The Cityborn

by Edward Willett

  . . . but for how long?

  She tried to move, tried to raise her arms and push at the pod lid, but she had lost control of her limbs. She could still feel her heart beating, but she had the strangest feeling it was pushing more than just blood through her veins, that it was somehow also pumping water and sewage and lubricants and other unnamed fluids through an endless network of pipes. She knew she was breathing, but every breath also seemed to be moving air through ducts and vents and fans.

  She closed her eyes—though she had no way of knowing whether they were really closed or not, since it made no difference to the strange welter of images flooding her mind—and tried to sense what was happening in the chamber in which she lay. She pictured Thirteenth Tier, the gardens, the small, white, temple-like building . . .

  . . . and suddenly she saw it, though her perspective was strange: she found herself looking down at the top of Kranz’s head as the pod lid slowly descended. She saw Danyl, still curled up like a baby, lying on the floor behind him.

  In a moment, Kranz would give his final command, and she would cease to exist. She strained muscles she could not move, tried to scream, tried to protest, but nothing worked. All she could do was watch, helpless, as he leaned forward to execute her.

  And then she sensed in a way she could not describe that someone else was approaching. She tried to expand her view of the Tier, and her perspective shifted. Now she was looking down the path of crushed white rocks leading from the antechamber to the “temple.”

  Someone rushed along that path: Erl.

  He reached the door.

  Alania jumped back to her previous view as he burst into the control room—and shot Kranz at point-blank range.

  With no way of knowing how far things had progressed in the Captain’s control chamber, Erl burst out of the antechamber at a dead run, the powerful beamer in his hands. A robot scuttled toward him, and he burned a hole through its central processor, then pounded the length of the white path. Counting on the element of surprise, he slammed through the door, saw Kranz standing over the Captain’s bed, barely registered Danyl curled naked on the floor, and fired directly into Kranz’s back.

  Light flashed and acrid smoke billowed, and Kranz whirled to face him. The back of his uniform was burned away, but the man himself was clearly unharmed. Erl knew instantly what had happened: the First Officer’s nanobots had deflected the energy of the blast just as his own had saved him from the Provost’s beam in the Quarters Kranz stairwell. The effort must have taken a huge bite of the nanobots’ available energy, and if he could have fired two or three more times, he was certain he could have overwhelmed them. But he never got that chance; Kranz swung his own beamer up and fired, not at Erl—he’d clearly made the lightning-quick deduction that Erl could only be standing here unharmed if he, too, were protected by fully active nanobots—but at Erl’s weapon. It shattered in his hands, and he let it drop as he hurled himself at the First Officer.

  Kranz toppled backward, Erl on top of him, and then everything devolved into a whirl of blows and counterblows. All Officers learned unarmed combat, though most completed only the minimal required training and never practiced. Erl had worked hard at it when he had been living on Twelfth Tier, and he had trained in the simulator and sparred with Danyl as the boy grew into a man, but he knew at once that he was outclassed. Though he’d landed on top of Kranz, an instant later, he was thrown backward and slammed to the floor, rolling over and out of the way a split second before Kranz’s fist would have crushed his windpipe.

  He fought on, but the contest had already been decided. Less than a minute after he’d charged into the control room, Erl lay crumpled not far from Danyl, breathing hoarsely, his broken left leg bent awkwardly beneath him. From the agony in his chest, he knew he also had broken ribs and suspected he might have punctured a lung. The nanobots were working, but even they could not knit bones in minutes, and minutes were all he had left.

  If that.

  Kranz limped over to him, his face splattered with blood from his broken nose—the satisfying crunch it had made when Erl’s fist connected with it had been his one triumphant moment of the brief battle. Kranz’s beamer lay near Danyl. He didn’t bother to pick it up. Erl knew Kranz could kill him with his bare hands if he wanted to, and clearly he wanted to.

  “You’ve failed,” Kranz snarled, standing over him. “The pod is closed, and when I activate her nanobots in a moment, she will become both the new Captain and the new First Officer, irretrievably, for the rest of her life. Beruthi is dead. And now . . . so are you.”

