The Last Human IV - 54 - The Howl of Nothing

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A cast iron pot cooked over a fire. Flaming logs filled the air with a sweet, burning scent. Oil crackled, and pale rings of dough floated and bumped against each other as they slowly darkened. Smoke, perhaps a little too much, rose off the top, and droplets of boiling oil popped and leaped out of the pot. Poire cursed as another drop settled on his hand as he tried to knock the stack of logs down with a poker. A spark caught in his beard, and he cursed again as he tried to pull it out.

It was silly. Here he was, nothing but a tiny, grungy speck huddled beneath the colossal ceiling and soaring columns of the Tower—that he had conjured with his bare hands—stoking a little fire, trying to do it the old way. He didn’t care. Ash and grease blackened the stone floor, and the flames were too tall, and the smoke kept getting into his eyes and none of the donuts were the right shape, and a drop of sweat slid off his nose and dripped into the pot making the oil snap and splatter—and still, he didn’t care.

Because he was not alone.

Poire spooned one of the donuts out, dripping oil on the floor as he placed it gently on a rack to dry. 

The Boy frowned at him. “Why don’t you just pull the donuts out of matter?”

“Not the same,” Poire said. He stuck his tongue out between his lips as he concentrated on fishing out another donut. He hissed as another splatter of oil landed on his wrist, but he managed to keep the donut from falling.

“You could avoid the whole mess,” the Boy said, nodding at the flour covered bowls and utensils spread behind Poire. “And the sweat. And maybe they wouldn’t be so lumpy.” 

“The lumps,” Poire said, “Are the point.” 

He held one at eye level, inspecting the crags of golden brown dough, and that perfect sheen of oil. This one deserved to be covered in cinnamon and sugar. Then again… Poire licked his lips. Topping or not, what was better than a freshly fried old-fashioned? He took a bite. The outside cracked, exactly what he was hoping for. Inside, it was dense and chewy and far too hot. Poire hooted as it burned his tongue. He flapped his hands, trying to blow out the heat and chew at the same time. 

The Boy shook his head, though he also sniffed the air. 

“Smell them, don’t you?” Poire asked, fishing the last one out. One by one, he pressed the cooling donuts into a bowl full of sandy, crunchy sugar. The flour, the cinnamon, the oil—all the ingredients had been pulled from the broken stones meant for building the Tower, but Poire had made the dough by hand. He’d learned the techniques from watching bakers in the Seeing Pools. Frivolous, he knew. A waste of precious time. And crucial to his sanity.

Poire carefully selected the best looking donut from the batch, and handed it to the Boy. The two of them sat, crunching in silence, smacking and chewing sounds echoing in the vast space of the Tower. 

The Boy reached for a second donut. Instead of eating it, he inspected the surface, like he could see something in the texture of the fried dough.

“What’s wrong?” Poire asked.

“Do you see it, too?” the Boy asked. He lowered the doughnut. Looked up at the ceiling. At the far walls. At Poire. With his free hand, the Boy curled his fingers through the air, as if trying to pull at cobwebs. “It shimmers, everywhere I look. It’s in everything. The Light.” 

“Anu,” Poire agreed.

“It’s like everything is a thread, woven into the same cloth. Trapped in it. Even me.” 

“Even you,” Poire said, “But one thing makes you different.”

The Boy blinked, and looked up at Poire. 

“You are aware,” Poire said.

“We can never go back.” 

“No.”

“And the others…” 

“Anu will take them, too. They will cease to exist.”

The Boy nodded, grimly. He set his jaw, and spoke the words Poire had been waiting to hear. “If you’re going to kill that thing, I want to help.” 

***

It was different.

Poire had spent ages immersed in the Pools, gazing at humanity across time. Learning, and wishing he could be there. With them.

