by Steve Haynes
Ahren had never known a time before the cloudstraits. They hung low and heavy, enormous masses clinging to the world like parasites, brushing the tips of mountain ranges, obscuring the sun. They lingered like floating tectonic plates constantly settling into new positions, the atmosphere shifting just like the ground below it. For Ahren they were platforms above the earth, a delicate bridge over the world below. But it was a rope bridge at best. You had to know where to step.
Ahren carted his equipment on a small sledge. He didn’t have much, just the essentials: his ration pack, a small portable stove, a first aid kit (including an oxy-pack and a couple of back up canisters) and a change of clothes. His outgear was state of the art, all-weather terrain, thermal lined, with the Company’s name brandished across the front in illuminous lettering. Not that anyone could see it up here. It was his cartographical equipment that weighed the most though. Especially the density sensors and various mapping devices but they were crucial to his task. His task was relatively simple: he measured this undiscovered landscape and mapped it.
Ahren reached a reasonably safe spot and took some preliminary readings. When he was satisfied that the ground was stable, he sat down and opened his ration pack. Inside were a few protein bars and a selection of the Company’s brand of liquefied meals. He selected one, opened, and drank without pleasure. There was a time when he studied the list of ingredients on each container in an attempt to determine what the pulp was, but the chemical names were always too obscure and despite whatever food it tried to resemble, it was always orange. Ahren pretended it was something else, some great feast, some culinary delight, and he would enter it later in his journal as pad thai or a cheeseburger and fries in the hope of wilfully deceiving his memory.
Often, if he was near the edge of a cloudface, he’d chuck the carton over when he was done. It somehow appeased a strange rebelliousness inside of him. If he wasn’t near an edge, he sometimes chucked it anyway; the force of his throw could sometimes penetrate the surface of the cloud if it was a weak spot. Sometimes it could unsettle a whole cloudmass.
Ahren tried it now and it whistled through the air before thumping against the surface. He sighed and hauled himself to his feet to retrieve it. He wasn’t going to litter the only unpolluted space on the planet. Below was different. Below was already messed up.
Ahren walked the rest of the day, only stopping when darkness began to descend. He took some more readings and pitched his tent, activating the synthetic cloudbase. He started the stove, warming his hands above it, and ate some more food from his ration pack.
It was very cold at night. Despite his thermal outgear and the stove, it was colder than anything Ahren had ever known. After his meagre meal, ham and eggs he decided, he retreated to his tent to record the day’s activity.
Ahren was a creature of habit and he approached his task as mapmaker the same way every night. He began by entering all his data into the cartographical programme and watched as it constructed a topographical relief of the area he’d covered. Then, because he was slightly distrustful of technology, he unrolled a large sheet of paper and drew the map by hand. His drawing was much more topological, omitting many of the details of the computer projection in favour of aesthetics. This map was his backup, sketchily drawn like the ones leading to pirate treasure and included only the most significant features of the cloudmass – the valleys and peaks, the areas prone to flux and the places that were unstable. He always carried this on his person, folded into the inside pocket of his outgear. Then he’d write a brief summation of his day in his journal and pack his equipment away.
It wasn’t all work. Before he slept, Ahren would pour himself a scotch, a fine mature malt he’d told the Company was a medicinal necessity. Then he’d crawl out of the tent, his insulated sleeping bag wrapped around him, and watch the spectacle above. He loved the stars. They illuminated the otherwise absolute black, as no artificial light from below could penetrate the cloudstraits, and Ahren thought he could feel their light shining on him. He was comforted, enjoying the exclusive proximity to the heavens. Sometimes he traced patterns in their constellations and at other times he just let his mind drift, meditating on the composition of the universe or remembering snatches of poetry he’d read so avidly as a child. I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere among the clouds above. Before he became too drowsy he always retreated back inside his tent. He couldn’t fall asleep outside where he could roll off in the night and plunge back down to earth. He had to stay grounded. So he finished the dregs of his whisky and went back inside.
‘Do you think if there was a tree tall enough we could climb all the way to the clouds?’ Lucy asked. They were perched in the highest branches of an old oak tree, looking up at the cloudstraits above.
‘Like Jack and the Beanstalk?’ Ahren replied, trying not to look down.
‘Yeah.’
‘You’d need some magic beans.’
‘I’ve got some magic acorns.’ Lucy dug deep into her pocket and withdrew a handful.
‘They’re not magic.’
‘Yes they are. A fairy cast a spell on them.’
Ahren sighed. It was pointless arguing with her.
‘One day you won’t need magic to go to the clouds,’ Ahren said with the certainty of a twelve year old boy, ‘we’ll all be able to go. And live up there, and build cities up there in the sky.’
Lucy smiled a partially toothless grin. ‘I’d like to go up to the clouds.’
‘Why?’
‘To see what the angels see.’
