Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  All the usual crowd. They said:

  Is it true?

  Potocki? He’s cracked it?

  Shut up—shut up. Who’s heard what?

  Where? Where?

  They had raced each other downstairs, squeezing into elevators, sliding down fire escapes, taking secret routes through the staff quarters. They stumbled and slid over each other in the lobby. Muykrit stuck out a muscled leg and tripped Cantor. Losond tripped on his cats’ tangled leashes and they savaged his cape and his balding scalp. Abra-Melin stood in the glass doorway making occult gestures that did nothing—then suddenly swinging his staff he cracked Longfellow on his bald head, taking the penitent efficiently out of the running. The mob bowled Abra-Melin over, and surged out into the street. Tourists and scarlet-jacketed porters looked on curiously.

  Taxi! Taxi!

  Arjun had shared the backseat of a yellow taxi with St. Loup, who sat reading a glossy magazine, pretending to be calm while his hands shook with eagerness and fear. At the time Arjun and St. Loup had had a sort of alliance—something less than friendship, more than mere detente—which usually resulted in Arjun carrying St. Loup’s bags, running to keep up, waiting for scraps of information. Faster, driver, St. Loup drawled, if you don’t mind. The roads were strange—it was day, and then night, and then day again, along the route St. Loup picked—and the driver was nervous. The scenery shifted, fashions changed, the skyline rippled. Green raindrops and fat foreign insects blatted against the windscreen. Traffic lights strobed through the night—so, too, did Gods. They were driving down newly made paths through the city, and Gods strutted and blazed beside them, taller than towers, brighter than stars, many-limbed, radioactive; reshaping the city as they passed … St. Loup lunged forward and leaned on the horn. Out of the fucking way! The driver started to cry. Neon advertisements in alien languages reflected on the windshield. The skyline was made menacing by ziggurats and fires. Fucking go faster! St. Loup shrieked, with his gun against the back of the driver’s neck. We’re going to be too late!

  Potocki, the mad Engineer—born in a ditch full of pigs somewhere, or a tunnel, or the inside of a diesel engine. A genius, a mutant, a monster, made out of mad beard and black grease and bony elbows. He’d raised himself up out of the dirt by his own ingenuity, his gift for invention, and he now controlled a dozen factories, all over the city. He owned a hundred hangars full of slumbering tarpaulined prototypes; full of weapons of civic destruction, hidden from the inspectors in unmarked crates. People said he did business with Shay himself, that even the great and hidden Shay himself purchased Potocki’s machines. Potocki visited the WaneLight Hotel for rumors and business, never relaxation; he never relaxed. He had only ever exchanged one word with Arjun: primitive.

  Potocki’s great obsession was the Mountain. For their various reasons, they were all obsessed with it; that was what brought them together. What did Potocki want with it? Probably he thought of it as some huge machine, probably he wanted to reverse-engineer it. Arjun wasn’t sure. But again and again Potocki constructed machines to breach the Mountain, and again and again he failed.

  The first thing everyone learned about the Mountain, when they were first dragged out of their little local neighborhood and into the City Beyond, was that you couldn’t just walk there; the streets turned against you, you circled your steps, if you were lucky you only got lost … No matter how far north you walked, the Mountain remained remote, away over the rooftops. Did the Mountain retreat? Did new streets pour in to fill the gap as it receded? No one was sure. Perhaps it was a kind of hallucination. No telescope could pierce the darkness of the Mountain. The maze was never the same twice. The way was guarded. Time became a trap that could freeze or end you. If there were secret paths through it, out of the city, and up the Mountain—and the Hotel was full of rumors of secret paths—then no one who’d found one had ever returned.

