Pilgrimage v1.0, page 15
“Do you see?” Liza pointed to it. “I imagine that’s why there is no wind at Tailend. Those conduits probably go where we lived.”
“The shaking?” asked Halsam.
“Certainly the shaking,” she said. “Perhaps the prophecy of the Post Guild is right Perhaps the city is falling.”
Halsam shrugged. “Well, I’m going.” He swung over the edge onto the ladder and started down.
“Me, too,” said Brann. He took up his satchel and followed Halsam.
Liza stood watching them for a moment The catwalk faded into the far dying place and all at once a strange fluttering cry came from somewhere above. A yellow duster of lights swarmed past her, brushing her skin so that hair stood up on her spine and the skin of her belly crawled.
“I’m coming,” she called to the other two. She pulled on her satchel and scrambled after.
“It tastes like rusty iron down here,” Liza complained. They had walked through the machine room trailed by groups of the lights and now they were across the chasm over a bridge of fallen conduit Brann had shone a flashlight down and could detect no bottom.
“It could go on forever,” Halsam said. “You could fall and just keep on, the way you would if you tumbled off the roof at Tailend.”
“Tailend is only three miles,” said Brann. “If that’s all this were, you would stop sometime.”
“Did you ever see anyone who fell three miles?”
Brann hadn’t Halsam annoyed him sometimes, his irascible temper especially. But Hals was right no one ever fell from the verge. Perhaps in the same way they had feared to stay outside, something kept folk from taking the one chance which would be too much, which would let them fall.
“Look!” Liza exclaimed. “Who is she?”
The lights had been gathering across the chasm, slowly taking note of their presence. They had come singly and in groups, drifting over to the edge. The three sorts of lights didn’t mix. Here were blue, antlike gleams, a stream of them pouring out from an alley between two great engines, spreading along the bank. Here was a gathering of the monkler lights (as Liza called them), spectral from orange to the lightest of green. And here, one of the sun globes, red like the sunrise sky, seemed hot though Brann was sure they only imagined radiation. As the blue ant lights blended into the ultraviolet, so this seemed to radiate in the infrared. The lights gathered until the machines were insubstantial and the lights themselves were solid.
It was the red globe to which Liza pointed. These lights were subtly marked with shadings, darker interior territories as though they had once been something else and had blended into their present forms.
The red globe held a woman.
“She’s crossing,” Liza said. They watched her move, alternating between light and woman’s form, not touching the conduit at all. Her hair was part of the light, a plasma possibly of strands. If she were clothed it was not in anything of real cloth. The fluid light revealed and hid her, realigning with each step and breath.
“She’s looking at Halsam,” Liza said. “She’s coming to you, Hals.”
She spoke, and the jewel on Halsam’s chest answered, the same twitter that sounded constantly in the machine room. The jewel began to light itself and it was as if Brann and Liza had vanished. The woman walked past them (through them? it felt so to Brann).
“Hals,” Liza called, and the woman turned once. Her eyes, part of the light, filled red and warm with it. Where she looked, other lights appeared, blue ants swarming, the spectral monkler lights which climbed them and clung so that Brann and Liza were clothed, like the woman, in luminous motley.
Brann thought he heard Liza calling, and monkler lights closed over his eyes. His vision was quenched. But somehow he saw through Halsam’s eyes, through the woman’s and through Liza’s in all directions at once.
The twitter: Hello, you’re the first here in a very long time.
Halsam: “What is happening?”
The twitter: We are all together. I was lonesome.
Halsam: “I see others like you.”
Twitter: Them! They’re not separate anymore. You can’t tell them from the mechanics.
Halsam: “You’re not of file folk.”
I am. I’ll show you. The red light billowed out from her as a cloak in an unfelt wind. She took his hand and moved it slowly over her, stretching to it as his fingers crossed bare soft skin, warm as the light, and perhaps it was hairs he felt, red so that Oten’s seemed like a shadow, though Oten’s hair had been redder than Liza’s. Her arms came around him then.
