The Unwound Way

by Bill Adams

  We watched for a few minutes in silence. “I think we’re going down, slightly,” she said. “But he’s not releasing hydrogen, is he?”

  “The next time one of those clouds is shining behind him, look through the envelope. Look at that interior bladder, the one that stored the oxygen before. He’s compressing air from the outside into it, to make us heavier—without giving up any hydrogen.”

  “So he can go back up again later, by letting the ballast air go,” Foyle said. “All right. But why change altitude, except to land?”

  “Look at our shadow,” I answered. “Isn’t our line of flight a little more easterly now? We must get a slightly different direction of wind down here. Beautiful! He’s using the different wind layers to trim his course. I’ll bet anything he drops us within five meters of his target when the time comes.”

  Foyle objected. “Beautiful? There’s no reason for complex wind patterns down here. They’re being manufactured somewhere, just for the eel. He’s not choosing a course, he’s following a program. And so are we. This big phony stage set has reduced us to characters in a play.”

  “Helen was right about you,” I told her. “You’ve got to learn to live in the moment. If we don’t have many left, all the more reason.”

  “Spoken like an Old Rite Kanalist,” she said bitterly. “Past and future are an illusion. We can be reborn at will. And of course, we are free. As free as the programmed wind.”

  She sat down, curled up next to Hogg-Smythe, and closed her eyes. It occurred to me that if she was a character in a play, I—as her husband’s inspiration—was her true author. An uncomfortable thought, like the fact that Helen Hogg-Smythe and I were once the same age. Didn’t I sleep with an opera singer once, in college?

  I sat at their feet and kept track of the eel’s maneuvers, the patient eye, the rippling throat, the changing view below. I knew I would never see such a thing again.

  The evening’s talk swirled through my head, plays and college days and ideals and reputation. I had to distract myself from Foyle’s main thesis: the idea that the Kanalism I’d spent my youth on had never been better than the Elitist crypto-fascism, or the real Fascism before that—her un-Kanalist idea that we are just trapped in history’s repetitive pattern, and cannot follow our own golden thread. Despite everything, I still wanted to believe otherwise—still wanted to believe in myself, for one thing. And as the night wore on, I realized I was spinning out a play. A new idea, Cyrano On the Moon.

  We take off from act three of the original. Cyrano has just left Roxane and Christian alone and, being a playwright himself, can see where the story will go from there. And so, in the middle of his conversation with de Guiche, he suddenly breaks off. Instead of just talking about going to the Moon, he actually goes—a flight of poetry—and that’s our play. On the Moon, it turns out, long noses are especially prized. Moon maidens throw themselves at his feet. Men copy the cut of his clothes. His poetry and plays are praised, not for their own virtues, but as part of the cult of personality centered upon him. And Cyrano can’t take it. He returns to the original play, accepting his fate in order to reclaim his soul, as a hero must. Only a character in a play, but what a character!

  I grew more and more excited as I toyed with it. The perfect vehicle for a hit-and-run treatment of fame, fashion, the literary life—or at least one literary life. And a reunion with an old friend.

  But who was I kidding? I hadn’t written a line for years. Sometimes I forgot that Larkspur was dead.

  ◆◆◆

  Foyle and I said little to each other throughout the following day, aside from her noting that the grass appeared greener now, and my speculating that the color was simply unadulterated by undertints of white, blue, pink—that we had passed beyond moth country.

  By midafternoon we could see where we were meant to land. There was no doubt about it, because the balloon ahead of us was making its descent. And as Foyle had guessed, we were aimed at the eels’ breeding ground, the source of the river.

  The prairie ended in a steep ridge that extended east and west a great distance; greener, hillier country continued to the north. Dead ahead, the ridge was crowned with a grassy plateau. There was a large pool—or small lake—in the plateau, apparently spring- or pump-fed, because it spilled over into a waterfall of some forty meters’ height and the river extended from that.

