Terminal World (58 page)

‘Now we know better. You’ve got a theory, haven’t you?’

‘I had one,’ Ricasso said forlornly. ‘Spearpoint - our Spearpoint - happens to be located quite close to the equator. For a long time, I’ve had a notion that Spearpoint was a kind of bridge between the Earth and the heavens. There have been treatises ... scholarly speculations ... on the possibility of constructing a kind of cosmic funicular, one that would ferry people and goods far above our atmosphere. I’ve made a point of collecting these articles, sifting the good from the bad, the sane from the demented. I do not pretend to understand every nuance of the mathematical underpinnings, but one thing has remained constant. You do not build such a structure up from the face of the Earth. You hang it down from a point in the void, so that its weight is exactly counterbalanced by the outward force it feels due to its orbit around the world. It must, of course, hover above the same spot on the ground to be of use. And it must be located close to the equator, if not exactly on it.’

‘I’ve seen the charts,’ Quillon said. ‘We’re still thirty or forty degrees from the equator.’

‘And yet here is something very like Spearpoint, except that it’s snapped.’

‘Meaning that Spearpoint cannot be the thing you imagined,’ Quillon said, wary of making his point too forcefully, for he knew how much of Ricasso’s self-worth was invested in his scholarship.

But Ricasso didn’t seem to take it too badly. ‘No, you’re right. It can’t be. Whatever Spearpoint is - whatever Spearpoint
was
- it was almost certainly never a cosmic funicular. Unless our whole world has tipped on its axis. Which means that if I was wrong about that, there’s a chance I was wrong about everything else as well.’

 

They were gaining height. Of all the ships in Swarm,
Painted Lady
was the one best equipped for high-altitude work, but even at her operational limit she would still be two leagues below the broken summit of what was now being called Spearpoint 2. Ricasso had known that, of course, just as he’d known that she still carried a spotter balloon that could be released and recovered in the thinning air. The balloons were used only rarely, since they were unpowered and therefore could not be employed as survey aides from fast-moving ships. But all the larger escort craft carried them, for the balloons had occasionally proved the decisive factor in aerial engagements where long-range observation was crucial. That didn’t make them popular, for Swarmers - as Quillon had quickly recognised - were universally contemptuous of any airborne contraption lacking an engine, steering system or stiffening structure. Even blimps were beneath their dignity.

The deflated balloon and its airtight passenger pod travelled in a recess just behind the main turret on the upper surface of
Painted Lady’s
envelope, ready to be launched directly into the air with the minimum of fuss. The airship had to slow to a virtual standstill for the balloon to be inflated, filled with hot air from a firesap burner, but the procedure had obviously been well drilled and despite having to be handled by a reduced number of airmen, it proceeded without incident. Quillon, who had agreed to travel with Ricasso in the pod, watched matters with only mild apprehension. Set against all the dangers he had faced since leaving Spearpoint, a spot of high-altitude ballooning seemed in no way extraordinary. No one had made any concerted efforts to talk Ricasso out of the enterprise, and as ship’s physician, Quillon was at a loss to find medical grounds against it. Ricasso was - despite appearances - fairly healthy, and conditions inside the pressurised compartment would differ very little from those in the gondola.

The passenger pod was a brass-coloured thing with angular, down-sloping riveted sides, hemispherical portholes set into three of the four faces and a pressure-tight door in the other. A small selection of instruments poked down through the floor, worked from inside. There were two seats and some rudimentary controls, enabling the occupants to work the firesap heater on the roof of the balloon, to drop ballast when it was required and to adjust the flow of air from the bottled supply within the cabin. That was it. No wireless to communicate with
Painted Lady,
since wireless didn’t work in the zones. No means of steering or choosing a landing spot, beyond such control as was achievable through varying altitude and thereby intercepting different windstreams. None of that really mattered, though. Ricasso, who claimed no particular proficiency with balloons, only wanted to go up and down. If they landed on
Painted Lady
again, so be it. If they missed and had to be picked up from the ground, it would entail only a small delay, inconsequential against the tremendous saving already achieved by passing through the Bane.

