The City We Became

by N. K. Jemisin

  “Sssso,” she says, sitting forward. “This process? It happens all the time. All over the world, wherever there’s a city. Enough human beings occupy one space, tell enough stories about it, develop a unique enough culture, and all those layers of reality start to compact and metamorphose. Eventually, when it’s close to that, uh, moment”—she nods to Manhattan for the word—“the city picks someone to be its… midwife. Champion. A person who represents the city and protects it, as we do—but that person gets the job even before the city becomes something new. That person helps it happen.”

  “Poor sucker,” mutters Veneza. Manhattan frowns at her.

  “If all goes well,” Bronca continues, “the city becomes whole. The Enemy can’t touch a whole city, not directly, or at least not without a lot of effort. But the birthing process can go wrong. If the Enemy catches the primary avatar, for example, and rips him to shreds before the city can do its thing, then the city isn’t born; it dies. It dies hard. We don’t know the names of some of the cities that have died this way, but the ones we do know will tell you what we’re up against: Pompeii. Tenochtitlán. Atlantis.”

  “Atlantis isn’t a real thing,” says Brooklyn. Then before Bronca can say it, she inhales. “Or… it isn’t a real thing anymore. What you’re saying is that it was a real thing once, but its avatar failed.”

  Bronca nods. “In Plato’s stories, Atlantis was swallowed up by earthquake and floods. But the real disaster is that Atlantis became just a story. It failed so catastrophically that the entire human race shifted into a branch of realities in which Atlantis never existed at all.”

  They all stare at her, and each other. “Holy shit,” Veneza murmurs, which seems to cover everyone’s expressions. “Jesus, B.”

  Bronca lets out a slow, careful breath. “Yeah. But we’re good on that count; our primary succeeded. New York obviously survived.”

  Now they all start talking at once. Manhattan blurts, “Then why is he sleeping—” and Brooklyn pronounces, “Well, something seems to have gone wrong,” and Queens shakes her head and says in an irritated tone, “Then why does he need us?” And Veneza gives Bronca a skeptical look and says, “Uh, are you sure about that? Because, squiggly shit.”

  As noisy and rude as children. Bronca pushes through their talking. “It survived,” she says, and pauses ’til they shut up, which at least doesn’t take long. “But the battle was hard. And the primary, who did not understand that we were necessary to him, fought alone.” Brave, strong young man, her Unknown. “He won, but it took all his strength. He fell into… well, I guess we could call it a coma. He can’t wake up, can’t strengthen the city as he should, until we find him. And we need to find him. We’re not supposed to do this alone.”

  With deliberate emphasis on this last line, she looks at Brooklyn, who still radiates visible weariness even after they allowed her a day to recover. Brooklyn, already frowning, catches this look and understands instantly, inhaling a little. But then, surprisingly, she turns to gaze at Manhattan. “Guess I owe you more than I thought. Bad time for a coma.”

  Manhattan nods, looking amused. “If I’d realized what was happening sooner, I would’ve helped more. Next time, don’t go charging off in your pajamas alone.”

  Meanwhile, Queens has shaken off her irritation; now she looks excited. “The equations always suggested simultaneous events, not purely conditional. The cat is alive and dead in the box! A universe for each outcome, and probably one in which it’s both!” She beams at all of them, clearly expecting them to share her excitement.

  “Uh, right,” Manhattan says.

  Queens sighs with the air of someone who is used to not being understood. She takes out her phone and starts texting someone, her bottom lip poked out a little.

  Brooklyn’s expression turns grim. To Bronca, she says, “You said becoming a city punches through other universes.”

  So she’s not stupid. Bronca inclines her head to the woman, in respect if not in approval. “Yes.”

  “Okay, so.” Brooklyn visibly braces herself. “So what happens to those universes that our city punches through?”

  Manhattan’s got a terrible look on his face. Queens goes on an entire face journey—shock to calculation to dawning horror to anguish. She puts her hands to her mouth.

