Grace House: The Trial of Obscurity

by Rob Summers

Chapter 15 The City Limits

  Pinch checked her e-mail. Uh-oh. Something from Bits Bitterly with the subject ‘Fortress Grace.’ She clicked on it and read.

  Sorry, darling, but my friends are still persona non grata at the Grace place. I swung by this evening with Sarcasm and Confusion. Intended to pop in and see Reason but blockaded at the front door by a big thug named Humility in a bathrobe. Also that little gremlin Honesty. They might have made any number of polite excuses (such as that the family has the flu) but instead told us we were simply unwanted and unwelcome. Flies at a picnic. That sort of thing. You can imagine how embarrassing this was for me, trying to explain to the ladies. Fortunately, they’re both good eggs and didn’t blame me. We agreed, in a late confab at Numb’s Place, that these Heavenites can be hideously uncivilized. I phoned Reason from there and told her what had happened. She did apologize, just. Quite formal. But she advises not to bring Miss. S and Miss C back. She was cool, Pinchy, distinctly cool. I also have overheard her refer to me as a ‘sprained ankle.’ Do we sense a sea change? It’s really your own fault for employing me. You might have known that people don’t welcome me for long. I could type here my long, sad history, but I’ll spare you. When this is over, shall we drive off a bridge together? Just you and me? Till then.

  Pinch clicked on ‘return to sender’ and pounded the keys for a minute.

  Too much style and drivel in your reports, Bits. ‘Can’t get S and C in’ is all I needed. Are you quitting? If so, say so, so I can notify payroll. If not, get on with it. I want Grace House out of the Heavenites’ column and firmly in the Game. Preferably before Christmas. Also, tell Obscurity to pick up her checks and to RETURN MY PHONE CALLS.

  She paused and considered.

  As for crashing the bridge rail, I agree it’s cheerier for two. I’ll keep it in mind.

  She sent the message, shut down her PC, and straightened up her cubicle. The winter day was almost dusk. Despite the disappointing results with Grace House and her long day at the office, she felt better than she had for some days. This was due to a train of thought which she had taken that afternoon.

  It went like this. The real public approval rating of the City administration was, quite true, abysmal; and the edifice seemed in danger of collapse. However—and this is what heartened her—what could succeed such a collapse? She had almost laughed with relief when this thought had struck her. What is there besides the City? What has there ever been? Even if a new administration took over, it would necessarily be a City administration. New names, same methods. But that very truth almost guaranteed that no rebellion would take place, for what would a counter-movement have to offer that would be any different?

  These thoughts had been warming her for hours. Who needs public approval? The City is all, the City is everything. The dissatisfied public would just have to gag that down and digest it.

  Smiling, Pinch left the office building and got into her dark green Mazda. She purred out of the parking lot and made for the beltway that surrounded the City.

  A closed system, she decided, was the best way to describe it. Of course, people eventually did leave the City. As a confidante of the administration, Pinch knew a good deal about the contract whereby survivors of collapsed houses were rounded up and sold to the Hellites. (She assumed that their fate after that was none too pleasant, but that was none of her concern.) Besides this, vacationers made trips to other countries, but always returned. So people got out, it’s true, but no strangers ever came in so as to spoil things. So that was that, the system was closed to outside influence—a private game. Except, of course, that Lawyer Pitfall had been unnerved by a memory of some bygone exception. How had he said it? ‘Like a chess piece dropped into the middle of a game.’

  She sped up the ramp onto the beltway and turned toward her home.

  But Pitfall’s fears had to be ridiculous. Every school child was taught that the City was in the midst of an empty plain. Nothing was outside the City! Nothing but the Hellites, that is. The City was all.

  She glanced to the right at the steep grassy bank that bordered the beltway. This banking had been raised high all around the City, blocking the view of the plains beyond. Even the center of town provided no point to observe those plains, for the City was like a bowl with it’s centralized tall buildings at its lowest point, their highest floors well below the outer rim. Pinch had never looked outside the City. She had never wanted to. She had never thought to.

  Outside was nothing. Nothing but a few Hellites. Perhaps Heavenites too. They too were said to be out there somewhere, probably not very near. But foreigners counted for nothing. They were not the City. And they were not invading it and never would, not though Pitfall said one of them had done so long ago.

