Angela had never seen the pyramid from above before. The Great Wallendas had invented the seven-man pyramid in 1947; when their pyramid collapsed during a show in Detroit in 1962, two members of their troupe were killed and a third—like poor Carlo—had been paralyzed. But if the Wallendas had invented it, and the Guerreros had refined it, the Renaldos had perfected it. Even without its apex, it was still a sight to behold—a thin wire supporting four people, with two more on their shoulders, three stories above the crowd—
A crowd that was screaming, the sounds low and drawn out. And pointing, hands moving in slow motion.
She beat her wings once more, gaining even more height. Although she’d never done it before, flying to her was now like walking the wire—knowledge ingrained, no thought required, her body responding perfectly.
Up.
And up again.
She’d have preferred to become a bird—a lark, perhaps, or a jay. But he was a creature of the night; the gifts he bestowed were crepuscular, nocturnal.
A bat, then.
A bat who would fly to safety; a bat who would never fall.
Who could fly to safety…
She had sold her soul to the devil, and yet—
And yet she was a minor. Delmonico’s Circus traveled to many jurisdictions. In some, the age of majority was eighteen; in others, nineteen; in others still, it was twenty-one.
But nowhere was it seventeen, the age she was now.
Or fifteen, the age she had been then.
Surely, this deal she’d made—this bargain with Satan—surely it could not be legally binding. Surely she could get out of it. And when would she have a better chance to make her case? If she flew high enough, surely she would catch God’s eye, just as Poppa had always said.
God was forgiving—whether mass was in English, Italian, or Latin, they all said that. God would forgive her, take her back, protect her. She had but to confess her sins within his hearing.
Another stroke of her wings.
And another.
Of course, she was still under the big top. She couldn’t just go up to escape. Rather, she had to go down.
Just not too far down…
She folded her wings against her body, letting herself fall, confident that she could gain height again with another beat of the leathery membranes. It was an exhilarating fall, a thrilling fall, excitement rushing through her, a frisson passing over her. Her time sense contracted again, to let her enjoy the rush, experience the headlong, overwhelming pull of gravity, what she’d feared for so long now what she craved the most.
She had no doubt that she could stop her fall before she hit—he had promised, after all, and she wasn’t the first to have made a bargain with him. Thousands—millions—before her must have made similar deals; even if she herself didn’t intend to keep it, he would have to hold up his end as long as he thought he would eventually get her soul.
The screams from the crowd had risen in pitch as her time sense had returned to normal, but now they were growing deeper again as she neared the ground—close enough now to see the spiral galaxies of sawdust here and there, the circular pits of elephant footprints, the cloud-freckles caused by a spilled bag of popcorn.
She swooped now, heading out the great tent’s entrance, out into the circus grounds proper, out into the stinging light of day.
And then, at once, she began to rise higher and higher and higher and higher, beating her wings furiously, gaining as much altitude as she could. Soon she was far above the big top. She longed to look down, to see the fairgrounds from this new perspective, see the trailers, the animal cages, the horizontal circle of the merry-go-round, the vertical circle of the Ferris wheel. But she couldn’t. She had to concentrate, just like when she was on the high wire, allowing no distractions, no stray thoughts.
Another beat of the wings, flying higher and higher and—
Pain.
Incredible pain—as though she’d hit a sheet of glass, hit the ceiling of the world.
No farther; said a voice in her head, a voice with a strange accent, a voice like liquid metal.
But she had to go higher—she had to catch the eye of God. She beat her wings again, and felt her face flatten—but not back into its original, human form. No, it was pressing against a transparency; there was no way to fly higher.
It’s too close to Him, said the same voice, answering her unasked question.
She wanted to beat her fists against the transparency, but she had no fists—only elongated fingers supporting membranous wings. If she could just get God’s attention—
You’re not trying to cheat me, are you? said the splashing metallic voice in her head.
