At the Edge of the Game (20 page)

And then I
fired the engines. I would to go to the Moon, I had decided. The ship itself
did the navigation, and within the hour I had attained a lunar orbit that
matched that of the enormous relativistic boosters. The ship curved slowly
towards the ten-kilometre long structures, sleek and luminous even against the
backdrop of the shining, ravaged lunar surface. The boosters, like the Unquiet
Spirit itself, had been designed in the extravagant style of their era. I knew
of very few spacecraft from my own time that displayed such elegance and
grandeur, and none that was so large.

I nudged
the ship into a lower orbit and turned my full attention to the lunar surface. All
the craters of old were gone. The dark mare were no more. Even the mountain
ranges had been razed by whatever cataclysm had befallen the dead world. It
looked as though vast tracts of lunar rock and soil had been forcefully gouged
away to leave an irregularly streaked, approximately smooth surface. I could
see no sign of any ruins or machine debris; nor could I detect even traces of
radioactive or chemical waste.

The Moon no
longer had two distinct faces, as it did in the 23rd Century. Nor any more did
one side permanently face the Earth. The new Moon rotated once every sixteen
and a half hours, so that the sun and the earth moved swiftly across its black
sky.

Over the
course of a few leisurely orbits, I took in the barren beauty of the place. I
thought about descending, to land and experience the lunar surface on a level
that I could come close to grasping directly. But guilt was getting the better
of me. I felt bad about what I had done to Dexter, and I was becoming worried
that he might require regular medication of some kind. So rather than indulge
my curiosity any further, I decided to return to Earth to make sure he was all
right.

The sun
illuminates thinly crusted hilltops, casts lengthy shadows across weirdly
liquefying ice shapes in the valley below. It looks neither like Ireland as she
is known to be, nor like any previously known icy region of this planet. Travelling
across the frigid hydrocarbon wastes of Titan can’t be much different to this.

Impossible to
judge the weather. Worn too many layers, and this exertion is making me sweat.  It
was five below zero yesterday at least, and when we set out this morning it
looked like it wouldn’t be much warmer today. But it’s got to be ten degrees or
more. Springtime feeling has returned to the air, but rather than lift the
spirits with the promise of better days to come, it is an omen of further
misfortune. This is not our world any more. The governing spirits are laughing
at us.

Dark roofs
penetrate that bright surface below us. They’re our goal, those houses. We’ll
have to make the best of it there. Helen can’t go any further. We have to stop.
As it is, these few miles since we left the farmhouse are far more than I
thought she’d manage. It’s Plan C for us now. No transport. No possibility of
Helen going any further on foot. Here’s where the journey ends. We wait here
for the true end of winter, or else we die.

But at least
we’re away from that farmhouse. Wish I hadn’t gone into the old man’s room. I was
niggled by the stupid, soft-headed notion that to pretend that he was not in
the house with us, that we were not intruders, would be uncivilised.

The air in his
room smelled foul. The grey bed coverings hid every part of him, save the upper
half of his head. His face was almost death-white, and his hair also white, but
with yellow ends. I looked more at the Sacred Heart picture on the wall just
above the bed than at the man himself. A wisp of fogged breath rose. I noticed
that his eyes were open, might have opened just the instant before, and I
almost fled there and then, not having bargained on dealing with the man in
animate mode. But instead, unwilling to be seen to do something so callous,
even to be dimly perceived by this living cadaver, I stepped a little closer. Open
eyes, but mercifully no flicker of awareness. I waved my hand over the
emaciated face. Nothing. The old man stared and he breathed, but that was it.

Then:
contamination. My hand, as I drew it back, passed through the next cloud of
fogged breath. Molecules of his, rank particulates small enough to glide clean
through any palisade, vectors of decay, sank easily through to my blood and
were distributed widely. And - God, even worse - the slimy remainder condensed
on my wrist so that I could feel residue. I turned for the door and rushed
outside to the yard, where much was squeezed painfully from my innards.

Even so, I could
not leave it at that. I felt that having availed of the old man’s home for
shelter, the least we could do was lay a couple of extra blankets on his
withered body. Heathshade, contemptuous and not a little perplexed at the
nature of this self-indulgence, said that I should have laid them over his head
instead.

