Authors: Ian McDonald
A
T FOUR THOUSAND METERS
the fog lingered well into the afternoon before the sun dissolved it into blue.
Born and raised under dark clouds (those same clouds that at four thousand meters are called fog) Courtney Hall glowed in sun and blue sky. Blue was the thing she had always dreamed of: pedaling and panting her course through the realm of the Celestials, and when the fog was at last spirited away, she drew for the pure joy of light, the pure joy of the dimension of
blue
beyond the wicker window. Not all her company shared her blue exultation: children of the heavier sky of concrete and steel, Angelo Brasil and Xian Man Ray hid away from the agoraphobic blue. But when altitude sickness permitted, Jonathon Ammonier reveled in the light, ordering his bearers to carry his litter into the window bay where he could survey his realm, from the lake of the drowned city up along the river valley where the dead buildings shouldered together like bones, all the way to the line of smoke and silver that was the edge of the manufactories and industrial units of East Yu.
This had been the King of Nebraska’s most prolonged bout of altitude sickness. For three days the Expedition to the End of the World had depended on the hospitality of the Ramshambé Nation while Jonathon Ammonier fluctuated between feverish, sweaty hallucination and periods of tranquil lucidity when he would come to the window to look down upon the world. But no one was fooled. Even the Elders of the Ramshambé Nation knew that it was not altitude sickness. But still they maintained the pretense to each other that this was a passing thing, soon over and done with. The remaining three human members of the expedition did not want to cease being an expedition here, one kilometer from the top.
This was Jonathon Ammonier’s fourth attack of altitude (hah! sweet euphemism!
radiation
) sickness. Courtney Hall was still thankful to whatever deities presided over the Wall that the King’s first bout had been held off until they had reached Bascombe, the capital of the Yea! people; lowest of the stratified castes that lived on the Wall. Too weak to climb, Jonathon Ammonier had been portaged up that first few hundred meters in a litter. Having to treat a sick (sweet euphemism again:
dying
) man on the stairways and ladders and ramps that zigzagged up the wall, the paths so narrow two people could not safely stand abreast: a shuddering prospect to Courtney Hall, his artist, and increasingly, his keeper. That first had been the mildest attack; an afternoon and a night of feverish rantings and screamings at Jinkajou for impossible requests while the warm monsoon rain of these low tropical altitudes drummed on the grass roof, and Angelo Brasil and his pseudosister whispered little conferences full of cutting, slashing hand movements.
The third attack had been the worst. Saints and spirits had not been generous then. Caught in the open on a ladder climbing along the seventy-degree face of the Wall; a wind had suddenly come funneling down the chimney between the Wall and one of its buttresses … Nightmare. As the icy air from higher altitudes struck the warmer subtropical air of two and a half thousand meters, instant freezing fog had enveloped the Expedition. Struck blind. One misplaced footfall, one careless paw … the long bounce to the water. And reconnaissance reported no settlement, no shelter for another three or four hundred meters vertical, five kilometers horizontal.
And Jonathon Ammonier had decided he wanted to get out of his bed.
Courtney Hall had tried to wrestle him back onto his litter, but with a cry he had swung out with his gold-topped cane. She’d ducked. Just. Blind reflex. Afterward, when she saw how close she had been to the big jump, she had been paralyzed with fear. Tinka Tae bearers fled squealing. The litter had fallen and almost tipped the cane-wielding King of Nebraska into two and a half thousand meters of airspace. Suddenly, salvation from nowhere: Xian Man Ray flipping in from twenty meters up ahead to lay His Majesty Jonathon I of Victorialand and Beyond cold with a haymaking wallop to the jaw. They’d tied him to his litter with torn strips of his blue silk handkerchief and wrestled the ranting, foaming monarch through three hours of freezing fog to the UnderGate of Tulby, capital of the Dooneyites.
Who had not wanted to let them in. A face behind the bamboo floor hatch, the UnderSentry had initially threatened them with water, crud, boulders, darts, boiling oil. The problem was coming from below, it seemed. Contact with untouchables. The castes that inhabited the Wall lived in literal hierarchy. Vertical stratification increasingly exclusive with altitude. Even by exchanging words with ones from below, the UnderSentry was committing a serious act of personal defilement. It took two hours of careful theologically loaded negotiation to convince him that they were not underlings but altogether other, and that mercy was the touchstone of the more advanced spiritual beings.