The Boy hardly touched the Pools. Instead, he and Poire broke down the mountains together, and hauled the stones up the Tower, growing it hour by hour. Often, they worked side by side. Sometimes, the Boy asked questions. Sometimes, they shared memories about what life had been like, before coming to this universe. Sometimes, Poire talked about all that he had seen in the Pools, or what he had learned in this universe. Poire made the Boy practice with Anu’s matter, churning out increasingly complex substances. From salt, to sucrose, to a ceramic cup filled with freshly-boiled tea. One day, the Boy brought him a figurine once, and though the proportions weren’t quite right, Poire knew her in an instant. 

“Laykis,” he smiled, and his heart warmed even as he said her name. “I haven’t seen her in such a long time.”

“I tried making Eolh, but his feathers were too difficult to shape.”

Poire took the figurine and inspected it. He was surprised to find that her little metal arms and legs moved. 

This is how it should’ve been, Poire thought, sadly. When I first came here. We should have worked together. Of course, the Old Man had offered. It was Poire who had refused. He also refused to wallow in regret. Instead, he swore to teach the Boy everything he could, so that when Poire’s own time came… Well. Someone had to keep going.

Everyone, everything depended on this. 

One day, they were carrying sacks of stones over their shoulders, walking almost side by side up the steps. Poire had never noticed before how the steps were just wide enough to accommodate them both—as if he had unconsciously made them that way. 

“Poire?” the Boy asked, breathing hard with the effort.

“Yes?”

“You healed your injury, didn’t you?” 

Poire touched at his side, where the stone shard had pierced him, not so many weeks ago. It was stiffer than before. Hadn’t healed quite right, and now and then it sent a sharp shooting pain through his gut. “Sort of.”

“Do you think you could make other parts of yourself better?”

A smile lingered on Poire’s lips. “Better, how?”

The Boy set his bag down, and gestured with both hands, “Imagine if you were huge. Shredded. Jacked like no human has ever been jacked before.” 

“You think my old joints could handle that?”

“Why not? Make them strong as steel. And your lungs, too,” the Boy inhaled with wild exaggeration, puffing out his chest and flexing his arms. 

“If I were that strong,” Poire bent and hefted both sacks of stones easily over his shoulder, his old muscles bulging beneath his robes, “Then what would I need you for?”

Laughing, Poire leaped up three and four steps at a time, leaving the Boy to gawk up at him. 

A shout came from below, “... this whole time?”

His calves propelled him up, stronger than they had ever been in his youth. His ankles cracked with every step, but his joints had never felt better. The pain in his gut twinged once or twice, but what was a little pain compared to the joy of showing off?  

A few hundred steps above, Poire stopped and waited for the Boy, who, carrying nothing, was bent over and gasping from the effort of trying to catch up. “Can you—can you—make me—stronger, too?” 

“Yes,” Poire put a thoughtful finger to his chin, “But then, you’d never learn, would you?” 

The Boy frowned, and Poire thought he was going to argue. “So, why do you still have wrinkles? And gray hair?”

“Don’t know,” Poire tugged at a strand in his beard. “Reckon I prefer them.”

“You want the wrinkles?”

“Reckon they remind me of … me. Of what I am,” he grinned at Poire, smiling all the more because he imagined he could feel the creases of his crow’s feet. “Just a man.”

***

As the Tower grew, so did the journey. Poire remembered the days when it only took a few hours to reach the top, but now they spent a week or more trekking up the stairs. The taller it grew, the further they saw. And the more they learned of their world.

More than once, the universe turned. It at one end of the horizon, and flowed across the landscape, folding the ground, and then the sky, until gravity itself twisted around them. The first time it happened, Poire clung to the stone, but even with his self-improved strength, his fingers slipped. “Change the stone!” the Boy shouted, and Poire cursed himself for not thinking of it first. He willed the stone to liquefy and solidify around his hands and he held fast as his legs and torso were pulled to one side. 

Great sections of the landscape below siphoned away, kicking up a haze of dust that gravity pulled into the sky. But the steps remained in place, as if what Poire had built could not be so easily wiped out. And yet, the world continued to try. When the dust settled, Poire glanced up at the stained-glass windows of the sky, outlined in black. Soon, he promised himself. And yet, doubt whispered. How long have you been saying that?

