Vellum

by Hal Duncan

  And though we know that when this moment ends there will, without a shadow of doubt—for in the fierce light of this summer noon there are no shadows, or at least only the smallest ones under our padding feet—although we know that there will come a doom to shatter this tranquillity—because this is the way it happens, always in existence, or forever in eternity—we know also that somewhere, somewhen, Tammuz escapes. From every time, from every tomb, Tammuz escapes. But still we weep for him; we weep for the lost deus of Sumer as we weep for all the lost days of our summers.

  And still he runs, he leaps, he bounds, still, caught in the moment and unbound in the myth, through the fields of lost days, far from the road of all dust, and down the river of crows and kings, the river of the voices and the visions of the living and the dead, and all around him grow the buds and the rushes, and the grass and the bushes and the trees, and the poppies.

  Errata

  The Strazza Ce La Daedalii

  I step out of the hostelry into the late-morning light of the Strazza Ce La Daedalii—as I’ve taken to calling it, shamelessly cobbling together the morphemes of three or four different languages that I have learned in my travels, christening it with this hybrid, invented phrase simply because I find it descriptive in a pleasantly Latin manner, with cadences more liquid, more suited to this waterfall civilization. I step out onto the marble flagstones of a plaza of kafe and restoranti with four sets of grand stairs: two run downward from the balustraded outer edge, from the northeast and the northwest corners, running parallel to the precipitous wall and meeting at a small landing down below only to turn and part again, and carry on down to the southeast and the southwest corners of another plaza; the other two sets of stairs echo the plaza on the lower level, running upward along the stone that backs the plaza at its southern wall, to a small landing where they turn and carry on up. The Strazza Ce La Daedalii goes on in this manner, down and up, for quite some way, plaza upon plaza upon plaza, its upper heights and lower depths hidden in mist or in the simple haze of atmosphere diffusing the light in watery blue until eventually, in the distance, even with binoculars, it is impossible to distinguish start or end. A street in strata, plaza after plaza, I christen it a strazza. I have no idea what the natives would have called it, unable as I am to read their alphabet of squicks and wheedles.

  Laying my espresso down on the red-and-white checkwork of waxed tablecloth, on one of the tables of the rustic little kafe that I have chosen to make my room in, while I try to get my latest project off the ground, so to speak, I wander out onto the flagstones to examine my finished handiwork.

  It seems I am working in a long tradition here; from what I can gather from the glossy pictures in the tourist shops, I’m not the first by any means to choose this Jacob’s Ladder staircase street as launching ground. Old black-and-white photographs, glossy color snapshots, charcoal sketches, oil paintings, blueprints—the tourist books show centuries of fantastic contraptions designed by some would-be Daedalus in his doodling mind and built with defiant gusto. I imagine the crowds gathering at the sides of the plazas, thronging the steps above and below, peering from balconies and shuttered windows, old men smoking pipes and shaking their heads, young girls swooning over the dashing, daring, death-defying and clearly demented aviator, a young lad declaring to his mother that one day he too will try—no matter what the whole of history tells them—at least try to touch the sky.

  As bounded as they were, these people, by the geography of the Rift, they must have dreamed of flight since the first day a caveman watched an eagle soaring down below, spiraling upward on the currents of air or swooping down to catch its prey. How could they not look at the birds and realize that if they themselves could just step out of the slanted plane of their existence it would be a revolution more momentous in an instant, more encompassing, than the discovery of fire? Freedom to travel in the vertical, to soar past all those towns and villages between their own backwater and the fabled, distant cities, to laugh at the tollbooths and the taxes taken by gatekeeper hamlets with no industry of their own, only the good fortune to be in the path of trade. Freedom to see for themselves what they had only heard of on the grapevine chain of word of mouth, tales told by travelers to travelers in a game of Chinese Whispers, rumors of the Edge, so far above, or of the Vale below, mythologized by their distance and by their difference, these legendary, fantastic lands, impossibly, unbelievably…flat.

