I looked at the deleted scenes. I looked at the Scrutator.
I looked at Zephyr.
“Come with me,” I said.
56
THE SCRUTATOR DROVE us to the crater in his automobile. It was a rough journey, but the robot was well acquainted with String City’s back-alleys and the car had good legs. When we reached the Street of Plenty, we found the crowd barriers deserted. All the cops had either fled or been blown into the crater by the relentless wind. There were a few residual tremors, and the tornadoes had mostly blown themselves out. Zephyr and I left the robot with the car and descended into the crater on foot.
The Fool was exactly where we’d left him, sat at the bottom of the crater, still dismantling the Still Point of the Turning World. The pile of golden dust had grown to a small mountain. The SPTW looked smaller than ever. How long before it was nothing? Minutes? Days? Who knew?
“We can’t stop it, can we?” said Zephyr, staring at the hooded figure.
“No,” I said. “Nobody can. The clock’s ticking.”
We waited for a tornado. The first two that came looked big and nasty, the kind best avoided. The third was tiny, little more than a dust-devil. I brought Zephyr within throwing distance.
“Not too close,” I said. “It may look small but it can still suck you down.”
“You don’t need to tell me.”
I stepped away, so she could do what she needed to do.
One by one, she threw the deleted scenes into the tornado. Instead of swallowing them down, the whirlwind tore them to shreds.
I waited, wishing I felt good about what she was doing. It was a fine thing to see her happy. But it was hard to be happy myself with a Fool sitting right there, taking the worlds apart.
Besides, I couldn’t stop thinking about crates and consequences.
About prices that have to be paid.
Zephyr accidentally dropped one of the deleted scenes. An eddy snatched it up. She didn’t notice. The scene skated over the ground, right toward me. I trapped it under my boot. I picked it up: a little square of card with a moving picture on the front. I started toward Zephyr. I was going to give it to her, so she could throw it away with the others.
What I saw in the picture stopped me short.
The scene was from early in the sequence. It showed Zephyr getting off the bus. When she reached the garden gate, she stopped to switch her shopping bags from one hand to the other. I didn’t recall seeing her do that before. Then I remembered Zephyr distracting me when we’d been watching from under the tree. By the time I’d looked back, the bus had already driven away.
This was a moment I’d missed.
In the picture, Zephyr was about to set off up the path to the house when she spotted something on the ground. She bent her knees, picked it up. Moonlight turned it silver. Something gripped my chest. It was my heart, stopping. The hairs rose on my neck.
The thing Zephyr had picked up was a penny. Just a penny, lying in the street, lying there for anyone to find.
I waited for my heart to start beating again. For a second I thought it never would. When it did, it was thundering.
“All done!” Zephyr skipped over to me, clapping her hands. “And, do you know what? I feel fantastic!”
She wrapped her arms round me and kissed me full on the lips.
“I’m glad,” I replied.
“Me too! Are you ready to go? Is there anything else you need to do here?”
“No,” I said. “Nothing.”
I slipped the deleted scene into my pocket and we climbed up out of the crater, and the Scrutator drove us back to the office. Zephyr was so happy she didn’t remark on my distracted air until we were sat back in our chairs.
“Are you okay?” she said. “It’s just... I thought you’d be pleased for me.”
“I am,” I said. “Really. It’s peachy.”
“No. Something’s wrong. What is it?”
The deleted scene played over and over in my head.
“I’ve got a question for you,” I said.
“Is it a hard question or an easy one?”
“Depends on you.”
“Ask away.”
“When you were talking about how you came to String City, you told me something made you stop at my office door. What was it?”
“I don’t really remember. I just... no, wait a second, that was it. Something flew past my head. A bird. It startled me, it flew so close. I sort of jumped back, into the doorway of your office. That’s how I saw the Help Wanted sign.”
“What kind of bird? Was it big?”
“No—actually it was small. It flew really fast, like a bullet. I only caught a glimpse. I remember the color though. It was blue-green, electric.”
