Glass Town Wars

by Celia Rees

  She looked around the room at the screwed-up bits of paper, hatched and cross-hatched with minuscule writing, with tiny sketches in the margins. A careful and complex drawing of a tall, many-windowed building, towered and turreted, rendered as precisely as an architectural drawing, surrounded and overlaid with letters and words. Pinned to the wall, a larger drawing, so heavily shaded the ink was still wet, soaking and buckling the cheap paper. Not a bad likeness. A man in profile: high-domed forehead, dark, curling hair falling on to his collar and brushed forward on to his temples, deep-set eyes, thin nose, mouth curving downwards in haughty disapproval. Another, more fanciful—the same man dressed as a pirate, standing with a swagger, sword dangling at his side. Alexander Percy. Duke of Northangerland. Rogue’s name and title.

  The other two have escaped in their own fashion: one distancing herself into the intricate minuet of Glass Town romance and social dalliance; the other into making maps and plans, elaborating hairstyles and dresses for Gondal. But Emily felt it as powerfully as Branwell: the pull of a world so much more exciting, so much more seductive, than everyday, humdrum existence. It was there all the time. She could go there without the need of stimulants, slipping into it as easily as she slipped her arms into the sleeves of her coat. It was part of the weave of her waking life.

  She stared at the curling portrait pinned above the desk. Beyond the cloying laudanum, she thought she caught the sharpish, metallic tang of electricity—as if he had been there, in this room.

  THE NOISE GREW AND GREW. A great wind enveloped them; dust and sand swirled around in a gritty cloud. The noise was so loud, the sudden wind so strong, Augusta thought that they were in the grip of the Jinn.

  “Grab hold!” a voice boomed from above, and Augusta looked up to see a harness falling down towards her. “Grab hold! Put your arms through it. That’s it. Hold tight.”

  She put her head and chest through the padded loops and was whirled into the air. She saw Rogue staring up at her, his arms outstretched, as if to draw her back to him, but it was too late. She was being hauled up towards the craft hovering above. A small, squat machine, like an enormous mosquito, blades whirling above the body of it, like sycamore wings.

  “Put your foot on the bar.” Tom’s voice came through the shatter of noise. “That’s it. See those handles? Grab hold and haul yourself in. That’s it! That’s it.”

  Augusta pulled herself into the flying machine and fell on to the floor. She lay there for a moment or two, gasping like a fish on the shore. Then she inched towards the open door. The machine was rising with incredible speed. Rogue beneath her, getting smaller and smaller, still staring up, his arms reaching, his cloak-like wings; he looked like the dark angel he longed to be.

  As they rose higher and higher, she saw Glass Town as she’d never seen it before. The towers and turrets, the enclosing walls, the spider span of the bridge, the darkglass gleam of river and harbour and the sea beyond. Lights showed here and there. Torches moved like lines of fireflies along the darkened streets, converging on the Great Piazza.

  “There’s a clasp at the front of the harness,” Tom said without looking round. “It unclips. Come up here and sit by me.”

  Some unseen mechanism slid the open door shut behind her and Augusta crawled forward cautiously, not trusting the shifting movement of the frail-looking craft, a mere skin of metal and glass between them and the empty air. She took the narrow seat next to Tom.

  “Now it’s payback time,” he said. “Let’s see how Pigtail likes this.”

  The craft wheeled around. They were diving down with an angry hornet’s whine. She could see the slender frame of the guillotine in the Great Piazza, the faces around it upturned in awe and wonder. Augusta cowered back, fearing that they were going to crash. Tom pressed a button with his gloved thumb and the piazza disappeared in a staccato blast of cannon fire.

  The craft swooped up again, like a hawk in flight. The only sound was the thump, thump of the rotating blades. Tom turned to dive again, this time with the Duke’s Palace in his sights.

  “No!” Augusta shouted and reached to cover over his gloved hand. “Annie’s down there and Keeper, Isaac, Amos and lots of innocent people. They don’t deserve to die. Go there—in the bay!”

  The craft dipped and veered away, heading towards the sea where ships showed dark against the glint of the water. Tom pressed a button and missiles flew down, stitching their way across the harbour, targeting one ship after another, ending with the black freighter, which disappeared in a series of explosions, billowing smoke and flame.

  They both stared, awed, their faces illuminated by the flickering red glow from the burning ships.

  “That was carrying some serious ordinance.”

  “What is this thing?”

  Augusta looked around in wonder. In front of Tom and above his head were switches, buttons and dials, glowing green and red; small glass windows showing moving maps, bright and lit up; a compass, the dial white against black. They were flying almost due west, the dial registering even the slightest change of direction. She automatically reached out her hand.

  “Don’t touch anything! It’s called a helicopter. A flying machine,” he tried to explain. “The blades on the top turn very fast, creating an updraught which keeps us in the air. The blades in the tail keep the craft stable.”

  A flying machine. Why not? Men had always envied the birds and dreamt of such a thing. Didn’t Leonardo da Vinci sketch a machine that turned and turned like sycamore wings? Augusta savoured the word. Helic-o-pter. From the Greek, she guessed, helix and pteron—“spiral wing”.