Her breathing was ragged from fighting so hard to break through the transparency. “No,” she gasped. “No, I’m not.”
I have a confession, he said. I lied when I said Carlo had turned me down; I lie a lot. He did take the deal, but he, too, tried to break it.
“And so you let him fall?” The words were forced out; her lungs were raw.
He didn’t fall, said the voice. He jumped. He thought if he jumped, then the deal would be broken. Oh, yes, he would die, but his soul would go up, not down. A pause. The irony was too much for me to resist: for one who had come so close to touching the heavens to now not even be able to stand—a perfect living hell.
“No,” said Angela, the words a hoarse whisper. “No, please—not that. Don’t make me fall.”
Of course not, splashed the voice. Of course not.
Angela breathed a sigh of relief.
For you, something different.
She was hit by an explosion of hot air, like the exhalation of a blast furnace, air so hot that sweat evaporated from her skin as soon as it beaded up. The wind slapped her like an open-palmed hand, pushing her down, down, down. Its impact had slammed her wings against her body, had flattened her little pink skirt against her thighs, had, she was sure, plastered her bat-ears flat against her skull once more. She tried to unfurl the wings, spreading her arms, splaying her protracted fingers, fingers as long as her legs. But the wind continued to blow, hot as hell, and she found herself tumbling, head over heels. Instinct took over, and instead of trying to extend her arms, she drew them in now to protect her face, her torso. Soon she was only a few meters above the ground, a ball of tightly wound limbs being pushed laterally through the air.
No, no. She had to fight her instincts. It was like being on the high wire. Do what your eyes tell you to do, and you’ll fall for sure; the human mind wasn’t made for such heights, such perspectives. She forced her arms to unfurl, forced the wings to try once more to catch the air, and—
Such pain, pain so sharp it made her wish her spinal cord was severed.
The wings were burning now, sheets of flame attached to her elongated, bony fingers. She could feel the membranes crisping, reducing to ash. Her long digits raked the air, but there was nothing much spread between them now to catch it—just a few singed and tattered pieces of skin. Incredibly, her clothes remained intact—or, perhaps not so incredibly, for all circus clothing had to be flame retardant…
She curled her sticklike fingers, as if clawing for purchase—but there was nothing but air, blisteringly hot, a wind from Hades propelling her along past the freak show, haunted faces looking up, past the arcade, children agape, past the fortune teller’s tent, the line of suckers somehow parting just in time to permit her passage barely above their heads, farther and farther still, toward—
—toward the Ferris wheel, it rotating in one plane, she tumbling head over heels in a perpendicular plane.
She’d thought for sure that she would slam into the spokes of the Ferris wheel, knocking herself unconscious, but that didn’t happen. Instead, she found herself reaching out instinctively with her feet, and hanging like the bat she’d become from one of the spokes, and—
No.
No, he could not be that cruel, that wicked…
But, if he could not, who could be?
It was as though her ankles were pierced through, like Christ’s, and yet not like Christ’s, for hers were joined now by a small axle, a spindle upon which she hung, rotating along with the great wheel, always facing down, pointing head-first toward the ground.
She thought briefly of a butterfly, pinned on a collector’s sheet. He was a collector, too, of course…
The wheel rotated on, and she hung from it, a macabre bauble, with skeletal fingers that once had supported flight membranes now hanging limp, like the boughs of a dead willow.
He had won, of course. Angela imagined he always won—and, she supposed, always would win. And, as she hung upside down, a pendant, she thought of her Poppa, and her fear of falling, and of failing him. No, things hadn’t turned out as she’d hoped, but, still, this wasn’t so bad; the old fears were indeed dead.
The wheel continued to turn. She felt sure it would always turn; no fireman could cut her free, no ladder would ever reach her. She rather suspected that the devil did not leave fingerprints, that she—indeed, the whole damned wheel, and its other occupants, whom she caught only horrid glimpses of—could only be seen when the lighting was just so, when it was not quite dawn, or just past dusk, when you weren’t really looking.
