City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  He crossed half the width of the giant building to a little-used stairway, ascended two levels, went out a storeroom window, across a low roof, up a metal ladder in the inky darkness, in another window—squeezing awkwardly between the two boards that haphazardly sealed it—up one more level by another dusty back stairway, along a deserted corridor, and so arrived back at the shift room unseen. He knew the rounds of all the watchmen and State Inspectors perfectly, by the second and by the inch, and he had dodged three of them by this roundabout route, passing successfully through their territories just before or just after they did: the watchmen would swear that no one could have passed them unobserved, and that might help to cloud matters a little, or so the rational layer of his mind hoped, although he was too far gone now to worry much about consequences—he had acted mostly out of an animal instinct that had told him not to let himself be seen, to avoid other men because he was, in this moment, alien to them.

  The shift room was empty, echoing and too bright under the carbon lamps. The big metal lockers looked like rows of drab tombstones, light winking coldly and malevolently from their polished faces. Hanson crossed the room unhurriedly and used one of his keys to open a locker. He took out a shovel, carefully doctored the supply sheet to make it appear that the shovel had been issued to one of the men now on shift, and closed the locker up again. Then he walked to a door half hidden by the row of lockers, opened it with another key, stepped briskly inside, and locked it behind him.

  This was a big supply room, seldom in use: dark, smothering, full of the slumbering, shrouded shapes of crates and barrels, steeped through with pungent, unidentifiable stinks. The only light came from far on the other side of the room, very dim and pale, as if it was leaking in from another world.

  Hanson made his way slowly through this dusty tangle, oozing around the nearly invisible crates with preternatural ease, making no sound. In the darkness, he appeared less human, more feral: thicker and broader, bulkier, goblin-shaped and glitter-eyed, too sure and cat-footed for a man. He held the heavy, iron-bladed shovel like a twig, like a fey child with a switch.

  A rectangle of smoky light: a door.

  Hanson settled down to wait, squatting on his hams behind a tall packing crate. He knew Oristano’s schedule as well as he knew every other detail of factory routine, knew it in both the overt and covert details, as the foreman was a creature of long-established habit in all things. The second night crew had gone on shift about a half hour before; in an hour Oristano would go on an inspection tour of those sections under his authority, poking and prying and making the workers uncomfortable, as he was hired to do. In the meanwhile, he would be in there fucking fat Emily, the tumorous whore from the Bog, on the cot in his office. In about a half hour, Oristano would finish fucking fat Emily, they would share the obligatory cigarette, and he would let her out the other door—she had another regular appointment on the hour, with Oristano’s immediate superior. Then Oristano would cook a C and M speedball—crystal cocaine and morphine—over a small brazier, bang himself with it, and settle down to wait for the rush, and to drink enough corn whisky to ensure that he was in a sufficiently evil mood for his tour. After the whore left, he would be alone in his office for a half to three-quarters of an hour: no one would dare disturb him then, no matter what. Everyone knew better.

  A muffled jumble of sound: voices.

  Oristano would be alone.

  A shrill laugh, silence, the sound of bedsprings.

  Hanson hefted the shovel in his hands.

  The dust tickled his nose and tiny spiders scampered across his arms, across his face, like the touch of gentle, invisible fingers. They were the shy, albino spiders that inhabit dusty corners in dark buildings and spin gossamer out of disuse—they never saw the sun. They used Hanson for a highway, washing over him in a waterfall of velvet feet while he sat in the shadows and listened to the factory: the massive, deep-throated beat of pistons far below reechoed through every joint and seam of the building, conducted through cement and wood, shaking the room, shaking his blood, shaking the teeth in his head, shaking the brain inside his skull, boomdoom, boomdoom, boomdoom, boomdoom, until he was somehow on his feet, shaking uncontrollably, convulsively squeezing wood to keep it in his hands, shaking, being shaken, jarred, jostled, jolted, being frog-marched toward the door in a lurching stiff-legged stride, trying to remember that he had to wait, wait, although it was hard to remember what he had to wait for. He stopped just outside the door, fingertips resting on the wood, wondering why it didn’t explode inward under the force of the pressure behind him, why it didn’t shatter and fly to flinders, as he was shaken by the surge of the world that wrenched his bones out of his body, boomdoom, boomdoom.

