Atlas: A Pylonic Dawn

by J. J. Malchus

  He smiles. “I don’t understand.”

  “We’re gonna run and do stupid things and make up games while we drive and go to our hill and chart the stars and—” Gene’s eyes roll back. She closes them.

  Atlas opens his and looks at her. “Gene? Gene.”

  Sighing, she nestles her head up his shoulder, faces him, and squints. “What wus I saying?”

  “Are you well?”

  Gene stares. Her forehead smooths and her exhale forms words. “Your eyes are the sky.”

  Atlas brushes a lock of hair from her face. “Yours are Sidera.”

  “Is Sidera beautiful?”

  He stills his lungs. Wind spraying mist into his cheek, Atlas shuts his mouth and nods, centimeter up, centimeter down.

  “I don’t remember,” her eyes dart between his, “where this’s.”

  “What is, Gene?”

  “Me is.”

  “You’re here.” Atlas kisses her forehead. “Exactly here and nowhere different.”

  “Why am I so confused?”

  “Because Earth is a confusing world.”

  “Atlas,” Gene wraps her fingers around his shoulder strap, “I need to remember the right—I need—don’ wanna think about the street and the bodies. About what’s coming. Please don’t stop talking.”

  “Yes, um. I will speak about something.” Atlas’s pulse speeds. “Speak about some topic.”

  She searches his eyes, her chest rising and falling, grasp loosening.

  He frowns. “We should rest. I’m not proficient in aimless conversation.”

  But Gene holds on to Atlas’s secondary sash and watches his lips move, his eyes scan the air, his brows tense. He breathes out.

  “Sleep,” Atlas gazes at the lightless bulbs overhead, “sleep. The morning come.” He blurts a weak laugh and shifts Gene up his arm. “In dark of night, in quiet blight, here, to you, I will hum.”

  She makes a face. “Your brain’s rhyme-y.”

  Atlas runs his eyes down the lines from their burnt-out lights to a far bulb’s flicker, the one frail glimmer doubling itself brighter as it beats a reflection in the lobby glass. He stretches his free arm over the space above Gene’s cut, blocking it from sight and mind, and tunes his voice to a song heard decades ago and days recent. It comes out a whisper.

  Our empire tumble

  They build a pyre

  The time of fire

  All in sun—

  Atlas’s eyes fog. He blinks and glances at Gene, who looks back, quiet, still. He swallows and forces voice through its shakes.

  But tonight you shall rest

  Cantus, cantus

  Quietis, quietis

  On moon’s fiery crest

  Sleep, sleep, the morning come

  In dark of night

  In quiet blight

  Here, to you, I will hum

  Gene closes her eyes. She rolls toward him, a thread’s gap between her cut and his side, and curls her hand over his shoulder, under his neck. She hums a variation of the hooded Sideran’s song; her tone bobs in and out, peeks around the boom of thunder, sprinkles among rain’s sweeping drums. Atlas feels the vibration in her throat. He blinks between glimpses of flashes of the far bulb’s mirrored flickering as the two yellowed haloes rap a silent rhythm upon wandering water vapor. Halfway through Gene’s second chorus, hers and Atlas’s bristles smooth and his eyelids slide shut. The lightbulb burns out.

  * * *

  “What do you fear?”

  Atlas hoists the beam onto his shoulder, bends his elbow around its far side, and curls his fingers over the lip opposite his ear. He steps forward. His step booms; his heel compresses golden dirt into rock. The steel beam’s weight pushes him into ground and he pushes ground until foot’s shock shudders slouching up his spine and Sidera sags in the sky.

  “The beam,” Atlas says.

  The Cartographer walks with him, squinting over the laborhouse roof. He slips his hand into his coat, a white Imperium coat, the first Atlas’s seen.

  “What do you fear most?” The Cartographer asks.

  Atlas lifts, strains, pounds his heel into dirt centimeters closer to his destination. “I told you.”

  “And me—what do I fear most?” The Cartographer hunches his shoulders toward his neck. He drops them. “Sometimes the oppressed desires control of his fate so desperately that he grows to control others’. Corvus is like me and you. The universe’s choice terrifies us. We fear the uncertain.”

  “The future.”

