Authors: Ian McDonald
Drip, plink. Drip, plink, drip.
She aimed and fired with a unity of thought and action that dazzled her. There was a howl of power, an explosion, and all the lights went out. Shorted power conduits snaked and hissed and shed blue sparks toward the oil-dark lake. “Damn.” With one shot she had disabled the power and air systems for New Paris Community Mall. Within the hour Shaft Twelve would be a-buzz with environmental maintenance workers, crawling into, round, over, through every catwalk, access tunnel, gantry, hatchway, vent. They could not possibly overlook Courtney Hall’s fur-lined nest in the air-conditioning subsystems control room. “Damn damn damn damn.” But she had seen something. She was certain. A something—a someone? A what—a who? Light-starved, spindly, a pale shadow. At least that was one question answered. Contact with the others: unarguably undesirable.
Surprising how few souvenirs of her furry little home she chose to take with her in her nightsac. A hammock, a bicycle lamp, a sleepsac, some cleanup tissues, a box of tampons (removed from the Compassionate Society’s regulation of her womanhood, she could not be certain her periods would not restart), a rope, a packed lunch, a bottle of mineral water (nongaseous), some clean underwear, some spare clothes, and shoes. The rest she left: stolen goods are worth exactly what you pay for them. But she did say good-bye to the hundred and seventy-four Wee Wendy Waifs. None of them seemed sad to see her go.
Her early timid surveys of the warrenways about Shaft Twelve had disclosed no other potential living spaces. She must quit New Paris entirely and move into unexplored territory. Unexplored, potentially occupied.
She tried not to advertise her presence too widely with the bicycle lamp. As her journey led her away from the upper levels, down into older, more chaotic strata of jumbled architectures, she left behind the artificial illumination to enter a stoop-shouldered country of brick tunnels, trickling water, and stygian darkness. Fear of the dark overcame fear of discovery. She fixed the bicycle lamp to her nightsac shoulder straps with a roll of electrical tape filched some days previously from another careless engineer. And she kept the impacter at the ready. Her swinging beam illuminated damp brick arches and fan-vaulted ceilings, brass pipes and corroded wheels of a curiously archaic design. A sense of having wandered far from Yu overcame her, in time as well as in space, of having left the city that was the world to enter an altogether other world coexistent with the Compassionate Society but secretive, inaccessible, an old world of damp, dark, and drippings that had survived, preserved unchanged by the darkness, since the time of the Break. She had come too far, too deep; she could feel history pressing on her stooped shoulders as she squeezed along the narrow brick intestines. She splashed ankle-deep through ancient fossilized rainwater and at every junction, every confluence of brick pipes, chose the upward path. But a claustrophobic awareness told her that the tunnels were redefining themselves before her, twisting and turning so that for every upward she chose, the tunnels moved to draw her down.
There was no question of ever being able to find her way back to Shaft Twelve. It was gone as irrevocably as Apt 33/Red/16 Kilimanjaro West.
She sang, attempting to whistle up high spirits. The echoes that scampered back to her along the brick buttresses sounded nothing like her voice. And behind those echoes, something more. A film of water flowing out of somewhere parted around her boots to flow on to somewhere. Her bicycle lamp picked hysterical faces out of the brickwork. A scuttling, scurrying sound that might have been moving air (and just as easily might not) whispered out of the dark.
“All right. All right, whoever you are.” She did not want to have to say
whatever
. “Just to let you know that if you’re trying to frighten me, you’re succeeding.”
She walked one complete slow circle, sending her bicycle beam probing into every dark crevice. The impacter rested snug and comfortable in her hand. “Hello? Anyone there? Hello?” She let the last echo fade into the general silence before concluding, “Okay, so I was talking to myself. So, who’s to hear?”
… earearearear…
And they were upon her.
All over her.
