Gears of the City (23 page)

The WaneLight Hotel was not
formally
a seat of government. That came later: when the building was crumbling and real power had long since moved elsewhere an ineffectual Council would headquarter itself there, and take over the Hotel’s famous elegant letterhead, and steal what remained of its glamour, until the taxes stopped coming in and they could not afford to stop the roof collapsing.

At the height of the Hotel’s influence it was simply known as a place where powerful people came to meet each other, came to do business. Ambassadors from all over the city lived there—the Hotel catered to all tastes and cultures, and there was nothing it could not copy. It cocooned in luxury the presidents and owners of every corporation of significance. It indulged the antics of the stars of whatever entertainments were popular at the time. The city’s finest athletes roomed there in their spoiled retirements, reverting one by one into a cosseted muscular second infancy, swollen gigantically by the drugs the Hotel’s staff slipped into their food—an illusion of continued virility for which the athletes would drain their bank accounts and prostitute their endorsements for the Hotel’s
clients, and that would, in the end, turn them violent and ogreish, so that floors thirty-one and thirty-two were not safe for regular guests, and the cleaning staff there went armed with cattle prods.

It housed—so the rumor went—a small, shifting, and secretive community of… call them
travelers.
Those who wandered in the City Beyond, in the Metacontext, among the shifting Gears of the city—the visionaries, the madmen, the lost, the unmoored in time. They came to the Hotel to scheme, to deal, to share their various obsessions. (St. Loup claimed to be in pursuit of the most beautiful woman in the world; the magus Abra-Melin sought a sacred Grail; Longfellow dreamed of some God, somewhere, with the authority to forgive him for his apparently monstrous crimes; for Monmouth it was a particular and improbable flavor of ice cream; the thuggish Crebillon only wanted to find his way home to the city of his birth—he had scores to settle.) They haggled over secrets—the paths, the rumors, the keys and the doors; sightings of the mysterious and omnipresent Shay, who for so many of them had been their first sinister introduction to the City Beyond, who had pulled back the walls and given them their first terrifying glimpse of the spin of the Gears.

They told each other stories of the Mountain.

If anyone in the city, anywhere, possessed a map of the safe path to the Mountain, then someone in the Hotel would know about it. It would be available, for a price.

Who were they? The Hotel’s crowds teemed. Everyone in the Hotel had something to sell, held secrets close to their chests. Arjun had no contacts. No invitation. Who, among the Hotel’s guests, was an alien, who was merely eccentric and affected? Who was a fake and who was the real thing? Hard to tell. Arjun needed time to observe. To spy. To ingratiate. He needed a job.

The Bodleys put Arjun to work on the roof, because he was slight and nimble and unafraid of heights, but unsuitable for working with guests. They gave him overalls, and a pan, and an assortment of tuning-fork brushes, and sent him up there to join the teams who groomed bird shit and dead pigeons from the shivering antennae.

Arjun worked on the roof for more than a year. That was nothing remarkable. There were men who’d been working on the roof
for ten years, twenty, all still hoping that one day they’d be noticed or notice something compromising and their long-awaited political careers would begin.

In the winter it rained and stormed and the cleaning teams wore waxy indigo cloaks. The guests were guarded and suspicious; angry sullen static crawled along the wires and the chimneys groaned. In summer the guests were happy and greedy and every minute in some room somewhere a deal was made and the Hotel’s silvery antennae quivered and purred.

Arjun applied for a transfer to the engineering teams who tuned the antennae and tended their frequencies. He failed the examination. The invigilating Bodley shook his head. “You must be from one of the
backward
districts, right?” And fair enough; Arjun never
had
learned to understand machines. And another six months went by.

All sorts of birds gathered on the roofs. Not just pigeons— swifts, hawks, parakeets, parrots. All kinds of engineered birds and surgical creations—muttering messenger birds, scaled and bladed and strutting war-birds, chiming clock-birds. Something about the Hotel’s vibrations attracted them. Parliaments of ravens gathered among the wires and did their own business, up there on the roofs; and in the mornings Arjun’s crew had a special spike-and-bag to clear up the bodies of defeated challengers …

The wires buzzed and the antennae murmured. Some of Arjun’s crew believed they could
hear
the secrets the guests whispered down below. On at least two occasions, during Arjun’s time on the roof, a clever cleaner invented a device to snoop on the wires—and both men disappeared shortly after, and blandly smiling Bodleys shrugged and lied,
it’s just turnover, you know?

