Ninth City Burning (34 page)

“Are you kidding?” I say, emerging from behind the overturned desk where I'd taken cover. “That was fantastic!”

“But I wrecked half of your workshop, and his arm—there's glowing blue blood everywhere!”

“It's called gwayd,” Lady chimes in, her costume construction-themed for the evening. “It transmits viatic energy through the equus—people would never be able to animate something that big and complex without it. It's a lot easier to replace than blood and only stains your clothes for a little while.”

“You destroyed an eighth of the workshop at most,” I add.

Despite my protestations and insistence that this was probably the best activation the Project has ever seen, Rae blames herself entirely for the damage. “I've never had one of these guys get away from me like that,” she says. She spends the rest of the night collecting the ruined bookshelves'
scattered contents, mostly obsolete infusions composed in my early days at the Academy, which I would be just as happy to throw out.

Further partials go just as well or better, and soon I am confident enough in Rae's burgeoning talents that I cease taking the Project apart, ministering to him piecemeal, and set my sights on a full trial.

Rae's skills improve in roughly inverse proportion to the quantity of undemolished items within the Project's reach, but even after the workshop is fully tidied of all damage and clutter for which Rae can claim any responsibility, Rae tidies on. She has decided that “straightening up a bit” will be among her services to me, and perseveres against my conviction that the workshop is straightened quite enough as it is. Lady, who has been after me for months to remedy the so-called deplorable confusion of my offices, only encourages her, tutting in annoyance as Rae unearths one layer of ancient sediment after another, squealing with exaggerated horror over moldy pizza and melted candy bars. Rae, meanwhile, frequently stops to marvel over some old experiment or other, a practice I'd find far more irritating if it weren't for her obviously earnest appreciation. The bottom layers of clutter are mostly early work that seems silly or pointless to me now, though occasionally Rae does find something I'm pleased to remember, as when one night she exclaims, “Is this an
underwater city
?”

I'd almost forgotten about
Associative Architecture
, and when I see her holding the skinny little green-leather-bound book, I feel a warm and welcome flush of pride. “It is,” I say, straightening up from my position over the Project's spine. As yet he's little more than a torso and collection of limbs, but that will change quickly.

“And people can really live there? Normal people? Not—” She waggles her fingers to indicate the kinds of dubious unnatural transformations that might allow a human to survive underwater.

“Definitely,” Lady says. If anyone was more obsessed with
Associative Architecture
and its more fanciful applications than I was, it was Lady. Behind her, the reflection of my workshop disappears, replaced by a metropolitan scene with seaweed and blooms of psychedelically colored jellyfish drifting over the streets. “The theory is completely sound. We spent weeks working out the proofs, Kizabel and Vinneas and me.”

Rae, who has been gazing in wonder at my drawings, suddenly looks up. “Vinneas helped make this?”

“It's all based on his theories, actually,” I admit, hopefully with less tetchiness than I feel. “What you're holding there is his First-Class thesis at Rhetoric,
Associative Architecture in Large System Dynamics
. It's about altering basic aspects of reality on an extensive scale. Caused quite a stir when he presented it at the Academy. If he wasn't already top-ranked for the School of Philosophy, that alone would have got him in.”

“What about you and Lady?” Rae asks, brow furrowed with suspicion.

“We got credit for helping with the proofs and calculations. Or I did anyway,” I clarify when Lady makes a face. “And we got this lab.”

“What a horse's ass!” declares Rae, sneering. “And you let him waltz away like it was all his idea?”

“Well, associative architecture
was
his theory,” I'm obliged to point out, though Rae's indignation does give me a small twinge of satisfaction. “We've been able to tweak certain basic features of the world for a long time—it's how we change the weather in Ninth City. But Vinneas was the one who figured out a way to apply almost any artifice to a wide area by altering the way thelemity actually flows within that space.”

“
Emotions
, especially strong ones, influence how thelemity behaves,” Lady says excitedly. “And if something really big has happened in a particular place, it can leave behind a kind of echo that does the same thing.”

Rae has turned speculative. “You mean like someplace haunted.”

“Exactly!” Lady squeals.

“Well, sort of,” I clarify. “Certain types of events can leave an impression that alters the way thelemity works. Associative architecture is about weaving together those kinds of impressions to create effects on a broad scale. It's a little like changing a person's behavior, or way of thinking, through training and repetition.”

