Analog SFF, October 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

  They called themselves dinner clubs, but they were just politics conducted with a touch of discretion. They circulated among Sky City's rich variety of ethnic eateries, holding court, making deals, plotting.

  Some were revolutionary and progressive, questioning authority and critiquing the social order. Some hid dark collections of the worst reactionary bigots. Well, hid isn't the right word, since they came right out on their weblogs and displayed their bigotry for all to see.

  "While lunching at the Pho Saigon today,” said one wag, “I spotted a portuguesa across the street arguing with a shopkeeper, as that type will often do, chattering away in that slippery language of theirs. I wonder how those people got here, considering the genetic experiments they were conducting in the Amazon for all those years. Maybe our entry screening isn't what it used to be."

  Roger would have fit right in with them.

  Standing above all the roiling masses were the political and economic leaders of Ciudad de Cielo—the Twenty-Seven Families of Humanitas Universalis who had first staked a claim to this piece of unusual real estate more than a generation ago. They did not indulge in membership in the clubs and factions, but instead took on the role of public institutions in their own right. Aloof, apart from the common competition of ordinary interests, they cleaved to a greater civic duty—to govern the city for the good of all.

  Which made for a more cutthroat rivalry. Without ideology as a prop, the life-and-death struggle was much more personal and intimate.

  Penelope belonged to one of the families. I found her biography in a common school library.

  She lived alone—not counting her household staff—because she was an orphan. She was an orphan because her parents had been killed in an explosion while visiting family businesses down below Sky City in Ecuador. No one in Ecuador had ever determined the cause of the explosion, but no one in Ecuador wanted to get involved in HU Family politics.

  Maybe that explained a certain stubbornness I had noticed about her.

  A bit of surfing through the networks and weblogs dredged up the gossip and speculation at the time—that the man ultimately behind the death of her parents was none other than the leader of Humanitas Universalis and the urbamastro of Ciudad de Cielo himself, Don Alexandro Espinosa de Madrid.

  Don Alexandro was not that much younger than me, according to the library biography, though he did miss the twentieth century by a few years. He was one of the founders of Humanitas Universalis and had guided it through the years.

  And tonight, he was the guest of honor at a formal ball in the Grand Esplanade at the center of Sky City.

  A live newsfeed showed him standing behind a podium at the center of a long table lined with men and women in their finest attire—the members of the Twenty-Seven Families. He was talking, but I had the sound off. I watched as the elite of Ciudad de Cielo fawned and flattered their leader.

  About halfway down the length of the table, I spotted Penelope.

  The newsfeed was a user-controlled image, so I zoomed in close on her and her companion, Victor from the message queue. A pop-up IDed him as Victor Nguyen Pettengill and listed his pedigree and public holdings.

  She had draped her arm across his shoulders and gazed at him raptly, but Victor was interested only in Don Alexandro.

  As little as I knew about their relationship, I wasn't impressed by him. She certainly deserved more attention than he was providing. I felt a little offended for her.

  Then everyone was on their feet, applauding enthusiastically. I zoomed out and saw that Don A. was finished speaking. The members of the Twenty-Seven families formed themselves up in a long reception line and filed past him. I followed Penelope and Victor as they worked their way down the length of the table.

  When they reached the podium, the urbamastro shook Victor's hand vigorously. Victor nodded and lifted his chin in a display of male bravado. Penelope put on the appearance of someone more shy and demure than the armor-clad warrior who had so recently shot her way onto the L-1 Solar Observatory in search of ancient loot.

  Then she turned sharply, bent an elbow, and sent nearly the full contents of her glass—a dark red wine, no doubt from some sunny vineyard far below us—splashing across Don Alexandro's chest and his pristine white dinner jacket.

  If I still had a jaw, it would have dropped.

  I couldn't quite believe what I was seeing. Victor was apologizing like crazy. Penelope looked terribly embarrassed. The staff of the Grand Esplanade exploded from some hidden chamber to surround him, blotting the wine from the white linen of his dinner jacket, mopping it from the floor, unshipping some kind of molecular-mechanics cleaning device and running it across his clothes as they hustled him away.

