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He got up and went over to his pashe, and hugged her again. ‘You and me, pashe,’ he said, ‘together we are strong, I think. Together we will …’
but he broke off, looking around himself nervously. Who knew how the Wizard worked? What if he were eavesdropping on them at that very time?

Hours passed. Tighe occupied some of the time staring intently at the controls of the Wizard’s machine. There were a number of identical-looking protrusions, like metallic thumbs, and a series of star-crossed indentations in the smooth metal. He tried fiddling with the levers, prodding his fingernails into the indentations, but it had no effect.

He sat for a long time on the floor. What he had taken to be merely decorative metal studs, fixed into the floor, were in fact something else. With a mesmerising slowness they moved over the metal. As Tighe watched he could see that they all changed position together, so that the regularity of the pattern they formed stayed the same. He tried prising one up from the floor with his thumbnail and it flipped up easily. Underneath was a tiny hole, with several striations leading into it from the rim. It felt like a slightly humped metal coin in his hand. Tighe replaced it on the floor, deliberately out of pattern with the others. Slowly, over a period of about an hour, all the other nubbins adjusted themselves until the pattern was restored. Tighe had no idea what the function of these tiny machines might be.

Soon enough he became hungry, and thirsty. There were several doors that opened out from the metal podium underneath the screens, and inside one of these Tighe found a metallic flask with some fluid inside. He tasted it tentatively, and swallowed it. It was faintly bitter, but fairly refreshing. He rummaged through the cupboard, but found nothing else to eat or drink.

He offered the flask to his pashe and she took it without a word, swigging and returning it to him.

He paced around the lower room; tried the upper hatch again, hung from the ladder like a bored monkey. After a while he lay down on the floor and slept.

When he woke, nothing in the tiny room had changed. His pashe was sitting in exactly the same posture, staring into nothing. He paced around again, checked the images on the screen, and felt his anger grow. Climbing the ladder he started banging on the hatch. ‘Wizard! Wizard! Wake yourself – how long must you sleep?’

This produced no reaction. Eventually Tighe’s arm grew tired. He sat on the floor and swigged from the metal flask, offered it again to his pashe. Then he tried sitting in the Wizard’s metal cradle, but it ejected him again. He flew up and landed on his feet – more elegantly than before, this time, because he had been expecting the thrust. He tried once again. It was not painful and even had a pleasant aspect to it. He peered closely at the seat of the cradle, and sat in it again. The metal itself deformed and buckled to throw him off. It was remarkable.

He turned his attention to the screens again, and started fiddling with the controls. The whole craft shuddered and skittered left-right, yawing and pitching. Tighe threw himself backwards, away from the controls, terrified that he had accidentally done something that would destroy the whole machine and them all along with it. The floor rocked more gently and the images on the screen slowed. Then it stabilised and settled. Tighe felt a tight pressure in his bladder, but he controlled himself. He sat down or rather half collapsed; his heart was thundering. Sweat had oozed out of the skin of his face. His hand was trembling.

With a squeak the hatch opened and the Wizard’s black-clad legs appeared, fumbling their way down the ladder. His high whistly voice followed. ‘Ten hours! A little less! Really not
enough
, though I’m not one to complain.’ He stepped on to the floor and stalked over to the screens, his uncanny leather face blank. The images on the screen showed that they were stationary; a view of rocky wall patched over with white was in every corner.

Tighe’s breathing was settling. He was still startled, but not so much as to miss the slight pressure the Wizard applied to a point on the underside of one of the back bars of his cradle. He settled himself down and fiddled with the controls.

Tighe debated with himself and decided that it would be better to be honest from the beginning. ‘I touched the controls, Master Wizard,’ he said in Imperial, looking bashfully at the floor.

‘Of course you did, my beautiful youngster,’ said the Wizard, without looking over. ‘I would expect nothing less. But you are locked out, so your touch counts for nothing.’ He looked round with his grotesque smile. ‘Did you think you interrupted the flight of my machine with your tinkering?’ This idea seemed to amuse him, for he grinned to himself. ‘Nothing so dramatic. No, the craft responds to the fluctuations in the gravity. As we approach the East Pole, gravity lessens and the flow tightens. My beautiful machine functions so smoothly in a conventional gravity, but it is calibrated to operate with a ninety-degree interface. Digging its gluon-expression into the flow-lines at exactly ninety degrees for absolute stability. This far east, the angle closes and we will find our platform less solid.’

