Chapter 5 - Leeges Mission Broadcast
The Man panted as he parted the curtain and stepped into the study. Sweat glistened over his forehead and hands - both still covered in rose petals of bright, burned skin. His clothes clung wetly. Steam wafted off The Man’s body in the cold air of the room.
Today had been the farthest he’d ever pulled on his spinner.
And, he’d done it on the littlest food.
The Man walked to his desk. His legs seemed to wobble in the short distance from the plastic curtain. He sank into the hard wooden chair and took a deep breath. Blackness retreated from his vision. The room returned to its normal starlight view.
The Man heard the radio, faint but without static, coming through the speaker.
Nikon: “Okay, so, so what you’re painting for me - this picture… Worship! I can’t stop laughing…”
Ma, deadpan: “I don’t see what’s your trouble. Theeles’s warriors wear leotards for their uniforms. What’s wrong with that?”
Nikon: “But look at this thing. Do they wear it while they’re spinning? Do they wear it on deck? What about when they’re on Nakadanan soil; do they have camo leotards? What about slingproof leotards?”
Ma: “So many questions; is this a Kaning? The source in army provisions who got me this thing didn’t say where it came in.”
Dano: “Maybe it’s only for spinning. I could see a soldier pulling an oar in this.”
Nikon: “Ha! That’s even better. Imagine a swift metal frigate, pushing through the sea, driven by scullers dressed in these… It’s so tight too. How’s that work?”
Ma: “What do you mean?”
Nikon: “For the men. Do they pick a leg? Toss the stick and stones to one side?”
Ma: “Maybe this is the eunuchs uniform.”
Dano, laughing: “What were we supposed to be talking about?”
Ma: “Casualties.”
Nikon: “Nice going, Ma. Way to waylay us.”
Ma: “Oh, sure. I’m the one…”
The Man opened a desk drawer. From inside, he plucked a glass jar. He scraped his chair close to the window and held the jar to the starlight. It was halfway full of greenish pickling fluid. Swimming in this fluid were twelve long, pale worms. These were birdworms; found in the second stomachs of glass sky raptors. The worms writhed over each other at the bottom of the jar.
The Man settled against the hard back of the chair. He twisted the top of the jar off and pulled one of the wriggling creatures from the fluid. It twisted over his fingers.
The Man brought it to his mouth and bit halfway down its length. The worm was chewy. The second half writhed over his beard and nose and lips until The Man slurped it down.
While he chewed, The Man looked through the window. The stars were tiny motes of white, cobalt, and sapphire beyond a semi-translucent sky. Rime and grime thickly covered this stretch of the great glass. It had no other features; of flora and fauna, there were none. The Man had entered a barren stretch. The metal striation rolled steadily through the tracks of his shell.
The stars were in that pre-waking dimness. In an hour, maybe less, they would flare into huge honeyed discs.
The Man plucked another worm from the jar. He brought it to his mouth and bit. He set his elbow against the arm of the chair and rested his chin in his palm. The Man forgot to chew for a moment. He seemed to forget his wet clothes, and the shell he needed to stop, and the radio hosts. He only matched looks with the stars; they, peering down through the grimy sky; he, watching from his window through eyes laden by dark bags. All the while the worm wriggled in his beard.
The Man lifted his chin and leaned toward the window. His eyes took on a sharper look. His jaw opened a fraction and the worm fell from his face. The Man reached down, picked it up, wiped it off, and stuffed it back in his mouth. While chewing, he continued to inspect at the sky.
Ahead of the shell was a Windblown pack of dust and snow. It lay like a lake of starless grey pallor across the flatness. It covered a stretch of the striation. Even with a hot furnace The Man doubted his shell could push through. The pack would be dense. He’d have to get out and scrape a way through.
Another task. But it was not the buildup of grim which had drawn The Man’s eye.
The Phaen prodded The Man’s knee with the curve of its beak. He brought the binoculars down from his face and reached a finger to scratch its tufted forehead. Then he returned the magnifying lenses to his eyes and looked through the window.
The grime lake had a gradual sloping edge. The Man estimated the pack at two to three inches thick. The rough surface had stopped approaching - The Man had set his brakes. He arced the binoculars now across the still patch. He started from the edge into which the striation plunged. His view crossed to the far side, where the line would exit.
The striation forked.
Somewhere within the lake of packed ice and gristle, the single line of metal from which the shell dangled split in two.
It had been a tenday, at least, since The Man had seen a fork. He’d need to bring both his scraper and his decoupling hook with him to the top of the shell. He would clear the gristle off the line while his shell rolled forward. Then, one at a time, he would unhook the four couplers from where they clung to the single line, and re-hook them on one of the branches.
