On

by Adam Roberts

  ‘Well observed,’ said the Wizard. He spun his cradle around and looked at Tighe. ‘Yours is a fine intelligence, my beautiful one.’

  ‘Is this pole, said Tighe, uncertainly, ‘the eastward limit of the wall?’ He had a hazy notion of an enormous flagpole, towering into the sky marking the furthest extremity of the wall itself. And beyond? The blueness of infinity, reaching for ever. ‘Is there a pole at the western edge as well?’

  ‘You are amusing,’ said the Wizard, although he didn’t sound amused. ‘You picture, perhaps, a giant trunk of wood, stretching up hundreds of miles.’

  Tighe couldn’t think of a reply to this.

  ‘The worldwall’, said the Wizard, with an airy gesture of his right hand, ‘is not as you think it is.’

  The superior air of the man, with his distorted face and eccentric manner, sparked a feeling of resentment in the exact centre of Tighe’s head. He felt his eyeballs heat up with annoyance. ‘I know the secret of the worldwall!’ he blurted. ‘You think I am a boy, that I know nothing. But I am not! I have been a warrior and I have fought monsters. I have learned the secrets of the wall.’ Tears were pricking his eyes now and he fought them back with a furious inner self-chastisement. To cry, in front of him? No! ‘I know more than you think.’

  There was a strange moment of silence.

  ‘So’, said the Wizard slowly, ‘you know the secret of the wall, do you? But, do you really? You are a remarkable boy. Your beauty is matched by your ability to say the surprising things.’ He inclined his head. ‘And what is the secret that you know?’

  Tighe felt, suddenly, inhibited from saying anything more. He wasn’t sure why; he didn’t regard what he knew as a secret exactly. But there was something menacing, something that might have been an edge of ridicule, in the Wizard’s manner. He turned and went over to where his pashe was sitting on the ground, to sit beside her.

  The Wizard was watching him, waiting for him to reply. The silence stretched uncomfortably.

  ‘There is a Door in the wall,’ Tighe said eventually. ‘It leads through to God.’

  ‘Really?’ said the Wizard. His leather face was beyond expression.

  ‘No,’ said Tighe, stung despite himself. ‘There is. The Imperial Popes put together a mighty army to capture this Door. That was the army in which I fought.’

  ‘I saw your fighting’, said the Wizard, his leather lips stretching to the merest smile, ‘on one of my screens.’ He gestured over his shoulder.

  Tighe understood that the allusion was to his flight away from the battle and towards the Meshwood. He ground his teeth together. ‘I know more,’ he said. ‘God lives at the foot of the wall, not on the top at all. Every morning he hurls the sun over the wall to combat his enemies.’

  ‘To combat’, repeated the Wizard neutrally, ‘his enemies.’

  Saying this, in so many words, was making Tighe uncomfortably aware of how thin his explanations sounded. He struggled to find a means of conveying the potency of the idea; of the way the thought of God lurking at the base of things, of God hurling the flaming boulder with main force of his strong arm, of the eternal war between cosmic forces separated only by the thinnest of walls – to make the Wizard understand how intoxicating this notion was. He hummed, tried again. ‘The wall is there to separate out good and evil,’ he said. ‘The wall is …’ But he stopped.

  ‘Go on,’ prompted the Wizard.

  ‘The wall is small,’ said Tighe, in a cowed voice. ‘That is the secret I have come to comprehend. It seems big, but it is not big. It is we who are small. The wall is a toy, built by a small-minded god – by a child god, perhaps. Populated with miniatures.’ He stopped. He had spoken the mystery of mysteries.

  ‘What ingenuity!’ declared the Wizard. ‘But quite, quite wrong. The wall is not tiny!’

  Tighe looked up at him. ‘How do you know?’

  ‘Believe me, I know. I have travelled widely over the wall. And I remember, I remember because I am older than you can imagine. But I am always impressed, my philosophical fruitling, at the perplexity people wrap themselves in when contemplating simple matters.’ He sucked in a large breath.

  There was a silence for the space of seven heartbeats.

  ‘Now,’ said the Wizard, ‘shall I tell you what the wall is?’

