a seal’s back, turned heat into static—a hundred trillion threads a single molecule thick, each kilometers long, accommodating stress factors in the nano-bloodstream of carbon corpuscles. When I say it bends, I mean it bends, Doctor.
The laws dictated equatorial placement: rotational imperatives. Ladon tried acquiring it. Rivals and nations caught wind and went to the New United Nations. Before long, they’d hammered so many legal spikes into the equation, Ladon couldn’t buy a bucket of dirt if it came from the equator. They had no choice but to look elsewhere, and to challenge toe-to-toe the exigencies of rotational dynamics.
It took eleven years before the Lady and Max Ohman stood atop the mountain, raised high the stone tablet, then swung it shattering down. Not an elevator as much as a slide, the tail of a spermatozoa, slanting skyward. Another miracle of engineering tethering it in place.
Nobody should reach that high. Frail humans should never strive for godhood. The wax melts; justice is meted out. Exaltation is suspect. Anybody with balls like that deserves to get them chopped off. They stand so tall, their shadows cover the world, and we frail humans begrudge the loss of light upon our upturned faces.
Not that we ever paid any attention to it when it showered down its brilliant promise.
But never mind that.
Nobody should reach that high. No matter the quagmire of emotions drowning in insipid fears and flaws, no matter the primal pit of terror bubbling uneasy beneath those words. It was a statement voiced the world over, there in those shadows cast down by achievement. Sometimes a whine, mostly vicious with blind, unreasoning hatred. The unspoken secret remained: What the shadows hid was darkness in the soul, and its voice was spite, and it said, Nobody should reach that high.
Well, Ladon reached, was reaching even now. It seemed the world was having trouble living with that fact.
An hour before dusk. Maybe less. William continued staring at the object in the backpack. He felt sickness in his flesh, something like a fever, but somehow sour as well. A taste of corruption.
The ghosts were gone. He’d sent them off, riding the storm as it tracked the blistered lands of the Hole. He hoped one would come back in time, one in particular. He’d not seen that one yet, but he was sure it was there, somewhere in the army of dead that had dogged his tracks.
A sound off to his right, footsteps crunching through the crust of calcined sand. And beyond that—William now heard—the hum of a rover’s engine.
“Oh hell,” William mumbled through broken lips. “I thought it was over.”
* * *
“The Lord have mercy,” Old Jim breathed softly as he crouched down beside William Potts. “Unpack the kit, Stel, I figure he’s taken more than seventy MRs for every day he’s been out here, never mind the dehydration, sun- and windburns and, hell, starvation.”
Stel handed Old Jim the medikit. Her gaze remained on William as she tried remembering what he’d looked like, that night in his room. Gaunt even then, but this. She barely recognized him.
“He’ll need plasma,” Old Jim said as he prepared a syringe. “Fluids.”
“He needs clean marrow,” Stel said.
“Better call the university. Tell ’em we’re taking him back to Val Marie, and they’d better get someone over, fast.”
Old Jim’s weathered hands worked over William, stripping back the ragged bootsuit. He knew there were questions that Stel wanted answered. Questions about how he’d driven all over the damn place, about how he’d found the boy. The Hole was a big place, after all. The chances of finding him were damn near hopeless.
He injected William with E-67 flushant, the latest available in rad treatment.
How the hell can I tell her I had help? How can I tell her that I followed an old Indian ghost?
“Let’s get him in the buggy.”
Some goddamned ghost leading me across the prairie, an Indian ghost carrying a
The laws dictated equatorial placement: rotational imperatives. Ladon tried acquiring it. Rivals and nations caught wind and went to the New United Nations. Before long, they’d hammered so many legal spikes into the equation, Ladon couldn’t buy a bucket of dirt if it came from the equator. They had no choice but to look elsewhere, and to challenge toe-to-toe the exigencies of rotational dynamics.
It took eleven years before the Lady and Max Ohman stood atop the mountain, raised high the stone tablet, then swung it shattering down. Not an elevator as much as a slide, the tail of a spermatozoa, slanting skyward. Another miracle of engineering tethering it in place.
Nobody should reach that high. Frail humans should never strive for godhood. The wax melts; justice is meted out. Exaltation is suspect. Anybody with balls like that deserves to get them chopped off. They stand so tall, their shadows cover the world, and we frail humans begrudge the loss of light upon our upturned faces.
Not that we ever paid any attention to it when it showered down its brilliant promise.
But never mind that.
Nobody should reach that high. No matter the quagmire of emotions drowning in insipid fears and flaws, no matter the primal pit of terror bubbling uneasy beneath those words. It was a statement voiced the world over, there in those shadows cast down by achievement. Sometimes a whine, mostly vicious with blind, unreasoning hatred. The unspoken secret remained: What the shadows hid was darkness in the soul, and its voice was spite, and it said, Nobody should reach that high.
Well, Ladon reached, was reaching even now. It seemed the world was having trouble living with that fact.
An hour before dusk. Maybe less. William continued staring at the object in the backpack. He felt sickness in his flesh, something like a fever, but somehow sour as well. A taste of corruption.
The ghosts were gone. He’d sent them off, riding the storm as it tracked the blistered lands of the Hole. He hoped one would come back in time, one in particular. He’d not seen that one yet, but he was sure it was there, somewhere in the army of dead that had dogged his tracks.
A sound off to his right, footsteps crunching through the crust of calcined sand. And beyond that—William now heard—the hum of a rover’s engine.
“Oh hell,” William mumbled through broken lips. “I thought it was over.”
* * *
“The Lord have mercy,” Old Jim breathed softly as he crouched down beside William Potts. “Unpack the kit, Stel, I figure he’s taken more than seventy MRs for every day he’s been out here, never mind the dehydration, sun- and windburns and, hell, starvation.”
Stel handed Old Jim the medikit. Her gaze remained on William as she tried remembering what he’d looked like, that night in his room. Gaunt even then, but this. She barely recognized him.
“He’ll need plasma,” Old Jim said as he prepared a syringe. “Fluids.”
“He needs clean marrow,” Stel said.
“Better call the university. Tell ’em we’re taking him back to Val Marie, and they’d better get someone over, fast.”
Old Jim’s weathered hands worked over William, stripping back the ragged bootsuit. He knew there were questions that Stel wanted answered. Questions about how he’d driven all over the damn place, about how he’d found the boy. The Hole was a big place, after all. The chances of finding him were damn near hopeless.
He injected William with E-67 flushant, the latest available in rad treatment.
How the hell can I tell her I had help? How can I tell her that I followed an old Indian ghost?
“Let’s get him in the buggy.”
Some goddamned ghost leading me across the prairie, an Indian ghost carrying a
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