After two days of recuperation and mercy mild, the Expedition had left Tulby to continue onward and upward, back and forth through the vertical pastures of the Dooneyites where herdpersons tended to their “cows”; bulbous piebald things closer to a cross between a lamprey and a sloth than the gentle kine of the forgotten age of animal husbandry. These gravid sacs of juice clung to the seventy-degree meadows with sucker feet. The sound of their suckering about in search of fresh grazing disgusted Courtney Hall. Onward and upward, to the next kingdom, the caste of the Masters of Solitude, two hundred meters upWall.
The eighty castes and nations of the Wall existed in a grim parody of the Compassionate Society that had established and duly forgotten them. Each nation was a long, thin band of territoriality averaging seventy meters high and fifty kilometers long. The primary political principle was that it was easier to travel horizontally than vertically, effectively reducing life on the Wall to one dimension. The citizens of the wickerwork towns that clung like pups to the black masonry knew more about their neighbors fifty kilometers to right and left than their neighbors fifty meters above their heads or beneath their feet. Stratified insularity. Ascending through these levels, Courtney Hall observed a curious inverse relationship at work. Each level regarded the one above it as in some way spiritually superior and the one below it as spiritually inferior, yet technological ability declined with altitude as the Wall’s distinct biomes became less rich and varied. From the vigorous wood-age societies of the lowest tropical zones to the two-kilometer bamboo houses of the temperate wetlands to the thatch and wattle of the grasslands heavenward, Courtney Hall had climbed through orders of increasing spiritual status and decreasing levels of technological competence. The Wall, she concluded, had been settled from top down. Certainly no incentive would have called those early engineers to migrate upward, and only a top-down diaspora satisfactorily explained the spiritual mores of the Wall dwellers.
She was very pleased with her bit of anthropological reasoning.
However, there was a grimmer turn yet to the Wall’s parody of the Compassionate Society. Centuries of isolation and exposure on the bare face of the Wall had hammered the benevolent totalitarianism of the doctrine of Social Compassion into absolutist despotisms of the most repressive form. Oligarchies, heptarchies, monarchies; meritocracies, bureaucracies, theocracies: whether under the omniscient eyes of saints and ancestors hovering wan and insubstantial in the icy air above the top of the Wall, or the scrutiny of the unresting Guardians of Righteousness who earwigged on every nighttime murmur, every lover’s whisper, every childish cry, for Sinful Thought, or watched by the serried rows of painted wooden gargoyles, called famuluses by their devotees, and holding health, wealth, and good fortune in their charmed paws, or monitored by the spirit tattoos on wrist and forearm that winged every errant thought straight to the Council of Nine; the societies that clung to the Wall were an alarming foresight into what the Compassionate Society might become if ever the equilibrium between State, Industry, and Religion were upset.
Might?
Had
, Courtney Hall.
Had
to you. Totalitarianism without the benevolence. Tyranny, but not benign.
From the window of the wicker room tied to the basalt slabs with woven straw ropes, Courtney Hall could look down to see all the sins of the Compassionate Society spreading out and away from her, sweeping down to the waters that covered the past.
The King of Nebraska’s evening announcement that he was feeling well enough for the Expedition to recommence the following morning was greeted with weary pleasure. It would be good to be busy with something outside of themselves. They were all heartily sick of themselves. With every meter climbed, Courtney Hall’s suspicion of the pseudosiblings also mounted. And their cat. Angelo Brass’s temper had deteriorated with altitude: Courtney Hall could no longer say anything to him without inviting a scathing reply. Unaccustomed as any yulp to the two-edged syllable, she found his sarcasms especially slicing. Even Xian Man Ray, by far the more affable of the pair, seemed to have a predatory beam in her eye. And the cat just licked itself. Licked and licked and licked itself. Licked and licked and licked and licked itself until Courtney Hall wanted to scream.
It was all to do with the collective personas of the forty-three Electors of Yu.
They wanted them.
Jonathon Ammonier wanted to give them to Courtney Hall.
Courtney Hall did not want forty-three dead souls.
She told the forty-fourth Elector as much that night in one of their by-now-habitual nocturnal conversations, King and Artist.
“But you must, madam! They will make you safe!”
“I’m not safe?”
“Heed the words of a king: Do not trust anyone DeepUnder who tells you he is an angel but salivates like a dog.”
“How will they make me safe?”
“By making you valuable.”
Climbing the ladder to her wicker night-cell, she saw Angelo Brasil squatting outside the door to his adjacent sleepery.
“Good evening to you, my dear.” There was enough of a moon to make his teeth shine white and flat.
Even when the Love Police and the Ministry of Pain and all the corporate will of Great Yu had come howling after her, Courtney Hall had never felt so threatened.