“It's totally awesome, is what it is,” Lady concludes.

“In theory,” I add, before she can get too carried away. “We never actually got to try any of it out.”

Rae is crestfallen to learn there is no actual underwater city. “Why not?”

“We would have needed to borrow a whole lot of fontani from the Legion, for one thing. And then there was the small matter of building an entire city at the bottom of the ocean. No way the Consulate was going to devote those kinds of resources to a school project. We did have a lot of fun, though.”

There are actually two versions of our underwater megalopolis, dubbed
EASSaC-1 and EASSaC-2,
6
one in which our aquatic citizens are endowed with the ability to process water via their natural pulmonary systems, and another where the whole city is encased in a bubble of air that continually renews and circulates of its own volition. Both lacked any obvious value to the war effort. The same could be said of the city we designed to allow each inhabitant his or her own customized day-and-night cycle, the one where every physical action triggered a corresponding audible effect, creating a symphony out of the residents' daily activities, and just about every other example of the flurry of whimsy filling the final section of
Associative Architecture
, devoted (somewhat facetiously) to “practical applications.”

“But you really could build it, right?” Rae contends hotly. “They've got you sneaking around just to work on Snuggles, and you made a goddamn underwater city!”

That has been my opinion in a nutshell for nearly a year, much of which time I spent partly convinced I was insane, delusional, or both. But seeing Rae so searingly furious over the necessary secrecy of my work is another shot of jet fuel to my ambitions.

Full activation of the Project, when it comes, is almost anticlimactic. I'm working around the core, fully assuming I have a long way left to go, when suddenly I realize all the gwayd canals are in place. I step back, glance at my schematics, give the Project a full once-over. Lady and Rae, noticing my change in rhythm, make inquiries. “I think we're ready to go,” I tell them, still not completely sure.

“Then let's go,” Rae says, enthusiastic, confident.

I'm still having difficulty sorting the trepidation from my sense of accomplishment. “Now?”

“Now. If you're ready, I'm ready.”

I am expecting a fusillade of objections from Lady, but all she says is “I'll check the testing floor.” She returns furnished for lighthearted outdoor spectating: a peachy sundress and wide-brimmed straw hat, binoculars hanging around her neck. “All clear!”

We're ready. I know it. If I were to delay things now, it would only be out of reluctance to entrust my Project to someone else. And so I cart Snuggles onto the testing floor and help Rae inside.

“All right, just like we discussed,” I call once I've returned to the relative safety of my workshop. “Just see if you can stand him up. Nothing fancy. Got it?”

Rae, settled onto the throne in the Project's open chest cavity, holds out one fist, thumb extended upward.
7
She sets her hands to the grips, closes her eyes. Slowly, the core comes to life, bathing her face in soft blue light, and the Project goes from rigid metal to living, moving thing, his body stretching, straightening, and finally standing in the center of Testing Floor Sixteen.

I wait, breath held, for something in him to come apart, wincing at each unsteady quiver of his limbs, each unexpected jerk of his digits, but his hands do not turn to fists, his spine does not twist, his legs do not kick and flail, and some ten meters above my head, Rae's voice rises in a whoop of excitement, and in my workshop, Lady whoops, too, leaping wildly as confetti and balloons shower inside her mirrors.

After that, things are almost unreasonably easy. We start on calibrations that night—we're too excited to do anything else, even celebrate—adjusting the Project's interface, smoothing out his functions, preparing him to cooperate with a human rider.

Each session brings new leaps in functionality, first in coarse, general-type movements, then in ever-finer gestures. Before long, those huge metal hands can hold an egg without breaking the shell. Processes and protocols fall neatly into place. We close Rae up in the core, equipped with a breathing mask and emergency beacon, but life support and sensory systems activate without a hitch. The masterful white armor, engineered weeks ago in an unwarranted flight of optimism, fits perfectly, the gleaming helmet glowing with an elegant blue pattern like stylized wings.

It's only a matter of time now until I can unveil the Project. Dr. Afşar will help me with the blowback from city and Academy officials, and so will Vinneas, once I bring him in on the secret. I'm a little sad to be so nearly finished, and it's not only nerves over the inevitable uproar once my off-hours shenanigans are revealed. I'm fairly positive Rae has amassed the requisite proficiency with equi to get herself fast-tracked into a training program for animi, meaning I'm about to lose yet another friend to the
Legion. That was the deal all along, true, but it still glooms up my success. We'll be at the Academy together at least a while longer, though, and she's promised to help me demonstrate Snuggles when the time comes to really put his majesty on display.

