by Jay Lake
Even stopping for natural necessity seemed both wasteful of precious time, and somehow blasphemous. Urinating on the gears of God was wrong. Not that he had much choice.
Three hours to climb Heaven’s Ladder, he thought, moving on from his third such pause. The process of opening his crotch had let too much cold air inside his quilted suit, and his mind wandered in search of a distraction. Three hours down the other side. That left eighteen hours to cross twenty miles of brass. He’d been struggling for four hours and some, but he had no sense of how far he’d gotten. Daylight had arrived and Malgus was still visible in the distance ahead, so Hethor couldn’t be in that much trouble.
Until he realized the sound he heard over his rough breathing was Malgus cursing.
Hethor caught up with his guide soon enough. Malgus was still working his way through a lengthy run of naval imprecations mixed with several other languages, along with a number of terms Hethor had never heard before.
“What is it?” he called from just behind.
Malgus looked over his shoulder. “There’s something here.”
Hethor’s heart suddenly felt as cold as his face and hands. This could be their death warrant. “Is it big? Are we trapped?”
“No. That’s not the problem. You don’t understand. Nothing’s ever here. How could it be? The wheels of the universe grind everything to dust once a day.” Malgus sighed. “I’m trying to figure what this means, if we should turn back. There’s still time.”
“What is it?”
Malgus bent, grunting, picked something up, then turned to pass it back to Hethor.
It was a golden tablet, with the same strangely scratched writing as the one he’d found in the vertical city. Exactly the same writing.
“It’s a message.” Hethor’s heart was exultant as any flight of birds. “For me.”
Malgus shook his head. “Anything might be true, but I’ll be damned if I know why you think that. But if it’s yours, sobeit. You must carry it. As for me, I plan to live to see the other side.” He shuffled ahead, walking at a pace that even Hethor realized was too fast.
Hethor hugged the tablet to his chest, then opened his quilted suit to slip it inside. His torso nearly froze with the influx of frigid air, and the tablet poked into his belly most unpleasantly. Hethor didn’t care.
Gabriel was still watching over him.
This was where he needed to be.
A faint vibration in the brass around him stirred Hethor to motion once more. He might need to be here, but only to pass through. Shuffling in his ice-skater walk, Hethor scuttled after Simeon Malgus as quickly as his wedge-soled boots would allow.
THE TRIP across the brass vee devolved into a painful nightmare of strained leg muscles, freezing hands, and sheer exhaustion. Hethor’s lips froze together at one point. The gold tablet within his suit refused to warm—rather it continued to impart a chill to his chest and gut that made his lungs shudder and his heart race. With the coming of dusk, he lost sight of Malgus toiling ahead of him. The sense of isolation brought Hethor nearly to the point of despair.
“Oh, God,” he said, stumbling along the vee, “You did not bring me this far to abandon me. Grant me strength, please, to carry on Your work.”
By way of answer, Hethor heard a faint clatter. He was heartened by this echo of the music of the world until he realized the clatter was slowly getting louder, accompanied by a rumble.
The gear! The track was approaching!
Hethor began to run, fast as he could on the wedge-shaped clogs, glancing up. Earth’s orbital track glimmered close above, a brass roof blocking out what should be his view of the stars.
“Malgus!” Hethor shrieked. “Don’t let me die here.”
He ran harder, fighting the weakness in his ankles and calves. The tablet dug in at his waist so hard as to draw blood. Under his steadying hands, the brass walls of the vee felt warmed, as if the approaching contact with the orbital ring were transmitting heat.
The clatter built toward the mind-blanking roar he’d heard at the Sacrament of Listening. Then louder. In the Orchid Grove, he’d been two miles below the gearing, without metal walls around him to amplify the sound.
The same metal walls that would amplify him to so much grease. Where was the end!?
“Simeon, help!”
