The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  “It will have a properly functioning City, to begin with. But the Free want far more than that. They want a more equitable distribution of resources, freedom for people to live their own lives, freedom for anyone to move out into the Heartland and settle and farm and build new towns and start new businesses.”

  “So,” Danyl said. “It all comes down to me agreeing to do this.” He paused. “Let me ask you this. What if I refuse?”

  Beruthi said nothing.

  Alania’s eyes narrowed. “No,” she said. Anger boiled up in her again. “No, it doesn’t come down to him agreeing, does it? You’ve—we’ve—made it so that there’s no choice left.” She rounded on Danyl. “We’ve made ourselves prisoners, coming here! I’ve ended up right where the kidnappers would have brought me. Beruthi will imprison me here, just like he always intended, guarded by more of his damn robots, and robots will drag you off to the City to be ‘plugged in’ as Captain whether you like it or not!”

  “Alania,” Beruthi said, his tone pleading, “you don’t understand how vital this all is. How could you? You’ve lived a pampered life. You don’t know what life is like below Twelfth Tier—”

  “Don’t I?” Alania snapped, rounding on him. “You made a point of letting me ‘escape’ to Fifth and be threatened by a gang . . . although that was just a way to make sure I never made a serious attempt to escape again, wasn’t it? But it still made an impression. And in the last two days, I’ve seen the Middens, been threatened by the Rustbloods, fought Provosts, met the River People. I understand that the world could be better. But I keep coming back to one question: do you really begin making a better world by treating people like robots? Making them robots, in our case? Or by murdering babies?”

  “Alania,” Danyl said. His voice was soft, but there was a note in it that made her turn to look at him. “I’ll do it.”

  Alania felt like he’d driven his fist into her gut. “Danyl! Become Captain? Give up your life for some nightmarish existence as a glorified circuit board? Why?”

  “Because Erl believed in this cause,” Danyl said simply. “Because things have to change. Because no one else can do it.”

  I can, Alania almost said, but she didn’t. There was no way she would allow herself to be plugged into the City, to become Captain—if Beruthi were telling the truth, to become Kranz. Nobody should be sentenced to that. And the thought that Danyl might be . . .

  Danyl turned to Beruthi. “How do we make this happen?”

  Beruthi let out a gust of air, as though he’d been holding his breath. Then he reached into his pocket. “The first thing is to give you this.” He pulled out a golden rod about ten centimeters long and a centimeter in diameter. Alania recognized it instantly, and she gasped.

  Danyl glanced at her. “What is it?”

  “A high-level City access key,” she said. “Most of the Officers carry one. They open a lot of doors and give elevator access.”

  “But only some doors and limited elevator access,” Beruthi said. “This one . . .” He held the key up. Twilight was falling outside, and the City had vanished in the gathering gloom, but the office lights glinted off the key’s golden length. “This one opens all doors, public or private, and allows access to all Tiers . . . including Thirteenth.” He lowered the key and held it out to Danyl. “To the Captain.”

  Alania stared at the rod as Danyl took it, a little gingerly. “How is that possible?” she breathed.

  “Because it tells all security systems that the person wielding it is the Captain,” Beruthi said. “It’s keyed to your Captain-specific genetic traits and the Captain’s nanobots in your bloodstreams, which means it will only work for Danyl or you. For anyone else, it not only won’t open a thing, it will set off alarms that will bring a horde of Provosts running.”

  “How did you make something like this?” Danyl said.

  Beruthi shrugged. “Once I had access to the nanobot equipment, it was easy. Well, maybe not easy, but at least possible.”

  “Wow,” Danyl said. He tucked the key very carefully into his left pants pocket, then patted it as if to reassure himself it was there. “Wow,” he said again. “And three days ago, all I wanted was an ordinary City Pass.”

