Against the Day (154 page)

aving journeyed eastward through the
day, the
Inconvenience
had set down beneath the bleak sunset with the
menacing flank of a sandstorm not far off. At first glance no one appeared to
live here. From the air it had seemed a single giant roof of baked mud, as if
you could walk across the entire city without descending to the invisible
streets. Beneath the unpenetrated surface, the world, scarcely comprehensible,
went about its business, the cosmetics artists in hidden rooms who knew how to
conceal white patches appearing on the skin, which, leprosy or not, found on
anyone outside the lepers’ quarter meant summary execution
. . .
the
rishta
doctors patiently removing guineaworms, making an incision,
trapping the threefootlong creature’s head in a cleft at the end of a stick,
and then slowly winding it out of the incision, around the stick, cautiously,
so as not to break the
rishta
and cause an infection
. . .
the secret drinkers and merchants’
wives insatiably drawn to caravan drivers who would be gone long before
morning.

Nobody
aboard
Inconvenience
slept soundly that night. Darby had the 4:00 to
8:00 a.m. watch, and Miles was rattling around the galley preparing breakfast,
and Pugnax was on the bridge, looking east, still as stone, when the Event in
the sky occurred, the early daylight deepening past orange, too general in
space or memory to know where to look till the sound arrived, ripping apart the
firmament over western China—by which time the terrible pulse had already
begun to fade to a counterstain of aquamarine, and a mutter of drumfire at the horizon.
They were all gathered at the quarterdeck by now. A sudden hot wind enveloped
them, gone nearly before they could think of how to get in out of it. Randolph
ordered the special sky detail set, and they ascended to have a look at
whatever it was.

   
In
the pale blue aftermath, the first thing they noticed was that the city below
was not the same as the one they had arrived at the night before. The streets
were all visible now. Fountains sparkled everywhere. Each dwelling had its own
garden inside. Markets seethed in cheerful commotion, caravans came and went
through the city gates, tiled and gilded domes shone in the sun, towers soared
like song, the desert was renounced.

“Shambhala,”
cried Miles, and there was no need to ask how he knew— they all knew. For
centuries the sacred City had lain invisible, cloaked in everyday light, sun,
star, and moonlight, the campfires and electric torches of desert explorers,
until the Event over the Stony Tunguska, as if those precise lightfrequencies
which would allow human eyes to see the City had finally been released. What it
would take the boys longer to understand was that the great burst of light had
also torn the veil separating their own space from that of the everyday world,
and that for the brief moment they had also met the same fate as Shambhala,
their protection lost, and no longer able to count on their invisibility before
the earthbound day.

They
proceeded rapidly eastward, high above the taiga. Evidence of disaster
somewhere ahead began to appear. They arrived over the scene of devastation
shortly after the
Bol’shaia Igra.

   
“It
was the Trespassers,” Lindsay declared.

“We
do know they are far more advanced than we in the applied sciences,” Randolph
said. “Their will to act is pure and uninflected. Would a catastrophe of this
size be beyond their means? Technically? morally?”

“At
least we cannot say this time that we were
sent here,
”
added Lindsay, meaningfully
glaring at Darby Suckling.

“That
hardly establishes anybody’s innocence,” opined the Legal Officer, but before
they could get into a dispute, the Tesla device wheezed into active status.
Miles began throwing appropriate switches, and Randolph took the speakinghorn.

It
proved to be Professor Vanderjuice, transmitting from Tierra del Fuego, where
he had been measuring variations in the Earth’s gravity. “Discombobulated
dynamos!” he cried, “apparently we happened to be at the point on Earth
directly opposite this Event. Everything here just went chaotic—magnetic
storms, all communication interrupted, the wiring in the power supplies melted
. . .
as for the gravity readings, it is
difficult even this soon after to quite believe, but. . . gravity itself for a
moment simply vanished. Motor launches, tents, cookstoves, all went flying up
into the sky, perhaps never to land again on Earth. Bless me, if I hadn’t been
down by the water fishing, why, I might have been taken anywhere.

   
“Now
that Gibbs is gone, I’ve no one back at Yale to consult with about this,” said
the distraught academician. “It is still possible to contact Kimura, I suppose,
and Dr. Tesla. Unless the terrible rumors about him are true.”

According
to Professor Vanderjuice, the story was abroad that Tesla, seeking to
communicate with the explorer Peary, then in the Arctic, projecting unspecified
rays from his tower at Wardenclyffe in a direction slightly west of due north,
had mistaken his aim by a small but fatal angle, causing the beam to miss
Peary’s base at Ellsmere Island, cross the Polar region over into Siberia, and
hit the Stony Tunguska instead.

“Here
is what puzzles me about the story. Did Tesla want to send Peary a message, or
beam him a quantity of electric power, or for some undisclosed reason blast him
off the map? Tesla may not even have been involved, for it is unclear just who
is at Wardenclyffe anymore—Tesla seems to have abandoned the place after
Morgan’s abandoned him. That is all I can find out at this antipodal remove.”

“It
sounds like capitalistic propaganda,” said Darby. “Dr. Tesla has always had his
enemies in New York. The place is a nightmare of backbiting, tort lawyers, and
patent disputes. It is the fate of anyone who does serious science. Look at
Edison. Look particularly at our colleague, Brother Tom Swift. He spends more
time these days in court than in the laboratory.”

“The
last time I saw Tom, he looked older than I do,” the Professor said. “Nothing
like perpetual litigation to age a man before his time.”