The Man used the binoculars to follow a branch where it emerged from the lake. Keeping it in view was difficult. The Wind had risen, the ship rocked, and the lines were hard to spot against the icy glass. He saw that this left branch continued on the westward path. It maintained his current route, keeping the ridged line of the seacover many kilometers to starboard. The Man thought he saw, farther west, the early ridge-snow which marked another patch of dunes. Possibly, food and fuel waited that way.
The Man brought his binoculars back to where the fork emerged from the grey patch. He found and followed the other branch. It curved off and to the right.
It curved toward the seacover.
The line made a gradual turn against the glass, before running in an almost perfectly northward line. The Man squinted against the binocular lenses. He followed the north-running striation as far as possible. It became indistinguishable a kilometer out, even at full magnification. But The Man imagined that the divergent line ran true to the north.
North. North beyond the frontier. North into the seacover.
The Wind rocked The Man’s vision. He lost sight of the line. The radio turned to static behind him.
The Man dropped the goggles and looked at the speaker. It was unintelligible static. The Wind must have nudged the receiving dish. The angle at which The Man received the Leeges Mission Broadcast had become acute over the last tenday.
Beside The Man, the Phaen bristled its feathers and cocked its head.
The Man walked to the dish wheel on the other side of the room. As he turned it, The Man tried to remember all he knew of the seacover. It was little.
No great multiship fleet had ever scraped the glass sky above the Kyrillion and Arno seas. The Man knew, however, that the sky there wasn’t blanketed entirely in Wind-blown dirt and rooted plants. That was the seacover of stories, but worthy seamen had crossed those waters beneath that cover. The Man had read the accounts; he knew that starry glass was just as likely as swathes of sediment and root.
Besides that, it was rare for glass-clinging material to mass over a striation. Plants never grew over the metal. Ice grime spots like the one ahead were an uncommon inconvenience.
What exactly did exist within that far realm of the glass, no trapper’s journal or encyclopedia told. The Man guessed he’d see Dorren and Aedra and Staegons, but that was only a guess. Those known plants and birds might be absent from the skyscape over the sea. The sky itself was unknown. The distant ridgeline marked a craggy buildup of ice and dirt. What lay past, no sculler knew.
If the striation continued north, it would likely run through that vast, unknown, uncharted sky.
The hosts’ voices crystallized as The Man turned the antenna wheel.
Dano: “…don’t want to, to diminish the sacrifice of the sailors on the Warship Skairos.”
Ma: “Sacrifice for what? Chairos’s ambitions.”
Dano: “Well that’s valid. I mean the loss, I guess. I just want to clarify. Our pity goes to the sailors lost at the Skairos’s sinking. The survivors in Nakadan’s prison camps have our sympathy. That’s all I’m saying.”
Ma: “Of course. I didn’t say the soldiers deserved it!”
Dano: “I know, I know, Ma. But some listeners, I think, got the wrong impression in our last war dialogue.”
Nikon: “Hey fellows, look at it this way. Any Leegesman sent to a prison camp is getting a free uniform upgrade.”
Laughter Dano: “I think there won’t be any more tragedies today or tomorrow. I hear the Wind’s blowing in from The Katamas. She’s making mountains across the sea.”
Ma: “Awww. I bet Chairos feels isolated out there in the eastern archipelago.”
Nikon: “It’s lonely being a god.”
Ma: “What Chairos god of, Nikon? War?”
Dano: “I was going to guess Ghost Worship. Or no; spinners. He’s always led naval people.”
Nikon: “Fellows, think better… It’s leotards.”
The Man gave the wheel a last turn to make the voices clear. He glanced at the Phaen. It seemed satisfied. Its beak bobbed up and down to the staticky words. The Man walked back to stand beside it at the window.
The stars now shone as slightly brighter bulbs. Only in the grey patch where the track forked were they fully obscure. It would only be an hour until the waking; until the sky became so bright they reflected off the ice on the shell roof; until everything near the glass baked in their radioactive shine.
After a moment’s more thinking, while the Leeges Mission Broadcast chattered, and the ship rocked in a rising gale, The Man left the window. He grabbed the jar of birdworms from the desk. He started chomping the nutrient-dense, wriggling creatures, one after another as fast as possible.
The Man shifted sideways. He just dodged another chunk of grey, frozen dross as it crashed to the shell beside him. His torso was fixed to the sail post, and the frozen surface made his footing unsure. The Man could only shift sideways so much; this particular chunk smacked painfully against his hip. Then it split into fragments when it struck the frozen shell.
With a shove The Man jammed his scraper pole at the sky. He scraped toward his shell track from a cleared spot ahead on the striation. Each time The Man completed a fresh stretch of line, and met where the shell tracks were stuck on the grime, the whole deck suddenly surged. It surged now, as the last fragment of grime exploded away between his chisel and the track coupling.
