Memoranda (10 page)

The trees were almost perfectly straight, and the entire forest seemed so strategically laid out in a crisscrossing geometric pattern, I was sure it must have been planted. Leaves fell around me in great numbers as I kept to a crude path that snaked through the shadows. I walked quickly, thinking that each one of the trees, even the leaves, could be a symbolic representation of one of Below's grand schemes. But when I touched the rough bark and smelled the sap, I could only think of them as devoid of anything but reality.

“Cley,” said a voice from within the dark outline of a tree.

I turned quickly, half-expecting to see the mayor again. “Who's there?” I said.

Nunnly, the engineer of useless machines, stepped forward so that his lean face and frame emerged from the shadows.

“Out for a walk?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said, unsure if I was supposed to be on my own.

“You are curious about the edge of the island, no doubt,” he said.

“I am,” I told him.

“How did you hear of it?” he asked.

“I can't recall.”

“Follow me, Cley,” he said, and started off ahead of me.

“You are lucky that you are Anotine's specimen and not Brisden's,” he said. “The last one that old gasser had, he literally talked into a coma. We had to send the poor fellow back and request another one. By the time we took him to the chair in the parlor, he was extraordinarily dull, as if Brisden's babble had eaten his wits. Anotine, on the other hand, will do anything for her specimens.”

“She already has,” I said.

“That's the spirit,” he said.

We walked a few more paces, then Nunnly held up his arm, preventing me from going on.

“Do you hear it?” he asked.

Behind him, I could hear a strong wind and beneath that a very distant sound of waves.

I nodded.

“Don't get too close to the edge,” he said. “It's very dangerous now.” Then he lifted his hand and let me continue.

I walked up a small hill, and when I reached the top, I found myself staring out over the end of the island. There was a fallen tree next to me, which I leaned against as I tried to encompass the entirety of nothingness beneath us. Far below, through the trails of passing clouds, I could see the liquid-mercury ocean, shining a distant silver where the moon and the tower's brightness touched its surface. I felt a great rush of my blood as I stood there staring and wondered how glorious the fall would be from that height.

“Look down there,” said Nunnly, who, I just then noticed, had stepped up and was standing next to me. He was pointing to the very outline of the island.

“What is it?” I asked, searching for his meaning.

“The edge of the island,” he said. “Brisden discovered a few weeks ago that it is slowly disintegrating. Close your eyes and listen carefully.”

I did as he said and tried to listen at a point between the wind and the far-off waves. “I think I hear it,” I said.

“Now, look again,” he instructed.

Concentrating my sight on a jutting root just at the rim, I noticed, the way one might notice with the proper focus, the hour hand of a clock moving, that it was almost imperceptibly diminishing in thickness. It seemed to come apart into tiny crumbs that did not fall but instead crackled into nothing.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“Well,” said Nunnly, tapping a cigarette against the back of his wrist and leaning almost elegantly against the fallen tree, “when you are on a disintegrating island, a mile above a sea of liquid mercury, I would consider that cause for a modicum of concern.”

“Do any of you know why it is happening?” I asked.

“No,” he said, striking a match, “but Anotine has calculated that in a matter of a few weeks or so, we will have to worry about it while we are falling.”

“How long have you been here for?” I asked.

“Forever, it seems,” he said. “We were all hired some time ago by a fellow none of us had actually met by the name of Drachton Below. Everything was done through correspondence which offered handsome payment for us to come here and do research in our particular fields. Since we have arrived, we haven't seen him. We keep working in good faith, but, my god, I wouldn't mind leaving at this point.”

“Where are you from?” I asked.

“I tell you, my head is so full of designs for machinery, I can hardly think of it. I vaguely recall having had a family before I arrived here, but I can no longer see their faces. That's why I come out into the wood at night, to try to remember. I experience all of the loneliness and loss, but for whom or what remains a mystery. I am beginning to wonder if I ever really knew.”

We left the edge of the island and walked back through the trees toward the village. Nunnly asked me about my own life and how I had been chosen to serve as a specimen. I told him I had been chosen for my good looks.

“You, too,” he said, and laughed. “You'll be interested to know that Doctor Hellman believes that neither we nor the island exists. Everything to him is dreams.”

“What do you say to that?”

“What can I say? I'm an engineer. My work is with matter, not with mental indigestion.”

We walked on across the field, and then Nunnly showed me a shortcut back to Anotine's rooms. Before leaving me, he shook my hand again, and said, “Cley, for a specimen, you are a bright fellow. Be diligent at your work. It would be pleasant to have you around for a while.”

I lay down on the brown rug in the middle of the room and stared at Anotine's back as it rose and fell with her breathing.

“The Master, asleep in the clutches of the disease, is wasting toward death,” I thought. “His memory is evaporating with his life, and that is why the island is disintegrating.”

As my eyes shut and I began to doze, I remembered the drawing of the hourglass on that scrap of paper I had discovered. Particles of light passed through the neck of the figure eight.

10

I came awake to the glare of sunlight flooding the room, reflecting off the smooth, whitewashed walls. There was an unreal, immaculate clarity to it, a vitality that offered perfect warmth and submerged me in a sense of well-being that ignored the countless dilemmas I faced. After rubbing my eyes and reminding myself as to who and where I was, I looked around and saw that Anotine was no longer lying on her bed.

“Hello?” I called as I stood up and stretched.

As if in answer, a shrill, steady note, like the cry of a thin-throated pig, sounded from down the hall. There was no modulation to the tone at all, and its relentless nature forced me to cover my ears. In this manner, I proceeded to search out its source. I passed a room to the left, also sparsely furnished and brimming with sunlight. Somewhat smaller than the bedroom, it appeared to be a dining area, for there was a large wooden table, surrounded by four chairs.

