Telling the Map

by Christopher Rowe

  We had to keep running.

  The stranger kept pace, no matter how fast we went or what twists our route took. He leaped with the strongest of us, ran with the swiftest, sneaked with the quietest. And when we stood looking down at the park, three stories up and a million miles away, he even laughed with us at the number of policemen who surrounded it.

  “That’s what I meant by crowds,” he told us. “That’s what I meant by teeming.”

  We were hidden from the view of those below, and had shaken off those behind, at least for the time being. The time being past time to separate ourselves from this man, at least to David’s way of thinking.

  “That’s the park,” he spat. He’d been closer to Justin than most of us. “That’s where the detective said you came from and where Old Olivia said to take you back. We should never have been mixed up with any of this.”

  The stranger nodded gravely. “You’re right. You should all go. But before you do, young lady . . .” He held out his hand, and Les put the blue and silver box in it.

  He lifted the lid and set it aside, took the deck in one hand and fanned the cards like a magician. It was a standard deck of playing cards, technically illegal but such as could be found in all the bars and most of the households of the Northside. We could see the four suits in the dim light of the gray dawning that was creeping up on us. Hearts and Ships, Clubs and Coins.

  He turned his wrist and the faces of the cards were hidden from us. He held up the fanned deck to David. “Choose,” he said, and when David didn’t, the man didn’t argue that Les leaned forward and took a card from the precise middle of the deck.

  She turned it over where we could see that it was the one we expected. The Jack of Coins. Our grandparents called that one the Rebel when they played behind drawn curtains.

  “I see now,” said the stranger. “I remember why I came. I understand.”

  We didn’t yet, and protested.

  “It’s not me that’s lost,” he said. “It’s you.” Somehow, him pointing with his chin took in all of us, and all the Northside and its people, and all the other neighborhoods, and even the policemen. “Come on. I’ll show you the way.”

  And we all followed him, even David, as he clambered down the fire escape to the street that ran alongside the park. By the time we reached the bottom, the crowd of policemen who waited for us numbered in the dozens.

  The stranger paused before he put his foot on the topmost rung of the last ladder down. He took a card from the deck in his hand and his wrist flicked forward. The card sailed down and through the crowd, and stuck edge in to the asphalt like a razor. The policemen took a step back, then another as a second card sailed down. Then a third went, and a fourth, then the whole deck was flying through the air, pushing the policemen back and marking a path in two lines straight across the street to the north entrance of the park.

  We trailed him across the way, and hesitated at the entrance. It had been closed all our lives.

  “There’s everything to be afraid of,” he said.

  All of us but David followed him in.

  In, but not through.

  The stranger cast one glance over his shoulder as we skirted a treeline and said, “Now you’re found.” He stepped sideways into the trees and out of this world as far as we could ever tell. Perhaps he will return. Perhaps he’s gone to yours.

  We have lived in the park down through all the long years since, sortying out across the Northside, chasing policemen and reshaping the way of things. We were seditionists after all.

  Not all of us lived from that night to this, but there are more of us now, and our ranks will ever grow, until we are as numberless as worlds.

  The Unveiling

  The sky was the color of a robin’s egg, and like a robin’s egg it was mottled and imperfect. Ash from Old Vice’s constant low-grade eruptions mixed with the complex hydrocarbons of industrial smokes—the word “pollution” was forbidden by gubernatorial edict—with the effluvia of the thousands of transports uplifting daily to low orbit, and even with naturally occurring clouds, high scudding cirrus following the wake of the continental jet stream and low, ominous thunderheads piling up in the sunset west.

  It was these last that attracted Tayne’s attention as his crew worked to scour bird droppings and other, less clearly identifiable grime from the pedestal supporting a statue of some hero from the last war. The statue, and a dozen others that were more or less identical to Tayne’s eyes, was set atop the tor overlooking the seaport. Another, just upslope and concealed under roped-down tarps, was to be dedicated the next day. The whole sculpture garden had to be gleaming for the dignitaries who would be in attendance for the speeches and the drinking.

  Lizane walked up, returning from the crew’s van burdened with another bulky canister of the muriatic acid they were using to clean the monuments. She followed his gaze west to the clouds and spat to one side. “Rain’ll just bring grit,” she said. “We’ll be out here in the morning doing this all over again.”

  Precipitation on Castellon was never clean. In the howling winters, the snowflakes formed around cores of ash and fell gray instead of the white of other, cleaner worlds. Castellon hail melted away to leave toxic sand dusting the roadways and rooftops, and Castellon rain, stinging more from its chemical content than from its tumultuous fall, left behind a thin patina of slick brown sludge that coated everything it touched.

  “Work order is to clean these up tonight,” he said. “We’re down waterside in the morning moving freight.”

  Lizane curled her nose. “‘Freight,’” she said. “You mean we’ll be loading a garbage scow.”

  Tayne’s crew was free-floating and unspecialized. They reported to a municipal hall at the beginning of every six-day workweek, where Tayne received a list of jobs that needed doing, inevitably dirty and sometimes even dangerous. The work didn’t pay enough for lodging any better than a room in the city dormitories downwind of the fish-packing plant, but it paid just enough for a few drinks at week’s end, and most of Tayne’s crew lacked the imagination or drive to want anything more than that.

