by Felix Gilman
F our things changed for Arjun in the first weeks of spring. He could count them off on his fingers, reflecting, as he did so, on how little control it seemed he had over his own life, outside his one great mission. And even that, perhaps, had been given to him, not chosen.
The first change was that he learned the nature of Holbach’s project, and the purpose of the work he had been engaged in since leaving the Nessenes. After Olympia told him, Arjun went home from the café very drunk and very excited, and lay awake on the hard bed in his flat in Stammer Gate, his head reeling. It was a wonderful purpose, insanely ambitious and wild. To take everything the city knew and reflect it back, like light in a signal-mirror, so the city could change itself and be wiser: it was the kind of thing to which a man could give over a life. He was glad to be even the tiniest part of it.
The next morning, hungover and grey-faced, he sat at his desk, rubbing his aching temples, and wondered how on earth he had come to be involved in Olympia’s nonsense. He stared out of the window, over the graveyard and the sea of roofs beyond, and thought what an absurd vanity it was. Nothing could capture all the city’s knowledge, not in a thousand years, nothing could map that chaos, and certainly no mere book could change it. It was idiocy to think that it could; a consuming delusion. The weapon Holbach had created, the dreadful thing that had laid waste to Stross End: that could change the city, though only for the worse. But a book? And how was it that his own pure passion, that had borne him from edge to summit of the world, had been soiled and stamped to ash, and the wound in him filled with this city-trash? He had failed.
Still, he had some notes to drop off with Holbach that morning, so he dragged himself out of his flat and through the streets. And once he was there, in the thick of it, with lively people around him, the thrill of it caught him up again.
“Rough night of it?” Liancourt asked him as he passed the kitchen. The playwright was sitting at the table with one of the painters—Mochai, Olympia’s lover, the young artist whose daring bird-shit-spattered canvases were creating quite a stir in the press…Arjun fell gratefully on the coffee, and joined their conversation.
Liancourt was explaining how his play in progress—The Marriage Blessing—would dramatize the themes of the new Atlas. “The scholars can tell the citizens how they’re used and lied to and divided and confused,” Liancourt said, “but we can make them feel it. And oh, the lords and their censors will hate it! With this and the new edition out at the same time, they won’t know what hit ’em! They’ll feel like the whole city is rising up and speaking against them, from the very stones! They’ll howl, boys! But are we scared?”
Mochai thumped the table, laughing, and shouted, “No, sir!”
Arjun smiled, too. “Excuse me,” he said. “I have to see something.” He left them, and went up to the ballroom.
It was locked, but the housekeeper opened it for him, saying, “Remember, no candles. The Professor’ll kill you if you take fire in there. And take off your shoes, of course.”
The pine floor was buried under sheets of thick paper, overlaid end to end and side to side all across the huge bright room, densely etched with charcoal lines and circles that ran across one sheet to the next. A variety of hands had annotated it in tiny script. These were the notes they made toward the great work; this was the work. Place-names, street-names. The names of prominent persons. Lines of string in many colors were pinned across the map. Arjun followed a red line to the note that explained that it marked out the borders of the Countess’s power. He imagined she would hate to see her limits delineated so starkly.
There were other circles of red, here and there, marking other parts of the Countess’s domains, overlapping with the yellow of Cimenti and the brown of Mass How, and others. Further from what Arjun thought of as the city’s core (though he supposed there was no reason to), the Atlas-makers had reused the red for other Estates. Not enough colors, he supposed, not nearly.
He followed a grey-green line, stepping very carefully on or between the papers. A note on that string read, in Holbach’s hand, Course of the Motions of Atenu, ’47–’56, ’61–’67. There were many tiny knots in the string, some with little tags of paper tied to them, with dates on them.
It made him dizzy to look so closely at the tiny details of it, so he stood up straight and looked around the room. Ar-Mouth and the Bay were near the door. The sheets of paper nearby were very thickly detailed, and full of pins and strings and tags. Piles of note-paper containing relevant essays and entries from the Atlas sat on top of each map-sheet.
