Ruined Cities

by James Tallett (ed)

  ***

  Rat had found herself a good nest for the night. Now, she awakened. They’d given the station night and day, the builders, for human and alien sanity. The ceiling became warmly lit then shaded to blue.

  She woke, then, to that false dawn, and uncurled herself. A nest on the equally fake “roof” of the old Greek’s restaurant. A roof below a ceiling. It would have been irony to planet-dwellers, but to Rat it was simply the way things were. Somebody had told her of worlds without ceilings.

  It scared her as much as Hell did. More than death. No ceiling? Why didn’t all the air leak out?

  Gravity and the like were beyond her. She moved, dropping from the roof in a twisting series of moves that involved the wall around his garden, where he managed to grow a few miserable herbs. No true soil. She had never seen soil.

  Landing in the alleyway, on her feet, more cat than rat in that moment, but neither and both and just a kid. Breakfast was snagged from the Greek man’s dumpster, a pastry which she munched on as she made her way through the streets. There was nothing to do except beg, and few had much more than she did. Somebody had sprayed the walls with red paint. It wasn’t actually blood, but it looked like it.

  It was words, and Rat could not read them. Thus, she ignored them, walking away. Padding quietly on bare feet, ever wary of the trash that littered the floor. Not just the alleyways, but the wider corridors and the streets. Trash everywhere, and she hadn’t seen a cleaning bot in a couple of days.

  Maybe they’d all, finally, died. People could pick up the trash, but where would they take it? Rat envisioned them drowning in trash. Then she saw it… an almost perfectly good shirt, tossed in a corner. She picked it up, tied it around her waist by the sleeves. It was better than anything she had, albeit a bit too big. She laid claim to it without looking back. That was what you did, and you owned no more than you could carry or hide.

  Then she saw the ship man. He’d found a pastry too, although she suspected his to have been more honorably come by. Then again, she knew the Greek did not mind anyone taking his leftovers. What was the point? What would he spend his money on? As if in greeting, she spoke to him, flatly, “The ships aren’t coming.”

  “No.”

  “We’re going to die.” No more a question than that. Yet, he would know if that common wisdom bore any connection to her reality, a reality in which the confines of the space city were all there was, all there could be.

  “Possibly. Come with me?”

  He spoke to her, once more, he who spoke to nobody. He offered her his hand.

  “Why are you talking to me?” She took it. Oh, wisdom told her he might want things street kids did not want to give, but she was not sure she cared. She was not afraid of him, even if he wanted to touch in the dark.

  “Bagels.”

  She laughed a bit, unable to help it. Bribery? Or maybe it hadn’t been that simple. She didn’t know. But bagels were a good reason to talk. So were pastries, but she had finished hers and did not expect him to share his. Food, always a good reason.

  He led her towards the docks… not a place for touching, she supposed. A good place to kill her, but he’d get a nasty surprise if he tried. Rat had won fights before. She was tough and hard, a product of nothing but the street. She could take the ship man, but she was oddly sure that she would not have to. Not sure how or why she felt that way, she followed him into the darkness.

  ***

  Padrik had no idea why he had grabbed the girl. By certain definitions of grabbed. He got the distinct impression she followed him out of curiosity and, perhaps, because she had nothing better to do.

  He had spent all of his time for the last few days in the control tower, fixing what he could, jury-rigging what he could not. Not that there was much that could be done with it. He had managed, though, to find some working exterior cameras.

  The girl gasped at the screen, seeing the outside of her world for the first time. He smiled at her. “That’s the outside of the station. Beyond the walls.”

  Slowly, she nodded. “There’s nothing outside.”

  A simple understanding from a simple young woman. “Vacuum. Nothing we can live in. And beyond that?”

  “Hell.”

  El’s World. Well named, he thought, even if he wasn’t sure who El was. A woman, by the rumors, but beyond that? He did not know, any more than he knew what “Greek” really meant — Padrik had never set foot on Earth.

  “There’s more than just Hell. Where did the ships come from?”

  She furrowed her brow. “I don’t know.”

  “They came from other worlds. On some of them we could live, but we’d need to get there.”

  “We need ships.”

  “We can make the city into a ship.”

  She seemed to consider this, her head tilted to one sky. “The city rests above Hell.”

  “But it can move. Slowly. It would take more time than I have. Years.”

  She nodded. “So, you’re going to move the city?” The idea was clearly alien to her, its foreignness echoing in her words.

  “Yes, but we’re going to have to… This is what I need you and your friends to do.” Slowly, he began to explain.

  Trusting the street kids seemed strange, but none knew the city better than they did. None understood it the way this girl did.

  Street kids always knew best.

  ***

  Rat slipped through the thin crowds on Restaurant Row. Another place had closed, unable to sustain itself, unable to survive. As they would all be unable to survive… except the ship man had a plan.

  A bizarre plan. The city couldn’t move — it was a city, anchored in space, tied to Hell. Yet, he thought it could. With one snag.

  Parts of the city would break off. He was trusting her to spread the word, to make sure nobody was in those parts, to get everyone out before the bots closed them off, sealed in the air.

