“Yes,” said Tench.
“I know you will succeed. In the meantime, Banda-pylx will inform me in the unlikely case that aught should befall your family. My entire brood will fly, hop and scuttle to their defense!”
Tench smiled and laid a hand on Bandalonon’s lower shoulder. “Bandalonon, you are one of a kind.”
Bandalonon flicked an antenna dismissively. “That is the nature of my species. Fare you well!”
Tench climbed back into the daylight, with Banda-sarg bounding after him.
* * *
Tench spent much of the rest of the day wearing the helm, working through familiar glyphs until they fairly flew from his mind, and putting the finishing touches on a few innovations. He had no certain idea of what to expect in the Verch, now that the solidifying presence of the Entity’s mighty intellect had vanished. Tench guessed that Tenbor’s shallows would be mildly troubled, reverberating from the implosion of the Entity’s departure.
It was even possible that the Entity still lurked in the shallows, that it had decided for some incomprehensible reason to shut Tenbor down of its own accord. But Tench could not conceive of a motivation for such an action. It was far more likely that he would have to follow the Entity into the depths, where logic and reality became increasingly negotiable.
He had relished these spaces, long ago. Now the thought of going back almost unmanned him, and fanned the whispers into distant howls.
When sweat and exhaustion threatened to overwhelm him, he allowed the importunate Byx to pry the helm off of his head, after which she replaced its stifling visor with her tiny hands and cried, “Guess who!”
“Hmm. Artung?”
“No.”
“Bandalonon?”
“No.”
“Administrative Unit 78-D-4006-Omicron?”
“No! It’s me, Daddy!”
“You! Well then come here, you!”
Tench turned around and caught Byx up in his arms, tickling her as she squealed and squirmed. Merinel, laughing, arrived in response to her daughter’s pleas for help, and once order was restored the trio sat down to a dinner of steamed vegetables and sheet-grown quail. After dinner, Byx yawned mightily, and her chair reclined in response to her biorhythms. As she fell asleep, Tench twined a lock of Merinel’s hair about his finger.
“I don’t mean to sound fatalistic,” he said, “but before I leave, there’s one more biological pursuit I want to engage in.”
They tiptoed away, instructing the house to warn them immediately if Byx awakened.
* * *
Tench avoided getting up when he first woke, allowing himself to drift back into light slumber. When he woke again, he turned over and feigned sleep for another ten minutes. When the sun broke over the rim of the Dish, he finally rose, scowling darkly.
Merinel yawned, and the bed propped her up, allowing her to observe her husband as he leaned forward against the window, staring down the slope of the Dish towards the distant antenna. “You need to calm down,” she told him.
“It’s not a calming errand.”
“In that case, you need to be wound up for the right reasons, and right now you’re not.”
“Is that a fact?”
“Uh-huh.” She got up and began rummaging through the armoire, picking out the traveling clothes he had worn upon his return from Mecantrion, which were rugged and durable and woven of reactive fibers which would conform to his fifteen-years-later physique. “You’re not worried about what’s in the Verch, you’re worried about what’s in your head.”
“I’m worried that they might become the same thing.”
“That won’t happen. You’re not the same man you were then.”
“No, I’ve gone soft.”
Merinel turned and pinned him with a glare. “You may not have noticed this,” she told him, “but I have been observing you closely for perhaps twenty years, the last fifteen from the vantage of your bed, and I know what you are and are not capable of. I know you better than you know yourself -- which isn’t hard -- and when I tell you that you are in perfect mental health, barring hypochondria, you can stake your life on it.”
“I am staking my life on it!” snapped Tench.
Merinel came over to him and framed his face in her hands. “Wrong choice of words,” she murmured. “But you need to trust me -- again -- when I tell you it’s going to be all right. And it is.”
Tench held her close for a long moment, not saying anything, doing his best not to think of anything.
“When do you need to go?” she asked.
“Right now.”