The map-sheets got less and less detailed as they moved away from the Bay. It was very easy to see where the Atlas-makers were based. Further out, there were patches of detail, surrounded by blank sheets, or sheets marked only with a name and a question mark. In the distance, there were more rivers, Arjun saw, with dis-orienting shock; one came down in a thick line of charcoal from Ar-Mount and ran west, and another ran east. There were other docks along them.
Concentric circles of string on the far side of the room marked the rising slopes of the Mountain. A few sheets within the outer circles were marked up—Arjun saw that Stross End’s map had been redrawn recently, on fresh white paper—but the inner circles were all blank. There was nothing north of the Mountain except the room’s wide bay windows.
At the room’s other edges, past wide stretches of blank whiteness, thick rough lines sketched out the city’s walls. There were question marks next to them.
Some of the pages were fresh, recent changes to what was clearly a work in progress; others were stiff and faded golden-brown, the black lines like cracks in leather. It was, Arjun thought, the color of the city’s thick fogs; the color of its stained brick and stone when, from a hill, one watched the sun set behind the towers. He felt briefly dizzy.
A couple of weeks ago, Arjun had spoken to Holbach in the study. There was yet another story in the Sentinel, headlined Survivors of Stross End Rebuild in Wreckage. Holbach had sunk over it, and said, “Maybe Olympia’s right. Maybe Nicolas would have told me not to make the Thunderer. Maybe he’d have known they would make it a weapon. But I thought we could see everything at once, from above. See how it all fits together, and what it all means. I thought I was working for his dream.” Arjun hadn’t understood, and Holbach had gone back to work without explaining. Arjun understood now. He went back downstairs, locking the door behind him, thinking of how Julah had locked the door behind him as they came down from the Voice’s Chamber.
T he second change was that he took Olympia to bed, or perhaps she took him; his memory was unclear.
Like all of them, Olympia was very busy, in those last months of the Atlas. There were deals to be made with printers and distributors and dealers, and there were a thousand censors and regulators and licensing authorities to be bribed, or converted, or tangled up with legal trickery; everything had to be ready. The free-love advocate Mr. Brace-Bel—a sinister, arrogant little man; he preferred to be called debaucher—angered the censors with a new volume of letters and was charged in blasphemy and sedition in seven separate jurisdictions, and tried in two, and, despite Olympia’s best efforts, convicted in one, and returned to the Iron Rose by order of the Duke of Baltic Street. “No great loss,” she said, philosophically; “He comes and goes.” The battle took her all over the city. But the gathering speed of the work filled her with energy, as it did for them all, and she was never busy enough. She burned off that energy drinking in the bars of opulent hotels, or in lupine dives, depending on where she found herself at the end of the day. She was often in places where women were not welcome, and so she kept Hoxton with her for protection, but she had—she told Arjun, as they sat on deep red leather seats in the bar of the Hotel Nareau, looking out on Lake Kuyt—exhausted most topics of conversation with her driver. So she took Arjun along, for the company. “Come on,” she had said, as she passed him that morning, leaving Holbach’s office with an armful of books. “The Tuvar will be just as dead tomorrow. You sho
uld see more of the city while it’s alive.”
He sat back, warmly creaking the hotel’s red leather, and asked her, “Why me? I hadn’t thought I was good company.”
“Fishing for compliments? You’re a good listener. You’re honest. You’re not un-handsome, now that you’ve put some weight back on after your, shall we say, sickness, so I needn’t be embarrassed to be seen with you. And you’re so, well, foreign. So fresh. You probably haven’t had time yet to see how very irritating and silly we all are. I want to know how we impress you. Do we?”
“Very much.” And they did. They were much more alive than the Choristry had been. The Choristry had only had one moment of vibrant life, and that had vanished. He started to tell her that, but he realized that he wanted to be the one to impress her. So he got drunkenly up and walked over to the corner of the bar, where the band played, and leaned over the (incompetent, sadly) pianist, and said, “I can pay you, sir, if you will please move aside for a moment.”
