Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  As he climbed the back fence and fled down the alleys he heard Carnyx Street’s conversation resume, as if whatever unpleasant thought had distracted it had passed and been forgotten.

  In or Out?-An Ugly Joke-Among the

  Paranoids-A Memory of Flight-A Kiss-

  The Third Sister

  Dead end. Arjun threw himself at the fence, scrabbled panting up it, the rusty wire cutting the palm of his good hand, tearing into the bandages on the other. The mesh sagged loose like the hide of a starving beast. It shook with a harsh percussive sound. Atonal—very modern, he thought. His foot slipped on the fence’s hollow frame and he fell, landing on his back. Grey dust rose around him—the backyard was heaped with acrid soot, black dunes, waste products of some incomprehensible industrial process. The windows overhead were dark. He stood slowly and looked back through the fence. The alley was empty. No sound of footsteps— only his own heart, its strained gears rattling. The long shadows that had seemed to follow him were only the shadows of chimneys, pipes, laundry. The sun was rising, flushed and sweating. The Hollow Men were gone.

  His chest burned, and his legs were weak. He’d fled for hours, imagining the Hollows behind him, not daring to look back. When had he lost them? Had they even chased him at all?

  He rested his head on the cold metal of the fence and twined his bruised fingers in it, and he dredged in the darkness for memories. His flight down the Mountain, and how the Hollows had chased him—he caught scattered images, but their sense slipped his grasp. All those streets and corridors, alleys and rooftops; sliding down a silver staircase, his feet slippery with strange muck; and the Hollows always following behind him. They were slow and patient. Time and distance meant nothing to them. They were inevitable. He belonged among them. They were what happened to those who failed on the Mountain …

  A horn sounded overhead, booming over the rooftops. Dawn shift. A single motorcar roared down the street and into the distance. Chains rattled and heavy doors unbolted. Horses approached, dragging iron wheels along the cobbles. Arjun clutched the fence, sighed, smiled. He should not be caught trespassing. He had enough problems as it was.

  Morning, he thought. The Low sisters would be waking …

  For the first time since he’d fled the house he thought of the sisters. The sick panic the Hollows radiated had left him, and his thoughts were clear again: he’d left Ruth and Marta alone with those horrors. Perhaps the Hollows were still there in the house— perhaps that was why they hadn’t chased him. He imagined them questioning Marta, tormenting Ruth, standing in the darkened doorways with their arms folded. Their presence would stop the clocks and put out the candles.

  Arjun flushed with shame. He had to go back. Hooking a foot into the loose wire he launched himself at the fence again. Hunger and exhaustion plucked at his heels. He gasped as he threw himself over.

  Down the alley, around and out into the street—he walked quickly, keeping his head down. By the factory’s front gate stood a pale giant of a man, banging a rod arrhythmically on the cobbles, marking the last trickle of grey workers into the yard.

  “In or out? Hey, you—come on, in or out?”

  Arjun pointed, questioningly, at himself, and the huge foreman repeated: “In or out?”

  Arjun demurred, backed away. “No, I …” The foreman locked the gate in his face.

  Machines began booming. Someone was shouting as Arjun walked away, briskly, soon breaking into a run.

  But running wasn’t a good idea—not in this Age. Men stood smoking on every corner, and any of them might have been policemen. Suspicious faces watched from the windows. An omnibus clattered by, pulled slowly by four looming bony horses, a rusting cage packed with pale men. Workers? Prisoners? It didn’t matter. Their grey eyes tracked him enviously as he ran. Running screamed: I am an alien here. A ghost. I am lost. Arjun forced himself to slow down, walked with his hands in his pockets.

  He was lost. He didn’t understand the street signs. Numbers, letters, code repeated. He walked for a while down 1121 Street, past empty concrete sheds, past the thrusting black towers of the Patagan Sewer & Piping Plant Seventeen, past crumbling tenements, past a patch of yellow grassland that smelled of sewage. The numbers of the cross streets climbed and fell. Which way was he headed? The plan of the city seemed willfully confused, maliciously hidden from him. Where was Carnyx Street?

  It was an unmusical city, or an unmusical time in the city. The clang and crash of the factories set its rhythm. The shift whistles and bells were its only music. Arjun passed no theaters, no music-halls, no churches, no choirs. He found this deeply upsetting, deeply disorienting, as if he was blind or deaf; as if he was missing a sense that he had no name for, and had forgotten how to use.