Soon, Hethor could no longer hear his own breathing. His right foot slipped. The wedge-shaped clog tore free from the boot. Hethor found himself prone at the bottom of the vee, sobbing his fear. Not knowing what else to do, he pulled himself onward, scuttling like a silverfish trapped within the pages of a book as the roar washed over him, blanking out all thoughts except the sheer terror of survival.
The brass teeth of the orbital track came for Hethor.
SEVEN
A CHILL breeze worried at Hethor’s face. His legs felt peculiar, or more to the point, they didn’t feel at all. He could sense his heart beating, but there was no sound.
He opened his eyes, or tried to. The lids seemed stuck together.
His right arm wiggled, but it did not move. Something was wrong with his head, too, Hethor realized. It was hot, and felt heavy as one of Bassett’s cannonballs.
Was he back on the airship somehow?
His left arm was free from entanglement. Hethor reached to rub his eyes, fought an unaccustomed heaviness in his hand, and discovered his lids coated with a sticky grit.
Scabbed blood.
Hethor tried to shout his fear, but though his chest heaved, nothing happened.
I am struck dumb, he thought. So this is death … silence, and near-immobility.
Somehow, that didn’t make sense.
He swiped again at the blood sealing his eyes. The left lid fluttered open, revealing something huge far above him.
Then Hethor understood the world. He was hanging upside down, nothing but empty air between him and the ledge at the top of the southern side of the Wall. He did not want to think how far down that would be. The inverted position certainly explained the heaviness in his head.
He spent the next few minutes heaving his guts while trying to hold perfectly still against a spinning rush of panic that threatened to rob him of all his faculties. The world remained silent, too silent, but in his fear, he did not have time to consider this. Hethor kept his eyes firmly shut and tried to calm himself.
Concentrate on one thing at a time, he thought. Just like trigonometry. Break the problem down; solve it in steps.
Step one. He was alive.
Step two. His left arm worked.
What about the other arm?
Careful to look only in that direction, Hethor saw that his right arm was still enclosed in the quilted suit, which had snagged on a bamboo stub protruding from a pole.
He could have shouted for joy. He was on the other part of Heaven’s Ladder, on the southern side of the Equatorial Wall. Upside down was … not good … but much, much better than dead. Encouraged, he checked on his feet.
One boot was missing; the other seemed to be in tatters. His legs, loyal to the last, were wrapped around the very top of the pole. Leather strips from the tattered boot and bits of the quilted suit formed a knot that kept Hethor hanging.
The gears. He had survived the gears, somehow squeezed out of the end of the vee at the last possible moment, though his boots seemed to have been caught. This time, he did shout for joy.
Nothing came out.
He shouted again, paying careful attention as he did so.
The air puffed in his mouth. His throat buzzed. His lips moved.
I am deaf, but alive. It was still a small price, Hethor told himself.
Back to the trigonometry of survival. Should he unhook his right arm, or his legs next? Which was less likely to send him tumbling thousands of yards down the brass cliff face?
In fact, with both hands free and cautiously working on the accidental bindings of his foot, Hethor tore something loose despite his best efforts and went sliding upside down along the bamboo pole lad
der. The ladder on this side had been unfortunately damaged as well, either by Malgus or by his precipitous arrival. Each of the stubbed handholds jerked him back, but his weight pulled him past. He could see the cloth at his ankles unwinding to set him all too free.
Desperate, Hethor grabbed the pole with his hands, accepting a bone-numbing bruise, just as his ankles tore loose. He flipped in place and continued to slide feetfirst. This time he hung on with nearly frozen hands and knees, praying for a stop before a crosspiece tore out his thighs and crotch, or simply smashed his face.
Hethor finally came to a halt resting on his shoulders, legs up in the air on the highest of the scaffold platforms. He rolled aside just in time to dodge two of the pole ladders falling free from the brass face of the gear. He watched them spin away into the two-mile-deep darkness below, took a deep breath, and followed the poles at a slightly less hurried pace down the scaffold stairs.
He had to catch Malgus before his reluctant guide left the ledge on errands of his own.