She was up high now, the wheel having rotated her to her topmost position, the zenith of the cycle, the pinnacle of her punishment. Here, facing down, looking at the ground, at the hard, unrelenting earth—the crust over the underworld, the veneer over the furnace from which the wind that had propelled her along had doubtless come—here, it was frightening, for if the spindle broke, if her ankles slipped off the axle, an axle greased with her own blood, she would plummet face first to the hard, hard ground.
But that wouldn’t happen. It wouldn’t ever happen.
The wheel continued its rotation, with Angela always pointing down. At the nadir of the cycle she was indeed rather close to the ground, the ground that had shattered Carlo’s spine, the ground that she had feared for so long.
But then she started upward again.
Had Poppa seen any of it? Had Momma? Had Carlo looked up long enough to see her transformation, her fall, her flight, her capture? Or had it all happened somewhere outside of human perception; certainly, she, just nine when it had occurred, hadn’t seen anything unusual when Carlo fell—jumped—from the high wire.
Poppa would now have to do what he’d always feared—bring an outsider into the act, take on someone new to be the pinnacle of the pyramid.
She hoped whoever it was would look after Carlo.
The wheel took her down once more, bringing her close again to the ground.
It really was a comfort knowing that she was never going to hit it.
The Shoulders of Giants
Author’s Introduction
I love to get out into the country to write, and most of this story was written at a cottage my wife and I had rented near Parry Sound, Ontario; during the same cottage trip, I wrote the outline for my Neanderthal Parallax trilogy of novels. The germ for this story came from Marshall T. Savage’s fascinating nonfiction book The Millennial Project, in which he said only a fool would set out for a long space voyage on a generation ship…
This story ended up being the lead piece in the anthology Star Colonies, edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers. Edo van Belkom and Robert Charles Wilson are two of my closest friends in the Toronto SF-writing community; Star Colonies marked the first time any of us had appeared together in the same anthology with new (rather than reprint) stories, making it rather a special book for the three of us.
The Shoulders of Giants
It seemed like only yesterday when I’d died, but, of course, it was almost certainly centuries ago. I wish the computer would just tell me, dammitall, but it was doubtless waiting until its sensors said I was sufficiently stable and alert. The irony was that my pulse was surely racing out of concern, forestalling it speaking to me. If this was an emergency, it should inform me, and if it wasn’t, it should let me relax.
Finally, the machine did speak in its crisp, feminine voice. “Hello, Toby. Welcome back to the world of the living.”
“Where—” I’d thought I’d spoken the word, but no sound had come out. I tried again. “Where are we?”
“Exactly where we should be: decelerating toward Soror.”
I felt myself calming down. “How is Ling?”
“She’s reviving, as well.”
“The others?”
“All forty-eight cryogenics chambers are functioning properly,” said the computer. “Everybody is apparently fine.”
That was good to hear, but it wasn’t surprising. We had four extra cryochambers; if one of the occupied ones had failed, Ling and I would have been awoken earlier to transfer the person within it into a spare. “What’s the date?”
“16 June 3296.”
I’d expected an answer like that, but it still took me back a bit. Twelve hundred years had elapsed since the blood had been siphoned out of my body and oxygenated antifreeze had been pumped in to replace it. We’d spent the first of those years accelerating, and presumably the last one decelerating, and the rest—
—the rest was spent coasting at our maximum velocity, 3,000 km/s, one percent of the speed of light. My father had been from Glasgow; my mother, from Los Angeles. They had both enjoyed the quip that the difference between an American and a European was that to an American, a hundred years was a long time, and to a European, a hundred miles is a big journey.
But both would agree that twelve hundred years and 11.9 light-years were equally staggering values. And now, here we were, decelerating in toward Tau Ceti, the closest sunlike star to Earth that wasn’t part of a multiple-star system. Of course, because of that, this star had been frequently examined by Earth’s Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. But nothing had ever been detected; nary a peep.
