String City

by Graham Edwards

  “Seriously,” said the doppelganger, “I could use an aspirin.”

  “It’s very simple,” I said. “There’s the cosmos, and there’s Beyond, which is a place that exists and doesn’t exist, both at the same time. It’s like the Pennyman himself—the perfect embodiment of chance.”

  “Sounds quantum to me.”

  “It is. Probably.”

  “So let me get this straight. The Pennyman actually created Beyond?”

  “Yes. And now he’s stuck inside it.”

  “Why can’t he get out?”

  “Nobody knows. For some reason, Beyond seems to work a bit like a black hole. You can pour any amount of stuff into it, but ain’t nothing ever coming out.”

  The doppelganger rasped his hands over his stubble. “And now the girl’s in there too?”

  I nodded. “The Pennyman has kidnapped her. I’ve no idea how. That should be impossible too. But somehow he’s done it, and now we’re going to get her out.”

  “Now you’re going to tell me there’s a ransom,” said the doppelganger. “Cases like this, there’s always a ransom.”

  “Indeed there is,” said the Scrutator.

  “So where’s the note?”

  “I’ll show you that in a minute,” I said.

  “You boys ever think this might be a trap?” said the doppelganger.

  “Of course it’s a trap.”

  “I mean, even if we could find a way into this Beyond place, you’re saying there’s no way to get back out again.”

  “This is problematic,” the Scrutator agreed.

  The doppelganger shook his head. “I was hoping you boys were going to clue me in. Seems like this isn’t the day for answers. So here’s another question for you.” He spread his arms wide. “What in the name of Hades are we doing in this crater?”

  110

  BEFORE I COULD answer, light burst from the lap of the Fool. We all turned to look. It was like facing an arc welder. I threw up my arm just in time to save my retinas. Heat seared the palm of my hand. I heard a hissing noise—the sound of oil turning to vapor inside the Scrutator’s joints.

  The light dimmed a little and I lowered my arm. The Fool was sitting motionless. Clasped loosely in his hands was a point of light too small to be real, too bright to be there.

  “The Fool has finished deconstructing the Still Point of the Turning World,” whispered the Scrutator. Its mechanical larynx buzzed with awe. “Behold the Glory.”

  Cautiously we approached the inanimate Fool. The Glory blazed through his bone-and-sinew fingers; it looked like he was clutching a sun. The light poured through his flayed body, throwing caustic highlights off glistening organs and all kinds of uncertain anatomy.

  “Why doesn’t he move?” the doppelganger said.

  “He cannot,” replied the Scrutator. “The Fool has become the Still Point.”

  “Come again?”

  “Look, the Still Point of the Turning World is just a box,” I said. “The real prize is what it contains. And that’s what the Pennyman wants.”

  “The Glory?”

  “Right. The essence of the cosmos, the lifestring of everything there ever was, or ever could be. The Glory is powerful, but it’s fragile. If it’s exposed, it immediately seeks a new shelter.”

  “Like a hermit crab looking for a new shell,” said the doppelganger.

  I thought about it. Actually, that was pretty good.

  “In this case, the nearest new shelter it had available was the Fool,” said the Scrutator.

  I prodded the Fool’s bony shoulder. He didn’t budge so much as an inch. I pushed harder; I might as well have been trying to move a mountain. “See? It’s like the Scrutator said. As of now, the whole of creation is turning about the Fool; everything is moving but him.”

  “Remind me why we care about this?” the doppelganger sighed.

  The coil of spider silk that Arachne had given me was hanging at my belt. I unclipped it. Holding the end lightly—the thin webbing bristled with spiky shards—I started spinning it like a lariat. Air whistled. Music rang out. Inside the music there were words.

  ... glory... girl...

  “Who’s that talking?” said the doppelganger.

  “It is the voice of the Pennyman,” the Scrutator replied. “If the Glory is the ransom, then this is the note.”

  When I spun the lasso faster, more words began to leak out.

  ... bring me the Glory...

  The Pennyman’s voice sounded like steel wheels on the tracks of an ice-locked railroad.

