String City

by Graham Edwards

  Jarrett led us back through the aircraft maze to where his automobile was parked.

  “Something puzzles me,” I said as we climbed aboard. “Why would Aeolus want to force you people out of the canyon? He’s got a loyal workforce right on his doorstep—what’s his motive?”

  “Money,” said Jarrett, goosing the motor. “What else?”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “Desert looks bleak but it’s prime real estate. Now more than ever. Developers, they’re hungry to buy up tracts they wouldn’t have spat on five years ago. Aeolus, he struggles to turn a profit as it is. Municipal development grant would solve that. City limits stretch out here, suddenly he’s got all the labor he wants. Suddenly his books start addin’ up.”

  Which was something Jarrett’s story didn’t do at all.

  “It figures,” I said evenly.

  Jarrett pulled a lever. The lock door opened. He steered the car down the broken ramp and straight into a fresh sandstorm. The world turned featureless and gold.

  68

  THE SAND BEGAN to clear once we got near the wind factory. The complex was as big as a town. Jarrett drove us past cyclone pumps, katabatic conveyors, monsoon sponges. Each gadget was a factory in its own right, and Jarrett had a story to tell about every one: the capacity of this cloudbuster; how this intake sucked in toxic gases and turned them to fertiliser; the way this wall of rotors reset the compass bearing of any storm that passed through it. The way Jarrett talked, you’d have thought he was a tour guide.

  “You sure know your wind,” I said as he squeezed the car between a pair of typhoon bafflers.

  “We all do,” Jarrett said proudly.

  He parked the car beside a huge whelk-shaped tower. The building was so high it wore the clouds like a skirt.

  “What’s this place?”

  “Jetstream pump. It’s new. Taller than Babel, Aeolus reckons. You should see the fire escape.”

  There was a door in the base of the tower. Jarrett had a key.

  “Control room’s your best bet,” he said. “This time of day, Aeolus’ll be out doin’ his rounds. Snoop all you like, scram before he knows you’ve been.”

  “What about security?”

  “Ain’t none. Who’d want to steal the wind?”

  “Steal, maybe not. There’s always sabotage.”

  “Ain’t nobody got a spanner big enough to jam these works. I’ll leave you to it. Watch for Aeolus—he’s older than these hills and twice as mean. Head left to the main corridor, follow the red line.”

  He drove away, leaving me and the Scrutator standing in the doorway. The sand started to blow up again.

  “Shut the door,” I said. “Before we get etched.”

  Inside, the tower was all faint hums and rattles. It was strangely soothing. We turned left like Jarrett had said, found ourselves in a corridor as wide as a freeway. Ahead, the passage broke in ten different directions. The floor was a mess of painted lines. We picked out the red one and followed it into the labyrinth.

  “Big place,” I said. “Hardly anyone around. It must be mostly automated.”

  “You are correct in your assumption,” said the Scrutator. As we walked, the robot ran its fingers along the wall. “The architectural infrastructure contains an array of intelligent servo-systems, all of which interact in much the same way as the component parts of an artificial brain.”

  “So this whole place is one giant robot?”

  “That is a reasonable metaphor.”

  “How can you tell all this?”

  The Scrutator stopped, pressed its bronze palm to the wall. The gears behind its eyes stopped spinning. The clank of its guts faded to a whisper. It swayed like a mechanical reed.

  “Can you not hear its voice?” the robot said.

  69

  AS WE MOVED deeper into the factory, the lines on the floor grew scuffmarks. The air became stale and hot. The machinery in the walls cranked louder and the humming turning to banging, like the whole system needed oiling. Maybe there was sand in the works. Soon all the lines were gone except the red one. The ceiling drooped and the lamps flickered, those that worked at all.

  “The environment appears to be growing more dilapidated the closer we get to the center of operations,” said the Scrutator.

  “The place is going to the dogs,” I agreed, and wished I hadn’t. These days, it seemed like everything reminded me of boundary wolves.

