by Adam Roberts
There was a crack that buckled the air and a wash of a sharp, metallic smell. Tighe looked up to see a second silver craft sweeping down from above. The cracking noise percussed a second time, so loud it actively hurt. A beam of white light flickered into existence between the two craft; and the Wizard’s machine dazzled, light shining in all directions. There was a huge whining noise and then another crack. This time a strand of blackness appeared, reaching from one craft to the other; as purely defined against the blue sky as if it had been black thread. This did not produce a glittering light-effect off the silver of the Wizard’s craft. Instead there was a rapid series of croaky whomph noises and a bole of smoke coughed out of the side.
Tighe glimpsed, briefly, a hole in the side of the Wizard’s calabash and black smoke sputtering out, as the whole machine veered sharply into the wall. It crunched enormously against the ice and Tighe felt the wall itself shudder.
With a sinking sensation in his belly, Tighe felt the world slip, slide downwards.
The Wizard’s craft, rebounding from the ice, part fell and part flew down and away. Tighe had a fleeting sense of a crushed-in side of silver, of smoke dribbling from the machine, and then it sped with a rush of following air and dwindled rapidly into nothing.
Tighe clung more desperately to the ice; but it lurched and slid again and then it was falling.
He knew he was falling because his gut told him; but he pressed himself against the chilly bosom of the ice, turned his face towards the wall. He couldn’t see movement.
The frozen air pushed at him from below.
The world heaved and danced. His frozen joints burned with sudden pain as everything stumbled sharply left. The world was shadowed and then lit, and Tighe had the vague apprehension that he was tumbling strapped to an enormous flake of ice. Then the ice began to break into pieces.
A portion of ice tore away to Tighe’s right, and then another, peeling itself away from Tighe’s filament grip. He looked over at it, too chilled and icy to feel fear. He could see the wall of ice sweeping up past him, the ripples and folds in the wall scrolling past.
A crack appeared in the ice directly in front of his face, and with a twitch of muscle Tighe disengaged his filament grip. He started to separate from the ice just as it fragmented. A gust from below caught him and turned him upside down, and then he was tumbling. He put his frozen legs together and his kite-pilot’s instinct operated his body beyond his stunned semi-consciousness. He flattened his angle, brought his head back up.
The second silver calabash, the one that had attacked the Wizard’s craft with its beam of black light, swept past him again and again. It was as if there was an endless supply of these machines, each hanging in the air a thousand yards above the other: as if Tighe were stationary in air, and this parade of upward-rising silver machines were streaming past him.
There was an explosive, sore percussion, and Tighe’s head creaked with pain. He had, he distantly realised, been hit by one of the pieces of falling ice. The collision pushed him away. The repeating image of the rising silver machine dwindled, shrank.
Tighe may have passed out; he wasn’t certain. He didn’t feel so cold any more. In fact, he could feel a delicious warmth seeping through his bones. His fingers flared into achy life again and then warmed to a more comfortable temperature.
But he was passing in and out of consciousness.
10
It seemed to Tighe that he was falling in pure space; there no longer was any wall. All around him was blue sky, with an iterated pattern of white patches that might have been clouds, sweeping up and past and away over and over again. Tighe was warm, except at his face where the chill wind through which he moved made his lips and nose numb and spread blunt fronds of pain into the bridge of his nose, into his forehead. But otherwise he felt almost babyish.
He stretched out, then curled himself up again. Hanging in pure nothingness. Only the intensity of the wind, only the level of its roar, increased or decreased. He was freed of all constraints: this was pure existence.
He wasn’t certain how long he fell. He couldn’t think where the wall had gone. He started to feel thirsty.
5
The Godman
1
Tighe was conscious of the silver craft’s approach in a dreamlike fashion because he was fearful it was the Wizard come to claim him again. He cried out, but – as in a dream – his voice didn’t sound. There was a great rushing, as of a waterfall, all about him.