  ... and I will give you the girl...

  I kept spinning the spider lasso. The words repeated, over and over.

  “That’s all there is?” said the doppelganger.

  “Seems like. Arachne spent a lifetime spinning her web out into the corners of the cosmos, trying to pinpoint the Pennyman’s hideout. Eventually, a single strand found its way Beyond. It picked up this message and transmitted it back through the web. Straight to Arachne.”

  “I thought nothing could get out of Beyond.”

  “Nothing material, which is why Zephyr getting snatched is such a puzzle. Information—that’s different. You ever send a message using two empty soup cans and a piece of string? Same thing. Only in this case the string was cosmic.”

  The doppelganger eyed the frozen Fool. “You want to shift the Glory, you’re going to have to shift the Fool. But this guy’s going nowhere.”

  “That’s why I brought you along,” I replied.

  “Say what?”

  111

  I COULDN’T HAVE done it without the Scrutator. While the robot clamped its mechanical arms around the doppelganger’s ribs, I grabbed my twin’s wrists and thrust his hands between the fingers of the Fool. The instant the doppelganger touched the Glory, his whole body went stiff and the Fool collapsed like a sack of offal, dead to the world. I pulled the compact from my pocket and thumbed the button marked STANDBY.

  The doppelganger winked out of existence.

  So did the Glory.

  I stared at the compact. So did the Scrutator. My hand was shaking so hard I couldn’t read the display. I willed my muscles to hold still. Nine minutes and holding.

  “You are now carrying the very lifestring of the cosmos,” said the Scrutator with reverence. “Please, do not drop it.”

  “I don’t plan to.”

  “The doppelganger is holding the Glory. He is now therefore the Still Point of the Turning World. As long as he is on standby, however, it appears he can be moved.”

  “And the Glory with him. You sound as surprised as me. What would you have done if this hadn’t worked?”

  The Scrutator ticked for a moment, then said quietly, “I would have despaired for the future of all things.”

  “You and me both, my mechanical friend. So, are you ready for the next part?”

  “Taking the Glory to the Pennyman? Of course. However, I confess that I do not know the way.”

  “I thought you knew everything.”

  “I hear everything. That is different.”

  “The world must be a noisy place for you, Scrutator.”

  “You have no idea. Do you know how to go Beyond?”

  Minding my fingers, I coiled up the lasso. “Once upon a time, you told me you were woven from cosmic string. Were you telling the truth?”

  “I have no reason to lie to you.”

  “That’s what I figured.”

  112

  I THOUGHT THE robot would kick up a stink when I asked it to open up its head. But it didn’t so much as murmur.

  Inside, the Scrutator was even more of a marvel than I’d imagined. The interior of its cranium was a bright bronzed cave crammed with a million tiny gears all tumbling over each other like wheels in a whirligig. It was like someone had built a Swiss watch out of fractal equations. It snatched my breath away.

  It took me less than thirty seconds to thread Arachne’s silk lasso into the robot’s workings. It was tricky, but frankl
y, I’ve had more trouble lacing up one of Harry Arriflex’s old movie projectors. Once the silk was in place, I tripped a likely-looking lever and watched as the single strand of cosmic string churned its way deep into the Scrutator’s mechanical brain. When it was done, I flipped the top of its head shut and stood back.

  “Anything?” I said.

  “Nothing yet,” replied the Scrutator. “I do not know if... wait... wait, I hear something.”

  Someone danced a polka down my spine. “What do you hear?”

  “The voice of the Pennyman! He is talking about the Glory. And he is talking about the girl.”

  “Where’s it coming from?”

  The Scrutator cocked its head. “Triangulating.”

  113

  I SHOULDN’T HAVE been surprised where the trail led. But I was.

  “Jimmy knew,” I said, nudging the dial on the tokamak. The afterburners ignited, flooding my office cellar with livid orange light. “He could have told me. Instead he fed me just enough to keep me stupid.”

  “I cannot parse that sentence,” said the Scrutator.

