The dockworkers, of course, save their wages for just such entertainment. I am not naïve. This is the old business of the world. But it seems a sad business. When I think on it, I turn the painting of M. away. But when the thought persists, as it sometimes does, I turn her image back again.
September 24th –
I have succeeded finally in compiling an accurate roll of all the stevedores, wharfies, drivers, sentries, and peons employed by Mr. Goll in his port. After firing some fourteen loafers, there are fifty-two fit men in all; eighteen are moonlighters who also work in one of the more legitimate New Babel ports, such as Ginside or Erstmeer. Of the thirty-four full time workers, not a single one is literate or capable of anything more than rudimentary counting done upon the fingers. If the number of something is greater than ten, two men are required to count it.
Adam, of course, is the exception. He is well-read, a reliable calculator, and absolutely gifted with mechanical repairs. I routinely forget his relative youth, and so often find myself confiding in him about one practical dilemma or other. (No one ever speaks of his miserable past or anything else of personal importance.) We have transcended the mistakes of our first meeting, though he was suspicious of an easy reconciliation. He first wanted all of our cards to be laid on the table before we decided to be friends. So, he explained why he’d robbed me only hours after meeting me.
The scheme had been Finn Goll’s entirely, of course. Goll insisted on importing talent from the ground because he believed such men to be smart, naïve, and unaffiliated with his enemies. In short, such men could be trusted. (Ironically, Goll trusts no one well enough to let them recruit for any position better than a porter.) Adam’s role in the plot was to identify isolated, vulnerable, and educated tourists. He’d earn their trust, lead them toward an unsuspected rendezvous with Goll, and, as soon as the opportunity presented itself, rob them blind. Adam then delivered the tourist’s personal effects to Goll, who, all-too conveniently, would stumble upon the ruined tourists.
After that, it was just a matter of manipulating the tourist into believing that Goll was also a victim of the same thief, which, as I can attest, creates an instant and surprisingly strong bond. Goll’s philosophy of sowing many prospects to reap a single resilient hire meant that Adam had robbed many, many men. Knowing Goll, knowing his persuasive and brutal extremes, I can hardly blame Adam for the part he played. He was only doing what was required of him. How can I hold a grudge?
Besides, Adam is the only man in the yard not rooting for my involvement in a fatal accident. I am unpopular with the men. They think my schedules and routines are arbitrary and excessive. It has never occurred to them that overstocks of rotting meat and produce are the result of poor management, or that bottlenecks in traffic can be avoided, or that money is being lost to faulty indexes. For them, the rotting bushels of figs, and the dented wheel fenders, and the evaporation of alcohol are just natural phenomena that may be bemoaned but not corrected.
Adam is teaching me the rudiments of steam engines. Since our tractors break down religiously, we are left to repair them or carry in the imports by hand, so it is prudent to learn. In honesty, I enjoy those claustrophobic sessions under the carriages of engines because it at least liberates me from my desk where I feel increasingly chained. Also, this work with engines has sparked a theory about the Tower that I would like to pursue… if I ever have energy for academic thoughts again.
September 29th –
Ah, the nightly airing! Every evening I stand upon the base of the weigh crane in the yard, adopt my headmaster’s bawl, and make announcements about productivity and assignments. These sessions, much loathed by the men, have only been recently redeemed. One evening a week ago, our cook, Louis Mawk, asked me to read a scrap of paper. It was an I.O.U. of which he was suspicious, but being illiterate, he could not satisfy his curiosity. I read it, and with no trouble of course, though it entertained the men greatly. The next night, another man approached with another document he wished to have deciphered. And ever since, I am beset each night by a half dozen men with limericks, letters, and flyers.
While I would expect these men to wish to keep their affairs private, no one else seems troubled by the publicity. It is just the opposite: the men stay in assembly to hear what news of the world will be read. In general, the news is quite banal and sometimes profane. But I treat it all as literature, and so manage not to squirm even as I am forced to read the bawdy advertisement of a brothel or the charmless love notes the men sometimes receive.
