Something caught the edge of his vision and he looked instinctively away from the destruction of his upper limb. Small dark shapes were lifting up from the far end of the operating table, rising into the air a trifle unsteadily. That was fair enough, he though wildly, since they had only just been born.
Pain tore through his chest and he knew that this was the end. It would only take one of the things breaking out of his ribs to go inward instead of out and they would lacerate his heart or tear open his lungs. The heart would be better, quicker. The thought of suffocating whilst his chest heaved, trying to suck oxygen into lungs that flapped like abandoned carrier bags in the street or drowning in his own blood was more than he could bear.
Let it be his heart.
“Ladies and gentlemen, we are here to make our final deliberations on the death of Mr George Wilson, a task that I think you will all agree has been made that much harder by the surprising, but apparently genuine, case of mass amnesia amongst the theatre staff. We have all seen the photographs of the perplexing injuries that Mr Wilson incurred during what should have been a routine procedure. We have all studied the rather absurd conclusions of the forensic specialist from the police service. We have all visited the scene of the tragedy and seen it exactly as it was after Mr Wilson’s body was removed. Exactly how we are going to be able to come up with sensible recommendations from this… mess, I really don’t know, but that is the task that we have been given.
“We were going to be given the opportunity of interviewing both Doctor Kaanange and Doctor Parker again today, but I have just been informed that they have both been taken ill, apparently pain in their extremities, mainly the legs.
Anyway, shall we continue?”
The Wall at the End of the World
It was about the wall.
Of course, it was about the wall. It was always about the wall.
The position of his house, further up the side of the valley than most, allowed him to see the lights burning inside the council building in the middle of the village. Except that Higholme was more of a town now and would soon be spilling out from the ends of the valley that had been its birthing place. There just wasn’t room enough for the population to grow without expansion of the borders and the slopes of the valley sides were becoming too steep for further building.
And then there was the wall. It stretched across the northern end of the valley, impossibly high and, well, just impossible. It had been constructed by methods that nobody could fathom since there were no discrete blocks or seams or flaws. It simply flowed up from bottom to top. It was rough to the touch, but resisted every effort to drill into it or chip parts off it. It was impervious and inscrutable and, to most of the inhabitants of Higholme, rather dull. Even the greatest miracles become commonplace when you see them every day and they never, ever change. Like the road, or the post box or the courthouse, the wall became the background that nobody ever thought about.
Except Cal.
Cal thought about the wall. He had thought about it all his life, the bits that he could remember at least. For the last twenty years, it had been pretty much all he had thought about.
“You have to go to the council,” his wife had said to him when he had explained his plan. She hadn’t asked ‘why?’ or ‘what for?’, but had instead offered practical advice on how to advance things. That had reminded him of why he had fallen in love with her in the first place. She didn’t think he was mad like everyone else did. Well maybe she did, but she didn’t show it or ever raise an objection or observation on the how it impacted on their lives negatively.
Right now, she was down in the council chamber, in her capacity as the town’s chief healer, discussing his plan, whilst he was stuck at home looking down at the lights and wondering what was being said.
“I want to cross the wall,” had been his simple plan when he had faced the council to first express it. Then, it had been made up of parents of the current members. He had countered their surprised, half-formed arguments with the simple facts that his plan couldn’t damage the wall in any way and couldn’t change the current situation in Higholme in any way.
Except for him. He could finally see what lay beyond the wall.
Many people, most in fact, couldn’t see even why he wanted to see what was beyond the wall. Higholme wasn’t the most northerly of communities, though the naturally inhospitable barrier of cold and snow and ice prevented anyone from travelling through the mountain range that stretched hundreds of miles across the kingdoms. Only here, though, only in Higholme, was there a wall. It had been placed there with deliberation, with a purpose.
Cal wanted to understand that purpose because, in understanding that, he would be closer to understanding the minds of those unknown people who had built the wall and who knew so much more than he, or anyone else, did.
“And why should we permit such a thing?” the leader of the council had asked, as fearful of changes to the status quo as any who held such positions.
“And why should you not?” Cal had responded, as his wife had advised him to. “The land is not claimed, cannot be farmed and holds no value. I shall work on this only in time that is mine and it will not affect the work I do for the community.”
As the owner and worker of the main smithy in the village, this was an important consideration. So much of what everyone did had relied upon his services. Since then, though, he had apprenticed four young men, three of whom had set up in the ever-expanding village and one who had taken his services elsewhere in the hope of seeing new things.
“I will pay for everything myself and I will share anything useful that I find with the village as a whole.”
Appealing to the council members’ greed had also been his wife’s idea, though ‘greed’ was not quite the right word. They were tasked with administering the village’s fortunes and anything that was likely to improve those, and their own at the same time, naturally attracted them.
