The towers
It was a competition and a carnival: each tower a candidate and a cacophony of blue. The whole city watched while the twenty carts, each one representing a tower, held their annual race. In the weeks before the race, every morning, streams of people left town through the six gates and late in the evening the now mainly blue-coloured, broad ribbons re-entered the town. The men carried the long vines and the big leaves, the women bore the ripe and swollen fruit: a harvest of unearthly, multiple blue colours.
Broad ladders and scaffoldings and pulley blocks were raised along towers, that rose kilometers high. Tiny, fragile as cobwebs in an old oak tree, they disappeared from view halfway up the tower walls. In their thousands people climbed the towers to put up the decorations, cheered on by those who were too young, too old or too ill to take part in the climb. Those who fell were buried in silence, outside the city wall; those who climbed the highest were honoured and crowned with blue wreaths.
Above the city the huge, transparent, blue ships floated. Shaped like elongated drops, the lazy tears of some God, each one was as big and deep as a lake. Inside each ship a continuous electric storm raged, sometimes erupting in dark-blue flashes of lightning that raced over the ship’s surface. Then kilometers’ Â long, slender fingers grew from the bottom of the ship and reached down and almost touched the flat roofs of the towers below, before slowly pulling back again. The ships circled endlessly above the city, while the people below decorated the towers.
No-one knew how long ago the first race had been held - or what had come first: the ships, the towers or this yearly recurring event - but the race was now inextricably linked to the city and its inhabitants. Each spring, when outside the city walls the only plants still growing grew new, light blue leaves and the deep blue fruit re-appeared on their branches, the people left town. There, amidst the thousands of grave hills, where the roots of the plants drank deep, they sang the songs and said the prayers that had been passed along by their forbears. There, a few weeks later, all the inhabitants gathered to collect the leaves and vines and fruit, that each year were used to decorate the towers.
The women plucked the leaves and vines and spread these out over the grave hills. Only when the last blue drops had bled out the men could pick them up and carry them back to town. Before, all men who touched leaf or vine died. Women who touched the fruit while it hang from the plants, got pregnant. Their bellies swelled grotesquely within minutes and they died giving birth to strange, blue creatures that subsequently died, choking: poisoned by earth’s alien atmosphere. Only after the fruits were plucked it was safe for the women to carry them into town.
Each harvest day thousands of men and women died in this dense forest of plants, in which the fruit was deeply, sometimes invisibly hidden. Their bodies lay where they had fallen, till the day’s work was done. Then the survivors buried their dead and carried the day’s harvest into town. At the end of these harvest weeks the grave hills had grown considerably taller and the plants grew even more lushly and thick than the previous year.
The carts were laden with the dark blue, ripe or rotting fruit and were decorated with now brittle, light blue vines and leaves. Each cart was pulled by twenty men. Once there had been hundreds of carts, each representing one tower; now there were only twenty of them left. From within the towers the people watched. The ships floated above town, in slow circles and blue lightning rippled over the ships’ surfaces, while the long, slender fingers lazily reached down and almost touched the tower roofs. Apart from the creaking of the wooden wheels and the grunts and heavy breathing of the men in front of the carts, the town was silent.
Once the race had led through town but that had not been possible for more than a century, due to the rubble and the deep cracks in the roads. When a tower fell it was as if a mountain burst apart and came down in a rain of grit. The race now led over the high and perfectly round city wall. The wall with its six round gates was also blue: the sparkling blue of the deadliest steel. Four times the carts went round - each time slower. The men who stumbled and fell were trampled or crushed under the wheels.
Each time desperation triumphed over exhaustion and the carts kept moving. Muscles tore and blood streamed from the shoes and mouths and sometimes the noses and ears of the men, while the people in their towers watched and cheered and the ships slowly circled above. There was no official finish, no prescribed number of circuits. The sun went down and the wheels creaked under the weight of the carts and the reeking, dark blue fruit. The sun came up and the men still pulled the carts slowly forwards.
It was only at the end of the second day of the race that a mighty roar rose from nineteen towers: it was decided. The now hovering ships formed a circle and then melted together, until they formed one huge ocean drop, that now hung above one of the towers. Thousands of long and light blue fingers reached down and mingled with the leaves and the vines that served as the tower’s decoration. The roar from the other towers died, when the fingers slowly closed around the tower and formed a pulsing, blue cocoon. The tower moaned and shook, while the fingers exerted more and more pressure.
For a moment the voices of the people inside rose above the noise of the dying tower itself. Then it grew silent again, while a cloud of dust and grit and glass and bone slowly descended and blood rained down. In the nineteen remaining towers the people resumed breathing, while, high above, the oceanic drop split into smaller ones, which slowly started to circle once more above the city. The race was over.
The next day the people would remove the decorations from the remaining towers and the men who had survived the race would be treated or put out of their misery. Next day the blue, swollen fruit that had survived the race would rise and merge with the ever circling ships. Next day the people would forget about this day, until next year’s race.