I almost laughed this evening to see the young Adam Boreas blush at just such a recital. Old Louis Mawk came forth with a particularly lurid broadside for the Steam Pipe, Goll’s own den of iniquity, which, beside a menu of vulgarities, included an etching of a beautiful young woman with a writhing abundance of curly black hair. She sat perched on a trapeze bar in an acrobat’s leotard. The copy said, and I read, “Come see, come see the Flying Girl! The Amazing Voleta! Slim of bust but broad of back, will she go flying into the sack?”
It was crude enough, but I was surprised to see the usually implacable Adam turn a furious shade of red and then disappear for the remainder of the evening.
September 30th –
I am an insensitive fool. The name of the girl on the flyer was only vaguely familiar, and even so, I should have remembered. Voleta was who Adam addressed his note to, the one he’d posted to the Lost and Found in the grim shadow of the Tower. Voleta, starlet of the Steam Pipe, is his sister.
Why did he lie about her being lost? Shame? Denial? Superstition? Oh, the question answers itself. Honesty is so often full of defeat. We do not talk about our past. To do so would invite despair. We talk of the port, the men, the state of the tea mildewing in crates in the yard. We are friends, but I have yet to ask how he came here, or why, or how he lost his eye, or how it was that his sister became Finn Goll’s showgirl. What horrible questions to ask. What horrible answers to conceal.
October 5th –
Every day, Iren comes to my office to collect the Almighty Eight O’clock Report for Goll. I have not seen Goll myself since my hire, and have no sense of where he lies ensconced inside New Babel. For all I know, he lives on a ship in a cloud.
Every morning, without fail, Iren startles me half out of my wits by erupting into my office with all the civility of a famished bear. She is ingenious at catching me off guard, arriving on a different minute of a different hour, and always without making any noise in her approach. The door merely flies on its hinges, bangs upon the bookshelf, and the famished bear rushes in.
This morning, I leapt in such fright that I knocked over my inkpot, throwing a black lake across an open ledger. While I mopped at the mess with my now-ruined handkerchief, I told Iren to collect the envelope containing the Eight O’Clock herself. It laid on the edge of my desk among several others, clearly marked, “Port of Goll Figures of Commerce for the 4th of October.”
She was instantly irate (a fierce prospect), and demanded that I hand it to her. I sat there with my hands blackened to the second knuckle, and in my distress, refused her request.
It was only later that I realized she could not read the envelope to distinguish it from the others. It shouldn’t have come as any surprise, and if I had not been so discombobulated by the early hour and the tide of ink creeping across my desk, I would never have made the mistake. What did surprise me was how ashamed and angry this revelation made her. The men in the yard express no embarrassment at having another man read their mail. But Iren was… upset. And she quickly reminded me why I should make it a point to not upset her.
She rapped me once on the top of my skull like she was knocking on a door, and repeated her request. I was sufficiently inspired to fulfill it.
I wonder if Goll was curious as to why his regular post was decorated with blackened fingerprints this morning.
October 8th –
A ship, small and dreadful, hardly better than a dingy tied to a goatskin gasbag, arrived with a loa
d of White Chrom today. The shipment agitated the men, who alternately leered at it distrustfully, and were drawn out by it like worms in a cloudburst. The men call it Crumb. It is too dangerous to leave it in the yard. It would vanish or spark a riot; more likely, it would do both. So it is sitting in my room. Ten pounds of White Chrom squats on my dresser in a pine cube crate.
That first day in New Babel when I was chased into what I mistook for a mission, I fell under the trance of Crumb. It showed me a vision of a burnt-match Tower, but it also showed me something better than a painter’s impression, better than a memory, or a fitful dream. It brought Marya back in such a tangible way that it felt as if we had never parted. Strange as it was to see her, gigantic and in the basket of a balloon, I believed with all my heart that it was her. She was really there.
