Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (20 page)

I feel I was vindicated when, in the book
Tin Woodman of Oz
, in one of the freakiest scenes ever, the Tin Woodman comes across his old severed head, which was stored in the deserted cabinet of the tinsmith, still alive and able to talk. The two were clearly different people. And even freakier, all the severed limbs of the Woodman were stowed in a barrel out back, still alive, but not connected to any person. I think the tinsmith later glued them together, Frankenstein-style, and made a new man out of the cast-off parts. Which made me wonder why he did not use that magic glue in the first place just to glue back on the severed fingers and limbs of Nick Chopper back when he was a flesh-and-blood person.

Whatever. The point was that people in Oz could not die, but their bodies could be severed and scattered, and each part would remain alive, but a group of cells smashed and scattered across acres of land would not be able to move, or talk, or think, or do any of the things living things do, except persist.

So I was not looking forward to hitting the ground.

If my people, my race, my whatever, could survive such things and walk away unscathed, we would probably be called the
Really Lucky Guys That No One Can Kill
, rather than
Those Who Seek Death in Vain
.

Two thoughts cheered me up. First, I would survive this. If a fall could kill us, we’d be called something like
Those Who Seek Death Successfully by Jumping off Really High Things
. Second, I had had one lesson in skydiving some months ago, and I had a really, really long way to go.

So I held my arms behind me just so, and bowed my head, and pointed my toes, and used my body like a surfboard of the air, and started drifting to the left as I fell, rather than to the right, closer and closer to the Tower, which, after all, had all sorts of projections and balconies and other things to grab on …

I heard the thunderclap of noise of a Moebius gate somewhere in the atmosphere above me snapping open and shut. You do not need to touch the cone of a tornado to be in the tornado: I did not feel the wind grab me, because I was moving with it. The Dark Tower was warping the winds of the world to carry me where it willed I should go.

The hurricanic insanity of wind that flung me along must have been calculated with the precision known to rocket scientists or sharpshooters. The flare of light from the upper Moebius gate was bright as a lightning bolt, and so for a long second or two, I was not blind.

The last thing I recall were Bronze-Age Spacemen standing in a line with nets on a battlement just below the section of wall that came far too suddenly toward me. They wore what looked like Victorian diving suits, or space-armor someone from a Jules Verne story might wear, if Jules Verne was from the pre-Biblical Near East, and copied the shape of his space helmets from the conical helms of Sumerian warlords, or Babylonian, or Chaldaean, complete with plumes shaped like question marks, ceremonial wigs made of wire and ceremonial beards made of copper.

The wall in this area was ornamented with spikes and lances pointing outward, toward which I was flung at an oblique angle at terminal velocity. The net was strung up between these spearpoints.

To me, the dark wall was a flyswatter, and I was a fly.

I don’t remember the impact.

If my brains scattered out of my skull like the yolk of a dropped egg, and recorded no memories until they slowly slurped back inside as bone re-grew and reassembled, and particles of blood magically or magnetically re-gathered into me, that I do not know. That would have been cool, though.

Freaky gross, but cool.

I woke up naked in a cylindrical cage whose sides were black metal and whose floor was bright lampwood. The planks formed a circular platform suspended over a few miles of empty air. The lampwood planks were glowing with a cold, bright blue and ceaseless light, painful to the eye, neon-bright, annoying. Around the big hole in the floor there was no railing and no sign saying WATCH YOUR STEP.

The curve of the wall was covered with hundreds of inward-pointing spikes, like the inside-out version of one of Mom’s hair curlers or Dad’s lawn aerator.

I had a headache, and it was darn cold, and the air was too thin to breathe.

Below freezing.

What woke me, beside the cold, was a sound in the background of wind hissing or yowling or droning or screeching like the high string on a fiddle. It fell silent near where I was, but then a moment later I could hear it dimly either half a mile or two miles below me, or half a mile or two miles above. The tortured voice of the wind changed pitch and location and volume, but never fell silent.

