Chapter 1 - Spinning
The Man pulled. He pulled again. And again. Three more times. Another six made twelve on the oar.
Each pull stung his legs and arms and back. But the sting was nothing; a thimble of pain. Each pull sounded as a high-pitched slosh of the flywheel. The spinning fan whined to fill The Man’s ears like the rise of a tuning orchestra, chasing him as he leaned back from the catch. When The Man stopped his pull at the back of the metal spinner rail, the fan reached its crescendo. Then The Man curled in toward the catch.
In the lull between each stroke, The Man’s heart beat. Thump. Thump. Thump. He counted six beats to a pull.
The chamber shifted. The curving walls of dark shell-metal and glass moved. The hum of the distant furnace - a base undertone to the spinner flywheel treble - warbled. Chilly air-fluid moved with secondary momentum. The air rubbed its skin-prickling fingers over The Man’s sweat-crusted skin. The Man leaned left on his spinner seat. The room shifted; the curtain in the door on The Man’s left shifted; the whole shell shifted, as the Wind struck broadside.
The Man’s brown eyes flicked to the window. The glass ran the whole curving length of one side of the room. Frost crusted it. The Man squinted past the frost. The shell swayed back to level, The Man leaned accordingly. The brown eyes captured the horizon.
Beyond the glass window of the shell lay the glass surface of the sky. It rolled far, far away from The Man’s little window room. Lumps of hard snow drooped from the glass sky like beads of flash-frozen, soft condensation.
In some of the lumps, Aedra Roots - glass hugging plants - curled down in thorny strands. They swayed in The Wind. Beyond and beneath the lumps and Aedra, there rolled mist and clouds. They were white teal under this night’s glass. They were like a shifting sea below The Man.
Beyond the glass sky, unreachable stars watched the shell move.
In his shell, in his spinning room, The Man occupied a tiny pocket of heat in a frozen atmosphere. The temperature outside might be negative fifty. Probably it was lower. The Man kept the shell warm with his furnace. He kept his own warmth by spinning. But even so the air felt prickly. The furnace had burned down. The freeze beyond his window, above the sea of clouds, below the glass sky, stole heat.
The Man pulled. Another two pulls made three. Another nine made twelve. Sixty heartbeats, give or take. Each pull repulsed the cold-air from his skin. Each pull added a tiny charge to the greater charge of the dwindling furnace. All this charge fed the shell heart.
Every pull of The Man and every furnace rumble pushed the shell forward. It dangled from a long, lone striation of metal on the glass sky. Rollers connected shell-hanger to striation-track. By the energy of the spinner and the furnace, the tracks rolled past, and the shell crawled.
Another pull. Another inch along the track. The Man heard a distant groan, the sound of stepping on lake ice. He slowed as he approached the flywheel. He breathed in. He scanned the horizon. Nothing there. He pulled again.
On The Man’s left, opposite the room from the window, through the curtain door in the metal wall, something moved.
Through the plastic curtain flaps rustled an animal. First came a beak. It was a sharp hooked thing, colored like bone with a blush, bumpily serrated like a goose’s, and big enough to snap a human hand.
The Man glanced at the door. A narrow head followed the beak. Feathers covered it - white, but with a parchment undertone suggesting a blonde shaft. Two shiny eyes of deep blue regarded The Man.
The feathered head tilted at a contemplative angle. The blue eyes blinked with vertical slits. The beak opened for a long, low croon, like a rooster at the bottom of a well.
The Man looked away from the animal. He faced forward. He curled in towards the flywheel, took one of the deep breaths of heat-poor air, and pulled.
A raptor-body pushed through the plastic into the spinner room. The bulky creature crowded the space. It had two small wings which it wagged. It had two taloned legs of the same strawberry-bone color as the beak. The talons clattered mutedly on the floor. The feathers of the raptor creature - a Phaen bird - rippled in air churned by the spinning flywheel. The Phaen gave another low croon.
The Man pulled again. Another five times made six. The shell crawled along the sky.