Almost all of this went over Tighe’s head, but he picked up the one phrase. ‘East Pole?’ he asked, standing unsteadily. His breathing was still sharp and shallow, but the fright had focused his mind more acutely. ‘Is this our destination, Master Wizard?’

‘Well observed,’ said the Wizard. He spun his cradle around and looked at Tighe. ‘Yours is a fine intelligence, my beautiful one.’

‘Is this
pole
, said Tighe, uncertainly, ‘the eastward limit of the wall?’ He
had a hazy notion of an enormous flagpole, towering into the sky marking the furthest extremity of the wall itself. And beyond? The blueness of infinity, reaching for ever. ‘Is there a pole at the western edge as well?’

‘You are amusing,’ said the Wizard, although he didn’t sound amused. ‘You picture, perhaps, a giant trunk of wood, stretching up hundreds of miles.’

Tighe couldn’t think of a reply to this.

‘The worldwall’, said the Wizard, with an airy gesture of his right hand, ‘is not as you think it is.’

The superior air of the man, with his distorted face and eccentric manner, sparked a feeling of resentment in the exact centre of Tighe’s head. He felt his eyeballs heat up with annoyance. ‘I know the secret of the worldwall!’ he blurted. ‘You think I am a boy, that I know nothing. But I am not! I have been a warrior and I have fought monsters. I have learned the secrets of the wall.’ Tears were pricking his eyes now and he fought them back with a furious inner self-chastisement. To cry, in front of him? No! ‘I know more than you think.’

There was a strange moment of silence.

‘So’, said the Wizard slowly, ‘you know the secret of the wall, do you? But, do you really? You are a remarkable boy. Your beauty is matched by your ability to say the surprising things.’ He inclined his head. ‘And what is the secret that you know?’

Tighe felt, suddenly, inhibited from saying anything more. He wasn’t sure why; he didn’t regard what he knew as a
secret
exactly. But there was something menacing, something that might have been an edge of ridicule, in the Wizard’s manner. He turned and went over to where his pashe was sitting on the ground, to sit beside her.

The Wizard was watching him, waiting for him to reply. The silence stretched uncomfortably.

‘There is a Door in the wall,’ Tighe said eventually. ‘It leads through to God.’

‘Really?’ said the Wizard. His leather face was beyond expression.

‘No,’ said Tighe, stung despite himself. ‘There is. The Imperial Popes put together a mighty army to capture this Door. That was the army in which I fought.’

‘I saw your fighting’, said the Wizard, his leather lips stretching to the merest smile, ‘on one of my screens.’ He gestured over his shoulder.

Tighe understood that the allusion was to his flight away from the battle and towards the Meshwood. He ground his teeth together. ‘I know more,’ he said. ‘God lives at the foot of the wall, not on the top at all. Every morning he hurls the sun over the wall to combat his enemies.’

‘To combat’, repeated the Wizard neutrally, ‘his enemies.’

Saying this, in so many words, was making Tighe uncomfortably aware of how thin his explanations sounded. He struggled to find a means of conveying the potency of the idea; of the way the thought of God lurking at the base of things, of God hurling the flaming boulder with main force of his strong arm, of the eternal war between cosmic forces separated only by the thinnest of walls – to make the Wizard understand how intoxicating this notion was. He hummed, tried again. ‘The wall is there to separate out good and evil,’ he said. ‘The wall is …’ But he stopped.

‘Go on,’ prompted the Wizard.

‘The wall is small,’ said Tighe, in a cowed voice. ‘That is the secret I have come to comprehend. It seems big, but it is not big. It is we who are small. The wall is a toy, built by a small-minded god – by a child god, perhaps. Populated with miniatures.’ He stopped. He had spoken the mystery of mysteries.

‘What ingenuity!’ declared the Wizard. ‘But quite, quite wrong. The wall is not tiny!’

Tighe looked up at him. ‘How do you know?’

‘Believe me, I know. I have travelled widely over the wall. And I remember, I remember because I am older than you can imagine. But I am always impressed, my philosophical fruitling, at the perplexity people wrap themselves in when contemplating simple matters.’ He sucked in a large breath.

