The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  He’d never really thought of that as a possibility before. He could die.

  He tried to scream for help, but he didn’t have the air or the space. He could only remain there, curled tight in the darkness, trapped, helpless.

  Then the trash moved around him. The pressure eased. The light turned from black to gray, and he glimpsed sky through cracks in the rubbish. And then the trash was suddenly swept aside, and the blue sky appeared, and a lined brown face looked down at him, wisps of gray hair peeking out beneath a synthileather cap.

  Erl!

  “Help,” Danyl said weakly, but of course Erl was already reaching down to him. There was someone else with him, the man in the dark coat and glasses, and that was weird, Danyl thought, though the thought was rather fuzzy. Erl had always said that no one from the Last Chance Market would ever step off the platform and into the Middens, and yet . . .

  He drifted into unconsciousness, half woke in a daze as he was hauled out of the hole and pain stabbed his leg and side, drifted off again, had a transient moment of awareness of being slung over Erl’s shoulders and carried through the Middens, and then another of Erl lugging him down the tunnel leading to their hidden home in the Canyon wall. Erl laid him on the dining table—We’ll have to disinfect it, Danyl thought fitfully—and fetched the old docbot he’d scavenged years before. A sphere about twenty centimeters in diameter skittered across the reddish stone floor on three spindly metal legs. A glowing blue scanner orb extended on a flexible stalk and turned to Erl. “Please select a function,” the docbot said in a light female voice.

  “First aid,” Erl said.

  “Please identify the injured person.”

  “Danyl.”

  The docbot’s orb turned toward Danyl. “Please remove the patient’s clothing to permit diagnosis and treatment.”

  Erl hurriedly and roughly stripped Danyl to allow the docbot to get at his wounds. The pain brought Danyl more fully awake, and he tried to help as best he could, gasping as he saw how much blood covered his pants and shirt, then going pale when he saw the hole in his side. He shouldn’t be able to see inside himself like that . . .

  But shouldn’t there be even more blood? he thought. Because it looked to him like the wounds were already starting to close, and even though his ordinary scrapes and cuts had always healed quickly, that couldn’t be right, not so soon . . .

  Something hissed against his arm, and the world faded out again.

  He woke in his own bed down the hall from the living/dining room, clean and naked and bandaged beneath the blankets. He stared up at the familiar stone ceiling for a moment, blinking, trying to make sense of the scattered jumble of disconnected memories since the rumble of the slide had startled him.

  “How do you feel?” Erl said from his right, and he turned his head to see his guardian sitting there, finger marking his place in the old water-stained book he was reading, another bit of salvage from the Middens.

  “Okay,” Danyl said. Surprisingly, it was true. He didn’t hurt, and the dazed, foggy feeling was gone. He sat up. “How long have I been asleep?”

  “A day,” Erl said. “The docbot thought you needed that long, so it put you under.”

  Danyl touched the bandage on his side, expecting to feel a twinge, but he felt nothing. In fact, it felt as if there were no wound there at all, but it had only been a day, how could . . .

  Erl reached out and touched his arm. “Don’t play with the bandages,” he said.

  “I don’t feel anything,” Danyl said.

  “The docbot has some powerful analgesics.”

  “Anal . . . what?”

  “Pain medicine,” Erl said. He put his book down on Danyl’s cracked plastic bedside table. “Hungry?”

  Danyl hadn’t thought about it until then, but now that he did . . . “Starving!”

  Erl laughed. “I thought you would be. I’ve got a treat in the kitchen. Fresh vegetables and a couple of real steaks, not vat-grown.”

  Danyl’s mouth suddenly flooded with saliva. He’d only had real meat once, when he was nine, and he’d been craving it ever since. “How . . . ?”

  “That’s what I was bargaining for at the Last Chance Market,” Erl said. “You know, the place you had absolutely no business being.”

  Danyl felt a little ashamed, but only a little. “I’m twelve years old,” he said stoutly. “I’m not a kid anymore. I want out of the Middens someday, and you said the only way out was through the Last Chance Market, so I—”

  “Disobeyed me and almost got yourself killed,” Erl finished. “Was that the responsible action of someone who is ‘not a kid anymore’?”