  He reached down to snap Erl’s neck . . .

  . . . and then screamed and jerked upright as his own beamer, held in Danyl’s trembling hands, burned into his back.

  Danyl came slowly back to himself, his shattered consciousness contracting and coalescing, the strange fire that had scorched his nerves receding. His awareness of his own body grew bit by bit. He realized first that he was cold, then that he was lying on a hard surface, then that he was naked . . .

  And then, all at once, his lingering connection to the City vanished. He was suddenly fully aware, fully awake, shivering, hurting, but himself again. And when he raised his head, he saw the First Officer beating the man he had always thought of as his father to a bloody pulp.

  Kranz stood over the sprawled, crippled Erl, ready to deliver the coup de grâce . . . and Danyl realized that a beamer lay close at hand. He forced his aching muscles to move, seized the beamer, rolled over, sat up . . . and fired.

  At first, the beam seemed to have no effect other than burning away swatches of the First Officer’s already ragged and bloodstained uniform, though Kranz cried out and straightened. But Danyl, desperate and despairing and deeply, deeply angry, held down the firing stud, discharging the weapon in one long, continuous blast, and as Kranz lurched toward him, whatever strange protection he had against the beam suddenly failed utterly and completely.

  The beam sliced through his midriff like a scalpel, and Kranz looked down with an expression of almost comical shock as his guts spilled out, sizzling in the still-burning beam. He raised his head. “You . . .” he began, but he got no further—the beam had found his spine. It scored the wall above Erl’s head, then sputtered out.

  The First Officer died before his steaming body hit the floor. Blood spilled out of him, a vast pool of it, slicking the floor, soaking Danyl’s and Alania’s discarded clothing. Danyl dropped the beamer. He stared at the Kranz, then suddenly remembered Alania. He staggered to his feet, staring around the small chamber, but she was nowhere to be seen.

  “Transfer complete,” the strange male voice said. “We have a new Captain.”

  “No!” Danyl cried hoarsely. He stumbled toward the command pod through Kranz’s blood. “Alania . . .”

  “You can’t . . . stop it,” a voice said. He turned to see Erl hauling himself slowly into a sitting position, grimacing with pain as he did so. “Once it’s done . . . it’s done.”

  “You . . .” Danyl took an unsteady step toward his erstwhile guardian. “I thought you were dead.”

  Erl coughed and grimaced again, holding his side. Blood stained the corner of his mouth. “I should be,” he said. “Would have been a minute ago, if you hadn’t grabbed Kranz’s beamer. But . . .”

  “Nanobots,” Danyl said. “The damned nanobots. You have them, too.”

  Erl nodded.

  Danyl had to hold on to the bottom end of the command pod. He didn’t want to look into the other end, didn’t want to see Alania’s face behind the window where he had first glimpsed the Captain’s. “You’ve known,” he whispered. “All my life. You’ve known what I was meant for. You knew I would end up here. You planned for me to end up here. When you sent us off to Yvelle . . . you knew.”

  Erl nodded again. “Yes,” he said. “Beruthi was Prime, but I was . . . Prime Secundus, I guess you would say. Equal t
o Beruthi, but I chose to be the one who withdrew from the City to look after you—our pride and joy. When Kranz made Beruthi Alania’s guardian, we thought we couldn’t lose. Then everything went wrong, and against all odds, you two were thrown together. From there . . . we had to improvise.”

  The strange prickling heat Danyl had felt from the nanobots in his bloodstream seemed to have returned, but he knew this heat was fanned by his own fury and had nothing to with microscopic machines. “Everything you told me growing up was a lie. You rewrote my memories to keep me in the dark. You pretended to care for me, but all the time I was just a . . . a spare part, a cog in a machine.”

  “A machine intended to make the City better,” Erl said. “And if you were a cog, you were the most important cog of all.”

