At the Edge of the Game Page 15

  ‘You stick your head out the window and tell me if I’m going all right.’

  The car is moving. No choice but to do what he says. Sheets of ice-cold water pour off the right-hand slope, taking large masses of undigested snow. Right onto my head.

  ‘Straight ahead! Right! Stop! Straight! Stop!’

  We inch towards the top of the hill. The water rushes knee-deep past, gurgles through the cracks of the doors, pooling inside.

  The top of the hill is in sight. I see buildings… but now a mass of snow gives way high above us and crashes down upon the car. I haul my head back inside just in time to avoid having my neck snapped. The snow must have been damming a mass of rainwater. The avalanche is followed by thousands of pounding gallons.

  The engine cuts out. Now the car lurches. It’s sliding backwards.

  ‘Get out!’ Heathshade pushes his door open against the force of the water. I drag Helen with me. Heathshade splashes forward. I pull her after him.

  The road is blocked, but we can climb the right-hand slope. We scramble upwards through icy bracken and unstable snow. Lightning flashes away to the east, illuminating the car as it falls over the side of the precipice and tumbles down into the valley.

  The top of the hill is wide and flat, covered in bracken still brittle despite the thaw. The wind lashes. I try to support Helen’s weight, dragging her forward.

  A light penetrates through the obscurity somewhere ahead. Heathshade lets out a shout. A farmhouse.

  He kicks the front door open. Helen falls onto the cold stone floor, and so do I.

  I spent a day moving various items between the Unquiet Spirit and the habitat. I was making the ship my own, removing signs of Dexter and Brinnilla's occupancy and replacing them with things of mine. Even so, I still intended to return the craft to Dexter after I was sure that he had abandoned his ridiculous plan. I decided that I was merely making the ship more comfortable for myself in the meantime.

  The following day I flew the ship into space. The ship handled differently in the near vacuum of the upper extremes of the atmosphere. It was a joyous experience to see the curvature of the earth for the first time since I crashed my own ship, to behold the pulsing weather systems, the rivers, lakes and seas, the valleys and mountains, the structure and detail of all the world's great features. For one full orbit I watched the planet turn beneath me, so strangely free of ice in comparison with the Earth of my time.

  And then I fired the engines. I would to go to the Moon, I had decided. The ship itself did the navigation, and within the hour I had attained a lunar orbit that matched that of the enormous relativistic boosters. The ship curved slowly towards the ten-kilometre long structures, sleek and luminous even against the backdrop of the shining, ravaged lunar surface. The boosters, like the Unquiet Spirit itself, had been designed in the extravagant style of their era. I knew of very few spacecraft from my own time that displayed such elegance and grandeur, and none that was so large.

  I nudged the ship into a lower orbit and turned my full attention to the lunar surface. All the craters of old were gone. The dark mare were no more. Even the mountain ranges had been razed by whatever cataclysm had befallen the dead world. It looked as though vast tracts of lunar rock and soil had been forcefully gouged away to leave an irregularly streaked, approximately smooth surface. I could see no sign of any ruins or machine debris; nor could I detect even traces of radioactive or chemical waste.

  The Moon no longer had two distinct faces, as it did in the 23rd Century. Nor any more did one side permanently face the Earth. The new Moon rotated once every sixteen and a half hours, so that the sun and the earth moved swiftly across its black sky.

  Over the course of a few leisurely orbits, I took in the barren beauty of the place. I thought about descending, to land and experience the lunar surface on a level that I could come close to grasping directly. But guilt was getting the better of me. I felt bad about what I had done to Dexter, and I was becoming worried that he might require regular medication of some kind. So rather than indulge my curiosity any further, I decided to return to Earth to make sure he was all right.

  The sun illuminates thinly crusted hilltops, casts lengthy shadows across weirdly liquefying ice shapes in the valley below. It looks neither like Ireland as she is known to be, nor like any previously known icy region of this planet. Travelling across the frigid hydrocarbon wastes of Titan can’t be much different to this.

