Member by Michael Cisco

Author:Michael Cisco [Cisco, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi, azw3
Publisher: Chomu Press
Published: 2013-10-15T06:00:00+00:00

Finally, near the top at last, there’s nothing but a pair of narrow boards stapled to the wall to form a ledge, and a slender guiderope attached in brackets. We pause, panting in the thin air, the wind whips our garments and numbs exposed skin; we waver in the blast, and below us is a sheer drop of hundreds of feet. Through the battering of air in my ears I can make out an exclamation, I think from droop lip, who draws wood face’s attention excitedly to something—a long, black filament, twirling in the wind, pinched in the tubing of a bamboo pole. Droop produces a kit, tweezes the filament out, and claps it in a sample case. Wooden, meanwhile, searches everywhere for other traces, even asking us, with gestures, to lift our feet and shuffle this way and that so he check under them.

The wind dies down a little, and Yunis gives the command to move again.

“Now or never,” I hear him say.

How old is this construction project? The slender wooden boards beneath my feet are bleached nearly white, and seem like bones. Ancient bones.

My palms sweat, hot and cold flashes burst through me, and my legs feel like buckling. The ledge projects out into space in a kinked line angling up, over a sheer drop. Yunis leads the others out first, and I take up the rear, moving my feet like blocks of wood, unable to tear my eyes from my feet. The ledge is only slightly wider than they are. A kind of billowing, anarchic feeling whips around me in the wind. I want to cling to the artifact, but somehow that makes it feel as if I’m priming to shove off from it and launch myself backwards into space and death. The others are a line of bobbing heads in the blue, with Yunis moving steadily, alertly forward, set directly against a sky of infinitely layered blue darkness.

One by one I hear them lunge forward, and I hurry the last few steps and fling myself on top of the artifact. Now I lie here, on my face, trying to collect myself. Wondering with terror about the trip down.

Even the top of this thing is tarped, but the fabric is battered, the weave is unravelling, and in places, one very near me, totally torn away. Why I want to be so furtive about it, I don’t know, but I creep a little sideways and bring my face right down next to the gap, to get my first look at the artifact itself. Actually, I touch it before I see it, having flung out my hand a little too far. As my fingers come to rest on the surface, I suddenly remember an ancient tree I used to pass by regularly in the old days; its massive trunk was flaky with scales of fungus, and there was one big white gill, half the size of a dinner plate, protruding from a shallow indentation in the bark. Once, I

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