Subjunctive

by Integral Archer

Chapter XVIII: Lacuna

When I asked her, the fastest way to Fillydelphia, she said, would normally be to use the train. But, she continued, the train system was halted such that walking all the way there would probably be faster. Whether she spoke this alternative method in irony or in all seriousness, I didn’t know.

“Why?” I asked.

“They had new rules put in for the city for the wedding. They might still have them.”

My memories of that climatic day so firmly imprinted in my senses came back to me: the tired sentry, hearing them ready, an extemporaneous and specious joke on politics, the sentry looking at me and saying . . .

“Martial law?” I said. “Are they still under martial law?”

She only shrugged.

I once again felt Foil’s spear against my neck. I remembered those eyes, that look of a keen intelligence and perception judging me; my stomach churned as I remembered the feeling of being judged poorly and with disgust and revulsion . . .

I shook my head.

“Have you changed your mind?” she asked.

“I must get home,” I said. “That hasn’t changed.”

“You won’t be able to walk the distance on that leg.”

I sighed. To get to Canterlot from Fillydelphia, I had flown. Walking seemed to me impractical, no matter what. But what about the risk of being molested by the Royal Guard if I were to take the train? What if they grabbed me by the scruff of my neck and shook me until my facade fell away and in front of them dangled the naked, scrawny changeling, all shrills and spite but no mass? What then? All recoil in disgust, and Foil . . . I remembered his injunction. What would happen if he were to see me again?

But walking? How long would it be until my leg fell off? How long would it be before the pegasus, who had so serendipitously and unwittingly fallen into my clutches, would find unsettled nature too imperious, such that it would override any sense of duty she felt she had to me?

The sooner I got her home, the better. The more time I spent with her, talking to her, always in her direct sight, was longer for the fungus of suspicion to sprout and grow until it eventually monopolized all her thoughts. Oh yes, suspicion; no matter how intimate you may get with the most trusting creature, no matter how much he may say that he believes your facade, there exists deep within his mind a trace of doubt, so small that he himself is not aware of it. But it grows . . . faster than most of us could imagine. I’ve heard stories of some of my brothers or sisters getting complacent around the clutches of the inferiors—and when they’re the most careless, there comes the claw to the affected throat . . .

“I’m taking the train,” I said. “It’ll be faster regardless.”

She sighed.

*

Now, my legs trembled as I stood on the train platform among the crowd of ponies. Every so often, I would whip my head around in a panic, hear a gentle voice say “What’s wrong?” and then would clasp a hoof to my heart in relief after turning to see the yellow pegasus still beside me.

“Are you going to leave and make me make the journey on my own?” I asked, trying to find a good mixture of despair and frustration in my tone.

There was a silence as the implication got to her. She’d heard the question not by its words but just as how I’d intended to ask it: Why are you with me?

“There was a Catskill eagle once,” she began. “His name was Tryworks—or, at least, that’s what I called him. It was migration season; he sprained his wing and fell into my yard. I tried to help him; but you know Catskill eagles—very stubborn, proud birds. Tryworks made up his mind to finish his migration on foot rather than accept my help. I couldn’t just leave him—without flight, he would not be able to hunt and would surely die, especially at that time of year—but he wouldn’t let me help him. So I followed him, trying all the while to get him to come home, he always refusing. Day by day, he got weaker; but still, he wouldn’t accept my help. Until, at last, after ascending one side of a small escarpment and trying to descend the other side, his talon slipped, and he fell all the way to the bottom. Tryworks got a concussion, broke his other wing, and fractured nearly every bone in one of his talons. Still, he didn’t want to accept my help—but, by that time, he was too malnourished, dehydrated, and injured to resist.”

Ponies passed all around us on the platform, moving bags, checking watches, staring idly at walls. Somewhere in the distance, a loudspeaker droned some indiscernible direction, its monotone inherent to the incidental and routine, its incoherence relaying its unimportance. All around us, the ponies walked, as though nothing had been said, on their inexorable impetus, forever fed by their vague desires to get somewhere where they were not.

“It’s hard,” she said, “but it might be the only way: You’ll suffer something. It might be a while; but it will happen. Don’t worry—I’ll be there when it does.”

I turned back toward the tracks, and a slight spasm jerked through me as I thought of the web I was spinning around her: so thin right now that she didn’t even notice it, yet with one flick of a hoof she could cast it off without effort. It was inconceivable how I’d even gotten her to stay still long enough to put in the first few threads.

