I’d bought the globe as a basic route-finder, but soon discovered you can also use it to access the strings. The metaballs fend off the worst of the dimensional debris so it’s a smooth enough ride, and the manufacturers even claim resistance to leviathan attack. On the down side, they amplify the background branewave radiation to the kind of level that melts gonads.
In other words, to actually use it to travel around, you’ve got to be desperate.
I spun the three primary space globes. They caught the neon light from outside and sprayed dirty rainbows up the office walls. As they jostled against the time globe, it stole their momentum and started to turn itself. From there, the seven nested subdimensional globes began spinning, one after the other.
Hypnotising me a little, all that contra-rotary motion set me thinking how everything that happens affects everything else. How everything matters. Once upon a time that thought would have made me nervous. Not any more. You fret too hard about consequences, you never get out of bed. Trust me, I know. Oh, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying nothing matters. It’s just that some things matter more than others. It all depends on your point of view.
Truth matters. That much I do know. As the years roll on and the worlds turn tighter and faster, I’m getting to believe truth is all that matters. It’s that thought alone keeps me behind the desk of this two-bit private investigation business, keeps me facing down angry Titans and sulky gods, keeps me grinding down the leather on the soles of my shoes in the hope that the sucker I’m following might just lead me to an answer.
I opened the globe’s scanner slot and dropped in the business card. The globe’s got any amount of fancy interfaces, but if you have hard evidence the scanner works best. It read the address on the card, sniffed the varnish for residues and cross-referred the two. Ten seconds later, all the globes locked in place and a screen popped up displaying a schematic of String City. The east side, to be exact. Right in the middle, pinned by a set of crosshairs, a little yellow light was flashing.
I had my coordinates.
I used the globe’s remote bladderwrack plug-in to check the weather on the east side: freezing smog and acid sleet. A normal day for that part of town. I turned my coat inside-out five times until it was triplex titanium foil with a lead-lined codpiece. Then I folded myself in half and posted myself into the globe’s outbox.
16
A SMALL METAL plate on the side of the Feynman globe promises “a smoother ride through the cosmos”. For once, the blurb was right. The dimensions are riddled with potholes—using the globe is like graduating to air suspension. In the early day I used the globe pretty much all the time. I’m a natural stringwalker, but working the dimensions is still a pain in the ass. The globe made it easy.
Later I found the safety warning on the inside of the power box. The one about the gonads. After that I retired the globe as a journeymaker and just used it to verify coordinates. Actually it was a relief to go back to riding the dimensions raw. After all, it’s what I was born to do.
But now, scooting between the strings, surrounded and protected by a metaball shield projected by the globe’s remote tracker, I remembered what I’d been missing. I also remembered how the metaball amplification could work like a set of nutcrackers and checked my codpiece. Everything was intact, so I relaxed and took in the view. Trust me, it was worth it.
String City was laid out below me. The streets looked like a billion diamond necklaces tangled on black satin sheets. Way to my left was the finance quarter. The twin towers of the Silverlode loomed over the regular banks like a chromed victory sign. Next door was the bunched neon of the Hot Hub, String City’s entertainment district. You go to the Hub at night, you can sample most anything, from crowd-pleasing 5D movies to illegal syren song. Beyond the Hub was a vast sprawl of malls and condos, cut through by the snaking River Lethe. Beyond that the dockland with its wharfs and warehouses and big quarantine fence, and from it all the countless roads and railtracks cutting out across the town.
From out here in the dimensions, String City looked just like it always did: big and gaudy and unlikely as all hell. But the high viewpoint and the clarity of the globe’s metaball lens revealed things I’d never seen before. Changes. Like the way parts of the river had started to flow uphill. Like the way some of the streets had three ends. Like the way whole districts had shrunk, or got bigger, or disappeared altogether.
Like the way the cosmic string binding up this whole place in one gigantic cat’s cradle had got frayed, and how those frayed ends had started slashing at reality like a cat o’nine tails, making stripes across its back.
