by John Skipp
KEY TO THE CITY
CODY GOODFELLOW
Rhubarb Rayvonne Balker dearly loved to hear the old folks tell stories about the City across the wide green River, about how it was when any old car with wheels could ride the highways, and anyone with nerve enough could try their hand navigating the smartstreets and strange ways of Cityfolk.
With no honest trade to keep her running, and only Bama, the zika-wit mascot of the Lower Mergatroyd Mobile Estates park for surviving kin, Rhubarb was apt to lose herself in fairystories. She dreamed about the City, ate up the old shows, and collected the stories that she retold to anyone in earshot like she had a jinglebug in her ear. This appetite did make her a figure of fun among the old River rats and retired pirates at Speedy’s off-license fuel station and bait shop, who peppered the unbelievable true tidbits they actually recalled with pure weevil-grease of their own stunted but peculiarly flummoxatious invention.
So Speedy Boningham and Jubal Fufkin were primed to topple off their bait-barrels, convulsed with hilarity, when Barb came wallowing in out of the shallows under a frenzy of wingworms, with a body over one shoulder and a black glass briefcase under her arm, popping off that they’d be doing themselves a favor getting in on the ground floor kissing her mildewy bog-boots.
Back before the City closed up to all traffic but the high-speed tubes, a body with a knife and a modicum of hack-learning could jack truck-trains or hovercraft carrying cargo pods with work-ready mites from China, freefall weed from the orbital arcologies, Martian moonshine, and some things the more credulous clans down in the Bottoms worshipped as gods to this day.
The promise of the sunken dregs of those halcyon days was enough to keep moon-eyed seekers like Rhubarb poking for salvage up and down the west bend of the delta, where the gleaming walls and animated spires of the City a mile and more off across the water blocked out the sun at half past afternoon in summer, and in winter plunged all of Mergatroyd County into uneasy neon twilight before her gullet was done with lunch. The lights of the City were a perverse aurora, the pornographic holograms of the shoreline pleasure district cavorting above the clouds, showing her everything she knew so far about what went on between boys and girls. She was ogling those angelic visions when her suction hose blocked up and the whole skimmer nosed into the swamp and tossed her overboard.
Paddling after the stalled skimmer, she figured she’d sucked up a crawgator or a humanatee, but was dismayed to find it was just some fool who got stuck in the mud trying to creep across the bottom in a gillsuit. But then he turned out to be alive, and offered her what he was carrying if she’d save his life. Said it was the keys to the kingdom …
On the fisherman’s scale at Speedy’s landing, Rhubarb peeled the gillsuit off the body and wiped her knife off on her rubber dungarees. “Well hell,” she said, and then again. When she stepped on his chest, all that came out his mouth was a little mud.
“Don’t see how a no-account clone like this would have the keys to his own car, anyhow.” Speedy nipped off a leaf-bulb of Albino Krowe tonic and flicked the crushed empty into the river. He didn’t need to point out the zip-stitches, shunts and bar-codes all over the carcass. “Must’ve jumped off a farm …”
“Might could be a rich man’s shadow,” Rhubarb put in. “You said only the moguls ever grow whole clones. Maybe I could sell it downriver to King Cadillac, if it’s a wavy germline––”
“No good’ll come of you pokewits fiddling with that thing,” Fufkin warned.
Speedy already had it on the bench and was trying to pick the lock. “You’re just gonna have to wait a few more minutes for your toy soldiers, is all …”
“Ain’t toys,” Fufkin grunted, “they’re antique historical recreation bots …” He’d reaped a couple regiments of Confederate infantry resin figurines off a pre-Collapse maker site, and dropped a case of Albino Krowe on Speedy to get him to fabricate them off his printers.
“Which battle’re you fixing to make ‘em fight, Gen’ral?” Speedy asked.
“Battle of Fufkin’s Pantry,” Jubal said. “I got roaches.”
