Abaddon - Chapter 21

Day Thirteen

The Smoke has me now. It has probably had me for a long time.

He backed up against a passage from the Avesta, annotating a paragraph in red. But now, I see it all. Now it's all painted on my brain in glorious technicolour.

He staggered out of the chamber, into galleries through which his own troops were rampaging, oblivious to the carnage going on around him. His troops had discovered the Enemy women and children, and were busy ensuring the children would never become adults and breed with the women. They were quite inventive in their means of ensuring this.

I can't stop them, because I don't. I walk out of here, and stumble to the edge of the drop, and look down.

And the drop looks back.

And I know who it is, what it is that is way down there, hiding from mankind in the darkness but known to everyone in their nightmares. I know the purpose of the walls around me. I know where a bat will fall to if it flits out of Hell and flies seven days downwards. I know what is at the bottom of all things, because I've been there. And that thought terrifies me, because the fact that I know I've been there means that I'll have to go there.

Ah well. A journey of nine worlds starts with but a single step.

He took his single step, realizing only as he did so that he was actually standing on the carved pavement outside the Temple, looking down into at least a mile of air. It had not been a dream or memory, but real. And only the three pairs of Citizen arms that snaked about his waist, neck and shoulders stopped him travelling downwards to his doom.

But I knew they stopped me. You hear me? I knew it all along! I, who have discovered the Secret of Life Itself? YOU CALL ME MAD?

They were dragging him back now, away from the precipice, businesslike as mental nurses, having probably seen the effects of immersion in Oracle Smoke a thousand times before. He felt them walk his legs across the stepping stones at the entrance to the Temple, moving him as far away from the edge as possible.

But I can still see it. I can still hear it. I still know what it meant, what they meant, when they made this place.

"ALL OF YOU!" he yelled. "ALL OF YOU, YOU ARE ALL SHEEP STARING ACROSS A CATTLE GRID AT THE GREEN PASTURE!"

They were pushing him towards a wagon now, a wagon equipped with restraining straps for the wrists and ankles. Of course, it would make sense that they would have a wagon ready.

Above him, the world burned. He had no idea whether it was really burning now, or whether it would only be burning in the future. The laser speck of sky at the Abyss’s mouth still glowed as if someone had set fire to the earth. Someone had to sooner or later, obviously. All those bombers and rockets and submarines all dressed up with nowhere to nuke -

Either way, now or later, it would happen. The bombs would fall, the rockets would rise, the world would burn. He saw Vzeng Na’s poor filing down into the dark, taking cover before they heard the two minute warning. He saw vehicles, buildings, people swept into the Abyss like kitchen waste, an entire metropolis falling together in the dark. He saw Citizens wiped from the cliffs by falling rubble that impacted with the force of meteors. He saw nights a week, a year, a thousand years hence, where the mouth of the Abyss on high glowed like a green galaxy with tiny patches of breathable death that outglistered the stars.

If the pit really went down forever, an enterprising faller ought to be able to die a natural death in free fall, living a happy and fulfilled life in a constantly accelerating environment, maybe crossing occasionally to the next falling building to forage for a tumbling tin of beans, or to kill and eat his plummeting neighbour. He might, mind you, get careless and become trapped in the air between the buildings, unable either to cross or to get back, dying of hunger and thirst within ten feet of safety.

But all this was the merest fancy, of course. Any falling thing would be bound to hit the side of the shaft eventually, with a detonation fit to be heard from Heaven.

The cart was going upward now, out of the gates of the Enemy city, as his mental nurses fastened the leather straps tight on his wrists and ankles. His head lolled over the drop, and the cartwheels bounced and wobbled, but it was all right, because he knew he did not fall.

Up above, the City also burned, with candles, torches and halogen lanterns that had been missing from his army’s inventory. It was still dimmer than a town blacked out for aerial bombardment on the dark side of Pluto, but by Abysmal standards, it was a veritable Piccadilly Circus. Her Infernal Majesty was welcoming her heroes home.