  Victor, in his turn, hustled Penelope away from the table and off to some less visible spot.

  I zoomed in on them once more as they weaved their way through the crowd, watching the heads turn as they passed. Just before they stepped beyond the view of the newscam, Penelope turned and looked back in the direction they had taken Don Alexandro.

  For a moment, there was something in her eyes, some irrepressible delight at her own deviltry, that told me that spilling the wine had been no accident.

  * * * *

  Penelope didn't get home until around three A.M.

  I spent the time tracking reports of the embarrassing wine spill around the networks. It didn't take long for the story to get around. There were three versions.

  The official version—an unnamed guest had spilled her glass when she tripped on a defect in the carpet. It shielded Penelope from embarrassment, if she were honestly at fault, while robbing her of notoriety, if she were not.

  The “critics of the establishment” version—three cheers for young cousin who took the pomp out of His Pomposity. The perpetrator remained unidentified, reflecting the lack of information sources within the Twenty-Seven Families.

  And the “supporters of the establishment” version—tell us who the young cousin was so we can be sure she isn't a tool of the aforementioned critics.

  But within an hour or so, Penelope's name leaked out. That spawned a round of data mining, which brought into the frame every news file anyone could find about Penelope and her family. The first things to come up, of course, were the details of her parents’ untimely death and the speculation that surrounded it at the time. And after that, most of the commentary seemed restrained.

  The critics stopped trying to claim her as a symbol of their own antagonism. The supporters bit their tongues, lest they say something that wasn't sanctioned before anyone knew what the official line was supposed to be. And the officials refused to confirm the identity of the woman who spilled the wine.

  And then, sometime well after midnight, on anonymous blogs where forbidden secrets were shared and quickly erased, a few commenters speculated on the obvious question: “Who is Penelope Antoinette de Sandino y Murphy? And if it wasn't an accident, what makes her so brave that she would do something like this on purpose?"

  Who indeed?

  Could it be the woman who put herself in harm's way aboard an airless space station to pull yours truly from decades of thrall to the machinery of the night?

  Did I know something about young Penelope that few others in Ciudad de Cielo knew?

  You bet I did. And yet I still didn't have any idea what she might be up to.

  She finally came home, climbed the stairs slowly, and weaved her way through the door of the den to her desk. I could tell she wasn't well practiced at drinking. But even here in private she was trying hard not to let it show.

  Nevertheless, I greeted her with a few bars of Jim Morrison's plaintive moan, “Show me the way to the next whiskey bar."

  It startled her, sending her seeking the source of the music with a bob and weave of her head, which sent cascades of her red hair into motion.

  "Are you still on?” she asked when she figured out it was me.

  "I'm still up,” I said. “Waiting for you to come home. I was
watching the news tonight. I saw what happened."

  "Oh dear. Am I notorious yet?"

  I gave her a report on what people were saying about it.

  She smiled, in a way that melted what I used to think of as my heart. “It's so ... exciting."

  She jumped up and pirouetted in the middle of the room, then wobbled unsteadily back to the chair. “It was Victor's idea."

  "Victor's idea?"

  "Don't tell anyone,” she said, putting a finger to her lips. “It's a secret. I suppose I can tell you, though. You can't tell anyone, can you?"

  "I can, but I won't,” I said.

  That answer seemed to puzzle her, then she asked, “Do you think I can trust Victor?"

  "I don't know him well enough to say,” I replied. “Do you?"

  "That's a good question. You're quite clever. I wish I had more time to work with you. But there's so much going on right now. So many things are happening. No, I don't know Victor well enough to say."

  I wondered suddenly just what kinds of demons haunted young Penelope de Sandino. She probably had a number of trust and intimacy issues, the depths of which I could only imagine. Something made her hang around with the military jocks who'd accompanied her on the raid at L-1. And something made her pour wine on the urbamastro himself.

