On

by Adam Roberts

Genres: Science Fiction

Synopsis

Tighe lives on the wall. It towers above his village and falls away below it. It is vast and unforgiving and it is everything he knows. Life is hard on the wall, little more than a clinging on for dear life. And then one day Tighe falls off the wall. And falls, and falls, and falls ... Lavishly praised everywhere from Asimov's magazine to Interzone, ON is proof positive that Adam Roberts is a new author whose potential for greatness is rapidly being realised. ON is at once a vertiginous concept novel, a coming of age saga, a picaresque journey across a changed world and an epic adventure in the very best traditions of SF.

Release date: September 9, 2010

Publisher: Gollancz

Print pages: 382

Sample

On Tighe’s eighth birthday one of the family goats fell off the world. This was a serious matter.

The news of this loss, of losing so valuable a thing as a goat, went all round the village. Of course, it completely eclipsed Tighe’s birthday. Tighe’s pas were struck down by the news, his pahe reacting in what was a typical manner for him, sitting gloomily in the shadows of the house; and his pashe reacting typically for her, shouting her anger. Tighe was only glad, as his pashe raged, kicking chunks out of the house-wall in her fury, that he was not yet old enough to be given the task of tending the goats, or he could have been responsible and then he would have been on the receiving end of the rage. It was a girl called Carashe, who had been paid to tend the winter flock for the moment, until he was old enough to take on the job. A couple of months earlier Tighe had gone up (to see how it was done because a Prince’s son ought to know about these things) and watched Carashe tending the animals as they grazed the higher ledges. There was no doubt that goats were the stupidest things ever put on the wall. It was a puzzle why God had created them. They looked sideways at you with their lunatic eyes, grinding their mouths never-endingly; and then you’d try to come over to them to tug their hair or pet them or something – and they’d leap to the side, or scatter away like midges evading a swatting hand. They’d leap with no thought to where the edge might be. It was as if their pearl-small brains had not registered that God had put them on the worldwall in the first place.

‘It’s because they’re animals,’ Wittershe had told him. ‘They have no brains.’

But that didn’t make sense because there were lots of animals on the wall that never lurched about with such a suicidally myopic sense of where they were. The monkeys never did that, for instance.

Tighe preferred the monkeys, in fact. He knew (if only because he had been told so) that goats had a higher status than monkeys; that it was appropriate for the Prince’s family to own goats and that everybody in the village looked down on an old monkeymonger like Wittershe’s pahe. But monkeys looked nicer, nearly human. And they acted smart and Tighe liked that.

‘I guess I’ve always wondered why goats are better than monkeys,’ he had said a few weeks before his birthday. It had been a bad moment. Pashe was sitting in her chair, reading through her tattered edition of the Sayings. ‘Pashe, why is it that goats are better than monkeys?’ His question sent her flying into a rage. Sometimes it took the slightest thing to send her exploding with her anger. Even as a little boy Tighe could sense that she was a woman stuffed so full of anger that the merest rip in her outward skein of mood would cause it to come bursting out. She didn’t get up this time (which was good, he knew, because it meant she wouldn’t actually smack him), but she sat there screaming. ‘This boy will drive us all over the ledge, will he never stop with his questions? Will he smash my head apart With all his questions? On and on and on …’

Tighe’s pahe, who had been mending the dawn-door with some mud-patched grass-weave, heard the raised voice and came through. Tighe, sitting in his alcove frozen with sudden fear, saw him come in. Recognised the delicate, graceful pad of his walk; the way he lowered his head and hunched up his shoulders, placatory. It was a delicate dance, but one that Tighe had seen so often he thought it ordinary. Surely everybody’s family was like this. Pahe would try and calm pashe, would say things in a smooth low voice, would start to stroke her sides. If her anger settled a little, he would stroke her head and maybe kiss her. If it didn’t, then she might well start hitting him, or pulling at his hair, and then Tighe would watch his pahe bend double, bring his elbows up to defend his head, and his own heart would shrink within him. But on this occasion it didn’t take much to calm pashe down.

‘It’s that boy,’ she said loudly. ‘He will drive me to madness. He will drive me over the edge.’

‘I think’, said pahe, sucking at his words and letting them out slowly, ‘that maybe the boy had better come and help me mend the dawn-door.’