HETHOR REACHED level ground as light flashed over the curve of the eastern horizon. The world here spread as it had on the other side, a tempting array of lands and kingdoms bordered by broad ocean, in a view that pulled at his eyes and gut much as it had before. Hethor did not have time for such distraction. He had to find Malgus.
A broken trail led away through a riotous mass of bushes that might once have been a garden. There were signs of recent passage. Malgus, of course. Hethor followed, moving as fast as his nearly crippled feet would allow him to.
After a long, hilly descent, he came out just above an enormous building—a twin, Hethor realized, of the Jade Temple. This one was in obvious disrepair. Holes gaped in the roof, and there were mottled patches where exterior plastering or stonework had fallen away.
Reasoning that Malgus might be somewhere within, Hethor hobbled around the near end of the building. Gardens and orchards stretched away toward the rim of the Wall, as neglected as the building. Small figures in white rags ghosted among the trees, perhaps the Southern exemplars of the same race as the littlest monks of the Jade Temple on the Northern side.
Hethor found the main entrance and looked up at the doors, which gaped open like missing teeth. He turned to look along the walkway toward the edge. A man-sized figure was visible in the gloom.
Hethor tried to shout, “Malgus,” but there was no sound. He ran, the pain lancing up his legs and right into his head, still screaming silently.
The figure turned. In the rising twilight of morning it resolved itself to be Bassett’s navigator.
His guide began talking, jabbing a finger at Hethor, who slowed to a limping stumble and pointed at his ears.
“Can’t hear,” his lips tried to say. “Deaf.”
Malgus looked puzzled for a moment, then nodded. Hethor could see that the navigator was laughing at him. Malgus mimed something long and thin falling, bouncing, then pointed up, and at Hethor.
He must have seen the poles fall, Hethor thought, and therefore knew I was alive.
Malgus picked up one of two heavy packs at his feet and shouldered it, nudging the other one toward Hethor.
Hethor pointed to his own distressed feet. “Need help.”
The navigator shook his head and settled his new pack onto his back. It also strapped around his waist and groin, seeming to wrap him in a leather web.
Hethor picked his own up and positioned all the straps in the same fashion, though he did not understand their purpose. Somewhere coming off the brass gear, he’d lost the smaller pack Malgus had given him back at the Jade Temple.
Malgus pointed downward, jerking his hand, before turning to sprint along the grass-crazed marble walkway toward the cliff edge. Hethor stumbled after him, wondering if the man had gone completely crackers. Malgus spread his arms as he ran, as if expecting to leap into the air and fly, before doing just that—leaping off the little balcony at the end of the walkway and into empty space.
Hethor pulled himself short at the marble railing to see Malgus falling through the air. The navigator’s arms and legs were spread in the “X” shape of the clockwork Christ.
Parachutes, Hethor thought. These were parachutes, just like the sailors used on Bassett. Which conjured immediate and unpleasant memories of his jump at Hamilton, and of the loblolly boy falling into darkness below the vertical city.
“I can’t do it,” he tried to say. But what else could he do? Even if he hadn’t destroyed the top of Heaven’s Ladder, Hethor was in no shape to recross the brass desert of the gears by himself. It might literally be the work of a lifetime to climb the miles upon miles down from here to the surface of the Southern Earth on foot. Even assuming he healed well enough and he could somehow find new boots in the ruined temple. Not even considering earthquakes, monsters, and suchlike.
But the jump frightened him so very, very much.
He realized that the little hairy men in their rags were approaching. They tossed stones and dung ahead of them. Some carried large sticks, wielding them as spears or prods.
This was why Malgus had been so rushed. He’d been concerned about opposition. Alone and wounded, Hethor could not fight these creatures off. Deaf, he could not negotiate.
Hethor turned, stepped with a wince up onto the marble railing, and let himself pitch forward, screaming so loudly that even in his deafness his skull hurt from it.
