String City

by Graham Edwards

  It figured. Suited the surroundings too. What better place to spin yourself a tomb than inside a pyramid?

  “It didn’t exactly help me get inside.”

  Like her ancient face, Arachne’s smile had a beauty. I knew you would find a way.

  “I found the ambrosia,” I said. “Brought back a barrel. It was all we could carry.”

  She waved a stick-like arm. It is of no consequence.

  Up to that moment I’d been sympathetic—Arachne was clearly on her last legs. Then I remembered she had an awful lot of legs, and liked to kill folk with them.

  “No consequence?! I risked my life for your precious liquor! One of my friends died out there! And you tell me it doesn’t matter?”

  Arachne started coughing. Each cough sent more pus spurting from the cracks in her abdomen. It dripped like rancid syrup down through the web. I waited, shaking with fury.

  When she’d recovered, Arachne said, Don’t be a fool—that is not what I meant.

  “It sure sounded like...”

  And don’t play games. There isn’t time!

  I was madder than ever. “I’m not the one playing games, lady!”

  Shut up and listen to me!

  Arachne reared up. Her mouth gaped, revealing long iron fangs. I remembered all the times she’d tricked me over the years: the double-crosses, the torture, the simple practical jokes. The not-so-simple ones too.

  I realised none of this mattered. It was like a punch to the gut. So I held my ground, fists clenched not caring what she did.

  I see you’ve grown brave, she said, looming over me. That is good. Very good. You’ll be needing plenty of bravery before this is over.

  “This is over,” I said. “The case of the missing ambrosia. Case closed.”

  The dying spider queen bent double with another coughing fit. I waited, still angry. Impatient too. I wanted out of there. But our business wasn’t yet done.

  I thank you for locating my ambrosia, Arachne said when she could speak again. When I said it was of no consequence, I simply meant your success comes too late to save me. But that is all right. I think we both knew this is how it would end, didn’t we? As for the “case”, as you call it, you have indeed done what I hired you to do. You therefore require payment.

  My feet started walking me away. Looking back, I think they must have known what was coming, and didn’t want any part of it. I made them stop. This was why I’d returned to the pyramid, after all: not to deliver the ambrosia, but to settle my account.

  As quick as it had come, my anger was gone. What replaced it was something nameless and profound.

  Arachne wore a locket around her neck. Grimacing with pain, she took it in her wasted hands and snapped it open. Something fell out. She caught it before it tumbled down through the web. She stared at it, then held it out to me.

  It sat on her palm, glinting in the dawn glow from the skylights. It was a small round silver coin.

  A penny.

  I found it when I was a girl. A human girl. I found the penny in the street and did what any little girl wearing a pretty frock and ribbons would do: I picked it up. I thought it would bring me good luck.

  Later that night, when I was spinning at my mother’s wheel, I was bitten by a metamorphic meshweaver. That single poisonous spider bite transformed me into what I am today. I put my ribbons and frock away and entered a life of misery. Endless misery. Now, however, as the life finally drains from me, I rejoice, because misery is the worst I have experienced, and there are far, far worse things I might have endured.

  Because it wasn’t really the spider’s bite that changed my life. It was the penny I picked up off the street. It brought me luck all right, but not of the good kind. And that’s not all. I know who puts down bad pennies for people to find.

  And so do you, gumshoe, so do you.

  For the first time since this whole sorry affair had started, I said his name out loud:

  “The Pennyman.”

  Arachne exhaled: a long, slow susurration of stinking spider breath. I thought for a moment she’d breathed her last. Then she spoke again, her voice no louder than sandpaper.

  When I decided who it was had laid this curse upon me, I dedicated my life to tracking him down.

  “That’s impossible. Nobody knows where the Pennyman lives. Hell, nobody even know if he’s real.”

  “Nevertheless, I searched. I am nothing if not persistent, as you well know. I searched this world and others, to no avail. I hired bounty hunters to travel the cosmos, far and wide. They found pennies everywhere, but of the Pennyman himself there was no trace.

