by M. T Hill
Shep swings hard and misses. Kapper doesn’t flinch, but looks amazed. It gives Shep time to slip towards the access hatch, where he squats and thrusts his feet backwards until his heels meet a rung, boot soles squealing. He unzips his top layer, pulls it open. The air rushes in.
‘Shep,’ Kapper says, appalled. ‘Don’t—’
Shep pulls his arms out of his sleeves, drags down the overalls to reveal his naked torso. The jacks on the platform gape at his patchy chest, the black lace on his skin. A single word sears across Shep’s lips:
Stratosphere.
And Shep gives in to the word and the word engulfs him, and the air above Vertex crackles. He lifts his arms, each dark and swollen. He pulses hard against the crotch of his overalls, tearing at them until only the ankle hems hold them on. He wrenches his knees up, legs out, upper body juddering at the hatch. Kapper and the others back away, hands raised.
Shep reaches down with the knife and slices at the material trapping his boots. He wants to be colder than this. He needs to be. He lets the overalls fall away down the ladder tube, fully naked now apart from his boots and toolbelt. Slick with sweat and something thicker. Shep leans back into the ladder tube and grips the nearest rungs, staring up to the five-hundred-metre point, the lift access platform halfway up, and beyond to the very top.
‘I’m glanding,’ he tells the jacks on the platform, and with one last jerk he kicks away his boots.
From here he takes the ladder in great leaps – no protection, no helmet – missing rungs with his feet where shins and knees will do. He suffers the start of every bruise, every scrape, every blow of his penis on the rungs, and he doesn’t break pace. He passes the lift access at five hundred metres, and starts on the tower’s gantrywork itself. He’ll get there now, he’ll crown this tower, stand a kilometre tall. Even as his breath shortens, he goes on. Even as his nerves lose the capacity to report and as the sunlight blinds him, he climbs on.
Closer to the summit, he breaks momentarily to look down. A labyrinth between his toes. Perfect geometry with no end. He shimmies out across a beam to lean out of the structure to where the wind shear is at full force. His body black-veined and raw. Through his tears, the tower is shivering silver, vanishing point deep in the ocean itself. It appears unstable, unconnected to anything. The island is a hard lake, its cabins and service buildings no more than flotsam. All activity – all life – has been extinguished by perspective. Shep stands alone. He could explain God’s ignorance. He looks up. He’s nearly there, the height a revelation; in this sun he’ll release his burden. Absolution. That’s clear now: they tell him from the inside, these surfacing things, these lives between his synapses. And for the last length of ladder, land and soil turned into distant ideas, the burden teems, roils and burns him. Icy holes open in his wrists and fingers, and through his molecules flows a vision of the future, the goal – and Shep at last remembers the bunk, last night, the sequence that led him here.
He’d woken to bells above his cabin, a clicking under his pillow. The hornet had crawled from her cocoon. She whispered to him as she had before, the night he returned to the Lakes with Freya. She the siren, and he her sailor. She’d whispered to him as he ate from her nest, filled his tub. He remembers when she spoke to him again, hushed and hypnotic, his mother’s voice or someone else, someone dead. A lament he understood in the moment and would forget by morning: We have met before. You, little vessel. Before the stratosphere you will bring us. Carry us.
‘Stratosphere,’ Shep whispers. Her scheme is bare now, exquisite. Ingress. Shep stands there at the top of the beta scaffold surveying the prize with a conqueror’s smile. The rich Pacific looks infinite. His skin breaks out in crystalline formations that creak as he studies his hands. An innate sense of dying, an exertion that might have already killed him. Then irrelevance. His wrists and arms are completely hairless. He raises his hands, stands on tiptoes. His penis is so hard it’s aching. He isn’t in control, but it feels very natural.
The beginnings of an exodus.
