Authors: Ian McDonald
“Third Epact: Thirteenth Meld!” roared Hanno, or possibly Chezz on the public commentary system. “Hup hup hup!”
Kansas Byrne fiddle-fumbled with fifty meters of monomolecule fiber spun from a spirochete on her wrist.
“Pyar’s probably watching this on a big public screen,” she added conversationally. “Me, I can’t follow the thing. Probably have to be barrio born and bred like him to follow the rules. Here, you any good at knots?”
“Knots?” asked Kilimanjaro West.
“Self-binding topological structures in one-dimensional systems.” She frowned and made passes with her hands. “Shug. So much for the Theater of Rigor.”
“Here, maybe I …”
She slapped his fingers away. “Shug, you stupid or something? It was a purely rhetorical question. Monomolecules are bitchin’ things. Any tension in the line and they’ll take your fingers clean off, and there’s no white brothers here to sew them on again. You got to wear gloves, see?” Her hands shimmered as she held them up before his face. “Knitted monomolecule.” The shimmering magical hands performed mystical passes and mystical oaths before Kansas Byrne was satisfied.
“Won’t they notice that?” Kilimanjaro West nodded at the melon-shaped device resting on the girder between their faces.
“Shug no.” Kansas Byrne payed out a length of the magical thread and heaved the object off the beam. It fell half a hundred meters before coming to an abrupt halt with a loud tenor twang. “Definitely keep your fingers away from that now. It’s under tension. Nah, no one’ll see it. Pyar made it up to look like one of the ceiling mikes, and you can be shuggin’ sure no one’s counting ceiling mikes down there.”
Trumpets fanfared, cheerleaders leaped and split with excruciating precision, and Hanno and Chezz stumbled over each other in attempts to plumb the adjectival depths of the popular lexicon. Meter by meter, the Babazulu Aztecs advanced over the Pandas’ desecrated turf. Looking upward: art. The happening world. About to happen.
“Primed and ready to go blooey three minutes into the final Epact. Pyar reckons they should be well into the third or fourth Meld by then, probably going for a Placement Run or a Table. Apparently, that’s very important at this stage of the game. To an athleto, like Pyar, this is the ultimate experience. Every kid in the barrios wants to be on a Glory Bowl team someday. Pyar was one of the few who made it. Reserve Throwing Back. Never got called onto the field; team never made a Passing Shot or a Back Line Throw. Shame. Bigger shame, his barrio never made it to the bowl again. Has a lot of resentment, has Pyar; he was in counseling for six months before he just blew and joined the Raging Apostles after we put on a happening at his barrio street market. He’s been planning this one for months. Could be a lot of personal revenge in it. Hey! K.W., want to know why I brought you and not Pyar? Because you know nothing. Because every experience is a learning experience for you. And because you learn, I learn, I reexperience. I relive everything in the light of your ignorance. Does that make sense?”
No less than Kansas Byrne’s butterfly mind made sense. Or this city, this world, this universe.
“You know, this is funny, but I think that more than any of us, you have the potential to achieve, to become, the Theater of Rigor.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Because you have no preconceptions about what can or cannot be done. All of us Raging Apostles are too deeply rooted in the Compassionate Society to ever unlearn what it has taught us. But you, somehow you never learned anything in the first place. Just what are you? Where do you come from, why are you here with me?” Her questions raised more unanswerables within and about herself and she scowled, looked away. “Quit looking at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like … like… just don’t look at me like that. Shug, maybe Winston was right, maybe you are a security risk. I just don’t know enough about you to be able to say anything.”
Music blared forth. The Virgins of St. Fonda’s Women’s Workout Team jogged onto the pitch to lead the spectators in a quarter-time stretch’n’tone routine designed to shape up muscles flagging from three and three-quarter hours sedentary spectating. With a grace and a feline ease not even the limber ladies of St. Fonda could match, Kansas Byrne jackknifed herself into a standing position on the narrow girder. She flipped a daredevil back-somersault (no safety net, no freegee belt, no Department of Arts and Crafts insurance policy) and stretched into a set of casual splits along the girder. She folded her torso over her legs to left and right in turn.
“Aren’t you afraid for me?” she asked.
“No. Why? Should I be?”
