by Ian McDonald
The squeal of brakes broke his dream. The buffers were approaching. Porters and pedicab wallahs were already closing on the train like warrior ants tackling a snake. With stiff fingers, he worked loose the bindings, returned his belt to its more socially acceptable use of keeping his pants from obeying gravity. He stood up, balanced himself and stepped off the cow-catcher on to the platform at a gentle walking pace.
Belladonna.
He had made it. He had arrived.
He clenched his fists in private triumph, let a slow, sly “yes” slip across his lips.
Instantly he felt fingers at his pocket. He turned: gone. Faces. The Grand Trunk Rapido was disembarking, a flood of faces. Pharaoh shrugged. So. Everything he valued, he carried inside his clothes, and up there, the sun was shining.
Belladonna.
Made it.
“Long way between down there and up here,” Sweetness Octave Glorious Honey-Bun Asiim Engineer 12th observed as she tugged the blankets tighter around her and tried to ignore the swaying of the little webbing nest.
The shaking had soon passed, eased with cups of a herbal brew that left twiggy bits in the gaps of her teeth. Picking at them too vigorously, Sweetness noticed that she was setting this little globular nest of plastic, webbing and soft fabrics in which she had found herself swaying. Before Pharaoh could stop her, she had stuck her head out through the entrance slit and found herself looking down through five kilometres at the sinuous terraces of Canton Czystoya.
“Oh whoa,” Sweetness had said, queasily, and crept back into the draughty comfort of Pharaoh's nest.
“More tea?”
“I think I could, yeah.”
Because it was all story, it was necessary not just that she be rescued from the Point of Worst Personal Threat by a daring swoop out of the big blue, but that the daring swooper be a character she had last encountered before she properly understood what it was to be a story and have improbable things happen around you. Ironic too; the saviour saved. Now she understood what the Teacher of the Air had been going on about in all those lessons about story and structure and narrative. All you had to do was throw yourself off the thousandth-level balcony of a pier-top manor. Irony on irony; the meat Lotto winner from the pits under Meridian should end up some kind of vertical goondah in a squatter town of pods and cocoons hanging like grapefruit from the heat-exchange vanes of Pier 11738.
Some folk just got the hooverville in the genes, Sweetness supposed. Never get away from it. Like some people got trains. At least the view's better, and you get to crap on the people below.
“It's easy to get trapped, so,” Pharaoh said in his soft, hesitating way, his head half turned so she would not have to look at one price he had paid to make it all the way up here.
Yeah, Sweetness thought and remembered those other men she had met who, one way or another, had trapped themselves. Uncle Neon, literally so, fused into the global signalling network, his soul blasted into some alternative world less friendly than this. The doctor, free to go as far into the futures and pasts as he liked, but only within the confines of the town he had invented. Bedassie with his dream cinema playing every night to an audience of zombies because any applause was better than the sound of your own feet walking off stage. Cadmon and Euphrasie: weird butty-boys. Building things and blowing them up again and not caring if anyone ever saw or knew. Bones in the sand now, with no one caring or knowing, because they'd let head stuff—politics, art, aesthetic outrage—drive them to war with Harx. He was at art school with them? So what was this Church of the Ever-Circling things then? Big big art—so they got jealous, or sell-out? Trapped. Leading of course to him. Serpio. Trapped like the rest of them. Terrible, the things mail order can lead to. Now this Pharaoh guy, again. You give some folk the key to the box, they walk out, take a look, decide it's not for them, then they turn around and walk right in again. When station rats look at heaven, they see just a bigger station, with better retailing.
You need to cultivate a different flavour of males, Engineer.
So? What's so different about you, cutie? All this is working, all these adventures are happening, all this story stuff you tell yourself, because one evening you walked into a trackside booth and you've never really walked out again. You're still in there with the falling beans, balancing on those skinny sticks.
Trapped, like the rest of them.
She didn't like the track this train of thought was taking, so she prompted, “So, what was it about Belladonna, then?”
The boy leaned back against the yielding skin of his bubble. Sweetness tried not to think of the terrible void outside.
“No kids.”
“Explain this.”