Normally, he would have shoved the thought away. But this time, he decided to wrap his arms around it. To bring it in close, and use it as fuel for the fire in his heart. “Come on,” Poire said, pulling himself up before helping the Boy, “There’s work to do.” 

Sometimes, one of the sky’s membranes would burst open, dumping a cascade of gelatinous tissue to the ground so far below. The neighboring cells would crowd in to fill the gap, sometimes bursting themselves in the process, provoking new storms that rippled across the sky. Sometimes, though he could not see where they came from, strange fluttering shapes fell down in a swirling flock—like leaves from a tree, cut into little pieces. They made flitting sounds as they sliced through the air, faster than aerodynamics should allow. Poire wanted to catch one, to study it, or at least to recycle its matter for the Tower. He grabbed at one. It sliced through the last segment of his finger, as if his skin and bone were made of nothing more than smoke. He hadn’t even felt it, until the blood spurted. Bright and red and hot. 

Then, the rest of the debris fluttered down around him, and he fled down the steps, clutching his finger and screaming at the Boy to run. The flock of shapes swept, not quite aimlessly, across the steps and out over the dunes, so far below. When they had passed, the top of the steps were cut open in a hundred different places, and chunks of stone floated gently away into the sky, as if gravity could no longer reach them.

Poire tried to go back to work immediately, but the Boy pointed out that he was dripping blood down his back. “And if you pass out here,” the Boy said, standing on a half-broken stair, “I won’t be able to catch you.”

Since when did the Boy start making so much sense? 

So, Poire agreed to rest. Just for a bit. Meanwhile, the Boy asked if he could practice his medical skills on Poire. After a few bloody attempts, the Boy finally got the skin to seal up.

“Do you think Anu knows we’re coming?” the Boy asked, wiping his hands on his robes. 

Still wincing from the half-healed wounds, Poire said, “Anu knows everything.” 

“Everything?”

Poire didn’t answer. That feeling swelled in his chest again. All wrong. Poire tried to swallow it down, but it kept getting stuck. You can barely survive in this world. What hope do you have against a foe like Anu?

He hardened his jaw. Hope. Doubt. What did they matter, now? Neither would change his course. It’s Anu, or it’s us.

And so, the Tower grew. And so did the Boy. Poire marked the passing of time by the changes in his face—his limbs thickened with muscle, his thin facial hair grew into a beard of his own, freckles and tiny wrinkles and the first gray hairs began to show. Still young, but not the boy that Poire had brought back from the brink of death.

Some days, the sky would unleash flurries of those paper-thin shapes, but they never came close to Tower’s steps and Poire found himself wondering if Anu really was sending them intentionally… or if they were nothing more than some strange byproduct. 

Some days, the landscape would twist in a spiral, so that both sky and sand were above and below them. On these disorienting days, it was easy to lose their footing on the steps, so they rested. Some days, long slender shadows stretched for hundreds of miles across the landscape, as if a great, dead forest far beyond sight was occluding the light. They left trails of frost wherever they touched, and when the Boy lingered too long in one, he earned frostbite scars down half his body. Even with the Boy’s new-found talents for altering matter, those took a long time to heal. 

One day, sitting halfway up the steps, they sat and ate a workman’s lunch, and watched huge, hulking shapes wandering across the valleys. Poire didn’t think they were animals—more like icebergs drifting across an ocean of sand. Clouds of dust trailed behind them for miles, dissipating into a broad, pale haze that cloaked the land. 

“Think I could hit one?” the Boy asked, bouncing a stone in his hand.

“Too far.”

“Bet me.” 

“For what?”

“Loser carries twice the load on the next journey.” 

Poire snorted. The iceberg-thing was easily a mile out from the base of the Tower. And they were sitting high in the sky, nowhere near the base. “Deal.” 

