The Glassy, Burning Floor of Hell Page 8

  “I see,” I said, though I didn’t exactly. “Who brought it here?” I asked.

  “You did,” he said.

  “I?”

  “Your people, I mean.”

  “It can’t be us,” I said. I tapped on my throat. “We can’t breathe within this city.”

  He hesitated. “Things have … changed,” he said. “Machinery has broken down. There was a device that once scrubbed the air, not unlike the apparatus you now wear under your skin, but it is broken.” He shrugged. “Perhaps my people broke it,” he admitted, “or rather changed how it worked so we could breathe here.”

  He drew me back inside. “But it is not all broken,” he said. He gestured to the illuminated panels studding the ceiling. “The artificial lighting still works,” he said. “And we still float, though who knows how long that will last.”

  He started to lead me back to my room, but when he saw I was too tired to continue, he bent far down and gathered me in his arms as if I were a child. Perhaps to him I was. He carried me back to my room.

  “Where did it come from?” I asked.

  He shook his head. “Only you know.”

  “My people, you mean.”

  “Your people,” he assented. With great care he settled me gently on the bed. “Sleep now,” he said. “Tomorrow we will speak at length about what you might do for us now that you are here in the true high city. How we might help one another.”

  III.

  Once he was gone, my exhaustion receded and I lay awake thinking.

  I thought about when I had first heard of the high city, the tales that had circulated when I was a boy, the stories I thought to be mere fictions. I thought about my father, in the low city, the domed city in which we could breathe unaided, crouched at the edge of the pallet he had made for me out of cloth stuffed with straw.

  “Hush,” he would say, “time to sleep.”

  “Tell me a story,” I would say.

  “All right,” he would say. “A quick one. Should it be about the high city?”

  And then he would tell me a story about a city that had come from another world, a city that was, in ways he either could not explain or which I could not understand, sentient. The beings in this city, so he told me, had once been like us. But they knew things we did not know, and what they knew allowed them to travel from world to world.

  “They were not citizens?”

  “No. They were our people.”

  Where we were, in the low city, there were citizens, more unlike us than like. Taller, more knowledgeable, more powerful, holding us in thrall. To breathe the air of the low city, they had to wear masks, just as we did in the high city—or, indeed, any time we left the dome of the low city to explore the land surrounding it.

  “The citizens are not evil,” my father told me once. “Not exactly. But they do not have our interest at heart.”

  “Are we not citizens too?” I asked him.

  “No,” he said. “No, we’re not.”

  “What are we, then?”

  “My grandfather always claimed we were guests,” he said. “We do not belong here.”

  “If they’re the citizens, why can’t they breathe and we can?”

  “They can breathe everywhere but the low city. If we did not have our domed city, though, we would not survive.”

  I thought about this. “And what about the others in the high city?” I asked. “The ones like us?”

  “They are gone from the high city now,” he said.

  “Where did they go?” I asked.

  “They became us.”

  In the middle of the night, I awoke. I was feeling better, stronger—ready. I could see what I must do. My citizen had left the telescoping rod leaning against the wall beside the bed. I took it and hobbled my way to the hidden drawer from which my citizen had taken the stylus. The wall at first appeared smooth, but as I ran my hand over it, I found at last the slightest lump. When I pressed my fingers against the lump, the wall popped open and the drawer slid out.

  The stylus that lit up on one end was there, and I took it. There was also a sheaf of papers, the writing on it in a language I could not read. These papers I left as they were. Under them, however, was a set of calipers, such as my father used to use in his profession before he was killed.

  Well, I am not being entirely accurate. I am too well trained in hiding the truth from the citizens: my father did not use the calipers in his profession, but privately, in his own time, as he drew plans, the nature of which I did not fully understand except that he was designing something intended to transport him secretly to the high city. I thought at the time he meant the high city we could see, on the mountain peak above us. But perhaps I was wrong.

  “Why not just go to the high city in the way the citizens advise and sponsor? By funicular?” I asked, back when he was still alive.

  He just shook his head. Perhaps he knew what I did not know, that what was presented to us as the high city was a hollow front, a false high city. If he did know, he never told me.

  “Should we not fight against them?” I asked my father, as he bent over his plans. Soon he would graduate from sketching on paper to building a miniature prototype of the thing he hoped would carry him to the high city. It would be this, his seemingly discreet requests for particular and peculiar materials, that would bring him to the attention of the citizens and lead to his subsequent disappearance, followed by the return of his mutilated corpse a few days later to my mother and me. His face was mostly torn off. His throat, open at the side, had been coated inside with what looked to be porcelain, just as my own would be. At the time, I believed these to be the gruesome methods of punishment of the citizens of the lower city, the least refined of the citizens.

  My citizen had found me by much different means. Or, rather, he had not found me at all. Instead, he had bided his time and waited for me to find him. This made him at once more humane and, at the same time, far more dangerous. I should not forget that he seemed to have a certain power over me, a way of regarding me, a sway I found difficult to resist. Probably, in the end, once he figured out he couldn’t use me, he would kill me.