I have seen the dockworkers who’ve crawled one time too many into the Crumb’s convincing dream. They have the soft smiles of a sleepy child. It is a pitiful, unaware expression. And sometimes I envy it. Marya is in that crate on my dresser. Not in flesh and blood, but in the conviction of memory and mind. She is in there, and I could go in after her.
I must find Adam and see if he is interested in playing a game of cards.
October 15th –
It has been ninety-three days since I last saw Marya vanish into the underwear bazaar, and forty days since I shook hands with Goll. The burn on my hand has healed, though it looks like a splot of candle wax dried upon my palm. It is strange to look at, strange to think that I will always have this mark with me now. When I consider the scars my friends have accrued, Edith’s malicious branding, Tarrou’s carved scalp, and Adam’s undone eye, I feel fortunate.
Now, the port and weigh station tick along like two clocks. The station house is tidy as a library, and the autowagons run as regularly as the tides. I have Goll fairly convinced that I am Port Master Tom Senlin, a reliable man who is satisfied with his salary and his lot. He believes that I have forgotten my old crusade.
A ship arrived today with a miraculous cargo. The captain himself escorted to the station the four waterlogged crates. He opened one, and showed me layers of straw packed about a crust of ice— ice!— which he had harvested himself, from the horn of a mountain, before flying to a port, not a sky port, but an honest oceanic port, where he took on his precious cargo: five hundred oysters. He pulled one of the horned shells from the ice pack to prove the oysters were still tightly closed and redolent of the sea. He deftly cracked it open with a pick and offered me the shimmering morsel to sample. What had always seemed peasant’s food to me before now was a capsule of a lost home and an old life… I have never tasted anything so wonderful.
That captain walked away from the port with a king’s purse, which the port coffers quickly recouped and doubled after selling the treasures to a private cantina. But more importantly, that unpolished, unremarkable captain left me with the clear revelation that a man with a ship is capable of all sorts of miracles. If five hundred oysters, those most perishable of creatures, can be plucked from the sea and carried to the heart of a continent, unspoiled, is anything impossible with the advantage of a ship?
What good is money? It can be skimmed and extorted, taxed and burgled! Tickets will strand you. Customs will rob you. I do not need money to buy passage upon a ship. I need a ship entire and my own. Let Goll think I have lost my resolve! I am determined. I will find her.
I am going to take a ship.
Chapter Six
“Presuming that I can obtain a ship, I wonder how I would crew it. Of course, I cannot afford to hire airmen, nor can I tolerate the pirate option of violent salaries. No, each one of my crew must come on their own, for their own reasons.”
- Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin
It was midday in late October when Adam slunk cross-armed into the Port Master’s office under the burden of a terrible secret.
Senlin was too distracted to notice his friend’s brooding because he had just that morning made an absorbing discovery. While cleaning the corner cobwebs from the underside of his ship’s prow desk, he’d found stowed on a receded ledge a strange and dusty artifact. It was a steel rod, a straight yard in length and about as thick as a broom handle. It was quite heavy, but in a satisfying way. At first, he had mistaken it for a bit of plumbing, but it was not hollow like a pipe, and its surface was scored with regular rings. After polishing away a thick film of soot and grime, Senlin discovered names had been engraved minutely between these rings. No, not names: destinations. Between the heel of the rod and the first line were the words, “The Genesis.” Then, above the next line, “Algez’s Parlor,” and above the next, “The Baths.”
It was a model of the Tower, a three dimensional map!
It took him a half hour to clean it fully, and a half hour more to oil it and file down several obnoxious burrs. There were thirty-five segments in all, and though many of the segments were blank or had been purposefully scratched out, nineteen of the sections were clearly marked. Senlin saw evidence of at least three different hands in the shaping of the letters. It was marvelous!
In the sixth segment, Senlin found the inscription he was looking for: “The Ringdom of Pelphia, Seat of the Pells.” He worried those pristine serifs with his thumb, repeating the words to himself until the utterance became almost a mantra. The Ringdom of Pelphia, Seat of the Pells.
