On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

  He hurried upwards, expecting at any time for the sheer face to start to curve over to the flat. After a few minutes something came into view; a shining beacon of some kind. Snow flurried around him briefly and the ice made the end of his nose go numb. But surely the beacon was a marker that the top of the world was near-by.

  As he approached, he saw that it was another silver craft, just like the one possessed by the Wizard. He shimmied up past the spindly legs and the bulging hourglass shape of the body. Then he saw another human being. With a sense of dislocation, mixed in with a sort of disappointment, he saw that this was the Wizard.

  ‘How did you get here?’ he shouted, breathless with the effort of the climb. ‘How did you get here so quickly?’

  ‘But I’ve not moved,’ said the Wizard. ‘You have – you’ve climbed right round the world. I thought you said you understood my explanation.’

  ‘The top of the wall,’ insisted Tighe. ‘It’s just up there – it’s almost within our reach. I’ll go again!’

  ‘No, no,’ said the Wizard, ‘we have not got all of the day. My Lover is near-by and I don’t like being away from my craft when he’s prowling through the air. Come: I’ll show you why I came here.’

  It was so cold that he looked absurd in his skimpy clothes. But he didn’t seem to mind the chill. He pushed with one hand and a crag emerged from the ice wall like a board of wood. It was white, but seemed to be made of metal rather than ice. The Wizard stepped on to it.

  ‘Be careful,’ he said. ‘It’s slippy. Frosty.’

  Uncertain, Tighe stepped on to the platform. The Wizard was fiddling with a panel that had emerged, and suddenly a man-sized hole irised into existence.

  ‘Well,’ said the Wizard, looking briefly at Tighe. ‘Come through, then.’

  He stepped through. Tighe looked around him. The silver bulge of the Wizard’s craft stood out briefly against the bright blue sky and then a grainy mist of fluttering snow obscured it. He reached up and rubbed the chilled end of his nose with the palm of his gloves. The cloth felt warm to the touch; that must be how he was being kept warm in the chill of the ice world.

  Then he stepped through.

  He emerged into a hollow space, groined with metal and – apart from the flat metal floor – arched and circular. It was perhaps fifty yards from side to side and twice that in length. Along the sides near the entrance were parcels; many almost as large as Tighe himself. Further along the metal floor was bare. The Wizard himself was fishing in an open metal box on the right, bringing out an assortment of things.

  ‘What place is this?’ gasped Tighe.

  ‘My little storeroom,’ said the Wizard. ‘Impressive, isn’t it? I wish I could claim I had dug it all out myself, but the truth is I deposited some machines and they dug it for me whilst I travelled elsewhere. Still, you can enter it from either side – it goes right through the world! Imagine that!’

  Tighe stepped forward and felt the odd sensations he had felt before, inside the Wizard’s craft, in strengthened form. He felt as if he were leaning backwards, bent in the middle. It was freakish: as if he were folded about his waist, with both his torso and his legs leaning sharply backwards. He kept looking down at himself to reassure himself that he wasn’t, but the sense of positioning was too strong. He hunched himself as far forward as he could, but it was difficult to walk.

  ‘How comical you look,’ exclaimed the Wizard. But his voice did not express much amusement.

  ‘What are you looking for?’ asked Tighe. He reached forward with each leg in turn, but the closer he got to the middle of the strange ice cave, the sharper the sense of being bent in the middle became.

  ‘Oh, supplies. Some electrical things. A bit of food. Need more food now, now that you’re here. This side of the cavern is food, don’t you see. That side is something else. I do believe my Lover has not yet discovered my little cache, which rather surprises me. But if he had I suppose he would have taken it all away.’

  He looked up. ‘Go to the exact centre of the room. There are some delicious experiences there.’

  Tighe couldn’t walk any further. He sat down, and began inching along on his behind. He felt wrong, queer inside. It flashed upon his brain that he was upside down, crawling along the ceiling. As he moved he got lighter and lighter. The floor, which seemed perfectly flat when he first came into the space, now sloped down away from him. With a cry of fear, he turned to scrabble back to where he came from, but there was ice on the metal floor and suddenly he slipped.