  The streets emptied and filled again. Grey mobs of men stood silently by factory gates. Little groups of women scuttled through the shadows, and their harsh laughter echoed off high fences. Shrill children played in an empty lot, among the rusting wheel-less skeletons of junked omnibuses.

  Was it safe to ask directions?

  Probably not. It wasn’t safe to be an alien here.

  Three young men in smart black coats strutted down the street, sharing some hilarious joke, which the tallest was embellishing with closed-fist gestures of violence. Arjun slipped into an alley and pressed himself against the wall. He stared at his feet and listened to them go by.

  His shoes were caked with yellow sulphurous mud. His trousers were torn and blotched. Both hands were bloodied, and his bandages unspooled into dirty rags. His shirt was a disgrace. He ran his hand unthinkingly through his hair—it was wild enough, and now it was bloody, too. An alien? He laughed. Nothing so grand. He looked like a mad tramp. He looked like an escaped psychopath. He couldn’t ask for help looking like this.

  A poster on the alley wall showed a picture of the Mountain, jet black, limned with lurid red. vigilance, it said underneath, and below that, in smaller text, Join the Civic League. The art had the bitter, strained quality of war propaganda everywhere.

  What War were they waiting for? What enemy were they afraid of?

  A paranoid time.

  One of Arjun’s jacket’s pockets had torn on a fence somewhere, and he’d lost the bread and cheese he’d stolen. In the other pocket the knife still rested heavily.

  Twenty minutes later a young woman passed by the alley, holding her skirts and sprinting, running late. She was the first person Arjun had seen who was by herself.

  Well, it wasn’t the first shameful thing he’d done.

  She shrieked when he grabbed her and struggled as he muffled her mouth with his bandaged hand. He pulled her into the alley and she went silent at the sight of the knife.

  “Don’t make a sound,” he told her. His voice cracked, high-pitched and tired and nervous. “Just do what I tell you.” Then he was so ashamed of the look in her eyes that he said, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” without quite meaning to.

  She struggled again and he held her against the wall. “I just want directions,” he said. “I don’t want to. I’m just very lost.” He dropped the knife in the dirt. “Please?”

  North, through a maze of crisscrossing canals. The hollow clatter of the iron bridges echoed off wet stone walls. Engine thump and cold winds shivered the oily water. Ugly grey birds stalked in the low-tide mud. They called after Arjun in nearly human voices, shrill and cracking like children; they flapped heavily up and dropped on the railings beside him, shouting outraged near-obscenities.

  One, braver than the rest, got too close, flapping in his face. Its wings were like dishrags, its beak like a broken bottle. Oiyu. Yu. Yu. He slapped it out of the air, and it fell on its back wheezing.

  Thunders, Marta had called them. Because of the shouting. They offended him somehow, like an ugly and cynical joke. At whose expense? Yu. Fackoff. Yu. They hovered just out of his reach. Did they want him gone, did they want his attention? He hurried and flinched through their territory.

  He didn’t remember the ca
nals from the night before, not at all.

  He crossed empty train tracks, plunging through thick weeds. He didn’t remember those either. The tracks ran northeast into the fog, and he thought of that homemade map in Ruth’s shop, the trains carrying the product of the city’s factories endlessly north to the Mountain, and for a moment he turned without thinking to follow the tracks; but the afternoon was wearing on, and the sun was getting low, and he was no nearer to Carnyx Street; so he crossed the tracks and left them behind. He didn’t expect to see them again.

  As the sun set a red light burned across high windows, sparked on steel bridges, limned the grey swell of gasometers, and—in the distance—lit something he recognized: the ancient dome of the Museum, softly brushing the sky, rising over the rooftops. It was the one curved and elegant thing among the jut and glower of the factories. There was a statue of something winged and angelic at its apex, red in the light of the setting sun. It was north by northwest, past a few last miles of tenement blocks.

  For a moment he remembered the Beast, and what it owed him, and he forgot Carnyx Street.

  He walked faster, hoping to get to the Museum before the night closed in.

  He got there after dark. The angel on the dome was silver in the moonlight.

  The Museum itself was guarded. Five men on the steps, all armed; more around the sides.

  They were identifiable as Know-Nothings by … what? They had no clear uniform. Most but not all of them were white men, and young. They wore workers’ clothes, heavy coats. They showed a fondness for boots and flat leather caps that might have been a badge of membership, or the fashion of this part of the city. An irregular group of some sort—hired thugs? A gang, a movement, a party, not an army, not a police force. Arjun regretted not questioning the Low sisters more carefully.

