Metatropolis

by John Scalzi

  Shearer’s voice interrupted her reverie. “Go ahead and put it on.”

  “Hm?”

  “The tag.”

  Dubiously, Cadie fastened the ring around her wrist and shook it so the lone tag made a shimmering sound against the band. It sounded pretty. “And are you taking me to your community?”

  Homer took a hand off the wheel to gesture. “Our community is everywhere. A core is easy to uproot. A distributed model—”

  “Like water to a knife, right.” Cadie meant to sound ironic and arch, but it didn’t quite come out that way. These people were so obviously true believers, fanatics. Adrenaline chilled her as a sickening suspicion took hold. “You guys aren’t the ones who commandeered that skyscraper, are you?”

  But Shearer snorted with such obvious dismissal that Cadie instantly felt like an idiot for asking. And then felt like an idiot for feeling like an idiot, because what was to stop Shearer from lying to her until she gave them what they wanted?

  “We salvage,” Shearer said. “We don’t steal.”

  Homer caught Cadie’s eye in the mirror. “We come or go, more or less as we please. Some of us hold down outside jobs, like Stephanie.” He shrugged. “Some of us do not.”

  Cadie scrunched her legs around behind his seat, trying to encourage blood flow. The bracelet was a weight on her wrist; it seemed like she could hear the tag shimmer every time she so much as took a breath. The sound made her as conscious of every tiny motion as if a predator watched her. “How much longer?”

  Homer pulled the car onto a narrow road that wound through a heavy copse of trees. An ivy-covered sign, unreadable, made Cadie think this’ must be the remains of an abandoned office park. Somebody had laid truckloads of gravel over the ruined asphalt, so the driveway was smoother than the municipal road that led to it.

  “To see your lawnmower,” he said.

  “LIKE industrialization and the black satanic mills, globalization is a failed model that nevertheless we have to pass through to invent the next modality.” Even holding the car door for Cadie, Shearer was still lecturing. And Cadie was still listening, though she was starting to find some intelligent questions.

  “So who makes the stuff you can’t salvage?” she asked. “The stuff you hold in common? Does your society work without an industrial society to…to parasitize?”

  Shearer grinned. “Maybe not. But industrial society has it coming. Allez-oop,” Propped on the open door, she offered Cadie a hand, and Cadie—despite her better judgment regarding Shearer’s frailty—accepted it. She tried to use the frame of the auto as her primary source of lift for standing, but the older woman’s strength surprised her. In reflected light, Cadie could see where parking lots had once been. Now, the rustle of tall corn filled the night.

  Here, there were people. Men and women moved along pathways lit by solar-powered LED lamps stuck on spikes into the grass, so Cadie had very little sense of their faces, forms, or how they were dressed. But she heard the click of high heels and the rubbery thud of heavy boots, the scuff of sneakers. And the light high Tinker-Bell shimmer of tags ringing on each other as their wearers moved.

  Everyone seemed casually busy and a few were far more intent—obviously in a hurry. But some passersby still glanced at Cadie and her escorts, and several greeted Shearer and Homer with a word or a wave. Cadie found herself hiding half-behind Homer, sticking close to his heels like an uncertain dog or a child.

  “I’m going to let Homer take you around,” Shearer said. “My hip has had enough.”

  Homer studied her with a concerned expression, but his only response was a nod. “I’ll meet you in the lounge.”

  Shearer winked before she turned away. “Make sure you take her up to the roof.”

  Inside, they paused in a glass-roofed atrium full of potted chest-tall fruit trees. The heavy scent of oranges filled the air, sharp enough to wrinkle Cadie’s nose. The space was not brightly lit; instead, strands of fairy-light LEDs strung overhead gave illumination enough to walk by. And as with outside, there were people walking. A woman in blue jeans and a flannel shirt with the sleeves rolled up tended the orange and lime trees, dropping fruit into a basket that curved around her hip. A man surrounded by six or seven school-age children climbed the wide stair to the mezzanine level, and a security guard or receptionist or both looked up from behind the desk beside the doors. Her entire head and body except her face was enveloped in a hijab and chador, but based on her gimlet-eyed appraisal of them as they entered, Cadie did not think the concealing garments would slow her down at all. After her inspection, she nodded, though Cadie caught her rechecking Cadie’s wrist for the bracelet before she looked down.