  Before he knew what was happening he was in the air. He fell. The room swung about his head. He saw the silver metal of the floor sweep past, missing his head. The white roof swept past. The floor again.

  ‘Wizard,’ he called out, scared, ‘what’s happening?’

  ‘You’re falling, young warrior,’ called the Wizard.

  Tighe twisted in midair and got a better view of his position. He was circling through the air, following an arc that echoed the larger curve of the roof. The Wizard, upright against the silver floor, swept past and past his vision.

  ‘Try to control it,’ suggested the Wizard. Tighe couldn’t see if he was looking at him or not. It seemed that he was rummaging in another box. ‘Spread yourself and fly like a kite.’

  ‘But there’s no wind!’ Tighe complained. He followed the advice, though: putting his arms by his side and his legs together. His kite training was still there, inside himself. He tried to angle himself inwards. With a lurch, the angle of his spin tightened; he was now going round much faster, in a smaller circle. He felt sick. He abandoned himself and kicked furiously with his legs. There was another lurch and he felt the logic of the world – or gravity – redefine itself around his midriff. His legs felt dissociated from him.

  He was still spinning, but now he was rotating about an axis that was his own belly-button, as if strapped to a circling wheel. The floor was several yards away from him, but it seemed an arbitrary point, not down. His head was up but so were his legs. ‘Help me, Wizard!’ he called.

  ‘You’re at the centre of the world,’ called the Wizard. ‘To all intents and purposes.’

  ‘Help me. I feel dizzy. I feel sick.’

  Something thread-slender gripped his leg, and with a jerk Tighe was pulled away: it felt as if he were being pulled sharply up, but when he came to rest he was sitting on the strangely curved-but-flat metal floor at the Wizard’s feet. One of the filaments that came out of the Wizard’s palm was wrapped around his ankle.

  The Wizard loosened his filament and drew it back inside his palm. ‘A nice adventure?’ he said flatly. ‘Do you understand my explanation now, young scholar that you are?’

  Tighe shuffled along the floor away from the Wizard, towards the other side of the room. He felt profoundly disorientated. His stomach was still spinning. ‘What happened to me?’ he demanded.

  The Wizard turned his attention back to the box through which he was rummaging. ‘You can never find the one thing you want, can you?’ he said. ‘You think you know where it is, but you never know.’

  For several minutes he searched through in silence. Tighe sat, trying to calm himself, to breathe slowly. He didn’t like the way his breath spored out of his mouth in puffy white clouds.

  On the other side of the room were square and hexagonal boxes. On Tighe’s side the parcels were lumpy, bulgy, like sacks filled with vegetables and frozen solid. Tighe turned and examined the one nearest him. With a start, he realised that it was a human being. He reached up and with the warmth of his palm he cleared the layer of frost from a face. A blue-white set of features revealed itself: clenched lips, shut eyes. There was a black dribble from one nostril.

  ‘Wizard!’ he squealed. ‘Wizard!’

  ‘What?’

  ‘These are people! Dead people, all frozen, over here.’

  ‘Yes,’ said the Wizard, and chuckled his raspy high-pitched chuckle. ‘That was what I wanted to show you. A fair number of people have visited the East Pole, but f
ew have visited it and lived.’

  Tighe, alarmed, tried to stand up, but the weirdness of this odd room was too much for him and he staggered, overbalanced and fell again. He managed to get himself up to a sitting position, and in that posture he shuffled over to another individual. It didn’t take long to clear the frost from this one’s dead face. It turned out to be a pale-skinned woman. Or at least Tighe thought she was a woman.

  ‘Who are these people?’ he asked.

  ‘They? Some are family, so to speak. Others are just people. Only people. Nothing to worry about.’

  ‘Family?’ hissed Tighe, horrified. ‘People?’

  ‘Well, yes. Harvest, so to speak. They grew what was required and it didn’t work out, or there was some problem. But I was able to salvage something worthwhile from many of them. The others – well, assorted individuals. One or two are explorers; people who made their way further east than anybody else.’

