by Ian McDonald
“Okay, Joshi,” said the driver, and the already hurtling ’lectrovan found a miraculous third speed somewhere in its shrieking motor and careened, swaying and slewing violently, down the rain-wet streets of Neu Ulmsbad.
Chapter 3
SHE WAS NOT ALONE down here. She was certain of it. Luminous arrows spray-painted on dripping walls. Discarded bric-a-brac: noodle cartons, numbgum wrappers, articles of clothing, a newssheet (intellectual shock to find Wee Wendy Waif gazing up through twenty centimeters of filmy rainwater). Wall panels removed, fizzing, sparking contraptions jerry-rigged to the power lines. The occasional heap of human excrement, hard and stale. The occasional ringing, plashing footfall—transported who knew how far?—along the ringing tunnels and crawlways of Undertown.
She was not alone.
Sometimes the thought terrified her; cold, hostile hands reaching into the cozy little womb she had woven into the underpinnings of New Paris Community Mall. At other times the presence of others/brothers sharing her runways and conduits was almost welcome. The solitude at the bottom of Shaft Twelve was absolute and unbroken. She had drawn one hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs on her walls, smiling down like Botticelli angels. For company. They only deepened her sense of isolation. She had always been a solitary creature. The Compassionate Society had made her that way. But there was a world of difference between being solitary and being alone. Before there had always been the possibility of company: the Dario Sanduccis, the Marcus Fordes, and his four and twenty cushioncats. Down in Shaft Twelve there was only herself. And the dream.
Those blue-silver wings. That impossibly romantic white silk scarf flowing out behind. Up we go, up we go, up we go. Now that it was absolutely denied her, like heaven to the damned, the land above the clouds where the Great Spirits and the Celestials dwelled was painful in its purity. Its freedom mocked her. But not because it was unattainable. It mocked her because she had once touched it, felt it, held it, and had lost it again. That was the pain.
Strange, but in this incarnation of the dream, there was no wall of faces. No barrier to the Beyond. But what that Beyond was, she could no longer see. From the saddle of her high-flying bicycle/ornithopter, she could see the last dawnward towers of Great Yu. And beyond them, nothing.
The dream no longer comforted. But it was all she had, so she clung to it: the sixteen-o’clock dream.
And the others.
Like the dream, she could not be comfortable with them, but she could not be comfortable without them. At least they would be company. She would not face an indefinite future underground, alone. There would be the common bond of circumstance. Experiences would be shared, resources pooled, stratagems of survival tables, futures mapped out. That there was a future, a time to come reaching out ahead of her along the cableways and conduits and ducts until she found her own death there in the tunnels, was more than she could bear.
“I’m a yulp cartoonist,” she would convince the piles of romantic novels stolen on her furtive midnight forays to the surface. “I was born in the White Sisters of Koinonia Maternity Hostel, I was fostered by the Sigmarsenn family of Coober Peedie until, age seven, I was admitted to the Ladies of Celestial Succor Community Crèche, where I remained until at age fourteen the Ministry of Pain apprenticed me to Jovanian Yelkenko from whom I learned the cartoonic arts and took over his creation, Wee Wendy Waif. I lived in apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West, I worked producing Wee Wendy Waif for the Armitage-Weir Publishing House, and what I want to know is, what am I doing down here?”
Inevitably these arguments brought her back again to the question of whether or not contact with these others was desirable. Supine on her live-fur carpet (stolen in bulk from Thirteen Moons Furnishings on an after-hours raid through their floor service-hatch, she like some overwhelmed insect wrestling the huge roll of vat-grown fur down into her hole) she argued with herself. She argued this argument so many times that each pro, each con, had taken on an individual character and voice.
“Whaddya mean, whaddya mean, common experience?” This voice, straight-edged and gritty as a broken floor-tile, was Mr. Don’t-Be-Stupid-Girl. “The only common experience down here is you’re all criminals. PainCriminals. You know what you did to get yourself down here; Yah only knows what they had to do.”
“Be reasonable.” This was the voice called High-Pitched Reasonableness. “Everyone down here was a member of the Compassionate Society at some time. The rules aren’t easily forgotten.”
“That’s rich, coming from you,” said Growly Accuser. “Who said the rules hold down here?”
“But you can’t be alone forever,” said Self-pitying Whiner. “Not: forever.”
“Better safe than dead,” said Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution.
Working her way one morning through the tangle of crawlways and ducts that led, eventually, to the air-conditioning plant under New Paris Community Mall, she came upon a workspace recently vacated by some lunch-or toilet-seeking environmental maintenance engineer. Magpie-minded, magpie-moraled, Courtney Hall fingered through his neglected toolcase until those fingers came to rest on the stubby metal barrel of a sonic impacter.
She had spied upon engineers using these devices. It was sign of how far she had strayed from the path of Social Compassion that she had devised ways in which one could be converted into a nasty little personal weapon. She slipped the impacter into the leather pouch she had just yesterday pickpocketed from Western Promise Novelties and Gifts and continued on her way to the surface and further petty crime.
