Chapter 16 - The Cold Wind Blew
The Man held the cracked radio room speaker by one hand. With effort, he swung it overhead and brought it against the metal floor. The equipment splintered, without sound, into smaller pieces of wood.
The Man took the pieces and fed them through the furnace door. The flame inside ate with relish. It was no great blaze, but it shed life-giving heat through the shell, and light through the chamber.
Swinging the speaker box made The Man swoon. He stepped back from the fire - unwillingly back from the warm fire - and crumpled on the leg Anka had slashed. He fell against his elbows. A second nauseated wave hit him as pain connected and multiplied with his ruin-hand. The Man lay for many moments on the cold insulation.
The Man grasped at consciousness. He fought for it as he had before. He wasn’t starving now, but the pain opposing him was greater. He fought harder this time. He focused on concrete needs: food, fuel, recovery, heat. The bile at his throat receded. The tunnels at his eyes’ edges fell off the sides. The pain remained.
The Man sat up and looked about.
The furnace left a dreary shine on the room. Anka still lay in a dead, unbutchered pile at the center. The spear still jutted from its body. The Man would try to butcher it, of course. He couldn’t waste potential food. But heat, fuel for the furnace; those were more important. He looked to the woodpile, as if hoping the ash he’d found had been a lie told by his eyes.
But the pile was gone. Flame had taken it after the furnace explosion. The pile had burned away - one isolated, enormous diaspora of heat - while The Man lay meters away, unconscious of its blaze.
The Man glances at the shelves. There were odd burnable bits: the small brown square of the old spinner seat, a pile of triangular wooden wedges, a broken shelf for books. None of the stuff on his shelf would give much fire. They made a day’s worth of shallow warmth and short travel at best.
Things from the rest of the shell would need to serve The Man. There were not many extraneous things left, he mused. He had already taken the radio room speaker, and the speakers from the other rooms. But those rooms still held burnables. The Man thought of his desk and books in the study. He could burn those. He thought of the heart chamber door. The solid wooden boards would be hard to break apart, but they were food for flame as well.
The Man thought of the scaffolding holding the ballast in place below. It was strong wood, but not very dense. The hold-scaffolding would be a last resort, he thought. Then The Man realized that this was the time of last resort. He could dump the other half of his ballast; a heavy chore, and the Wind would be merciless afterwards. If he dumped it though, he wouldn’t need scaffolding to keep the shell balanced. He added it to his fuel tabulation.
The Man came up short. Travel back to the Engi - to a place with enough plants to take for fuel - was at least a tenday of fast paced travel. The gutting of the shell wouldn’t buy more than five, with his broken-bodied spinning adding little to the sum.
Ignoring the sum, The Man rose to his feet. Heat and fuel were precious, and he couldn’t waste time. He would try the plan. He would keep trying. He would not stop here.
Fresh pain jolted up through his leg and brought The Man down as soon as he rose. He looked at the limb. He’d wrapped the torn flesh and muscle of his left thigh in tight bandages. Beneath the feather-lined pants, however, it looked swollen. Maybe it was simply a bad wound of flesh. Maybe the femur was broken.
The Man looked to his other side, to his left hand. That certainly was broken. He had his mitt off now. He could see the splotchy, swollen, broken stump. After the shattering from the furnace door, it had taken frostbite. The fingertips were black. He doubted if the best Leeges physic could heal a thing like that. The Man certainly couldn’t heal it here on the sky.
The Man crawled over to Anka’s body. Dead now, Anka was only a flat, black-coated bird, with a thin body, and spiny feathers. Only a bird, thought The Man. He grabbed the shaft of the spear and wriggled it loose. He used it as a crutch and propped himself up.
Hobbling on his new support, The Man set out for the study. The Wind struck the shell - like the playful swat a cat gives a dead mouse. The Man crumpled again. He rose again. He went to the wall and leaned against it as he moved. He refused to stop; not here, not in this starless desert.
The hard wood of the desk chair caught The Man as he sat. He leaned the spear against the desk and stretched his crippled leg before him. The overwhelming ache inside it numbed to a dull throb. The light began to fade in his crank lantern, so The Man ground out a fresh charge.
