Last Plane to Heaven (27 page)

When he was ready, he clutched the punk pot close, made the final cut, and cast the steel knife away.

The balloon shot up, lurched, and caught on the edge of one of the open-roofed workshop's walls. The Sunstrip was waning out in the middle of the pit, and so he and the balloon cast a huge, reddening shadow. The children guarding his door shrieked, but Attestation told himself it was joy, not terror.

Then he and the balloon broke free, bouncing up and off the pit wall before twirling out into the open air.

For the first time in his life, Attestation was flying. For the first time in his life, he truly opened his eyes and looked at the world. The pit gaped beneath him, Sunstrip off to one side, shadowed far below even in the glowing light of the fading day, but from here he could see Ortinoize, Mossyrock, and a dozen more villages he did not know. A pair of nihlex spun perhaps a thousand feet below him, indifferent and unknowing to what passed above them. A flight of lantern-plants caught the Sunstrip's reddening light in their translucent bags-of-air, so each became a bright jewel held up against the onset of darkness.

Just as he himself was a bright jewel held up against the onset of the darkness at the end of life.

Carefully Attestation looked over his shoulder, but the bag-of-air obscured most of his upward view. He thought he could see Clings-Too-Low. He could certainly see his own village, dozens of faces wide-eyed and round-mouthed staring at him as he bobbed toward the center of the pit and the Sunstrip.

Not just bobbed, but rose. Flew. On wings of hydrogen and bamboo and the hair of his beloved wife he flew.

Attestation knew he would never see a more perfect moment than this. Young Aoife was long lost to him. Unswerving had just now walked down the spirit path into the darkness beyond sleep. He'd brought no ropes nor water nor any way to go beyond this point of flying.

This was what he'd lived for all his life, hoarding coins and stirring the sludge to make paper and teaching old Sammael's lessons to the children. “That which rises ever upward can never die,” he said aloud.

Smiling, he opened his punk pot and blew its tiny flame into a more robust life.

Smiling, he waved a fond farewell to the people he'd always known.

Smiling, he set the flame among the hydrogen of the lantern-plant bags-of-air.

Smiling, Attestation stepped down the spirit path in a burst of flame and light that wrapped him in glory.

 

Angels iii: A Feast of Angels

Yet more angels. The sarcastic kind, this time.

Saint Peter made Friedrich Nietzsche coroner of Heaven. Though Heaven stands outside time, all things there both concurrent and infinite, being human Nietzsche had perceptions that were perforce more or less sequential. Heaven's coroner was a stultifying job, as death was unknown there.

“I am convinced,” Nietzsche told Origen of Alexandria over a six-pack of Stroh's, “that this is my punishment.” They sat at a picnic table on a small, isolated cloud.

The little Egyptian's hand spasmed, crinkling his own can of beer. “This is hell,” he whispered. Lately they spoke American English, equally foreign to both. Also equally offensive in its colloquial imprecision. “The Adversary has crafted this eternity for such as us.”

“Could be worse.” Nietzsche stared down off their cloud at a bus loaded with joyful Charismatics bound for Branson, Missouri, on a three-day pass. “We could be with
them
.”

“Though all days in Heaven are the same, still I have been here a very long time.” Origen tugged another Stroh's off the six-pack. “There
have
been worse things. Old Hermes Trismegistus got it wrong. As below, so above.”

Nietzsche shuddered, imagining the Heaven of the Inquisition, or John Calvin. Origen had lived through them both. Aimee Semple McPherson had been bad enough for him.

Saint Peter appeared, potbellied and irritated. His robes were askew and his halo appeared to have developed a crack. “We've got a problem.”

“This is Heaven,” said Nietzsche. “There are no problems.”

Origen burped for emphasis, the yeasty odor of recycled Stroh's disturbing Heaven's usual pine-scented freshness.

Peter frowned, obviously picking his words with care. “This problem has always existed, but now I wish to address it.”

“Sh-sh-shimultaneity,” said Origen, who had been talking to Einstein lately. “No shuch thing.”

Nietzsche shot Origen a hard glare. “What kind of trouble?”

