THE BARE LEDGE
1544 4D
They disembarked early the next day, under a gray sky and a bitter northwest wind, onto a platform that seemed only a slight, small, square raising of the flat table-land they had just crossed. The track now pointed west. Beyond the platform stood a long metal shed, its walls rattling in the gusting air. Behind the chilled soldiers, the train offered a windbreak; many hung back by the cars, turning helmeted heads toward the train, positioning themselves where the undercarriage and wheel-trucks offered some shelter from the wind.
Yuss was having none of that. “All of you, out here and line up! We’re getting equipment inside, and you’re going to get lesson one right here.”
“So where’s this Fall?” Marande called, coming forward and squinting against a few driving drops of rain. Her jaw-length dark hair whipped around her face.
“It’s right here,” Yuss said. “Just be patient. You’ll see all of the Fall you’ll ever want to, soon enough.” He turned. “Top Lead, get these soldiers inside!”
They filed gratefully into the long shed. Its walls were no higher than the heads of the tallest of the company. An arching, steel-trussed metal roof, corrugated, held a run of lights like those in the understreets of the City, but these lights were harsh pinpoints that threw bluish tones on everyone. Drops of rain pattered on the roof; the wind made the thin walls shake, and leaked in around their edges.
Andrew felt a chill inside that was not the wind, and shivered; this cold, rickety metal place held an echo of fear and loss, but he could not locate it in his life. He moved to stand next to Hings-Wen. Marande came beside him and pressed her arm against his, shivering a little.
Facing the line of soldiers was a long table covered with gear, apparently for climbing. Andrew didn’t recognize much of it.
A small, hardened soldier Andrew didn’t recognize moved behind the table, faced them all, and spoke in a sharp high voice that pierced the wind and rain-sounds. “I’m Woodlinrie, and I’m top for the rest of this session in here, and for the time you’re out on the face. Your tops and leads are part of this training session now too, so everybody pay very close attention.
“Your captain tells me you’ve been beat up pretty bad, and you could use some confidence. All you’ve got to do here is follow what I’m teaching you, and you’ll have it. If you want to end up in worse shape than the people you lost, all you’ve got to do is miss something I tell you.” He paused and looked up and down the line. “I see I have your attention.”
He went through each item of equipment, detailing its use, its misuse, and its limits, at many points picking out two or three of the soldiers to grill on what he had just said. Then he got them doing the knots and the procedures themselves. Within an hour, fed quickly and supplied with water, they were on their way out of the shed.
The wind had come up, whistling out of the northwest with rolling rainclouds that let go only a spatter of their burdens as they canted overhead. Andrew, Alliji, Hings-Wen and Marande joked as their company followed Woodlinrie and his leads through a maze of low scrub, up a slight rise.
Hings-Wen said, “It’s gotta be just like Number Forty-Seven over in West Sobi.” Number Forty-Seven was the largest and deepest of the City‘s spiral stairs, running over eight thousand meters from the City‘s depths in Babiar Zone to the surface.
“Ah, that’s just a hole,” Marande answered. “Maybe if you turned it inside out, it would be the right size.”
“You mean like a big pole?”
“A big shaft.” Marande grinned.
“Without a hole to go in.”
“The City‘s got a big enough hole,” Andrew put in.
Marande didn’t miss a beat. “No shaft‘s big enough to heat up the City.”
“Depends on who’s driving it,” Hings-Wen tossed back.
Woodlinrie‘s voice cut in. “Stop here.”
The rise continued ahead of them, but at Woodlinrie‘s feet the rock opened into a round gap, where the edges of a slight crack in the ground widened enough for a person to drop in.
“Ah, the hole; now where’s the shaft? They could use Mentrius, but he’s too thin,” Alliji muttered. Andrew snickered.
Woodlinrie shot them a nasty look. “Some of you are used to City tunnels, so that’s how we’re starting. This chimney takes you down to an opening onto the face of the Fall itself. We’re roping you in threes, just the way I said.
“I’m not going to put you out onto the face. The wind is up, and we’ll have some ugly downdrafts today, and I don’t want any of you greenbirds taking the express train south. We’ll do some rope work lower in the chimney, and a lesson or two on the slanting face where the chimney exits, and that’s it. You get through all that, and you’ll have a story to tell them in Poly Town.” He beckoned to Andrew and Marande. “You two, follow me. We’ve got people waiting down below. Let’s boot up and hook up.”
