(Strive 10:5)
The things we find most beautiful are often too good to be true; that was a lesson I’d learned by painful experience many times in the real world.
But in this tower, I’d been charmed by the sudden appearance of that manic pixie dream girl, a dark forest meet-cute. It was clear that Mia had used her looks and demeanor to deadly effect at least once before, and thinking back on our encounter, I felt both foolish and ashamed.
So it was in a guarded state of mind that I stepped out of Uomo Universale. The light was reddish gold, burnishing the walls of the building in a kind of shabby grandeur. A beacon like an artificial moon shone from atop the center of the city, and a thin cable next to it shot upward to the next floor. That hill stood seemingly at the center of the city and was crowned by fine castles, contrasting the row houses and rough cobblestones of our current avenue. A child skipped by, laughing, with a sky-blue kada on his wrist.
“How did a kid make it up here?” I asked El. “Are we just bad at this?”
El shrugged. “I’m more interested in where everyone’s headed.”
Most of the people we saw were filtering slowly in one direction, and we followed the trickle of humanity as it became a stream. The street emptied out onto a wide plaza, where an unruly line had formed near the entrance of a rounded building.
“What’s everyone here for?” I asked a nearby man with a pale-orange bracelet.
He turned and spoke in rapid Spanish that displayed on my udjat a second later.
Language Identified: Indo-European, Ibero-Romance, Spanish (~1900 AD)
<
That sounded like it could be informative. “That’s right,” I said, stepping into line. “Fresh out of prison.”
The man guffawed. <
“Ah.” I realized I’d put myself in dangerous territory. “My friend the raccoon here had a case of mistaken identity, and they pulled me in to sort things out.”
<
I laughed, glad he hadn’t questioned me further. “Felt like he hated me before I even said a word.”
<
We were at the front of the line now, and the Spanish-speaking man handed a few coins to the attendant, then waved goodbye to me. The attendant turned to look at me with his hand outstretched.
“I don’t have any—” I paused. Looking at my inventory, that was no longer the case. Next to the floor two tokens I’d squirreled away, there seemed to be a new wealth of gold coins with square holes drilled through the center. Tokens of Master Shaw’s appreciation, it seemed. “Is this enough?” I pulled out a few, and the usher’s eyes boggled out of his head.
<
Well, it was nice we’d gotten something out of our detention.
The first floor of the playhouse was standing room only, and people were crammed up to the gills near the front of the stage. My udjat overwhelmed me with overlapping messages, and I couldn’t make heads or tails of what was going on. The mezzanine level seemed less crowded, and I placed El on my shoulders as I pushed my way toward the stairs.
“Headset?” An usher offered me a wireless earpiece, and I took it with a nod of thanks and put it on. Much to my surprise, my udjat lit up.
Registering new output peripheral…
Sync with Babelfish-110 OK…
Language inferred from settings: Standard American English, circa 2000s.
A female voice spoke a single word in my ear: "Connected," and the hubbub of the crowd suddenly shifted into focus.
“—just love to visit the Gardens every once in a while—”
“—stay close now, don’t go wandering off now—”
“—theoretical study of the nearest-neighbor towers—”
The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.
“—asshole, stop blocking the stairs!”
The last was directed at me, and I blinked as I stepped aside. None of these folks had been speaking English before, yet now I understood them perfectly. It wasn’t that the earpiece translated their words in my ear; the words now emerged from their mouths as English.
“How is that possible?” I wondered aloud.
“What?” said El.
“I can understand them now.” I was awestruck. “I don’t need captions anymore. This is amazing!”
Some folks glanced at me curiously as El replied, “Good for you.”
“Wait a second.” Realization dawned on me. “You never needed—”
“I’m a magical talking raccoon,” said El. “English ain’t special.”
As we ascended the staircase, we found ourselves standing at a balcony next to a man wearing glasses and a blue ring, who gawked at El before edging away slightly. That was alright by me; I wasn’t going to complain about a bit more breathing room. Oddly, some folks seemed to treat El like an alien while others hardly spared a second glance for her.
The stage was a simple wooden deck, and the restless audience milled about underneath. A rainbow of kada bracelets gave the whole scene a festival atmosphere. Most of the bracelets were as pale as mine, an assortment of wan pastels, with very few having the full-bodied saturation that Artem’s had displayed. Unfortunately, my people-watching was cut short when the lights dimmed, and a hush of expectation fell across the room.
