Michael Swanwick - The Edge of the World.pdf - Michael Swanwick - Amiga78

The Edge of the World

Michael Swanwick

The day that Donna and Piggy and Russ went to see the Edge of the World was a hot one. They

were sitting on the curb by the gas station that noontime, sharing a Coke and watching the big Starlifters

lumber up into the air, one by one, out of Toldenarba AFB. The sky rumbled with their passing. There'd

been an incident in the Persian Gulf, and half the American forces in the Twilight Emirates were on alert.

"My old man says when the Big One goes up, the base will be the first to go," Piggy said

speculatively. "Treaties won't allow us to defend it. One bomber comes in high and whaboom" —he

made soft nuclear explosion noises—"it's all gone." He was wearing camouflage pants and a khaki T-shirt

with an iron-on reading: KILL 'EM ALL AND LET GOD SORT 'EM OUT. Donna watched as he took

off his glasses to polish them on his shirt. His face went slack and vacant, then livened as he put them

back on again, as if he were playing with a mask.

"You should be so lucky," Donna said. "Mrs. Khashoggi is still going to want that paper done on

Monday morning, Armageddon or not."

"Yeah, can you believe her?" Piggy said. "That weird accent! And all that memorization! Cut me

some slack. I mean, who cares whether Ackronnion was part of the Mezentian Dynasty?"

"You ought to care, dipshit," Russ said. "Local history's the only decent class the school's got." Russ

was the smartest boy Donna had ever met, never mind the fact that he was flunking out. He had soulful

eyes and a radical haircut, short on the sides with a dyed-blond punklock down the back of his neck.

"Man, I opened the Excerpts from Epics text that first night, thinking it was going to be the same old

bullshit, and I stayed up 'til dawn. Got to school without a wink of sleep, but I'd managed to read every

last word. This is one weird part of the world; its history is full of dragons and magic and all kinds of

weird monsters. Do you realize that in the eighteenth century three members of the British legation were

eaten by demons? That's in the historical record!"

Russ was an enigma to Donna. The first time they'd met, hanging with the misfits at an American

School dance, he'd tried to put a hand down her pants, and she'd slugged him good, almost breaking his

nose. She could still hear his surprised laughter as blood ran down his chin. They'd been friends ever

since. Only there were limits to friendship, and now she was waiting for him to make his move and hoping

he'd get down to it before her father was rotated out.

In Japan she'd known a girl who had a taken a razor blade and carved her boyfriend's name in the

palm of her hand. How could she do that, Donna had wanted to know? Her friend had shrugged, said,

"As long as it gets me noticed." It wasn't until Russ that Donna understood.

"Strange country," Russ said dreamily. "The sky beyond the Edge is supposed to be full of demons

and serpents and shit. They say that if you stare into it long enough, you'll go mad."

They all three looked at one another.

"Well, hell," Piggy said. "What are we waiting for?"

The Edge of the World lay beyond the railroad tracks. They bicycled through the American enclave

into the old native quarter. The streets were narrow here, the sideyards crammed with broken trucks,

rusted-out buses, even yachts up in cradles with staved-in sides. Garage doors were black mouths

hissing and spitting welding sparks, throbbing to the hammered sound of worked metal. They hid their

bikes in a patch of scrub apricot trees where the railroad crossed the industrial canal and hiked across.

Time had altered the character of the city where it bordered the Edge. Gone were the archers in

their towers, vigilant against a threat that never came. Gone were the rose quartz palaces with their

thousand windows, not a one of which overlooked the Edge. The battlements where blind musicians

once piped up the dawn now survived only in Mrs. Khashoggi's texts. Where they had been was now a

drear line of weary factory buildings, their lower windows cinderblocked or bricked up and those

beyond reach of vandals' stones painted over in patchwork squares of gray and faded blue.

A steam whistle sounded and lines of factory workers shambled back inside, brown men in chinos

and white shirts, Syrian and Lebanese laborers imported to do work no native Toldenarban would touch.

A shredded net waved forlornly from a basketball hoop set up by the loading dock.

There was a section of hurricane fence down. They scrambled through.

As they cut across the grounds, a loud whine arose from within the factory building. Down the way

another plant lifted its voice in a solid wham-wham-wham as rhythmic and unrelenting as a headache.

One by one the factories shook themselves from their midday drowse and went back to work. "Why do

they locate these things along the Edge?" Donna asked.

"It's so they can dump their chemical waste over the Edge," Russ explained. "These were all erected

before the Emir nationalized the culverts that the Russian Protectorate built."