  "But he's the only one who's been willing to court me,” Penelope said with a wince. “The others are nice and polite and then they turn away. Only Victor has been willing to put his name on the line to bring me back into the Families. Is it too much to ask that he feel the same way I do?"

  "That's a question that transcends time,” I said.

  "I'm sure it does,” she replied. “So tell me about the twentieth century. They knew much more about love then. Do you know any other songs? Tell me about rock ‘n’ roll."

  "To understand rock ‘n’ roll, you've got to understand the blues,” I said. “Leonard Bernstein figured out what makes the blues blue. Minor chords. Minor chords contain the overtones of two major chords, at war within the same sound. It's the essential human dilemma—two emotions at war with one another."

  I played some of “I Can't Quit You, Babe” by Otis Reed. She sighed as her face collapsed in sorrow at the sad guitar.

  "But that became rhythm and blues after World War II, and by the time I was growing up, the rhythm was overtaking the blues. Rock ‘n’ roll rides a four-four beat right out of the blues and into the future."

  I switched from Otis to Buddy Holly and “It's So Easy to Fall in Love."

  Then I followed it up with Ginjer Baker's “I'm So Glad,” with its hard-driving wail of narcissistic self-discovery. I ended it with Eric Clapton and Blind Faith with “Can't Find My Way Home.” That was a bit of a mistake for me, because I choked up a little when he started talking about leaving your body behind, but I recovered quickly.

  "We made heroes out of our poets,” I said. “We made love songs into anthems."

  She swayed to Clapton's gentle acoustic guitar work with her eyes half-closed.

  "You have a very intriguing face,” she said softly, wounding me deeply again without knowing it. I remembered my days as an undergrad playing private D.J. in my dorm room, and with the wisdom of my great age, I knew that if this were another century, Penelope would be spending the night with me. Instead, I took advantage of her mood by asking a selfish question.

  "So tell me, what brought you out to L-1 just to fetch me back here?"

  She laughed and turned to her datascreen and with a couple taps of her finger produced a garish, flashing ad on what looked a lot like an eBay auction site. “Can you see this?” she asked.

  I tapped into the deskframe and brought the ad up close. I didn't like what I saw.

  "Historic Organic Memory Storage Device!” it proclaimed. “Straight from the twentieth century—the Jonathan Bender Relic! Now available to the intrepid collector!"

  "Baaah!!” I wailed.

  "Oooh,” Penelope said. “Please don't make that sound again. Is something wrong?"

  "No,” I said. “Nothing's wrong. Nothing or everything. It's all the same."

  Organic memory storage device? Moynihan's agent had screwed me. No wonder no one was taking me seriously. No wonder Penelope was treating me like a complicated MP3 player. How could I ever convince her I was anything else?

  "I'm going to bed,” she announced suddenly. She stood up quickly and headed for the door. “I don't feel well."

  Neither did I, but I didn't say so. She left me in the darkness to contemplate my own despair.

  * * * *

  The next morning Penelope woke late, moaned for a while, ate breakfast in her bedroom, showered, and left, all in about half an hour.

  I decided immediately thereafter that I also had to get out of the house.

  Hacking into the city webcam network didn't take more than a minute, and suddenly I was free. Or virtually so. Thirty years of teleoperation experience can be useful from time to time.

  Ciudad de Cielo was thick with webcams. You'd be amazed how a bit of coordination can make it seem like you're flying over the rooftops when switching from site to site. And the imaging software in my kit kicks in after a minute to mimic my tricks.

  Humanitas Universalis had created its urban utopia by sampling the world below. They'd copied and pasted pieces of other cities in a tight patchwork on a big platform a couple of kilometers square atop the hundred-kilometer spire that rose up out of the Ecuadorian Andes.

  One piece came from Florence—complete with Giordello Bruno's Dome, the shops along the Ponte Vecchio, and a copy of the copy of Michelangelo's David out side the Galleria dell'Accademia.