A voice boomed across the stage. “This is the story of how a tower was born. A tower that has of late drawn closer than ever to us, yet remains ever distant from our comprehension.” The glasses-wearing man snorted as the narrator began to recite:
“Eramai the rigid stele,
Monument of my desire.
Eramai the tender heart,
Skinless, bare, still beats in time.”
“What the hell is Eramai?” I whispered in dismay. “I thought this was about our tower, Strive.” There was a chorus of shushes.
“Makes sense, I guess,” El said from my shoulder. “You wouldn’t go to the theaters to watch a movie about where Earth came from. That’d just be a documentary.”
A man with a beaten old instrument that looked like a guitar walked onstage to a swell of applause. Without preamble, he began to sing and strum, in an otherworldly voice that was half-speaking and half-wailing, and soon I was lost in his story. Though he wasn’t singing in any language I knew, these were the words that I perceived.
----------------------------------------
In a far-off, green-peaked tower, there lived a prince and a princess who loved each other dearly. They spent many happy seasons together in their high solaria until one day, the princess was abducted by an evil tyrant.
The prince sought her out, but her kidnapper had covered his tracks well, and he didn’t know where to begin. He remembered then that at the uppermost reaches of his tower, there was a Sibyl who had a reputation for deep wisdom. So he journeyed there and asked her where his princess might be.
The Sibyl opened her eyes from a deep meditation. “I’m sorry, my prince,” she said. “If the princess yet lives, it is not within these walls.”
The prince was not so easily discouraged, and he crossed over to another tower to begin the ascent anew. This time, it was not an oracle but a Sculptor that he found at the top.
“Haven’t seen ‘er,” the Sculptor responded brusquely, chiseling at a marble block, for that was what he did, day in and day out, crafting ever higher and more beautiful floors for his tower.
The prince was tired from his climb, and he asked if he might rest there for a while. The Sculptor gestured to an unfinished marble slab, perhaps intended to be a bier or a coffin. So the prince lay on it and slept little, for the stone was rough and cold on his princely skin, which was indeed more accustomed to goose down and silken sheets.
In the morning, the prince found that the floor had been completed around him (the slab he’d been lying on turned out to be a bench) and went up a new staircase to find the Sculptor already hard at work on the next floor.
“If I only had your fortitude,” the prince marveled, “I should be able to find my dearest easily.”
The Sculptor took pity and lay his hand on the prince’s chest, shaping something in him. When it was done, the prince found that the very walls now lent their hardness and strength to him. He bowed and left, feeling very thankful.
In the next tower, the prince fought through floors of scorching heat to ascend to a cosmic forge, where a Smith hammered steel upon an anvil made of stars. The Smith did not know of the princess’s whereabouts, but he too had a gift for the prince. The Smith struck him once, twice, three times on the breastbone, and after the pain subsided, he found that when he breathed, the air pumped him full of vigor like a great bellows. “My utmost thanks,” said the prince, kneeling in respect.
The prince’s heart was weary as he climbed a third tower. At the top, he found a young Sender, who was impressed at his prowess and skill. But the Sender could not help him, as he was still busy climbing the tower himself. Still, he was fairly certain no one had come this way, as he gave the prince a sidelong smile and said, “I’m sorry, but your princess is in another tower.”
Many towers the prince scaled, and many blessings were bestowed on him, except that which he most desired, which was the return of his beloved. One day, as he was wandering the land-between-the-towers, almost in despair, he happened upon a small cottage. His heart leaped, for it had been constructed in the style peculiar to his almost-forgotten homeland, which is a triangular sloped roof around an open courtyard.
When he entered, he knew that it was her, somehow escaped from the tyrant’s grip. Though her dress was simple, her scent filled his mind, and the look of her filled his heart. All his senses delighted, and he moved to embrace her.
But the thousand blessings, augmentations, modifications, and enhancements, all in the service of his quest, had changed him into what appeared to her akin to a monster. She did not know him, and she screamed.
At this, the prince, scarcely knowing why, reached inside himself to seize his own heart and planted it into the earth. There was a deep rumbling, as out of the floorboards of the cottage, something grew, with all the feelings enmixed in him as the seed. The interstices trembled and shook for many hours, and when the air had stilled, the cottage, the prince, and the princess were nowhere to be seen, and in their place a new tower reached to the heavens above.
Yet that part of the world was never truly still again, for from the moment the new tower appeared, it thrummed with a beating rhythm that was both more and less than human.
And they called the new tower Eramai, for in the language of that prince’s people, the name meant He loved…