by Tom Fletcher
In the Pyramid, Stationing was a moral obligation. The enthusiasm and commitment with which you went to your Station was one of the factors in determining exactly what your Station was, and what kind of quarters you were allocated. If you did well – if you rhapsodised about your Stationing, if you went willingly, if you didn’t express any interest in doing anything else – you’d get noticed, and promoted to another Station, on the floor above. You could work your way up, in theory becoming an Astronomer or an Alchemist, if you didn’t make the cut at School, or even Management. But most people were born into Admin or Manufacturing and stayed there all their life, perhaps ascending by several storeys, and then they were shunted off into the Gardens when they were incapable of performing their Stationing any longer, and in the Gardens they died.
Maybe better the Gardens than this dank, stinking hell-hole, though. Alan looked around him. He looked at Eyes lying sick on the damp raft; at Churr and Spider acting like mad people. That was the trade-off: perform your Stationing, and you can stay warm and dry and well fed. Oh, and bled. Don’t forget the Bleeding. But for all that, you get … No. Alan shook his head. He remembered the seeping welt on Billy’s palm. He remembered his parents. They’d been kind to him. There was kindness and safety in the Discard. Well, there had been, before the Pyramidders razed Modest Mills.
Alan’s Stationing had usually consisted of standing at a long desk full of slots, each numbered with a ten-digit number. There was a large clipping device attached to the desk that reminded him of a long set of jaws with sharp teeth. Baskets hung from the wall next to him, full of cards, and from the ceiling extended tubes from which, every minute, small stone discs fell. The discs were patterned with symbols that matched various symbols on the cards in the baskets. Alan had to take a card from the basket corresponding with the tube from which the disc had fallen, and then he clipped it in accordance with the symbols on the disc. Then he put the card in the slot on the desk indicated by the pattern on the disc. Then he dropped the disc into a kind of bucket-on-rails that he’d kick down the room once it was full. The bucket passed through a flap in the wall and disappeared. Alan had once stuck his head through the flap to see where they went, but all he saw was a long tunnel with shining rails disappearing down a slope and round a corner. That had earned him an extra Bleed. Presumably the discs were collected from wherever they went and then somehow passed back up to the storey above to be reused the following day. That would be the purpose of somebody else’s Stationing. The Stationings were supposed to be performed reverently; they were rituals. They were to be performed in the right robes, in the right manner, with the right words being spoken. The Stations were lit in a particular way and certain scents emanated from censers and candles. At Alan’s usual Station, the air was full of a fresh smell, something organic and green – something that he had not yet encountered in the Discard. It was a nice smell; that had been the best thing about it. But the dullness had been deathly, and the frustration of being told repeatedly that there were no consequences to his Stationing had come close to driving him mad.
‘The Stationing is a ritual that will develop your mind,’ he’d been told by one of the more patient Assistant Administrative Managers. ‘That is its purpose. Your time and date of birth determine your personality and your own particular defects, which in turn determine the Stations you will be assigned to throughout your life. The Stations are chosen in order to correct you. The timing of your Stations is dictated by the positioning of Satis, Corval and the stars. The Astronomers pass on shift and Station changes down to us here in Administration, and we obey. So you never know, Wild Alan’ – the Assistant Administrative Manager smiled – ‘perhaps some cosmic realignment is on its way and you’ll be re-assigned to the Manufacturing Sector. Some of their work is a little more intricate.’ The smile vanished. ‘But you have to be achieving your Vitals here first, of course. Otherwise you’ll miss out on this re-assignment and have to wait until the next one. If there is a next one.’
Alan had his doubts about the Astronomers. Their methods and rulings were complex and arcane – impossible for anybody not of their order to understand – and he suspected that they merely promoted and re-assigned the most obedient – or, no, probably up there in their Observatories they just set all of the brass machines spinning and got drunk out of their skulls and ordered the rest of the Pyramidders’ lives at random. You only had to look at some of the Management to know that there was no moral dimension to the way it worked. The idea that the Stations shaped your mind and somehow prepared you for more challenging Stations or for responsibility for those below you, was demonstrably false … unless part of the whole Pyramid design depended on some of those higher up in the hierarchy actually being cruel and unpleasant; unless some Pyramidders were assigned Stations that actively shaped them that way …
Alan sat up in the raft. Something was scraping against the side. He slowly turned to look. At first, he couldn’t see anything, but then there it was: a rock. They must be near the shore. But the rock was gently moving. Alan reached down and lifted it up. It was as heavy as it looked. He poked at the swamp with the punting pole, and there was a good three feet between the surface and the bottom. And yet the rock had been floating. He threw it back into the swamp and it sank, and then it bobbed back up.
Alan lay back down.
*
Nora came back to her body at some point. ‘I’ve been looking ahead,’ she said, by way of explanation. ‘I’ve been projecting. My people have a way of leaving their bodies behind and journeying onwards.’
