City

Jaboc Knorrec woke, and knew that the woman was lying next to him. He struggled briefly with, then gave into the old urge. His fingers tensed and eyelids flickered along with his better judgement. He didn’t need to look, he could hear her breathing, could smell her sleeping, dreaming body as it rested beneath the quilt. All was darkness above him, and he held his eyes open against the tide of sleep pulling at him from somewhere deep within//
[private]//underneath a steel sky he stood, and the distant hum of machinery he knew too well, with which he was too intimately familiar, called him to tend the motors of the city. He was on shift//
//she tried to turn toward him in her sleep, to lift an arm over the warm body next to her. Some compulsion prevented her completing the gesture and she sighed heavily//
//the machines provided, however inefficiently, air and food from the condensed, heated salt-water mush of the ocean‘s depths. Jaboc tended to their basic needs. He checked oil levels, measured wear on their cogs and chains. Watched over them//
//Knorrec slipped back into sleep//
//the city floated midway between the oceanic depths and the sunspotted surface, it drew heat and sustenance from the deep-sea vents where black water billowed and smoked from between the drifting tectonic plates. Not that its inhabitants often thought of it that way, it was, to them: City. Complete in and of itself.

Jaboc and his fellow mechanics had had the misfortune to have been born into the greater knowledge sufficient to preserve an uncomfortable stasis, limited in scope as it was. The institution – an inherited Masonry – failed to obscure completely the many compromises that had brought it into being; the losses that predicated the current limitations. That the City was dying, and worse, was the last stronghold of a dying race upon a dying planet. Machines plumbed the ocean’s depths for those remaining few species not dependant upon the sun – late friend turned enemy – and drew the City’s energy more by good fortune than planning from the billowing, boiling water. They provided for the recycling of breathable air and edible food.
The planet spun, as ever, about its sun. Jaboc worked, as ever, at the machines. At his shoulder a fellow mechanic joined him for a few delicate adjustments and recalibrations. A raised eyebrow and proffered wristwatch called time on their operations, and as they climbed the rungs from the lowest level of the city the next shift passed them on their way down, unrecognisable inside their bubble-helmets and ungainly protective suits, patched and repatched to keep out the cold and bruising jets that forced their way between the cracked and blistered panels. A raised hand gestured toward the airlock, Jaboc entered and removed his helmet as the City’s recycled air hissed into the emptied void.

The club was full. The club was always full; twenty-four hour shifts operated throughout the City, constantly maintaining its integrity against the deep-ocean pressures and unpredictable currents. Returning from the bar, Jaboc sipped from the cold beer in his left hand and looked for somewhere to rest the hot whisky he held in his right. A saxophone honked and wailed through the speakers hanging from the ceiling, and nearly drowned out the hum of chatter and clashing of glasses on black plastic tables.

The drummer was singing something like “woooah heavy and a bottle of bread” as Jaboc worked his elbows into a space against the wall, lifted the beer and drained it off. His eyes wandered around the crowd and pulled in a few glances and not a few glares. The girl in a bright yellow plastic one-piece apron, showing off tattooed forearms and long brown hair pointedly ignored him. The whisky was raised and sipped; cinnamon burst in his sinuses as the liquor warmed him and revived his appetite. The low ceiling dripped sweat, it ran down the walls and wet the backs of his arms; he paused on the edge of conversation as the nearest elbow nudged him – he caught the meaning sooner, as a waved arm from the bar called him to name his poison: the empty beer glass was raised, then placed on a tray which circled the room perched on a chubby childlike arm raised by the dwarf waiter. His new glass of beer found its way back by the same method that his empty glass had found its way away. The girl in the yellow one-piece approached.
“Baby”
“is it?”
“what do say to another whereabouts?”
“is it?”

The girl in the plastic one-piece pulled her shoulder straps back over a dragon’s tail and the curlicued M of MOTHER. Jaboc lifted his head and laid it back on his couch again. She took the liberty of 20 Credits from the slot next to the door of the booth. Flashed her card at Jaboc, and left the booth through the sliding door. Jaboc pulled on the cable hanging above the couch and slipped into sleep//
//his left hand twitched, his eyeballs rolled, sought the darkness for a clue. Her breath next to him lulled him into sleep//

The city’s hydroponic pastures slipped past in the corner of his eye as Jaboc reached for the ashtray built into the side of the pod. The ranks of Cannabis Indica shimmered murkily through plastic yellowed by age. The farmer raised a flattened straw hat to offer his hicks’ grin to the engineer as his pod swung in its Perspex tube and Jaboc was swung momentarily against the camber to look down upon the long green rows, fed by the constant dripping recycled water and artificial light. The papers had announced another shortage. Jaboc winced at their artificial optimism. He took a long breath on his cigarette as the pod took a sudden plunge and the city’s ranks of semi-circular levels sped past him. His card was empty. What shortage?
At the face of the ranks of machines his apprehension proved more than justified. Two clumsily suited engineers – he didn’t immediately recognise his shift-mates – struggled with an outsized spanner, tweaking ineffectually against a cog whose rivets spat pressurised black water. He rushed (as best he could in leaden boots and inflated suit) to their assistance. The huge cog shot over his head, and the rush of water that lifted his erstwhile colleagues and slammed and snapped them against a bulkhead picked him up feet first to swing him spinning into a void.

