Voleta, born just ten months after Adam, was near enough to be his twin, and he was fiercely devoted to her. She was a happy, adventurous child who possessed a natural physical grace that was only honed by the environment. The city of a hundred footbridges and a thousand guywires was the stage of her very own balancing act. Rigid cables flew over canals that, with little notice, would fill with blunt tons of rushing iron. Gouts from smokestacks shot up in waves that could cook a man at a pass. Only the brave and the witless used the guywires rather than the bridges to traverse the city, and Voleta crossed them all as confidently as a squirrel. She leapt between gutters and chutes, and danced along the wires as if unaware of the twenty foot drop that followed her everywhere like a shadow.
Adam lived in mortal fear that she would one day miss a toehold and fall onto the iron arms of a track. But Voleta was more nimble than his imagination.
If only their father had been so.
Accidents were commonplace on the floor of the Depot of Sumer. The lighting was poor, the atmosphere bleak with steam and smoke, and the rails were so densely laid that one could hardly help but to stand on one line or another. The droves of porters and switchmen were in constant peril, and still it came as a surprise when the foreman rapped on the door of their house, making the whole facade shiver, and informed their mother that her husband had slipped on the toe of another man’s polished boot, and had fallen under a crawling car wheel up to his thigh.
His death, she was told, had not been merciful.
Their mother, an entirely practical person, did not ask for elaboration. Details were only good for resolving denial, and she was not the sort to disbelieve the brutal facts of life. She thanked the foreman, closed the door, pulled her black dress from the cedar chest, and began ironing it. Adam hoped that he had inherited her pragmatism. It was a very practical wish.
Sturdy-minded as she was, their mother had suffered a severe fever in her youth that had returned later in her life, first intermittently and then more frequently, making her incapable now of supporting Adam and Voleta during their final years of school.
Adam had been a dutiful student all through his youth, had made high marks, and had even hoped to attend a university. But that was impossible now. He had to find work, and high marks would not help him. In the Depot of Sumer, there was only one kind of work for young men born to unremarkable parents: the gory, deadly sort. He was sure his father’s old foreman could find some place for him in the yards, and though he would have to begin with a pittance of a salary, he would be gainfully employed, at least. Even the thought of it was enough to chill him. After his father’s death, the underbelly of the city on stilts had become as awful as a bottomless pit. Even looking down into the gloom from a footbridge filled him with dread.
Then, while the catastrophe was still fresh and unsettled, his mother was driven to bed by the return of her childhood pyrexia. Even while the fever cooked her, she resisted the delirium, which a less practical person might’ve succumbed to. She lay rigid for two days, staring clear-eyed at the ceiling of her bedroom before calling Adam in and announcing in her matter-of-fact way that it was time he struck out on his own. “If you have to worry about taking care of me, you’re going to drown; and if I have to worry about taking care of you, I’m going to sink. That’s how it is, Adamos. But if we go our own ways and save ourselves, we’ll be saving each other, too.” Adam could think of no reason, no practical reason, to disagree.
His mother would move in with her sister, whose husband was an Assistant to the Scheduler. He stood in line to become, one day, the Scheduler himself. Adam’s aunt and uncle were riding on the cusp of what passed for wealth in the Depot of Sumer. He knew his mother would never go hungry while under their roof.
She would take Voleta, too, who would be useful in her Uncle’s kitchen; there were six cousins who needed looking after as well, which was also partly why there was no room for him. Partly why. His uncle already had two sons of his own to educate, dote upon, and insinuate into the local industry. He couldn’t manage a third son. Meanwhile, Adam’s whole inheritance, his father’s entire wealth in death, was only enough to buy a single train ticket.
Adam was strangely relieved by all of this. It was as if he had been put to pasture just as the rest of the herd was being gathered up for the slaughter. He knew instantly where he would go: the Tower of Babel, the sink of humanity, the promised land of young men. He packed his meager bindle of possessions, kissed his feverish mother, and left with Voleta as if it was a matter of course that she would go with him. He could not leave her.