“Coroner trouble,” said Peter.

“In
Heaven
? I thought you were just yanking my chain.”

“Consider yourself yanked,” said Peter darkly. “We need you now.”

“Now is the same as then in Heaven,” muttered Nietzsche, disentangling himself from the picnic table. “Where are we going?”

“Other end of time,” said Peter.

“Hot dog,” Origen shouted. He vaulted over the table after Nietzsche and Saint Peter. “I always wanted to see Creation.”

*   *   *

They stood on nothing, slightly above a rough-textured plain receding into darkness. Scattered vegetation struggled from the surface; thin, sword-like plants. The only light was from Saint Peter's Heavenly effulgence. Somewhere nearby, water lapped against an unseen shore. Unlike the rest of Heaven, this place stank of mold and rust and an odor of damp rock.

“I'm impressed,” observed Nietzsche. “What is this? The root cellar?”

“Foundations, more like it,” Peter said.

They both glanced at Origen, who looked intently into the darkness.

Peter waved his staff and the three of them, still standing on nothing, began to cruise over the landscape. Nietzsche found this far more unnerving than Heaven's usual cloudscape.

“Clouds,” said Peter, “simply hide the unsettling reality.”

Nietzsche stared at him.

Peter shrugged. “This close to the source, thoughts are words.”

“Mind your soul.” Origen spoke quietly. He sounded very sober.

There was a glimmering of light ahead, a false dawn that grew into a constellation of fireflies as they approached.

“This is the problem.” Peter's voice was stony and grim. “This has always been the problem.”

The fireflies became bonfires, and the bonfires became a sky full of light, and the sky full of light became a host of angels, in their naked majesty all swords and pinions and flames and power, burrowing amongst ribs larger than rivers.

Angels feasting on the corpse of God.

Like maggots eating Leviathan.

“His bones are the world's,” Origen said quietly. “His flesh is the world's. I was right. The Adversary did create Earth to torment us.”

“Heaven stands outside time,” Peter declared. “The world is made, for the first time and anew, over and over. For ever and ever.”

“So what do we do?” Nietzsche asked. “Is this the beginning, or the end?”

Peter turned to Nietzsche, laid one trembling hand on his shoulder. “Make it different this time. You have free will. He made you so. Break the cycle and create us a better world.”

“I have no power here.”

“You are Heaven's coroner.”

“God is dead,” Nietzsche whispered.

“Long live God,” Peter echoed.

“The Earth was without form and void,” said Origen.

Though it took time beyond measure for them to see the difference, mountains rose from His bones, while the terrible angels birthed snakes who would someday be teachers of men in their innocence.

Phantasies of Style and Place

 

Promises: A Tale of the City Imperishable

A story about a place I love, and wish I could have revisited. I managed two novels,
Trial of Flowers
and
Madness of Flowers,
and a few shorts. This world always wanted more.

Girl

She'd had a name, when she was little. All children did, even if it was just Grub or Little Jo or Sexta. But for some living on the brawling streets of the City Imperishable, names were like cloaks, to be put on and taken off. And for some, a name might be cut away like a finger crushed beneath a cartwheel, lest rot set in.

The lash cracked past Girl's ear, so close she felt the sting, though without the burn of a rising welt.

This time.

Girl held her pose splayed against the wall, dipping her chin as best she could with her face pressed against the rough stone. She waited while Sister Nurse studied her. Right now, there were five of them under Sister Nurse's care. Each of them was named Girl. Each of them was taller than the broken hinge set in the wall stub along Pyrrhea Alley. Each of them was shorter than the rusted iron post in front of the Fountain of Hope where the alley let out on Hammer Lane. That was how long they had under Sister Nurse's care, from hinge to post. It was the way of things in the Tribade.

“What's your name?” Sister Nurse asked, looking up from just below Girl's feet.

“Girl,” she whispered, though a woman's voice in her head spoke another name.

“Where are you bound?”

It was the catechism, then. “From hinge to post.”

“You've my count of thirty to gain the roof,” Sister Nurse said.