“You oughta record it,” Rhubarb cut in. “That’d be a hell of a show.” She rattled off how everything everybody did in the City was recorded, so everybody’s life was a TV show you could live like real life, and how nobody ever went hungry, because you could just grow a scrape of skin off yourself or buy celebrity cultures online and grow it into a meal, or a better nose or a new heart; how nobody died in the City if they didn’t want to, how they became ghosts inside the big computer, and lived in a world that made the near-perfection of the City look like the seventh circle of Hell …
“Where’d you hear all that shit?” Fufkin demanded, when he’d repacked the levee of moonweed chew in his jaw that had messily breached and overrun his chin amid Rhubarb’s rhapsodic speech. She just pointed at Speedy, who tossed his lockpicks and told everyone who wasn’t wearing lead to get scarce, then whipped out his X-ray gun.
The light didn’t look any different, but Rhubarb felt it like millions of invisible catfish kissing her all over. Inside the black glass case, a pink bubble bulging with pressurized fluid, and something else only slightly denser than the ooze, but way more wiggly … and cute …
“Oops,” Speedy dropped the gun and pulled up a 3D scan.
The ghost spinning between them was a humanoid fetus––a more or less normal-looking unborn cyclops with a crystal lens for an eye so complicated it seemed to wiggle in and out of three dimensions, and to let several as yet uncataloged realities seep through.
“Judas get home,” Speedy said, “it’s a mirror-baby.”
“A what?” Rhubarb squeezed closer.
“Just an ugly baby, is all.” Jubal Fufkin spat a bottle cap he’d chewed into a bullet into the spitoon. “Throw it back.”
“Hell no!” Rhubarb blushed ultraviolet. “My salvage! You know what it is, Speedy, go on and tell him!”
Speedy just shook his head. “It might-could be somebody tried to make it one, but … It was just some dead clone at Riverbottom, Barb …”
“Look at that big marble eye, Speedy Boningham. This thing is a backup mirror for the City’s holographic matrix, ain’t it? The spine for the whole damn program, and you damn-well know it. You’re the one, tol’ me about it …”
One thing everyone knew about the City was, it was smart. Too smart for its own good, most folks would add, and nothing more.
Long before it stopped letting country folk inside or even onto its highways, every little brick, every blade of grass, was smarter than a whole raft of local know-it-all weak AI’s. Ants and mites didn’t just pick up the trash, they could remake it, or anything in the City, into anything else––could turn diamonds to ice cream and poop to plutonium. The only things in the City that weren’t worth a tin shit, processing-wise, were the people, even though they had the best computers of all under their dumbass fancy hairdos. Their master computers were nothing but great big old chains of tank-grown human brains, dreaming the perfect mirror image of the City that guided its unthinkably complex operations, and a perfect manmade Heaven for their dead.
Rhubarb’s earliest memories of the River were of how spooky-quick the skyline reared up from nothing after the whole City went and melted into gray goo in the Second Collapse, how it rebuilt itself up into an unbreakable wave a mile and more high in less than two weeks, between her first riverbath and her baptism. Pretty much everything inside it was a computer, and the computers that ran it were the biggest of all, but they looked pretty small, if you didn’t know what you were looking at.
Speedy ogled the exotic socket ports on the black glass briefcase with his membrane lenses dialed wide open as he rummaged in a bin of cables. “Sure looks like a viable backup mirror … but I don’t rightly know if we should …”
“You do so!” Jubal Fufkin snapped. “You know it’s the nadir of sensibility to even commonplate it. Just suppose that ugly sport does spark up and ports into the big show. What’re you
fixin to do with it anyway, that anybody round these parts wants or needs? Them folks stopped buying from our farms cos they eat their own asses! Stopped letting us in cos we wouldn’t let em monkey with our genes or put their chips in our blood. Why you think Mergatroyd moved its county seat eight times in the last fifty years? Why’s Main Street built under one of their big ol high-speed tubes? It ain’t just to stay out of the sun, girls. You plug in that ugly baby, you gonna light up this whole town on their great big map, and they gonna come down on us like forty days and forty nights of fiery hammers––”
“Chill, Jube,” Speedy said, trying one jack after another from an armload of cables. “Little bitty baby like this might just let us take a peek through their backdoor, but we ain’t gonna make any kind of fuss they can track back to our … uh … front door …” He plugged one in and twisted it. “How’s that?”
Nobody answered him. Nobody could find the words.