  ‘You killed them?’

  ‘Well,’ said the Wizard, scratching his leather face, ‘I can’t take the credit for all of them. Many just died of the cold. Without that suit I’ve given you, my precious, you’d die too. But, yes, some of them. They’re only people, my ice-prince. Only family. None of them are actually us; none of them are Lovers.’

  ‘Lovers,’ echoed Tighe, looking around in horror.

  ‘Talking of which,’ said the Wizard, turning his attention to his box, ‘we can’t spend all day here.’ He continued speaking over his shoulder. ‘I hoped you’d be impressed. One of the advantages of the material I put in your head is that you won’t be as disabled by conscience as many would be. Think of the freedom I have given you! I impress myself, actually. It usually only results in a more or less severe series of mood swings and disorders. But you seem perfectly level, perfectly placid. I’ve perfected things sooner than even I thought I would.’

  Tighe, listening to the Wizard without really understanding what he was saying, moved amongst the frozen bodies. He found one with a skin as dark as his own. His eyes were open, but the eyeballs were pure blank whiteness, like eyes of ice. Tighe saw that he was clutching something in his lap.

  ‘One or two were more problematic,’ said the Wizard, still rattling on as he searched through his box. ‘Others were perfectly acquiescent. Funny that. Still, they didn’t die in vain, that’s the important thing. Each step brings us closer to undoing the disaster that has afflicted humanity.’

  Rubbing with his glove, Tighe saw that the dead man was clutching a small rifle; one of the compact, short-barrelled rifles that could be held in one hand, the sort that Tighe had seen the Otre carry about. He glanced over his shoulder, but the Wizard’s attention was elsewhere.

  ‘How do we do that, Master?’ he asked, hoping to keep the Wizard distracted. His mind felt clear.

  ‘Well, it’s a complicated business, more complicated than your uneducated mind could comprehend, I fear. But we must lay the wall flat! We must lay the wall flat for humanity to be able to grow. That is my plan. My Lover wants the same thing. If we could work together, we could achieve marvels. But he doesn’t trust me, that is the thing. He doesn’t trust me.’

  ‘What did you put in my head, Wizard?’ Tighe asked. The handheld rifle had almost come free from the ice that held it. Tighe rubbed with the warmth of his gloves.

  ‘Eh? What? What did I put in your head? Well, I hope you can see how impressive my achievement has been. I hope you can understand it.’

  The gun came free and Tighe pulled it out. It was black, with a short barrel and a handle like a horn. There was a trigger like a nipple tucked in at the junction of handle and shaft. Tighe had seen soldiers shoot such devices. He knew what to do.

  ‘When you were born, a year old or so, I came by your village and inserted my equipment. I put in several things, in a complex of pollenmachine polymers. Think of it this way: I planted my seed, my metal seed, at the base of your head, a little above your neck. That is where your strength comes from, your mental strength. But, like any seed, it takes time to grow, and with something as complex as the integration into a whole living cortex – well, it’s impossible to predict success.’

  Tighe sucked in a breath. ‘Is my pahe here?’ he asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘In this ice room? Is my pahe here?’

  The Wizard turned to look at Tighe. ‘But we’re talking about your implants!’ he said. ‘Why would you be interested in your pahe?’ Then he registered what Tighe was holding in his hands. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  Tighe swallowed quickly. ‘I found it,’ he said, holding it between both gloved hands. It was a moment of intense focus in his head. To avenge his pahe. To make things right for pashe. He pressed his hands together, feeling the trigger resist, resist, and then click in.

  The gun exploded, bounding out of Tighe’s hands, and a bullet sped through the icy air towards the Wizard.

  7

  For a moment time seemed as frozen as the location. The Wizard was standing there. The gun had thrown itself out of Tighe’s hands and landed amongst the frozen corpses.

  The Wizard reached down with one hand and his long leather fingers fumbled at his stomach. He pulled out a black pellet and held it up to his face. His skin had not been broken.

  ‘Sorry,’ said Tighe.

