by Felix Gilman
Murder stalked the halls all afternoon. Temporary alliances formed and disintegrated. As far as Arjun could tell, Ivy seemed to be doing well in the struggle. She had an unusual number and strength of the servants at her command. Her servants fought her rivals’ forces in the corridors. They did it dutifully and unhappily. They made a noise like birds’ wings fluttering, like sick children sniveling. They canceled each other out. They exhausted each other, like a bitter drawn-out argument between people who were no longer friends. They left scraps of shadow in the corners.
Arjun found one of the Shays dead in an empty corridor, in a ripped business suit, torn to shreds by the claws of some great Beast. He saw a pipe burst and fire and steam swallow a corridor that contained the unfortunate Mr. Cuttle. He saw three Shays standing in an attic, pistols trained on each other, frozen, glaring, each caught in his own shadow’s trap. He laughed. They snarled at him. It seemed to hurt their feelings. They took their predicament very seriously.
He met Ivy at a junction. She smiled distantly, tensely. He held out his empty hands. I’m not playing. She passed him by as if he wasn’t there. A flock of servants followed her, whining and muttering.
Ruth
Ruth stayed in the little hideaway, and wrote. The servants, eager to please, brought her paper and pen. She sat on the bed, rested the mirror on her knees, and wrote until her fingers cramped.
It began as a letter to Marta. Why not? Perhaps she could throw it from the balcony, and it would flutter down through the clouds, and be picked up from a gutter somewhere. Or she could tie it to a bird’s leg. Or a message in a bottle, like in the old fairy tales. So it began,
This letter is for Marta Low, from her sister. If you find this, whoever you are, if you know her, if she’s still alive, please, please, pass this letter on to her. I can’t promise you any payment but I would if I could.
But Marta didn’t want to hear about the Mountain. Marta didn’t want to hear about their father. It was too strange, too painful. Knowledge she couldn’t use. Why burden her with it? The letter’s address drifted. For a while Ruth conceived it as addressed generally to the world below, or to whoever might find it. She tried to explain the Mountain, or at least what little she knew of it, to offer her theories on how it might be approached. The secret should be shared, she thought, congratulating herself on her generosity. Whoever finds this, pass it on.
But was it wise to share the secret? What if the letter fell into the wrong hands? Not that there was ever much chance of it falling into anyone’s hands. Not that her own understanding of the Mountain was more than superficial. But still. So she began to write for herself. First she tried to order her thoughts about the Mountain. Her vague theories, her growing fears. It was disintegrating. What would be left? Would anyone be left in the world below, when the machine fell apart? She tried to imagine the city, torn apart by the self-devouring engines of the Mountain. Earthquakes? Floods? Fire? Accelerating Time, decay like a disease?
Who else could she write to? She described people she knew— if you find this, please give it to …
If there was anything left of the city, she decided, it would be utterly changed. The thought pained her. She described the places she knew, in loving detail. There weren’t very many. She set down the routines of her life. She’d taken so much for granted! What did she understand of the factories, the Combines, the way her world had worked? She approached it as a puzzle, as a difficult work of art. A dozen different retellings of the shock of the bombs. The struggle to rebuild Fosdyke told as heroic epic, as a horror of starvation and fear, as a black comedy of pointless punch-drunk stubbornness and delusion and ridiculous Committee meetings. No one would ever read it; she did it for herself, for the sake of the memories themselves. There was so much that might be lost. The stories! She set out to record every story she’d ever read, or heard, the gist of every precious banned book she’d ever saved from destruction. Everything sounded like a fairy tale when she wrote it down. The servants silently brought her more paper, and hovered over her shoulder as she wrote.
Arjun
By evening (what felt like evening—shadows lengthened, the sky was red) there were no servants left. They had extinguished each other. The monkeys, and the dogs, and the birds had long since been spent. Even the handful of truly monstrous Beasts were dead—they’d all fought each other to the death in the corridors in service of one challenger or another. One Beast with the body of a lizard and claws like a tiger, dreadful surgical scars, and a civilized and sorrowful manner of speech, had torn a Shay in pinstripes to shreds, and his pinstripes, too, and been fatally burned by Shay’s energy weapon in the process. Soon the energy weapons would be gone, and it would be down to knives and fists.
He found Abra-Melin kneeling sobbing over his broken staff. “Help me!” Abra-Melin grabbed at Arjun’s ankles. “You, I know you. What’s your name? Help me.” He kept walking.
In a black metal corridor (the walls of which pulsed with heat and cold) one of the Shays menaced Arjun with a broken bottle. “This is your fault. This is your fault.” But the man was swaying from wounds and exhaustion, and Arjun took the bottle off him and knocked him down and left him cowering in a corner.
“You did this,” Arjun said. “You made this.”
Heat and light pulsed from behind the walls. What would the Mountain be when Shay was gone from it? Would there be music?