The bait shack vanished, and everything was made of light, and the light was pregnant with unspeakably expensive information. Gleaming spires and lattices of animated data towered around them. An impossible orrery of spheres and pyramids of consciousnesses collective and individual swarmed round an axis of blinding light, like the heart of a galaxy.
“Nobody move,” Speedy mumbled, but until he said it, neither of the others seemed to remember they had bodies at all, let alone try to move them.
Rhubarb finally broke the spell, throwing out her arms to play with a firefly crown that seemed to circle tantalizingly overhead.
The galaxy exploded.
They stood on a plaza where six rivers of light came together, and the walls were made of perfect faces a mile high saying her name, and the people passing through her were ghostly jellyfish with pulsating financial and social organs shining out through the gray translucence of their avatars.
“Told you not to move,” Speedy said.
“I didn’t do it,” Rhubarb whined, hands behind her back.
Somebody shouted, “Obdormisco!”
Everything disappeared. Speedy and Rhubarb rubbed their eyes and shivered. Jubal Fufkin had his eyes closed the whole time, so he only shook his head sadly when they looked accusingly at him. “I didn’t do it,” he said, pointing with his cane. “Reckon he did.”
“Speak plain American, boy!” Speedy barked in the clone’s face.
“Was Latin,” Fufkin said. “Told it to take a nap …”
“Stupid fucking hicks,” the clone gasped. “This isn’t a mirror … It’s …” Then he spaced out.
Rhubarb pounced on his chest and tried giving him mouth-to-mouth. “Breathe, ya crazy critter!”
“Get off him!” Speedy slapped a couple first-aid derms on his neck. “These damn tank-devils are always dying and getting better. Can’t tell what they’re using for brains, so most of the time, they’ll drown in the rain––”
The clone jolted to bug-eyed alertness and pushed himself up on one elbow. “Please … I need to find my brothers in the resistance …”
“Ain’t no clone guerilla army around here, boy,” Fufkin said.
“You’re fighting for your freedom?” Rhubarb asked. “That’s the bravest thing I ever heard!”
“We’re just fighting for our jobs. For a place. No work to do, anymore. Nobody works, everybody dies in debt, gets turned into programs, put into trash cans and subway cars. Everything is run by ghosts, everything undead.
“All I’ve ever known was the farm. My master was good to me, but last year, they said we were obsolete. We were going to escape, me and the rest of my pod, but I guess I was the only one who made it. We took the little brother to hack the City and rewrite ourselves in as full citizens or blow it all up, but … the mirror isn’t a mirror … The City isn’t a City, anymore …” His eyes seemed to glaze over, pointed at the suitcase. “It’s a dream of a City. We tried to wake it up …”
“Think I know what he means,” Speedy said. “Girl, your Daddy always hated the City … We’re always funning you, but we wanted you to shy off it, because me and Junebug Stookey and your Daddy once tried to jack the high-speed tube.”
“Go hang,” Jubal said, “that was you? That was supposed to be a acciden …”
“Warn’t no accident.” Speedy spat his chew in the River. “That’s what happened to your Daddy, Rhubarb … and maybe I felt a little responsible, on account of it was my idea.
“We just blew a hole in the side of the tube. Figured we’d stop traffic and loot the truck-trains and light off into the hills before City law showed up.
“But there weren’t no truck-trains or hovercraft full of cargo inside … no flying cars with glassjaw slicks begging for their lives … Warn’t nothing inside that tube but a bunch of fat opticables. No roads in or out of that City after they rebuilt from the goo plague, Barb. Just them cables … Well, your Daddy went and got himself fried trying to make something come out the wires, the dumb redneck.”
Rhubarb waited for him to stop talking. Folks in town had all kinds of ideas how her Daddy died, but her mama told her the truth, about how he turned mercenary and went down south with the Warbabies and got killed fighting the Aztech Empire. To hear her tell it––how he went to the top of their floating pyramid and lay on the altar and bared his chest with the Cyclops battle-flag of the Risen Dixie tattooed on it so it waved like an antique GIF loop so they cracked his ribcage and dug out his beating heart––you might have thought they sent her a commemorative video.