“Not the city—never got out into the city, not the city proper. The station. I walked down the platform on to the concourse and just stood there, looking around me, because I knew something wasn't right, so, but I couldn't smell what it was. I mean, there were travelling people and staff and people selling food and shining your shoes and reading your cards and selling you travel insurance and all that passenger stuff but there was something not right. Something missing, you know? So there I was, standing under the Diamond Clock with all these people rushing around past me and then it hit me. Where were the kids?”
Sweetness understood. Not passenger stuff. Not the grouchy four-year-olds dressed in their breeches and frocks for their Dedication at the shrine of their Celestial Patroness. Not the bouncy T-shirts and shorts kids off for their holidays at the seaside or in the mountains or some desert spa. Not the school parties roped together by the wrists off on an educational jolly to the chasmside colleges of Lyx. Not the commuting high-schoolers burning holes in the upholstery with their illicit cigarillos, stopping off at the shopping levels before traipsing on home. The track kids. The seen-but-unseen kids. The world's mainline termini teemed with vermin children: water sellers, hotel touts, street performers, beggars, get-rich-quick pamphleteers, hawkers of burgled goods, apprentice pimps, rent-boys, sucky-sucky girls, shoe shines, con-artists, muggers, teen dacoits, cut-purses, luggage-slicers, street sleepers and trash. Those pinched ferret faces Sweetness had seen peering up between the sleepers. In her professional capacity, she accepted them as you accept fleas on a dog, had even come to relegate them to background noise, as trainpeople of necessity learn this skill, but any station, let alone Belladonna Main, with its five million transits every day and night, without kids was more than peculiar. It was improper. It was a full quarteryear since Catherine of Tharsis had last drawn in to a stand on the crystal cantilevers of Belladonna Main—a succession of dreary if lucrative heavy haulage contracts had kept the trainfolk out on the industrial circuit—but such a total pogrom of the vermin could only have come from radical changes in station hierarchy.
“Karen Kupelski,” Pharaoh said quietly. The high winds soughed in the support webbing. “Concourse and Franchise Management. Heard about her later. After, you know.”
“She cleared out all the tunnels and chased them off the concourse.”
“More'n that. She sold them. Made a lot of cash out of the deal. That was the idea; they were going to put out shares or something like that, I don't know; anyway, they need a boost of quick cash, so Karen Kupelski, she's three weeks in the job and says, I got an idea! Watch me kill two birds with one stone! In come the railway police with torches and hunting cheetahs and sonics and gas and all that. Rounded them all up, put them in containers, shipped them out as night freight. Result, happy shareholders and passenger complaints way down for the quarter. There's a lot of people out there've got a use for a spare kid. Them ones I lifted you from…”
“The furniture folk.”
“Them, they're not the worst by any means. Not by a long way, no.”
Children as resources. Feedstock. Sound economic sense to recycle your trash. Sweetness shivered: memories of being an almost-chandelier. She thought about the others, ever-ready for dinner, shedding light from a plastic flambeaux, then unthought, guiltily.
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“So what did you do?” she asked.
“Tell you something, if I hadn't twigged, if the nose hadn't said, Something not right here, hey! Where's the kids? they'd've had me. They were coming for me, lucky, I've got this eye for pattern, I can see patterns in things, know what I mean? I'm looking round at the crowd and suddenly I see that this guy and this guy and that woman and this guy are all heading toward me. So I leg it. Up and out; up the ramp, throwing people out of my way, all these passengers and their kids, get the hell out of my way! You know? Up to the first level, and up beyond that even. Right out, on to the surface. Tell you something, if they'd got me, God knows where I'd be right now.”
“Still a long way between there and here,” Sweetness coaxed.
Pharaoh tapped the star of scarred skin where he had sold his ear for freedom.
“From the top of Meridian Main, you got two choices. Horizontal, or…” He pointed upward. “And I heard her say, “Go up, boy. Go up.”
“Her? Who?”
“The one bought my ear. Remember? I told you sometimes I hear what she's hearing. Other times, it's like she's talking to me.”
“Through your ear.”
“Through my ear. Still part of me. ‘Go up,’ she said. ‘I'm up here.’”