  Having exhausted the worlds, I started looking further afield. I found a surgeon with the skills to change my body, to give me new powers. Look closely at my web. What do you see?

  I gave the nearest strand a cursory glance. “Silk. Nasty silk, but silk all the same.”

  Shaking with the effort, Arachne swung her mutilated abdomen around and extended her spinnarets. They glistening, throbbing, soft naked things that pulsed with more energy than the whole of the rest of her body. I held my body tight, repulsed and fascinated at the same time.

  One spinnaret touched a nearby strand of silk. Light bloomed and the thread snapped like a bullwhip, its outer surface peeling back like the skin of a nuclear banana. At its core was something I recognised at once.

  “String,” I gasped, “cosmic string.”

  106

  DO YOU REMEMBER what they used to call me? Arachne said.

  “Weaver of worlds,” I replied.

  Back then, it was just a name. Now, I believe I could indeed weave a world if I set my mind to it. And if I had a thousand years to spare. Alas, only a few moments remain to me. And there are enough worlds, don’t you think?

  I could imagine a hundred different uses for a set of spinnarets capable of manipulating cosmic string. Most of them bad. “So what did you weave?”

  Pathways. Pathways through the cosmos. I spun myself a web that extended to the outer limits of the cosmos and back again. I walked it, step by step, a painstaking search during which I isolated each square of the web’s grid, one after the other. I’ve been searching for the Pennyman my whole life, gumshoe.

  “A web made of cosmic string? How come I never saw it when I was out in the bulk?”

  With a trembling hand, Arachne stroked her web. My cosmic silk is sheer. Monofilament. Purer than pure. Here in the real world, it catches the light. Out in the bulk, where there is no light—at least, not as we know it—it is all but invisible, even to the eyes of the stringwalkers.

  “Visible or not, surely it still has mass. Momentum. Gravity. Intent. Everything you’d expect of ordinary cosmic string. A web like you’ve described... geez, lady, that would seriously destabilise the harmonics of the natural string network...” I stopped, started to speak again, stopped once more. Finally I got it out. “It’s your web that started the storms out in the bulk. You’re the reason the dimensions are screwed.”

  A small price to pay.

  “You think?” I bunched my fists. “You’re the reason I can’t walk the strings any more. Plus you probably triggered the end of the world. I don’t know which I hate you for the most!”

  I did not bring the apocalypse. Responsibility for that lies with the Pennyman.

  “Oh, sure, pass the buck. Thanks to you, the cosmos is toast!”

  I believe in salvation, despite everything. Why else would I send my spiders out over the city? Why else would I raise my web?

  I remembered what she’d said earlier, about how, with her web incomplete, String City was vulnerable. Sudden understanding slugged me on the jaw.

  “You were trying to protect us from the Pennyman. It wasn’t an invasion at all.” Arachne bowed her head. Somewhere inside me, the cold hatred I’d carried for years transformed into an incredulous hot coal of respect.

  It was too little too late, the spider queen said.

  Too little, yes. Also, far too much. “I just want
to find Zephyr, before it’s too late.”

  Then we are, as they say, on the same page.

  “I don’t understand.”

  Saving the cosmos. Finding the girl. In this case, they are one and the same.

  I stared her down. She waited with the patience of a spider.

  “All right,” I said at last. “Talk.”

  107

  SO ARACHNE TALKED and I listened, reluctantly at first, then with growing interest. The more she told me, the more things added up. Every single thing that had happened to me these past weeks—strike that, most of my life—turned out to be a piece of the puzzle and one by one Arachne put them together. The Tartarus heist. The hooded Fools. The kingfishers. The Still Point of the Turning World.

  The pennies.

  “Why is he doing this?” I said when she’d finished. “And why did he take Zephyr?”

  Arachne shook her mutilated head. Her movements were jerky. Her whole body had leaked almost dry. I don’t know. Observation and a lifetime’s research may have revealed to me his actions, but as to his intentions... I leave those to you to discover.

  “In another life,” I said, “you’d have made a swell detective.”

