String City

by Graham Edwards

  “Help me!” she yelled. I tried to run, but the same wind that was pulling her was pushing me the opposite way.

  Struggling even to stand, I took off my coat, turned it inside-out until it was made of buckytube monofilament and spun it into a lariat. High winds slip right past buckytubes. At least, that’s what I hoped. I whirled the lasso over my head, tried to snag her. The noose missed, hit the ground steaming. I reeled it in, made ready to try again.

  The Planck tornado spun itself into a frenzy. Zephyr flew toward it, her heels dragging grooves in the dirt just as if she was being pulled by an invisible horse. I threw the lariat again. It looped round her arm. She grabbed it with both hands. The lariat crackled like an electric eel.

  “Don’t hold on!” I yelled. “It doesn’t like it!”

  She let go and allowed the lasso to do the holding. Meanwhile, a dimensional snag had opened up inside the whirlwind, round like the mouth of a straw. Zephyr’s legs lifted off the ground and plunged into it. I hauled on the lariat. There was panic in Zephyr’s eyes. That was bad. You hit the dimensions with a head full of fear, fear’s all you’ll find in there.

  “Look at me!” I shouted. “I’ve got you!”

  Our eyes locked. But the lariat was slipping off her arm. I was losing her. “Don’t let the dimensions take charge! You’ve seen what I can do. You can do it too. Just let them know who’s boss!”

  Her hips sank deeper into the tornado. Her body flattened out. She started to fade. She was slipping between the strings and there was nothing I could do about it. To follow her, I’d have to let go of the lariat. As soon as I did that, she’d be gone, and the snag would close before I could reach it. I’d be cut off from her, with no idea what direction she’d gone.

  The lasso slipped off Zephyr’s arm.

  She gave a long, wailing, terrified scream. That’s when the angel swooped in.

  Deliciosa didn’t try and save Zephyr—by that point the poor kid was beyond saving. Instead, the angel hung suspended on her zombie wings directly above the tornado, bent her head low and whispered something in Zephyr’s vanishing ear. Zephyr listened, then her dwindling face calmed and she closed her eyes.

  The dimensional snag snapped shut. I fell backward, the lariat limp in my hands. The shockwave knocked Deliciosa to the ground.

  I clambered to my feet, dazed.

  The Planck tornado was gone.

  So was Zephyr.

  46

  "WE HAVE TO go!” Deliciosa tugged at my coat. I shoved her away.

  “Not yet!”

  Planck tornadoes leave interference patterns in the dirt. If you take a mold, you can track them. It took me two seconds to switch my coat to sharkskin, another two to pull the atmospheric casting kit out of my pocket. The tornado tracks looked like a million chipmunks had been line-dancing. The tracks wouldn’t last, not in this wind. I didn’t have much time.

  I dropped to my knees, ripped open the pack of self-hydrating plaster.

  “Leave it!” Deliciosa took the plaster pack from me, tossed it away.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Look at me!”

  Her angel eyes were wide and angry. That suited me—I was mad too and needed a target. I considered mulching her rotten nose into the empty sack of her sinuses. The only thing that stopped me was knowing that hitting zombies is like punching tripe. That, and I still remembered the good times.

  “Do you want to save the girl?” Deliciosa said. I tried not to look at the beetle that was crawling out of her ear.

  “What do you think?”

  “Then save the girl! But not here!”

  Zombie hands grabbed my head, swiveled it toward the view.

  The entire crater was rolling like an ocean. The Fool’s hands were a blur; the Still Point of the Turning World was a sticky glow in his lap, shrinking steadily as he tore the fundamental core of the cosmos to pieces. Through the threadbare seams of reality, the boundary wolves bayed their favorite hunting songs. Everything was coming apart. Everything.

  “Let’s get out of here,” I said.

  47

  DELICIOSA FLEW ME out. It was worse than a flight through Hell. Trust me, I’m qualified to make the comparison.

  By the time we left the crater, the city streets were snapping like popcorn and the sky was boiling like the stroganoff of the gods. Tower blocks went over like dominoes. The sewers grew mouths and started chomping up the streets. Thunderbirds lost their sense of direction and hit the city parks like meteorites. Behind the sky, hulking things moved that hadn’t moved in aeons, looking for ways to get through into next-door realities.

