Fast Forward

by Lou Anders

  Enough.

  Six paces, and Yukiko's portrait winks out.

  Last night I dreamed about a prince who dreamed through the minds of others. Through a hundred…no, two hundred thousand others: sleeping inhabitants of the vast lumbering construct that is the Clanking City, engaged on an endless journey along a cylindrical world.

  The sleeper's name was Prince Argul. Lying, he appeared tall. Certainly he was lean, his narrow face bearded. Prince Argul slept atop a couch furnished in silver, a detail I remembered as I fell awake, back into reality.

  Inside the twenty-mile length of the Clanking City's steel-jointed carapace, articulated metal streets and cog-shaped inner buildings fitted together, sliding or turning in lubricated joints. But Prince Argul's mind was not constrained by the geographical engineering of his city.

  Telepathy, I somehow knew, was characteristic of the ruling line. It also occurred randomly among the ordinary population; and whether this was caused by natural mutation or royal bastardy, only scurrilous scholars debated in whispers, far away from hard-eyed legal officials.

  None of this could possibly be true.

  As I sat up in bed, in a room filled with darkness, I remembered vividly the smile on Prince Argul's face as he slept. His chambers, I believe, had shielding capable of protecting him from his subjects’ thoughts; but at night, the shields were open, not closed. The kaleidoscope of shifting, chaotic dreaming images and scents, the myriads of muscular sensations, of imagined voices, was not torture but soothing to Prince Argul.

  He bathed in the minds of the dreaming populace.

  Scarlet holographic digits hung near my pillow. The time was 3:07. Outside, featureless blackness hid the Connecticut forest. I supposed the place was filled with life, with millions of crawling organisms, hunting or sleeping or fleeing. Only my bedroom was empty.

  “Why can't I dream of you, my love?”

  I placed my palm on the side of the bed where Yukiko used to sleep.

  I ascend from the cemetery via escalator, and come up blinking into the garish busyness of Sixth Avenue. Yellow mag-cabs hum; private cars mostly wait for the traffic to get moving. Crowds throng the sidewalks. Behind me in Central Park—I glance over my shoulder as always, and smile—rises the slow-morphing complexity of Grimwood Towers, foreshadowing a new Manhattan.

  At the beginning of the 1960s, a visitor from the ‘30s would have thought New York unchanged; a few years later, his opinion would be radically different. Yukiko would love to have seen motile bioarchitecture change the city now. I remembered in Dublin—

  Oh, my love.

  —how Yukiko admired the new developments north of the River Liffey. “Creeping tenements” means something different since buildings gained the ability to grow and slowly move.

  “Excuse me, pal.”

  A rotund man in a business suit pushes past, jostling a white-haired woman who stops in her tracks. The businessman crosses the street just as the holo stick-figure raises one hand, shifting hue to red. The old woman looks on stoically; but across the street, a dark-skinned youth with dreadlocks, rainbows shimmering across his eyes, frowns at the rudeness.

  Reflections slide across the young man's silvered contacts; then the qPin in his left earlobe flares crimson and the signals change, stopping the traffic once more.

  He crosses, purely so he can lead the woman back across the street. I watch, standing in place, while the rest of the crowd bustles into motion. As the young man accepts the woman's thanks with humble grace, I touch my eyebrow with a fingertip and salute him. He nods in return.

  Nice work.

  We didn't design the qPin to interface with public traffic systems. Neither did our competitors.

  Two blocks at a slow walk, and I'm at the entranceway to our building. Inside, I wave at Martin, who remains sitting behind the security desk. He looks anorexic as always, his bulging eyes symptomatic of recurrent thyroid problems.

  “Hey there, Ryan,” he says. “How's it going?”

  “Fantastic,” I tell him. “How's the book getting on?”

  “Put episode seventeen to bed last night.” Martin shrugs. “Nearly a thousand folk have downloaded so far.”

  In the evenings I'm in town, if I stay late, I chat with Martin about relativity or reincarnation, prions or primal scream therapy. Most of the building's other visitors say nothing as they pass him en route to their office or back out to the street, as if Martin were part of the fittings.

