Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (35 page)

Below each horoscope was one or more rowboats made of what looked like blue glass. The rowboats had sliding shells or panels that could cover them, and they were standing upright on their sterns. I did not see what prevented them from falling over. In the gloom, they looked like headstones.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“The stream-path of the unclean,” she said. And she raised her hand, and her wood cloak pins and my wooden crotch-mask went dark.

Only then, as my eyes adjusted, did I see three vertical ribbons of metal, large as four-lane highways, hanging in midair with no support, stretching from infinitely above to infinitely below, passing through the stone rings held at the axis of this chamber, which I realized was not a chamber at all, but the platform of a train station shaped like a chimney. It was like looking at a subway station turned on its side, if the subway had been designed by the architects who built Notre Dame in Paris.

The shape and proportions of the circle of floor surrounding nothing looked so much like my bottomless cage where I had just been confined, but on a titanic scale. I could not shake the image in my heart of an empire where whole nations and peoples and worlds were as strictly enchained and as brutally treated as I had been. The true magnitude of this Dark Tower’s shadow, and the true extent of its terrible reach, became clear to me at that moment.

My feet were a little unsteady as I stepped toward the drop (there was no railing). I peered down.

I saw something as vast as the night sky rolled into a tube and propped upright: a column of air forty thousand feet tall, higher than most commercial aircraft fly, surrounded by seven miles and more of dark metal, dark brick, and threads of gold made tiny in the distance. Windows, lanterns, balconies were like distant stars, garden plots and lit greenhouses were like the nonexistent seas of the Moon or the imaginary canals of Mars, and internal airship traffic crossing the well of empty air were like tiny fishes glimpsed at the bottom of the sea.

Abby looked carefully from face to square-bearded face of the man-headed bulls, until she found one she apparently liked. She stepped forward and started wrestling with the glass rowboat standing under the gaze of the man-headed statue.

Abby had her arms wrapped partly around the boat, and was grunting and puffing, and the prow wobbled slightly. Her motions were so tentative and awkward that for a moment I did not realize she was trying to manhandle the glass rowboat across the platform, or, rather girlhandle it.

It began to tilt, threatening to collapse on her, and I stepped forward, plucked the rowboat up out of her hands, and tucked it with a grunt under one arm. It was not a little rowboat, but I have pretty big arms.

“Where to?” I asked. “And, next time, ask for help.”

The little monkey-mask face grinned at me, but the little girl’s voice from behind it was quivering. “It is not right for you to bear burdens for me. I am untouchable.”

“Well, since you rescued me from that midair version of Hell I was in, acting in my authority as temporary Ostiary for the Poor Fellow-Soldiers of Christ and of the Temple of Solomon, I, Ilya Muromets, Life Scout of Troop Two, Bobcat Patrol, officially decree, ordain and establish, now and forever, that you are touchable, so help me God! And if any man should dispute me, he shall face the peril of my sword just as soon as I get it back.
Troop Two! Second to none!

Strangely enough, she did not seem impressed.

“Is this real, what you are saying, or is it make-believe?”

Since I was sort of kidding but deadly serious at the same time, I was not sure what to say. When I did not answer right away, her shoulders drooped a bit, and she walked towards the dizzying brink of the platform.

A tongue of metal like the plank from which pirates throw captives to the sharks hung out into the middle of the air: there was a hollow or slot fitted to receive the keel of the rowboat, and a block-and-tackle arrangement leading to a brass ring the size of a dinner plate, which dangled in midair on a yardarm. It looked for all the world like the brass ring you are supposed to catch with your finger on the merry-go-round, or maybe those rings dangling from threads that jousters at the Renaissance Fair try to spear on their lances.

She did not have to tell me what to do. I have seen old Cowboy movies, including ones where you hang a mailbag on a hook for the mail-train to pick up as it chugs by at high speed without stopping. I set the rowboat in position, snapped the chains into the corresponding D-rings set about the rowboat, and removed the chocks from the windlass.