  I knew what my citizen intended to ask of me, or at least suspected I did from what my father had said. I knew, too, that I could not help him—not because I didn’t want to help him, though there was that as well, but because I did not possess the information he wanted to know. What I knew was something quite different.

  Turning out the light, I slid the sharp-edged calipers into my pocket and groped my way back to the bed. They were not identical by any means to my father’s calipers, I realized, as I removed them from my pocket and felt out their shape beneath the blanket. I wondered if they were, properly speaking, calipers at all.

  I brought up in my mind the schematic my father had drawn for me over and over and forced me to memorize. In the years since his death, I had often, when I had a free moment, scratched the figure into the dirt with a stick and then rubbed it out, or even drawn it on a piece of paper and afterward chewed up the paper or thrown it into the fire.

  “Remember,” my father had said, “you must never seem too eager to please, nor too hostile. The citizens are, in a manner of speaking, as trapped as we are. They did not ask for us to come to this world, and yet we are here. In some ways, we are fortunate that they let us continue to exist at all. They did not do so with the creatures who were here before all of us and from whom they took this world.

  “But we are not their friends,” he continued. “Above all, we cannot give them what they will ask us for. We must protect our people, even if it means our own death.”

  …

  I thought again and again of the schematic. I lay in the dark, and once I was exhausted and could imagine it no more, I let my mind go and began to see again, instead of the schematic, that strange fluttering back and forth, those half-formed shapes. Perhaps it was the result of some slight hypoxia, perhaps I had already faded into dream, but I like to think I was actuall
y seeing what I was seeing, actually hearing what I was hearing. The shapes I saw struck me more and more as being the shapes of men—not men like the citizens but like me: smaller, from elsewhere. In this vision, if that was what it was, they came and whirled around me, and one bowed very low to me and whispered my name.

  “What is wanted?” I asked, but to this way of speaking, required of us by the citizens, he did not respond, merely whispering my name again.

  “Yes,” I said. “That is my name.”

  Are you prepared? he asked.

  “As prepared as I can be,” I said. “I have learned from my father, who learned from his father, who learned in turn from the fathers who came before. I am as prepared as I can be.”

  We were prepared as well, he said. Some of us better than others, but all of us to some measure. Yet look at us now.

  “Yes,” I said, looking through his insubstantial body. “Look at you now.”

  You have deceived him so far. Perhaps you will continue to do so.

  “Perhaps.”

  You know chances are you will end up dead.

  “I know,” I said. “But I am not dead yet.”

  Even if you succeed, you will almost certainly end up dead.

  “I know,” I said.

  He bowed very low again, as did all his fellows. And then, as suddenly as they had come, they were gone.

  My citizen comes to see me, suspecting nothing. He offers to take me somewhere. Lying in bed, I whisper something in response that he cannot quite hear. When he bends down, I stab him in the temple with the calipers. He staggers, cries out. I strike again and he falls to his knees, then again, then again. And then, alone, I make my way into the high city.

  If I can imagine it, I can make it so. He will come and I will kill him, I think. There: in the dark, my hand is tight on the calipers, waiting.

  IV.

  Someone was shaking me lightly. My father, I thought at first, but no, it was the citizen. At some point my exhaustion had betrayed me. He was close but not close enough for me to strike him. I waited, tense, for him to come closer.

  “What’s wrong?” he asked.

  “Nothing’s wrong,” I said.

  I was gripping the calipers under the covers so tightly that my hand ached. They were sturdy, and just heavy enough to inflict a certain amount of damage if he bent down just right.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked. His voice was relaxed, but his body was tense, on alert.

  “Well enough,” I managed.

  “Can you tell me why you got up during the night?”

  “Got up?” I stalled.

  He made an almost offhand gesture and a portion of wall to one side of the bed changed, becoming a projecting surface. On it I saw myself from hours before. I watched myself climb out of bed and approach the far wall. I palpated the wall with great care until the hidden drawer opened. I took out the calipers, examined them, became thoughtful, and turned off the light. For a moment I couldn’t be seen and then there I was again, rendered in pale green. Eventually, furtively, I returned to the bed.

  The projection stopped. The wall became a wall again. My citizen extended an open palm.

  “You can have no secrets from us,” he said. “Surely you know this by now.”

  I hesitated for long enough that I saw his other hand begin to clench as he prepared for the assault he thought was coming. But in the end, knowing I would accomplish nothing, I handed over the calipers.

  “Good,” he said, relaxing. “Very good. Now we are getting somewhere.”

  I could walk better than I had the day before, and my breathing was better too. Together we moved down the hallway to another hallway and through a door. It led to a refectory of sorts. There were several citizens conversing here, sitting hunched at tables that were my size rather than theirs, in chairs that were too small for them—another indication the legends had been accurate, that this place once belonged to guests, not citizens. As soon as we arrived, they fell silent. A moment later, perhaps at a signal from my citizen, they picked up their trays and departed, leaving us alone.

