Hieroglyph (86 page)

For a few kilometers, some roughneck steel men kept us company in their sealed tractor. Sometimes a drone airplane would putter by with a pennant for us, some wisecrack from a skeptic, or a mash note from a lady fan.

After that, our climb got hard and lonely. Most people just plain gave up at these heights. Living without air is far worse than living without water, while the lack of water will destroy all living things.

As my horse and I gallantly ventured on, I could see all kinds of strange, haphazard methods and inventions. Big rubber bubbles. Hairy garages like soda-straw haystacks. Wheeled caravans that retreated downward to suck up fresh air and then returned to the heights. Cryogenic air conditioners that froze oxygen in steel pails of air, then reeled that air up all spiderlike, so that folks could somehow breathe.

There were lichen shelters, and barnacle shelters, that sucked in traces of air through a foamy lacquer and wouldn't let the air back out. These dogged human settlers of vacuum weren't beaten yet. After two hundred years of the tower's existence, the great steel aerial desert still had its die-hards. Every once in a great distance, tucked into some steel niche, I would see a pale, sunless, bearded, crazy face at a porthole . . .

I, too, found myself engaged in fateful struggle with my own overlarge ambitions.

My horse and I, intimately joined at the saddle, had become two bloated bubbles of imperiled air. A swift death by freezing suffocation surrounded our every step. Our glassy helmets steamed up with our labored breathing.

With an effort, I could pull my bare hand out of my space-suit sleeve, squinch it down, and scratch the dew off my faceplate. So I could see to guide the horse—but then, frost formed all over my helmet. This was my human warmth and moisture, adhering to me.

Frosted up as we were, we were hard put to see the obstacles—even those directly in front of Levi's big airtight rubber horseshoes.

I had made a paper map to the heights, based on the best advice from past explorers. At kilometer six, a cruel gust of wind caught my map and bore it off like a tumbleweed.

Then I had to depend on Levi's instincts. To give him his due praise, the superequine horse was bold and tireless. Fed intravenously while huffing pure oxygen, Levi climbed as deftly as a mountain goat.

I could tell from the airtight reek of his heavy sweat that the beast was suffering, yet Levi understood our goal. If I died in his saddle, he would carry my corpse to the heights.

The broken guardrails, the half-collapsing ramps, the piles of defunct machinery, the dizzying aerial vistas of desert—they didn't daunt my horse. Iron stairs, he took two at a time. Burdened though he was by his steel armor, he didn't hesitate to jump.

Sometimes, when rounding some desolate iron corner, we would catch a vista from the awesome height we had achieved. We saw the curvature of the earth, and layers of haze in the atmosphere. We saw aircraft flying below us, small and bright as fireflies, and we saw the Tall Tower's long gray pennant clouds, wreathing and writhing in the tower's mighty slipstream.

The homely features of the planet's surface had gone all abstract with our distance. Homes were mere dots, roads were sore red scratches, gullies were crooked little veins, everything gone remote in the blended shades of planetary hues, olive, rust, dusty hazes.

At night, quantum launches rushed up the core of the Tall Tower. As we slept uneasily, stinking in our airtight suits, there would come a gut-wrenching sense of unnatural motion, of a space-time twisting speed that was so much more than any earthly speed—these awesome sensations rippled through my puckered skin and Levi's horsehide, and I heard the horse bellow in the tainted, private atmosphere we shared.

Sometimes, I would dismount. The suit seals worked, but we lost some good air by doing it. Still, I had to move to ease my body's pain and stiffness, and also to set loose the emptied cylinders of oxygen, and lighten Levi's load.

We were lucky with the legendary winds of the heights. Those winds existed, and they direly wanted to blow us to hell, but we made haste, and the winds got weak on us faster than they could get vicious on us.

After our windy ordeal, we plodded up into a strange, glaring, silent place, where the sun was round like a golden coin, and shone crazy bright, and the bare, scorched surfaces did odd tricks. Rust patinas that looked steel-solid popped off and chipped like fingernail polish. Electrostatic dust clung to us, then crept around on us in little waves of living grime, and leaped off us in eerie haste.

Slow tremors ran through the great metal Tall Tower. Some of the shadowed cracks had dry ice in them, or some dirty, furry, frozen substance that wasn't honest water. Things decayed up here—but they decayed through methods unknown to living organisms. An airless, spacey, mummified degeneration.

There were metallic vibrations, and sometimes awful swaying rumbles, but no air to carry any audible noise. Every hut and pressured arch and citadel looked sun-scorched, gray, and entirely old.

There were no warning signs above the Neck, where the hostiles dwelled. No sign of any life that a native of Earth's surface would understand. But there were huge, archaic machineries, and there were death traps. At this height, even simple barbed wire could kill a man, for the barbs could rip his suit. There was barbed wire aplenty, in snaky tangles and coils.

Once Levi snagged a thin tripwire, where a big tumbledown trap of concrete blocks was poised to crush us like bugs. But that trap had been set decades ago, and a grit of static dust had glued the deadly blocks together.

There were mazes of fat white pipe, wrapped in shiny airtight tape. Slanted solar panels sat in tight nests of colored electrical wire. Sometimes I would see a gently steaming rivulet of icy sewage, in areas that should have no water at all. Machines were running up here, for I felt a rhythmic banging. Some of those bangs felt sinister and deliberate, like a drum-code conveyed by human hands.

I would like to claim that it was bravery and skill that got us to the tower's summit, but it was luck plus grim persistence. When we finally reached the peak, I was so weary, so chafed and stale in my own skin, that I had given up counting the oxygen bottles for our likely fatal trip down.

Levi and I plodded up one last interior ramp to the tower's flat summit. The Tall Tower was so huge that its great flat head was a desert plaza—an abandoned, airless ghost town.