  “Make the City better how?” Danyl said scornfully. “Beruthi said I’d be able to seize control, overthrow the Officers . . . but that was never the real plan, was it?” He slammed his fist down on the command pod in which Alania was imprisoned. “This thing would have left me with no control at all. You programmed the nanobots inside me, didn’t you? Just like Kranz programmed the ones in Alania. You set me up so that once I was in the pod I would do whatever you and Beruthi told me to do with no more free will than one of Beruthi’s robots.”

  “It couldn’t be left to chance,” Erl said.

  “You could have told me the truth!”

  “Only to have you reject it all and join the Greenskulls or Rustbloods just to get away from me?” Erl snapped back with sudden heat. “I told you: it couldn’t—could not—be left to chance.”

  Danyl, fueled by his fury, found the strength to step away from the pod until he stood over Erl just like Kranz had before Danyl had cut him down. “You and Beruthi didn’t want to overthrow the Officers at all. You just want to replace Kranz as First Officer. Nothing would have changed except that you would have been in charge!”

  “Everything would have changed!” Erl was starting to look stronger, his dark face less gray and beaded with sweat, as his nanobots repaired the damage he had suffered. “We would have seized power, yes, but we would have tried to restore the City’s functions, tried to make things better for the lower Tiers, even for the people in the Middens. We would have provided more freedom than the Heartland has ever known—”

  “Freedom as long as no one did anything you didn’t approve of, you mean! And my freedom was never a consideration at all. You kidnapped me as a baby and raised me to be Captain, pretended to care for me—”

  “I do care for you!” Erl cried. “Danyl, you have to—”

  “Pretended to care for me,” Danyl went on as if he hadn’t spoken, “and all the while, you didn’t see me as a human being at all. And if you didn’t see me as fully human, how the hell am I supposed to believe that you see the people in the Middens or First Tier or the Tenth Tier prison or any of the other Tiers as human, either?” He turned and looked at the crumpled, oozing body of First Officer Kranz. “I should have thanked him for freeing me from that pod instead of killing him!”

  “Danyl,” Erl said urgently. “Danyl, please believe me. Yes, I knew what you were fated to be, but I’ve always loved you as my own child. I was proud to think you would someday be Captain, proud of the young man I had raised, proud—”

  “You’re a filthy, lying son of a bitch, and the only reason you’re not a steaming pile of smoking meat and shit like First Officer Kranz is that I used up his beamer charge!” Danyl shouted. “The only person who has ever really cared about me is my sister, and now she’s the new cog in this vast machine of yours. Dead, even if her body still lives. Someone else will take over as First Officer, and nothing will change. Everyone who has died, everything Alania and I have been through, has all been a waste. Go to hell.”

  He turned away, walked to the top end of the command pod at last, and looked down into it.

  All he could see of Alania was her face and her bare shoulders. Her eyes were closed but flickering. He had never fully connected with the City; she had. All her life she had been subject to the same kind of programming as he had been, though to different ends. Now that programming had fully engaged. Danyl reached out and touched the window. “Sister,” he murmured. He felt a strange pain in his chest, as though his heart were being torn apart. Alania had never had someone who truly cared for her, and as it turned out, neither had he. For four brief days, they had had each other, but now it was all ending in dust and ashes.

  “Good-bye,” he barely managed to choke out through a suddenly constricted throat. He leaned down and planted a kiss on the glass . . .

  . . . and then jerked back.

  Alania’s eyes had just opened.

  And then she screamed.

  Erl watched the young man he truly had thought of as his son turn away from him, saw him run his hand along the command pod, lean over, and kiss the window above his sister’s face. Something broke inside him.

  Go to hell, Danyl had said, but Erl knew in that moment that he was already there.

  For twenty years, he had raised Danyl to be Captain, and the decades-long plan he and his best friend, Ipsil Beruthi, had concocted together had come to fruition at last . . . only to collapse so spectacularly in the last few minutes.

  Beruthi was dead. Kranz had said so, and Erl believed him, all the more because Danyl and Alania were here but Beruthi was not. Yes, the First Officer was dead, too, and he had had a hand in that . . . but Danyl was not Captain. Alania was, and she had been programmed by Kranz. She would carry out his wishes; she might literally become him, the latest in a long line of tyrants, but this time with all the power of a fully awake Captain to draw on as well.