It was a diminished study The Man found himself in. The broken shelves and their former contents now formed a burnable goulash; a pile of books, wood, and textiles in the center of the floor. The front window was fractured, the sky beyond, lightless. On the room’s other side the plastic curtain flaps were sheared to ragged stumps. The radio speaker box on the wall was already gone for burning. The spare bolts of silk were gone, the rope pile was gone. The Phaen was gone.
The Man ran his hand across the scored umber top of his barren desk. The rubber matt and the drink cup were missing; the latter to the floor as a scatter of broken glass, the former to the burnable pile. The Man’s latest logbook still lay open on one side of the desk. The page stood out to The Man, an unmarked buttermilk rectangle against the dark wood.
The coilspear also lay atop the flat surface. The Man had found it on the floor in the corridor. Launcher, spear, lastiwire connecting line - all were undamaged despite Anka’s dragging. Only the spear itself showed use. Anka’s dark blood stained the tip.
The Man had already untangled the line. Now he pulled the weapon closer. Reeling the line in with one hand was difficult, but The Man did it. He loaded the spear into the barrel and cranked that back too. He felt the click telling him the coilspear was armed. He set the weapon back atop the desk beside the logbook. The spear looked almost pristine, and entirely useless in the current trouble.
The Man surveyed the whole space. There was a feeling of change in the air, like the transitional time in a city house, after the old owners have died or gone away, but before new ones claim residence. The floor swayed continually under the press of the Wind beyond the fractured glass. It complemented the changing feeling. The Man felt as if his shell were on the move, but not in the way it moved when traveling. The dim, rocking, metal silence into which The Man plunged felt like the last throes of death.
The lantern once more faded. The Man almost let it go dark. Just before the flicker within disappeared, he reached a hand out and took the handle. He cranked, and the light globe spread back over the empty room.
The Man stood, using the spear for support. He limped over and sat on the curving window sill. The Man held his lantern up to the cracked glass. He looked upward as far as the bend in the viewing glass allowed. The light of his lantern didn’t reach the sky. He could see neither the black ice, nor the stars they hid.
The Man did catch something nearer by, on the edge of his shell. It was hard to make out in the dark. The Man quickly ground a bright shine. He pressed his scalp against the cold glass in an effort to see what made the movement.
The moving thing on the edge of sight was the Wind sail. It had unfurled, either knocked down by Anka or blown loose by the Wind. The shell was currently braked, and the sail made no drive at present. But, The Man thought it might. Excitement urged The Man to his feet, painful though that was. He peered fixedly at the sail.
His excitement vanished. The sail was taut, but it curved forward. It curved in the direction of the window. The Wind was blowing the wrong way, toward the unknown. It blew The Man away from the food and fuel of the Engi.
If The Man wanted to go back, he wouldn’t just have to manage it on an insufficient fuel supply. He’d also be moving against the Wind.
Grabbing the spear and propping himself up once more, The Man hobbled to his hammock. He did not settle and rest, but undid the strings tying it to the wall hooks. He would hang it in the furnace chamber. He would shut all the vents except the one to the spinning room - the furnace would heat that chamber alone.
The Man looked once more at the pile in the center of the room. So much that once seemed essential now served only as food for flame. When it had been books and shelves and supplies, the pile had seemed like so much. It still seemed like much for a man who had relied upon one good leg and hand to gather it. As a fuel source, it was very little. The Man glanced at the desk. He could burn that too, if he broke it down. That was another hour of flame. Another hour of living.
The Man would preserve his logbook and coilspear. He couldn’t burn the latter. He wouldn’t burn the former.
The Man stepped to the pile. He began loading books into his hammock. When it was full, he managed to sling it over his shoulder. He set out, slowed more than ever by injury and weakness, for the furnace.
The torn flaps of the spinning room curtain parted as The Man staggered inside. He stumbled over to the spinner, bearing his full weight heavily on the long metal shaft of the spear. He reached it, barely, and collapsed into the seat. Instead of setting his feet on the heel plate, The Man simply sat, bent and gasping. He set his lantern on the floor and leaned his spear on the spinner rail.