  Tight around my ribs, holding me safe inside the chaos, were the decaying arms of a zombie angel.

  Apocalypse. End of the world. Folks had been talking it up for years. Hell, I’d talked it up myself often enough. Underneath, had I really believed it would happen?

  I believed it now.

  We flew through wormholes and powder storms: the worst kind of flak. After a dozen close calls, we finally reached the end of my street. Deliciosa swooped low and dropped me like a sack. The carriageway was in two halves, each part jerking like a severed worm.

  “I can’t stay with you,” she shouted over the battle-roar. “I’m still on duty.”

  “Law and order? At a time like this?”

  “Now more than ever.”

  Duty I understood. But this was madness. “You’d be safer in my office.”

  “Safety is not a factor. Now get inside before the storm hits.”

  She pointed straight up. Gunmetal clouds had been chasing us like a herd of buffalo all the way from the crater. At last they’d caught up. It got dark, fast, then darker still. The sun fell off Sol’s chariot and hit the river, hissing madly. Sol herself flew west on the end of Arvak’s reins; the other horse, Alsvid, started grazing on the dead.

  “Ra will be glad his contract ended last week,” I said.

  “Get inside!”

  “Wait! You whispered something in Zephyr’s ear. Just before the tornado got her. What did you say?”

  Deliciosa didn’t answer, just spread her wings and took off. Some second thought brought her briefly back to earth. She bent, embraced me, kissed me on the cheek. Her lips were cold, but her breath still smelt of cinnamon. I wanted to hold her. But she was already back in the air.

  “Be careful out there!” I shouted.

  A wheel flung from Sol’s chariot took the wings off a passing thunderbird. The bird clipped the deli, its crippled body bowling the length of the street and knocking down nine of the ten pillars supporting the Temple of Isis.

  “When they start getting strikes,” Deliciosa called down as she flew away, “Then I’ll be worried.” But there was fear in her eyes.

  I jumped the gap between the two sides of the street, ran to my office door. It was locked. I patted my pockets, searching for the key. Behind me, a sewer grate yawned, belching a black miasma across my back. I ignored it. I also ignored the Planck tornadoes forming on the corner where the hamadryads used to root. A dozen harpies shrieked past, human corpses clinging to the sticky hairs on their thighs.

  I found the key. As I held it up, it slipped from my fingers. It was too dark to see where it fell. I bent, fumbled. I touched something hot and sticky that touched me back. I jerked my hand away, tried elsewhere. Behind me the sewer gaped, drooling slime.

  My fingers brushed the key, snatched it up. Before I could reach the lock the sewer lunged... and the door clicked open. A mechanical hand closed on my collar, yanked me inside. I hit the carpet, rolling between the Scrutator’s legs as it slammed the door shut. The sewer mouth struck the glass, smearing it with slime.

  “Deadlocks!”

  A tremor went through the floor as the singularity bolts crunched together.

  “I apologise for having secured the latch,” said the Scrutator, wiping raw sewage from its arm with a fair impression of distaste. “But I was apprehensive as to the security of the situation.”r />
  “No problem,” I gasped. I tried to get up, found my ribs were hurting. I’d hit the floor hard. And Deliciosa’s grip had been strong.

  “It pleases me to discover you are still alive, however, I am curious as to the whereabouts of the young female, Zephyr.”

  “You and me both.”

  The Scrutator’s cogs ground against each other. “Am I to conclude that Zephyr’s location is currently unknown?”

  “I lost her.” I stood, holding my ribs, grimacing with pain. “But she ain’t gonna stay lost for long!”

  48

  FIRST I SPUN up the Feynman globe. The metaballs bounced over each other like chrome puppies. I zoomed the optics to wide, punched in a Boolean search algorithm. There was a clank as the pinions meshed with the local brane-space. I set my eyes on the scope, hopes high. But the optics stayed stubbornly dark.