  “You won’t need one of those,” Beruthi assured him. “You will be smuggled into the City aboard the same transport that brought you here and let off in First Tier. There’s a secure haven there, a place called Bertel’s Bar. You’ll be expected. The owner is a friend. She’ll tuck you away until I can join you. Then I’ll take you to Twelfth and get you to the elevator to Thirteenth—and we’ll do what must be done.”

  Danyl nodded. “Bertel’s Bar,” he repeated.

  “Kranz is looking for us,” Alania said. “There’ll be cameras . . .”

  “Cameras,” Beruthi said, “do not survive long in First Tier. And the few that are operational will suffer a minor malfunction for an hour or so after your transport arrives. No one will see you.” His lips quirked again. “In any event, the last place Kranz will expect you to show up is the City.”

  Danyl nodded. Alania couldn’t believe he was taking all of this so calmly, considering he was planning to take the place of the Captain. “When do I leave?” he asked.

  “My robots are already preparing the transport. It was one thing to bring you here in an empty one, but it needs to be loaded to hide you from cursory inspection before you use it to enter the City. It should be ready within an hour or two, but I was thinking you must both need baths, a decent dinner, and a good night’s sleep. How about first thing in the morning?”

  How about never? Alania thought, but Danyl said, “That sounds great.”

  “In that case,” Beruthi said, “if you’ll come with me, I’ll—”

  An urgent chime from his desk cut him off.

  TWENTY-THREE

  BERUTHI’S HEAD JERKED around. He crossed to his desk in two strides, rounded it, and swept his hand over its surface. He stared down at a glowing screen, frowning. “Provosts,” he said. “At the gate to my Estate.”

  “They know we went there to catch the transport?” Danyl asked.

  Beruthi shook his head. “No. They can’t. They’re probably conducting a routine Estate-to-Estate search. They’ll see my security is intact and be on their—”

  A new alarm sounded. Beruthi’s eyes widened, and he suddenly went pale. “They just blew the gate. They’re storming the house.” He spun toward Danyl and Alania. “That means they’re already on their way here. You have to go. Now. I can talk my way out of whatever has brought this on, but not if they actually find you on my property.”

  Danyl stared at him. “Go where? How? If they’ve linked you to all this, the transport I’m taking will be intercepted before we can get anywhere near the City!” It’s all falling apart, a part of him whispered with shameful relief. You won’t have to be Captain. You won’t have to plug yourself into the City . . .

  “There’s another option. Come with me.” Beruthi almost ran to the front door. Danyl exchanged one glance with Alania, and then they hurried after him together.

  It wasn’t as dark outside as it had seemed when they were looking out from the bright office; the west still glowed pink, though a few stars were beginning to prick the sky. Beruthi strode swiftly across the stones of the compound to a side gate in the wall, made of the same golden wood as the beams of the house bound in black iron. He slapped his palm against a plate in the rock, and the gate swung open. A dirt path stretched away beyond it. “Follow that path,” he said. “To the River.”

  “The River?” Danyl said. He blinked. “You mean, the River?” Considering that their last experience on the River had involved being swept over a waterfall and netted like fish, he didn’t like the sound of that.

  “There’s a boat. A contingency vessel, in case I ever had to flee the Retreat and make my way to the City by a more secretive route. It will t
ake you down to the Middens. You know your way around down there. Get up into the City however you can. If I had more time, I could arrange safe passage, but . . . you’ll have to manage it on your own. Find an access port in the Undercity; the key will get you through it. Get up to First and go to Bertel’s as planned. I’ll meet you there once I’ve smoothed everything out.”

  “What if you can’t?” Alania demanded.

  “I can,” Beruthi said, and if he felt any doubt, he didn’t let it into his voice. “Kranz trusts me completely. There’s no way he ordered this. I’ll go back to the City with the Provosts when they arrive and straighten it out once I’m there, then find you at Bertel’s. Now hurry up—they’ll be sending ’copters, and that means we don’t have much time.”