  And so, Daedalus after Daedalus, in this small area of the Rift, at least, they all came here, romantic fools funded by merchants with a vision of a liberated world, and tried to fly.

  The plaza above has a monument to them all, a great, twisted bronze of vanes and gears, batwing-like things projecting upward from the impacted mass of harness, with a human form thrown out and up, arms reaching up toward the sky as if ejecting from the wreckage, as if even in the implosion of the machine collapsing, crushing itself into the stone beneath him, the soul of the pilot is exploding out of it, a butterfly born from a chrysalis of confused copper and iron. As in my own far-distant world, most of the flawed designs of flying machines seem to have taken their form from features in the animal world, feathered and flapping, articulated artifices of thin tissue and extending joints, things pedaled with hands or feet, hydraulic pistons amplifying muscle movements over wingspans of twenty feet or more, dead weights that must have plummeted or tender things that could have glided out into the air to gasps and cheers until, quite suddenly, some terrible tear would open in it and the screams and tears would start as the grand dream of the latest Daedalus fell apart.

  There are a few pictures in the books of men or women who took off and soared and swooped, those in the simplest, gliding airfoils who sailed out into the skies and circled down until they disappeared beneath the clouds, unable to capture, somehow, the same secret currents of air used by the birds to lift them back up to their homes. One or two returned on foot, after a decade or so; you see their gray-haired, grizzled forms in pictures beside their grinning, younger selves, gripping not gears but walking sticks. They at least fared better than the ballooners who, to a man, drifted away on some inexorable current never to be seen again; even the most powerful dirigibles, if my interpretation of the pictures is correct, were unable to overcome the powerful downdrafts and cross-streams diagrammed by aged aviators, aeronauticists and meteorologists alike. Had it been otherwise, my own flying machine might well have taken a more sensible form.

  Leonardo’s Laughter

  I slip my feet into the stirrups, buckle the straps and pull them tight, clamp metal clasps and click my legs into the light, limbed frame of exoskeleton. It’s made of a material—synthe, they called it, in the books of the world where it belongs—unknown in all the Rift—in all the Rift I’ve visited, at least—and I’m not even sure if it’s a plastic or a metal. It shines like chrome, and is as sleekly solid, shining silvery in the early-morning sun, but the whole complex artifact weighs less than a handful of sand and it would blow away in the wind as easily if it weren’t tethered to the iron grids of manhole covers that dot the marble flagstones of the strazza here and there. It makes aluminum seem leaden and, if it’s a metal at all, I think, then it’s an alloy, of adamantium and cavorite, as strong as one, as gravity-defying as the other. It took me centuries to learn to work the stuff, and I’m lucky that I brought a salvaged store of this synthe with me, on my long, diagonal journey down into the Rift, as much as the trundling rig could carry.

  As I pull up the folded pinions to slip my arms into the harness, I glance over at my last vehicle, parked on the road that leads out of the strazza, to the east, the hulking flatbed loaded, on which the ancient Winnebago sits engulfed in the canopies of its tent extensions, the wooden porch I built myself, the lean-to. And the huge five-fingered waldo-device yoked to it like an infant giant’s hand playing the role of oxen. If there’d been anybody in this world to see it when I rolled into town, this crazy gypsy nomad whose very caravan was a circus freak, I wonder what they
would have made of me. I have to admit there is a part of me that’s grown to revel in the very outlandishness of the machinery I’ve accreted in my journey on the road of all dust, salvaged from this world or that and retrofitted to my own ends. I’ll be a little sad to leave the rig and the absurd crawling contraption that’s pulled it down three centuries of mountain road and track; but the endless zigzag of my journey into the Rift is drawing me further and further from the path I want to go, I’m far enough off course as is, and if I want to carry on along the road mapped out for me in the Book, I’m going to have to sacrifice the comforts of my lumbering mobile home for something more…spectacular.