It took from six o’clock dawn until noon the next day for the Expedition to the End of the World to gain one hundred meters: “Thirteen meters per hour,” as Angelo Brasil bitched on one of the many halts for Jonathon Ammonier’s racoon bearers to gasp a little thin air into their lungs. Angelo Brasil bitched almost continuously now, and always where Courtney Hall could not but hear him: the brightness, the cold, the thin air, the altitude, his hair, his hands,
look
at the state of his clothes, he felt tired, depressed, sick, cold. Cold mostly. Courtney Hall could understand that complaint. Even protected by fat in the final stages of metamorphosis to muscle, she felt the nip when the Expedition passed out of direct sunlight into the shadow of one of the buttresses. She had been only too glad to accept the Ramshambé Nation’s gift of a pair of knitted woollen leggings. Understood, but did not sympathize. If Angelo Brasil chose pride and fashion over humility and warmth, he could keep his folly to himself. As for herself, she had been suffering through her first period in ten years without one whisper of complaint. She suspected that two thirds of the decay in Angelo Brasil’s character could be out of frustration that his abilities and talents were useless on the Wall. He was resentful at toiling for kilometers along terraces and ledges in search for ladders or stairways to the next level while Xian Man Ray went flip! flip! flip! from stairway to balcony to terrace to ladder as she scouted out new lands and terrains.
They were all to get a lot colder very soon.
The final two hours of that day’s ascent were through a blizzard that whirled up with sudden malevolence to engulf them. Being frightened was the norm for Courtney Hall’s life now. DeepUnder she had been frightened so diversely and constantly that she thought she was immunized to fright. The blizzard paralyzed her.
Whiteout. Endless; a white hell. Heaving up an endless staircase of slick gray ice, each meter must be the last, must, must, must, but always there was another meter, another step beyond, and Xian Man Ray was shrieking, begging, pleading with her to go on, only a few hundred meters more and then there would be shelter: a hundred meters? a hundred parsecs, the shelter could be on Alpha Centauri or pinned to Orion’s belt for all the likelihood that she would see it, but she kept climbing, meter by meter by meter, wrestling that litter up one step, two steps, three steps, four; each step a triumph in itself, but please, no one could surely, reasonably expect her to make it one hundred and ninety-eight, one hundred and ninety-nine, two hundred steps: that was impossible, a fantasy, a lie to keep her from lying down and rolling over in the snow where the screaming, slashing wind could not touch her, giving up and falling asleep, which she wanted more than anything, anything … Ahead of her, blurs in the white fog, Jinkajou and the porters crept like crustaceans, crusted with rime, up one step, two steps, three steps, four. Behind her, Angelo Brasil’s sarcasms had been sacrificed to fuel the task of putting one foot in front of the other in front of the other in front of the other.
She caught herself screaming at herself, screams of alternate encouragement and despair, and no one could hear them but herself, and even she poorly. Snow-blind. Winter kills. Embedded in a globe of whirling white atoms forever and ever and ever and ever, amen, amen, praise Yah … She became vaguely aware that Xian Man Ray was shaking her by the shoulders. Didn’t she know how important it was that she kept counting one step, two steps, three steps, four, one step, two steps … What? Here? Where? Then everything white went black and everything black went white, and incredibly, there was an ending. And heat. And warmth. And light. And faces.
The Tabreeni were vain creatures of paradox. Loftiest and least of the eighty castes, they dwelled a little lower than the angels (whose astral forms could be seen shimmering over the capstones of the Wall) in a land of bitter poverty and permanent cold. These they accepted without question: a little asceticism was small price for nearness to the angels. The house in which they accommodated their guests was nothing more than a cluster of wicker grapes suspended from a stone bollard, niggardly heated by stone fat lamps. Yet the Tabreeni lived on so exalted a spiritual plane that they could not speak directly to their guests (a defilement so dreadful as to warrant three weeks solitary purification in a wicker hermitage up where the ice fields reached cold lingers down into the demesne of the Tabreeni) and communicated what little information they thought necessary through notes dictated to lower-order agriculturals and scratched by them onto wax tablets. They lived on birds, bugs, eggs and a variety of high-altitude potato that was the only staple that would grow under the breath of the ice, and once Courtney Hall realized she was finally out of the cold and the wind and the snow, once a little warmth and a little life had returned in the glow of the camping stove (an abominable luxury to the Tabreeni elders), she was able to appreciate what poor, paltry, vain creatures these lords of spirituality were. Their oil lamps gave as little warmth as their smiles, their food was cold and watery, and the wind found every gap and flaw in their wicker shelters. No one slept well in their macramé hammocks that night.