Authors: Felix Gilman
“Silt. Ha! Silt was never much use to me. I can’t say I care if he lives or dies. Ruth Low—do you care? Really?”
“Not much.”
How very frank of you! No lies, Ruth Low. You are old enough now to understand.”
E
asy questions first
,
the Beast said.
What am I making here? A new world of my own. Others to share my burden. No success so far. But
—
early days, early days.
You freed me from the Museum. That was kind of you. Your sister freed me from the burden of my extraordinary flesh. That was cunning of her.
I was free. I had never been free before.
I concluded my business with your sister and I vanished into the crowd. I went south, away from the Mountain. I savored humanity
—
it is an imperfect condition, but far superior to the alternatives. I wore a rich man’s flesh, and I enjoyed a rich man’s luxuries. I was ordinary. I was learning to become fat and stupid. I was happy.
Then the airships came. I knew at once who sent them
—
he sent them. My maker. King of this City, by right of fraud and theft. Ivy had failed to kill him; she had only angered him. She had frightened him
—
that man is the most contemptible coward!
The world was ruined. I stood in the rubble and wept bloody tears. I shall never be happy
—/
understood that. He will not allow it. I am still his creature.
There were others in the ruins. Survivors. Those too stubborn or mad or wicked to go north and seek shelter in Fosdyke, or Fleet Wark, and rebuild. Those, like me, too proud to beg.
They followed me. I am still a remarkable creature, aren’t I? Even in this new flesh? I cannot be ordinary. I cannot have an ordinary life.
I told them things, and made them follow me. I did not want to be alone.
But they can’t understand
—
none of them can. What it’s like to be a made thing, a provisional thing, unknit by strange surgeries from
the fabric of the city
—
to exist in an oblique and shifting relation to time.
They are only human. Poor Silt! Poor Flitter!
I watched him work, Ruth Low
—
my maker. I lived on his shoulder once, before I grew too long and heavy and blood-fat. I was with him when he dealt with those doctors. I thought I could make my own creatures. I thought I would act in the image of my own creator. I am a man now, a maker. I would make a world of my own, in the ruins. They would talk to me. They would understand me. Remarkable creatures!
You see the results all around you. I do not have the right knives. My memories are imperfect. I know a great deal, but I am not very intelligent. I am not the equal of my creator. I have surrounded myself with failures
—
neither alive nor dead. Mindless, feeble. A little more than animal, and much less. That damned owl! It spouts nonsense. It mocks me. I cannot kill it now, hard as I may try.
My mistakes will last forever. These creatures will haunt the city forever, hidden in weeds and back alleys and moonlight, secret testaments to my own flawed nature. Just as I am a testament to
his.
I
don’t understand,” Ruth said. “Who made you? How? What are you?”
O
nce I lived in a little brass cage. I have vague animal memories of the market in which he purchased me
—
monochrome, motion, scent. I was a kind of lizard.
Not large
—
no larger than your delectable forearm. I don’t know my own breed. Does it matter? I asked my maker; he wouldn’t tell me.
I woke to myself on the operating table. Before that my awareness had been dim and thoughtless
—
a constant throbbing awareness only of the present moment. With needles in my brain and my tiny bones cracked and splinted I woke to glaring electric light, and my first thought was how I hated that light. It was a hospital light, like a compound eye. My awareness, too, became compound
—/
saw not only the present moment, but the future, the past. Suddenly I had words with which to slice up my sensations. Can you imagine what it is to have words thrust upon you?
He was not done with me. He continued to operate, to open, to unknit, until my awareness unfurled as far beyond yours as yours is beyond that of the lizard I was.
What was my purpose? Once the scars had healed? To sit on his shoulder, to watch and listen, to spy for him, to keep his secrets and carry his messages. To remember his countless aliases and schemes, who owed him money, who owed him their soul. Sometimes to kill for him. All through time we traveled.
Mr. Shay. Clever little man. I was one of his first.