It wasn’t until he was on the train with Voleta, sipping the weak, cold tea that was served to the third-class passengers, that it occurred to him this had not been a practical choice. His sister was guaranteed a home in Khayyam in their Uncle’s house, and he was stealing her from that certainty. It would have been the life of an unwanted cousin and a wanted scullery maid, but it would have been a stable life. He felt the sting of this new responsibility. Outside the car window, the buffelgrass luffed in the wind. He watched it and fretted about the future.
As is so often the case with older brothers, Adam had presumed to have more responsibility than he did, and presumed his sister was acting only out of devotion to him. He couldn’t imagine that she had her own reasons for leaving. Of course, Voleta would not have let him go alone. He was her dear, near-twin brother. But that was not the reason she had decided to follow him to the Tower. She would not tell him the truth for some weeks, but she would eventually confess that she had left with him because the fear had gone out of her daily leaps. Her hours were filled with confident, minor feats and toothless dangers. She would not call it such, but Adam would later name it for her: it was boredom that had driven her from her mother’s side and a secure home.
Her father’s death mystified her. It seemed such a silly accident. How could a man slip on another man’s boot? Was he tripped? Had some unspoken grudge made the other man throw a foot under him? It seemed impossible. Even if she halved the agility of her legs, and then aged those legs twenty years, she still could not believe that her father had stumbled on such sturdy and able legs. It was too stupid.
The moment she heard the morbid news she was sure that he had thrown himself under the train. And why not? He had worked in a coal swamp beneath a pine board sky for twenty-nine years. Iron-nosed, devil-hot boilers flew past him on knives every minute of every hour, all twelve hours of the day. He had never been struck before. He had leaped nimbly among them all, in the dark and the low, rotten clouds.
He was an acrobat who had, in a moment of despair, let himself be killed. It was not suicide, though. It was worse. It was boredom. So she had to leave and go some place where she did not know every chasm and every foothold and leap. She had to rediscover fear and, tucked somewhere inside that fear, life.
Wisely enough, the younger near-twin did not put it this way to Adam for some time. She merely mentioned one of their cousins, an eighteen-year-old maid named Delphie, who was homely and desperate to get married, saying, “Delphie told me she would pay two mina for my hair, and that will buy my train ticket.”
So, she sawed off all her hair, her roundly curled, jet black, pride-of-her-mother hair, and bought her own passage to the Tower.
They were gone forever before their mother’s fever broke.
When their train pulled into the station under the Tower of Babel, it was a man who disembarked.
The boy had evaporated over the course of their two day journey like ore from a smelted ingot of gold. Climbing down, hardly touching the stairs, Adam did not step into the umbra of the greatest monument to human industry, ingenuity and daring; he stepped into manhood, into his potential, which the spiraling Tower, at that moment, seemed hardly able to contain.
He swelled to his full height on the station platform, which quaked under the feet of a thousand immigrants, while Voleta’s hand wrenched his own. He could feel the fear in her grip. But she was smiling, beamin
g up at the trunk of the Tower, the white marble blending into limestone, limestone into sandstone, sandstone into clouds. The beetle bores of high portals winked minutely as figures and machines moved inside them. Airships nosed and fled from the Tower like gnats about the leg of a great bull. And he was not afraid.
It would only be much later that the memory would become a sort of sad fable to him, and he would see the boy proudly descending to his ruin like a mad king being led to the executioner’s block.
They walked into the maddening Market, hands locked together. Two days later, he had found work as a clerk in the Parlor.
Chapter Seven
“Even with a crew and a ship, escaping the port requires the right wind. A single airstream feeds the entire Port of Goll; all ships come in from the low south and depart to the high north. When there is only one road out of town, runaways are easy to catch.”
- Every Man’s Tower, One Man’s Travails by T. Senlin
“Wait,” Senlin interrupted Adam. “You worked in the Parlor. You worked in the Parlor.”
“Well, I thought I did,” Adam shrugged. “When we got to the landing with the four Parlor doors, an usher tried to give me a role. I stopped him and said I hadn’t come for the play. I wanted a job.”