  He twisted around to look out over the Heartland. “It’s almost dark. There’s no reason for them to go to the River, but even if they do, they won’t be able to see you. The Canyon isn’t very deep this far north, but it’s deep enough, and the boat is designed to be hard to see—and stealthed against radar and infrared sensors. But you have to go now.”

  With that, he shoved them both through the gate with such sudden force that Danyl had no time to react. He spun, only to see the gate slam shut. He tried the latch, but the gate wouldn’t budge, and it ignored his palm against the lockplate.

  “Another boat?” Alania said from behind him. “The last one almost killed us.”

  “At least the water should be clean on this side of the City,” Danyl said. He stepped back from the gate and looked up at the towering peaks, now just black silhouettes against the brightening stars, remembering the glaciers that topped them. “And very, very cold. But what choice do we have?”

  His head jerked to the left as he heard the sound of rotors, far off in the distance but rapidly growing closer.

  “That answers that,” Alania said.

  They hurried along the trail, which at first climbed up into the woods on the arm of the mountain embracing the house to the east. At the top of the ridge, breathing hard, Alania panting beside him, Danyl turned and looked back, just as the helicopters thundering toward Retreat Beruthi turned on their nose lights. A harsh white glare pinned the house and its fenced compound to the mountainside.

  Beruthi stood in the open, hands behind his back, clearly nonthreatening. Danyl glanced around the compound. No sentry robots were in sight. He’s doing his best to defuse the situation. “He seems awfully confident he can talk his way out of being arrested,” he said out loud.

  “He probably can,” Alania said. “A friend of Kranz’s, recently promoted to Lieutenant Commander? He’s got every reason to be confident.” She shook her head. “I’ve never met any Officer who wasn’t supremely self-confident. You might even say arrogant.”

  Danyl glanced at his . . . sister? The word seemed as unreal as everything else that was happening.

  We’re Cityborn. Not even fully human. Special genetic makeup . . . nanobots . . . literally bred to be what we are, like prize cattle.

  But still. She was his sister, and he felt a surge of protectiveness as he looked at her. Erl had been the only member of his family, and he was . . . missing. Now he had another, and he vowed there and then that he wouldn’t lose her, too. If the only way to keep her safe was to become Captain, he would do it. No matter what it meant for him. No matter how terrifying it might be . . . and it sounded supremely terrifying.

  “We should push on toward the River,” Alania said. “If things go badly, we need to be as far away from here as possible.” But she made no move to follow her own advice. Instead she waited, like Danyl, to see what would happen next.

  Kranz barely slept the night after the raid on the River People; he sat up anxiously and waited for word—which never came—of Alania’s and Danyl’s recapture. Earlier than usual the following morning, he plunged back into routine work.

  How did it come to this? he thought as he slogged through yet another report of failing infrastructure. How had the life of the City—the City the Kranzes had devoted their lives to since before it was a City, the City they had given everything over almost five centuries of selfless service—come to depend on two young people on the run?

  He blamed his predecessors. Had his grandclone done his duty a century ago, when the replacement should have taken place, long before the cloning unit finally broke down, there would have been no need for his desperate Cityborn Project. Even if cloning the Captain had failed and his forerunner had hit upon the same scheme he had, there would have been many more viable eggs remaining, frozen when the Captain became the Captain, long before the founding of the City. There would’ve been more opportunities to get things right, more redundancy in case things went wrong.

  But the uncertainty of the replacement process, which had never been attempted, had stayed his grandclone’s hand and Kranz’s own “father’s.” And the Captain’s decline had been slow at first, almost imperceptible. The signals of it—temperature controls run amok, ventilation failures, computer malfunctions, blackouts, other breakdowns, too many to enumerate—were impossible to untangle from the general decline of the City, which, after all, had never been intended to remain intact this long. Every First Officer Kranz knew that the Captain would eventually wear out and have to be replaced, because Thomas Kranz himself had known it. It was the great doom hanging over them all, passed down from Kranz to Kranz. Cloning the Captain, with her peculiar genetic makeup and even more advanced nanobots, had seemed a different order of magnitude from simply cloning another Kranz. None of them had wanted to act. The uncertainties were too great, the risks almost unthinkable.