Who is Shay?
I don’t know. I don’t know half of his secrets. I traveled with him for ten years, a thousand years ago.
He was an ordinary man once. How do I know that? Because he boasted of it. He wouldn’t shut up.
He’d say:
I did it myself, didn’t I? My own bloody self. I broke free of the world, said bye-bye to the city, up into the beyond, out into the abstract, down into the maze. And no bloody bugger ever helped me. I found the way out myself, and I went all alone. I was the fucking first. The things I had to suffer for it! The things I gave up!
And so on. It was my sad duty to listen to his whining. That was why he kept me
—
for he was not comfortable in the company of mankind
—
for no human creature could ever be so utterly in his power as I was.
How was I made? The surgical techniques that made me the freak I am
—
those, Shay learned from the Doctors of the Academy of Marfelon. Have you heard of them? Of course you haven’t. They are a well-kept secret. Slope-browed skulls containing an excess of cunning, a numb deficiency of morals and affections. Ontological surgeons. They can uncut you from time, gravity, mortality, existence, your own soul. Engineering speech in a lizard is nothing to them. In this city, everything approaches to the condition of everything else
—
your little friend, Arjun, understood that dimly, it was a fine trick with the birds! A slice, a stitch, a fold, this becomes that. Easily done.
The Doctors of Marfelon
—
in their own time, their experiments made them an enemy of all decent folk. Mobs, torches, pitchforks
—
oh, I know the feeling well! They were in danger of extinction. They were scientists, not fighters. My maker Shay made a deal
—
they taught him
their methods, and in return, he hid them away in the twisting passages of the singularity beneath the Iron Rose.
Do you understand what I mean when I say, singularity ?
Hah. We’ll be here all night.
I
don’t care about that. I wouldn’t understand, would I? If Ivy were here you could talk to her about singularities.”
“You seem disappointed in me, Ruth.”
“I always thought you were a kind of… myth. A dream. Something magical, something that no one could explain. Now you say you’re just a kind ofthing someone made.”
“Everything that exists has a reason why, Ruth.”
“I don’t mean to be hurtful.”
“I disappoint myself, lately.”
“So who taught you to tell the future?”
“Oh, Ruth—no lies between us. I cannot tell the future. No one can—the city is always in flux. I remember things, I know secrets, I watch carefully. I plan and I am cunning. Everything is trickery— people are very predictable. I have no gifts of prophecy.”
“Oh. Oh, I had so many questions about the future.”
“I know. My answers would be lies. Would you like me to lie to you?”
“No, thank you.”
“I don’t know if the city can be saved. I expect not. The old man will have his way.”
Ruth sighed and shifted. When she’d come in, the tent had been warm. Now a cold breeze drifted around her shoulders.
She said, “Whatever’s going to happen is going to happen. I just came here to
understand.
I remember you in the Museum. I was only a girl, and I liked you better back then. So—why were you in the Museum?”
“Oh, Ruth Low. That’s cruel of you to ask. One day I may ask you a cruel question. He left me behind, Ruth Low.”
T
here are too many of him.
His business, his scheming, his deals and revenges, his flights from creditors
and polke and inquisitors
—
it took him all over the city. Back and forth. To and fro. In and out. Up and down. From the first times to the last. Your mind cannot grasp the complexity of it
—
forward and back, how his own schemes tangled him, how he thwarted himself over and over. A trap laid in the first times springing itself in the last, and on the man who set it! A yellowing photograph in the police files of a prior century. The long memories of the many churches who knew him as the Devil. Nor could
he
grasp the complexity
—/
do not mean to insult you, Ruth Low.
He lost himself. He doubled and tripled himself. Weaving back and forth, he stepped too often in his own traces. He existed simultaneously. Shadows. Reflections. Reiterations. His past became confused. Rumors of his presence abounded
—
which were true? He looked to me to remember for him. He used to say:
“I was never here before, was I? Did I do this? I never did this. This wasn’t my fault. They’ve got the wrong man. This isn’t fair.”