The Phaen settled to the floor, just inside the plastic curtain of the spinning room. It fixed its tilted head on The Man. The two blue orbs followed him as he moved back and forth along the spinner track. Every fourth or fifth pull, the vertical slits closed over the blue orbs, like a camera shutter capturing a still of The Man mid-spin. Every few minutes the Phaen shifted on the floor. Its talon’s dug through the soft insulation and scraped the metal shell below.
The Man ignored The Phaen. And the cold. He pulled at the oar. He glanced through the window. He searched the glass horizon.
The Man slowed again as he curled toward the catch. He inhaled long. He now felt the chill crawling thickly over the room. The cold pounced upon The Man in his half-rest. The air his lungs drew in gnawed against the lining of his throat. The wet of his sweatband touched like a dead finger on the vertebrae of his upper back.
Another ice-groan rumbled over the sky. The Man glanced through the window. He searched - the horizon hadn’t changed.
The Man felt The Wind. Another gust rocked the shell as it made its crawling way. This time the tilt was greater. On the wall at his side, four spare bands of sweat cloth dangled away from the curving metal. They fluttered in the flywheel air. The Man leaned over his knees on the spinner seat.
Beside him, the Phaen shuffled in its feathered skin. It crooned again. It lifted its beak from the floor and pointed at The Man.
The Man pulled suddenly. Harder this time - not a jerk, just enough to recover the lost momentum. The air’s ice-fingers withdrew from his skin, replaced by the fingers of muscle-ache.
The Man pulled again. And again. And again. Like a dog-beast pawing a hole in a cave floor, in the dead of winter; so The Man pulled the spinner oar, in the small room, in the small shell, crawling slower and slower along the sky.
The Man’s eyes settled without focus on the metal casing of the flywheel. His eyes rested on the dark catch-hole. He watched the oar-cord slithered in-to and out-of the opening with each pull. The sky beyond the window disappeared. The Phaen disappeared. The low hum of the furnace and the flywheel’s rhythmic whine went mute.
The Man fixed his thoughts on his muscles. He performed one perfect pull; first heel-press, then leg-press, swing at the hips, then draw the arms back. He curled back in reverse order. Then he repeated The Maneuver. He forgot sight and sound. The Man knew only the comfort-pain of muscles at work.
Once more The Wind shook his shell.
The Man felt skin rub on skin, both rubbing on silken underclothes. He wriggled his thighs and pulled. He still felt the rub. It wasn’t chafing or pain, only distraction. He focused on another good pull.
The Man knew he shouldn’t check the window, not yet. The shell moved slowly over the sky, and the view hadn’t changed in the last twelve pulls. Still, The Man’s eyes made a first sally toward the frosted glass. He stopped them halfway through the twitch. He fixed them on the oar-cord hole. He focused on technique; heels, legs, back-swing, arm-pull.
Still he felt the skin-skin-cloth rubbing. The Man wiggled his thighs, but dared not slow. The cold, like a predator, waited in slowness. Any stop, and it would pounce with its chilly claws.
The Man would pull a while longer. But fixing his mind on the body was failing. The mind found only aches and skin rubbing in the body.
The Man returned to his externals; sight and sound. He heard the flywheel rise with his latest pull. He followed the oar cord with his eyes. They were brown eyes, with a little shine. Brown hair that was curly surrounded them.
The eyes rolled up as the head tilted back. They flicked up and to the right of the spinner casing.
On the gritty shell wall, beside the far edge of the window, The Man found the face of his stopwatch. The two hands split the pearl background in a line perfectly vertical. Thirty seconds would finish the hour. Thirty seconds - twelve easy pulls.
The Man’s leg and arm muscles rolled like a hunting tiger’s.
The Man’s breath misted as he leaned back for the twelfth pull. When he came forward again he uncurled the fingers of his right hand from the oar. He leaned and reached down with the free hand. From a floor-holder beside the spinner, he snatched the handle of an iron jug. The Man couldn’t get his first sip on the recovery portion. He had to pull again - lighter with only the left hand - before he brought the sloshing jug to his lips. Frigid water washed salt from his throat.
