On (GollanczF.)

by Adam Roberts

8

  For a while Tighe did nothing but sit still, with his arm around his pashe. His mind circled round and round, just as he had spun round and round in the Wizard’s strange ice cavern. Most of what the Wizard had told him made no sense at all. The world was not the way he had thought the world was; no. But he had no clear idea of the version that the Wizard seemed so wedded to. This strange part of the wall was unlike any place he had been to before, that was true; but as Ati had once said, the wall is cluttered with wonders. Perhaps the Wizard possessed powers beyond his machines; or machines that Tighe had not yet seen. The more he thought about it, the more likely it became that it had been some magic of the Wizard’s that had spun him through the air in the ice cave. Some tantalising magical trick of the Wizard’s that had shown him the top of the wall and then baffled his attempts to climb up to it.

  ‘He is a powerful creature, pashe,’ Tighe whispered into the ear of his unresponding mother. ‘But perhaps he can nevertheless be defeated.’

  For some unfathomable reason, this leather-skinned man had been present in his family life, a hidden thing, a secret. Tighe stroked his pashe’s hair. She seemed to be shivering.

  ‘Don’t fret, pashe,’ hushed Tighe, trying to calm her down. ‘I have a thing in my pocket – it is a device of the Wizard’s own. He won’t expect it. I believe it will harm him. I believe that!’

  Pashe was trembling hard now. From sitting placidly, she was suddenly in the grip of something; it was as if she was having a fit of some kind. Her lips were working. ‘Pashe!’ said Tighe, feeling a lump of fearful anticipation in his throat. ‘What is it?’

  She started rocking backwards and forwards, and a thin sound forced itself between her lips.

  Tighe clutched her more closely. ‘He did something to you, I think,’ he said, his voice hoarse. ‘He killed pahe and put him in that cave of ice, I think. He did something to your head. To mine.’

  For a while pashe struggled against his embrace, moaning faintly, a most pathetic sound. Then suddenly she stopped. She turned her head and looked directly into Tighe’s eyes. It was the first time she had looked at Tighe since his arrival on the Wizard’s craft. Her eyes locked with his. He saw the little sparks of lighter brown freckling the darker brown of her pupils, like flaws in a jewel. Her brows were pressed together in pain, or puzzlement.

  Tighe felt tears clog the corners of his eyes. ‘Pashe,’ he said.

  ‘I remember you,’ said his pashe. She lifted a wobbly hand and touched the side of Tighe’s face. ‘When you were a baby. You were a smooth baby. Sweet-smelling. A nice baby.’

  ‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, the tears tickling down his cheeks. He felt his adam’s apple as a tightness in his throat, a knot of emotion.

  ‘He came,’ she said and Tighe knew at once that she was talking about the Wizard. ‘He came and he fiddled with your head. He made me sit and watch it; he made me happy to see it. He can do that, he can twist the inside of your head from a distance, make you happy or sad, give you pleasure or pain. He can manipulate his machines from a distance. He made a doorway in the back of your head and put in his machinery. But after he went I had a temper and I pulled as many wires as I could out of the back of your head before the wound healed over.’

  She dropped her hand, and turned her face away, looking again at the wall across the floor from her.

  ‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, softly, meaning to ask a question. But she cut back in.

  ‘Your pahe didn’t like it. He said best leave alone, that you’d die. But I was in a state, I wouldn’t be told. I pulled the wires out of the back of your head where he had bandaged it. You bled and bled. You didn’t even cry. I don’t think I got them all, but I got much.’ She was starting to tremble again, to shiver from side to side. ‘It was all like stalks of grass, very fine, very fine. A thin wire. I threw it off the world, never told him. You didn’t even cry. Bled and bled. Bled and bled and bled.’

  ‘Pashe,’ said Tighe, wiping his tears with his gloveless hands. ‘Pashe, stop now.’

  ‘Your pahe tried to stop me and I hit him, hit him hard. Then I pulled it all out, all that badness, out of your head.’

  ‘Pashe – stop. You’re hurting yourself.’

  And it was obvious that she was. Every word was an effort. There was something wrong. Her eyes were thrumming up and down, and a tendril of blood dribbled down from one nostril. Her words became indistinct. ‘Pashe!’ cried Tighe, coming round and trying to embrace her fully. ‘Pashe!’

