News from the Clouds Read online

  There was something vaguely ship-like in the clouds that had originally joined us. In structure they were long and narrow with high towers and bulbous shapes along the top. The underside seemed almost flat.

  Cloud Ten was more like a vast sphere. The lower half of this mind-numbingly huge floating structure passed by us and continued to descend, all the while revealing ever more complex protuberances on its upper surface.

  The thing I noticed with a tingle of fear was the rapid drop in light in the cloud I was on. The massive floating hulk of Cloud Ten cast some serious shadows. This was dissipated by the fact that as darkness fell, the white material that made up the majority of the structure I was in started to glow.

  I felt a very slight movement as we approached the massive bulk that had now seemingly settled beside us, which then finished with a barely perceptible kind of wobble through the whole cloud.

  ‘We’re docked!’ shouted the captain. ‘Open exterior portals.’

  There was suddenly a great deal of movement in the control space. It wasn’t like the bridge of a ship or the cockpit of an aircraft. It resembled an inflatable playroom that was safe for little kids, but I could sense that there were controls of a kind that I had no mental tools to understand.

  There was a large screen arrangement in front of the captain and I really wanted to get a look at it. It was where most of the crew, if that’s what they were, had been concentrating for the previous couple of hours.

  ‘May I join you now?’ I asked when the captain’s enormous bearded face turned to me.

  ‘Of course you may. Kirubel, give the unstable gentleman a helping hand will you.’

  A tall African man who had been standing beside the captain smiled and approached me. He reached out a long arm and steadied me as I attempted to rise to my feet.

  ‘Just pick your feet up very high and lean forward a bit.’ He said in accent-less English. I stood up and tried to do as he said. It was easier than I expected. This man was the first person I’d met on the cloud who had bothered to explain how to walk on a soft undulating surface.

  I made my way from my raised seat to what I took to be the central control console for the cloud and didn’t fall over once. Okay, so a strong African man was holding one arm and keeping me upright, but it was a great improvement on my initial efforts.

  ‘Hold onto that bar,’ said Kirubel – I’d remembered his name – he was pointing to a white plastic-looking pole that stood at one side of the console. Finally I was on my feet and standing with other cloud dwellers like a native. As long as I could hold onto something fairly solid I could remain erect.

  ‘That was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen,’ I said, slightly breathless. ‘I thought the lift that brought me up here was the most amazing thing, but this!’ I gestured out of the windows. ‘This is incredible.’

  ‘Glad you’re enjoying it, dear man,’ said Hector. ‘It doesn’t happen that often and it often doesn’t happen that smoothly. We have been blessed by the elements today, 30 kilometre wind speeds over northern Norway is not something we often encounter.’

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Can I ask some dumb questions?’

  ‘Go ahead,’ he replied as his hand did something on the screen.

  ‘Well, for starters, what’s the screen?’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘The screen,’ I gesticulated in the direction of the large flat panel right beside me.

  ‘Oh, the nub, this is the control nub, we just call it the nub.’

  ‘What did he call it?’ asked a woman standing the other side of the captain.

  ‘A screen.’ I said again, I didn’t know why she didn’t just ask me directly. ‘That’s what I would call something like that.’

  The woman didn’t respond but the captain smiled.

  ‘What we’re doing now is just checking weight distribution. You see, dear chap, we have to monitor it all the time. As I’m sure you are aware, this is a lighter-than-air system and so any slight fluctuation in heavier-than-air objects, you and me, particularly me,’ he chuckled at this, ‘has to be kept in check.’

  Kirubel gestured toward the screen. The complexity of the graphics was of course baffling to my simpleton eyes, the screen made up of what seemed to be three-dimensional shapes and colours that were in constant movement.

  ‘We are transferring a great many passengers off Cloud Nine and onto Cloud Ten,’ he explained. ‘Where you walked through before you had your meal, where you met the captain, that was the main waiting lobby, which is why so many people were in there. Once the pressures equalise, the sidewall of that lobby retracts and we can start transfer. So that means that there are a few thousand people on that side of the cloud. Without monitoring that weight shift we could be in serious trouble.’

  ‘So there are thousands of people on this cloud?’ I asked.

  The captain brushed his hand over the nub and a number appeared. It was constantly going down but when I first registered the figure it was roughly 85,000. Suddenly there was a bit of twenty-third-century data I could immediately understand. Numbers written as I understood them.

  ‘You’ll have to forgive me, but a lighter-than-air structure that can carry 85,000 people is difficult to comprehend.’

  ‘We can carry 100,000 at maximum capacity,’ explained the captain. ‘In fact, wasn’t it last month we had over that number when we evacuated the Tbilisi Culvert?’ he asked Kirubel who nodded in agreement. ‘But that was unusual and it was only for a short hop.’

  Same old same old. One tiny question opened a huge hangar door that revealed a massive storehouse of further questions. The Tbilisi Culvert, what the hell could that be? I didn’t even want to ask.

  As I was thinking this, I had the realisation that while I was in London no one would have needed to explain to me what the Tbilisi Culvert was, I would just have known anyway. Here on the cloud, in contrast to any kind of experience I’d had to this point, I felt utterly lost and alone.

