6. Pavlyk cannot stop shaking. There is a humming buzz in the rearward distance: the rear-mounted propeller at labor against the wind currents in half-conflict with the course Iako has determined that they must take. The world, beyond the forward windows and flanking portholes is gray and featureless—exactly as Pavlyk has imagined the lower reaches of the sky would come to him. It would all be an anticlimax, were it not for the single gunshot and blood left on the hangar floor. Éáś, dead in service of Mēdē's bleak manipulations, has tainted this moment of slow ascent with an existential ichor like sweat drawn to flesh from dubious labors. Pavlyk hasn't figured on the zag of nervous energy burning through his hands and up/down the course of his spine, or the sight-echo of Éáś, dead and crumpled on the hangar floor, his eyes open and drooled spittle puddled on the stone floor beneath his slack, half-open mouth. Iako sits at the pilot controls, eyes ahead, jaw set as if his teeth are clenched with enough pressure to shatter. He's scarcely spoken. Feeling the urgency buried in Mēdē's last words—Pavlyk thinks—he has simply checked idiot lights and gages, and brought all he has to bear on his rogue-pilot's task. He has scarcely spoken, though there is—as Pavlyk sees it—a tumultuous storm of things to say, brimming in his eyes and knotting—as Pavlyk presumes—in his throat. Now, Pavlyk glances at his wrist chronometer. It has been an hour since lift-off, an hour since he vomited, twice, in the lav, and accepted tepid water from the drink-flask Iako offered. One hour... Time, he thinks, passes so slowly in this cloud-obscured layer of sky. There is turbulence below, and at least one balloon, ready to drift upward in hurried, deadly pursuit. Ready, if not already airborne and—hopefully—heading south as Mēdē said it would. Mēdē's black device is little more than a passive data transfer slate. She's loaded coordinates into its memory. Iako has transferred them into the navigational computer, and now, the balloon drifts along the suggested course. It is fortunate that the winds help, that the stream they've entered blows—though only grudgingly—on an easterly course. Iako has to make adjustments to compensate for an oblique, northward drift. “How much did you know?” Pavlyk asks, after a long, long time. It is as if a disconnected part of him speaks, while the dumb-animal portion of his mind, occupies itself with watching droplets of condensation smearing upward and across the forward window. “Not much,” Iako says, keeping his focus stubbornly ahead. “I knew that Mēdē saw me as a professional challenge and that she had some trick up her sleeve. What particular trick, I didn't know. It occurred to me that she'd probably try to use you somehow. I'd expected something long before today, and I was stupid to think that she's have less patience than I'd credited.” And she had something—someone—to use. Éáś “The gun,” Pavlyk says. “Was there ever a possibility that it could be for me?” “No,” Iako says. There is a note in his voice like a wounded animal. “No,” he repeats. “Even if there'd been reason to use it, I wouldn't have. I...—” he breaks off as if the intended words are too unbearable. When he resumes, it's as if he's shifted the line of this thoughts. “No matter what, I could never fire it at you.” “But if Mēdē was using me to get to you?” “I'd have found out, and I would have disappeared.” “Just like that?” Iako shifts in the pilot's seat and faces Pavlyk full-on. “No,” he says softly—almost in a whisper. “It's easier said than done, and if it came to that, I'd leave alone rather than shoot you, but both would have hurt, both would have marked me more painfully than anything ever could.” He draws a deep breath and presses back in the seat. “I'm in love with you. Leaving you and shooting you would have been equally unbearable for me.” He stops, abruptly, letting the words hang in the propeller buzz and deck-carried vibrations. Storms rage in the obsidian depths of his eyes, but he keeps his focus ahead, as if sparing Pavlyk of his raging, internal tumult. Iako's words...the gun and its horrible weight...the expression of silent anguish on his face: these are the elements of Pavlyk's world, right now. The promise of clear sky, and a glimpse of sunlight is nothing. There is the weight, as well, of seeing Éáś, crumpled and lifeless on the hangar floor. That wasn't supposed to happen, and from Iako's voice (more than his words) it's clear that he hadn't seen the possibility of an innocent fatality. He'd seen other—perhaps darker—things, but not that. “Please,” Iako says. “Unload the gun.” He reaches onto the flight-control console, grasps the gun deftly, and with disturbing familiarity. He flips it—all too casually—in his grasp and extends it to Pavlyk. There is howling need in that simple request, a horrible necessity in the way he surrenders possession of it. Pavlyk feels sudden salt on his cheeks as his hands—of their own accord and not