And now, inevitably, the barriers along South East Street no longer existed. Access to the great southeastern tower was open to all, and everyone who was anyone was going there. Women, children and warriors thronged the streets, making passage difficult for Percival's triumphal tumbril, as it was impossible for onlookers to hang out of overlooking windows in the City, and everyone had to be on either the streets or the rooftops. Seeming to find no contradiction in the fact that their general and saviour was tied raving to a wagon, Citizens rushed out of the crowd to touch Percival like lepers round a saint. Coloured streamers had been made for the occasion. They were all blue. Percival found this last detail so amusing that he began laughing with the crowd, and did not stop laughing till the tumbril drew him up alongside the tower that perched on the southeasternmost corner of all that was not vertical. The boards had been stripped from the second tower that grew out of the side of the first, revealing what had been hidden within it. But Percival did not need to look; he knew already. He was still cackling to himself as they cut the bonds and dragged him from the wagon, up steps to a romanesque arch at the tower's entrance, where She was waiting.

She had changed her coiffure specially for the occasion. Her hair hung above her, wound onto wood and steel laths like candyfloss. Underneath it, her face hung as if decapitated and suspended, stark white with lead foundation against a jet black neck and body which Percival suspected was painted rather than dressed. In one hand she held a bundle of sticks wound around an axe too rusty to be used for anything other than spreading hepatitis. In the other, she held something that glittered and gleamed and sparkled, inset with other things that also glittered and gleamed and sparkled. Five huge rubies were hammered into the gold at all four points of it, and also into the left hand side of the shaft, signifying the five wounds of Christ. Smaller rubies wept from the larger ones like drops of Christ's blood leaking from His heart, sapphires trickled down the shaft like His tears, and tiny pearls were inset into the base of it like His divine toe-jam.

After six hundred years, the altar cross of St. Justinian's Cathedral in Na still shone bright down in the dark. And he knew how it had come to be here, in the Queen's keeping, how it had fallen, how it had risen,

"Kane gave you that", said Percival. "As a bribe for safe passage. And Vladimir gave it to Kane."

Her Majesty nodded. "General Percival, you are going on a little journey."

"It's a beauty", he giggled, ignoring the gilded cross and looking up at what was inside the tower. "Where did you find it?"

"The Totalitarian Complex upstairs. They were making many of them. We originally had several. We lost some in tests and accidents."

Percival nodded. "You knew the tests would fail, but you had to run them anyway, just for the look of the thing."

She nodded. "We nearly burned down the City several times. You have no idea how dangerous the propellant is. Luckily the payloads were kept separate at the factory."

He looked the structure inside the tower up and down curiously. "You've added a cockpit."

"We did the best we could. The original warhead weighed a thousand kilos, so there was ample room for a human being, however fat and unwell, once it was removed."

"Where did you get the cockpit?"

"From a Bochem Natter. A German last-ditch weapon, essentially a rocket with a whole load of other rockets nailed to it and a very frightened German somewhere in the middle. The seat faces downwards, I'm afraid. You'll be hanging in your harness all the way. We thought it discourteous not to show you where you were going."

They were bundling him up toward the cockpit now, allowing him a chance to look inside. "Aha, there aren't any controls inside, I see."

"There don't need to be. The guidance systems were designed to operate on radar reflections from the walls. As soon as you drift up close to a cliff, the fins tilt and pull you back. Most ingenious. The radar is from a Messerschmitt night fighter. It doesn't have to be too powerful - it only needs to see for a few yards. We had a gaggle of captured German scientists working on these things for quite a while. It's amazing what feats of ingenuity the human mind is capable of once it's been shown its teammates being eaten alive."

The gantry - the wooden gantry - around the thing was decked with azure streamers. Onlookers were clustered around the thing, many so close that they were almost certain to be burnt up in the blast. Didn't they know that? Maybe they thought it a glorious death.