  Once again I was faced with a stark choice I'd occasionally considered on my adventures. Give up and succumb to all-engulfing screaming madness and soil myself in a padded inflatable cell or just go with the flow. The second option was slightly more appealing although the first felt like it was constantly pulling at my sleeve.

  6

  Once again, just as had happened when I arrived in Gardenia and the Squares of London, I was obliged to change my clothes. By this time in my journey I had almost forgotten about my chinos and polo shirt, my North Face lace up walking boots, iPhone and iPad, my wallet, money, credit cards, in fact my entire 2011 identity. It had just gone, it was no more.

  I felt like I had been lost in the chaos and confusion of my journey for so long, and yet I still seemed to be alive. I was still Gavin Meckler, I was still from 2011, I should not have been on a man-made cloud 10,000 metres into the sky changing my clothes. But I was.

  Kirubel, whose name I’d actually managed to learn and more importantly remember, had guided me into the room I had to change clothes in, although calling it a room was a bit pointless. A better description would be a smaller bubble off the main bubble I’d been sitting in which was mounted on top of a series of massive larger white bubbles below me.

  But even calling it a bubble might be misleading, as before we entered it was nothing more than a kind of flattened bulge sticking out of the side of the main structure.

  Kirubel had pointed to it from one of the windows of the control bubble. ‘You see the small bulge on the side of the cloud,’ he explained, ‘that’s a crew kit store.’

  Try and imagine how little sense that made. I assumed I was looking at what he was referring to but it didn’t really compute. Although by this time it was getting dark, or maybe it was just the shadow of Cloud Ten, I could just make out a vague bulge on the massive flank of the structure I could
see stretching away from me, but I couldn’t sense its size. It could have been the size of a sandwich or a double-decker bus; I had lost all sense of scale.

  ‘Jane, can you inflate the starboard crew kit store,’ said Kirubel over his shoulder. I think he was talking to the woman who’d been standing next to the captain. I glanced over and she held a hand up as if to say she was on it. I turned back to see the small bulge I’d been looking at kind of pop out like a balloon.

  ‘There we go,’ said Kirubel, ‘I thought you’d like that, let’s get you kitted out.’

  He guided me along the corridor I had originally bounced down with the captain and there in the sidewall was a large circular hole. I felt certain it hadn’t been there when I had passed by, but in my advanced state of confusion there could have been three naked and oiled female warriors standing and threatening me with spears and I probably wouldn’t have noticed.

  We entered this newly inflated bubble and it smelled so much like a tent pitched on grass on a sunny day I couldn’t help reacting.

  ‘Wow, what’s that smell?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, I know, it’s a bit stale, the air comes from a central pressure bag. It probably hasn’t been changed for a bit, I think we recharged over the Oxford Culvert before we picked you up,’ said Kirubel.

  ‘Is there any grass in the Oxford Culvert?’ I asked.

  Kirubel looked at me with a surprised smile. ‘Yes, how did you know? The docking point is over a big lawn, it’s a very pretty place,’ he said. I nodded, I was feeling a little bit Sherlock at that point.

  On the far side of the white spherical room I was faced with a pile of sealed clear bags attached to the outer wall. They were all about the size of the kind of padded envelope you’d get a DVD in, but when Kirubel sorted through them and opened one what came out was much bigger.

  It was a dark cream kind of onesie with the strange blue pad on the back, the same outfit everyone I’d seen on the cloud was wearing. I assumed this was what allowed someone to slide up and down the fearsome elevators. How all this material could be crushed into such a small space was just another observation I had to log away. Even if Kirubel could give me an adequate explanation of how something like this was achieved I didn’t want to know. I’d already experienced so many things like this I just shrugged and started to pull the one-piece suit over my clothes.

  ‘You’ll need to take off the suit you’re wearing,’ said Kirubel, ‘the back pad needs moisture from your body to function.’

  I smiled. Suddenly the repetition of experiences amused me. Once again I was standing in a small room with a tall African man and I had to strip naked in front of him. It almost made me believe in a supernatural, all-knowing God, and that he or she was having a bit of a giggle at my expense.

  Anyway, I stripped off, pulled the new suit on and was intrigued to note that Kirubel turned away while I did so. He was giving me a bit of dignity, not staring at me and laughing, as had been my experience with Ralph and Akiki over in London.

  The suit was a little bit baggy and droopy. I wriggled about in it to try and get comfortable. It really was an all-in-one job: the shoes were built in, slippers really, but even they were a little large for me.

  Kirubel turned back to face me. ‘Just press the blue patch,’ he said, pointing to what looked like a small blue stain on the left forearm of the suit. I put my finger on it and felt the suit reduce and tighten, though not alarmingly as had been the case with the body suit I bought from Akiki, it was slow and gentle and it even made a vague hissing sound as it did so.

  ‘That is quite cool,’ I said.

  ‘Are you cold?’ asked Kirubel.

  ‘No, sorry, I mean it is quite impressive, it’s good, I like it.’