This close to
the village it’s possible to make out, at the corners of the buildings, the
rigid, rearing bow waves of the flash-frozen flash flood. The sun angle means
that the dripping ice glistens and blinds. The flood, released in increments of
droplets, is pooling, turning the valley floor into an array of mirrors. And
the vista shimmers as warm air rises. It’s as though we were descending into a white
salt desert recently drenched by rain.

Enduring human
life manifests itself ahead. A window rotates open in one of the village roofs.
A head protrudes. A figure hauls itself up and out, and slides down onto the
ice crust of the village street. A man, a grey-topped man, not wearing any coat
or hat. Black shirt and black trousers. A priest? He calls to us.

‘What’s he saying?’
says Helen.

‘Keep moving.’
Heathshade has set his shoulders for conflict.

‘He’s saying
stop.’

‘We’re not
stopping.’

 ‘Come on.’ Heathshade
sticks up two fingers and picks up the pace.

The man is now
standing wringing his hands in what seems to me to be a very priestly manner. He
can’t turn us away. Hasn’t he a Christian duty to uphold? He has to help us.
But Heathshade’s attitude is not going to do us any favours here. Some
diplomacy, or just plain and simple civility, is what we need now.

The priest backs
away, as well he might. Heathshade is advancing in the manner of one not to be
taken lightly. But his feet are cracking straight through the crust. He sinks
in waist-deep, now chest-deep. Fractures spread across the ice. A pit widens
around him. He descends as though in quicksand, and is suddenly lost to sight.

It’s too late
for us too. With cruel slowness the ice creaks and sags. We slide into
subsurface slush. Helen claws at me cat-style, like she would climb up my body
to safety. We fall into water, only a couple of feet deep. Coldness like a
hammer to the head.

Helen struggles,
tries to stand, falls back down with a splash. The bottom of this stream is
ice. The walls are ice, the roof is ice. The current is pushing us along. Heathshade’s
a few feet ahead. He grabs hold of something. A boat. Unbelievably, a rowboat. He
climbs in and then takes hold of Helen as she slides past. Perceiving the
arrival of the last moment in which I can save myself, I lunge, grip with all
the strength I have, willing wooden hands not to slip. I squirm out of my pack
harness. Heathshade grabs my collar and heaves me up and in.

The boat’s tied
to something below the waterline. Heathshade cuts the rope, but the boat
doesn’t move. It seems to be rooted to the ice beneath the water, but some
rocking frees it, and we start to drift downstream, rapidly at first, and then,
as the water deepens and widens in this pearly translucent tunnel, more slowly.

We emerge into
the open air, squinting against the light of the blinding, greenish sky above
us. To our front, high snowy banks form sheer walls. In places, streams of
melted snow pour into the river like storm drains. The river joins a big body
of water that flows southwards. A cold Amazon, meandering over a huge plain.

Far away, on the
steep slope of a mountain to the east, an avalanche progresses. White crystal
clouds rise and catch the airflow like a dust storm in Africa, and some
interval later the sound waves reach us - a thunderous rumble that loosens the
left bank, which subsides with much hissing and fizzing. Exposed gorse and
scrub sees the light of day for the first time in months.

The flood is
taking us towards a range of white hills. The flow shall veer one way or the
other, east or west. Which shall it be? We’re so close to the hills now, we
surely should have veered by now – could we pass through them? A tunnel,
naturally formed in the rock? Or some vast sinkhole – perhaps we will orbit it
as disassembled stars orbit a black hole singularity, doomed to vortex forever.
But the river is at last swerving around to the east. Those slopes are riven
with channels, rushing liquid cutting crevasses in snow, feeding the flood.

Another
inundated town in a wide, black temporary lake. We use our hands to steer past
chimneys and television aerials, a belfry, electricity pylons, the top of a
billboard advertising computers, a flagpole with a soaking Tricolour. The
current is slack here, but not dead, and we drift into a narrow, swift-moving,
turbulent gulley. One of these ice banks has collapsed far ahead of us, formed
a natural dam, a temporary lake.

