Penult (The Liminality, Part Four)

Chapter 19: Wings

Olivier brought me into an adjoining room where they had stashed a collection of war material taken from the forces of Penult. There was a cracker column, sliced open down its length, revealing an intricate network of channels and ducts. A root cannon, flared like a blunderbuss had a bulbous base fed by diverging pipes that were apparently meant to tap into the root system below, reloading in place, shaping shredded roots into whatever property they needed in a shell—density and mass, high explosiveness, toxicity. Two sets of wings—one crumpled, one intact—completed the collection.

Olivier showed me one of the wing joints, a dense agglomeration of intertwining rods and ratchets and cogs.

“This one’s the real deal. We can copy all its parts, but we can’t get the damned thing to work. Want to give it a shot?”

“Not really.”

Olivier cuffed my jaw. “Oh come on. See what you can do. If we make any progress at all then it’s all worthwhile.”

He dragged a stool over for me to sit on. The table before me was crowded with at least a dozen failed replicas of the wing mechanism.

I touched the real one. The material was waxy and slick. I twisted one the rods and the whole mechanism responded in force, throwing my hand back into my face. For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction? In this case, the reaction was opposite, but far from equal. The stuff responded to perturbations with an almost spiteful vengeance.

I tried the same with one of the replicas and it was no more springy than a rubber band.

“Gosh. This thing is like magic.”

“Which, according to Clarke, any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from.”

“Has Petros given you any clue what makes it go?”

“As if he would help us. He was begging Luther to take his life today.”

“Isn’t he already dead?”

“On Earth. Not here.”

“So where would he end up? The Deeps?”

“No. Not someone like him.”

“Then where?”

“Some other realm the likes of us will never see, most likely. Lethe. Limbo. Whatever is out there.”

“I’ll never get my head around this afterland business. Why so many places? What’s the point?”

“Don’t look at me. You’re talking about something way above my pay grade,” said Olivier. He picked up the real wing joint, taking care not to touch the business end.

“The key to fine weaving is getting a feel for the properties of roots. Their size and shape and number can be modified without limit.”

“But this isn’t like making a napkin into a leaf,” I said. “Nothing like this exists on the other side.”

“No, but it exists right here, right in front of us. We just need to find a way to grok it.”

“Grok?”

“I guess you never read Heinlein. It’s a term from the sixties, not widely used anymore but I find it appropriate in describing masterful weaving. It means to understand something inside and out, intimately and intuitively.”

“Why bother?”

“Because … Penult has the edge on us right now. We need to even things up.” He slid the salvaged wing joint over to me. “Keep this close to you. Play around with it. Get to know it. I’m hoping you’ll have better luck than me. In fact, I’m counting on it.”