  Inside, voices again, louder now, another laugh, footsteps going away, the slamming of another and more distant door, a single set of heavy footsteps returning.

  Suddenly smooth as silk and steady as skin, as if he had instantly shifted into a different gear, Hanson reached out and opened the door.

  The room was dingy and cluttered: a table, two chairs, a cot, a washbasin, a cabinet. Oristano’s broad back was toward the door—he had not heard it open. He was rummaging in the cabinet, taking out a hypodermic needle and a rusty spoon. An ancient revolver, symbol of his position and authority, sat in its holster on the table, three feet away.

  Now, said Hanson’s blood, while his back is turned. But instead he heard his own voice, as if from a great distance, speaking Oristano’s name aloud, as a rock might speak, or ice.

  Oristano knew death when he heard it. Without bothering to look around, he whirled and snatched for the table. His shadow swung and scurried like a crab behind him. He was awesomely fast for a man of his bulk. He had the gun in his hand and had brought it halfway around to bear before Hanson’s shovel, swung in a short horizontal arc of immense force, crushed his head.

  The force of the blow spun Oristano in a misty explosion of blood and brains, and hurled him heavily against the table, which splintered and collapsed. The table and Oristano went down together, in a tangle.

  Except for the meaty slap of the shovel and the crack of breaking wood, there had been no sound.

  The hypodermic needle teetered on the edge of the cabinet, then toppled very slowly to the floor. It shattered with a tiny glass cry, like the breaking of a fragile dream.

  Hanson stood motionless, holding the shovel. His arms tingled from impact, and a splinter had dug into his palm. The blow had nearly decapitated Oristano, and the body, in falling, had sprayed blood across half the room, the cot, the ceiling. Most of the spray had missed Hanson, but his face had been lightly, almost delicately, dusted with a fine sprinkling of droplets, as if he was a child playing at measles with garish red paint. He took one hand off the shovel and absently wiped at his eyes with his knuckles, smearing the blood. He continued to wipe at it, grinding it into his skin.

  He looked down at Oristano’s body. With his killing blow, with the first touch of impact, the red light in Hanson’s mind had instantly gone out, leaving him with no purpose or plan, drowned in the paralytic black light of despair. Now he was like a man waking, stupid and desolate, from a particularly evil dream—or else like a man swimming down from the border of dream into another, even more troubled sleep, unable to wake although he knows that he should. The room around him seemed blurred and vague, his memory of the past hour even more vague; he remembered his actions as if another man had done them while he watched, only dimly able to guess at that man’s motives and feelings. Oristano’s bloated corpse filled him with surprise and horror. He felt no emotional responsibility for it as yet, no sense of it being a child of his hands, but it seemed so charged with outré significance, so remarkable and unnatural an object in itself, that it flooded him with superstitious dread: he could imagine the shattered, faceless man rising, confronting him, embracing him with cold arms, smothering him. Absorbing him tracelessly into its bulk.

  And now there was a sickness starting deep inside, a
spreading numbness that drove the room even further away. He shook his head stupidly, baffled as a bull. He couldn’t wake up. The room spitefully refused to change, to alter—it remained starkly and harshly the same, and he mired in the middle of it with murder in his hand and death all around. And now there was a noise, a scrape of wood on wood. Through numbing waves of nausea, he looked up.

  Tac stood in the doorway: face bland as butter, eyes shrewd and malefic.

  There was his doom, Hanson realized with tranced calm and logic. Tac was poised for flight, holding the door ready to slam after him; he was the entire length of the room away, on the other side of Oristano’s body; from that other door the main entrance of the shift room was only six paces distant, down a short corridor—even if Hanson should try to attack him, all Tac would have to do was slam the door and run out into the shift room, shouting for help. Long before Hanson could hope to catch up to him and silence him—if Hanson could get his numb, leaden body to move at all—Tac would have the place boiling with workmen, watchmen, State Inspectors. Escape would be impossible—they would run him down in seconds, subdue him, take him away. Then the gallows, the block, a bullet in the head, maybe a public stoning or the stake since this had been a dull season in Orange. No way out. No way to stop Tac, no way to talk him into silence. Tac would surely get a big promotion for turning Hanson in, and Hanson had nothing to bribe him with anywhere near the value. And to appeal to the charity of that sly, cruel creature would be like entreating fire not to burn.