Sweetness did not want to say that the odds of the donee knowing the identity of the donor, let alone choosing to send a message to the ear's erstwhile owner, were negligible. Multiply by the likelihood of Pharaoh emerging on the foot of precisely the correct one out of half a million roofpillars…But, in the realms of the psychic, there were no coincidences, and fewer unlikelihoods.
“Okay, so she told you to go up,” she said.
The first couple of kilometres were easy. Like the roots of the immense primeval trees in the Forest of Chryse (planted by St. Catherine herself, the legend went) the piers of Worldroof flared out in massive buttresses. This was the demesne of the lowest orders in the tower's vertical society. From the condos and projects, dock workers and glass cleaners would toil up the zigzagging staircases to the express elevators that whisked them five kilometres up to their daily labour. Easy here for a ragged railrat to merge with the on-shift and try to blag a ride skyward. The eyes of elevator security, paid to protect the privilege of altitude by the tower-top mandarins who had massed nabob fortunes out of glass-cleaning contracts, were ever sharp for goondahs.
“Pass?” they said.
“Forgot it,” Pharaoh said with his best ingratiating smile. They bounced him, hard. The workers smirked. He cursed them all roundly, but it was no hardship. There was breakfast to be filched from the concessionaires and food-courts that had joined together to form catering districts around the elevators. Service stairs took him up the escalators of Dunny, a cloistered district of globular habitats clustered like clitorae in the crotches where the buttresses merged to form the pier. Here a race of petty professionals lived, bookkeepers, never accountants; legal clerks, never advocates; data processors, never systems designers. Bourgeois values are always held more tenaciously by those whose claim is slightest; the window-studded tenements were all gated and guarded by security men in black leather. No place to linger, and hi-speed escalators swiftly took Pharaoh up through half a kilometre of mall levels (a moment's warmth, some scavenged centavos and a stolen bite) to St. Dominic's Preview, the first of three that ringed the pillar at significant and spectacular points. The preview was a wide annular plaza where the pillar vertical began, a popular pet-walking, child-strolling and picnicking place for people of all classes from a kilometre up and down the spire. Mingling with the crowds—even on a midmorning work day—Pharaoh was aware for the first time of his altitude. All his morning's climb had been facing the pillar, up stairs, along walkways loomed over by tight-packed buildings. Now he had clear blue air in front of him. It drew him to the edge. The boy from deep under Meridian Main learned the meaning of vista.
Before him, Grand Valley; its gently greened hills, its rangelands and ranches, ancient and noble haciendas folded at their hearts; the woodlands and lakes of the Pay Parks; the sister pillars rising at regular geometrical intervals: true primeval world-trees. Here Grand Valley was at its widest; even through a coin-operated opticon, Pharaoh could not see the valley walls to north and south. The hexagon-patterned glass of Worldroof arched over all, curving down to the visual horizon in every direction. Pharaoh looked down. Beneath him the boroughs and manufacturing districts of Pier 11738 swept down to the earth. They went much further than he had imagined. He trained his opticon on the place where the naked carbon of a root buttress entered the ground. Turf and bedrock were heaved up around it, like plucked skin, or a scar. Pharaoh stroked his lost ear, the ear that was guiding him upward, and turned around to look up at his final destination. It seemed to lean over him like a bullying deity, or a new Concourse and Franchise Manager. He leaned back. Railrat and tower regarded each other. The way up is not so simple now, the tower said.
Cunning could find sneaky ascents in the vertical country above St. Dominic's Preview. A sneaky ride on top of a tourist elevator lifted Pharaoh fifty whole levels. Up in the land of the communications systems: great, crackling dishes and relays, the neurons of Grand Valley's communication system were crawling with access ladders and, when those gave out, offered plenty of handholds.