“Bad times coming.” That’s what Hyperion had said. Maybe he was right.
Safe in the metaball, I realised how lucky I’d been when I’d walked the strings earlier that morning. I remembered something else Hyperion had said, that these days working the dimensions was like moving through treacle. The kind of treacle that wants to peel off your skin and cram your bleeding muscles down your own flayed throat.
Then the metaball began to stutter as the rogue strings started cutting into it. At this rate, I’d be lucky if it lasted the journey.
I came to a decision. As soon as this trip was done, I’d turn my back on the dimensions altogether and go back to pounding the streets. Maybe take the occasional cab, expenses allowing. My stringwalking days were over. Leastways, until the cosmos got its act together.
Or came to an end.
It was a big decision. I’d been walking the strings for as long as I could remember. It helped with the detective work but it was more than that—it was in my blood. The idea of giving it up was painful. But what could I do? Seeing the strings all snarled like this was like coming back to the pool you’d swum in every day for years, only to find some joker had swapped the water for sulfuric acid and shipped in a school of piranhas.
A pack of boundary wolves appeared over a nearby event horizon. They snapped at a crease in reality and earthquakes shook all the tenement blocks on the south side of the city. The quakes bled beads of dark matter into the void; the beads settled on the strings like dew on grass. The strings hissed, gave off clouds of recombinant plasma that attacked the wolves, turning them to living stone. Howling, chewing at their own petrified limbs, the wolves spiraled back into the aether.
The strings continued to lash.
On the south side of String City, the earthquakes deepened. The turmoil in the strings was soaking through the branes and shaking up the many worlds they contained. The knots of the cosmos were tightening.
I crossed my hands over my codpiece, closed my eyes and waited for the journey to be over.
17
I FETCHED UP in a square flagged yard. The weather was as bad as the bladderwrack had predicted. The sleet burned hard and the smog glowing livid yellow under the thick night sky. The six cylindrical towers of the Carr Industries power complex marched across the skyline. Fueled by nuclear syren song, they shook with a fury that, were it ever to be unleashed, would make the explosion at the Tartarus Club look like a party popper. I pulled my coat tight and tried not to breathe the toxic air.
At the end of the yard was a concrete blockhouse with a waterwheel on the side. The architecture was gulag meets country cottage. If I hadn’t known the sign over the door read Single Vision Forge, I’d never have guessed, there were that many letters missing. The roof sagged and the windows gaped. The whole place had been all the way to the dogs and back again.
As I crossed the yard, a musclebound giant in a leather apron shambled out of the doorway. He was carrying a holdall as big as my desk. When he saw me he stopped and blinked his single eye.
“We closed,” he said. He looked about to say more. Then he decided that was enough, put down the holdall, closed the padlock on the door, picked up the holdall again and started toward me. His head was down and his eye refused to meet either of mine.
When he drew level with me, I pulled the business card from my pocket.
“Thi
s look familiar?” I said.
He stared at the card. “Where you get that?”
“Off the body of a guy who looked a lot like you.”
The cyclops extended a hand big enough to swallow mine whole and leave room for several more. With surprising delicacy, he took the card. His face crunched up. Tears dripped from his eye into one of the yellow puddles littering the yard.
“You saw his body?” he said. I nodded. “How he look? He look... peaceful?”
I thought about the corpse in the cellar. About how most of it had resembled raw steak.
“Very peaceful. You worked together?”
“Work together. Live together. Brontes—he my brother. We do everything together.”
“Does that include blowing up the Tartarus Club?”
The cyclops delved into the pocket of his apron and brought out a hammer even Thor would have thought twice about lifting. “You want I turn you into horseshoe?”
“Calm down, buddy. What I want is to ask a few questions.”
His eye narrowed. “You cop?”
“Do I look like a cop?”
“If you not cop, that big guy send you?”
“Big guy? You mean Hyperion?”
“I guess.”