  In a thousand years of scheming, no explorer—as far as anyone could tell—had ever found the secret way to the Mountain. They all tried in the end. Sooner or later their patience gave out, and they went walking …

  Potocki once built a bulldozing engine, the size of a house, and sent it bludgeoning its way north. It sank in a deep pond. He once built an enormous corkscrew engine to tunnel under the maze of streets. It drilled through a snarl of subterranean gas pipes and exploded. Now he built flying machines. Every few years he had a new prototype—from huge heavy things like winged whales to remote-operated helicopters the size of hummingbirds. None of them ever reached the Mountain: lightning and fog struck them down. They fished up smashed in gutters a thousand years in the future, or as rusting hulks in primitive rivers, mistaken by barbarians for the bones of Gods.

  “Sneaky bastard’s been quiet this time,” St. Loup said. “Well done. Lying low. Well done. Didn’t see this coming. When we get there, you know the plan, right?”

  “No,” Arjun said.

  “Nor do I. We’ll think of something. You and me together!”

  Arjun didn’t smile. St. Loup would sell Arjun to Potocki as a slave in the blink of a glittering eye if he thought it would buy passage on Potocki’s new machines. They both knew it. Arjun was never very good at pretending not to care …

  The taxi lurched sideways. A hideous scrape of metal and a burst of sparks. As they barreled north down a great lonely suspension bridge—strung like a silver harp, over a formless midnight river—another car slammed again into them. They hit the railings hard and the windows shattered. The other car broke away, swerving right across the empty road, trailing wing mirrors and broken metal, and came sharking back toward them again. Murderous intent was written in its low-slung lines, the one-eyed glare of its headlamps. Its hood, rawly crumpled, pulled back in a snarl. The face at the window, hunched over the wheel, was Muykrit, teeth bared, eyes wide, as he bore down again.

  “He’s gone mad,” St. Loup said. “No patience!”

  Muykrit—huge, fat, and pale, filed teeth, clammy skin purpled with savage tattoos. A placid manner, except when enraged, which was frequent. He was from some pre-pre-industrial district—wattle and daub huts, down by a marshy untrafficked river. A barbarian priest-king in the place of his birth, he sacrificed his enemies to crocodiles, or so rumor had it. Ten years ago Shay himself had brought Muykrit through into the City Beyond, which Muykrit conceived of as Hell. He’d been Shay’s muscle. Abandoned by Shay, Muykrit hired himself out. He navigated through the secret ways of the City Beyond by blind instinct, and dreamed of plundering the treasure vaults of the Mountain, and raping its women. He wasn’t sophisticated. He feared electric light the way he still feared lightning. He had no business being behind the wheel of a car. Was he howling? Impossible to tell over the roar of engines, the squeal of abused tires.

  St. Loup leaned across Arjun’s lap. His sleek needle-gun was in his hand. An elegant weapon—you wouldn’t know it was there, even under St. Loup’s tight-fitted jacket. He smelled more of aftershave than of fear. His gun emitted a sad melismatic whine. A wound opened in the flank of Muykrit’s car, a thin smile of torn metal. Muykrit’s tires burst. His car skidded, spun, pinballed from side to side of the bridge’s railings, and finally slammed up against a concrete pillar.

  As they passed, and as Arjun looked back through the cracked window, Muykrit’s car sat and smoked. No movement. Midnight, and the bridge was silent.

  Soon the bridge was far behind them, and the river was gone, and it was day again.

  Soon after that they were forcing their way down the crowded roads of Potocki’s part of the city. Grey-smocked cyclists scattered. No doubt they broke local traffic laws. Their driver was at that point utterly numb with terror and disorientation, and responded to St. Loup’s commands like a puppet.

  They crashed through a barrier—already smashed, they weren’t the first to arrive—and onto the concrete grounds of Potocki’s factory. They rushed up the stairs. Potocki’s resentful and underpaid laborers didn’t bother to stop them. This wasn’t the first time a
mob of Potocki’s demented rivals had descended on the factory, and the laborers knew it was safest to leave them be. Besides, it was too late for anyone to stop …

  The launch! Bursting out onto the rooftop, St. Loup first, Arjun following, they found that Abra-Melin was already there: he stood on top of a stack of air-conditioning machines, shaking his staff over his head, threatening to call down the lightning, denouncing Potocki’s blasphemy in a harsh and booming voice. No one paid him any attention. Cantor was on his knees, offering up jewels and cash, begging Potocki to take him along for the ride. Lord Losond held out a dossier of photographs and mimeographs: he seemed to be trying blackmail. Some of the others had apparently tried to sabotage or steal Potocki’s aircraft, and were being held down and beaten with wrenches by Potocki’s hand-picked personal security staff. And the Engineer himself stood at the edge of the roof, as the sun set through the polluted bronze of the sky; and he raised his long apelike arms, and dropped them, and the aircraft rose.

