Chapter 12 - The Heart
The Man sat cross legged before the furnace. Cold air lapped in through the open door, past his bony shoulders and knees. The fire inside ate the air and danced a tiny flame. This dancing flame had no choice where to shed its product. The vents had all been closed; the boiler, stopped. The flame sent everything back through the same door; all its heat, all its light, all its little crackles.
These things, as they washed The Man, made his world.
The little crackles were all the sound he knew. The radio speakers sat silent and brooding upon the gritty, grimy, curved walls. The Man couldn’t afford the electricity to power his radio. It only played static anyway. He guessed the frost had claimed the antenna. Aside from the occasional rustle of insulation whenever The Man shifted, or the startling sound of his infrequent, raspy breaths, the crackling wood alone held back silence.
It was the furnace fire which also held back the dark. By its light, The Man saw all his world laid before him. A cone arced forth from the open door. It fell over the floor strewn in feathers and bones. It fell over a subset of the shelves on the far wall, and glinted off spare pieces of gear and piping. It lit the gaunt shape of The Man, wrapped within loose texel and silk clothes. The flickering light reflected, dimly, off The Man’s brown eyes.
Greatest of all the furnace’s gifts, however, was its heat. The heat had retreated from the other rooms. It had retreated from the cold in the rest of the shell as blood from extremities. Only the furnace chamber - the little circle of hot light before which The Man sat - carried the shell’s faint pulse.
It seemed strange to The Man, that once he’d spent heat so wastefully. Strange, to have kept every chamber unnecessarily warm. Stranger still, to have once left the window open - the exterior door, ajar - in easier days. The concept of limitless heat, the heat of lands far below, was unimaginable to The Man. He didn’t try to imagine it. He focused on drawing as much heat as possible from his own tiny fire.
The Man watched one piece of multiship pallet crumble through the metal grate. The collapsing cinders made a tiny plume of ashes among the remaining flames. The Man reached a skinny hand to his nearby pile of broken board fuel. He plucked a splintered piece. He set it atop the burning pile.
Along the return of his hand to his lap, The Man picked up a pale bird bone. Bones lay randomly among the feather-and-gristle floor insulation. This bone was from the leg of a Rhok. The Man brought it to his mouth. He gnawed upon it, seeking remnant flavor.
All The Man’s motions were slow. All had deliberate purpose. In another man, the shaking of the hands and their lethargic motion might have looked like indecision. But this Man’s hands shook from malnutrition, not doubt. His movements were slow to conserve energy.
Like a body letting fail the systems it least needs when strained, The Man had tried all his talents and resources against the cold, cold sky. All had come to nothing. The Man now had one tool left with which to battle. Patience.
The Man felt death’s nearness in his new world. He saw it in the deeper shadows at the chamber’s extremities. He felt it in the tepid flame, and the hunger pangs, and sharp bones under his skin. He smelled it in his squalid clothes. He heard it in the silence. Death was all around in this world. Mostly though, death was in the cold.
The Man saw death, but was not afraid. Fear served nothing. The cold might kill The Man, but he would not surrender to it. The Man would be patient for as long as his body allowed. As long as possible, he would endure.
The Man stared into the fire. He gnawed upon his bone. He waited.
The Man hunched. He set his palms against bare metal patches of the floor. He leaned farther forward, turned his head sideways, and set his ear against the floor. He held his breath.
The floor shifted.
The Man had no doubts. He knew the feeling - the sway of a Wind. He knew, intimately, the feeling of his center of balance shifting. It was like shaking the hand of a long-missing friend.
The Man rose quickly. He swayed in place until the sparklers faded from his eyes. Then The Man stepped to the woodpile. Only three paces from the furnace door the cold air struck, like a wintry morn’s farm chores. The pile lay in the dark, but The Man could still discern the smallness of its shadow.
He took as many boards as he could. He grabbed them and he dragged them. He pulled them one-by-one to the furnace and stuffed them one-by-one through the door.
As The Man fed the fire he kept note of his balance. He felt the floor through his boots for any motion. Sure enough the shell shifted. The shift was small, the shift was almost unnoticeable, but the shift was.
The fire burned hotter and brighter and louder with each added board. All its produce poured back through the open door. The Man realized the block was still on the boiler and vents. He flipped two dampening levers at the furnace’s side. Instantly the old air droning told The Man of hot life returning to the shell’s extremities. A moment later he heard the boiler hiss, and the electric hum of his motor.
The light spread farther and farther over the chamber. It glinted off shelved sundries: the spare spear from the multiship, the buckles of his outdoor tool pack, the empty tea tins. The light spread over the tiny firewood pile, and revealed in full the scarce supply. If he burned at the usual rate now, The Man might have enough fuel for four days.
