Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm

by John C. Wright

  I waved bye-bye, and felt like I just got a little bit of my free will back.

  I watched the searchlight play back and forth across the huge dome, as the crew of the airship on which we sat continued to hunt for us so diligently, an unpredictable anomaly in their perfect deterministic machine of a world. I stretched out on the leathery surface, found it almost as comfy as an air mattress, crossed my legs, put my hands behind my head, and felt a little smug.

  6. Over the Garden Wall

  As the airship on which we perched searched for us along the ceiling dome that was so like a low and metal sky, eventually we were carried to a position near where the needle was pointing.

  Ossifrage snatched us with his weightlessness trick off the slippery top of the zeppelin, and flung us through the air, avoiding the searchlight. But someone aboard must have had a wolf nose, or Panotii ears, or eyes as big as Nakasu’s, because a cry rang out, and then a trumpet.

  We passed over a balcony and landed in a walled garden. I smelled oranges. It was an orange grove.

  We heard a noise, and then a dozen shots from the zeppelin hit the wall behind us. It was not loud like a cannon ball, and there was not a flash like their lantern weapons, but the spears or boulders or whatever it was smashed against the bricks, cracking them in places, and a smell like molten metal or ozone, a hot and airless smell, stung my nostrils. Clouds of black smoke were pouring up from the wall where the broadside had hit. We saw the huge prow of the zeppelin turning. She was approaching us in a sinuous path, to allow her to bring her portside guns to bear while her starboard were reloading.

  Ossifrage said something, looked impatient and stepped back up into the air, his hair and beard flowing and flapping in the current of whatever unseen force boiled around him and held him aloft.

  He did not have a brave look on his face, just grim, like he had to do a task and did not have much time to do it, and he wanted it over with. I thought it was the bravest look I’d ever seen, and I made a mental note to try to copy it next time I was in a fight.

  Abby told me he was going to drive the armored warship of the air away.

  “By himself?”

  She said, “It is a lighter-than-air machine. His power is levity. They are helpless.”

  Abby must have been right, because when the airship fired another broadside, all the shots went wild, and the giant ship came into view up overhead for a moment, all horns ringing and gongs sounding, and then heeled over to one side, listing terribly, and the nose dropped, and all the propellers screamed into highest velocity. I don’t think there was an engine as such. The propellers on the gondola looked as if they were jet-black, self-moving blades of living metal.

  The ship fired wildly as she careened lower and lower—this time I saw what was being fired were black balls made of glass, balls that broke and emitted black clouds on impact. Four of them came near the severe old man standing in midair. The glass shells slowed, and stopped, and hung near him like balloons for a moment, and then floated away to land gently on a balcony not far away. He was too nice just to drop them on whoever was below.

  Meanwhile, we ducked our heads and looked for a door in the dark to get out of the walled garden. I should have been looking too, but the smell, that delightful and refreshing smell, stabbed me with pure hunger. When was the last time I had eaten? Days ago? I yanked oranges one after another into a fold of my mantle, and started wolfing them down. Nakasu laughed, and broke off a whole branch to take with him.

  Ossifrage descended from the metal sky in a flutter of camel-hair robes and said something stern in Hebrew. It was one of the few things he said where I clearly understood every word: “Thou shalt not steal.” So I pretended not to understand and I offered him an orange.

  His face darkened. He looked like he was thinking of flinging me back onto the zeppelin.

  7. Inside the Suicide Closet

  We found a door inside and ran through dark corridors, one after another.

  Then Abby called a halt, lit up her cloak pins, and, dangling her magic needle from a thread, watched it intently. She was wearing her porcelain She-Monkey-faced mask, which she had donned when the glass cannonballs started belching black smoke in our direction.

  With a mouth full of orange pulp, I said to Abby, “How do the people here get the trees to grow inside?”

  She spoke absentmindedly, tapping the needle and watching it turn. “Only trees whose wood can act like lampwood flourish. The Archangel blood gives them joy and nourishment, like sunlight.”

  “Wait, you mean you can do your glowy stick thing trick on living wood?”

  “Of course. Why should we not?”

  “How does it work?”

  “By magic.”

  “Like your mask?”

  “Of course not!” I could not see her eyes, but her tone of voice told me she was rolling them. “That is alchemy. This is twilightry.”

  “Which means what?”

  I heard her sigh, and I imagined I heard the courtesy of a noble-born lady’s upbringing coming to the fore, preventing her from any further sign or sound of impatience. “As I said before. An aspect of the wood is carefully lowered towards Uncreation, which is unseen, all around us. The light is shed by the tears of pain of The Archangel.”

  “Creepy. I’ve been meaning to ask. How do you ignite the lampwood? Nothing here has switches or buttons.”

  She said, “I am of Ur. I am of the Oneness. All which is part of the One touches all else which is part of the One.”

  But then the needle twitched, and she must have liked that twitch particularly, for she set out at a quick trot.

  Abby led us through empty dormitory rooms and unlit corridors. Some of the rooms had furniture in them, but covered with tarps (which oddly enough, made me feel homesick. I mean people back on earth putting chairs and couches into storage do the same thing). Other rooms had fire pits in the floor.

