Gears of the City (38 page)

Ruth slipped through the streets, down to the Station, again, another moonlit night. The route was becoming familiar. She wondered if the Station
meant
anything to Ivy. If she remembered.

Because in the years before the Dad left, when the sisters had been small, and the Dad was always going on longer and longer journeys, leaving them alone, they’d had a game. They’d gone exploring the streets, creeping out of the house at night. All three of them together. (They had been strange children.) Exploring, conquering, naming and renaming waste grounds, inventing history for shuttered ruins. Declaring themselves Princesses of abandoned spaces. They had followed the canal as far out as Walbrook. They had broken into Pumping Station 300 and claimed it as theirs. It had been one of their favorites for a week or two before they found the stables on Crow Street. It was still active in those days—the pumps heaved and roared and rose and fell. Ruth had imagined the machines were an army, shifting in centuries-long fairy-tale sleep, waiting to be woken. Marta had declared the place a ruined castle, left over from forgotten Ages of the city, disguised in concrete and slate.

Did Ivy remember? Was that why she’d gone to ground there? Maybe. Maybe not. In retrospect Ruth thought little Ivy had been less interested in their childish fantasy than in the machines, the processes and systems they represented.

Ruth knew something was wrong as soon as she turned the street corner and saw the Station, down by the water. At first she couldn’t say what it was. But then, of course, she realized that the Station’s windows were dark, again.

She stopped, and she waited, and the lights did not come back. She approached slowly, already knowing what she would see: the ruined building returned to disuse, cold and silent again.

Scraps of Ivy’s notes and calculations were scattered on the
damp floor. Numbly Ruth picked them up and scanned them. She didn’t understand any of it.

They’d taken the lanterns. Perhaps the Mountain was dark, or the path to it. They’d left most of the food for the rats. Maybe you didn’t need food on the Mountain.

In the muddy ground outside the Station there were footprints. Were they fresh? Ruth wasn’t sure. A dozen people or more, walking together, down along the water—and the tracks were lost in the weeds.

Who’d gone? Who’d been left behind?

Suddenly she thought of Arjun, in the dark of Rawley’s bolt-hole. Was he still there?

She ran back to Carnyx Street.

Arjun

All evening the Know-Nothings in the bar outside had been making noise—drinking and shouting and arguing. The bolt-hole echoed with muffled voices. Where was Mrs. Rawley? Arjun hadn’t seen her since the afternoon of the day before, and in her absence the Know-Nothings seemed to have moved in permanently. They seemed to be drinking her cellars dry.

Arjun was hungry. Brace-Bel had fallen asleep.

The Know-Nothings all went silent, very suddenly and all at once. Brace-Bel muttered in his sleep.

There were footsteps in the corridor outside. Arjun picked up Brace-Bel’s stick and held it like a club, waiting in the dark.

The door slid back. Framed in the lamplight that poured in, glowing like an angel, was a head of curly blond hair, and a brilliant smile.

“Arjun?
There
you are.”

“St. Loup?”

Behind St. Loup stood a little round man in a brown suit, with an egg-shaped head and mild bespectacled eyes.

“Turnbull?”

Behind Father Turnbull, lying in the corridor, was what appeared to be at least one Know-Nothing, possibly deceased.

St. Loup vaguely waved the needle-gun in his hand.

“I think at this point you should probably regard yourself as our captive,” St. Loup explained.

Brace-Bel rolled over, snoring.

“And I suppose we’ll take the fat one, too.”

Ruth

Ruth went to bed that night without a word to anyone. Marta tried to say something to her; she didn’t listen. She slept most of the next day, and most of the day after.

Who was gone? Ivy was gone. Rawley was gone—when Ruth had gone running panting into Rawley’s pub, she’d found it empty, except for a half-dozen Know-Nothings who appeared to be passed out in a dead drunk, so total that they might in fact have been drugged. Arjun was gone—the bolt-hole was empty. Had Ivy come to Arjun, had Arjun gone to her? Had they all left together? She couldn’t know. Who else was gone? She didn’t care.

“Ivy’s gone,” Marta said. It wasn’t a question.

“Yes.”

“Huh. Well, good riddance.”

But Marta was tough.
Good riddance
was what she’d said when the Dad disappeared, too.

Ruth couldn’t stand to be alone in the house. She went walking, on the streets on which she was trapped. The Know-Nothings hung around for a few more days, inquiring after the mysterious disappearances of the following individuals of interest to their inquiries: Mrs. Rawley, Mr. Zeigler, a Mr…. Then they went home. The patrols were recalled—the state of emergency was relaxed. Carnyx Street was quiet again. Hours were increased at the local factories to compensate for the lost productivity of the past week. The weather got a little worse. The Mountain looked the same. The lights of distant streets were scattered on it like nameless constellations. The peaks were a void, coal-black.

One night there was a storm over the Mountain, a real shocker, slashes of violent white lightning and lurid clouds, nets of rain sweeping and surging across the city, and maybe that storm meant something and maybe it didn’t. In the morning everyone slogged to work through the puddles, same as every day. Whatever Ivy had done on the Mountain had made no difference to anything, except
that she was gone, and Arjun, and everyone else. The city felt the same as ever, only slightly less so.