He went into Byx’s room, stepping gingerly around the minefield of stuffed animals and gamepieces which had been instructed not to clean themselves up, in order to promote tidiness in their young owner. Byx was sound asleep, and Tench kissed her as softly as he could. Even so, her eyelids fluttered open.
“Are you leaving, Daddy?”
“Yes, I am.”
“OK. Hurry back.” She was asleep again before he could promise to do so.
* * *
Tench collected Banda-sarg, who had chosen to sleep on the roof, and rode a barge down the nearest river to the antenna base. They made their way through the city as quickly as they could, with the assistance of a relatively sane bot who led them through the labyrinth of semi-functional elevators. When they had reached his spar, Tench took in the view for a few minutes, and then turned his attention skywards. At this level, the antenna was still girdled by a dense support structure, but he knew that the catwalks and ladders and mesh platforms would grow sparse as he ascended. He had no definite idea how low he might expect to find the Iron Goats.
Tench and his insect companion climbed for the better part of an hour, spending half of that time staring upwards, trying to puzzle out a route that would not end in a vertical blind alley. Banda-sarg proved adept at outpacing Tench with prodigious bounds and directing him to fruitful paths by rattling her empty wing-cases, but as the sun approached its zenith, they found themselves atop a small platform with no obvious way forward. Tench stared in dismay at the increasingly fragmented structure of struts and catwalks, wondering if there was any route that led all the way to the summit, when Banda-sarg let out a startling hiss.
Tench spun about to see what had upset Banda-sarg. Behind him was a young man dangling upside down in mid-air, suspended by a silver cable wound about one athletic forearm. The other end of the cable, Tench saw, was coiled about a support beam some fifty feet above them.
“Why do you climb?” the man asked. “If you wish to become an Iron Goat, you are wiser than your fellow soil-grubs, who seem wedded to the hull, but I must warn you that the life is hard for one not born to it. I was only five when the Entity led us out of the ship’s belly, so I am well used to flinging myself from spar to spar, but many of the older ones among us have difficulty with such feats, and swing gently from one platform to the next, like the pendulum of a clock.”
“I’m not here to become an Iron Goat.”
“Then why are you here? Below, there are the pallid comforts of the soil. Above, there are the wild joys of the heights. But where you are, there is nothing.”
Tench tried to read the man’s expression, but the upside-down visage suspended in mid-air made him reel with vertigo. He decided that he was too disoriented to lie. “I need to reach the tower’s summit to enter the Verch, and restore the Entity,” he said. “I am Tench.”
“You are not Tench,” the man replied.
Tench had planned for a variety of responses, but this came as a surprise. “I am none other,” he replied.
“You are not impressive enough to be Tench.”
Tench paused to digest this. “That may be true,” he admitted, “but I am Tench, all the same.”
“If you are Tench,” the man said, “then what is the significance of my hair?”
The man swiveled around on his cable so that he
was hanging right side up, and Tench saw that a pattern of lines had been shaven into his short brown hair, radiating backwards from a point on his brow. Tench closed his eyes and uttered a mnemonic chant, sending his mind back across the years to the momentous day when he puzzled and fought his way through the Verch to the space inhabited by the Entity that would later become the Tenbor Entity, and encountered members of the band of Humans which the Entity had been watching over, deep within the bowels of the ship. Facts about their lives came floating up out of the depths of his memory.
He opened his eyes and regarded the young man. “The lines in your hair represent the rays of the Sun,” he said, “which was known to your people only as a legend, until the Entity led you here to the surface.”
The man’s eyes widened, and the cable -- seemingly of its own accord -- swung him backwards in a great arc, and then forwards, releasing its grip on the beam high above. The man hurtled through the air, somersaulting twice, and landed on the platform not more than two feet from Tench, who scrambled backwards until he felt the platform’s rail against his back. Banda-sarg sidled unobtrusively between them, but the Iron Goat took no notice.
The man looked into Tench’s left eye, and then into his right. “By the stars!” he cried. “You are Tench!”
“This is what I’ve been telling you.”
