METAtropolis:The Wings We Dare Aspire

by Jay Lake

  “Right,” she tells him. The lie is convenient, he already believes it. This way she might not have to kill him.

  She is getting soft.

  “It wasn’t nothing but a little dope.” Now he is whining.

  Dope? she thinks. That’s not even against the rules around here, unless you’re handling weapons or delicate equipment. “Look, kid,” she says, letting exasperation creep into her voice. She really should kill him—his dead body will cause far less trouble for her than whatever he might say to Zazie or anyone else on one of the subcommittees. “Go back to your squat, lay low, and don’t come out for a day or so, no matter what.”

  “You going after Zazie?” Now the fool sounds almost eager.

  “I’m going after you if you don’t skid out of here and keep your damned mouth shut!”

  At that, he backs away through the brush that conceals the hollow where the cache is located. “I-I’m sorry,” he says from outside.

  “Me, too, kid,” Cardoza responds.

  Her earlier burst of fatalism notwithstanding, she already considers her possible lines of retreat once she has terminated Tygre.

  * * *

  Communion

  Gloria Berry takes up the hunting knife she uses for emergencies. The blade is longer than her forearm. She has carefully blacked it out, keeping only the edge sharp and bright.

  Everybody is on high alert suddenly, and she knows damn well why. Tygre has finally betrayed them.

  She will serve him his own fare, blood warm. And if that fool Anna Chao stands in her way, Gloria will serve her as well.

  We are disturbed, we of the city. One of the wire mesh dishes strung high in the Douglas firs has picked up a signal, confirming the ghosts which had muttered at the edge of confirmation in the weeks since Tygre has come to us.

  Something is on the move. A bombing, a murder, or simple old-fashioned betrayal. It does not matter. Cascadiopolis’ years of paranoia are bearing fruit.

  In another lava tube called Objectivity, the Citizen’s Executive meets in a rare closed, emergency session. The man Tygre is not present. It is well into the day, and most of us should have been sleeping long ago.

  “Anyone who has entered the city in the last months,” shouts the Chair of the Labor Subcommittee.

  Manufacturing and Craft shakes her head. “We already know where the problem is. That bastard will have us all dancing to his tune in another few weeks.”

  “Do you serious believe Tygre is taking orders from outside?” Bashar asks quietly.

  “He doesn’t have to,” mutters Manufacturing and Crafts. “He’s plenty dangerous all on his own.”

  “Popularity is not danger,” Bashar replies.

  “Ever heard of demagoguery?” demands the Chair of Political Education and Theory.

  Bashar cracks a small, deadly smile. “Leaders emerge from among the people.”

  “We are a collective,” the Executive Chairman says. “We don’t have leaders.”

  In that moment, Bashar knows they have lost. He rises. “Excuse me, but I need to go supervise the security arrangements.”

  “Against an air strike?” demands Labor.

  “Against Tygre, if you must know.” Bashar shakes his head. “And for him. Either one.”

  * * *

  A children’s call-and-response chant, used by early childhood facilitators in Cascadiopolis:

  Why are we green?

  Because nature is green.

  Why do we hide in the hills?

  Because nature lives in the hills.

  Who do we trust?

  Ourselves. And nature.

  Who do we fear?

  Everyone outside.

  What will do?

  Grow and grow, like nature.

  Until when?

  Until the world is green.

  * * *

  Tygre heads back to the kitchen where he cooked the first night. It is time to cook again. Wine at the wedding, catfish and cornbread for the crowd, blood beneath the plow boards—food is the oldest sacrament.

  He has been here long enough to know more about the ingredients. Woodears grown in the deadfalls on these slopes can be as rich as a steak. Wild onions and sweet herbs from the water meadows provide a flavor that speaks of these high places. Saps boiled to bitter syrups add a tinge.

  So he makes a stew, humming the Doxology. Different words are in his mind now than the old hymnals would have it, about the quiet green cathedrals of these high slopes and the basalt bones buried in the loam beneath his feet. Tygre is not sure whether he will share them.