They arranged
a
skyrendezvous with the
Bol’shaia Igra,
over Semipalatinsk. Seen from the
ground, the two airships together accounted for a quarter of the visible sky.
The boys wore matching sable hats and wolfskin cloaks, purchased at the great
February market in Irbit.

“Why
didn’t you tell us about Trespassers sooner?” Padzhitnoff struggling to be
amiable. “We’ve known since Venice, and we might have been able to help.”

   
“Why
should you have believed anything we told you?”

“Officially,
of course not. Must always be ‘some American trick.’ You can imagine emotions
up at staff level—very delicate balance of interests out here, who needs
Americans to come blundering in, like galloping cowboys, disrupting all known
quantities?”

   
“But
unofficially
. . .
you,
as a
skybrother,
might
have believed us?”

“I?
since Tunguskan
obstanovka,
I believe everything. Back in St. Petersburg”—a
shared look of not so much disdain as sympathetic resignation to the ways of
the surfaceworld—“they want to believe it was a Japanese weapon. Russian
military intelligence wants us to confirm it was Japanese— or at least
Chinese.”

   
“But.
. . ?”

   
“American
government? What do they think?”

   
“We
don’t work for them anymore.”

   
“
Zdorovo!
You
are working for whom now?
Large American corporation?”

   
“Ourselves.”

Padzhitnoff
narrowed his gaze, which remained friendly. “You—balloonboys—are
large American corporation?”

Randolph
shrugged. “I guess not quite yet. Though with what’s been coming in on
investments, we may have to incorporate soon. We’re looking into Switzerland,
Neutral Moresnet, a couple of remote island territories—”

“What
do you think of Rand shares? Will bubble burst? Most of our money is there, and
in armaments.”

“We
have been gradually reducing our exposure in South Africa,” Lindsay said, “but
what’s looking very promising lately are Chinese Turkestan railway bonds.”

“Some
tchudak
in bar in Kiakhta told me same thing. He was blind drunk, of
course.”

In
a clicking and whistling cascade of electrical noises, the Russian wireless
receiver now came to life. Padzhitnoff picked up and was soon chatting away a
mile a minute, consulting maps and charts, sketching, calculating. When he was
done, he noticed Chick Counterfly looking at him strangely. “What.”

   
“You
just had that whole conversation in clear?”

   
“Clear?
What is ‘clear’?”

   
“Not
encrypted,” clarified Miles Blundell.

“No
need! Nobody else is listening! This is ‘wireless’! New invention! Better than
telephone!”

   
“All
the same, I’d be looking into some kind of encryption system.”

“Much
work for nothing! Not even Russian Army does that! Balloonboys, balloonboys!
Too careful, like old people!”

Returning
from the taiga, the crew of
Inconvenience
found the Earth they thought
they knew changed now in unpredictable ways, as if whatever had come to visit
above Tunguska had jolted the axes of Creation, perhaps for good. Below, across
the leagues of formerly unmarked Siberian forest and prairie, they saw a
considerable webwork of rail, steel within cleared rightsofway below shining as
rivercourses once had. Industrial smoke, in unhealthy shades of yellow and
reddish brown and acid green climbed the sky to lick at the underside of the
gondola. Birds they were used to sharing the sky with, migratory European
species, had vanished, leaving the region to the eagles and hawks that had
formerly hunted them. Huge modern cities of

multiple domes, towers of open
girderwork, smokestacks, and treeless plazas sprawled beneath, without a living
creature in sight.

By
dusk they had approached the fringes of a great aerial flotilla. Below them the
taiga was falling silent, as if beginning to yield to the hours of darkness and
sleep. Of the light seeping from the day, enough remained to reveal a sky
crowded everywhere with cargo balloons, immense and crewless, hung at all
altitudes upon the sky, the sunset illuminating finelyetched loadrings and
rigging, cargo nets and laded pallets swaying in the rising winds of the
evening, each borne by a different envelope, some perfectly spherical, others
shaped like watermelons, Polish sausages, or prize cigars, or streamlined like
oceancruising fish, or square or pointed or sewn together tightly into
stellated polyhedra or Chinese dragons, solid, striped, or streaked, yellow or
scarlet, turquoise or purple, a few of the newer craft equipped with
lowhorsepower engines, which now and then emitted brilliant gasps of steam,
just enough to keep station. Each was tethered by steel cable to a different
piece of rollingstock somewhere below, moving invisibly on its own track,
guiding its buoyed cargo to a different destination, all across the map of
Eurasia—as the boys watched, the highest envelopes of the fleet were
taken by the arc of Earth’s shadow advancing, flowing then in swift descent
among the lacqueredsilk flanks of the others, sweeping down onto the
countryside at last, to release it from quotidian light. Soon all that could be
seen were an earthbound constellation of red and green runninglights.

   
“As
above,” remarked Miles Blundell, “so below.”

Slowly as God’s justice
, reports began arriving out of the East, from what seemed
incomprehensibly eastward, as if the countless tiny engagements of an
unacknowledged war had at last been expressed as a single explosion, in an
almostmusical crescendo of a majesty usually encountered only in dreams.
Photographs would in due course begin to emerge, as if from a developingbath,
and be circulated
. . .
then copies
of copies, after a while degraded nearly to the most current of abstract art,
but no less shocking—virgin forest—every single trunk stripped
white, blown the unthinkable ninety degrees—flattened for miles.
Reactions in the West were uniformly hushed and perplexed, even among those
known as chattering fools. No one could dare to say which was worse—that
it had never happened before,
or that it had,
and that all the agencies
of history had conspired never to record it and then, displaying a sense of
honor hitherto unnoted, to maintain their silence.