  The apartments were clustered in squares of nine, each one surrounding a public bath. The water in the bath was frozen, but not cold to the touch. How they crystallized the water without lowering the temperature, I did not know. They had running water coming out of aqueducts of living metal. Our plumbing is better. They did not seem to have hot-water pipes.

  Multiple apartments also opened up on a central space where there were these tall, round, narrow rooms with nooses made of white silk hanging from the ceiling. They had walls covered in velvet, and incense burners shaped like flowers. Beneath each noose was a tall and narrow stool on a hinge. It did not look like a gallows.

  I pointed at a noose. “What is this? I thought this was the married officers’ quarters?”

  She said, “This is a communal death-closet. It is provided as a convenience. It is considered bad luck for a bride who commits suicide to spill her blood on the wedding night.”

  I did not ask any further questions. In my mind’s eye, I was trying to imagine living in a world where everyone knows whom he will marry from the day he is born, or if your parents or grandparents were curious enough to ask, from before that. So there is no mystery, no courtship, no romance, no nothing. Just breeding like livestock.

  Look at it from the girl’s point of view. Even if you might have liked the guy if he had asked for your hand, how could you do anything but hate him if he were assigned?

  I thought about people in my world who just hook up without getting married. I felt like a freak in school, back when I went to school, because most the kids even at fourteen or fifteen, if they were not virgins, had at least gotten some sort of action. Or at least all the guys talked that way. Maybe they were all lying. Maybe they felt like freaks too. My dad told me that the teen suicide rate was a lot higher than it had been in his youth, or at any point in history.

  I looked at the nooses, disturbed. I don’t know many girls, but every single one I know watches soap operas or reads romance novels. It is all about the romance for them. So when that is gone, what do they really live for?

  8. Solitude
and Dishonor

  My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.

  I don’t know if she was right, and I do remember what brought the subject up: I had quarreled with the babysitter’s niece when she wanted to play house, and I tried to sacrifice her Raggedy Ann doll, our baby, to the Dark Side of the Force. I cannot bring her name to mind. Becky? Boopsie? Bonny? Babs?

  She grew up to be totally smoking hot, and I mean like a cover girl on a girly magazine, a svelte and athletic brunette with hazel eyes that positively smoldered. She started hanging out with Curt Champion, from one of the older families in town, and he was pretty well-off and pretty wild and did pretty much whatever the heck he felt like.

  I suppose Curt Champion probably did pretty much whatever he felt like with her too. Around that time, she started getting tattoos painted up and down both her arms, and not little delicate floral ones either, but leering faces and images of death like you see on the cover art of heavy metal bands. And she got pierced, and then pierced some more. She was wearing nose rings and lip studs and a dozen rings in each ear until she looked like a cannibal squaw in National Geographic. All the kids at school said she was cool.

  But the smoky fire in her eyes vanished. They were just dull brown after that.

  She dropped out of school, and I never saw her again, and did not hear what eventually happened to her. I was being homeschooled by then, and you don’t pick up rumors in the cafeteria when you eat in your own kitchen every day.

  But now I knew what happened to her. Without ever leaving the Earth, she entered a world like this one: a place without romance. Without mystery, without love.

  With one last look at the white silk noose, I put my head down and hurried after Abby, glad to be out of there.

  9. Through the Differential Engine Yard

  Eventually we made our way to a dark chamber filled with small, child-sized coffins. Here was something that looked like an elevator door for midgets. With her weapon, Abby pried up some clamps holding that small door shut. I assume the door was meant for people tiny as Panotii. She could not open it, even when all the clamps whined and retracted, so Nakasu put his shoulders (both shoulders, including his collar bone) against the door, and his massive feet against the opposite wall, and just straightened his legs. We heard creaking and snapping noises. He slammed his shoulders, both at once, into the door again and again. With no head in the way, and his blowhole pinched shut, he could act as a human battering ram, and get a lot of leverage for his blows. Boom. The door went down.

  From beyond came the last noise I expected to hear: the clatter of machinery.

  When the door fell in, we were almost deafened. Nakasu tucked his huge hands in his armpits where his ears were kept and pressed his elbows down.

  We were in a place larger than a warehouse; some sort of factory or workfloor, and the sound was like waterfalls made of iron dominoes toppling down slopes of brass into a sea of bronze.

  Here were rank upon rank of machines, each one four stories tall, and nine feet wide, composed of thousands of interlocking clockworks. It looked like a graveyard for giants, with rows upon rows of headstones forty feet high and three yards wide. The ceiling was made of girders and railway tracks and catwalks, and chains and cranes and hooks on pulleys hung like backstage machinery used to raise and lower scenery.

  About half the machines were not in use or were under repair, and work crews were fitting and balancing gears and toothed wheels larger than a man is tall, or lowering whole gearboxes into place through skylights on huge chains. There were a number of trapdoors in the ceiling, and I assume a warehouse of spare parts occupied the places overhead. Communication between foreman and workers was all by means of flags and lanterns.