  I took the robot’s elbow and led it to the bricked-up doorway in the corner of the cellar. Tokamak light made deep shadows in the cracked mortar.

  “When he handed me the keys to this place, Jimmy told me there were over three hundred ways in and out of this cellar.”

  “I do not find that surprising. Your basement resonates with a dimensional discordance that is particularly strident.”

  “Jimmy told me something else too. All those years ago he told me, and I never gave it a second thought.”

  “What did he tell you?”

  “That he’d tried every doorway except one. He meant this one. It’s been under my nose all this time.”

  Tokamak light danced over the bricks, but there was one spot it failed to illuminate. One crack bigger than the rest. I bent to look, and saw it wasn’t a crack but a cavity. A hole.

  I poked my finger inside and felt something soft. I hooked my finger and drew it out. It was a blue feather.

  I glanced at Deliciosa’s ribcage, perched on a pile of splintered wood right where the tax beetles had left it. It seemed like a year since I’d kicked those desks down into the cellar. The kingfisher was motionless inside its prison of bone, its eyes black and cold.

  “The kingfisher took her.” I held up the feather. “After she walked out on me, it found her and took her to the Pennyman. It probably happened while we were down in the sewers, before our little showdown with Kweku Sunyana.”

  “Surely this kingfisher could not have carried Zephyr through this tiny aperture?” The Scrutator thrust a mechanical digit into the hole in the wall.

  “Sure it could. A trick like that would be child’s play for a metabird.”

  The Scrutator flattened the palm of its hand against the ancient bricks. “On the other side of this barrier lies Beyond. Now that I am aligned with Arachne’s web, I hear it, as clear as I hear the sound of your soul.” Behind the filigreed perforations in its cheeks, Arachne’s thread spooled past for the ten thousandth time. “I have not yet asked you this, but I will ask it now. Do you believe that the course of action we are about to take is the correct one?”

  Taking the compact out of my coat pocket, I fetched up a sigh. “Tricky as all this seems, what it comes down to is simple. Inside this gadget is something the Pennyman wants. The Pennyman has something I want. ‘Correct’ doesn’t come into it, buddy. This is just something I have to do.”

  “Do you know what the Pennyman will do when he gets his hands on the Glory?”

  “Nothing good.”

  114

  I TOOK OFF my coat, turned it inside-out seven times until it was made of carbonised barrateen. I picked up Deliciosa’s ribcage—still with the kingfisher inside—flattened it out and zipped it into the lining. As an afterthought, I went to the safe, opened it up, and dropped what I found there into my pocket. It sat nestled against the Dimension Die; there was no way I was forgetting to take that with me again.

  I held out my hand to the Scrutator.

  “Are you going to modify my dimensional status also?” the robot asked.

  “You got a problem with that, Bronzey?”

  “I trust you.”

  For no reason I can explain, those three words brought a lump to my throat.

  I twisted the Scrutator left and right, both at the same time, and inverted the polarity of its sub-brane interface. It was tricky, given the robot was made of cosmic string, but everything bends somewhere. I shrugged on my coat and opened the cuff. The Scrutator’s discombobulated matrix fled up my sleeve and settled under my armpit, whirring quietly to itself. I fastened my coat buttons, turned up the collar and cinched the belt tight, tighter, tightest. Half a dozen spare dimensions popped out through the seams and enveloped me in a rainbow aura. I folded myself over once, twice, four, eight, sixteen times, until I was the size of a half a postage stamp. Levitating on a froth of residual quarks, I slipped through the tiny hole in the bricked-up doorway.

  The mortar squeezed me down then spat me out onto an octagonal lattice of cosmic string. I breathed a sigh of relief—string I could deal with. Unfolding myself just once, I started skating toward the nearest pool of bubbling quicksilver. Hot fog hugged me, stinking of sulfur and a dozen unfathomable esters. Beyond the lattice of string I saw a skyline made of fingers, each higher than a mountain. City-sized knuckles bent like monumental walnuts as the towering digits clawed planets down from high above the clouds. One of the planets bounced on to the lattice and began rolling toward me. Gravity shuddered as the local dimensions contracted. Oceans spilled in the planet’s wake; raw atmosphere slewed across my path. The segment of string I was clinging to snapped, and the broken end became a whip that lashed me first up, then down, then both at the same time. I flew over the tumbling planet and under it. At the last moment I hoisted my pants, leapfrogging it by a whisker.