And then, one evening following an unusually long session at the Stabulum, I arrive at my workshop and the door won't open. “Lady?” I call, confused. “Lady, what's going on in there?”

The voice that responds is not Lady Jane's but the pompous creak of a Fabrica instarus. “Officer Aspirant Kizabel,” it says loftily, “you have been misbehaving. This workshop has been host to a shocking collection of violations, among them Fabrica Safety Code section ten paragraph five, section twelve paragraphs one, four, nine, and fifteen, section twenty paragraphs six, eight, twenty-four—”

Suddenly, the voice stutters and descends into mumbles, then tweaks to a higher register before bubbling out. A beat later, Lady's voice emerges from the door. “Kizabel? Is that you?”

“Lady! What happened?”

“It was Imway,” she says. Her speaking volume spins erratically from soft to loud. “He came by, said he wanted to apologize to you, and when I said you weren't here, he asked if he could leave you something and I—I let him in. I didn't think he would see your concealing artifice, but he did, and—”

“It's all right, Lady,” I say, urgent now, because her voice is becoming more garbled as the Fabrica instarus tries to reassert himself. Even through my panic, I'm impressed she's held him off this long. “Do they know about—about my assistant?” If Rae isn't already in trouble, I don't want to land her there.

“I don't know—I don't think so. I'm so sorry, Kizabel. I thought I could trust him. I just wanted the two of you to make up, and—”

Lady's voice shrinks to nothing, and the Fabrica instarus returns. “Access to this workshop is revoked until further notice,” he croaks. “All items within are hereby impounded, your naughty little instara included. You will report to Curator Ellmore for disciplinary action at 0900 tomorrow. That is all.”

I
t's been a great game so far, a lot of good plays but no one getting slaughtered. It's warm and sunny out, not too much wind, with a few clouds gliding slowly across the blue sky—a perfect day. The field is all thick green grass, not a dry patch anywhere except for the diamond of soft dirt and the bases at each corner, all of them empty. All around, the other team waits for the pitch, hunched and ready to react, their faces shadowed beneath the brims of their caps. On the pitcher's mound, a tall girl with long, skinny arms chews on a wad of gum, watching the batter like she's trying to read his mind. Finally, she winds up and throws, and there's a crack as the ball shoots out over first base. By the time someone chases it down, the batter is rounding second. He stops at third, our whole team cheering, waving his hat while the pitcher scrapes her cleats in the dirt, waiting for the next player at bat. Which is me. I'm up next.

I'm not terribly great at hitting, or even very good, but I'm getting better. I have a lot of time to practice. The girl's first two pitches are way outside, and I let them go by. “Good eye!” shouts the kid on third. The pitcher glares at him, like now that he's got a hit off her, he should at least behave himself, and he gives her a friendly wave. The next pitch is perfect, straight down the middle and only a little fast. I know I should take the easy base hit, but suddenly I want to kill it. I know I can.

But right as I'm about to swing, I see something out of the corner of my eye: a man standing behind the fence way at the other end of the field. He's too far away for me to really make out anything about him, but from the way he's standing, I know he's watching me. And now, even though I still get a pretty good piece of the ball, instead of zooming out across the field, it pops
high over second base. The center fielder just waits and grabs it as it's coming down, and I'm out, and the inning is over. But I still love baseball.

Baseball is my favorite game in the world. Not many people know this about me. In fact, not many people have even heard of baseball, since practically no one plays anymore. Charles knows about baseball, and I guess Ninth City has its own league, which is a bunch of people who get together and play sometimes, out in the valley, but almost everyone who plays is a vet, and vets are always doing weird things, so no one really pays much attention. At the Academy, just about everything cadets do is training for war, and that includes the games. Charles gets annoyed sometimes that cadets never actually
play
, which to him means doing something just because it's fun, not to practice combat skills. According to Charles, doing things for fun is what being a kid is all about, which means when you're in a war, no one is really a kid. He seems to think that's a bad thing, though if you ask an actual kid, most of them aren't terribly thrilled to be treated like kids. But maybe Charles has a point because I really do like baseball. I liked it from the beginning, from the first day I played it, even before I knew it was called “baseball.”