  Yet procrastination could go on only so long, and it had been Kranz’s misfortune to be the First Officer who could procrastinate no longer. When the cloning unit had finally and irreparably failed after Falkin’s creation, he had realized that he could not carry out the long-planned procedure for replacing the Captain, the one crystal-clear in the memories he carried from Thomas Kranz. He could not clone the Captain.

  Making the blow even more devastating, he knew that with the failure of the cloning unit, Falkin would be the last First Officer Kranz. And he knew that would have been true even if the cloning unit hadn’t failed, because the nanobots that turned each generation’s clone into a new First Officer Kranz were also failing. Science Officer Prentis had made that clear. Kranz had been forced to accept that his Thomas Kranz memories were faulty because his nanobots had been degraded by too much copying.

  It would be years before Falkin’s nanobots were fully activated and Kranz would learn just how faulty they were. But the moment Prentis had proven to him that the line of First Officer Kranzes would end with them, he had set his mind to figure out how to salvage the situation, how to ensure that both the Kranz memories and the Captain’s unique ability to become the brain and nervous system of the City were preserved.

  And that had led to the Cityborn. He had decided that the only hope was to merge Captain and First Officer into one person, to create a Captain who would be conscious and aware, able to both control the City and to govern it the way the Kranzes had always governed it.

  That had, after all, been the original intention for the Captain. She was supposed to have been conscious and aware. But Thomas Kranz had discovered that it could not work; the Captain had been unstable, and the City had been fatally damaged because of her instability. He had made the difficult but necessary choice to keep the Captain less than fully functional while taking operational control himself. Kranz remembered that choice as clearly as if he had made it himself, which in some ways he had. That memory of the Captain’s instability was another reason his ancestors had put off the replacement process too long. If that instability were somehow inherent in the Captain’s genetic makeup, then the new Captain might endanger the City all over again, just like the original had.

  His more recent choice had been no less difficult than his original’s, but
also no less necessary. And so he had donated his sperm to fertilize the Captain’s eggs, the embryos were implanted into the artificial wombs, and at the appropriate time, the Cityborn had come into the world: seven babies with the potential to save the City from collapse.

  The genetics had been hit or miss, as he had feared. The initial tests showed that only three of the seven children had the genes both to become Captain and accept the Kranz memories. Three infants on whose tiny shoulders rested the future of everything.

  Then . . . that night. Kranz’s teeth clenched as he thought about it. The supposedly secure Twelfth Tier had been infiltrated. One of the precious Cityborn had been killed as she lay in her crib. Another—Danyl, he knew now—had been spirited away by the thrice-damned Ensign Erlkin Orillia, who was now lying in that same hospital, critically wounded and unconscious but heavily guarded all the same. Only the fact Alania had been taken out of the ward by one of the carebots because of a slight fever, placing her safely out of reach of the child-murderer, had prevented total disaster.

  Yet now total disaster might have come upon Kranz anyway. Danyl and Alania had spent a night in the open. They might have been seriously injured when the helicopter had crashed. The nanobots Alania had been injected with at birth should have protected her, since they had been carefully programmed (oh, so carefully programmed!) and maintained throughout her life. Danyl’s had surely deteriorated to uselessness by now, since he’d been living in the Middens without access to proper care. But in truth, Kranz couldn’t even be sure Alania was safe. Her nanobots were not fully activated yet, and they could be overwhelmed by severe enough trauma.

  Just after lunch, which he took at his desk, he at last heard a chime. His heart jumped. He glanced at the comm panel and felt a flicker of annoyance that it wasn’t the call he was waiting for from Commander Havelin. He touched the Accept button. “Yes, Science Officer Prentis?” he said, trying not to sound peevish and almost succeeding.