  The spillway started as a sheer drop, but appeared to be a rounded slide where it met the prairie at the bottom, and there wasn’t as much white water and mist as if there had been rocks. No doubt the compact bodies of the eels could survive this way of returning to the river.

  Foyle and I watched through field glasses as the balloon ahead of us made an odd little dip and bob at the last second but splashed down successfully, just past the south bank of the source waters. The heavy mass of passenger eels anchored it in a slow drift across the pool until it managed to deflate; then all subsided into the water, which was already half-green with their squirming relations.

  “Ten minutes and we’ll be among them,” Foyle said. “Every one of them electrically charged. Maybe we’ll wish we’d settled for the moths.”

  “No, look,” I said. “See that bunker on the far side? I think that’s our transport station. You were right the first time. We were meant to make this trip, and survive.”

  “The gondola will capsize,” Foyle pointed out. “You or I could take our chances swimming, but⁠…⁠”

  She didn’t have to say it. For the past hour, we’d been unable to rouse Helen Hogg-Smythe. And yet her breathing was strong and regular now; we weren’t about to write her off.

  When you approach something from the air, its aspect doesn’t change much from minute to minute, but remains at toy scale. Until you cross a certain threshold, and then with every second your destination grows not only larger as you watch, but more real. Less escapable.

  “There’s another way,” I said. “Look at that north bank, beyond the pool. See the way it ripples? That’s tall grass, maybe soft, and the slope looks gentle.”

  “So? It’s not where our eel is going.”

  “No. He’ll go for the pinpoint landing at the south end of the pool, to cover himself against the northward drag while the balloon deflates. But suppose we drop ballast just before he makes it.”

  “We’ll go back up, fast,” she said. “But I’m sure he’d compensate to bring us down again.”

  “Oh, I’m counting on that. But venting the extra gas would have to take several seconds, during which you’d fly north. There’s a good chance you’d clear the pool entirely, and hit the bank instead.”

  “At five or ten k an hour,” Foyle said. But she was considering it.

  “A nasty jolt, and you’d have to roll out—and roll Helen out—awfully fast to avoid being dragged. It wouldn’t be a picnic, but it wouldn’t be a swim through electric eels, either. And it demands nothing of Helen.”

  “That’s true. And we don’t know. She may come out of this sleep later, if she gets the chance; she came out of it last night…How much ballast do you think we should drop?”

  “Me. Or you.”

  She looked sharply at me. “That’s unnecessary. That backpack of mine is pretty heavy. Jettisoning even a little weight probably has a big effect.”

  I shook my head. “You saw how fast that last balloon deflated. That’s how fast this eel will be able to compensate. We have to make it hard on him. And another thing. The grass landing will be less risky if there’s less mass in the basket, fewer arms and legs in the way, fewer bodies to get out.”

  We’d begun to go down as fast as we went north, causing a sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach.

  “You believe the Hellway’s a gantlet, a test to destruction,” I said, “and maybe you’re right. But I think a transport stop waiting at the side of the pool means that it’s swimmable. That may even be the safer way, so I offer you your choice.”

  She shook her head, pale and grave. “I think you’re aski
ng for the worst of it. But I couldn’t leave Helen behind. That makes it fair, doesn’t it, if I take responsibility for her?”

  “More than fair. Brace yourself, then. Plan your moves.” I took off my boots, put them inside one of the waterproof-looking provision bags, and tied that onto my belt. We already had blankets around Helen; Foyle quickly wrapped them in enough cord to make a handier bundle of her.

  While she found her own stance, I stood and swung one foot around the outside of a gondola leg, gripping the post with both hands, my toes pointing inward and my back to the empty air. We could hear the rush and roar of the waterfall now; we’d pass over it in a moment and splash down seconds later. When we’d been higher there had been little sense of motion, but now the landscape flew by, dizzying.

  “You’re ready to hold her down now?” I asked. “When I jump, the basket will jerk up and try to throw you out.”

