Filaria - Brent Hayward [41]
Yet he also had within him the capacity to lose his lucidity, his confidence. He could not allow himself to become maudlin; a positive mood, if he were not careful, would quickly deflate. No looking down, he told himself. No looking down. No regrets.
Pendulous in the updrafts, Mereziah planted both bare feet flat against the curved wall of the shaft and pushed off, rising and twisting, pulled by the madman’s pod as it nudged ever upwards. The track they rode was true and very long. Casting a russet glow, the device overhead gave off more than enough light for Mereziah to distinguish his surroundings, and he came to accept a somewhat disconcerting fact: despite his fancies and anticipation, there was little difference between where he had worked his life away and these new, higher areas of the shaft. Nor did they show any promise of change. Retired pods embedded deep in the curved walls. Dusty mesh strung between glistening tracks. Loops and untold lengths of entwined tubes. Endless tubes. Hundreds of sizes, gurgling and trickling and burping quietly, up and down the great shaft. Everything dusty and grey. Just like back home.
And there came flashes of light from the wall, too, maybe a little stronger than those he was used to, almost as bright, it seemed, as the light that falls regularly on level grounds — though not in the dingy grotto where his father had built their family’s cabin.
Within the pod the passenger screamed, perhaps suddenly horrified by wandering thoughts of his own, triggered by the intermittent glare. Mereziah heard those dirty feet shuffling about, a few meters above his head. The passenger shouted twice more.
That light flashed again.
Was it unusually bright? Different microfauna in the walls here? Any indication, Mereziah wondered, of change at last?
The only incident truly out of the ordinary in those first few hours was when he caught a quick glimpse of another lift attendant, watching in shock from the gloom, lean face agog over the transgression that rose up from the black depths like the coming of some prophet from places where the dead fell. Mereziah was unable to contain his grin as he gave this comrade — whom he would never meet but with whom, no doubt, he had so much in common — a tentative little wave; the other attendant, after a moment, staring up in utter disbelief, returned the wave uncertainly.
And once a brood of young sloths, coming arm over arm up the adjacent webbing, paused to bat at Mereziah’s form with outsized claws, but these creatures were remotely interested in him, and only for a short while, before they too melted into the shadows.
So Mereziah had lots of time, as usual, to dwell on the uneventful years of his long life. Perhaps not exactly a life wasted, but an overly courteous and restrained one, obedient, a life of service. Undermined, mostly, by a bitterness that had flowed, until today, deep under his proper-yet-seething skin. He thought about his brother, more like himself than he could ever fully admit; about his dead parents, at whom, when they were alive, he’d often rolled his eyes. He had considered them to be archaic, out of touch, but could never tell them, now they were dust, how sorry he was for that, how wise he truly saw them now, with age and the few small wisdoms with which his drab life had graced him.
Components of his experiences seemed to break down, sorting into hard facts, like a series of crystals, as if they could be arranged, made sense of, as if they could be held, easy to view, hold, and look at from different angles.
How often did Mereziah stare upwards that afternoon, squinting past the moving pod, convincing himself that not only were distant glimmers signs of life from above but that they were getting closer?
At one point, dozing, he imagined he was an infant again, about to suckle an oozing drop from his mother’s swollen teat as she