  When Cadie stuffed her hand into her pocket the tag caught on the fabric, keeping her from reaching easily to the bottom. She was still following Homer like a duckling, head down so her dreads hid her expression, but she had to steal glances at the flock of children climbing the stairs and Homer caught her.

  She imagined Firuza laughing with these children, flocking with them like so many noisy starlings. Her own childhood had been play groups and educational trips and team sports in the summertime, and she wondered what it was like to grow up surrounded by foster siblings. Did their caretakers watch them? Make sure nobody got bullied, that the little ones got their fair share?

  Everybody in San Diego must think she was dead by now. She wondered what they had done, when the emails and phone calls had stopped coming. Had they worried?

  Had her sister said to her mother, Mama, I told her so?

  You did. You did, Ruby. You did.

  “You have your own crèche?” she asked, as they reached the bottom of the flight themselves. The kids and their minder vanished through a door at the top of the stairs.

  “School,” he said. “Not crèche. They stay with their guardians at night. Guardians or parents,” he amended. “They’re probably on their way home now. Distributed model also makes child rearing that much easier.”

  She watched his shoulders rise and fall, and suffered a realization. “You have kids.”

  “Had,” He paused at the top of the stair and waited, looking down at her until she caught him. “You’ll discover that a lot of people find us out of some kind of life trauma.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  This time, the shrug came with wide-spread hands. He looked at her, really looked at her, and she looked back just as hard. What she saw was a skinny sallow-skinned person with acne scars across the tops of his cheeks, one who didn’t look down when she stared right at him. It’s about people, too, she realized. You can’t do what they want to do without people.

  And then, like a tripping cat, the realization. I’m people.

  “It is what it is,” Homer said. “Come on.”

  A bank of elevators waited silent immediately before them, but two had the buttons taped over, and the third bore a hand-lettered sign that read ARE YOU SURE? Cadie found the implied faith in personal judgment refreshing, and was about to say so to Homer, but he was already vanishing up a stair. He paused just inside to hold the door for her, and she ran a couple of steps to catch up.

  “Farther up and further in,” she said, but Homer looked at her blankly. “Nevermind,” she finished with a wince.

  He didn’t seem concerned about it anyway. He led her up three flights at a trot that made her glad of the time she spent in a bicycle saddle, and then out into a corridor that connected on either end to a broad open space broken up by partial-height walls. “A cube farm?” Cadie asked.

  “Former cube farm,” he said, and led her out into the walkways between the once-beige fabric walls.

  Somebody with little concern for corporate image had been at them with fabric paints and glitter glue, illuminating the cubes with vivid primitive paintings of macaws and monkeys, sea turtles and sloths. Even in the LED fairylight, the colors were stunning enough that Cadie wished she were seeing them by daylight. Curtains—repurposed blankets, draperies, and sho
wer curtains—hung across the doorway of each cube, and from inside some of them Cadie could hear the click of keypads or the rustle of cloth. One or two stood open, empty, revealing futon mattresses with neatly folded bedclothes, plastic crates set beside them to serve as storage and tables.

  “Dormitories,” she said.

  Homer cocked his finger like a gun and made an approving click. “Yours if you want to use them. First-come, first-served, though it becomes possible to make reservations with enough history of service. But as you can see, we’re rarely full.”

  There were plants here too, racked in front of the floor to ceiling windows where they would break up the glare of the light. Cadie recognized potted strawberries, thyme, basil, rosemary, and sage.

  “Clover?” she asked, pointing. “What for?”

  Homer followed her line. “Wood sorrel,” he said, “It grows like a weed, and it’s tasty and full of vitamin C. We toss it in soup. Might as well. Here, follow me.”