  She jerked back hard and cracked her head against the wall behind. Then she was fitting fully, her tongue out and her eyeballs white. The violence of her seizure knocked Tighe away and he scrambled over the nightmare landscape of the warped-but-flat floor back to her body. Blood was squeezing from the corners of her mouth where she had bitten her tongue, mixing with her saliva into a pink froth. She was grunting in rhythm, her arms straight at her side. Then she went quiet.

  Tighe laid her out on the floor on her back, and pressed his face to her chest. He couldn’t sense any breathing.

  Panic was swelling inside his chest. He couldn’t believe this was happening. ‘Wizard!’ he cried, lurching over the treacherously shaped floor to the ladder, and climbing it awkwardly. ‘Wizard! Wake up! Wizard!’ He hooked one arm round the top rung and hammered on the bottom of the hatch with the other. ‘Wizard!’

  There was a grumble through the floor from above. ‘What?’

  ‘Come down here, Wizard!’

  ‘Leave me sleeping, boy.’

  ‘Come down here Wizard! It’s pashe. She’s had a seizure.’

  ‘Leave me be. I need my sleep.’ The Wizard sounded impossibly querulous and distant.

  ‘Please come down! Please come and help me!’

  ‘Oh very well, tiresome and troublesome.’ Tighe heard a rustle, and some footsteps from above. ‘You can have five minutes, then I’m going back to sleep.’ The hatch started opening.

  Tighe dropped quickly down the seemingly curved ladder to give the Wizard space to come down. He made his way back to where his pashe was lying.

  ‘What is it?’ said the Wizard, coming up behind him. ‘Fallen over, has she? Coma, is it? I can’t say I’m surprised. You can’t muck around with somebody’s cortexes the way I was compelled to do and expect everything to work properly afterwards.’ He leant over, putting his leathery hand on Tighe’s shoulder for support. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, yes. I thought this might happen.’

  ‘What will you do?’ Tighe asked. ‘To bring her round? What will you do?’

  ‘Bring her round? Dear me. Dear me. You seem much more agitated by this than I should expect. I’ll turn up the dials, if you see what I mean. I’ll adjust my fine-tuning of your mind, so that you don’t feel so upset by this.’

  ‘It’s my pashe!’

  ‘Yes, I know it is. Obviously there will be a part of your mind that knows that. I couldn’t eradicate the fact from your consciousness without losing important aspects of who you are. So, I suppose, in an intellectual sense you might feel a little disturbed by her death.’

  ‘She’s dead?’

  ‘But I can tweak other sensitivities, so that it shouldn’t feel too bad. I’m surprised,’ said the Wizard, getting to his feet and making his way over to his cradle. ‘I’m surprised that you feel as bad as you seem to do, to be honest. The adjustments I’ve already made should have dampened down a lot of that.’

  He settled into his cradle and fiddled with one switch, prodding it with a single leathern finger whilst watching the corner of a screen. ‘There,’ he said. ‘Better?’

  ‘Dead,’ said Tighe, looking down at the body of his pashe.

  ‘Yes – yes. You sound more neutral about it already. I don’t mind boasting that I’ve gotten myself quite skilled at the fine-tuning. There … there. How’s that?’

  Things went calm inside Tighe’s head, like a snowstorm clearing to leave a patch of blue sky. It was clear to him what he had to do. He reached over to pick up his spare glov
e, holding it in his left hand. His right hand was empty. He stood up.

  ‘You see, how much better that is?’ the Wizard was saying. ‘I like to think of it as a kind of emotional analgesic. A painkiller for the soul, if you see what I mean. It’s one of the many things we can do, you and I.’

  Tighe concentrated on the Wizard in his cradle, fixed his eye on that destination so as not to be distracted by the strange topography, and started walking towards him. The floor seemed curiously curved. He reached into his front pocket with his ungloved hand and drew out the gun. It felt chilly against his skin.

  ‘Eh, my boy?’ said the Wizard, looking round. He saw the gun. ‘I see you still have that,’ he said. ‘A souvenir? You can pick up more if you like, since we’d better shift your mother’s body to the cavern. Back inside the cavern. Lots of goodies there.’

