Chapter 7 - Seacover
Consciousness began with pain. The Man felt, before anything else, an ache in his chest and arms. The pain from his nose was more radial and honed. His body felt as if it were under a heavy, flat stone.
The Man latched onto the feeling. Pain meant life, and this pain wasn’t atrocious. The Man had known worse. The feeling of touch returned slowly. The Man grew conscious of the cold, but not a numbing kind. He even felt his fingers. And his toes. He moved his digits. They felt stiff, but warm.
The other senses followed. A musty smell filled his nose. His heartbeat sounded loud in his own ears, and his eyes blinked open to darkness.
The Man remembered the Puga. He remembered dumping the ballast. He remembered crawling into the hall and being tossed in the air.
Then The Man realized that the weight he felt across his body was, in fact, something lying atop him. He squirmed, first slowly and stiffly, then with force. The weight atop him suddenly lifted. The Man felt something sharp poke his hip for a moment, and heard a metal scrape. The Man sat up with difficulty and removed the cracked lead helmet.
He was still in the shell tunnel. Only the stars - filtering through the curtains of the spinning and study rooms - allowed him to see. The Man distinguished the feathery shape of his Phaen at his side. It cocked its beak at him.
The Man understood that the Phaen had been the weight on his body.
The Man reached out to it. The raptor came tentatively forward, as though it distrusted the figure in the lead armor. The Man petted the soft feathers beside its beak with his mitted hand. This was his thanks for the warmth it had shared.
With the Phaen off his back, The Man felt the cold now. He realized he would probably have died without the floor insulation and the Phaen’s heat. At a minimum, he’d have lost some toes. He wriggled them now with his legs straight out. They were numb, but he felt the movement and the pain.
The Man pulled his hood up and set his head against the metal wall. The shell inside must be as cold as the outside, he thought. He heard nothing; no Wind, no furnace hum. Hours must have passed since the Puga.
The Wind had stripped the shell of its lacquer. The Man wondered what the dosimeter needle pointed to now. He remembered leaving the box hanging from a nail in the hold.
No doubt the shell had drifted in the storm. The Man couldn’t guess how much. Too many factors were unknown: the Wind speed, the changed shell weight, the time passed. Perhaps the Wind had driven him away from the seacover, back against the striation fork.
Putting his shell and himself in order would take The Man effort.
With effort, The Man rose. A dizzy weakness passed before his eyes. He pressed a mitt against the wall and waited for it to pass. The Phaen nudged the back of his knee and gave one of its worried croons.
Feeling the chill of the floor on his unbooted feet, The Man started for the furnace.
The Man stood in the study.
A blazing furnace now vented hot air through the shell. The Man felt the warm current from the duct wash over his body clad in fresh silks. Even his toes, snug in the deerskin boots, felt almost normal. The Man had seen no black frostbite spots on the toes, though the little ones refused to take on any color.
Beside The Man, the dosimeter box lay silent; for now. The Man had shoved the stuffy lead-armor back into the glass case. The cracked helmet stared through the front, a souvenir of the Puga.
The Man thought of neither cold nor radiation at the moment. He simply stood, facing the window. He sipped from a mug of hot water with a dissolved vitamin tablet, and stared at the night.
In all the life he’d lived, on or above land, The Man had never seen such a prospect. A craggy, hilly terrain smothered the sky. Slopes of Wind-blown buildup clung to the glass in thick, rolling hills to the left of The Man. In the far, far distance, the hills rose into peaks - like real, jagged, toothy mountains. The Peaks pointed to a cloudy sea below, over which The Man’s shell hung. The light glinting off the jagged topography was so bright that The Man guessed the mountains to be almost pure water. He realized that the inverted mountains were, in effect, enormous icicles; formed from layer after layer of packed ice. He decided to call them glaciers instead.
On The Man’s left a space of glass remained perfectly clear. No ice or grime marred the flat surface. The slumbering stars floated tiny and still behind the glass, like the lights of lanternfish swimming under the surface of a lake. Many such clear glass lakes and rivers did The Man see as he scanned the jagged heavens. The light from those bodies fell down the crusted banks of ice. The tiny motes beyond the glass combined to fill the atmosphere with a thin, sterling flush, which bounced off the puffy sheet of clouds below, and twinkled against the upside-down hills and valleys.
The sterling light twinkled in the eyes of The Man, as he surveyed the frozen scene.
Frozen, but not lifeless. The Man set his mug of vitamin water on the desk. He picked up the binoculars dangling at his chest and looked through the lenses.