  The stew comes along slowly and he hums. Cooking by daylight is not so common – smoke can escape sometimes, and most people shift their meals in the early evening and later night hours, to be well abed by dawn.

  But he knows a strike is coming. Probably not the orbital kinetics which reduced Jack City to ash, though that is possible. Even the oldest schools, the most ancient secret-keepers, have some very modern codes. And their own quiet, bloody disputes.

  Except he is not weapon, but target. The hurried busy-ness around him confirms that. It might have gone differently, lasted longer, been sweeter, but this is of no mind to Tygre now.

  One way or another, these forests will burn bright, even if no match is ever set. Like those pines which only germinate amid flame, this city will not truly spread its seed until threat is overwhelming.

  The dandelion flower must die before its children can fly.

  With that thought, he smiles and cuts dried trillium into his stew.

  “Was it you?” Bashar asks. Close behind, silent. The man is an arrow fired in the dark.

  “It was always me,” Tygre says pleasantly without turning. He can smell the musk of Bashar’s desire for him that the other man will never admit. Bashar barely acknowledges women, finds men no fit object whatsoever for lust, but the scent will not be denied. “But I did not breach communications security, if that is your question.”

  “Could you have?” Bashar sounds fascinated.

  Tygre slices thin strips of garter snake jerky, then scrapes them into his pot. This will be a stew of the high places. After that, he faces Bashar. “Couldn’t any of us?”

  Tygre’s clicker has been heel-smashed to black sand in streambed these past three weeks. That city man’s contract had its uses in getting him close, passage through certain difficult barriers, but had never been his true purpose.

  “You’re in trouble,” Bashar says.

  “With you?” Tygre cocks an eyebrow.

  “With everyone, I think. The Citizen’s Executive is stirred up. There are other rumors, people with difficulties.”

  “Everybody loves me.” He grins at Bashar’s stone face. “Well, almost everybody.”

  “Everybody is coming for you. Jack City scared us all.”

  “Jack City is dead,” Tygre says. He ladles out of a bowl of stew. “It would be better if it sat up for a shift or two. We don’t have that much time.” Handing the bowl to Bashar, he continues, “Here. Take, eat, and be comforted. Jack City is dead, but Cascadiopolis is going to live forever.”

  Bashar plucks a spoon from the tabletop and eats. Everything he does around this man is wrong, he knows it. The flavor stops his thoughts. It tastes of the city, of Mt. Hood, of all the vanishing green in the world. High slopes and deep loam and the bugling of elk across the valleys. Glacier melt and the buzzing silences of the burn scars in summer.

  He is consumed by a moment of transcendence, and in that moment, sees the future.

  * * *

  There is a woman with a gun. Another woman carries a knife with dire intent. A committee votes orders for their man Bashar to carry out. A satellite rotates on its axis, acquiring a target in the Cascades.

  Children run through the bear grass shrieking at the flowers. City-building manuals are stored in quantum matrices embedded in small river cobbles that fit in the palm of a hand. Silences amid the high forests remember times before even the first nations had p
assed here on calloused feet.

  The world is running down, but it will always be reborn. Coastlines retreat, and there are new beaches. Floodwaters recede and there is a dove on a drenched olive branch. Empires fall but people still break the ground for grain, and their grandchildren need to keep records, and so it begins again.

  Capital, rebellion, chaos, climate change. It all comes together so it can all be pulled apart once again.

  We wonder if it matters how he died. The city-kill will come soon enough—this day, next season, ten years down the road. There is no real difference.

  Tygre’s stew, his song, his folding of the place of the green city into a simple taste and a few words—these are the winds that will scatter the seeds. Different mountains, different meadows, estuaries that have never seen a volcano piercing the sky. It does not matter. The city will be born and reborn again until stamping it out will be like stamping out worms after a rainstorm.

  And this time, capital and rebellion and ancient scholarship have combined to ensure the future restarts without having to repeat every lesson of the past. We crossed a threshold, shed our Big Science and Big Industry in favor of little things which could be carried in a pocket and last a generation.