A metal tendril snaked out and grabbed him, and this was a clumsy, painful sensation. It jolted him; this sensation no longer felt like a dream. The tendril dug painfully into the flesh of Tighe’s waist, catching a fold of skin in sharp agony. He screamed, started thrashing.
It drew him in; or – as it seemed – it was as if Tighe reeled the craft in towards him, such that it grew and grew until it towered over him. Up close he saw that it was not the same as the Wizard’s machine: it was larger, taller, and there were many more devices and artefacts fixed to its outer skin.
A mouth opened in the silver fabric and swallowed Tighe whole. Inside, away from the enormous push and howl of the constant wind, it was suddenly so quiet that Tighe passed out with the exquisiteness of it.
He woke again in the dark, and with a miserable aching from the chafed skin of his waist. He was still dressed in the suit the Wizard had given him, but he took off a glove and fumbled with the toggles and the ties in order to be able to wriggle a hand inside at his torso. The fingers touched wetness.
He may have swooned again because the next thing he knew he was sitting upright on a kind of bench, with a bright blanched light all about him. He sat still. For a while there was nothing but a quiet hum. Directly in front of him a tiled white wall dissolved out of the wash of light. The more his eyes got used to the gleam, the more he saw: the outline of a doorway, a constellation of silver-cream and white bricks, or tiles, in a diagonal pattern.
The back of his head felt peculiar.
He tried to stand up, to step forward off the bench so that he could examine the wall more closely. It was then that he realised his head was tethered. As he moved his body forwards his head yanked backwards, cricking his neck. He almost fell. Carefully he sat back down and reached behind him. A plastic cord, finger-thick, came out of a fitting in the wall and buried itself into the back of Tighe’s head. Tighe’s fingers explored the point where the cord entered the head: the hairs back there had been shaved clean, and the cord buried directly into the skin. There was a tiny ridge of scalp that circled the point of entry.
It bothered Tighe. He didn’t like the thought of it. But, with a puzzling sense of strangeness, he realised that he was in a way more bothered by the fact that it didn’t bother him all that much. It was another bizarre eventuality in the bizarre sequence of events his life had become.
Everything went black.
There was a whistling noise in the darkness. Tighe focused on it. A series of cyan-blue flickers pulsed in geometric patterns. A pink blur, like the neon torch a tinker had once tried to sell around the village, hazed through the black-purple darkness, settling around Tighe’s eyes. He reached out to flap his hand in front of his face, but he couldn’t see anything.
There was a strong smell of burnt sweat.
White light. A series of scratches and scribbles, so intimate as to appear imprinted on Tighe’s corneas, wriggled past the lower part of his vision. He barely had time to register that they were letters and numbers – not enough time even to read what they said – when everything went black again.
There was a voice. ‘Open your eyes,’ it said in Imperial.
Tighe opened his eyes cautiously. He was back in the white padded room. Three versions of his Grandhe stood before him.
‘Grandhe,’ he said. His mouth was sticky; his lips crackled and adhered against one another. Then, bizarrely, his mouth was full of saliva, so much and so suddenly that Tighe couldn’t stop it dribbling down his chin. ‘Grandhe!’ he said again
.
‘No,’ said the middle individual. He looked like Tighe’s Grandhe except that his skin was glossier, blacker, and he was much younger. The one on the left had much paler skin, a reddish copper tone. The one on the right had a knobbled, rough-looking texture to his skin; like the bark of a tree trunk, only on a finer scale.
Tighe swallowed, and gasped. ‘Where am I? Grandhe?’
‘No,’ said the middle Grandhe. ‘That’s not who we are. We have nothing to do with that.’
Tighe tried looking from Grandhe to Grandhe, but he couldn’t turn his head too far because the cord fixed into the back of it was too short to allow much movement. ‘You look like my Grandhe,’ he said. ‘You three do.’
‘Your hardware is incomplete,’ said the Grandhe on the right. ‘We can barely connect with the interfaces we have established.’
‘It is at a primitive level,’ said the central Grandhe.
‘The Wizard put the metalwork into my head,’ said Tighe.