  Round a corner, the banging got distinctly louder. The corridor opened up and the red line faded away. We were in a vast gloomy space. Gears like Gog’s shirt buttons turned slowly in the rafters. Turbines revolved, pumping smoky air through coiled tubes. Logic boxes lined the walls. A billion tiny lights blinked in syncopated patterns. The control room of the gods.

  One god, to be exact. Contrary to what Jarrett had promised, Aeolus wasn’t doing his rounds at all. He was right there in front of us: the king of the wind.

  White-haired and ropy with muscle, Aeolus was as big as a house and looked like the oldest weightlifter in the rest home. Not that he stood still long enough for us to pin him down. He kept racing from one end of the enormous room to the other, flipping switches, hauling levers, spinning dials. He swarmed up girders, nimble as a monkey, opening vents, adjusting fans. All he wore was a tattered apron. The sight of those massive godly buttocks hanging directly over our heads was unsettling in the extreme.

  We settled in the shadows and watched him for a while. Truth was, I didn’t know much about the guy. The corporation publicity said he employed four managers—the four big winds—plus a small army of support staff—Jarrett’s people.

  What we saw bore that out. There were five god-sized swivel chairs lined up on a central platform. The middle one was marked THE BOSS.

  All the chairs were empty.

  I was about to suggest we went closer when Aeolus spotted us.

  He swung over and hung himself off a fat dangling cable, eyeing us with curiosity. The wind god’s eyes were bloodshot. The veins in them squirmed like pythons.

  Aeolus spoke.

  “Could one of you go over to that console, please? The one that’s shaped like a clam.”

  I felt my legs twitch. A god says jump, your reflexes make you hit the ceiling before your conscious mind realises what’s happening. The Scrutator must have been even better tuned to the voice command—it was halfway to the console before I even got moving.

  “Is this the apparatus you wish me to attend to?” the robot asked the god.

  “Yes,” said Aeolus. “Do you see the lever that resembles a tulip? Please rotate it thirty-seven degrees clockwise and hold it in position.”

  I was glad the Scrutator had got there first. I’d have probably shoved it one-eighty in the wrong direction and got a thunderbolt for my pains.

  While the Scrutator worked the lever, Aeolus jumped ninety feet to a panel on the ceiling. He yanked knobs, slammed open a gigantic valve. A blast of air knocked me flat.

  “Release the lever!” bellowed the god.

  The Scrutator obeyed.

  Along the back wall, an array of fans powered up. Half the red lights on the logic boxes turned green. Aeolus dropped from the ceiling, landing square in his chair. For the first time since we’d got there, he was still.

  I picked myself up, walked up to the chair. The god’s bare legs towered like hairy oaks. His head was in his hands. His breathing was ragged.

  “Tough day?” I said.

  Aeolus stretched. “You don’t know what a relief it is to get the reserve fans turning,” he said. “All week I’ve been run ragged, just trying to keep the air moving. For a minute there I thought it was all over.”

  “It looks like hard work,” I said. “You run this place on your own?”

  “Apart from the cleaning staff, yes.”

  “Cleaning staff?”

  “Those wonderful people who live in that peculiar little shanty town built out of crashed aeroplanes. Oh, they do a marvellous job.”


  “All they do is clean?”

  “Yes, indeed.” He bent over, confiding. “Between you and me, these days they’re non-essential workforce. But I feel I have an obligation to keep them employed. It’s my way of giving something back to the community.”

  “No offense,” I said, “but couldn’t you set them working on maintenance? Seems to me this place could do with an overhaul.”

  Aeolus reached under his apron and scratched his crotch. God’s jewels swung. I looked the other way.

  “Things were better when my boys were here,” he sighed.

  I glanced at the empty chairs. “You want to tell me about it?”

  From the clam-shaped panel, the Scrutator called, “Can I let go of this lever now?”

  70

  "THIS TIME LAST year it was all different,” Aeolus began. “The factory was running at full capacity; the weather was always on time and always on budget. We turned a small profit. More importantly, we were one big, happy family.”