  There were two dozen of them. They unfolded themselves out of the junk heaped on the rooftop; hatches irised open to let them emerge; teams of grey laborers heaved open the doors of hangars down on the ground below, from which the mechanical swarm fluttered forth. The air buzzed and crackled. They were made of wire, plastic, and ivory, and each was the size of an elephant. Four wings flapped—two above, two below—and complex vanes spun. They were designed to ride strange winds. Cloth-of-gold mesh billowed out behind them to catch and disperse the lightning. They appeared to be unmanned—scout craft, sent to map the route, if there was one. They rose together into the bronze sky. They were an unlikely flock, mutant jellyfish-birds of the distant future, wheeling east and then north, driving toward the Mountain.

  St. Loup shifted anxiously from foot to foot. Arjun held his breath. He felt that there should have been music, a crescendo, cymbals and brass. But there was only the silence of expectation, the distant hum of engines and snap of wings, as the craft became silhouettes, then specks, then …

  Potocki sat slumped on the edge of the roof, not looking at the sky. He looked exhausted. He seemed to have given up hope at the instant of the launch, not wanting to wait for the bad news. But it came anyway. Distant lightning flashed, once, twice, three times. The black specks of his craft ceased to exist. There was no sound. Then St. Loup sighed, and Abra-Melin howled with laughter, and Cantor sobbed quietly into his handkerchief.

  Potocki didn’t get up. He spoke in a numb monotone: get rid of these idiots. His security staff drew their guns and advanced. But St. Loup was already running, halfway down the stairs, and Arjun was following. St. Loup had stuffed his pockets with stolen scraps of machinery—gears and gyroscopes—who knew what useful intelligence could be gleaned from Potocki’s castoffs? Arjun took with him the memory of those alien craft, rising black against the Mountain, and a moment of utter silence.

  The taxi was where they’d left it. The driver sat in the backseat, covering his face, too scared to move. He moaned in terror as St. Loup opened the door. “I’ll drive,” St. Loup announced. “Arjun, shut him up, would you?”

  “It’s all right,” Arjun had lied, a hand on the driver’s shoulder. “Think of it as a bad dream.”

  “Soft-hearted,” St. Loup said. He turned, a huge smile on his face, one hand on the wheel. “So much for Potocki’s new prototype. Same time next year, I suppose.” St. Loup’s other hand lovingly held his needle-gun. “Let’s go see if there’s anything interesting left of good old Muykrit.”

  High over Fosdyke’s night, Arjun reeled on the edge of the rooftop. His head was full of smoke and memories. For a moment he nearly fell and it seemed the peaked roofs below lurched up to meet him. He sat down with a thump. Memories …

  St. Loup had …

  At the Hotel that night, they had …

  The memories were gone again—vanished like a fever dream. All he had were fragments, without sense; lurid colors; the grinning faces of madmen.

  He sat and breathed in cold night air. It was starting to rain.

  What was the Hotel? Who was St. Loup, who was Potocki, who were those other men?

  What Godi Was that what he was looking for?

  Was that his life?

  It was like a nightmare, or a half-remembered and unpleasant film. (For a moment he recalled the private screening rooms at the Hotel, where banned films and classified footage from a thousand and one districts were shown to discerning audiences … An aftershock of memory. It faded.) It scared him to think that his head contained those madmen. Was he one of them?