The thought never entered The Man’s mind to run the furnace at anything less than its hottest. He had waited in stillness for a season of the lower world’s time. The new Wind was small, but The Man would throw himself upon its chance. He added another board to the conflagration.
As the floor rocked beneath him, The Man heard a clatter. By the brightening firelight he saw loose bones tumble from the bone pile. Feathers too, drifted off their respective store, driven by the swaying ship and the warm air current.
The feathers, and even the bones, burned when the furnace ran hot.
The Man rushed back and forth. He moved from feather pile, to bone pile, to wood pile, to furnace. He watched the flame reach higher and higher with each new load.
The iron handle nearly blistered The Man palm when he finally pressed the furnace door shut. Nearly shut. The Man left a crack for better airflow and hotter flames.
The Man stepped toward the exit curtain.
Then The Man reconsidered. He recalled the fire from the time he’d been hunting. He heard the crack of bones and wood inside now, and saw the wild light flickering through the sliver of open door.
The Man turned back and shut the furnace completely.
With a hundredth heavy inhale, The Man made a hundredth heave upon the spinner oar. The footplates stabbed into his bony heels. The wooden oar clacked upon his fleshless fingers. The Man strained, hard as he could. But the flywheel’s softer whine told him that the actual force was less than what he might have managed before the glacial wait.
Gasping, The Man dropped the oar and let the drive rope pull it back to the catch. He came forward and bent over his knees. His breaths were thin and his heartbeat fast, but The Man had hardly broken a sweat. The Man wiped his brow even so. He stopped his breath and listened. He breathed out and dropped his shoulders when he heard the grinding noise of the axles.
The ice still locked the tracks in place.
The Man looked to the side instinctively, but the sealed plate still covered the broken window. He looked up and behind the spinner wheel for his painting; his eyes followed their usual spinning pattern mechanically. Without the window and its faint starlight, however, the room was pitch black. Besides that, She Crawled in Stars with Elder bugs lay in the study against his desk.
The Man put himself through a waking and warming exercise. He swung his arms and bent his legs. He flexed his fingers. He wriggled his toes. He twisted his neck one way, then another, then nodded back and forth. He arched his spine until he heard it pop.
The Man reached in the dark until he felt the wooden oar. He waited until his breath was caught, then renewed his pulls. He concentrated on building his effort gradually; fifty easy pulls, then fifty that were harder, then fifty more, increasing in effort. The Man’s skinny frame seemed to him to grind against the spinner seat and footplates. The old spear wound on his right arm stung all over again.
The Man pushed the pain back. He made himself concentrate on counting. When he lost count, he focused for a dozen pulls on getting air into his lungs. He had little bodily fuel left to burn; he needed the air.
This time The Man worked up a sweat. He felt it run down the back of his neck. He felt it stinging the open sores on his lips. He hauled harder, pushing himself closer to the black edge of consciousness. The sparkling motes appeared in his vision. Had the room not been already pitch black, The Man would have noticed sight shrinking to a tunnel. The Man knew he could no longer pull in enough air for this effort. But, he pushed his body harder. Feeling his consciousness slipping, The Man abandoned good form. He nearly doubled the rate of his strokes. He simply threw himself into pulling as many times as possible before he lost consciousness.
A moment later, The Man realized he wasn’t moving. Beyond that, he couldn’t remember who he was, or where he was. He knew he was exhausted. He felt the soft padding of the insulation on his hands. He smelled its moist, gristly odor; a stink which had frozen in the preceding tendays, now warming and releasing as The Man breathed raggedly.
The Man found himself lying halfway off of the spinner. His boots were still lashed to the heel plates, but his body dangled over the side of the cupped seat. His arms and face lay against the floor.
The Man’s identity returned to him with some breaths. He remembered himself, and the shell on the glass sky, and eventually the ice. He remembered the spinner. He remembered the last shriek of the flywheel. Its pitch had been earsplitting. The Man listened carefully for the shell’s ambience.
He heard, under the vents and the engine churr, the same sound of grinding.
The Man pushed himself off the floor. He leaned tiredly forward over his knees. He wanted to sit there for a while. He wanted to rest until he felt well.
An inner will compelled The Man not to rest. He forced himself to reach forward. He didn’t pick up the oar, the oar wasn’t working. He might try it again later.
The Man undid the straps holding his boots to the heel plate. He swung his feet over the side. With a deep breath, he stood. The room was already lightless, but The Man felt the dangerous, sight-blackening rush of blood to his head. He swooned; the shell seemed to sway with sudden energy.