  Ideas, ideals, and no small measure of love in a cruel and dying world.

  * * *

  Bashar sits with Anna Chao as she carves the marker. Such delicate work is not truly suited to her style of shaping stone. She is better at ashlars and slabs. Still, someone must do this thing, and by daylight, for it is too delicate to be worked in the shadows.

  Though Anna carves a flame, the city has not burned yet. People are leaving anyway. Not in a rush seeking refuge, but in twos and tens and scores. The secret societies of couples and the tribalism of work gangs.

  They all carry stones, and each stone is filled with data. Most carry tools as well, enough simple wedges and hammers and crucibles to jump start the first year of effort in some other wild place.

  The grave contains three bodies. Tygre lies in the embrace of two women who did not know one another. The blood is on Bashar’s hands in the end. That is who he is, that is what he does, killing the only man he will ever love, and striking down the enraged assassins in the moments which follow.

  His days are shortened, too. The darts that ripped into his arm have left him with a paralysis, which will be fatal in his line of work. Bashar does not mind so much. He just wants to see things set to rights before he walks off on his own. “I may be some time,” will be his epitaph, borrowed from half-remembered history but still true enough.

  A stranger approaches through the woods, a man clearly not accustomed to running down roads. Bashar meets the newcomer’s gaze, an old but serviceable pistol ready in his still-good left hand.

  “You won’t need that,” says William Silas Crown. “I just wanted to come see for myself.” He nods at the grave.

  Bashar knows there is no point in asking how. Tygre’s flame was all too visible far from the night-dark forests of Cascadiopolis. He does have one question, though. “Did you send him?” Bashar asks Crown.

  “I thought I did,” Crown answers slowly. “But we were used alike, you and I.”

  Bashar, Anna and Crown stay by the grave ’til evening, watching the satellites transit the sky. One flares, possibly turning into the sun, possibly launching kinetics at some ground target.

  * * *

  It would be nice to say that Tygre arrived in Cascadiopolis on the wings of a storm. He did not, for he came as a man. But he left with everyone who walked away before the end, his power multiplied by his name on all their lips.

  His stone yet remains, if you know where to look, blackened by ash, covered by creepers, silent and cold as the mountain itself.

  ***

  The Bull Dancers

  The first, immutable law of capital is that it will be preserved

  Sitting propped up in the hospital bed he would never leave again, with his view of Mt. Hood to Portland’s east and his automated medical devices and on-call nurses, William Silas Crown could feel every moment of his eighty years of life bearing down on him like a slow rain of anvils. The Malaysian telomere hack had been good to him, as had the de Grey diet. Being the twenty-third richest man in the Western hemisphere had helped quite a bit, too. But age, time-delayed side effects and, ultimately, cell division errors in his colon had caught up to him.

  Put simply, Crown was dying of metastasized colon cancer in his lymph, liver and lungs. All the money in the world, or even his measurably significant percentage of it, could not defeat tubulovillous adenocarcinoma rendered immortal and nearly invulnerable by the same viral-delivered genetic hacks that had granted him the years already so carelessly spent.

  As his oncologist had said, they could keep part of Crown alive in a petri dish for the next thousand years. Just not the part he cared about. The woman was very good at her job, but basically nuts so far as Crown could tell.

  But then again, likely he was too.

  Eighty was not so old, if one’s body was not conspiring against one’s self. Cancer had robbed him of both years and vigor. Crown concentrated on his breathing, letting the moments pass one after another like drops from a leaking faucet. Jewels of concentration, each one distorting a single memory past recognition, tiny funhouse mirrors of recollection falling from his grasp. Smells brought the most powerful recall, but also the most random, and lately weighted far too much toward hospitals and the deaths over the years of most of the people he’d ever known.

  The cancer did not steal his memories, but the drugs that slightly delayed his death took their own price. Crown relied more and more on written reports, spreadsheeted numbers, mumbling expert systems that spoke to him in the dark when all good folk were abed.

  “J. Appleseed Foundation,” he said aloud. The words were a gasp, almost incomprehensible, he knew, but his expert systems had adjusted their speech rec to match his failing voice.