Not bothering to fight back, not sure he still possessed a soul to save, Percival allowed himself to be carried along the gantry toward the black and white elongated ogive of a V-2 rocket, most powerful of Hitler's Vergeltungswaffen. He had thought all such things had been stored in Germany and occupied Holland, and captured by the Allies after the opening of the Second Front. But evidently some had been constructed in the East as well. With a range of nearly two hundred miles and a typical trajectory that took it almost to the edge of space, the V-2 had carried enough amatol explosive to level an entire tenement block wherever it came down again. You never hear the one that hits you, his great-grandparents had said. That was even truer of V-2's than it was of bullets, as although both were supersonic, you had an even chance of surviving being shot with a rifle. But a V-2 would kill you, and the man in the house next to you, and the man in the street behind him.

But this V-2 was slightly different to the average Vengeance Weapon. First of all, it possessed a tiny, rudimentary cockpit just behind the nose. And secondly, that nose was not pointing in the direction of the Edge of Space, but straight down, further into the Abyss.

Snickering and guffawing, he was manhandled into the cockpit chair, two pairs of hands holding him up while another buckled a leather harness round his chest and stomach, tightening it until he was suspended in space, face down, bum up, like a bondage victim. Dials in front of his face said 'METER', 'STUNDENKILOMETER', and 'VOLT'. He wondered whether they would register anything in flight. There was even an artificial horizon, which spun hopelessly confused in its housing.

“You are going to fire a manned rocket straight down into the ground”, said Percival with glee.

“Not the ground”, corrected Her Majesty, her retinue crowding around her, supporting her hair and clothing. She bent over the gantry edge, looking down into the black. “It goes down a long, long way - some say forever. We think, however, just a long, long way. The ancient Greeks experimented with homing pigeons, did I ever tell you that? They weighted the birds with ice, so that they were forced to fly downward, but would be able to return home once their payloads had melted. Some birds took as long as a week to return.”

“’He stayed yet another seven days’”, parroted Percival, “’and again he sent forth the dove out of the ark”.

“I hardly think they returned with olive branches in their beaks”, said Her Majesty. “Many had lost feathers. Some were injured. But none of them had feathers that had been singed by boiling lava. A pigeon, dear General, is a very swift-flying bird, capable of covering hundreds of miles in a day. Any bird flying even one day down from here should have reached the edge of the Earth’s mantle by that time. If the Abyss truly does go down all the way, from here, even we should be able to see the rocks of the Earth’s core glowing.”

“The deduction from which is obvious.”

The Queen nodded. “This deep down in the Abyss, we are not on Earth any longer.” She stroked his hair gently. “And you know why, because I have sent you to the bottom of the Abyss and back; but you are not going to tell me.”

“I am never going to tell you”, said Percival, his face freezing in mid-laugh into a stare, “because you have sent me to the bottom of the Abyss. Are about to, rather.”

“But I knew you would survive.”

“You also knew the test subjects you sent down in previous rockets wouldn’t.”

“So did they. We constructed the rocket to take you to pit bottom, because we knew that would be the method that eventually succeeded. Many others have tried to explore the Abyss by flight, and failed. The Turkish beys sent captive Na Christians down the pit on leather wings as birdmen, though I think this may have been more entertainment rather than serious scientific research. Napoléon even sent down a military volunteer in a Montgolfière. Just be so good as to tell me one thing, Percival - was it worth sending you? Will it be worth all this time, and all these lives?”

Percival thought about this briefly, and nodded.

The Queen nodded back and withdrew back down the gantry, nodding to the naked ground crew swarming all over the V-2 frame to commence ignition.

Percival craned his neck to look up at the vast bulk of the rocket above him. Barefoot electricians were connecting ancient manual chargers to the rocketship’s electrical systems. Children were dashing round the upward-pointed tail, waving lighted torches round the engines.

“Burning off unignited fuel”, explained Her Majesty proudly.

He heard a voice beginning a quiet countdown in Latin. Up above, workers were scuttling from the gantry.

“Novem - octo - septem -“

Some workers evidently had to remain, however, sitting silent at their posts, hefting massive, square -bladed cleavers made from steel votive tablets shaved thin as paper. Without being told, he guessed what their purpose was. This launch wasn’t a nice convenient lift upward against gravity. Someone would need to stand on the gantry and sever the leather straps that held the V-2 suspended in its frame. Someone who was prepared to be burnt to death in an instant when the rocket motor fired.

