Free Vellum by Hal Duncan Page A

the ship’s bridge under my feet, down through the clouds toward the churning course of mud and filth; I am thankful that at this height I can no longer smell the rot. Reaching over with my free hand, I grasp the ivory handle of the lever and pull it back. The low hum of the
Search Engine
heightens slightly, becomes louder as its monstrous turbines rise out of sloth and into life. There is no lurch, no feeling of inertia broken, and at this height it’s almost impossible to see any visible shifting of the world beneath me. Only the glittering light displays of dials and indicators, projected on the glass in front of me, give any sign that we are moving forward. That this leviathan of the sky is rising from its indolence and moving slowly, saurian, across the oceanic clouds, following the path marked out for me in the Book of All Hours, north, ever north, toward the end of the world.

    In scale and style somewhere between a steamship and a cathedral, the
Search Engine
is the product of some technology far surpassing the world of my origins. I found it in a city as pristine in its desolation as if it had never had inhabitants at all, berthed among a score or so designed on the same principles in a wide dockland of glistening gray warehouses full of steel cargo containers and wooden crates, plastic sheets covering bales of hay, huge reels of cotton or silk thread, canisters of sugar, tobacco. In a way, the whole scene was quite mundane—a dock or port like any other dock or port I’ve come across in my travels. It was only the black river of unspeakable mire and the great hulking sky-ships floating in the air above like zeppelins, grounded by spiraling threads of silver staircase, that made the vision quite different from anything else I’ve seen.

    I have no idea how these contraptions fly; if I were to describe them as having wings it would be the type of wings that a mansion has rather than those upon an airplane. From the main hull of the ship, transepts project, three at each side as in the crosses to be found in a Greek or Russian Orthodox church. From below, that hull appears as an inverted vault, like the rib cage or armor plating of some great beast, curving up and opening out to araeostyle intercolumniations, panes of stained glass and pillars between them. Parapeted towers rise above, with spires topped by vast thuribles spewing a blue-green steam, presumably some by-product of their power source, though I really have no idea. I have no idea how they float in the air impervious to the winds buffeting, no idea how they glide smoothly forward or back, up or down at the touch of this lever or that. But thankfully, the controls are rather less inscrutable than the principles underlying their construction. When I finally found my way to the glass bowl of the cockpit-bridge that hangs from the tip of the machine’s prow like some World War Two gunnery emplacement on a bomber, I was relieved to see, at the bottom of the steps leading down into that segmented swimming pool, at the center of this vertigo-inspiring glass bowl, only a deep green leather armchair with a crescent-shaped glass desk and console and a few bronze, ivory-tipped levers and wheels around it. It’s taken me less than a week of experimentation to get the hang of it all; I’d have to say I’m really rather impressed by the elegant simplicity of the design.

    And so now, I am off again, a thief at the helm of yet another stolen vehicle, leaving behind me yet another caravan of sundry acquisitions, souvenirs of my seemingly eternal travels. This time, I have to say, I have little regret.
    I have been finding it increasingly difficult, these last few centuries, you see, to maintain my memories of the world I left so far behind, and I realize now that it was a mistake to start collecting these various scraps and parchments of the transfigured realities I travel through, the places I have come to call the Folds. I have