On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  ‘I think,’ whispered his pashe, and stopped. ‘Yes,’ she said, shortly. ‘That’s it. I think I am most comfortable here.’ She folded her arms more tightly about her own knees as if clutching them to her breast, as if they were her own babies. Tighe thought she had stopped speaking because she closed her eyes and rested her chin on her arms, but as he turned away she spoke loudly. ‘This is where I belong.’

  Tighe twitched at the unexpectedness. He turned back to her and reached out to touch her again; a finger brushing her naked knees, touching her hair. But she didn’t respond and he gave up.

  ‘I’m hungry, Wizard,’ he announced.

  ‘Yes,’ said the Wizard. ‘Yes, you are. Here.’ He swivelled his cradle, and brought out a small portion of something and a vial of water. The vial was plastic, but the plastic was pure and unscuffed, the finest material, fit to make jewellery out of. ‘I’ll give you more later,’ he said, ‘but if you eat too much now you’ll be sick.’

  Tighe took the two gifts with an expression of awe and then settled himself on the floor with his back to the cloth-padded wall and drank deeply. The water tasted empty, almost metallic; the food on the other hand was a grass-bread of a delicacy and taste he had never experienced before. It was delicious; instead of the crushed bodies of insects, it contained chunks of pure meat. Instead of the rough texture of grass-dough it was smooth and a cold salty jelly surrounded the whole, wrapped in turn in a moist crust. It was the most delicious thing that Tighe had ever eaten. When he had finished he drank some more of the water.

  His stomach was throbbing with unusual use and he curled up on the floor and fell into a brief sleep. When he woke, his pashe was still sitting hunched up on the floor over the way and the Wizard was still in his cradle.

  Feeling immensely revived, Tighe got to his feet and went over to the Wizard, standing directly behind his bald, leather-skinned head. His screen was showing four separate images, one in each quarter. Top right was the sky: bottom right and bottom left were the wall to the left and right of their position. Top left was the wall directly ahead, with a large head-shaped blot of silver in the middle of the picture. With his sense of dreaming becoming more acute, Tighe realised that this impossible image was of themselves – as if a bird had carried a screen-eye out into the air and was looking back at them with it.

  ‘Wizard!’ he exclaimed, pointing at the picture. ‘That’s us.’

  ‘Perhaps’, replied the Wizard without looking round, ‘you expect credit for stating the obvious?’

  ‘But how can such a picture be possible?’ Tighe had seen screens before. From time to time screen-tinkers would pass through the village and charge a small fee to show off their stained and battered toy. Older people were usually not interested in such stuff because they had seen it all before and it was a kind of entertainment that swiftly went stale. But there were always children for whom it was a new thing, and the tinker, on his long loops around villages, would return after years to scratch out a little more of a living from showing the screen to these youngsters. Look at the screen! he would say – Like a picture, but, magic! Your own face in the book! Your own ledge in the picture! And as the children huddled round the old cracked stretch of plastic trying to make out the image the tinker would pull the screen-eye from his pocket and carry it in his hand. First he would angle the thumb-sized eye at the children themselves and – miracle! – their own faces, their friends’ faces would appear on the screen. Pictures that smiled when they smiled, bulged their eyes when the giggling children bulged theirs. Then the tinker would swoop his hand up to show the sky, angle it at the ledge, walk along with a bored expression. The image, as Tighe remembered it, was dark and often puzzling. Anything that moved trailed a thin line of blur immediately behind it; and the edges of the screen cut off the image, which sometimes made it hard to understand the relationship of line and line, of patch of light and darkness. But the wonder of it! Tighe and other children had stared as if hypnotised at the tinker’s screen, snatching occasional glances at the direction of the tinker himself to confirm that the landscape of ledge, wall and sky at which he was pointing his screen-eye was just the same as the magic shifting pictures on the screen in front of them! It was breathtaking and all the children whined when the tinker turned the screen off and packed it up. ‘You get your pas’, he said gruffly, ‘to pay me a little more in cheese or cloth and you can see some more. Yes?’ So they had hurried off to badger their pas – all except Tighe, who hadn’t dared bother his pashe with the request.

