Thursday, May 06, 2004
The Wheel
Trumpington looked through the eyepiece for a last time, confirming the alignment of the survey pegs, calling the figures to her assistant. Then, opening her spyglass, she looked out along her line to the bleeding sunset on the desert's sepia horizon. A dark smudge stood against the russet disk. Her earthworks were still in alignment with the Wheel.
"Pay the men and let them go," she said, collapsing the 'glass. "I'll be here until a few standard-days after sunset."
She turned from her amanuensis to walk the track up the bluff to the camp. She had paid impossible sums of money on what her employees thought a folly.
This deep in the desert, only the mines could afford to pay labourers and that only because they could work in the steady, cool underground temperatures. Up here six months of bone-cold night followed six months of blistering day. Two to four weeks of sunset and twilight was the best you could hope for.
She had waited a long time for everything she needed to align so perfectly. The enterprise, in the parching desert heat, had drunk her fortune greedily to the lees. But it was done.
A rectangular hole in the desert, a great wedge of earth removed from it. At three hundred metres wide and five hundred long it should suffice. There was some room for error.
The simple genius of it was the gradient on each axis: on the long West-East axis, it dropped from the level of the desert floor in the West, to tens of metres below it at the East end. It made a ramp leading down from the sunset to nothing: to a towering wall of dirt.
But not an even ramp, the floor of the pit sloped down Southwards at a more and more dramatic angle the further East one went. A large ball dropped anywhere would roll the focal South-East corner.
Her father, the surveyor and late stationmaster, would have been proud. Just as he was proud of having helped extend the Fourth City railway into the hinterlands and settling along its route himself. Its construction had not been easy.
The problem of an old land, he'd said, is you're constantly up against history and all its immovable objects.
He was right, of course. The dominant place of the Fist, and other strange Brobdingnagian relics, on the Fourth City skyline confirmed it. But his axiom neglected the alien, ancient vastnesses still moving pieces, its turning Wheels.
The settlers had known of the Wheels, of course. Even before the sightings, when the stranded, accidental colonists had begun building their Fourth City from the wrack of their arrival, the native Candlemen and Sonambulists had brought stories of them.
Vast disks of bronze, higher than cliffs, wider than six houses, inexorably rolled their endless way across deserts and dried seas and plied the ridgelines above the hinterland forest.
As barnacles attach to ships, elaborate trader cities had grafted themselves to the Wheels' sides: a mercantile ecosystem of huts and houses tethered on huge ball-bearing joints, swaying gently like Ferris wheel seats as their Wheel rolled on.
These Wheel cities were strangely democratic: poor and rich alike took their turn to have the highest views, and to dodge chamber-pot emptyings.
But no-one had thought the juggernaut Wheels could change course or pace.
During a dry deep-night winter of her girlhood, months as waterless as this present desert, the scrub around the railway-siding town like tinder, it happened. Much had been moved for safety, in case of fire, into the tall stationmaster’s tower.
By its fires, a Wheel had been spotted ascending the ridgeline. No-one thought anything of it. The ridge was rock, no spark would carry on the still air.
It was the avalanche of sound that later woke sleeping residents to fear: the rending of the eucalypt forest by metal. The Wheel had slid from the ridge, but remained implacably upright – bearing with fearful new momentum down upon the railway town.
Its limpet houses swung in crazy discord in the dark, a bobbing mass of houselights, and soon, spreading fire.
Catastrophe enveloped both sides of the Wheel in flame, and flame roared ahead of the dreadful engine, blasting through the mist of oil that clung above the eucalypt canopy. Many farmers and settlers could not outrace the flame to the railway tower, those who did found a new trap.
The tower roof was high above the tree-line, safe from the orange blazing contagion sweeping the forest. It was less safe from the near-passage of the Wheel, a double-sided city in flames, throwing sparks high into the air. The tower roof caught light, and more died in the panic than the fire.
Trumpington lost her father and neighbours to the fire, her childhood to the scent of burnt flesh.
But on the Wheel, she heard, there were no survivors.
The earthworks were the culmination of half a life's planning and study, not to mention the dangerous businesses she had pursued to fund this expedition. She had always kept track, more or less, of the Wheel's progress, kept abreast of its rumoured path and cursed reputation.
All she had to do, now that she had the knowledge and money, was to get sufficiently ahead of it. She had to prove that the Wheels, that blind tyrannous history, could be stopped.
She had set a snare for history. The Wheel would roll in, a wall of earth slowly rising on its North side, the ground slipping dangerously away from it to the South.
It would begin to tilt, the tilt would exaggerate as it accelerated down the Eastern slope. It would hit a thirty metre wall, solid as the desert's foundations, already listing North, and it would topple, catch the wall and fall like a rolled coin.
Ignorant, the men left after sleeping. She sent off her assistant before sunset to return with fresh horses and food within a hundred hours. It would be enough. She wanted to see the culmination of her plan alone.
She was glad of her solitude initially, even in the gathering desert night-winter; but at dusk faded to darkness, what she saw of the disk through her spyglass terrified her.
Its dark sides were studded with pinprick firelights.
Not the wraith-lights of the long dead, but the kitchen fires of new traders. The Wheel's twin townships had been resettled – and all sailed oblivious towards a terror that would fall upon them, crashing in the night.
An end to history of her making.
8:56 PM
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