Ahren woke with a start. He lay still until the disorientation subsided and remembered where he was. Most days began like this, as if not only his body but his mind gravitated towards the world below. He unzipped the tent and stepped out into the clouds and began the day as any other – with a carton of Company-endorsed baby food (that he pretended were eggs and bacon) and a strong coffee. Imitation or not, he savoured his caffeine fix and packed up his belongings with no great speed. The cirrostratus clouds from the day before had grown in size and darkened in colour. If it was going to rain, it was better that he was here, in the middle of a fairly stable cloudmass, than walking on unpredictable terrain.
The problem with rain was that it rendered all terrain unpredictable. The cloudslide at the start of his journey had taught him that. He’d thought his position pretty secure – the readings were mostly stable – when the cloudmass below gave way and Ahren found himself running on a surface that seemed to collapse with every footfall. The Company had to send him more equipment to compensate for the kit that he lost to gravity.
Ahren called them aerial avalanches and they happened fairly frequently. Mostly near the edge of a cloudface but sometimes in the middle as precipitation and air pressures collided or mingled. Sometimes these air parcels became gaps or holes and often once they’d formed they released pressure, making the surface more stable. It was the forming of them that was precarious, marked by a distant rumble and the sudden appearance of a vacuum, sucking the ground out from under you. But much of the terrain was fairly solid, and after three months of cloudwalking, Ahren knew which straits were safe. That was what he was paid to discover. But there was always a level of unpredictability up here; it was what had attracted him to the job in the first place.
Ahren wasn’t planning to go very far today with such ominous clouds nearby. He unrolled the map of the clouds he’d drawn and studied it for patterns. He saw the strait that he might recommend to the developers. With the world below crumbling, the Company could charge a fortune up here for unspoilt, virgin land. But Ahren wanted to be sure before he made any proposals; the clouds were in constant flux and he had to understand more about their extraordinary nature. Besides, he wasn’t ready to share this land with anyone else yet. Or worse, to go back below.
When Ahren was a boy he had an atlas which he studied everyday. He’d make his sister Lucy test his knowledge of it, d
eriving boundless pleasure in accurately pointing out the source of the Nile or the location of Everest. Sometimes he asked Lucy questions, assuming that she’d assimilated some understanding of the world during these hours of play, but her responses were always a disappointment. He’d ask her easier questions but she found them just as hard. Lucy couldn’t imagine the world like Ahren. She couldn’t see it in a map. She tried but she found the visualising of it difficult. She understood what surrounded her, she could read the individual components – the trees, the warrens, the pond – but she couldn’t see the bigger picture.
‘If you ever get lost,’ Ahren had told her, ‘just climb up high and look down. Then you can see the way home.’
Lucy had liked that answer and she’d begun to scale the nearby oaks. She knew the treetops like Ahren knew the ground. Ahren waited at the bottom, reading a collection of poetry from his father’s study. He was clumsy in the trees and not too fond of heights.
Ahren and Lucy were fortunate to grow up knowing the natural world. Their father owned a vast quantity of woodland, an area coveted by developers and businessmen eager to accommodate ever-expanding population demands. It was only when Ahren and his father moved to the city and into one of a hundred tower-blocks that he realised just how rare and fortunate a childhood it was. The city towers attained impossible heights, people stacked on top of one another as in some delicate card trick. It was a forest of concrete stretching up, up, up, brushing the cloudmass above.
Their father was a rarity too, though Ahren hadn’t known it at the time. He was a landowner and would have rather died than give up that right. His forest was Lucy’s and Ahren’s playground. They had no idea how much others wanted it.
‘Who’s that?’ Lucy called from her position in the boughs, pointing. But by the time Ahren had climbed up, whoever she’d seen was gone.
Ahren was walking again. He had a lot of ground to cover due to the delay of the previous day. In the end the cirrostratus clouds had dispersed after little more than a light drizzle and Ahren was reminded again of how powerless he was against the capriciousness of the sky.
He hadn’t slept well. He had dreamt of Lucy again and woke up thrashing and flailing in his sleeping bag. When his breathing calmed, he thought he could discern a rustle outside his tent. He’d listened hard, surprised when he’d heard the sound again. Footsteps. The whispered hush of footsteps. Someone was circling his tent, he was sure of it. He grabbed his torch, fumbling for the switch. The inside of the tent was suddenly illuminated and he waited a moment, hoping that the light would scare whatever it was away. Then he stumbled to his feet and hesitantly unzipped the tent opening.
There was nothing there, of course. Absurd to think there would be. He must have imagined it, he told himself. Some sort of dream haze leftover.
But it had felt so real.
Ahren shined the torch over the cloudface a few times more before returning inside. The plains were empty. He was alone.
Walking now, he was annoyed that not only did he have to make up a day but that he had to do it on only a few hours sleep. It could have been an animal scavenging about, maybe. It was rare for them to be up this high but he’d sighted the occasional bird; sometimes they’d burst through weaker spots in the clouds beneath him. He was always impressed by their conviction, flying into a cloudmass at such speed with no certainty that the cloud was weak enough for them to pass through. It was either an incredible act of faith, or some suicidal impulse. Perhaps they could just read the clouds better than he could. Another time, Ahren had spotted a mountain fox on the edge of a cloudface, forced higher and higher in its search for food. They’d eyed each other for a moment before the fox disappeared into the cloudfog.