Brann felt the power of her embrace and he wanted nothing so much as to be holding Liza. Maybe he was; there was a peculiar continuity of mind in which all were touching each other. Whose ribs he felt, whose spine, whose flesh slipped beneath his hands, who kissed, whose mouth his tongue entered, whom he entered entirely, whose hips moved, whose nails bit into his back, whose voice was in his ear, whose perfume? He could not say.
They were on pillows of light, blue through orange, drenched as though a storm had broken upon them. Whose legs moved, whose hands still stroked slowly, who remained within whom—it was all quite unimportant.
The twitter: I was lonesome. Giggles. I was!
“Do you have a name?” Liza said.
“Leoht,” the woman answered. It seemed quite reasonable that her speech should be coherent to them.
It was her skin Brann found himself touching, though they still seemed intermixed. “Why did that happen?” he asked. “Just all of a sudden and we were…” He felt confused, didn’t finish.
Leoht frowned. “You didn’t like it It was just a welcome. We see none of the folk here. Not in a very long time.”
“There are others?” Hals am inquired.
“There are. See? They wait there in the quick place. It is dead here for us and they do not like to cross.”
“What is dead?” Liza asked.
“Motion. We remember when it was all motion. When the engines we tended were so many and so far spread that we mechanics were countless. There is only a handful of us now. A thing will come, a crumbling. Suddenly it will be cold, perhaps a crevice opens and then all the machines on the one side of it cease their motion. Only a short time ago we felt a great crumbling. Half the quick place crumbled and became like this. We are crowded here now and the crumbling is beyond even the best of us to repair.”
Liza saw. In the machines that moved was a life luster. They spun intricately and forces shifted. But the machine which rose above them—possibly it was a pump which fed into the fallen conduit—was still and the metal which composed it dull. It was solid but seemed soft and rotten. She ran a hand over it and felt her body heat begin to drain.
“What will happen when all the rest of this crumbles?” she asked.
Leoht frowned again. “We won’t have a place. The quick place will be gone and the mechanics will crumble, too. But it won’t matter at all, because it will mean the city has fallen.”
They seemed to have disengaged though skin still touched and the warm, lazy sensation of palpable light still washed around them. Bits of it condensed and Brann watched Leoht bring a piece to her mouth and nibble it. He did the same, as if his sensory nerves had crossed; the bite tasted maroon, smelled of dawn light at the verge.
“Is that another of you standing at the other side of the chasm?” Liza asked.
“Ah,” said Leoht, “it’s Magh, a friend. One of the last I can talk to.” She twittered and was answered across the open space. The man, enfolded in rose-tinted light, waved once and turned away.
“Magh says for you to come back across. He says that you should stay a while.” Perhaps fingers touched Brann’s neck. Something touched Halsam; he bobbed his head.
It seemed a reasonable idea to Brann, even in the way that Liza’s eyes followed Magh away. Could it be right though? Was there not something important still for them to do? He held back.
“How old are you?” Hals asked.
“I don’t know,” said Leoht. “We go back to the beginning. I wasn’t one of the first”
The thought excited Brann. Could she say what the city was all about?
“I can show you some,” Leoht admitted. “I have memories which come from other mechanics before me. I don’t understand them. Maybe you will.”
At once they were enclosed in light, again drifting. They saw a plain sloping up to mountains. But here, below—they were high over it as they were when the brain had shown them a scene—was water. Liza asked what it was.
“Ocean,” said Leoht. “I know the city could be in it and be covered without a trace. It is so big.”
“And those, like mountain tops emerging from the water?”
“Islands.”
“The Huten come from islands, they said. Could these be their home?”
“I know nothing of anyone called Huten,” Leoht said.
The view showed no city yet. Instead, a few tiers, perhaps five galleries wide, stood at the edge of the ocean. They saw a small reach of Farmy Fields, green in patches and gold like the wheat.
