Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  My mistakes will last forever. These creatures will haunt the city forever, hidden in weeds and back alleys and moonlight, secret testaments to my own flawed nature. Just as I am a testament to his.

  I don’t understand,” Ruth said. “Who made you? How? What are you?”

  Once I lived in a little brass cage. I have vague animal memories of the market in which he purchased me—monochrome, motion, scent. I was a kind of lizard.

  Not large—no larger than your delectable forearm. I don’t know my own breed. Does it matter? I asked my maker; he wouldn’t tell me.

  I woke to myself on the operating table. Before that my awareness had been dim and thoughtless—a constant throbbing awareness only of the present moment. With needles in my brain and my tiny bones cracked and splinted I woke to glaring electric light, and my first thought was how I hated that light. It was a hospital light, like a compound eye. My awareness, too, became compound—/ saw not only the present moment, but the future, the past. Suddenly I had words with which to slice up my sensations. Can you imagine what it is to have words thrust upon you?

  He was not done with me. He continued to operate, to open, to unknit, until my awareness unfurled as far beyond yours as yours is beyond that of the lizard I was.

  What was my purpose? Once the scars had healed? To sit on his shoulder, to watch and listen, to spy for him, to keep his secrets and carry his messages. To remember his countless aliases and schemes, who owed him money, who owed him their soul. Sometimes to kill for him. All through time we traveled.

  Mr. Shay. Clever little man. I was one of his first.

  Who is Shay?

  I don’t know. I don’t know half of his secrets. I traveled with him for ten years, a thousand years ago.

  He was an ordinary man once. How do I know that? Because he boasted of it. He wouldn’t shut up.

  He’d say: I did it myself, didn’t I? My own bloody self. I broke free of the world, said bye-bye to the city, up into the beyond, out into the abstract, down into the maze. And no bloody bugger ever helped me. I found the way out myself, and I went all alone. I was the fucking first. The things I had to suffer for it! The things I gave up!

  And so on. It was my sad duty to listen to his whining. That was why he kept me—for he was not comfortable in the company of mankind—for no human creature could ever be so utterly in his power as I was.

  How was I made? The surgical techniques that made me the freak I am—those, Shay learned from the Doctors of the Academy of Marfelon. Have you heard of them? Of course you haven’t. They are a well-kept secret. Slope-browed skulls containing an excess of cunning, a numb deficiency of morals and affections. Ontological surgeons. They can uncut you from time, gravity, mortality, existence, your own soul. Engineering speech in a lizard is nothing to them. In this city, everything approaches to the condition of everything else—your little friend, Arjun, understood that dimly, it was a fine trick with the birds! A slice, a stitch, a fold, this becomes that. Easily done.

  The Doctors of Marfelon—in their own time, their experiments made them an enemy of all decent folk. Mobs, torches, pitchforks—oh, I know the feeling well! They were in danger of extinction. They were scientists, not fighters. My maker Shay made a deal—they taught him their methods, and in return, he hid them away in the twisting passages of the singularity beneath the Iron Rose.

  Do you understand what I mean when I say, singularity ?

  Hah. We’ll be here all night.

  I don’t care about that. I wouldn’t understand, would I? If Ivy were here you could talk to her about singularities.”

  “You seem disappointed in me, Ruth.”

  “I always thought you were a kind of… myth. A dream. Something magical, something that no one could explain. Now you say you’re just a kind ofthing someone made.”

  “Everything that exists has a reason why, Ruth.”

  “I don’t mean to be hurtful.”

  “I disappoint myself, lately.”

  “So who taught you to tell the future?”

  “Oh, Ruth—no lies between us. I cannot tell the future. No one can—the city is always in flux. I remember things, I know secrets, I watch carefully. I plan and I am cunning. Everything is trickery— people are very predictable. I have no gifts of prophecy.”

  “Oh. Oh, I had so many questions about the future.”

  “I know. My answers would be lies. Would you like me to lie to you?”

  “No, thank you.”

  “I don’t know if the city can be saved. I expect not. The old man will have his way.”