But the prowling around his tent hadn’t sounded like an animal. It sounded more like human footsteps. Besides he thought he heard the soft ringing of a bell.
Irritable and tired, Ahren eventually settled down for the evening, pitching his tent perfunctorily. He was ravenous, but hungry for real food. The daily exertion and brutal temperatures cultivated an appetite that the contents of the ration pack were just not fit to satisfy. He wanted some meat, something with flavour and texture.
He was being punished, he thought, suffering the tasteless contents of another carton. This was his purgatory.
As if in confirmation, he heard a gentle ringing, far off in the distance.
Ahren paused mid mouthful, straining to hear the sound again. Was his mind playing tricks? Yet there it was again. A ringing, almost too low to hear, but it was there. He was sure of it. He listened hard and squinted into the distance. Was it possible something else occupied the clouds with him?
He put his food aside. ‘Hello?’ Months of silence had rendered his voice hoarse and alien. He cleared his throat. ‘Is anyone there?’ He felt instantly foolish. How could anyone be up here? This was frontier land, undiscovered territory. There was more probability that he’d encounter Gabriel and a host of angels, and for an atheist that was something.
He had to be the only one.
Ahren resumed eating, pausing occasionally to listen. Nothing.
He withdrew into the tent, taking one last tentative look around. If he were being tracked, he’d have no way of knowing: there are no footprints in the clouds.
Ahren woke to the sound of rain. Inside his tent it always sounded much louder like horses galloping, but despite its volume it still possessed a strange soothing lullaby quality. The rain always took him back to Lucy. Of endless play days inside when the weather was too wild to go out. Lucy would watch her breath cloud the glass, tracing the journey of wayward raindrops on the windowpane, while Ahren spun his globe faster and faster until he thought it would spin off its axis.
He wondered what she would make of this strange landscape, a world without words. Ahren tried not to adapt the language of below, terrain, landscape, plain. This new world demanded its own vocabulary, a more elevated language, and Ahren recorded his own coinages in the back of his journal. Perhaps, when the clouds were civilised, his words would define this new world.
When the rain subsided, Ahren spread the equipment over the sledge in the hope that it would dry. The ground was wet with the rain that would now descend on the people below, this time carrying the pollutants and poisons of the cloudstraits with it. The wind had not relented, whipping the cloudface into rolling vaporous peaks. Visibility was poor. He’d have to take it slow if he decided to trek today.
Ahren wrapped his scarf around his face and pressed on. He preferred to be on the move. It felt like progress, though he knew in these conditions he could easily get turned around or lost in a cloudmist. He checked his compass often, preferring it to his more technical software. It felt like a more honest way to navigate the clouds. Ahren followed the quivering needle, aware that he was heading in the direction of the sound of bells he’d heard the previous night.
Ahren kept his head down, concentrating on the cloudsurface and compass. Cloud vapour streamed past him, wrapping him up in a blanket of white. He would have probably walked past it had he not lifted his head at that particular moment, thinking he heard the bells.
A line of prayer flags stretched into the distance, suspended on a length of rope that led into the cloudmist. The colours were so bright they hurt Ahren’s eyes. Ahren had seen them before on his way up to the clouds. They were comprised of five colours: blue, white, red, green and yellow. Each colour represented a different element and the order was important. He knew it started with the sky (blue) and ended with the earth (yellow) but he couldn’t quite remember the significance of the colours in between, except for white. He knew what that stood for. The white flags were only discernible in the cloudmist because of the printed image on their surface, otherwise they would have disappeared into what they revered – the clouds.
The closest one to him was yellow and blown by the wind it looked like diamond or like the crude stars Lu
cy made out of tissue paper and glitter. As a whole they looked like a strange rainbow, stretching across the clouds like an absurd paper chain.
Ahren had never seen prayer flags in the clouds, though he’d seen many on his way up. They populated the mountains as abundantly as the people. Ahren hadn’t expected so many people on this particular massif, though he knew that all the mountain ranges were prone to overpopulation – being the only pockets of affordable land left. It was his father’s fault for telling him legends about the unspoilt mountains here. He’d read him and Lucy tales of Shangri-La. Tales of a mythical place, an impossible place hidden somewhere in the Himalayas. Ahren had imagined it nestled among snow-capped mountains, a beautiful lamasery amid a desert of ice and emptiness. An earthly paradise.
As a boy Ahren had tried to find it on his map and now that he was older he’d trekked the plains seeking it, before he finally came up here to the clouds.
Ahren had seen first-hand how densely populated the mountains were now, sprawling cities replacing green plateaus and paddy fields, tower-blocks upon tower-blocks stacked precariously on cliff faces, not like the images in his father’s books.
Ahren was resigned to the fact that the landscape of Shangri-La existed only in his imagination. If it had ever existed at all there was no room for it now.
Ahren looked with dismay at the flags flapping above him in the wind and wondered whether he should take them down. They were not a welcome sight, despite their intentions of good will. Prayer flags were not offered to any higher being, they were a prayer to land. They were here to bless the cloudstraits.