Behind the factory was a chest-high concrete wall, rough-edged and pebbly with the slow erosion

of cement. Weeds grew in clumps at its foot. Beyond was nothing but sky.

Piggy ran ahead and spat over the Edge. "Hey, remember what Nixon said when he came here? It

is indeed a long way down . What a guy!"

Donna leaned against the wall. A film of haze tinted the sky gray, intensifying at the focal point to

dirty brown, as if a dead spot were burned into the center of her vision. When she looked down, her

eyes kept grabbing for ground and finding more sky. There were a few wispy clouds in the distance and

nothing more. No serpents coiled in the air. She should have felt disappointed but, really, she hadn't

expected better. This was of a piece with all the natural wonders she had ever seen, the waterfalls,

geysers and scenic vistas that inevitably included power lines, railings and parking lots absent from the

postcards. Russ was staring intently ahead, hawklike, frowning. His jaw worked slightly, and she

wondered what he saw.

"Hey, look what I found!" Piggy whooped. "It's a stairway!"

They joined him at the top of an institutional-looking concrete and iron stairway. It zigzagged down

the cliff toward an infinitely distant and nonexistent Below, dwindling into hazy blue. Quietly, as if he'd

impressed himself, Piggy said, "What do you suppose is down there?"

"Only one way to find out, isn't there?" Russ said.

Russ went first, then Piggy, then Donna, the steps ringing dully under their feet. Graffiti covered the

rocks, worn spraypaint letters in yellow and black and red scrawled one over the other and faded by

time and weather into mutual unreadability, and on the iron railings, words and arrows and triangles had

been markered onto or dug into the paint with knife or nail: JURGEN BIN SCHEISSKOPF. MOTLEY

CRUE. DEATH TO SATAN AMERICA IMPERIALIST. Seventeen steps down, the first landing was

filthy with broken brown glass, bits of crumbled concrete, cigarette butts, soggy, half-melted cardboard.

The stairway folded back on itself and they followed it down.

"You ever had fugu? Piggy asked. Without waiting for an answer, he said, "It's Japanese poisonous

blowfish. It has to be prepared very carefully—they license the chefs—and even so, several people die

every year. It's considered a great delicacy."

"Nothing tastes that good," Russ said.

"It's not the flavor," Piggy said enthusiastically. "It's the poison. Properly prepared, see, there's a

very small amount left in the sashimi and you get a threshold dose. Your lips and the tips of your fingers

turn cold. Numb. That's how you know you're having the real thing. That's how you know you're living

right on the edge."

"I'm already living on the edge," Russ said. He looked startled when Piggy laughed.

A fat moon floated in the sky, pale as a disk of ice melting in blue water. It bounced after them as

they descended, kicking aside loose soda bottles in styrofoam sleeves, crushed Marlboro boxes, a

scattering of carbonized spark plugs. On one landing they found a crumpled shopping cart, and Piggy had

to muscle it over the railing and watch it fall. "Sure is a lot of crap here," he observed. The landing

smelled faintly of urine.

"It'll get better farther down," Russ said. "We're still near the top, where people can come to get

drunk after work." He pushed on down. Far to one side they could see the brown flow from the

industrial canal where it spilled into space, widening and then slowly dispersing into rainbowed mist,

distance glamoring its beauty.

"How far are we planning to go?" Donna asked apprehensively.

"Don't be a weak sister," Piggy sneered. Russ said nothing.

The deeper they went, the shabbier the stairway grew, and the spottier its maintenance. Pipes were

missing from the railing. Where patches of paint had fallen away the bolts anchoring the stair to the rock

were walnut-sized lumps of rust.

Needle-clawed marsupials chittered warningly from niches in the rock as they passed. Tufts of grass

and moth-white gentians grew in the loess-filled cracks.

Hours passed. Donna's feet and calves and the small of her back grew increasingly sore, but she

refused to be the one to complain. By degrees she stopped looking over the side and out into the sky,

and stared instead at her feet flashing in and out of sight while one hand went slap-grab-tug on the rail.

She felt sweaty and miserable.

Back home she had a half-finished paper on the Three Days Incident of March, 1810, when the

French Occupation, by order of Napoleon himself, had fired cannonade after cannonade over the Edge

into nothingness. They had hoped to make rainstorms of devastating force that would lash and destroy

their enemies, and created instead only a gunpowder haze, history's first great failure in weather control.

This descent was equally futile, Donna thought, an endless and wearying exercise in nothing. Just the

same as the rest of her life. Every time her father was reposted, she had resolved to change, to be

somebody different this time around, whatever the price, even if—no, especially if—it meant playacting

something she was not. Last year in Germany when she'd gone out with that local boy with the Alfa

Romeo and instead of jerking him off had used her mouth, she had thought: Everything's going to be

different now. But no.