The sun contracts to a dot. The chill that follows is so severe that Shep’s mouth is welded shut, and the toolbelt on his belly freezes, grafts itself to his skin. His toes begin to fuse to the metal joists of the platform, here at the very point where the orbital cable might one day meet the earth and complete the Vaughans’ moon-link. There comes a pain in his fingertips that makes him come and vomit simultaneously. He opens himself like his ribs are hinged, pulling at his skin. The things inside hatch and spread outwards, particles of dust in the light, many connected together in long mobius-like filaments. A smell of ripe fruit and semen. A perfect, intoxicating taste. They shouldn’t be visible, he realises, but they’re letting him see, they dance and play and explode around him, satin against his face. He marvels as they shoal and spin against his damp skin, gemstone particles in antigrav, bronze and lilac flashes, motes of slate and cerise. The wind is stilled, the horizon is burning. He has no name for them, can think of none, but they’re alive and livid, frenetic yet harmonious, vibrant and fizzing, pouring out of him to seed the island and the ocean that holds it. And Shep knows that even if their queen died in his cabin, the brood isn’t vengeful. Her children play with their father, and he stands there on the beta scaffold and lets them, lost to total, obliterating serenity, fixed in this point between sun and concrete. Shep’s grateful, most of all. He’s found the vertex itself. The fractal hive he saw in that corridor all those weeks ago. The cold he sought.
The Journalist
The private annex in Manchester Airport isn’t Freya’s idea of the North. She rarely sees this side of the job, being more used to dreary shops opened by Z-listers in damp town centres, packed press conferences for weary-sounding detectives, tearful parents, and stifling court waiting rooms whose wooden floors hold in the peppery smell of old rubber.
It’s the decadence, mostly. From the luxurious car that collected her from the bungalow, to the velvet bedroom she waits in now, the organisers want Freya to know that no expense has been spared.
Freya included, there are twenty journalists and photographers at the airport. They were marshalled inside by white-teethed chaperones wearing identical uniforms and security guards whose faces never betrayed an emotion. After an initial briefing – a self-satisfied speech – they were each given a keycard to a ritzy suite overlooking the private jet paddock. They were told to relax, to enjoy a good night’s sleep, to help themselves to room service.
After eating, Freya showers before visiting the bar for a nightcap. It’s not that she wants to socialise, much less craves a drink. It’s more that Shep is within reaching distance – and she doesn’t want to feel angry or excited. To think of him now is almost painful: she’s so close to the full truth, and the most selfish part of her needs him to show her, to unlock everything. To give her closure.
At the hotel bar stand five or six journalists loudly discussing foreign policy with a security guard. As Freya skirts them, she overhears a comment about Iran. Another man saying, ‘That was before the fall, wasn’t it?’ A reply, huffed out by a know-it-all in olive drabs and a camo snood: ‘You youngsters know bugger-all about war.’
Freya orders a double whisky on ice and smiles politely as the bartender starts pouring.
‘Bit of a sausage-fest,’ the bartender says.
‘Sorry?’
The bartender smiles. ‘These lot. Didn’t plan to be with them, did you?’
Freya grimaces.
‘You’ll be fine,’ the bartender says. ‘They’ll give up when they realise you don’t want to suck them off.’
Freya snorts. The bluntness is refreshing.
‘Who’s treating you, anyway?’ the bartender asks, putting down Freya’s drink. ‘You’re press, right?’
Freya takes a sip and tilts the glass so the ice slides across the bottom. ‘Heard of the Vaughan family?’
The bartender couldn’t care less.
‘Doesn’t matter either way,’ Freya says. ‘I’m onl
y a jumped-up court reporter. Still waiting for them to realise their mistake.’
The bartender pulls an earnest face. ‘Don’t have to be a travel journalist to travel and write about travel, though. Who cares?’
‘Yeah,’ Freya says. ‘Who cares.’
‘Can anyone go?’
‘I was commissioned,’ Freya says. ‘A climbing magazine. It’s a secondment – I don’t think they’re bothered about what I get up to.’
‘You into your extreme sports?’
‘A bit,’ Freya says. ‘These guys say what they’re doing?’
‘Sure. Tosser in the army get-up was giving it all that about “futurism”. He showed me pictures – space lifts? A big tower. Won’t even open for decades, will it? Himalayas? And then what?’
Freya takes another sip of her drink.
The bartender leans in, conspiratorial. ‘Lap it up, I say. They want you impressed. As long as you bang a few hits in the aggregators, return on investment… You gone through your literature yet? I was told to ask you all.’
