By then Constantin’s breathing had become chains of gasps, and his other memory accumulated little more than his nausea and pain and the clarity of her sensorium. She cast about for some last, great thing to give him at the end and settled on her night on the deck of a tramp steamer in the equatorial Pacific. She’d kept waking and drifting off again, eager to see the space elevator, and finally there it was, like a column of darkness, at least at the base, a thin vertical absence of stars. Her father had told her it was mankind’s great ambition to build a tower that pierced the sky, an elevator into low orbit that would link the terrestrial and sidereal spheres, a phrase she is almost sure of—it sounds like him—though the memory has a vagueness, like all her memories from before the implant, and she half suspects she made it up. And they’d almost done it, he’d said, though the tower, built, had been abandoned, victim of the deflating economy and spectacular failures of engineering. It had never borne a single payload into space, a scandal in its day, but all that had been long ago, decades before her birth, and for her the tower had only ever been the most elegiac of ruins.
Constantin’s eyes moved randomly behind his lids and he thought he was dreaming her and her grief felt unmanageable but sharing her story let her focus on him. The steamer had reached the atoll at dawn, the tower red as blood in the new day’s light, tapering inward as it rose into the sky, its shadow stretching to the limits of the west. Though the sun had scarcely cleared the ocean, heat shimmered over the jungle that covered the atoll; once there had been a city there, the unimaginatively named Base Camp, its rotting structures now become steep-sided green hills. Titanic buttresses rose around the tower’s base, the clean lines of their geometry blurred with overgrowth, and she found them thrilling, like the monuments of a lost civilization, which, she supposed, they almost were.
Gulls rose in cacophonous masses as she stepped onto the reeking, guano-caked pier. She had an old but carefully serviced Colt revolver in her pocket—she didn’t like guns, but it seemed necessary to have it if she was going to travel that far beyond the pale of the law. She sat on a rusting bollard, clutching her serious technical expeditionary backpack and dangling her feet over the water as she watched the ship sail away.
She wasn’t the first to visit. Fifteen years ago an Italian hippie had come and explored and written a guidebook that she’d found buried on his long forgotten blog. With a crudely machine-translated English version on her phone, she’d picked her way over the wide, low valleys that had once been thoroughfares. As she got closer to the tower it was occluded by the buttresses but she soon found her way to the ascending spiral of the ramp around the base. Giorgio’s notes assured her it was sound, made to support the heaviest construction equipment, unlikely to collapse even after a thousand years. It was a while before she realized that what she’d taken for cracks in the buttresses were in fact inscriptions in many languages, perhaps all languages, and every one some version of “I am the first stone in the road to the stars.”
The bottom of the ramp was covered with graffiti but as she climbed the graffiti became sparser. The ramp was made of something very hard and probably lighter than it looked, one of those replacements for concrete that hadn’t quite worked out. Here and there green shoots grew in tiny cracks, the species of the plants changing as she ascended, and she’d reflected that all the seeds must have been carried by the wind.
She’d meant to study the elevator’s architecture, as long as she was on it, but she found she just wanted to keep climbing. Her legs were soon aching, and, confronted with the blue gulf of space, she could scarcely bring herself to approach the ramp’s edge, but still she climbed, infused with a sense of the most radiant purpose, for the tower was the symbol of all that was forever out of reach, and at night, in her bedroll, the tower’s promise and the thought of its apex and the glittering light of the stars were almost more than she could bear, but neither intense contemplation nor orgasm nor her understanding of the physics nor the exact record of the stars’ shimmerings helped at all, and the strain was such that she’d thought she’d come apart, lying there high above the world, though of course all that had happened was that she’d fallen asleep, and then she noticed that Constantin’s blood oxygen had settled at zero, and that his breathing had stopped. She looked into his other memory, the last eleven years of his life’s experience fixed forever in deep strata of data, immobile now, and somehow cold. Of course, she thought, I should have known, this is what death is, this stillness in memory.
25
Just Leaving the Station
Kern is in a tunnel about ten minutes from Lares’ room and there’s a little light filtering down from high above and it seems to brighten and darken with his heartbeat, though he feels perfectly calm, and oddly detached from his body.
“Watch your breathing,” says the ghost. “Easy. Long exhalation. There you go. You can handle it. Your heart is a soldier’s, and you’ve seen worse than this.”
“Where now?” His voice sounds like it’s coming from far away, like it might be someone else’s.
“The subway, to the airport. It’s way past time.”
“Won’t it make me visible?”
“It won’t matter, if you can make it to the station. Transportation infrastructure is highly secured. It’s suicide to try a hit in an airport.”
*
The train’s doors sigh shut, sealing them in. A raw edge of panic as its engines heave to life, but now there’s nowhere to go. Waft of chewing gum, motor oil, damp humanity, and then, as the train accelerates, the shrill harmonics of metal under strain. He remembers Lares saying that a train is like time, or history, irresistible in its momentum, its future unseen but coming on fast, and unavoidably.