A diverse scatter of flora grew across the hard hills. The Man knew some of the growths. Aedra roots dangled as untangled and bloated strands in the still air. One tall Segel tree pointing downward like a needle. Other forms sprouting from the ice were unknown to The Man. He caught a flash of emerald in the blurred edge of his magnified vision. He focused on it. It appeared at first to be a crystal. As The Man watched it, however, a breath of Wind rolled down from one of the icy crests. The Man knew the Wind was light, for it hardly stirred a patch of Aedra growing at the shore of the ice, near a star lake. The emerald crystal flapped in the light Wind, and The Man saw that it was flat. It was like one huge plant leaf, growing straight down in a geometric, diamond shape.
The Man had neither seen, nor read, nor heard of such a plant. He thought this was a new discovery, albeit a small one. He decided to name it the ‘Olktian Cactus’.
Scanning down the frosted ridgeline from which the emerald sprouted, he saw other odd shoots of brown and gnarly black. He saw a tiny formation that looked like a rounded, upside down teepee. Strands of wood merged into a single point at the bottom. Each of the strands grew from an eye-like circle of dark blue in the ice, like a dinner plate. It would take The Man time to think of a name for that plant.
The Man let the goggles fall. He reached for the vitamin water, which was getting cold. He saw sudden movement among the inverted cliffs, stopped and brought the goggles back to his eyes.
A kettle of Staegons flew between two ridgelines. They followed a course along one of the star-rivers of clear glass. There were six - no, seven - flying in one line. They were all of a mottled brown and black coat of feathers. They looked like large ones, though it was hard for The Man to tell at a distance. Probably they were hunting for Trackleeches or other small pests. The Man knew Staegons. But, he rarely saw them in groups; never six at once. They were usually flighty, lonely birds. Who could say how many of them - or what other unheard of birds - might be nesting now in the clusters of Aedra and Dorren, or soaring just out of sight behind a ridge?
And through it all; through the roots; through the birds; through the crust of ice and packed dust; the striation ran. The Man noticed it as he followed the Staegons. The striation ran along the glass just above them, in a line that curved slightly right until it disappeared behind an ice hill. It formed a river as it ran; The Man thought his shell would roll easily along it.
The Man let the binoculars drop against his silken shirt. He picked up the mug of vitamin water. He sipped. It was lukewarm.
This was the Engi - the ‘wilderness’ - of myth. This was the whole sky, back when men first built towers to touch glass. This was the sky where men had found the shells which hung from the striations, and copied the model for their own multiships. This was the sky of old, unbroken and overgrown. The first scullers had pulled at their spinners to explore it. This was not some simple ‘seacover’ or ‘unknown’, this was the Engi. From now on, The Man would call it by that name.
The Man saw a chance here for food and fuel. His muscles still felt weak, however, and he’d need a meal first.
And The Man would need one soon. He looked more closely at the stars. They were in the waxing stage, past midnight. The storm had driven him all through the previous night and day. He glanced at the dosimeter box on the worn desk. It was silent now, matching the silence of the sky. But the radiation levels would jump when the stars glowed in their waking. And the shell varnish was now damaged, The Man knew.
The Man finished off the vitamin water in one cold gulp. He turned from the broad window view. He set off for the furnace room to prepare.
The Man knelt onto the shell beside the axle housing. He scooped chunk ice out by the mittful and threw it behind. It clattered over the side of the shell. The Man leaned over the housing and looked down into the cavity.
As The Man had expected, the axle was completely ruined. The rounded rolling cylinder was bent into a shallow V. It had pulled part of the housing metal with it when the track snapped. The cavity and axle were scored and jagged where the track plates had torn loose.
The Man stood. He looked across the deck. The other three tracks looked undamaged. Only this one, the second from the bow, had been ruined when the Puga grabbed and hurled his shell.
Only one track… and the rest of his shell. The Man scanned the roof surface.
The entire top layer of lacquer was gone. The Man had hoped the upward direction of the hail would take the bottom and spare the roof. It seemed, however, that the rebounded fragments of ice had chiseled away the top layer also. The outer coat of protective varnish was gone. Just gone.
The Man stood. He grabbed a rope (not the harness) tied at his waist and pulled. Attached to the rope were four ten-liter canisters. The Man drew the rope in until the first of these lay at his feet. He slipped off his mitts and felt the instant bite of air through his gloves. He quickly untied the rope from his waist and secured it around the damaged axle; at least the broken thing still served some purpose. The first canister came loose with a hard tug; the lid opened as a screw.
The Man set the canister carefully on the curve of the shell to avoid spilling any of the thick, white lead-paint within. The paint was oil based. Even so, the paint would have frozen on its own. The Man had placed heated shell metal stones inside each canister before venturing out.