  Impossible to judge the weather. Worn too many layers, and this exertion is making me sweat. It was five below zero yesterday at least, and when we set out this morning it looked like it wouldn’t be much warmer today. But it’s got to be ten degrees or more. Springtime feeling has returned to the air, but rather than lift the spirits with the promise of better days to come, it is an omen of further misfortune. This is not our world any more. The governing spirits are laughing at us.

  Dark roofs penetrate that bright surface below us. They’re our goal, those houses. We’ll have to make the best of it there. Helen can’t go any further. We have to stop. As it is, these few miles since we left the farmhouse are far more than I thought she’d manage. It’s Plan C for us now. No transport. No possibility of Helen going any further on foot. Here’s where the journey ends. We wait here for the true end of winter, or else we die.

  But at least we’re away from that farmhouse. Wish I hadn’t gone into the old man’s room. I was niggled by the stupid, soft-headed notion that to pretend that he was not in the house with us, that we were not intruders, would be uncivilised.

  The air in his room smelled foul. The grey bed coverings hid every part of him, save the upper half of his head. His face was almost death-white, and his hair also white, but with yellow ends. I looked more at the Sacred Heart picture on the wall just above the bed than at the man himself. A wisp of fogged breath rose. I noticed that his eyes were open, might have opened just the instant before, and I almost fled there and then, not having bargained on dealing with the man in animate mode. But instead, unwilling to be seen to do something so callous, even to be dimly perceived by this living cadaver, I stepped a little closer. Open eyes, but mercifully no flicker of awareness. I waved my hand over the emaciated face. Nothing. The old man stared and he breathed, but that was it.

  Then: contamination. My hand, as I drew it back, passed through the next cloud of fogged breath. Molecules of his, rank particulates small enough to glide clean through any palisade, vectors of decay, sank easily through to my blood and were distributed widely. And - God, even worse - the slimy remainder condensed on my wrist so that I could feel residue. I turned for the door and rushed outside to the yard, where much was squeezed painfully from my innards.

  Even so, I could not leave it at that. I felt that having availed of the old man’s home for shelter, the least we could do was lay a couple of extra blankets on his withered body. Heathshade, contemptuous and not a little perplexed at the nature of this self-indulgence, said that I should have laid them over his head instead.

  This close to the village it’s possible to make out, at the corners of the buildings, the rigid, rearing bow waves of the flash-frozen flash flood. The sun angle means that the dripping ice glistens and blinds. The flood, released in increments of droplets, is pooling, turning the valley floor into an array of mirrors. And the vista shimmers as warm air rises. It’s as though we were descending into a white salt desert recently drenched by rain.

  Enduring human life manifests itself ahead. A window rotates open in one of the village roofs. A head protrudes. A figure hauls itself up and out, and slides down onto the ice crust of the village street. A man, a grey-topped man, not wearing any coat or hat. Black shirt and black trousers. A priest? He calls to us.

  ‘What’s he saying?’ says Helen.

  ‘Keep moving.’ Heathshade has set his shoulders for conflict.

  ‘He’s saying stop.’

  ‘We’re not stopping.’

  ‘Come on.’ Heathshade sticks up two fingers and picks up t
he pace.

  The man is now standing wringing his hands in what seems to me to be a very priestly manner. He can’t turn us away. Hasn’t he a Christian duty to uphold? He has to help us. But Heathshade’s attitude is not going to do us any favours here. Some diplomacy, or just plain and simple civility, is what we need now.

  The priest backs away, as well he might. Heathshade is advancing in the manner of one not to be taken lightly. But his feet are cracking straight through the crust. He sinks in waist-deep, now chest-deep. Fractures spread across the ice. A pit widens around him. He descends as though in quicksand, and is suddenly lost to sight.

  It’s too late for us too. With cruel slowness the ice creaks and sags. We slide into subsurface slush. Helen claws at me cat-style, like she would climb up my body to safety. We fall into water, only a couple of feet deep. Coldness like a hammer to the head.

  Helen struggles, tries to stand, falls back down with a splash. The bottom of this stream is ice. The walls are ice, the roof is ice. The current is pushing us along. Heathshade’s a few feet ahead. He grabs hold of something. A boat. Unbelievably, a rowboat. He climbs in and then takes hold of Helen as she slides past. Perceiving the arrival of the last moment in which I can save myself, I lunge, grip with all the strength I have, willing wooden hands not to slip. I squirm out of my pack harness. Heathshade grabs my collar and heaves me up and in.