  3

  The floor wobbled and Tighe cried out in fear. The Wizard swivelled his cradle around and began fiddling with his devices. ‘No requirement for alarm,’ he squeaked. ‘These are merely the manner of perturbations we must expect this far east. We’ll have to proceed much more slowly from here. But we shall proceed! Let me show you the East Pole, my charming one. Few humans have seen it; fewer still have seen it and lived.’

  There was a dry hiccoughing sound in the Wizard’s throat; it took a moment for Tighe to realise that this was laughter.

  ‘Who are you, Master Wizard?’ Tighe asked, feeling a profound sense of discomfort. ‘What have you to do with me? With my family? Why …?’ but there were so many questions that they collapsed together in Tighe’s mind. There was no way he could ask all of them at once.

  ‘Your skin,’ Tighe said shortly. ‘Why is your skin, so … so …’

  ‘So what? So unusual? Or were you about to say something like so grotesque? It is a good skin, my delicate-complexioned boy. A strong skin. It is tanned leather, laid over a network of fine-woven filament wire and genbonded underneath with vital carapace that connects it to a living subcutaneous layer of fascia. But these words mean nothing at all to you, do they? Eeh, poor ignorant boy. My skin. My skin is a good place to start, I think. It is stronger than your skin; and much more durable. It suits me better. But it can only be because of a command of pollenmachines, and a sense of the workings of technology, that derives from an earlier age. You have heard of this earlier age?’

  Tighe was rolling his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger; one of his expressions of nervousness. He did not reply.

  ‘But of course you have heard of this age!’ said the Wizard. ‘The evidence for it is all around; the old machines, the screens and pieces of time-stained electronics that are traded back and forth. The structures, the manrock, the archaeological evidence. The very metal out of which are made the tubes for military rifles – nobody actually makes metal any more. It all derives from the past, great age. How could you not notice these things? Or did you notice them and ignore them? The stories are of an age of wonder and then a fall. Always a fall. Humanity always thinks of itself as balanced most precariously on the edge of things; as already falling, already defined by the Fall.’ The Wizard chuckled his dry, spooky laugh again.

  ‘Fall,’ said Tighe, in a thin voice.

  ‘Did you ever wonder about that past age?’ asked the Wizard.

  ‘They built this,’ said Tighe, with a sudden burst of understanding, ‘your machine.’

  ‘They did. Well, not exactly; but this machine does indeed derive from their antique technology. Many of the parts are old; and the décor,’ he gestured at the richly hung walls, ‘that too. Once every man and every woman had the skills to make such machines as this. Once we all had those skills.’

  ‘Why did we lose the skills?’ asked Tighe.

  ‘We did not. You did, I concede. You and your people, not I. But that is a function, I think, of population. A degree of technological advantage can only be maintained in a large enough population base. How many people inhabit the world today? Some few thousands? It is insufficient – and you,’ he said, gesturing at Tighe with one hand, ‘you do not understand anything I am saying, do you?’

  Tighe fiddled with his lower lip, put his eyes to the floor.

  ‘You are talking about pollenmachines,’ he said, sulkily. ‘The bolts on the floor – they are pollenmachines.’

  ‘Dear me no; they’re much too large. They are simply cleaning devices. They keep everything spotless inside here, crawling back and forth, very simple machines. Pollenmachines are much more intricate. But I can see this is going to be
harder than I thought. Tell me this, my dazzle-eyed young man. How tall do you think the wall is?’

  ‘How tall?’

  ‘Yes. Hundreds of miles, perhaps. Thousands?’

  Tighe had often pondered exactly this question when he had been younger. ‘From its base to its top?’ he said. ‘Thousands.’

  ‘We could travel upwards,’ said the Wizard. ‘In my machine, if you would like to undertake the journey. We could travel upwall thousands of miles. I have done it.’

  Tighe caught his breath. ‘Have you been to the top of the wall?’ he gasped. ‘All the way to the top? And is it true – does God live there, or below?’

  ‘There is no top to the wall,’ said the Wizard. ‘You can travel up for ever; you can travel down for ever, if you wish.’

  Tighe digested this. ‘The wall goes on for ever,’ he said. Somehow that sounded somehow right, somehow appropriate to the mystery of the wall. ‘But how can you know it is endless?’ he asked. ‘You cannot have travelled up the wall for ever. And’, a second objection occurred to him, ‘if the wall has no top and no bottom, then where does God reside?’