Freya shakes her head. It’s disarming that the bartender has all the right words.
‘I don’t blame you,’ the bartender says. ‘I had to. And it’s not that it’s dull – it’s mental. This big dick-swinging tower they want you to gush about. Touring with Daddy Vaughan while he drags his mouldy old bollocks around, playing Alpha Male. Sure, love, but I’m there for the canapés and maybe I’ll bang a contractor or two. Know what I mean?’
‘You’re working for the Vaughans?’
The bartender laughs. ‘Everyone in this frigging airport is, tonight. And I’m only making your drinks!’
‘Sorry,’ Freya says.
‘Oh,’ the bartender says. ‘Me too. But anyway. Would you?’
‘Would I what?’
‘Bang a contractor.’
Freya smiles and takes another sip of her drink. ‘It won’t be so bad,’ she says. ‘Surely.’ She nods backwards. ‘Unless I’m sitting with one of them on the plane.’
The bartender makes a different face. They can both imagine that all too well. Then the bartender swears and draws up a tablet from behind the bar. ‘You seen this?’ A screaming headline: NEW FOOT AND MOUTH STRAIN SPREADS.
Freya downs her drink. Transmission. Infection. Proliferation.
‘You want one?’ Freya asks, shaking the empty glass.
‘Nah,’ the bartender says. ‘But you plough on.’
* * *
Freya takes the press literature to bed. True romance. Out of its sleeve, it’s a perfect-bound volume, presented like overwrought brand guidelines for a corporate. The first page has a full-bleed shot of Mr Vaughan playing golf, the entrepreneur and visionary at leisure. The copy beside it is unreadably pompous – a litany of space metaphors finished with a clunker: ‘What if, this century, we could reach the stars without rocket fuel?’
Her drinks have hit the mark, either way. Drowsy, head dulled, one eye shut, Freya flips through the book and takes in technicalities between lengthening blinks: ‘nanothread’, ‘core size’, ‘anchor station’, ‘vortex shedding’, ‘geostationary orbit’; a flowery description of the island, once mined for guano deposits, now a ‘uniquely terraformed base of operations’. Details of ‘deep synergy’ with the US Navy, who are testing drones on the island.
She manages to stay awake for the section on ‘threat assessments’, and finds herself twitching to read about what could go wrong when the tower is built in the Himalayas. Orbital debris, terrorism, megastorms – it’s already under siege. She drops the book and starts to drift off, half-dreaming of standing on the shore of the island. A legion of frogmen, a thousand in blank masks, marching from the swell with bolt cutters in their hands. Her body convulses, that weird primitive release before proper sleep, as one of the frogmen taps a beam with his tool. He takes off his mask and his face is Oriol’s, webbed with black veins.
She opens her phone. She writes a text she knows will bounce:
You’re ill, Shep. Don’t do anything stupid.
She hits send and sets her alarm. Tomorrow, she thinks. And before long she slips down through island sand into the warm ocean.
The Steeplejack
Lying this way should feel wrong to Shep. As he drifts, encased in a white box, he thinks about that, wondering if an injustice has been wrought against him. It’s good to realise he doesn’t mind. How content, how relaxed, he is.
He’s definitely restrained, though. A mechanical paralysis, a pressure on his body. Vague shapes move across his white box, but it’s impossible to interact with them: he occupies a no man’s land, nothing to climb or pass over. The only thing he can control is emptying his bladder, and he isn’t sure where it goes.
When Shep opens one eye a crack, the white box takes on fuzzy detail. A cheap suspended ceiling, a curtain, a metal-framed cot. Owing to a sore neck, examining his body takes effort. He lies in a sort of bivouac, wired into machines purring by his head. Pins and needles rage in his feet. There’s a cannula in his hand. His arms are wrapped in bloodied bandages. His skin feels tight.
At some point, a more solid shape appears and hovers at the end of his cot.
‘You awake?’ the shape asks. With a strain, the shape becomes fleshy. A face. It’s Kapper.
‘Shit man,’ Kapper says, ‘you are awake. Don’t speak – you’ve shredded your larynx. Nurse says your tongue’s fucked as well.’
