“Which Ark?”
“I don’t know. One of those that is aggressive about garnering power. They had an iconography—”
“A what?”
“Well,” I said, “let’s just say that they felt threatened by certain things that avout tend to believe.”
“Such as that the world is old,” Yul said.
“Yeah. There had been trouble at a couple of Annual Aperts, and bigger trouble at the Decennial of 2780. The Tenners’ math got sacked a little on Tenth Night. But then things seemed to calm down. Apert was over. Things went back to normal. So, now, a parking ramp was then under construction within sight of the concent. It was part of a shopping center. The avout could see it going up, just by looking out the windows of their towers—Muncoster has a lot of towers. The ramp was finished a few months later. Sæculars went in there every day and parked their cars. No problem. Six years passed. The shopping center expanded. The workers had to make some structural changes to the parking ramp so that they could attach a new wing. One of them was up on the fourth level, using a pneumatic hammer to demolish part of the floor, when he noticed something embedded in the synthetic stone. It looked like a claw. Investigating, they removed more and more stone. It was a major safety issue since the building isn’t structurally sound if there are such things as claws and bones in load-bearing members. They had to shore it up—the building was weakening, sagging, before their eyes. The more they uncovered, the worse it got. When all was said and done, they had uncovered a complete skeleton of a hundred-foot-long reptile embedded in synthetic stone that had only been poured four years earlier. The Deolaters didn’t know what to make of it. There started to be serious unrest and violence around the walls of the concent. Then one night, chanting was heard from the Thousanders’ tower. It went on all night. The next day, the parking ramp was back to normal. So the story goes.”
“Do you believe it?” Yul asked.
“Something happened. There were—are—records.”
“You mean, like, phototypes of the skeleton?”
“I’m referring more to things like the memories in the witnesses’ minds. Piles of lumber used to shore up the structure. The paperwork at the lumberyard. A little bit of additional wear on the tires of the drummons that carried the lumber to the site.”
“Like ripples spreading out,” Yul said.
“Yeah. So if the skeleton suddenly vanishes, and there’s no physical evidence it was ever there, what do you have left?”
“Only the records,” Yul said, nodding vigorously, as if he understood it better than I. “The ripples, without the splash.”
“The tires of the lumber drummon didn’t suddenly get un-worn. The paperwork at the lumberyard didn’t vanish from the files. But now there is a conflict. The world isn’t coherent any more—there are logical contradictions.”
“Big piles of shoring lumber in front of a parking ramp that never needed to be shored up,” Yul said.
“Yeah. And it’s not that this is physically impossible. Obviously it is possible to have a pile of wood in front of a parking ramp, or some pieces of paper in a filing cabinet. But the problem—the issue it raises—is that the overall state of affairs just doesn’t add up any more.” I was remembering the pink dragon dialog with Orolo—realizing, all these months later, that his choice of a dragon to illustrate the point had been no accident. He’d been trying to remind us of the very incident Yul was talking about.
We heard a braying engine behind us and turned around to see Ganelial Crade headed our way on the three-wheeler. Yul and I exchanged a look that meant let’s not discuss this around him. Yul bent down, scooped up a double handful of snow, and tried to pack it into a ball to throw at his cousin. It was too cold to pack though.
We reached the sledge port at Eighty-three North at two in the morning, which only meant that the sun was slightly lower in the sky than usual. The slit-road debouched into a plateau of pack ice a mile or two wide, and somewhat lower than the surrounding ice, so that it felt like being on the floor of a large meteorite crater. Here and there, housing modules rose on stilts that could be moved and adjusted when the ice flowed under them. The drummons tended to congregate around these. Each was the headquarters of a different scrap dealer, and the drivers would hustle from one to the next trying to get the best prices for their loads. Other structures served as hostels, eateries, or bordellos.
The place was dominated by the sledge train itself. The first time I saw this, with the low sun behind it, I mistook it for a factory. The locomotive looked like one of those city-eating scrap processors: a power plant and a village of housing modules built on a bridge that spanned the interval between two colossal tracks. In the train behind it were half a dozen sledges, each built on parallel runners that rode in the ruts of packed snow laid down by the locomotive’s treads. The first of these was built to carry shipping containers. They were stacked four high, and an ungainly crane on wheels was laboring to begin a fifth layer. Behind it were a few sledges that simply consisted of great open boxes. Another crane, equipped with pincers easily big enough to snatch both of our vehicles at the same time, was clawing tangles of scrap metal from a pile on the snow and dropping them into these with heart-stopping crashes. The last sledge in the train was a flatbed: a mobile parking lot about half full of loaded drummons.
We spent a while blundering around, but from having talked to drummon operators at roadside stops we had a general notion of how the place worked and some good suggestions on how not to behave. From Sammann’s research we already knew that another sledge train had departed two days earlier and that the one we were looking at would continue loading for another few days.
Getting about was a hazard because there were no established rights-of-way. Drummons and fetches just moved in straight lines toward whatever their jumped-up drivers wanted to reach. So we tended to use our vehicles even for short movements. We found the office-on-stilts that booked places on the flatbed, and arranged to have both of our vehicles loaded upon it. But we paid a little extra to get Gnel’s fetch situated at the edge, rather than in the middle; that way, by deploying planks as ramps, we were able to get the three-wheeler on and off at will. It then became our means of moving around the sledge port, though it could only take two at a time and so at any given moment three of us would be marooned. So we rented one of the housing modules on the locomotive and marooned ourselves there. It was cheap. The toilet was a hole in the floor covered, when not used, by a trapdoor weighed down with slugs of scrap iron so that arctic gales wouldn’t blow it open. A few trips up and down the sledge train in the three-wheeler sufficed to stock our little house with the rations and other goods we’d packed into the fetches, as well as a surprisingly comprehensive arsenal of projectile and edged weapons. Yulassetar and Ganelial Crade might disagree about religion, but in their relationship to arms they were the same mind in two different bodies. They even used the same types of cases to store their guns, and the same boxes for ammunition. Many at the sledge port carried weapons openly, and there was a place at the edge of “town” where people would go out and discharge weapons into the encircling ice-wall just to pass the time. On the whole, though, the place was more orderly and predictable than the territory we’d spent the last week driving though. As I was coming to understand, it had to be thus because it was a place of commerce.
Once we were settled in, Sammann and I took the three-wheeler and made the rounds of bars and brothels just to confirm that Orolo wasn’t in any of them. Cord clambered around on the locomotive, admiring its workings, and Yul followed her. He claimed to be as interested in such things as Cord, but to me it was obvious that he expected she’d be raped if she went out alone.