  Nothing would change, and Erl could not escape. The Provosts would come. He would be taken to Tenth Tier, and he would never again leave it alive, though he might well linger there for years.

  Ipsil is dead. Danyl has turned his back on me. Our plan has failed. We achieved nothing. We failed, and Kranz won, even though he died at the moment of his victory.

  If the victor dies, surely the loser should die, too.

  It didn’t take any great effort on his part. He could command his nanobots to do whatever he wished, and so he commanded them to slip him into unconsciousness, then stop his heart.

  The last thing he saw before darkness claimed him forever was Danyl suddenly jerking upright and stumbling back from the command pod. The last thing he heard was the thin sound of Alania screaming inside.

  What . . . ? he thought, and then he thought nothing more ever again.

  THIRTY-FIVE

  THE MOMENT the command pod cover closed over Alania, her view of what was happening in the Captain’s temple vanished.

  Information poured into her brain, a vast river filling every nook and cranny of her being. Suddenly she knew things she couldn’t even have conceived of a moment before, understood concepts of which she’d had no inkling, grasped realities that would have seemed childish fables before she became the Captain.

  She knew what the City was. She knew where it had come from. She knew what those who built it had intended to achieve . . .

  . . . and she knew how it had all gone wrong.

  The City was not a city at all. It was a vast vessel, like Beruthi’s boat that had brought them down the River. It had been carried through the stars by an even greater vessel, an unimaginably large vessel: the one she had seen a model of in the Thirteenth-Tier antechamber, UES Discovery, which also transported tens of thousands of would-be colonists held in suspended animation. Throughout that journey, only one mind had stayed awake, caring for the sleeping charges, maintaining the ship’s complex systems: the Captain, a living person made a permanent part of the ship’s systems. Her autonomous nervous system, through genetic enhancements and complex nanomachinery, had kept fluids flowing and air circulating. And above all, she had kept the ship on track for the day when a promising candidate f
or colonization revealed itself to her sensors and she could send the first of the colony seeds, captained by a clone of herself, on toward planetfall.

  Each colony seed was designed to ferry colonists to a promising planet and provide the raw materials and technology to begin the process of colonizing a new world.

  A new world implied there was an old world, of course, and the old world, to Alania’s delight, was Earth: the very Earth of the Earthmyth stories she had always enjoyed. It was not a myth at all but a very real place, the true Heartland of all humanity, scattering its seeds out among the stars so that whatever happened to the home planet, the species to which it had given birth would live.

  But something had gone wrong. The City, one of the colony seeds, had clearly been launched from Discovery as planned, but it had never dismantled itself, never opened the Cubes that contained the robots to carry out that dismantling, never become the seed of a thriving new civilization. The colony seed, full of sleeping colonists, had had its own crew of Officers, awakened first, to oversee the landing, Officers who were supposed to give up their authority to a civilian government once the seed had been planted and the colonists roused. But somehow the City Captain, a clone of the original Discovery Captain, had instead been convinced she was still Captain of Discovery, still sailing among the stars. As a result, the dismantling of the colony seed had never happened.

  More to the point, the Officers had never relinquished power.

  Alania, mind working at computer speed, pieced together the truth even though many records had been altered. Mutiny! Plans put in place by First Officer Thomas Kranz even before Discovery had launched had came to fruition when the colony seed Officers were roused from their own suspended animation long before planetfall. He had worked with the original Lieutenant Beruthi to trick the clone of the Captain, to alter her consciousness using the very nanobots that had kept her original alive during the long journey from Earth. She had lived in the illusion of Captaining Discovery as the years piled up, while all around her the colony seed had fallen into decay, for her false reality had prevented her from sensing and repairing the failing systems of machines that had never been intended to operate for so long. And meanwhile, the descendants of the Officers who had led the mutiny had cemented their control, living in luxury while the colony seed had become the City, squatting over the canyon, pissing and shitting and vomiting into it. Its failing systems were merely the incredibly ancient and decrepit body of its brain and heart—the Captain—writ large.