Tales of the Dissolutionverse Box Set

by William C. Tracy

  I frowned, looking out one of the basket’s windows and calculating distances. “That’s halfway across the Sea of Light. I hadn’t realized the Nether was so big.” I’d only been here a handful of times, passing through a majus’ portal from Etan to this place. The Nether wasn’t like the homeworlds. It wasn’t a planet, and it didn’t orbit a star. In fact, no one was sure where it was. Maji found it long ago, and that’s how the ten species found each other.

  “You’d think someone else would have figured out how to climb the Nether’s walls before now,” I said.

  “Good thing they didn’t,” Mom said. “Then I wouldn’t have this opportunity with you.”

  “I’m still not convinced this is better than staying at home and studying what you bring back,” I told her.

  “Give it time.”

  “What if I want to go home?”

  “That’s too bad.” Mom’s voice gained a little of the harshness that said she was getting annoyed again. “Try it out, Natina. I think you’ll like being a naturalist.”

  We watched out the side of the basket for a while longer, silent. Besides the glow in the distance and the columns and walls, there were only a few spotty lights near us, a lot closer than Gloomlight. Majus E’Flyr had said they were probably houses of the farm owners and workers who lived on huge tracts of land near the wall.

  “I bet if I spit over the side and aim just right, I could hit one,” I said, after a while.

  * * *

  I didn’t sleep well that night. All my parents liked camping and long sailing trips, so my brothers and I were used to sleeping outside. Still, there was something about trying to sleep on a mat woven from thin strips of wood, floating so far above the ground I could barely see anything more than colors and shapes.

  In addition, we still had to change the fuel canister every two lightenings. Every time the balloon sank, it woke us all up. The next morning we were tired and cranky, but at least the balloon was still rising.

  “How tall is this dumb wall, anyway?” I asked. I watched the wavy crystal to my right, and the nearest column to my left. If I was at home, I wouldn’t need to pee in a hole in the floor, or lose sleep when the balloon tried to fall out of the sky.

  “A lot taller than this,” Mom said, her tone sharper than usual. “Just…draw a picture. Write about how I made you come on this expedition. Or you could help me take measurements of ground features.”

  Mom had some of her equipment out, her telescope resting on the side of the basket. She leaned back to the eyepiece, her other hand sketching. “I don’t just pick up ancient skeletons off the ground and discover sites anyone can walk to. There’s work involved.”

  “Just like at home,” I told her. “So why did we come all the way out here?” It wasn’t fair and I knew it, but I was tired.

  Mom looked back up. “Can you get a view like this from our house?” she said, her voice getting a little bit louder. She gestured over the side. “Can you measure the Nether’s width from our little cove on Etan? No. You can’t.” We both looked to the central mast at the familiar sizzle and thump of the canister emptying. I set my mouth in a frown.

  I’m getting real tired of changing that.

  “There’s only one more canister change before we tie up to the wall and start the Nether drill.” Mom crossed her long arms, fingers twitching with frustration.

  “I…we’re going to start the crystal beetle thing?” My anger melted away.

  Mom opened her mouth, probably to tell me that boring name she had for it instead, but then she stopped. She smiled. “Yes. We’re going to start the ‘crystal beetle thing’ soon. Partino will go down there with the majus. The quicker we get the luggage sorted and lined up, the quicker we can get it attached to the bottom of the drill—the crystal beetle drill.”

  I nodded at Mom’s name. It was a good combination of mine and hers—she was trying. My tiredness was gone, or at least pushed to the side for now. But then I thought of something else.

  “What will we do with the balloon?” I asked. “Do we let it fall back down the wall like the canisters?” I imagined the giant orange sheet of the balloon tumbling end over end.

  “We’ll disassemble the whole thing!” Partino called from where he was pulling at the controls, releasing the empty canister. I watched his long arms work the levers. “The balloon can be folded up. Then the fabric and any supplies we don’t really need can be stored where we start climbing.”