  “You're on fire, my friend.”

  “I hope so, Ryan. Um, you're up with the bigwigs on twenty-seven.”

  “Sounds good.”

  The elevator's door is polished and warm, somewhere between brass and gold. As I approach, the door slides open. Behind me, Martin says: “Hey…I meant you're with the other bigwigs, right?”

  I give him a half-salute from inside the elevator.

  “If you say so.”

  Ian comes out to greet me, then leads the way back to the boardroom as though I don't know where it is. It's been a while since I made the trek into Manhattan, and I'm not sure why I'm here. Something's going on, but I don't really care.

  That's the real problem, isn't it?

  Val, our new VP of marketing, is checking her presentation material. I look over at Ned, gray-haired engineer and true geek. When I raise one eyebrow, Ned grins: we are fellow nerds in the face of the marketroid invasion.

  The presentation begins. After a while, I'm biting my lip, then sucking in quiet breaths, anything to stop falling asleep. Perhaps Ian notices, because he breaks in with, “Remember how we nearly ended up in the trash with the monthly rags?”

  Beside me, Irina from R & D directs her gaze up to the ceiling, shaking her head.

  “Point taken,” I tell Ian.

  The qPin in Val's ear flares scarlet, brighter than anyone else's. In the holovolume, her presentation freezes, then minimizes into a rotating cube.

  “Something I should know about, guys?”

  “Um…Before your time,” mutters Ian.

  “He's talking about qPad.” Irina gestures at Ian. “That was the original branding for qPins. And this one”—she nods at me—“suggested we call the smallest model femto.”

  “Er…” Val frowns.

  “Your predecessor,” says Irina, “wanted to know whether we were launching a quantum interface or a feminine hygiene product.”

  Ned is beginning to blush. Last I heard, he was still—aged thirty-eight—honest-to-goodness living with his mother.

  Val's shoulders begin to shake. I notice she has a large bosom that ripples when she laughs. Ian notices me noticing, so I have to shake my head, meaning: Not interested.

  “You invented the q-pairing concept, Ryan,” Val says to me. “Do I have that right?”

  “I'm not sure ‘invented’ is the right—”

  “He also,” Ian breaks in, “came up with the slogan Play Cupid with your qPin. Marketing were smart enough to use it.”

  “Oh…” Now a small, warm blush is growing on Val's face. “My husband…We met because of that—well. All I can say is, Ryan, your own married life must be wonderful.”

  A dislocated silence slips across the table. Everyone's expression changes.

  “I'm sorry…” Val realizes she's made a faux pas.

  “She died.” I keep my voice gentle. “That's all.”

  “Oh my God. You must…Oh, Ryan, how you must miss her.”

  I lower my head. Anger brightens in Irina's eyes, but it's misplaced. Val obviously understands everything about deep pairing. And I can talk about Yukiko's death. It's my colleagues who assume I can't.

  “The agenda,” murmurs Ian. “Perhaps we should move on?”

  “Of course.”

  Val resumes the presentation, taking us through sales targets and marketing initiatives, and a product release schedule, with an aside to discuss the opening of the new plant in Greenland. None of it excites me. None of it requires my presence.

  Every now and then, I c
atch Ian watching me. Each time, he looks away.

  When we take a break, Irina and I stand together in the corner. She brings me up to date on her son's life, filled with small adventures that contrast with Irina's Lithuanian childhood.

  “Sleepovers,” she says. “He and his friends stay in each other's houses, building up a network of friends who can help each other as they grow older. Isn't it great?”

  In the past, Irina's given me invaluable tips on how to bribe my way through officialdom, should I ever find myself in a country where corruption is a way of life.

  “It's not like the Old Country,” I tell her, unsure of whether I'm referring to Lithuania or Ireland. “How long have we lived here?”

  Irina raises her eyebrows, understanding what I mean. You can live in a new culture for years and still be fascinated by life's small details. In Ireland, for instance, Yukiko would have been in the ground within two days of her death, but in New York we had to wait for the postmortem and then the—

  “Looks like round two”—Irina gestures with her cup—“is starting. Glad you came?”