The Man began re-varnishing the shell. The process required continuous, careful effort. He couldn’t dunk a mop in the canister and spread the varnish that way; the strands of the mop would only freeze. He had to spill the varnish across the rough metal surface and spread it with the ice scraper. Touching the shell metal would have turned the paint to ice as well, except that the radiant heat from the furnace kept the outer metal warmer than air temperature. The paint froze anyway. With small pours from the canister, however, and by scraping the varnish quickly over the shell, The Man was able to effectively coat the surface.
The Man worked quietly and monotonously. The night sky was mercifully still. The Man wasn’t sure he’d have managed on a rocking shell. Occasionally zephyrs did blow through the Engi. They rocked his shell gently, but The Man stopped and waited whenever they passed.
The Man had left one track powered to drive the shell. It rolled slowly along the striation. Sometimes The Man caught the noise of rustling from the plants growing on the surrounding slopes. Then he would pause in his work. The Man would quietly set down the canister and the scraper, and rise slowly to his feet. He would turn his head and peer through his goggles across the ice formations.
The Man had brought his coilspear. He carried it slung over his back. Whenever he heard a sound that might be prey, he brought the spear to bear.
But The Man saw no birds. He only heard their movements, and sometimes their cries on the Wind. The Man would eventually sling his coilspear over to his back once more, and return to work.
As The Man went through both his first and second canister, he realized he had too little paint for the whole shell. With four canisters he could probably finish off the top half. That would protect him from the sun, at least. The Man had perhaps fifteen spare liters left in a plastic drum by the furnace. Fifteen liters would cover only half of the bottom side, with only a thin layer. Even then, The Man had not thought of how he might reach that bottom half.
When the third canister was empty, The Man flung it into the sky void. He walked back for the fourth, tied around the broken axle. He walked by first grinding each cleated boot against the freshly coated metal. He wanted secure footing on the semi-frozen lacquer.
The Man reached the axle housing. He paused, and looked over his work. A little over two thirds of the top lay under a perfect sheen of white. The shell was like an isolated patch of fresh snowfall, surrounded by the grimy, old, hard packed buildup on the sky. The Man figured if he spread this last canister with care, he might finish the top.
The Man shook off the moment of thinking. His muscles ached from his tumble, and the plates of shell metal in his coat were losing heat to the sky. Wind or not, the temperature this close to the glass never rose above negative forty. The Man could think later, inside the shell.
He pulled the last canister loose from the rope. He struggled with numb fingers to twist the lid. It finally gave out with a rusted metal screech. The Man threw the lid into space. He wondered, for a moment, why he hadn’t waited to open the canister until he’d brought it to the unpainted section.
A shrill warbling noise made The Man twitch. The container of varnish jerked in his hands; a small amount splashed onto the already-painted shell at his feet. Quick as he could, The Man set the canister in the dark axle hollow, rose to his feet, and swiveled the coilspear into his arms. He scanned the sky from his goggled view.
Thick patches of plant life grew down from the ice and dust on either side. They were three-pronged plants, another kind The Man had never seen, with hard wooden knobs at their ends. A light Wind made them knock together softly. The Man saw no other motion.
He looked ahead. These plants grew thickly like this for a long way along the striation. The flora rolled by on either side, the shell moving slowly through. The Man had passed into the denser growth without notice. He listened. Except for the sigh of the Wind and the soft clatter of the plants, the Engi was silent.
The Man had not recognized the warbling bird call. It might have been any sort of docile, unknown bird, he thought.
It might also have been Anka. But, The Man did not think so. Every story of Anka said it came with strong Wind. Tonight the sky was tranquil.
The Man searched one last time. He passed his goggles slowly over the rolling hills of ice on his port side. He did the same for starboard. There were only the knobby plants and the hard-packed ice hills.
The Man saw, also, creeping fog. He hadn’t noticed it before; it was only just forming. The Man saw that the clouds below were smoking. Tiny trails of vapor spiraled up from the vast sea of puffy white. The trails evaporated as they rose. The Man guessed them to be the cause of the distant but closing haze.
The Man bent to pick up the last canister.
He lifted it from the axle housing.
Suddenly he slipped.
The small amount of lacquer which had spilled when The Man first heard the cry had run beneath his boots. As he stood, new canister in hand, The Man’s foot slid from beneath him. Before he could stop himself, his hand swung up. The remaining lacquer splashed across his chest and arms.