  “They die,” Bronca says. She’s decided to be compassionate about it, but relentless. None of them can afford sentimentality. “The punching-through? It’s a mortal wound, and that universe folds out of existence. Every time a city is born—no, really, before that. The process of our creation, what makes us alive, is the deaths of hundreds or thousands of other closely related universes, and every living thing in them.”

  Brooklyn shuts her eyes for a moment. “Oh my God,” Queens breathes. “Oh my God. We’re all mass murderers.”

  “What’s done is done, though,” Manhattan says. His voice is soft, his gaze distant and unreadable. “From the moment we came to be.”

  Queens flinches and stares at him, openmouthed. “How can you say that? What’s wrong with you? That’s… what, trillions of people? I can’t even begin to calculate it! All dead? And we killed them?” She looks on the verge of tears. Her hands have begun to shake. “For fuck’s sake!”

  Bronca’s expecting Manhattan to go cold again. He does that so easily, she’s noticed, even in just the few hours that they’ve known each other. Instead, however, he looks away for a moment, then takes a deep breath and moves to kneel in front of Queens. He takes her shaking hands in his own, and looks her in the eye, and says, “Would you prefer to offer up all of your family and friends to die instead? Maybe there’s a way we can.”

  Everyone goes still. It sounds like a threat, even though it’s just a suggestion. Bronca’s not sure how Manhattan makes such a quiet statement sound so awful—but maybe it’s the fact that there is compassion in his gaze, instead of coldness, when he says it. Coldness would be reprehensible, horrifying. Compassion is worse, because it cannot be dismissed as evil.

  And Padmini stares at him for a long, pent moment. Then, slowly, her shakes still. She shuts her eyes and lets out a long breath. Manhattan doesn’t move, doesn’t press. It’s not the approach that Bronca would have taken… but then, Bronca’s approach would probably have been wrong. Something about Queens makes Bronca feel toward her as she does toward Veneza—as if Queens is younger than she actually is, a surrogate daughter to be protected. She isn’t, though. Padmini is Queens, land of refugees who’ve fled horrors, blue-collar people working themselves to death, and spare daughters mortgaged for an entire family’s future. She knows all about brutal choices and unavoidable sacrifice—and Manhattan’s question, cruel as it seems, is one that respects this knowledge.

  Finally, like the shading of the evening sky toward night, Bronca sees the change come over Queens as she accepts the inevitable. She doesn’t slump, but there is nevertheless an air of sorrow about her as she presses her lips together. “Of course not,” she says to Manhattan. It just pisses me off, that’s all.” She takes her hands out of his… but then nods to him, in graceful concession. “The world might be awful, but we don’t have to like it that way.”

  Manhattan, to Bronca’s surprise, smiles at this, with his own air of sorrow. “Exactly,” he says. Then he gets up and goes over to the little window that looks out on the main gallery, his back to them.

  Bronca lets out a long, uneasy sigh. This was hard knowledge for her, too, when it came. And yet. “It’s also nature,” she says. “Many things die so that something else can live. Since we’re the ones who get to live, we should offer thanks to those worlds for contributing themselves to our survival—and we owe it to them, as well as our own world’s people, to struggle as hard as we can.”

  Queens and Veneza stare at her. This is a general problem of city-people, Bronca knows—because she, too, was born and raised in a city, and had to learn the lesson late in life. Chris took her hunting once, over her vehement objections. And though Bronca would not fire the g
un that took down the deer, Chris and the other Indigenous woman they’d been hunting with had made Bronca help with the butchery. It was important, they’d told her, to know where her food came from, and to understand that not just one, but many deaths had enabled her survival. Therefore it was crucial that she use every part of the animal, as much as she could, and take no more than she needed. To kill under those circumstances, or to survive, was respectful. To kill for any other reason was monstrous.

  Manhattan gets this, Bronca notes. So does Brooklyn, who’s probably seen some shit in her day. And, Bronca suspects, so does the avatar of New York City, in his peaceful enchanted sleep. It seems like a New York sort of thing to understand.

  After a moment, Manhattan takes a deep breath and turns back to them. “So what’s our next step?” he asks. “Since you seem to understand best how this works.”

  “Now, we find Staten Island.”

