Paper Cities, an Anthology of Urban Fantasy (5 page)

This is the crux, perhaps: that his intent in its construction was that the building and what is beyond it should seem bounded by and binding each other, just as the world and the will of any creator are bound and bind. And so in his design he sought to capture the complexity of the relationship between creator and creation, describing it completely and consistently. It was only as the tower rose, however, manifest in steel and concrete, glass and plaster, light and matter, that he began to understand the resonances of its form. So, as he walked the curves of corridors, the reiterations of room, the shapes and spaces of it, tracing out its meanings with his feet, what he read in what he’d wrought was an
intension
, an internal tension, which tore the whole idea of creation as an act apart within his head, which spoke of the will and the world in a language as liquid and turbulent as the tower was solid and still. So he walks within it still, still designing it, redesigning it in his head. Sometimes, in the night, they say, when no one else is looking, walls shift and rooms realign, reflecting his schematics.

•

In the city of the soul, this is the tower and the tomb of change. This is the architecture of time, described in three dimensions, not just one, the four-square breadth and length of it a plan of energy and possibility, its solid shape formed of events much as the city that surrounds it — and the whole afterworld surrounding that — is formed from and forms, in turn, one great event. To some citizens it seems a symbol of power, sentinel for a system of stability of thought that generates order out of rules, imposed imperatives. From its highest window, in the heights of awareness, the lords and legislators, whoever they might be, may well be looking out over all the city, out to the deep-sweeping fields of illusion, past the known or knowable to the far horizons, to the startless, endless finity of truth.

To the carter, looking up at its dark shape before him, framed between the peeling paint on wooden doorways, soot-stained walls and rusting iron fire-escapes, and crossed, obscured, by lines of washing hung like bunting, it is only another monument to mortal vanity, waiting to fall, in time.

The lord architect looks out over the darkness flowing through the city streets below, over the rivers of night still running even as rose hints of dawn tint the red tiles of older areas of the city. The whole world he sees is fallen like some Babylon torn down by bitmite builders, scoured by scarab seraphim. In the thick of flowing black, he can make out the ruin, the rubble, the jut of a skyscraper impossibly angled or the bulk of a new rookery grown out of long-abandoned docklands. A motorway flyover curves elegantly into the air, spirals around itself and ends abruptly in mid-air. The work of the bitmites.

— You think they’ll stop? the consul asks him.

The consul stands at the desk, tapping a finger on the leather surface of it, his drab uniform creased and sweaty. The lord architect turns to him, shakes his head, walks slowly back from the dark vision on the other side of the glass.

— No…I don’t know.

— We need to know, m’sire. You have to find out what they want.

•

Bitmites. The blind watchmaker’s clockwork toys. The lord architect has studied the fine construction of these nanite mechanisms of intension, awed by the precision timing and geared interlock of automation, the way a core command structure processes stimuli into activity, translating patterns of reception into patterns of inception. Even in innate reflex, even back in those days when the intensions that invoked their actions were not theirs but the intensions of the situation, of the need or the danger, the bitmites had seemed such intricacies as a man might spend a lifetime studying. And he has spent far longer than that. He doesn’t know how long. After the first millennium, in the world remade in images of heaven and hell, of forgotten histories and imagined futures, the measuring of time no longer seemed so relevant.

By then the bitmites had begun to reconstruct humanity themselves.

•

They had emerged out of a covert military or medical bioscience, the recorded rumours of the old world said, as airborne and invasive artificial germs and antibodies, designed to find their way into a human host, to wreak havoc or to immunise. Or as a secret system of surveillance, chirping information across the airwaves to each other, acting on such signals in accordance with unknown agendas and unspoken protocols. For a while he had believed them to be alien technology, seeded by some cold intelligence that sought to understand the human mind by manifesting all its ancient dreams, all its desires and fears, in the world around it. In another era, he became convinced that he himself was their original creator, that by some accident he had unleashed them on the world. He preferred to think that he was only one of the first called in to study them, only the last man of his team to fall, to surrender to the dreams they offered, the last man of reason in a world of chaos.