They roped up, Andrew fumbling at first with the shockline that connected his harness to the rope they shared. The wind beat around his ears as he sat down on a rock outcrop to slide the grabtracs onto his boots. Grabtracs, soles made of a gummy, intelligent polymer, served to add frictional surface to the boots for climbing.
“You first, so your name’s First.” Woodlinrie said to Andrew. “You’ve done this kind of chimney in the City, right, First?”
“All the time,” Andrew said, looking down into the hole. It was rough-sided, with many cracks and holds he could use. He wouldn’t even need the ‘tracs or the rope. He saw a distant gleam of light below. “Is that light the bottom?” he asked.
“Ha, no. It’s empty space. That’s why we’re roping up, brodo. Wanted to try it head down, didn’t you? City-style?”
Andrew nodded.
“Coming out down there, you would have ended up with a few seconds of really windy weather. All right, let’s go, the way I said to.”
They descended slowly, feet first, Woodlinrie anchoring them from the top, doing slack and belay, each of them loosening rope and tightening again as the one ahead sought and found holds and anchors. Above Woodlinrie came the next trio; now and then a small stone pinged off a wall and struck Andrew on his helmet. It was very dark around him; little light came from either end of the chimney, and he felt his way carefully from hold to hold, calling for slack and belay from Marande as he moved and rested. This was no harder than the City. He settled into a good rhythm, and descended what he though was about a hundred meters.
The light had increased a little. “Slack,” he called.
“No,” came Woodlinrie‘s voice. “Time to rest. First, do you feel any rung anchors?”
“Yeah. There’s one, no, two of them.”
“You’re at the base of the chimney.”
Andrew bent and twisted forward, looking down. “There’s more below me.”
“It looks that way, but it’s a trap. We’ve got to lower you from here. Okay, Second, here’s what you do.” He instructed Marande, who belayed the line to Andrew.
They began to lower him. He tried to keep his feet against the wall of the chimney, but the walls all receded, leaving him in a globular void; he hung in dark space with a glow of daylight below him. The glow brightened, and he sank out into brilliant emptiness.
At first he was confused by the light, then he made out the face of the Fall several feet away. Beside him a line dangled free; this had to be for the climbers who’d gone earlier. He turned, dangling, in the wind, and an awesome daylight panorama filled his vision.
In a remote distance, flattened, dark-gray clouds rolled and fulminated slowly away from him in a wind-ripped sky that lay below and above where he hung. Far below him, a layer of cumulus puffs scudded away eastward across an endless, subdued and darkened green sea of trees; skimming the tops of the puffs far away, tiny winged dots marked a flock of huge flyers, probably orneys, angling against the wind. He clutched the rope tightly; the wind roared and groaned near him; the bite of electricity parched his nostrils.
To his left was a vertical wall of red and orange and cream-colored rock. As he turned, the colors and striations and stone texture carried from left to right across the face of the Fall. Below, on a flat open space cradled behind an upthrust outcrop, two soldiers waited, looking up at him.
His legs wobbled as he landed, breathing hard, and prepared to anchor Marande on her way down from the dark patch above. His hands shook, and he couldn’t get enough air into his lungs.
The company regrouped on the flat space and looked out into the hemisphere of sky that opened south of them. Andrew blinked and squinted; his eyes somehow wouldn’t adjust to the appalling magnification of perspective in this hollow at the edge of empty air. To the left, towering above and behind him, the Fall stood, vertical, immense, crazed here and there with diagonal cracks and slips that interrupted a geometry of smooth planes of stone.
To the right the Fall curved out of sight, then back southward to reveal a distant advance of its wall: a prominence, an outlier of the elevated land of the north reaching southward from its main bastion. To Andrew it was an impassable and remote barrier, gray and tan and red, wreathed in plunging clouds and vapors. He stared, dumbfounded; in a continuous prodigal flood of air, a cavalry of winds broke over the bastion’s top, swept past its flank, and curled and roiled over the green forest sea that heaved at its foot.
Hings-Wen, Marande and Alliji had all landed and found their way to the upthrust that formed a natural railing for the space on which they stood; they all craned on tiptoe to see downward. Andrew joined them and peered over the lip of orange rock.
His breath caught. While he had been on the rope, he’d felt secure, in the hands of his team, too busy to think; here, even with his body safely behind a wall of stone, the tremendous sky that lay below him disoriented him, and every direction felt like the way down. He closed his eyes and turned away.