‘Wizard?’
‘I was in another craft, like this one I think. There was a man with leather skin.’
The central Grandhe smiled very slowly. ‘You called him the Wizard?’ he said, softly. ‘He called himself the Wizard? How droll.’
‘You know him, I think,’ said Tighe. ‘You are his Lover. He talked about his Lover often.’
‘We are all three his Lover,’ confirmed the one on the right, ‘and he is ours.’
‘How is it you are all the same?’ Tighe asked.
‘One hundred and eighteen eggs were taken from one woman,’ said the Grandhe on the right, ‘many hundreds of years ago. They were all fertilised out of the same stock.’
‘My stock,’ said the central Grandhe. ‘I am the original.’
‘I do not believe that you are,’ said Tighe, a little surprised at his own boldness.
The two outer Grandhes looked at the central one and then back at Tighe.
‘As far as anybody is concerned,’ said the central Grandhe, ‘I am. It is not cloning and therefore we are all slightly different; but there are strong resemblances, it is true. We may not be clones, but we share many qualities.’
Tighe didn’t follow this. He reached up to fiddle with the cord that passed into his head. Taking it between his finger and thumb he tugged to see if it could click out. It was firm. Each tug sent flickers of light sparkling at the edges of his vision.
‘Leave that,’ advised the central Grandhe. ‘We have not finished checking the work done by our Lover.’
‘Which one of you was the Lover he spoke of?’ Tighe asked.
‘We all are. We don’t distinguish in a way that you are likely to understand.’
‘You tried to destroy him in the air,’ Tighe recalled, picturing the swooping silver craft and its black beam of fire; ‘but I think he escaped.’
‘He escaped,’ confirmed the right-hand Grandhe.
‘You are pursuing him. Why do you look like my Grandhe?’
‘Grandhe?’
‘When I was growing up,’ Tighe started to explain, ‘in my village …’
‘Ah,’ said the central Grandhe. ‘This was one of the areas used by the man you call the Wizard. He planted versions of us, of him – stolen versions – in several places and performed various experiments. You are not one of us, though: you are the offspring of one of us.’
‘Perhaps you are the offspring of the offspring,’ suggested the right-hand Grandhe.
‘It is a more remote genetic connection, certainly.’
‘You say your mother removed some of the hardware that was inserted into your head? When did this happen? When you were a baby?’
‘What experiments was the Wizard undertaking?’ asked Tighe. He felt an itching sensation right in the centre of his head. It was not pleasant. He put both hands to his head and tried massaging and scratching the skin of his face and scalp. But the itch was directly in the middle of his head.
‘He wants what we want,’ said the central Grandhe. ‘We must return the world to a flat condition. Humanity cannot go on living this precarious existence.’
‘Precariousness’, said Tighe, distractedly, ‘is the point of existence.’
‘Metaphysics,’ said the right-hand Grandhe, in a cross voice. ‘Don’t scratch at the back of your head like that!’
‘How does putting machines in peoples’ heads’, said Tighe, grumpily, ‘and letting them grow and then cutting them out – how does that help anything?’
‘Our Lover’, said the central Grandhe, with a hint of awe in his voice, ‘has the most ambitious plans. He would like to turn a person into a machine for manipulating gravity; in something after the manner with which a craft such as this one converts power into gravitational resistance, a person might warp gravity in a local context. It is an astonishing dream.’
‘An impossible dream,’ said the right-hand Grandhe.
‘He wants other things as well. He wants power, particularly; and he is testing out machinery that has grown in the minds of genetically appropriate subjects until he has developed one that functions neatly in harmony with consciousness. This is not a small task.’
‘You admire him,’ said Tighe.
‘Of course.’
‘And yet you want to destroy him.’
‘Of course. Naturally, he wants to destroy us. He was one of us, we were Lovers together, before he fled away.’
‘He was trying to kill you,’ observed the right-handed Grandhe. ‘He had remote-turned-off the heating in your suit. You would have frozen to death if we had not overridden the command.’