The Man took four mouthfuls per pull. He paused for breath between each set. Meanwhile the cold was settling on his skin, and sneaking into his body through the water.
The Man had taken his last drink fifteen minutes ago. In that time, He’d have lost a fourth of a liter in sweat. Each mouthful would be twenty milliliters. He needed about twelve mouthfuls, twelve gulps, to match the sweat lost. The Man did not think of all this as he drank. The drinking was routine, like the pushing of heels, or the scan of the horizon. For every quarter hour, twelve gulps in three strokes - that was the rule.
The Man set the iron jug back in the iron holder bolted to the floor. In fifteen minutes he would drink again. Now, though, it was time for work. To move slower or to stop was to recognize the cold.
The raptor-beast, the Phaen, recognized the cold. The Phaen shivered under its coat of feathers. It followed The Man with its beak and blue eyes.
The Man held his eyes back from the Phaen. He held them off the stopwatch too, and the window. Too soon to check either. The seconds would only pass slower.
Instead The Man looked at The Painting. It hung against the wall, facing him, behind the flywheel case. The frame was scored and blackened by the same soot staining the rounded shell walls and ceilings. But the canvas was clear. The Painting was, ‘She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs’. On it, packed-together blue beetles coagulated into a long strand. They came together from root-like lines that ran along striations on the glass sky. They collected to form a thicker trunk of bugs. At the top - or bottom - of the upside-down tree, the trunk of beetles ended in the milky, black haired, sad face of a child. The stars beyond the glass shone down around the face with a ghostly light.
The Man focused on the beetles. He ignored the window, the timer, and the muscle-ache. He ignored the rustling of the Phaen. He counted the beetles of one root in the painting.
And as The Man counted, he pulled.
The Man pulled. Over, and over, and over again. Dozens upon dozens of draws at the oar. The flywheel whirring. The furnace humming lower. The hours ticking by. Every so often, a glance through the window. Beyond the frosted glass - endless horizon.
And the air within turned colder. The air inside the shell didn’t want to be twenty degrees, or zero degrees, or even negative twenty degrees. The air inside the shell wanted to be like the air outside. The air wanted to be negative fifty, like the air rubbing directly on the glass sky. Only the pacemaker heart of the furnace kept the shell alive with warmth. And the pacemaker heart beat lower with each passing pull.
The Man was careless with his heat.
But The Man still pulled. Each breath now summoned a grey vapor, but he pulled once more. The flywheel gave a metronomic, asylum scream. The Man’s tried fixing his mind on the sound. No luck - the sweat cloth rubbed pickled cold fingers over his neck and forehead. He checked the horizon again. Too soon - only endless glass and endless snowpiles and endless roots rolled away from his humid-cold cave. Endlessly rolling; until they ended where the glass met the clouds.
The Phaen - Wind cursed bird - crooned constantly now. The Man caught the furnace hum in his ear. The furnace burned low, but it burned. The shell still crawled, as it would not from spinning alone. The Phaen, however, ignored the hum of the furnace. It shivered. It inched nearer The Man and bobbed at him with its beak. The Phaen wanted warmth.
The Man pulled again. He could go farther.
The cold had gradually overcome The Man. The cold always overcame him as the spinning hours passed. He felt it creeping into his toes where they were strapped into his footplates. He felt it creeping through his fingers where they gripped the oar. He felt it prod his face, his nose especially, each time he leaned for the next pull. He even felt it in his arms and legs now. It pressed through his leathern skin. The cold wanted The Man’s heat; he knew this. Not just his finger-heat, or the heat in his legs, but all of it. If The Man wasn’t careful, the cold would take all the warmth of his body, until he became one with the air and the sky.
But The Man could still ignore the cold if he worked hard enough. He clenched tight to the oar, and pulled.
Another quake rumbled somewhere in the distance. The Man looked through the window and scanned the sky. Two snow piles dropped off the glass. They disintegrated into clouds of dry flakes in a heavy Wind. That same Wind then struck the shell, and set it swinging on its cables. The Man leaned to counter the motion.
