Welcome to Bordertown

by Holly Black

  * * *

  More dimensions are easy. Say you’ve got a table of names and ages:

  ShannonJetfuelSynack

  201884

  If you were initializing this as a table in a computer program, you could write it like this: (shannon,20)(jetfuel,18)(synack,84). We call that a two-dimensional array. If you wanted to add race to the picture, making it a three-dimensional array, it’d look like this: (shannon,20,human)(jetfuel,18,halfie)(synack,84,highborn). If you were drawing that up as a table, it’d look like a cube with two values on each edge, like this:

  That’s easy for humans. We live in 3-D, so it’s easy to think in it. Now, imagine that you want the computer to consider something else, like smell: (shannon, 20, human, coffee)(jetfuel, 18, halfie, bread)(synack, 84, highborn, croissants). Now you have a four-dimensional array—that is, a table where each entry has four associated pieces of information.

  This is easy for computers. They don’t even slow down. Every database you’ve interacted with juggles arrays that are vastly more complex than this, running up to hundreds of dimensions—height, fingerprints, handedness, date of birth, and so on. But it’s hard to draw this kind of array in a way that a 3-D eye can transmit to a 3-D brain. Go Google “tesseract” to see what a 4-D cube looks like, but you’re not going to find many 5-D cube pictures. Five dimensions, six dimensions, ten dimensions, a hundred dimensions … They’re easy to blithely knock up in a computer array but practically impossible to visualize using your poor 3-D brain.

  But that’s not what Jetfuel and Synack mean by “dimension,” as far as I can tell. Or maybe it is. Maybe there’s a shape that stories have when you look at them in more than three dimensions, a shape that’s obviously right or wrong, the way that a cube is a cube and if it has a short side or a side that’s slanted, you can just look at it and say, “That’s not a cube.” Maybe the right kind of dramatic necessity makes an obvious straight line between two points.

  If that’s right, we’ll find it. We’ll use it as a way to optimize our transmissions. Maybe a TCP transmission that’s carrying something beautiful and heroic or ugly and tragic will travel faster and more reliably. Maybe there’s a router that can be designed that will sort outbound traffic by its poetic quotient and route it accordingly.

  Maybe Jetfuel is right and we’ll be able to send ideas to Faerie so that brains with the right shape will be able to see their romantic forms and dramatic topologies and write reports on them and send them back to us. It could be full employment for bored elf princes and princesses, shape-judging, like an Indian call center, paid by the piece to evaluate beauty and grace.

  I don’t know what I’m going to do with my network link to Faerie. But here’s the thing: I think it would be beautiful, and ugly, and terrible, and romantic, and heroic. Maybe that means it will work.

  * * *

  The calligrapher was Highborn. Jetfuel assured me that nothing less would do. “If you’re going to engrave a number on a paintbrush handle, you can’t just etch it in nine-point Courier. It has to be beautiful. Mandala is the unquestioned mistress of calligraphy.”

  I didn’t spend a lot of time up on Dragon’s Tooth Hill, though we had plenty of customers there. The Highborn don’t like Border-born elves, they have very little patience for halfies, they really don’t like humans, and they really, really don’t like humans who came to B-town after the Pinching Off passed. We weren’t poetic enough, we newcomers who’d grown up in a world that had seen wonder, seen it vanish, seen it reappear. We were graspers at wealth, mere businesspeople.

  So I had halfies and elves and such who did the business on the Hill.

  The calligrapher was exactly the kind of Highborn I didn’t go to the Hill to see. She was dressed as if she had been clothed by a weeping willow and a gang of silkworms. She was so ethereal that she was practically transparent. At first she didn’t look directly at me, ushering us into her mansion, whose walls had all been knocked out, making the place into a single huge room—I did a double take and realized that the floors had been removed, too, giving the room a ceiling that was three stories tall. I kept seeing wisps of mist or smoke out of the corners of my eyes, but when I looked at them straight on, they vanished. Her tools were arranged neatly on a table that appeared to be floating in midair but that, on closer inspection, turned out to be hung from the high ceiling by long pieces of industrial monofilament. Once I realized this, I also realized that the whole thing was a sham, something to impress the yokels before she handed them the bill.