his conscious desire—cradle the weapon like some incongruously valuable thing. It is heavy in his grasp. He doesn't know what to do with it. “Please,” Iako says again. Quietly. And though the rolling baritone note in his voice is infinitely familiar, there is a plaintive, alien note embedded in that single word. He faces Pavlyk now. The dark, nut-brown cast of his features lie masked with an expression Pavlyk has never seen before. It is the look of complete, and relentless defeat. “The release is there...on the butt. Point down and flip the toggle.” His thumb finds the ammunition cartridge release. There is some resistance as he pushes it—first left, and then to the right. There is a snap, a mild, concussive thump that speaks of tension released from some internal mechanism. The cartridge of bullets is ejected, though it remains in the well of the gun's grip. The monster in his grasp maintains its deadly potential, but there is no tension in it now. He flicks his wrist, allowing the gun to surrender it's danger to gravity. The cartridge clatters on the deck with a rattling thump, and in less than a beat of his heart, he drops the gun itself, kicking it out of sight, though his awareness of its presence will not vanish for as long as it remains in the balloon cabin with him. Beneath the co-pilot's seat, it lies in wait, like some venomous animal, ready to bite the flesh of a carelessly bare foot. “That was the only thing I ever hid from you, Pavlyk...and it was too much. I'm sorry.” Pavlyk closes his eyes and draws a deep, shuddering breath. “It's okay,” he says, surprised at the firmness in his voice. “It's okay,” he repeats, thankful—now—for the clasp of Iako's fingers around the trembling pallor of his hand. He closes his fingers around Iako's and pulls him close, almost laughing at the ease with which Iako moves into the awkward but clenching embrace offered. There is hunger in the kiss that follows, and a release of tensions built on the hangar floor. * * * * * Though the two-hour mark has passed, Pavlyk is calm. Iako has set the autopilot, and though he remains seated in the number-one seat, he has allowed himself a few moments of rest. There is still a line of tension across his shoulders, and he keeps an eye on the guages, on the radar screen between the pilot-station seats. He makes minor adjustments, once...and then again, and spends long moments staring out of the forward and port-side windows. There is nothing in the air with them, nothing this far up and within range of the balloon's senses. They are alone. If there are pursuers—as Mēdē said there would be—then they are (hopefully) heading elsewhere, and still below the cloud deck. There is light in the cabin, a flood of intensity that Pavlyk realizes he could never have prepared himself for. Sunlight. If he twists in his seat and takes a steady glance to the right, he may see the eye-searing intensity of the world's mother star. His blood courses loudly through his ears and his hands are cold. He is confronted by a beauty he knows he could never have prepared himself to see. The sun. over there and rearward, is too much. He dares not look at it. Dense, lumpy clouds have shaped a strange play at landscape below. He imagines mountains sculpted in their impenetrable fluff, and is struck dumb by the sheer, unbroken mass of condensation rolling so placidly and silently down there. As Pavlyk glances out of the starboard side windows, he thinks that the clouds below, are like some restive and gargantuan amoeba. In the vast, vast distance, the cloud deck swells upward, and where Pavlyk sees the clumped, irregular domes—markers of the immense cloud-factories below. City runs hundreds of such factories, scattered across the face of its continent. Each factory is fed by underground canals and networks of thick, indestructible pipe. Water is fed to each and every of the monster structures, and that water is sublimated and forced upward through enormous chimney funnels. Here...so high up...things are different. The uppermost reach of sky is terrifying in it's unperturbed nature and so much more vast than any Elder's or warden's sky-cloaking ambitions. Though Pavlyk has seen these shades of blue before, he's never imagined the immensity that such colors might convey. He has never imagined them in such vertiginous clarity. There is a knot in this throat and he feels it as his heart, dislodged. Though the cabin is cold and stinks of recycled air, sweat beads of his forehead and leaves crescents at his armpits. He sweats, like some crass animal meant for meat-harvest, but the moisture and the salts yielded by his flesh stink of fear. Though the deck beneath his feet is solid—enough so to support an abandoned gun and its ejected load of bullets—there is little substance below him. The sky! He is here. Few have been to this place. There are scant fogs at this altitude. What wisps hang in the upper heights are more like gossamer whiffs of smoke from a devout religionist's sacred