The Eighth Room

Teal slept through dawn.

He woke with a jolt. There was the faintest crack of red around the teepee’s leather flap.

After all his planning… it would be broad daylight by the time he reached the bridge anchor.

But, he reflected ruefully, there was a certain irony. The dawn had been too feeble to wake him — and that was the heart of the problem.

The Sun was going out. And today Teal was going to try to fix it.

With a fluid movement he slid off the pallet and stood in the darkness.

Erwal’s breathing was even and undisturbed. Teal hesitated; then he bent and touched his wife’s belly, his fingertips exploring the mummy-cow skin blanket to find the second heartbeat beneath.

Then he pulled on his clothes and slipped out of the teepee.

His breath steamed. Dawn was an icy glow; a roof of snow-laden cloud hid all sight of Home, the world in the sky.

He walked softly through the heart of the little village. The ground was corrugated by mummy-cow hooves. He stepped around piles of bone needles and broken stone tools, past heaps of lichen and moss gathered to feed the cows.

Frost crackled.

He glanced about uneasily. Nobody knew what he was planning today, and he didn’t want to be spotted by any early risers…

But all the dozen teepees were silent. Even the one belonging to Damen, Teal’s elder brother. If Damen knew what he was up to, he’d knock Teal senseless.

He found himself tip-toeing away like a naughty child.

He reached the border of the village and began to lope across the tundra, his breathing easier. His even pace ate up the silent miles and the sky was barely brighter when he came to the bridge anchor.

The anchor itself was an arch about the height of a man, made of something smooth and milky-white. The structure’s original purpose was long forgotten, dating from before the ice. It was unimaginably old.

Now, though, there was a rope tied to the crosspiece. The rope rose from the arch and pierced the clouds, as if it were tethering the sky… but, Teal knew, the rope looped on past the clouds and crossed space to another world.

He approached the anchor past tarpaulined bundles of balloon equipment. Huddled around the arch were five mummy-cows. Humming simple songs they picked at the rope’s knots with their articulated trunks.

“Get away from that rope.”

The great soft beasts cowered at his voice. In their agitation they bumped together, trembling. Their ears flapped and their food teats wobbled comically.

Finally one of the cows broke out of the group and approached nervously. “Pardon, ssir…”

The cow was a broad fur-covered cylinder supported on stumplike legs. Her rectangular head rotated mournfully around a single ball joint, and plate-sized eyes looked down at Teal. From the center of the blocky face sprouted a bifurcated trunk, and humanlike hands at the ends of the trunk’s forks pulled at each other nervously.

The other mummy-cows giggled and whispered.

“Well?”

“Pardon, ssir, but it iss… needed to move the rope today. It is the Su-Sun, ssir…”

“I know about the Sun. Listen to me: I need your help. What’s your name?”

“Orange, ssir…”

“Well, Orange, I intend to take up a balloon. Go and fetch the envelope and tackle. You know what that means, don’t you?”

“Yess. I often help with flightss. But the Su-Sun will come t-too close today…” The great floppy mouth worked in agitation.

“That’s the idea,” he snapped. “I don’t want to avoid the Sun. I’m going up to it. All right?”

The other mummy-cows, startled, whispered together. He silenced them with a glare, his breath quickening. If they suspected he was here without the knowledge of the rest of the village they wouldn’t help him.

But Orange was looking at him steadily. “The Su-Sun is going out, isn’t it, s-ssir?”

“You know about that?” Teal asked, surprised.

“We live a long time,” said Orange. “Longer than people. Some of us notice things… Today the Su… the Sun is orange. But once it was yellow… in the da-dayss when Allel arrived in the f-first balloon from Home.”

The other mummy-cows nodded hugely, pounds of flesh rippling in their cheeks.

Teal felt obscurely sorry for the mummy-cows, moved to speak to them, to explain. “Even then the world was growing cold,” he said. “My grandmother crossed the Gap to find the answer. After that people were excited enough to build this bridge, so now we can travel between the worlds whenever we like.

“But in the end Allel failed. The Sun’s still cooling, and she found no answer.”

“But you will… fix-x it, ssir?”

Teal laughed. If only he could find a human with such imagination — “Maybe.”

The dawn stained the sky a little brighter. Soon the village would be stirring; he had to be aloft quickly—

There was an odd shrewdness in Orange’s brown eyes. “I… w-will help you.” She turned and made her way to one of the piles of balloon equipment. With her articulated trunk she pulled at a bark tarpaulin.

His heart lifting, Teal shooed the other cows away from the rope anchor and began to check the knots and stays.

The morning was approaching its murky peak by the time Teal and his unexpected ally had assembled a one-man balloon and attached it to the rope bridge. Teal wrestled with a cluster of alcohol burners, directing heated air into the leather envelope’s brown gloom.

At last the envelope rose from the frozen earth, billowing like a waking giant. Orange strained to hold it back; she trumpeted in alarm as she was dragged across the ground. Teal pulled a harness round his shoulders.

There was a gust of wind. The balloon lurched higher and its guide ropes began to scrape up the rope bridge.

The harness dug into Teal’s armpits. His feet left the ground.

Orange fell away, her huge head rotating up to him. Soon the anchor shrank to a cluster of bundles, anonymous in the gray landscape.

He wriggled in the harness, swinging slowly beneath the envelope. He looked to the south and picked out his home village. It looked like a muddy patch sprinkled with teepees… and out of one of the teepees came a running figure, shouting like an angry insect.

Damen, his brother. It had to be. Well, Teal couldn’t be stopped now.

He continued to rise and Damen’s cries dropped away. Soon there was only the creak of the rigging, his own rapid breath.

The barren landscape opened out further. It was a dreary panorama of red and gray, starved of color and warmth by the dying Sun. His grandmother spoke of flowers a bright orange, birds as blue as ice — of hundreds or thousands of people in villages clustered so close they were forced to fight over resources.

But now colors like blue were only a dim childhood memory to Teal. And there were only a few score people in Teal’s village, and no one knew how far away their nearest surviving neighbors were.

The low clouds fell on him; the world shrank to a fluffy cocoon. Flecks of snow pattered into his face, and he drew the hood of his leather jacket tight around his head.

Then he burst into crimson sunlight.

He gasped at the sudden clarity of the air. Frost sparkled over his cheeks.

The rope bridge rose from the carpet of cloud below him and arced gracefully across the Gap, a spider’s web between the twin worlds. Finally, on the other side of the Gap, it disappeared into a second layer of broken cloud… a layer belonging to another world, upside down and far above him.

The landscape of the world above — called Home — served Teal’s world — called the Shell — as a sky; it was an unbroken ceiling coated with upside-down seas, rivers, forests, ice caps. Teal searched for familiar features. There were threads of smoke: fires warding off the chill, even at noon.