That night she had a reply to the Pigeon-Voiced Mother of Extreme Caution. The Voice of Off-hand Tough-Nut Exuberance said, “Sure, I’ve got the impacter. What have I got to worry about?”
A sound.
Unidentifiable in the sinister acoustic darklands of Shaft Twelve. Just: a sound. A presence.
Courtney Hall took grip of the impacter and slid the output control up into the red. She had never used the tool even as a tool, much less a weapon, but the principle seemed simple. Point. Squeeze. What you pointed at exploded. From the hatchway she could survey all of Shaft Twelve. She held the impacter emission head against her chin, watching, listening. Water dripped from a pipe joint and fell, sparkling in the wan maintenance lights, down the center of the shaft to gather in a deep pool at the bottom.
“Hello?” Courtney Hall ventured. “Helloooo.”
Drip, plink. Drip, plink, drip.
She aimed and fired with a unity of thought and action that dazzled her. There was a howl of power, an explosion, and all the lights went out. Shorted power conduits snaked and hissed and shed blue sparks toward the oil-dark lake. “Damn.” With one shot she had disabled the power and air systems for New Paris Community Mall. Within the hour Shaft Twelve would be a-buzz with environmental maintenance workers, crawling into, round, over, through every catwalk, access tunnel, gantry, hatchway, vent. They could not possibly overlook Courtney Hall’s fur-lined nest in the air-conditioning subsystems control room. “Damn damn damn damn.” But she had seen something. She was certain. A something—a someone? A what—a who? Light-starved, spindly, a pale shadow. At least that was one question answered. Contact with the others: unarguably undesirable.
Surprising how few souvenirs of her furry little home she chose to take with her in her nightsac. A hammock, a bicycle lamp, a sleepsac, some cleanup tissues, a box of tampons (removed from the Compassionate Society’s regulation of her womanhood, she could not be certain her periods would not restart), a rope, a packed lunch, a bottle of mineral water (nongaseous), some clean underwear, some spare clothes, and shoes. The rest she left: stolen goods are worth exactly what you pay for them. But she did say good-bye to the hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs. None of them seemed sad to see her go.
Her early timid surveys of the warrenways about Shaft Twelve had disclosed no other potential living spaces. She must quit New Paris entirely and move into unexplored territory. Unexplored, potentially occupied.
She tried
not to advertise her presence too widely with the bicycle lamp. As her journey led her away from the upper levels, down into older, more chaotic strata of jumbled architectures, she left behind the artificial illumination to enter a stoop-shouldered country of brick tunnels, trickling water, and stygian darkness. Fear of the dark overcame fear of discovery. She fixed the bicycle lamp to her nightsac shoulder straps with a roll of electrical tape filched some days previously from another careless engineer. And she kept the impacter at the ready. Her swinging beam illuminated damp brick arches and fan-vaulted ceilings, brass pipes and corroded wheels of a curiously archaic design. A sense of having wandered far from Yu overcame her, in time as well as in space, of having left the city that was the world to enter an altogether other world coexistent with the Compassionate Society but secretive, inaccessible, an old world of damp, dark, and drippings that had survived, preserved unchanged by the darkness, since the time of the Break. She had come too far, too deep; she could feel history pressing on her stooped shoulders as she squeezed along the narrow brick intestines. She splashed ankle-deep through ancient fossilized rainwater and at every junction, every confluence of brick pipes, chose the upward path. But a claustrophobic awareness told her that the tunnels were redefining themselves before her, twisting and turning so that for every upward she chose, the tunnels moved to draw her down.
There was no question of ever being able to find her way back to Shaft Twelve. It was gone as irrevocably as Apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West.
She sang, attempting to whistle up high spirits. The echoes that scampered back to her along the brick buttresses sounded nothing like her voice. And behind those echoes, something more. A film of water flowing out of somewhere parted around her boots to flow on to somewhere. Her bicycle lamp picked hysterical faces out of the brickwork. A scuttling, scurrying sound that might have been moving air (and just as easily might not) whispered out of the dark.
“All right. All right, whoever you are.” She did not want to have to say whatever. “Just to let you know that if you’re trying to frighten me, you’re succeeding.”
She walked one complete slow circle, sending her bicycle beam probing into every dark crevice. The impacter rested snug and comfortable in her hand. “Hello? Anyone there? Hello?” She let the last echo fade into the general silence before concluding, “Okay, so I was talking to myself. So, who’s to hear?”
… earearearear…
And they were upon her.
All over her.
In her hair, hanging from her clothes, clawing at her hands, her face, her eyes, more and more and more of them, piling onto her, swarming, shrieking, a mass of fur and claws and teeth, throwing themselves out of nowhere, onto her, dragging her down under the weight of their numbers. She screamed and screamed and screamed, flailing at her face, her precious, delicate eyes. The swinging, swooping bicycle lamp gave momentary infernal revelations of ivory needles, matted fur, steaming drool, bulbous light-blinded pink eyes …
Pets. Dogkits, catkits, monkeykits, cute cuddlesome blobs of genetic ingenuity flushed away, thrown out, refuse-chuted, abandoned by bored creators. Knowing what they had been made them all the more horrifying. Courtney Hall struck free with her left hand and fired the impacter. Blind fear sent shot after shot after shot ricocheting around the chamber, flashing water to steam, blasting shattered bricks from the vaulted ceiling. A wet, soft, bursting sound: a fortunate shot exploded a doggery or kitkin in a shriek of fur and intestines. Teeth met through her gun hand. Howling, she dropped the impacter. Clinging to hands, hair, face, clothes, the genetic menagerie pulled her down, and as teeth tugged flesh, Courtney Hall became aware of a wondrous sense of detachment that said, Well, this is it, isn’t it? This brick sewer is the last, the very last, thing you will ever see.