Shep tries to give his partner a half-nod. Kapper stares at him. No easy openers. It’s Kapper who breaks the tension. ‘Can’t believe you made it down,’ he says. ‘I swear, Shepherd. No suit, nothing. I figured the cold must’ve preserved the bloody cloth between your ears. But the sensors all said it was boiling up there. Strongest UV the climate crew has on record this decade, and you, you silly bastard, you had no protection. Sweet fuck-all!’
Shep twists in his cot. Each breath feels badly interrupted, like a morning stretch cut short by a cramp. He tries to sit up, but his body won’t fold. He turns his face towards the window.
‘Shep?’
In his mind, Shep occupies a jungle. There’s a bird with incredible plumage out there on the sill, pecking at moss. A shocking view, as though the end of the world has been and gone, and a rainforest has overtaken the island.
He focuses farther afield. To make certain he’s awake. The beta scaffold has the matt-green finish of oxidised copper.
He comes back to Kapper. He slowly brings a hand up to his face and lets the image settle. Two of his fingertips are missing, and his three remaining fingers are deep grey.
‘What happened?’ Shep croaks. Not that it matters: he’d topped out. A strange frost had coated his body, metallic sweat reflecting the sun from every pore. There’d been a whispered memory, excerpts from some sleep-conference with a queen, an entity… but from where? He smiles. In exchange for her children, she altered him.
Kapper puts a hand on Shep’s foot. His pins and needles give way to liquid heat.
Shep opens his eyes fully, conscious of a shift.
Kapper is naked.
‘The navy still had the Merlin up,’ Kapper tells him, apparently oblivious. ‘We had teams on every platform. And the drone hovering there. Max range, and this Yank comes over the relay: “There’s your guy. Summit of the rig.” And you were there, Shep. You just were. Stark bollock naked.’
Shep swallows; his tonsils burn. He can’t speak. He can’t say: But why are you naked?
‘Time we had enough crew with slings to get you down, you were gone,’ Kapper says. ‘You’d hooked your Stilly in a big hole in the superstructure, even though you had nothing on you to punch a hole through the platform like that. By the state of your fingers, you wouldn’t have managed to wedge it afterwards.’ Kapper breaks off to shake his head.
‘Kapper…’ Shep tries.
Kapper ignores him. ‘You had all these symptoms. Frostbite, hypothermia,’ he says. ‘It was impossible. First the heat, and second because you’d have to be five miles up
to be affected that way. Maybe it was climbing the whole tower, maybe that did you in? Skipping the lift and that, like you did. Exothermic, they said… but I don’t know, Shep. And your eyes. They found growths on your corneas.’
‘Why aren’t you wearing—’
‘You’re going home soon, see? Eddy bagged you a space on the next freighter. Tomorrow, or day after, weather depending.’
Shep moves his head fractionally. ‘I can’t,’ he rasps.
‘The tests are done,’ Kapper says. ‘The navy’s already packing up. Beacons worked. You can get some proper rain, a pint down you. Nurse says the Vaughans’ insurance covers transfer and private care back home. You’ll be on the mend in no time.’
Shep considers his damaged hands. Thinking of the fingerboard at Big Walls.
‘Prosthetics are pretty sweet,’ Kapper says. ‘If they upgrade you, I’d get a wet chip while you’re at it.’
But Shep doesn’t want upgrading. That’s not how jacks do it. You retire early with a big pile of compensation to blow…
‘Either way,’ Kapper says, ‘you’re their first inpatient. When Big Vaughan’s tour arrives this afternoon, you’ll probably get a hi. Mallory says he’ll ring in from Blighty, too.’
Kapper steps away from the bed. ‘Speak of the devil,’ he says, looking at his watchless wrist. ‘I’m meant to be on the welcome committee – best get cleaned up. Who’d want greeting by this godawful mug?’
Shep tries to protest. Kapper smirks and parts the curtains. ‘Don’t be a dickhead. And for the record,’ Kapper says, ‘you were never shite.’
Shep lurches as far as the cot will allow him.
Kapper pauses halfway out of the bay. Lines of life-earned muscle. His dark pubis. ‘What are you doing, you daft twat?’
‘Kap,’ Shep says.
‘Your hair? Is that it? I don’t want you jumping off something when you see it.’