Pahe had taken him by the hand and led him out of his alcove and out into the vestibule. But, of course, pahe had no need of his help mending the dawn-door. So, instead, Tighe sat and watched his father work, plaiting the grass-stems together and smoothing plastermud over the mat with a spatula. His pahe was a handsome man; he was certain of it. His skin was smooth, as richly brown as the mud he worked with, his features regular. His eyes were pale, the irises violet like a flame in daylight. His straight black hair was neat. Tighe admired his pahe.

‘What had you said’, pahe was asking, ‘to get your pashe so riled?’

The question burned in his head now. He wished he’d never asked it. He wished he’d never thought it. He hated the way he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t think still, the way his pashe did. She could sit and be absolutely motionless for hour after hour. But he fidgeted and wriggled, and kept thinking of questions. But his pahe had asked, and so he said, ‘I was only wondering why goats are better than monkeys.’

And, of course, his pahe was not angry. It was, he said in his quiet, slow way, a good question. It was a thoughtful question.

‘It’s only’, Tighe went on, ‘that monkeys look so much more like human beings, don’t they? They look like human beings. And Grandhe always says that we are humans, and that we are closer to God. He says that God looks like us.’

‘I think’, said pahe, pausing between every word to stroke mud on to the wattle, ‘that he said we look like God.’

Tighe stopped. Wasn’t that what he had just said?

‘Goats are better than monkeys’, said pahe after a pause, ‘because we get more from goats. We get milk, for one thing, which we don’t get from monkeys. And the meat is better eating. And monkey hair is bad for weaving, it’s too short and it frays. And monkeys are difficult to keep. Tether them and they pine and grow thin, but let them run free and they scramble all over the wall and you lose half of them.’ He was fitting the panel over the broken panel in the dawn-door, fastening it with palm-nails which he pushed sharply into the fabric of the door with smooth movements of his forearm. ‘Goats like to stick together,’ he said. ‘They like to stick with the herd.’

Tighe scratched at his scalp. There was a long scar on his scalp, from an old injury; he had cut his head when he was too young to remember and sometimes now the line of the scar itched a bit.

Tighe thought of his pahe’s words later, on his eighth birthday. One of their six goats had evidently decided he didn’t want to stick with the herd. He had danced, skittering and trilling his legs, right over the grass tufts of an upper ledge and over into nothingness.

Months before, Carashe, the goatherd they had hired, had been sitting with him on a tuft and together they had chewed stalkgrass and looked out at the sky. His days were idle because he was the son of the Prince; so he was mostly bored and loitered around. But because he was the son of the Prince of the Village, the villagers gave him their time, talked to him, humoured him. Carashe did the same.

‘You need to keep an eye on the goats,’ she had told him. But she didn’t act out the caution her words suggested. In fact she had a thoroughly blase attitude to her charges. She would sometimes look round to see where the goats had got to, but they were quietly munching and seemed at peace. ‘Keep an eye, and make sure that none of them go over the edge.’

Carashe was nine and no longer a girl. She had been a woman for the best part of a year now. Tighe could remember when her front had been flat as a board; now she was as ledged and creviced as the wall itself, her breasts standing out from her ribs, her belly folding out over her lap as she sat on the tuft. Tighe found his wick stiffening as he watched the way the fabric of her tunic creased and smiled with her shifting about. Carashe had a man friend down at the middle of the village and everybody knew that. Tighe had no illusions. He knew she looked at him and saw only a boy, for all that he was a Princeling. But he liked spending time with her, being with her; he liked sitting on the higher ledge, nobody else around but the goats with their straining bulging eyes, listening to her talk about how to tend the animals.

‘Why not just tether them together?’ he asked.

She shook her head and sucked a little more on a piece of grass. ‘They need to roam about, to find the sweetest grass. They won’t get fat unless they get at the succulent tips. Besides, six is too many goats to tether. They get cross with one another and fight and butt. They’ll end up tearing up the tether post, or chewing through the leather straps.’