“Nobody sent me, buddy. I’m just trying to get to the bottom of things.” I paused. “Trying to make sure your brother didn’t die for nothing.”
That did it. The cyclops’s massive shoulders twitched, then collapsed. He dropped the holdall in a puddle, sat on it and started to sob.
I raised my collar against the sleet and waited. Eventually the cyclops dried up. I was about to prompt him when, to my surprise, he started talking all of his own accord. That happens more times than you’d think. Sometimes you have to push; mostly folk just want to tell you their story. Either way, I’m always ready to listen.
“It Brontes,” he said. “It his idea. He always with the ideas, my brother. ‘Hey, Steropes,’ he says, ‘why we isn’t making something else than horseshoes?’ So we starts make thunderbolts for Aeolus.”
“The wind god?”
“That him. Anyways, those Thanes up on the Mountain, they starts breed thunderbirds and nobody want regular bolts no more.” He jerked his thumb over his shoulder. “I got heap of regular bolts out back, you know anybody wants.”
“Nobody springs to mind,” I replied. “So after the thunderbolt business dried up you went back to making horseshoes?”
“S’right.”
“How come you got mixed up with the Titans?”
“Titan and cyclops, we goes way back. We cousins, only those Titans, they say we runts of family. S’pose we is, you put us against Hyperion.”
“You put anything up against a Titan,” I said, “it comes out looking small.”
Steropes scratched his nose. “S’right. Anyways, we always had—what you call—feud? Yeah, that it. Family feud. We get together, we fight. Titan and cyclops. Fighting cousins. Only, cyclopses so small they always lose. So we stop. Just make us honest living, you know?”
“So what went wrong?”
“It got so folks they don’t want horseshoes no more. Time was there was loads of horses. Now they most in boneyard. Or in cans. Last year we scrapes by—this year, nothing. Bad times, mister. Real bad. So Brontes, he figure we got one choice.”
“Which is what?”
“Crime,” said Steropes matter-of-factly
I gazed through the sleet at the neighboring industrial units. Hundreds of little businesses, all desperately trying to turn a profit. Printers and packers and makers of lace. Little businesses all folding up, one after the next. I wondered how many others had crossed the line of the law to make ends meet.
“So let me guess,” I said. “Brontes figured he’d blow the safe at the Tartarus Club and steal whatever he found inside. Plus get one over on the family to boot.”
Steropes nodded miserably. “We went together. Brontes steals us big rig. Makes me drive. Makes me wait outside while he does job. Says he doesn’t trust me to... mister, you see, I not too bright...” His voice trailed off, leaving empty air. He gave me a plaintive look. “Anyways, he come out with stuff he heisted and loads it in rig. Then he goes back for rest. Then there’s big bang, and I waits and waits, but Brontes, he doesn’t come out. I know he’s dead ’cos my heart makes little stabs, but I waits. Then those Titans start busying and I get scared and drives big rig down to river and I jumped out before it hit the water and it rolls under those waves and sank down and down and down. Nearly I didn’t jump, ’cos they say you go under Lethe that water makes that you forget everything and I thinks maybe that not so bad. My brain, mostly it don’t remember much too good anyways, but I get to feeling it never forget that how Brontes is dead. Not ever. Feelings like dead family, they don’t go away, and it gets so how you just want to wipe them out, you know?”
“I know,” I said, because I did. “So what happened next? Did you come back here?”
He sniffled, wiped his nose on his apron, nodded. “Walked home. Sits me down. Wait ’til I forgets what I waiting for. After while I remembers all over Brontes is dead. That’s when I couldn’t bear it no longer and I packs my undershorts and brings my hammer and... and here’s I talking to you.”
“This ‘stuff’ that you stole,” I said carefully. “What exactly was it?”
His brow furrowed over his single eye. “Dunno.”
“Was it gold? Diamonds? Bonds?”
“What’s bonds?”
“Never mind. Was it shiny?”