  Sealed out anyone who was there. She understood that much… but moving the city? Well. Whether it worked or not, she had sensed he was serious. The man who never talked had spoken to her at length and while she had not understood his words, she knew he only spoke when he had to. When he needed to. This was need, and she had a purpose.

  Moving through Restaurant Row, she turned towards the ring. The outermost road of the city. It encircled it, it made a short cut, and people even worse off than her slept in it, now.

  The ring. That was the most vulnerable, the thing he wanted to seal first, but where would those who lived there go? They were fae mutants, and the deformed, and the crippled. The people nobody wanted to look at. The people everyone wished did not exist.

  Where would they go? The docks would be sealed too, but for right now, all she could do was warn.

  All she and the others could do was warn. She’d found the kareen kid, roped him in. Fae mutants, though… you couldn’t talk to them. They weren’t sane, but they were people. They were still people and she didn’t want them to suffocate or whatever was going to happen. Details were unclear.

  The air in the ring was stale, once she got there. Stale as if it was not circulating properly, and she knew instinctively to keep moving. The first person she found was dead. Maybe they all were. Maybe they had all suffocated when they tried to sleep. That was what would happen to everyone when the city died.

  Just go to sleep and never wake up, but she had to keep moving, keep looking. The kareen was on the other side, searching a different area. She found several more still forms, and then a baby.

  The baby was alive. It cried when she scooped it up… no, he, she saw his tiny boy parts. Wrapping a cloth around him, she kept moving. Even if this was the only person she could save… she couldn’t tell if he was human or a fae mutant, not at this age, but he might be human. He was very new. “Hush. I’ll find you some milk.” She thought of abandoning her quest, but the baby did not seem in imminent danger of starving.

  So she moved, kept moving, through the very dregs of the city. She knew
why the ship man had asked her. Only street kids would consider coming here. Only street kids would care. Yet, she found no others alive, not in this entire section, and the stale air drove her into another inward corridor in the end, baby still held in her arms. She knew what she should do with him, but she didn’t want to.

  Something in her was stirring and she did not want to hand it over to the strangers in the hospital. She knew, though, that she must. She had no choice. The hospital. Once there had been three, now there was one. It was in the shining town, the place where people still had something. Where people who went to Restaurant Row and bought food lived.

  She was out of place, a ragged girl, barefoot, holding a baby. Which was now squalling, desperate for food. The ceiling was higher here, higher even than in Restaurant Row, giving space for small towers, and for the hospital, which stood five stories tall. She hesitated outside, then walked into the emergency room.

  Rat did not go to the hospital. It was not for people like her, but surely they would help a small baby.

  A woman turned. “Is that yours?”

  Rat shook her head, blinking at the question. “No. I found him.”

  “Abandoned, then.” She shook her head, reaching to take the child.

  “I think he’s just hungry.” A pause. “What will you do with him?”

  “He’s an infant. Some infertile woman will take him.”

  Not like the older orphans, who were cast aside, expected to fend for themselves. Some infertile woman would take him, would raise him. Rat felt tears start in her eyes. Her mother was dead, her father unknown, but no infertile woman had taken her. Too old. Damaged goods.

  The baby would not remember. She thought of her mission and nodded, handing him over. “Just take good care of him.”

  Then she turned to flee, the word “Wait” echoing in her ears. Surely the woman knew he was not hers — she was not yet ripe to bear children. Perhaps she thought he was a sibling.

  Perhaps the nurse believed her, but nobody pursued her as she went out into the almost clean street.

  ***

  “There’s nobody left in the Ring but bodies.” The blonde girl had come to the tower to give her report.

  Padrik nodded. “Life support’s failing there anyway. We’ll seal it.”

  Of the bodies he didn’t speak. There were enough unprocessed corpses… more than enough. Most had been turned into fertilizer, but not all. Just seal it, forget it, save the air and the light for the living. Like in the war. Save the medicine for those who would survive. Let those who would not, could not, fail and die.

  That was how you kept people alive in the toughest of situations. It was how you survived, but he felt grim about it. “And the docks?”

  “There’s a few kareen kids doing one last check. But if ships come?”

  “I can protect most of the outer ring, we’re just likely to lose atmosphere there. They will be able to dock. If they come. But that won’t be for years.”

  Rat nodded. “How many years?”

  He looked at her. “More years than I have to live.”

  “Then…” She blurted, her eyes wide. “Who’s going to stop the city?”

  He had thought of that. He looked at her, serious. “You are.”

  She was illiterate, uneducated, but she was not stupid. She might not understand everything he talked about, but she understood what she needed to. She had lived in this world her entire life.

  “I don’t know how.”

  “By the time you need the knowledge, you will. I’m steering the city for Omicron Beta. Even if there’s nobody there, the planet is inhabitable, or was last I knew. We have working shuttles… I’ve already moved them into the center of the docks. You’ll be able to evacuate to the surface.” Did she understand that?

  “Hell.”

  “No. Trust me. This is a completely different place. A place where humans can live.” He offered her a hug. After a moment, she accepted. “Trust me.”

