Саймон Морден: The White City

The moon was overhead, and Mary was on her back, staring up at its vast ivory seas.

‘Do you think,’ she said idly, ‘do you think I could fly there?’

‘No.’ Dalip, lying nearby, sounded definite, but she wasn’t so sure. She could see the shadows cast by the lunar mountains shift as they passed overhead, and if she reached up, she thought she might touch them.

She raised her hand, extending her fingers, stretching out. But all she felt was cool air, not the dry granularity of another world. She traced the curves of the craters, the lines of the rilles, and wondered.

‘Why not?’ She let her arm fall back and rested her wrist across her forehead.

‘The atmosphere’s only, what, eighty kilometres thick, and for almost nine-tenths of that it’s too thin to sustain life. The moon’s further away from Down than that. A lot further.’

‘Sure?’

‘Positive. Our moon is four hundred thousand kilometres away.’

‘Okay.’ She batted away a tiny flying thing that seemed intent on hovering between her nose and her top lip. ‘But what if it’s not like that here? What if, you know, magic?’

‘This moon doesn’t have an atmosphere. If it did, it’d have weather, and we’d be able to see clouds. The shadows are too sharp, too. Light scatters in air◦– that’s why the sky’s blue◦– and there’s no evidence for that. So, yes. Magic. But you can’t fly to the moon. Not even here.’

His voice grew increasingly exasperated, and she tutted. The silence between them dragged out.

‘I…’ said Dalip finally. She heard him turn on his side to face her. ‘I’m worried.’

There was a lot to be worried about. They had control of the biggest cache of maps that Down had ever seen◦– at least according to Crows, but he was an inveterate bullshitter◦– and that level of wealth was going to draw the wrong kind of attention. And in Down, almost all attention seemed to be the wrong kind.

She twisted her head to see Dalip. She was on one side of the rough wooden trunk containing the maps, and he was the other. Though it wasn’t big, the size of a large suitcase, the trunk obscured him from shoulders to knees. She touched the planks to remind her of the riches and danger inside.

‘So what are you worried about?’ she asked. ‘Apart from thieves, assassins, monsters, the weather, Crows, the portals, the journey and this city we’re supposed to be heading for? Tell me if I’ve left something out.’

‘Tides,’ said Dalip.

‘Fuck off.’

‘No, I’m serious. A moon that huge should create tides higher than mountains, and that’s without thinking about the earthquakes it should be causing. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘I can turn into a giant fucking eagle-thing, and you’re saying the tide doesn’t do what it should?’

The pale light from above cast deep shadows on Dalip’s face. One eye was bright and glittering; the other, dark and hidden.

‘Down has to follow rules, even if they’re different to what we’re used to.’

‘Does it?’

‘Yes. And we know most of them are similar, because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t even be able to exist here. Gravity—’

‘Gravity?’

‘– is an intrinsic property of mass. We don’t feel any heavier or lighter, so it must be about the same here, and yet the moon doesn’t behave like it is.’

He was lecturing her, so she took her revenge and shook her fist at the sky. ‘Fuck you, moon,’ she called.

He rolled back and drew his lips into a thin line. She’d offended him again, something she didn’t mean to do yet managed almost as often as he pissed her off by parading his education. To her, his quest for order amongst the chaos◦– a chaos as woven through Down as a silver thread through a banknote◦– seemed pointless. As far as she could tell, Down did as it pleased: it gave and took away, capricious as a gang leader. Sometimes it was generous, sometimes it was searingly violent, but it was never predictable.

‘I’m sorry,’ she said, ‘that Down doesn’t do what you want it to do. It doesn’t do some of the things that I want it to. But unlike you, I don’t expect it to.’

He groaned, ‘I know. It’s… I want it to be logical. And there are patterns. The thing with the portals, the lines of power, the villages and castles, the instruments Bell used◦– they had to be measuring something, or she wouldn’t have had so many of them. Down orbits its sun, and the moon goes round Down predictably. There are rules—’

‘Even to magic?’

‘Even that. If we can understand them, then we can start to predict events, and then maybe control them.’

‘But what if it isn’t like that? Bell was batshit crazy. I’ve got scars on my back to prove that.’

‘Then,’ he said, ‘this box of maps is worthless, and we may as well cut them up for toilet paper.’

He had a point. Everyone, but especially Crows and Bell, whose opinions about this were the only ones that really counted, thought like Dalip: given enough information, an answer would fall out and give them control of the portals. That was pretty much what being a geomancer was all about. Mary had her doubts, though. Down was more like the kids’ homes she’d been brought up in than the schools that had tried to educate her. Lots of rules; almost all of them broken, almost all of the time.

Mary put her hand in front of her face again and looked at the moon through the bars of her fingers. One side of them was silvered. The side closest to her were black shadow. She concentrated on that darkness and dragged it like ribbons through the air, five ragged lines whose edges trembled in time with her fingertips.

She stared at what she’d done, at what she could do. It was simple enough now she knew how. Crows had showed her, and she’d practised. And yet, when the others◦– Dalip, Elena, Luiza, Mama◦– had tried, none of them could emulate her. It was a gift to her, and her alone. As far as she knew, science didn’t work like that. It didn’t prefer one person over another.

So if there were patterns, they were fucking weird. Easier perhaps to believe that she was Down’s favourite: unlike poor, mad Stanislav, who had been blessed in an entirely different way. She could still see the eyes and the teeth in her dreams. So many eyes, so many teeth.

She blinked the image away, or at least tried to, because it seemed to be burned on her retinas like a bright light.

‘I remember toilet paper,’ she said to distract herself. ‘I remember the first fag of the day, and leaning out the window to blow the smoke away. I remember the traffic on the street below, and the people on the pavement. I miss the toilet paper.’

‘Oh, come on. You were made for Down,’ said Dalip, and he sat up, leaf litter clinging to the back of his orange work overalls. He pushed himself up using the box until he was kneeling, hands on the lid. ‘But I don’t know about the rest of us.’

The moon, still vast and close, passed with uncanny silence. In her mind, it rumbled and growled past like a huge truck. The trees, the ground, the air itself, should be shaking.

‘I don’t know why I don’t miss those things. Okay, it was all a bit shit, and I was in a fuck-ton of trouble, but I was getting it together. I even had a job, for fuck’s sake, a crappy cleaning job, but I wasn’t going to do that for ever. I didn’t ask for London to burn down, and I didn’t ask to come here. But now we’re here…’

‘…we have to decide what we’re going to do.’ Dalip leaned heavily on the trunk, making it creak, and when he got up, he did so carefully, stiffly.

Mary had given him those injuries, nearly killing him in order to save him from smearing himself against the iron-hard surface of a lake. She still felt guilty. She watched him stretch, and squeeze a finger between his scalp and the band of cloth he wore instead of his turban. He scratched and sagged, and she looked up at him, looking down at her. Her red dress, long to her ankles, bare to her shoulders, was less vibrant than when she’d first worn it to go Stanislav-hunting, but it was still more than serviceable. She’d put on the mantle of the Red Queen. Maybe one day she’d actually be that person: she’d sit on a throne, and let all the responsibility that title brought settle on her proud head.