Gears of the City (2 page)

There. I have thought long and hard about the nature of light. If you have lost something, look in the shadows.

The dark man winced, shook his head. He said,
yes, but…
He sighed, scratched his beard.

It wasn’t the first time he’d been told that. In fact he’d heard it so often he was sick of hearing it. Wherever he went in the city the final answer was always—in a hundred different languages, for a hundred different reasons—the Mountain.

In the Temples of the Prime Mover they said it was the body of a dead God, the first, petrified, and all lesser and subsequent Gods burrowed in its tunnels like maggots. In Croix they said the Builders, whoever or whatever they were, had made the Mountain to lock away the last of the city’s secrets. In the Hotel every conversation turned to the Mountain.

He wasn’t ready for the Mountain. That terrible cold absence in the city—that wound, that flaw, that inexplicable mystery in even the most enlightened Ages of the city. There was no safe path to the
Mountain. All those mad enough or daring enough to attempt it came back ruined, mad—or not at all. He wasn’t ready.

The Mountain? Are you sure?

The Mountain. Yes.

How do I go there?

No answer. There was never any answer. So he went back down the crumbling tower and sat out in the sun and listened to the music.

St. Loup was spying on him. He saw St. Loup hiding among the golden crowds—or looking for shadows to lurk in, scattering his cigarette butts on pristine surfaces—or, as he was now, watching through telescopes from high places.

He waved St. Loup over and the man came smiling.

“If you plan to attack me, St. Loup, would you get it over with?”

“Perish the thought! Perhaps I’m concerned about you.”

St. Loup was an acquaintance, a contact, not a friend. Nevertheless they knew each other horribly well. Among the hidden and irregular communities of madmen, paranoids, sorcerers, those who had Broken Through to the city behind and above the city of their births, there was a certain community or anticommunity, there was a guarded and untrustworthy exchange of information. They were the wanderers of the City Beyond, the Via Obscura, the Thousand-Fold Path, the Metacontext, die Träumenstadt, the Gears, the Slew, Time Itself, whatever you wanted to call it. (From time to time he’d suggested the Song, or the Chorus—neither caught on.) They bartered maps and keys and rumors of the Mountain.

Every one of them had his own private obsessions, and each one pointed, in the end, to the Mountain; the impossible, unattainable Mountain. For the dark man it was his God. For St. Loup, if St. Loup could be believed, it was a woman.

“Go home, St. Loup. Leave these people alone. They don’t know anything. They don’t know the way.”

“Everyone has secrets.”

“I don’t know anything either, St. Loup.”

“Then why are you here?”

They watched each other all the time—St. Loup, Arjun, Father
Turnbull, all the rest of them. Who would be first to move? Who would be first to take the Mountain? What did they
know?

“No reason. It doesn’t matter anymore.”

“Come back to the Hotel. Potocki’s moving and I need allies. I’ll make it worth your while. When I hold the Mountain I’ll give you as many Gods as you like, and a million choirs to praise them, you odd little man.”

“Not yet. I still have other places to look.”

“There’s only one. You know that.”

“Not necessarily. It’s a big city.”

“It’s smaller than it seems. Well, you know where to find me.”

St. Loup vanished one way through the Metacontext, and, sighing, the dark man went another way, and he left the Bright Towers behind for streets of grey cobblestones and brick.

He imagined the towers, after he’d gone, cracking all at once with a sound like a spring rain shower, that whole Age of the city, and its people, too, turned instantly weightless, shards and seeds of light, blowing away on the breeze.

But in Winding Hall, and in Perrabia, and Slew, and Volstat, and on the cloud-high deck of the cityship
Annihilator
, and on the wires of the City-Signal, and in the haunted crypts under Red Barrow, and in the Houses of the Red Moon, and in the laboratories of the Zubiri Corporation, and everywhere else he went, forward or back, the answer was always the same. The Mountain. In Slew they said the Mountain was like a cage, and it held the failed Gods prisoner. In the Zubiri laboratories they said the Mountain was like a black hole, and it drew all light and music and spirit and positively charged energies into its maw—they had charts and data to prove it. In a dusty little shop in the rafters of Winding Hall he purchased a
Children’s Miscellany of Fairy-Stories
because it had a mountain on the cover. It had a story of a wicked mean old man who came down into the city from a clockwork mountain every night to steal away children’s dreams in his grey sack. The pictures were haunting. The dreams looked like angels. He kept the book.

A fairy story, a myth, a machine, a weapon, a dark palace, the Mountain! There was no hiding from it. And at last his need overwhelmed his fear, and he began to plan the impossible ascent.

A
nd
he failed.

And so later, much later—
afterward
—he came fleeing headlong down the Mountain. Its servants pursued him. He tore his shirt—it caught on a dead tree in the park and a white wing of cloth ripped away, fluttering on the bare branch. He ran and his
mind
tore away, too. He saw and heard too much and his self and his soul swelled, strained, tore at the seams.

He fled through Time. They were always there, close on his heels. In the café by the reservoir they waited anxiously behind the railings. He threw himself through a door in the kitchen and the name of the city was torn away. At the station they came walking silently down the tracks. He ran through the coal shed and left the names of his lovers in the dust. There were always two of them, his hollow hunters, faces faded like old photographs, always awkwardly about to speak … By the river he crawled under wire, through the muck, and the name of his hunters was left in the mud. He had no father or mother; that fact, too, was torn from him as he tumbled through brass elevator doors and onto rain-slick cobbles. He lost the fairy stories when he lost his jacket, swimming across the freezing and night-dark river—he lost all his stories. That was how it worked: an expansion of possibilities to the limits of the self, and beyond, followed by an inexorable contraction. Shay had not warned him that the Mountain was
defended.
He was burning himself too fast in his headlong flight. He left Shay’s name on the bloody floor of the butcher’s market. The memory of the Mountain was stolen as he pushed through the parade, through the dancing and music and sequins and flesh. The Mountain’s hollow servants still pursued him, slow and deliberate. How could they keep pace with him? It was impossible. But when he hid in the dark of the theater they crossed the stage toward him, tall shadows in the limelight, and when he tumbled fleeing through the trapdoor his own name was torn away from him. He ran panting and crying up a silver staircase in the moonlight, and their shiny patent-leather shoes
clack-clack-clacked
up the steps behind him. He hurled himself through an arch of bloody stones and the name of his God tore away and its Song went dumb within him, like a stone in his gut. He fell into darkness and silence.