  I snap the buckle of the flying machine’s belt around my waist and release the bolts that hold the chest-grapple open; it swings slowly shut around my sides, soft and padded like a child’s fingers closing round a baseball, but as solid as an extra set of ribs. The support latches swing out from under my armpits and lock into place above my shoulders, in the pack of metal muscle, processing power and air tanks out of which the wings extend above my head, still folded. I swivel the breastplate down from above and clip it, strap it, latch it at my waist—I couldn’t resist the urge to mold it in a shape of shining pectorals, like the armor of an ancient Greek or Roman, or of an angel in the images of my homeworld. It sits out from my chest a little—giving the whole exoskeletal suit an even more seraphic look—because I’ve built a small compartment into it; I crouch down to pick up the Book, slip it into the opening at the right-hand side and clip the door closed. This is the only thing I’m taking with me. I bring the goggles down over my eyes, the oxygen mask up over my mouth. I have no idea of the environment out there in the blue skies beyond the Rift—I am probably already far enough down that the sheer weight of the air above should crush me, so the laws of physics clearly are little more than rules of thumb in this world, but I’m not taking any chances.

  Lastly, finally, I slip my hands into the wired and articulated gauntlets hanging from the belt, unhook them and tighten them round the wrists, make sure that all the jacks and plugs are tight and firm, then flick the on switch at my belt that tells this mad contraption that I’m ready, to transmit the motions of my fingers along the long wires that run up to my shoulders where, as I step forward, spreading my arms in an unnecessary but unconscious gesture, and splaying my fingers wide and open, palm-down, thirty feet of silvery wings spread out above me and behind me and I feel the air moving under them, the way the motion of every finger catches it, the lift, and all I have to do is bat my fingers and the pinions of the waldo wings bat with them, and my feet lift from the ground, and I kick the release and all my tethers fall away and suddenly I’m rising.

  And the Strazza Ce La Daedalii rings with my laughter as I rise into the skies of the Vellum, with my laughter and the laughter of every demented dreamer of the Rift, all those failed and falling aviators whose names I’ll never know, those Leonardos of this corner of eternity. I could have called this place the Strazza Ce La Icarii, for all those failures, but that would have been…a paucity of commitment that insulted every one of them. Daedalus flew and so did every one of them who laughed in the face of old men with their pipes, shaking their heads.

  I rise on their laughter, their whooping joy the air beneath the fingers of my wings. I don’t care who’s watching me, the ghosts of this abandoned world from their balconies, or angels from their windows in the sky.

  I fly.

  six

  THE PASSION OF EVERY THOMAS

  The Crucified Shepherd

  She finds him in the church, sitting on one of the wooden pews with a plastic bag between his legs; it clinks as he shifts position. This is the last place she would have expected to find him but she supposes that’s part of the reason he’s there. It’s the last place she would expect to find him. He glances at her sideways, clocking her approach, and reaches into the bag to pull out a beer bottle. He doesn’t look at her as he cracks the cap off on the pew in front. A priest starts toward them from a door over to the right behind the altar; Finnan just mutters something under his breath and the man stops, turns around and heads back out the door.

  “I didn’t think you believed in any of this shit,” she says.

  “I don’t,” he says. “But it’s a nice idea, though, eh, Phree? Redemption.”

  “That’s not what you used to say.”

  “No? What did I used to say, then?”

  “‘I’ll die for me own bloody sins, thank you very much,’” she says, imitating him.

  “Aye,” he says. “I probably will. That’s a shite accent, by the way.”

  She slides into the pew beside him.

  There are no bruises on him, from what she can see, but he’s pale and sick-looking. Actually he’s almost white, and when she reaches over to touch his cheek—he flinches, looks away—it’s cold, like marble.

  “What happened to you?” she says.

  “Angel took me heart, he did. Reached in and plucked it out with his fingers. Oh, I felt him rearranging the plumbing, hooking up arteries to veins, veins to arteries. It’s all tied together, neat and tidy, like, apart from the missing pump, that is. So you see, I have to keep a little mantra going in me head all the time now, to keep the blood flowing. And that uses up a lot of heat. You ever noticed that, when you’re using the mojo? There’s some scientific word for that, ain’t there?”