The state was eponymous with the man: W. H. Pell, the Count who had deceived and abducted Marya. For the first time, Senlin knew, knew with thrilling certainty, where Marya was.
Now, wearing an expression that verged on giddiness, Senlin held up the steel staff, polished to a gleam, and asked, “Have you seen this before?”
Adam closed the heavy door to Senlin’s office, which swung unevenly on hinges that had been loosened daily by the amazon’s visits. He dropped into the chair before Senlin’s desk, which was bookended by great leaning shelves of ledgers and manuscripts, so much paper that Senlin sometimes felt like he was in the spine of an immense book that was slowly coming shut. The old red leather of the chair crackled under Adam’s self-conscious shifting. “It’s called an aeronaut’s rod, or an aerorod,” Adam said with hardly a second glance, as if the totems were common enough. “Captains carry them for navigation.”
“An aerorod!” Senlin said approvingly. “It’s unfinished though, and what is written upon it seems to have been added by several hands. I imagine additions were made as new lands were discovered. It must be decades old!” Hardly taking his eyes off of the staff, and still oblivious to Adam’s apparent misery, Senlin went on: “Again, this is evidence of the importance of literacy. Uneducated men could not have made this record. I’ve been thinking,” Senlin said, turning the heavy staff in the air, “I’m going to teach Iren to read.”
Despite his poor mood, this pronouncement goaded Adam into brief laughter. “I can’t think of a worse idea,” he said.
“Why? I’ve seen many brutes reformed by the ability to read. Iren knows there are open secrets written all around her that are invisible to her because she cannot read. She knows how easily she could be taken advantage of, knows her ignorance makes her vulnerable, and so she compensates with force. But she can’t hope to go on being a bodyguard into her dotage. One day she’ll have to retire, and then what will she do?”
“It’s a noble thought, Tom, but…”
Senlin looked up, and his eyes narrowed with abrupt concern. “Why are you making such a miserable face? Are you sick?”
Adam’s mouth hung open, his eyes on the floor. He gathered up a breath and said, “The organ at the Steam Pipe is broken again, and Rodion has called me in to repair it this evening before tonight’s show.”
“Well, that’s…”
Adam interrupted, “He wants you to come, too. He wants to meet the new Port Master.”
“Ah.” Senlin quickly divined the root of Adam’s discomfort. It was not the repairs to the pipe organ or the repulsive whoremonger, Rodion, who had upset him. The
Steam Pipe was where Voleta performed and lived, and Adam was embarrassed to think that Senlin might see “the flying girl,” his sister, amid her humiliation.
The subject of Voleta had remained unaddressed in the weeks following the awkward reading of the Steam Pipe’s advertisement, and Senlin had respected Adam’s silence on the matter. But now, it seemed, something had to be said, or rather, Adam wished to say something. “I’d like to tell you, Tom, about where I came from.”
The young man cleared his throat and lifted his gaze to Senlin’s, who was in the process of quietly setting aside the aerorod. The once-headmaster folded his hands on his desk and gave Adam the time he needed to gather his words and courage. The pages of the office seemed to close a little more about them, while the dangling lightbulb, like a luminary at a fall festival, softened the darkness. Then Adam began his tale.
Adam Boreas was born in the grasslands of Khayyam in the west of Ur where the land was golden with perennial drought, and the sky was a blue desert. His father worked in the Depot of Sumer, where many vital railroads intersected, swapped cargo, and snaked again into the expansive fields of tall buffelgrass like black millipedes.
In the far distance, a hazy form rose from the Earth like a single hair from an ancient head: the Tower of Babel. It was the dream catcher of his boyhood.
The city of Sumer had been built on stilts above the Depot’s matrix of rails and switch tracks. The buildings were all thin and flimsy as playing cards. No matter where one stood or sat or slept, the rumble of trains was immediately underfoot. Steam jetted and seeped up through every crack and knothole, as if a volcanic spring churned just beneath the baked-gray boardwalks. There were no streets between buildings, only empty canals where trains ran submerged just beneath the surface of the city.
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 27