The image continued to sink gradually, below the highest towers, through the aerial levels, the pedestrian (human and ahuman) esplanades, the various transport and service strata, down to the ground, the imperve pavement, at which point a convex glass traffic guide reflected in miniature the whole of that long camera descent from the skies. Then the focus shifted laterally, taking in the vermilion boots of a Flux officer.
Almost unnoticed, a commentary had begun. It was a typical Unit Two commentary: quiet, unemphatic, spoken in Ars Staykr’s own voice.
‘On the seventy thousand planets which occupy the single Galaxy inhabited by man, there is no more vast or diverse city than Nunion,’ the commentary said. ‘It has become a fable to all men of all races. To describe it is impossible without descending into statistics and figures, and this is to lose sight of the reality; we ask you to explore some of the reality with us. Forget the facts and figures: look instead at the flux-ways and mansions and, above all, at the individuals which comprise Nunion. Look, and ask yourself: How does one find the heart of a great city? What secret lies at the core of it when one arrives there?’
Nunion had grown over the ten islands of an archipelago in the temperate zone of Yinnisfar, spreading from the nearby continent. Five hundred bridges, a hundred and fifty sub-fluxes, sixty heliplane routes, and innumerable ferries, gondolas and sailing craft interconnected the eleven sectors and forty-five districts. Lining the water lanes or breaking the seemingly endless phalanxes of streets went avenues of either natural or polycathic trees, with here and there – perhaps at some focal point like the Ishrail Memorial – the rare and lovely jenny-merit, newly imported, perpetually flowering. The camera swept over Clive Amethyst Bridge now, hovering before the first block beyond the waterway. A young man was coming out of the block, springing down the outer steps three at a time. On his face were mingled excitement, triumph and joy. He could hardly contain himself. Buoyed with exultation, he could not walk fast enough. He was the young man in any large city: the man about to make his mark, to score his first success, confident beyond sense, exuberant beyond measure. In him one could see the drive that had reached out to seventy thousand planets and dreamed of seventy thousand more.
The commentator did not say this. The picture said it for him, catching the young man’s strut, his angular shadow sharp and restless on the pavement. Sharp and restless, too, the scene changed, angular shadows becoming angular shapes. Down billions of miles of pipe that were Nunion’s veins and drains swam the changing ghost shapes of pseudoleucocytes. With eerie mobility, they preyed on the sewage of the megapolis, ingesting it, cleaning it. Sealed away from human sight, the half-live phantoms went about their needs, which also served the city’s.
Others of the capital’s servitors paraded through the illusory emptiness of the cube: The ahuman menials whose immunity to hard radiation had earned them the task of tending the universal air-conditioning. The electronic brains out at Starfield. The human-brain culture under Peach Bosphorus that handled a guaranteed two billion decisions every day. The Undead of the Communications Exchanges, where pepped nerves routed with mindless precision the messages of every district.
The pictures were brilliant, at once clear but nonliteral. No commentary was used, for none was needed. But Rhapsody 182 could not stay silent. He came forward so that his figure bit its silhouette out of the solid.
‘That’s the way it was with Staykr,’ he said. ‘Always digging for what he called “the exact revealing detail.” Maybe that’s why he got no farther than he did; he drove us crazy for the sake of that detail.’
‘These are just shots of a big city,’ a man from Story called up impatiently. ‘We’ve seen this sort of cubage before, Harsch. Just what does it all add up to?’
‘Use your eyes. See the pattern forming,’ Harsch replied. ‘That was how it was where Staykr was concerned; he let the thing evolve, without imposing a pattern. Watch this coming shot now for gentle comedy …’
Young lovers had come sweeping up a Bastion water lane in a powered float. They moored, stepped ashore, and walked arm in arm across a mosaic walk to the nearest café. They chatted animatedly as they found a table. Background music changed tempo; the focus of attention slid from the lovers to the waiters. Their smoothness of manner while serving was contrasted with their indifference when they were behind scenes, in the squalor and confusion of the kitchens. A waiter was followed off duty down to subterranean Pelt, where he submerged himself in a two-credit tub of dyraco and slept.
‘Get the idea?’ Rhapsody asked his audience. ‘Ars Staykr is digging. He’s peeling off stratum after stratum of the mightiest city of all time. Before we’re through, you’re going to see just what he found at the bottom.’
