“We’ll worry about our orbit after we have one,” he told O’Toole as he slid into the number two seat. “Lift! And lift now!”
So, they did.
Both boats reached the stratosphere ahead of the advancing storm front. Lightning crackled below them. Yet part of the storm had broken through the tropopause—dour thunderheads looking for all the world like billowing giants made of smoke. A tremendous bolt arced upward into space. O’Toole cursed.
“Climb, Slugger,” January told the pilot. “Climb as fast as you can. Climb, even if you dry-tank the gig. Annie will pick us up in the lighter if she has to.”
“Aye, Cap’n.” Sweat was pouring off the man. His fingers might leave dents in the pilot’s yoke. “We’re heading east to west, an’ that’s a bad climb f’shure; but we’re stayin’ ahead o’ those sand clouds. ’T isn’t ourselves I’m worrying over, y’ follow, but what that jolly-boat is a slow climber.”
“Where are they now?”
“So far, so good.” O’Toole gusted a sigh and seemed to relax microscopically. “But that’s what Wheezer Hottlemeyer said whan he was after passin’ the second floor, and him falling out av a noine-story buildin’ at th’ toime.”
And a skybolt turned the viewports blue. The gig shuddered, and one of the panels sparked and died.
“Are we hit?” January cried, half rising in the two gees. “Did it get us?”
O’Toole laid a beefy hand on January’s wrist, touching the sandstone as he did. “Don’t ye be worryin’, Cap’n darlin’.” And January relaxed, weirdly comforted, confident now in the pilot’s abilities to see them through. “Aye, an’ there’s the jolly-boat, too!” the pilot cried, a triumphant shout, finger stabbing the 360-sensor display, piercing its ghostly green wireframe images. “Hoígh, th’ Roger. All bristol, down there?”
“Hoígh, Aloe,” Maggie replied. “Skin of the teeth here, Slugger. There was one bolt, I thought it was gonna peel the paint right off the skin, and leave its autograph. Hell, mebbe it did. Storm’s well below us now. Looks like we made it, you damned Paddy! Now we gotta find the Angel.”
“Shure,” said O’Toole, “an’ ut’ll be a story for to tell our grandkids.”
“I don’t even have kids yet,” Maggie said.
“Well, then, let’s you an’ me make some while there’s still time!”
The pilot and the astrogator instructed their respective boats to lock on to the New Angeles, plot a suite of orbits, and report back with projected transit times and air and fuel usage. When the engines cut out and the gig entered low orbit, O’Toole grinned and turned about to face January.
And the smile faded. Slugger clasped his fists together into a ball and shuddered. “She can joke, but I know how close that was.” He sucked in a deep breath. “It weren’t normal, Cap’n. That storm. It was coming at us east t’ west, an’ that’s aginst th’ prevailin’ winds. Yessir, ’t was, and I nivver heard tell uv a storrum doin’ that. An’ maybe a planet dry like that an’ all can work up a monster static charge, but, Jaysus, Cap’n, that storrum was bigger’n the planet, I’m thinkin’.”
January glanced at the prehuman artifact in his hand. It was twisted along its length like a screw. He had ordered the others to abandon backhoe and molecular sieve, but he had hung on to this. It really was quite pretty when you got used to it.
“I’m guessin’ th’ toorist attraction notion is off th’ table now.”
January laughed with nervous release. “By the gods, yes. But, maybe we can sell this…this dancing rock for enough to replace the gear we abandoned. Looks like Hogan’ll have to cannibalize the ship after all. I don’t think we should go back and try to salvage the equipment.”
“Jaysus, no! I’d ruther be back home on New Eireann awaitin’ for th’ Big Blow. Our equipment’d be all lightning’ed over by now, anyways, the backhoe and Bill’s toy. Nothing lift uv thim but slag. But I shure hope the storrum didn’t hurt those other things—the Midnight Egg, the Slipstone, the whatever heathen name Johnny gave the pot…”
“The Budmash Lotah.”
“Yeah. I don’t know for why Johnny don’t speak fookin’ Gaelactic like th’ rist uv us.”
“I don’t think they were hurt, the Unmovable Objects. And, Slugger? I don’t think that was a natural storm, either. I think the prehumans made something they had second thoughts about and they locked it away forever, but…” The gig’s orbit, looping around the planet had brought them back up over the site, but January saw nothing out the viewport but a black, writhing mass covering a quarter of the planet. Maybe it was fading, settling out now. He couldn’t tell.
“But?” O’Toole prompted him.
“But even forever ends.” And he relaxed in his harness, stroking the lovely sandstone, thankful that they had escaped the Irresistible Force.
An Craic
“It’s to be a geantraí, then,” the harper says. “A joyous stain. A triumphant escape from the unknown—and with the prize in hand!” She has uncased her harp, and setting it upon her lap, it sings the happy tune her fingers pry from it. About the room, men, half listening, smile without quite knowing why; and one (a woman, of course) frowns and turns toward the darkened alcove, as if seeking the source of such unwonted delight.
The scarred man grins, though the rictus is joyless. It is the smile more grieving than sorrow; the delight that is dark as despair. “Beginnings often are,” he says. “Otherwise, who’d go on? Sorrow is for conclusions, not commencements.”
The geantraí grows hesitant, pivots from the third mode into the darker fourth, hints at sorrow underneath the joy. But, then…
She lays her palm flat across the strings, silencing them, and those in the room—other than the scarred man, who is impervious to all music—sigh a little from apprehensions released. Music has charms, but it is not always charming.
“No,” says the harper. “That’s a cheat. That’s seeing the past with the eyes of the future, which is why the past is never quite seen correctly. Let them have their gaiety. No one ever knows it’s only a beginning they have. Let them be in their moment. The past must be seen as if it were still present, and the future all possibilities.”
The grin of the scarred man is not pleasant. “As if Tristam might yet succeed? But it’s over. It’s done. What happened, happened and you can’t change it. There is no moment without a future in its gravid belly. No tragedy issues but from the womb of the happiness that bore it.”
The harper’s smile is brighter, more pleasant, more deadly. “And ulta-pulta,” she answers. “Topsy-turvy. Yin-and-yang. Sorrow births joy.” Her fingers tickle the harp, which laughs in reprise of Tristam’s theme. “He did succeed. Tristam’s death was his triumph.”
The scarred man grunts. “He might liefer have failed, then.”
The harper forbears to argue the point. The scarred man has confused triumph with survival and she has no wish to antagonize him, not before she has sucked the wellspring dry of its story. Her fingers evoke January from the harp, and the discovery of the Dancer. It is all fragmentary, only motifs and themes. It is not yet a song. She limns the forlorn wastes of the unnamed world, the mystery of a city under the sand, the curious beauty of the Chamber and its unmovable Contents—earth, water, fire, and air. The relentless approach of the Irresistible. And the figures end in a dance of danger and escape—wild reel and stately quadrille, whirling waltz and graceful ballet. That much is true, at least. Waltzes and reels are dangerous, and she suspects there is dancing yet to come.