“Quattuor - tres - duo - unus -“

The frame of the cockpit began to shake. Percival forgot the fate of his ground crew, however horrible it might be, and stared fixedly downward. Then the rocket tore free of its moorings and punched into the earth like a piledriver.

***

He had hoped he might black out. No such luck.

The push of the wholly inadequate seat in his back was like being hit by a leather-upholstered rhinoceros. His neck whipped backward and attempted to squirm free of his shoulders. Only after several seconds of keeping his eyes tight shut to stop the eyeballs from escaping could he struggle his gaze back forwards.

The Abyss thundered towards him. So quickly that he had only as much time to note the details on its walls as a bullet has to examine the rifling on the gunbarrel it’s fired out of. Rock walls with which the lightest brush would kill hurtle past, dimly illuminated by the flare of his own engines, a moving, blurred grey halo of abyssite.

But there were details in the blurring - tantalizing details, suggestive of shape and form, yet gone in an instant. For the first two or three seconds, he was surrounded by ruby rings of staring, binary eyes - evidence that a mass migration upwards into the country of the weaker City people truly was in progress. Whatever unseen force or creature was pushing the devil-people upwards, however, it was not giving out enough light to be seen.

Sometimes, he sailed past other lights both dim and brilliant, which might have been the photophores of some bioluminescent deep-earth organism, or might have been the cities of some proud subterranean civilization, spanning more land than a man could climb in a lifetime, and passed in the blink of an eye. Sometimes the rocketship shuddered through great darknesses, bubbles in the earth, where no cavern wall came close enough for the naked eye to see it. Most of the time, however, the tunnel walls were visible by the brief bright flare of his own exhaust, an onrushing ring of instantly vanishing terrain which provided no clue whatsoever as to what flat wall of granite his rocket might be speeding towards, pock-marked with the cratered remains of previous rockets -

Then he noticed that the cockpit was beginning to steam around him.

This was not an altogether unexpected phenomenon, as he must already be travelling faster than the speed of sound. Didn’t the outer shells of American rocketplanes glow red hot when they flew at top speed? And they were made of advanced things like carbon fibre and titanium - and this was, for all its technical sophistication, only a very old aluminium-hulled ballistic missile, designed without thought for carrying human cargo. It would break apart in flight, or cook him like human stew in a long thin cauldron. Or possibly even, being aluminium, melt around him.

It went suddenly, horribly dark. Not only were the exhaust lights on all sides of him no longer shining off the Abyss walls, the instrument lights were also dead. The only light now came from the fizzing and sparking of ancient electrical connectors shorting out inside the cabin. Something that sounded ominously like glass crazing under pressure travelled across the dark, out of his left ear into his right.

Then the glass did more than craze, and the slipstream hammered in after it like a piledriver, and he heard inch-thick steel struts around him squeal like spitted piglets, and the dark was full of, and lit by, red hot iron tumbling past a dimly-seen Abyss wall moving too quickly for him to be capable of worrying about it, like a television screen refresh, or a rotor blade. He briefly wondered whether, miraculously, the supersonic mechanics of the slipstream, travelling at the speed it was, would push a pressure wave before it and prevent him from hitting the walls until he slowed to a relatively dawdling two hundred miles an hour, which he seemed to recall was the terminal velocity of the human body. Then he might have been able to risk opening a parachute. If he’d had one.

Then the V-2’s own compression wave hit him from behind like a subway train. Since breaking the sound barrier on its way down, the rocket must have been trailing a membrane of slightly subsonic compressed air in its wake. Now, however, the fragments of V-2 had slowed down, while the wave front had not. It rolled him in a surf of red hot metal fragments, like a boogie boarder tumbled in a pipeline and thrown onto a gravel beach. As if he had fallen underwater, he felt all sound drain out of the world. He also felt his own skin burning.

The last thing he remembered was falling towards a wall of water big enough to drown mankind.