  If the men loitering outside the Museum had anything in common it was that they appeared somewhat better fed than their neighbors, and better dressed. Their boots shone. They wore neckties or cuff links. The little luxuries of leather and color and boot polish marked them as a class apart; as men with a source of income into which it was best not to inquire too closely. A certain arrogance; a certain brutishness. They did not particularly look like evil men, but they looked willing to do evil things, and then laugh it off later as just business.

  Arjun wondered why they didn’t just burn the Museum down; if they hated and feared what was in it so much, why not simply erase it, rather than keep it locked away, alive but rotting? For a moment he considered asking them. If he were truly a ghost here, he could say what he liked without consequence; or he could walk past them and down into the cellars and they couldn’t touch him.

  Suppose that he was real, and they were only ghosts; suppose this whole ugly city of factories and slums and ruins and brutal men was only a backdrop for some nasty dream. Then he could simply walk up to them and say, enough now. That’s enough. Go home. He could march in and claim the prophecy he’d purchased from the monster in the cellars. You bore me, Know-Nothings. Bring on the Beast.

  Arjun watched them from across the street. The market had emptied out and all the stalls had been packed and wheeled away. The plaza was empty, and they could hardly not have noticed him standing there. Soon enough they’d be bored enough to come over and ask him what are you looking at, ehi He slipped quietly away, keeping his head down.

  Where was Carnyx Street? South of the Museum, southwest … Arjun couldn’t quite remember.

  A high moon—yellow clouds slunk like cats across it. How long could the Low sisters survive the attentions of the Hollows?

  An empty concrete lot, fenced with chains, was strewn with broken boxes, stamped: holcroft combine engine mfg. He built them into a tottering heap, from which he could reach a low-hanging fire escape. He climbed quickly past occupied windows, leaking dim light, the sounds of whining and dull arguments.

  On the roof an iron chimney, brown and hooded, bent like a monk, vented clouds of white fog like stale incense. Arjun held his sleeve to his mouth and looked out over the darkening city. Where was Carnyx Street?

  He oriented himself by the Mountain—there it was, looming on the skyline, marking the north pole of the city. The high dome of the Museum, off to his right, was tiny by comparison.

  The Mountain! Unshakable, unchanging. There was so much he was so close to remembering.

  There were old tricks; ways of triangulating between two landmarks—one, the Mountain, permanent, perfect, the same from Age to Age; the others purely local, ephemeral. Rivers came and went, flags and signposts couldn’t be trusted, golden pillars and copper roofs got stolen, even marble crumbled; but the explorers of the City Beyond had their tricks. There were no maps, but a smart traveler was never lost.

  Arjun remembered Shay snarling: that way, north, you idiot, can’t you see it? Never forget it. Never turn your back on it. That was a thousand years ago.

  In a flash, he remembered another time, another place: golden-haired St. Loup, shimmering in sunglasses, scarlet snakeskin jacket, silk shirt, and shined shoes, checking his watch and smiling, saying: here comes the storm, chaps. St. Loup had been a rich man back in real life, something in business or banking or aristocracy. Over his razor-sharp collar spilled golden curls so perfect they seemed to conduct light. See—it starts on the peaks. Gesturing north with a wave of a manicured hand. Lightning, fire. Set your watch by it. Only here, only now, only in this dreary little district.

  Arjun couldn’t remember the district, he couldn’t remember the place. They’d been on a rooftop? Haifa dozen of them, watching the skies. Blood-red and snake-green flashed over the Mountain. A crack in the armor, St. Loup had suggested, the gears grinding, the fires of creation, fireworks and jubilation among the lords and ladies of the Mountain? One hell of a show. What do you think? Useful intelligence? Gentlemen, what do you propose?

  Abra-Melin, shaking, with his gnarled staff and black skullcap and dirty beard, had boomed: the Gods are angry, you fool. His huge frame was sagging with age like a condemned building. The angels make war. His robes were like a heap of old laundry.

  Turnbull had shaken his head: God is dead. A plain suit, glasses, an egg-shaped head, the manner of a middling academic or an unbelieving priest. A pedantic little shrug. God is dead. The Mountain is empty. Sometimes a storm is only a storm.