The Man looked at the oar handles. He couldn’t picture himself pulling, not right now. His body felt wrong. It made no sense to The Man. The shell was now at a survivable temperature. The Man had taken food and drink. True, he was wounded, but that was only pain. Pain could be endured. But The Man also felt tired. That was what seemed wrong. To The Man, it seemed as if his shell and his body were failing together.
The spinning room felt especially cold. The Man couldn’t hear the vent blowing; but then, he could hear nothing at all. He looked at the slats high in the wall. He saw that they were open. Still, the room felt cold.
There was nothing for The Man to burn in the spinning room. At least, he’d thought so as he dragged hammock-loads of books and splintered wood from the study to the furnace. The Man saw the colored cloth headbands sway out from the sooty shell wall. Those would burn, he supposed.
The Man noticed the portrait. She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs. That too could burn. It hung where it was supposed to, on the wall before the spinner. He turned on the spinner seat, manually lifting his hurt leg with his good hand over the bowl crest. He faced the painting fully. The Man studied the artwork now, as he’d done so often while spinning. He let his eyes jump, without rhyme or reason, from painted star to painted star. He followed the lines of bugs. He descended the trunk they made. He matches eyes with the sad child.
A strange foreboding stole over The Man. He no longer felt tired, yet neither did he feel motivated to spin. It was like the sudden clarity which The Man knew well; the ability to snap on a choice and know instinctively that it was right. Only this time the spark was drawn out, a sense of dawning comprehension.
In all the endless hours he’d spun, The Man had looked at every different particle of She Crawled in Stars with Elder Bugs. Sometimes he’d seen it in his dreams. In his study of the art, The Man had always assumed that the diverse roots of Elderbugs were coming together. It had always seemed that the bugs merged to form the trunk, holding aloft the child’s frown.
Yet now, The Man couldn’t say why he’d ever thought so. Now it seemed to him that the bugs were not gathering, but dispersing. It seemed that they were spreading out across the metal lines between the stars. To The Man, studying the painting at rest, in his weakened health, seemed to grant this new insight. He stared into the face of the child now, and felt that he understood its sadness.
The Man wondered how much heat the painting would give if it burned.
He smiled at the thought, at the hopeless nature. Not hopeless, he corrected in his mind, but without need. The Man felt the pain in his body. He felt the cold shell air, its own warmth stolen by an impartial glass sky, stealing his warmth in turn. He pictured the little fuel pile of broken bits by the furnace. He pictured the shell’s barren, carcassed chambers. The Man heard nothing, and he watched the light from the crank lantern fade, and he knew that the sum of all these sensations was this; that ‘home’ was a dream.
The Man rose from the seat. He hobbled - not slowly, but not with any zeal - over to the painting on the wall. He took it down. He left the spinning chamber with its vent open. He returned to the furnace room. The burnable pile was just as he’d left it.
The Man walked up to the huge stones of the furnace. The door was already open. The flame inside burned yellow, at a low ebb upon a piece of his desk, and lacked the will to spread.
The Man tossed his painting into the furnace. The fire, like a starving convict over a last crust before the noose, scurried over the canvas. The Man had already turned and did not see.
With equal measure The Man left the chamber. He walked under the curtain torn by Anka. He walked along cold metal corridors blackened with soot. He reached the steps leading to the heart chamber. He stopped at the landing, because he wanted a break.
The Man took a piece of Anka from his coat. He had roasted it earlier and wrapped it in cloth for an intra-spinner snack. He ate it now. The meat was tough, chewy, and tasteless.
When he felt like it, The Man hobbled down the steps to the heart chamber. He opened the door. No blast of sound greeted him, of course. There wasn’t even pressure on his ears.
The Man ground his crank lantern to look at the leather heart. It beat slowly, and seemed slower each second. The Man walked over to the wall controls. He pulled the lever which stopped the shell’s brakes. The floor shifted more than usually as the shell bucked into motion. The motion was uneven; not the steady pace of a full furnace with The Man pulling at his spinner, but the helter skelter stop and start of a low-burning flame and a Wind sail.
The Man exited the heart chamber. He left the door open. At his leisure, he returned to the spinning room. It was cold, but the cold had stopped bothering The Man. The cold was familiar.