“Incredible.”
“Not to me. It seemed pretty straightforward. I was interviewed by one of the— what were they called— Assistants to the Registrar. He offered me a six-month contract as a clerk, and I signed without hesitation. He asked for a deposit on room and board, which I paid. I was naïve enough to think this was all a matter of course. A few minutes later I was being measured for a new uniform. I hadn’t a shekel left to my name, but it didn’t matter. I had a job.”
“What about Voleta? Did she get a job, too?”
Adam shook his head. “No. She was fifteen years old, and they didn’t have any work for her. Honestly, I meant to take care of her, so I wasn’t bothered by it. We had our own cabin. It wasn’t much, and I know she went a little stir crazy, but I’d brought some of my old school primers. All she had to do was stay out of trouble and study while I worked.”
“What did you do?”
Adam’s snort seemed part chagrin and part disdain. “For one hundred and eighty days I sat on a stool in a dim hallway, looking through a peephole and taking notes.”
“I saw you,” Senlin murmured, and then when Adam looked understandably confused, Senlin corrected himself, “No, not you. I saw the clerks in the backstage corridors, looking through little brass loupes.”
“That was me. I was so nervous I could hardly eat my lunch that first day. I was afraid I’d miss something. I didn’t really know what I was looking for. So I noted every sneeze and awkward phrase and drunken giggle. I was shocked by how pitiful my subjects were; I couldn’t imagine why anyone would want to spy on such a thing. But I had been told to observe and report, so I filled my steno pad, and at the end of the day, proudly presented it to the Head Clerk. The only things that interested him were the fires and the exits. He wanted to know who had added fuel and who had used which doors. It was all quite… dumb. I never understood their obsession with the fireplaces.”
Senlin nodded sympathetically. “I have a theory about that…” He waved the thought away, as if it were a bothersome odor. “But, never mind— you were just an actor reporting on other actors, correct?”
Adam made stuttering qualifying noises that finally resolved in a full-chested sigh. “The strangest thing about the Parlor is that you can’t tell the difference between people who are in character and people who don’t know they are acting. There must be some legitimate management there, but I don’t think I ever met anyone who was part of it. Then again, who can say?” He said, his revitalized frustration raised a deep blush on his neck. “At the end of my six month contract, I went to the Head Clerk and asked for my wage and a promotion. I wanted to become an Assistant to the Registrar. They had full apartments, not just cabins with a bed and a chaise lounge— I was so tired of sleeping on a lumpy sofa! Spying on people through a fisheye was not my idea of a career, and I was beginning to worry about Voleta. She had become jumpy and moody and strange. And it was my fault.
“Asking for money really confused the Head Clerk. He said that if I was interested in becoming an Assistant to the Registrar, I just needed to finish paying out my contract, and sign a new one. The whole thing fell apart pretty quickly. I had misread the contract; really, I hadn’t read it. I saw a figure, sixteen mina, and I presumed that would be my salary. It seemed plum enough. So, I went six months believing I was a responsible working adult, but I was a tourist the whole time, just like all the fools I’d spent twelve hours a day studying through a bunghole in the wall. One hundred and eighty days in the Parlor is not cheap. I owed sixteen mina.”
As he had spoken, Adam’s posture seemed to melt like a candle into the slouch of an old man. He looked at Senlin with his one eye that was the color of dead grass and said, “My arm was branded. I was taken into the wall to where the hods are. Tom, there are places in the dark of the Tower, places I hope you never see, where men and women are put in pens like cattle. The bones are pounded to dust and become part of the road.” He did not describe it further, seemed incapable of describing what he had seen, but Adam’s haunted look was enough. Senlin could not hold his morose gaze. He looked down at his blotter, picked up the stock of a pen and fiddled with the nib.
“Voleta saved me, in the end.” Adam said, with a swell of pride. “She is so fearless. She went with me into the dark, though she had to fight me and the ushers to do it. While I was being fitted with an iron dog collar in an airless slave market, she… found a man who would make a deal with her.”
“Finn Goll,” Senlin said grimly.