  Where had this happened? When? Who were these people? Arjun couldn’t remember. He couldn’t place them. Maybe they had no place, no context. Half a dozen madmen on a roof in a storm, talking nonsense. Most or maybe all of them were murderers. Drawn from a half-dozen different Ages, wanderers in the City Beyond, united only by their shared obsession. A clownish variety of clothes from a half-dozen cultures and Ages—all hid knives, guns, poison needles. Uneasy in each other’s company, contemptuous of real people and real life. Paranoia was simply common sense among these men—they’d all glimpsed the City Beyond the City, the huge and hostile structure in which other people’s ordinary lives were suspended. These were the men who chased the Mountain.

  Someone had said: Why did you bring us here, St. Loup? What do you want for this information? Is this a trap? Arjun couldn’t remember who’d said that. Maybe it was him.

  The dust venting from the chimney was thick, drowsy. It smelled of age, exhaustion, old fires, stale food. Arjun swayed with hunger. A sudden explosion of birds from behind the chimney made him duck. Two dozen black beating shapes, tiny machines, rose past his head, through the fog, and out north across the sky, their pattern loosening and tightening again, their forms quickly becoming invisible against the darkness of the Mountain. It made him remember …

  Another time. Later, earlier? Elsewhere. Another rooftop—on top of Potocki’s vast factory, south of the Mountain, above streets clogged with cars and noisy intershuttling trams. The madmen of the City Beyond returned again and again to high places.

  Arjun remembered: a wide rooftop, a broad concrete plain under a bronze sky, gorgeous with strange pollution. Complex steel machines l
ittered the rooftop, humming and grinding their wheels; delicate wire-mesh mouths sifted oils and grit from the air, to be processed below into food and materiel. The waiting aircraft flexed white plastic wings. Electricity crackled from pylon to pylon. Potocki the Engineer lived in a nest of machines. And there he was, dressed in oily rags, scraggle-bearded, hunched and swollen like a gigantic mole, dragging his lame left leg around the rooftop in circles, conducting his servants, bellowing: Now! Now! Now!

  Arjun had arrived at Potocki’s rooftop too late. He’d taken a taxi to get there, down strange and shifting roads, skidding and swerving forward through history, from the honking jostling ranks out the front of the WaneLight Hotel.

  Luxurious, immense—the memory of the Hotel pressed itself into Arjun’s mind, too huge to grasp. Bright yellow-black taxis leaving the Hotel like a swarm of greedy wasps, homing in on a rumor: Potocki’s got another prototype. He launches today … The horde descended, armed with cameras, bribes, knives. Me too, take me with you …

  Everything began at the Hotel in those days—everyone’s schemes were hatched there. If the vastness of the city had a center, it was the Mountain—but if its impossible geometry allowed for a second center, that would be the Hotel. Power and influence and fame gathered there, connections were made, secrets were bartered. The secrets of power; the secrets of the Gods and the city; the secrets of the Mountain. Years of Arjun’s life spent penetrating the mysteries, ingratiating himself with the right people, watching his back, listening for rumors. Gossip at the bar. A note pushed under the bedroom door. A phone call, untraceable, at dead of night, spilling secrets. A whisper overheard in the casinos. Surveillance and countersurveillance systems constantly breaking down, hissing and crackling, leaking information, leaking plans.

  The conspirators—the explorers—the secret-hunters—had met in the Bar Caucasus. It was on the south face of the Hotel’s forty-fourth floor—a forest of potted palms, a shrine of vulgar brass. There was the scent of a rumor in the stale air. Turnbull was there, and St. Loup, Longfellow, and Monmouth. St. Loup was stylish as ever, golden-haired, in trousers of sapphire-blue leather and a white shirt with a red snake logo. He leaned on the bar and toyed tensely with his drink, which he held like a weapon. Longfellow looked hot and itching in his long black coat. Probably he was wearing his hair shirt again—the pious Longfellow believed the Mountain was the house of God, and hoped to find forgiveness there for unspecified but presumably dreadful sins. Arjun himself was recently returned from one of his futile trips to primitive districts in search of his own God, and still wore pilgrim’s robes. The mage Abra-Melin looked out of place in a corner, clutching his ornate staff, glowering at cocktail waitresses. The collector Lord Losond showed off three sleek amber wildcats, sprawled on the bar, chewing their silver leashes. Someone measured out drugs in the back of the room—there was a new xaw dealer at the Bar Caucasus, and the air in those days was greasy with the stuff. Wreathed in furtive purple clouds, there was Cantor, there was Karatas, there was Muykrit …