AIR BATTERED him, slapped him, pinched him, violent as a storm wind. Hethor imitated Malgus’ “X” shape, and found he could follow the navigator downward, steering his body by twisting his arms and legs. The blue-black of the aether, the approaching fire of the sun, the lazy curves of Earth below—all symbols of his failure. He was wounded, deaf, on the wrong side of the Wall, sure to lose track of Simeon Malgus somewhere between here and honest soil.
He had failed the archangel Gabriel, and in failing Gabriel, had betrayed the Tetragrammaton. Now he plunged through the thin blanket of air that surrounded the Equatorial Wall, to arrive a victim in some land he would likely never know the name of.
What if he didn’t open his parachute? What if he fell all the way to the ocean, let the warm waters of the Southern Earth swallow him whole? His bad luck would be erased. Gabriel could find another champion.
Then Hethor remembered the tablet still digging into his waist and chest. Words brought by an angel, a message from God, that he had yet to read.
Whipped by the wind, Hethor was still moved to unbutton the top of his quilted suit. He tugged the tablet to the resulting opening and tucked his chin down to his chest to stare at it, as though he could will the words to meaning. They were close, somehow, very close, but simply not present for him. Like when he had first tried to learn Latin.
Looking ahead into the far-distant lands of his descent, Hethor watched Malgus, watched the shape of lands he’d never before seen, watched the clouds grow closer, and the ocean beneath them. Malgus seemed to be steering toward the coast. Presumably he had some port city in mind for his destination.
Assuming the people of Southern Earth bothered with shipping. Malgus had made it sound like a Heaven, all paradise and lions-and-lambs.
Hethor steered after his guide, growing bored even with this glorious view. His earlier despair had given way in the face of first magnificence, then silence, so that in time he reached the same neutral mental state that the Sacrament of Listening had induced.
A bit less than an hour later when Simeon Malgus finally opened his parachute, Hethor discovered that he did not know how to do the same.
Morning light flooded the sky now. The sun shone brilliant on his frost-damaged, bloody hands as Hethor fumbled for snaps or straps or handles or anything that would allow him to release the parachute, to do something other than hit the water like Milton’s Lucifer on his final descent into the ice.
Nothing. There was nothing.
Hethor screamed his frustration again, though Malgus was much too far away to hear it, and drifting east as Hethor plunged past the navigator’
s altitude.
What could he do? How could he cheat death yet one more time?
Hethor twisted onto his back, losing sight of Malgus to look up the expanse of the Wall rising above him like the world turned on edge. Trust in Heaven, he thought, and the riches of the world will be yours. He worked the golden tablet all of the way out from under his quilted suit and took a long look at the crazy-handed writing. He then held it to his chest, trying to catch the morning sunlight to make it flash upward.
God’s words make a glorious heliograph.
Refusing to look at the uprushing ocean, Hethor stayed on his back, signaling toward the top of the Equatorial Wall as he counted out the remaining seconds of his life. Help would come, or death would.
They had come for him before, after all, help flying on death’s wings.
His ankles, already damaged, nearly separated from his shins as two of the winged savages caught him from below and behind. Their pinions beat upward to pull Hethor out of his fall. He flipped over, head down, and lost his grip on the golden tablet. It tumbled away like a tiny, square shooting star to meet the sea perhaps a hundred feet below.
Hethor’s rescuers shifted their grip to his calves, then thighs, trying to hold him in a way that didn’t threaten to dismember him. He was beyond caring. He closed his eyes and prayed, really prayed, thanking God for his life in a deep and heartfelt way that he had not experienced since he was a little boy.
Losing the words of God a second time seemed almost as great a disaster as losing his life and failing in his mission.
Eventually the winged savages shifted their stance to take Hethor by his arms and chest. They flew him for a while over a mud-banked coastline, then across an endless topography of jungle treetops not so different from those of Guyana. Which led Hethor to wonder if the Southern Earth was a sort of mirror to the Northern, until he fell asleep in their arms.
