Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (56 page)

With a flourish, the headless hulk offered the dripping brass tablet to me, smirking. “You don’t speak English,” I said. “But you were just waiting for me to realize I am an idiot. How did you guess?”

But I realized that, in this world, the one thing every man must have always thought and dreamt about, is finding out every last thing the Astrologers knew of him, not just what the Astrologers saw fit to tell.

Nakasu said something in his language, patted me on the head, and thumped me on the chest.

Abby said, “He says…”

“I know,” I said. “I am not using my skullbag because my chest ain’t got no brains in them. He and I are beginning to understand each other, language barrier or not.” Since he was sitting down, I threw a friendly arm around his shoulders, but with no neck on him, it was like putting your elbow on top of a chest of drawers. “Nakasu,” I said to him. “Since the back of your throat should be against your spine, how can your mouth hold things that, geometrically speaking, are too big to actually fit inside you?”

I hefted the tablet in my hand. “If I pitch this over the side, will they predict the fall and recover it?”

“Not if I do it,” she said.

I handed her the tablet, and she bent over it with her sickle weapon, and pried loose one of the Venetian blind slats with something written in cuneiform on it.

“What is that?”

She said, “Your name. In case we get separated again, I will use the Remembering Needle.”

Ossifrage said something in Hebrew. Abby said to me, “He wants to know why you do not read it, and at least discover what it is the enemy expects you to do?”

“Toss it,” I said.

She whirled it like a discus thrower, and it did not fly that far, but bounced once on the curve of the gasbag, went over the edge of the airship, and flipped end-over-end into the dark air below.

I said, “Tell Ossifrage I don’t believe in astrology. Besides, the stars might be able to track my movements better if
they
know
I
know what they predicted. If I don’t know, I think my chance of doing the right thing, predictable or not, goes up.”

And I did not say it to him, but the reason I wanted the damned thing thrown away was because I had a dread of it in the pit of my stomach.

I remember as a kid seeing a Twilight Zone show once where William Shatner in a diner gets addicted to a little devil-faced fortune-telling machine with a bobble head, just because it keeps telling him fortunes that were accurate. He was addicted to it. Just like cocaine. I don’t know how old I was when I saw it. I don’t think I was old enough to get the concept that one actor could play two parts. The idea that Captain Kirk, of all people, could be victimized by his own weakness offended my sense of the rightness of the world.

But I do remember how old I was when Wizard of Oz came on television. It was years earlier. I was four. I was so terrified of the green-faced witch that I would cry and hide in my mother’s lap. That was back when I was small enough to crawl into her lap, back when I had a mother. I understood that the cruel and cackling witch could kill the sobbing and frightened little girl merely by turning an hourglass upside-down. I understood that this was
black magic
. It was unseen and unstoppable and unnatural. Against magic, neither the brains of the Scarecrow, nor the teeth of the Lion, nor the glittering ax of the Tin Man, could avail in the least.

So even at four years old I understood something Foster and my teenage friends from later in my life, the ones who toyed with Ouija boards or fooled around with tarot cards, simply did not get. Magic is not something from our world; it is not healthy, it is not meant for human beings.

The gleaming tablet with all its intricate and detailed predictions about me and my life caught the light of dormitory balcony windows as it fell past the inhabited floors, making a little glittering parabola of gold against the velvet blackness arcing toward the dark water so far below.

I waved bye-bye, and felt like I just got a little bit of my free will back.

I watched the searchlight play back and forth across the huge dome, as the crew of the airship on which we sat continued to hunt for us so diligently, an unpredictable anomaly in their perfect deterministic machine of a world. I stretched out on the leathery surface, found it almost as comfy as an air mattress, crossed my legs, put my hands behind my head, and felt a little smug.

As the airship on which we perched searched for us along the ceiling dome that was so like a low and metal sky, eventually we were carried to a position near where the needle was pointing.

Ossifrage snatched us with his weightlessness trick off the slippery top of the zeppelin, and flung us through the air, avoiding the searchlight. But someone aboard must have had a wolf nose, or Panotii ears, or eyes as big as Nakasu’s, because a cry rang out, and then a trumpet.