‘You sure you’re cool with this, Cutter?’ Meroka, clad in cold-weather gear, was with them as they prepared to board the cabin.

‘Done much ballooning?’ Quillon asked with a smile.

‘About as much as you’ve done horse burying.’

‘Then I’ll be fine.’ He slipped on his goggles. He had not been wearing them routinely since leaving
Purple Emperor -
his nature was no secret to
Painted Lady‘
s crew - but now the wind made his eyes sting. ‘Besides, if anything goes wrong with the air tanks, the fact that one of us is already adapted for high-altitude breathing may help matters.’

‘Half-adapted, Cutter. Don’t get ideas above your station.’

‘I won’t.’

Curtana stamped her feet against the cold. It had been pleasant enough at their normal cruising altitude, but the air was chillier up here. ‘With the wind direction as it is right now, you should drift clean over the summit. Suggest you start losing height almost as soon as you’re over it. You don’t have long before those bottles run dry.’

‘We’ll be the very epitome of haste,’ Ricasso said.

They got into the compartment, knees touching as they took up opposing seats. Curtana pushed the airtight door shut, allowing Ricasso to lock it from inside. He increased the firesap burner, fully inflating the balloon. The pod clanged against its fasteners as it tried to rise into the air. Curtana peered through one of the portholes and gave a hand gesture indicating that they were ready to depart.

‘This is it, Doctor,’ Ricasso said theatrically. ‘No going back now!’

‘Then let’s get this diversion over with, so we can return to the serious business of the medicine run.’

‘Intellectual spoilsport.’ But Ricasso was smiling.

Ricasso worked a release mechanism and suddenly - dreamily - they were aloft and rising. It wasn’t silent - there was the steady hiss of the air supply, and the on/off rumble of the firesap burner - but it was immediately obvious that they were not in a powered craft, and the motion, smooth as it was, had a sense of not being under their direct control.
Painted Lady
diminished with considerable speed, falling away and below as winds snagged the balloon. Quillon had just enough of a view of her to see her engines rev up again as the airship resumed powered flight. Very soon they had the sky to themselves, save for the looming tower of Spearpoint 2. The air currents were conveying them towards that edifice at considerable speed, but they were also rising steadily. Already the angle of view had changed, and Quillon was able to make out the upper surface of a ledge that had not been visible from the airship. Unlike Spearpoint’s ledges, it showed no sign of ever having been lived on.

‘If it’s not a ... what did you call it? Cosmic funicular?’

‘A working hypothesis, now gratefully discarded.’

‘Then what is it?’

‘I don’t know. That’s rather the point of this little exercise.’ But Ricasso leaned forwards, rising to the theme. ‘I was wrong, and so was everyone who ever speculated that Spearpoint might have been a cosmic funicular, at least in the conventional sense. But all those fables about it being a bridge to the stars? They can’t
all
be wrong.’

‘Unless, that is, they’re all wrong.’

‘That wreck we saw - the fallen void-crosser?’

‘Yes?’

‘Something that big, we’d have noticed it if it came down anywhere else in the world. The Bane preserved it to some degree, but even with five thousand years of weather and war, if one of those had crashed somewhere else, there’d still be something left. Don’t you think, Doctor?’

‘I suppose.’

‘So why aren’t there any?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘I think the answer, quite literally, is staring us in the face. The void-crosser’s here because it had something to do with Spearpoint Two. The one is intimately related to the other.’

‘So why aren’t there any fallen void-crossers lying near our - my - Spearpoint?’ Quillon asked.

‘Because, Doctor, your Spearpoint isn’t broken.’

The balloon’s course was straight and true, the winds clement. Quillon’s ears popped slightly on the ascent - cabin pressure was obviously lower than aboard
Painted Lady
- but in all other respects he felt clear-headed and alert, and he saw nothing in Ricasso’s boyish demeanour to indicate that the other man was suffering any ill effects.

‘Look,’ Ricasso said at one point, gesturing excitedly through one of the windows. ‘There’s Swarm! I’ve never seen it from so high up before.’