When we were both settled in the rowboat, I pushed the ring to which all the chains led out on its rotating arm to a position hanging over the bottomless drop. Then we pulled the sliding panels over our heads, so that the rowboat now looked more like a soda bottle or maybe an artillery shell, with us crouched inside. The hull was semitransparent so we had a stomach-wrenching view of the endless drop into which we would fall, should a chain break or the ring slip.

Abby pulled a leather wallet out from her belt pouch, unfolded it, and took out what looked like a mummified hand, which she placed carefully in the bilge near the prow. The glass of the boat immediately grew cloudy where it was resting.

“What is that for?” I asked.

“The horoscopes controlling today’s stream-path traffic cannot see me, nor you when your acts rest atop my acts, so no hook of living metal will emerge from the wayship to seize us and carry us down. But the vessels are purified, and dead flesh is impure, so the living metal will always take away corpses or mummies found on this path, even if unforeseen.”

Kerruxsaru
is the word I am translating as ‘wayship.’ I could have said ‘walking ship’ or ‘ship that walked by three thousand ways.’ The word literally meant an argosy that sailed as easily on earth and mountain, cloud and void as on the sea. These were the things I have been calling freight-trains or invasion machines: the king-sized Moebius coils. Apparently, the Dark Tower used them for everything.

At that moment, a set of gold prisms looking just like the invasion machines I had seen earlier, if perhaps slightly smaller, came sliding noiselessly down the nearest highway-sized ribbon of vertical living metal. Imagine a windowless and silent freight train that was triangular in cross section rather than square, and then imagine it hanging vertically from its caboose.

Before I could blink, a huge hook unfolded from the bowsprit of the wayship, snatched us off the plank, and dangled us in midair at forty thousand feet, rattling around like two rats in a Coke bottle. And down we sped.

I put my arms around the little girl to protect her from getting jarred or bruised. And she writhed uncomfortably, and I shouted in terror from the vertigo of the sudden fall, so I guess she thought I was clinging to her for protection, even though I am built like a linebacker and she was built like an underfed chicken in pint-size.

The bowsprit-hook of living metal twisted and banged against a flat hull-segment of gold, where we clung. Magic? Magnetics? Velcro? Your guess is as good as mine. The rowboat settled into place. We found ourselves held to the golden hull of one of the wayships, stacked like cordwood along with dozens of other bullet-shaped rowboat-sized containers.

We were falling swiftly, and came into an area where the lamps were brighter. Now I saw that there were other golden wayships above us or below or to either side, some crowded with glass rowboats clinging to their hulls like remora clinging to a shark, some with larger containers, and others bare of cargo. Here and there on the ribbon, like motorcyclists threading through a convoy of eighteen-wheelers, were rowboat-sized or yacht-sized bullets of blue glass traveling by themselves.

You are probably seeing in your mind’s eye traffic on a highway. That is not a bad picture, but remove any visible drivers and passengers, plate over all the car windows, put it through a tunnel of darkness guarded by gold monuments, shut off all the headlights and taillights, and in your mind’s ear, you should be hearing no noise aside from the whistle of wind. Machines roar and clang and stink, and well-tuned machines purr, but all this traffic was as silent as a caravan of ghosts falling toward the core of the world.

The whole thing looked like a vertical conveyer belt, but it was not: the surface of the road-sized vertical ribbon, seen up close, looked like a hairy carpet made of zillions of tiny centipede legs, which rippled in hypnotic and silent waves of motion. It was made of the living metal, and it certainly writhed like it was alive. I wonder if each tiny hair were passing all these loads from one to the next, sort of like the way a crowd surfer who throws himself into a mosh pit is passed from hand to hand, no one dancer ever bearing his whole weight.

The other two vertical ribbons must have been local or express tracks, because after a moment, we came to a spot where the three ribbons were connected by a horizontal series of ramps as baffling as any cloverleaf our highway engineers back on Earth ever erected. The wayship curved to follow the living metal road through a horizontal slant to reach an on ramp. We crossed a narrower thread of metal to a faster-moving ribbon, the express.