The Man hit the shell on his back. The canister flew from his cold fingers and clattered over the side. The Man’s fall gave him momentum, and he followed the canister down the steepening curve. He tried digging his metal-studded coat arms into the shell. The varnish was too slick. The Man had no grip on the smooth surface.
Without a cry - with a last scrape of leather and studs on lacquer - The Man plunged off the shell.
The Man’s harness caught him. He hit the end with a hard tug. The rope bit into his waist and chest. Sharp, lightning pain flashed at the bruised parts of his body where he’d fallen during the Puga. The air flew from The Man’s lungs and evaporated from his leather mask.
Gasping, The Man brought a hand up and yanked the mask open. He breathed desperately, re-inflating his lungs with huge swallows of negative-fifty-degree air.
Black edges closed in around The Man’s eyes. The googles seemed to constrict. The pain of twice-struck bruises tried to overwhelm him.
The Man forced the pain back. After each sucking gasp of winter air he tensed his neck and forced blood to his head.
The Man’s breathing evened. Each inhale felt like gaseous ice blasting directly against his lips and teeth. The Man moved to re-fasten the leather mask. When he brought the hand up this time, he saw that his glove was stark white. The lacquering paint had splashed across his body. It had clung to his leather coat and frozen.
The Man smacked his hands against his hip and moved his fingers to break the ice crusting his gloves. Each hit sent a sharp twinge of pain coursing along his body again. In his fingers the pain was dulled by cold. The Man brought his hand up again and saw that he’d removed most of the white coat. He tied his mask back across his beard, pulled his mitts over the gloves, and stuffed them in his pits.
The Man looked up. The harness had been tied to the top rung of the shell. He dangled from that rung now by the harness’s length. This put The Man about four meters beneath the lowest rung beside the door.
From this position The Man could see the shell’s underside. As he’d expected, the entire bottom was stripped of protective coating. The metal was actually scored in places, where the Puga had blasted it with hail.
The Man waited until his fingers felt warm under his arms. He grabbed the robe above his head and pulled. He tried bringing his body high enough to loop the rope under a knee or foot. The cord slipped through his mitts. He took the mitts off and let them dangle from his wrists. He rubbed the gloves against the feathers of his collars to remove the last of the frozen lacquer. He tried again to raise himself with a firmer grip.
The Man spent minutes struggling to get the rope under his legs. His arms shook as he strained with his own weight plus the weight of his clothing and coilspear. The Man bent his arms and managed a small amount of slack between his hands and waist. After a moment of trembling, the weakness and injury of the last twenty-four hours overcame him. The Man sank slowly to a rest.
The Man returned his hands to his mitts, and his mitts to his underarms. A gust of air set him swinging. He breathed deep from his exertions. He glanced down; he knew that clouds blocked the view of land below.
The clouds rolled in one pillowy sheet. They lay about a kilometer below. They looked almost inviting. For a moment, The Man had a mental image of the lost paint canister lying down there, having landed softly on the sheet.
The clouds continued to evaporate. The fog and mist had slunk closer. The Man’s vision now extended to only a hundred yards across the Engi. After that, the thickening vapor shrouded crags and plants.
The Man looked for another way up.
The knobby, drooping plants hung overhead. They were no less tangled here than from the shell’s roof. The plants, the rustling sounds the Wind made in them, the mist; all seemed to close around The Man.
From somewhere The Man heard another screech. It was the same from just before the fall. The cry echoed across the ice and the sky. It might have originated in the nearest thickets, or somewhere in the mist.
Dangling, The Man could just reach his coilspear. He shifted the shoulder strap awkwardly, until he got the weapon into his arms. He watched and listened for movements in the Engi. He trained his sights over the shifting thickets. The sleeping stars behind the glass - more than half obscured by the Engi’s thick terrain - shrouded both Man and sky. The nearly motionless and habitually cold air sank through The Man’s coat seams.
An idea struck The Man. He might try launching his spear and lodging it among the knobbed plants. Then he could use the coilspear reel and the harness rope in concert.
The Man spotted a thick looking patch of growth. It appeared as a shadow on the edge of the packed ice, growing beside the striation.
The Man took aim at the shadow. He exhaled, and squeezed. The spear surged from the barrel. The lastiwire line trailed behind. The force released by the weapon shoved The Man back in his harness.
His aim had been true. The spear plunged into the dark shadow on the Engi’s shore. The Man heard it snap through the dry growth and crack off the hard packed ice behind. The spear rebounded and stuck partially out of the tangle; the sharp metal tip shone in the ambient starlight.
The lastiwire stayed tangled in the knobs. The shell was still rolling, and had already closed distance to the shadowed patch. The Man quickly reeled in the line. It went taut, and The Man felt the resistance increase.
