Mainspring

by Jay Lake

  “Oh.”

  “Do you have another name to hand?”

  “We often name boats after people, but since this is your side of the Wall, I will follow your custom of the names. I think perhaps instead we should call it Heart of God.” Pryce and his fellows would have hounded Hethor out of Connecticut all over again for such a blasphemy, but high up in the African night, it seemed right.

  “Heart of God. A good name.”

  “We should have a ceremony. A feast in honor.”

  “Every day is a feast in honor.”

  They went to tell the others, who danced the night away, hairy feet slapping on the wood until the moon was long gone and the east glowed with the fire of the impending day.

  SIXTEEN DAYS out of the cyclopean city, Hethor was awoken in his cabin by a panicked Salwoo. The correct person flung open the hatch, shouting unintelligibly.

  He was glad Arellya was gone already—as often was her habit—though he knew Salwoo would have had nothing to say about it even if she had been present. “What is it, man? Slow down.”

  “Jewels,” Salwoo said. “There are jewels on the ship! And the sun has died.”

  He had failed! Or did the Southern Earth somehow have different eclipses than the North?

  Hethor leapt to his feet, tugged on only his linen underclothes, and followed Salwoo up to the deck. Some of the correct people were wailing. Others huddled in the waist of the airship. Arellya moved among them, talking, reassuring, her hand brushing across miserable shoulders.

  Heart of God was fogged in, completely embedded in a frigid cloud. Hethor couldn’t make out the stern at all. He could barely see the bow from where he stood. It was dark, too—a deep, thick cloud. And the cold had condensed into droplets of ice along the seams in the gasbag, on the struts supporting the deck, on the rails of the ship. He was mightily glad of his thickening beard even though his breath was crusting on it.

  Then Hethor understood Salwoo’s panic. There was no word in the correct people’s language for “ice.” They had never seen such a thing.

  “Is this what comes after life?” Salwoo asked in a still-frightened whisper.

  “It is but water,” Hethor said. “Great cold makes water turn to a kind of rock. It flows free again when warmth returns.” He stepped to the rail, picked off a little icicle, held it in his hand to show to Salwoo. “Look. See, already it runs away from the warmth of my touch.” It was cold, painfully cold on his skin, but he wanted to make his point.

  “So we are inside the Great Salt River?”

  Hethor laughed at that, though he tried not to. “No, no, we are inside one of the clouds of the sky.”

  “We have been in clouds before,” Salwoo objected. “They were like mist on the water. This is thick and cold enough to kill.”

  “South,” said Hethor. “The south is cold.” We must be closing in on the pole, he realized. But that made no sense, unless they had been blown very, very far in the night. “Let us check the helm.”

  He and Salwoo unfolded the casing of the navigation station. The glowing dot on the little globe showed them still off the African shore, a long distance of water separating the land that capped the pole.

  Winter? In July?

  If so, Southern Earth was indeed a different world.

  Hethor walked back to where most of the correct people were huddled together. “Among my people,” he began, speaking loudly so the whole ship’s company would hear him, “in our land, we have a season that brings cold weather. Very cold, so that water turns to this jeweled rock you see around the boat of air. Our word for this is ice. It will not hurt you, except if you allow your bodies to become too cold. Ice can be touched and eaten. It is part of God’s world. There is nothing to fear, not here, not now.”

  At his words, the correct people chattered a bit, then stood up and began exploring the possibilities of frost and ice. That was it—their fear had left with his words.

  Arellya came to him. “You did well to speak out.”

  “I did not at first understand the problem,” Hethor admitted. “But your folk live near the Wall, where the sun is always warm.”

  “If your home is like this from time to time,” said Arellya, “I would not care to visit. Why anyone would live among this cold is beyond me.”

  “In reaching my goal, there will be more cold to come.”

  And how would they survive it? The correct people had no woolens or heavy coats or boots. Neither did he. Miraculous as the airship’s provisioning and controls had proven, it had obviously been built and run by people of the tropics as well. There would be no hidden hold full of furs, Hethor was certain.