“He paid my debt, took her life as bond, and I have been here trying to work our way out of it ever since. More than two years now.”
“How much longer until the debt is paid?”
“Three years.” Adam said and looked at the rut of the callous in the palm of his hand. “She will be twenty one years old when she is free again.”
“Three years!” Senlin echoed it, his voice filled with the pains of empathy. “Why so long? Even two years of your salary would cover sixteen mina and then some.”
“Because my sister attracts a lot of… attention.” Adam gulped as a sudden welling of emotion caught in his throat. He shook his head clear and said, “I have to bribe Rodion to keep her on the stage and out of the boudoirs; I have to bribe him to keep her from being sold to some rich noble. Most of what I earn goes straight back to Rodion, and I’m sure Finn Goll takes a cut. I work to pay the man who works me. I hate that she has to parade around in front of all those muddy ogglers, but it’s better to be on the stage than behind it.”
“But why not escape, take your chances? Three years!” Senlin stifled his horror, realizing that he was just rubbing salt in the wound. “How can you wait?”
Adam gave him a soft smile of defeat that seemed years beyond his age. “I felt the same way,” he said. He had been edging forward on his seat for many minutes, but now he settled back into the crackling leather. “And then I lost my eye.”
The words hung heavily in the air. Sympathy and the desire to fix this tangled mess, to somehow advise a retroactive solution, had already exhausted Senlin. He wished that he could put off the remainder of Adam’s miserable confession. But, as is often the case with men, once the silence has been broken, it can’t be recovered until everything has been said.
Adam, sensing Senlin’s discomfort, tried to lighten his narration. “Not long after I ruined your day, I robbed a bunch of tourists, fresh off a train in Babel Central Station. I wasn’t supposed to; it wasn’t part of the job. Goll gives a shopping list, a schedule, a budget, a timetable, and a postcard so you never forget to write. But I saw them standing there, just like I had stood months before, happy and confident and dumb as they come. I thought, Here it is! Here is your chance to shorten your sentence and
save your sister. I told them I was a porter from the train company, come to take their luggage to the ferry. And they couldn’t wait; they were so excited. They gave me everything they owned. I had to hire a wagon to carry it all.” Boreas scratched the edge of his brown leather eyepatch, and gave an unconvincing laugh. Senlin could sense the guilt that loitered beneath the surface, but Adam rushed on. “I sold it all as quick as I could, dresses and bassinets and hats and shaving kits and jewelry. I walked away with nearly twenty mina. If Finn Goll had found out, he would’ve sent Iren over to pound it out of me. So, I decided to sneak my way back to New Babel, come in through Ginside port on the other end of town, bribe Rodion with everything I had, and be gone with Voleta before Goll could cock an eyebrow.”
“What happened?”
“Pirates,” Adam said with a dry scoff. “Me and five other worthless souls bought passage on a ship that looked legitimate; really, it looked like a classic courier ship: a tall barque with three envelopes and two boilers. Built for load and durability, but a pretty ship. But I should’ve paid more attention to the crew. Instead, I was hanging over the gunwale like a kid, picturing Voleta’s face when I told her we were leaving.
“Then, the barque got up in the high air, and the captain wanted to renegotiate the terms of our voyage. His proposal was this: we would give him everything that we had, and he would not push us off a plank. One man argued. They threw him over. The rest of us emptied our pockets. Afterward, we were dumped at the most convenient port, which happened to be the Parlor. I didn’t think I could argue, though I knew I was stepping into deep mud. I’d been careful for two years to avoid that awful place. I wanted to forget. But…” Adam pointed at the circular brand on his arm. “They remembered me. And they made sure I would remember them.” Adam flipped up the egg-shaped patch of soft leather, showing a purple, drooping gash in the center of an empty eyesocket. The scar seemed sacrilegious on the young, handsome face, but Senlin did not grimace or look away. “Tom, don’t tell me I can’t wait. I can only wait. We have to be patient. We have to work our way free.” Adam flinched with the final words, reset the eyepatch, and looked down at his empty hands.
Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel Book 1) Page 28