  “I didn’t become Cartographer of futures because I enjoyed the dark.” He meets the corner of Atlas’s eye. “We are all moths wandering for light.”

  Atlas grinds his teeth and shifts the beam up his shoulder. His eyes blur his feet into the bronze they stride.

  “I know why you’ve come,” The Cartographer says. “You’re going to ask me how to close Pylon.”

  “How do I close Pylon?”

  “I told you.”

  Atlas exhales. He lifts his chin, looks across the constellation, to the laborhouse’s door, and picks up pace; but the building only shrinks, stretches the opposite direction until it’s as wide as his thumb.

  “The laborhouse is where the beam came from. And you carry it there?”

  Atlas shoots The Cartographer a side-glance. “I must return. I believed it ready but,” he frowns, “it is not.”

  “Not yet strong enough to support the weight it must.” The Cartographer nods and pulls an object from his pocket. He jerks it toward the sky. “Have you noticed how much smaller the sun is up there than it is on the horizon? Fifteen million degrees frozen over. Saddening.”

  “How does one defrost it?”

  “With the fire we fly for.” The Cartographer turns his object in hand. “A tool and weapon, beauty and horror, warmth and pain—humanity. The way will be long.”

  Atlas stops. The laborhouse dissolves into distance, sinks into sky above the constellation walls, and he drops the steel beam. It slams the dirt. Dust wafts clouds up his legs. He stares at the linear highlight of paralyzed sun across the beam’s lip and, though his mouth makes no movement and mind gives no command, whispers:

  Is this my fate?

  “You couldn’t exactly fly as you were.” The Cartographer flips his golden object into the air and catches it in his palm. “What do you fear most, Atlas?”

  Atlas faces him. “Clipped wings.”

  Frowning, The Cartographer rests his hand on Atlas’s arm. “I’m sorry.”

  “It was never Gene. It was me.”

  “Yes.”

  Atlas crinkles his forehead. “I am mapped as the ultimate sacrifice.”

  “A sacrifice to open Pylon and a sacrifice to close it. The sky grows heavier by the moment and, if you don’t hurry, it will crush every last bird.” The Cartographer pinches his object between thumb and forefinger and raises it to eye level. “This belongs to you now.”

  Atlas takes the aureus coin from his fingers and turns it face-up. Its engraved golden dove glints sun rays.

  “I won’t tell you how to choose,” The Cartographer says. “I’m no architect. I merely draw paths. You,” he points to Atlas’s chest, “however, are the sovereign of your soul, able to choose for himself so long as his heart beats, able to look up beyond the curvature of his shoulder’s load so long as he remembers three words. Courage will help you stand; freedom will help you fly; and love helps others into uplift and so,” he angles forward, “what do you fear more, Atlas? Clipped wings or clipping wings?”

  Twisting his fingers back and forth, Atlas watches the aureus’s reflections.

  The Cartographer pockets his hands. “That’s the difference between liberty and lawlessness: love. Which do you choose?”

  Atlas looks at him. “Earth.”

  Wind blasts his and The Cartographer’s hair toward the sun. It blows down the constellation walls, shakes the terrain, and cracks the sky. Across the sapphire, an explosive clap shatters day’s crystalline enamel cap,
webs of fractures revealing night behind it, tearing along the Milky Way’s smoked canyon. Midnight flaunts its vivacity as it emerges. Stars and meteors and galaxies wisp purples and pinks and blues streaked in yellow-white rain flashing arcs from horizon to horizon while solar brushstrokes swirl and sing wordless hymn to the billions of billions trillions kilometers close.

  Blinking every color beyond imagination, the aureus coin slips from Atlas’s fingers. Sidera rips asunder in the pools of his wide eyes. Its sun swells until it bursts and showers gold from a cloudless sky. Each falling shimmer stops in a different nook in celestial night; each forms a new star, all named, all charted. Atlas smiles.

  He crouches, grabs the steel beam, and turns it upright without grimace. He places it in line with the others, the other thirty-two vertical beams standing palm-widths apart, surrounding his body. They enclose him in a circle. The Cartographer steps toward Atlas’s prison.