“But why are you here? Do you not live in a fine palace at the antenna’s base, with a different beautiful handmaiden for every day of the year?”
“Not exactly, no. In any case, I am here to restore the Entity.”
“So you said,” the man acknowledged. “I had forgotten, being distracted by the discovery of your true identity.”
“‘Discovery?’ It was the first word out of my mouth!”
“And I, in turn, am Adimar,” the young man replied. “Come with me, and I will take you to the Mooting Platform, and thence to the summit.”
“Much obliged,” replied Tench uncertainly. “How precisely do you propose to deliver me there?”
By way of reply, Adimar caused his cable to coil snugly about Tench’s torso. Banda-sarg looked at Tench quizzically, and though he was tempted to order her to attack, he shook his head negatively and tried to calm his stomach.
* * *
The first leap was not as bad as Tench feared. The cable provided a comforting harness, being yielding and warm to the touch despite its metallic appearance. Tench was enveloped in one end of the cable, which proceeded to coil around Adimar’s forearm, leaving perhaps forty feet free for locomotion. Adimar began their journey by swinging them gently to a nearby strut, and by clenching his eyes shut and repeating a soothing chant designed to quell nausea, Tench was able to remain relatively calm. When Adimar proceeded by lashing his cable-tip about a support element directly above them, and drawing them slowly upwards, Tench began to feel that he could withstand, and possibly even enjoy, this unique mode of travel.
His equanimity was shattered when Adimar sent the cable-tip darting towards a terrifyingly thin free-hanging beam and launched into the air with Tench in tow. The beam squealed and sank alarmingly under their weight, as the cable swung them forward and upward with far more momentum than could be accounted for by Adimar’s jump. At the peak of their swing, the cable-tip released its grip, and they went sailing through empty space. They reached the zenith of their trajectory and traveled well past it, and just as their gentle fall was about to become a plummet, the cable shot over their heads and punched a hole in the mesh floor of a platform, forming a knot at the tip once it was through. They dangled for a moment in this fashion as Adimar considered his next move. Tench, in the meantime, stared upwards in terror at the mesh, which was sinking under the knot and would soon give way.
When the knot had slipped halfway through the mesh, the cable began swinging them in a rapid circle, and after they had built up a sickening amount of momentum, it unknotted itself and withdrew from the mesh in the space of an instant, leaving them to hurtle horizontally. In mid-flight, Adimar arrested their progress by lashing the cable around a pillar to their left, and they swung about precipitously, alighting on a maintenance platform which girdled the pillar.
Tench leaned over the platform railing and violently emptied his stomach.
“Come, come!” chided Adimar. “That was easy! If you cannot bear that, how will you withstand the series of spiraling vaults necessary to cross from the Black-and-Yellow Spar to the Six Ledge Gangway?”
Tench stumbled to the floor, causing Banda-sarg to leap nimbly from his shoulder. “Bite me,” he gasped. Banda-sarg’s mandibles closed gently on his neck, and he sank into blessed oblivion.
* * *
Tench was dreaming of a symphony of keening woodwinds when the muffled, irregular thump of the accompanying tympani grew steadily louder, finally resulting in wakefulness. He peered up in puzzlement at the three blurry faces that hovered over him.
The first face was apparently that of a woman, for its voice was high and delicate, yet steady: “Is he awake?”
“He blinks in the sun like a drunkard,” opined the second face -- a man’s voice, scornful and dismissive.
“He will be himself again in a moment -- I think,” replied the third face, who was none other than Adimar. “Tench? Are you well?”
“I’m all right,” whispered Tench, as the three faces swam into focus. To Adimar’s left stood a gaunt man, not yet fifty, his foreboding face framed in a black-and-red striped beard. To Adimar’s right stood a young woman who could hardly have been older than Adimar himself. Her face was as delicate as her voice, and she was so slight of frame that she looked as though a strong wind might whisk her away. Tench blinked twice in an effort to clear his vision before he realized that she bore a set of heavy geometric scars on each fragile cheekbone.