I lied to him. No, I whispered, when the truth was yes; yes, I whispered, in the rare event that he was truly innocent. I confused him further. I schemed against him! I was a spiteful little thing! I started to grow fat on lies and secrets.
His shadows proliferated. They took different paths through the city, so sometimes they were old, sometimes young, sometimes scarred, sometimes un-wounded.
I was with him on occasion when he met one of his shadows.
My master went generally by the name Shay, sometimes Hangley, sometimes Cuttle. He was a man in middle age when he made me, and when he left me behind he was still not old. He was a little man but a strong one
—
he had a system of exercises, about which he was fanatical. His body was a tool to be mastered. He shaved his white head near-bald. He carried no ordinary weapon
—/
was sufficient.
We traveled to Cendylon. Cendylon, where the thick vines strangled the emerald city. Summer, when the violet flowers spread like a disease.
We went hunting a God. A God of music, something that took the form of a sudden silence in the city’s cacophony, a sudden chanting that might change a man’s life. A God that had wandered in from the wastes, in obedience to the strange currents that carry their kind.
My master sought to trap it, so that he might offer it to the folk of the Bright Towers, in trade for the seeds that… never mind. He had his plans for it.
We followed rumors. The God had settled in a bend of the green river, in a little bower of vines, where now the flowers rang like bells. The botanists of Cendylon were there to observe the phenomenon. Access was restricted.
We had to blackmail the Police Chief of Cendyion, and to bribe the Chair of Botanical Science. So every one of my master’s schemes bred further scheming! We had to murder a man and kidnap a child. In the moss-walled tunnels beneath the river my master stood chain-smoking while I rooted in the Police Chief’s trash for incriminating material.
“Hurry up,”
my master said.
“What’s taking so long? Losing your nose for secrets? You’re getting fat and lazy. You belong in the trash.”
He was always cruel to me, Ruth. But perhaps I was too slow, because we were interrupted.
A snarl. A hiss.
I poked my green head from the filth to see, at the far end of the tunnel, a short fat man, white hair in a wild greasy tangle, the long robes of Cendy Ion hanging in shimmering folds from his round belly. My master’s face
—
but older, looser, heavy-fowled.
My own master, snarling in hate. Lips pulled back from his teeth. He hated with animal simplicity. I loved him then, Ruth.
That… shadow of my master, sneering. What was beneath his robes? A gun, a knife? He had not come unarmed. How had our paths crossed? No doubt he hunted the same quarry as my master. To him, my master was the shadow
—
the contempt was clear on his face. My loyalties, such as they were, were divided. The tunnel’s air crackled with something that can’t be named. Were any of us real?
The imposter carne with weapons. My master preferred not to risk himself, or unleash my own … capabilities. We left the tunnel.
“Not again,”
he whined.
“It’s not fair. I shouldn’t have to live like this.”
We returned to our hotel in Cendy Ion, where that fat shadow tried to murder my master by arson. We in turn tried to kill him with poison, by bribing his bodyguards, with a curse …
And so on. For years. In the end my master prevailed. But in our chases and scheming back and forth across the city, no doubt we birthed another half-dozen shadows.
Another time we met a man called Lemuel at an auction, quite by accident … Never mind. I could go on. I won’t.
He was the first. He has been doing this for so long, now. The city is large, but not large enough.
T
he Beast stood and walked to the flap of the tent. Outside the night was dark and silent. The Beast breathed cold air.
“This is painful for me, Ruth. A thousand years ago I was
abandoned. Left alone to find my own purpose. To rot in a cage. Circus freak, sideshow act, medical specimen, dusty antiquity. Neither alive nor dead, real nor unreal. To remember the days with Shay is—Ruth, how bittersweet is it for you to recall your childhood? To hang on Shay’s shoulder and share his secrets—that was my youth! Those were my golden days! We had great adventures together. We did terrible things.”