  “Status unchanged,” replied Hubbard in a nasal twang moderated to Crown’s sensitive hearing and permanent headache. Heinlein and Kornbluth were the other two expert systems. They often disagreed, which suited Crown just fine.

  “Ericsson said there were political implications.” That sentence took a lot out of Crown, left him dizzy and, oddly, remembering a swimming hole in his youth.

  Heinlein answered with a throat-clearing noise that was an eccentricity of its programming. “Patriot, Inc. has assets attached to J. Appleseed at the moment. Also, the office of Senator Rodriguez, G-Denver Free Zone, has been phishing heavily around the Foundation.”

  “Patriot?” Those idiots at Edgewater had their hands in everything, but why would their politicals be digging here? “Who contracted those assets?”

  Kornbluth was the legal mind, based in part on Thicket, the long-running open source law program dedicated to the conflicting and overlapping national, regional, local and virtual legal codes that applied throughout Cascadia. “Not in public record. Also unavailable through first- or second-order paid searches. Further investigation will involve felonious activity.” Unlike a human attorney, Kornbluth always spoke the blunt truth. Crown had become fond of expert systems in his old age for precisely that reason. He didn’t have enough time left in his life for the usual misdirections and innuendoes and plausible deniability.

  Let them bring criminal charges against him. He’d be long dead before the case could ever come to trial.

  “I authorize all necessary research.” Crown paused, took a deep breath and rested a moment before making a run at authorization. “Open budget, report back for confirmation…” Shuddering gasp. “… if you exceed one hundred thousand Euros before concluding the effort.” Hard currency was required for this kind work, not the soft and essentially worthless dollar.

  “Acknowledged and understood,” said Kornbluth.

  Crown rested a while in silence, watching the blue-green glow of his medical instrumentation watch him. He had not been out of this bed in three mo
nths, did not expect to ever leave it again except after being promoted to corpse. There would be no more surgeries, and he’d long since given up pissing and shitting for himself.

  Still, he felt as if he were spending his dying weeks in the cockpit of some twen-cen jumbo jet.

  Oh, to fly once more before he died.

  * * *

  Mindanao Snow Fleischer, Mindy to her friends such as they were, scowled at the datamat flopped on the scarred formica table. The diner was ancient, reeking of grease and ketchup and coffee. The tables were even older, surfaced with what had once been an off-white veneer covered with the little gold outlines of boomerangs. Now it was mostly covered with stains, knife scars, and weirdly, even cigarette burns, though tobacco had largely been illegal all of Mindy’s life. Roughly the polar opposite of restaurants like Dwiggins and the rest of Portland’s white tablecloth New Food movement.

  The food here should have been illegal, too, but her dad, a Navy nuke out on a psych discharge from the submarine service, had been an unreconstructed carnivore in this era of soy and textured vegetable protein. He’d carefully led Mindy down the garden path of bacon, burgers and steak when she was too young to know better. Or possibly worse. The Hotcake House still served burgers the way Dad had made them, somewhere back in the long ago before a deep swing in his bipolar disorder had provoked lead poisoning of the .44 caliber variety. Sadly not fatal, and she still visited his drooling husk once a week in the long-term ward at the VA up on Marquam Hill.

  That there still was a long-term care ward was more than a minor miracle, but not miracle enough to call back the ghost of Raymond Fleischer to his ventilated skull and weakened body.

  So she called back other ghosts for a living now, working cold cases for the Cascadia Law Enforcement Collective, and occasionally seconded to other LECs and police or sheriff’s departments along the West Coast. Cold cases were hard work, and mostly unrewarding—the dirty cops couldn’t even find a take to be on, in this line, so nobody wanted them—but Dad would have been proud of her looking after forgotten justice. She had all the cold case work she wanted, to boot. No one had the resources for a serious cold case squad, hadn’t in decades, but Mindy was low paid and shaved her hours and just often enough came up with something that made the news in a good way, or even better, released some assets that could fund real crime fighting.