  All this in a second, Tac looming in the doorway, Hanson staring hopelessly at him across the tilted landscape of Oristano’s corpse. Then, before either man had a chance to move, Tac’s face suddenly changed: his slitted eyes widened enormously, huge with surprise; his cheeks puffed, his mouth gaped impossibly—all his broad face, all his stubby body seemed to swell, blowing up like a balloon, expanding like a pufferfish straining at the limits of his skin until it seemed certain he would explode and splatter. And then Tac went limp—ponderously he fell, first to his knees, then forward to his face, almost lazily, shouldering into death as a man settles into a warm and restful bed.

  Gossard stepped into the room, behind Tac. There was a knife in his hand, and the blade steamed with new blood.

  2

  ORANGE IS A SPRAWLING, ugly town, situated a few miles west of the historic site of Old Orange, something to the north of what was once St. Cloud. It is made mostly of wood and fired clay, sunbaked mud, some sections of fine brick and iron put up during the fleeting prosperous decade of the Great Restoration when York was carving an empire out of the checkerboarded squabble of the northwest, before the fortunes of the State began to decline. It contains a large proportion of Utopian buildings, although few are completely standing, and only a very few are in anything resembling usable condition. It is primarily a trading town, serving as a funnel and middleman for the traffic between the Stabilities of Portland, Pitt, and the South, all of the trade that follows the main routes skirting the Wall of the City of God. It also contains what passes today for heavy industry, and is well-known for leather tanning and textiles. It is the third-largest city in York, and, since the destruction of Worcester, the most eastern of all the really big towns in the Human Domain, south of Portland.

  Tonight, it simmered.

  Deep in a parched, brutal summer, the city stewed and steamed like sluggish porridge over a flame. Heat poured in from the west, as though tilted from a giant’s ladle, filled the city to the brim, and then hardened—like wax, like amber, catching and preserving everything within the fierce dry ocean of itself.

  In Orange, all motion had stopped. The life of the city sank to a torpid minimum, the occasional patient twitching of a toad buried in mud at the bottom of a riverbed, hiding from the sun. People huddled in their shanty homes, stunned by heat, stacked like corpses in the smothering dark. There was no wind. Torches burned without wavering, their smoke stretching straight up, as if they were lines attached to a hook in heaven. Heat swallowed sound like a mountain of feathers, damping it, sopping it up. Even the air itself seemed to have been sucked away, molecule by molecule, and replaced with a clear liquid glass that one could somehow breathe without ever quite suffocating completely, but which never afforded any comfort or relief.

  To Hanson, sitting on top of an ancient Utopian freight transport crawling through Orange from the Docks toward South Gate, it seemed as if the hush and suspension of the night were aimed at him, as if the whole city were holding its breath in horror at what he had done. Or perhaps the city was gathering that breath for a great shout, a scream, the hush breaking in an instant and boiling with sudden faceless pursuit, the pointed finger, there he is, the contaminated one, the fugitive, the killer, there, and the horny, impersonal hands pulling him down, pulling him under, rending his bones apart in a single ecstatic explosion of blood . . . Hanson shifted his feet on the deckplates, bracing himself better against the rolling of the massive old machine. There was no pursuit yet. The shabby buildings of the Blackstone district watched him with disinterest, drooping lids of windows, slack-gaped mouths of doors, leaning against each other in weariness and defeat—they had seen too much, known too much; they didn’t care about Hanson, or his crime.