  “The City has no limits,” she said to herself. “The City is everything. We are the whole show. The City has no limits.”

  Suddenly, she pulled out of the three lane traffic and onto the shoulder. She turned off her lights and engine. Sliding over to the passenger side, she looked up the grassy slope and saw a metal sign on a pole. It was getting too dark to read it, but she knew what it said. She had been passing those signs for years. They were located regularly along the bank, and they all read, “City Limits, No Egress.”

  But no one ever went to the limits. You got in your car and you drove on the beltway around the City. You did not just walk out. In all her thirty-two years, Pinch had never until now considered such a thing.

  She got out of the car and stood there. Traffic was light at this hour, and no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. Tentatively, she walked a few steps up the steep slope. When she got beyond the headlights of other cars, she felt more confident and speeded up. It was a stiff hike. At last she reached the top where the sky had always seemed to come down and meet the land, and there she found that—the sky actually did come down and meet the land! Or something like that. She stood just a foot or two from an oily, reflective surface that was, if not the sky, then something. It reflected the City behind her, making the buildings look as if they were twisted and afloat on grimy mists. Nearer by, a couple of trash fires across the beltway looked somehow sinister in reflection, like things kept burning constantly and to no good purpose. The surface before her also reflected her own dark form, attenuated and misshapen, with just a hint of the fires behind her gathered into the lenses of her driving glasses.

  “So this is it,” she thought. “There really is no ‘outside.’ All around the City, wherever you go, is just a reflection. So it’s just as I thought, and the City is everything.”

  Somehow that did not now seem at all calming. It was almost scary. Suffocating. The reflected City looked like some disgusting dump that filled this pocket of land. It did not look fit for human habitation.

  “So what’s behind the reflection?” she said out loud. “We send out tourist flights from our airport, so they must be flying over something.” Reaching out and almost touching the dark, oily sheet, she wondered, was it hard or soft? Thick or thin? Her finger tips reached it and passed through. She felt nothing. But she shuddered at the imagined touch of her own reflected hand.

  “I’ll just pop through and look,” she said. “Then back to my car.”

  But when it came to it, that seemed a bit silly. What if there was a sheer drop on the other side? What if there was no air? She of course did not believe in monsters, but—”

  Down on the beltway a car went by with its horn screaming, and startled by it, Pinch hopped through. She arrived merely on the other, downward slope of the grassy banking. So that was all right. But as she raised her eyes, she saw below her a vast stretch of canyon lands, dark and deep. Across all the jumbled desolation she saw no sign of plant or tree; and the vista was so tremendous that it made the City behind her seem like a dirty little speck. Beyond the canyons were immense mountains.

  For a minute at least she simply st
ared with her mouth open. Enough light remained on the tops of the mountains for her to see them clearly. Here and there on their high slopes were cities, or what appeared to be cities. They glowed like white pearls in the evening. She thought that they were arranged like music in the air. But that made no sense.

  Looking down again, she saw glimmers of red light deep in the canyons, as of a reflected fire. She went to the far edge of the bank, to where the first cutting of the canyons dropped off abruptly. Not twenty feet below her was a rough dirt road. It came from the left along the edge of the bank and, not far to her right, turned away from the City to descend into one of the deeper cuttings.

  As she crouched in the darkness, a vehicle came down the road, came—she knew—from the City, probably by way of some tunnel under the bank. It came rumbling slowly down with its lights off, moving at about ten miles per hour. It was a heavy truck with a windowless, metal trailer section. For just a few seconds it passed slowly under her, passed so near that she could see, resting on the sill of the open window, the right arm of the person sitting on the passenger side of the cab. The arm was not human but scaly and ended in a claw. At the same moment, she heard from the back of the truck muffled thumps and screams. It passed on down the canyon floor toward the flickering fires below.

  With her stomach heaving, Pinch turned and reeled back up the slope, through the oily curtain, and within the City limits. She stumbled down to her car, got in, and crumpled over, crying, her dyed hair touching the dashboard. She had seen Relocation. And for the first time she had seen the City: a tiny, gritty bubble floating on an ocean of lava and ready to burst. When it did burst, her car would not save her, or her position, or her contacts. And it could happen at any time.

  She cursed and trembled.