The maître d’ started to glide over to Arjun, to usher him back to his seat, but Hoxton stopped him with a look. Arjun took no notice. He sat at the piano and played. Like all his music, there was an echo of the Voice in it, but it was different from anything he had played for years. It did not draw on the Voice in its melancholy and fragile aspect, or its demanding and austere aspect; it was the Voice in joy and elation. He had forgotten. It was wonderful. The room was full of laughter. After a while, he returned control of the instrument to the anxious pianist, fumbling an absurdly excessive tip into the man’s hands, and joined Olympia on the polished dance floor.
They woke up together in the hotel’s deep bed, her leg lying across his. They made themselves late for Olympia’s morning appointment. She was demanding, and laughed a lot. Arjun was very serious; it had been a long time. They did not speak, until Atenu’s temple, two streets over, banged the big hammers to signal noon, and Olympia said, “Shit!” and rolled out of bed and clutched at her clothes.
It became a habit. They were spending the days together anyway, traveling the city, as she carried out her business. And when she wasn’t traveling, she was a fixture in the cafés and salons of Ebon Fields and Faugère, where they talked radical politics and enthusiastic blasphemy. She passed off Nicolas’s wit as her own, but she coined her own, too. She needed every weapon she could bring to bear. She was very determined to shock and to impress.
Sometimes they crossed water; sometimes they drank in cafés on the banks of the pleasure-canals. Arjun was nervous at first but she dared him to go near the water, and nothing dreadful happened to him, so he began to think that perhaps he had imagined the Typhon’s hatred of him. Perhaps it had gone back into the water to gnaw at its wounds. Perhaps it had died of its own sickness, and good riddance. In the spring it was hard to believe in the monster; in the elegant and lively places Olympia took him, it was impossible.
Perhaps Olympia liked to bring Arjun with her because he was not witty, and would not outshine her. Or, he thought sometimes, she was an outsider to the Atlas, too, in a way, for all her efforts on its behalf. She served it, but she had added nothing to it. And he thought perhaps she enjoyed drawing him into it, that it made her feel more central to things to have him in her orbit. Those were both just guesses; he was quite sure he didn’t altogether understand her. She was much more sophisticated than him; or, at least, sophisticated in a way he wasn’t. She was very clever and strange. He found her interesting.
They were not in love—not even in the cool and abstract way the Choirmen loved, and certainly not according to the city’s theatrical and sentimental understanding of the condition. On that first morning, as he sat at the back of the room and watched her conduct her delayed meeting with the Brattle Printers’ and Pressmens’ Collective, shouting them down one moment and cajoling them the next, he had worried that she might be (why not? Passions of all kinds were sparked too quickly, it seemed to him, in this strange city), but he was relieved by her good sense. Her first dedication was to the Atlas. And he knew that she had other lovers, some of whom he thought she still saw. He was not jealous. His own highest love was still the Voice; she’d never understand that or share it with him. Still, it was a pleasant arrangement. He had, he realized, been lonely.
He talked to her in a way that was new to him (I’ve found a new Voice, he thought, ha-ha). It wasn’t just the drink that loosened his tongue, or the stuff they breathed in from the bubbling glass bellies on the tables in the bars in certain parts of the city to the west; it was the way she talked, the way they all talked: quick, argumentative, as if always questioning themselves, joking with themselves. He tried to explain to her, leaning across the smoky buzzing space above their table in the back room of Vittorio’s, that he’d seen how they, the Atlas-makers, were all prepared to give their lives over to their work, but how they laughed at it, too, and at themselves. And of course, he said, he knew that he probably gave the impression, with his silence, that he couldn’t exercise the same self-scrutiny, but that wasn’t true. He must seem like a very simple creature, but he wasn’t. He could imagine how his quest looked to them. He could say it himself: it was an obsession, it was an addiction, it was selfish and shut-in. People in the city had so many gods and purposes to choose from; the Choristry had had no choices. They’d never had a place from which to stand outside their lives and look in and laugh. He was what he was. But he didn’t want her to think he was stupid. He was well-traveled, remember, he said. He was learning; he’d find a way to make it mean something.