  Chasing the planet was a vast heart thumping out a funky twenty-bar beat. Blood splashed from its valves in jets of syncopated crimson. My coat went hazmat just in the nick of time, sprouting cosmofoil ailerons that banked me smack into an upright sea of glutinous mud. I held my breath, shut my eyes and swam. Twelve strokes took me through and out and on to the razor edge of a tetrahedral balloon. I tucked, rolled and flipped off the needle of its apex just nanoseconds before it burst.

  I passed into a nebula packed with discarded weapons, some shattered, some whole, the graveyard of a forgotten war. Giant rusty rifles revolved like battleships; sprouting barbs, the strings wound themselves into lethal clutching coils. A vast flock of iron grenades flew past, spilling their pins. Wind roared, not loud enough to dull the ticking of their timers. I looked to all points of the compass and a dozen points past, seeking escape. But there was none. Despite the absence of any kind of highway, it looked like I’d reached the end of the road.

  Blacklight flashed off the facets of a distant, spinning shape—a large white cube, pirouetting in the nonsense. The first grenade went off. Hard air thumped my back and propelled me straight toward the cube. A second detonated and drove me back. All around me, a billion ticking bombs marked off the seconds.

  “Scrutator!” I shouted. “Your hearing is better than mine. Which one’s next?”

  A bronzed finger thrust its way from my cuff and pointed toward a nearby grenade. I paddled furiously past, placing myself between the grenade and the cube. Two breaths later the grenade exploded, slamming me a mile or more nearer my target.

  “Next!”

  The robot’s finger swiveled. I swam. Another boom, another mule-kick in the ribs, another mile. Eight explosions later and the cube was close enough to touch. In the center of one face was a handle. It flashed in and out of view as the cube rotated, once, twice...

  Third time round I grabbed it and was instantly snatched sideways, the jerk wrenching my shoulder almost from its socket. Now the cube and I were still, and what passed for the cosmos was turning aroun
d us. I twisted the handle. Something unlatched, or laughed, or both, and all six sides of the cube peeled back, spraying dimensions like rain. I flew and fell. My guts compressed. Everything unfolded. Something hit me, then something else. My head banged sideways. Another impact. A chattering sound. Blackness.

  115

  I WOKE FLAT on my back, surrounded by the smell of popcorn and a low murmur of conversation. I blinked my eyes open, stared up at a thousand points of light. Stars? I blinked again—not stars but cabochons, bare bulbs burning in a firmament of frayed black velvet.

  I tried to sit up, but something sticky held my coat to the floor. I worked my shoulders and peeled myself free. I stood, and the murmured conversation stopped. I looked around, amazed.

  I was in a cinema, one I knew very well. One that had ceased to exist when the Fools had blown up the vault containing the Still Point of the Turning World. Harry’s Holodeon.

  Everything about the place was the same: the cheap carpet, the rows of cracked plaster pillars, two blocks of tiered seats separated by a narrow aisle sloping down to the big trapdoor in the floor, beyond which loomed a pair of vast swagged crimson curtains. Behind the curtains, I presumed, was the holographic screen on to which Harry Arriflex had routinely projected the latest in a long line of salacious melodramas.

  “This can’t be real,” I muttered.

  At the sound of my voice, five hundred bronze heads swiveled in my direction. For the first time in years, Harry’s Holodeon—or whatever fleapit facsimile this was—had a full house.

  I shook my cuff and let the Scrutator spill out on to the carpet. All of its dimensions unfolded instantly. Springing back into solidity, it stood swaying, gears chugging noiselessly inside its cheeks, shining eyes wide with surprise.

  “My brothers,” said the robot, staring at the seated audience.