  “So what went wrong?” I said. The Scrutator had boosted me on to one of the empty chairs, then climbed up itself. We dangled our legs like children, listened to the god’s tale.

  “The boys left me—I called them my boys, even though they weren’t actually my sons. They might as well have been, considering the pain they caused me.

  “It was Boreas who started it. Boreas was the north wind. He had a terrible temper, but he was awfully kind to horses. I used to keep stables, you see, and Boreas looked after all the animals. They had a marvellous rapport. He only had to blow in the horses’ ears and they did exactly what he told them. He had the same power over the other three winds—Eurus, Notus and Sefyrus. Like the horses, they were in Boreas’s thrall. They worshipped him over me. I didn’t mind. I’ve always considered myself more of a practical kind of god.”

  “So what went wrong?”

  “When I told you the profit we made was small, I truly meant it. There’s no money in wind—there never has been. It’s a vocation, not a career. But Boreas, well, he was nothing if not ambitious. So, one day, just last month, he conceived a plan.”

  “A plan?”

  “To get rich. Oh, it was a hare-brained scheme. I told him so, told him to his face. He became so angry his beard froze up. You remember that unseasonal cold snap we had recently? That happened because of the argument we had.”

  “What did Boreas want to do?” said the Scrutator in a strangely high-pitched voice. Maybe sand had got into its workings.

  The god sighed. “He had this idea about entering his horses in the Derbies. He had so much power over them that he could virtually guarantee where they’d come in any given race. By his own calculations, he was perfectly positioned to make himself an absolute fortune.”

  “Rigging horse races?” I said. “The Titans would never stand for it. Everyone knows they’ve got the city sweepstakes wrapped tighter than Medusa’s hair net.”

  “Which is precisely why the Titans were the first people Boreas approached. He explained his scheme and offered them a ten percent share. The other winds were in on the deal too, each with ten percent of his own, leaving Boreas with a majority of sixty.”

  “It must have looked pretty on paper. How long before it turned ugly?”

  “Clearly you know how the Titans operate. As I predicted, the operation went sour almost immediately. Boreas and the boys had taken the afternoon off. They went to the Tartarus Club to watch the first race of the season. It was also the first race Boreas had fixed. They’d all bet modest amounts of money, just to test the system. Everything was set.

  “Just before the race was due to start, Hyperion became nervous. He told my boys an important client had turned up unexpectedly, and that he’d had to double-book the executive suite. He asked them to adjourn to an adjacent office. Boreas objected, but Hyperion plied them with drinks and dancing girls, so they went.

  “It turned out that the office they were shown into wasn’t an office at all. It was a sealed vault.”

  My hackles were on the move. This was one coincidence too many.

  “Finish the story,” I said.

  “Thirty seconds after my boys were locked in, somebody blew up the vault and everything in it. They were vaporised. No remains.”

  “I know,” I said quietly.

  “You do?”

  “I investigated the aftermath. I thought I caught a whiff of desert coming out of that safe. Looks like putting your boys in the vault was Hyperion’s way of killing two birds with one stone.”

  “It interests me how much you seem to know about this matter.”

  “Feels to me like I don’t know nearly enough. So why did Hyperion want to ice your boys?”

  Aeolus impaled me with a baleful glare. “Afterward, I learned that Hyperion had secured an audio recording of Boreas’s horse-whispering routine. He planned to use the recording to operate the scam alone and take a full one hundred percent of the profits for himself. As you may know, the Tartarus Club has been struggling financially for some time. I imagine this was just one of many straws Hyperion was clutching at.”

  “I know a few others,” I said. “How did you find all this out?”

  “The answers blew in on the wind.”

  I nearly laughed, until I saw the god’s face was straight. “Meaning?” I said.

  “Winds have spirits too, you know. The boys’ bodies were blown to atoms but their ghosts came home. They passed through the factory turbines, whispering news of their murder. They’re out in the desert now, gradually dissolving. Soon they’ll be just empty air. It makes me so sad to think of it.”