  The boat’s tied to something below the waterline. Heathshade cuts the rope, but the boat doesn’t move. It seems to be rooted to the ice beneath the water, but some rocking frees it, and we start to drift downstream, rapidly at first, and then, as the water deepens and widens in this pearly translucent tunnel, more slowly.

  We emerge into the open air, squinting against the light of the blinding, greenish sky above us. To our front, high snowy banks form sheer walls. In places, streams of melted snow pour into the river like storm drains. The river joins a big body of water that flows southwards. A cold Amazon, meandering over a huge plain.

  Far away, on the steep slope of a mountain to the east, an avalanche progresses. White crystal clouds rise and catch the airflow like a dust storm in Africa, and some interval later the sound waves reach us - a thunderous rumble that loosens the left bank, which subsides with much hissing and fizzing. Exposed gorse and scrub sees the light of day for the first time in months.

  The flood is taking us towards a range of white hills. The flow shall veer one way or the other, east or west. Which shall it be? We’re so close to the hills now, we surely should have veered by now – could we pass through them? A tunnel, naturally formed in the rock? Or some vast sinkhole – perhaps we will orbit it as disassembled stars orbit a black hole singularity, doomed to vortex forever. But the river is at last swerving around to the east. Those slopes are riven with channels, rushing liquid cutting crevasses in snow, feeding the flood.

  Another inundated town in a wide, black temporary lake. We use our hands to steer past chimneys and television aerials, a belfry, electricity pylons, the top of a billboard advertising computers, a flagpole with a soaking Tricolour. The current is slack here, but not dead, and we drift into a narrow, swift-moving, turbulent gulley. One of these ice banks has collapsed far ahead of us, formed a natural dam, a temporary lake.

  We’re close to the weakest point in the snow dam when it gives way to the tremendous pressure of the building volumes of water behind it. We’re sucked through the breach into roaring, foaming whiteout. Every sense is negated – sight, sound, touch and all the others, all overwhelmed by solid, liquid, vaporous water. Time has stopped. Helen and Heathshade are gone. The boat is gone. I think I have crossed the event horizon. There surely can be no morning extrication from this blank, soaked singularity.

  Or can there? Extrication by way of sleep rather than wake, as it were. This isn’t morning – I was awake at sunrise, as I had been at the previous sunrise, and got little sleep in between – and anyway time of day is irrelevant in a place like this. Now, in this perilous situation, spinning slowly in near-freefall, I might well drop off. It’s silent in my suit. The levitator needs a recharge.

  I’m descending quickly on low power, dropping through Dublin City Cylinder’s uppermost inhabited levels. I stay just beyond assegai-throwing range of the near wall lest the savage tribes of these levels show an unfriendly interest in me. The walls are coated by mosses and algae. High-altitude birds flit about me curiously, squawking in irritation of this interruption of their daily quest for wall-dwelling insects and small reptiles.

  Now I am passing through the boreal levels, where the ecology is quite different. Ivy and other creeping plants choke the chasm. Lemurs and monkeys climb among them, living out their existences in savagely fought-over vertical territories. But the air is dense enough here to be tolerable, so I open my visor. I fill my lungs, and taste smoke, condensation, flowers. I see figures, male and female, silhouetted against red fires. One raises an arm in salute. My descent is too swift to afford time to respond.

  There are blinking red and green lights far below, ascending. I recognise the danger, and initiate a drift in towards the wall, where I slow to a hover in cover. Close by is a troop of lemurs with wide, darkly ringed eyes that lend them in expressions of permanent astonishment. They converge in the branches close to me and stare, chattering, reaching towards me as though in supplication. My ailing suit levitator strains to bear my weight as three Urban Guard transports shoot upwards, hurrying towards the tropospheric Front. I watch them go until they are no longer visible, and then I bid the lemurs farewell and resume my descent.