The hospital wasn’t much more than a line of sleeping-booths, with the doors jammed open and stained curtains hanging over their doorways. The booths sported the few sentimentalities allowed regular occupants; above Jaboc hung a braided cord that could have been a dreadlock or friendship-bracelet. He tolerated its greasy familiarity. He tested the bruises and sprains he’d sustained in the flume, the whole left-hand side of his skull felt soggy, otherwise he was solid as ever.

A nurse pulled aside the curtain and looked apologetically over her shoulder at the blind man whose cane tapped at her ankle gently, reassuring itself of her continued presence. Jaboc left the warm sheets happily and found a coffee-bulb steaming on the tray outside his booth, along with hospital whites, which he pulled on over his bandages and bruises, and his wristwatch, which had stopped.

There was a distinct if subtle difference in the air pressure as he moved through the bulkhead that kept the hospital apart from the rest of its tier, crowded with clubs, sleeping booths and the cheapest eateries. The pressure was higher, and it was gaining. Jaboc pressed his hands against his ears and staggered into a side-alley between two spiced-food joints, the odours perceivably green. Jaboc retched, retched and suddenly the alley was up, and the main route along which he had walked from the hospital was a precarious down, the coffee-bulb falling spinning against the wall and a spray of grey liquid following it down. His left temple throbbed and stung.

The next wrench was more of a twist, and the corridor parallel to Jaboc’s narrow perch rushed up to offer its steel resistance to his loose collection of bone and muscle, he relaxed from the impact briefly, which was when the whole world’s plug was pulled out and the painkillers still in his system spilled him out of his present predicament and into one more profound and simple//
//lights fade up over the sleepers. A quilt turned up at their chins lies oddly flat, the contours of two sleeping bodies outlined by blue shadow stand out against the grey weave. Their hands are crossed each above their breastbones.
The sleepers’ faces are uncannily calm.

From a distance their planet seems to shake and, like a punctured beachball, collapse about the point now marked by a tremendous clockwise-turning whirlpool, at the centre of which, stupendous and unthinkable, an abysmal gulf yawns with black water plunging into it from either side, like a million Niagaras.

The Spacecraft that entered the eye of the storm and fetched from it the spindle-shaped crushed steel City – and in its myriad cells the meagre remains of a once proud species – was inconceivably immense, yet it appeared a mote in the storm’s tremendous eye. It deftly scooped the City from its last perch upon the brink, where spray, super-heated into steam, had etched a labyrinth of corrosion on the softly metallic, mercury-smooth, flowing spacecraft as it extended to a silver streak and shot from the split that, like a dropped watermelon, cracked a brief crazy smile across the planet’s blue face. Then the sun’s gravity dragged the planet down, as it split along its meridian, corkscrewing into the bloated atmospheric weal of that dully combusting star.

The creatures that have effected this rescue sit bemused before the field of force that separates the sleeping aliens from their benevolent captors. The aliens sleep still. The measuring equipment keeps the sleepers in a state //of lucid dreaming, constrained by the co/mplex machinery that perceives and manages the storm boiling in the collective unconscious of those that their rescuers have been able to revive. Machines ar/e reading and recording these visions, p/sychologists study them. Every attempt to revive the aliens leading to the subject causing itself fatal injury with //whatever instrument is nearest to hand. In th/e latest experiment the aliens – who conform to this sector’s predominant binary sexuality – had been woken up gradually alongside a mate selected, as far as possible, for maximum compatibility. The first female had awoken, and attempted immediately to rush the screen in an effort, apparently, to escape its ‘/mate’. The second was being held for as long as possible upon the edge of sleep, and its responses modulated and closely measured.
//
Jaboc Knorrec woke. The sight of his captors terrified him more than the terrible paralysis that had, until his sudden release, held him aware of his surroundings but horribly unable to respond. Now he sat bolt upright, and saw the woman lying next to him. Her eyes were closed as yet. Surely he could spare her at least from the horror of their true situation. With a wild leer in his eyes, and his clawed fingers clutching at air he turned and hardly felt the stun of impact as the shimmering, fire-red, winged biologist lowered the tranquiliser gun held in her taloned left hand, and shrugged.

“Increase the dose in the female, lets keep at least one example alive for as long as we can.”

The slowly spinning collapsing star burps upon another, dusty red planet as it slowly drifts apart. The City, though hopelessly crushed and utterly sterilised, a honeycomb frozen in grey dust, reflects yet the glow of a pale, fugitive moon which, having come adrift from its companion planet, pulled within the passing field of an inertia-proofed Spacecraft, has shifted into escape orbit taking with it, for moon, the discarded City’s bare husk of humanity.[/private]

Andrew S. Bailes lives in Hackney. He is a teacher of English and Media. This story is dedicated to the memory of Arthur C. Clarke.