In her hair, hanging from her clothes, clawing at her hands, her face, her eyes, more and more and more of them, piling onto her, swarming, shrieking, a mass of fur and claws and teeth, throwing themselves out of nowhere, onto her, dragging her down under the weight of their numbers. She screamed and screamed and screamed, flailing at her face, her precious, delicate eyes. The swinging, swooping bicycle lamp gave momentary infernal revelations of ivory needles, matted fur, steaming drool, bulbous light-blinded pink eyes …
Pets. Dogkits, catkits, monkeykits, cute cuddlesome blobs of genetic ingenuity flushed away, thrown out, refuse-chuted, abandoned by bored creators. Knowing what they had been made them all the more horrifying. Courtney Hall struck free with her left hand and fired the impacter. Blind fear sent shot after shot after shot ricocheting around the chamber, flashing water to steam, blasting shattered bricks from the vaulted ceiling. A wet, soft, bursting sound: a fortunate shot exploded a doggery or kitkin in a shriek of fur and intestines. Teeth met through her gun hand. Howling, she dropped the impacter. Clinging to hands, hair, face, clothes, the genetic menagerie pulled her down, and as teeth tugged flesh, Courtney Hall became aware of a wondrous sense of detachment that said, Well, this is it, isn’t it? This brick sewer is the last, the very last, thing you will ever see.
A brightening light filled the chamber.
The Light of Yah
! she thought, grateful that soon this distressing toothy tugging of her body would cease. And it did. And now that she was dead, it seemed that war broke out in heaven, that black-and-white-striped angels in domino masks fell upon the fell beasts with swords and crossbows and left a goodly multitude of cubby-bears and marmosetties lying with her in the stagnant rainwater before the vile pets fled to those vile places from which they had come. And it seemed that a face bent over her body.
“Lady most lucky,” said the raccoon-faced angel. “Lucky lucky lucky. Still, lady pretty bad, poor lady. Rest awhile, poor lady. Assistance has come.”
“Are angelic raccoons theologically supportable?” asked Courtney Hall.
“You tell me, lady,” said the racoon savior, and Courtney Hall dropped off the edge of heaven with a dismal thud to land back in her body again.
“Raccoons!” she cried. “You are raccoons!”
“Of course, lady,” said the racoon, peeling the backing from a dermoplast and sticking it to her forehead. “Sleep now.”
“But …” she asked, and then a fog of theological outrage descended upon her. A last coherent impression was of the racoon absentmindedly stroking a little metal socket in the side of its neck out of which grew a cluster of soft, fungusy biochips. Time then passed, or did not pass, in degrees of awareness from deep sleep to complete consciousness. Upon one such occasion of lucidity, the thought clearly entered Courtney Hall’s head (and remained there) that in all the adventures of Wee Wendy Waif she had helped to create, there had never been anything half so bizarre as being dragged down dark tunnels deep under Yu on a tube-steel travois by an army of talking raccoons.
A
S HE WAITED FOR
the judgment, it came to him: a moment of clairaudience (some alchemic combination of time and place and atmosphere) when the ear abolished all distance between sources and all sounds arrived at it with equal weight and clarity. The iron grumble of tram wheels. The hiss of rain, ebbing. The calls, the splashing footfalls of the wingers abroad in the streets of Pendelburg. The ring of a solitary pedicab bell. High above, indeterminate, the purr of airship engines. He heard them all, clearly, distinctly, each voice a note in the night-song. And he heard the voices of his friends judging him.
The little he understood about the universe forced him to conclude that he was a threat to these people. This society into which he had been thrust (how? from whence? why?) had an inside and an outside; his own experience taught him that much, and these people were firmly outside. He suspected that, unlike himself, they had chosen to be outside; unlike himself again, they had not been outside from the very beginning. But to such outsiders as they, others of their kind could be a threat, an insider in disguise.
Marvelous, the amount he had learned of this fascinating universe already.
He listened to the debating voices, the soliloquies, the valiant defenses from the dock, the accusations and the parries, and pondered anew the condition of the outsider in this rigidly enclosed society. They could claim nothing from their Compassionate Society (whole blocks of a priori knowledge that had hitherto floated solitary, isolated, in the spaces of his memories, were levered into place, monolith by monolith), and as he suspected that this institution controlled all resources political, economic, physical, and spiritual, these Raging Apostles had only such access to food, power, and shelter as their wits allowed them. A dangerous place to be outside. He recalled the hang gliders, the synthesizers, the fireworks, the glittering costumes that had bedazzled him in Neu Ulmsbad Square. Their wits must be sharp indeed to winkle such beads and baubles from the Seven Servants. (Another block of masonry fell with a crash into position.) Quickness of the hands deceives the eye. Empty bellies under robes of splendor. He reckoned the Raging Apostles sacrificed themselves for their art.
