by Jeffrey Ford
The fall seemed inordinately long as I waved my arms at my sides, trying to catch myself. When the water came up around me, I realized I had been knocked into the river. The force of the current was remarkably strong, but I reached out and grabbed a small out-cropping of stone with my left hand. This allowed me to bring my head above water for a minute. In that time, I heard the soldiers arrive. There were shouts of “Harrow’s hindquarters” and “I’ll be a winking minch” before the tunnel above me exploded with fire. I heard the screams of the demon as I let go of the wall and gave myself up to the river.
I worked desperately to keep my head above water, but it moved so swiftly, tumbling me and dashing me against the sides and bottom, that I had very little control at all. I could feel my topcoat being torn off me by the action of the rapids. As it flew away beneath the foam, I managed a last breath before I hit my head against another outcropping. Then I sank into unconsciousness, immediately dreaming that I was dead and that Corporal Matters of the day watch was sliding my body into its tomb.
There was an eternity of blankness in which I could feel myself becoming a pile of salt. When I finally opened my eyes, I stared up at a dreamy blue sky. There was a warm wind blowing, and I could hear birds calling in the distance. I felt thankful that death had been easy. I was tired and every muscle in my body hurt from the drubbing the river had given me. I lay there half asleep and just stared into the sky thinking, “Had I only known it was going to be like this.”
I dozed for a minute or two, and when I woke again, the sky was eclipsed by something. A pale green piece of cloth fluttered over me. I concentrated and saw that it was a veil, covering a face.
“Arla,” I said.
“Yes,” said a voice, and I could tell it was hers.
“I love you,” I said.
She leaned back so that I could see her whole body now, kneeling above me. Her beautiful hands came into view, and I watched them move like a pair of birds in the blue sky. They came to rest against my neck, and her touch thrilled me. I was about to reach up, when her fingers tightened around my throat.
26
When I woke again, I was lying on the ground near a fire beneath a vaulting green canopy of leaves. That same beautifully warm breeze enveloped me, bringing the sweet scents of tree blossoms and wildflowers. I rose up on my elbow and saw Arla sitting across from me, holding a baby in her arms. Next to her, on the ground, sat the Traveler with his legs crossed in front of him. When he saw that I was awake, he smiled at me. I noticed now that in addition to the bumps and bruises that had been supplied by the river, my throat hurt terribly.
“Arla, I’ve come to rescue you,” I said as I sat up. My head suddenly got light, and I fell onto my back again.
They laughed as I scrabbled back to a sitting position.
“You’re lucky you’re not dead,” she said, her voice cold and flat, the veil moving slightly with her words as it had in my dream of her. “I would have killed you, but Ea came and made me stop choking you.”
“Where am I?” I asked.
“Somehow, you came through the river into the false paradise. I found you washed up on the bank,” she said.
“Arla,” I said, then paused, trying to consider the best manner with which to present my case. Before I could employ any scheme to make my plea sound less trite, the words blundered forth with the power of the river that had nearly drowned me. “I’ve been waiting for a long time to ask you to forgive me for what I’ve done to you. I have suffered greatly, but somehow I managed to stay alive in order to find my way to you.”
“You needn’t have stayed alive on my account. What am I to forgive you for? Butchering my face? Making me a sideshow exhibit? Or just being a pompous prig, convinced of your own superiority?” she asked.
“I am changed,” I said. “I have been to the sulphur mines. I am surreptitiously fighting against the Master in order to save your lives,” I told her.
“Would you like me to remind you of what you were before this miracle you mention?” she said, and began to lift the bottom of her veil.
I readied to cover my eyes, but here the Traveler held up his hand and spoke. “I can see in him that he is different now,” he said to her.
“Unfortunately, my face is still a weapon,” she said.
He put his hand out and touched her shoulder. “Even this, you will eventually forgive,” he said in his calm voice.
After this, she let me speak, and I told them my sad saga and how I had come to see the evil of my actions. “All I can do now is try to rectify what I have done,” I said.
She asked me about the fate of Calloo and Bataldo, and I wanted to tell her that they were free, heading through the wilderness toward Wenau, but that veiled face required more truth than any set of piercing eyes. She wept when I explained the fate of her people.
“I’ve got only a limited amount of time in which to get us out of the city,” I told her. “In a few days, the Master is going to ask me for a list of citizens that he intends to execute as part of the gala event revealing this bubble of paradise to the people. If I have not been successful by then, it will be me who will be executed, for I will not turn over any names to him.”
The Traveler asked me what I had in mind.
I told him how it was that I had come inside the bubble and suggested that, though it was dangerous, we could probably leave the same way.
“No,” said Arla, “Ea is weak because of having to live beneath this counterfeit sun. The river almost killed you. He will never make it, and even if he could, the baby couldn’t.”
“There are no other exits?” I asked.
“They built the place around us. It is hermetically sealed, a supposedly self-contained environment. It’s a wonder you happened upon the entrance you did. We hadn’t thought of that,” she said.
“It is an egg ready to hatch,” said Ea.