‘Are you going to kill me?’ asked Tighe. It was funny how placid he felt in this environment. All his sensations were concentrated in his head.
‘Well,’ said the right-hand Grandhe, vaguely, ‘we usually destroy the offshoots of his experimental dabblings. If may not be safe to leave them climbing around on the wall.’
‘Don’t kill me,’ said Tighe, without emotion. He felt ambivalent either way. ‘I have information about him. I’ll trade it for my life if you like.’
There was a pause. ‘It seems’, said the central Grandhe, ‘that we cannot access your rapid memory. The hardware is not complete.’
Tighe looked again: the central Grandhe was the red-skinned Grandhe who had been standing a moment before – he was sure – on the right. The Grandhe with the skin like liquid oil was now on the right. When had they changed places? He didn’t remember.
There was a stabbing odour, a potent chemical smell, but it passed directly. Transparent blobular creatures floated over Tighe’s field of vision. ‘What is happening?’ he said.
‘What information do you have?’
‘The Wizard has a cave in the ice,’ he said. ‘In it are his supplies and many bodies. He showed me. I took a gun from there and shot him.’
‘Stories,’ said the central, red-skinned Grandhe. ‘Metaphysics. He has a new skin now with a microfilament underlay. Shooting him would do no good.’
‘I shot him through his eye-holes,’ said Tighe, shutting his eyes. But even though he shut his eyes, he could still see the scene in front of him in perfect detail. It was as if his eyelids were transparent. He wasn’t even sure he had shut his eyes. He fluttered them up and down, feeling them slide over his eyeballs, but the scene in front of him did not go away.
The black-skinned Grandhe smiled his slow smile again. ‘He won’t like that.’
‘He said that he’d fit himself some new eyes,’ said Tighe.
‘But of course he’ll do that,’ said the right-hand Grandhe.
The three of them flickered out of view and a drifting pattern of blue triangles floated aimlessly through the white spaces in front of Tighe.
Then they were back: three versions of the same man, black, red and textured. The order in which they were standing had changed.
‘I don’t follow …’ said Tighe.
‘We should apologise, really,’ said the black-skinned Grandhe. ‘It is not your fault
that you are caught up in this. We are playing for larger goals. Individuals – well, they take second place. Which can be a shame for the individuals concerned.’ The space he occupied abruptly emptied, impossibly, to be filled with a patch of grey light scratched and criss-crossed with shimmering lines. The black-skinned Grandhe flickered back into space.
‘The future of everything,’ said the red-skinned Grandhe. ‘We need to lay the wall flat on its side. Then life can begin again.’
‘People will still fall,’ said Tighe. ‘That is the nature of being alive, living on the wall or living elsewhere makes no odds. People will still fall.’
‘Our Lover has been foolish,’ said the black-skinned Grandhe. ‘We will soon destroy him.’
‘He had high hopes for me,’ drawled Tighe. ‘He thought I was important to his plans.’
‘He hoped to use you to destroy us, we think,’ said the Grandhes in unison.
Then one added, with what sounded almost like a chuckle, ‘Your hardware is incomplete. Some has grown, which is how we are able to interface you now. But it is at a primitive level.’
‘When you snatched me with your metal tendril,’ said Tighe, a distant sensation of crossness registering itself in his mind, ‘you nicked the skin around my waist! It still hurts. You weren’t very careful.’
‘Once upon a time,’ said the black-skinned Grandhe. He was the only Grandhe present. Tighe felt that the others had not vanished, but were somehow still present. Or perhaps they had never been there in the first place. Certainly, he could only see the black-skinned Grandhe now, outlined against an environment of dull blue sparkles, each glint of which caused a pricking sensation inside his head. ‘Once upon a time,’ the black-skinned Grandhe said again. His voice was suddenly huge, drowning out every other sound, drowning out every other sensation, as huge as the wind, as huge as the wall itself. There was nothing now but the voice, no vision, no feeling or taste, no smell. Only the voice.