  A huge tear rolled down Aeolus’s cheek. A gust of wind caught it up and sucked it through a grille. The grille diced it into a million droplets; a vent spat the droplets outside. Just for a second, it was raining in the desert.

  The Scrutator lowered itself to the floor. “A peculiar stiffness has overtaken all my joints,” it said. “Please excuse me while I exercise.” It wandered off, weaving a little. I thought briefly about going after it, just to make sure it was okay, but Aeolus had picked up the thread again.

  “Ever since then, the factory has been running further and further out of synchronisation. It only takes a day or two for things to go quite badly wrong. Keeping everything balanced was a full-time job for five operators, and now there’s only me.”

  “Can’t you get Jarrett’s people to help?” I said.

  “As I said—the labor requires the skills of a god. The desert people are hard workers, but they are simply underqualified. I’m afraid this factory will last only a few more days before it undergoes a catastrophic multiple system failure.”

  “What happens then?”

  “The wind stops.”

  “Leaves you with plenty of thumb-twiddling time.”

  Aeolus glared at me. “I don’t think you fully understand. It isn’t just about the wind. The work I do here affects the entire atmosphere, right down to the molecular level. The minute this plant stops generating wind, the city’s entire airspace will enter stasis. People will be working their lungs as hard as they can, but there will be nothing there to breathe. Approximately twelve hours after this factory shuts down, the entire population of String City will suffocate to death.”

  I didn’t want to believe it. Still, the guy was a god. Time for a second opinion. But when I looked for the Scrutator, the robot was nowhere to be seen.

  After a few seconds scanning the room, I spotted it halfway up the back wall, climbing like a crazy mountaineer, bronzed fingers digging deep into the plaster and lath. It reached one of the big control panels, grabbed a handful of cables and pulled them loose. Sparks gushed like water from a hose. The Scrutator scrambled to the next panel, ripped more cables away. More sparks sprayed over the logic boxes, setting them on fire. The back-up fans Aeolus had worked so hard to start up ground to a halt.

  “WHAT IS THAT ROBOT DOING?” bellowed Aeolus.

  You hear a god yelling, you know things are bad.

/>   “Still!” shouted the Scrutator from its perch near the ceiling. “All shall be still, and all shall be still, and all manner of things shall be still! Here and there and everywhere! Still, still, still, and the lost shall join hands once more!”

  Eyes flashing, gears spinning fit to bust, steam pouring from its neck, the Scrutator scrambled like a crazy bug along the wall, tearing up everything in its path. Turbines belched smoke. Pipes like ships’ funnels crashed to the floor. Fires broke out in every corner. I’ve never seen one robot do so much damage in such a short time.

  Nearby, a bank of fans like gigantic ships’ propellers hit top speed. The motors running them whined up through the octaves. One by one, the propellers jumped off their shafts.

  It was like letting loose a whole bunch of circular saws. The propellers flew like foo fighters, slicing through everything they hit: floors, furniture, machinery. Three tore out the entire front wall. Desert light flooded the control room. A fourth missed my head by inches. I scrambled down from the chair and hid in a hole that had opened up in the floor.

  Frozen to the spot, Aeolus tore his white hair and screamed at the Scrutator to stop.

  The Scrutator kept going.

  An alarm screeched, fell silent. As the sound died away, I heard a meaty thunk. The last of the fans slowed, then stopped. Steam trickled from a shattered grate, thinned to mist, vanished. The air fell still and the noise went away, except for the crackle of the flames. Nothing moved.

  I raised my head, looked through the big hole in the wall. Out in the desert, everything was still.

  The wind had stopped.

  Its work done, the Scrutator crouched on an overhead conduit, its mechanical chest heaving in and out.

  An internal door swung open. A skinny man with yard-broom mustaches loped in: Pete Jarrett. In his left hand he held a small grey box. It looked like a remote control device. He tweaked a lever on the box. Up on the conduit, the Scrutator jerked to the left. When Jarrett nudged the lever the opposite way, the robot moved to the right. Jarrett pushed a button. The Scrutator stopped moving altogether. Its bronzed head drooped. Its gears stopped turning.