“Like a kingfisher?”
“Yes! A kingfisher! That’s exactly what it was like. Why are you so interested?”
“Bird spotting’s my thing. Didn’t I tell you?”
I rubbed my neck. It was hard to keep my tone light. First the penny, now this. A big part of me wanted to tell her everything these two things made me fear. But where to begin?
“You’re a strange man,” Zephyr said.
“It’s a strange town, honey.”
The Scrutator came in then, having got back from garaging the car at Tony Marscapone’s place. The sun was going down; the street was quiet at last. No mob. No spiders. Still, I closed the deadlocks. It was probably just a lull.
We stood a minute, the three of us. Then Zephyr spread her arms, hugged us together.
“We’re quite a team, aren’t we?” she said.
We both resisted, the robot and me. At last I relented, let her squeeze me close. The Scrutator made a resistant whirr before bringing his mechanical body in for the clinch. Then we broke and sat behind our respective desks. Zephyr was grinning. The Scrutator purred. Despite everything, I forced myself to smile.
“You know,” said Zephyr, “I’ve come a long way today. I’ve seen this crazy city fall down about my ears, and seen my own past blow away like a cloud of dandelion seeds.”
She kicked off her shoes, lifted her legs, dropped her little bare feet on her desk. The Scrutator planted his cleats on his. I raised my boots, assumed the position. It felt good. A ritual. Maybe even a rite of passage.
“The other thing I’ve learned,” Zephyr was looking right at me, “is that it’s okay to rely on other people. You’d probably call that ‘sappy’, but it’s true. And true things are what matter. They’re also our business. We’re here to seek out the truth. That’s our job.”
The prickle that had been plaguing my neck was subsiding. So help me, it was my eyes prickling now.
“Thanks to you and your magical zoetrope,” said Zephyr, “I made a new truth. And now the world’s got to hold to it. Isn’t that right?”
A note of pleading had edged into her voice. I ignored it. I ignored the trap in what she’d said and held on to what counted: the idea that truth was important. That much I could believe in. There was a truth in that office, right there, right then, one I kind of liked. Whatever else was happening out in the cosmos, well, the deadlocks would keep it from us. For a while.
Right now, a while was enough.
So there we sat with our feet up. We laughed. We drank coffee laced with bourbon.
For a time, things felt good.
Just as long as I didn’t think about Fools and kingfishers.
And pennies.
Windy City
57
SEVEN DAYS PASSED, during which I finally grew to understand why Zephyr and Raymond had never talked about the guy being a bosquadrille. “Talk about the elephant in the room,” she’d said. Well, instead of a room I had the inside of my head, and in place of the elephant I had a shiny spinning coin and a bird with blue-green feathers.
I had little enough idea what they meant individually. Together, they signified nothing at all. Except they did. I just didn’t know what. So I avoided them. Every time my thoughts strayed t
heir way, I turned my mind to someplace else: an old case, a new case, the fact that none of our clients could pay us and we owed the bank a Thane’s ransom, didn’t matter what. I was in denial. If you’d asked me, of course, I’d have denied it.
On the morning of the seventh day, the sun rose bright as a tangerine. For all the rioting that had gone on the night before, and for all the devastation evident in the street outside, it sure was a beautiful dawn. I flipped over the calendar and immediately choked on my coffee. From the sublime to the mundane in a single swipe of the wrist.
“Tax inspector’s due,” I said.
I trudged to the coffee machine. My first visit from the tax department in ten years and I’d done nothing to prepare. I pulled the spigot with a shaking hand and ended up with more java on my shirt than in the cup.
“Let me do it,” said Zephyr. She pushed me aside and drew us both a double espresso. “And stop fretting. They probably won’t turn up, given the state of emergency and everything. I can’t believe collecting taxes is very high on the government’s to-do list right now.”