  “Negative entropy.”

  “That’s the one,” he says. “Someone should investigate that, don’t you think? I mean, maybe it’s not fookin magic at all. Maybe there’s a perfectly rational explanation for all of this shite.”

  “Maybe,” she says.

  “And that would be nice, wouldn’t it? We could actually learn something about what makes us all tick, if the fookin eedjits weren’t all so busy playing fookin sodjies.”

  “Sodjies? What?”

  He makes a mock salute.

  “Sergeant Seamus Finnan reporting for duty, sir.”

  “I guess they’re fookin gearing up now,” he says. “They’re not even offering an alternative. No, if you’re not with them, then you die. But if you kill an unkin it has consequences, you know; what we’re hooked into, that mojo, runs pretty fookin deep under reality. You cut one little thread, just one little thread…But they don’t care. Sod it, says they. Let’s just burn the fookin world and start another one.”

  He takes another swig.

  “Christ,” he says, “they’re still living in the fookin neolithic. Burn the fields before you plant the new crop.”

  And another swig.

  “But they didn’t have to kill him. They didn’t have to do that. If you kill an unkin—no, I said that already—you create one big fookin” he waves an arm in the air, grasping for a word “rip in the Vellum. There are places in this world where the…repair work ain’t too tight. Days which are just holes.”

  I have a lot of days like that, she thinks.

  “You know what an angel’s voice can do,” he says. “Think about the damage from a scream.”

  She remembers hearing it in her bones, waking up in the dead of night, the sound still echoing in her skull, ringing in her ears. The shock wave of her brother’s death.

  “So are ye going to fookin kill me or what?” says Finnan.

  She looks at him, sitting there pale and pathetic, and she finds herself shaking her head. She doesn’t have the heart. She knows that if she’d had any more to give the angels than a fragment of a word, the one syllable of a place-name Thomas forced on her before she had the time to cut him off, if she’d had any more than that Ash-, the angels would have taken it from her as well. Ashton? Ashbury? She doesn’t know enough for them, but Finnan obviously did. She can see it in the way he doesn’t look at her. He looks down, away to the side, anywhere but at her.

  “No,” she says. “I just want to know…”

  She doesn’t know what she wants to know.

  He looks up at the crucifix, points with his bottle.

&nb
sp; “D’ye think himself was one of us, then?”

  A RAG DOLL OR A SCARECROW

  They crucified Puck in a field outside of town, stripped naked on an October night on a mountain where the cold wind brought the temperature down near enough to freezing—not on an actual cross, of course, not literally, but they left his body hanging, tied with ropes around his broken arms to a barbed-wire fence before they beat him near to death with the butt of a shotgun, caving in his skull in a fracture that stretched from the back of his head down and around to the front of his right ear. They left him hanging there spread-eagled like some World War One soldier caught on the wire in no-man’s-land, cut down by enemy gunfire, and there he hung for eighteen hours, limp as a rag doll or a scarecrow, until he was discovered, still dying. He never woke from the coma.

  Just so you know how this story goes and that it’s not a happy ending. Puck—my young buck, my slim, fairy fuck—didn’t rise from death after three days entombed, and there was no salvation for our sins through his murder, no life everlasting for him or for us. Puck—Thomas Messenger, as he was christened by his parents—for all that his green hair and smirking cherub lips and blinking lashes long and dark gave him the look of some eternal child, some Peter Pan—died like we all die, without resurrection, with no miracle rebirth. I can still remember the feel of his peach-fuzz downy legs under my hand, the fine flutter of a feather across my chest, the point of a horn pressed into my side as he butted me, the goatish kid. But Pan is dead. Great Pan is dead. And we should weep for him, as the women wailed for Tammuz in Jerusalem, in the sure and certain knowledge of his absence.