  He led her to another stair, this one in the corner of the building and boasting an old FIRE EXIT sign. Again, she climbed behind him, this time hearing the giggles of children echoing down the glass and cement stairwell. She was not sure if she wanted to catch them, or if what she really wanted was to clap her hands over her ears and block the sound away.

  Whatever her conscious mind thought, her subconscious was sure. She only caught herself walking faster when she almost trod on Homer’s heels. “The person who painted the murals,” she said, when Homer turned back to see what the rush was. “Did she—he?—earn more tags for doing that?”

  “Not just for that,” Homer said. “She’s kind of a polymath. But yes, that’s one of her contributions.”

  “Okay,” Cadie said. “So really, it’s not all that different from anything else. Except instead of money, you get tags.…”

  “Except, instead of contributing to an exploitative economy designed to line the pockets of the top capital holders, we’re contributing to a collective economy in which people know one another by reputation.”

  “Until it gets too big.”

  “Then we split up,” Homer said. “Subdivide until we reach a sustainable level. Growth—getting as big as possible as fast as possible—is not the only way to survive. Think about dinosaurs and mammals.”

  His grin was infectious. He pushed open the roof door and she followed him, surprised by the springiness of turf under her feet, and the sweetness of cool night air. She had, perhaps subconsciously, been expecting gravel and the reek of rubber roofing after a long day baking in the sun.

  “Green roof,” she said, an exclamation of surprise, and felt Homer’s smug pleasure beside her.

  “This is all ancient technology,” he said. “From turf roofs to cooperative agriculture. It’s just that for a while we got confused about progress, and hooked on the idea that it also means giving up what works.”

  As they moved out into the darkness and Cadie’s eyes adjusted, she could make out the silhouettes of other people. First, the children she’d glimpsed earlier, not giggling and shoving now but standing in a close and cheerful huddle, gathered around something illuminated by the LED flashlight in their crouching instructor’s hand. Beyond them, a couple pulled each other close, watching the crescent moon rise over trees, the taller man’s head leaned on top of his lover’s.

  Cadie stepped away from Homer, towards the huddle of children gathered around the puddle of bright green light. The instructor glanced up as she came close, registering her approach, but didn’t otherwise acknowledge her. Since he also made no move to exclude her, she rose up on tiptoe to see over the heads of the kids. They were gathered around an unprepossessing black beetle the size of a kidney bean, and as Cadie was wondering what, exactly, the point of the exercise was, the instructor took his thumb off the button on the LED flash and the light went out.

  Her eyes took a moment to adjust to blackness and moonlight, the silver-limned figures of the hunched-over children and the high block wall of the roof edge beyond. Moonlight, she remembered from somewhere, is comprised of parallel rays, because it is reflected as if by a giant mirror. It’s cold—reflected light is cold—and it casts perfect sharp-edged shadows, because it does not scatter the way sunlight does. It turned each blade of grass into a slender knife of frost, and the pools of shadow under the children into bottomless wells. Twinkling green fairy lights flickered on and off overhead, casting no appreciable illumination, unlike the LED chains in the lobby.

  That’s what Cadie thought, at least, until at the center of their gathering, a sharp signal flickered, a cold chemical light as green as the doused LED answering the flashes overhead. “Firefly,” she breathed, understanding, and bit her lip just in time to keep from embarrassing herself by saying it out loud.

  “The female stays on the ground,” the instructor said. “Until she finds a male that flashes fast and bright enough to interest her. When that happens, she flashes back, to show him where to find her. Until she does that, the male doesn’t even know she’s there.”

  “But then why don’t all the bad flashers get bred out?” It was a girl who asked the question, Cadie thought, though it was hard to tell from the voices in the dark. She wondered if Firuza had ever seen a firefly.