Tighe nodded and watched the goats again. One was cropping vigorously, stepping towards the edge of the world. It seemed blithely unconcerned. Tighe felt his stomach tighten in sympathy. He hated going to the rim of a ledge; he hated the raw yank of the endless drop, the way the downward distance somehow pulled and distorted the inside of his head. There was something truly terrible about that looking down. It sucked at his heart, some magnetic yaw towards destruction. Looking up, and seeing the wall stretch upwards and upwards over you into the haze was also disconcerting, but it wasn’t as heart-tickling as down.

Down was a terrible thing.

Yet the goat was unconcerned. It leaned its tool-shaped head right over the lip of the ledge and yanked up some of the spikegrass growing over the void. Then it shifted round and started grazing back towards the wall.

When their time was up, Carashe had pushed with her legs and hopped off the tuft. Then she had looped each of the goats in turn, draping the O of their tethers easily around their necks. They barely noticed even this, but carried on munching the grass. As Carashe led them towards the slope down to the lower ledges of the village, Tighe stood up too. He watched as her now adult body rolled easily from foot to foot. Tighe fell in behind, hypnotised by the pull of cloth across her seat. He expected nothing. He was only a boy and barely even that (his pashe still called him boy-boy from time to time). Carashe was a woman, with a man interested in her from the middle of the village. But the whisper was that the man was nobody special, only a technical sort of man, a machine-mending man. Tighe knew himself to be better than that; because he was a Princeling, because his father was the Prince. It had dawned on him recently that being a Prince didn’t mean a great deal, not compared to the splendour of his Grandhe’s house (but then his Grandhe was a Priest); or the Doge’s house (but then the Doge looked after all the trade, so you would expect her to be wealthy). But Tighe’s pahe was still the Prince, and the Prince was notionally the boss of the whole village – of the whole Princedom. Besides Tighe’s family wasn’t poor. After all, they owned many goats – not the largest herd in the village, admittedly, but six whole goats and the carcasses of three more salted and hanging in the storeroom dug out at the back of the house. So he watched the beautiful roll and pull of Carashe’s body with a certain hopefulness. Surely there would be more of a chance next year, if only his manhood would come on (and eight was about the right age for that to happen), if only he could grow some hair from his face like the monkeys and bulk up his wick a little so that it took on a man’s thickness. And it only took that for his imagination to start pressing his own body close against Carashe, to imagine what it would be to put his hands underneath the fabric of her clothes.

But then, on the day of his eighth birthday, things changed. The goat went over the edge; a sixth of the family’s wealth. His pahe might be the Prince of the village, but a Prince without money would starve as quickly as the meanest beggar. Tighe didn’t quite understand it, but it seemed that his pas were involved in a network of promises and exchanges, of debts and double-debts with other people in the village, and that the whole thing depended upon goatgoods. On milk, on promises of flax and meat. Losing a sixth of the family wealth tipped this delicate web towards collapse. Pahe tried to explain it to him in his alcove, whilst the sounds of pashe’s sobbing shuddered louder, softer and louder again in the main space.

‘We promised a salted haunch and fourteen months milk to old Hammerhe at the Dogeal end of the village for the work he did sealing off the cold store.’ Tighe shook his head. His pahe had dug out the cold store with his own hands. He had watched him do it, had even helped him carry away the dirt in grass-weave buckets down the ledges to the allotments on the lower reach of the village.

‘But yo-you d-dug it yourself,’ he stuttered. His own eyes were sore. He had been crying. Not, he thought, for the goat, because what did he care for a stupid goat? But because his pashe was crying so hard; and because Carashe was in disgrace now and he wouldn’t see her again for a very long time. And because … well, just because.

‘I dug it out,’ said his pahe in his soft, slow voice, ‘but we needed to get it sealed. That meant plastics and that meant old Hammerhe. And plastics don’t come cheap, so that was a whole haunch. And we promised the hide to your Grandhe Jaffiahe, which is why he’s been so good to us recently. If you ask me …’ and pahe’s soft voice became softer again, soft as a flow of water, and Tighe sucked back his sobbing so as to be able to hear his father’s deep, melodious voice,‘… if you ask me, we should simply call the debt to Jaffiahe off – in the name of family. But your pashe won’t hear of that. You know she and your Grandhe don’t get on. You know how they fight. It’s been that way since she was a girl. But that puts us in difficulties because if she would only go and speak to him then a lot of this difficulty would go away.’ He was whispering very low, now, bending his head towards his son so that the words didn’t go astray. ‘Don’t tell your pashe I said so, though.’