Hardly for a moment had he taken his eyes off Big Cello, whose deadpan countenance was partially hidden by wreaths of aphrohale. The chief now crossed his legs; that could be bad, a sign perhaps of impatience. Rhapsody, who had learned to be sensitive about such things, thought it time to try a direct sounding. Coming to the edge of the stage, he leaned forward and said ingratiatingly, ‘Can you see it building, B. C.?’
‘I’m still sitting here,’ Big Cello answered. It could be called a relatively enthusiastic response.
‘Those of you who never had the privilege of meeting Ars,’ Rhapsody continued, ‘will be asking, “What sort of man could reveal a city with such genius?” Not to keep you in suspense any longer, I’ll tell you. When Ars was on this last assignment, I was just a youngster in the solid business. I learned a lot from him, in the matter of plain, everyday humanity as well as in technique. We’re going to show you a bit of film now that a cameraman of Unit Two took of Ars without his knowing. I believe you’ll find it – sort of moving.’
The solid was suddenly there, seeming to fill all the audience’s vision. In a corner of one of Nunion’s many starports, Ars Staykr and several of his documentary team sat against junked oxygenation equipment, taking lunch. Ars was sixty-eight and passing his middle years. Hair blown over his eyes, he could be seen devouring a gigantic kyfeff sandwich and talking to a youth with a space cut. Looking around at the solid, Rhapsody identified his younger self with some embarrassment and said, ‘You have to remember this was taken all of twenty years back.’
‘You weren’t so gangling in those days,’ one of the audience called.
Ars Staykr was speaking. ‘Cello 69 has given us the chance to go through with this,’ he was saying. ‘So let’s see we use the chance properly. Anyone in a city this size can pick up interesting faces, or build up architectural angles into a pattern with the help of a background noise. Let’s try for something deeper. What I want to find is what really lies at the heart of the greatest metropolis ever known to man.’
‘Supposing there is no heart, Staykr?’ the youthful Rhapsody asked. (He had been only a Tiger dweller in those days.) ‘I mean – you hear of heartless men and women; couldn’t this simply be a heartless city?’
‘A semantic quibble,’ Ars Staykr replied. ‘All men and women have hearts, even the cruel ones. Same with cities. I’m not denying Nunion isn’t a cruel city in many ways. People who live in it have to fight continually. The good in them gradually gets overlaid and lost. You start good, you end bad just because you – oh, hell – you forget, I suppose. You forget you’re human.’
Ars Staykr paused and looked searchingly at the blank young face before him. ‘Never mind watching out for Nunion,’ he said, almost curtly. ‘Watch out for yourself.’
He stood up, wiping his big hands on his slacks. One of his compo crew offered him an aphrohale and said, ‘Well, that’s it on the starport angle, Staykr; we’ve jelled all we need to here. What sector do we head for next?’
Ars Staykr looked around smilingly, the set of his jaw noticeable. ‘We take on the politicians next,’ he said.
The youthful Rhapsody scrambled to his feet, his manner noticeably more aggressive.
‘Say, if we could clear up the legal rackets of Nunio
n,’ he said, ‘why, we’d get our solids and be doing everyone a favour, too. We’d be famous, all of us!’
‘I was just a crazy, idealistic kid back in those days,’ the mature Rhapsody, at once abashed and delighted, protested to the audience. ‘I’d still to learn that life is nothing but a kind of co-ordination of rackets.’ He smiled widely to indicate that he might be kidding, saw that Big Cello was not smiling, and lapsed into silence.
In the cube, Unit Two was picking up its traps. The cumbersome polyhedron of a trans-Burst freighter from far Lapraca sank into the landing pits behind them and blew piercingly.
‘I’ll tell you the sort of thing we want to try and capture,’ Ars Staykr told his team as he shouldered a pack of equipment. ‘When I first came to this city to join Supernova, I was standing in the lobby of the Justice Building before an important industrial case was being tried. A group of local politicians about to give evidence passed me, and I heard one say as they went in – I’ve never forgotten it – ‘Have your hatreds ready, gentlemen.’ For me, it will always symbolise the way that prejudice can engulf a man. Touches like that we must have.’