Alan wondered who she was talking to. Neither Churr nor Spider appeared to be listening, and he wasn’t either, really. Eyes was not dead, but he was as good as dead. Maybe they should have left him behind after all. Nora tutted when she saw him lying there in the Boatman’s cloak, and she used her skinning knife to dribble a little of her moss juice – now fermenting, to judge by the smell – between his lips.
‘Has nobody been caring for poor Eyes?’ she asked.
Nobody answered.
Spider was still scribbling away. His drawings looked incredible: some of the most intricate and powerful geometries he had ever created, with here and there sketchy records of some of the swamp flora. He was not eating, not even drinking, though sometimes he still stopped to build a roll-up with his trembling fingers. There were green fibres in his beard that looked like a kind of lichen.
Churr was delirious, muttering a low stream of words to herself that Alan couldn’t make out. And Alan, for his part, was trying to stay low so that the Clawbaby didn’t see him. The Clawbaby was what he had taken to calling the big thing with glowing green eyes that had attacked them at The Cup and Skull, because of its metal claws and its baby cries. It was down here with them, he knew it. The glow of its eyes was the same as the glow of the sludge that had greeted them when they opened that door. Perhaps the Clawbaby had beaten them here and was just keeping itself submerged, slowly following them by walking along the bottom of the swamp. Though not them: him. Alan knew that it wanted him, and him only. He wondered how he knew what he knew about it. He wondered if they were connected.
‘So where is the Boatman, then?’ Nora asked.
‘Crocodile got him,’ Alan said.
‘There are no tooth holes in his cloak,’ Nora replied.
Alan shrugged. He realised that contradicted what he knew, but his mind was sluggish and he couldn’t get past the contradiction to think about it. ‘There’s a fog in my head,’ he said. ‘I can’t help you.’
‘Hunger, exhaustion and the proximity to Dok,’ Nora said. ‘Dok reaches out and gets into you. It corrupts over time. It has twisted many. Some are more susceptible than others. Many find themselves drawn to it, and without knowing why – without even knowing that Dok is the source of their problems – they wander on down here. Dok has claimed many souls.’
Alan could not construct a meaningful response. He fell back on habit and scrabbled around in his bag for the bott
le of whisky they’d found in the old desk. There was not much left. There never was.
‘Soon we will find the Pilgrims,’ Nora said. ‘Then we will be able to clear your head.’
22
Mushroom Gatherers
The channel narrowed. The sound of dripping water was constant, and too loud. It echoed. It felt invasive. Soon the raft really did encounter a shoreline, of sorts: stinking mud humping up from out of the thick liquid. The mud was full of rubbish – bones and sharp metal wire. Churr and Spider kept falling over, which they found hilarious. Watching them, Alan struggled with a monstrous anger. How could their spirits be so light? But the journey meant so little to them, of course; for them it was just an adventure. Nora tied Eyes to Alan’s back and he followed her carefully through the filth. He listened to Churr and Spider giggling behind him.
The channel ended at a gateway in a wall as huge as those at either side. The heavy, ornate gate was lying in the iridescent mud, slowly corroding. Nora led the party through the gap. There were cobbles protruding from the mud. Eyes was heavy on Alan’s back, and the breath that escaped his mouth as his head lolled from side to side smelled intensely bad.
They travelled at a painfully slow speed, following the shoreline until they found themselves on a causeway crossing an expanse of oily sludge. Then those intestinal trees closed in again and Nora led them through a squat forest, bidding them to stand only on the roots. Between the roots was the oily sludge, and here it stank, reminding Alan of the drains in the House of a Thousand Hollows’ after a monsoon.
Alan had to stop frequently to put Eyes down. Sometimes his old friend would cough and splutter and speak unintelligible words, but he would at least swallow fluids – a bitter sap that Nora bled from the trees, then boiled and cooled – and he would eat, if someone pushed tiny morsels of food between his lips. They ate snail, mostly, or if they were lucky, Nora snared them a snake. And Spider was good at identifying the myriad varieties of mushrooms that sprouted from the damp tree trunks around them.
Alan knew night from day only by Nora’s new routine. Every evening she took herself away from the group to perform a sequence of movements that she called her ‘carto’. She started standing straight, feet together, palms towards the sky, and then she stretched as if pushing away something hanging over her. She moved through stances and poses, sometimes fast and sometimes slowly, incorporating wide, sweeping movements and tiny, more intricate motions that Alan couldn’t quite make out. She finished by placing her hands over her ears and raising one leg so that she was standing on one foot, lowering herself into a one-legged crouch, and then gently starting to spin. It was not obvious what started the spin, or how she did it, but the spinning speeded up and up, until she was nothing but a blur, and then suddenly she stopped.
She was never dizzy afterwards.
After watching her perform the carto back and forth along a wide, low branch, Alan asked her about it.