I was feeling better minute by minute. My own blood, stored in bottles, had been returned to my body and was now coursing through my arteries, my veins, reanimating me.
We were going to make it.
Tau Ceti happened to be oriented with its north pole facing toward Sol; that meant that the technique developed late in the twentieth century to detect planetary systems based on subtle blueshifts and redshifts of a star tugged now closer, now farther away, was useless with it. Any wobble in Tau Ceti’s movements would be perpendicular, as seen from Earth, producing no Doppler effect. But eventually Earth-orbiting telescopes had been developed that were sensitive enough to detect the wobble visually, and—
It had been front-page news around the world: the first solar system seen by telescopes. Not inferred from stellar wobbles or spectral shifts, but actually seen. At least four planets could be made out orbiting Tau Ceti, and one of them—
There had been formulas for decades, first popularized in the RAND Corporation’s study Habitable Planets for Man. Every science-fiction writer and astrobiologist worth his or her salt had used them to determine the life zones—the distances from target stars at which planets with Earthlike surface temperatures might exist, a Goldilocks band, neither too hot nor too cold.
And the second of the four planets that could be seen around Tau Ceti was smack-dab in the middle of that star’s life zone. The planet was watched carefully for an entire year—one of its years, that is, a period of 193 Earth days. Two wonderful facts became apparent. First, the planet’s orbit was damn near circular—meaning it would likely have stable temperatures all the time; the gravitational influence of the fourth planet, a Jovian giant orbiting at a distance of half a billion kilometers from Tau Ceti, probably was responsible for that.
And, second, the planet varied in brightness substantially over the course of its twenty-nine-hour-and-seventeen-minute day. The reason was easy to deduce: most of one hemisphere was covered with land, which reflected back little of Tau Ceti’s yellow light, while the other hemisphere, with a much higher albedo, was likely covered by a vast ocean, no doubt, given the planet’s fo
rtuitous orbital radius, of liquid water—an extraterrestrial Pacific.
Of course, at a distance of 11.9 light-years, it was quite possible that Tau Ceti had other planets, too small or too dark to be seen. And so referring to the Earthlike globe as Tau Ceti II would have been problematic; if an additional world or worlds were eventually found orbiting closer in, the system’s planetary numbering would end up as confusing as the scheme used to designate Saturn’s rings.
Clearly a name was called for, and Giancarlo DiMaio, the astronomer who had discovered the half-land, half-water world, gave it one: Soror, the Latin word for sister. And, indeed, Soror appeared, at least as far as could be told from Earth, to be a sister to humanity’s home world.
Soon we would know for sure just how perfect a sister it was. And speaking of sisters, well—okay, Ling Woo wasn’t my biological sister, but we’d worked together and trained together for four years before launch, and I’d come to think of her as a sister, despite the press constantly referring to us as the new Adam and Eve. Of course, we’d help to populate the new world, but not together; my wife, Helena, was one of the forty-eight others still frozen solid. Ling wasn’t involved yet with any of the other colonists, but, well, she was gorgeous and brilliant, and of the two dozen men in cryosleep, twenty-one were unattached.
Ling and I were co-captains of the Pioneer Spirit. Her cryocoffin was like mine, and unlike all the others: it was designed for repeated use. She and I could be revived multiple times during the voyage, to deal with emergencies. The rest of the crew, in coffins that had cost only $700,000 a piece instead of the six million each of ours was worth, could only be revived once, when our ship reached its final destination.
“You’re all set,” said the computer. “You can get up now.”
The thick glass cover over my coffin slid aside, and I used the padded handles to hoist myself out of its black porcelain frame. For most of the journey, the ship had been coasting in zero gravity, but now that it was decelerating, there was a gentle push downward. Still, it was nowhere near a full g, and I was grateful for that. It would be a day or two before I would be truly steady on my feet.