That night Tighe lay in his alcove. He could hear his pas talking in a low, burbling stream of words. He couldn’t hear the words themselves, just the mellow burr they made in the air. Like music. Every now and again his pashe’s voice would warble and rise, would transmute into a reedy wail; then it would be shepherded by pahe’s soothing grumble until it was calmed and dropped away again. It took Tighe a long time to get to sleep. He kept twisting and wriggling in his alcove. Outside the dusk gale roared. He fell asleep, but woke up again in the dark. Everything was still; no sounds from his pas’ bed through the wall; no nightwind, which must have meant it was deep in the night. Tighe put both his hands between his thighs and pressed his legs close together, for the comfort of the gesture. Eventually he fell asleep again and this time he dreamed. The goat was in the dream, but it was as bald as a baby, pink hide catching the sun with its occasional stubbly white hairs. It danced and danced and Tighe pressed his arms around its neck. There was some sense of familiarity about it all, as if the intense particularity of the pressure of skin against skin reminded him of something. But the goat was right on the edge of the world now, and with a horrible lurch in his stomach Tighe knew it was going over the edge. And he knew that he could not let go of the goat, and that he

– was over the edge of the world. The whole worldwall arced, and tilted, and slewed round and then he could see nothing but sky. His limbs convulsed, and he was suddenly alone, no goat, with the rushing of clouds past his head

and he woke with a sweaty start. The morning gale was blowing, loud as thunder outside the house. Tighe’s hands were digging into the grass-weave mat of his bed. His face was cold with old sweat. His heart was thundering.

He tumbled out of the alcove and staggered to the family sink. He drank deeply and then (looking around, because his pashe got furious if she saw him doing this) ducked his head into the water. His pas were still asleep. The house was gloomy with dawn and absolutely still with a kind of unnatural vacancy. Only the battering of the gale against the dawn-door disturbed the lifelessness.

There was nowhere to go whilst the morning gale blustered outside, so Tighe went back to his alcove and lay down. For a while he dozed and then his pashe was at the door of the alcove.

He couldn’t help himself; he jerked on his bed, jittery with the jolt of sudden fear. But she didn’t yell, she didn’t strike him, she only said, ‘My sweet boy-boy,’ and came in to hug him.

There was a swift unloosening of feelings inside him. His eyes even prickled with moisture. ‘Pashe!’ he said, returning the hug.

‘You know I love you very much indeed, my little boy-boy,’ she was saying, her voice woven through with tenderness. And she was crying a little bit and hugging him so hard it pressed his breath out of his chest.

‘I’m not a boy-boy any more, you know, pashe,’ he said, his voice warm and breaking. ‘I’m a proper boy now.’

‘Oh I know,’ she said, holding him back at arm’s length to have a good look at him, her eyes dawn-red with crying. ‘In another year you’ll not even be a boy, you’ll be a man. But you’ll always be my little boy-boy in my heart.’

And – as miraculously as the sun appearing from nowhere on a cold day – everything was all right. After the broken, bruising mood in the house the day before, this morning was golden. He was eight now, grown up, and that was what was important about his birthday, more even than the gift-giving. His pas and he took their breakfast milk; and when the morning gale had died away they all three went out on to the ledge and started downways towards the village.

But that was his pashe. Everything balanced, teeter-totter. Some days she would be wonderful; some days she would scream at you and flail out, trying to hit you with a stick, or whatever came to hand. It was as if his pahe lived in the deeps of the house, solid as the groined roof and the flattened, mat-covered earthen floor of the cold store; but his pashe lived forever on the very lip of the ledge, precariously balanced, forever poised to fall.

But then, his pashe had visions. He knew this was the case although it was rarely mentioned; and perhaps it explained the precariousness of her mood. She would wake in the night screaming – really screaming. This would happen once a month, as regular as regular, through all twenty months of the year. Each time the yelling from his pas’ room would startle Tighe from his sleep. He would sit straight up so hard it made his spine ache, and there was the noise – ach! ach! – shouting, or sobbing, crumpled and muffled by the walls between him and them. And his pahe, the Prince, cooing and soothing her.