The Boy cocked his arm back, and threw. As the stone left his hand, it stretched into a long, silver javelin. Fins stabilized its spin and it arced a perfect line toward the nearest iceberg-thing. The two of them went down on hands and knees at the edge of the stair, watching it go. Poire gripped tight to the edge, not because he was afraid of falling (they had spent too many years up here for that), but because he found himself secretly urging the Boy’s stupid toy to go just a little further. To prove the Boy right.

The javelin landed with a tiny puff of dust. Dead center of the wandering mountain. The Boy yelled and Poire found himself yelling with him, jumping up and down on that slender chunk of stone, with nothing below them for miles. They must’ve looked like idiots, which only made Poire laugh harder.

When they next journeyed up the steps with an extra sack slung over his back, he was still shaking his head and smiling to himself. The stones didn’t seem to weigh so much. 

***

“It’s taller.”

“Are you sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Did you count?”

“No.”

“Then how do you know?”

“Look at it.”

Sometimes, the oldest steps cracked, and had to be replaced. Sometimes, they simply drifted out of place. They were used to this. 

But new steps, drifting into place? Unheard of. Where would the steps even come from? And what were the chances they’d be aligned exactly so? 

Poire frowned up. The stairs looked like they always looked, marching toward the windows of the sky. Only, the windows were closer than ever. One shimmered directly above, an aqueous green, streaked with rich sapphire. Imperfections, millions of specks, dotted the semi-translucent membrane. They were so damn close…

…and the stairs kept going. 

Poire tread up them, craning his neck to look up each spiral. Wary. What if it’s a trick? What if Anu did this? But the steps looked identical. Bland, in their familiarity. Who else could have made them, except for him and the Boy? 

Who else…? 

The stairs ended, only a few stories short of the membrane of the sky. Agonizingly close. And he sat at the top. Cross-legged. Head tilted back, mouth agape, staring up. 

Poire barely recognized the Old Man. In fact, he couldn’t tell if this was the Old Man he had known, or if he was staring at an even older Poire, for the man’s skin was so wrinkled and his hair so thin and wiry, he didn’t match Poire’s memory. 

“Do I know you?” Poire asked. 

The man jerked his head slightly, as if to shake off a fly that had landed on his cheek. One eyelid no longer opened all the way, and the other eye stared at a point just above Poire’s head. 

“We’re a cancer, you know,” the Old Man croaked in a thin, wavering voice.

“What?”

“Do you know how many times we’ve done this?” 

“Done what?”

The Old Man lifted a thin arm, all the muscle wasted away, and pointed at the membrane of the sky. 

Imperfections. Millions of specks. Only, they weren’t specks now. They were … people. Bodies submerged in the semi-translucent membrane. Posed a hundred different ways, jumping, leaping, climbing, embedded upside down or head first as if they had been catapulted into the membrane. Some were buried so deep in that gelatinous barrier, Poire could only make out the foggy shadow of their outlines. But the others… Millions of others… All Poire. All dead. 

At least, he hoped they were.

The Boy set down his stack of stones, and started to conjure them into a kind of pole, with handholds for climbing. 

“What are you doing?” Poire asked.

“Going up,” the Boy said. “I’m going to cut one of them out.”

Like a snake, the Old Man’s hand shot out, and grabbed the Boy by the wrist. “Don’t,” he hissed. “Don’t.”

“Why not?” the Boy asked, easily prying the Old Man’s hand away.

“Why do you think they’re still there?” 

“Anu,” Poire said. 

“Anu,” the Old Man agreed.

“A trap?” the Boy asked.

“Once, I was not alone,” The Old Man drawled in a wistful voice, “The Old Man thought he could succeed where all the others had failed… They all thought that, at one time, I suppose. Thus, I am alone.”

Poire and the Boy glanced at each other. Shrugged, at the same time. 

“How long have you been here?” Poire asked. 

“Too long.” He tugged on one ear as if it was bothering him. “Thought there might be another way up. Thought for too, too long. There is nothing else we can do. And now, I am too weak. Won’t go up,” his lip quivered, and so did all his sagging skin. His thin voice shook with the sadness that comes from an ancient lifetime steeped in regret. “Won’t ever find out. Won’t ever know what it’s like. Won’t ever know Anu. But you will. Yes. You’ll go up there, and you’ll die.”