It was a perfect sunny day, even more perfect than this one. I was walking along a curving, sandy road when I heard kids shouting in high, excited voices. I followed the sound to a stretch of dry, patchy grass beside the ocean. It looked like the kids were just standing around, watching one boy who was holding a sort of wooden club. Some of them were spread out over the grass, with the rest just sitting in a row on a beach behind the kid with the club. For a while nothing happened, then one of the kids on the grass threw something, and the kid with the club took a swing.

There was a loud, sharp crack, and everyone looked up, following something through the air. I looked, too: There was something small flying way overhead. It soared up and up, and I remember thinking it was going to hit me, but then it landed with a thud a few meters away and rolled to my feet. Everyone on the beach was pretty excited, which made sense in a way. The thing at my feet was a small white ball, and hitting it so far with just a little club seemed extremely impressive.

One of the kids who had been standing on the grass came jogging my way. He was a little older than me, maybe fourteen. He had a soft red hat with a long bill that covered his eyes, and a thick leather glove on one hand. He raised the glove to me, sort of like a salute, and said, “Little help?”

I just looked at him, trying to figure out what he meant. Then, after a second, I got it. I picked up the ball and threw it to him. It was a pretty pathetic throw—he had to lunge to get it—but he didn't care. “Thanks,” he said, folding the ball into his big leather glove. “Hey, you wanna play? We could use one more.”

I did want to play, but I said, “I don't know how.”

“It's easy,” said the kid. “I'll show you.”

“So it's like a game?” I asked.

“A game!” The kid laughed. “Baseball is life, my man! Come on.” He ran ahead, back toward the field and the ocean, shouting, “Jax is on our team!”

That was the day I joined the Legion.

It was also my first visit to a mijmere—
my
mijmere, I should say. A mijmere is sort of like a dream, but also sort of real, kind of halfway between. To tell the truth, no one knows
exactly
what mijmeri are, only that they're created whenever fontani shade into fontani usikuu.

When all that power starts flowing out of you, it makes kind of like its own little world. The things there are real, like really real, like if you go swimming in a mijmere and don't dry off before you leave, your hair will stay wet. But mijmeri are also like dreams, because things can change every time you look. Like in a dream, you might be standing in your classroom at school one minute, and the next you're in the middle of a desert, or you might find a bottle lying on the ground, and when you open it, a whole ocean's worth of water comes pouring out—that kind of stuff can happen in a mijmere, too. Most people who study mijmeri think they're real places that are being created out of pure thelemity second by second, forming to the thoughts of the fontani at the center. But like I said, no one knows for sure.

Only a few things never change in a mijmere, and one of those is the Theme. In every mijmere, there's always something happening, some activity the whole world revolves around. We call that thing the Theme. For me, it's baseball. I don't know why; it just is. Every time I visit my mijmere, there's a game of baseball going on. Maybe I'm playing, or maybe I'm watching, but there's always baseball somewhere. If the game stops, my mijmere disappears, too, and then I'm not Jax the invincible fontanus, I'm just Jax the twelve-year-old kid, no superpowers or anything. For a while anyway. I can get my mijmere back, of course, just not right away.

All fontani have a Theme like that. For example, in Charles's mijmere,
he's always traveling down a road, just walking or riding, going nowhere in particular. Fortunately, you never get tired in a mijmere, so it's easy to keep your Theme going, especially when your Theme is something fun like baseball.

It's the other team's turn at bat now, so I head for the outfield. The kid who made the three-base hit hurries to catch up with me. He's the same one who invited me to play that first day, and he's been here every time I've come back. All fontani have someone like that, one person who's always waiting for you in your mijmere, who helps you out and gives you advice. It's another one of the things that doesn't change in a mijmere. We call this person your Genius. Mine is this lanky kid with the red hat. I've never found out his name. I just think of him as the Kid.

“Hey,” says the Kid as we jog toward the outfield. “Did you see that guy over there?” He nods in the direction of the fence, toward the man who messed up my swing. I can see him more clearly now. He's short and ratty-looking, with a lot of chin stubble and a tattered overcoat covered in rust-colored dust. He looks strange and out of place beside this nice green field with the rows of small, neat houses behind him, trees along the street swaying in the summer breeze and birds chirping in their branches.

