Gears of the City (68 page)

Cinders and sparks turned in empty space—the spinning of tiny golden gears. An infinity of delicate adjustments were made. Each atom, each moment transformed itself into the next. There was a stain of black ash on the floor. The air was warm and dusty.

He was gone; transformed. And whatever he’d set loose had escaped; had gone beyond the confines of the machine.

Well? The world seemed unchanged so far.

A dozen stories sprang to Ruth’s mind—stories from the city below, myths that had fallen through the cracks of the city’s history.
The hero who stole the wings of a mighty Bird, and new too close to the sun. The hero who went down into the crypts under the city in search of his dead wife, and looked back, and so
fell
back, and burned in the deep-dwellers’ forge fires. The hero who climbed a tower of glass and was pinned and torn on the sharp wild spires. A painting, hung in the Museum in an airy upper gallery, showing two lovers in robes of gold and ruby embracing while the sun behind them descended ready to swallow the world. Stories about love and war, songs about death. An ache gripped her chest; her love for the shadow he’d left behind.

S
he took the mirror upstairs again. It was heavy, and silent. Above, below, the machine shuddered and strained. She found a stable place, and thought it as good as any other. She rested the mirror against a thick rubbery pipe and sat across from it. Unnatural light played around her; it pricked her skin.

“He just had to show off, didn’t he?”

The mirror was silent. Her own eyes, reflected in it, were red and tired. She sighed.

“This is all your fault,” she said. But the mirror didn’t answer, and she shrugged; it was too late now to feel any real bitterness. “I suppose you are what you are,” she said.

From where she sat she could see down three—sometimes four or five—corridors and chambers of the machine. All around her the thing slowly transformed. The fires below came and went—the buckling of metal, the gouts of steam. Gears snarled. The corridors twisted into new shapes.

Only the mirror stayed the same, and Ruth herself. If she turned away from the mirror she thought it, too, might vanish. Was Ivy still in there? It seemed a shame to let her go. “You’re the clever one. Can you tell me how to mend this?” Still no answer.

She remembered how once, in childhood, she’d walked in on Ivy’s room, meaning to ask her some question, and found Ivy sitting between two mirrors. One was taken from the bathroom. One was their mother’s old silver-backed mirror, from before she’d died, which Ivy must have taken down from the attic. Ivy was talking to herself, to herselves. What was she practicing for? Ivy had shrieked, childishly, lost her temper; and Ruth had backed away, red-faced,
half guilty, half laughing. Later she sat between the mirrors herself. All she saw was her own reflection, flushed rose-red with embarrassment. She hadn’t understood then, and she didn’t understand now.

There was nothing to do but wait.

The corridors twined and twisted like vines. The cables took on a green and vibrant aspect. The gears creaked like oaks in a storm. The fires burned vivid floral shades. The machine attempted nature. Perhaps it was trying to save itself. Perhaps it was accommodating itself to her whims.

She remembered all the games she, and Marta, and Ivy used to play. The pale and scrubby and smog-poisoned gardens of Fosdyke, transformed into forests of myth. The new world should have something of that in it, she decided—not too much. She remembered how they’d lost themselves in the Museum, how they’d dreamed … Their long, long childhood. Too long. With the losses they’d suffered, how could they have been expected to grow up right? With the world around them all broken and twisted and full of fear, what should they have grown into? But that was all changed now; everything was ready to be changed.

One by one the fires went out. For a long time the walls bled dark sap, and blackened and withered; slowly they greened again. The corridors righted themselves. The machine was healing. All she had to do was wait. The city was all spread out below her. What did it see, as the Mountain transformed itself? She could feel the city holding its breath. What should she make of it?