Ruth
By midnight (it felt like midnight—something somewhere was chiming) the room where Ruth wrote was nothing like a bedroom—it had flowered into a metal vault, icosahedral in shape, into which cables and gears intruded, on the upper angles of which light flickered across brushed black steel.
She was running the pen’s rounded end thoughtfully over her lower lip and trying to recall the story, the long-forgotten and forbidden story, of Jack, the butcher’s boy, who’d climbed down the stalk of the great flower on which the city rested, and found his true love among the red roots—was it serpents he’d fought, down there, or worms? —when she was woken from her memories by the sound of running feet clanging along the walkway outside. She stood, setting the paper and the mirror aside, as Ivy, panting and sweating, staggered through the open door. It was less a door, now, than a circular saw-toothed hole through which some gigantic piston might extend. Ruth greeted her—”Ivy.”
Ivy barely threw her a glance. Her eyes were wild with fear— with humiliation. She looked close to tears, close to laughing at the absurdity of it all; close to laughing and saying, enough, enough, good game, let’s try it again. But she only said, “I have to hide. Have to hide. Quick.”
And she shoved Ruth aside and lunged for the mirror, and, staring into the glassy enigmatic surface, she muttered the key words—numbers, colors, names of stones or flowers or mathematical properties or diseases or devices Ruth didn’t recognize. Ivy was unable to calm herself enough at first to say the words with the offhand casual command the mirror recognized, so she settled herself, breathed deeply, and then she did laugh.
There was an immense sound of shattering glass; and then, where Ivy had knelt, her image lingered on the air for a moment as a pale reflection, while her long dark hair retreated behind the surface of the mirror.
And then she was gone. Ruth touched the mirror and its surface was cold. “Ivy?” No answer.
Four iterations of their terrible father appeared at the door. One was fat, the others thin. Two were bald, one long-haired, one short. They wore a variety of clothes, dark, colorful, formal, wild, tight, flowing; all torn and singed and blood-stained. Two carried knives, one bloody; two held brutal lengths of broken pipe.
“Where is she?”
“I said where is she?”
“It’s over.”
“Where did she go?”
They panted, or sneered, or smiled blankly. Wild-eyed, glassy-eyed, lank-haired, eccentrically dressed; the foursome resembled disreputable musicians, long in the tooth, short on money, hunting for drugs. They would have been
funny if not for the knives and the blood on them.
These were the worst, Ruth thought: the most vicious and inventive murderers. The last to survive.
“I said where did she fucking go?”
“The game’s over, now. Where did she go?”
“Good girl, good girl, Ruth. Help your father.”
“Help yourself,” she said. “I’m done here.” She sifted through her papers. The handwriting was tiny, cramped, almost unreadable, even to herself. She tossed them onto the bed. “Try the mirror,” she said. “Get it over with, why don’t you?”
They parted to let her go. One of them sniffed like an animal. Their attention turned to the mirror, to each other. Who would move first?
Ruth was only halfway down the corridor when she heard shouts of outrage, and triumph, and the crash of shattering glass, as the last of the challengers turned on each other with the last weapon they had to hand.
When she returned to the room it was empty. The silence echoed. The room smelled of electricity and cold fire. The papers were ash, and the bed was a charred frame, its black wires and struts already reverting to the condition of machinery.
The glass of the mirror was grey and clouded and warm. She carried it out with both hands. It was very heavy.
She found Arjun a while later, on one of the lower floors. The corridors had seemed to spiral in, and down, narrowing and tensing, clenching and knotting, as if the Mountain was in pain. She had headed down because the path up seemed to be blocked by small lurid fires, pockets of acrid gas, spills of cables, buckled passages.
He was standing beneath her, down on the floor of a huge empty chamber—an industrial emptiness, like an abandoned factory. Cartwheel gears loomed in the darkness, toothed hawsers cut through it. It was ringed around with multileveled iron catwalks, from which Ruth looked down; he seemed so tiny in that vast and inhuman space.
A boy lost in a dark cave, she thought. All that was missing was a dragon!
He stood in front of a door of black steel, which was locked and bolted and bound with chains. He appeared to have been examining the door for some time.
As she watched, he moved one of the bolts.
A light escaped from beneath the crack of the door. It was too bright and too beautiful to look at.
“It’s over,” she called. Her voice echoed, became metallic, oracular, the voice of the machine. “They’re gone,” she said, more quietly.
He turned back to her and smiled. “I know. I can feel it. The Mountain feels different.” He slipped another of the bolts. “The locks are opening again.”
“Are they?”
“It was a mistake. It corrected itself. Your father—your sister— had no business here. He stole it. Cheated it. Don’t know how, exactly. Everything in the city was always wrong—I felt it from the start, you know. A purer note’s sounding again. I’m sorry, by the way. “
“That’s all right. Wait a moment—I’m coming down.”
“I don’t think you should.”
He bent, his back to her, to untangle a knot of chains. They chimed as they hit the floor. The light beyond the door blazed, winked out, surged again. Golden footlights on a darkened stage. Expectant silence in the galleries; the conductor stands alone.