Eventually, The Man sat upon the spinning seat. He brought his good leg up and lashed it to the heel plate. He tried doing the same with his mangled one, but realized the pain would overwhelm him. He instead set the limb at an angle with the spinner rail. It would bend and flex at the knee while The Man pressed with only his right leg.
Reaching for the oar, The Man seemed to notice his broken left hand again, all of a sudden somehow. He thought for a moment. Then he grabbed one of the sweatbands. Using it, he tied the hand to the oar handle. The grip was painful - the hurt leg would give him pain too - but The Man knew he could manage both. Pain faded with repeated pulls.
The Man grabbed the other oar handle. He pulled. The pain began.
The Man started slowly. He built up slowly, and never to a brisk pace. He pulled without counting. The Man pulled, not to travel farther, but because it felt human.[]{#_dj1pl578aqp9 .anchor}
Epilogue
The Man pulled. He curled back to the catch. He stopped. He breathed in - cold air slipped slowly through the ice crusting his beard. He breathed out in a long rasp that went unheard. Seconds later, The Man set the boot of his good leg into the spinner’s heel plate. He gripped the oar with two numb hands; one lashed down, one with black curled fingers. When he felt ready, after a long stop, The Man pulled again.
The Man knew his pulsing, restful pulls made an odd rhythm on the flywheel. The spinner’s whine would be swelling and crashing along the lifeless shell walls. The whine would encounter little resistance in the form of other sounds. The furnace, if it still held embers, gave little heat and no hum. The heart chamber beat only when The Man accomplished a pull. A few weak beats a minute.
So the spinner thrummed alone through the metal shell. That shell was still, both its insides and outsides coated in rime. The spinner hum sounded uncannily in the shell, like a pacemaker in a corpse.
The Man’s brown eyes were dulled. The frost covering his beard and feather coat seemed to form a semi-translucent layer over them as well.
But the eyes still moved. They looked out the window. Against the resistance of his stiff, cold coat, The Man followed his eyes. He faced the sky.
The sky was shrouded. Not shrouded entirely though, not anymore. The blackglass desert had been passed. Instead, a cold mist hung in the air. Night stars gleamed through the glass above, making the mist thick and white.
The Wind no longer rocked his shell back and forth. Now in fact, the Wind seemed to push the shell at a perfectly gentle pace. The shell moved forward along the track as if caught in a laminar current.
Beyond fifty meters, The Man saw little. Tumorous, bulbous crystals grew in singular motes across the sky glass. Otherwise, the glass had appeared featureless.
Featureless, and soundless, until now. The Man saw, for the first time in days, a shape in the mist.
In the clouds ahead, along the striation, a huge, downward-pointing geometric shape emerged. It didn’t look like ice to The Man. It looked artificial. It looked like metal.
The Man tried to release the oar. His blackened finger would not move. He twisted his arm at the elbow and pried them loose. His other hand was lashed to the oar; he simply slid the knot off the wood handle. He wriggled his boot side-to-side on the heel plate until the fastening rope loosened and he could free his foot. With all this done, The Man grabbed his walking-spear. He cradled it with arms and elbows, and rose to his feet.
As a freshly embalmed corpse which has animated in ghostly possession; risen from its slate, it stalks down the halls of the morgue; its movements, though active, are not the same as a live man’s, and the slow up-and-down breathing of its chest beneath the stiff funereal suit seems contrary to the breath of life; such were The Man’s steps through the shell.
The corridor wasn’t dark. The curtains were all torn, and the walls were covered in the same frost as The Man, and starlight coming in through the windows rebounded over every surface. To The Man, the hall seemed almost bright. Like a temple.
The Man’s eyes remained dull and matte despite the light. The pupils did not shine. His eyes, semi-opaque behind their cloudy cover that was like ice, remained fixed on the study. He hobbled with neither excitement nor lethargy. The corpse-man seemed beyond feeling.
But the eyes flickered suddenly, hinting at life in the grave. The Man glanced at the tattered radio room curtain. He stopped. His chest heaved once with dead breath. A human interest expressed itself in his face.
The Man turned and slunk beneath the torn radio room curtain.