“I’m not happy about this. I’m not happy at all; what proof have we that this Kilimanjaro West is not a Love Police agent?” That was Winston’s voice. He was learning to distinguish the individual performers by their voices. A deep “pneumatic rumble of a voice; the athleto, what was his name? Kilimanjaro West had only just begun to come to terms with a casted, stratified society.
“Then why aren’t we in West One? Why didn’t they pick us up back there in Neu Ulmsbad?” A debate between the two. “Because we gave them the slip. But how do you know that we’re safe here, that the Love Police won’t come out of the sky at any moment?”
Here, the safe here, was the Big Tree. Seeing it from a distance through rain-streaked glass and frantically pumping windshield wipers, Kilimanjaro West had had great difficulty in believing that such a place could exist. Incongruous in boulevard after boulevard after boulevard of fin de siècle brownstones as a fart in a cathedral, Big Tree was a solid block of green growingness, a vertical jungle, its canopy breaking in a steaming green wave twenty meters above the red pantiles of Pendelburg. A solitary trog enclave in a prefecture of wingers.
“
SHELTER
closed it down about twelve years back,” explained the girl he had learned to call Kansas Byrne. “Part of a planned population shift; the prollets over in Wheldon formed eight new septs, and there was a lot of assimilation of other prollet boros all over Yu and a massive population surge in Wheldon. The winger population was reduced from thirty percent to ten to accommodate the influx, and the surplus was sent over here. Of course, that fugged up the mixed-caste ratios, so the Ministry of Pain declared Pendelburg a monocaste district, all winger. So they had to relocate the trog clan that had been living in Big Tree for close on three hundred years. Never was a terribly big or important clan, they didn’t make much of a fuss when they went. Thunderheart heard about this place when he was a cub, all the way over on Grundy Street, and that’s twelve prefectures. Seemed it became a kind of unofficial singing-ground for the trog bell-boys; still use it, keeps us awake most nights, shuggers up there singing their balls off for the glory of clan and family.” Her words had become little buzzing, inconsequential mosquitoes as the ’lectrovan had penetrated the veil of flowering vines that fronted Big Tree and brought them into a three-dimensional grid of green vibrancy. Girders wrapped with vines, spreading limbs, massive boles, leaves, flowers, a faint dappling of light, leaf-diffracted and chlorophyll-green; all dripping, heavy drops of rain falling through the green cubes and shafts and tunnels. Wicker hammocks, cocoons, wooden huts built onto girders, open spaces, floors, terraces, walkways, swings, levels. “Perfect temporary headquarters for the ’postles. Thunderheart remembered how to get the life systems chuggin’ again, and now we have all the water we can drink and the fruit we can eat. And when we get tired of fruit, which is kind of regularly, we go down to the winger deli and shoplift.”
“Shoplift?” He had imagined V. S. Pyar’s muscles bulging as he held up the corner of a building while the Raging Apostles slipped inside.
“Stealing food, toiletries, little things, without anyone’s seeing,” explained the zook, Devadip Samdhavi.
“It’s quite a work of art,” Kansas Byrne had continued. “A very subtle work of prestidigitation. Pity no one even notices. They’re just not geared up to think that way.”
“We’ve had to reinvent a lot of long-lost antisocial skills,” added the zook. “We can get almost anything in the city without having to pay for it. Of course, some big things, big props and all, we have to use marquins for, and then move before the Love Police backtrack the transaction.”
As he replayed his memories in the cinema of the imagination, the singers in the canopy pumped up their throat sacks to give song. Basso profundo voices booming to the moon, and pride and glory and ambition as the bell-boys did battle in the canopy high above his wicker sleep-basket. The rain, which had wavered indecisively, began again in earnest, raindrops falling from the monsoon sky, raindrops intersecting leaf, growing leaf. Pit. Pat. Pit. Falling on the singers and the Big Tree and the gray, steely, lone waters of the Lamarinthian Canal and the barges growling along it: drip, drop, drip—all across this great city of Yu. He was again taken up into clairaudience, and in the universal voice he heard voices.
“I still maintain it’s too dangerous, we cannot afford to take risks.”
“But the whole thing is about taking risks. We take a risk every time we go out on the streets, every time we use our marquins or filch something, we take a risk when every famulus-carrying winger sees us on the streets.”