  The fog shifted a little, and Arjun could see clear over Fosdyke. A harsh grid. The formless blocks of factories, tenements, a rubble of low houses in the cracks. Black smoke and flashes of fire, from engines that ran all night, churning out—what? Everything else was the same cold grey.

  Fragile specks of light, here and there—and there, over to the east, a single street glowed in the darkness. A necklace of lights scattered in a heap of coal. Carnyx Street—he recognized the curve of it. The moment he grasped its shape he set off at a run, clambering down from the roof, leaving all thoughts of the past behind him. The City Beyond was meaningless, probably a hallucination. The Low sisters might already be …

  He wove through back alleys. He ran across a black field where monstrous drayhorses dreamed upright in their chains. He stumbled through an alley where men without papers, or too wounded to work, slept in rags; he dodged outstretched hands and kept running. He nearly got lost again; the sound of music drew him in. The bars were open on Carnyx Street, defying the Know-Nothings, and music spilled out.

  He heard a piano playing in an upstairs room. It was a cheap and badly tuned instrument, clacking and thumping in a small room. It was a simple tune; the piano started and halted again and again. He followed the sound without quite meaning to, without quite realizing what he was doing. He circled it, through dirt alleys, over back fences and darting—for fear of dogs—across weed-cracked yards. He turned a corner under that window and found himself stepping out onto Carnyx Street, through a crowded garden. Scrubby but green grass; torches burning along the fence; a lush shadow-growth of hedges. Drinkers at the benches looked up at him as he passed—men and women, mostly old, some young, curious but not hostile. A murmur of conversation.

  Arjun crossed the garden and left by the gate. He emerged onto Carnyx Street between a shop that sold secondhand clothes—violet and blue lace and green bows and red ribbons pressed up against bottle-glass windows—and the rich black stink of a tobacco shop. Now the piano was gone, but Arjun could hear the scratchy sound of Ruth’s music-machine—long-dead music, ghost music gently welcomed back into the air.

  Carnyx Street curved; it described a sinuous serpentine S, and there was a serpentine shimmer to the colors in the shop windows and the lights in the windows above. Arjun surprised himself; though he’d never seen the street front of Ruth’s shop he recognized it at once. He walked faster. It was late and Ruth’s door was locked. Arjun climbed up the shallow stone steps and knocked on the glass—the thick and bleary and whorled window glass, green-tinted, through which the shop’s dark interior was visible only as shadows and void. A single candle, unattended on a shelf, was a blazing mote in the darkness. No answer. The music-machine had gone silent.

  Arjun knocked again. He didn’t dare call out.

  Any of those shifting glassy shadows might be the Hollows, still patiently waiting, silent in the dark. They had nothing better to do. They were the Failed Men …

  Arjun fought back mad memories.

  He remembered Marta coming into Ruth’s shop at the balcony, at the door over the stairhead. The two houses were connected— joined at the hip—and maybe they’d retreated to Marta’s, hidden there. He ran down the street.

  Marta’s door was locked, too, but there were sounds of movement from the backyard: low voices and coughing. There was a glow of gaslight.

  He climbed the fence. On the other side he dropped down into mud.
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br />   There were grey figures moving in the moonlit yard. They were hunched and despairing. Lame legs shuffled across the concrete. Their heads were bowed, and they muttered and whispered.

  By the back door, in the dim light of a half-shuttered lantern, stood Marta. She wore plain black. One of the grey men stood before her, reaching out his pale arms …

  Arjun shouted something. He wasn’t sure what. He charged forward.

  To his astonishment, the grey men scattered. Shocked faces turned to him—filthy, tangle-bearded—and swore in panic. Two men, with remarkable speed considering their hunched frames, heaved themselves over the back fence and away.

  “It’s the fucking Know-Nothings!”

  Three more men, fleeing, fell at the fence. One was missing a leg, one an arm.

  “Run!”

  Another, a woman, fell to her knees. Three men stood sheepishly by the back fence, lined up like schoolboys waiting to be flogged. One white-haired old man yelled in terror, began to cough, and was sick in a corner.