She climbed down a ladder from one walkway to another, circled round the room to the next ladder.
He said, “You should stay back, I think.” Thoughtfully he pulled aside another bar. The room shook.
“What is it?”
“Can’t you feel it? He kept them here for so long. He stole. He hoarded. He interfered. The city was supposed to be so different— but so much of it was stolen. So much was missing, off-balance. You could always hear it, if you listened. You know that—you always felt it, didn’t you?”
She worked her way down the walkways. Steel clanged under her feet. “Your God.”
“All of them.” He slid another bolt. “So many of them. The city should have been full of treasures. They shouldn’t have been rare— every moment should have been full of wonders. This city was made to be a paradise.”
“Wait a moment. You don’t know any of this.”
“Who’d build all this for any other reason?” Another bolt. A chain shattered. A deep note sounded from behind the straining door. “I’ve thought a lot about this. While I was walking. You shouldn’t come any closer. They’ve been caged for so long, but never tamed. This will be dangerous.”
“Wait. I’m on my way.”
He turned back and smiled. “I’ve made up my mind. I’m not brave enough to change it now. “
“Stop. You don’t know what’s in there.”
One after another he snapped back a series of hairpin silver clasps. “No,” he agreed. “I don’t really, do I?”
“I’m coming down.”
Snap, snap. The sound echoed in the emptiness of the chamber. “Is my God in there? Maybe. I don’t know. The fact is it’s been so long I don’t know if I’d recognize it anyway. Maybe it’s dead. Maybe it never existed. Maybe it’s not what I think it is. Maybe I imagined it. There are no final explanations, are there? Not this side of death. Does it matter?”
“Of course it bloody matters. Don’t get mystical now. Hang on a moment.”
“What’s trapped in here are beautiful things. Energies of making and meaning. The city’s been without them too long.” The handle was a great black lever. He put his hands on it. “Follow them home, Ruth. Good luck. I’m sorry it all had to work this way. Everything should be better now. “
“Wait …”
“We were all of us bent out of shape, weren’t we? Twisted. It hurt. The wrong kind of lives. Ah, right.” He braced himself, squared his thin shoulders. “Now I think we can start setting things right. End of the old song, beginning of the new. Hah. All right then.”
He threw his weight on the handle. It turned slowly, creaking, groaning, then faster, and faster. Gears behind the walls, and rising out of the floor, and swelling blackly from the ceiling, began painfully to turn. The mechanism shifted. The handle jammed; and then with a sudden ecstatic cry of metal against metal it gave way, lurching out of Arjun’s hands. “Ah,” he said. The door burst open and the light roared out.
She opened her eyes slowly. She stayed on the floor, with her face turned to the corner. Her breathing slowly steadied. Silence and darkness. What had she seen in the light? If she closed her eyes again she could see, wrought in scarlet and jade and gold, the shapes, the thousand forms, tumbling jubilantly over and over each other. A thousand Gods, or a single energy with a thousand forms? The chiming of a city full of bells. A long-hoarded treasure spilling out like a golden rain. Fire; music; laughter. Already the forms were blurring. She blinked and they were gone.
Cinders and sparks turned in empty space—the spinning of tiny golden gears. An infinity of delicate adjustments were made. Each atom, each moment transformed itself into the next. There was a stain of black ash on the floor. The air was warm and dusty.
He was gone; transformed. And whatever he’d set loose had escaped; had gone beyond the confines of the machine.
Well? The world seemed unchanged so far.
A dozen stories sprang to Ruth’s mind—stories from the city below, myths that had fallen through the cracks of the city’s history. The hero who stole the wings of a mighty Bird, and new too close to the sun. The hero who went down into the crypts under the city in search of his dead wife, and looked back, and so fell back, and burned in the deep-dwellers’ forge fires. The hero who climbed a tower of glass and was pinned and torn on the sharp wild spires. A painting, hung in the Museum in an airy upper gallery, showing two lovers in robes of gold and ruby embracing while the sun behind them descended ready to swallow the world. Stories about love and war, songs about death. An ache gripped her chest; her love for the shadow he’d left behind.
She took the mirror upstairs again. It was heavy, and silent. Above, below, the machine shuddered and strained. She found a stable place, and thou
ght it as good as any other. She rested the mirror against a thick rubbery pipe and sat across from it. Unnatural light played around her; it pricked her skin.
“He just had to show off, didn’t he?”
The mirror was silent. Her own eyes, reflected in it, were red and tired. She sighed.
“This is all your fault,” she said. But the mirror didn’t answer, and she shrugged; it was too late now to feel any real bitterness. “I suppose you are what you are,” she said.
From where she sat she could see down three—sometimes four or five—corridors and chambers of the machine. All around her the thing slowly transformed. The fires below came and went—the buckling of metal, the gouts of steam. Gears snarled. The corridors twisted into new shapes.