I stood, looking for an escape. It was an ugly place.

This circle of floor slanted slightly toward the hole. I wished I had a coin or a BB to drop, so that I could have checked to see if the slant was something I was imagining, or was real.

I was going to get to know that glowing wood quite well. The entire space where I lived and moved and suffered my continued existence was a narrow zero of glowing wood surrounding a long drop into nothingness.

The walls of the cage I inspected for joints or weak spots or the seam of a door. The spikes were nine inches long, made of some alloy I did not recognize, and evenly spaced across each part of the wall, all pointing inward. So huddling up against the wall to minimize the chance of rolling over in your sleep and falling out the hole was discouraged.

Even as I stood, one of the spikes started slowly to expand like a telescoping rod or a car jack. I moved out of the way before it pushed me into the hole, staring in wonder. Magical growing metal? It was not the weirdest thing I had seen today, but it was weird because it seemed so silent, so sinister, so unnatural.

When I moved, another spike started to unfold very slowly behind me. I never heard any footsteps or voices behind the wall indicating a pikeman was shoving the pikes. Maybe the system was on automatic. If so, there was no resting inside this cage. Every few minutes, you’d have to move. So, no one could sleep here.

There was no pattern to it. The darn things were completely silent. There was no clicking or ticking an honest machine would make to warn you. Sometimes they opened quickly, too quickly to dodge, and at other times, so slowly that you could not see them growing.

The roof also had a round opening in it, directly above the hole in the floor. There was a tic-tac-toe grating of four rather thin bars that looked to me like they’d be easy to bend. The thinness of those bars almost taunted me with how easy it should be to climb out.

In a circle around the edge of this upper hole was a ring of bright gold, twisted like a Moebius strip. A twilight gate? Above that was another chamber or area. I could only catch a glimpse of a patch of its ceiling directly above me, with an arched vault of black brick.

All I had to do was wait until the random pattern of expanding spikes gave me enough of a grip to get to the top. I shook my head and snorted. Was it really going to be this easy?

It wasn’t.

There was a moment when more than four spikes at four different heights off the floor were telescoped out to their full length, and I saw my chance, and used the rods like an impromptu ladder, trying to make for that opening.

Then a rod unfolding as fast as an arrow from a string jabbed into my abdomen, and blood and viscera poured out, and my arms and legs jerked, and another rod unfolded laterally, so that it caught me across the midriff as the first rod yanked back, slipping me as neatly off the spike as you might push a meatball off your fork with your knife. All the rods were retracted at once; there was no more makeshift ladder, nothing to grab, only a long fall underfoot.

Down I plunged.

I was not too worried, insane as that might sound. I figured I would splatter somewhere in the landscape far away from the base of the tower, pull myself slowly together, rest, and walk on out of there. Maybe I would find an unwatched clothesline or a lonely farmer’s cottage where I could get some clothing. I remember I actually laughed at how easy it would be for an unkillable boy to escape an open cage, and I folded my arms behind my head, and crossed my legs, as I toppled end over end through the stratosphere.

I spread my arms and legs, so that the world stopped spinning. There were clouds pushed across the walls of the Dark Tower, which looked like an icebreaker drifting through the sea. I saw the world, a patchwork quilt of green and brown, far underfoot.

The wind caught me like a leaf, and blew me against the metal towerside, long before I hit the clouds so far below, or hit the world.

There were nets strung up to catch me and break my fall, and men in Bronze-Age looking spacesuits or diving helmets with harpoons were waiting to close the net and beat me senseless. I woke up in the cell again.

No one came to speak to me that day. No one gave me food or drink. The thirst started really getting to me. The very smallest hint of what it meant to be from the Order of Those Who Yearn in Vain for Death was beginning to nag and grow at the back of my mind.