  Danyl opened his mouth, couldn’t think of anything to say, and closed it again.

  “Exactly.” But then Erl’s stern expression softened into a near-smile. “All the same,” he said, “I can’t fault your stealth. I had no idea you’d followed me until I heard you yell.” The smiled faded. “Good thing I did hear you. Otherwise you would have just vanished without a trace, and I would never have known what had happened to you.” He looked positively grim at the thought, and his hand snaked out and gripped Danyl’s arm again, this time hard enough to hurt. “Promise me. Promise me you’ll never do anything that stupid again.”

  “You’ll never let me go out there on my own,” Danyl said, a little frightened by Erl’s intensity, which made him sound more petulant than he’d intended.

  Erl squeezed his arm a moment longer, then relaxed his grip and drew back his hand. “Yes, I will. But you need more training. And someday you will get into the City, I promise you. But you need more training before that, too.” Erl got up. “Get dressed and come down the hall. You’re right, you’re not a kid anymore, and there’s something I want to show you before you eat.”

  Erl went out, and Danyl swung his legs over the side of the bed. Despite what Erl had said, he touched the bandage on his side, then the one on his leg. He felt nothing. He hesitated, then peeled back the edge of the adhesive holding the round patch of synthiskin on his flank.

  Underneath it, his real skin was as smooth and unbroken as its artificial covering, only a shiny pink mark showing where he’d been impaled. He stared, then hastily pushed the synthiskin back into place. He didn’t disturb the leg bandage, but he was certain he’d find the same thing under it.

  He hadn’t imagined being injured. He hadn’t dreamed it. The pain and blood had been real. But somehow, the wounds had healed . . . in a day.

  If it’s really been only a day, he thought. Maybe I’ve been out a lot longer and Erl didn’t want to worry me.

  That was easy enough to check. His scavenged watch lay on his bedside table. It confirmed what Erl had first said; it had been a little more than twenty-seven hours since the trashslide had rumbled down on his head.

  Weird, he thought. Maybe the docbot sealed the hole in my skin, but I’m still healing underneath? For a second he thought he’d figured it out, but then he frowned. But if the skin is sealed up, why do I need a bandage?

  There was no way to ask the ancient docbot, whose AI could not respond to those sorts of questions, and he wasn’t sure Erl would know—he certainly wasn’t a doctor. But Danyl still intended to ask him . . .

  . . . except it went out of his head when, dressed but still barefoot on the cool stone floor, he followed the mouth-watering scent of cooking meat down the hallway to the living/dining room, and Erl opened a door across from the hallway that he’d never seen open before.

  Erl had always said he kept the door locked because the room on the other side had collapsed and was filled with rubble, but nothing could have been further from the truth. In fact, it was the largest room in their carved-from-the-Canyon-wall hideaway. In the middle stood a circular dais maybe half a meter high. Hanging from the ceiling was a helmet that would completely cover Danyl’s head if he put it on.

  “What is
it?” he asked in wonder.

  “A reality simulator,” Erl said.

  Danyl blinked at him. “A what?”

  Erl frowned. “Did the trashslide make you deaf?”

  Danyl shook his head. “No, it’s just . . . how did it get here?”

  “How does anything get here?” Erl said. “I salvaged it. Before you were born. Same hoard I found the docbot in. I kept it because I thought the parts might be useful, but when I found you . . . I decided to see if I could get it working. Took some serious trading at the Market, but eventually I got the equipment I needed to fix it.”

  “But . . . what’s it for?”

  Erl sighed. “For you, of course. I told you—one day you will go into the City, and when you do, you’ll need to know a lot more. And long before that, you’re going to be running around the Middens on your own, and for that”—he gave Danyl a frown—“you also need to know a lot more. As you proved yesterday.”

  “But . . . what will it teach me?”