  “I don't think,” I murmur, “that this is the real meeting. Not for me.”

  “Ah.”

  Neither of us looks at Ian as we retake our seats.

  Afterwards, we ride down to the first floor. The elevator is full, and while most of the people wear qRious Minds, Inc. IDs like Ian's and mine, some are visitors. So Ian confines his remarks to: “Have you ever wondered what would happen if terrorists released a coffee virus? I mean something that would wipe out coffee beans across the globe.”

  “Jesus,” I murmur. “The world's economy…I'd never manage a stroke of work again.”

  My last comment is provocative. Both of us know that my contributions these days are nominal, meaning nonexistent-but-let's-not-discuss-it. Or not until now.

  “Better drink some while you can.”

  “I could murder a cappuccino.”

  The other folk look puzzled. Did I just use a foreign idiom? But Ian knows what I mean. He grins in no particular direction, then looks up at the indicator holo. The elevator slows and my stomach tugs more than it should, vision blurring as—

  Through a thousand, ten thousand miles of pipes and pistons, gaskets and manifolds, the Clanking City's motive power pulsed and thrummed and whooshed. From a distance, the city appeared to undulate, to flow, its articulated metal joints flexing as it crawled over ridges and through valleys.

  Most recently, it had crossed a wide mesa, from whose flattened surface the horizon showed on either side, where the world dropped away, and to fore and rear, where the world simply arrowed onwards in perspective view, towards infinity. Scholars had long debated whether the world formed an endlessly long cylinder or one that was simply unimaginably long; but for practical purposes it extended forever.

  And the City continued to clank onward or die.

  —the elevator door slides open, revealing the bright, glass-walled foyer and beyond, the bright Avenue of the Americas, trapped in sunshine.

  “You okay, Ryan?” Ian's hand grasps my arm.

  “Why shouldn't I—”

  The faintest of lines, some miles distant, traced the atmospheric perimeter. Between scouting teams and scholars, the Clanking City's academies maintained careful records of the great air bubble's estimated volume. It had shrunk at times during centuries past, always to expand again while traversing dark beds of certain minerals.

  As the bubble continued its peregrination along the world, its speed remained approximately constant. Slow enough for the Clanking City to keep pace.

  Devices of mirrors and lenses and flexible polished tubes watched from silvery balloons tethered to the city's upper carapace. The highest balloons floated above the breathable limit, within the caustic layer. What they revealed was unsettling.

  Soon, the city would pass through an area of great outcrops from which round towers rose. But it was the most distant terrain that concerned the long-term planners.

  Farther ahead, maybe two decades’ traveling time into the future, lay an area of broken blue-and-red ground whose hues betrayed the presence of minerals no human scholar had examined…or at least, no scholar from this city.

  Some observers thought they had observed a faint, dark outline of a crashed city far ahead. Others claimed it was merely a geological outcrop, sparking overactive imaginations.

  Yet no one could deny the existence of broken human cities. Five were recorded in the Clanking City's archives. There were grizzled veterans still alive who had explored the ruins of Traction.

  Whether it was mechanical breakdown, demonic artillery fire, or civil strife that had destroyed Traction, no one knew (though scholars fiercely and humorlessly maintained their differing interpretations).

  And what if the minerals that lay ahead were injurious to the traveling atmosphere? But while scholars and planners worried about distant futures, the Observers Guild kept unstinting watch, their presence in the moment, alert for immediate and imminent dangers.

  Rivet-encrusted armored steel formed the Clanking City's carapace. From slits in the major sections, most of them set two hundred feet above the ground, Observer teams, unstinting, scanned terrain and sky.

  Inside one observation chamber, a junior observer early for duty was sketching with charcoal on a pad. The picture growing on the page was of jumbled towers that stood in place amid aeries and caves. Winged shapes moved among the towers.

  “You've drawn it well, lad.” The watch sergeant leaned over the young observer's shoulder. “Too bad you ain't captured the shitty color.”