After an eon of studying them, though, it seems that he knows less than when he first begun, and he worries at his failing memory. He sleeps by day and stays awake by night, when the bitmites are most active, most destructive and reconstructive, as if only his vigilance can keep the world from finally dissolving.

— What time is it? he asks.

•

The consul brings an antique fob watch from his pocket, snicks it open and looks curiously at the face, taps at it, winds it, taps again.

— M’sire…

— It doesn’t matter.

Outside, lighter now with creeping daybreak, the grey and formless fog, the flowing billows of the bitmites that roll in out of the ocean, that the press once christened demon dust, flow over the world like a morning mist, dissolving silhouettes and outlines, smearing lights of windows into an ethereal glow, volcanic-golden, like dying embers seen through smoke and shadows. He wonders how much of the city outside even exists anymore.

— It’s nearly dawn, he says.

— Thru Triassic and Jurassic, run, sings the songliner. Run, you small bipedal theodont reptile, evolve into 200 million year old ichthyosaur; two metres of Arthropleura mammata curl around you; swim in the stone, you fossil ray, Pseuderhina alifera; spiral ammonite, your curling siphuncle partitioned by curving septa into buoyant chambers; fly, archangel Archaeopterix, in the first flash of light, progenitor of birds, progenitor of dove and crow, of harbinger of peace and thief of fire.

•

Fire. The light at the time of dawn, at the dawn of time, before the sun, is not the insipid glory of an aetheric archon, but the volcanic fire that paints a rock wall with the flickering solidity of lamplight. We trace out the textured clarity of the world we wake into with the precise lucidity of blue and the luxuriance of gold, for even the afterworld is basalt, burning hotter than the face of the sun and with a core of iron. Clothed in encrustations of blue-white glass waters and ice, deep-black alluvial mud, rich-red raindust of songlines, the green sheen of lush plants. Even the air, our breath, our pneuma, is not colourless but blue — the air in our lungs the very sky above our heads.

Yes, he had dreamt of the spirit that began his world, not as the shallow, pallid glow of some celestial essence, but as the rich, full flesh of fire, fire upon the deep. And he feels it in his lungs, the fire, as he sings now, the flesh becoming word, the word becoming world.

•

— Arise, he sings, two-million-year-old Homo habilis; walk the dreamtime of our afroaustralasian Adam, in your caverns of fire and decapitation. Come, Cro-Magnon, out of the Dordogne of painted aurochs and gazelles, you birdmen of the Paleolithic, flying in the liquid depths of heaven, animal men of Lascaux and the Tassili-n-Ajer. Carve the fat mother, widowed bride in graves and caves. And walk out of the darkness carved in fire, waking into forest dawn.

Out of the desert, streams of consciousness flow, fusing as rivers that flood the city’s streets at night, merging with the chthonic ocean.

•

Over the grey memory of his dream and over the grey reality of the world outside, he sings out loud and long the lines that weave the world around him, music and mosaic, a shape of songlines. This modern muezzin sings from his minaret to wake the mourning city up, and as he sings, a tower of hours arises out of swamp, vines climbing shaft to glassy dome. The songliner laughs — the city’s morning glory. Somewhere a weathervane cockcrows.

— Awake, sunken slumbering city in the jungle, he sings. And as he sings, the silversea of dawnsurf breaks over the city and the mist rolls back from it, this city of the secret knowledge of the alphabets, city of the builders of the book and of the three unworthy craftsmen, city of the sons of the first killer, city oust of Eden and inland of Nod.

— Awake, he sings.

— Hie! Hie!

The carter turns, pulls back the reins with one hand, shields his eyes with the other as sunlight strikes, shears off the mirror of the tower and flashes like a blade down into the streets, piercing the mists and picking out each mote of dust. The chimaera stops and snorts, paws at the ground. Blinking, the carter pulls the brim of his hat down to shade his eyes, gathers the reins up in both hands again and flicks the beast onward. He can hear the muezzin’s song now, ringing out over the city, echoing off the walls just as the sunlight shatters off the mirror windows of the tower, and though he does not recognise the language of it, the tune is so familiar that he hums it quietly to himself as he drives on, feeling the vibration in his throat, the rhythm in his chest.