  Another came from Japan, a puzzle box of gardens and apartment towers and townhouses and stairways and bridges built in the midtwenty-first century as an exercise in spatial multitasking.

  Penelope lived in a neighborhood of tree-lined streets full of all-American homes lifted from one of those Springfields that were parceled out to various American states.

  A wall of ice more than a hundred meters high that had something to do with climate control rose from the northwest corner of the city. The ice fed a stream that ran east into a large park on the north side of town, also lifted from that American Springfield, with picnic groves, a baseball diamond in front of a small grandstand, a well-stocked zoo, and a series of duck ponds and waterfalls along the bottom of a long creek.

  At the center of the city, clustered around the tower that would have led to geosynchronous orbit, were colored glass and molded metal palaces. Where they'd used moletech (one wag called it “halfway to nanotech") to create copies of earthbound structures, the builders of Sky City had created new forms to take advantage of the fluid and organic character of the moletech itself.

  About three thousand people lived on the great platform that was Sky City. And another six thousand lived literally in its shadow. All down the length of the spire for a good ten kilometers was habitable territory. Immediately below the platform were the industrial and commercial sectors—the shipyard, the docks, the elevator heads that handled the never-ending stream of food and products from below. And then below that were apartment towers, built in reverse, tapering down onto the moletech-sculpted spire. And then farther down developments and colonizations broke out opportunistically along the elevator lines, extending in one form or another all the way to the base at Volcán Cayambe.

  I spent the day exploring the city.

  I followed the trams running along the three broad avenues that sliced the city like a pizza. I inspected the flocks of pigeons above the Plaza de la República. I explored the underside of La Doma, then the outside. I watched a soccer game in the park. I saw a piece of sunshine break off a mirrored wall on the west side of the city and splash onto the ice wall, producing clouds of steam that later turned to rain showers that washed the streets in midafternoon. I toured the shipyard where hulls and engines grew in vacuum bubbles. I stared in amazement at a ship being launched straight up out of the spire and i
nto space above Sky City, driven by a magnetic catapult down twenty kilometers below us.

  And when I got tired of the webcams, I moved on to something more satisfying.

  Down on the ground, scurrying about when no one was watching, were hundreds of little cleaning bots. Self-contained contraptions with wheels and spider legs and tracks and arms and handles and trimmers and brushes and hoses and soapers and squeegees. When someone walked by, they would freeze. And when they were gone, they'd spring back into action.

  It took a little longer to hack into their network. I had to figure out some of the tricks to it, but I didn't need to use the crypt crackers and hacking tools I'd picked up on Phobos.

  I picked out a small unit, something nondescript and close to the ground, but with good imaging gear and a set of four wheels for stability. It was some kind of gardening tool, I think.

  A few minutes later I was careening along, centimeters away from the faux-granite curbing on my right, a safe distance from the tram line on my left, on the street in front of Penelope's house.

  At first I was caught up in the scale of the apparatus I was riding in. The roadway was immense, a wide plain of dark asphalt, pitted and cracked, littered with sand and stones. Trees were lost in the hazy distance overhead. Houses were distant mansions the size of resort hotels or casinos.

  Then my own imaging system kicked in and raised me up to normal eye level as we rolled along. Now I felt like I was riding a bicycle down the street—but without the boneshaking or the cramps in the calf.

  The street was much narrower even than I expected. Dooryards were measured in inches here, not feet. The houses, though, were still mansions.

  They were quintessential American houses, from the Arts and Craft era, the dawn of the twentieth century when Victorians had grown old and builders brought together artists and craftsmen to design and build a new generation of homes. Tall, square, and proud. With great eaves extending far out over lawns and gardens. With gables, pergolas, bay windows, and porches, porches, porches. Open porches, screened-in porches, enclosed porches, porches wrapped in ivy, porches framed by rhododendrons, porches perched on top of porches, climbing toward the sky.