Life continued with its usual rhythms after Tighe’s eighth birthday, despite the loss of the goat. The remaining animals still had to be pastured, of course, even if Carashe could no longer be trusted with the task. They were still hungry. Their wild-orb eyes held no knowledge that their fellow had fallen to his death. They cared nothing for that. Their minds were as rooted as the grass they ate; food, food, and then (in season) mating. There was a solidity in that, too, Tighe supposed.

‘We can’t have Carashe any more,’ his pahe said to him, on the ledge outside. It was the day after his birthday. ‘Best not even mention her name again, in front of your pashe, you know.’ They both looked at pashe, forty arms away. She was leading the five goats out of the village pen, where all the animals spent the night. She was still smiling her tearful smile, still luminous with her joy at being alive in the morning.

‘But anyway,’ said pahe, cupping his hand on Tighe’s shoulder, ‘you’re a boy now – eight! – near enough a man. You can herd the goats yourself, with your pahe to help you the first few times.’

Tighe’s breast swelled with joy. ‘I’ll look after them,’ he said.

But in the end Tighe didn’t herd the goats. His pashe, her mood wobbling a little, said no. It was obvious that she didn’t want to risk losing any more of the animals and it was obvious, though unspoken, that she did not trust Tighe to take care of the goats. It wasn’t what she said: she said that it was below the dignity of a Princeling and the grandson of the Priest, but Tighe realised that that wasn’t the true reason. He was, he knew, almost wholly inexperienced with tending goats; but the rejection hurt him none the less. Of course, it was not to be argued with. Pashe waited with the goats by the mouth of the pen until another goatmonger came to collect her animals. Then they chatted for a few minutes, pashe striking some bargain whereby their animals would join the larger herd for a day or two until a new herder could be arranged.

After that, his pas went down to the village to start the elaborate negotiations that followed on from losing a goat, and Tighe had nothing to do. He was the Princeling of the village, he never had anything to do. He could have sought out his friends, but he wasn’t in the mood. So he loitered outside the pen, watching people come and go. He offered to help the stallmen set up their food booth, in the hope of some free food in payment, but they shooed him away. Then he thought about going down to the village and seeking out Carashe, telling her that he personally had no hard feelings about the lost goat. But that was a stupid idea, a non-starter. And so, instead, he went off to be by himself in the sunshine.

He made his way along the main-street shelf where most of the market traders set up pitches, jostling through the growing crowd; then, with a duck into the church and out the back, squeezing through the narrow cupboardways and along a dim alley, before scrabbling up a bamboo ladder set into the wall (a public ladder, of course – he had no money to pay for private passage), and out again into the sunshine. The ledges up here were shorter and narrower, more thoroughly overhung, and the houses correspondingly more primitive. Two grassy ledges slanted up zigzag from one another, and then he was into the newest part of the village – mostly people from Meat, a village several thousand yards above and to the Right. Tighe had never been to Meat, but he knew from report that it was a large place, founded on a great broad platform that jutted out from the worldwall. He knew it was a place rich with all sorts of meat. Some of the poorer people from there had migrated downwall to Cragcouthie in the hope of a better living, but as Tighe walked along the muddy stretches outside their houses he wondered if their life was any better downwall than it had been higher up. The shelf seemed so miserable. A switchback and then a few grassy crags, barely more than crevices. Then another row of new houses, dug out of the wall barely a year before. Many still had raw dirt walls in their vestibules and some of them didn’t even seem to have dawn-doors; which made Tighe wonder how they managed when the dawn winds got up every morning.

Then he was past the last houses and up on to the higher crags. Nobody lived here and even the goatherds didn’t bother to bring their charges this far. These crags were too small, and their grass too meagre, to provide grazing; so Tighe was able to settle himself with his back against the wall and be alone. The wall stretched above him for a thousand leagues, and below him for a thousand leagues, for all that he knew. And yet he was inches away from the edge of the world.

He stared out into the sky. Birds swooped and curled in the air. Several popped down on to the ledge in front of him to see if he had any food, but they lost interest and waddled off the world again, falling into space and swinging up on their magical wings.

An insect landed on his cheek and tickled; he slapped it with the flat of his palm.