  Tighe stopped, standing beside the Wizard’s cradle. The Wizard’s leather face was in full profile as he examined one of his screens.

  ‘It’s a good job you woke me, actually, my boy,’ he was saying. ‘I think my Lover is closer than is entirely comfortable. It may be this is the time to leave.’

  Tighe lifted the gun and levelled its stocky barrel at the side of the Wizard’s head. The old man was staring at his screens, his face in profile; his eyes, from Tighe’s perspective, lined up one behind the other; his eyeholes the only weak space in his strengthened skin.

  The Wizard glanced round, before turning his head back, focusing on the screens before him. ‘Yes, yes,’ he said indulgently. ‘I saw it already. It’s very nice.’

  Tighe fired the gun.

  The bullet passed through the Wizard’s left eyeball, snapped the bones in the bridge of his nose and passed directly out through his right eyeball. It sheared away and ricocheted off the curved metal wall behind the Wizard’s cradle, bounced once, and then twice, screeching with each change of trajectory. It smashed into one of the Wizard’s four screens a heartbeat after having been fired, whistling so close to Tighe’s own head that he felt the puff of air as it passed. The screen cracked and splintered. But the Wizard did not see this because both of his eyeballs had been mashed by the shot.

  The Wizard howled. For a moment that was all he did. He didn’t move a muscle, except to let out a high-pitched howl of agony and surprise. Then both of his hands came up, clutching at his wounds as the blood started coming out of the holes in his leather face.

  Tighe stepped back, his heart pumping hard. There was a deep terror lurking somewhere inside him. He didn’t want to think about that. He didn’t want to look at the body of his pashe on the floor behind him. He didn’t want to stay in this space at all.

  The uncanny screechy howl of pain from the Wizard’s face did not seem human. It did not seem to Tighe that he had injured a human being.

  He stepped awkwardly over to the ladder and hauled himself up it. Just before he passed up into the green room above, he saw the Wizard’s cradle spin round, so that the Wizard’s sightless head turned to face him. ‘Boy!’ screamed the Wizard. ‘Boy! What did you do?’

  ‘For my pashe!’ yelled Tighe, and pulled himself up into the upper chamber. As an afterthought he yelled down, ‘For my pahe too.’

  ‘I’ve turned the pain off now,’ came the Wizard’s voice from downstairs. ‘You idiot boy! What did you think you were going to do?’

  Tighe stumbled awkwardly, trying to position himself in the exact centre of the upper room without falling over. ‘Your magic won’t help you see in your blindness, I think,’ he called. He felt a pervasive sense of exhilaration.

  There was the sound of movement in the room below. ‘Idiot,’ shouted the Wizard. ‘I thought you were stable! How obvious that you’re not! Where do you think you’re going? There’s nowhere for you to go.’

  ‘I’m going away from you,’ yelled Tighe.

  ‘Idiot – I’ll turn off your muscles with a switch! I’ll operate you by remote control. I’ll force you to cut off your own fingers, to break off your own teeth and use them to scratch out your eyes! You’ll know what my anger is like.’ The Wizard’s threats sounded bizarre in his high-pitched voice. ‘There!’ he called. ‘There! I told you. Maybe I can’t see for now, but I can feel my way over my controls. How do you like that, eh?’

  Tighe did feel a twinge, a tingle of cramp that ran all the way down his spine, like the uncomfortable numbness of an arm caught underneath during sleep that flails helplessly when you wake up. But the sensation soon passed.

  He reached with his foot, stamping on the patch of floor that he had seen the Wizard press when they had left the craft earlier. Nothing happened.

  ‘You can’t control me!’ he called gleefully to the room below. ‘My pashe pulled your machinery out of my head just after you installed it! I’m free.’

  He pushed down on one of the nubbins on the floor. Still nothing happened. He was too excited to think clearly. How had the Wizard operated the elevator device? Where had he put his foot?

  There was a bark of what might have been laughter from below. ‘Did she, now? That doesn’t surprise me. She was never stable.’ Another laugh. ‘Ironic! I thought this one was doing so well! Still, she can’t have got everything out, or I wouldn’t have been able to track you. There was something left behind, and it will have grown into something in your head.’ There was a stamping noise, and then a crash, and the Wizard cursed. ‘Damn you boy, this is most inconvenient. Have you any idea how long it will take me to fit new eyes?’