“He doesn’t know that,” the Boy said. “Does he?”

“Took too long,” the Old Man moaned. He was shaking, shivering, and tears spilled down the sagging planes of his cheeks, and drool from the corner of his mouth. One hand was pressed to his skull, as if trying to hold his head together. Poire felt a pang of pity, and embarrassment for what he had become. And more than a little anger at the Old Man’s pathetic resignation. 

And then, a touch of empathy, for this was only himself, who had fallen down a different path. Poire took one of the stones from his sack, and broke it, and with one piece he formed a long shawl, which he draped over the Old Man’s shaking shoulders. With the other, he conjured a clay cup of tea, steaming, which he pressed carefully into the Old Man’s gnarled hands. And the Old Man’s fingers closed instinctively around it. And though his tears still flowed, he cried in silence. 

“Let’s go,” Poire said, and gathered the rest of his stones, and resumed building what the Boy had started.

The Boy eyed the Old Man warily. “What if he tries to stop us? What if we can’t trust him?”

“He’s us,” Poire said grimly, “He’s only us.” 

The membrane bulged downward, like a vast droplet of water not quite ready to fall. Veins of sapphire and iridescent violet shot through the pale barrier. And, of course, the myriad bodies of Poire, suspended in the membrane. The higher their climbing pole became, the better they could see the suspended bodies. Every age, from near-boyhood, to ancient beyond belief. Some wearing robes, some wearing clothes more like old humanity, some missing fingers, or arms, or legs. Wide-eyed with anger, or pinched expressions focused on the task at hand, or mouths opening to scream—forever frozen. 

It wasn’t just the refraction of the membrane. All of them were all blurred. Where skin met membrane, the atoms of Poire came apart, so that each Poire was surrounded by foaming, boiling un-matter.

Poire and the Boy built a platform at the top of their pole, just a few feet shy of the Membrane. Close enough that, if they wanted to, they could reach up and touch it.

The Boy tried it first, with a simple stick he conjured from a rock. It sizzled as he pressed it into the membrane. When he tried to draw it back, it refused to move, no matter how hard they pulled.

“Okay, then what about…” Poire conjured a long-handled sword, and chopped it into the membrane. Droplets of jelly pattered on the corner of their platform, sizzled, ate through the stone, and dropped through. And the sword was stuck. 

“Damn it.” 

They took turns, trying out ideas. Slicing, cutting, drilling, every tool they threw at the membrane only stuck in the gel. Once, when they both attacked it at the same time, they succeeded in tearing open a gap in the membrane, which lasted for a few moments, before the entire membrane wobbled dangerously, and snapped shut.

A few hours later, the Boy was sitting on the edge of the platform, hunched over, his chin resting on his chin, while Poire, in a fit of anger, had conjured a compound bow, and was loosing arrow after arrow into the membrane, growling out his frustration between shots. 

“Why—” Crack! “Won’t—” Crack! “It—” Crack! 

“Poire,” the Boy said. “Did you hear that?” 

Poire paused, the string pulled taut. “Hear what?” 

Flit.

A sound like paper, slicing through the air.

Flit, flit.

It looked as if someone had cut up leaves with scissors, and was dropping them from the sky. They fell through the membrane without any resistance at all. They sliced through the air.  

Flit—

A leaf sliced the air, leaving a hair-thin gap in the platform in front of his foot. Poire hadn’t even felt the wind from its passing. 

“Watch out!” the Boy shouted, and Poire moved out of the way as another leaf dropped straight through the membrane. It had cut through one of the suspended Poires, pulling a streak of red in the jelly. Frothy, almost-pixelated liquid dripped onto the platform, burning a hole through the stone. Perhaps it would drip all the way down to the Tower. 