A brightening light filled the chamber.
The Light of Yah! she thought, grateful that soon this distressing toothy tugging of her body would cease. And it did. And now that she was dead, it seemed that war broke out in heaven, that black-and-white-striped angels in domino masks fell upon the fell beasts with swords and crossbows and left a goodly multitude of cubby-bears and marmosetties lying with her in the stagnant rainwater before the vile pets fled to those vile places from which they had come. And it seemed that a face bent over her body.
“Lady most lucky,” said the raccoon-faced angel. “Lucky lucky lucky. Still, lady pretty bad, poor lady. Rest awhile, poor lady. Assistance has come.”
“Are angelic raccoons theologically supportable?” asked Courtney Hall.
“You tell me, lady,” said the racoon savior, and Courtney Hall dropped off the edge of heaven with a dismal thud to land back in her body again.
“Raccoons!” she cried. “You are raccoons!”
“Of course, lady,” said the racoon, peeling the backing from a dermoplast and sticking it to her forehead. “Sleep now.”
“But …” she asked, and then a fog of theological outrage descended upon her. A last coherent impression was of the racoon absentmindedly stroking a little metal socket in the side of its neck out of which grew a cluster of soft, fungusy biochips. Time then passed, or did not pass, in degrees of awareness from deep sleep to complete consciousness. Upon one such occasion of lucidity, the thought clearly entered Courtney Hall’s head (and remained there) that in all the adventures of Wee Wendy Waif she had helped to create, there had never been anything half so bizarre as being dragged down dark tunnels deep under Yu on a tube-steel travois by an army of talking raccoons.
Apostles I
AS HE WAITED FOR the judgment, it came to him: a moment of clairaudience (some alchemic combination of time and place and atmosphere) when the ear abolished all distance between sources and all sounds arrived at it with equal weight and clarity. The iron grumble of tram wheels. The hiss of rain, ebbing. The calls, the splashing footfalls of the wingers abroad in the streets of Pendelburg. The ring of a solitary pedicab bell. High above, indeterminate, the purr of airship engines. He heard them all, clearly, distinctly, each voice a note in the night-song. And he heard the voices of his friends judging him.
The little he understood about the universe forced him to conclude that he was a threat to these people. This society into which he had been thrust (how? from whence? why?) had an inside and an outside; his own experience taught him that much, and these people were firmly outside. He suspected that, unlike himself, they had chosen to be outside; unlike himself again, they had not been outside from the very beginning. But to such outsiders as they, others of their kind could be a threat, an insider in disguise.
Marvelous, the amount he had learned of this fascinating universe already.
He listened to the debating voices, the soliloquies, the valiant defenses from the dock, the accusations and the parries, and pondered anew the condition of the outsider in this rigidly enclosed society. They could claim nothing from their Compassionate Society (whole blocks of a priori knowledge that had hitherto floated solitary, isolated, in the spaces of his memories, were levered into place, monolith by monolith), and as he suspected that this institution controlled all resources political, economic, physical, and spiritual, these Raging Apostles had only such access to food, power, and shelter as their wits allowed them. A dangerous place to be outside. He recalled the hang gliders, the synthesizers, the fireworks, the glittering costumes that had bedazzled him in Neu Ulmsbad Square. Their wits must be sharp indeed to winkle such beads and baubles from the Seven Servants. (Another block of masonry fell with a crash into position.) Quickness of the hands deceives the eye. Empty bellies under robes of splendor. He reckoned the Raging Apostles sacrificed themselves for their art.
“I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy at all; what proof have we that this Kilimanjaro West is not a Love Police agent?” That was Winston’s voice. He was learning to distinguish the individual performers by their voices. A deep “pneumatic rumble of a voice; the athleto, what was his name? Kilimanjaro West had only just begun to come to terms with a cast
ed, stratified society.
“Then why aren’t we in West One? Why didn’t they pick us up back there in Neu Ulmsbad?” A debate between the two. “Because we gave them the slip. But how do you know that we’re safe here, that the Love Police won’t come out of the sky at any moment?”
Here, the safe here, was the Big Tree. Seeing it from a distance through rain-streaked glass and frantically pumping windshield wipers, Kilimanjaro West had had great difficulty in believing that such a place could exist. Incongruous in boulevard after boulevard after boulevard of fin de siècle brownstones as a fart in a cathedral, Big Tree was a solid block of green growingness, a vertical jungle, its canopy breaking in a steaming green wave twenty meters above the red pantiles of Pendelburg. A solitary trog enclave in a prefecture of wingers.