  Ruth sighed and shifted. When she’d come in, the tent had been warm. Now a cold breeze drifted around her shoulders.

  She said, “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. I just came here to understand. I remember you in the Museum. I was only a girl, and I liked you better back then. So—why were you in the Museum?”

  “Oh, Ruth Low. That’s cruel of you to ask. One day I may ask you a cruel question. He left me behind, Ruth Low.”

  There are too many of him.

  His business, his scheming, his deals and revenges, his flights from creditors and polke and inquisitors—it took him all over the city. Back and forth. To and fro. In and out. Up and down. From the first times to the last. Your mind cannot grasp the complexity of it—forward and back, how his own schemes tangled him, how he thwarted himself over and over. A trap laid in the first times springing itself in the last, and on the man who set it! A yellowing photograph in the police files of a prior century. The long memories of the many churches who knew him as the Devil. Nor could he grasp the complexity—/ do not mean to insult you, Ruth Low.

  He lost himself. He doubled and tripled himself. Weaving back and forth, he stepped too often in his own traces. He existed simultaneously. Shadows. Reflections. Reiterations. His past became confused. Rumors of his presence abounded—which were true? He looked to me to remember for him. He used to say: “I was never here before, was I? Did I do this? I never did this. This wasn’t my fault. They’ve got the wrong man. This isn’t fair.” I lied to him. No, I whispered, when the truth was yes; yes, I whispered, in the rare event that he was truly innocent. I confused him further. I schemed against him! I was a spiteful little thing! I started to grow fat on lies and secrets.

  His shadows proliferated. They took different paths through the city, so sometimes they were old, sometimes young, sometimes scarred, sometimes un-wounded.

  I was with him on occasion when he met one of his shadows.

  My master went generally by the name Shay, sometimes Hangley, sometimes Cuttle. He was a man in middle age when he made me, and when he left me behind he was still not old. He was a little man but a strong one— he had a system of exercises, about which he was fanatical. His body was a tool to be mastered. He shaved his white head near-bald. He carried no ordinary weapon—/ was sufficient.

  We traveled to Cendylon. Cendylon, where the thick vines strangled the emerald city. Summer, when the violet flowers spread like a disease.

  We went hunting a God. A God of music, something that took the form of a sudden silence in the city’s cacophony, a sudden chanting that might change a man’s life. A God that had wandered in from the wastes, in obedience to the strange currents that carry their kind.

  My master sought to trap it, so that he might offer it to the folk of the Bright Towers, in trade for the seeds that… never mind. He had his plans for it.

  We followed rumors. The God had settled in a bend of the green river, in a little bower of vines, where now the flowers rang like bells. The botanists of Cendylon were there to observe the phenomenon. Access was restricted. We had to blackmail the Police Chief of Cendyion, and to bribe the Chair of Botanical Science. So every one of my master’s schemes bred further scheming! We had to murder a man and kidnap a child. In the moss-walled tunnels beneath the river my master stood chain-smoking while I rooted in the Police Chief’s trash for incriminating material. “Hurry up,” my master said. “What
’s taking so long? Losing your nose for secrets? You’re getting fat and lazy. You belong in the trash.” He was always cruel to me, Ruth. But perhaps I was too slow, because we were interrupted.

  A snarl. A hiss.

  I poked my green head from the filth to see, at the far end of the tunnel, a short fat man, white hair in a wild greasy tangle, the long robes of Cendy Ion hanging in shimmering folds from his round belly. My master’s face—but older, looser, heavy-fowled.

  My own master, snarling in hate. Lips pulled back from his teeth. He hated with animal simplicity. I loved him then, Ruth.

  That… shadow of my master, sneering. What was beneath his robes? A gun, a knife? He had not come unarmed. How had our paths crossed? No doubt he hunted the same quarry as my master. To him, my master was the shadow—the contempt was clear on his face. My loyalties, such as they were, were divided. The tunnel’s air crackled with something that can’t be named. Were any of us real?