A few paces farther along on the other side of the hall was a small, windowless space, almost a closet. I could make out that its walls were lined with shelves and that they were filled with shadowy objects, but by then I realized that the sound was coming from the room at the end of the hall. From my limited vantage point, it appeared to be a much larger space than the others. I moved up to the opening, my hands still protecting my ears, and leaned forward to peer inside.

This room was also bathed in the clear light of morning, and, to my wonder, filled with all manner of strange-looking equipment that demanded my immediate attention. All of it, though, receded out of view as my eyes came to rest on perhaps the strangest scene I had ever witnessed.

Standing by a large window opening at the far right of the room was Anotine. Her face was lifted slightly so that she could make direct eye contact with, of all things, a human female head that floated in the air of its own volition. The sight of this caused my hands to drop to my sides, and the maddening noise that issued from the open mouth of the bodiless woman passed unimpeded into my ears, drilling my mind. The intensity of it made my head swim as I focused on the twin beacons of green light that connected one woman's gaze to the other's. Both the pain of the din and the utter madness of what I witnessed made me gasp. I fell against the side of the entrance for support.

Anotine's tormentor shut her mouth, and the noise suddenly ceased. The green rays of light appeared to retract into the eyes of the floating head, and the moment they disengaged from Anotine's, she let out a deep breath and doubled over.

Then, like a hummingbird flitting from one flower to another, the head flew across the room and hovered in the air three feet from my face. I thought of running, but instead I simply slid down the side of the entrance until I was kneeling on the floor. The horrid thing floated there in front of me, and I was hypnotized by the way its black hair writhed behind it like a nest of angry snakes. The face was drawn and appeared perfectly cruel in its pale green complexion. Its lips were deep red, its sharp teeth and irisless eyes, pure white. A growl sounded from somewhere within it, obviously not its throat, for it had none. Even in my state of panic, I understood that it was admonishing me for having interfered. I was certain for a moment that it was going to lunge at me, but as quickly as it had come, it circled once around the room, hair streaming behind it, then flew out the window.

Anotine looked over at me and smiled. “You're shaking,” she said.

I got to my feet, somewhat put out by her offhand reaction to my fear. “I'm glad you are amused,” I said.

With this she began to laugh out loud. “There, there,” she said, and she walked over and put her arms around me.

This was almost as surprising to me as the sight of the flying head. All I could think in the brief time that the embrace lasted was how fortunate I was that she was now dressed. As she released me, I suddenly realized that the act was not one of affection but merely that of a researcher comforting a frightened lab animal. It would be dangerous for me to assume that I was anything more than Cley, the specimen.

“We call that the Fetch,” she said as she backed away.

“It's an atrocity,” I said.

“Not very pretty,” she conceded, “but an amazing device.”

“You mean it is a machine?” I asked.

“Not a machine in the sense of gears and motors, but an organic entity that works as a tool. It swoops down from the tower and, we believe, like a dog retrieving a stick, fetches back information to whomever or whatever is up there. Doctor Hellman named it. It seems to gather our discoveries into itself through the beams emitted from its eyes. We have all been scrutinized by it many times, and we have all witnessed it probing inanimate objects in the same manner.”

“Does it hurt when it studies you?” I asked.

“It's an odd experience. The only unpleasantness comes from the fact that you stop breathing while it does its work,” she said.

I shook my head and grimaced.

“I suppose it's better than having to write reports constantly,” she said with a forced smile.

“How does it fly?” I asked.

She shrugged. “How does the island fly? What ocean is this beneath us made of liquid mercury? What are we all doing here? These questions have become rather useless. We do our work and live in hope that someday we will be returned to the lives we have traded away for this commission.”

I had a thousand questions, but I thought it better not to bother asking them. It was clear to me, as Misrix had warned, that Below was only limited by his imagination in this mnemonic world he had built. Flying heads and islands were probably only the beginning of it. What was pitiful to me was the belief that both Anotine and Nunnly had expressed, namely that they had real lives and loves elsewhere that they longed to return to.

“Come, Cley, let's eat breakfast,” she said.

I could only nod, for my mind was preoccupied with an awareness of the tyranny we exercise over the creations of our imaginations. In waking from a dream, we obliterate worlds, and in calling up a memory, we return the dead to life again and again only to bring them face-to-face with annihilation as our attention shifts to something else.

Anotine led me down the hall to the room I suspected was for dining. There, on the long table, two meals had been served, the steam rising off of them as if they had come that moment from the oven.

“Oh, you're in luck, Cley,” she said as she took the seat beneath the window. “We have caribou steak.”

How it all had gotten there—the vase of flowers, the pitcher of lemon water with ice, the baby carrots and threaded dumplings—was a phenomenon that should have floored me, but at which I hardly blinked. I sat down, lifted my knife and fork, and set to work on the meat, which was, of course, cooked to perfection.

“Delicious,” I said after my first bite, and I could see in Anotine's eyes her relief that my utterance was a statement rather than another question.

We ate in silence for some time. I wasn't particularly hungry, and as I continued to eat I never really felt full. It was as if we had been preordained to finish the meal. Even the fleeting realization that what I was ingesting were Below's thoughts didn't put me off from slicing away at the sizable portion of meat.

I was just discovering the cheese vein in a threaded dumpling, when Anotine looked up and said, “I study the moment.”

“The moment?” I asked.

“That near nonexistent instant between the past and the future. The state we are always in but that we never recognize. When we stop to experience it, it flies away into the past and then we wait for the next one, but by the time we recognize its arrival, it too has gone.”

“Why does it interest you?” I asked.

“Because there is a whole undiscovered country there. In my experiments, I try to pry a hole in the seam between past and future in order to get a look at that exotic place,” she said.

“Interesting,” I said, and stared as if caught up in her ideas, when in reality I was caught up in the depth of her eyes.