We knew we had reached the top through the simple fact that there was nothing left to climb. Just the blackened sky overhead, stars visible in daylight, and glowing satellites, chasing one another through the heavens, in their stately and abstract fashion.

For a hard-breathing hour, Levi and I clomped around the airless streets of the long-dead casino, in a thin gritty film that seemed to be meteor dust. I was vaguely looking for some souvenir that I might loot, to prove to folks that I had really been up there.

Then I noticed footprints. Naked, savage footprints, in that gritty dust, at the very summit of the Tall Tower.

The horse and I followed that trail. I soon found many marks of toes and heels, even finger smears, of agile men running and falling, trampling one another in hasty steps.

Then we came upon the savage ceremony. They were naked and ferocious, these young men covered head to foot in warpaint grease. In their sacred ceremony, their secret ritual performance, they were flinging their bare human bodies from the peak of the Tall Tower toward the distant earth so far below.

These initiates of a mystical fraternity were casting themselves, headlong and gasping, into free fall toward our mother planet. They had built a BASE-jumping ramp, a skeletal tangle of cordage and lumber. They were scampering straight off that, naked but for odd little parachutes.

These fierce, savage teens, in order to attain the awesome privilege of jumping into emptiness, had to run through a gauntlet of their fellows.

These older, wiser brutes wore diving suits and homemade tanks like aqualungs. They also carried long canes, which they cheerfully deployed to beat the daylights out of the naked kids, whose bare ribs heaved convulsively at empty vacuum, before they flung themselves off in their frantic pursuit of the living sea of air far below.

These barbarians of the airless heights, born and raised within sealed chambers and as pale as ghosts, were performing this strange feat, not because it was easy, but because it was hard.

This soulful agony was a noble performance, and I had spoiled the art of it, for the medicine men saw my intrusion, and they were furious. Instant confusion reigned. The remaining naked daredevils convulsed and fainted beneath their warpaint. The older warriors, those who wore the breathing masks, didn't know whether to kill me right away, or to rescue their smothering fellows.

It was Levi who proved my salvation. We had committed a grave offense, but not even the most reckless brave wanted to face this beast of mine, this uncanny rhinoceros clad all in steel.

To these natives of the heights, a creature like Levi was a wonderment.

The natives and I couldn't speak to each other—for there was no air for us to speak with—but I made it clear to the savages by hand signs that, whatever fate we met, my horse and I would meet that fate together.

Levi and I deserved punishment for the insult we had delivered—but to the eyes of these savages, our misdeed, so strange and unexpected to them, bore a mystical significance. Our intrusion was a sign.

We had to leave the sacred ground of the tower in one of two directions: down or up. As our savage judges saw the situation, up would be all right, and down would be all right, too. As long as we left, and we never returned.

The horse and I didn't care to leap to our deaths by walking that BASE-jumping plank. I allowed that we would prefer to be flung together upward into outer space.

It took some negotiations with the Astronaut—and his chief lieutenants Robur, Wernher, and Yuri—to settle this tangled situation.

But, through the passage of time, I'd become accustomed to the ways of the tower people. I had found the knack to befriend them. Sometimes, I could make these people see certain things that they could not see about themselves.

Levi and I chose to be thrown together into orbit. Let the Whip do its worst to us both, man and beast, I declared. Unlike most tower people, I was unafraid of the Whip. Because I knew that the Whip, this wicked device they all cherished so much, was really just some rickety contraption. They adored it, but it had weaknesses they never perceived.

The Whip might well throw me into orbit. Or it might throw Levi, if Levi was cut into separate horsemeat chunks and thrown repeatedly. But the Whip had never been designed or built to launch a man riding a horse. No matter how fearsome they are, machines can only do what is physically possible.

Superstition can decree whatever it wants: but physics is a science. An artwork can symbolize most anything—but engineering meets hard constraints.

BEING WHO THEY WERE,
the tower people set to work to build a Whip big enough for both man and horse. Taxes were raised, and everybody cheerfully collaborated. A construction program arose within the Tall Tower. Everyone got busy and was forward-looking again.

I was solemnly sworn to become the sacrificial victim in the embrace of this spacey device. But I thought: Let them try. Let them build this instrument of my doom, if they think they can doom me. Me, and my horse.

To tell the truth, I was willing enough to die for the Tall Tower. Many have died for otherworldly aspirations. To perish as an old man, who has known his own worldly experience, that is not such a big, dreadful thing. Billions of us men have done it, cheerful and unflinching. The fear of dying is way overblown.

The people of the Tall Tower still work at that space program today. Like most great public works of mankind, it never seems to conclude. However, most everybody inside the tower has some cut of that action. The new prosperity has been spun off and spread around, with all the cunning of the locals.

While they plot and scheme and build their bigger, grander Whip, their older Whip, the original one, no longer works at all. They had to dismantle it to prepare for something grander, and I can't say it's much missed. The human race commonly substitutes big dreams for actual, existent engineering. Luckily, the tower people are long accustomed to overlooking the obvious.

I am pretty well known in the Tall Tower nowadays, although I am merely a white-haired old figurehead. It's my famous horse who is truly adored by the tower's people. Everyone is engrossed by this mighty, public task of lofting Levi into orbit—the first horse ever launched to outer space.

Being a mute beast of the earth, Levi doesn't make a fuss about it. This ageless beast has sired colts, the spindly-legged creatures of futurity, who are stabled far aloft in their vacuum stables. If my horse could write as I do, I think he would announce his satisfaction.

Clearly, this situation can't last forever. I know that, and you know that. But let's face it: nothing lasts forever, no matter how big it is. A man and a horse have to act within their own span of days. If not us, whom? If not now, when?

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