  “Problem,” Brooklyn says. She holds up her phone for some reason. “I’ve had my people on this—the ones who aren’t trying to figure out who stole my damn house—and there hasn’t been a single bit of weirdness on social media that we can zero in on.”

  It’s Bronca’s turn to be confused. “Weirdness to zero in on…?”

  They explain their process to her, and Bronca finally gives up being angry with them for not finding her until now. The whole thing is entirely too loosey-goosey for her tastes. But the gist of it is that their method’s not working with respect to Staten Island—which is about what Bronca expected. Staten Island gonna Staten Island.

  They go around for a while before Brooklyn finally sighs and rubs her eyes. “Look, there’s enough of us now to just go there, rent some Zipcars, and drive around until our city-dar or whatever it is kicks in. It’s the only thing I can think of to do—”

  “I don’t know how to drive,” says Queens. “Sorry.”

  Veneza leans over to her. “I couldn’t drive ’til last year. Solidarity, babe.”

  “—aaand maybe we should concentrate on trying to find the primary avatar anyhow,” Brooklyn concludes. “It sounds like he’s the more important target anyway. At least we’re all, uh, awake, and able to defend ourselves if those white things, or the Woman in White, finds us. Staten Island must be able to do it, too, since the island’s not a crater right now.”

  “It’s harder, fighting alone,” Queens says, looking troubled. “Scarier, because you don’t really know what’s going on.”

  “We’ll find her as soon as we can,” Manhattan says. “But if there’s a way to find the primary…” He looks at Bronca, leaving this sentence a question.

  “Maybe,” Bronca says. “Like I said, it might not work without all five of us. But we can try it now, if you want.”

  “I want,” Manhattan says. The other two aren’t as decisive about it, but they at least look interested.

  “Uh, should I go?” Veneza asks, frowning at Bronca. “Shit gets weirder when you guys are doing, uh, weird stuff.”

  “It should be safe, but up to you,” Bronca says. To the others, she adds, “Now, do whatever you normally do to step into that other place. Meditate, pray, sing, whatever.”

  “Math,” says Queens. She looks sheepish. “I, uh, never got anything less than 100 percent in math, back in high school. Stupid kids made fun of me for it. Called me ‘Math Queen,’ like I would think that’s an insult. I’m a bloody math goddess—” She flushes, apparently realizing that she has digressed. “Anyway, when I, um, engage with that other part of me, I do math in my head.”

  “Whatever floats your boat, kiddo,” Bronca says.

  Brooklyn nods, thoughtful, then falls silent. After a moment, she starts murmuring softly to herself, or maybe subvocalizing, and bobbing her head to some inner rhythm as she concentrates.

  Only Manhattan looks troubled. “I’ve never controlled it,” he says. “It just comes to me, whenever I’m, uh, feeling New Yorkish.”

  “And when you think about him,” Brooklyn says, pausing in her freestyling or whatever she’s doing.

  He blinks, then sobers. “Uh. Yeah.”

  Bronca shakes her head slowly. “Well, you did say you’re, I guess, his bodyguard. If he’s your thing, then that’s what you’ve got to go with.”

  “Yeah, okay.” He sighs and rubs at the back of his head. More quietly: “I don’t know what this means.”

  Bronca shrugs, then offers her usual solution for awkward interpersonal interactions. “It means you ask him out for coffee, once he’s awake. And then you hope for the best, same as regular people.”

  He blinks, then chuckles a little, relaxing as if Bronca calling a spade a spade has finally made him feel better about the whole thing. Probably gets laid a lot with that face, but no idea how to do an actual relationship. Also figures that the personification of Manhattan is two-spirit, too. She snorts a little at the thought. Maybe Stonewall was worth something after all. Anyway.

  “Let’s get to it,” she says.

  She isn’t in quite the right headspace for a spiritual journey, not here in this cold place lit too brightly by fluorescents and smelling a little too much of chemicals and cleaning solvents. Still, they’re standing in the Bronx right now, with her people’s songs still reverberating through the ground. No need for a journey at all, really. Her city is right here.