“I see Structors,” Halsam said. “But they’re only building up, not tearing down.”
Brann pointed. “Look at the trolley tracks going into the mountains. The Structors are bringing loads of stone.”
“Do you see it?” Liza exclaimed. “Watch where the sun is coming up.”
The viewpoint seemed to whirl. Suddenly they were not seeing the city from the same vantage. The sun rose (the time scheme shifted greatly). The sun came from the water. “The mountains are on the wrong side,” Halsam said.
“I think they are different mountains,” Brann answered.
Things accelerated. The base of the city expanded away from the ocean. How could the city be both in a location where the sun rose from the mountains and where it rose from an ocean? How far had it moved since its building? Galleries grew next to each other and more tiers were layered. Folk seemed to be coming in streams from the north and south, but the time swept so fast that the streams contained vast successions of folk, generations of them, sometimes many, sometimes a scattered few, moving possessionless toward the growing bulk of the city. The structure built westward and the light was a blur, a steady gray in which the sun occupied all points of a wide, sweeping arc in the sky, red at both horizons, yellow-white at zenith, oscillating north and south with the seasons. Days merged, years merged. The scaffolds of the Structors were a spider web that clung and crawled across the west face of the city. On the trolley tracks came a thickness of objects, trolley cars which merged into each other as time compressed. They seemed like thick bundles of silver conduit, fattening in a great flow inward to the city. The green disappeared from the western mountains. Frontend grew into their foothills, climbed the mountains themselves and began to nose over into valleys beyond. Out, too, grew the Farmy Fields, flickering green and russet, snow-white and sear in progression of cycles. But their reach went beyond the bounds of the vision, and soon in all directions except on the highest ridges of the mountains the Farmy Fields were unbroken.
“What’s happening now?” Brann asked. For it had all stopped. The volume of traffic on the trolley tracks dwindled. Folk ceased coming to the city on the roads north and south. For a time the old trolley tracks remained, a faint rusty streak. But to replace them, new tracks grew along the city’s flanks. Abruptly, a change came. Tailend shrank away from the ocean. Frontend nosed downward out of the mountains to the west, and along the city flanks the new trolley tracks took more traffic until their thick conduits carried as much as the old tracks ever had. Tailend became farther away from the ocean. Frontend nosed farther past the mountains and be* hind.
“The Foundations,” Brann exclaimed, and Liza and Hals joined him.
“They take away from Tailend,” Leoht said. “What is old and crumbled gets tom down and carted along the trolley to Frontend, where Structors fashion it into new galleries and rebuild the city. Only the Foundations are left. I do not understand the reason for this. Do you? Can you tell it to me?”
They could not The view shifted again; time slowed. They were now at the foot of Tailend, seeming to stand on the grass there. It looked like a familiar place now. From portals along the nearest flank folk were emerging. They were dressed in a fashion stranger than anything Brann had ever seen, and something else was strange about them. From the grass in which Brann seemed to stand, he had to look up to see the faces of the folk.
“Everyone is so tall,” Liza said.
“I remember that all the folk were that tall once,” said Leoht “The city has made folk shorter.”
“But everyone is as fall as the giants,” Liza protested.
Hals pointed. “Some of the men even have hair on their faces.”
This was obviously the same city, somehow displaced. Structors tore down the last galleries from Tailend. On the trolleys folk rode forward toward Frontend on Pilgrimage. Between the trolleys, great masses of Tailend were carted down the tracks on flatcars. The vision followed these cars along to Frontend where Structors worked to build new tiers from the old.
The vision abruptly dissolved. They were again in the depths of the city. Leoht complained that she was tired. She curled with her legs and Halsam’s intertwined. Her light dimmed and she fell asleep.
