Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

The Birdmen and Kingdoms of Sky - (Nov 6, Wednesday)

Want light. want levity. want to get up out of the dark nuclear-armed depths of the Core.

Back to the dream that spawned the Sky Ward: back to the bird-like imaginings of those men who sat on steel girders in the sky--the welders, and the fitters, and the concrete pourers--and lost themselves in reveries about what it would be like to live on high: to move around along the highways of birds. They would sit there on breaks between building, in the silent moments between realizing the neverending, upward momentum of Man, and they would delight in being mostly alone in this place, in being the necessary, labour-intensive trail blazers for all that would come after: first skydeck lookouts, then Bank towers filled with corporate offices, then condo buildings, and finally the MegaCondominiums. Or just MegaDos for short, because the reality was that they were far more than simple vertical housing.

However, back here on the first edge, back at the beginning of the climb into the sky, a man could stand on the very edge of a gangplank of metal with nothing around him but blue and white. There were no safety harnesses yet, no fallbelts, no builder drones flying up their vertical railways. It is just him and the view gods must have once had: looking down from on high, taking in the still vertically-challenged works of Man below. There are other skeletal growths of girders and scaffolding going up in places along the one-dimensional sweep of vision, but they are few, and their progress is slow. His own surges; growing upwards more rapidly than any of the others, as if it had an appointment that it was hurrying to meet, as if—should it arrive at the right height at a precise moment in time—it might bisect the heavens, impaling them on its lofty spire. And humanity, only so many generations distant from a parliament of clever apes, would scramble up that ladder of steel piles and crossbeams, before the bricks and concrete were even laid. At the top, they'd cluster like a flock of birds, jabbering just the same, delighted to finally be able to converse with their skyborn makers.

The man on the girder finishes his sandwich, and he sacrifices the wax paper it has been wrapped in, with spots of sauce and tomato and crust still clinging to it, to the wind. It is an old habit, born of laziness, but come to reverence: an illogical, primal belief that in giving it to the winds, he makes a prayer.

Make my feet sure

Make my mass heavy

Make my gravity sympathetic

Stick me to this earth, and take me not off into the sky.

He's seen it happen before. Everyone who works in the high places has. 

Those few, green fitters who may have slaved in the hulls of ships, or have rivetted together the iron hulks of locomotives, but have never before ventured up into the sky. He feels like it's been so long now that he's getting to a place where he can spot them as soon as those cage doors rattle open, and they take their first teetering steps onto the web of girders.

Most of the green ones look down then, and they're given to vertigo, and they stumble backwards, clawing their fingers into the mesh of the cage as if they could weld those digits into it by pure force of will. They exclaim "CHRIST!" or something similar, and all the old guard laugh because they were once there themselves. 

This is normal. It has been a long time since the fathers of our fathers came down out of the trees, and, with our terrestrial existence, this is the highest these men have ever and will ever be.

It's the fear that sticks the men to the girders. It is the vertigo that coats the bottom of their boots like flypaper: the acrophobia that empowers them like adrenaline to react like cats when their footing does eventually slip—causes them to shoot out their arms faster than they've ever done before; allows them to grab and hang on tighter than they'd otherwise be able.