  Systems of ladders and catwalks webbed the front of the machines. The slaves toiled over the machines, oiling, changing gears, working clutches, busy as ants. At the foot of the machines were clerks in lightest gray, and slaves in kilts. An overweight overseer with a whip coiled at his broad leather belt stood loitering nearby, watching the slaves cart in and cart out thousands of sheets of metal, either blank or stamped with cuneiform. The sheets of metal were being carried along on a conveyer belt that ran like a river with many tributaries around the feet of the giant machines.

  Halfway up, held in baskets like window-washers, were young magicians, apprentices in short robes of dark gray, twisting the knobs of what looked like seven-armed clockfaces. A ring of astrological symbols ran around the edge of each clockface. Whenever an apprentice magician had the hands set in the proper form, he would pull an arm like those you see on slot machines.

  At the top level were magicians in black robes and earmuffs staring up at yard-wide spherical armatures of brass and bronze hung with astrological symbols. These skeletal globes were evidently astrolabes and orreries, miniature models of the heavens in motion. Near the magicians was a line of typesetters in leather aprons. The typesetters were hunched over endless boxes of punch types, placing cuneiforms rapidly into plates. The plates were then carried by teams of sweating boys (who handled the plates like they were hot) across a narrow and unrailed catwalk into the jaws of some sort of steam-powered press. The lid would clamp shut just a second after the boys had slid the plates into place.

  The press would shove the cuneiform plates against a comb of movable teeth, which would rise or fall according to the shape of the cuneiform underneath. These in turn raised and lowered larger pistons forming the uppermost story of the four-story machine, and set all the clockwork gears to spinning, first the top rows, then the middle, and so on down. It was like watching water made out of bronze and brass, copper and carbon-steel flow down in rippling circles. It was hypnotic.

  And every turn of every wheel made a loud metallic noise. No one had heard us break in the door. I assume they had all gone deaf years ago.

  The whole process looked so dangerous from top to bottom, I was amazed the machines were not coated with blood and severed hands. But maybe any kid destined to lose a hand that day just called in sick. I am not sure how a world where people knew their future would deal with safety hazards. Why wear a seatbelt on days that are known to be accident-free?

  Of course, they kept a closet full of boy-sized coffins in a chamber right off the main area, so it could not have been all that safe.

  Abby pointed to one of the empty coffins behind us, gestured for us to pick it up. Ossifrage and I took the front, and Nakasu held both rear corners by himself.

  She drew out a long green-and-black striped cloth from her pouch, threw it over one shoulder, and draped the hem over her head so that a veil of dangling strands hung before her eyes, hiding her face. She drew out a brass cowbell from somewhere, unwrapped it, hooked a metal tongue inside it, and stepped forward. She walked with her hands swinging up and down with every step. I think it is one of those philosophical questions, like asking if a tree falls in a wood with none to hear, whether it makes a noise, to ask if her bell made any sound in that metallic uproar.

  We walked behind her, carrying a coffin. There was a pathway painted with pale green and black stripes of the same design she wore. The path wound around the backside of the huge machines, staying near the unlit walls.

  No one stopped us, no one interfered. Some people looked up as we walked slowly by, but they put their hand before their left eye, or before their heart, or they bit their thumb and spat on the floor. Hey, my folks are from the Old Country: I recognize the signs to ward off bad luck even when those signs are not the same here as they are back on Earth. Some things are the same wherever people are people.

  Then we came to a larger green-painted door. The doorposts and lintel were decorated with images of winged skulls and inverted torches. Abby looked carefully over her shoulder, trying to make it look like she was not looking. She still had that mu
mmified hand of a corpse with her. (The one she had used to unlock the glass boat on the stream-path, remember?) She touched the dead hand to the pale green door. The living metal controlling the lock must have thought that this was its cue to open. The door unlocked. It was a double door, large enough for men carrying a coffin to enter with room to spare.

  A cold sensation touched me.

  I looked over my shoulder at the nearest of the titanic clockworks in this warehouse-sized vastness. This one was eight stories high rather than four, because a second unit, equal in size with the first, had been lowered on immense chains from a place in the ceiling where the ceiling panels had been pulled aside, and this second unit fitted atop the first like children’s blocks stacked up. A set of linkages and bands of living metal communicated the motions from the bottom of the upper unit to the top of the lower.

  The calculation process, whatever it was, that turned the wheels within wheels evidently needed more computing power than only one unit could provide. The magicians clustered gravely about this machine were older and their chains of office were longer and coffee-pot-shaped hats were taller and shinier.

  With the master magicians was a rout of monsters from various worlds: I saw a group of Cyclopes-eyed spearmen in leather jackets sewn with rings of golden Cunning Metal, and on their heads were tall cone-shaped helms of the same metal; I saw an Abarimon in a red jacket fidgeting his backward-pointing feet impatiently, a spear in a spear-thrower carried at his shoulder; and next to him a fierce-looking man with dreadlocks and a bone through his nose carried himself on a single leg six feet long and sinuous as the body of an anaconda, ending in a foot as large and round as a parasol. There were two Panotii hunkered down with their ears wrapped around their bodies like miniature leather teepees.