That night, I fell again. Some spear had poked and pushed me over the side into the abyss of air. I had no recollection of falling asleep: I was just too exhausted to stay awake. I woke from dreams of flying to the dizzy horror of an endless fall. I saw the stars above and the city lights below.

I did not see the men waiting for me this time. In the distance, I saw lanterns on the top of tall brass helmets, which turned toward me like spectators at a tennis match as I zoomed past them. Perhaps I missed the net, or there was not one this time. Someone or something harpooned me as I flew past dark balconies and walls at terminal velocity, and the barbed heads sank into my flesh, and the long lines sang and went tight, and I slammed against the side of the Dark Tower and felt every bone in my body break.

How had they known both times the exact spot where I would fall? Between the wind, and even little things like my orientation as I fell, or whether I extended my limbs or pulled them in, would have changed my point of impact by thousands of feet.

And I woke in the cell again. No one was there.

They did not put me in casts or splints: I lay there with both arms and both legs broken, compound fractures sticking out of my skin, and the only medicine was me trying to push broken bones back together with my unaided, naked fingers. I had to try to straighten a broken arm with my other broken arm to get the bone ends back in place, or push the joint back into the socket.

There was no morphine, no aspirin, no nurses, no voices.

And there was nothing else in the cell. No soap to whittle into the shape of a gun, and no guard to fool with it. No floor to dig under to dig my way out.

Days passed, and nights, and I never slept longer than dazed naps, and lost track of time.

And the spikes never stopped expanding, never formed a pattern, and so, even with both arms and legs broken, I had to keep moving, despite the blinding pain, or else get pushed out of the hole again.

I was there for an eternity.

Yes, I had plenty of time to stare down that hole. From the distance between the cage and the Dark Tower wall, I figured the birdcage was suspended on some sort of really long yardarm, hanging out over an abyss of air.

By day, I gazed and pondered.

I counted the points of the bastions and made geometric calculations in my head, wishing I had something to write on. I stared at the ravelins and redoubts, bonnettes and lunettes, tenailles and tenaillons, counterguards and crownworks and hornworks and curvettes and fausse brayes and scarps and cordons and banquettes and counterscarps.

The main tower itself, I eventually deduced, was an octakaidecagon with a triangular bastion at each vertex. What looked like complex outerworks were actually part of the shield wall, connected by bridges or built as one piece.

This indicated that this world had some form of big guns, because there is no point in an architect calculating out so many zones of redundant overlapping fields of fire, if he expects the Tower to repel besiegers armed with nothing more than pikes and arrows. But it also suggested this world did not have the sophisticated weapons of our world. A hydrogen bomb would crack any tower like that in half; I don’t care what sort of metal it is made of.

By night, I studied the lights.

There were no lamps or spotlights on the Dark Tower. Hence the name, I guess. But from time to time, at dusk or dawn, I would see some sort of lines or channels or canals running straight up the sides. The same bluish light which had suddenly flamed inside the chamber where I had been caught was shining from these canals, but so dimly that they seemed like darkness made visible, illuminating nothing.

What was that blue light? A defense against escaped clouds of Uncreation? Perhaps so, because I never felt the least stirring of the Oobleck I had once swallowed. I assume they cut it out of my stomach before I woke. That is what I would have done.

At right angles to these channels, vast battlements or balconies like roadways circumvallated the diameter of the tower. Tiny patches of green and squares and threads of blue told me that there were gardens filling some of the balconies visible far below me. These were immense plots bigger than football fields, but so far away as to seem like the gardens and fountains of a dollhouse in a little girl’s room.

The air must have been thicker down there, or perhaps the gardeners had a technology for sustaining greenery above thirty thousand feet. Vines of ivy and grapes and orchids growing along the coils of lianas hung over the side of these immense battlements, beards of green reaching down from each of these crenellated brinks.

I saw petals cast by the thin, high ice-winds of the stratosphere drifting and dripping down, in a constant and intermittent confetti. The sense of desolation that comes to some men in autumn touched my soul.