  She twisted round. Glass Town was slipping from view, a smudge in the distance. They were flying over water, the land a dark band receding all the time.

  “We have to go back!” Augusta was filled with sudden panic. “We can’t leave now!”

  “That’s the only thing we can do.”

  “When will we be back again?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “I don’t know that, either.”

  That was the truth. Tom had no idea as he flew the helicopter out over the open sea. They were in another kind of game now, one where he could fly helicopters like a Navy Seal—Milo’s “fix”, no doubt, but one where Tom had no influence over where they were going. None of the controls responded to him. They were being taken on a predetermined trajectory, as if caught in a tractor beam. He didn’t have a clue where they were heading or how it would play out.

  They were flying over water, the restless black glitter of the sea far below them. They were heading west, into a constantly setting sun. Augusta sat quietly, taking in all this strangeness.

  “What are all those little lights in front of you?” she asked. “The switches and dials?”

  “This shows how high we’re flying; this shows how fast. This is for…” Tom paused. “Not sure what that’s for, or that, or that. Oh, I think that one’s fuel. This is a gyro, keeping us steady; these are maps, showing where we are and where we’re heading; and this is a compass.”

  All Augusta really understood was compass.

  “We’re travelling north-west,” she said.

  “Looks like it.”

  She was intensely curious, wanting to know how the machine worked, asking all sorts of questions that Tom couldn’t answer. Amazing how much you took for granted. This was a helicopter. They just were.

  “Are there more machines like this?” she asked when she’d exhausted his scanty knowledge of the craft. “That can fly?”

  “Yes,” he answered. “Many. Bigger than this, more powerful. Flying higher and faster—much faster. Rockets, even, that can travel to the moon and out to the planets.”

  “With men in them?”

  “To the moon, yes. The planets are much further, so not yet.”

  Augusta was silent. She didn’t seem fazed by any of this. Not at all. She was just absorbing it as an interesting new thing. Men had always yearned to f
ly. Such things only existed in stories but there was no limit to the imagination. It wasn’t that strange that they would one day find a way to do it…

  “The Fairish Lady said you were from the future…”

  “About two hundred years in the future—at a rough guess.”

  “To live in a world where such wonders are real.” Augusta’s grey eyes were wide with wonder. “I envy you.”

  “Some things are better.” Tom leant back, arms folded. No point in keeping hold of the joystick—the thing was flying itself. “Life is much easier for most people. We can cure many diseases. Machines do much of the work for us and we can travel any distance. Speak to people on the other side of the world. Some things haven’t changed, though. We can’t cure every disease and we still have wars and fighting, and the weapons we’ve invented mean there’s killing on a scale you wouldn’t believe.”

  Augusta nodded at the logic of that. Just as men have always wanted to fly, they’d always want to find more efficient ways to kill. Even so…

  “I’d love to see it,” she said.

  “Something tells me that your wish is about to be granted.”

  The helicopter banked and changed its trajectory. The compass on the dashboard swung north-north-west. On the digital map, Tom could see the southern seaboard of the United States approaching. They were over the Gulf of Mexico. Tom could see ships beneath them, small as matchboxes, and oil rigs lit up like Christmas trees. They were crossing the coastal highway, following a necklace of lights. Then they were turning inland. In between the blackness of less populated areas, cities and towns showed in grids and starbursts connected by snaking strings of white and gold.

  “What are those lights?” Augusta asked. “It’s like looking down on the stars.”

  “Houses, roads, streets. Where people live.”

  “How are they lit so bright?”

  “Electricity.”

  “Mr Faraday’s invention?”

  “Yes, I guess. It kind of took off.”

  Augusta fell silent, staring out of the window, fascinated by the carpet of sparks below her. They were flying over more and more darkness, the lights strung out and sporadic.

  Tom was flying higher, faster, further—way beyond the capability of a craft like this. He wasn’t flying it at all—somebody else was, he knew that, but who that could be he had no idea.

  The craft was rising, going over mountains. High mountains. There was snow on the peaks below them. Tom thought he knew where they were and where they might be heading.

  He took a sideways look at Augusta. Her face was set and serious, grey eyes taking in everything. She looked different. Younger. Also more ordinary. Her beauty had lost that edge that made you catch your breath, but Tom preferred her like this. She looked real. Like a real girl.

  “You’re not Augusta any more, are you?” Tom stared ahead.

  “No,” she replied simply. “I’m Emily.”

  THEY WERE COMING TO HIM. They had no choice in that. He was calling them. At a touch he could make the craft crash, blow apart in mid-air, but he didn’t want that. The cargo was too valuable, too precious.

  The image he was seeing filled the screen in front of him. He pulled out from the intimacy of the cockpit to watch the helicopter fly down from the Rockies and out across a darkened California. At a touch, it disappeared into a corner to become just one of many small screens, showing a thousand, thousand worlds that made up an image of himself.