We’re close to
the weakest point in the snow dam when it gives way to the tremendous pressure
of the building volumes of water behind it. We’re sucked through the breach
into roaring, foaming whiteout. Every sense is negated – sight, sound, touch
and all the others, all overwhelmed by solid, liquid, vaporous water. Time has
stopped. Helen and Heathshade are gone. The boat is gone. I think I have
crossed the event horizon. There surely can be no morning extrication from this
blank, soaked singularity.

Or can there? Extrication
by way of sleep rather than wake, as it were. This isn’t morning – I was awake
at sunrise, as I had been at the previous sunrise, and got little sleep in
between – and anyway time of day is irrelevant in a place like this. Now, in
this perilous situation, spinning slowly in near-freefall, I might well drop
off. It’s silent in my suit. The levitator needs a recharge.

I’m descending
quickly on low power, dropping through Dublin City Cylinder’s uppermost
inhabited levels. I stay just beyond assegai-throwing range of the near wall
lest the savage tribes of these levels show an unfriendly interest in me. The
walls are coated by mosses and algae. High-altitude birds flit about me
curiously, squawking in irritation of this interruption of their daily quest
for wall-dwelling insects and small reptiles.

Now I am passing
through the boreal levels, where the ecology is quite different. Ivy and other
creeping plants choke the chasm. Lemurs and monkeys climb among them, living
out their existences in savagely fought-over vertical territories. But the air
is dense enough here to be tolerable, so I open my visor. I fill my lungs, and
taste smoke, condensation, flowers. I see figures, male and female, silhouetted
against red fires. One raises an arm in salute. My descent is too swift to
afford time to respond.

There are
blinking red and green lights far below, ascending. I recognise the danger, and
initiate a drift in towards the wall, where I slow to a hover in cover. Close
by is a troop of lemurs with wide, darkly ringed eyes that lend them in
expressions of permanent astonishment. They converge in the branches close to
me and stare, chattering, reaching towards me as though in supplication. My
ailing suit levitator strains to bear my weight as three Urban Guard transports
shoot upwards, hurrying towards the tropospheric Front. I watch them go until
they are no longer visible, and then I bid the lemurs farewell and resume my
descent.

I drop past
levels where the wall has been denuded and vivid murals painted, etched images in
stone of the Gods as they were imagined by the Ancients, as man-beasts, as beautiful
naked youths and maidens. The tribal habitations - flimsy as gossamer they seem
- hang from the walls amongst these colossal images, and are works of art in
their own right, beautifully elaborate wooden frames painted red, blue, yellow,
green. Faces watch me curiously from the shuttered windows.

A low, rumbling
boom grows from nothing until it is so loud I force my hands into the helmet to
block my ears. The Chasm walls are shaking. Chunks or rock come free and spin
into the void. Some of the delicate wooden frames are struck. They are torn
from their fastenings and fall, disintegrating, towards the city far below,
villagers still inside. Their death-plunge takes them past where several rope
bridges span the wide chasm, supported at intervals along their length by large
balloons filled, I suspect, with volatile hydrogen. A bridge has come undone
from its tether on one side, and hangs limply. Across one of the intact bridges
a man leads a brown ox pulling a cart laden with produce. He does not see me –
he is too intent on calming the beast, whose panicky movements threaten to rock
the bridge dangerously. A body impacts the bridge ahead of the ox and smashes
clean through. The ox, in its terror, leaps over the side, taking man and cart
with it.

Now I can see
the bottom of the chasm. The streets of Dublin City Cylinder are laid out below
me. Smells of gasoline and ozone. Warm city updraughts. The huge Gothic arch
where the Cylinder City bridge connects to the African continent. Silver rays
of daylight shine in, illuminate the red roofs of the enclosed metropolis. The
Cylinder City extends, level after cavernous level, all the way down to the
floor of the Salt Desert, where it merges with Dublin Far City, the only
metropolitan area on earth thus configured. The M50 twists all the way down
through the layers of the Cylinder City, like a spiral staircase connecting
Dublin Near City and Dublin Far City.