  The imposter carne with weapons. My master preferred not to risk himself, or unleash my own … capabilities. We left the tunnel. “Not again,” he whined. “It’s not fair. I shouldn’t have to live like this.” We returned to our hotel in Cendy Ion, where that fat shadow tried to murder my master by arson. We in turn tried to kill him with poison, by bribing his bodyguards, with a curse …

  And so on. For years. In the end my master prevailed. But in our chases and scheming back and forth across the city, no doubt we birthed another half-dozen shadows.

  Another time we met a man called Lemuel at an auction, quite by accident … Never mind. I could go on. I won’t.

  He was the first. He has been doing this for so long, now. The city is large, but not large enough.

  The Beast stood and walked to the flap of the tent. Outside the night was dark and silent. The Beast breathed cold air.

  “This is painful for me, Ruth. A thousand years ago I was abandoned. Left alone to find my own purpose. To rot in a cage. Circus freak, sideshow act, medical specimen, dusty antiquity. Neither alive nor dead, real nor unreal. To remember the days with Shay is—Ruth, how bittersweet is it for you to recall your childhood? To hang on Shay’s shoulder and share his secrets—that was my youth! Those were my golden days! We had great adventures together. We did terrible things.”

  Suddenly the Beast slipped through the flap and outside. It stalked across the quarry, and up and around the broad path out of the quarry’s depths.

  It talked as it went. Ruth, clutching a scarlet sheet around her shoulders to ward off the cold, followed.

  … our endless struggles. Our schemes and murders. What did we fight over? What else could it be? The Mountain.

  What is the Mountain?

  I have never seen it. I do not precisely know. Secrets upon secrets.

  It is not a Mountain. That is a veil it wears.

  It exists in every part of the city, in every Age. An anchor that holds the sea together. Sometimes it is close, more often it is far, far away. Here it is very close. Here, we are always on its threshold. Kings have given up their kingdoms just to come this close.

  It has an unusual relationship to time. Shay rules it now, having stolen it, and it has always been the case that Shay rules it.

  It is a kind of machine. But perhaps I only say that because I am a kind of machine, and that is how things seem to me.

  Those who built the city made it. I don’t mean the vague energies your kind calls Gods. Nor the pioneers and first fathers and stout burghers who laid down the foundation-stones and built bridges over the river and made pompous statues of themselves. I mean those who, from the outside of things, laid down the conditions for the city’s impossible flourishing.

  I have no names for them. Call them the Builders; everything is defined by its function. I like to think they made the city as a kind of prison, but perhaps I only say that because I have spent so long in cages.

  The energies of the Mountain spin out time and distance. The Mountain is the engine of creation. The Gods are its fuel, its energies, its agents. Its hands and its knives and its fire, to cut and burn and shape the city. On the Gears of the Mountain the city spins. He who rules the Mountain rules everything below it.

  We were not meant to approach it. The Builders of the city created defenses around it. They locked us out. Approach the Mountain’s slopes: the streets become a maze. Shadows fall. Memory and awareness falter. The way is trapped. I have never dared come any closer than this—my own existence is tenuous enough already.

  The first makers set the machine into motion, spinning out time and possibilities. How many thousands of years ago? What impossible energies poured through the Mountain? Vast and out of control, the piling up beyond reason of time and complexity, the impossible weight, always growing, the awareness of which burdens everything we do. No wonder in these last days the Mountain has gone dark.

  The Builders set it into motion, then they left us alone. Perhaps we disgusted them. Perhaps they will return for us when our sentence is up.

  For millennia the Mountain existed alone, working according to its own mysterious design. Then Shay stole it.

  Not my master—oh, not my master! My master was only a second-rate shadow. I believe the Shay who fought through to the Mountain was the same who first fought his way free of the routines of ordinary life, and learned to walk in the city behind the city. Not that it matters which it was, in the end.

  Shay stole the Mountain. He grew old there. What does he do with it? Nothing. With the Mountain he could do anything. The airships are the least of the tricks he can work with it. Yes, of course the airships are his— a cheap nasty trick—pay attention. He could make the city a paradise— a thousand different paradises. With the Mountain, the Gods are at his beck and call—he could light every street with them. He could fill every moment with meaning and beauty. He could make the dead walk, he could make brutes speak, he could make every hovel a palace, and float them on a cloud. Instead he hid, and hoarded his treasures, and worked on his defenses.