  Partino jerked the canister free, muscles in his arms and legs bulging. “We’ll take the basket apart, and part of it will make individual sleeping mats for climbing the wall. The mats, the rest of the luggage, and the four of us will all be tied to the drill—excuse me, the crystal beetle drill. That’s what will be doing the real work.”

  He lugged the canister to the side of the basket and tipped it over. While he did that, I unhooked another full canister from where it was tethered. But not the last cylinder…

  “Wait,” I said, counting. “We still have five canisters left. Can’t we go farther up in the balloon?” I braced as the balloon began to sink.

  Mom shook her head as she adjusted valves beneath the central hole in the balloon. “We’ll leave those behind, hanging from the wall, in case there’s an emergency and we can’t go any further.”

  “An emergency?” I gave Partino the canister and he installed it. “Like what?” Something else Mom didn’t account for?

  “Like if one of us falls,” Majus E’Flyr said, and my head whipped around. She had been watching us talk.

  Does she know I’ve been thinking about that since we left?

  “Or if someone breaks a limb, or gets sick, or all of us get sick, or worse,” the majus continued.

  “Don’t scare her,” Partino said, and for once I didn’t mind him talking about me like I was still eight. The majus only snorted and returned to watching the wall drift past. What’s she done while we’ve been working, anyway? Sure she had helped me with a few canisters, but only because Mom and Partino were sleeping. My mind went back to the box I’d found in the luggage. Is she just here to guard it, and watch us?

  Soon, Partino unfolded another strange contraption from the middle of the balloon and cranked a winch with long movements of his arms. I came closer to watch.

  “Careful there,” he said in between rotations of the crank. “Don’t get too close to the blades.” He pointed with his chin. The mechanism he had unfolded was a propeller, propped over the side of the basket. The crank turned them until they were a blur. Partino’s mass of dark hair floated around his head, waving in the wind.

  Wind?

  We’d drifted away from the wall over the last day, and the propeller corrected that. The balloon was steadily drifting closer to the massive wall. My heart beat faster as I realized we would really climb the unclimbable walls of the Nether.

  * * *

  Over the next half a lightening, according to my watch, we drifted closer until the orange balloon fabric just touched the smooth, glowing surface of the wall. The columns behind us were off in the distance, the entire Nether stretched out beneath us like a sea of green light. The illumination from the wall made us all cast long shadows.

  Mom throttled the current canister down to a low flow, so the balloon barely moved, hanging like a fly against the crystal sea beside us.

  The excess fuel that wasn’t burning stank, and I had a moment of vertigo as I saw the wall as down and everything else as up. My eyes swam, and I clenched the side of the basket to keep from falling out and away, to drift out over the expanse of the Nether.

  After a moment, the feeling receded, and I loosened my grip, breathing fast. I looked into the wall.

  It was…beautiful. At the basket’s edge, I reached out as far as I could. My fingers couldn’t quite touch the surface, because the curve of the balloon overhead held us too far away.

  The wall was clear, but the deeper I looked, the more the crystal went o
n forever. How thick was it? What was behind the wall? Space? Another planet?

  Bands of purple and blue and green passed along the glassy surface, with orange reflecting from our balloon. It was almost too bright to look at. The wall gave off enough light to make the whole Nether bright. I felt like something that big should smell, or hum, but it just sat there—larger than any other object I could think of. I was looking at only one little piece, like if someone was staring at one pore of my skin.

  “That will do it,” Mom said, and I jumped. How long had I been staring at the wall? Her fingers were tracing patterns of excitement in the air. “Partino, can you get the drill—” She shot a look at me. “—the crystal beetle drill started up?”

  “Will do,” Partino said with a mock salute.

  Majus E’Flyr stumped up next to him, half his height. “Hold on there, you pile of muscles,” she said. “I’m going with you. I won’t miss starting up an ancient artifact like that. There are all kinds of Systems created by maji involved. I’ll want another look.” She began retying her head-tentacles into a tighter knot to get them out of the way.

