Glasshouse - Charles Stross [114]
I wipe the sweat from my face and lean against the wall. “Up or down?” I ask aloud, but nobody’s answering. Down, at least there’s another level with air. Up, and . . . well, there might be nothing. Or there might be a whole damn orbital habitat that the bad guys don’t know about. I could step out into a city boulevard in Old Paradys, or the back of a brasserie in Zhang Li. If I get lucky. If I’m not just imagining those places.
I stow the big flashlight in my belt loop and head back toward the ladder. If I don’t get somewhere in another thousand rungs, I’m going to have to rethink my escape plan. Two thousand rungs total will be nearly half a kilometer. If I’d realized I was in for something like this, I would have bought climbing equipment, a winch, even a rope I could sling around myself so I could rest on the ladder. I fantasize briefly about rocket packs and elevator cars. Then I grab the next rung and begin to climb again.
Another nine hundred rungs up the ladder I become half-certain that I’m going to die. My arms are screaming at me, and my left thigh has started threatening to cramp. I pause for breath, my heart hammering. It’s like being on the cliff again. This hab has got to be kilometers in radius—the gravity here feels about the same as it did when I started out. I’m in a tube with Urth-standard gee, air: terminal velocity will be about eighty meters per second. If I were to let go, the Coriolis force would rub me against the ladder like a cheese grater at two hundred kilometers per hour, leaving a greasy red smear. I can keep climbing, sure, but how easy is it going to be to climb back down if I keep going up until I’m exhausted? Thinking about it, I’m not sure going down is any better than going up. Less lifting, but still flexing a left elbow that feels about twice the size it should be, hot and throbbing as I raise it—
There’s another platform ahead. Twenty rungs up. Roughly four hundred meters from the bottom. “What?” I’m talking to myself—that’s not good news. I raise my right hand. Yes, it’s a platform.
The next thing I know, I’m sitting on the platform, my legs dangling over the abyss, and I have no clear recollection of how I got here. I must have had another fugue moment. I shudder, my blood running cold at the realization.
I look round. This platform is just like the last one, right down to the door with the handwheel set in it two meters up the tunnel. Which means either I’m shit out of luck, or—well, I can try the door, at least. If it doesn’t work, I can rest up. Then it’s either up or down, heads or tails. I really don’t think I can make another climb until my abused muscles have had some time to recover, and I didn’t bring water or food. So I guess it’s down, and down and down and back into the depths of Yourdon’s little totalitarian fantasy.
Unless I let go of the ladder.
Or the door opens.
I take a kilosecond to rest up before I approach the door. When I spin the wheel one-handed, it smoothly winds up momentum, then there’s a sigh of long-seated gaskets as it pulls away from the frame and swings out to one side. I look through the opening and see a universe that doesn’t make any kind of sense to my eyes.
The floor in front of the doorway is flat, slightly rough, with a grayish stippled regularity typical of a high-grip paving system. The segments are Penrose tiles, presumably laid out by a walking assembler that crawled across the inner surface of this gigantic cylindrical space, never recrossing its own path as it vomited out the floor. Above my head there’s a grayish ceiling that curves in the far distance to meet the upturned bowl of the horizon. Fine needles of diamond stab from the floor to the roof, holding heaven and earth apart. The door I’ve just stepped out of is set in the base of one of the needles—they’re huge, and they’re a long way apart.
This is probably an interdeck, an interstitial