  Bronca feels the change before she opens her eyes, because all of a sudden she has become vast. She stretches, upward because her sprawl is checked on all sides, and downward into the tunnels and caverns that are her root. When she opens her eyes, the world is strange and the sky is twilit and she beholds herself: bright and dark, a spirit-form of blurred lines and stained concrete and built-over brickyards. She is the Bronx.

  And around her, suddenly, joined and overlapping in a way that somehow does not create paradox or cause pain, are her kin. Bright Manhattan, tall and shining, but with the deepest of shadows between his daggerlike skyscrapers. Jittery, jagged Queens, pan-amorous in her welcome to all, genius in her creative hustle and determination to put down roots. Brooklyn is old, family-solid, a deep-rooted thing of brown stone and marble halls and crumbling tenements, last stop for the true-born of New York before they are forced into the wilderness of, horror of horrors, Long Island.

  And together, they turn and behold their lost sister at last: Staten Island. She is dim compared to their light, suburban where they are dense, thinly populated in comparison to their teeming millions. There are actually farms somewhere amid her substance. And yet. She bristles with tiny throwing daggers in the shape of ferries, and defensive fortifications built in semi-attached two-family blocks. They can feel the strength and attitude of her, blazing more brightly than any sodium lamp. She is so different, so reluctant… but whether she wants to be or not, and whether the rest of them are willing to admit it or not, she is clearly, truly, New York.

  It’s strange, though. Even though Staten Island is right there—and there is no space in this place—she’s somehow also distant from them. And dimmer than she should be, her high-rises shadowed and streets oddly clouded, as if something’s laid down fog in thick obscuring lines. Bronca reaches, but cannot touch her. Manhattan tries, too, and comes closest, his bustling businesses almost brushing her commuter hubs… but at the last moment, she shies away. Very strange.

  Not the only one they’ve come for, however. The others stir restlessly, so Bronca takes hold of the wheel of them and spins it. She is the guide. And in order to see where the singularity of New York is, she must back out of the other world. She must shift her perception up a level, and then up again, until it becomes possible to see the entire universe. (She feels Queens’ awe, because she alone understands the scale of what they are seeing, but Bronca shies away from the girl’s eager grasp of the numbers. They are immense. They contain multitudes. That’ll do for Bronca.) And then they shift up again.

  Before them floats the immensity of space and time as Bronca now understands it: not just here but everywhere, not one universe but an i
nfinity of them. It is an endlessly growing broccoliesque mass, here in the no-place of perception. Each branch consists of thousands of universes stacked atop each other like plates of mica, forming columns that snake around and branch off, dominoes set up by someone with no sense of order. There is an order to it (and she hears another part of herself, Queens, thinking loudly, A fractal tree!), but in its immensity and dynamism, in the ferociously energetic churn of creation, it’s almost an overwhelming thing to grasp. Not limitless, as Bronca first thinks, but vast beyond her ability to easily imagine. A thousand branches (that Bronca can see) grow and then crank out two thousand fissioned-off children that then generate four thousand grandchildren, and…

  But abruptly there is a hollow thoom, and a ripple, and one of the bigger thickets of branches collapses before them. It happens so fast. There is a fleeting blue-shifted glow, and then that whole twisting cluster burns away, all the way back to the stem it branched off from. Bronca feels the others shudder in anguish and horror, and she shares it. As beautiful as that brightly burning chain is—like the most amazing fireworks ever—they all know what it means. Countless universes have just died, or become as never-were, like the branchings that must once have spawned Atlantis.

  But Bronca draws their attention to what floats in this branch’s place, tiny but bright, not connected to the other universes but blazing and stable all on its own. A singular point of light.

  Bronca spins them, and again they behold themselves: they are such a light. They have witnessed the birth of another city like themselves, somewhere in the multiverse. Many such lights dot the tree, interspersed among its splits and folds—thousands of cities, glowing like jewels against the formless dark. There are places in the distance that seem to lack those lights; the tree’s trunk, maybe? But amid the nearby crown? Cities. Everywhere.

  And now Bronca uses the strength of the other four to direct them back and down and in, to the centerpoint of them all—