  He would find a way, though. He had found a way to pass every other obstacle that had impeded his progress toward his charter. This would be no different.

  THE SUN failed them for days. Africa continued to crawl past unseen far below the port-side rail. Once, something howled from the waters, a voice as great as Leviathan, but there was no telling what it was. Their fishing was more difficult, but when the catches did come they were greatly increased.

  Hethor watched the brass globe with its winking light as Africa first narrowed to a point, then passed completely by to their east. He wondered at the weather—it was not much of a hindrance, but the chill clouds depressed the correct people. The cool damp kept them huddled in miserable heaps or hidden reluctantly belowdecks. The days grew colder and more ice appeared on Heart of God, especially in the mornings.

  Then one day the sun returned. Hethor came on deck to a brilliant glare that narrowed his eyes while giving him an immediate headache. The light seemed so bright it was almost like being stabbed, yet the air was chill as ever it had been inside the icy fogs.

  Below there was ocean. Enormous swells rolled by larger than any he had ever seen save for the earthquake-spawned monsters that had swamped the coast early in this journey. There was water from horizon to horizon. The Wall and the land below it were long gone except for large white rocks studding the sea.

  After some scrutiny, he realized the rocks were ice. Enormous chunks the size of cities, or even counties, floated below him.

  How cold was the water?

  He was still far from the pole and the Mainspring. If Heart of God was forced down here, Hethor and his correct people would die in minutes of sheer exposure. They were very far from God or man, and his quest was still far beyond the curve of the world.

  Even with Arellya nearby and a ship full of her brethren, Hethor was suddenly as lonely as he’d ever been.

  ELEVEN

  THE COAST of the southernmost continent slid by several thousand feet below Heart of God. Nights were much longer and colder over the Southern ocean, and when morning came it brought a short-lived day. This made sense to Hethor, as he had read much the same of the North Pole. Clearly the Southern Earth was in the grip of winter despite the time of year. Perhaps there was a balance of nature between the sides of the Wall.

  The sun that greeted them was wan. The light possessed an almost tinny quality. The wind carried a chill as bone-wrenching as any Hethor had ever felt in the depths of New England’s hostile winters. Even this high up, the rot-and-wrack smell of the frozen coast was discernible—all of the bird droppings, seaweed, and who knew what else crusting the shingled beaches undisturbed for the six thousand years since Creation began.

  Even in the midst of this frigid, forbidding territory, there was beauty. Ahead some distance, Hethor could make out glinting towers that seemed to be made of ice—sister cities to the crystal metropolises he had seen in his ascension of the Equatorial Wall. It made him wonder why the exotic only persisted at the boundaries of the known. Or was it that the familiar was incapable of seeming exotic?

  The towers were studded along a coastal highland, catching the pale sun in their peaks only to throw it back again diamond-bright. Lower domes clustered about their bases. What commerce or industry sustained them was impossible to determine from a distance, but simply to live among suc
h beauty would steal his heart away with each rising of the sun.

  “Messenger.”

  Hethor turned from his reflection. Arellya had taken his hand, stood beside him now accompanied by Salwoo. “I’m sorry,” he said with reflexive politeness. “I was paying no attention.”

  Arellya nodded, both acknowledging and dismissing his apology. “The correct people are chilled. They will be unwell. Can you bring back the true sun? This pale cousin haunting the sky is worthless.”

  Hethor stifled a laugh. “No. Only through travel back to the north, which I cannot do. There are blankets in the ship’s stores. We should have a work party to parcel them out.”

  Salwoo looked miserable. “You cover your full self in plant skins in the manner of your people. Correct people do not do such things.”

  “Then correct people will die of cold,” Hethor said. He squeezed Arellya’s hand. “Do you want your souls to be cold forever?”

  The two correct people nodded, then walked away conferring.