  As for Tayne himself, well, he’d wanted more once. But now, in his early forties, he’d learned to settle for what he had. As he usually did when melancholy overtook him, Tayne ran his hand through the fringe of graying black hair on the back of his head. Thick as the calluses on his fingers were, he could still feel the diamond-shaped scar there.

  He realized Lizane was still standing next to him, expecting a reply.

  “At least tomorrow’s Sixthday,” he said. “Just half a shift in the stink.”

  But it wasn’t to be just the six hours of work a half shift would have required. As Lizane had more or less predicted, an automated call came over the vox an hour before dawn, letting Tayne know that his crew was needed back up at the statuary garden and that their hours shoveling on the docks were pushed to after the meal break.

  “It’s overtime, anyway,” he told each of his crew members in turn when he reached them. For one or two, this meant a call over the vox to the same sort of communal hall phone that word had come to him by. For most of them, though, it meant rousting them out in person from the bunkhouses along the river, enduring the curses of a dozen or a hundred others housed in the warehouse-like barracks. Tayne made it a point to learn the favored bunks of all his workers for days just like this, when he had to pick his way through the dark and dank to find them and tell them of a change in the schedule.

  He made it a point, too, to know where to find the last few of them, Lizane among their number, who refused to bed down in the communal bunkhouses for reasons they hadn’t shared with Tayne. So with just a half hour left before he should be starting the van at the muster point, he found himself walking a narrow alley full of cardboard squats and canvas lean-tos, his jacket open to show he wore the garb of a laboring man, his hands held wide to show he carried no weapons.

  He found Lizane already awake, brewing something foul-smelling in a tin coffe
epot over a grate lain across a cut-off drum. Ashes spilled out around the corroded drum’s bottom rim where it rested on the rotted asphalt of the alley, telling Tayne that it had been used as a fireplace for a long time.

  Lizane was squatting, sitting on her heels, chewing on a ration bar. She didn’t look surprised to see him and mutely offered him a cup of the black stuff she poured from the coffeepot. He shook his head.

  “It’s like you said,” he told her. “Back up to those statues.”

  She nodded and drank. “No garbage scow?”

  Tayne took a careful squat himself, mindful of putting a hand down on the filthy ground. “Docks in the afternoon. So, overtime.”

  Most of the others on the crew had greeted this news with grumblings. They could all use the extra scrip, but the way payroll was managed for municipal contractors they wouldn’t see it for weeks. For today, it just meant no afternoon off, which meant being too exhausted, probably, to have much of a Sixthday night.

  Tayne didn’t think Lizane ever had much of a Sixthday night. She just shrugged and leaned back, hooked her jacket out from a pile of clothing in the closest lean-to. The pile moved and growled, and Tayne caught a brief glimpse of the scar-faced man Lizane lived with. She’d never mentioned his name, and Tayne had never asked.

  The van wouldn’t start.

  “It’s the fuel cell again,” said Hap. Hap, tallest in the crew, skinniest and most nervous, had somehow once again won his way into the passenger seat in the complicated game of thrown fingers the crew used to determine who rode up front with Tayne. The game was supposed to yield random winners, but Hap won far too often for true randomness, and for Tayne’s taste. Hap talked too much to be a welcome companion in the forward compartment early mornings.

  “Fuel cell’s charged,” said Tayne, but he knew that Hap meant the worn coupling that connected the cell to the intake pump was fouled again. Tayne sighed. “Tell the others what’s going on.”

  For all that the van’s systems were supposedly designed for easy use and maintenance, the fuel cell coupling was perversely hard to get to. Tayne had the choice of either using the balky hydraulic jacks built into the undercarriage to raise the front of the van clear of the garage floor or half-clambering into the engine compartment and leaning in to work from the top. If he did the latter, he would be working by feel alone, because there was no line of sight to the coupling from above.

  He remembered the last time they’d used the jacks, when they’d thrown a track crawling up one of the seaport’s older cobbled streets. A seal had blown on one fully extended jack, spraying everyone with hydraulic fluid, and the bulk of the van had settled down onto the street, Lizane barely scrambling out from beneath in time to avoid being crushed.

  He decided to work by feel.

  So they arrived at the statuary garden an hour later than scheduled, all of them anxious to make up the lost time, no one wanting to be shoveling aboard a scow when the evening tide came in and the deck started bucking with the waves. As they pulled through the ornate iron gate, Tayne looked over at the pair of marble statues, winged warriors of some kind, flanking the entrance. These were the ones they’d spent the most time on the day before and had left gleaming. They were still gleaming, all right, not from the crew’s polishing job but from the slick coat of brown sludge that the thunderstorms had draped over the city. Tayne felt a headache building from the amount of work they had ahead of them.

  “Somebody else is here, boss,” Hap said, pointing toward the top of the garden.

  A personal transport was parked haphazardly across the gravel lane running below the tarped-over statue. The running panels of the transport were ostentatiously white, and the vehicle had obviously not been parked out of doors the night before. Everything about it spoke of wealth and privilege.