“I shall do the work myself and ask for no assistance other than is freely given by others in their own time,” he had added.
In essence, the argument was that there was no risk and some possible advantage. Looking back, how could they have turned him down?
There was one more question to be asked; “And how long do you think this will take you?”
“Barring the unforeseen,” he had replied, “five years.”
It was that number which had sealed the deal with the councilmen. Five years in Higholme was an eternity. People counted time in seasons and barely looked beyond the next harvest. The construction of the council building had taken only three seasons and that had been the greatest project that the village had ever undertaken communally. In five years, life would change immeasurably and the village smith would inevitably let fall his fanciful idea for the more pressing matters of daily life.
Those five years had stretched to twenty and Cal’s determination had not faltered. Neither had his work rate. The unforeseen had played its part and Cal learned that he had underestimated what was required in taking a single man so high up the face of a structure that he could bind nothing to for support. Though the pinnacle of his scaffold would always be a simple ladder, the base of the construction had spread out along fully two thirds of the width of the wall itself and projected out from the wall’s base toward the boundary of the village much more than he had ever considered necessary.
For a while, Cal’s Folly (as many called it, little thinking that he knew full well how they considered both it and its creator) became notorious. It was new and unusual in a way that the people of Higholme had ceased to consider even the wall itself. At market, they discussed the construction in passing and word spread. People whose lives were hard and lacked much in terms of novelty travelled to the village to see this wonder and a whole new inn had to be built, much of the work done by Cal himself, to house and entertain them.
The council admitted that already there was some advantage to letting the smith carry on with his curious pastime and
did not interfere.
As the seasons, and then the years passed, curiosity waned and the novelty of the unfinished scaffold faded. The folk of Higholme stopped discussing it and the people from neighbouring communities stopped asking.
Only Cal was consistent and the scaffold grew daily, almost invisibly in its slowness, toward the top of the wall.
And now, twenty years since their elder relatives had seen no risk in Cal’s foolish dream, the councilmen had called an urgent meeting to discuss it, because the end was in sight. The scaffold, which looked more complex and more rickety than it truly was in either case, had almost reached the top of the wall. The ladder that had been the first thing that Cal had fashioned and the last thing that he would put into place had only to be carried up to the top platform and lashed into place.
Cal had achieved what they believed to be impossible and was preparing to face the unknown. Both the impossible and the unknown scare people, especially people who lack the imagination to face either and overcome them.
The lights in the council building went out. A decision had been reached. No doubt, he would be summoned in the morning and given the council’s ruling. The hour was late and most of the council members would be eager to reach their homes and eat with their families. He would be left until the morning to learn his fate. His wife knew well enough that to reveal anything before the council announced its ruling would be to forfeit her place in the decision-making elite.
Cal set about preparing to welcome her home. He placed the stew back over the fire to warm. Since she had to scale the steep climb to their house, it would have time to bubble into life before she arrived. He also placed socks by the fire to soak up the warmth a bit. It was a cold night and she would be chilled.
It was going to be an uncomfortable evening for them both as neither of them liked to keep secrets from the other.
The door opened suddenly with the sounds that accompanied a hurried entrance.
“Orla?” he questioned as he entered the main room, not because he doubted that it was her (anyone else would have knocked and waited for permission), but because for her to have arrived in such a short time she must have run most of the way.
It was his wife, the first strands of grey touching her fine brown hair, but her face was as unlined, alive and intelligent as it had been the first time that he saw her, perhaps even more so in the latter two categories. Her expression, though, was not one that she wore often; concern, even a touch of panic, determination and, yes, fear.
“It is decided,” she told him through heavy breaths.
“You must not speak of it,” Cal warned her, shocked at the breach of the etiquette of her position.
“It is decided and you must go now,” she told him, slumping into one of the chairs by the dining table. “If you do not go now, they will come for you in the morning and force you to destroy all that you have built.”
Orla had never given a name to the construction that obsessed her husband more than she did. She knew that Cal loved her more than he could have loved any other woman, and that he would do anything that she asked of him, perhaps even destroy the construction that she would not name had she demanded it, but Cal without his dream, with the driving force of his life taken forcibly away from him, would not be the Cal that she loved. She was willing to come second to this, if nothing and nobody, else.
“What?” though Cal had feared it, he could not believe that this was the decision that the council had made. To have allowed him to come so far, to come to the very edge of success and then to take it away from him…
“They are frightened,” Orla told him softly, “and they do not know what they are frightened of, which makes it all the more frightening for them.”
“But you…”
She smiled wearily at him and he could see the toll that the arguments had taken on her. How she must have battled for him against them. “Do you think that I would take my position with them over you?”