The Phaen clawed a step closer. A second step scraped the shell floor. The white feathers across its long body rippled, like dunes of sugar sifted through a fine mesh. The bird’s croon rose once into a quick chirrup bark.
The Man pulled.
The Phaen made another chirrup; The Man tossed it a warning glance. It returned to lower humming, but remained sitting just out of arm’s reach.
The Man looked back to the spinner.
For, despite all these distractions; despite the Phaen stirring closer to his elbow; despite the sinking degrees inside the hanging shell, so cold that even The Man’s heavy effort failed him, and the air made the blood shrink from his extremities; despite The Wind; despite all, The Man pulled with a steady heart. Six beats per pull. Twenty-four pulls per minute.
Hours slipped by in such fashion. The muscles in The Man - most of them - flashed with minor pain. The Man ignored the pain. He ignored The Wind, and his Phaen when it called.
He could not entirely ignore his numbed fingers. Every once in a while he caught the knuckles of a hand loosening. He would flex the fingers one by one, and then force them to re-wrap the wooden handle.
Against any one factor, The Man triumphed. When they came at him together, however, he lost focus. Instead of the internal, meditative exertion, pausing only for external breaks of water, window, and stopwatch, his thoughts turned wholly external. His eyes jumped wildly between stimuli. They darted to the sky in search of new features, or glared intently at the stopwatch face.
The seconds crawled when this happened. The Man felt his attention failing. His shell crawled slower. His heart jumped to seven, sometimes eight beats a stroke. He felt every contact point of the silken underclothes, every patch where the fabric clunk to his sweaty skin. He felt the way the leather in his right boot did not bend enough at the arch as he curled up to the front. He felt the ache - not numbness or muscular, but an older pain - in his right ankle. He felt the way his left leg seemed to stretch longer than his right. He shifted in the seat one way, pulled, then shifted the other.
The Man was slipping. He took a deeper breath and focused. He pulled, and the flywheel roared.
Another Wind blew the ship, harder than any in the last hour. The cable-tracks fixing the shell to the sky striation must have gone slack for a moment. The Man felt a sudden weightless second, followed by a sharp jostling in the seat.
He heard the thunder of the glass.
The jostle startled The Phaen. It darted the last arm-length forward and gave a bass squawk. The bird buried its feathered head and bone-colored beak into the crook of The Man’s shoulder. He was at the rest position on the oar, and the movement caught him off-guard. The Man pulled before he could stop himself and nearly fell from the seat as the bulk of the feathered body resisted his motion.
The Phaen backed off. Not fast enough. Without breaking the rhythmic pulls, The Man released the oar with his left hand. He brought it up, then down in a flash. The hardened skin of the palm caught the retreating bird beside its vertical eye. It chirped high in pain and blinked. The Phaen skittered backwards. It turned, wobbled off-balance, and rushed through the plastic curtain of the spinning room. Three of its feathers danced in the flywheel’s currents before settling to the floor.
The Man pulled harder. Now that the bird was gone, he thought he could focus.
The Man’s eyes went to the window view before he could control the impulse. The sky was the same. The sparse plant roots curled like burnt hairs in the same gale rocking his shell. The Man saw another mound of packed snow drop in the open air. In the last moment before the pile disintegrated, when it became loose flakes, and the filtered light of sleeping stars shone down dimly across all the rimy sky, the last cloud seemed to twist with its own will, like a wraith in the Wind.
Suddenly the view through the window disappeared. A flat white strip replaced the window. The strip starkly contrasted with the gritty, sooty, black shell walls. The grimy walls turned doubly dark with shadow.
The Man understood; one of the snow piles had dropped from beside the track. It had fallen just above his spinning room. It had covered his viewing window. Then, the Wind had glued the snow to the window’s warmer surface.
The Man let out a grey fume of breath as he came to the catch. He slowed. He stopped. He took more breaths, and felt his pulse fall. He undid the fastenings over his boots and took a pull from his water. The cold attacked his body-at-rest.
The Man stood.
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