If the camp couldn’t hear me, there had to be another reason.
I listened, and realized that much of what I’d taken for wind was instead a soft hiss.
The bastard. Or bitch. Whatever.
They’d hiss-screened the entire hammock, to cut me off from any would-be rescuers.
I could cry for help until I scraped my throat raw, and nobody would ever hear me.
For the next few seconds, that didn’t stop me from trying.
Afterward, running out of breath, managing another look above me to confirm that the holes in the canvas had grown larger and more numerous, I became angry enough to do something about it.
Had to take this one step at a time.
The tether was the only thing keeping me alive. Getting a grip on it, behind my back, was difficult as I was bobbing and spinning from my initial fall, but I managed it. It was a thin line, but a strong one, with just enough texture to make a firm grip possible. It wasn’t the kind of rope I would have chosen to climb, but then I’d never allowed my life to depend on climbing a rope before.
I pulled and with tremendous strain managed to lift my body a few centimeters before exhaustion made me let go and fall again.
That was okay. I’d learned what I wanted to learn.
I reached behind my back and grabbed the line with both hands, with my favored hand, the right, uppermost. Holding on with both hands was not quite as difficult as maintaining a grip with only one, but still more than I could manage for very long.
This would have been easier facing the tether. The blood wouldn’t be rushing to my head, for one thing. But I didn’t need this to be easy. I needed it to be possible.
All I had to do was release the line with my left hand, move that hand just a few centimeters to a new hold directly above my right.
My left hand didn’t want to let go until I screamed at it for being so fucking useless.
Then it complied.
I rose a few worthless centimeters. The strain on my arms and lower back was horrible, but at least now there was some slack on the line.
The clouds of One One One’s lower atmosphere called to me.
Climbing just this little bit had taken more out of me than I could really afford. The position was just too difficult. One of Gibb’s monkeys might have managed it, but I was not built like them. I didn’t have that kind of climbing experience or upper-body strength.
To have any chance at all I had to find a way to turn around and face the line.
Another few inches gained, and the slack in the line began to curl against my waist. Black spots swarmed at the edges of my vision. I hissed through gritted teeth and knew, with as much certainty as I’ve ever known anything, that I’d only have one shot at this.
Still holding on with my left hand, I released the hold I had with my right and allowed myself to roll. Throwing all my weight into the spin, I put everything I had, and a little bit more, into whipping my right arm around.
I don’t know what I would have done if I’d missed it. The tether would have arrested my fall again, but I’d have been back where I started, too exhausted to start again, with the only safety line still attached to my back and still almost impossible to reach.
But my right hand found the line.
I spun, gasped as my grip almost failed to survive the counterswing, then gasped again as I righted and the line now curling in front of me whipped across my face, drawing a nasty friction burn on my cheek.
But once I stopped spinning, my body was no longer an inverted V, bent at the waist and trapped with a view of the clouds. Now I had my back to them and my eyes fixed on the remains of my hammock. The material of the upper structure had further deteriorated in the long minutes since my last close look. It was now marred by big gaping holes surrounded by clusters of smaller ones. I could see additional ribs of the same material, composing the central spine, descending from the hammock’s highest point like a pair of interlocking arches, to anchor the rib in four places.
Anything I could hold on to was good news.
All I had to do now was climb up, hook my legs around the circular spine, and scramble up and over.
That was still going to be difficult, but the hard part was done, I thought.
I was wrong.
By the time I straddled the circular spine, grateful for the substantial comfort I found in contact with such a solid object, the air around me was flecked with falling snow.
Not water-snow. This was another phenomenon, resembling little flakes of ash. They tumbled around me in thin flurries, captives of One One One’s high-altitude breezes, each speck a little pinprick of tan color I was only able to discern because of all the lights of Hammocktown, shining through the wreckage above me.
I didn’t know what the specks were until one came to rest on the back of my hand. It was an irregular square about half the size of my pinky fingernail, neutral in texture, so light I wouldn’t have been aware of its arrival at all had I not been watching at the moment. There were probably any number of flakes just like it already dotting my skin and in my hair. This one seemed to be sizzling, though I couldn’t feel any difference between its temperature and that of the surrounding air. Even as I watched, a small hole formed in its center, and the straight lines of the outer perimeter turned saw-toothed as bits and pieces of it dissolved into nothingness.
It was a piece of my hammock.
The process responsible for dissolving the lower half was still hard at work on the upper portions.
The loose canvas at my side rippled in the wind. I tightened my thighs around the thin rail and probed the cloth with my left hand.
It felt softer. Fuzzier. The more it broke down, the more pitted and rutted its surface became. The imperfections may not have been visible to the naked eye, but they did change the texture, and my fingertips could feel the difference.
Whatever was happening here didn’t seem to be affecting the hammock ribs, yet, but I had no guarantee that they’d remain intact forever.
I yelled again, testing the hiss screen: “HEY! HELP! I’M OVER HERE!”
Then listened.
Nothing.
I couldn’t tell whether I was still within the hiss field, or outside it in a Hammocktown where everybody else had died, but either way, my options remained limited.
I had to get to solid ground.
Unfortunately, I was on the far side of the circular spine, opposite the bridge to the rest of the community. To get there I’d have to use the spine as a tightrope. The sections of hammock still remaining intact would only hinder me in that attempt. I couldn’t straddle the spine, let alone walk upright, in any of the places where material flapped. Nor was I sure I had enough will left to move at all. I couldn’t think of the emptiness below me without wanting to close my eyes and shut myself down.
The only solution to that was to start moving.
First things first: retrieving my bag. I’d tethered it before tethering myself, and I wasn’t willing to surrender it.
I reached over, grabbed the shoulder strap, and looped it over my head.
Then I undid its tether.
Fear flared when I realized that it was as vulnerable now as I was…and that there were any number of ways it could unbalance me and pull me over the side.
I didn’t allow that thought to lead to considerations of dropping it.
More snow flurries around my head.
Canvas shrapnel tumbled past me, and into the void.
The tent above me had deteriorated enough to reveal the Uppergrowth. Three Brachiators dangled in plain sight, their broad, shaggy backs blind to me. One bore a little baby Brachiator, one-tenth the size of its mother,