“You don’t know the municipals,” I said, pulling a clean shirt out of my desk drawer. “They subbed out the whole tax business a couple of years ago. The new operators are keen as razors. They’ll be here.”
“You think so? Have you seen the state of the street?”
I had to admit things looked bad. The tangerine sun had already disappeared behind clouds, and the road outside the office was crushed like an accordion and littered with half a dozen fresh thunderbird corpses. Most of the surrounding buildings were rubble. Beyond, the String City skyline looked like a set of cancer-ridden gums. Gale-force wind blew grit and tattered newspapers in a horizontal stream. It had been blowing like that for days.
A single hamadryad hooker stood forlorn on the kerb. She looked like a lightning-struck elm, bent double by the wind. There were no passers-by to offer her trade. Looking at the state of her, I doubted anyone would have stopped anyway.
“It’s like the whole city’s dying,” said Zephyr. She looked tired, and her face was pale.
“It’s dead already,” I said. “It just doesn’t realise it yet. The minute that Fool started picking at the Still Point, the future was set. He’s still picking at it now, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop it. It’s only a matter of time.”
“We have a saying back in my world, you know: ‘Where there’s life, there’s hope’.” The dead tone in her voice told me she didn’t believe it.
“Folk say that here too. Doesn’t stop the tax inspector calling.”
“Money isn’t everything, you know.”
“It ain’t the money, honey. It’s what they do to you when you don’t have it.”
Together, we dug out the ledgers from the last decade and piled them next to my desk. Ten years of accounts stood nearly as tall as I did. I was about to start going through them when the door flew open. We both jumped, but it was only the Scrutator. Wind gusted past it, and for a second I thought the neatly ordered accounts books were headed to all seven points of the metacompass. But the robot was fast, managing to open and close the door quick enough to stop the gale wreaking havoc.
“Hey Bronzey,” said Zephyr. “Did you sell the car?”
The Scrutator trudged across the carpet and slumped in its chair. “I did.” The gears in its head were grating. Its shoulders sagged.
“You didn’t have to do this, buddy,” I said. “I know you loved that car.”
“While I regret selling the automobile, I am glad to be of some small service. The agency’s cashflow has suffered greatly during the current crisis.” It held out a wad of battered bills. “This will at least enable us to trade for a little longer.”
“Well, I’m grateful.” It was a touching gesture, and I hated the fact I felt disappointed: the wad was thinner than Cain’s alibi. Still, since the inflation curve had hit the stratosphere, most bread had gone stale anyway. “You want to put it in the safe?”
Head drooping, the Scrutator dragged its heels down to the cellar.
“Something’s wrong with him,” said Zephyr.
“The robot’s just sore at losing its wheels.”
“That car didn’t have wheels. It had legs and tank tracks.”
“The principle holds.”
“He hasn’t been right all week. I think he might be depressed.”
“Machines don’t get depressed. Maybe it needs a service. Anyway, you’re hardly the life and soul this morning.”
“I’m fine.”
“Look,” I said, tapping my pencil on the desk, “maybe the robot’s just freaked. I know I am. For years folk have been touting the end of the world; now it’s come knocking. But that won’t stop the taxman. So please—can we get back to crunching the numbers?”
Before we could crunch anything, the biggest gust of wind yet stripped the street bare. Screeching like a banshee chorus, it carried off the bloated thunderbird corpses, scalped the asphalt and snapped off the poor hamadryad at the roots. I jumped up to snap the deadlocks, but I didn’t even make it to the door. If I had, I’d have been dead, because right then a second gust hit the office building head-on. Cinderblocks flew like feathers. The glass in the window screamed. The wind dug in its claws, snapped sideways, and the whole office lurched a foot to the left. The front wall blew off like a champagne cork, leaving a gaping hole.
The wind stopped blowing and started sucking.
Zephyr grabbed me. I grabbed the desk. We hung out sideways like a daisy chain. I was glad the desk was bolted down. All the paperwork took flight. The Scrutator rushed up from the cellar, ticking fit to bust. Its arms went into some kind of overdrive, fielding the papers like some crazed baseball catcher. The cleats on its feet grew teeth—they bit the floor, keeping the robot from flying away. For several seconds, the entire office was full of flying paper.