The Man stumbled to the wall where he knew the curtain to be. He caught himself on the gritty metal with a hand. When he felt himself stable, The Man groped around the rim of the door until he felt the wall hook and the crank lantern. He gave it three slow turns. A dim blond light spilled from the glass. The spinning room looked the same.
The Man pushed through the curtain, into the long corridor. The blond lantern light reflected on the walls. They were still sooty and covered with grime. The stagnant, humid air of many days had condensed, however, and frozen over the gritty surfaces.
The Man set his lantern on the corridor wall hook over the spinning room curtain. He stepped down the hall and into the study. This room too was entirely dark. The ice had formed thickly enough on the broken viewing glass to block out the stars. The Man grabbed its lantern and cranked it.
Light lent life to the room as it fell on The Man’s possessions. The spines of his books and journals were like the photos of family; the hammock looked soft and beckoning. The Man had given this room up as well, when he’d retreated to the furnace.
He now looked upon the shelves, and the pile of rope, and even the books, with a new appreciation.
He wondered how long each might burn.
The Man had no definite plan upon entering the study. He thought he might break down all these creature comforts, converting them to their fuel potential. He rubbed a hand through his mangy beard. He glanced to the right, to the radio wheel. The radio was off. Adjusting the antenna wouldn’t change that, but it might cause reverberations in the shell.
The Man grabbed the wheel. It wouldn’t budge at first, but a hard jerk set the gears moving and the antenna spinning.
The Man heard the crack of ice and a sharp squeal. The antenna had broken loose. The Man listened, not for the radio, but for the same crack and squeal from above.
He heard no mass shattering announcing release from the ice. The grinding noise of the stuck tracks persisted.
The Man spun away from the wheel. He stalked toward the window without a known purpose. The shadows thickened as his lantern light waned. He cranked out a renewed glow.
The bullet hammer caught his eye, lying behind a footboard below the curving window. He thought of winding and swinging it against the exterior walls. Perhaps those vibrations would break the ice. The Man looked upon the window. If the front viewing glass broke completely, The Man had no replacement. He thought of trying the hammer vibrations anyway, and abandoning the study if needed.
The Man’s eyes found those of the child in the painting. He looked to the painted stars behind the pale face, blue-white dots on a shiny glass canvas of purple night. Though beautiful, the painted firmament was a sad substitute for the genuine one.
A sudden idea struck The Man. The thought came to him that, perhaps, a stronger Wind meant a higher temperature.
The Man stepped over to the wooden foot chest beside the glass fronted cabinet. He grabbed the feather-lined coat and pants from their hook above the chest. He began pulling on the protective suit. The fit was looser now.
The Man stepped back from the ledge and pulled the exterior shell door shut. He twisted the lever lock to seal it. Darkness folded over him, along with the shell’s warmth.
The Man reached blindly up until he felt the hot air of the vent blowing over his mitted hands. Within the mitts, within the leather gloves, his fingers pricked with returning feeling.
In the brief moment when he’d climbed onto the rungs, the bitter air had laid siege to The Man’s extremities. He hadn’t reached the top of the shell, he hadn’t even managed to get his coilspear from around his back. He’d just had time to glimpse the tiny band of real stars above, and to see his track connectors still frozen to the striation.
Perhaps the Wind had brought warmer air. If that was the case, The Man hadn’t noticed it. The glacial sky felt cold as ever.
When The Man could feel his fingers, he found the lantern he’d left on the floor. He cranked out a glow. He listened. The only sound beyond the vents was the grinding heart.
The Man returned to the central corridor. He turned first in the direction of the study and spinning room, then towards the furnace, then stopped. Plans multiplied and weighed themselves in his mind. He thought of using the bullet hammer against the shell; of taking all his journals and tossing them in the oven (they’d burn hotter, maybe hot enough to break the ice); of dumping every last bit of ballast and furniture from his shell and hoping the Wind would jolt him loose.
The floor rocked uncertainly beneath The Man’s feet. It seemed almost as if the sky demanded some sacrifice in exchange for freedom. As if The Man must lose something precious in exchange for the power to break the ice. The Man found himself pulled in different directions by the choice; pulled toward the bullet hammer and the possibility of a shattered window; pulled toward his books and their burnage; pulled toward the hold, and ballast he might not survive losing. And as The Man’s mind ran over these and other plans, all the while, the heart chamber filled the shell with that distracting noise of grinding axles.
The heart chamber’s rumble filled The Man’s senses. The sound came through the muffling leather coat. The sound thrummed through the shell’s metal. The sound was like the vibration of a motor, or the beat of a smaller heart, but on a grand scale.