  “That’s a really good question, Sabrina. See, there are other males, who aren’t such good flashers, and sometimes they wait until a female flashes at a male who is bright, and then try to get to her first and fool her. So they can pass on their genes by being tricky. Salazar, here, pick out a male, one of the flying ones. Take the LED and see if you can imitate the flashes well enough to get him to come down to you—”

  In the intermittent backglow of the LED, Cadie could make out Salazar’s face. He might have been eight or nine years old, and as he looked up his expression was as perfectly intent as any scientist’s as he tried to pick one male firefly’s flash pattern out of the holding pattern overhead.

  Cadie only realized she was holding her breath when Salazar’s silent concentration imploded around the sudden, unmistakable hail-pelting rattle of gunfire.

  She hit the ground—or the roof—intuitively, sweeping Salazar and one of the other children into her arms and covering them with her body. Homer hit the turf beside her as the instructor began snapping orders to his charges, quick commands that spoke of faithful drill. As they all dropped to a crouch and began moving quickly and in good order towards the roof door, Cadie rolled to let the children she’d shielded scramble alongside their classmates. At the edge, the two men who had been watching the moonrise both went to their knees, peering over the wall like archers over a battlement. One—the shorter one—touched his headset. Cadie saw the blue light flicker live as he began to speak into it.

  Homer touched her arm. “Follow the kids. Ernie will take care of you.”

  “Homer, this might be about me—”

  “Miss Grange,” he said. “Not everything is about you. Go with the nice man.”

  Cadie thought about arguing, but Homer was already moving away from her while Ernie—Ernie must be the instructor—shooed eight-year-olds down the stairs single file, counting each child with a tap on the head as he or she passed. Cadie, bent double with her knees against her chest, ran to meet him.

  “Homer says you’ll take care of me,” she said, when Ernie looked at her with elevated eyebrows. He’d doused the light inside the stairwell, but she could see his expression plainly by moonlight. She bit her lip and said, “Sorry. I’m new.”

  It was the first real notion she’d had that Homer and Shearer’s hard sell was working. Ernie studied her for a second, dark thick hair falling in a wing across his forehead until he shook it back irritably. “Right,” he said. “Sorry. Didn’t mean to be an asshole. Come with me.”

  DOWN the stairs in the dark, without even the light of the LED flashlights to guide them. Only one floor, because this stairwell was at the corner of the building, and they would have been visible and vulnerable through the glass if anyone had
cared to look up. The children stayed close to the center of the staircase, heads ducked, shoulders hunched as they crabbed down the flight. Cadie mimicked them, protecting the ones closest to her with her body as much as she could. The descent gave her a strobe-image series of glimpses of the firefight below, muzzle-flash and then a shuddering roar of water as defenders within and atop the besieged office building opened up with firehoses. Searchlights flooded the lawn and crop fields with light. Rows of corn shook with the passage of running bodies, like something out of a horror movie.

  A child at the front of the file pressed her tags to a control panel by the door on the landing, and it slid open with a whisper of complaint. The kids ducked through, Ernie paused to usher Cadie through, and then he sealed the door behind.

  Once the solid door was shut, the kids straightened up. Cadie tried to emulate them, fighting a contraction of her abdominal muscles as if someone had fastened her lower ribs to her pelvis with giant hog-nosed staples. By placing one hand on the wall and pushing against it, she managed to stand up tall, though she thought Ernie and all the kids could see her shoulders and knees shaking.

  “It’s better than being shot at for real,” Ernie said, with a wink, and slapped her on the shoulder. “Come on, the panic room’s not far. Come on, kids, look sharp!”

  Doors had closed across the corridors like airlocks, breaking each one into defensible segments, and Ernie opened each one with his tag and cleared the other side like a pro before he let them pass each one. He urged them into a trot, using his voice like a border collie’s bark to keep them both moving and close. Cadie was pretty sure herding children wasn’t supposed to be that easy.

  Given the circumstances, she was happy to be herded as well. It’s easy to give up authority in crisis. Easy to do what you’re told. Easy to follow orders and let somebody else take responsibility. Easy to pretend you didn’t know what was going on.