Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes Read Free Page B

between it and the earth’s rim. “The palace of some celestial emperor,” I whispered, repeating the words of the tablet, “or an abode of blessed spirits, tethered to the sun’s setting.”
    My mind conjured up visions of vast cities teeming with men who had no thought of the dead realm of Arras swept eternally by the Pillar’s black shadow. The irruption into the settled scheme of things was too much to take in at first. I went out and sat on a sun-warmed rock.
    The desert floor fell away in every direction. I was pinned to a ball rolled by abstract scarabs. The single-eyed spirits of flame pressed down on me from their black thrones. Low down in the east, Saant burned like a flickering red candle.
    Later I went in and looked again. The stars had wheeled, but the oval was there. I watched it for a long time. I didn’t know what it was, empyrean palace or translunary garden. But I swore to myself that I would ascend its ladder, storm its gates, and wrest from it the medicine of immortality. Man’s lot was death, they said, but Sheol would never have me, nor its gates stand against Sephaura.
    I kept thinking of the distance. The great dragonfly came to my mind, and the driver that lay in my workyard, and my resins.
    I returned to my dome in the morning. Three days later I had my odonatopter.
    I went soaring over the desert, suspended from a flexing skeleton, driving the blurred wings with my arms. The leap from the Pillar’s crown had proved it.

4 Soaring

    The creeping death lay in a band that stretched from east to west across the constellation of wells, seeping slowly beneath the desert. But the springs to southward were still like emeralds strewn over the flats. I followed them to keep my water replenished.
    It brought terror to my heart to soar as I did, higher than any living creature I kenned. A snapped ferule, a stopped cog would mean my swift descent and death. But more than this I exalted to see the earth spread like a map below me, to feel the freedom of the air. It was an exultation shot through with fear, for high spirits go before a fall. Though I longed to spiral up toward the sun itself, I knew that this would be to leave the path of wisdom, and held to my level course.
    I regained the canyon two days after setting out, upstream from where I’d left it the first time. It was broad and deep, with red-black walls and flat-topped fins. The fossil city of Urgit climbed up terraces on either side. The ribbed stone riverbed held pools of clear water. There had been no wells that morning, so I spiraled down to where it trickled from trough to trough before disappearing beneath a bed of shoals to the south, and there filled my skins.
    Now I needed a place to launch my flier. A big dome with a cupola beyond the eastern bank looked to afford an easy ascent. I took the machine apart and carried it up the ruined bridge and through the gate.
    A great plaza with a dry fountain lay just inside, surrounded by buildings like giant stone blocks. Streets ran away from it in every direction. I set my craft down on the pavement and went to explore the widest way.
    It was a dark and winding defile of carved stone, with shadow-hung doorways opening on either side like square caves, and paintings of hoplites in formation and cataphracts on clawed schyrothim. The acrid odor of maugreth dens tainted the air.
    The street emerged upon a terrace at the base of the cliffs, where a fissure in the side of the canyon was fronted with a pillared portico. I went up the steps and entered the old darkness.
    The nave within was a huge crack with rough natural walls that met overhead in a series of pointed arches. The floor had been filled in and leveled. A dais with a stone altar occupied the inner end, beyond which a wall reached from one side of the crevice to the other. High in the partition were images of the sun and the moon, golden and white. A hole gaped between them like a giant, empty niche, giving upon the eternal night of