Brann wished he could ask Leoht more. Whatever memory she tapped to bring forth the vision was something from which she could not draw any explanation. It was as passive as the scenes shown them by the brain. The city had begun in a time, if the dwarf was correct, thirty thousand years ago. Folk had come to it in a great gathering. Materials had come also. Then a change had taken place. The outside lost contact with the city and the mass of the city itself had seemingly begun to move. In fact, the Structors dismantled one part and used the materials to build another. If this had happened steadily over thirty millennia, the city could have traveled an immense distance. The folk inside were smaller now. Brann, a tall young man by the standards of Tailend folk, saw that he was no more than a dwarf’s height in comparison with the original folk of the city. The giants, the Huten, were the original folk or of them, and Brann’s folk were the ones who had changed.
The quick place drew them back. Now there was no terror in the fluting twitter of mechanical voices, no foreboding in the drifting lights. Leoht led. If anyone wondered that he should understand her, it was only Brann, in whom a bit of mistrust still lurked. Liza followed Magh. She had become taken with him. Perhaps Brann was jealous. The light that fused to him was russet, clinging like a cloak. Magh was taller than Brann, as Leoht was tall also, a height midway between theirs and the giants’. His musculature seemed intricate and visible, more like the internals of the machine world around them than something human.
The bherk came to them now. This was Leoht’s name for the antlike lights that moved in patterned webs across the quick place. Leoht could not explain their function.
“They are part of how each machine will mesh. It is one whole here; nothing is separate. They hate separate. When one becomes out of mesh with the other machines, the bherk know. They make changes.”
The bherk worried at their feet. A small flock of them followed everywhere, especially Brann, clinging as far as his knees, so that he seemed to be booted in blue fog. He could brush them off as he would brush away the dust puffs that accumulated beneath a bed. They came back, though. They dung to his hands. They tickled.
“You are apart,” Leoht said to Brann. “It is why they worry at you so.”
The vagueness of this frustrated him. “I don’t like it,” he complained.
The alek, the monkler-like lights, large as two fists together, were not so enigmatic. Their function was to discover weakness and erosions in the machines. According to Leoht, they repaired minor breakdowns—in a manner she could not make clear. What fascinated Liza was that the alek did this not only for the machines but for them also. When the three first crossed the conduit back into the quick place with Leoht, a squad of alek had climbed them.
Liza had shivered at their touch, but Leoht said, “Don’t fear. They are finding hurts on you and clearing them.” Scars from the Driver’s lash, bruises and aches from the long stairway climb began to fade. Liza watched a long scar from the Driver’s whip, which had coiled about her left shin as though a vine had climbed there. One of the alek moved along it The tones of its surface shifted subtly. A tentative fluting noise sang and at once Liza exclaimed, “It’s inside my leg! I can feel it” The scar went pale, blended into the flesh tones of her skin and then neither scar nor any other mark told where the wound had been.
Brann watched scratches disappear from his arms. The alek seemed to climb in and out of his skin.
“What else does it change?” he asked.
“Whatever do you mean?” Leoht asked in return.
“I mean, does it change us also?”
“Where things are not correct.”
“And in my head, does it change my thoughts?”
“Do you find them changed?”
“I don’t know.”
“How long have we been here?” Brann asked. They sat among light pillows in an intricate bowl which reminded Brann of the chamber beneath the Isocourt Hall. Striations of light played beneath a translucent surface, cream ripples in ivory.
Several mechanics were with them, Leoht, Magh, another whose amber cloak flowed in and out of the wall, two other women (perhaps one whose legs rubbed gently against Brann’s, one whose fingers combed his and stroked his cheek).
“Not long,” said Liza, whose own fingertips touched the hairs on Magh’s strong arm.
“We only just came,” Halsam answered.
“How long?” Brann demanded of Leoht.
“I don’t know time,” she said. “I lose count”
“I believe the summer months are gone,” said Brann. “I believe we have been to sleep many times.” He saw something wrong in the way Liza reached, languidly as though no other work were so important or so difficult, for a snippet of food glow that broke away from a pillow and drifted toward her hand.