Nothing ever changed.

"Heads up!" Russ said. "There's some steps missing here!" He leaped, and the landing gonged

hollowly under his sneakers. Then again as Piggy jumped after.

Donna hesitated. There were five steps gone and a drop of twenty feet before the stairway cut back

beneath itself. The cliff bulged outward here, and if she slipped she'd probably miss the stairs altogether.

She felt the rock draw away from her to either side, and was suddenly aware that she was

connected to the world by the merest speck of matter, barely enough to anchor her feet. The sky

wrapped itself about her, extending to infinity, depthless and absolute. She could extend her arms and fall

into it forever. What would happen to her then, she wondered. Would she die of thirst and starvation, or

would the speed of her fall grow so great that the oxygen would be sucked from her lungs, leaving her to

strangle in a sea of air? "Come on Donna!" Piggy shouted up at her. "Don't be a pussy!"

"Russ—" she said quaveringly.

But Russ wasn't looking her way. He was frowning downward, anxious to be going. "Don't push the

lady," he said. "We can go on by ourselves."

Donna choked with anger and hurt and desperation all at once. She took a deep breath and, heart

scudding, leaped. Sky and rock wheeled over her head. For an instant she was floating, falling, totally

lost and filled with a panicky awareness that she was about to die. Then she crashed onto the landing. It

hurt like hell, and at first she feared she'd pulled an ankle. Piggy grabbed her shoulders and rubbed the

side of her head with his knuckles. "I knew you could do it, you wimp."

Donna knocked away his arm. "Okay, wise-ass. How are you expecting to get us back up?"

The smile disappeared from Piggy's face. His mouth opened, closed. His head jerked fearfully

upward. An acrobat could leap across, grab the step and flip up without any trouble at all. "I—I mean,

I—"

"Don't worry about it," Russ said impatiently. "We'll think of something." He started down again.

It wasn't natural, Donna realized, his attitude. There was something obsessive about his desire to

descend the stairway. It was like the time he'd brought his father's revolver to school along with a story

about playing Russian roulette that morning before breakfast. "Three times!" he'd said proudly.

He'd had that same crazy look on him, and she hadn't the slightest notion then or now how she

could help him.

Russ walked like an automaton, wordlessly, tirelessly, never hurrying up or slowing down. Donna

followed in concerned silence, while Piggy scurried between them, chattering like somebody's pet

Pekingese. This struck Donna as so apt as to be almost allegorical: the two of them together yet alone,

the distance between filled with noise. She thought of this distance, this silence, as the sun passed behind

the cliff and the afternoon heat lost its edge.

The stairs changed to cement-jacketed brick with small buttresses cut into the rock. There was a

pile of stems and cherry pits on one landing, and the railing above them was white with bird droppings.

Piggy leaned over the rail and said, "Hey, I can see seagulls down there. Flying around."

"Where?" Russ leaned over the railing, then said scornfully, "Those are pigeons. The Ghazoddis

used to release them for rifle practice."

As Piggy turned to follow Russ down again, Donna caught a glimpse into his eyes, liquid and

trembling with helplessness and despair. She'd seen that fear in him only once before, months ago when

she'd stopped by his house on the way to school, just after the Emir's assassination.

The living-room windows were draped and the room seemed unnaturally gloomy after being out in

the morning sun. Blue television light flickered over shelves of shadowy ceramic figurines: Dresden

milkmaids, Chantilly Chinamen, Meissen pug-dogs connected by a gold chain held in their champed

jaws, naked Delft nymphs dancing.

Piggy's mother sat in a limp dressing gown, hair unbrushed, watching the funeral. She held a cup of

oily-looking coffee in one hand. Donna was surprised to see her up so early. Everyone said that she had

a bad problem with alcohol, that even by service wife standards she was out of control.

"Look at them," Piggy's mother said. On the screen were solemn processions of camels and

Cadillacs, sheikhs in jellaba, keffigeh and mirrorshades, European dignitaries with wives in tasteful gray

Parisian fashions. "They've got their nerve."

"Where did you put my lunch?" Piggy said loudly from the kitchen.