Ars Staykr and Unit Two trudged out of the picture, shabby, determined. The solid faded, and there before the screen stood Rhapsody 182, spruce, determined.
‘It still doesn’t begin to stack up, Rhap,’ a voice spoke up. It was Rhapsody Double Seven, a rival of Rhapsody’s, and Big Cello’s personnel manager. You had to be careful with a man like that.
‘Perhaps you missed the subtleties,’ Rhapsody suggested instantly. ‘The thing’s stacking fine. That little cameo has just demonstrated to you why Ars never made the grade. He talked too much. He shot off his mouth to kids like I was then. He wasn’t hard. He was nothing more or less than just an artist. Right?’
‘If you say so, Rhap,’ the answer came levelly, but Double Seven turned at once to say something inaudible to Big Cello.
Rhapsody made a brusque signal to the projection box. He would swing this deal on Supernova if he had to stay here all afternoon and evening to do it.
Behind him, Ars Staykr’s Nunion was re-created once more, a city which administered the might of Yinnisfar’s growing dominance and magnetised the wealth of a galaxy, assembled as the mind of Ars Staykr had visualized it two decades before.
Evening was falling over its maze of ferroline canyons. The sun set; great globes of atomic light tethered in the sky poured their radiance over thoroughfares moving with a new awareness. The original commentary dimmed, giving Rhapsody the opportunity to provide his own.
‘Night,’ he said briskly. ‘Ars caught it all as it’s never been caught before or since. He used to tell me, I remember, that night was the time a city showed its claws. We spent two weeks looking for sharp, broken shadows. The craze for significant detail began.’
The clawed shadows moved in, fangs of light etched against the dark flanks of side alleys. An almost tangible restlessness, like the noisy silence of a jungle, moved across the ramps and squares of Nunion; even the present onlookers could feel it. They sat more alertly in their seats.
Behind a façade of civilisation, the night life of Nunion had a primitive ferocity; the Jurassic wore evening dress. In Ars Staykr’s interpretation it was essentially a dreary world, the amalgam of the homesicknesses and lusts of the many thousand nations that had drifted to Yinnisfar. The individual was lost in an atom-lit wilderness where ninety million people could be alone together within a few square farlings.
It was quite clear that the thronging multitudes, waiting in line for leg shows and jikey joints, were harmless. Living in flocks, they had developed the flock mentality. They were too harmless to tear anything of value out of the matter of Nunion; all they seemed to ask for was a good time.
Into the cube came the hard-steppers – the ones who could afford to buy solitude and a woman or pneuma-dancer to go with it. They drifted above the sparkling avenues in bubbles; they ate in undersea restaurants, nodding in brotherly fashion to sharks swimming beyond glass walls; they wined in a hundred dives; they sat absorbed over games of chance. Always, at the imperious signal of an eye, there was someone to come running, a man who sweated and trembled as he ran. In short, a galactic city; power must remember it is powerful.
The scene changed. The view swept over the Old Jandanagger and began to investigate Bosphorus Concourse.
The Concourse lay at the heart of Nunion. Here the search for pleasure reached its peak. Barkers cried rival attractions, polyhermaphros signalled, liquor flowed in never-ending streams, cinema vied with participation hall, quirps and quaints beckoned from drifting floats, women of the night moved sleek and busy, a thousand sensations – the perversions of a galaxy – were available at a price. Man, conscious as never before of all of his cells, had invented a different thrill for each.
Rhapsody 182 could not resist adding a word.
‘Have you ever seen such realism?’ he demanded. ‘Ordinary folks – folks like you, like me – getting down to having themselves a time. Think what promotion these shots are for Nunion! And where’ve they been these last twenty years? Why, down in our vaults, neglected, almost lost. Nobody would ever have seen them if I hadn’t hunted them up!’
Big Cello spoke.
‘I’ve seen them, Rhapsody,’ he said throatily. ‘They’re just too sordid to have popular appeal.’
Rhapsody stood absolutely still. A dark stain rose in his face. Those few words told him – and everyone else present – exactly where he stood. If he persisted, he would rouse the chief’s anger; if he backed down, he would lose face.
In the solid behind Rhapsody, men and women jostled for admission to an all-sense horror show, Death in Death Cell Six. Above them, gigantic, was a quasi-live jell of a man being choked, head down, eyes popping, mouth agape.
