He crawled, sweeping cloud out of the way in puffs. The vapor did not resist him here. Aubrey uncovered what seemed to be a gold wire, as thin as a hair, running along the outside of the clouded glass. A dozen feet later, he discovered another gold filament. Soon he found a third, a fourth. All the gold wires were rising toward the very top of the globe to enwrap it in a fragile netting.
As his hand passed over one of the wires, he felt a cool breath against his palm. Aubrey paused and bent close and discovered that the lines were pricked with thousands of fine perforations, spilling wisps of white haze.
The whole impossible substance of the cloud began here, he thought. The pearl wore a coat of golden threads, which produced the cloud as a form of disguise, extruding a smoke that was lighter than air but as tough as human skin. It wasn’t magic but machinery.
This idea was followed closely by another. He wasn’t getting stepped on anymore. He had not felt the psychic impact of that black, glassy mace since finding the first golden thread.
I’m inside its defenses, he thought, certain without knowing how he could be sure. It can’t fight me here. And it can’t hide either.
He looked past the gold webbing and into the not-ice once more and spotted a second frozen eel, thick as a man’s thigh. He followed it upward to see where it led, scooping aside the thin mist as he went.
At last he was at the very top. He pursed his lips and blew away a tissue of smoke, and finally he had a view of what he’d been hearing for the last fifteen minutes. The globe was crowned by what looked like an upside-down dish of beautiful gold foil. Hundreds of shining lines radiated out of it, spokes from the hub of a wheel. The dish produced a steady electrical drone that he could feel in the fine hairs on his arms, on the surface of his skin, in his fillings.
Aubrey stood, wiped an arm across his brow. His eyes shifted focus, peering beneath the golden cup and into that great ball of not-glass. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, and when it clicked into place, he was swept with an almost overpowering dizziness.
It was a face. The gray, smooth sphere contained a head, bigger than the head of a sperm whale. Aubrey saw a single closed eye, turned up toward him, an eye with the approximate diameter of a hot tub. Farther down was a beard of tentacles—those eels he’d seen—each ropy appendage thicker than a fire hose. It was hard to tell what color the creature might be. Everything within the sphere assumed a greenish-gray hue, like old, cold snot.
At some point he sank back to his knees. The gold platter set atop the pearl hummed steadily. He thought the thing inside the not-ice was either dead or in a state of coma very close to death, but the machinery that concealed it was alive and well.
He saw movement at the edge of his vision and turned his head. Sky Harriet waited a few yards away, nervously wringing her hands. The hem of her pale gown, ideal for a wedding, swept the steel-colored not-glass beneath her.
He gestured at the face in the sphere.
“What is that? Is that you in there?” he called out to her. “Is that the real you?”
He wasn’t sure she understood, and he thought again of an illiterate thumbing through a magazine full of pictures. But then she shook her head, almost desperately, and hugged herself.
No. No, he didn’t think so. He thought again (hoped was maybe more accurate) that whatever was down there was dead. She—the cloud—was more like . . . what? A security drone? A pet?
He was leaning forward a little, and he put one hand on that wrinkled, upside-down dish of gold foil.
It was like sticking a finger into a light socket, a charge so intense his whole body went rigid and his teeth clamped together, and for an instant his vision was wiped out by a flurry of silver lights, as if a dozen flashbulbs were going off in his face all at once. Only what galvanized him was not electricity but a five-hundred-thousand-volt shock of loneliness, a feeling of need so intense it could kill.
He yanked his hand free. When he blinked away the blurred afterglow of all those flashing lights, his Harriet of the heavens was regarding him with something like fear.
Aubrey held his left hand to his chest. It ached with pins and needles.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I’m so sorry for you. But you can’t keep me here. You’re killing me. I’m sorry you’re alone, but you have to let me go. I—I don’t want to be with you anymore.”
She gazed at him with complete incomprehension.
He felt not surprise but only a kind of weary disappointment. A sentient and empathic life-form made of smoke had come to this world who knew how long ago, with a single purpose—to conceal and protect a head in a ball. A monstrous, silent thing that had maybe not even survived the voyage.
The cloud consciousness lived by one law: protect its freight from discovery. There was no going down. And there was no letting anyone free who might endanger that thing inside the sphere, a decapitated head the size of a house. The living smoke had kept the balloonists—and no doubt tried to please them—so it would not be alone. It was holding on to him for the same reason. It did not understand that this temporary easing of its agonizing, endless loneliness would inevitably come at the cost of the only life Aubrey had.
Perhaps it did not really understand death. Maybe it thought the balloonists were still there with it but only being very still and quiet, much like the creature inside the sphere. How much did the living cloud know, after all? How much could it know? That head inside the sphere no doubt had a brain the size of a two-car garage. But the thinking, feeling smoke . . . that was just some circuitry trapped inside a little gold dish.
“I have to get down,” he said. “I want you to put me down somewhere. Leave me on a mountaintop, and I promise never to tell anyone about any of this. You can trust me. You can look into my thoughts and see that I mean it.”
She shook her head, very sadly, very seriously.
“You don’t understand. I’m not asking. This isn’t a request. This is an offer,” he said. “Please. Put me down, and I won’t have to use this.”
And he removed the gun from his pocket.
23
SHE COCKED HER HEAD, a bit like a dog who has heard an interesting faraway sound. If she knew what the gun did—and she had to know what it did, she’d certainly been present the last time it had been used—she gave no sign. Still he felt the need to explain.
“This is a pistol. It can do a lot of damage. I don’t want to hurt you,” he said. “Or your friend here. But I will if you don’t set me down safely someplace.”
She shook her head.
“I have. To. Get. Down.” He punctuated his last three words by rapping the dish with the pistol, a little harder each time. Bong, bong, bong.