Gears of the City (24 page)

“Basso,” Stevie said, “We were only …”

“Don’t you have chores? Get lost, Stevie.”

She picked up her wings and ran, ducking through the doorway under Basso’s outstretched arm, eyes on the ground, not saying a word.

“We were only talking,” Arjun said. “She offered to show me around. You didn’t have to talk to her like that.”

Basso laughed, not unpleasantly. Prominent on his hip, under his loose shirt, was the handle of a knife. “That’s sweet,” he said. “But you don’t tell us how to run things, all right? Now, you and me, let’s go for a walk.”

Whispers-Old Experiments-T
HE
S
URVIVOR-
A
RREST

Ruth

R
uth spent the
morning waiting for the doorbell to ring; every time she heard footsteps in the streets she thought it would be Arjun, and Ivy, and her heart leapt into her throat. She was too restless to read or work—instead she moved things aimlessly from shelf to shelf, rearranging, reorganizing, and restructuring, in what she slowly came to realize was
exactly
the neurotic, fussy, coldly precise and perfectionist manner Ivy had sometimes had—as if Ruth were trying to call her sister home by some magic of impersonation. She laughed and decided to let the books on the table under the slope of the stairs
stay
in a mess, then. She sat back down and began to roll a cigarette.

There was a whispering sound. While she’d been working she’d hardly been aware of it, but now—it was unmistakably
not
just birds, or the pipes, or the wind in the eaves. A scratching, a hissing, a vague and distant chattering.

It was coming from the cellar.

That meant going next door to Marta’s place to get the key to the cellar door. The cellar had been the Dad’s territory, and Marta was still funny about that whole business. Getting the key would have meant an awkward conversation, had Marta not, fortunately, been out somewhere, gathering, visiting, maybe just walking, but in any case leaving the key in the oak jewelry box on the dusty bottom shelf in the back room.

Ruth got one of the lamps from under the stairs.

The cellar door, set down a short flight of cold stone steps in the corner of the backyard, was cobwebbed and clogged with old leaves, and the hinges were rusty, and Ruth had to grunt and strain to open it. How long had it been since anyone had been down there? Not since Ivy, and that bad night when Ivy had gone down and come back nearly screaming with rage …

As the door slowly scraped open the sound of whispering— electric, many-throated—escaped, and for a moment the sound made Ruth think of the voice of the Beast, and then she remembered:
radios.

There
was a word, and a noise, she hadn’t heard in a few years— not since she was a child.

For about six months, when she was very small, the Dad had had a phase of experiments with old radios. (After the phase with the birds; around the time of the great rusty gear collection; before the phase with the clocks.) No one else in the city remembered the devices—like the music-machines, like all the rest of that stuff, they were forgotten, anomalous, beyond the capacity of the Combines or their factories to reproduce.

But the Dad had discovered a schematic in an old manual, and he’d dug the rusting dented machines out of junk heaps on weekends, and he’d made his own out of parts he traded for with other … enthusiasts. He tinkered with and tuned them. All they ever picked up was a hollow hiss and crackle, like night rain falling out over the reservoirs; occasionally the distant ghost or echo of a voice, a scrap of peculiar music, but nothing more, nothing useful or comprehensible. And no wonder—after all, the last of the old broadcasting towers had closed down long before the Dad’s time, long before the Dad’s Dad’s time, even.

When the Dad got drunk he liked to say that maybe if you tuned them right the radios would reach back to past Ages of the city, where those who were dead were not yet entirely forgotten. He once got drunk enough to tell his daughters that maybe, maybe their dead mother was somewhere in some distant part of the city tuning her
own
radio, separated from them only by static; when he sobered up and found that Ivy, the youngest, had taken him literally, he laughed. Afterward he felt guilty—at least after Marta reproved him—and he lost interest in the machines. One by one their
irreplaceable power sources ran down. Later Ivy dismantled most of them to see how they worked. Now the few remaining devices sat on a high shelf, in the far corner of the cellar, under a shroud of dust and grime, and they were
whispering.

She held the lamp up to them, absurdly, as if she could see their lips moving.

The words were distant, crackling, incomprehensible. A tidal
whoosh
swept back and forth, obliterating meaning.

It was cold in the cellar; her skin crawled and her hair bristled with static.

The cellar was huge, and deep, and its corners shadowed. The Dad had built the house over complex foundations, and sledge-hammered through into adjacent buried spaces. The darkness thronged with uncomfortable memories. The light of the lamp made the eyes of the Dad’s mangy stuffed birds and vermin glitter.

Ruth had never been down there much. Nor had Marta, for that matter. Only Ivy, who’d always been so clever with the machines, who’d shared their father’s fascinations, had really been welcome in the cellar when he was working.

The radios chattered and sighed.

What were the devices picking up? What barriers were falling?

She had no idea how the things operated. She turned the stiff dials and knobs, but it seemed to make no difference.

There was a tone of panic in the whispering that unnerved her and excited her at once.

Still, to be on the safe side, she lowered the machines to the floor, got a thick blanket from upstairs, and covered them up. Grunting and cursing, she dragged breeze blocks in place to hold the blanket down. It wouldn’t do to have the wrong person hear those strange voices.