Upward, guided still by the echo in his deaf inner ear. Birds swooped at Pharaoh; householders and pier security hurled threats and harder objects; keek and filth discarded from yet higher levels threatened to dislodge and knock him spinning into space. Tucked in a crevice between the pipes of a water recycling system, he chewed a refrito chapatti stolen from Aisle of Plenty Mall and surveyed his kingdom. A half-hour overhead was the great baffle of St. Lutetia's Preview, midpoint of the pier. Two and a half kilometres. Pharaoh's lunch perch opened new panoramas to him; lines of shadow to north and south were the rim walls, higher even than this high seat. The land beneath had lost its geography and become a carpet, a tapestry of green on greener, arbitrary and thus lovely. He could trace the progress of rivers and the movements of trains. He had to make it to five now, to see how more different his world looked from the very top. He could not stop now. Halfway? Like the immigrants off the Sailships who made it six streets away from the sheddle port and no further. Enough energy for six streets. Upward, to the owner of his ear.
The second Preview was difficult. Understatement. It was only after his traverse of the canopy ribbing (“Look, look Rafe, is that a boy? How theatrical!”) to the guy stays, soaked through, fingers numb with cold from a sudden squall, that he understood how close he had come to the long scream. For Pharaoh, that was the only way back now. Above the Preview was a quarter-kay of expensive residential apartments. No access to the interior service shafts was apparent, so Pharaoh made his way up via the obligingly railinged balconies. He struck out strong and zealous to dry out his clinging clothes and put a little fire into his fibres but the cold was sinking its claws into his core. Every hand-haul was that little more difficult than the one before. Every grasp and pull weaker. Sometime, if he did not find a way in to heat, his fingers would grasp falsely, slip and he would fall.
It was beginning to look more attractive than the recriminations of What have you got yourself into now, boy?
Open drapes. A sliding door ajar. Pharaoh heaved himself over the railing, stumbled across the balcony, into ankle-hugging fur carpet, rose damask and the overwhelming reek of Nightshade by Arvonne.
A woman was seated on a boudoir stool. She saw the apparition in the mirror stumbling in from the direction from which no apparition should stumble. She froze in the brushing of her long brown hair, half scooped back behind her left ear. She turned.
Pharaoh could see nothing but the bud-like ear, pierced for a single stone, and the mahogany hair tucked behind it. It seemed to open before him like a maw. He was falling into his own ear.
“My ear,” he mumbled. “Give me back my ear…”
He lunged at the woman, whose n
ame was Tallysker Merie Thrinton. She leaped spryly away, swiping at Pharaoh with the hairbrush.
“Kidnapper!” she yelled. “Sky-pirate, abseiling hijacker! I've heard of people like you, come in on airships all quiet and steal people. Well, my husband has no money, it's all in bonds, he can't get it out. I'm as worthless alive as dead…”
“My ear,” Pharaoh said soggily and dived for it, fingers hooked to claw it from the misappropriator's head. The hairbrush caught him underneath the jaw. He spun round once and was cold before he hit the fur pile.
Pharaoh regained consciousness with two dominant impressions. The first: he was as cold wet shivery filled with pain and hungry as ever. The second: two granite pairs of hands held him in a stern grip, supine, like a battering ram. Like that battering ram, his head was being aimed toward a small hatch in a riveted metal bulwark.
“Help!” he bleated.
“Oh ho,” said one pair of granite hands. By twisting his head, Pharaoh could follow the leather-clad arms up to the padded shoulders and helmet-covered head of Paradise View Apartment Services: 17. “Trash.”
“You know what we do with trash,” the other pair of hands, connected by identical sleeves to identical shoulders and a helmet that differed only in that it read Paradise View Apartment Services: 24.
Then Pharaoh saw the wording on the steel hatch: Refuse Disposal Chute.
“Bastards!” he started to shout as the two security men broke into a charge. His head clanged painfully against the hatch. Pharaoh was looking down a short, sharp metal slide into a bottomless pit. Plastic shopping bags, sanitary towel cover sheets and pieces of tissue paper flocked on the thermals that spiralled up from the dark depths of the titanic rubbish shaft. As he was held there, head down toward disposal, he heard a clank from above and a collection of individual cereal packets tumbled past him into the darkness of the abyss. He let himself slide. His fingers scrabbled for a firm grip but his shoulders were wedged in the hatch, he could get no purchase. By slow degrees, he was being tilted down the chute.