Cloud Permutations (14 page)

But the Bay of Black its name remains for most, for there is something awesome and frightening about it beyond its beauty: it is a place of night, and of the vast darkness that lies between the stars. Into this place, huge and silent and unknown, Kal and Bani sailed, and with the last of their power, with the engine failing at last, they rowed to the glassy shore.

There are many conflicting versions of this story. In some, the Guardians await the two boys on the shore, in one last desperate ambush, and the two boys fight, sustaining many wounds, until at last they win their way into the tower. This is Bani’s version of the story, told each time with more embellishments, with larger and more desperate forces arrayed against them with each telling, but it is probably not true. In others yet, it is the tower itself that halts them, some invisible defences awakening from millennia-long slumber to challenge their two unannounced visitors. In some versions of this there is a sphinx-like figure, or perhaps a jester, who riddles the boys, and in some of those versions it is Kal who wins the day, who solves the riddles and gains entrance for them both. But it is hard to imagine what sort of riddles an ancient alien entity might come up with: the stories are never entirely clear on that point. Nor is the purpose of such riddles particularly clear, and in any case, we have never found evidence of such protection, such
interference
from the tower. The tower exists, perfect and whole and immutable. It cannot be modified. It cannot be destroyed. And though occasional stories of ghosts do surface from time to time, we have found no evidence of the tower being in any sense aware or alive. It is an edifice, an artefact, a testament to its unknown builders. It has no need to do anything but be.

In other versions still, the boys encounter a tribe of half-wild
waetman
, men and women wearing strange tattered uniform clothes that were once, perhaps, a kind of overall-type outfit with a repeating design of sorts, a common motif sewn on their breast. The mythical
waetman
capture the two boys and seem intent on cooking them. They have a complex social arrangement, with their chief at the top, and everyone else having a specific function, a role they must perform within their rigid hierarchy. Why that should be so the stories never tell: and it seems a curious detail, but only one of many to have attached themselves over the years to Kal’s story.

At last—so all these stories agree—after much fear and harrowing danger, the two boys escape half-scalded from the cooking-pot, and find their way into the tower and safety.

But that story, too, is unlikely. Though the tower is large enough to hold hidden entire cities and a multitude of tribes, we have never found a shred of evidence to support the story of the waetman. It is an embellishment, no more, one of the many added over the distance of years by a multitude of story-tellers.

All that is certain, at any rate, is this: that Kal and Bani entered the Bay of Black; that they reached the smooth, glassy shore and stepped onto it; and that they found at last an entry into the tower.

Whoever had built the tower favoured huge spaces over practical ones. The whole edifice is what was once called a Folly, a place built for vanity, not use. Though the tower has a purpose, it has no obvious
reason
to exist; its function could be fulfilled with ease by use of a minimal cord running from orbit to the surface. But the tower’s use is only a side-product. It is first and foremost a statement; or, perhaps, a tombstone.

The entrance through the Bay of Black is small at first, but it expands startlingly, and becomes cathedral-like, smooth black arches rising for over a mile above, forming an unsmiling mouth through which one enters, stepping on smooth-shiny black stone with footsteps that make no sound. There are no echoes. Yet the place, once entered, is not entirely dark; there are strands of silver light running through the walls, like quartz through stone once it is cut open, and that—
motif
, that design—runs through the entire structure. Walking through First Hall can take days. They camped inside that first night, lying on that smooth, warm stone—for the tower is never cold, and the energies that sustain it from the deeps are those of volcano and quake—and watched the huge darkness above them. It felt like the biggest place Kal had ever been in: bigger than a world, for size is imposed by borders, and the borders of the tower are immense.

‘I wish I had a cigarette,’ Bani said, and Kal laughed. They were easier with each other now. He said, ‘How do we get to the top?’

They were lying in the midst of a dark ocean of calm. They had no water, no food, and no fire. Bani said, ‘Walk.’

They walked.