  She seemed to sense my cynicism, for she arched her brows at me as though noticing me for the first time (and thoroughly disapproving of me) and pointed a single finger at me. “Do you care about beauty?” she said, without any preamble. Ah, that famed elfin conversational grace.

  “Sure,” I said. “Why not.” Even I could hear that I sounded like a brat. Jetfuel glared at me. I made a conscious effort to be less offensive and tried to project awe at the majesty of it all.

  She seemed to let that go. Jetfuel produced her sister’s paint box and set the brushes down, click-click-click, on the work surface, amid the fine etching knives, the oil pastels, and the pots of ink. She also unfolded a sheet of paper bearing our message, carefully transcribed from a peecee screen that morning and triple-checked against the original stored on a USB stick in my pocket. She had refused to allow me to print it on one of the semi-disposable inkjets that littered the BINGO offices, insisting the calligrapher wouldn’t deign to handle an original that had been machine produced.

  The calligrapher looked down at the brushes and the sheet for a long, long time. Then I noticed that she had her eyes closed, either in contemplation or because she was asleep. I caught Jetfuel’s attention and rolled my eyes. Jetfuel furrowed her brows at me, sending me a shut-up-and-don’t-make-trouble look that was hilarious, coming from her. Since when was Jetfuel the grown-up in our friendship? I went back to studying my shoes.

  “I don’t think so. I think you wouldn’t recognize beauty if it poked you in the eye. I think you care about money and nothing but money, like all humans. Silver-mad, you are.”

  I had to rewind a bit to figure out that she was replying to something I’d said ten minutes before. She’d opened her eyes and was staring at me, finger out, little half-moon of nail aimed directly at me like she was about to spell me into oblivion.

  I was angry for half a second; then I chuckled. “Lady, you’ve got the wrong guy. There’s plenty of things wrong with me, but my love of money isn’t one of them.” Besides, I didn’t add, you clearly didn’t get this swanky mansion by caring only for beauty. “And since you’re not doing this job for free, let’s just both admit that neither of us are adverse to a little cash now and then.” I thought I saw a hint of a smile cross her face; then she scowled at the paper again.

  “This is what I am to engrave upon these brushes?”

  We both nodded.

  She looked longer at it. “What is it?”

  I looked at Jetfuel and she looked at me. “A random number,” I said.

  She ran her finger along it. “Not so random,” she said. “See how the ones appear again and again?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They sure do. That’s how random numbers work. Sometimes you get ones that seem to have patterns, but it’s like the faces you see in the clouds—just illusions of order from the chaos.”

  “No wonder you in the World are so poor in spirit, if you think that it’s impossible to scry from the clouds. That’s powerful magic, sky magic.”

  The last thing I wanted was an argument. “Well, let me put it this way. We chose this number at random. If it’s got a message from the gods or something in it, we didn’t put it there, we don’t care about it, and we don’t know about it. Can you engrave it?”

  The calligrapher folded her hands. “I will dance with these numbers,” she said. “And perhaps they will dance with me. Come again tomorrow and I will show you what we have found in our dance.”

  I wa
ited until the door clicked shut behind us before I hissed, “Pretentious, much?” and rolled my eyes. Jetfuel snorted and socked me in the thigh, giving me an instant—but friendly—deadleg.

  “She’s the best,” Jetfuel said. “If anyone can turn a hundred-twenty-eight-bit number into art, it’s her. So don’t piss her off and maybe she’ll ‘dance’ our number across the Border.”

  * * *

  Jetfuel was the first person to really get what I was doing with BINGO and B-town. Oh, there were plenty of geeks who thought it was all cool and nerdy and fun, and plenty of suits from the Hill who wanted to invest in the business and cash out with a big fat dividend. But Jetfuel was the only one who ever understood the beauty of it all.

  Somewhere along the years, she became a mere heliographer and I became a mere businessman, and until that fateful day on the roof, we barely spoke to each other.

  Tomorrow, it will all change. Tomorrow, we will begin to make beauty—instead of money—again.

