The New Weird - Ann VanderMeer [137]
We fell for so long we reached a steady speed. I half-closed my eyes, trying to see what sort of land was below us. I could barely distinguish between the ground and the scarcely-fainter sky. There were miniscule stars and, low against the far horizon, two sallow moons glossed the tilting flat mountaintops of a mesa landscape with a pallid light.
The ends of the scarf swept in front of my face as they searched the ground. "I'll lower you."
It shot out a thick tentacle towards the table-topped mountain. The tentacle dived faster than we were falling, worms unspooling from us and adding to it. It reached the crunchy rubble and anchored there. We slowed; the wind ceased. It began lowering us smoothly, millions of individual worms drawing over each other and taking the strain. They coiled in a pile on the ground. We came to the ground gently on top of them and toppled over in a heap.
The Vermiform uncoiled and stood us on the very edge of an escarpment that fell away sheer below us to a level lake. Other plateaux cut the clear night sky. In places, their edges had eroded and slipped down into stepped, crumbling cliffs. Deep gorges carved dry and lifeless valleys between them. They gave onto a vast plain cracked across with sheer-sided canyons. The bottom of each, if they had floors at all, were as far below the surface as we were above it.
A series of lakes were so still, without any ripples, they looked heavy and ominous, somehow fake. It was difficult to believe they were water at all, but the stars reflected in their murky depths. The landscape looked as if it was nothing but a thin black sheet punched out with hollow-sided mountains, with great rents torn in it, through which I was looking to starry space beneath. There were no plants, no buildings; the grit lay evenly untouched by any wind.
The Vermiform threw out expansive tendrils. "How do you like our own world?"
"Is this the Somatopolis?" I said. "It's empty."
"It is long dead. We were the Somatopolis, when we lived here. Once our flesh city was the whole world. We covered it up to twice the height of these mountains. We filled those chasms. Now it's bare. We are all that is left of the Somatopolis."
The pinkish-white moonlight shone on the desolate escarpments. I imagined the whole landscape covered in nothing but worms, kilometres deep. Their surface constantly writhed, filled and reformed. I imagined them sending up meshed towers topped with high parapets loosely tangled together. Their bulk would pull out from continents into isthmuses, into islands; then contract back together, throwing up entire annelid mountain ranges. Caverns would yawn deep in the mass as worms separated, dripping worm stalactites, then would close up again with the horribly meaty pressure of their weight.
"Let's go," I said. "The Gabbleratchet will appear any second."
"Wait until it does," said the Vermiform. "We are bringing it here deliberately. We have an idea."
"The air's so stale," said Cyan.
"It is used up. The Insects took our world."
I said, "Look, Cyan; this is what happens to a world that loses against the Insects."
The Vermiform raised a tentacle that transformed into a hand, pointing to a plain of familiar grey roofs ― the beginning of the Insects' Paperlands. Their raised front arced towards us like a stationary tidal wave and their full extent was lost to view over the unnervingly distant horizon. The paper buildings were cracked and weathered ― they were extremely old. They were darker in colour than the Paperlands in our world, but patched with pale regions where Insects had reworked them hundreds of times.
"They bring in material from other places to build with," said the Vermiform. "There is nothing left for them to use on my entire planet."
As we grew accustomed to the distance, we began to distinguish them: tiny specks scurrying over the plain, around the lakes and along the summits. It was like looking down into an enormous ant's nest. I stared, forgetting this was a whole world, and imagined the mountains as