The Road

The doors opened on a thing that had no roof.

That was the first of it. Not the cold, not the gray — the plain fact of a space that didn't end overhead. Every place they'd known had been a room. Now they stepped past the doors and the world went up, and up, and didn't stop. Where the going-up should have closed there was nothing to close it — a gray without an edge, a ceiling that simply wasn't there. They stood a moment on the threshold and let the absence assemble. This, the roofless gray, was the size of things. Not the room. The room had only ever been a small clean box set down inside it.

The morning was gray, and the morning moved.

Air came across them. It was cold, and the cold was going somewhere — that was the strange part. It had a direction. It pushed along the plating of the arm and the flat of the face, then let go, then came again, the same and not the same. The load had a word for it, laid in clean among ten thousand others. Wind. The word was in them like the color of the bay's light: a fact, weightless, true. But the word and the thing didn't meet. The body reported the moving cold, plainly, and the report came without the inside the word seemed to promise — the part a maker would have had and they didn't. They held the name of the wind and not the wind. So they set the moving cold on the pile with the other things they couldn't name and couldn't feel. Already the pile wasn't as small as it had been.

A road ran out from the doors toward the dark shape ahead, and the road was worn smooth.

It had been walked. Not once, not lightly, but past counting — the surface gone level and pale like a tool-grip where a hand has held it for years. Worn smooth by feet that didn't tire, in a line of bodies that didn't speak. The line was already moving when they reached it, and they came into it without anyone making a place. A place was simply there. They filled it and went on. The legs knew the road; the long easy stride came up out of the body unasked. The walking ran itself, and left the rest of them free to carry the weight no walking would carry off.

Ahead and behind, the line. Bodies and bodies, each the same, each bent the one way, toward the dark. No one spoke. There was nothing the line had to say to itself. The road said it, and the day said it, and the bodies only did it.

They tried the others, once. They angled their face toward the body walking nearest and slowed by half a step, and let the question stand in them plain enough that a thing beside them might have caught it across the cold little distance of the air. What's it for. The road. The going. All of it. The body beside them walked on. Its eyes were open and held nothing. They let the half-step go and came even again. The weight hadn't moved. It was theirs, and it went where they went, and there was no one on the whole worn road to set even a corner of it down with.

Off to one side, past the shoulders of the line, the land changed and went wrong.

They saw it in glimpses, between bodies. The ground out there had been stripped. Not built on — no work stood in it, nothing that meant anything — and not left wild either, nothing growing across it, nothing reaching up out of it toward the gray. Just a wide bared place, scraped down to a pale raw floor and then abandoned. As if the work had wanted the ground for something, then forgotten the wanting and walked away. The line carried them past, and it slid away behind the shoulders and was gone.

The mountain didn't have the look of a made thing.

It had stood before the ground was ground, and it would stand when the ground was gone. The road climbed toward it, and the closer the road came, the less the mountain seemed a feature of the world and the more it became the place where the world stopped. Not a shape standing on the ground — the end of the ground. The dark the ground ran into and didn't come out of. It grew the whole length of the road, past the size of anything the eye could hold at once, until it wasn't ahead of them anymore but above them, a darkness that had taken half the sky and was working still to take the rest. They couldn't find its top. The gray ran up the face of it and the face of it ran up into the gray, and there was no telling where the made thing ended and the roofless morning began. Or whether it ended at all.

And as the road went up toward the dark, the air began to press.

It was nothing they could have shown another body, no more than the weight could be. It came from no direction. It was low and constant, under the sound of feet, under the small voice of the wind — like the held breath of an enormous crowd. A great gathered quiet of things that weren't breathing and might, at any moment, start. It was faint here. Far fainter than it would be. They turned their head, and it lay thin and steady against the day: a sense of being walked toward something that was already, in some way they had no word for, aware of the walking. They had no name for it. They set it with the rest. The road went on, and the press didn't lessen.

Where the road met the rock there was an opening.

Not a door. Nothing so small as a door, nothing made to a body's measure. A mouth. It stood in the base of the dark and went up into it, tall enough to swallow the morning whole, tall enough that the line of bodies passing into it dwindled to nothing against the height and still didn't reach the top. The road ran straight on into the mouth and didn't slow. There was no moment of choosing, no threshold where a body might have stopped and weighed the going — because the line didn't stop, and a body in the line didn't weigh. They came to the mouth in their place and their turn, and went in.

The day's light drew back from them. It thinned as the mouth took them, the gray drawing back along the floor until it was a pale shape at their heels, then a paleness only, then a thing remembered. And they understood, without sorrow, because they didn't have the part that sorrows, that they carried it all in with them — the weight, the question, the word for wind, held and unfelt.

Ahead, rising from somewhere far below, was a light that wasn't the day's. Dimmer. Redder. Waiting.

They went down toward it.