  “Can only mean trouble, right, boss?” said Hap.

  Tayne answered with a noncommittal grunt, even though he agreed. He eased the van into the same spot beside the maintenance shed they’d used the day before and set the brake. “Get everybody out and going,” he said. “Start with those angels or whatever they are, closest to the gate. If I’m not back when those are done, do whatever Lizane says.”

  He considered digging out some hand cleaner from the van’s supply bay before he walked up to the transport, but then decided not to take the time, despite the fact his hands were filthy from cleaning out the coupling. He figured the car’s occupant was probably somebody from the municipal authority and so unlikely to offer to shake his hand anyway.

  He was proven wrong on both counts.

  A slightly built older man, dressed in a smart morning coat over the twill one-piece of the artisan class, was on his knees at the base of the new statue, making a poor job of untying the ropes that held down the tarps. His fine clothes were covered with the muck running off the canvas, and when he looked up at Tayne the man even had a smear of brown running from his creased forehead back over his pale, bald pate.

  The man’s thin face lit up with a broad smile when he saw Tayne. “I mean no offense, sir,” he said, “when I tell you that you look like someone who’s better equipped to get this piece uncovered than I am.”

  The voice was as unexpected as everything else about the situation. The man’s accent wasn’t just cultured, it was offworld cultured. Maybe even Earth cultured.

  Tayne said, “Our work order is for cleaning all these others. That one was covered up pretty well—it’s probably fine.”

  When he said “our,” the other man furrowed his bushy white eyebrows and peered myopically down the garden. “Look at that. There’s a whole gang of you.”

  “Gang” meant something very specific in the port, and Tayne winced. “We’re a civic work crew, sir,” he said, deciding that the man was definitely an offworlder, or at the very least new to the city. “We’ve got a ticket this morning to get the garden cleaned up for.” He hesitated, trying to remember if the work order had used some official-sounding word for the afternoon’s ceremony. “For the unveiling,” he finished awkwardly.

  “Well, that’s fine,” said the old man. “Though to be perfectly honest, most of these pieces won’t be particularly improved by cleaning. A lot of dreary, pompous, celebratory stuff, isn’t it? Unexamined patriotism bordering on jingoism, that sort of thing?”

  Tayne worked a minute to unpack what the man had just said. After a moment, he said, “They take sedition pretty seriously around here, sir.”

  The man waved that off and picked at the mess he’d made of the ropes’ master knot. “I’ve said worse and they still hired me for this commission,” he said. “And back to what I was saying, you’ll surely agree that it’s most important that this piece be clean and ready? Can’t we just have a peek to make sure none of this filth got through the wrappings?”

  Tayne glanced back down at the gate and saw that Lizane had the crew divided into two teams, tackling the angels. She’d assigned them exactly as he would have, splitting up people who couldn’t stand each other and people who got along too well, preventing fights before they started, and lollygagging as well.

  He unsnapped the cover of the holster at his belt where he kept his multi-tool and pulled it out, unfolding the utility blade. He nodded at the ropes and said, “That’s not going to get untangled anytime soon.”

  Grasping his intentions, the old man smiled again and said, “The Alexandrian solution, excellent.” Then he hesitated and added, “Alexander the Great. An old general who found a knot that couldn’t be untied in a place called Phrygia, and so he—”

  Tayne kept his utility blade sharpened to a very keen edge. He sliced through the ropes with a single pass. “I know what the Gordion Knot was,” he said, interrupting the man. “Even laborers on Castellon go to school. Until they’re sixteen at any rate.”

  The old man pursed his lips. “They must be very excellent schools,” he said.

  Tayne shrugged and started pulling the tarps down. “Not really. But the libraries are all right.�
��

  The sculpture was of the previous governor, a woman who had ruled Castellon, its moons, and its outlying stations when Tayne was a boy. She was remembered for putting down a rebellion on the western continent, for reforming the tax code, and for patronizing the arts. At least that’s what it said on the bronze plate bolted to the base of the statue. Tayne mainly remembered her for the draconian anti-gang policies that had been enforced during the later part of her administration. He touched the scar on the back of his head again as he gazed up at the outsized marble face three meters above.

  “I suppose it’s a good enough likeness,” he said.

  The old man tutted. “Hardly the point, sir, but thanks nonetheless.”

  Tayne looked over at him. “What is the point, then?”

  The old man drew himself up, and an arch look came to his face. He opened his mouth to speak, but then suddenly deflated and smiled again. “The point, sir, is unexamined patriotism bordering on jingoism, as we established earlier. Which is what pays my bills and leaves me time for my own work. I knocked this out in two weeks, if you must know.”

  Tayne knew all about makework, about doing things just to pay the bills. “Why are you out here this morning, then?” he asked. “Why do you care if a little rain got onto this statue before the mayor and the rest of them see it?”

  The man, Tayne supposed he should think of him as the sculptor, didn’t immediately answer. He was slowly circling the plinth the statue stood upon, kicking his way through the fallen canvas. He stopped on the upland side, opposite of where Tayne stood, and said, “This. I’m out here this morning checking for something like this.”