"Making fun of the Kennedys like that!" The Emir's youngest son, no more than four years old,

salaamed his father's casket as it passed before him. "That kid's bad enough, but you should see the

mother, crying as if her heart were broken. It's enough to turn your stomach. If I were Jackie, I'd—"

Donna and Piggy and Russ had gone bowling the night the Emir was shot. This was out in the ruck

of cheap joints that surrounded the base, catering almost exclusively to servicemen. When the Muzak

piped through overhead speakers was interrupted for the news bulletin, everyone had stood up and

cheered. Up we go , someone had begun singing, and the rest had joined in, into the wild blue yonder

… Donna had felt so sick with fear and disgust she had thrown up in the parking lot. "I don't think they're

making fun of anyone," Donna said. "They're just—"

"Don't talk to her!" The refrigerator door slammed shut. A cupboard door slammed open.

Piggy's mother smiled bitterly. "This is exactly what you'd expect from these ragheads. Pretending

they're white people, deliberately mocking their betters. Filthy brown animals."

" Mother! Where is my fucking lunch?"

She looked at him then, jaw tightening. "Don't you use that kind of language on me, young man."

"All right!" Piggy shouted. "All right, I'm going to school without lunch! Shows how much you care!"

He turned to Donna and in the instant before he grabbed her wrist and dragged her out of the

house, Donna could no longer hear the words, could only see that universe of baffled futility haunting

Piggy's eyes. That same look she glimpsed today.

The railings were wooden now, half the posts rotting at their bases, with an occasional plank

missing, wrenched off and thrown over the side by previous visitors. Donna's knees buckled and she

stumbled, almost lurching into the rock. "I have to stop," she said, hating herself for it. "I cannot go one

more step."

Piggy immediately collapsed on the landing. Russ hesitated, then climbed up to join them. They

three sat staring out into nothing, legs over the Edge, arms clutching the rail.

Piggy found a Pepsi can, logo in flowing Arabic, among the rubble. He held it in his left hand and

began sticking holes in it with his butterfly knife, again and again, cackling like a demented sex criminal.

"Exterminate the brutes!" he said happily. Then, with absolutely no transition he asked, "How are we ever

going to get back up?" so dolorously Donna had to bite back her laughter.

"Look, I just want to go on down a little bit more," Russ said.

"Why?" Piggy sounded petulant.

"So I can get down enough to get away from this garbage." He gestured at the cigarette butts, the

broken brown glass, sparser than above but still there. "Just a little further, okay guys?" There was an

edge to his voice, and under that the faintest hint of a plea.

Donna felt helpless before those eyes. She wished they were alone, so she could ask him what was

wrong.

Donna doubted that Russ himself knew what he expected to find down below. Did he think that if

he went down far enough, he'd never have to climb back? She remembered the time in Mr. Herriman's

algebra class when a sudden tension in the air had made her glance across the room at Russ, and he was,

with great concentration, tearing the pages out of his math text and dropping them one by one on the

floor. He'd taken a five-day suspension for that, and Donna had never found out what it was all about.

But there was a kind of glorious arrogance to the act; Russ had been born out of time. He really should

have been a medieval prince, a Medici or one of the Sabakan pretenders.

"Okay," Donna said, and Piggy of course had to go along.

Seven flights farther down the modern stairs came to an end. The wooden railing of the last short,

septambic flight had been torn off entire, and laid across the steps. They had to step carefully between

the uprights and the rails. But when they stood at the absolute bottom, they saw that there were stairs

beyond the final landing, steps that had been cut into the stone itself. They were curving swaybacked

things that millennia of rain and foot traffic had worn so uneven they were almost unpassable.

Piggy groaned. "Man, you can't expect us to go down that thing."

"Nobody's asking you," Russ said.

They descended the old stairway backwards and on all fours. The wind breezed up, hitting them

with the force of an expected shove first to one side and then the other. There were times when Donna

was so frightened she thought she was going to freeze up and never move again. But at last the stone

broadened and became a wide, even ledge, with caves leading back into the rock.

The cliff face here was green-white with lichen, and had in ancient times been laboriously smoothed

and carved. Between each cave (their mouths alone left in a natural state, unaltered) were heavy-thighed

women—goddesses, perhaps, or demons or sacred dancers—their breasts and faces chipped away by

the image-hating followers of the Prophet at a time when Mohammed yet lived. Their hands held loops of

vines in which were entangled moons, cycling from new through waxing quarter and gibbous to full and

then back through gibbous and waning quarter to dark. Piggy was gasping, his face bright with sweat, but

he kept up his blustery front. "What the fuck is all this shit, man?"

"It was a monastery," Russ said. He walked along the ledge dazedly, a wondering half smile on his

lips. "I read about this." He stopped at a turquoise automobile door someone had flung over the Edge to

be caught and tossed by fluke winds, the only piece of trash that had made it down this far. "Give me a

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