Within, the light was lesser. It took The Man’s eyes a moment to adjust to the dark, longer than normal. When they did he looked on the metal control box. Anka had destroyed the speaker - it seemed like ages past - but the controls were the same.
The Man passed his blackened hand across the panel. He seemed to notice the fingers for the first time. His eyes widened for a moment. Then he settled. The Man grabbed one knob with a single groove carved upon it. The groove pointed to the left. The Man turned it clockwise to the right. He leaned close to a black mesh orb on the side of the box. He spoke.
“Will this reach? Doubt it. The weak electrics… I’m in an Elderbug on the sky. I found an artifact. I’ll see what’s inside…”
The Man’s words trailed off. To his damaged ears, they sounded muffled. He stepped back from the radio. The Man’s eyes took on the glazed look again as he pulled himself inside himself; as though he withdrew both senses and blood from the extremities in surrender to the cold.
The Man left the radio set to broadcast. He grabbed his spear and hobbled from the room.
An inverted ziggurat clung to the sky. The mist had withdrawn in a kilometer-wide radius around the structure. The Man saw it clearly now. He looked upon the round plain of crystal clear, starry glass; surrounded on all sides by walls of arcing fog; with the carved, stepped ziggurat at its center, hanging like a metal icicle.
The metal striation line stood out in the clear night. It ran from the shell, and the cracked window view from which The Man looked, all the way to the structure’s base.
It seemed as though the shell had stopped now. Not a motion rocked the floor left or right. The Man watched without blinking.
Within the study chamber were scattered bits of glass or metal. There was no wood. The radio adjustment wheel hung from a bare wall. The coilspear lay on one side of the floor. The Man’s logbook, yet unburned, lay on the sill beside him.
Everything in the room was still. A layer of rime covered it all, including The Man. His beard and his coat were heavy with frost. The space had the marbled atmosphere of a tomb. The whole shell hung like a sterile bead of ice and metal from the crystal sky.
The Man let go of a breath. Vapor left his mouth and fogged over the glass for a brief second, like the passage of a ghost.
The shell had not stopped. The Man had faculties enough to see that the ziggurat came steadily closer as the seconds passed. He saw that its metal was like the metal of his shell; dark, probably gritty, with a smoky pattern under. He saw that a similar coat of ice clung to its surface, and thick icicles dangled from its steps. Where the striation touched the ziggurat’s base, a tall, shell-sized seam in the metal suggested a door.
The Wind pushed him closer. It left the shell’s flanks - port and starboard - alone. The Wind seemed only to press against the sail now, again with that laminar smooth flow, driving the shell toward the ziggurat. It was as though that glass sky Wind worked now in tandem with the shell, as though the Wind were no longer merely natural, but nature and artifice’s crossbreed.
The Man’s eyes were glossy and almost vacant through the approach. There was, however, a faint gleam in them - like one smaller star reflecting back upon the sky above.
The Man woke from this patient stupor, just for a moment. His eyes flicked to the journal on the sill beside him. He hesitated. Then The Man took up his pencil by clasping it between his wrists. In clumsy, jagged strokes, he wrote out the line, ‘One artifact, Golem’ upon the parchment.
The Man let the pencil drop, but it made no sound as it hit the floor stripped of insulation. He sat on the narrow sill, laid his head against the cracked viewing window, and watched the ziggurat approach.
As the shell came close to the seam at the base, The Man saw faint lines upon the metal surface. They looked like letters - grooves carved in deep, long lines upon the surface. What they said, The Man couldn’t read. They were in a language he had never seen.
On the tide of the steady Wind, The Shell came to ten meters from the ziggurat. The seam cracked, then widened, then yawned to reveal a black tunnel. The moment was soundless, but The Man felt a vibration run all through his shell and his body. The coat of rime fell from the walls like chalk from a board.
Into the tunnel the shell passed, with The Man inside it. Darkness folded over him.
The Man couldn’t see the pieces of unburned junk scattered across the study room. Even if he could have, he would not have noticed the small box lying in the corner. It was the dosimeter. When the door opened it began to click. The Man couldn’t hear the clicks.
The dosimeter sent its signal unnoticed. Its needle jumped to the rightmost side of the dial and stayed there. The clicks merged, forming one continual, screaming, unheard drone.