Not the catechism after all. Girl scrambled, knowing the task to be impossible—there were at least five body lengths of wall above her, and the other Girls had been climbing quickly while she was stopped for questioning.

She came to a window at Sister Nurse's slow eleven. Scrambling up the side of the frame, it occurred to Girl that Sister Nurse had changed the rules. She was no longer climbing the wall, she was gaining the roof.

With no more thought than that, Girl tumbled into a dusty room. The lash cracked against the window frame, but missed the soles of her bare feet. She scrambled, taking up the count in her own head, looking for stair or ladder before time ran out and she was beaten bloody for both failure and insubordination.

Never again, she told herself. Not while she drew breath.

*   *   *

Each of the Girls had made a scourge. The six of them, for there had been six at the time, had gone into the River Saltus to land a freshwater shark. One Girl had been bitten so badly she was taken away bloody-stumped and weeping, never to return. The rest skinned their kill, cured the strange, rough hide, and cut it into long strips for braiding. They used human shinbones, found or harvested at their own discretion—Girl had cut hers from a three-day-old corpse—for the handles. The sharkskin braids were anchored to the handles by copper windings. Those, mercifully, had been provided, though Girl supposed only because the City Imperishable lacked mines for them to descend into.

She'd wound her old name into her handle, setting gaps in the copper in the places where the letters might have fallen. It was a code known only to Girl, a secret message from her former self to her future self in memory of silent promises of revenge and betterment. “You are you,” she'd said, a message being drawn out of her with red-hot tongs by the Sisterhood.

Whenever Sister Nurse landed a blow or cut across her back, her neck, her ass, her thighs, Girl knew it was with the power of her lost name behind it.

She'd never asked the other Girls if they'd somehow done the same. Perhaps they bled in vain. She did not.

*   *   *

The Tribade did indeed beat her bloody before a fire that roared in an iron grate. The metal glowed like eyes in the darkness of a summer night. Skin came away in narrow red flecks, while sisters shouted at her. Is this your name? Who are you? Why are you here?

“Girl,” she told them, until she could no longer move her jaw. That was all she said, no matter what they asked her. She would give them no satisfaction. Instead she remembered every cut and blow, for the future.

In time Sister Nurse cut Girl down and slung her across her neck like a haunch of meat. They trudged through moonlit streets, surrounded by beggars and whores and night soil men, none of whom lifted a face dark or pale to acknowledge Girl as she watched the world upside down through blood-dimmed eyes.

Stairs after that, stairs on stairs on stairs. They were climbing the Sudgate, the great, monstrous, empty castle which anchored the southwestern wall of the City Imperishable, brooding over the river and the poorest districts and the vine-wrapped forests that slunk away to the south. She could tell from the scent of the dust, too—this was cold stone crumbled with age and disuse, not scattered dirt and flakes of skin and pollen borne on bright winds from beyond the walls.

Even if Sister Nurse had remained still and silent, Girl would have known where she was. Then, and always.

On the roof—a roof, rather, for the Sudgate was ramified and ramparted like some palace of dream—the moonlight was almost violet. The heavy grease-and-shit scent of the Sudgate Districts moiled below them somewhere, miscegenating with night humors off the Saltus and whatever flowed down from the Heliograph Hill and the Limerock Palace. Sister Nurse set Girl down so that they stood on a narrow ledge, looking back across the City Imperishable to the north and east as a curious, abrasive wind plucked at them both.

The great ranging complex of the Limerock Palace in the middle distance was the most obvious structure. Gilded and tiled domes of the Temple District gleamed in the moonlight. The Rugmaker's Cupola on Nannyback Hill punctuated the northern horizon, its candy-striped walls shadow-on-shadow now. Smokestacks and factories and mansions and commercial buildings stood all across the City Imperishable. This close to the top of the Sudgate, they were as high up as all but the tallest of the buildings and hilltops.

Sister Nurse said a name. It was a familiar name, one borne by hundreds of female children in the City Imperishable. It was the name worked into the handle of her scourge. Girl said nothing, did not even blink or turn to face the half-familiar sound.