They survived. They went on—starved, desiccated—they walked because there was nothing else to do. Now that they had found the tower, it seemed to Kal impossible that they would ever find a way to the top. ‘We’re going to die here,’ he said to Bani, with a strange, quiet acceptance, but Bani didn’t reply. He was looking at something in the distance and smiling his old cynical smile.

Think of the tower as a stone, with strands of quartz running through it in spirals like human DNA. What Bani saw—what Bani discovered—was one of the arteries of the tower: a tube that rose from the floor of First Hall and disappeared into the darkness above. It glowed a faint silver glow. As it rose it twisted and spiralled, its multi-faceted sides reflecting nothing. It took them hours yet before they reached it. Its base was as large as a ship, and it seemed dead.

Yet when the two boys approached it, something came alive. Systems that had been dormant for millennia returned to the surface with smooth, eternal efficiency, and a part of the tube’s wall dissolved, opening onto an interior full of light.

Kal turned his head away. He had lived in the dark for what felt like years, then. The sudden light blinded him, and he lifted his hand over his eyes, and realised he was crying.

He sat down, cross-legged on the floor. Bani sat down beside him. For a long while they sat in silence, awed by the light.

Kal’s eyes grew gradually accustomed to the glare. When he looked up he saw the interior of the tube, a carriage he might have compared in size to an ocean-liner, if such things had existed on Heven.

The carriage was empty. There were no seats, no controls. The light came from hidden sources embedded in the walls. Bani said, ‘Kal … ‘ and didn’t finish. Kal nodded. They both rose. They held each other’s hand. Kal smiled.

Then they went inside the tube, and the wall reformed on the outside, and closed them in. They could see through the walls. They watched as lights come alive in ones and twos all around First Hall, illuminating the impossibly distant ceiling above, shining everywhere like hidden treasures; and the carriage shot out and spiralled away towards the heavens, and bore Kal and Bani with it.

— Chapter 21 —

ANTAP

KNOWING THE END of a story does not make it easy to tell. Over the generations many have tried, but details are sparse, exaggerations rife. What we do know is this: that the tube they took extends all the way from First Hall to the top of the tower itself; that it passes, in its crazy loops and turns, through Halls Second to Thirty-Fifth (all silent. All empty. All large enough to house the cargo of a thousand living worlds) before it attains the stratosphere and, at last, enters the great Space Port itself, and reaches the end of the edifice they call the Cord-wainer Tower.

Here, where the air thins and clouds cannot rise, the stars are closest, and the blackness of the tower gives way to the blackness of space. The tower rises over Heven, but one cannot see far, for the clouds mass underneath, in groups and clusters, drifting forever over the single vast ocean and its tiny, insignificant islands. Here the tower rises over Heven in all of its immensity, its grandiosity, its purposelessness. It is a Folly, and there are those anthropologists who speculate that the tower itself is a kind of cargo-cult monument, that it was built by aliens who believed in faster-than-light travel, as if by building such a space port, huge and empty, all the ships and bright cargo of the galaxy would be drawn there.

There is another aspect to this theory, far-fetched as it may seem. The argument is that whoever was capable of building such a tower may well have been capable of altering the laws of physics. And where, after all,
are
the builders? Would it not make sense to assume that they did possess true star travel, and left en masse, and will one day return? The proliferation of theories—and new religious movements—continues. There are few answers.

For Bani and Kal, it was a long, slow, undoubtedly uncomfortable journey. Yet the view may have compensated for it. There are several moments in the carriage’s journey when it traverses the outer wall of the tower, emerging onto the surface of the walls, and from there the drop down is a god’s-eye view, a cloud’s view, and there is another when it circumnavigates the circumference of the tower even as it continues to rise, and the Space Port itself becomes apparent then, there on the border between air and cold space, between sunlight and stars: and the great huge flat landing area of the Space Port becomes visible, stretching out across forever like a harvested field, and what they must have seen then—

‘It’s a spaceship,’ Bani said. ‘Kal, look! It’s a fucking spaceship!’ Kal looked. They were on the edge of space now, and gravity was lessening and he was floating and he was sick. His sick floated beside him. But it didn’t really matter.