“Yeah,” I say. “I saw him.”

“He's pretty creepy. You think we ought to call the police?”

I take another look at the rusty man, and he looks back, right into my eyes. I recognize him now: It's Charles. “Yeah,” I say to the Kid. “Let's call the police.”

If I can see Charles in my mijmere, it means I'm in trouble. Charles will be in his own mijmere, walking along his road, but he's here, too, because his mijmere is bashing up against mine. That's how fontani fight one another: by crashing their mijmeri against each other until one of them breaks. Charles says it's like a wrestling match between different realities. Whoever wins gets to control the whole world. My mijmere must be weakening, or else Charles wouldn't be able to just hang around like that.

Charles isn't trying to hurt me, of course—we're only sparring. But if I want to learn, I have to treat this like a real fight, like Charles is actually some hostile fontanus, a Valentine Type Zero. I've got to use my mijmere to stop him. “Calling the police” is one way to do that. “Police” is what the Kid calls the law-enforcement people here, and since this is my world, anyone I don't want around is automatically a criminal.

The main thing to remember when you're in a mijmere is always listen to your Genius. As long as your Theme keeps going, just about anything can happen in a mijmere. You could end up pretty much anywhere, and a lot of time it'll be someplace you've never seen or heard of, someplace where you don't know the rules, like when I saw those kids playing baseball by the beach. Your Genius is sort of like your guide. The Kid always gets what's happening. He helps me figure out what to do.

The police arrive a few minutes later, two of their old combustion-powered cars pulling up on the street behind Charles. Men in blue uniforms get out and walk over toward Charles, but I don't see what happens next, because just then the batter hits a fly ball to left field, which is my position, and I need to chase after it. By the time I've caught it and tossed it in, one of the police cars has pulled away, and a policeman from the other is coming my way. “Excuse me, son,” he calls out to me, “can I talk to you a minute?”

I glance over at the Kid, who only shrugs a kind of
sure why not
shrug. I run over to the officer, a big round man with a shiny silver badge on the left side of his chest, his blue hat worn low so it covers his eyes.

“I'm afraid you kids are going to have to move on,” he says. “You see that man over there? Well, this is his property, and he doesn't want anyone playing here.”

He points back at Charles, who's still by the fence, only he's not so ragged and dirty-looking anymore. He's wearing a nice suit with a vest and pocket watch. The colors around him still seem rusty, but it's more because of the light than actual dirt, like he's standing under a different sun than the one shining down onto my field. Behind him, the neighborhood of clean little houses is gone, and instead there's only a flat open plain with a wide road running through, thick clouds of dust hanging in the air. I can only hear one bird singing now, in a weird, slow melody, not very birdlike.

Charles is overpowering my mijmere, turning it against me. Before, he was just some old stranger, but now he owns the land where I'm playing. That road is from his world. It's flooding into mine, taking it over. None of that is any big surprise—Charles always wins when we spar. But he doesn't usually win so quickly.

“Tell him we'll keep the noise down,” I say to the policeman. “He's not using the field, and we don't have anything else to do. It's better than causing trouble, right?”

The policeman nods. Policemen hate when kids “cause trouble.” “That sounds fine, son. Just remember, I'll be keeping an eye on you.”

“Great, thanks!” I say, starting back toward the field.

“You know, son,” the policeman adds, “he did say you could play all you want if you'd let him join in.”

This is an old trick. If I let Charles into my game, he'd have no trouble breaking it up. You never let an enemy near your Theme. “Sorry, no room!” I yell, and run back toward the game.

I'm not lying about there being no room. Pretty much as soon as I thought it, more kids started wandering up out of nowhere to join the game. The field is full of them now, all making a lot of noise while they wait to play. When they see me coming back, they start shouting and clapping. “Hey!” someone yells. “Who's the old weirdo?”

“No one important,” I say, and now it really does seem true. Charles isn't
literally
no one—he's still there—but he doesn't look rich and powerful anymore. His clothes have started falling apart again, and the hair on his chin is back. He's still covered in red, rusty light from the sun in his world shining into mine, but the neighborhood of little houses has closed in around him, and people have started peeking out of their windows. In one of the yards, a dog starts barking, and another joins in across the street. Charles is almost surrounded.