“Sure,” Rhubarb said, “I know all about teleports … like, they zap people and things into bits, and shoot ‘em through the wire, and they come out the other side solid again?”
“They don’t come out solid, girl. Once you’re in the City, you never come out at all. That’s why …”
“That’s why we had to move the whole town,” Jubal said. “Damn you, the City news said twelve thousand folks lost their lives in that crash, and we had to shift into the hills and cook over woodstoves for damn near four years, Boningham, you zik-brain bugfucker––”
“Listen,” the clone said, trying to stand. “I need to take it with me. We need it. You need to be very careful how you unplug it …”
“Balls to that,” Rhubarb said. “It’s mine by right of salvage. You said yourself …”
“I know what I said, but you can’t have it. It’s not a mirror backup, it’s … a Trojan horse. It’s a bomb––”
Whatever the clone said next, nobody heard over the shriek of all three of Speedy’s industrial printers going at once.
“What the hell?” Jubal Fufkin jumped off his bait-barrel and took cover like the others, but what he saw made him get up and shuffle closer to the bank of screaming fabricators as they vomited out a jackpot mound of tiny soldiers.
“I’ll be damned,” Fufkin said, picking up a miniature graycoat cavalry officer thrusting out a saber and standing up in his stirrups on a charging stallion to sound the charge. “My order’s ready.”
“Brother Jube,” Speedy said from behind a diorama of his Uncle Karl’s taxidermied Kudzu Devils, “I didn’t place your order yet.”
Jubal Fufkin was still admiring the exquisitely detailed figurine when it skewered his left eye up to the hilt of the cavalry saber and roared, “CHARGE!” as it rode Jubal Fufkin’s disbelieving face all the way to the floor.
With a frantic popcorn sound, an army poured out of the mouth of each printer. Jubal was dusted with waves of gunpowder glitter that made bloody soup of his skin and set countless pinprick fires on his shirt and sarong. The toy soldiers wielded blatantly anachronistic semiauto repeaters that peppered Jubal Fufkin until he split open and seeped through the planks of the wharf.
Rhubarb jumped up and grabbed a blowtorch off Speedy’s bench, fanned it wide open, and vaporized a phalanx of the ornery toys as they tried to seize the workbench.
Speedy jumped over the bench and shoved something into her arms, said, “Sorry, darlin,” and shoved her off the end of the wharf, into the green R
iver.
The sluggish current rolled her under a row of anchored skimmers that burst, one by one, into fiberglass confetti. Rhubarb kicked to the surface, fighting the dead weight clasped to her bosom, then gagged as muddy water sluiced up her nose. Dragged backward by the cable attached to the black briefcase in her arms.
Hundreds of winged Confederate infantry hovered over her head like reactionary dragonflies. Oblivious to the droplets of aerosolized boat fuel suspended in the sultry summer evening air, they rallied and formed up in a killer bee vortex and made as if to charge down into her gasping mouth.
The water shook with a concussion that dunked her under again. The air over the water flared white-hot.
When she came up, it rained fizzing ingots of burning plastic. She let the current push her up against the shore half a mile downstream from Main Street. The mud soothed her scalded skin and she folded over and dropped the briefcase, which had begun to bounce and tremble like a Aztech jumping bean.
She fiddled with the elaborate locks for a few precious minutes, the bouncing becoming ever more desperately acute, then more feeble, then finally gave up and smashed it against a big rock.
The glass briefcase shivered into pieces fine as ash and floated away on the breeze. She tore the soft pink pouch that flopped into her hands and cradled the fragile, gourd-headed thing she found inside.
She looked up and shaded her eyes against the purpling light of the sunset peering through the shaggy wall of mangrove trees that lined the west bank of the River. The tubes, the towers, the animated pornographic palisades and hanging pleasure gardens. They weren’t just dark, they were all gone.
The ugly newborn baby wailed in her arms, a plaintive command that made her budding breasts ache. She tried to put it down, but it latched onto her tit through her shirt and sucked milk from it, watching her solemnly out of the infinite crystal of its solitary eye. Its massive cranium throbbed and pulsed restlessly in her hand. Restless pink claws kneaded the tender swelling of her breast, demanding something else.