  But the tinker’s screen he had seen as a child had been tiny, dark and marked. It had to stand in the sun for an hour before the dimmest, bleariest picture emerged; whereas the Wizard’s screen was enormous, bright and clean. There was no blurring of the image with movement, every detail of the world outside was clearly defined. And there was that impossible perspective of the Wizard’s craft itself, which looked as though it had been taken by a screen-eye two hundred yards outwall Tighe touched the Wizard’s sleeve, and said again, ‘Wizard, how is such a picture possible?’

  ‘I wish’, said the Wizard, ‘that you, my bright boy, would speak the Imperial tongue, which is so much more elegant than your village language.’

  Tighe felt this as a rebuke. He swallowed and began to rephrase the question in Imperial language.

  ‘Master Wizard,’ he began.

  ‘Now,’ said the Wizard, still speaking Tighe’s native tongue for all his expressed preference for the other, ‘perhaps it is time we departed.’

  The floor lurched and Tighe tumbled over. His stomach pulled uncomfortably at the base of his torso. He felt momentarily sick and then the sensation stopped and he was able to stand up again. The images on the screens were of wall spinning past; except for the top left which showed the silver blob that was themselves hanging stationary in the middle of the screen whilst the green-brown blur behind showed the speed at which they hurtled to the east.

  ‘Wizard,’ said Tighe, in his native tongue, ‘you did visit the battlefield. You were looking for me.’

  The Wizard spun his cradle around. ‘I did indeed, my sharp boy. I did indeed. My dear boy. I was looking for you and you were hard enough to find.’ He smiled and the stiff leather of his facial skin creaked and creased awkwardly.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘The most profound question in the philosopher’s store of questions,’ said the Wizard.

  ‘You called my name.’

  ‘I did. I amplified your name. It did me no good because you went off running, running along that ledge. Bullets sped past. I was worried, I will confess to you; my heart was in my mouth. At any time you might have been killed – killed! Imagine it. Still, these things have turned out for the best, I believe. I believe things turn out for the best more often than they do not. You ran and I tried to follow you, but then you disappeared into that Meshwood and I lost the ability to track you.’

  Tighe was unfamiliar with the phrase. ‘To what?’

  ‘To follow you. To find out where you were, on all this enormous wall we call the world.’ There was something grating about the Wizard’s high-pitched voice when it went on at length. The resemblance Tighe had spotted with his Grandhe seemed clearer the more Tighe looked at his bizarre leathery face.

  ‘You followed me in this machine?’

  ‘There are things in your head – your head –’ and he leant forward to pat the top of Tighe’s head with his dry, unreal hand. ‘Things that enable me to tune into you. It’s not easy because the wall is crammed with things and people. But I spent a great deal of time looking. I returned to the village and found you gone. Gone!’

  Tighe’s heart flushed sore at the thought of returning to the village. ‘You returned? To the village?’

  ‘Indeed I did, my handsome boy. And such stories! I almost despaired. They said you had run mad and fallen off the world. Of course, I assumed you were dead; but sometimes fate intervenes – don’t you think so? Sometimes fate intervenes.’

 
‘The village …’ wavered Tighe, uncertain how to frame the question that filled his breast. How is it? How are things there? Does life continue as it always did? Do they miss me – do they talk of me? But the Wizard was pursuing a different angle.

  ‘I tracked for a while, but without much hope. Then I had other business. When I returned I tried one last time – and there you were! There you were! It was luck – no, no, let us call it fate, please let us use that word – that I found you. And at such an inopportune time! Such a poor occasion. The middle of a war, I ask you! Then you were lost in the Meshwood and I lost your tracking. But once I realised that you were still alive I could pursue you. And so I did! Until I found you! And here you are.’

  ‘Why were you looking for me?’ asked Tighe.

  ‘Why? Because of how important you are, dear boy. You know how important you are. You’ve always known it.’ He smiled his hideous smile once again. ‘You are precious harvest, dear one. Precious harvest. As was your pashe here.’

  Tighe gasped. Each answer the Wizard gave him seemed to make the business more mysterious, not less. He felt a loss of control; an increasing discomfort in the presence of the leather-skinned Wizard. Something was wrong. He went back over to his pashe and put his arm around her unresisting neck.

  ‘There is something wrong with pashe,’ he said, in a cracked voice. ‘Why is there something wrong with pashe?’

