Skyward - (NaNoWriMo 2013 Novel)

Eat of the Fruit - (Nov 12, Tuesday)

Golden light from the rising sun slanted in huge, floor-to-ceiling windows that curved from base to summit. The room itself was dark, fashioned out of marble that had either been black to begin with or had been charred by all of the strife that this building had seen before it was actually abandonned. Some sort of incindiaries has been set off in the floors leading up to this one, and from the ruinous state of that highest room, it looked like it had faired no better than the rest of the 'Do.

It was hard to pay too much attention to the destruction, though. Those direct rays of sunlight were far more appealing a sight. Benedict crunched forward through the rubble, heedless of what (or who) he might be stepping on. Jakob followed, though more nimbly than Benedict, looking down regularly to steer clear of things that very likely were charred bones. Benedict, at that moment, was physically incapable of caution; he was far too taken by that light. He moved beyond the walls of furniture and the scroched drapes that had shored up in front of the eastward-facing bank of windows, and he stepped into the full glare of the sun.

He turned his eyes to it until they began to tear. He drank it in like a plant too long in the shadow. It had been so long since Benedict had seen actual sunlight like this that he didn't know whether to laugh or weep.

There were senior officials in the corporate government who had what were referred to as "Skyview" offices, but what this usually meant is that their actual windows allowed for slightly larger parcels of blue to be seen, as well as the occasional, fleeting glimpses of actual sun. To the credit of the largely indifferent corporate officials, when one of these haphazard rays of light would chance to lance into the office, conversation of the uninspiring and unimportant, bureaucratic matters of the day would, usually, cease, and everyone would sit or stand in mute tribute to the ray until it passed. It was a venerance that never went beyond that brief moment, though. The dull conversation would continue on, and no one ever suggested that perhaps there was something to be learned from these silent moments of observation.

The only true skyview layers of the MegaDos were reserved for the residences of these officials, above the administrative levels where they held their meetings and allowed fleeting, silent vigils for the light. To these actual skyview layers, which stood above the cloud deck and afforded true views of something other than the backside of another building, Benedict had only ever gone on one occassion.

As he and the boy had climbed through the vertical ruin of the levels in this MegaDo in the dark, Benedict hadn't stopped to consider how high they had gotten. This wasn't surprising as Benedict wasn't even sure why he had said that they should first head up before going down. There was an itch that lingered in the back of his mind that he had longed to scratch: he wanted to stand on the highest levels of one of those spires he had helped to drive into the sky all those years ago.

He'd managed it once, briefly, decades ago; when he had been invited, along with the rest of the Core Rebuild team's senior members, to a celebratory reception in one of the executive palaces that capped each 'Do. In those days the architectural hierarchy was only in the early offing, but it was already considered gauche and unsophisticated to spend too much time goggling out the expansive windows that stood in for walls at the sweep of the heavens beyond. The time for goggling was during the designated Sundown viewing, and even in this alotted time it was fashionable to seem mostly bored with the proceedings. The viewings saw all of the officials take up seated or standing positions along the west-ward bank of windows on the drawing level of the palatial corporate penthouse suite.

Benedict could no longer remember who their host had been on that occassion, but he did remember that the man had done his best to feign abject ennui at his having to indulge the other administrators with the viewing event. It had felt like they had all taken on the role of excited children, slavering over the glass of a toy shop while their host took on the role of the stern parent, allowing them their moment of weakness before he pulled them back on to schedule. The setting sun inflamed the cloud bank below with ruby and gold, and eventually indigo, and then that fell to blue, to grey, to black. The majority of the other observers had by then been drawn away by expensive scotch, rye, and wine that had been bottled a half century earlier, but Benedict held on to that view tenaciously, scarcely moving a muscle until he had to be physically dragged from the windows to the dinner table by one of his nervous colleagues.