  “When the Siderans were to return to Earth,” The Cartographer hovers his hand before one of the beams, “as I mapped, then any clinging trace of Sidera could only be banished to its rightful place again—Pylon could only be closed again by the liberator meant to open it. An exchange. He would take the fall. The mapped opener must be the sealer. He would sacrifice all he has. You, Atlas.”

  Chin to sky, Atlas ticks his eyes down a degree, hopping from one star to one lower, lips of beams lurking below.

  “Siderans aren’t yet ready for the freedom we hoped they’d seek and you didn’t ask for this, I know. But your present is yours to choose and future yours to alter. Know that these bars,” The Cartographer’s hand drops, “can’t stand forever. An end will come and another beginning will arise. All must end in a circle, which never truly ends.”

  “Did his end come as I saw it?” Atlas meets The Cartographer’s eyes between the beams. “Will his revolution continue? That is what I need to know. Corvus—is he dead?”

  “His universal revolution will continue only if you allow it.”

  Atlas scoffs. “Good Imperium. You’re in my dream. Answer my questions.”

  “You’re the one still experiencing my Presage.”

  He glances behind a shoulder, then up, and around.

  “Morning come.” The Cartographer narrows his eyes at rent atmosphere. “Sunrise will sew Pylon to Earth. Dimensional tears don’t mend easily. If you don’t close the gateway by dawn, by the time two suns shine, then Sidera will merge with the world you’ve made home, eternally tied to its land. You must hurry.”

  “Why me? I refuse to wake until you explain.” Atlas lowers his voice. “Why was my name chosen, Cartographer?”

  With his forefinger, The Cartographer nudges a steel beam; it tips into another, which tips into the next, and every beam encircling Atlas clunks and thuds collapsing to ground until they lie as a spoked star he centers. He looks over the fallen metal. Grass sways into the steel’s dimmed highlights, dark emerald underfoot, twinkling lights overhead, and trees populate the horizon cowered so far beneath his vantage.

  Atlas stands on his and Gene’s hill, the same from which they watched the night sky.

  “You don’t have to be afraid any longer, Atlas.”

  He gazes upward, at Orion, Auriga, Taurus, at the Pleiades cluster cradling a handful of brilliant cobalt dots. He spots his star. Warmth floods his chest.

  “Your name was chosen up there many, many full cycles ago.” The Cartographer steps to Atlas’s side and looks toward Perseus. “For as long as man can remember, the celestial spheres have perched atop this world, supported by an unfathomable force, and, for as long as I can remember, that force was given the name Atlas . . .”

  He stares and listens. Breeze sweeps cosmos down his arms and Atlas listens to The Cartographer speak for minutes turned hours until the stars revolve to the opposite skyline and the heavens glow blue.

  L

  Weight of the World

  “Gene.” Atlas gasps and swings himself up into a seated position. He shakes her. “You must wake.”

  “Orville Redenbacher’s tryin—” Gene rolls into Atlas’s lap, grabs his knee, smacks her lips, “trying to kill me—”

  He glances over each shoulder. “Reality, Gene.”

  Her eyelids wrinkle. Gene peels them back and blinks up at Atlas. “Hmm?”

  “How long were we asleep?” Atlas peers around the steel beam that shades them, down the stairs, through the street still dim, damp, and empty, clouds sagging above and ash smeared beneath. Rain traded its downpour for a sprinkle still rapping at highway brick. But the air brushing his cheek carries a temperature shift and altered charge, and the street’s median planter is skimmed by dayglow, whether Sideran or Earthly, he doesn’t know. He feels rested. Atlas touches his side, winces. He slips his fingers through the hole in his tunic and traces the bandage that shrunk as inflammation did, side’s aches less radiating. His breathing speeds. “Where’s Samuel?”

  “Speak of the devil’s handsome and athletic younger brother.”

  Samuel sprints around one of the porch’s beams and up the stairs. Holding his stomach, he pants and staggers to a stop before Atlas and Gene.

  “You—we—” Samuel jabs a thumb behind his shoulder. “Need to go. The Accenda are done curling their hair and are barreling down the street, sweeping up every clueless human who decided to waltz to work today and every other who’s skipping town. Police cars are stacked like Legos at the end of the street. How do they even do that? I tried to hold them off but—”

  “Whoa, work?” Gene sits up, cringing. “What time is it?”