And Arjun learned how to hear the music in the wires.

At first he thought he was mad. The heights and the winds and the vibrations in the ether drove many of the roof-workers to madness. (And the
waiting
, the endless waiting, in hopes that some guest might notice them, that they might be welcomed below, that they might get to make
deals.)

He heard it as a kind of code, a kind of itch. He slowly learned to piece it together as music.

It was
terrible.

The Hotel piped music everywhere—to soothe, to inflame, to
inspire awe, greed, nervousness, misery—whatever was most conducive to business. To Arjun’s ears, it was a jangling, manipulative abomination. Since Day One he had
suffered
during his long daily elevator rides between the roof and his quarters in the basement— in the service elevators the Hotel played bright and cheery muzak. He was profoundly upset to find that even the roof was no longer a sanctuary from the noise.

A
nd one morning, around that time, the elevator opened briefly on forty-four and Arjun saw
Shay
in the corridor shaking someone’s hand and smiling hugely and handing over a briefcase. Sunglasses, tan, red silk shirt, cropped white hair … but the doors closed again before Arjun could say anything, and he never saw Shay there again, though he made inquiries, and he heard
rumors.
And not long after that, one of the guests on sixty-one, a defrocked priest named Turnbull, invited Arjun to
come and talk about this Shay chap, then.
Sometimes he went by
Father
Turnbull, though his faith had long since inverted into an obsessive hatred of the deity. Turnbull, like Arjun, like Brace-Bel, like most of their kind, had been lifted from the city of his birth into the Metacontext by Shay, for Shay’s own mysterious reasons, with vague promises that what Turnbull sought—the final proof of God’s nonexistence—could be found on the Mountain. And then Turnbull had been left behind.
What do you know about Shay? Where is he? What’ve you heard? What are they saying about him these days?

And through Turnbull, Arjun met Dr. Quayle, and through Quayle he met Mr. Mangalore, and through the services he performed for Mangalore he developed an uneasy working relationship with the brutish enforcers Slough and Muykrit, who introduced him to the hairshirted penitent Longfellow, who gave him access to the mad magus Abra-Melin, at one of whose seances he met St. Loup, who persuaded him to go in on a deal with Li-Paz, one of whose girls knew Cantor, who told him the great comical secret about Mr. Monmouth, who, under threat of blackmail, offered Arjun an introduction to Potocki, who … A dangerous business, his introduction to the uncommunity of travelers. They were solitary, unsympathetic, untrustworthy by nature. Everyone who Broke Through did so alone. They didn’t care about the consequences of their actions.
Their very existence was an act of ontological violence—few of them scrupled over human life. The secret nature of the world was profoundly corrupt, and they all knew it. But what choice did Arjun have? He did what he needed to do. For nearly a year he assisted the serpentine St. Loup with his schemes, and at the end he had nothing to show for it except an introduction to the dissipated Lord Losond, the collector, who introduced Arjun to his wife, who …

Arjun had come to the Hotel to find the way to the Mountain. That was a story in itself, how he had first heard rumors of the Hotel (it was all coming back to him now, as he spoke, as he walked with Stevie through the corridors of Brace-Bel’s house). He sought the Mountain because his God lived there—so he believed; it must. There was nowhere else left to look. Inward and upward. Since his God left him—alone in that distant crumbling monastery, an abandoned child, in silent halls that had once been full of music—his search had taken him upward and inward and deeper into the city.

He spent ten years in the Hotel. He ran away after rumors of music and Gods, again and again, and again and again he came back disappointed. He schemed. The pursuit of secrets became its own purpose. Sometimes he forgot
why
he was searching for the Mountain, sometimes for months at a time. Sometimes he forgot the difference between himself and St. Loup or Abra-Melin or Turnbull or the other madmen. Sometimes there was no difference.

