Free Gears of the City by Felix Gilman Page B

only a storm.
    Where had this happened? When? Who were these people? Arjun couldn’t remember. He couldn’t place them. Maybe they
had
no place, no context. Half a dozen madmen on a roof in a storm, talking nonsense. Most or maybe all of them were murderers. Drawn from a half-dozen different Ages, wanderers in the City Beyond, united only by their shared obsession. A clownish variety of clothes from a half-dozen cultures and Ages—all hid knives, guns, poison needles. Uneasy in each other’s company, contemptuous of real people and real life. Paranoia was simply common sense among these men—they’d all glimpsed the City Beyond the City, the huge and hostile structure in which other people’s ordinary lives were suspended. These were the men who chased the Mountain.
    Someone had said:
Why did you bring us here, St. Loup? What do you want for this information? Is this a trap?
Arjun couldn’t remember who’d said that. Maybe it was him.
    The dust venting from the chimney was thick, drowsy. It smelled of age, exhaustion, old fires, stale food. Arjun swayed with hunger. A sudden explosion of birds from behind the chimney made him duck. Two dozen black beating shapes, tiny machines, rose past his head, through the fog, and out north across the sky, their pattern loosening and tightening again, their forms quickly becoming invisible against the darkness of the Mountain. It made him remember …
    Another time. Later, earlier?
Elsewhere.
Another rooftop—on top of Potocki’s vast factory, south of the Mountain, above streets clogged with cars and noisy intershuttling trams. The madmen of the City Beyond returned again and again to high places.
    Arjun remembered: a wide rooftop, a broad concrete plain under a bronze sky, gorgeous with strange pollution. Complex steel machines littered the rooftop, humming and grinding their wheels; delicate wire-mesh mouths sifted oils and grit from the air, to be processed below into food and materiel. The waiting aircraft flexed white plastic wings. Electricity crackled from pylon to pylon. Potocki the Engineer lived in a nest of machines. And there he was,dressed in oily rags, scraggle-bearded, hunched and swollen like a gigantic mole, dragging his lame left leg around the rooftop in circles, conducting his servants, bellowing:
Now! Now! Now!
    Arjun had arrived at Potocki’s rooftop too late. He’d taken a taxi to get there, down strange and shifting roads, skidding and swerving forward through history, from the honking jostling ranks out the front of the WaneLight Hotel.
    Luxurious, immense—the memory of the Hotel pressed itself into Arjun’s mind, too huge to grasp. Bright yellow-black taxis leaving the Hotel like a swarm of greedy wasps, homing in on a rumor:
Potocki’s got another prototype. He launches today …
The horde descended, armed with cameras, bribes, knives.
Me too, take me with you …
    Everything began at the Hotel in those days—everyone’s schemes were hatched there. If the vastness of the city had a center, it was the Mountain—but if its impossible geometry allowed for a
second
center, that would be the Hotel. Power and influence and fame gathered there, connections were made, secrets were bartered. The secrets of power; the secrets of the Gods and the city; the secrets of the Mountain. Years of Arjun’s life spent penetrating the mysteries, ingratiating himself with the right people, watching his back, listening for rumors. Gossip at the bar. A note pushed under the bedroom door. A phone call, untraceable, at dead of night, spilling secrets. A whisper overheard in the casinos. Surveillance and countersurveillance systems constantly breaking down, hissing and crackling, leaking information, leaking plans.
    The conspirators—the explorers—the secret-hunters—had met in the Bar Caucasus. It was on the south face of the Hotel’s forty-fourth floor—a forest of potted palms, a shrine of vulgar brass. There was the scent of a rumor in the stale air.