  He led me to the back of a room, to a console there. He touched first one button and then another. After a moment a panel opened, and a tray appeared with a steaming bowl of food on it.

  The food was more substantial than the gruel he had given me while I was recovering. It was palatable but little more. It had a strange undertone, as if it had been mixed with something that was not food.

  My citizen sat beside me on a chair that was too small for him, his knees nearly touching his chin, and watched me eat, taking nothing for himself.

  When I was finished, he took my tray with one large hand and displaced it to the table next to ours.

  “What did you want the calipers for?”

  “I don’t know,” I claimed.

  “We expected you to take the stylus,” he said. “We foresaw that would happen as soon as I used it on you and made no effort to conceal where I had gotten it. As an act of goodwill, you can see I have made no effort to take it from you. We did not think you would take the papers in the drawer, and you did not—we didn’t imagine you could read them, but I suppose you might have surprised us. But what did you want the calipers for? Did you think you could kill me with them?”

  “No,” I said. “But I thought perhaps I could try.”

  “This saddens me,” he said, though to my eye he did not look saddened. Perhaps I was still unused to the nuance of expression offered by a face such as his.

  “As a precaution,” I amended. “I had no plans to attack you. I took it,” I said, “because having it helped me feel safe.”

  “Ah,” he said. “That strikes me as foolish but not inconsistent with your kind. I can accept that.” He unfolded himself and stood. “Come with me,” he said.

  He led me deeper and deeper into the high city, if city is the proper word. It was the only word he offered, and so I suppose it will continue to serve. Sometimes I grew tired and he helped me along. Always he was attentive and patient. We moved through endless halls lined with a series of round windows and past row upon row of burnished doors devoid of handles. Indeed, I only knew them to be doors because I saw a citizen come through one and stop, alarmed, when he saw me. When other citizens saw us coming they avoided us, sometimes turning in their tracks and going the other way.

  At last we came to a doubled metal door. Beside it, inset in the wall, was a metal plate that my citizen touched with his palm, causing the door to slide back into the wall.

  Inside was a large, circular room. In one quadrant of the circle, the wall was glass from floor to ceiling and looked out onto open air and sky: clouds above, the spires of the false high city just barely visible through more clouds below. The wall’s other quadrants were covered by machinery of some kind, apart from the door we had entered through. In the middle of the room was a central console, a chair affixed firmly to the floor in front of it in such a way that if you sat in it you would face the glass wall.

  The room was not exactly as my father had told me it would be, but through how many generations had the information passed, being deformed slightly by each telling? It was near enough I was sure I was in the right room.

  My citizen, I realized, was closely observing me.

  “Do you know where we are?” he asked.

  “In the high city,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said patiently, “of course. But here in particular. This room.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I think you do know,” he said, and it seemed to me there was a veiled threat in his voice.

  I shook my head.

  “Do you know the reason you have been allowed to see the true high city?” he asked.

  “Because I recognized that the other high city was false,” I said.

  “Most of those who see that that city is false we do not bring here,” he said. “We just kill them. Why do you suppose we brought you?”

  I stayed silent.

&nbs
p; “Answer,” he said, staring at me in that same peculiar way he had done in the false high city. I found I had no choice but to do as he wished.

  “Because, in my wandering, I found you.”

  “No. Because there is something we need from you.”

  “I have nothing to give,” I said.

  He gestured to the central console. “Go ahead,” he said. “Take the command chair.”

  Reluctantly, I did.

  He watched me very closely. “Apply your hands to the panels on its surface,” he said. “Perhaps that will be enough to activate it.”

  I did so.

  “Not acknowledged,” said a disembodied voice from above.

  My citizen shrugged. “Worth a try,” he said.

  For a long time, my citizen just looked at me, as if weighing what to do, how to approach me so as to best get what he wanted. I, in the meantime, was trying my best to furtively examine the panel in front of me, as a final surety I was in the right place. I maintained a calm front, as my father had taught me. Inside, though, I was all anxiety and anticipation.

  “I will tell you a story,” my father told me one night as he worked in secret by candlelight. He was working on one of his projects. His hands were slick with dark oil. “There was a man. He was a man of the first city, the high city, but he was not a citizen. He was like you or me.”

  “Then how was he of the high city?” I asked.

  “He was there first, before the citizens. Citizen is a misnomer when it comes to the high city. The high city belonged at the beginning not to them, but to him and people like him. People like us.” This confused me. It did not fit my conception of the world. But I knew better than to interrupt further.

  “He fell from the first city. He leaped.” The light of the candle glittered off the round frames of his glasses as he talked, as he peered at the clockwork object he was building in his hand. It was, I remember now, a tiny machine that looked innocuous but that, properly triggered, could be used to kill a man, or even oneself. “But he had a device to carry him safely down. Or almost safely—he lived, but both his legs were broken.