At last the storm subsided. Zephyr and I crashed to the floor. The Scrutator stopped its dervish act. It stood, fists packed tight with ten years’ worth of accounts.
The silence wasn’t exactly worse, but it was still bad. Bad because you kept expecting another demon gust. We crept around, righting chairs, restacking shelves. Zephyr stopped to check her zoetrope was intact—the wind had taken it right off her desk. Luckily it had landed in the yucca. She peered into the globe, checked that she and Raymond were still dancing. They were.
She set the zoetrope back on her desk like it was the Holy Grail. Her face looked strangely slack; maybe both my assistants were depressed. Meanwhile the Scrutator was sorting the books back into order like a supercharged postal worker and good job, because that’s when the tax inspector walked in. Zephyr looked up with a smile on her face. The smile was fake, but the scream that followed it was real.
The tax inspector was a giant scarab beetle.
58
A WORD ABOUT the Mountain.
The Mountain’s where the Thanes hang out. The Thanes run things. Except they don’t; they just tell the municipals what to do. It’s the municipals who actually make things happen.
Except it isn’t.
Truth is, String City mostly runs itself. But most folk like to believe there’s order, and the Thanes know that, so they spend the taxes they collect on paying the municipals to keep house. That means employing the cops, the schoolteachers, the garbage collectors... all the same public servants you’d find in any city anywhere in the cosmos.
As for the Thanes—they keep themselves to themselves. Just as well, if the rumors about their powers are true. Don’t get me wrong—they really are the good guys. No question of that. It’s just that legend has it, if you look at a Thane, your eyes melt all the way through the back of your head. Then your head implodes. In a good way, they say—there’s no pain, only ecstasy.
Doesn’t sound like ecstasy to me.
As talk of the end of the world spread, every department on the Mountain started sub-contracting essential services. Word was the Thanes had long known what was c
oming. Devolution was their way of cutting loose. If you ask me, that smacks of cowardice—not that I’d ever say that to a Thane. By the time the beetle turned up in my office, nearly half the public sector had been privatised: hospitals, street maintenance—you name it. As for tax collection, they subbed that out to the sewer system. Strangely appropriate.
Sewer intelligence was a long time coming to String City; evolution runs slow in the dark. But there were a lot of drains down there. Some brought waste from extremely toxic places: the Carr Industrial Belt, the Cicatrix, the Nuclear Dustbowl... a real primordial soup. Over time, that waste started clogging, gelling. Having babies. The babies were... odd. Like most babies, they grew, and soon got too big for those cramped pipes. At that point they collapsed back into a single organism: the sewer-mind. The story goes its first words were, “I stink, therefore I am.”
The sewer-mind spent years educating itself. Any literature that got swept down from the gutters, the sewer-mind read it all, from the tabloids to the complete works of Shakespeare. But while it got bright, it also got frustrated. Finally it understood why: it was unemployed. Waste disposal was a metabolism, not a career.
So it started looking for work. At the exact same time, the municipals started tendering for the tax collection gig. It was a perfect match—so good they turned over the entire Mountain bureaucracy to the sewers. The sewer-mind split into sub-divisions and started running everything from social care to parking fines.
It never looked back.
I explained all this to Zephyr. She couldn’t take her eyes off the giant beetle.
“I thought it was a spider at first,” she whispered. “That’s why I screamed.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Nobody likes tax inspectors. Me—I’m just queasy with bugs.”
“That’s not very fair, is it? I mean, they’re only human... well, you know what I mean. But why a beetle? I thought you said the sewer-mind was handling all this.”
“Think of a regular brain,” I said. “It’s built from neurons. Neurons fire volts at each other. Some say that’s all thought is: just electricity. But the sewer’s brain is different.”
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