  The Wizard inclined his head. ‘So many questions! Well, pashe has things in her head too. They are like the things in your head, if not quite as refined. Sometimes they make her – how shall we put it? – emotionally uncertain. Unstable, sometimes. The fact that you have had so much more stable an emotional development informs me that the things I put in your head are that much more refined. But your poor pashe. Ah,’ he said, shaking his head slowly, ‘ah, I sense your unhappiness, my sweetheart boy, your unease with me. But you shouldn’t be uneasy! I am your rescuer, after all. I rescued you from the slave-man, didn’t I?’

  Tighe’s hand went, almost involuntarily, to the scars on his scalp. ‘What things are these in my head, in my pashe’s?’ he said, shutting his eyes. He had a sudden, unbidden, horrible flash of memory, of Ravielre’s head being devoured from the side by a Meshwood claw-caterpil. ‘Who are you? Who are you anyway? What is all this – all this magical machinery? Is it yours?’

  ‘That’, said the Wizard, nodding, ‘is a whole bunch of questions all at once. What can I say? Things are not as you have been taught. There is a mystery about the world which you do not comprehend.’

  ‘I know about the mystery!’ flashed Tighe, suddenly swelling with courage. He leapt to his feet. ‘I know that the wall is not what people think it is!’

  ‘Do you really?’ said the Wizard languidly. ‘What an amazing, intelligent boy you are.’

  ‘You have my pashe,’ said Tighe. ‘Where is my pahe? Where is he?’ He took a step towards the Wizard, his eyes flashing.

  With startling, unbelievable rapidity the Wizard was standing by the ladder. How he had got up out of his cradle and moved across the floor so quickly was impossible to determine. Tighe’s eyes widened.

  ‘How?’ he gasped.

  The Wizard smiled another of his repulsive smiles. ‘One of the things you will learn about me’, he said, ‘is that I require more than the average amount of sleep. I don’t mind this fact; I enjoy sleep. But I fear it may become dull for you. For this I apologise. But there is nothing that can be done.’ He started climbing the ladder.

  ‘How did you move so fast?’ asked Tighe, his voice slipping into a whine. ‘What have you done with my pahe?’

  But the Wizard had vanished into the upper room.

  2

  Tighe tried the hatch that led into the upper room, but it was fixed tight. For several minutes he heaved and banged. ‘My pahe!’ he yelled. ‘Explain! Where! My pahe!’

  From above, muffled by the layer of metal that separated them, came the querulous voice of the Wizard. ‘Please be quiet, my dear boy,’ he said. ‘I’m trying to sleep.’

  ‘Master Wizard!’ shouted Tighe, banging furious.

  ‘That doesn’t help.’

  Tighe gave up and slid back down the ladder. He went over and sat next to his pashe, cuddling up against her as best he could. Everything was so bizarre, so unbelievable, that he felt his mind heave as if to reject it. Like a stomach that had taken poison, it clenched and tried to expel it. ‘Pashe,’ he said, ‘what has happened? What has happened?’

  ‘He came for us in the night,’ said pashe unexpectedly.

  ‘What?’ replied Tighe, excitedly. ‘Will you speak to me now, pashe? Pashe?’ But no matter how he prompted, she would say nothing else.

  After a while he began to get cramp in his arm, so he disentangled it and stood up. He paced about the space, examined the Wizard’s cradle, the curiously shaped control mechanisms, the images of blurring world-wall on the screen. He tried sitting in the Wizard’s cradle, but the device ejected him with a metallic spasm and he nearly collapsed face down on the floor.

  Soon enough he became thoroughly bored. He thought through all the things that the Wizard had said; his strange, oddly accented delivery, his high-pitched voice. There is a mystery about the world which you do not comprehend. Everything was connected. Somewhere was the key.

  He tried lying down and going to sleep, but he wasn’t tired. Images from the day hurtled round his mind. The Manmonger, with a perfectly circular hole carved cleanly out of his chest, tumbling forward in death. The way the Wizard’s craft had seemed to fly right out of the sun. His pashe.

  He got up and went over to his pashe, and hugged her again. ‘You and me, pashe,’ he said, ‘together we are strong, I think. Together we will …’ but he broke off, looking around himself nervously. Who knew how the Wizard worked? What if he were eavesdropping on them at that very time?