  Your words touch me. Thank you.

  She was still holding out the penny. The one she’d picked up as a girl. The one that had transformed her into a monster.

  “I can’t,” I said, eyeing the coin with something close to terror. “If I take it, who knows what I’ll turn into?”

  Nobody knows, Arachne replied. But hear this, gumshoe: I no longer believe this particular penny was laid by the Pennyman. I believe it was set in my path by another. One who believes in riddles, and in a single, true answer to them all.

  I couldn’t decide if this was worse. Hell, I couldn’t process anything any more. I’d heard too much. I just wanted out of there. Still, I was curious.

  “Who?” I said. Then I stopped. “Wait a second. Wind back. Earlier you said, ‘stringwalkers’. Plural. I thought...”

  “You were the only one?”

  Arachne smiled. Just for an instant, all her forgotten beauty shone through. Then a long, ragged sigh started deep in her broken abdomen. It shuddered up through her body, out of her mouth and into the cold air. It smelled sweet, like ambrosia.

  “Don’t go,” I said. “We’re not done.”

  My words echoed through empty space. The pyramid, like all pyramids before it, had become a tomb.

  My hand shook just as Arachne’s had done. I extended my fingers to her open palm. The silver coin lay there: my payment, my hope. Probably my doom.

  I hesitated. Worlds circled around me.

  I took the penny and turned to go.

  Wait. Arachne’s final breath was low and slow. I have... one more thing... to give you...

  She held out her other hand. I took what it was holding. And Arachne died.

  108

  THE SCARABS TRANSPORTED me to my office on their backs. The streets of String City have seen stranger forms of conveyance, but not many. I told them to put the barrel of ambrosia in the cellar, next to the tokamak. It was no use to Arachne and the beetles didn’t like the taste, and I hadn’t the heart to pour it down the drain. You never know when you might need twenty gallons of goddess juice.

  “Put the bird down there too,” I said.

  Inside the cage of ribs, the kingfisher’s wings flashed like neon flames.

  The bugs pulled back the trapdoor and descended into the cellar. The sound of their feet on the cement steps made my spine crawl. A minute later they came back up, chittered their goodbyes and left.

  I made a phone call. Afterward I crashed on the couch. Ten seconds later I was fast asleep. I slept all day, waking just as the sky above the street grille went from purple to black. Outside, the city was quieter than I’d ever known it.

  I made fresh coffee laced with sugar and bourbon, downed it, poured another. I tidied the papers on my desk, straightened the pictures on the wall.

  I stood for a long time, staring out through the doorway, the cup of coffee going slowly cold in my hand. The night air was dead still. The rain had stopped. Nothing moved except a solitary figure making its way steadily up the street toward my office. It shone like bronze and moved with gleaming oiled grace.

  “I came as you requested,” said the Scrutator, slipping through the door-shaped hole in the wall of dung.

  “You sure it’s okay to leave the wind factory?” I replied.

  “I spent the day optimising the automated systems. The new controls I have installed are very efficient. I estimate the plant is capable of functioning without intervention for the next seventeen days. Do you think that will be sufficient time to find the Pennyman and rescue Zephyr?”

  “Buddy, I don’t think this city has seventeen hours.”

  I brought the brass compact out of my pocket and placed it on the table. Beside it, I placed Arachne’s penny. I encircled them both with the spider queen’s final gift: a coiled rope of silk scissored from her cosmos-covering web. The web she’d woven to shield String City from the coming of the Pennyman. It lay there, a shining silver lasso of pure cosmic string.

  I thumbed the switch on the compact. A pocket of air popped like a balloon and my doppelganger appeared. The robot’s purring rose to a high-pitched whine of surprise.

  “Meet me,” I said to the Scrutator. “The other me. The good news is, he’s going to help us crack this case wide open, once and for all. The bad news is, he’s got just one hour and seven minutes to live.”

  Beyond

  109

  THE CRATER WHERE the Birdhouse had once stood was silent, deserted. The air was still and the ground was smooth, slippery and transparent—I could see right through the dirt to the bedrock below. Under the bedrock, sinister things prowled.