‘We needn’t show all this sordid stuff, of course,’ Rhapsody said, grinning as if in pain. ‘I’m just giving it a run-over to put the general idea before you. We’ll settle on the final details later, naturally.’ Naturally.
Big Cello nodded. ‘You’re too hot on Bastion 44, though, Rhap,’ he said kindly. ‘He was only a bum with a camera, after all.’
Ars Staykr’s city was emptying now. Crumpled aphrohale packets, minni-newscasts, tickets, programs, preventos, sick-sticks, handbills, and flowers lay in the gutter. The revellers were straggling home to sleep.
A fog settled lightly over Bosphorus Concourse, emphasizing the growing vacancy of the place. A fat man, clothes unbuttoned, reeled out of a participation hall and made for the nearest moveway. It spun him off like a leaf in a drain.
Three and one half sounded from Pla-To Court. Lights snapped off in a deserted restaurant, leaving on the retina an afterimage of upturned chairs. Even the Cello pleasure domes went dim. One last drab clattered wearily home, clutching her handbag tightly.
Yet the Concourse was not empty of humanity. The remorseless eye of the camera hunted down, in sundry doorways, the last watchers of the scene – the ones who had stood, motionless, not participating, when the evening was at its height. Watching the crowd, they waited in doorways as if peering from warrens. From the shadows, their faces gleamed with a terrible, inexpressible tension. Only their eyes moved.
‘These men,’ Rhapsody said, ‘really fascinated Ars Staykr. They were his discovery. He believed that if anyone could lead him to the heart of the city, these people could, these subterraneans in doorways. Night after night they were there. Staykr called them “the impotent spectres of the feast”.’
The solidscreen blanked, then filled with form once again. An overhead camera tracked two men down a canal-side walk. Ars Staykr and his young assistant, Rhapsody 182. They had movewayed down to the quiet side of Tiger.
The two figures paused outside a shabby boutique, looking doubtfully at the sign, A. WILLITTS, COSTUMES AND VESTMENTS.
‘I have the feeling we’re going to turn up something,’ Ars was saying as the sound came on. ‘We’re going to hear what a city really is, fro
m someone who must have felt its atmosphere most keenly. With this fellow, we’re digging right down into the heart of it. But it won’t be pleasant.’
Darkness. It seemed to seep out of the black G-suits; they were the antique tailor’s speciality, hanging stiff and bulky around the walls, funereal in the gloom. The costumier, Willitts, was a newt of a man; his features were recognisable as those of one of the Concourse night watchers, now trailed to his lair.
Willitts’ eyes bulged and glistened like those of a drowning rat. He denied ever going to Bosphorus Concourse. When Ars persisted, he fell silent, dangling his little fingers against the counter.
‘I’m not a flux officer,’ Ars Staykr said. ‘I’m simply curious. I want to know why you stand there every night the way you do.’
‘It’s nothing to be ashamed of,’ Willitts muttered, dropping his eyes. ‘I don’t do anything.’
‘That’s just it. You don’t do anything. Why do you – and others like you – stand there not doing anything? What are you thinking of? What do you see? What do you feel?’
‘I’ve got business to attend to,’ Willitts protested. ‘I’m busy. Can’t you see I’m busy?’
‘I want to know what you feel, how you tick, Willitts.’
‘Leave me alone, will you?’
‘Answer my questions and I’ll go away.’
‘We could make it worth your while, Willitts,’ young Rhapsody added, with a knowing look.
The little man’s eyes were furtive. He licked his lips. He seemed so tired, his tiny frame devoid of blood.
‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘That’s all I ask – leave me alone. I’m not hurting you, am I? A customer might come in any time. I’m not answering your questions. Now please get out of here.’
Unexpectedly, Ars Staykr jumped, pinning the little man backward across the counter. Of the two, Staykr’s face was the more desperate.
‘Willitts,’ he said, ‘I’ve got to know. I’ve got to know. I’ve been digging into this cesspit of a city week after week, and you’re the thing I’ve found at the bottom of it. You’re going to tell me what it feels like down there or, so help me, I’ll break your neck.’
The Complete Short Stories- The 1950s - Volume One Page 66