  Hethor turned his attention back to the coast and the distant towers. Heart of God’s course was taking her farther inland. Immediately below were long, graveled valleys dotted with humps of ice or snow. The rotting smell of the coast was not yet gone.

  There was a groan, almost a screech, that echoed through the whirring sound of gears that always hung on the edge of Hethor’s hearing. Earthquake, he thought. He looked down carefully.

  It was hard to tell for sure what was happening. The valleys below did not seem to jump or ripple particularly, but from this height their graveled landscape was little more than a texture. He looked over at the towers.

  They swayed.

  The winking diamonds of their mirrored sunlight danced in the sky like a swarm of fireflies. Even as he watched, one of the towers shattered, a glistening spray of splinters erupting to make a brilliant, deadly fog around the tower’s mates. Two more toppled. All this occurred in an eerie silence, until like thunder following lightning, the ringing, clattering crash of their demise was clearly audible from the deck of Heart of God. The rising fog from the wreckage obscured his view, turning the icy city to a rainbowed cloud glittering just above the frozen Earth.

  Amid the whirring of the world’s gears, he heard stuttering, like a great escapement retarded in its travels. The day was slipping, and the Earth was once more missing her time. The slippage in midnight had increased from the three seconds or so he’d noted back on Bassett to almost fifteen seconds. Every time one of these terrible earthquakes happened, the Earth’s rotation seemed to slow a bit more.

  The key-shaped scar on the palm of his hand flared an angry red. It ached in sympathy to the wretched destruction below. Watching the glimmer of the ice city’s death, Hethor felt moved to offer some epitaph, some comment to mark the passing of such a wonder from the world. He could only think of one set of words that would fit.

  “The heart of God is the heart of the world.

  “As man lives, so lives God.

  “As God lives, so lives the world.”

  FARTHER INLAND they passed over the ruins of another frozen city. Judging by the clouds of icy mist that shrouded the shattered tower bases, this one had also toppled in the recent earthquake. The long night had already come, after a day measured in minutes rather than hours, lit by a pallid sun that lurked far to the north. The starlight was so cold the air seemed to creak, though the heavenly glimmerings lit the ground well enough. Great cracks ran across the surface of the snow and ice that covered the land here away from the coast, several of the cracks meeting amid the jumble of toppled towers. Hethor could see no streaming refugees or folk straining at the rescue—these places were as abandoned as the vertical city had been back on the Wall.

  Who lived in them once? Angels? Or perhaps other kinds of men, as the correct people were another kind of man designed by God to favor the green depths of the equatorial jungles.

  He wasn’t sure if he preferred to have the heaving chaos of the ocean beneath him or this crystalline killing field of ice. Were Heart of God to put down here, Hethor and the correct people would be dead in a matter of hours. If they lived even that long. As it was, today the last of the correct people had abandoned the deck for the misery of the cabins below, crowded five and ten to a cubby. The cold had finally overwhelmed their resistance to suffering the rigors of enclosure.

  Hethor prayed that they would find the South Pole without further setback. There was no edge left, no margin for another miracle.

  At least Heart of God’s mysterious engines continued to work, even here in the frozen misery of the deepest south.

  He didn’t have the courage to wait for midnight, to see how late it might come. Instead, Hethor went below to wrap himself in Arellya and the cold comfort of his dreams.

  MORNING BROUGHT only more darkness—this far south dawn was a time of the soul rather than a moment in the sun’s transit across the sky. Wrapped in half a dozen blankets, Hethor went up on deck to check the course with the magical globe and see what there was to see.

  As he stepped up out of the aft ladder Hethor was immediately aware that something was different on the ship. The mysterious engines thrummed in the surrounding darkness. Heart of God still traveled through the night. Their course remained true to the southward heading, as best as he could tell without studying the stars or the globe in its little shelter.

  What, then?

  The shadows, Hethor thought. The shadows are wrong upon the deck. It was far too dark for a cloudless night.