  Erl pointed at the machine. “For one thing, with this, you can explore every Tier of the City—well, every Tier that’s not restricted. Of course many of the Tiers have changed a lot from the way they looked originally . . . but still, it will give you a feel for what to expect when it’s finally time for you to go inside.”

  “Wow,” Danyl said, because it seemed like he should say something.

  “That will be useful someday, but of more immediate use will be weapons and self-defense training. It can help with that too.”

  Danyl’s face split into a grin. “You’re going to teach me how to fight?”

  “Yes,” Erl said. “You were lucky yesterday in more ways than one: lucky because I heard you yell and rescued you from the trash, but even luckier that you didn’t run into the Rustbloods. You’d be their slave right now if you had.”

  Danyl swallowed. He’d seen the Rustblood compound from a distance; the desiccated corpse that hung on a chain beside the gate as decoration and warning had been enough to give him the chills. “But I’ve never even seen a Rustblood.”

  “That’s because I know how to stay clear of them,” Erl said. “Something else you need to learn.” He looked up at the helmet and the bank of equipment from which it hung, bolted to the ceiling of the stone chamber. “I intended to start this part of your training when you turned thirteen, but your little escapade yesterday has convinced me it can’t wait any longer.” He turned back to Danyl. “So. Eat. You need another week of convalescence before you can do any serious training, but—”

  “But I’ve already healed!”

  Erl frowned at him. “You lifted the bandage?”

  Uh-oh, Danyl thought. “Um, it’s just . . . It doesn’t hurt, and I thought . . .”

  “Appearances can be deceiving,” Erl said. “The docbot sealed your skin, but you’re still damaged underneath.”

  “That’s what I thought, but it doesn’t even—”

  “I’m not a doctor,” Erl snapped. “I just know the docbot said to leave the bandage on. So leave the bandage on. Got it?”

  “Got it,” Danyl said meekly.

  “As I was about to say before you interrupted me,” Erl said, “you can’t start any physical training yet, but you can start your virtual tour of the City, and I’ll fill you in on what I know about each Tier.”

  A thought struck Danyl. “Can we take a virtual tour of the Thirteenth Tier? Say hi to a virtual Captain?”

  Erl went strangely silent for a moment. “No,” he said. “No, you can’t see the Thirteenth Tier. Not yet.”

  “Not yet?” Danyl pounced on that. “Then I can someday?”

  “Anything is possible,” Erl said shortly. “Now, eat. Your body needs fuel to heal, and even without that, you’re growing like a tangleweed. Steaks tonight. Synthetics again tomorrow, but extra-large helpings for a bit.”

  Maybe getting buried in a trashslide isn’t so bad after all, Danyl thought as he took his first succulent bite of steak a few minutes later. If it means eating like this, I’ll have to try to get buried at least once a month.

  He stared at the door to the training room as he ate, anxious to get started on learning everything it could teach him.

  I will get into the City someday, he thought fiercely. Someday.

  Anything that brought that day closer, he was all for.

  He took another bite of steak and bit down fiercely.

  THREE

  THE CITY’S CURRENT First Officer, Staydmore Kranz, stood on the black-tiled floor of the Twelfth-Tier hangar and waited for Falkin Kranz, the young man who would be the City’s last First Officer, to emerge from the just-landed aircar. Beyond the hangar’s giant open hatch, the First Officer could see the distant ice-covered peaks of the western Iron Ring. The aircar carrying Falkin had come from Resort Kranz in the shadow of those peaks, a place the First Officer had loved when he was a boy but now only thought of when he was receiving his regular reports on the progress of the youth he was about to meet.

  Perhaps Falkin had loved the Resort, too, though his life there had been far different from that of young Staydmore. Staydmore Kranz had grown up with four identical brothers, all of them clones of the previous First Officer, as he had been a clone of the one before him, and he of the one before him, all the way back to the original First Officer Kranz almost five hundred years ago. But Falkin Kranz, Staydmore’s only clone, had grown up alone.

  Like Staydmore, Falkin Kranz had been kept ignorant of his inheritance as he’d matured. He’d been well educated by the elderly couple who ran the Estate, though he’d been shown little affection. He believed himself to be an orphan.