The Man hunched over with a sudden sharp pain in his abdomen. His muscles - cold for tendays, suddenly heated, made to work, thrust back into the cold sky, and abruptly returned to the warm bosom of the shell once more - cramped. He arched his back and massaged his stomach, trying to ease the pain. The muscles gradually relaxed.
The distracting beat of the shell heart, and pain from the cramp, merged in The Man’s mind. He had an idea.
The Man marched for the furnace chamber. He cranked the lantern as he went, its electric light leading through the grimy tunnel, while the vents warmed the fully-dressed Man, and the unspent coilspear bounced against his shoulders.
The Man ducked through the curtain and stepped to the furnace. Setting the lantern down, he threw back the iron bolt and flung wide the furnace door. A flume of hot air caused by pressure difference washed over The Man. His leathern, feathery suit kept his hair from singing. The Man waved at the gust and stomped a patch of singed insulation.
Turning to the woodpile, The Man took the largest logs of hottest burning wood. It was Dorren Ivy, the last of the wrinkly stuff. He loaded the stone furnace until it was packed. Already he could feel the heat rising to a wilting level. He shut the door and let the flame work.
The Man turned, picked up his lantern, and marched back through the curtain. He took two long strides, then beat a left. He entered the passage to the stairs leading down to the ballast room.
The Man, however, did not travel all the way down. He stopped halfway, upon a landing. He turned his lantern to a door at the right.
The door was a real piece of ironmongery and wood, not like the curtains elsewhere in the shell. These boards off of a real tree were held together by two sturdy iron bands and thick carriage bolts. A great barrel lock held the door shut.
Beyond the door, the shell heart thrummed.
The Man reached out and flicked the handle of the barrel lock. He felt the grinding vibrations through the metal. He threw the bolt back, and the door opened a crack. The grinding and thrumming sounds became instantly deafening; the Man would have set wax in his ears if he hadn’t been wearing the sound-dampening hood of his coat. He threw the door wide and stepped inside.
This chamber of the shell was not much larger than the radio room. The Man brought his light up to a hook above the metal doorframe. It lit the whole space. The walls were curved and rough, but not coated in grime.
The Man saw his light and his body reflected in two curving mirrors set immediately on either side of the door. The mirrors reflected The Man’s lanky, thin appearance, even in the thick cover of his coat and pants.
The mirrors also cast two beating reflections; two perfect likenesses of the giant, pink, leathery, living shell heart.
The heart was exactly human in shape, but like the bucket of a wheelbarrow in size. Glowing rods descended from the ceiling and stabbed down into the holes for the arteries. The giant organ beat in mad agony at the sizzling heat of the rods. A glass dial - like the one on the dosimeter - was sewn with thick wire stitching onto the face of the heart. Each time it pounded (several times a second at the current heat) the needle on the dial jumped to the right.
One ropey, insulated wire ran down from the dial, over the uninsulated metal floor, and halfway up the wall to a control box. The box was aluminum. From it, the churning gearworks of the shell rose and fell. Six axle pillars shot through the aluminum case. In the ceiling they met with horizontal bars. Gears all along the lengths of these pillars and bars gnashed teeth with other gears in the walls. When the shell was rolling free, some number of the gears would always be in a state of churn, converting the heart’s electric current into mechanical motion.
One other wire protruded from the control box beside the main heart line. This was the wire for the radio room. It ran from the box to the ceiling. It took the heart’s electricity and converted it to sound.
The Man turned to face the box. His twin reflections turned with him. On the box’s face were three stubbly, vertical wooden levers, evenly spaced across the center. There was also one cranking arm in the top right corner. The controls were unlabeled, except for small notch marks at points along the metal they fed into. The Man knew what each did. He needed no labels.
The Man took the farthest right lever. It had only two notches and was in the down position. He grabbed it from underneath and, with a great force of arm, shoved it up.
A sound of caught metal screamed through the space for a moment and made the ears ring. One of the dark pipes shooting up from the box quivered. A second later, the glowing rods above the shell heart began to cool.
The Man had engaged a muffling plate on the heart source. The glowing rods went dim, as did their twin reflections.
The heart beat slower. The sound of the stuck gears fell away.
With an equally hard pull, The Man brought the lever back down. The rods brightened, and the heart picked up. The gears let off a tremendous, strained-metal groan. The Man felt the floor quiver.
The axle drivers of the ship remained stuck.
The Man tried The Maneuver twice more. Both times had the same result. He stopped after the second time - the heart could only be strained so far. The Man moved over to the second lever. Currently facing down with its snub-length, this was the braking and direction lever. The Man tried the same motion with this lever. He switched it up and down. He had to apply more force; the brake lever connected to the entire rest of the gear system. The Man hoped a jolting start might free the shell from its prison.