There was a silence for the space of seven heartbeats.

‘Now,’ said the Wizard, ‘shall I tell you what the wall is?’

The floor wobbled and Tighe cried out in fear. The Wizard swivelled his cradle around and began fiddling with his devices. ‘No requirement for alarm,’ he squeaked. ‘These are merely the manner of perturbations we must expect this far east. We’ll have to proceed much more slowly from here. But we shall proceed! Let me show you the East Pole, my charming one. Few humans have seen it; fewer still have seen it and lived.’

There was a dry hiccoughing sound in the Wizard’s throat; it took a moment for Tighe to realise that this was laughter.

‘Who are you, Master Wizard?’ Tighe asked, feeling a profound sense of discomfort. ‘What have you to do with me? With my family? Why …?’ but there were so many questions that they collapsed together in Tighe’s mind. There was no way he could ask all of them at once.

‘Your skin,’ Tighe said shortly. ‘Why is your skin, so … so …’

‘So what? So unusual? Or were you about to say something like so
grotesque
? It is a good skin, my delicate-complexioned boy. A strong skin. It is tanned leather, laid over a network of fine-woven filament wire and genbonded underneath with vital carapace that connects it to a living subcutaneous layer of fascia. But these words mean nothing at all to you, do they? Eeh, poor ignorant boy. My skin. My skin is a good place to start, I think. It is stronger than your skin; and much more durable. It suits me better. But it can only be because of a command of pollenmachines, and a sense of the workings of technology, that derives from an earlier age. You have heard of this earlier age?’

Tighe was rolling his lower lip between his thumb and forefinger; one of his expressions of nervousness. He did not reply.

‘But of course you have heard of this age!’ said the Wizard. ‘The evidence for it is all around; the old machines, the screens and pieces of time-stained electronics that are traded back and forth. The structures, the manrock, the archaeological evidence. The very metal out of which are made the tubes for military rifles – nobody actually
makes
metal any more. It all derives from the past, great age. How could you not notice these things? Or did you notice them and ignore them? The stories are of an age of wonder and then
a fall. Always a fall. Humanity always thinks of itself as balanced most precariously on the edge of things; as already falling, already defined by the Fall.’ The Wizard chuckled his dry, spooky laugh again.

‘Fall,’ said Tighe, in a thin voice.

‘Did you ever wonder about that past age?’ asked the Wizard.

‘They built this,’ said Tighe, with a sudden burst of understanding, ‘your machine.’

‘They did. Well, not exactly; but this machine does indeed derive from their antique technology. Many of the parts are old; and the décor,’ he gestured at the richly hung walls, ‘that too. Once every man and every woman had the skills to make such machines as this. Once
we
all had those skills.’

‘Why did we lose the skills?’ asked Tighe.

‘
We
did not.
You
did, I concede. You and your people, not I. But that is a function, I think, of population. A degree of technological advantage can only be maintained in a large enough population base. How many people inhabit the world today? Some few thousands? It is insufficient – and you,’ he said, gesturing at Tighe with one hand, ‘you do not understand anything I am saying, do you?’

Tighe fiddled with his lower lip, put his eyes to the floor.

‘You are talking about pollenmachines,’ he said, sulkily. ‘The bolts on the floor – they are pollenmachines.’

‘Dear me no; they’re much too large. They are simply cleaning devices. They keep everything spotless inside here, crawling back and forth, very simple machines. Pollenmachines are much more intricate. But I can see this is going to be harder than I thought. Tell me this, my dazzle-eyed young man. How tall do you think the wall is?’

‘How tall?’

‘Yes. Hundreds of miles, perhaps. Thousands?’

Tighe had often pondered exactly this question when he had been younger. ‘From its base to its top?’ he said. ‘Thousands.’

‘We could travel upwards,’ said the Wizard. ‘In my machine, if you would like to undertake the journey. We could travel upwall thousands of miles. I have done it.’

Tighe caught his breath. ‘Have you been to the top of the wall?’ he gasped. ‘All the way to the top? And is it true – does God live there, or below?’

‘There is no top to the wall,’ said the Wizard. ‘You can travel up for ever; you can travel down for ever, if you wish.’