“Where did you learn the language?” I asked him.
“From the woman,” he said, pointing to Arla.
“He is brilliant, Cley,” she said. “He is so advanced, it was a miracle I could teach him anything.”
“I remember,” I said to the Traveler, “that you fed a piece of the white fruit to Arla before you left my study in Anamasobia.”
“Yes,” he said, “to preserve her life. She would have died otherwise.”
“I thought maybe it would reverse the effects of my scalpel,” I said to Arla.
“That will never change,” she said.
“The fruit,” he said, “does not do what you might expect it to always. That small bite of it helped her not to die, and it also burnt away some of her ambition for the power that you once held. If someone were to eat of it who was not so innocent as her, this could be trouble.”
“Is it truly the fruit of paradise?” I asked him.
“It is not,” he said. “It does cause seemingly miraculous things to happen, but they defy nature. They obscure what is important in life. Thousands of years ago, it came to Wenau, where my people lived. They began eating of it, and it caused many monstrous changes. The good things it caused cheated the people of a true life. The evil things it caused cheated them of hope. Finally, the elder of my people saw the truth about it and ordered the tree on which it grew to be burned. I was to take the last piece of fruit and find a spot to hide it that was so remote, it would never be found. We could not destroy it, because it had been made by the forest, and we did not have the right to obliterate it from the world. When I found such a spot, I was to take a mix of herbs and roots, prepared by our shaman, that would put me into a perpetual sleep. I was to guard the fruit and ensure that no creature ever tasted of it again.”
“But you were fed it by Garland, and then you gave a piece to Arla,” I said.
He nodded and smiled. “I would have awoken from my slumber eventually without it. When the man gave it to me, it caused some change in my person. I should not have given it to Arla, but seeing her there in your room, I felt I could love her,”
he said. “The change it made in me is that I was able to see her beauty, though she was so different from my people. I went against the spiritual law of Wenau for the promise of love. I am a criminal both here and in the Beyond.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“He means we are in love,” said Arla.
“In love,” I said, “as in the usual sense?”
“In every sense,” she said, and I could almost hear her smile behind the veil.
The Traveler reached over and held her hand the way an old man might his wife’s. I felt an instant surge of jealousy. “How could they be in love,” I thought to myself, staring at them. “They are like two different species.” I shook my head and tears came to my eyes, but when I cleared them and looked again at the couple, holding hands beside the fire, a transformation seemed to have taken place.
Where I had always seen the Traveler as some kind of prehuman animal with outlandish features, I noticed now that he looked as much like a man as any I had encountered in my life. He was tall and his skin was dark, but other than this I saw no difference. In fact, when I looked closely, I realized that his fingers were not webbed as I had always believed, and his nose was a nose and not merely two holes in his face.
“Look,” said Ea to Arla, dropping her hand and pointing, “he is seeing me.”
She put her arm around him and held him tightly. “Cley,” she said, “if you can save us, I will forgive you. Just help me get him back to the world before he dies. I love him.”
“I will try,” I said.
“You must think of some way to free us. We’ve beaten at the crystal with rocks and sticks. We’ve tried to tunnel under it, but found that the sphere reaches down below the ground. Ea has searched every inch of it for a flaw or some vent or opening. He has tried to dream an escape, but has been unable because of his waning strength,” she said.
“I’d better go,” I said, grimly considering the prospect of another swim. “You’ll have to take me to where the river leaves the paradise. There is no way I can swim upstream against that current.”
“I will show you,” said Ea, rising slowly to his feet.
I got up and walked over to Arla and held my hand out to her. “I’m sorry,” I said. She did not take my hand but sat silently, rocking the baby. The veil moved and I thought she was about to talk, but then I saw that it was just moving in the breeze. “I will come back for you,” I said.
Then we left the little encampment and journeyed out across the false paradise. As much as it was a sham and a prison for Arla, her child, and the Traveler, Below had created something amazing. There was no way I would have known, had I not earlier been outside the bubble, that I was not walking through one of the forests of the Beyond. There were all manner of animals and birds and even insects trapped in the crystal. I could not imagine how he had made the sun and clouds. For the first time in thirty-five years, I again wondered why the sky was blue.
When we reached the spot where the river flowed beneath the crystal wall, I turned to Ea and took his hand.
“Watch for me,” I said.
“I saw you coming in my dreams,” he told me.
I wanted to say more, but the silence we shared was sufficient. Stepping up to the bank of the river, I tried to decide if I should jump directly into the swiftly moving water or ease in off the side. That is when I felt his hand on my back, pushing me. I plunged in and was immediately swept along. This time, though, I did not roll and tumble, but I continued to feel that hand on my back, guiding me, as I sped away from paradise.
Sometime later, I am not exactly sure how long, I felt the current quickly abate and knew that I had entered some larger body of water. Swimming to the surface, I noticed from the white marble ceiling above and the columns that lined the walkway a few yards off, that I had entered a holding tank in the waterworks. How it all came to be, I had moved too rapidly to tell. I swam to the side and pulled myself out onto the walkway.