  Did she? Or would they stay in the city and die rather than risk a planet? He did not know, and he would be dead by then. No life extension therapies left. None for their descendants.

  Unless there was still thriving civilization at Omicron Beta. There might be. “Now… are you ready for your first lesson?”

  She nodded.

  “We have to start with the basics. I’m afraid you need to learn to read.”

  “Read?” Her eyes widened then brightened. “You really want me to learn to read?” She had never imagined being allowed such a thing.

  “Yes. And maybe we need to come up with a better name for you.”

  At that, she shook her head stubbornly. “My name is Rat.”

  She had good reason to be proud of it. Rats survived.

  ***

  The ship man had taught her what the displays showed. One of them showed the surface of Hell.

  It was time. He was going to move the city. They had spent the last week doing many things Rat did not understand. He had explained about the derelict ships, testing their engines, securing them to the body of the station.

  “Are you ready, Rat?” he asked now.

  He’d suggested changing her name once and only once. She was not going to let him, and the matter had been dropped. “Ready.”

  Simple switches, switches they had hooked up. The lights dimmed when they were thrown, then returned to full brightness. How would people react to that? They would think it another sign they were all going to die.

  She had thirty years to explain to them what was going on. Then the floor vibrated. The air vibrated. There were tearing sounds in the distance, the stresses and strains of doing something the structure was never designed to do.

  But it held. It held, she still breathed, and she threw her arms around the ship man. “Did it work?”

  “So far.”

  His so far was a yes, where she was concerned. The city was moving through space, slowly disentangling itself from Hell’s pull. Gravity. He’d started to teach her about gravity, so she would understand it, appreciate it.

  She had so much to learn, but the city was moving. If they reached Omicron Beta, most of them would live. And they would live because of somebody they had written off as damaged goods. The irony did not escape her.

  But for the rest of the day she watched the stars change in the display, Hell receding and the sun beyond it. Slowly. It would take years, but they were leaving Hell. No matter what happened, that world would not be her fate or her soul’s fate.

  They were free.

  ***

  Rat paced the control tower, ignoring her crew. She had needed crew — the task of slowing the city down was far harder than starting it on its way had been. Most of them were young. Born long after their voyage started.

  She was not young. There was grey in her hair and her oldest daughter threatened to make her a grandmother any time soon. She was 42, and in the city, that made her dangerously close to being an old woman.

  An old woman, after thirty years in the wilderness. Padrik had made that joke, before he died, about not seeing their promised land. Of course, in his quote it had been forty years, not thirty.

  “Any stations out there?”

  The young man studying their jury-rigged sensors shook his head. “Tons of debris. No structures remaining.”

  Padrik’s war must have hit Omicron Beta hard. “Any… any signals?”

  “No.”

  “The planet, then.” She and Padrik had gone over the numbers, to get the station captured by the second planet. Omicron Beta. Habitable. What did a habitable world look like? She knew only from books.

  She knew it should be white and blue and brown, an orb in space. And white and blue and brown it was, shapes moving through the atmosphere, across the surface of this world. “Get us into… orbit.” A strange word that, but Rat knew what it meant now.

  “We’re going to need the shuttles.”

  They’d kept the station going for thirty years… her crew and othe
rs, kept it going, but it could not last much longer. They were going to need the shuttles. They were going to need the planet.

  “To go to Hell?” The young man turned to her.

  She shook her head, studying the blue orb they were sliding towards. “No. To go to Heaven.”

  And when she set foot on the surface, her daughter at her side, of a world with green plants and a blue sky, an alien world where the air moved in all directions, she understood.

  No ceiling could be a sky and they had found Heaven… because Heaven was nothing more than a place where their children could live.

  And when, five hundred years later, the ships finally came, they found a thriving city under Heaven’s open skies.

  CROSSING

  by

  JOHN BIGGS

  Who’d have thought there’d be so many wrecked cars on the Oklahoma River Bridge? Rusted out hulks, left over from the riots when people didn’t know which way to run. Mary makes the sign of the cross; the way old time Catholics did when things might go terribly wrong.

  “In the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Ghost.” She synchronizes the words with the motion of her hand — exactly like Raj showed her before he went away.

  It feels good to be in control of something, even if the something is a ritual from the olden times. There’ll be so many things Mary can’t control when she starts across the bridge. Every wreck is a hiding place for something deadly: a rattle snake, a coyote, a man left over from the olden times.

  A bad man; is there any other kind, now that Raj is gone? Mary crosses herself one more time, sucking up to God just in case he’s real. She whispers a silent prayer that there are men like Raj on the other side of the bridge. Exactly like him, only less dad-like. Men the right age for Mary. Good looking men who aren’t solitary killers or members of misogynist boy-gangs who give a whole new meaning to the idea of one night stands.

  “Misogynist.” Mary likes to say that word. It sounds smart — college educated, sophisticated. It’s a library word. There’ll be libraries in Oklahoma City. There’ll be bullets too, and maybe something special, like the 9mm Glock she found in Ardmore, or the switchblade knife she found in Seminole. Everything in the world is finders-keepers now.