He pulled up fistfuls of stalkgrass and started chewing on it. Stalkgrass never filled you up, but it was better than nothing. You could always tell people who had nothing but stalkgrass to eat because they got thin in a particular way. Their faces became sucked out, dented with starvation. You could last for a long time eating nothing but stalkgrass, but eventually you’d waste away and die. It was a mystery how the goats managed because they grew fat on nothing but the grass. And, following from that, Tighe found himself wondering again about the lost goat from the day before. Scampering near the edge and, then, suddenly – gone. He crawled on his knees the four or five yards to the lip of the crag, covering the last yard on his belly. Finally, inching himself, he put his head over the edge of the world.

There was still that horrible griping in his stomach and the prickles all over his scalp. But there was something beautiful, too. He was lying on his belly looking down, back down the way he had come. The crags were layered narrowly on to one another so he saw the pathways of the newest parts of the village directly beneath him. Their ledge-lips, pressed close together by perspective, gave a vivid sense of depth. Below him somebody, a woman, came out of one of the houses and stood for a moment, lighting up a thorn-pipe. She hunched to get the flame to take and then stood up. Her head, from above, was as round as a pebble, furred with the bristles of her cropped hair. Then she walked off and Tighe lost sight of her.

Wisps of smoke, from cooking fires and curing benches, spiralled out and curled into nothingness from lower down. Sucking in his breath and trying not to concentrate on the thundering of his heart, Tighe pulled himself a little further out over the ledge. The perspective shifted a little and the outside edge of the main-street shelf came into view. Below that was nothing for a hundred yards, just flat wall, too steep to build on. Tighe knew the layout of the village so closely he did not have to think about it; the shelves leading away right and down from market shelf, the warren of smaller ledges spread in an arc, the dugouts leading back into the wall. The sun was rising, well past the lower limit of sight, and as Tighe angled his head higher he had to shade his eyes. Where did the sun come from every morning? How did it climb its way upwards, from the base of the wall to the top?

The day was getting warmer and the morning scatters of cloud were dispersing.

Tighe pulled himself back in and lay on his back. The wall stretched above him, impossibly high, enormously tall, vanishing into blue haze. How high was it? Toweringly high.

Insignificant crags puttered out into nothing above, into the smooth face of the wall, on which nothing grew but a few hardy strands of grass. Directly above Cragcouthie there was nothing; just one of those stretches of almost perfectly flat wall. Meat was somewhere up there, but away several thousand yards to the left. There was passage between the two villages, of course; crags that wound and connected zigzag, linked sometimes by stairways dug through the wall itself. And right and down was Heartshelf (not a shelf, in fact, but a motley collection of ledges, barely even enough to keep goats on). Heartshelf made its living mostly as an intermediary because it was on the only direct pathway between Smelt away downwall and Cragcouthie, Meat and the rest. At Smelt they dug ore out of the wall and fixed it up as metal. There were smelters in Cragcouthie too, of course, but ore was harder to come by up here. So metal was traded downwall and it went through Heartshelf, which took a percentage.

Up beyond Meat were some other villages, and it was said that the wall became more wrinkled in that direction, more prolific with crags and ledges, easier to find a living on. But Tighe thought the stretch directly above him now was the best; the flatness of it, the purity of it. The wall blued away into the distance, where it got hazy and vanished in a blur. If only his eyes were good enough and the day uncloudy, Tighe thought, maybe I could see all the way to the top of the wall. All the way to the top of the wall. The words gave him exquisite little chills on his scalp and neck. But there was a haze in the mid-morning air that muddled vision after a few thousand yards. Away to the Left big bustling clouds were nudging up against the wall, like great animals nosing some huge breast. Perhaps that was what happened to the far-off walltop, Tighe thought to himself, barely voicing the words. Perhaps it was transformed into clouds. Clouds. Transformed. Words could distil such intensity. Words were as high as the wall.

There was a noise at his feet and Tighe looked to see a monkey. He launched a kick at the brute, but it danced out of his way with a screech. Scrambling to his feet, Tighe chased the thing, but it swung upwards on handfuls of stiffgrass and was gone where there was no crag for Tighe to follow.

Laughing, Tighe settled down with his back against the wall again. He munched on some more stalkgrass and stared out at the sky. The colours changed the further up the sky he looked, from the flusher tongue-colours of the lower sky, where the sun was, to the darker, more plastic-blue tints of the upper, but Tighe co