Gears of the City

by Felix Gilman

  The WaneLight Hotel was not formally a seat of government. That came later: when the building was crumbling and real power had long since moved elsewhere an ineffectual Council would headquarter itself there, and take over the Hotel’s famous elegant letterhead, and steal what remained of its glamour, until the taxes stopped coming in and they could not afford to stop the roof collapsing.

  At the height of the Hotel’s influence it was simply known as a place where powerful people came to meet each other, came to do business. Ambassadors from all over the city lived there—the Hotel catered to all tastes and cultures, and there was nothing it could not copy. It cocooned in luxury the presidents and owners of every corporation of significance. It indulged the antics of the stars of whatever entertainments were popular at the time. The city’s finest athletes roomed there in their spoiled retirements, reverting one by one into a cosseted muscular second infancy, swollen gigantically by the drugs the Hotel’s staff slipped into their food—an illusion of continued virility for which the athletes would drain their bank accounts and prostitute their endorsements for the Hotel’s clients, and that would, in the end, turn them violent and ogreish, so that floors thirty-one and thirty-two were not safe for regular guests, and the cleaning staff there went armed with cattle prods.

  It housed—so the rumor went—a small, shifting, and secretive community of… call them travelers. Those who wandered in the City Beyond, in the Metacontext, among the shifting Gears of the city—the visionaries, the madmen, the lost, the unmoored in time. They came to the Hotel to scheme, to deal, to share their various obsessions. (St. Loup claimed to be in pursuit of the most beautiful woman in the world; the magus Abra-Melin sought a sacred Grail; Longfellow dreamed of some God, somewhere, with the authority to forgive him for his apparently monstrous crimes; for Monmouth it was a particular and improbable flavor of ice cream; the thuggish Crebillon only wanted to find his way home to the city of his birth—he had scores to settle.) They haggled over secrets—the paths, the rumors, the keys and the doors; sightings of the mysterious and omnipresent Shay, who for so many of them had been their first sinister introduction to the City Beyond, who had pulled back the walls and given them their first terrifying glimpse of the spin of the Gears.

  They told each other stories of the Mountain.

  If anyone in the city, anywhere, possessed a map of the safe path to the Mountain, then someone in the Hotel would know about it. It would be available, for a price.

  Who were they? The Hotel’s crowds teemed. Everyone in the Hotel had something to sell, held secrets close to their chests. Arjun had no contacts. No invitation. Who, among the Hotel’s guests, was an alien, who was merely eccentric and affected? Who was a fake and who was the real thing? Hard to tell. Arjun needed time to observe. To spy. To ingratiate. He needed a job.

  The Bodleys put Arjun to work on the roof, because he was slight and nimble and unafraid of heights, but unsuitable for working with guests. They gave him overalls, and a pan, and an assortment of tuning-fork brushes, and sent him up there to join the teams who groomed bird shit and dead pigeons from the shivering antennae.

  Arjun worked on the roof for more than a year. That was nothing remarkable. There were men who’d been working on the roof for ten years, twenty, all still hoping that one day they’d be noticed or notice something compromising and their long-awaited political careers would begin.

  In the winter it rained and stormed and the cleaning teams wore waxy indigo cloaks. The guests were guarded and suspicious; angry sullen static crawled along the wires and the chimneys groaned. In summer the guests were happy and greedy and every minute in some room somewhere a deal was made and the Hotel’s silvery antennae quivered and purred.

  Arjun applied for a transfer to the engineering teams who tuned the antennae and tended their frequencies. He failed the examination. The invigilating Bodley shook his head. “You must be from one of the backward districts, right?” And fair enough; Arjun never had learned to understand machines. And another six months went by.

  All sorts of birds gathered on the roofs. Not just pigeons— swifts, hawks, parakeets, parrots. All kinds of engineered birds and surgical creations—muttering messenger birds, scaled and bladed and strutting war-birds, chiming clock-birds. Something about the Hotel’s vibrations attracted them. Parliaments of ravens gathered among the wires and did their own business, up there on the roofs; and in the mornings Arjun’s crew had a special spike-and-bag to clear up the bodies of defeated challengers …

  The wires buzzed and the antennae murmured. Some of Arjun’s crew believed they could hear the secrets the guests whispered down below. On at least two occasions, during Arjun’s time on the roof, a clever cleaner invented a device to snoop on the wires—and both men disappeared shortly after, and blandly smiling Bodleys shrugged and lied, it’s just turnover, you know?