incense, but these tattered mists are insubstantial and only half-visible: nothing like the sultry fogs and clots of suspended condensation below. The world is terrifying and rarefied here, and Pavlyk feels something of himself, lost and cast woefully adrift. Most striking, however, are the looming crescents...one large and the other small. With so much sky in which to roam, one trails the other...so closely! For an instant, he thinks of a mother and her child. But the things he sees are remote and immortal, and oh-so-inhuman for that. The moons. They are terrifying immensities, unseen except for now. Of course he has always known of the moons. Every school-child is expected to learn at least some of what lies outside, and because oceans, like humans, exist only below the clouds, children are taught about tides and the gravitational dynamics that govern their rise and their fall. The moons are white and mottled, so improbable in their existence that Pavlyk thinks an illusion has filmed his eyes like the scum of oil at float in a factory-floor puddle. But no, the moons are real. They are there at some incomprehensible distance from the world, and yet so clearly defined. Low, just above the crests of the more massive clumps of cloud, the sky is a pale, pale blue. Up high, near the moons, the air darkens to indigo, to a shade of light-swallowing violet, and to black. There are tiny spots of light—at least half a dozen of them. Stars! Evil things, any Elder might say. The Books of Reason all show is that they are nothing but baubles strung in the weighty slave-necklaces of human arrogance. They tell us that we can walk among the gods, that we can be gods...but this is a lie, and you have only to stare at the lie of starlight to see this. Stars! There are definitions of such in any school-child's books, but as with the moons, no one has ever seen them. The stars. More often than not, they dwell in the City-human mind alongside demons, wraiths, and monstrosities of hell, and so few even wonder what they look like.. They are a bad thing, and the clouds—as the Elders always say—are all that protect innocence from the gleaming corruptions that turn men into monsters. It is impossible—now—for Pavlyk to imagine that some of them are suns around which other worlds circle. But the idea, even as he leaves it wordless and inarticulate, strikes him. It is a hard thought to grasp: other worlds, like this one in some small way, but with fewer clouds, or perhaps with more. If there are such worlds—and Pavlyk has no reason to doubt their exsitance—then there must be places for those like Iako, and like himself, by association. “It was like this on the day that you were born?” The question, as he speaks it, is the need to hear Iako's voice. Iako shrugs. “Not exactly. My mother says that there was only the lighter blue. Neither of the moons. No stars.” “And this is what the Elders hide from us, what the wardens would punish us for seeing, if we ever went back.” Iako nods. He smiles. “But we're not going back,” he says. “Never.” Pavlyk hears the solid note of promise in Iako's voice. City-logic confirms this. He has been touched—now—by the corruptions of clear sky, and upon his return, he'll be purged of such a compromise. He'll go to the wards, where they will strip the damagedsynapses from his brain. They'll look into other regions of his brain, and see his affections in the meat of his hypothalamus. They'll correct those too, turning him into someone else, someone who doesn't love Iako, turning him into an obedient halfling at best. He cannot allow this. He will not. There is a gun beneath his seat. There are bullets. He'll put one in his brain before allowing an Elder-employed doctor to take Iako from him. The thought is startling and disquieting: more so than Éáś, dead on a hangar floor. No longer will he visit some cantina on a well-advertised night. He won't weld T-junctions on a factory line...but neither will Pavlyk. City is a place marred—now—by death. But that is behind him. Below him now. The propeller hums behind the balloon's crew cabin, consuming fuel to keep on course, and as Pavlyk takes in the sound, he reaches across the radar screen and the bank of telltales and toggles, to find Iako's fingers with his own. Neither of them speaks. Even if there is a need, there is also time. Later. Beyond the subterranean confines of the City. Later... ...when they land: wherever that will be. THE END *** And so we come to the close of The Stolen Sky. Hopefully you've enjoyed this glimpse into Pavlyk's life and the head-space that I've been living in while enjoying (and enduring) an extended stay in the town of Česky Krumlov. Hopefully you've enjoyed this, and as always, thank you for reading and commenting, and hopefully you've enjoyed this. As a side note, Pavlyk and Iako *Might* make a return some day...but I suspect that depends on how much of their tale they want written...I'll have a nice, long talk with them, once things settle. :-)