  Tighe stamped furiously, as if performing a ritual dance, dabbing at dozens of points round about the centre-point of the room with his toe. There was another series of crashing noises, this time close under the hatchway.

  ‘I can hear your feet, boy,’ growled the Wizard from below.

  Suddenly Tighe was rising. He must have hit the right spot. He was lifted up, and the hole in the roof irised open. The cold air rushed and swirled, and tiny pieces of snow flurried in. And then he was on the roof and the cold was bitter. He knew it was, because his ungloved hand, still clutching the gun, felt the chill immediately. Tighe stuffed the gun into his pocket and fumbled the glove over his numb fingers. Then he stepped forward, hoping that the Wizard did not have a way of turning off the filament devices in his gloves and shoes. A thread leapt out to meet the ice and Tighe started away from the Wizard’s craft.

  9

  He made his way through a prolonged snowstorm, climbing away eastward. He had no idea where he was going, or what fate awaited him, as long as he could put as much distance as possible between himself and the Wizard. He passed rapidly over the ice.

  After a while the air around him cleared and Tighe looked over his shoulder. The sky was a blue so intense it seemed unreal. It seemed bright and clean as newly washed plastic, close enough to kiss. Tighe paused, panting. His sinuses hurt with breathing in the freezing air.

  He looked up and saw a blurry-edged cloud of snow descend the wall until it was all round him and he couldn’t see anything more than his own gloved hands before his face. He clambered further along.

  The air cleared again, and a shadow passed over the wall in front of him. He looked over his shoulder to see the silver shape of the Wizard’s craft swing through the sky. He whimpered in terror.

  ‘Tighe!’ boomed a voice from the craft. ‘Tighe!’

  Tighe stopped and clung to the ice, pressing up against it, hoping that motionlessness would protect him. He cannot see, he told himself. His eyes are gone. He cannot see me, he is hoping I will call out or move and give myself away to his devices. But I will not.

  The silver shape passed away to the east and then with a whine of motors it rose and passed up.

  Tighe breathed heavily. He looked away to his right; looking east. This was the end of the wall, he could see that. Instead of a continuing vista, there was a stretch of ice perhaps fifty arm’s lengths, perhaps further (it was difficult to gauge it), and then blue sky. The sky was not only behind him; it was above and below and away to the righ
t. Soon there would be nothing but sky. And then what would he do?

  And then what?

  Looking up, Tighe could see the silver shape descending again. ‘Tighe!’ boomed the amplified voice of the Wizard. ‘Tighe! Make yourself known, boy! Make yourself known.’

  Tighe clung as still as possible. He even tried to still his breathing.

  ‘Don’t be a fool, boy! My sensors tell me you’re around here somewhere. Shout out – move around and my sensors will pick you up more precisely. Then you can climb back aboard.’ The words distorted and echoed strangely against the ice.

  The Wizard’s craft disappeared downwall, his words still booming and echoing. They dissolved into the general hiss and hurry of the snowflake-filled air. When he could no long hear it, Tighe started climbing eastwards, palm over palm.

  Then, growing in volume again, the Wizard’s voice swelled into hearing once more. Tighe cursed silently and stopped where he was. The craft was coming down from above, the words wailing and grumbling incomprehensibly until Tighe was able to tune into what they were saying, ‘… rather than let that happen.’ Aphen-aphen-phen . phen wobbled the words. ‘I can do it! I control all my machines from where I am. I’ll turn off the heating in your suit and you’ll freeze to death!’ The echo bounced about in diminuendo, death! death! death! T’d rather kill you than let you go – I spent such effort trying to find you.’ The words smeared and Tighe lost track of them. Find you. Find you.

  The Wizard’s craft disappeared below. Tighe resumed his eastwards climb, uncertain of his destination. But it made him feel better to be moving.

  There was another blinding flurry of torn-up snow fragments and the cold pushed itself deeper into Tighe’s face. It seemed to catch because although the flurry cleared the cold continued worming its way inside. Tighe’s fingers started hurting; then his feet. Soon the chill had spread all over his body. It seemed the Wizard had made good his threat: whatever magic it was that provided heat in Tighe’s suit had been cancelled.