We passed over a balcony and landed in a walled garden. I smelled oranges. It was an orange grove.

We heard a noise, and then a dozen shots from the zeppelin hit the wall behind us. It was not loud like a cannon ball, and there was not a flash like their lantern weapons, but the spears or boulders or whatever it was smashed against the bricks, cracking them in places, and a smell like molten metal or ozone, a hot and airless smell, stung my nostrils. Clouds of black smoke were pouring up from the wall where the broadside had hit. We saw the huge prow of the zeppelin turning. She was approaching us in a sinuous path, to allow her to bring her portside guns to bear while her starboard were reloading.

Ossifrage said something, looked impatient and stepped back up into the air, his hair and beard flowing and flapping in the current of whatever unseen force boiled around him and held him aloft.

He did not have a brave look on his face, just grim, like he had to do a task and did not have much time to do it, and he wanted it over with. I thought it was the bravest look I’d ever seen, and I made a mental note to try to copy it next time I was in a fight.

Abby told me he was going to drive the armored warship of the air away.

“By himself?”

She said, “It is a lighter-than-air machine. His power is levity. They are helpless.”

Abby must have been right, because when the airship fired another broadside, all the shots went wild, and the giant ship came into view up overhead for a moment, all horns ringing and gongs sounding, and then heeled over to one side, listing terribly, and the nose dropped, and all the propellers screamed into highest velocity. I don’t think there was an engine as such. The propellers on the gondola looked as if they were jet-black, self-moving blades of living metal.

The ship fired wildly as she careened lower and lower—this time I saw what was being fired were black balls made of glass, balls that broke and emitted black clouds on impact. Four of them came near the severe old man standing in midair. The glass shells slowed, and stopped, and hung near him like balloons for a moment, and then floated away to land gently on a balcony not far away. He was too nice just to drop them on whoever was below.

Meanwhile, we ducked our heads and looked for a door in the dark to get out of the walled garden. I should have been looking too, but the smell, that delightful and refreshing smell, stabbed me with pure hunger. When was the last time I had eaten? Days ago? I yanked oranges one after another into a fold of my mantle, and started wolfing them down. Nakasu laughed, and broke off a whole branch to take with him.

Ossifrage descended from the metal sky in a flutter of camel-hair robes and said something stern in Hebrew. It was one of the few things he said where I clearly understood every word: “Thou shalt not steal.” So I pretended not to understand and I offered him an orange.

His face darkened. He looked like he was thinking of flinging me back onto the zeppelin.

We found a door inside and ran through dark corridors, one after another.

Then Abby called a halt, lit up her cloak pins, and, dangling her magic needle from a thread, watched it intently. She was wearing her porcelain She-Monkey-faced mask, which she had donned when the glass cannonballs started belching black smoke in our direction.

With a mouth full of orange pulp, I said to Abby, “How do the people here get the trees to grow inside?”

She spoke absentmindedly, tapping the needle and watching it turn. “Only trees whose wood can act like lampwood flourish. The Archangel blood gives them joy and nourishment, like sunlight.”

“Wait, you mean you can do your glowy stick thing trick on living wood?”

“Of course. Why should we not?”

“How does it work?”

“By magic.”

“Like your mask?”

“Of course not!” I could not see her eyes, but her tone of voice told me she was rolling them. “That is alchemy. This is twilightry.”

“Which means what?”

I heard her sigh, and I imagined I heard the courtesy of a noble-born lady’s upbringing coming to the fore, preventing her from any further sign or sound of impatience. “As I said before. An aspect of the wood is carefully lowered towards Uncreation, which is unseen, all around us. The light is shed by the tears of pain of The Archangel.”

“Creepy. I’ve been meaning to ask. How do you ignite the lampwood? Nothing here has switches or buttons.”

She said, “I am of Ur. I am of the Oneness. All which is part of the One touches all else which is part of the One.”

But then the needle twitched, and she must have liked that twitch particularly, for she set out at a quick trot.

Abby led us through empty dormitory rooms and unlit corridors. Some of the rooms had furniture in them, but covered with tarps (which oddly enough, made me feel homesick. I mean people back on earth putting chairs and couches into storage do the same thing). Other rooms had fire pits in the floor.