O
ne night, as she sat in the upstairs window smoking
xaw
and watching the unchanging Mountain, she saw three bright specks appear against its dark mass. At first she thought they were stars. Then she wondered if they were birds.

She watched them as they approached, fanning out across the city. As they spread out it became clear that there were more than three—six, twelve, twenty-four points of light.

They appeared to have come from the Mountain. But that, of course, was impossible. They might as well have come from the moon. Was she hallucinating? She stubbed out the cigarette.

The lights continued to move across the city. Most of them drifted off to east or west, but one came closer and closer.

It was hard to judge perspective—how large was it? It appeared to be a sort of flying machine. The mass of the thing was a dark grey balloon, long and bulletlike and ugly. The light was just something that hung from a cage below it—a cold, hard artificial light of a kind that she had not seen for years, not since the Dad’s experiments with electricity.

The thing droned. It had engines.

The light beamed down across the darkness of the city, freezing flashes of white rooftops and chimneys and fences.

Was it looking for something ?

“Ivy?” Ruth said. She leaned out of the window.

The thing passed overhead and two streets away. She ran to another window to try to see where it went, but the angle was bad; all she could see were the edges of the light as it passed. All she could hear was the drone of its engines.

Did it have a pilot? Did it have a mission? Who sent it?

Moments later there was an impossibly loud and earth-shaking crash, and a flash of red flame from over on Ezra Street, and the window cracked and the house shuddered.

An explosion? A bomb?

Ruth ran downstairs, pulled on a coat, and went out into the streets.

After the Second Expedition

Wake Upl-Inquiries, Cryptozoological
and Otherwise-News of the War and
a Dialogue on Faith-Fragile Alliances

Arjun

W
ake
up.”

“Wake
up.”

“Is he dead? He’d better not be dead, Turnbull.”

“We can know very little in this life, St. Loup. We are but mortals stumbling in the dark. But I
do
know poisons. He is not dead, and he
will
wake up.”

“He’d better, Turnbull. He’d better.”

“Are you threatening me, St. Loup?”

“A man of the cloth? Perish the thought.”

“His eye just twitched.”

“Give him another shot. More electricity, that’s the ticket.”

“Be quiet, St. Loup. Did you just hear him moan?”

“That’s scintillating conversation by his standards. I’ll give him a kick.”

“Ah, there we go. There we go.”

“Finally. Wake up! Wake up! It’s your old friend St. Loup and good old Father Turnbull. We have questions for you.”

T
hey held Arjun in a small suite of rooms, somewhere in a tall building. It appeared to be anonymous commercial office space.
Perhaps St. Loup had rented it—he had business interests all over the city. Perhaps it belonged to one of Turnbull’s people—Father Turnbull operated in a number of districts, working with young people, in churches, seminaries, universities, and temples, undermining and corrupting naive faith, and a surprising number of his proteges later became great successes in the business world. Perhaps it was neutral space.

The walls were grey and the carpets blue. There was a room with an ivory-white conference table, a small bathroom, and an office with a typewriter, on which he was encouraged to record his experiences. (He refused.) The conference table was covered in rows of bulky black telephones, all disconnected. The windows were all barred, and the door onto the corridor outside was locked. There were faint sounds of typing and conversation and elevators from the rest of the building, but no music, and certainly no doors out into the Metacontext.

It was high summer, and not air-conditioned.

They had drugged Arjun to bring him into the building, and he had no real idea where he was. Nowhere in particular, he supposed. Somewhere far distant from Fosdyke, certainly, in time and space and other respects. They had drugged him twice since then, once with something that Turnbull claimed was a truth serum, and once—apparently out of spite—with a hallucinogen that had caused him to imagine that the telephones were all ringing at once, and their black shiny bodies were like children burned in some horrible war, wailing for the death of his God; that was unpleasant.

Otherwise they hadn’t tortured him much yet. Once St. Loup had petulantly stamped on his wounded hand, and sometimes Father Turnbull rapped his knuckles or twisted his ears. Mostly they tormented him with endless questions. They were convinced that he knew more than he was telling them.

Arjun wasn’t sure how they’d come to be allied—they’d never been fond of each other. St. Loup was decadent, materialistic; Turnbull ascetic, intellectual. Probably Turnbull’s spies and St. Loup’s spies, both watching Arjun, had gotten tangled together, and now the two of them had reached a kind of wary
entente.
They were like two predators facing off over the same downed prey. They questioned him separately, taking turns. Apparently despite their
new arrangement they still couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other.

He expected they might kill him eventually. He’d asked St. Loup what they’d done with Brace-Bel, and the man had waved a hand vaguely and said, “He was useless. We got rid of him.”

That was days ago now. The beard he’d started to grow in the bolt-hole was coming in thick and scruffy.

What a stupid, humiliating way to go! There was still so much left to do.

S
t. Loup sauntered in. One of his thugs locked the door behind him and stood mute, arms folded, scowling like a bouncer.

St. Loup sat on the edge of the desk, took his sunglasses off, and smiled.

“Are you well? Are you getting enough to drink? You look tired.”

“Well enough.” Every day one of the thugs brought him greasy noodles wrapped in white paper, bought off the street below, and bottles of water. It gave him indigestion.

“If there’s anything we can do to make you comfortable.”