  I set my palm on the casing. The globe was hot, too hot. I tripped the diagnostics, saw red lights across the board. The globe had meshed with reality, but reality hadn’t meshed back. The scathefire had sent a tsunami through the brane-space. It could be years before the interference subsided.

  If it ever did.

  I shut down the globe, turned to the bookcase.

  On the top shelf I keep trashy novels. Westerns, mostly, the odd cheesecake romance. The rest of the books look smart but they’re only there to impress the clients: Ichnuemon’s Dragon Baiting, a rare hardback edition of The Unlikely Almanac, the Sakharov translation of Searching the Bulk... all detective defaults, but I only have to read a book once to get it in my head. My head’s good like that.

  There’s one book that’s different. Like most lexicons, The Big Dictionary is there to tell you what words mean. The difference is, every time you open it, the meanings change.

  I picked the dictionary off the shelf, cracked the spine back and forth until the cover read Q to U, opened it at T. I flicked through to Temporal Speleology and ran my finger down the page. I found the section about Planck tornadoes—how they open up snags through the sixth dimension into a limbo where the laws of chromodynamics flower like a limestone cavern. It’s a beautiful, deadly place. If you get sucked inside, you can end up anywhere.

  The passage told me nothing I didn’t know already.

  I cracked the spine again. Soon the book was a schematic of the chromodynamic limbo. I scanned the ready reckoner of tornado silhouettes and found a match for the one that had taken Zephyr. This enabled me to track a theoretical path through the cavern system. But that place is a labyrinth where even the left-turn trick doesn’t work. By page seven I’d lost the thread.

  I shut the dictionary, rammed it back on the shelf.

  I tried everything I could think of: the Mappa Mundi, the Clockwork Locator from the crate in the cellar, the Rhabdomancy Tarot. I even dipped into the top drawer of the filing cabinet and opened up the rift that leads to the interdimensional Search Engine. You can ride that iron horse most anywhere. But I found the tracks all torn up and the Engine nowhere to be seen.

  Dead ends at every turn.

  Outside, the rain had turned the color of blood. Thunderbird corpses filled the street to the rooftops. Nothing was moving but the weather.

  I slumped in the chair, pulled a bottle of bourbon from under a pile of case notes. I drank it from the neck. Thought hard. Came up blank. I’d tried everything I could think of. There was nothing I could do.

  I’d lost Zephyr.

  All the time I’d been searching, the Scrutator had been parked in the corner, watching me operate, ticking quietly. Now it came forward.

  “An excessive intake of alcohol will only inhibit your cognitive function,” it said.

  “Nuts.” My ribs hurt worse than ever. I took another swig.

  The Scrutator sat cautiously in the client chair. “May I?”

  I slid the bottle across the desk. The Scrutator took a hesitant sip, the liquor sloshing past the ratchets in its neck. Its eyes wobbled. “The taste is pleasing.”

  “You can taste?” I reclaimed the bottle, found a pair of shot glasses, set up doubles. No sense being uncivilised. “Machines can taste?”

  “What you define as ‘taste’ is merely the chemical analysis of substances passing through the corporeal threshold. It is a reproducible phenomenon.”

  “Since they tuned up your taste buds, you’d think they’d have greased your vocabulary.”

  “I cannot parse that sentence.”

  “Never mind.” The bourbon was working on the pain in my side. I figured three more doubles, I wouldn’t feel a thing. “So, you Scrutators—the Thanes built you, right?”

  “That statement is correct.”

  “You ever see one? A Thane, I mean.”

  “Nobody sees the Thanes. Not even their children.”

  “Huh? I thought the Thanes couldn’t have kids.”

  “I mean the Scrutators. The Thanes construct their children. I, and all my kind, are their offspring—that is how they regard us. They love us. That is why they saved us.”

  The Scrutator downed another shot of bourbon. You wouldn’t think alcohol and androids were compatible, but it seemed to me the robot was slurring its words.

  I was struggling with the idea of the Scrutators being the children of the Thanes—that a bunch of omnipotent entities more godlike than the gods had even felt the urge to get parental. And why, in order to scratch that particular itch, had they decided to head for the metalwork shop?

  “So how did they ‘save’ you?”