  The young man stopped, then rubbed at a tower's outline with his fingertip. Ordinary folk might say he was drawing a nest, but observers knew that such places were towns or cities…of a sort. Cities that could never move.

  This was the habitation they would soon bypass. The oxygen atmosphere would envelop most of the demonic city, maybe all of it.

  “Is it true, Sergeant”—the young man tapped the sketch—“that demons fall asleep when real air passes over ‘em?”

  “Of course, lad. They seals themselves in, doesn't they?”

  “Will we see any?”

  The sergeant folded his hands above his convex belly. “You was thinking of a transfer to the Raiders, like?”

  “Um…No, Sergeant. I prefer it here.”

  “Good lad.”

  Outside, a chitin-protected flitterbug thumped into the armored glass, bounced off, was gone.

  “Sorry, Sergeant.”

  “And I'll have a cup of tea now, thank you, lad.”

  Deep inside the city was the Core Palace. Underneath the palace, three decks down, a sweating man in leather vest and grease-stained pants was lashed to a hot steel pipe, its diameter almost equal to the man's height. The man's shoulder bore the triple brand of a Senior Artificer, but neither his proud office nor the tallow stick clenched between his teeth could stop the whimpering.

  Three men wearing purple headbands—a punishment detail—stood behind him. One of them held a seven-knotted whip.

  “You failed to check the gasket.”

  “Mm-mmm.”

  “When it blew, it could have killed someone.”

  “Mmm…”

  “It could've stopped the city.”

  The man with the whip raised his hand once more. The prisoner turned his head away, eyes shut, knowing there was no avoiding this.

  “We are engineers. We live and breathe control systems. Consider this feedback.”

  The whip came down.

  Two miles farther aft and one deck higher, a slight girl, aged perhaps eight, was watching her master as he poured molten crystal—red-yellow and vis-cous—into steel molds. Around the chamber, clockwork devices clacked their incantations, controlling and measuring. A shaven-headed servant stood poised with a long-handled ladle. It was important to hold back the aqua mementa until the exact moment that—

  “Now.”

  The servant poured. Steam hi
ssed and puffed.

  “Yes…”

  Shivering into a web configuration, the crystal solidified and did not shatter. The new web looked clear and perfect as if it had always existed, and always would.

  “You saw the hue, Shama? You felt the heat when the time was correct?”

  “Yes, Master.” The girl stared at the crystal. “When can I make one?”

  The tiniest of flaws marked a spot near the dreamweb's center. Shama would not have dreamed of shaming her master by pointing this out.

  “Not this year.” A smile rippled the scar which streaked down Master Teldrasso's face. “Or the next. Ordinary baubles first. But then…Oh, and tomorrow, I'll let you work the bellows.”

  His left eye was cloudy, a reminder that molten crystal was dangerous stuff. Yet the webs and other artifacts he cast were wonderful: even with the so-tiny flaw, this new dreamweb was magnificent.

  Disciplined expertise like her master's—that was what Shama, her skin child-soft and as yet unblemished, dreamed of attaining.

  “Oh. Yes.” Shama looked down at the steel deck. “Thank you.”

  Master Teldrasso sighed.

  Lost in sleep-trance, near the Core Palace's heart, Prince Argul continued to share his subjects’ dreams. His respiration was slow. His somnolent form looked solid atop the silver sleeping-couch.

  Then the dreaming prince frowned. Perhaps a transient groan sounded. But his eyelids failed to flutter, and in seconds his face was masklike, once more unmoving.

  Prince Argul, like thousands of his subjects, slept on.

  “—be okay?” I asked Ian.

  “Um…If you say so.” The worry clears from Ian's face, then returns. “If the qCafé is busy, we'll go somewhere else.”

  He means if any of our colleagues are around, we'll look for some privacy.

  “All right,” I tell him. Then: “Hey, Martin.”

  From the security desk, Martin says, “The café's pretty quiet right now.”

  Ian turns away and crosses the lobby. You can get into the qCafé from here or directly from the street. Beside the entrance, two young women are sitting on a dark green upholstered bench seat, staring into each other's eyes as their qPins blink a stroboscopic red.