Damon Knight - Orbit 19

“Poor creature,” Gloucester muttered. And then: “So you say it’s fog. All right, sir, climb out. So soon as your feet are on good, solid ground, call to me, and I’ll come too.”

“I prefer not to,” Kent said. His sad, handsome face creased, though only for a second, in a smile. “I believe in intellectual democracy; I know that I am right, but I concede the possibility that you’re right too.”

Gloucester cleared his throat. “Let’s stop amusing ourselves with fancies and look at this logically.” He thrust his hands behind him, under his own tattered cloak, and began to pace up and down. “The king’s senile. I won’t argue definitions with you. You know what I mean, and I know you agree with me, whatever you may say. Now, let’s list the options available to us.”

“We’ve done this before,” Kent said.

“Granted. But let’s do it again. I pride myself, sir, on being a sound sullen scholar; and when there is nothing more to be done, we triple ‘S’ men recast the data—integrate, integrate, integrate, and three pump handles.”

He took a deep breath. “Now then, what is the desired result? What is it we wish? To be away—isn’t that so? To courtier no more? That will do for a beginning. I’d like to leave aside those highflown plans of yours for the time being, and get to something practical.”

“One of my ancestors was supposed to be able to fly,” Kent said. He was craning his neck to look out the window again. “My mother showed me his picture once. The climate must have been warmer then, because his cloak was silk. Red silk. He flew through the air, and it streamed out behind him.”

“A symbolic figure,” Gloucester told him. “He represented the strong man who, ridding himself of the superstitions of the past, devoted himself to improving his own powers and achieving mastery of others. Actually there have been a number of people who’ve tried it, but someone always shoots them.”

“Bullets ricocheted from his chest,” Kent said dreamily.

There was a beating of vast wings outside the window.

“Listen!”

“Don’t go out there,” Gloucester warned, but Kent had already turned around, and was scrambling on hands and knees through the aperture in the wall until he could thrust his head and shoulders through the curtain of leaves into the faint, free air.

Above his head, and below it, the tower extended until sight failed in white mist. Though Kent knew it to be round, to either side the wall seemed flat—so great was the radius of that mighty curve. (Some, indeed, said that it was infinite.) Vines overgrew the wall; Kent set his foot upon a stout stem, and took another in his right hand; then, drawing his dagger with his left, stepped out, so that he hung suspended in a dark green jungle of foliage over the yawning void.

The wing-wind tugged at his hair and fluttered the fur of the collar at his throat. A vampire flapped systematically up and down the wall, beating the ivy with pinions that were to Kent’s cloak as the cloak to an Ivy leaf. There were climbers in the ivy, pale figures Kent knew to be men and women. When the vampire’s wings dislodged them they fell; and the flying horror dove after them until it had them in its claws, then rose again. What it did with them then, Kent could not see—it folded itself in the black membrane of its pinions as though shamed by its own malignancy, hanging in the air, head bowed, like a scud of sooty smoke. When the wings opened again, its victims were gone.

“What was it?” Gloucester asked when Kent stood on the floor of the room once more.

Kent shrugged, and sheathed his dagger.

“Are we high up?”

“Very high. How can it be that there is air here?”

“My theory is that the tower draws air with it,” Gloucester said. “Its mass is so great that it attracts its own atmosphere.”

Kent spat, and watched his spittle fall. It struck the flagstones in a pattern that suggested the skull-face of the vampire; but he ignored this, and said, “If what you say is true, then the direction we call ‘down’ would necessarily be toward the center of the tower.”

Gloucester shook his shaggy head. “No, down would be the resultant of the tower’s attraction, the earth’s, and the moon’s. The construction of the floors may take that into account.”

“The moon’s? Do you think the tower rises high enough for that?”

“The moon’s gravitation has an effect even on the earth’s surface,” Gloucester told him, “drawing the tides. And yes, I know that the tower rises very high indeed. One of its commonest names is Spire Sans Summit.”

“Poetical exaggeration,” Kent said. Although he did not like turning his back to the open window, he had wandered over to the stairs —down which they had come, and down which, as he knew, they would eventually go again.

“Suppose that it is not. Suppose that the king himself is the originator of that phrase, and that it reflects sober truth. How can it be true?”

“If work is still in progress,” Kent said slowly, “the tower could be called summitless, because the summit is not yet in place.”

“A mere quibble. But suppose another foundation exists—on another sphere. Imagine this tower stretched between the two, like a cobweb of stone.”

“Then in going downward,” Kent said, “we may be progressing toward either end. Is that it? When we reach the lowest floor, we may step out onto the surface of the moon?”

The other man nodded. “There are footprints on the surface of the moon, you know. Even though the king would have us believe all this is happening long before that time.”

“Then let us go, even if it is to the moon, or a farther place; when we reach it we will be able to see the earth, and we will know where we are.” He began to descend the stair.

“You’re going down again? I’ll come with you.”

The room below might have filled all the tower, from wall to wall, with a domed ceiling higher in the center than the room was wide; so that it seemed like a world unto itself. The stone stair they trod might have been a bit of gossamer in that immensity.

“It’s an orrery, by God,” Gloucester said. “At least it’s not another throne room.”

“It may still be another throne room,” Kent cautioned him.

In the center the sun burned with thermonuclear fire. Far away, at the dim borders of the room to which the two descended, cold Pluto circled. The walls were wainscoted, the wooden panels painted with the symbols of the zodiac; a rearing bison, shot to the heart, snorted gore near where they stood when they attained the floor at last.

Here the stair ended. “We must find another way down,” Gloucester said.

Kent nodded and added, “Or up, if we are going up.”

The rearing bison seemed to speak: “Long have I ruled—a hundred years and more.” (But it was the king’s voice.)

“Yes, monarch of the plain,” Kent answered, “long did you rule.”

“Hush,” Gloucester whispered, “he’ll hear you.”

“Long have I ruled,” the king’s voice continued. “I have starved my enemies; built my tower.”

“You are old,” Gloucester ventured. There was a stirring behind the painted panel, but Kent knew that the king was not there.

“In the dream of serving others, they have served me. Pisces the whale I penned in a tank of glass, sheltering her from the waters I poisoned. Does not that show the love I bore her? The poison was needed for the making: scientist and sorcerer am I.”

From a hole gnawed between the rearing bison’s feet, a rat’s head peeped forth. It was as large as a bucket; seeing it, Kent drew his sword.

“It is as I feared,” Gloucester said when his own blade was in his hand. “The lower parts of the tower are worse than the higher. Or the higher are worse than the lower, as may be.”