The third time he struck, her body of haze seemed to ripple, like tissue paper fluttering in a gentle breeze. She retreated a step. He wasn’t sure she even could come any closer. The mist was at its thinnest here. There had barely been enough to cover the dome.
She was going to make him shoot. He hadn’t thought it would come to that. He thought it would be enough to get up here and wave the gun in the direction of whatever she’d been hiding. He wasn’t even sure a century-old bullet would fire, and if it did, he thought it was unlikely it could penetrate whatever he was sitting on. He had no doubts that the enormous pearl beneath him was from A Long Way Away and had been built to withstand worse than a slug from some nineteenth-century dandy’s peashooter.
Did she know it could fire only once, at best? No, he thought, not with any certainty but with a kind of needy desperation. No, he had to play it out, had to push it as far as it could go. He was not yet sure if he’d just fire into the air to prove the gun worked or if he dared to fire into the ball, or at the gold dish. He just knew that if this was going to work, he had to keep going, had to be willing to pull the trigger.
“Don’t make me do this,” he pleaded. “If I have to shoot, I will. Please.”
She regarded him with an expression of wild, brainless anticipation.
The gun had four slender, elegant hammers, packed tight together, one for each barrel. In his mind he rolled them all back with his thumb in a single, awesome CLACK, like the Outlaw Josey Wales getting ready to deal some rough justice in the tumbleweeds. It surprised him when he pulled at them with his thumb and they wouldn’t snap back into the ready position. Aubrey lowered the pistol and had a look at them. They were barnacled together with rusty lace, would have to be raised one at a time. He clenched his teeth and wrestled with the first. For close to a full ludicrous minute, nothing happened. He strained and strained, feeling the dramatic effect of his threat seep away by the second.
Then, all at once, it snapped back into place with a satisfying mechanical crunch, splinters of rust flying. His hand throbbed, was bruised from the effort, a deep blue indentation in the palm. He grabbed the next hammer and pulled back on it with both thumbs, wrestling at it with all the force he could muster. It was like trying to open a particularly frustrating jar of pickles. Then, as suddenly as the last time, it ratcheted back and locked into the ready-to-fire position. He exhaled, something like confidence returning, and grabbed at the third hammer with both thumbs, ready to pull against it with all his might.
Only the third hammer came free right away, flew back so unexpectedly that he let go and it fell, and the gun went off with a hot flash of light and a raggedy cough, like the backfire of a very old car.
Brimstone flared in his face, burned his nostrils. The barrels were no longer pointing at the gold cup but rather at an angle to the curved surface of that smooth gray orb. The slug cracked off the globe and clipped through one of those hair-thin gold wires. The severed gold line began to spray what looked like a billion glittery flecks of snow. A fine crack leapt through the sphere beneath, where the bullet had struck.
That continuous low thrumming sound seemed to shift, took on a reverberating note of strain.
Aubrey recoiled—from the change in sound, from the hissing spray of fine particles, from the crack in the curve of the not-glass ball. He looked at the gun, then flung it aside in horror. It was, he knew, the natural first impulse of any murderer: to get rid of the weapon. It banged off the glass, slid down the slope, and scudded out of sight in the suddenly agitated smoke.
He looked around for his Harriet of the sky. She was staggering away and melting as she went, not unlike the witch at the end of The Wizard of Oz. She sank into bubbling smoke, dissolving to her hips. Her arms were already gone, so that she looked more than ever like Greek statuary.
Aubrey turned in a circle. From here he could see the entirety of his cloud island. He looked out upon minarets and towers. They were caving in. As he watched, a tower quivered and sagged and fell into slop, a massive quaking pile of white whipped cream. Another folded at the middle, assuming the posture of a man bent over to look at his fly. Beyond the palace the rest of the cloud was in a wind-blasted torment. The surface was all chop, and the gusts caught the roiled waves and tossed smoke like sea spray.
His alarm stuck him in place. What got him moving was not the dissolving palace, the boiling cloud, or the shower of probably toxic particles hissing from the broken line. He could not find the will to move until he looked down between his feet.
Directly below, one eye opened to a slit in that grotesque, humongous face. The eyeball beneath was red, shot through with black specks, like a ball filled with blood and dead flies. It shifted dully, drowsily, this way and that, before seeming to settle: on him.
He ran. It was not a choice, not something he gave any thought. His legs were just going—Feets don’t fail me now—taking him away from the top of the pearl, away from the hideous face, away from the increasingly wasplike buzz of the golden disk.
Aubrey fled down the curve of the sphere into the churning smoke until all at once the hard, smooth surface beneath his feet was a steep ramp and his heels shot out from under him. He struck on his ass and slid almost a hundred feet before he was able to roll over and catch himself. He went another hundred feet in a series of controlled drops, grabbing cloud, hanging, letting go, grabbing the next handhold, chimpanzeeing all the way to the bottom.
Aubrey leapt off the side and fell the final fifteen feet. He expected the springy jolt of impact when his feet found bottom. Instead he was, for one dreadful moment, plunging through a cloud like any other cloud.
When he stopped, it was because the cloud seemed to thicken and press in around him, a sensation like being buried up to the waist in wet sand. He had time, when he was half buried, to take in what had become of the banquet hall. It had collapsed in on itself, a ruin in the aftermath of a direct hit from a bomb. Craggy, shattered walls rose on either side of him. The floor was a tumbled mass of pillowy boulder shapes.
He wriggled up and free and began to climb across the debris. Even then there was a feeling as if the heaps and lumps of semi-solid smoke beneath him were bobbing in the fast current of a flood. It seemed at any instant that the unsteady blocks beneath him might roll and dump him right through the billowing paleness and toward the earth below. The cloud was losing its consistency, its ability to become solid—although he did not think of it as “consistency.” The term that came to him, as he frantically clambered across the slurry, was “self-image.”