Although I was soaked to the skin and my boots were squishing tiny geysers of water out of the seams with each step, I made it to the street before the workers arrived to begin the day. The sun was coming up as I fled from the entrance to the waterworks and down the first eastbound alley I could find. As I ran, I shivered and mourned the loss of Calloo for the third time. What was far more difficult was trying to come to terms with the fact that my dream of Arla’s love was never going to come to pass.
When I finally crawled up the steps to my apartment, I was completely exhausted, and, now that all of my adrenaline had been depleted, the beauty was calling. I fixed a dose even before undressing and plunged the needle into my wrist. My vision began to blur, and I became unsteady as I tried to strip off my wet pants. At least the violet drug brought me some warmth. More than anything, I needed a few hours sleep before I could make my next move. I got into bed and fell headlong into a feverish beauty dream that swept me along like the river leaving the false paradise.
I saw Calloo and the demon wrapped in combat while the soldiers shot their flamethrowers, burying the two enemies in a wall of fire. Then I just saw the fire and it burned and burned forever. When the fire suddenly stopped, there was nothing left of either of them except what appeared to be one glistening droplet of water that fell to the cement path, making the noise of the highest key of a piano, struck once. I walked over and picked this droplet up, discovering it was really made of crystal.
It came to me that I was now outside, under a deep blue sky. In the newfound light, away from the river tunnel, I could see something moving inside the tiny crystal. Putting it up to my eye, I could see a minuscule forest growing inside. A wind blew then, like someone breathing, and I looked up, past the blue, and saw a giant eye staring down on me as if through a distant wall of crystal.
Everything shattered and I came awake. It was midafternoon. I went to my closet to get dressed, half hoping that I might find Calloo jammed in there, but there was nothing but clothes. I did not bother with a bath, seeing as I had spent most of the previous night in the water. When I was dressed, I made out some appointment cards for later that evening and went out to give them away.
My first stop was a café, where I bought a Gazette and ordered two cups of shudder to get my eyes completely open. The headline read: DEMON KILLS THREE AT SEWAGE PLANT. I went on to read that three armed soldiers were attacked and killed by the demon. There was no news of the remains of Calloo, nothing about a topcoat found floating. The story was brief, giving few details beyond the names of the unfortunates. I wondered if Calloo could still be alive out there somewhere, tottering around, springs poking through his flesh. For some reason this ghoulish thought brought a smile to my lips. I leaned back and drank my shudder and noticed that on page three there was a small piece announcing that the Minister of the Treasury had accidentally fallen out of his bedroom window and broken his neck.
I distributed my appointment cards at the open-air market, handing them out randomly. As soon as that was accomplished, I returned to my office, hoping to get a few more hours of sleep before the subjects came to be read. I had just eased back in my chair, settling my aching body in a position that would hurt the least, when someone knocked at my door.
“Who is it?” I called.
The door opened and in walked the Master. As the door closed behind him I caught a glimpse of armed soldiers taking up sentry positions in the hallway. Below carried a brown paper bag with him. He looked completely exhausted, and his hands were shaking. I whipped my feet off the desk and straightened to attention. He sat down in the chair across from me, reached into the bag, and pulled out two cups of shudder. Then he reached back in, took out a shiny object and threw it on the desk in front of me. I instantly recognized the scalpel I had dropped in the sewage plant when the demon had attacked Calloo.
27
I did not hesitate but an eye blink before reaching out and grabbing the scalpel. “Where did you get this?” I asked. “I haven’t seen one of these in years.”
> “It’s a scalpel, Cley,” he said.
“Yes, but it’s a Pierpoint. The old-timers used to use these,” I said.
“It’s not the type you use?” he asked.
“I use a Janus, double head,” I said. “The cut is cleaner and it is easier to slice cartilage with. But, I’ll tell you, in the hands of someone like Flock or Muldabar Reiling, these were very effective.”
“I want you to find out whose it is,” he said, looking skeptically at me.
I put the scalpel back down on the desk. “I’m just waiting for another group of subjects,” I told him. “The list is slowly growing. I’ve unearthed a nice selection of miscreants so far.”
He nodded wearily.
“Cley, the headaches—I can’t shake them,” he said. “They come more frequently now with weird results.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“My physicians have told me that they think certain foods I eat might set them off or make them worse. They have told me not to drink shudder, but, Harrow’s hindquarters, how can a man with my busy schedule get by without a few jolts every day?” he asked.
“Perhaps it might be good to lie down for a day or two,” I said.
“You have no idea what is happening. Last night, at a certain bar in the manufacturing district, my soldiers went in to check for a runaway gladiator and had a gun battle with the patrons. How can these workers have guns? My men finally just bombed the place, killing ten citizens. Then they rushed into the rubble and shot the rest of them. But this is bad business. There is a malaise of ingratitude among the people that even I was unaware of.” He fell silent for a moment and shook his head. His eyes had dark crescents beneath them. “Things are falling apart,” he said.