  “You do know Partino will climb underneath the basket?” I asked. The porter was pulling at straps on the basket’s floor. After learning how the toilet worked, I’d left them alone. I wanted as much support between me and the ground as I could.

  “What do you think we’ll be doing when the balloon’s disassembled?” the majus asked me. “I was a champion mountain climber in my youth, or did your mother not tell you that?”

  “In what cycle?” I asked. She must have been twice Mom’s age. She’s just been sitting there, the whole time.

  Mom frowned and opened her mouth, but the majus got there first.

  “Never you mind.” Majus E’Flyr whipped her head around at a snort from Partino. “I’ll wager my arms against yours any day, porter.”

  “I may take you up on that, Majus,” Partino said. “Would be nice to have extra Nether glass to spend when we get back down.”

  The majus’ rubbery lips turned up in a smile, though her surprised silvery eyes made the expression less challenging.

  What can she possibly do better than Partino? I’d seen the porter lift things twice his size, and even pull in an adult shellshark while fishing.

  Mom and I knotted the rope around the central mast of the balloon, then stood far enough away from the hole Partino opened so I wouldn’t accidently stumble and fall through. Even though the balloon was almost still, a breeze whipped past the opening, and the basket shook more than normal. There was a noise like the wind over the surf at night.

  Partino looped the rope around his waist, and then Mom looped the rope around the mast again so we could lower him down carefully. Any Etanela worth their weight in seaweed learned how to tie knots soon after they started walking, and I was no exception.

  The porter was tall enough that he probably could have touched his feet to the back of the crystal beetle drill while still holding onto the basket, but better to have the safety of the ropes.

  “I’m down!” he called back up as I felt the rope go slack. There was a tug and I looked over the edge of the hole. Partino was standing on the shiny black back of the drill, holding onto the cables that connected it to the bottom of the basket—one to each of the beetle’s legs, folded underneath. He’d made a sling of the rope, knotting it around the cable he held onto.

  Before I could do anything, Majus E’Flyr gave the other end of the rope, tied to the central mast, a quick tug to make sure it was tight, then vaulted over the side of the hole.

  “Watch out!” I cried. The old fool is going to lose her grip and fall to her death!

  Majus E’Flyr’s long fingers gripped the rope as if they were carved from old wood. I could see tendons straining beneath her dark red, wrinkled skin.

  Like a chirruping tree fish, she descended, hand over hand, until her feet touched the surface of the drill and she settled. One hand dusted the front of her jumpsuit.

  Partino had his mouth open like a deep sea gulper waiting for a meal. I made sure mine was firmly closed.

  “Still want that bet, Muscles?” Majus E’Flyr asked Partino.

  The porter’s eyes were wide, but he nodded his head.

  Together, they knelt over the crystal beetle’s back, and Partino opened a small hatch I hadn’t seen before, fiddling with something. The two of them took up a good portion of the beetle’s back, especially with the hatch behind the head open.

  A strange surge of excitement rose at seeing this relic work again. Is this what Mom feels like? “Can I go down too?” I asked.

  “Let them get everything started up and us anchored to the wall first.” She turned to me. “You want to go down there? This is new.”

  I shrugged. “They did it.” I could hear the majus muttering as Partino moved a lever in the insides of the beetle. I avoided the grin on Mom’s face.

  “Ah—that’s what the System does.” The majus’ voice faded away, then came back. “I could hear the notes repeating from outside the drill, but now I can see the colors inside, I know what the House of Strength is working with.” Another pause. “This is using all the aspects of the Grand Symphony in its design. Definitely something made by early maji…”

  “What’s she talking about?” I asked Mom.

  “I’m not entirely sure,” Mom said. One hand waved through the air as her other checked the rope. “You know the maji hear what they call the Grand Symphony?”