  And Arjun learned how to hear the music in the wires.

  At first he thought he was mad. The heights and the winds and the vibrations in the ether drove many of the roof-workers to madness. (And the waiting, the endless waiting, in hopes that some guest might notice them, that they might be welcomed below, that they might get to make deals.)

  He heard it as a kind of code, a kind of itch. He slowly learned to piece it together as music.

  It was terrible.

  The Hotel piped music everywhere—to soothe, to inflame, to inspire awe, greed, nervousness, misery—whatever was most conducive to business. To Arjun’s ears, it was a jangling, manipulative abomination. Since Day One he had suffered during his long daily elevator rides between the roof and his quarters in the basement— in the service elevators the Hotel played bright and cheery muzak. He was profoundly upset to find that even the roof was no longer a sanctuary from the noise.

  And one morning, around that time, the elevator opened briefly on forty-four and Arjun saw Shay in the corridor shaking someone’s hand and smiling hugely and handing over a briefcase. Sunglasses, tan, red silk shirt, cropped white hair … but the doors closed again before Arjun could say anything, and he never saw Shay there again, though he made inquiries, and he heard rumors. And not long after that, one of the guests on sixty-one, a defrocked priest named Turnbull, invited Arjun to come and talk about this Shay chap, then. Sometimes he went by Father Turnbull, though his faith had long since inverted into an obsessive hatred of the deity. Turnbull, like Arjun, like Brace-Bel, like most of their kind, had been lifted from the city of his birth into the Metacontext by Shay, for Shay’s own mysterious reasons, with vague promises that what Turnbull sought—the final proof of God’s nonexistence—could be found on the Mountain. And then Turnbull had been left behind. What do you know about Shay? Where is he? What’ve you heard? What are they saying about him these days?

  And through Turnbull, Arjun met Dr. Quayle, and through Quayle he met Mr. Mangalore, and through the services he performed for Mangalore he developed an uneasy working relationship with the brutish enforcers Slough and Muykrit, who introduced him to the hairshirted penitent Longfellow, who gave him access to the mad magus Abra-Melin, at one of whose seances he met St. Loup, who persuaded him to go in on a deal with Li-Paz, one of whose girls knew Cantor, who told him the great comical secret about Mr. Monmouth, who, under threat of blackmail, offered Arjun an introduction to Potocki, who … A dangerous business, his introduction to the uncommunity of travelers. They were solitary, unsympathetic, untrustworthy by nature. Everyone who Broke Through did so alone. They didn’t care about the consequences of their actions. Their very existence was an act of ontological violence—few of them scrupled over human life. The secret nature of the world was profoundly corrupt, and they all knew it. But what choice did Arjun have? He did what he needed to do. For nearly a year he assisted the serpentine St. Loup with his schemes, and at the end he had nothing to show for it except an introduction to the dissipated Lord Losond, the collector, who introduced Arjun to his wife, who …

  Arjun had come to the Hotel to find the way to the Mou
ntain. That was a story in itself, how he had first heard rumors of the Hotel (it was all coming back to him now, as he spoke, as he walked with Stevie through the corridors of Brace-Bel’s house). He sought the Mountain because his God lived there—so he believed; it must. There was nowhere else left to look. Inward and upward. Since his God left him—alone in that distant crumbling monastery, an abandoned child, in silent halls that had once been full of music—his search had taken him upward and inward and deeper into the city.

  He spent ten years in the Hotel. He ran away after rumors of music and Gods, again and again, and again and again he came back disappointed. He schemed. The pursuit of secrets became its own purpose. Sometimes he forgot why he was searching for the Mountain, sometimes for months at a time. Sometimes he forgot the difference between himself and St. Loup or Abra-Melin or Turnbull or the other madmen. Sometimes there was no difference.