  He looked around at the rails.

  There were winged savages crowding the ship, occluding the night sky and the silvery gleam of the ice below. Now that he could see them, Hethor realized they were pale in the gloom, like so many white birds.

  “Get off!” Hethor shouted, startled and angry.

  He was answered with the twang of bows.

  Hethor ducked back down the aft ladder, screaming for Arellya, Salwoo, Kikiowo, any of the correct people. He stormed toward his cabin, intent on retrieving the golden tablet that had served him well with the winged savages in the past.

  Correct people emerged into the narrow passageway clutching spears and sticks. “What dreams, Messenger?” one called.

  Hethor stopped at his cabin door. “Our boat of the air is attacked,” he said. Then, shouting: “There are bird people on the deck, with bows and swords.”

  These often silly, often strange young males of the correct people were all hunters and warriors, survivors of an expedition that had taken them farther from their homes than any of their ancestors had ever dared venture in the entire history of Creation. Roaring with pride and anger, they flowed past Hethor to meet the threat.

  He ducked into the cabin to be nearly skewered by Arellya wielding a stone knife.

  “Hai,” she shouted. “Be careful, Messenger.”

  Hethor kicked a bolt of canvas aside, looted by Arellya from ship’s stores for some unknown purpose. “My golden plate, the words of God. Where is it?”

  She reached under the bunk, pulled the tablet out, and handed it to Hethor.

  He took it with a desperate grin. “Stay down here. Please.”

  “No,” she said.

  There would be no discussion, he knew. “At least stay behind me.”

  Arellya pulled him close, kissed him tight. After a moment, they separated, gasping. “Remember me in the next world, if needs be,” she said.

  As they ran for the deck ladder, Hethor realized that she meant that either of them might die.

  THE DECK was a freezing hell of steaming blood, screams, and the heavy, ragged thumps of butchery. At first it was impossible for Hethor to tell who had the advantage in the battle, for the combat was everywhere. He brandished his golden tablet like a battle standard and rushed into the fray, screaming, “Stop! Stand down, I tell you.”

  Most of the surviving correct people tried to pull back from the fight. The winged savages ignored him and pressed their advantage. Hethor quickly re
alized that it was the correct people who were being butchered—the winged savages fought with the same rangy strength and eerie precision they had shown aboard Bassett when kidnapping him.

  It was not their blood and limbs that littered the deck.

  Waving the tablet wildly, Hethor rushed to catch a winged savage alongside the head. Another swirled, swinging a glittering bronze sword that took Salwoo in the side just as the correct person stepped in with spear in hand to help Hethor. The winged savage’s blow split Salwoo in half, showering blood and offal over Hethor.

  He drove the golden tablet edgewise into the face of Salwoo’s killer, who fell back clutching at his eyes. The tablet itself was bent nearly double with the blow, so Hethor dropped it to the blood-slicked deck, grabbed up Salwoo’s spear, and gave chase.

  The fight raged on, unequal as the invasion of Bassett had been on the other side of the Wall. Correct people were slaughtered like conies on a cricket pitch while the winged savages danced among them.

  Hethor continued to fight for his ship and his people, taking blows that stung and burned double or treble, thanks to the terrible cold. The entire time, he wondered desperately where Arellya was. He had lost his sense of her in the confusion of the battle. That delicate touch inside his head and heart was drowned out by the shrieking chaos.

  The deck heaved, bouncing for a moment before listing to the port. Hethor whirled, spear braced outward.

  Winged savages on the port rail were cutting away the stanchions that attached the hull of Heart of God to the gasbag.

  In the terrible dark of the ultimate south, being forced down unprepared to the surface was a death sentence surely as any sword sweep to the gut.

  “To the left edge,” he shouted, trying to rally the correct people.

  There was a movement, but by no means a rush. So many had already fallen. He charged anyway, screaming incoherently, the air burning his lungs with cold flame.