  ‘Ah,’ said the Wizard. ‘God. But I think we are all three of us hungry.’

  He pulled out a parcel from a pouch by his belly and unwrapped some more of his delicious meat-cake, followed by a metal flask identical to the one Tighe had discovered in the cupboard under the control panel. He swiftly divided the food three ways and handed the smallest portion to pashe. She munched it absently.

  Tighe devoured his portion in a few mouthfuls and drank deep of the bitter tingly fluid in the flask. It made his thoughts blur a little, but he soon refocused himself. The Wizard himself picked at his food without energy, breaking off tiny fragments of meat-cake between thumb and forefinger and popping them delicately between his black leather lips.

  ‘What is wrong with my pashe, Master Wizard?’ Tighe asked, reverting to Imperial again, to express deference. ‘She is not herself.’

  ‘You speak more truth than you know,’ said the Wizard. ‘There has been a – shall we say, a cortical diminishment. Unfortunate, but necessary. She does not suffer, that is the important thing; but it would take me too long to explain to you the precise nature of the cerebellar microplaque operation that obtains in her skull.’ He lifted the flask to his own lips and let a tiny dribble pour into his mouth. ‘Where was I?’ he asked, picking again at his food.

  ‘I do not know, Master Wizard,’ said Tighe. ‘I find it difficult to follow your explanations.’ He was speaking the Imperial tongue, thinking this would find favour with the Wizard, but his leather face creased momentarily.

  ‘Don’t chatter so in Imperial,’ he said, crossly in the village tongue. ‘It’s hard enough explaining these things to you in the first place, without your having to translate them into a foreign language in your head! Speak your native tongue, boy!’

  He nibbled another morsel.

  ‘Let us talk about gravity, my son,’ he said. ‘Gravity. What else is it that makes the world so precarious a place? And precariousness is, after all, the condition of existence. It has been my struggle to escape the precariousness that defines the rest of humanity. Most of the rest of humanity, I should say, for neither I nor my Lover are defined by our precariousness.’

  Tighe looked up. The thought of so grotesque an individual having a lover made him queasy in his stomach. ‘Your Lover, Mister Wizard?’ he asked.

  The Wizard nodded. ‘You are surprised because you find my face hideous. Your failing, my pretty one, not mine. I have several Lovers and they are all myself. We go to the East Pole because that is the best place to hide from them. From one in particular, who has devoted himself to destroying me. As if he can destroy me! It would be destroying himself. We are the same. But’, he said, waggling his head with annoyance, ‘we are not talking about my Lover, fascinating though I find the topic. We are talking, my dear boy, about gravity.’

  ‘Gravity,’ said Tighe.

  ‘You understand gravity?’ prompted the Wizard.

  Tighe swallowed. The taste of the meat-cake was fading from his tongue and he mourned its passing. ‘I understand the word, Wizard,’ he replied.

  The Wizard seemed to find this amusing; he scraped out his dry laugh and nodded. ‘An excellent answer, my young monkey,’ he said. ‘Worth a philosopher’s salary. Yes, human beings have spent their lives trying to understand gravity. And yet it defines us. Who built the wall?’

  Tighe thought at first that this was a rhetorical question, so he didn’t answer. He was busy running his tongue into the coign of his mouth, where the last crumbs of meat lurked behind his teeth. When the Wizard stopped, and Tighe realised that he had directed the question at him, he looked up.

  ‘I’m sorry, Wizard?’

  ‘Who built the wall, boy?’

  ‘God,’ said Tighe, automatically.

  ‘Man,’ returned the Wizard. ‘Man built the wall. We built it.’

  Tighe thought about this. ‘Not possible, though, Mister Wizard,’ he returned. ‘How can man build something so high that it goes on for ever?’ He had, none the less, a sudden, piercing sense of the enormity of such an undertaking. Hundreds of people, hauling enormous blocks of stone together one after the other, building a wall on such a scale. Hundreds and hundreds. How many generations would it take? What now-lost skills of engineering? But it was a false image; it was nonsense.