  But that was beside the point. He remembered his God now. He wanted to tell Stevie about the music.

  Arjun complained to the Bodleys about the leaking music, and they ignored him. He complained to the other cleaners on his crew and they suggested earplugs. He filed a more formal complaint, attaching extra pages to the Bodley EI&P Grievance & Suggestion Form so that he could detail, at length, precisely how vile and debased the Hotel’s music was. It relieved his feelings a little. Three weeks later a Bodley summoned him to interview.

  The Bodley, whose name was Frank, claimed to be sensitive, musically minded—though to Arjun Frank seemed indistinguishable from his fellows. Frank listened to Arjun’s complaints and made him an offer—and soon Arjun found himself working under Frank the Bodley’s staff in the darkened and humming and machine-filled nerve center of the Hotel’s musical systems.

  There were eleven men in the Music Department, seven women, two indeterminate, one Bodley. Quarters were close and hygiene poor. They drank and smoked furiously in their darkened carrels, watching the feed from the cameras that were hidden in every corridor and every room, fiddling with buttons and dials, headphones on their nodding twitching heads—massaging constantly the Hotel’s moods and tempo.

  Frank assigned Arjun on a probationary basis to the east side of floor sixty-two, where no one very important lived, and where the bars and gymnasia were out of fashion.

  “No,” Frank said, one week later. “Oh dear no. You’re making them uneasy. What was that you were playing? You’re bad for business. This is about getting business done, Arjun. Look at the way Esme does it; do it the way she does it. Otherwise we may have to let you go back to the roof. “

  And Arjun—who was very eager not to lose access to the cameras, because who knew what secrets he might learn from them?— swallowed his pride and copied Esme.

  And the point Arjun wanted to make, he told Stevie, was that, as he worked for Frank the Bodley, as he sat in that nerve center listening to all the Hotel’s whispering insinuating music hissing and twining together, he remembered the Voice of his God. Because the Hotel’s music was its opposite, was everything the Voice was not; the Hotel’s constant song was all lies, was all manipulation, it cheated and twisted, it stole from all its listeners. It was there to make gamblers take that one last shot that would ruin them; it was there to make men forget their wives and children and all their promises; it was there to make people squander themselves. And when—after a few weeks of shame, and drinking, and a promotion to the feeds for the seventy-third and twenty-ninth floors—Arjun first learned to hear the Hotel’s music as a whole, he heard his God, too: his God was all the notes not played. He tore off his headphones and walked out. Frank the Bodley tried to stop him and Arjun took a swing, and the Bodley’s bland face, to no one’s particular surprise, turned out to be made of soft inhuman clay and a tangle of emerald circuitry. Fortunately by that time Arjun was moonlighting for Mr. Mangalore, and no longer needed the job. But the Music, Arjun said …

  But Stevie, as it turned out, didn’t much care about the music, and cared even less for Gods. She wanted to know about the clothes, and the food, and the hotel’s beds, and the lights, and the women who gambled, the dresses they wore, the wine … For a moment Arjun was nonplussed, almost stammered. But he liked the girl; there was something charming about her eagerness, so he rallied and tried to remember. “The women all wore heels so high they walked like storks, Stevie. Black, and red, and …”

  “Show me.”

  “What?”

  She grabbed his arm again. “Show me. All these things. I believe you, all right? Let me,” she started taking the ridiculous wings off, “let me get a few things, and you can take me there, right? Doors, time, streets. You said.”

  He held her bony hand. “It’s been a long time. I’ve forgotten a lot. I pushed too close to the Mountain and I hurt myself.”

  “Can you still do it, or not?”

  “I don’t know.” He laughed. “I actually don’t know.”

  “Well fucking try, then.” She looked close to tears. “Come on, come on. Take me there and I promise I’ll…”

  “Don’t. Please, don’t promise anything. No deals. No charge. I’ll try, Stevie. First I need music.”

  She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Then she whistled a cheerful little tune.

  “… not quite like that. Come on.”