  He has always been an old man, hoarding his treasures, in the Mountain.

  He made the city at the slopes of the Mountain into this … wasteland. The Know-Nothings. The pointless factories. The ugliness of it. That was his work. He wanted no visitors, no tourists. With the Mountain’s engines he stole and hoarded the city’s Gods, like a lesser miser would hoard gold.

  He hides in the Mountain. And his countless shadows scheme to steal it from him. How they envy him! How he hates himself! He is not a happy man.

  His shadows do not dare approach the Mountain themselves. He fears himself more than he hates himself. They work through surrogates, agents, dupes, patsies.

  What kind of madman would go up on the Mountain? Ruth, the city is full of madmen. Your friend Arjun—one of Shay’s shadows set him loose from the confines of the city, and no doubt meant to set him on the path to the Mountain. What was Arjun looking for? Has he told you? Are you in on that secret? For all I know it may be on the Mountain, whatever it is. Or it may not. But I can tell you that if, by some unlikely chance, Arjun were to fight his way onto the Mountain, and kill the old man who rules it, then Shay’s shadows would be close behind.

  That fat idiot Brace-Bel, who was at the Museum—one of my master’s shadows recruited him, once. I could smell it. Brace-Bel may try to refuse the call, but he will always dream of the Mountain, now. One day he will return there. Will he be the one to kill the old man? Not likely. But perhaps.

  I remember how my own particular master found a handsome psychopath named St. Loup, and lifted him out of his daily existence, and set him on his way. I whispered in his ear: I told him the power he craves is on the Mountain. He will kill anything that gets in his way.

  St. Loup has never yet found his way to the Mountain. Will he ever? If he does, how will we know? If he wins through, will everything change at once? I don’t know.

  When my master finally tired of me—oh, this is hard to say. I was too fat to sit on his shoulder. Swollen
on lies and secrets and crimes. His plans no longer included me. He had another use for me. He traded me away, Ruth, to the Archbishop Pnoffi in return for… Never mind. Firm hands clutched me, thrust me into a sack, from which I was decanted without dignity into a cage.

  “One last job,” he whispered to me. “You ugly thing. Endure. Be a sign. I made you fascinating. They will keep coming to you. Show them the way.”

  I endured for a thousand years. I told fortunes, I awed crowds. I gathered dust. I whispered into the ears of those who would hear the way to the Mountain.

  Not out of loyalty. Out of spite, Ruth.

  They go up in their hundreds, their thousands, onto the Mountain—the madmen of the city. Arjun, Brace-Bel, St. Loup, a thousand others. This is a vast city, and it has endured for millennia, and my master and his shadows have always fought over it. The madmen—my master and his shadows dangle dreams before them, myths, Gods, visions, answers, empty promises. They unveil the Gears of the city for them. They teach them just enough tricks to get by. So many mad people in this city! Sooner or later they find their way to the Mountain. They go up chanting, or scourging themselves, like pilgrims. They go with swords, or guns, and scarlet banners, roaring barbaric defiance. They steal in like thieves, like cockroaches. They fly their splendid machines, trailing rich plumes of smoke. They don’t know that Shay’s shadows are watching close behind, waiting to see if they break the Mountain’s defenses. Waiting to follow them home.

  But none of them have ever succeeded.

  Some of them, the old man catches. In his traps, in his nets, in his mirrors, in his paradoxes. His mirrors are prisons—an old technique. What do they make of him, when they see him? They thought the Mountain was ruled by demon princes, bright angels, glittering mechanical Minds. Those are the lies I told them. What do they think when they see that nasty and withered old man? “Not again,” he says. “Why won’t you leave me alone? It isn’t fair.”

  He applies his surgeries to them. A cut, a slice, a fold—unstitched from time—he makes them into his Hollow Servants. Have you ever wondered why they stink so of failure and shame?