The apartments were clustered in squares of nine, each one surrounding a public bath. The water in the bath was frozen, but not cold to the touch. How they crystallized the water without lowering the temperature, I did not know. They had running water coming out of aqueducts of living metal. Our plumbing is better. They did not seem to have hot-water pipes.

Multiple apartments also opened up on a central space where there were these tall, round, narrow rooms with nooses made of white silk hanging from the ceiling. They had walls covered in velvet, and incense burners shaped like flowers. Beneath each noose was a tall and narrow stool on a hinge. It did not look like a gallows.

I pointed at a noose. “What is this? I thought this was the married officers’ quarters?”

She said, “This is a communal death-closet. It is provided as a convenience. It is considered bad luck for a bride who commits suicide to spill her blood on the wedding night.”

I did not ask any further questions. In my mind’s eye, I was trying to imagine living in a world where everyone knows whom he will marry from the day he is born, or if your parents or grandparents were curious enough to ask, from before that. So there is no mystery, no courtship, no romance, no nothing. Just breeding like livestock.

Look at it from the girl’s point of view. Even if you might have liked the guy if he had asked for your hand, how could you do anything but hate him if he were
assigned
?

I thought about people in my world who just hook up without getting married. I felt like a freak in school, back when I went to school, because most the kids even at fourteen or fifteen, if they were not virgins, had at least gotten some sort of action. Or at least all the guys talked that way. Maybe they were all lying. Maybe they felt like freaks too. My dad told me that the teen suicide rate was a lot higher than it had been in his youth, or at any point in history.

I looked at the nooses, disturbed. I don’t know many girls, but every single one I know watches soap operas or reads romance novels. It is all about the romance for them. So when that is gone, what do they really live for?

My mom once told me, back when I was a kid, that I would never understand girls unless I understood the fear of being lonely and alone. She said no girl would ever understand boys unless she understood the fear of being dishonored and defeated.

I don’t know if she was right, and I do remember what brought the subject up: I had quarreled with the babysitter’s niece when she wanted to play house, and I tried to sacrifice her Raggedy Ann doll, our baby, to the Dark Side of the Force. I cannot bring her name to mind. Becky? Boopsie? Bonny? Babs?

She grew up to be totally smoking hot, and I mean like a cover girl on a girly magazine, a svelte and athletic brunette with hazel eyes that positively smoldered. She started hanging out with Curt Champion, from one of the older families in town, and he was pretty well-off and pretty wild and did pretty much whatever the heck he felt like.

I suppose Curt Champion probably did pretty much whatever he felt like with her too. Around that time, she started getting tattoos painted up and down both her arms, and not little delicate floral ones either, but leering faces and images of death like you see on the cover art of heavy metal bands. And she got pierced, and then pierced some more. She was wearing nose rings and lip studs and a dozen rings in each ear until she looked like a cannibal squaw in National Geographic. All the kids at school said she was cool.

But the smoky fire in her eyes vanished. They were just dull brown after that.

She dropped out of school, and I never saw her again, and did not hear what eventually happened to her. I was being homeschooled by then, and you don’t pick up rumors in the cafeteria when you eat in your own kitchen every day.

But now I knew what happened to her. Without ever leaving the Earth, she entered a world like this one: a place without romance. Without mystery, without love.

With one last look at the white silk noose, I put my head down and hurried after Abby, glad to be out of there.

Eventually we made our way to a dark chamber filled with small, child-sized coffins. Here was something that looked like an elevator door for midgets. With her weapon, Abby pried up some clamps holding that small door shut. I assume the door was meant for people tiny as Panotii. She could not open it, even when all the clamps whined and retracted, so Nakasu put his shoulders (both shoulders, including his collar bone) against the door, and his massive feet against the opposite wall, and just straightened his legs. We heard creaking and snapping noises. He slammed his shoulders, both at once, into the door again and again. With no head in the way, and his blowhole pinched shut, he could act as a human battering ram, and get a lot of leverage for his blows. Boom. The door went down.