Quillon turned to follow Ricasso’s down-pointing finger. It took him a few moments to identify Swarm against the confusion of background scenery. Far from the city-sized agglomeration of ships he had grown accustomed to, Swarm now appeared to be little more than a hectic concentration of slightly elongated dots, darkening near the middle where the larger ships were gathered. He could cover all of it with one hand. Even the sharp curvature of the Earth failed to diminish the sense of the landscape being vast and permanent compared to Swarm’s fragility.

‘Not much, is it?’ Ricasso said, reading Quillon’s thoughts as if they were written on his face. ‘But it’s all we’ve got, most of us.’

Quillon recalled looking back at Spearpoint, the night the storm turned out the lights.

‘Home is where the heart lies,’ he said quietly.

They kept rising. The cabin creaked and clanged with the rising pressure differential. The sky overhead was a deeper blue than even the view from the Celestial Levels, shading almost to black at the zenith. Quillon wondered whether a healthy, fully formed angel could have endured at this altitude. He didn’t know for sure, but he was certain that his own chances for survival were not much better than Ricasso’s. He stood between two worlds, without a confident foothold in either.

Before very long they were level with the summit and still rising. Ricasso adjusted the firesap burner to level their flight. If Spearpoint 2 resembled a wine glass with the cup snapped off, they were now at approximately the point in the narrowing stem where the break had occurred. It was close to half a league across, Quillon estimated. The edges were jagged, like the serrated wall of a circular crater. He had felt nothing resembling vertigo until this point, but as the balloon sped towards the summit, the feeling began to reassert itself. He was able to look all the way down the rising structure, to the point where it emerged from the ground. He was tiny and it was huge, and the balloon wouldn’t leave so much as a scratch if the winds changed and dashed them against that imperturbable black wall.

And then, suddenly, they were above the summit. Quillon wasn’t quite sure what he had been expecting until that moment. It had never occurred to him that Spearpoint might be hollow, but if this broken twin was any indication it was, and the thickness of the walls was no more than a twentieth of the diameter of the broken stem. The sun could not have reached more than a league or so down the shaft, but from what they could see, it was both perfectly smooth and of perfectly constant diameter. He had the ominous sense of looking down a rifle-barrel.

‘That void-crosser we saw,’ Ricasso said, ‘would easily have fitted inside that shaft, don’t you think?’

‘I suppose.’

Ricasso was busy working the cable-release for the underbelly camera.

‘Spearpoint’s diameter decreases from the base, but - and you’ll have to take my word on this - it’s never less than one-eighth of a league across. From the Celestial Levels upwards, it doesn’t get much narrower. A ship could travel all the way up, until it reached vacuum. Actually, it wouldn’t necessarily be a question of
reaching
vacuum; if the shaft pushed sufficiently far above the atmosphere, it could hold vacuum all the way down to the surface of the Earth. That ship was probably never meant to travel in air at all. It was a ship of space, a creature of the true void.’

‘Why?’ Quillon asked.

‘Why what?’

‘If it’s so much trouble, why bring a ship like that down to the ground at all? It seems a lot of effort, building something like Spearpoint - or Spearpoint Two, for that matter - just to bring a ship the last few leagues.’

‘Perhaps that’s the way they wanted to do things.’ But even as Ricasso spoke, Quillon heard the dissatisfaction with the glibness of his own explanation. ‘No, perhaps not. Wait a moment, Doctor. There’s still something else we can do.’ He leaned over to grab one of the instrument controls. ‘Flare drop. It’s meant for illuminating the ground in darkness, if you’re looking for somewhere to put down.’

They were still over the open mouth of Spearpoint, albeit much nearer to the far edge now.

‘Do it,’ Quillon said.

Ricasso tugged at the lever and a mechanism made a reassuring solid
clunk
somewhere under their feet. The flare, presumably, had just detached itself from the base of the pod. Quillon couldn’t see it at first, but as they travelled on, and the flare fell further below, it came into view. It was an incandescent blob under a tiny parachute.

They watched it fall into shadow, whereupon it began to illuminate the hitherto unseen part of the shaft. Alas, the wind was pushing the balloon too quickly for them to watch the flare as it travelled all the way down. It had barely reached halfway to the ground when the balloon’s motion took it over the edge, and the shaft was no longer visible.