  The sweltering torpor of Orange suited Hanson’s mood tonight—still half dazed, drained, and shaken by the violence of his passion at the factory, unable to keep up with a bewilderingly fast tumble of events. Like a graveyard, silent Orange was both disconcerting and peaceful, radiating an inevitable certainty of death that was oddly comforting. The city might have been an open grave, yawning dumbly at the stars, weighted down with the dead but not yet filled in with raw earth. In many ways it was just that—an open grave; always had been, always would be, until the last of its scurvy inhabitants succumbed to disease, hunger, war, murder. And then would someone, something, come along to kick the dirt down over man?

  They had come up from the Docks without seeing anyone at all—unusual, since the magic, lumbering passage of a Utopian machine was a minor event, and normally the streets would have suddenly swirled with people at their approach, certainly hordes of grimy children, all hoping for a moment’s release from the monotony and brutality of their lives. But the killing heat had won out over curiosity, over magic. Industry Hill had been deserted when they skirted around its base, as it had been earlier when Hanson had descended from the factory in the dazed clamor of his own blood. Even the State Inspectors who usually swarmed the Hill to guard against sneak thieves were hiding inside from the weather; but then, so too were the sneak thieves. As they rumbled through the edges of Prospect Terrace, Hanson had seen a drunk pissing contentedly on the fine stone house of a prosperous wool merchant—a harbinger of the slums, and a bellwether of the night: no SIs around to stop him, as he would usually have been intercepted long before reaching the Swank. Now, as they turned downhill toward the center of Blackstone and the Bog, and as the neighborhood crumbled and deteriorated appallingly, he saw people in the streets for the first time: sullen, sluggish crowds who were out on the street because they lived there, in the street; because they had nowhere else to go.

  Behind him, the State Factory shouldered against darkness, an island of brazen light, a mountain of iron—an open flame flickered red from its top, like a tongue. Lesser industries, lesser buildings clustered around its massive flanks: attendants to the Lord of Hell. It was a sight he had seen every evening for fifteen years, but now it made him uneasy and afraid, as if the factory was watching him with hungry furnace eyes, as if it would stride monstrously after him on legs made of stone and shadow, a demon cat after a mouse. It would have Oristano’s face.

  Murderer, he thought, trying it on for size.

  In spite of himself, he turned his head every few seconds while they crawled down the slope to the Bog, keeping an eye on the factory until it was swallowed by a jumble of low roofs, as Industry Hill sank below the outskirts of Blackstone.

  Gossard had saved him.

 
The feral half of Hanson’s mind, the killer that had taken control to hunt Oristano, had thought itself clever—dodging the watchmen and State Inspectors, stalking its prey, waiting in ambush. But Tac had been much smarter than Hanson. He had sensed Hanson’s anguish and turmoil, figured out what Hanson would do before Hanson himself knew, extrapolated the consequences and decided how best to turn them to his financial advantage; laying an ambush of his own to catch Hanson murdering Oristano. And Gossard had been smarter than Tac. Gossard had seen Tac skulking near the washroom, and had figured the whole tangle out in one intuitive, empathetic flash: what Hanson was doomed to do, what Tac’s avarice would drive him to do in response, and what he himself must do to save his friend’s life. And he had, setting a counter-ambush to silence Tac before he could betray Hanson.

  In the whole web of intrigue, only Hanson had been stupid.

  Passion had driven him to a blind crime, poorly conceived, clumsily executed—stupid. Only luck had saved him, for the moment, from the consequences of the act. And he was still stupid—now he was fleeing stupidly, blindly, stumblingly, with no plan, no purpose, no destination. If not for Gossard, Hanson told himself bitterly, he would probably still be standing in Oristano’s office like a heatstruck ox, waiting dumbly for the SIs to come and collect him. It had been Gossard who had gotten him going again, who had jolted him a little out of his daze, who had set the mechanism of escape in motion. It had been Gossard who had locked the doors to Oristano’s office from the outside and, leading Hanson by the elbow like a sleepwalker, helped him dodge the watchmen and make his way safely outside the factory. And it was also Gossard who destroyed the fantasy of Hanson concealing his guilt: everyone in the factory knew of the vendetta between Hanson and Oristano, and the moment Oristano was found dead, everyone would know who had killed him. The factory SIs wouldn’t even bother to carry out an investigation. They’d know who to arrest.