  He was, by all accounts, weak in both mind and body, weaknesses that had also been present to greater or lesser degrees in Staydmore Kranz’s “brothers.” It was why Staydmore had sailed through the battery of tests they had all been required to take and his brothers had not, why he was now First Officer and they were . . . not.

  Their regrettable but necessary elimination would have horrified the young Staydmore Kranz, who had been fond of his brothers, dimwitted and/or clumsy though they had been. But fortunately, by the time it had been carried out, he had no longer been Staydmore Kranz in any significant sense. He was, in mind as well as body, his ancestor, First Officer Thomas Kranz; the nanobots he had been injected with at birth had been fully activated when he’d turned twenty, rewriting his mind and personality.

  With that sea change had come the heavy burden he now carried: the burden of being the only person in the City or Heartland who knew the truth about how humans had come here . . . and how humanity’s place in this world teetered on a knife’s edge of catastrophic collapse.

  A new man, literally, Staydmore Kranz had worked side by side with his predecessor for many years, absorbing all the minute details of the day-to-day management of the City. When the previous First Officer had turned eighty, the nanobots had shut down his body as programmed, and the full authority of the position had passed to Staydmore Kranz.

  Three days ago, Falkin Kranz’s nanobots had been fully activated, beginning the process of rewriting his mind as they had rewritten Staydmore’s, imprinting upon it the mind of their original. Staydmore Kranz would live another twenty-eight years, barring catastrophe, but it was past time to begin working with his successor, especially since Falkin would be the last First Officer Kranz of the line.

  Science Officer Prentis claimed there had been a terminal failure in the ancient and poorly understood cloning equipment, something that they did not have the knowledge or technology to rectify, but Kranz suspected that was Prentis being diplomatic. She probably thought it safer to risk lying to the First Officer than to baldly state the truth, though he himself had already guessed it: that only one clone had been successfully created, and that one was badly flawed because there were only so many times you could copy anything before it became garbled. With
Falkin, First Officer Thomas Kranz’s grand scheme of protecting the City forever had stumbled to its inevitable end.

  Still, Kranz hoped that the nanobots that had rewritten Falkin’s mind might also be able to strengthen his body. It was not important that Falkin live to the programmed limit of eighty years, but it was important that he live long enough to assist in the great project Kranz had launched to save the City. It was a new take on Thomas Kranz’s original vision, one which would rejuvenate the ancient City’s faltering infrastructure and keep at bay for another half a millennium the dreadful fate all the First Officers had been striving so hard to avoid. Kranz needed someone he could trust completely to help him oversee the project, and the only person he absolutely knew he could trust was himself—which, in all important respects, Falkin Kranz should now be.

  Everything depends on the Cityborn, Kranz thought, staring at the aircar. He could see movement through the darkened canopy. The Cityborn can save us, but there are so many things that could go wrong. With Falkin at my side, the transition will be so much easier to manage.

  There was another reason he was relieved to have Falkin here at last. Sixteen years ago, Ensign Erlkin Orillia had almost derailed the Cityborn Project and ensured the City’s eventual collapse. He’d kidnapped one of the candidate babies and murdered another. Only by fortuitous happenstance had he failed to destroy all Kranz’s plans. Orillia had flown off with the kidnapped child from this very hangar, landed in the Iron Ring, and then vanished. No doubt the two had long since perished. But Kranz knew there were other malcontents in the City, and no matter how tight a lid he tried to keep on things—and the Provosts kept a very tight lid indeed—it was not entirely outside the realm of possibility that someone might manage to assassinate the First Officer before the Cityborn Project came to fruition. Having a spare First Officer Kranz on hand would provide some insurance against such a catastrophe.

  The aircar door opened. A Provost stepped out first, hand on the hilt of his slugthrower, and looked around the hangar. When he saw Kranz, he snapped to attention and saluted. Kranz impatiently sketched a salute back. The Provost stepped to one side, and Falkin emerged at last.