  Hours passed. Tighe occupied some of the time staring intently at the controls of the Wizard’s machine. There were a number of identical-looking protrusions, like metallic thumbs, and a series of star-crossed indentations in the smooth metal. He tried fiddling with the levers, prodding his fingernails into the indentations, but it had no effect.

  He sat for a long time on the floor. What he had taken to be merely decorative metal studs, fixed into the floor, were in fact something else. With a mesmerising slowness they moved over the metal. As Tighe watched he could see that they all changed position together, so that the regularity of the pattern they formed stayed the same. He tried prising one up from the floor with his thumbnail and it flipped up easily. Underneath was a tiny hole, with several striations leading into it from the rim. It felt like a slightly humped metal coin in his hand. Tighe replaced it on the floor, deliberately out of pattern with the others. Slowly, over a period of about an hour, all the other nubbins adjusted themselves until the pattern was restored. Tighe had no idea what the function of these tiny machines might be.

  Soon enough he became hungry, and thirsty. There were several doors that opened out from the metal podium underneath the screens, and inside one of these Tighe found a metallic flask with some fluid inside. He tasted it tentatively, and swallowed it. It was faintly bitter, but fairly refreshing. He rummaged through the cupboard, but found nothing else to eat or drink.

  He offered the flask to his pashe and she took it without a word, swigging and returning it to him.

  He paced around the lower room; tried the upper hatch again, hung from the ladder like a bored monkey. After a while he lay down on the floor and slept.

  When he woke, nothing in the tiny room had changed. His pashe was sitting in exactly the same posture, staring into nothing. He paced around again, checked the images on the screen, and felt his anger grow. Climbing the ladder he started banging on the hatch. ‘Wizard! Wizard! Wake yourself – how long must you sleep?’

  This produced no reaction. Eventually Tighe’s arm grew tired. He sat on the floor and swigged from the metal flask, offered it again to his pashe. Then he
tried sitting in the Wizard’s metal cradle, but it ejected him again. He flew up and landed on his feet – more elegantly than before, this time, because he had been expecting the thrust. He tried once again. It was not painful and even had a pleasant aspect to it. He peered closely at the seat of the cradle, and sat in it again. The metal itself deformed and buckled to throw him off. It was remarkable.

  He turned his attention to the screens again, and started fiddling with the controls. The whole craft shuddered and skittered left-right, yawing and pitching. Tighe threw himself backwards, away from the controls, terrified that he had accidentally done something that would destroy the whole machine and them all along with it. The floor rocked more gently and the images on the screen slowed. Then it stabilised and settled. Tighe felt a tight pressure in his bladder, but he controlled himself. He sat down or rather half collapsed; his heart was thundering. Sweat had oozed out of the skin of his face. His hand was trembling.

  With a squeak the hatch opened and the Wizard’s black-clad legs appeared, fumbling their way down the ladder. His high whistly voice followed. ‘Ten hours! A little less! Really not enough, though I’m not one to complain.’ He stepped on to the floor and stalked over to the screens, his uncanny leather face blank. The images on the screen showed that they were stationary; a view of rocky wall patched over with white was in every corner.

  Tighe’s breathing was settling. He was still startled, but not so much as to miss the slight pressure the Wizard applied to a point on the underside of one of the back bars of his cradle. He settled himself down and fiddled with the controls.

  Tighe debated with himself and decided that it would be better to be honest from the beginning. ‘I touched the controls, Master Wizard,’ he said in Imperial, looking bashfully at the floor.

  ‘Of course you did, my beautiful youngster,’ said the Wizard, without looking over. ‘I would expect nothing less. But you are locked out, so your touch counts for nothing.’ He looked round with his grotesque smile. ‘Did you think you interrupted the flight of my machine with your tinkering?’ This idea seemed to amuse him, for he grinned to himself. ‘Nothing so dramatic. No, the craft responds to the fluctuations in the gravity. As we approach the East Pole, gravity lessens and the flow tightens. My beautiful machine functions so smoothly in a conventional gravity, but it is calibrated to operate with a ninety-degree interface. Digging its gluon-expression into the flow-lines at exactly ninety degrees for absolute stability. This far east, the angle closes and we will find our platform less solid.’