“He seems quite addled,” noted the bearded man in disapproval, curling his bare upper lip. “I wonder if he is quite right in the head.”
The woman ignored him and knelt down to help Tench as he tried to sit up. “I am Sthenna,” she said.
“I’m Tench,” he replied. “It’s all right, I can manage.” He sat cross-legged and breathed deeply as the last of the fog cleared from his mind. Banda-sarg, who was nearby, approached contritely and offered him a bite of trophic egg; the disgusting smell served to rouse him further. He stood.
Adimar and the others, he noted, were wearing their cables in a peculiar fashion: twined about the right arm, the torso, and the left leg. As he took in his surroundings, he saw that this was because they were standing on a platform so commodious as the render the cables unnecessary – at least two hundred feet in diameter, it centered around the antenna, which had grown much thinner with altitude. Tench realized that the woodwinds in his dream orchestra had been nothing more than the moaning sound of the wind blowing across the mesh of the platform, and that the drums were the soft thuds of the Iron Goats who were landing on the platform in increasing numbers. There were already more than a hundred of them, milling about curiously with their cables coiled about arm, torso, and opposite leg, craning their necks to get a look at Tench. A young mother landed not more than ten feet from him, carrying her infant much as Adimar had carried Tench. Upon landing, she placed her baby on the ground, to let it take advantage of a rare opportunity to crawl freely. The infant, Tench saw, had a miniature cable, which slithered after it obediently, keeping a protective grip on one ankle.
“Adimar tells us you are here to restore the Entity to Tenbor,” Sthenna said. “You can rely on our support.”
“You speak out of turn, Sthenna,” declaimed the bearded man, raising his voice so that all could hear. “A man appears from below, suffering from the effects of a bizarre drug, and tells us he is Tench: suddenly you are ready to escort him wherever he desires to go. Is this wise? Suppose he is a spy from the soil-grubs, who wish to rid themselves of us now that their food supply is limited?”
“There is an easy way t
o prove his identity, Oteric, if you would stop your mouth for a moment and think,” replied Sthenna, her voice ringing out with surprising strength. “When Tench first encountered the Entity, many years ago, four of our number were present in our Verchspace. I call upon Tench to name them.”
Tench closed his eyes and repeated his mnemonic chant, drawing himself down through the layers of memory, to the moment when he finally stumbled upon the enigmatic presence he had been tracking for two days. The Entity had dwelt in an area of the Verch which it had stabilized and made secure. When Tench had puzzled his way into that sanctuary, he was stunned to find four other Humans, members of the little tribe which was the reason for the Entity’s seclusion.
He opened his eyes. “When I first entered your space,” he recounted, “I was greeted by Nalima, Ved, Ordo, and Rhen.”
Four Iron Goats, all Tench’s age or older, stepped forward from the crowd. “He speaks the truth,” said one -- after a moment, Tench recognized him as Ved. “We were all there. It is not the sort of thing you forget.”
“This may be common knowledge among the grubs, for all we know,” Oteric pointed out.
“It is Tench,” replied another of the four -- it was Rhen, her golden hair now silvered with age. “I recognize him.” The others nodded their assent.
Oteric sniffed. “A man may appear as he likes within the Verch.”
“Are you proposing,” Sthenna asked, “That the original Tench chose to abandon his own appearance to take that of another, so that this other man could visit us fifteen years later as an imposter? Oteric, I think you have been watching too much tee-vee.”
This ancient reference to immature entertainment sent a chuckle rippling through the crowd, causing Oteric to flush. “Suppose he is Tench, then,” he snapped. “Are we to offer ourselves up as his lackeys? When last he visited us, it was to uproot us from the lives we knew, to face a long and difficult journey to this place, where we live on scraps. Perhaps he has developed a taste for bidding us away from our homes, and has come to do it again. Where shall we travel next, O Tench? To one of the ship’s great midden-vats? Or perhaps you would have us depart the ship altogether, to live like animals in the wilderness?”