  We sat in my bedroom, listening to the techs moving around below us, shouting and typing on peecees and squabbling and sucking down coffees. I had my chocolate stash out, and I’d set it down between us on the windowsill where we sat, looking out at the Mad River and its meandering course all the way into Faerie. As I reached for the chunk of black, fragrant, slightly oily chocolate, our hands brushed and I felt something race up my arm to my spinal cord and up into my brain, like a ping that passes between two routers. I could tell she felt it, too, because she jerked her hand away as fast as I had.

  We were saved from embarrassment by the arrival of Synack, looking even more elfy-welfy than usual, her hair topped with a coronet made from silver leaves, her feet clad in sandals whose straps climbed up her long legs like vines. As we turned to her, I had a jolt of something entirely different—a feeling of nonrecognition, a feeling that this wasn’t the same kind of being that I was. This was a person whose brain sometimes pulsed and thought in dimensions I couldn’t grasp. This being was the product of a different set of physical laws than the ones my universe obeyed, physical laws that made exceptions for beauty and terror. Suddenly, Synack was as alien as a lobster, and her long legs and shimmering hair were as attractive as a distant star or the craters of the moon.

  “I leave in an hour,” she said, out of breath from the climb up the stairs and the excitement of her impending departure. Her words broke the spell, and she was a person again, someone I could relate to and care about.

  Jetfuel sprang from the windowsill and threw herself around her sister’s neck, tumbling her to my unmade bed. “I’ll miss ya, sis!” she said over the racket of small electrical components bouncing off the bed and side tables and rolling to the floor. The two of them giggled like any sisters, and I shook off the feeling of unreality and tried to recapture my excitement.

  I stood up and wiped my hands on my jeans. The two of them stopped laughing and looked at me solemnly, two pairs of eyes, one silver and one brown, staring with complex looks that I couldn’t quite understand. “You’ve got your brushes?”

  Synack nodded. “And I’ve been telling Father all about the painting I’ve been planning to make for him for days now, and he can’t wait to see it.”

  We all looked at each other. “And you’ll come back once you get the reply transmission, right?” This was the hardest part, figuring out how to confirm with her that her message had arrived safely back at BINGO. The plan for this stank: Jetfuel was going to reduce her sister’s return volley to a hash—that is, a shorter number arrived at by running the long number through a prearranged function. The new number should be only ten digits long, which means that the odds against her guessing the correct value by random chance were 1:1,000,000,000. Pretty rare. Ten digits were easier to sneak over the Border than a couple hundred. Jetfuel swore that she could work them into a poem about the painting that she could mail back to her sister and that this would be beautiful enough to traverse the Border.

  I hated this part. How the hell could I tell if it was a reasonable plan or totally nuts? I couldn’t see into this dimension where beauty could be measured and agreed upon. Neither could Jetfuel or Synack, but at least their brains were theoretically capable of it, on the other side of the Border.

  “I’ll come back. With Father here in the World, I’m the mistress of Caer Ceile. That makes me gentry, properly speaking, with all the rights and entitlements, et cetera. Father will be furious, of course—he’s so glad that his precious daughter is getting out of mean old Bordertown.” She fell silent and carefully avoided looking at Jetfuel. The question hung unspoken in the air: If Synack is the precious daughter who’s too good for B-town, what is Jetfuel?

  We all waited in the awkward silence. Then Synack said in a voice that was practically a whisper, “He does love you, you know.”

  Jetfuel put on a big, fake smile. “Yeah, yeah. Every father loves all his children equally, even the half-breeds.”

  “He left the True Lands for a human.”

  Jetfuel’s smile vanished like a popped soap bubble. “It’s a vacation. A half century in the World, and then he can go back to the Realm.” She spread her hands out, miming unlike me.

  “Um …,” I said. “Not that it’s any of my business, but this is totally not any of my business.” They had the good grace to look slightly embarrassed.

  “Sorry,” Synack said. “You’re right.” Somewhere in the distance, one of B-town’s many big clocks chimed four. “Is that Big Bend?” she said.

  “Sounds like Old Tongue to me,” I said. B-town’s clocks kept their own time, but if you knew which clock was bonging, you could usually approximate the real time. Whatever real time was.

  “I’d better get going.”