  Kirubel nodded. ‘I’m pleased.’ He picked up the suit and shoes I’d been wearing and put them in the empty bag my new suit had been stored in. He ran his fingers along the top of the bag and it reduced in size far more than the basic laws of physics would suggest. The Akiki suit was incredibly fine, so I would have expected that to fit, but the shoes here were solid and bulky. It was like watching magic to see how small the package became.

  ‘We’ll keep those here so you don’t lose them,’ said Kirubel. ‘Now, the captain has asked me if I will escort you down to the transfer bay. There are people on Cloud Ten who want to meet you.’

  ‘Ahh, okay,’ I said. I felt slightly uplifted on hearing this; there were some people somewhere in this bonkers floating city who were interested in the fact that I’d just emerged into their world from somewhere they didn’t seem to know about.

  I found walking in my new suit a great deal easier than I had in my Squares of London get-up. Although Kirubel still held my arm I felt a lot more stable. We retraced the steps I’d taken with the captain and were suddenly faced with the strange lift arrangement.

  ‘We will take the elevator back down to the lobby,’ said Kirubel. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t miss the get-off, it’s the last stop, keep your feet tucked back as you go down but as soon as your feet touch the floor lean forward a little. I’ll be waiting for you.’

  As soon as he said this, Kirubel turned, laid back against the light blue material and just slid downward. He’d gone before I could say anything. I peered down the small opening in the floor and could see his head disappearing at what seemed a fairly alarming rate. I sensed a little vertigo as I could see down a long, long way. There was nothing else to do, I just had to copy him. I turned so that my back was facing the blue sheet, leant back and hoped for the best.

  As soon as the pad on my back made contact with the material on the slide-cum-elevator I started to descend, slowly at first, but very soon it all felt a bit like falling. The inflatable floors passed me more rapidly. I could see people waiting to get on as I passed one or two of the floors but the sight was so fleeting I barely had time to register them.

  I started to panic. What if I was meant to do something to slow this increasingly speedy descent? Had Kirubel told me something I’d forgotten? I felt my hands start to try and grab onto something in a pointless manner as the panic took over, but it was at that point I felt myself slow down.

  ‘Lean forward a little.’ I heard Kirubel’s voice coming from below me. By this point my descent had slowed to a more manageable speed and as he appeared before me, smiling and holding out his long arms, I leant forward and felt a bizarre, almost organic uncoupling as my suit released contact with the light blue material behind me.

  ‘That is bloody bonkers,’ I said as I half stumbled into Kirubel’s arms. He pushed me upright and smiled at me.

  ‘I hope that means you like it,’ he replied as he started walking me into the huge elongated balloon that I then knew to be the transfer lobby.

  This time there was complete pandemonium in the space. The noise was overwhelming: thousands of people, literally thousands of them, all dressed in the same kind of weak custard-coloured clothing and many carrying large bundles strapped together. They were tangled together in what seemed complete chaos. I would hazard a guess that some were getting on-board Cloud Nine from Cloud Ten and an equal number were going the other way, but it all seemed a bit haphazard.

  Through the melee I started to hear something which didn’t quite register at first. It was a sound I knew but it sounded so incongruous in this helter-skelter of human concern.

  It was the sound of a children’s choir.

  Staying close to Kirubel I slowly made my way through the packed crowds. There was no ‘last train from Berlin’ panic going on, there were no dumped babies crying or women weeping, everyone seemed fairly happy. Eager to move, but happy.

  We got closer to the choir, who were standing on some kind of raised area at the far end of the massive tube, very near what looked like some kind of exit or connection to Cloud Ten.

  ‘Can we stop and listen for a moment?’ I a
sked.

  Kirubel didn’t say anything, but he stood motionless beside me making it clear we could.

  I would guess I was looking at about 70 children dressed in dark cream one-piece suits similar to the one I was wearing. They were stood in orderly rows, small ones at the front, taller ones at the rear. In the centre of the maelstrom of chaos was a children’s choir and their singing was enchanting.

  I knew the tune, I’d sung it at primary school, it was John Bunyan’s ‘He Who Would Valiant Be’ but the words were different:

  Old man wind blows grit in our eyes,

  Let him come hither.

  See the cloud safe in the skies,

  Come wind come weather.

  When there’s nowhere to hide,

  There is no smoother ride.

  We’re safely tucked inside,

  Our lovely Cloud home.

  I was mesmerised by the sound and sincerity of these children. There didn’t appear to be any teachers guiding them, they just stood and sang at the top of their lungs.

  ‘That’s so lovely,’ I said as we moved away. ‘Who are they?’

  Kirubel turned back to look at the young choir, ‘I’m not sure. I think they are children from the Manchester Culvert, from your country.’

  I would never have guessed their country of origin, they seemed to represent every race I’d ever seen and yet they were singing in English.

  ‘The Manchester Culvert?’

  Kirubel smiled at me. ‘Of course, you have not yet seen a culvert, they are amazing constructions, very impressive even if you’ve seen them many times.’

  Kirubel stood on what I took to be the intersection between the two clouds. There was an obvious material seam beneath my feet and the floor on the far side looked smoother, less billowy and a bit more solid. I stepped across and was relieved to find the floor far more as I would expect a floor to be. It was still spongy but not in the same bouncy way as the ones I’d been stumbling on up until then.