Should they retreat? Would that keep them safe from Anu, now? And, then again, how could he give up after all this time, trying to reach the sky? But there was no way through the membrane. Not that he could think of. More time. I need to think. But he had seen what time would make of him. The Old Man, gawping up at the sky, too weak to do anything at all. No answers. Nothing, but a wall in his mind. And the harder he thought, the thicker the wall became. Bitterness filled his mouth. An aching clutched in his chest. Despair, long kept at bay, now lapped at his mind. Hope. What hope?

Poire tried to swallow it down. It rose in his throat again. Choking. Drowning. “It can’t be done,” Poire said. “We can’t get through.” 

“We can.”

Flit—a leaf sliced one of the steps. Splitting the stone. The halves began to drift away, unburdened by anything like gravity.

“The moment we touch the membrane, it will kill us.”

“One of us,” the Boy said.

Poire blinked. For a moment, he couldn’t understand what the Boy was thinking. Couldn’t make sense of the determined glint in his younger self’s eyes. What does he know that I don’t? Or maybe, it was the other way around. Poire had spent so many long, wretched centuries out here, alone. He was painfully familiar with the depths of solitude. But the Boy was not burdened with his experience. The Boy hadn’t lived his life. Was free from his regrets. And so, before the thought even occurred to Poire, the Boy was already in motion. 

“I will open the way,” the Boy said. And he impulsed the platform to change. To rise. And he lifted his arms.

“Wait!” 

The Boy touched the membrane. Sank both of his hands into the translucent gel. Furrowed his brow, agony painted on his face. Snarled, his white teeth almost blinding against his dark skin. 

And the membrane parted. A great split, a jagged scar running all the way up. A groan ushered from the Boy’s throat, halfway to a scream. His hands were boiling in the membrane. Blisters bubbled on his wrists, and blood and a clear, foaming liquid trickled down his forearms. 

There was still time. Poire could save him. Amputate him at the arms, and keep Anu from devouring him like it had devoured all the others. 

“GO!” the Boy screamed. The gap in the membrane split a little wider. 

Before he could second guess himself, Poire sent an impulse. A ladder sprouted from the platform, and Poire grabbed the rungs as the ladder continued to grow, spearing him up through the split in the membrane.

Leaving the Boy behind.

As the ladder pushed him higher, silence reigned supreme. The last of the suspended Poires fell away, until he was the only thing up here. Not even a breeze stirred the air. Not even his own heart beat in his ears. Just the howl of nothing.

His jaw was granite. His teeth creaked against each other. His knuckles were pale from gripping the rung so tight. Tears burned in his eyes. No more despair. Not even a shred of doubt. He would make Anu pay.

Glittering veins of color shot through the tunnel of the membrane, and long black lines reached down through the gel, thick and gnarled like roots. The membrane seemed to ooze out from the roots, and Poire had the sudden intuition that, perhaps, the membrane wasn’t just a strange anomaly of this world’s physics. Perhaps, Anu grew it on purpose. As if it wanted to wall itself off from the world below… 

Poire gripped the ladder even tighter. The smile on his lips was anything but joyful.

The light through the membrane diminished as the ladder shot ever higher. What had sparkled and glittered now refracted vast, dull shadows. The endlessly thick membrane grew thinner. Thinner. 

And then, it was gone. 

Replaced by an expanse, the size of a universe. And Poire found himself gaping up at the greatest being to have ever lived. 

He had surfaced upon the merest twig of Anu. The entire membrane, containing that vast and impossible world, was only the tiniest drop of dew. Billions of branches reached across endless eons. Limbs spread above and below, sprouting from a single mutated mass of millions of trunks, all woven together.

But here, there was no Light. Here, there was no golden glow, like the one he had seen in the Pools. Here, there was only shadow. Black clouds of ash drifted and swirled in the empty voids between dark branches. Limbs cracked and peeled, bleeding off pale columns of gas. Of Light. The whole body of Anu swayed—not with that searching, vital movement that Poire had seen before—but rigid, and lifeless. 

Anu was already dead.

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