  “I’m not stupid!” Foyle snapped, but looked immediately contrite. And then the words tumbled out. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry about some of the things I’ve said to you, I don’t trust most people, and you’re so strange—but not, I think, such a bad man. Just not a very credible commissioner.”

  “Everyone’s a critic,” I said, which was as good an exit line as any, only just then everything went to hell.

  Chapter Nineteen

  The eel vented hydrogen with a steam-whistle sound and we plummeted, a dozen meters short of clearing the falls. Still driving forward, too, we would smash into the wall of water within seconds, and when you’re braced for one scare it’s no help against another; my hands were frozen to the gondola leg, my mind a swirl of mist and air.

  And then we entered the updraft which neither Foyle nor I had foreseen. For when the wind from the south hit the ridge it could go nowhere but up, and our eel-pilot had factored it in.

  Within a few meters of the falls we rode up as sharply as on a roller coaster. The eel shrieked out gas to bring us back down again as we crossed the edge of the grassy plateau. We clung to posts to avoid being tossed out by the whiplash, Foyle’s long legs holding Helen’s inert body down. And then the rich smells of grass and silt rose around us, along with another wave of turbulence, dark water suddenly everywhere below, hundreds of eels in view and the gondola about to join them—and I had to live up to Foyle’s good opinion, didn’t I?

  I let go. With one loud snap, the black lake swallowed me whole. I descended in a white shroud of bubbles, unable to see, hear, or think. But then I slowed, hung suspended, and after what seemed like a long time began to rise again.

  I’d made a simple plan in advance—a dead man’s float. The initial splash might alarm the eels, but I would do nothing further to threaten them.

  The water was warm and buoyant. My chest felt tight as my ascent gathered momentum…the no-color past my eyelids grew lighter and lighter…and then, with a gasp, I broke the surface.

  Floating on my back, I saw the balloon descending again, as planned, but from higher than I’d thought possible—and making faster time northward. I could do nothing but curse as it overshot the grassy bank and the rise beyond, too, before dipping out of sight. Unknown territory.

  Coils of eel kept splashing into view near me, and I felt an occasional rubbery impact, but managed not to respond. Soon I lifted my head for another look around.

  I was drifting toward a hole in the scenery—the waterfall. From this vantage I could see a mesh fence across the mouth of the falls, and it looked strong enough to bear my weight.

  I was still considering the possibilities when the eels discovered me.

  The first one went around and around my right leg like a whip at half-speed; the second snaked up my left arm to coil at the shoulder. One of them—I couldn’t see which as I craned my neck for air—threw an additional loop around my waist. The eels were as thick as a strong man’s arms, and could have crushed me if they had meant to; instead they slowly writhed to some other purpose, a spiraling squirm I could feel through my clothes. I waited, as paralyzed as if the voltage had already hit me.

  Now the shift in weight sent my body in a slow half-roll onto my side. I could still breathe, but took a mouthful of water and tried not to cough as I spat it out, nothing to annoy the passengers. The living cables tightened a little, but at least this kept me rolling, full-circle onto my back again. Now I could bend my neck and look down the length of my body, and see enough of the way the eels were intertwined to understand.

  I was not being attacked, and as long as I didn’t stir an eel up, as I had the day before, I needn’t be electrocuted. The eels had something better to do; I was just a handy platform. Anyone who’s ever tried to make love in a swimming pool will understand.

  The sound of the falls grew steadily louder, the twinings of the eels more rhythmic and powerful. I could only stare up at the artificial sky, thinking that at least no one would say, “He died as he lived⁠…⁠”

  The slow tendency to drift became a definite current, and I could see the water swirling on either side. Slowly, slowly, and just in time, I bent my free arm over my head—to take the impact when I hit the wire mesh of the falls’ restraining fence. The current spun my body around against the barrier lengthwise, and now the whipped-up white froth at the spillway threatened to choke me.

  The eels gave each other—and me—a few last fond squeezes, and slithered off. I grabbed at the mesh with both hands and yanked myself vertical, head out of the white spume. Gasping for air, I blinked the water out of my eyes and took in the vast prairie spread out below.