All around them rose the Space Port. It was not Bani’s space elevator, a thin strand like a beanpole running up into orbit, but a vast monolith, and at its apex lay a disc of smooth black metal, large enough to hold a thousand giant ships if such ever existed.

And there, almost on the edge of vision, across the empty field—a flash, as of light touching metal. The carriage spiralled and whirled; it had been rising for hours—or had it been days? Yet now, at last, it came to a halt, slowing, settling down finally at the other end of its organic-looking tube. Bani shouted, ‘Shit! Kal, the doors—we have no air!’ as the wall of the carriage began to dissolve. Kal kicked against the wall, fell through the air in an undignified fashion—and emerged out of the carriage and onto the plane of the Space Port itself.

And breathed in air.

The sunless sea Bani described was never found. It has been suggested that the breathable air one encounters at the top of the tower somewhat resembles the story of breathable water, which would suggest a correlation between the makers of that sea and the tower’s builders. If so, it may well be that the builders were ocean-dwelling air-breathers (not unlike the few Great Old Ones still, or so it is rumoured, remaining in the wild), which could also conveniently explain the sheer
size
of the tower, its halls and transportation system. Yet the sea was never found, and the single Olfala Bigwan ever captured, in the early days of settlement, was deemed unintelligent, a predator which had never developed language or tools. Many questions remain. Yet when Bani and Kal half-floated, half-stumbled out onto the huge landing deck of the tower, the temperature was warm, and they could breathe.

‘Look,’ Bani said again—he pirouetted in the air, rising above Kal like a pale balloon—’Look!’

Kal, too, rose up. He floated until he was level with Bani, and looked as the roof stretched out and away from them in every direction, an empty shiny surface, but for—

‘It’s a ship.’

The thing was far in the distance, a great silent whale of metal, black against the tower. ‘Do you think it’s the
Hilda Lini?
’ Kal said, and Bani’s answer, recorded for posterity, was, ‘I don’t know, but I’m going to take a look.’

It was a fording, the place where stories diverge, where one branch of a tree becomes two. Bani’s story—what he found there in Space Port itself, and how he explored the place of the Cord-wainer and met the odd Other again and then travelled, and where and how he met the beautiful and enigmatic Mikhaila Petrova—is well-known, and can be found elsewhere. Yet with Kal, it is only the ending that is ever remembered, and not its details, which are these:

Kal had gone across the great roof of Space Port and come to its edge. He looked down.

Perhaps he thought: life is a series of towers one falls from, continuously.

But, in fairness, it is unlikely that he did. Kal looked down and saw Heven.

Below, clouds swirled and danced across a hazy blue sky that appeared like a reflection. Clouds formed and re-formed all over the world, changing and shifting, separating and merging, not a single entity but many that became one, then dozens, then hundreds, then one again: Kal looked down and saw all the myriad permutations of clouds.

A cloud rose, detached itself from another and came towards Kal, rising impossibly high, climbing through the layers of air until it reached the border of space itself, and there it reformed.

The man was small, and his head was entirely bald. His skin was a deep, dark blue, a shade fading into black and yet other. His head was criss-crossed with faint white lines that extended downwards, all the way down his naked body. The man came and sat down there on the edge of the tower, there on the edge of the world beside Kal.

Kal dangled his feet over the world and after a moment of not uncompanionable silence, said, ‘I remember you.’

‘And I you,’ the blue man said, ‘Kalbaben.’ Below the clouds drifted, a skyscape over a landscape, white against ocean blue—a world. Kal thought about Vira, dead in the air. He said, ‘All I wanted was to fly.’

‘You still can,’ the blue man said.

‘How?’ Kal said, with more bitterness than he perhaps intended.

‘Become a cloud?’

The blue man smiled, and said, ‘There are worse things to be.’

‘Why couldn’t I fly?’

The blue man sighed. ‘It’s a question of ecology,’ he said at last. He seemed reluctant. ‘There is a cycle. Remember what I told you, when we first met?’