation. That changed, perhaps because of Richard Dawkins’s books. He writes very well. He really did popularize biology.

  My first thought when I began to read Richard’s books—which I think he just writes beautifully and I enjoy them immensely—my feeling was well, what’s new? This is about Darwin’s theory of evolution, it’s 150 years old. [Laughing] Why is he writing about this stuff? It’s old hat isn’t it? But of course I guess it’s anything but old hat. Now when you look at lists of popular science books, they tend to be dominated by biology.

  Biologists have an advantage and a disadvantage. The advantage is that we can all imagine certain animals and plants. The concept isn’t very abstract. The disadvantage is that at the molecular level it’s so incredibly complex, and everything you want to talk about has some horrible unpronounceable name. [Laughing] It’s only in recent years that they’re coming around to doing what the physicists have long done [with naming]. For example, black holes. That’s a pretty pithy explanation. In the beginning they used to be called totally gravitationally imploded stars or something.

  Biologists now talk about things like junk DNA or they give genes funny names like hedgehog and NANOG. I think they’ve learned that if you’re trying to communicate something, it really does pay to have some pithy acronym or description.

  EF: Names have a lot of power, of course. So many names also come prepackaged with these metaphors—the black hole is a great example. It conveys very powerfully this particular image of what the thing is. There are so many popular science books out on the market now. What do you see as your responsibilities as a public communicator of science? How does one do it well?

  PD: Don’t pretend that doing science is ultimately for making money. There is this horrible trend among people who are trying to popularize science: Why are we looking for the Higgs boson? Well, maybe in a hundred years somebody will make a buck out of this. That’s not why we’re doing it. The reason that we do basic science is to understand how the universe works, and what our place is within the universe. It’s a noble quest.

  Not something you’re going to devote 50 percent of the GDP to, but some small fraction of the GDP is spent basically exploring how the universe is put together, what the underlying laws are, and how it began, and how it’s going to end. All these things are just as important as—well, for previous generations were the great religious questions. People built the medieval cathedrals in Europe. I suppose there were a few people who said, “Well, what is this doing for the GDP? Where is the productivity in this, all these resources?”

  EF: Those people probably got their heads cut off.

  PD: That’s right. They were doing
it because this was a great, collective human venture for trying to understand our place in nature. It was uplifting. It was giving people a sense of belonging and purpose. Science is exactly the same. It doesn’t cost as much as the medieval cathedrals to do our type of science. I think science isn’t just entertaining; it is part of what it means to be human.

  If science leads to some practical application, that’s a bonus. The prime reason that we’re doing basic science—not applied science but basic science—is to probe the secrets of nature, to figure it all out. And I think that’s a wonderful thing to do. I think authors who communicate that sense of wonder—that we’re doing it, not because we’re trying to invent a better type of can opener, or something—that this really is part of the human adventure! That’s what goes over well.

  What doesn’t go over so well, and my literary agent cautioned me against it right at the outset, is to take a subject and just give a sort of rundown of it, a survey of the latest thinking about data mining or something. That isn’t going to do too well. If it’s something like chaos theory completely transforms the way that we understand the relationship between cause and effect, that’s pretty deep. Quantum reality shows there may be parallel worlds. That is attention grabbing.

  There’s got to be something in it that—and this touches on science fiction—takes us outside of our daily world into another realm; some people might say an Alice in Wonderland realm of weird and wonderful concepts. Things that are counterintuitive, defy common sense, really lie outside the scope of everyday experience. Yet we can still understand them. That’s the magic of the human mind. We can go into territory where our imagination and our common sense completely desert us. And yet we can still make sense of it. Science has the power to reveal how the world works, even in areas where we could never guess it just by looking.

  EF: I want to draw out two things that you just mentioned. First, the cathedral metaphor, which I think is very apt. Second, the sense of wonder. What I love about the idea of cathedrals is that they were literally building an architecture of the universe. It was a way to make sense of the world by putting a frame around it.