She shrugged. “Pity. I wanted to scare you. I like trying to scare you, shock you. Bad of me, isn’t it? I like trying to goad some reaction out of you, Citizen Kilimanjaro West. But you just keep on disappointing me. By the way, don’t look down when the spray bomb goes off.” Which it did two minutes twenty seconds later as the Babazulu Aztecs were marshaling for a Fourth Epact Second Meld Placement (probability 82%, V. S. Pyar had predicted) and the Pandas were deploying in an optimum probability coverage spread.
Red out.
Clinging to his girder in the afterblast, Kilimanjaro West took a breath and became aware of a great and holy hush filling the Babazulu Aztec Cathedrium like a spirit.
“This is the first part,” whispered Kansas Byrne. “Two hundred and twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty-seven voices: silenced.” The peace was divine. “All at once. Utterly. Just listen, K.W. Perfect nothing. That is art.”
The presence, the absence, lingered but a few breaths more. Then the need for questions, for answers, for expression, for anger and bafflement and all those things the Ministry of Pain said did not exist anymore, broke through the silence, voice by voice, question by question, shout by shout.
“The perfect contrast between the silence and the sound, that’s the second part,” yelled Kansas Byrne. “And this is the third part.” She directed Kilimanjaro West’s attention downward.
The individual letters were each seventy meters tall. The complete word filled the floor of the Cathedrium, the curving tiers of spectators, and the outer lip of the ceiling. The girder that concealed the Raging Aposdes formed a tiny red serif at the tip of an
E
. The bold upright of the
I
was a red slash across the twenty-two-meter line from left-side hash mark to the five-marq seats. A sinuous
S
, the ultimate challenge to the spray-bomber’s art, snaked up from the deadball Line Justices’ booths, hooked left across the stunned Virgins of St. Fonda (red on lilac an improbable combination) and made a 180° turn somewhere in the fifty-marq reserveds to come to an end up in the Seats of Grace and Favor where the Indigent Poor of all the barrios and corriadas could watch Glory Bowl DCCLXII free. When the Compassionate Society chose you to be poor, it gave compensations. The message lazed across the wreckage of Babazulu Aztecs’ glory, strode over players and spectators alike with nonchalant indifference:
RAGING APOSTLES
. A little fuzzy on the initial R and terminal S up there in the OutCaste Inviteds at the extreme range of the device, but for two hundred and twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty-seven witnesses there could be no mistaking (much less forgiving) the perpetrators of this act of … “creative vandalism, the most transitory of art forms.” Kansas Byrne was visibly aroused by the success of her performance. “The very best bit, better even than the silence, is when it begins to come apart. The aesthetic of disintegration. Beautiful.” As she spoke, her message was coming apart; person by person, quantum by quantum, as the athletos of Babazulu started their drifts toward exits or Team Spirit Confessoriums to obtain relief of anxiety, ease of soul. The letters began to dissolve at the edges and over the space of a few minutes disintegrated into a particulate sea of red dots. “Superb,” breathed Kansas Byrne. “Order into Chaos. Entropy as Art. Love to be able to run that backward, see them all come together, chaos into order.” She slapped her partner gently on the back. “Time we were gone. Place’ll be bubbling with Love Police and MiniPain investigators in two minutes flat.” Her proffered hand was the most alive thing Kilimanjaro West had ever known in his life. If Kansas Byrne’s short course of practical encouragement was to be believed, operating ah LTA flight suit was somewhere in difficulty between sex and riding a bicycle, neither of which Kilimanjaro West knew anything about, though he had witnessed both since his arrival in the city. And, she maintained, considerably safer than either. She left sticky red-paint fingerprints on his harness as she checked fastenings and valves.
“Relax,” she instructed. “Treat it as Experience. If you do it with the wrong attitude, you cripple yourself experientially.” Equally good advice for sex and bicycling as LTAing. She showed him the use of the joystick controls. “Simple: up, down, left, right. Left stick’s forward and braking thrust.” Kilimanjaro West found he enjoyed the way her hands moved over the controls. “Got it? Let’s go.” She pulled her rip cord. The silver LTA balloon unfolded and inflated with small pops and thumps as creased fabric stretched and tautened.
Kansas Byrne waved a small good-bye and stepped off the ogive roof of the Babazulu Aztec Cathedrium. She ascended a vertical meter, then the perpetual warm wind caught her and swept her into a distant blob of shining silver before the “Please wait” was off Kilimanjaro West’s lips.
Theater of Rigor.
He tugged his rip cord and the monsoon picked him off the Babazulu Aztec Cathedrium and carried him away. Half a kilometer above the transparent roof of the Sacred Circuit of Muscular Deity low-grav velodrome, Kansas Byrne was waiting in the sky.