The second lever also failed. The Man tried both braking and reversing. Neither worked. By now, The Man was sweating beneath his coat and pants. Ignoring the heart’s beat and the deafening gearworks, The Man shed his hooded coat and set it aside.
The Room was darker now. The electric lantern had died. The glowing brands above the heart still gave a molten, primeval light to the small space, reflected twice over in the mirrors; like three sets of low fire seen through the grated door of a stove.
By the light, The Man saw himself in the mirrors. This time it was without the coat to mask his condition. The Man’s skin lay pale and loose over his bones. His muscles were atrophied. Scars - the deeper cut on his arm - and burn marks covered him. There were yellow patches from bruises that had never healed. The Man’s eyes sank like tunnels into the jagged earth of his face, surrounded by a greasy, tangled wood of his hair and beard. He looked like a sweaty corpse.
The Man looked away from the mirror and focused on the heart. He tried the third lever. This one only controlled the number of track axles turning. It was at its highest setting right now, at the top to drive all four. The Man expected nothing to happen with this lever, since the other two had failed. He tried switching it anyway.
His expectations were met. The lever had no effect on the ice. It made the gearworks stutter, but not as violently as the braking and muffling controls.
The Man wiped a hand across his brow. He reached up and gave the crank at the corner six or so spins. It connected to the spinner system. A third wire, unseen, brought charge from the spinner to the control box. This crank could be used in the same way. But the current it made was small. The Man turned it with a burst of half-effort. The extra current didn’t even change the pitch of the grinding.
The Man stepped back and placed his hands over his ears. The controls had failed. He tried to think. Beneath him, the floor shifted in the Wind. It all seemed so tantalizingly close. The Man would not believe that his efforts to break free would fail now. He looked at the controls, and tried to imagine some combination which might startle the tracks loose.
The Man looked up suddenly. His reflection did the same. All three - The Man and his two reflections - turned back to the great leathery heart itself. All three reflections reached down and picked up their feather coat. All three pulled on the coat partway, just the hood and arms. All three slipped their hands into the mitts. All three took one pace close to the heart, and set the mitts against the surface.
The heart was hot. Very hot. Even through his leather gloves, The Man felt it baking his skin. It wasn’t burning, yet. He left his hands in place.
The Man let his body and hands acclimate to the pulse. It beat at several times a second, maybe a hundred and eighty times a minute. The Man’s own pulse began to creep in sympathy.
He waited, until his hands were falling up and down in perfect time with the beat.
The Man began to press back. He didn’t put all his force into it, just enough to make the flesh bend. First he only pushed at the same rate of the heart. Then he pushed faster. The rhythm was asymmetrical at first; his own pushes out of beat; as if the great shell heart suffered arrhythmia. At first The Man thought he’d have no effect - he’d tried The Maneuver before, just to start the heart. But only hot furnace pain seemed to do the job.
Gradually, the heart’s pace quickened. It rose to match The Man’s press. Counting in his head, as he counted at the spinner, The Man measured it at over a hundred and eighty beats now. The beats no longer fell perfectly three-to-a-second. Now the seconds and beats bled into each other. The Man was artificially manipulating the heart to a higher pulse.
The Gears pitched louder. They rang in The Man’s ears. He ignored them. He pressed faster. The heart rose higher. It climbed to two hundred.
The Man kept one hand pounded on the thrumming organ. It kept pace. He reached with his other hand out to the middle lever, the one which braked the tracks and changed their direction. His reflections reached with him.
With a sharp pull, he brought the lever down to a stop. The gears fell silent, though his ears kept ringing. The Heart vibrated all around and inside of The Man. The needle on its dial flicked right, right, right, right, faster, faster, faster, faster. His own pulse climbed maddeningly higher. He gasped and sweated from the stifling heat coming off the organ. His reflections labored with him.
The Man jerked it down another notch, throwing the tracks into reverse. The grinding sound exploded upon his ears. The heart seemed to tremble at the renewed draw on its electric energy.
With a screech like tin shorn from a roof in a hurricane, all three sets of gears - The Mans, the two reflected - spun suddenly free. Their deafening grind abated. Through the ring in his ears, The Man heard the noise of salvation.
The shell tracks rumbled upon the striation.
The Man took his hand from the heart and stepped back. The huge, pink organ’sw pulse slowed, though only back to a hundred and eighty. The Man’s pulse dropped as well. The Man took off his mitts and wiped his brow.
When he looked at his palms they were red, but unburned.
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