  I nodded. My brothers and I had played majus back at the house, before I got too old for it. It largely involved waving our hands around and pretending we were making trees grow, or throwing fireballs, or changing our shapes. Now I was older, I wasn’t sure if real maji did any of those things.

  “Well, as far as I know, the maji can change the notes of that Symphony and make…things happen.”

  Maybe she doesn’t know much more than I do.

  “They say each house of the maji is a different color, but of course only the maji can see them.”

  I went to my hands and knees, peering over the edge. There were no extra colors around the beetle.

  Just then, there was a grinding sound and Partino gave us a wave. “Got it working!” His other hand still gripped the cable.

  Majus E’Flyr rubbed both hands together and stood. She wasn’t gripping a cable, but she looked as solid as if she were standing on the beach rather than on the curved back of an ancient artifact, as high as the clouds.

  * * *

  Partino hooked a winch between the cables suspending the crystal beetle drill from the balloon, and he and the majus pulled ropes through it. While they stood on its back, almost like they were surfing, the beetle gradually drew closer to the wall. Its shining mandibles were spinning now, and they looked even more like melted glass.

  I went to one of the openings in the side and looked down, my new notebook in one hand. I could just about get the shape of the beetle’s head right, as the spinning mandibles came closer and closer to the wall. Nothing could break, destroy, or even scratch Nether crystal. Until now.

  Mom appeared beside me to watch, her fingers moving even more than usual, showing her excitement. With a hiss, the rotating glass-like mandibles touched the face of the wall and…bit in.

  “Yes!” I looked over in surprise and saw Mom with both hands clasped in front of her. Then they relaxed, fingers moving gracefully again.

  “You said you tested this, right?” I asked. Below us, Partino and Majus E’Flyr pulled on cables and guided the beetle’s mandibles until they drilled their full length into the wall, stopping where the spinning glass-like mandibles met the beetle’s head.

  “Yes, we tested it at the Broken Column site, and it made holes in the column, then used them to climb up,” Mom said, then looked away. “The wall is thicker, and maybe something would change this high up and—” she shrugged. “That’s why we call it an adventure. We’re discovering new things.”<
br />
  “You didn’t know this would work?” My hands clenched. “You dragged us all up here, just to be first at climbing the wall, whether it worked or n—”

  “First anchor holes done!” Partino called up. I looked down, away from Mom’s surprised and hurt expression.

  The porter was drawing the drill back. The mandibles left two neat holes in the crystal, each a little bigger than my fist. Majus E’Flyr was perched out on the head, as steady as she could be. She had a couple pieces of twisted metal in her hands, and inserted one into each of the holes.

  “Ready for the next two,” the majus called, and went back to the body of the drill. They both pulled on cables and the drill rose closer to the bottom of the basket.

  Partino and the majus repeated the process, while Mom regulated the fuel into the envelope so the balloon rose a little. I kept silent, intrigued by the beetle, but still mad at Mom for risking so much. The spinning mandibles plunged back into the wall, making another pair of holes.

  When they had several pairs drilled, they drew the beetle back and Majus E’Flyr bent back down to the hatch on the back. I could hear her clearly now she was closer.

  “It’s amazing the System has lasted this long,” Majus E’Flyr said. “You sure this thing can climb?”

  “It did when we tested in back at the column,” Partino said. “It’s that lever there.”

  I watched through the hole in the bottom of the basket as the old Lobath messed with controls. “Well, right you are. This must be a creation from before the Aridori war. We lost so much back then.”

  I leaned closer, my anger leaving me. The Aridori war? That was over a thousand cycles ago!

  “I’m still surprised the Council let you keep this artifact,” the majus muttered. “They’re as interested in what’s up there as you are.” She pointed a long wrinkled finger upward. “Ah, that’s got it.”

  “Bring us back up,” Partino said, and Mom and I hauled them up with the rope pulley around the central mast. While we did, the beetle moved its head side to side, and then up and down. The legs that had been tucked under the beetle’s shell unbent and waved around, as if it didn’t quite know what to do with them.