“Dunno. It in sacks.” He started crying again. “I so stupid! I forgets everything! If I jump in that River Lethe, you wouldn’t know difference!”
I felt like putting an arm round his shoulder. It would have been easier to hug a rhinoceros. “Where will you go?”
“Dunno. This city, it all I ever know.” He picked up his hammer and started pounding the ground with it, over and over again. The whole yard shook. “I just walk ’til I stop, I guess, then walk some more. Walk ’til I stop for good.”
I’d heard worse plans. If you’d asked me in the first year after Laura’s death, I’d have said I’d heard few better.
Steropes put the hammer down and looked round in puzzlement.
“What that?” he said.
Even though Steropes had stopped pounding it, the ground was still shaking. Everything was shaking. The puddles bounced like drumskins; the forge’s water wheel turned against the flow; electric light pulsed like muzzle flashes through the smog.
Someone was coming through the dimensions.
Reality unzipped. A freshly-cut snag opened from the end of the canal path all the way up to the top of the nearest cumulus cloud, lighting up the night. A Titan stepped through, wearing a halo of lightning.
“Hyperion,” I sighed. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”
18
THE SNAG THAT Hyperion had opened was vicious crimson, like a knife wound. Round its edges, torn strings spat like cobras. The Titan battered his way through all the same, muscling back the dimensions. For a second he swelled to full-size. I felt the whole world creak beneath my shoes.
Then the snag snapped shut and there was just steaming smog and a shadow as big as the night. We cowered under it, me and the cyclops. So did the rest of the city.
Hyperion took a deep breath and dropped a dozen sizes. The dimensions protested but he elbowed them aside. Soon he was no bigger than a department store. He squatted, dipped his head, planted his horns on the ground, massaged the back of his neck.
“Why did I pick such a small world?” he groaned. His skin was flayed and his eyes looked like baked eggs.
“Don’t let him thump me,” said Steropes, backing away.
“Out of my way, gumshoe,” said Hyperion. “The cyclops is mine.”
And there I was, caught like the world’s smallest bratwurst between two mountains of rye. I considered getting the hell out, but where could I go? The yard was closed on three sides and
Hyperion blocked the fourth.
“I’ll strike you a deal, Hyperion,” I said. “You tell me what’s going on, I’ll tell you where the stolen gear is.”
Hyperion’s eyes turned crimson. The cyclops gasped.
“‘Deal’?” said Hyperion. “‘Gear?’” His voice was calm. Not necessarily a good sign.
“Sure.” I was already drowning—why not shout for sharks? “How else am I gonna close this case?”
Those crimson eyes disappeared behind eyelids like garage doors. When the doors opened again, the eyes were smoking. “You are off the case, gumshoe. Or did you forget?”
“Sorry, buddy, it doesn’t work like that. You hire me, we’ve made a contract. Contracts work both ways—you’re a businessman, you know that. Two to make one, two to break one. And I never said I was finished.”
“Oh, you are finished all right.” Hyperion smiled, revealing several thousand teeth. The journey here had stripped them of their enamel, and his gums were bleeding.
“I see you had trouble with the strings too,” I said. “Reckon it cost you to get here. Why bother?”
“Tell me, gumshoe,” said Hyperion, “what is to stop me squashing you now, like a bug?”
“Nothing,” I replied, “except this. You ran yourself in circles trying to hide the truth, but here you still are, and here I still am, and here’s this case still open. So why not help me close it? When that’s done, if you still want to, you can kill me. If you do I’ll die happy, because I’ll know the answer to your damn mystery. You’ll be happy too, because I’ll take whatever secrets you’ve got to my grave.”
Hyperion’s fingers closed round my neck and I went up like an express elevator, the Titan’s chin speeding past like the side of a cliff. A second later I was staring him straight in the eye. I tried to breathe and couldn’t.
“You have a fancy tongue on you, gumshoe,” said the Titan, “but you forget one thing.”
String City Page 5