The line tore loose just as slack began forming in the harness. The Man fell back and swayed beneath the shell. The Spear fell through the void. It swung from its lastiwire line, back and forth beneath The Man, the two of them together forming a jointed pendant, swinging from the neck of the shell.
The Man reeled the spear in. In the meantime he relaxed his neck and shoulders. He stared up. Though the shell moved along the striation, its position relative to the fixed stars remained unchanged. The striation itself was featureless too. The sum of this was that it seemed as if the Engi itself were on the move; like enormous glaciers sliding by the static shell and sky.
The Man felt the metal shaft of the spear tap against his boot. He sat up and leaned forward. He grabbed the spear and shoved it back into the barrel. He cranked the spring back. A click told him when the weapon was armed.
The Man felt weary, sweaty, and sore. He had also begun shivering, however, and the once hot shell metal plates felt like ice sheets inside of his coat. He looked up, searching the sky for help.
After a moment, The Man came up with a new plan. He gave himself a second moment to think it out with care. Then he acted.
The Man brought his coilspear up once more. He leaned back until he was near horizontal with the harness. He took aim at the glass sky. He exhaled, and squeezed. The spear surged from the barrel. The lastiwire line trailed behind.
The spear flew up by the side of the shell over which The Man dangled. It impacted the sky beside the striation. The Man heard a single, reverberating note; like the quickest scratch of gemstone on glass. The reedy, knob-ended plants rustled at the sound. Common greybirds and glassbirds darted from hidden nests.
From what The Man saw, the spear left no mark on the sky. It did, however, rebound off at an angle. It plunged down on the other side of the shell. It disappeared behind the large metal ovoid for a second, then flashed back into view. His spear reached the end of the line and dangled, swaying on the other side of the shell from The Man.
The Man waited for the spear to stop. Right now it was too far for his reach. He let the barrel dangle from his chest and warmed his mitts under his arms in the pause.
When it had stopped swinging The Man slowly reeled The Spear in, until it hung a little below his own position.
The Man began a motion with the barrel. He shoved it out from his chest, then brought it back. The movement echoed up the lastiwire line; the spear at the other end began to swing. It swung nearer and nearer. Finally, The Man was able to hook the opposite line on the toe of his boot.
The spear was an unwieldy needle for The Man’s purpose. After a little juggling of it and the launcher, The Man managed to get the lastiwire line tied in a loop around itself. He reeled it in again. The tied spear slid up the line until it made a lasso around the shell. The Man reeled until the line was taut. The handle resisted, but The Man pushed harder. Slowly he shifted. The coilspear strap and the lastiwire line took over bearing The Man’s weight. The harness gained slack.
After that, reaching the shell became a matter of time and effort. After three minutes creeping slowly higher and higher; putting all his muscle into cranking at the reel; listening to the screech of the metal line rubbing against the metal the shell; after sweating under his coat, and stopping to catch his breath, The Man finally managed enough slack in the harness to form a loop under his foot.
Ignoring the sweat icing over his skin, the numbness in his fingers and toes, and the ache of his arms, The Man climbed. There were four meters between him and the bottom rung. At two meters, he stopped to warm his fingers, which he couldn’t feel. At one meter, when he tried reaching for the rung, the spear line shifted. The Man’s foot nearly slipped from the harness. He stopped again. He breathed deep to try and steady his shaking muscles. He glanced around, and saw that the fog had closed in. The Man now had a fifty meter sightline.
Three more turns did The Man’s arm make in the coilspear crank. He brought his feet up on the harness rope and pushed himself further up with his legs. He stretched, reaching with one arm.
The Man grasped the bottom rung.
With another hard effort, The Man secured himself to the rungs beside the shell door. He slid the coilspear lasso around the shell until the spear shaft came within reach. The Man untied the knot in the lastiwire. He opened the shell door and climbed inside. Only then did he reel in the last of the line. The Spear slid over the other side, over the top, and eventually fell past the door. The Man wound it the rest of the way in.
The Man heard the Phaen’s claws on the floor as it came around the corner. It stared at The Man in the open doorway and crooned once, as if asking a question.
The Man pulled his coilspear strap over his head. He set the weapon against the wall. He closed and barred the door.
Then, feeling the warm air of the furnace pressing down on him from a nearby vent, The Man sank against the corridor wall. He dropped his face cover, pulled his hood back, closed his eyes, and released every atom of his breath in a sigh.
Thinking about the night’s work, The Man considered himself fortunate.
The last fifteen liters of paint in the furnace room should still be enough to finish coating the roof.
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