“Of course not, but…”
“There was no way to retain both and there was no decision to be made,” she told him, placing one hand lovingly against his cheek. “And now you must go before someone else decides to doubt me, and with better cause.”
“I did not doubt you,” he denied firmly.
“I know,” she said with another tired smile, “but what sort of wife would I be if I did not tease you whenever the opportunity arose?”
“A normal one?” he suggested and they both laughed.
“Now you must go.”
“But I am not prepared,” he objected. “The ladder…”
“You do not have time for the ladder,” she told him, her practical nature reasserting itself. “Try to carry that up there and they will catch you before you reach the top. You know this. Is there another way. There must be another way.”
“Nothing will penetrate the wall, nothing will grip into it,” Cal told her. His mind, though, was already at work.
“Well, you have as long as it takes you to get to the top to think about it,” his wife told him. “Now quickly.”
Cal went into the bedroom at her urging and took down the clothes that he had prepared for this journey. Though it was a cold night down in the valley, it would be even colder at the top of the wall and there would be no protection from any winds that were blowing. He had a lantern that not even the strongest storm could extinguish (or so the salesman had said) and ‘weatherproof’ matches with which to light it. He also had a pad and some pencils with which to record anything that he encountered. Everything fitted snugly into a sturdy pack that Orla had purchased for that very purpose.
When he emerged into the main room again, she was sitting at the table, calmly eating bread and the stew that he had left warming over the fire.
“This is good,” she told him, indicating the stew as though there was nothing else that was noteworthy.
“So it should be,” he replied, “since it was you who made it. Last night.”
“Ah,” she nodded sagely. “That would explain it.”
Cal looked at the woman who had shared his life for more than a quarter of a century and faltered in his belief that climbing the wall was the most important thing that he could ever do.
“How could I ever leave you?” he asked.
“By promising to come back,” she said, the perturbation he had seen on her face earlier banished now by her customary control, “and with no regrets.”
“I have not been the best of husbands to you,” he realised abruptly.
She smiled wistfully, “You have been the best husband that you could be and that has been more than I could ever have asked for.”
He leaned down and kissed her, tasting the stew on her lips, and then he departed, leaving her at the table calmly eating her late evening meal.
He followed the same path that he had followed for twenty years and was so familiar with the route that he did not need to light the lamp that weighed at this back. There were clouds gathering overhead, but for the moment there were enough breaks between them for the bright half-moon to illuminate the way. He emerged from the last row of houses onto the scrubland where the soil was so thin that only a few straggling plants were able to find sustenance enough to survive. Before long, he left those behind him and ascended first across broken shale and then bare rock.
He climbed the first of many ladders and hurried up the slope to the highest point of the first platform. There, he turned to look at Higholme. The lighted windows of the community tumbled down the valley away from him, a sparkling reminder of the life that he had always been slightly apart from, the life that he was now leaving. He looked to his own house, but the lights there were unlit. Had Orla taken to her bed or was she there in the darkness, watching for him against the dark bulk of the wall? She couldn’t possibly see him and he would not light the lantern until the overcast was so complete that he could no longer see anything. Though his feet knew the ladders and platforms of this great endeavour as familiarly as they
knew the boots he was wearing, he was aware that the higher platforms were a good deal narrower and that he had built no safety rails. A fall from even a short way up the wall’s height would see him dead. He would need the light before he reached the top and had simply to hope that the cold of the night would keep the villagers indoors where they could not wonder at the spark of light hanging in the sky.
He craned his head back to look up at the point where that sky was bisected, cut across in a straight line by the summit of the wall, by the target of his life.
Enough prevarication! he chided himself and hurried on, climbing the second ladder. He still had a long way to go and a problem to overcome when he got there, though he hoped that he already had a solution to that.
The exercise was strenuous enough to keep him warm against the dropping temperature as he ascended. This was not like the climbing of mountains, which he was told some people did for entertainment, but it still required constant physical action. The village fell away below him and the lights winked out, though whether this was because people were settling down to sleep or because of the distance, he could not determine. He reached the end of the platform he was on and nearly tumbled off, his foot landing only half on last wooden plank. He grabbed at one of the supports and steadied himself before squatting down and removing the pack from his back. Putting one of his feet through the arm strap so that he wouldn’t drop it, he opened the pack and extracted the lantern. For a moment, he feared that he had left the matches in the house with his dear wife and scrabbled around the pack until his fingers closed on the box with great relief. Each match had two wooden sticks instead of the single one that most matches possessed and they were much longer. Cal was able to place the chemical bulbs at the end right inside the lantern, up against the wick, before breaking the two sticks apart. This set off a small chemical reaction that ignited end of the match. The wick caught immediately and the lens of the lantern magnified the light so that he could see once more.
Taking the Tube to the Outer Limits Page 3