  “Last year, the Thanes recalled all the Scrutators to their origination plant, packaged them up and despatched them out of the cosmos to a location where...”

  “Hold up, metal buddy. Rewind. Did you say, ‘out of the cosmos’?”

  “I believe those were the words I used. All my siblings have now been despatched. I am the last Scrutator left in String City. And, for the record, I am not made of metal.”

  The bottle was nearly empty. I had another one somewhere. My brain was too fuzzy to tell me where. “But... ‘out of the cosmos’? Nobody goes out. There is no out—everything’s in the cosmos. The dimensions, the strings, everything. What did the Thanes do?”

  “They are the Thanes,” said the Scrutator, as if it was an explanation.

  I shook my head, bemused. “Why didn’t they send you away too?” Another question occurred to me. “What do you mean, you’re not made of metal?”

  “I am what you might term an experimental model. All my siblings were indeed forged by metallurgists. I, however, was knitted.”

  “Knitted?”

  “From cosmic string. On the macro scale, I give the impression of operating on straightforward mechanical principles; however, were you to examine me at a sub-nano level, you would perceive my weave.” The Scrutator paused, the shot glass an inch from its gear-lined mouth. Its eyes trembled. “The weave of me is also the weave of the worlds. This is the reason I was forced to stay behind when my siblings left: because I am knitted from the cosmos, I am therefore part of the cosmos, and so cannot leave it by conventional means. I am the web and the web is me; I am attuned to the cosmos to such a degree that I hear all the sounds filtering down through the web of the worlds, all the echoes pouring in from the great beyond, everything that collapses into the distilling receptacle that is String City. This ability is a blessing, but it is also a curse, for it gives me the ability to hear everything that is going on, at all times, simultaneously, everywhere.”

  I put down the bourbon, grabbed the Scrutator’s thin wrist.

  “You can hear everything?” I said. “Everywhere?”

  Eyes knitted from cosmic string and addled by bourbon struggled to focus on my face. “I believe that is what I said.”

  “Can you hear Zephyr?”

  49

  THE SCRUTATOR SOBERED up as quick as it had got drunk. Just flicked a relay in its belly, flushed out the booze. Me, I had to use strong coffee.

  “Can you hear her yet?” I said for the fourth ti
me.

  “Ssh,” said the Scrutator for the fifth.

  It was inching on its mechanical tiptoes from one corner of the office to the other. Its arms were cocked at weird angles, like it was doing tai chi.

  “What are you doing?”

  “Triangulating. Please remain silent.”

  I swigged more coffee. My head felt like an anvil under a cyclops hammer. I tried to imagine what the Scrutator was hearing. Everything? Really everything? Was that even possible? But this was String City, where all things collide, and a robot was a child of the Thanes.

  I opened my mouth to ask what it was like, to have all the sounds of the cosmos filling your ears, every second of the day. The Scrutator’s baleful glare closed it again.

  Best leave the robot to it.

  I carried my coffee down to the cellar. The street grille was leaking thunderbird blood down the corner wall. I mopped it clean, tossed the rags into the tokamak, then sat on the bunk and wondered what Zephyr’s apartment was like back on her homeworld.

  “You have no home,” she’d said to me.

  She was wrong.

  Truth was, I owned a clapboard house on Nukatem Street. I’d gone back there just once since taking over the detective agency from Jimmy the Griff. A single visit in ten years. I wondered what the old place looked like now. Dusty, I figured. If it was even standing.

  I closed my eyes, imagined the front door of the home I’d shared with Laura. Imagined slipping the brass key into the lock, hearing the slow creak of the hinges as I pushed the door open. The antique mirror in the lobby, the mahogany staircase. Downstairs would be dark, on account of how the house backed on to the elephants’ graveyard. Those bones take out a lot of light.

  I imagined opening the door to the front room. Seeing the hospital bed in the middle of the floor, the rest of the furniture pushed to the walls to make room for it, the bed that had held Laura for all the long months of her illness, until the day she decided to end it. Beside the bed, a small nightstand crammed with tablets and tonics. A jug that had once held water. An IV stand. A cheap novel with a bookmark in the middle: a novel that would never now be finished.