  I wasn’t home free yet, pinned against the fence wire by the onrushing rapids; more heavy green eels washed against me, three-meter lengths writhing over my shoulders, throwing brief anchor holds around my neck or outstretched arms. But ultimately they always sought the open spaces in the fence and the long slide back to their feeding grounds. Meanwhile I kept every movement slow. The wires cut into my hands at first, and I made no progress until my feet found holds, too, but with every centimeter I reclaimed from the current the load seemed lighter, and soon I had hauled my dripping body above the waterline, into cold air.

  I made the long traverse along the top of the fence to shore without much trouble, watching swirls of white water and the occasional dark eel rush over the edge beneath my sidestepping feet. I had plenty of time to admire the falls, rainbows in the mist at its foot, and to notice a staircase running up alongside it from the prairie floor. Ingenuity or endurance. Meaning that the Elitists had honestly expected some of their children to ‘endure’ a two- or three-day hike through vampire moths, and reach that staircase on foot? Unbelievable.

  I had to cross some slippery rocks from the end of the fence to the bank, and did slip once, but my clothes couldn’t get any wetter than they were. I stopped to strip and wring them out, and—seeing no moths—rolled myself dry in the long grass before putting them on. I unbagged my boots and wore them, but carried my uniform tunic in one hand so that the breeze could finish drying shirt and pants as I hiked—though it was beginning to get dark, and colder.

  Beyond the rise was a country of green rolling hills that threw back echoes as I called after Foyle and Helen Hogg-Smythe. No sight of them, no reply. No knowing how much farther they would be blown. A wave of familiar self-loathing swept over me, survivor’s guilt, Barbarossa sickness. Despite my best intentions to save them, I was the one who’d bailed out safe.

  But if Hogg-Smythe had remembered the Hellway rite correctly, the next t-station would have separated our party anyway. Meanwhile, someone still had to beat the mercs to the pole, or none of us would survive in the long run. I returned to the eel pool while I could still see and followed its edge until I found the t-station, a low, moss-covered bunker.

  At my approach the door slid open to reveal a narrow horizontal space like a torpedo tube. A robot voice ordered me to lie in it, and I did. Blackness. Motion. Time and distance passing, but how much?

  ◆◆◆

  The Hellway transport let me out o
nto a rocky mountainside. A belt with food packets and a canteen popped into the torpedo as soon as I got out. I grabbed the belt, opened and ate one of its doughy meals, and strapped it on like a bandolier. The door closed, and the lights went out.

  The underworld’s night sky stretched above me, playing its mysterious games. An intense beam of silver illuminated a circle of landscape five minutes’ walk away—apparently for my benefit. It was the sort of favor the heroes at Troy had received from Olympus, and as I made my way down the steep slope I considered the various horrible fates of those heroes. With friends like gods, you don’t need enemies.

  My exit point had been an otherwise inaccessible place, a pocket among jagged heights. The only pass down into flat country appeared to have been filled by a rockslide; sharp-edged boulders protruded from a mass of dirt and gravel like the spines of a stegosaurus. But closer inspection showed an alternate route, a circular tunnel slanting beneath the rubble through solid rock. As soon as I reached it, the light from above went out. Subtle.

  The tunnel was dimly lit by a lamp at one end, where an elevator stood open. The lower tunnel wall was discolored, and I wondered if maintenance robots had just recently cleared out six centuries of washed-down dirt. I stepped inside the elevator. It took me an unknowable distance downward and let me out again on the opposite side of the shaft; although underground, I still faced what had been the downhill direction.

  I found myself in a new corridor, horizontal this time, but still circular in cross-section, between two and three meters in diameter. The tunnel ran through living rock, the wall surface as smooth as if cut by running water—or a particle beam. The light source was a narrow strip set flush to the stone, centered above me and running in a continuous line the length of the tunnel. Two ranks of small metal loops ran parallel, four or five centimeters to either side of the strip; they looked like hangers for something, but they were bare.