She kept nodding while he talked, and smiling. He didn’t think he could talk that way with anyone else, he told her. She told him he was sweet to say so; but he hadn’t meant it as flattery, but as simple truth. The smoke from the glass on the table made his tongue feel fat and numb, and his head charged but slippery. He’d lost his train of thought. No matter; it was there to be picked up again some other night.
She was fond of telling him, quite kindly, that he was mad. “Of course,” he observed, “to me you are mad, and foreign.” She remained unconvinced.
He spent most nights, when they weren’t off in some distant part of the city, at Olympia’s flat in Ebon Fields.
The Atlas-makers were libertines to a man, and were not shocked. Olympia had long had a prominent place in their daily gossip; they were happy enough to add Arjun to its cast.
Not everyone was happy. One of her other lovers, the painter Mochai, waited in Holbach’s hall, drinking rough wine, and threw himself weeping and cursing on Arjun as he passed, shouting, “She’s mine! Who the fuck are you? What’ve you got?”
He took a clumsy swing at Arjun’s head. It was not hard for Arjun to knock the man’s arm aside, and hold him until he stopped weeping. He had learned a little about violence in his travels. More than Mochai, at least. “I’m sorry,” they both said. Mochai picked himself up and stalked away with wounded pride, and stopped coming to Holbach’s house.
“Well, I’m not sorry,” Olympia said, when Arjun told her what had happened. “All that nonsense with birdshit. Yuck.” He mentioned it only in passing; he saw no reason to dwell on it.
A nd the third thing that changed was that, after all his excitement about the work of the Atlas, his own work ran out, and he was left idle and aimless again.
He had a long meeting with Holbach on a sunny morning, in the downstairs study, where they had retreated to escape a foul smell Dr. Branken’s experiments had produced, which pervaded all the top floors of the mansion. They spent the morning finalizing Arjun’s contributions to the Atlas. With Arjun’s help, Holbach drafted a short entry on the Black Bull, with a brief summary of the theories of the Tuvar theologians. It ran to a page or two. They went up to the map-room, and added a few notations to the stretches of the map in which the Tuvar had lived.
“There’s still much more to be read,” Arjun said.
Holbach shook his head. “I don’t think we need more. The Bull and its folk are long gone from the city; little more than a f
ootnote. Sufficiency will do, here, not perfection, I think.”
Holbach was also preparing a new version of an essay from the previous edition. “The death and the dying of gods, the how and the why of it. Or perhaps one should say that they fade, or are extinguished, or resolved. As with all the most interesting problems, it is hard to know even how to name our inquiry.” Over a long, late lunch, they worked a few references to the disappearance of the Bull into the essay. It didn’t require any changes to be made to its argument. The conclusion still amounted, essentially, to Who knows? It was, Holbach observed, defensively, a nascent science, regarding recalcitrant subjects.
Then it was over. Holbach laughed. “You worked too fast and too well! Put yourself out of a job!” Then he saw the expression on Arjun’s face, and scrambled to say, “I’ll tell you what, though. I think we barely have an entry on the Tuvar’s history.”
“I have it memorized. It reads, ‘Immigrant population circa 1100 to 1200; we presume assimilated or deceased.’”
“Oh, dear. And not a mark on the Big Map, either, I think. Hundreds of thousands of lives, perhaps. And some very worthy scholars, to judge from what you’ve translated. How sad. Well?”
“An entry on the Tuvar?”
“Why not? Who else? At this point, there’s no one who knows the Tuvar better. Talk to the historians, if you need advice. They were people, Arjun: do them justice! Have a crack at it.”
Arjun went back to his flat on foot, feeling suddenly guilty about taking a carriage on Holbach’s money. He started the slow work of writing an account of the Tuvar’s history. It didn’t come easily to him. He had no experience of writing anything but music. It was hard to know where to start. He could feel that he had many frustrating days ahead. He gave up in the evening, and took a carriage (the Fire with it!) to Olympia’s flat in Ebon Fields.