There was considerable jostling as we were slung at high speed from a straight vertical fall to a sideways circular slide to a second straight vertical faster-speed fall, so I put my arms around Abby again and let the hull of the rowboat slam me, not her.

“This sucks!” I said. “In my world, you step into a car the size of a closet, and push a button with a number on it, and go up or down without any discomfort. And there is soft, annoying music playing in the background.”

Abby squirmed uncomfortably. Her voice issued from somewhere in my armpit. “Comforts adorn the stream-paths for the high slaves, freeborn, and nobles. Where we are now, this stream-path, is for lepers and mummies, kinslayers and Unclean folk. Do your people really play music for them in your world?”

“Yeah. We have a special kind of music for the Unclean folk. It’s called heavy metal. But even for freight, this glass rowboat thingie is not a very elegant engineering solution. And does everyone have to carry around a dead man’s hand?”

She said, “I was raised by a corpse-handling family. You are not to touch me.”

“Oh, sorry,” I said and let her go. She kind of slid out of my hands into the stern of the boat, which was acting as the floor now. She probably thought I was a child molester or something. “Look, I did not mean to invade your personal space, I thought you might get slapped against the hull if…”

She said, “When we find Master Ossifrage, he can cleanse you.”

“Cleanse me from wha — Oh, Good God! You did NOT just say that!” Because I realized only then what she meant. She did not object to me touching her; she objected to my being touched by her.

Her stupid world had taught her that she was contaminated.

She flinched when I raised my voice. I reminded myself not to raise my voice to her ever again. Stupid world.

I said gently, “Little sister, you asked me if what I said before was make-believe. It is not. In my land, we hold the truth to be self-evident that all men are created equal, and are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights, among them, life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.”

“But you would not shake hands with me before…”

“That was because my hands were covered in blood! I did not want to dirty your mittens.”

Behind her lenses, her big brown eyes were big with astonishment. “You thought
you
would taint
me
?”

“Never be ashamed to ask me for help. Never hesitate to ask me to protect you. I am your own private Abomination, and I am not more or less unclean than you or anyone else. You understand?”

“How can I understand? Some men are born noble, and others born base. Is a king the same as a swineherd? Don’t they have untouchables in your world?”

“Not in the civilized parts. In my country, the Untouchables are heroic lawmen who gun down rumrunners with roaring Tommy-guns during the Roaring Twenties. They’re heroes.”

“Unbelievable!”

“It is one of those unbelievable things humans have to believe to be human.”

“It has never been thus in the Dark Tower.”

I wondered how long never was. “Who built this stupid Dark Tower? Where did it come from?”

“Nimrod the Mighty established the foundations by virtue of lore he learned of the magician Janus. There was a time when a great flood swallowed the land. The waters stood fifteen cubits higher than Mount Argaeus in Antitaurus. When the seas receded, the magicians resolved to build the tower higher than all mountains, and great enough to hold all the people, that no deluge should ever again have the power to destroy us.”

I blinked. Something about what she said sounded familiar, as if I had seen it in an episode of some sci-fi show I watched as a kid, but I could not place it.

There were flood myths from all around the world in my world, so many of them that some people used that as an argument to prove it had never happened, I guess on the theory that tribes of people on different continents with no communication with each other will always, naturally, tell the same stories about the same event. Other people used the prevalence of flood myths as an argument that it did happen, on the theory that people would tend to remember worldwide disasters, and on slow news days, talk about it and tell their children about it.

But I had never heard a story of people trying to survive the next flood by preventative skyscraper construction. “Sounds like a wise precaution.”

“Nor could we be scattered by catastrophe, and whatever our lords imagined in their hearts to do, they could accomplish.” An uncharacteristic note of pride crept into her voice, which was a little ironic, considering who was talking.

I wondered if black slaves in the antebellum South ever boasted about the glories of Southern cotton production, or eunuchs in Turkey ever boasted about how many Harem guards the great Sultan had unmanned. It is a natural thing to do, I guess, but still…