•

He turns a corner and the tower stands before him, closer now and overgrown in vines, down at the far end of a weed-cracked tarmac street of concrete flats, their balconies all lush with foliage, crawling ivy and cascading flowers. As he rattles down the street, the shrieks and whistles of waking birds rise and fall around the singer’s song, as tumultuous and chaotic as the foliage but somehow, like the foliage, with some solid, ordered structure buried in there, buried deep but present. Under the veins of vines, the morning has a skeleton, articulated in song and stone around him.

— Hie! Hyah! He turns another corner, and the tower is there again, a shattered ruin, a jagged, broken-bottle shard cutting up into the grey-black smoke that billows from its burning hulk, flickering with red and gold flames, blue-white flashes of electric discharge like lightning lashing its frame with showers of sparks. The chimaera flings its head from side to side, flicks its tail in animal nerves, and he speaks soothingly to it, coaxes it on, turns yet another corner to —

•

The tower rises out of and over the old city’s sandstone streets, an obelisk in steel and silver sheen, mirroring the sky it scrapes, but also — in its incompleteness, in the greys of girders and concrete columns, where the mirrors stop but the tower carries on up as a confusion of cranes and portacabins and clear plastic tarpaulins — somehow reflecting the reality of the city beneath it, of streets that even in their dilapidation have a dynamism and a grandeur, a vitality that the modernism of the finished portion of the tower hides behind its mirrors.

As the carter rides his cart into the confusion of arriving workmen, of machines chuntering into life and spewing petrol smoke into the air, of yellow hardhats and curses and the architect with the blueprints in one hand, pointing upwards with the other, and the gaffer shaking his head, and a hundred other carters, all arriving from different directions with their loads of this morning’s bones, all being pointed at the dumping grounds; as the song of the distant singer echoes over itself and melds into and becomes this cacophony of daily life: the carter follows the line of the tower’s walls upwards past their actual ends and on upwards to the eventual vanishing point in the blue morning sky.

Red, gold and green, the city stretches below. From his window in the highest room within the tower, the lord architect watches dawn wash over it, all the greys and blacks of shadows dissipating, mists burned off by morning sun. He sees the cathedrals and the mausoleums, spires and domes, parks and rookeries, docks and dumping grounds, centres of commerce and recreation, malls and stadiums, slums and skyports, office blocks and temple compounds, all the gardens and the ghettoes. Here and there are a few places that he recognises — a building that has kept its place, a street that hasn’t shifted — but the main part of it is utterly transformed. Razed in evenfall and hinter’s night and raised anew with daybreak, the city defies all reason, all attempts to grasp at any sort of certainty within its structure.

— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.

•

He tries not to, but in these three short years since his designs were made flesh he has seen too much not to regret his actions. He remembers the man-to-man talks with the presidenti, how he’d spoken of the vast potential that these bitmites might have as agents with autonomy. He remembers the months spent studying the strains, breeding for behaviours, virtually rewriting all the wired-in prescriptions of their natures, creating a whole liquid language for them to feed on, drink and breathe as information. From automatic organs of reckoned reflex, their actions measured and meted out to them by their design, he’d watched them evolve reckoning mechanisms to get the measure of a complex context, challenge the authority of the situation and act on chances, choices. He —

— You should not blame yourself, m’sire, the consul says.

•

But it was he who gave them their categorical imperative — the final, over-arching rule that they could break their own rules. Without this, he was sure, all the modules of their simple sentience that he’d adopted and adapted from innate responses would have amounted to no more than a cold calculus of survival. He had given them a reckoning of doubt and certainty, a sense of fear and fury, of desire and satisfaction, so that from these fundamentals he could build in them a sort of cunning, nerve and will quite absent in the automatons they began as. That, with the engrams he had built into the language itself, should have made them the most potent combination of the autonomous and the automaton, the soldier and the slave. But the creatures seem to have evolved their own chaos of tongues, and now, in all the noise of it, in all the clamouring, the inhabitants —
and he remembers shaping them from clay with his own hands
— have made themselves a rabble, a babble, scrabbling in the dust and rubble, too much trouble —