  He turned toward the door, and stopped short. It was occupied; Brace-Bel’s enforcer, Basso, leaned against the door frame, smirking. “Aren’t you two cozy?”

  “Basso,” Stevie said, “We were only …”

  “Don’t you have chores? Get lost, Stevie.”

  She picked up her wings and ran, ducking through the doorway under Basso’s outstretched arm, eyes on the ground, not saying a word.

  “We were only talking,” Arjun said. “She offered to show me around. You didn’t have to talk to her like that.”

  Basso laughed, not unpleasantly. Prominent on his hip, under his loose shirt, was the handle of a knife. “That’s sweet,” he said. “But you don’t tell us how to run things, all right? Now, you and me, let’s go for a walk.”

  Whispers-Old Experiments-THE SURVIVOR-ARREST

  Ruth

  Ruth spent the morning waiting for the doorbell to ring; every time she heard footsteps in the streets she thought it would be Arjun, and Ivy, and her heart leapt into her throat. She was too restless to read or work—instead she moved things aimlessly from shelf to shelf, rearranging, reorganizing, and restructuring, in what she slowly came to realize was exactly the neurotic, fussy, coldly precise and perfectionist manner Ivy had sometimes had—as if Ruth were trying to call her sister home by some magic of impersonation. She laughed and decided to let the books on the table under the slope of the stairs stay in a mess, then. She sat back down and began to roll a cigarette.

  There was a whispering sound. While she’d been working she’d hardly been aware of it, but now—it was unmistakably not just birds, or the pipes, or the wind in the eaves. A scratching, a hissing, a vague and distant chattering.

  It was coming from the cellar.

  That meant going next door to Marta’s place to get the key to the cellar door. The cellar had been the Dad’s territory, and Marta was still funny about that whole business. Getting the key would have meant an awkward conversation, had Marta not, fortunately, been out somewhere, gathering, visiting, maybe just walking, but in any case leaving the key in the oak jewelry box on the dusty bottom shelf in the back room.

  Ruth got one of the lamps from under the stairs.

  The cellar door, set down a short flight of cold stone steps in the corner of the backyard, was cobwebbed and clogged with old leaves, and the hinges were rusty, and Ruth had to grunt and strain to open it. How long had it been since anyone had been down there? Not since Ivy, and that bad night when Ivy had gone down and come back nearly screaming with rage …

  As the door slowly scraped open the sound of whispering— electric, many-throated—escaped, and for a moment the sound made Ruth think of the voice of the Beast, and then she rememb
ered: radios.

  There was a word, and a noise, she hadn’t heard in a few years— not since she was a child.

  For about six months, when she was very small, the Dad had had a phase of experiments with old radios. (After the phase with the birds; around the time of the great rusty gear collection; before the phase with the clocks.) No one else in the city remembered the devices—like the music-machines, like all the rest of that stuff, they were forgotten, anomalous, beyond the capacity of the Combines or their factories to reproduce.

  But the Dad had discovered a schematic in an old manual, and he’d dug the rusting dented machines out of junk heaps on weekends, and he’d made his own out of parts he traded for with other … enthusiasts. He tinkered with and tuned them. All they ever picked up was a hollow hiss and crackle, like night rain falling out over the reservoirs; occasionally the distant ghost or echo of a voice, a scrap of peculiar music, but nothing more, nothing useful or comprehensible. And no wonder—after all, the last of the old broadcasting towers had closed down long before the Dad’s time, long before the Dad’s Dad’s time, even.

  When the Dad got drunk he liked to say that maybe if you tuned them right the radios would reach back to past Ages of the city, where those who were dead were not yet entirely forgotten. He once got drunk enough to tell his daughters that maybe, maybe their dead mother was somewhere in some distant part of the city tuning her own radio, separated from them only by static; when he sobered up and found that Ivy, the youngest, had taken him literally, he laughed. Afterward he felt guilty—at least after Marta reproved him—and he lost interest in the machines. One by one their irreplaceable power sources ran down. Later Ivy dismantled most of them to see how they worked. Now the few remaining devices sat on a high shelf, in the far corner of the cellar, under a shroud of dust and grime, and they were whispering.