  “It’s gotta be early morning. I don’t—” Samuel inhales through chattering teeth and clutches his shoulder. “I wouldn’t know exactly. I was a bit wrapped up in a prime-time to fringe-time firefight and must’ve dropped my—my watch.”

  “Samuel, are you okay?” Gene asks.

  “Like a peach. You?”

  She touches her waist and bites down. “Pear.”

  Atlas darts his eyes over the road, buildings, concrete. Distant thunder rumbles disintegration that rolls away the overcast; but his ears magnify and he jumps to the jump of his pulse.

  “Attie,” Samuel nods to him, “you all right?”

  Glaring into distance, Atlas whispers, “Why are we discussing fruits?”

  Samuel faces Gene. “I didn’t see Pylon or the Siderans—got caught up saving the world on the one side of the alley. Sidera’s side is no doubt ranking up. Were you guys napping this whole time and being completely useless again?”

  She scoffs. “Useless?”

  “Gene killed Eden,” Atlas says.

  Samuel’s expression suspends.

  “She discharged your weapon on her.” Atlas freezes his wide eyes on his own foot. “Once in the head, four times in the back, and saved us all.”

  Gene frowns and softens tone. “Samuel, I—I don’t know—”

  “She shot your girlfriend. To be candid, Samuel,” Atlas mumbles, “she wasn’t much pleasant.”

  “Atlas.”

  Samuel’s lips twitch upward. “Naw, she wasn’t.” He glances at Gene. “ ’S okay. I’m high on Accend super-transformation. I’m almost as drugged as you’ve been.”

  Atlas stands, dragging his hands up his legs, and inhales morning mist. He helps Gene onto her feet. Quicker to respond but pain more lucid, she flinches as she uncurls upright and shields her center with an arm. Whipping his head, Samuel gestures down the stairs.

  “Like a ’Stang. Let’s move it.”

  Atlas catches Samuel’s healthier shoulder, fingers fixed around jacket’s epaulet. Midstride, Samuel makes a face and twists around.

  “I know,” Atlas squeezes his shoulder, “you can do good as an Accend. I’ve witnessed it.”

  Samuel grimaces at Atlas’s hand like a walker grimaces at an insect on sustenance. Atlas ducks his head and draws Samuel’s eyes.

  “Never give in and, please,” Atlas lowers his voice, “take care of her.”

  Gene flits he
r squint between the two nonhumans, and Atlas bores his heating pupils into Samuel’s. He stresses each syllable, clicks each consonant, but deepens voice’s range to vibrate between shouts down the Accenda’s alley and the cloud claps beyond them.

  “I know what must occur and I need you to tend to this world.”

  “Stop,” Samuel wriggles free, “touching me. Are you high too?” He leans back and tilts his head at Gene. “Is he high? I won’t judge.”

  “Atlas, what’s going on?”

  The ground shakes and street rattles, traffic poles clattering, glass shards springing from the concrete. A low growl revs up the highway, through tissue and bone, until Atlas’s body jostles to its frequency. He, Gene, and Samuel look at each other. Then down the stairs. Atlas swallows the lump in his throat, breathes through the pain in his side, and runs down the steps three at a time. He runs for the road.

  “Wait, Atlas,” Gene grasps the breeze at his back, “what are you—”

  Halfway through the road, he stops. Light paints his side. Warm, golden light extends up his leg and arm and shoots beyond his burning silhouette, down through Pittsburgh.

  Atlas jerks toward Pylon’s end of the street, then the Accenda’s, then Pylon’s and the otherworldly sun that stings his eyes: a dawn not yet Earthly, but a violent dawn, forcing a solar torrent on its backflowing antithesis black with protest. He pales. His mind numbs. Too numb to register the next words Gene yells.

  From wall to wall and beyond, their bodies flood the street, spill across sidewalks, into connecting alleys at intersections and building breaks. They stand in rectangular formations, left arms stiff at their sides, right arms bent with right fingers touching left shoulders, heels together. The rear ranks pour from Pylon and march to stand behind the anterior and their leveled chests and aligned profiles. Wind scrapes their scalps and gnarls their hair. Common footwear drums the line between soil and brick, foremost soldiers still as marble sculptures. Dirtied white consumes horizon. Thousands of Siderans stare back at Atlas.