  The terrain flattened out. The darkness below was spangled with light again. Freeways snaked between grid after grid, town after town. They were descending into a basin, a webbing, a skein of lights spreading from the eastern horizon to the blackness of the sea. Lines of red and white streaked in twisting rivers that ran like veins, like arteries, merging and splitting apart. Nowhere was completely dark below them. An orange and yellow glow spread along the ground, bursting out here and there like brushwood fire. Tom recognized it from any number of films, games and TV shows. Excitement tightened and bubbled up inside him. He wanted to laugh. He’d always wanted to do this. They were flying over Los Angeles, into one dazzling golden glow.

  Downtown rose up like an island in the centre, in obelisks and oblongs, soaring towers set at angles to each other, a many-storeyed glitter of glass in the darkness, lit against the night sky, illuminated from within. Emily caught her breath and held it; she had never seen or imagined anything like it. This truly was Great Glass Town. Huge images played: women’s smiling faces and almost naked bodies many feet high. Their mouths moved but no words came out of them. She had no name for the dazzling bright hues—the pinks, violets, greens and blues—that filled the spaces, then disappeared again, like liquid decanted from a bottle.

  They were flying through downtown LA now. The helicopter was manoeuvred down the canyons, between the towers, the chock-chock sound the blades made amplified by the narrow walls they passed. Emily watched the mosquito shape and turning blades appear and disappear in the glass on either side. In the silver streets below, the traffic’s ceaseless flow marked paths like sparks from a blacksmith’s hearth.

  “This is your world?” She craned forward to see more. Her voice was full of amazement and wonder.

  “It is a real place. And it is in my world. But not my world, exactly. I mean, Glass Town isn’t your world, is it? Not the place you live in all the time, eat, sleep and do ordinary things. My real world is like yours. Changed a bit since your time but you’d recognize most of it. I’ve never been here, not in real life, and this isn’t real life—it’s like Glass Town, a fantasy, a made-up place.”

  “So how are we in it?”

  “I don’t know. I guess we’ll be finding out.”

  They were through the canyons and out the other side. Below the wide, empty gash of the LA River. They were following the line of a multi-lane highway, heading north, out of the city, sea on the left, mountains on the right, their peaks pink and saffron with the coming dawn. Behind them, the buildings were turning to burnished bronze in the rising sun.

  “Where are we going?” she asked.

  “I still don’t know.” Tom shook his head. “North. Probably San Francisco.”

  She guessed it was the name of a place, although it meant nothing to her beyond being that of a saint who founded a monastic order.

  They were higher now. The sky was deep blue, the land beneath them a milky brown, with wide valleys and riverbeds, pale, wrinkling hills patched with forest and fissured with canyons.

  Tom thought they might be heading for Silicon Valley. The craft was flying low and fast, its shadow flitting over gridded streets lined with trees, the grey roofs of houses, bare backyards and bright turquoise swimming pools and bigger, low-rise buildings, surrounded by car parks. It was hard to tell if they were offices or shopping malls. Screening trees and black windows made him think the former.

  The helicopter circled and circled, making a noise like an angry wasp, spiralling down towards a flat, one-storey, matt graphite-black building clad in some non-reflective material. Then they were on solid ground; the blades wound down. Not solid ground exactly: the roof of a building.

  Before they could open their doors, before they could do anything, they were descending, helicopter and all, into the centre of the huge building.

  HE WAS STANDING in front of a wide desk, dressed in a black T-shirt and black jeans. Young. He could be anyone. Except he wasn’t anyone and he wasn’t even what they were looking at. The bank of screens filled the entire wall. Up there many, many games were playing, making up an ever-changing mosaic of little coloured tiles, all carefully shaded and arranged to make up a face. The face of the man coming to meet them. A face they both knew. Dark hair, swept back from a deep widow’s peak, straight black brows, blue-black eyes, long nose, full mouth with the lips curving between a sneer or a smile. They were curving upwards now.

  He came towards them. His arms were tanned and muscular, as though he worked out. The long side whiskers had been shaped
and cut close to his cheeks; his short beard sculpted to chin and upper lip. He wore a chunky watch, an expensive one; leather bands circled his other wrist, braided and embossed, which went with the black jeans and black tee. Very twenty-first century but Rogue nonetheless.

  “I see you recognize me. I go under different names—as you do, my dear—but you can call me Rogue for old times’ sake.”

  Emily. She was Emily now. Her true self in a world beyond anything she, or any of them, could have imagined. It was strange to see him the same but so different. Her mind was full to overflowing with wonders. And questions. But what was the point in asking questions? Logic and proportion had disappeared a long time ago.

  “Have you no questions?” he asked. Disappointed. Disconcerted. As though he could guess what she was thinking. “Don’t you want to know why I brought you here?”

  She stared back at him, anticipating his sigh of impatience. He’d answer them anyway.

  “I wanted to see you again, my dear. Tom was my Gulliver, voyaging to unknown lands. He found you there. Not something I foresaw. A happy accident, you might say. Now, he has brought you to me. Welcome to my world. Sit.” He indicated two deep chairs with a wave of his hand. “I’ve arranged a little tour and you might as well be comfortable.”

  He took a seat next to them. The chairs were arranged in a semicircle facing the bank of screens that flickered with a myriad of games all playing at the same time.

  One of the windows began to grow and expand until it filled the whole screen. Then it got bigger, until the room they were sitting in disappeared altogether.