She was here, standing beside me, waiting for a train to Fillydelphia, with me, a stranger whom she knew virtually nothing about. As I turned back to look at the tracks, there lay in my mind the trickles of some ineffable notion, one that I couldn’t pinpoint or grab hold of, but one that crawled under my raised hair, and ran down my back in a shudder. What was I doing? In the back of my head, I noticed a stirring entity. When I closed my eyes and turned my ears inward, I could hear nothing that would give me any indication of its nature. I knew only that it rumbled.

I perked my ears up and strained them. I could hear nothing but the rumbling, which was now proceeding to grow louder, ever so gradually.

“Is something wrong?” said the pegasus.

“Shh,” I said, my eyes still closed. “Can you not feel that?”

It was not a rumbling, I could hear now. It was a growling, like that which accompanied an animal baring its teeth.

“What?”

“Shh!” I said again. And into the sound now came panting, a wet, heavy wheezing, and I could feel the hot and moist air of its exhalations, saturating my brain with its humidity.

“There!” I said, for I was sure I heard it scream. “Do you not hear that?”

“Look,” she said. “The train’s coming.”

I opened my eyes, and there in the distance I saw the coal-exhaust from earlier, stretching out in a thick tower to the cloud layer and lazily retaining its form in the humid summer air. Though it was high noon, there was on the machine’s nose a small but intense point of light, which quivered side to side, as though forever trying to escape the barreling maw of the amorphous beast whose teeth it touched again and again.

The growling grew louder, but though I squinted, I couldn’t see the train moving. Instead, I watched the light shudder as it drew my eyesight more acutely with every passing second. It grew in proportion as my pupils shrunk—until I looked back at the body of the train, and there it was, rushing toward me still some distance away, but I could do nothing but stand and stare, for I could not believe that I could see such a distant object moving at such an apparent speed.

Bracing its wheels was a long spoke which spun round and round until it was nearly invisible, giving forward thrust to the train. And at every downthrust, I heard the growling and the panting of that of earlier, louder to me now as the sulfur made its way to my nose: the sight, the sound, and the smell—though faint in themselves, combined in my mind to form a trenchant image, and it pierced me through as though it had a spear mounted to the light on its prow.

And when it approached the entrance of the station, still so fast to be a blur, a small effluent of white steam fired from a bronze funnel on the side of the lead car, and a sound too high to be a pony’s scream and too low to be one of my language’s shrills put the last blow into me. I crumpled to the ground, my eyes closed, and the air that I felt racing across my mane felt like the internal precession of the senses when deprived of oxygen.

Then, the panting slowed at a continuous rate, and just when I thought the creature had had its fill, it let out one last screech higher, louder, and more acute, the cry of an apex predator on the verge of another kill out of his many; and I twisted again upon the ground and clutched my forehooves to my ears, waiting to feel its mouth across my torso to snap my spine.

“Come on; get up,” she said. “The train is here. Please stand up. Ponies are staring.”

The ends of the train vanished out of sight into the air and into the crowds of ponies moving toward the long mass of steel, which was now purring ingratiatingly as it waited to be fed by its masters.

“How long must we ride this?” I asked.

“Not long,” she said. “First, it’ll take us to the Canterlot Grand Junction. From there, to Fillydelphia, and we won’t even have to change trains. All in all, including the stop, it should take us no fewer than three hours. Fillydelphia is much closer than most ponies think.”

She nodded before turning back to the direction of the flow of the crowd, which was now starting to move toward the open door of the car right in front of us.

The din, the whistling of the train, and the slow movement toward the cars all stirred in her head along with the admittedly desultory reasoning I’d given her, such that its flimsy grounding in truth mixed with the truth around her. It satisfied her, for now, but I knew not how long it would. I could hope only that she would not ask any more questions as to that nature, neither to me nor to herself.

We boarded the train. When I saw the inside of the car, I had to look back outside to see if I had actually entered these steel intestines. I was expecting alien machinery and iron organs, which we would have to dodge continually throughout the entire duration of our trip lest their imperiousness slice us through. But instead I saw padded chairs, clear windows, a carpeted floor, incandescent lighting, and tables. Tables! For a second, I thought I was in a Canterlot café.

After a few seconds of indecision on my part and a few complaints of the ponies behind me, the pegasus led me to a seat by the window.