S
he went walking past the Museum, glancing nervously at the guards, listening intently, opening her ears to any sound as if she were a radio herself.

Nothing. No sound of the creature’s voice, no whispering. She flushed with embarrassment. What had she been expecting?

The guards at the door were different. She didn’t recognize either
of them. Siddon’s and Henry’s shifts had ended, of course; they’d gone home to bed, or off to other duties, or back to their regular jobs. Like most low-ranking Know-Nothings, Siddon and Henry still worked ordinary jobs at the factories, for the Combines. They spent their nights and their free days working for the Know-Nothings for a little extra cash or for the prospect of advancement; or because the Know-Nothings could get them free shifts away from the noise and dark of the factory floor, or because they just liked hurting people.

The two on the door today looked like real bastards.

She nearly stumbled right into a drift of grey young women on their way between factory shifts and home shifts. She stopped, collected herself, turned home, where she waited, and waited.

T
he doorbell rang and instantly Zeigler came running in, eyes gleaming, stage-whispering, “I’ve
found
him.”

“Arjun?”

“Who?”

“… never mind. Forget it. Who?” She put down her book.

“Our,” he glanced, with theatrical caution, at the slowly closing door. “Our
soldier.
Our ghost.”

“From last night? I thought he vanished.”

“So did I! Fair enough, fair enough, they do that, don’t they? But I happened to overhear Mrs. Salt talking to Mr. Thatch, she says there’s some beggar or paperless skulking around the back of the old barn, the Patagan one, you know, and I thought, hmm, sounds interesting …”

“And you went poking around? I know you.”

“It was him. Poor man. Huddled in a corner. Reduced to scrubbing up grass to eat. Quite lost, couldn’t give his own name, his rank, anything. I offered him something to eat. I asked him a few questions but …”

He took out his notebook, and held up the page—blank, save for the words
interview 3
7 and
War?

“I scared him,” Zeigler said. “Perhaps, if you’re not too busy, a woman’s touch … ?”

But Ruth was already getting her purse, and her coat, and getting ready to lock up the shop behind her.

T
he man hadn’t moved. He sat at the back of the barn, in the loft, up the iron ladder, and half hidden by shadows and a heap of old machinery. His back was against the rusting wall, his legs stretched out stiffly before him as if broken and stretchered. He stared blankly up into the shafts of dusty light that fell through the ceiling. He seemed to be counting under his breath. When he heard Ruth approach—as she stepped carefully up off the unsteady ladder—he scrabbled for his rifle. She held up her hands.

Zeigler, below, hissed, “Are you all right?”

“It’s all right,” she said. “Wait a moment.”

The man lowered his weapon again.

Ruth came slowly closer. She sat down beside him with a sigh and a, “Cigarette?”

He took one, automatically held it in his lips for her match. That told her something; many of the ghosts from far off parts had no idea what to do with a cigarette. The pilot Altair had smoked ferociously, as if trying to burn himself up; but her astronomer had regarded the practice as charmingly quaint; and the strange intense red-haired, spike-haired sculptress—who’d come wandering down Ezra Street lost, frightened, touching the surfaces of buildings and trees and the cobbles with her strong hands as if everything in the world was fake and poorly made—had said, “Ruth, are you mad? Put that shit out!”

So he smoked; this man was from a part of the city not altogether unlike her own.

He was looking at her a little more calmly now.

His ragged uniform was familiar, in an odd way. It seemed like a translation, an intensification, of something with which she was intimately acquainted—and, she thought,
unpleasantly
acquainted. She disliked the uniform. The man himself, helpless, confused, she couldn’t help but pity.

She let him finish the cigarette.

He stubbed it out under the heel of his boot, smiling for the first time, and suddenly he reminded her of
any
of the Know-Nothings, and she was a little afraid of him.

“Are you all right?” Zeigler called. “Hang on. I’m coming up.”

“Stay,” she said.

She waited for the soldier to ask her something. He stayed
silent. After a while he closed his eyes. He still had a faint smile on his lips.

He was enjoying the peace, she realized. Perhaps he thought she was a dream, the silence and shade of the barn were a dream of a wounded and dying man, and he was afraid that if he said anything the moment would be over, and he would wake on the battlefield, on the Mountain …

“My name’s Ruth,” she said. “If you can’t remember yours, don’t worry. That happens. You’re not the first. This close to the Mountain, we see a lot of ghosts, lost, we can
help.”

He winced at the word
Mountain.

“Were you a soldier?” She thought he might be able to answer that question.

“I didn’t bloody want to be.”

“You remember? Where are you from?”

He shook his head. He looked sad. “I don’t remember. I’ve been sitting here all day and I don’t remember. All of this,” he waved a hand, “it looks like I know it all, but I don’t remember, it doesn’t make sense.”

“The city you’re from, before you went on the …
before
, it was like this one?”

“I don’t know. I don’t bloody know. I look at it and I think:
I know all this.
Then I think:
all this is gone.”

“You were in a war. Sometimes we see … people like you, who say they were in a war.”

“We went up …
there.
I remember we had a song, about how all the rich bastards on the Mountain had castles of gold and rivers of wine and all that, and we weren’t going to put up with them anymore, and we were going to sort a few things out. The things they’d done—wicked. Shay, that name comes back to me, I don’t know why. “