“Use your controls,” she shouted as Kilimanjaro West breezed helplessly past. She fell into step beside him. “Relax. It’s fun.” Aft, piebald pantycars were circling and flocking like indecisive magpies.
“Is this not,” Kilimanjaro West yelled, “a very”—fighting with the control sticks—“conspicuous way”—he lurched as a thermal from the Shasten Community heating plant cooling tower whirled him stratosphereward—“to travel?”
“Not at all.” Kansas Byrne closed her eyes and shivered sensually as the warm updraft caressed her. “People of all castes use them all the time. For some didakoi tribes, only means of personal transport between dirigibles and city. Wingers use ’em, too. Never tried it myself, but LTA sex is supposed to be the most cosmic experience. Better than freegee, even.” Behind her helmet visor, her eyes confused Kilimanjaro West. “Relax. Enjoy. It’s fun.”
Blown eastward on the monsoon out of Pacahuaman Corriada over the anarchic geometries of the corporate arcologies and manufactories of Kurosawa, Kilimanjaro West found his consciousness performing a subtle inversion. He remembered: one word. A word from the before time; therefore, no matter how brief, or meaningless, it was important, that word.
The word was
purpose
.
He had a purpose. He was purpose. Therefore nothing he did or experienced could be in any way treated lightly or trivially for it might in some way serve this purpose. He did not know what this purpose was, only that he had a purpose, but he determined that he must open himself to every experience, and learn.
Learning, he learned, was fun. That in itself was experience, and something to be learned. He learned that he did enjoy wind-drifting, airborne flotsam, through the upper strata of Kurosawa’s corporate canyonlands. Beneath his feet the various levels of the city superimposed themselves on each other: creeping caterpillars of municipal trams, midlevel cycleways,
pneumatique
tubes looping like arteries around, through, into, under the techno-Gothic fantasias of the Seven Servants (another thing he had learned, the seven colossal mother-corporations that supplied, manufactured, grew, generated the city’s every need), the webwork of cablecar lines spun across the twinkling chasms, too slender by far to possibly bear the weight of crowded gondolas.
“What is that?” He glimpsed a tiny, darting figure, neon-bright, wild as night, impossibly
running
along the cablecar lines.
“Scorpio,” Kansas Byrne shouted in answer. She had removed her helmet to let the warm wind stream back her hair. “Wire-running. Kind of hazing ritual Scorpio singletons go through when they start their year out on blue six. Highly illegal. Three months counseling automatic for a first offense. You ask M’kuba the Doctor. He got reconditioning in West One for his third. Which is why he’s with us now and not on some job with the TAOS Consortium over in Tamazooma. Folk can get killed, not just the Scorpios.”
“‘Killed’?”
Her expression was clearly legible across twenty meters of airspace.
“Dead. Not living. Nonexistent. Permanently.”
“That’s good to know.”
“What’s good to know?”
“Permanently. It means that I wasn’t dead, before.”
Kansas Byrne wanted more than anything to ask, Before? Before what? but Kilimanjaro West’s attention had been snared by a didakoi passenger dirigible offloading citizens into an immaculately landscaped arcology-top leisure park. He watched the citizens flocking to the lakes and jungles and gardens with mazes, to the theme parks and pleasure domes and beaches with real surf. Passing onward, he saw the simple rooftop agricultural communities of the Aquadelphians, the soil-toilers peering up from beneath the brims of straw coolie hats to wave a greeting. He saw snow-blasted minimountains abuzz with skiers and sporters in all degrees of dress from the ludicrous to the nonexistent. The microclimate field bubbles veered the balloonauts away from ice-resorts and the prevailing wind carried them on into Four Solitudes.
“We’d calculated that these winds should bring us over Ranves in about an hour and a half,” Kansas Byrne yelled. “Enjoying it now?”
“Enormously.” And he was. And
enormous
was the word. He had never before been in such a position as to properly appreciate the scale of this city where he found himself. He could see a hundred kilometers in every direction, and he could still see no end to the city. Only a suggestion of a line of shadow drawn around that incredibly distant horizon. Enormous the dimensions, enormous the variety. Great Yu was a patchwork of clashing, colliding architectures, a motley of abutting improbabilities, tall with stunted, broad with slender, modern with ancient, classical with Gothic, technological with biological. Even as he came to understand that the city had not sprung from the earth formed as it was, but had been built, created, he also understood that it must have a past, a history out of which it had come.