‘I have to be receptive to the spirit of Gleam,’ she said, rummaging in her satchel for a glowing crystal. ‘The spinning is how I draw it into myself. I draw the spirit in, and it tells me a little about Gleam. Then, when I sleep, I dream through what the spirit has told me, and when I wake, in the morning, I have worked it out a little. The carto is how I learn the way. And it is also how I record my findings. See this?’ she said, and took hold of a small green gemstone dangling from a twisted branch on a leather thong. ‘I hang one of these before performing the carto. The stone remembers that I was here. When a Mapmaker performs their carto – they are all different – all of the hung stones sing out to them. They are like beacons, radiating the spirit. They tell Mapmakers where others have been, and they give a little more detail than if there were no green gems in that place. Next time a Mapmaker comes near here and they carto, they will receive visions of this particular place, and they will know that one of us has been this way before them.’
Alan stretched. He was lying across a knot of fat roots, and it was not comfortable, but it was still a blessed relief for his aching back. The swamp forest was alive with sound and movement: unfamiliar birdcalls, the occasional insect chirrup, and fireflies. Eyes lay on his side on top of another bunch of roots, Spider was collecting fungus and Churr was hunting for large cricket-like bugs that she liked to toast.
‘But if there was no stone hanging here?’ he asked.
‘They would still receive the spirit. But the spirit is more abstract. It is a voice that you have to decipher. And you have to dream to decipher it.’
‘So you’re only doing this now because nobody has been this way before? No Mapmakers?’
‘Yes. Before we took the boat, all of that has been mapped. And I had been to that doorway before too, so I did not need to perform the carto, and nor did I need to record my journey for the others. Whereas now … now, the stones I leave behind will tell the Mapmaker tribes what is here – what I have found.’
Alan leaned forward, and whispered. ‘I actually thought you lot had been down this way before.’
Nora frowned. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘I thought you’d been everywhere.’
Nora shook her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘but we are better at navigating than anyone else, even if we haven’t been to a place before.’
‘So,’ Alan said, ‘Daunt doesn’t employ any Mapmakers.’
‘We are not employed by anybody.’
‘No, but … you know what I mean.’
‘Well. She may have secured the services of a renegade.’
‘Like you.’
‘Like me, but one who does not adhere to the principle of the carto.’
‘Won’t your carto and your … What do you call them? Green gems?’
‘Yes, green gems.’
‘Not very imaginative.’
‘We rarely need to speak of them.’
‘Won’t it all give away where you are?’
‘The process does not reveal the identity of the Mapmaker.’
Alan paused, then asked, ‘And what’s the spirit of Gleam, anyway?’
‘It’s …’ Nora opened and closed her hands as she tried to put it into words. ‘So many questions, Alan. Gleam is not alive, but there is a force in it. We do not know where it comes from. It is not a soul … it is a feeling. A nature. A spirit. “Spirit” is simply the best word for it. There is a spirit in all of the structure. Structures – structures both old and new, but it is stronger in the old. The superstructure has the strongest spirit of all.’
‘And what is the spirit telling you about where we are now?’
Nora sighed. ‘It is difficult to know,’ she said. ‘The spirit here is sick, warped. We are nearing a great corruption.’
‘Before I went into the Pyramid,’ Alan said, ‘my parents used to tell me stories. I remember books, but I haven’t seen any books since Modest Mills was destroyed.’ He picked absent-mindedly at Snapper, lying across his stomach. ‘Some of the stories were adventure stories, and there’d be dangerous moments in the stories, scary bits, all of that. Threats. But there’d be nice moments too, happy parts where everybody was just kind of able to relax.’
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘I’m tired of feeling threatened. Of feeling scared.’
‘I thought that that was the primary appeal of the Pyramid? If you live in the Pyramid then you don’t have to worry all of the time.’
Alan frowned.
‘What I find interesting,’ Nora continued, ‘is that there are no books in the Pyramid.’
A firefly drifted blurrily through Alan’s field of vision, leaving a bright trail across the criss-cross network of branches above him. ‘No books,’ he said. ‘I’ve told you: there’s nothing in the Pyramid but Stationing and Bleeding.’ He thought of Billy and Marion. ‘There are people, of course there are, but you never see the ones you love because your Stations are scheduled that way deliberately. One gets in from their Station as the other is going out to
theirs. It’s so that you’re not tempted to make love out of cycle, see.’
‘You have scheduled love-making?’
‘Of course. The Astronomers dictate when you can make love. It depends on your birth skies, how the moons and stars and dragons burned when you were born. They look at yours and your partner’s and that determines the optimum birth sky for your child. The conception has to occur nine months before the optimum birth sky so they schedule the Stationing accordingly.’
Nora laughed. ‘I do not believe that can work. Some things cannot be managed in such a way.’
‘They try.’
‘So no child is ever born beneath the wrong sky?’
Alan felt the darkness pressing in. He looked around for another firefly. He could not speak until he found one. He sat up and watched the little creature dance. ‘They cannot completely control the love-making,’ he said slowly, ‘that is true. But to answer your question – no. No child – no living child – is ever born beneath the wrong sky.’ He watched Nora as the weight of his words sank in. ‘It’s one reason that they named the Discard the Discard.’