  Jetfuel gave Synack another hug that seemed within three microns of being sincere. “Take care of yourself. Come back soon.”

  Then Synack gave me a hug, and it was like hugging a bundle of sticks. That smelled like croissants. “Thanks for this, Shannon,” she said.

  “Thank you!” I said, unable to keep the surprise out of my voice. “You’re the one taking all the risks!”

  “You’re the one trusting me to take them,” she said.

  Then she turned and left, going down the wrought-iron staircase like a … well, like an elfin princess picking her way delicately down a spiral staircase.

  * * *

  We didn’t get drunk. Instead, we went out onto the roof, climbing along the window ledge to where there was a convenient overhang that we used to chin ourselves onto the top of the building, which bristled with antennae and dowsing rods and pigeon coops and a triple heliograph tower. Back in the day, we’d practically lived on the rooftops of B-town, amid the broken glass and the pigeon poop and the secret places where the city slumbered like an ancient desert even as the streets below thronged with life and revelry.

  Back in those days, it had been too much work to descend to street level with all our gear and then haul it back up onto the next roof. Instead, we got in touch with our inner parkour, which is to say that we taught ourselves to just jump from one roof to the next. Actually, technically, Jetfuel taught herself to jump from roof to roof, and then stood on the far roof shouting things like “Jump already, you pussy!”

  She looked at me and shook out her whole body, from her dreads to her toes, like a full-length shiver. It was a moment of pure grace, the sun high overhead making her skin glow, her motion as fluid as a dancer. She gave me a smile that was as wicked as wickedness and then one-two-three hoopla! She ran to the edge of the roof and leaped for the next roof, which was a good two feet lower than the BINGO building—but was also a good eight feet away. She landed and took the shock in her whole body, coiling like a spring, then using the momentum to pop straight up in the air, higher than I thought it would be possible to jump. She turned and waved at me. “Jump already, you big pussy!”

  It took me three tries. I kept chickening out before I took the leap. Jumping off a roof is dumb, okay? Your body knows it.
It doesn’t want to do this. You have to do a lot of convincing before it’ll let you take a leap of faith.

  At least mine did.

  Jumping off a roof is dumb, but I’ll tell you what: Nothing beats it for letting you know that you are, by the gods, alive. When my feet crunched down on the next rooftop, my body accordioning down as it remembered what to do when I was hurling it through the sky, I had a jolt of pure aliveness that was a lot like what coffee is supposed to feel like but never quite attains. It was not getting drunk. It was the opposite of getting drunk.

  She gave me a golf clap and then smiled again and one-two-three hoopla! She was off to the next roof. And the next. And the next. And where she went, I followed, my chest heaving, my vision sharper than it had ever been, my hearing so acute I could actually hear individual air molecules as they hissed past my ears. People looked up as we leaped like mountain goats, and I felt like physics might have actually suspended itself for our benefit, like we had stumbled onto something so beautiful and heroic (or so dumb and awful) that the universe was rearranging itself for us, allowing us to leap through a dimension in which the distance between two points was governed by how wonderful the journey would be.

  We must have covered nine or ten roofs this way before we finished up atop a notorious Wharf Rat nest, right by the river, with nowhere else to go. Most people wouldn’t go near the building, but we’d had a repeater on its roof for more than a year, and the rats knew that it was good to have friends at BINGO, so they didn’t touch it. And there was the repeater: a steel box with a solar cell and a spellbox bolted to it, the whole thing in turn bolted to the roof. Two antennae sprouted from it, phased arrays tuned to reach other nodes, off in the distance.

  We panted and whooped and thumped each other on the back and laughed and eventually collapsed onto the roof. It was hot high noon now, and the streets below thronged with people going about their business, oblivious to the data and the people flying over their heads. I was sweating, and I took off my shirt and wiped off my hair and armpits with it, then stuck it through a belt loop. Jetfuel shook out her dreads, and drops of sweat flew off her chin. She sat down abruptly. I sat down, too, and she pulled me to her. I leaned my sweaty head into her sweaty shoulder, and the distance between us telescoped down to microns, and time dilated so that every second took a thousand years, and I thought that perhaps I had found a way to perceive additional dimensions of space and time after all.