  ‘You ought to be careful with that,’ said the Wizard. He sounded mildly irritated. ‘You could harm yourself. That would be a waste of your potential.’

  ‘It must be the cold,’ said Tighe. ‘It just, sort of, went off.’

  ‘I can see it went off. Still!’ He beamed. ‘It shows off how excellent my new skin is. The microfilament mesh I told you about is very strong and very clever. It distributes the force of the bullet’s impact over its whole structure almost at once, so I barely even feel the blow. Isn’t that clever?’

  ‘Very clever,’ said Tighe. His head was swimming in and out of focus. Even in the bitter cold of the ice chamber he was sweating. ‘How clever you are, Wizard.’

  ‘Yes. Anyway, where was I?’

  He turned back to the box, and started rummaging through again.

  ‘My implants,’ said Tighe breathily. He looked about frantically and located the gun. ‘You were telling me.’

  ‘Yes. Well, yours are basically the same model as I tried out on several other people. Some of them now sitting frozen around you; some still living on the worldwall.’

  Tighe grabbed the gun and stuffed it into the pocket in front of his clothing. ‘Really?’ he said.

  ‘Your pashe’s implants were very similar.’

  ‘You put things in her head too,’ said Tighe, looking around for some other weapon. There was the dandelion-puff device, but that was in one of his own pockets, underneath the clothing the Wizard had made him put on. He couldn’t think how to undo this outer clothing and reach the little device without drawing attention to himself. He wasn’t even sure how to operate the little thing. And he wasn’t sure – he realised with a sensation of doom in his heart – wasn’t even sure it would penetrate the tough skin of the Wizard.

  ‘Yes,’ the Wizard was saying, ‘I inserted her implants when she was a child. It may have been too late, actually, because she suffered from all manner of emotional instabilities. Still, you haven’t inherited them. Either I reached you in time or else your metabolism was simply more suited to the implants. Ah!’ He lifted something from the box, and turned to face Tighe.

  Tighe looked up. He smiled weakly.

  ‘Back to the craft, I think,’ he said. ‘Enough time in here.’ He hoisted up a sack that rattled with the things that he had gathered, and made his way back to the door.

  Tighe, slowly and cautiously, got to his feet. He felt the strange tugs and weird angles, as if he were fevered and the world were warping around him.

  He staggered over to the Wizard’s side and held on to his arm as he made the door appear again. They stepped out on to the little platform and then the Wizard was away over the sheer face of the ice.
Tighe, braced by the mess of icy snowflakes that fluttered against his exposed face, reached out. A filament snaked out and he pulled himself along.

  In minutes he had joined the Wizard on top of his craft.

  Inside the upper, green room, the Wizard poured the contents of his sack on his bed-couch with the excitement of a child with its presents. ‘Let’s go down below,’ he said. ‘First, go downstairs and check to see what my Lover is up to. He’s a wily one, my Lover. We’d better keep him in view, that’s all.’

  He ushered Tighe down the ladder, still wearing his oversuit. He expected to feel too hot, wrapped up as he was. But in fact he felt pleasantly cool. He stepped off the bottom of the stairs and made his awkward way through the twist in space to settle beside his pashe.

  ‘Pashe,’ he whispered, as the Wizard made his way down the ladder. ‘I tried killing him, but his skin is magic. Strong.’ He pulled off one glove and pressed the ends of his fingers against his mother’s lips. The Wizard was standing now, making his way gingerly over towards his cradle.

  Tighe watched him. His pashe, staring straight ahead, started sucking, absently, on Tighe’s fingers’ ends.

  ‘So,’ said the Wizard, examining his screens. ‘He is close. Close! We may need to leave at a moment’s notice. Still, the flurries and blizzards do a good job in masking where we are.’

  He stood up. Tighe pulled his fingers from his pashe’s mouth.

  ‘So!’ he said. ‘I think we can spare an hour or two before we have to go. What can I say? My jaunt on the ice has tired me out. If you’ll excuse me I’ll have a little lie down.’

  He wandered back to the ladder and climbed up to the top room, pulling the hatch closed behind him.