The Man brought his tool down and crouched. The shell rocked forward and backward, suddenly freed from its locked state. The Wind aided the motion. It howled in The Man’s ears and slammed his back. The Man would’ve fallen without the rope lashing him to the sail post. As it was, his studded boots skidded on the ice. He slipped, landing on his tailbone.
After the tiny surge the front track rolled to the farthest point The Man had cleared. Then the rocking motion stopped. The back three couplings scrunched toward the front and threw the ship into an uneven angle. All four tracks eventually stopped. A grinding sound rose as axles tried to spin tracks which wouldn’t move. The sound was unpleasant, but unavoidable.
The Man got to his feet. He rubbed his tailbone, and started scraping a new hole three meters ahead. The Man had tried starting on the track side and chiseling forward as it moved, but the ice kept dropping into the axle housing. The Man had been repeatedly forced to untie himself from the sail, crawl over, and chip the axle loose. This way was easier.
The Man scraped. He heard the sound of metal on metal. Slowly, he worked back toward the track.
Another ice chunk fell. The Man shifted. He wondered how much farther until he hit the striation fork. His coat’s heat-plates had lost their warmth some time ago. Now they were just extra metal making The Man clumsy. The Wind had worsened as the stars widened to the fullness of day. Through the narrow line he’d scraped, The Man saw that full day wasn’t far off. Fifteen minutes, perhaps half-an-hour. The stars shone through the narrow, clean channel. They reflected off the frozen shell roof. Standing outside in the day would be deadly, The Man knew, even without cold and Wind.
It happened suddenly. The piece of ice The Man had been scraping dropped. The pieces around it followed. The Man ducked and brought an arm overhead just before frozen grime pelted his shoulders. He heard the falling ice radiating out, drumming across the shell. The shell shifted suddenly under him, the ice ahead of it on the track clearing away. The Man, still ducking, fell again to his tailbone.
The Man paused with his arms raised in defense. He waited while the immediate ice fell. When it had, he lowered his hand and looked around.
Radiating out from the place The Man had chiseled, the fast-sticking, frozen grime was fracturing off the glass sky. It moved out and away from him, like a ripple through stone, turning into a cascade of broken rock and wiping clean the space over which it moved. The sound was none The Man had ever heard, something like the creak of an old oak limb breaking off in a thunderstorm, but constant. Grey ice-grime-rain fell all around him in a perfect circle, radiating out from his shell as it surged forward along the fast clearing striation. The grim broke off farther and farther out, going all the way to the edge of the huge lake, almost a kilometer out.
Over the span of a minute, the space around The Man transitioned. One moment there had been a lonely line of starlight surrounded by perfect shadow. The next brought crystal clarity. When The Man looked up, there seemed to be no glass cover at all, so clean did the sky appear. The Man saw the swirling galaxies which comprised the stars. They stood in auroral shades against the backdrop of space.
The approaching fork brought The Man’s attention back to the striation. It seemed so simple this close, just two lines of metal running off where one had been.
The Man waited for his front track to come against the split and grind to a halt. After the swaying had faded to only what the Wind produced, The Man brought his scraper in. He unscrewed the scraper tip from the long pole and stowed it in a leather sack. From the same sack he brought a two-hook, grappling mechanism with a long rope attached. He screwed that mechanism in the scraper’s place.
The Man rose from his cold seat. He started raising the grappling pole. Then he stopped. He set the pole though the rope tied around his waist. He slid an arm down, pulled the binoculars from his bag, and brought them to his eyes.
He wanted a last scan.
The striation told him nothing new. It curved north before disappearing at a distance. Four kilometers away the seacover ridge looked unbroken. At this distance, however, The Man could tell nothing.
He swung the binoculars back to the split. He followed the other line. This time he saw more of the sky’s features. A kilometer along the west line, snow dunes did indeed begin to form.
The Man brought the binoculars down. The stars were bright overhead now. On a whim, The Man made a last turn to the south. He brought the magnifying lenses to his eyes.
He tilted them slowly down.
Far, far, far south of his current patch of sky, a landscape stretched. It was a spackle of green and brown, and a blue which seemed deeper than any The Man knew.
That was Leeges.
The view lasted a moment. Then the Wind blew in a flock of clouds, and The Man lost vision.
The Man brought his binoculars back up to sky, then took them from his goggles. He returned them to the leather sack. He grabbed the adjusting tool and brought it up to the front track.
It took The Man a moment to get the front track’s connector loose. He had to work his hooks underneath the rollers that slid along one side of the striation’s bottom. Then he had to hook and lift the rollers on the other side with the grabbing hooks. Eventually The Man had the connector loose, hoisted on the end of his pole.
Working with care to keep his balance; fighting a pounding, leather-flapping Wind; grinding his studded boots in the ice-crusted shell which swayed below; ignoring the frigid metal plates stealing warmth off his arms and legs and chest; The Man fixed his front track on the new striation line.
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