But that was beside the point. He remembered his God now. He wanted to tell Stevie about the
music.

A
rjun complained to the Bodleys about the leaking music, and they ignored him. He complained to the other cleaners on his crew and they suggested earplugs. He filed a more
formal
complaint, attaching extra pages to the Bodley EI&P Grievance & Suggestion Form so that he could detail, at length, precisely how vile and debased the Hotel’s music was. It relieved his feelings a little. Three weeks later a Bodley summoned him to interview.

The Bodley, whose name was Frank, claimed to be sensitive, musically minded—though to Arjun Frank seemed indistinguishable from his fellows. Frank listened to Arjun’s complaints and made him an offer—and soon Arjun found himself working under
Frank the Bodley’s staff in the darkened and humming and machine-filled nerve center of the Hotel’s musical systems.

There were eleven men in the Music Department, seven women, two indeterminate, one Bodley. Quarters were close and hygiene poor. They drank and smoked furiously in their darkened carrels, watching the feed from the cameras that were hidden in every corridor and every room, fiddling with buttons and dials, headphones on their nodding twitching heads—massaging constantly the Hotel’s moods and tempo.

Frank assigned Arjun on a probationary basis to the east side of floor sixty-two, where no one very important lived, and where the bars and gymnasia were out of fashion.

“No,” Frank said, one week later. “Oh dear no. You’re making them uneasy. What
was
that you were playing? You’re bad for business. This is about
getting business done
, Arjun. Look at the way Esme does it; do it the way she does it. Otherwise we may have to let you go back to the roof. “

And Arjun—who was very eager not to lose access to the cameras, because who knew what secrets he might learn from them?— swallowed his pride and copied Esme.

A
nd the
point
Arjun wanted to make, he told Stevie, was that, as he worked for Frank the Bodley, as he sat in that nerve center listening to all the Hotel’s whispering insinuating music hissing and twining together, he remembered the Voice of his God. Because the Hotel’s music was its
opposite
, was everything the Voice was
not;
the Hotel’s constant song was all lies, was all manipulation, it cheated and twisted, it
stole
from all its listeners. It was there to make gamblers take that one last shot that would ruin them; it was there to make men forget their wives and children and all their promises; it was there to make people squander themselves. And when—after a few weeks of shame, and drinking, and a promotion to the feeds for the seventy-third and twenty-ninth floors—Arjun first learned to hear the Hotel’s music as a whole, he heard his God, too: his God was all the notes
not
played. He tore off his headphones and walked out. Frank the Bodley tried to stop him and Arjun took a swing, and the
Bodley’s bland face, to no one’s particular surprise, turned out to be made of soft inhuman clay and a tangle of emerald circuitry. Fortunately by that time Arjun was moonlighting for Mr. Mangalore, and no longer needed the job. But the Music, Arjun said …

But Stevie, as it turned out, didn’t much care about the music, and cared even less for Gods. She wanted to know about the clothes, and the food, and the hotel’s beds, and the lights, and the women who gambled, the dresses they wore, the wine … For a moment Arjun was nonplussed, almost stammered. But he liked the girl; there was something charming about her eagerness, so he rallied and tried to remember. “The women all wore heels so high they walked like storks, Stevie. Black, and red, and …”

“Show me.”

“What?”

She grabbed his arm again. “Show me. All these things. I believe you, all right? Let me,” she started taking the ridiculous wings off, “let me get a few things, and you can take me there, right? Doors, time, streets.
You said.”

He held her bony hand. “It’s been a long time. I’ve forgotten a lot. I pushed too close to the Mountain and I hurt myself.”

“Can you still do it, or not?”

“I don’t know.” He laughed. “I actually don’t know.”

“Well fucking
try
, then.” She looked close to tears. “Come on, come on. Take me there and I promise I’ll…”

“Don’t. Please, don’t promise anything. No deals. No charge. I’ll try, Stevie. First I need
music.”

She narrowed her eyes suspiciously. Then she whistled a cheerful little tune.

“… not quite like that. Come on.”

He turned toward the door, and stopped short. It was occupied; Brace-Bel’s enforcer, Basso, leaned against the door frame, smirking. “Aren’t you two cozy?”