  “The cast of the cosmos has grown thin,” said the Scrutator, bending down to pick up a little stone, spiky as a shard of glass. Fragmentary forms fought in its core. The Scrutator placed it reverently back on the ground.

  Below us, the transparent dirt of the crater leveled out into a flat glassy plain. I looked up and around. Sunlight glinted off a million shining facets. We were descending into a crystal bowl the size of ten city blocks.

  At the bottom of the bowl sat the Fool. Huge heaps of golden dust surrounded him. His skeletal hands worked busily in his lap as he continued to dismantle the Still Point of the Turning World, one iota at a time.

  “How long before he’s finished?” The doppelganger rubbed his forehead. “I have the mother of all headaches.”

  I glanced at the compact—eighteen minutes left before my alter ego winked out of existence. My heart sank. It had taken us longer than I’d realised to walk here, and he’d insisted on staying conscious the whole way. “You need to brief me properly,” he’d said as we stepped out of the office. “And for that I need to be awake.”

  I’d talked all the way, but got barely halfway through the story. And now here we were, with time running out.

  “Look, I’m going to have to put you on standby again,” I said, “so let me cut to the chase.”

  “You’re finally going to tell me something I need to hear? Like maybe there’s actually something for me at the end of all this.”

  The Scrutator raised its hand. “May I speak?”

  “Make it quick,” I said.

  “That is precisely my intention. By my best estimate, I am capable of delivering the necessary exposition in less than three minutes. It will take you at least twenty-seven, especially given your tendency to drawl.”

  “You really think you know what’s going on here?”

  “Of course. I hear everything. It is why I became a detective. Have I not told you this?”

  I raised an eyebrow at the doppelganger. “Do I drawl?”

  The doppelganger glowered. “I’m on the clock here. Just spill the beans, one of you.”

  The Fool flung another cloud of golden dust over his shoulder.

 
“Go ahead,” I said to the Scrutator.

  “Very well. As I hear it, the situation is this. Long ago, one of the Aerlyft found his way to the edge of the cosmos...”

  “Wait,” said the doppelganger. “One of the what?”

  “The Aerlyft.”

  “And they are?”

  “The Aerlyft are the first-born, like the Thanes and the Fools and the behemoths. They were the earliest beings ever to roam creation.”

  “Don’t you know that?” I put in.

  The doppelganger rubbed his forehead again. “When you hit that pause button, pal, it kind of muddies the waters.”

  “Foremost among the Aerlyft were the Runefolk,” the Scrutator went on. “Each member of the Runefolk was the embodiment of a different abstraction, and...”

  “A different what?”

  “An idea. A concept.”

  “Give me an example.”

  “Well, the Roseman was the embodiment of love, while the Axeman was the embodiment of hate. There was the Arrowman—he was the embodiment of speed—and the Glassman, who embodied fragility. And so on.”

  “No dames?”

  “Of course. The Wirewoman embodied risk, the Candlewoman hope, and the concept of curiosity was embodied by...”

  “Okay, stop. I get it. It’s weird, but I get it.”

  “One of the strangest and most powerful members of the Runefolk clan was the Pennyman,” the Scrutator continued. “He was the embodiment of chance. His entire existence was dominated by just two thoughts: either and or. Shall I walk or run? Stand or fall? Eat candy or cake? The Pennyman had only to conceive of a choice for its conflicting options to spring spontaneously into existence. And then, one day, the Pennyman thought this: ‘Shall I stay inside the cosmos, or step out of it?’”

  “I thought stepping out of the cosmos was impossible,” said the doppelganger, “on account of there’s nothing beyond it.”

  “It is impossible,” I agreed. “At least, it was until the Pennyman thought of doing it.”

  “It is both impossible and possible,” the Scrutator said. “By definition, the cosmos is all that there is. And yet, the instant he conceived of something beyond it, the Pennyman successfully conjured an outside realm into existence. Having created Beyond, he stepped into it, even though its existence was a logical impossibility.”