  ‘I never said’, replied the Wizard, ‘that the wall was infinite in proportions. That was your contribution. I said that the wall has no top, nor bottom; and neither has it.’

  ‘I do not understand,’ said Tighe.

  ‘When I say that man built the wall,’ said the Wizard in gentle tones, ‘I mean that he altered his world and turned it into the worldwall. It is gravity, do you understand?’

  ‘No, Wizard.’

  ‘Of course not. Let me explain. Gravity changed. You know what gravity is – it pulls us down. If we step off a ladder, it pulls us down to the floor. If we step off a ledge, it pulls us down through the sky. I hardly need to tell you this! You fell!’

  ‘I fell,’ said Tighe.

  ‘Gravity pulled you down. Do you see? Gravity runs parallel to the world and that is what defines the world we live in. But it used not to be that way. Once, and it was some hundreds of years ago, gravity pulled in a different direction.’

  Tighe pondered. ‘What other direction could there be?’ he asked.

  ‘Not parallel to the world, but at a ninety-degree angle to it. Imagine that!’

  But Tighe could not imagine it. ‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

  ‘Before worldwall there was flat-earth,’ said the Wizard. ‘Try to enter imaginatively into such a place, my bright boy. The wall was not up, nor down, but a huge shelf, a never-ending shelf that stretched flat on all sides. That was because gravity in those days ran at ninety degrees to its way now. This is, in fact, the way gravity runs most elsewhere in the Universe; on other worlds, on other stars. And our world, that we call the worldwall – our world still orbits around the sun, and the sun still pulls us inwards with perpendicular gravitational attraction, or we would not so orbit. This is physics, my sweet-smelling child; please pay attention.’

  ‘Yes, Wizard,’ replied Tighe, baffled.

  ‘Once, our world was a sort of sun; it shone with the light made by its people and glittered out into the void. Like the sun it had its own planet, orbiting the world, which was called moon. After the gravity changed we lost the moon, which ran its own way. These days the place of turbulence, the point at which gravity starts to angle away from its universal direction, is only a few thousand yards out. But it seems that immediately after gravity changed this boundary fluctuated; it spooled and whirled, like water that is unruly, and the boundary whirled outwards in a great Van Eder pattern. It caught the moon, and the moon fell suddenly and sped away. But, according to my Lover – who has many interesting theories about this time of change – it was the vastness of the imp
ulse required to accelerate the moon out of its orbit, the orbit it had maintained for so many millennia, that reined the Van Eder pattern back towards the earth. Instead of spreading ever outwards in every-weakening spirals, the pattern of changed gravity shrank back to this world. It might have shrunk wholly to the centre of the planet and we would have had the old world restored to us. But this was not the way things happened. Instead it settled into its current pattern.

  ‘This’, said Tighe, with a hazy sense of what the Wizard was talking about,‘ – you mean, the Pause.’

  ‘The Pause,’ said the Wizard. ‘Is that what you call it?’

  ‘Kite-pilots know this,’ said Tighe. ‘You can fly only so far from the wall before you reach the Pause. Then you can fly no further.’

  ‘Well, exactly,’ said the Wizard. ‘That is the Pause, then. A good name for the phenomenon. How exciting, my witty adventurer! You bring tales from the boundary of the world. This is the boundary between the spiral of gravity that surrounds our world and the perpendicular force that applies elsewhere. As for the moon, it fell away from us, and in the vacuum of space there is none to slow its fall and it sped so fast it ran clear free of its onetime owner. Now it is out there on its own, and my Lover – who has examined it – says that its orbit is erratic, sunwards. Like as not, it will become a moon for another world, for Venus most say; and Venus is a foul world, acid and hot. Perhaps our moon will calm the world of Venus. Ah, the telescopic view of it makes it seem severely beautiful, fine and silver, etched with delicate patterns and designs like art-ware! I can imagine that having the moon will shake up the stagnant acid of Venus’s world and maybe bring about a better place. Maybe a place for a new life, so perhaps the changing of gravity will bring great good in the universe.’

  The Wizard stopped, as if musing. But Tighe had lost track of what he was saying. ‘Master Wizard,’ he said, in Imperial, and then stopped himself. ‘Mister Wizard,’ he said in his native tongue. ‘I do not understand. How can gravity change? How was the world before?’