  I drop past levels where the wall has been denuded and vivid murals painted, etched images in stone of the Gods as they were imagined by the Ancients, as man-beasts, as beautiful naked youths and maidens. The tribal habitations - flimsy as gossamer they seem - hang from the walls amongst these colossal images, and are works of art in their own right, beautifully elaborate wooden frames painted red, blue, yellow, green. Faces watch me curiously from the shuttered windows.

  A low, rumbling boom grows from nothing until it is so loud I force my hands into the helmet to block my ears. The Chasm walls are shaking. Chunks or rock come free and spin into the void. Some of the delicate wooden frames are struck. They are torn from their fastenings and fall, disintegrating, towards the city far below, villagers still inside. Their death-plunge takes them past where several rope bridges span the wide chasm, supported at intervals along their length by large balloons filled, I suspect, with volatile hydrogen. A bridge has come undone from its tether on one side, and hangs limply. Across one of the intact bridges a man leads a brown ox pulling a cart laden with produce. He does not see me – he is too intent on calming the beast, whose panicky movements threaten to rock the bridge dangerously. A body impacts the bridge ahead of the ox and smashes clean through. The ox, in its terror, leaps over the side, taking man and cart with it.

  Now I can see the bottom of the chasm. The streets of Dublin City Cylinder are laid out below me. Smells of gasoline and ozone. Warm city updraughts. The huge Gothic arch where the Cylinder City bridge connects to the African continent. Silver rays of daylight shine in, illuminate the red roofs of the enclosed metropolis. The Cylinder City extends, level after cavernous level, all the way down to the floor of the Salt Desert, where it merges with Dublin Far City, the only metropolitan area on earth thus configured. The M50 twists all the way down through the layers of the Cylinder City, like a spiral staircase connecting Dublin Near City and Dublin Far City.

  As I level off and drift out through the huge archway, the heavy-traffic carbon fumes force me to close my visor again. Although it might have been worse – most of the traffic is leaving the cylinder. Now the welcoming sun warms me. My suit levitator has only minutes’ worth of energy remaining, so I sink surfacewards, managing to make a safe soft landing on the shore of the Terminal Sea. A wave spreads up the stony beach and washes over my heavy-booted feet. I step into the shade of a copse of palm trees and divest myself of the levitator and th
e suit, both of which I cast into some bushes. I have to retain the silver boots of the suit, though, which look preposterously huge with this black jumpsuit. I also retain the force weapon, which is still good for another thousand shots. I step over the low railing separating the beach from the pavement. There’s almost no traffic on the coast road today. Were it not for the busy air traffic around the Cylinder, one might imagine that the Far City was deserted.

  The first citizens I encounter are in a desolate street of tenements, vacant lots and decrepit, poorly stocked shops. I keep a hand on the force weapon. I am a deserter, and my garb will betray as much to any Urban Guardsman that might come across me. The slovenly individuals native to this area disregard me as they go about their business. These people have little love for the Urban Guard, and certainly no inclination to turn in a deserter. Nevertheless, I feel heartened by the weight of the force weapon on my shoulder. It can’t kill a human, will merely stun, so I shall have no compunction about using it should the need arise. I have one intention only, and that is to get home to Helen.

  Sweating in the heat, I reach the Georgian quarter, the central precincts of Dublin Far City. I am in the vicinity of the ambassadorial palaces. Though there are more people in the streets here, no one pays me any heed. Most eyes are turned upwards at the flashing lights of the battle still in progress high above.

  I turn a corner onto St Stephen’s Green. The Cathedral bells toll the general alarm. Sirens begin to whine. Many citizens run for the thick, black cast-iron blast doors of the Cathedral. The Cylinder’s war-halo sparks and fizzes. Sparks of flame of many colours arc away from the Cylinder’s side and fade in the clear air.

  The earth trembles. Water sloshes out of the fountains and pools all around the square. The rain of fiery sparks intensifies until it is like a fountain of light. It intensifies still further until it blazes like the sun. The ground shakes again, more strongly this time. Hundreds of people are running for the doors of the Cathedral. A rain of many-coloured fireballs reaches the ground. One impacts close by and sinks through the cobblestone pavement, leaving behind a black scorch mark. The flesh of those unlucky enough to be struck by the flame chars and burns, and they fall to the ground in agony.