When I heard the “all aboard!” my seat turned cold, and I convulsively and in vain clutched at the frame of the window. A further numbness came over me as the scream from earlier ran through the air. Then the ground moved away beneath me. Whether I was ready or not, the world was moving; the only thing I could do was to hold on and hope.

But the train held me in its gentle grasp, and slowly but firmly, it bore me along. I tingled with apprehension those first few seconds, as any hatchling does on the cradle of the summit as his parents nudge him toward the drop for the commencement of his first flight. But, with the necessary time, I came to not feel it underneath me at all. I came to feel my heart beating with every chug chug chug of the engine rattling around me in an unknown periodic relationship with the clack-clack clack-clack of the wheels on the crossties below.

At the moment when the mass beneath me felt its lightest, I raised my head and looked through the window. The muscles in my back instinctively twitched, flaring hidden and unformed wings to catch the wind that must accompany such a velocity with such a quick passing of sights. Watching the trees, the grass, those unplaceable points in the distance rushing past, a sharp flare of emotion surged from the bottom of my chest as it usually did whenever I suddenly realized I was on a course and a speed out of my control, and that sharp moment of clarity hit me, that I could do nothing about it, that I could only sit and watch as I was carried along by decisions made so long ago under circumstances I could not recall. But no matter my cringing, still the sights barreled on; until my nerves came back to me, and I took a long, relaxed breath, as controlled as the motion of the train, as calculated, as relaxed. The sights continued to run by; but they appeared to me to be nothing more than a vast panning mural, for I ceased to feel the ground moving. I was a cell in this steel animal, an incoincident microscopic point in this assortment of these elements lodged as a whole. I opened my eyes, dreamed, and wondered what further reaches this unfathomable creature would take me. To subjugation or success? I anticipated both with equal zeal as I stared out that window.

But not long into this motion, replete from the core to the skin with a tingling of emotions as I was, one of the emotions, a discrepancy, surged just for a second to my undulating mind:

This machine, this train, was a massive project, worked on by hundreds, maybe thousands, of ponies with four times as many hooves. And language was the fluid between all of them, as it is between the individuals in any meaningful organization. With that precious fluid, they had exchanged specifications, times, dates, dimensions, quantities, qualities, laws of motion, standards of beauty, methods of operation, schedules, etc. And to add to it all, I even understood the meaning and significance: They had wanted to build a machine powered by coal, capable of moving steel at scores of miles per hour across the plains. To do that, they would have had to build an engine, and this engine would convert the energy gained from the combustion of this coal to forward motion—I understood all this. And if I used language to explain it to one of my brothers, he’d understand it too.

All this information, all these laws of physics and properties of chemicals were known not only to me but to any sagacious member of my family.

So why had we never built such a machine?

Truly, such a machine would have been valued. How would it not be valuable to be able to transport yourself in addition to objects so heavy that they are impractical to carry for more than a few yards at a time before needing to rest? I could see its value in the room around me, and I could feel its value in the vibrations that rumbled up my spine from the floor. If it would be so valuable, why had we never invented it? Why had not one of our scholars replicated such a machine in a similar wise?

This questions floated in the various recesses of my mind, starting at the place for reflection, then for confusion, dipping briefly into the dark access of doubt, before finally settling into a massive pile of notions thrown aside for later, an amassment of unorganized refuse dedicated to future contemplation but which continuously weighed down on my soul, forever inducing within me a general drowsiness.

And as the train rocked me, as the land drifted past with a now-monotonous regularity, it rocked me into a heaviness of body and soul. The train closed my eyes as one closes shutters at the end of a day; and I, against all my desire, drifted into a sleep which felt more akin to a deep reverie than a voiding of consciousness.

Comments

[Abronymous Lee]

Well, before my actual comment, I would just like to say...FIRST!!!!
Er hem...
Errenax is becoming even less of an enigma than I thought he was when I first picked up this fic. As he progresses from start to now, I am seeing myself in his thoughts and actions.
I eagerly await the next installment of this fantastic story.

[ferret]

Fluttershy totally knows. She's treating him like an eagle, not a pony.

[Forderz]

Errenax is spinning his own web around himself - nagging questions about his people's accomplishments, goals, and outlook.

Which web will snare its prey first?

[PresentPerfect]

I noticed some of Fluttershy's lines sounds more like something Errenax himself would say. I wonder if this is an artifact of her dialogue being filtered through his writing, or an oversight.