Dr Crumb showed her aboard a clumsy freight elevator, and led her off it again on Tier One, where the Housing Committee was erecting blocks of workers’ flats: lightweight buildings made from balsa wood and panels of lacquered paper, each block hexagonal and fitted in among its neighbours like the cells of a wasps’ nest. “We have calculated the exact volume of space which each person requires,” explained Dr Crumb, with modest pride. “The apartments are all based on that; not a cubic inch is wasted. The streets which radiate out from the hub are known by letter while the cross-streets have numbers, and each is preceded by its tier-number, so all the streets on this level have the preface 1. We are walking down 1:E, and just about to cross 1:12. It is a most rational system. Unfortunately the workers seem to find it hard to remember; they keep trying to give the streets old London names. Look there!” He pointed to a cardboard sign, tacked crudely to a wall, on which someone had written, Eel Pie Lane. “We must educate them,” muttered Dr Crumb.
Fever’s Engineerish heart leapt at the sight of so much reason on display, but the pigeons which flew confusedly between the tier-supports reminded her of the angels of Mayda, and the angels reminded her of Arlo Thursday, the young Maydan inventor whom she had helped to build a machine so delicate that it made all the wonders of the new London seem crude and clumsy. It had been a flying machine; the first true, heavier-than-air flying machine since Ancient times. She had flown. She watched the pigeons swoop overhead and the memories of her flight came back to her, and mingled with the memory of her first kiss; her one kiss. Arlo. . .
“Fever?” called Dr Crumb.
“Coming,” she said.
They crossed 1:15 and reached an unfinished section where a spindly platform of wooden scaffolding poked out from the city’s flank. All around them, like trees on a steep hillside, cranes towered up, hoisting fresh loads of steel and timber from the marshalling yards below and swinging them aboard the half-built higher tiers.
“So!” said Dr Crumb, turning to Fever as if he could no longer wait to hear what she thought of it all. His eyes were shining. His whole face seemed to shine. “So, what do you make of it?”
What did she make of it? Fever looked down past cranes and foundry smoke at the fields of tents planted around Ludgate Hill. Teams of mammoths and heavy horses were dragging logs in from the cleared woodlands west of the Brick Marsh. The city that her grandfather had dreamed of had been a crazy, glorious thing. This reality, all creaking timbers bolted to a swaying cage of steel, was far less grand. Still crazy, though.
“I know what you’re going to say,” said Dr Crumb. “You’re going to say that it is irrational. I thought so myself, at first. But look at it, Fever! Just look at what we have built here! It is the most ambitious project that mankind has undertaken in all the millennia since the Downsizing. Even before that! Even the Ancients never constructed anything like this!”
“Why should they have wanted to?” asked Fever. “What good reason is there to build a city on wheels?”
“Because London cannot stay where it is for much longer,” said Dr Crumb, who had had that same question answered for him by Wavey two years before. “Because the glaciers may soon push further south. Because there are new volcanoes growing in the north, and who knows what savage tribes will be driven from their hunting grounds up there? And because it would be wasteful to leave London’s fabric behind us when we seek new lands to live in. So we shall carry it with us, like the humble snail. . .”
Only a bit slower than the humble snail, thought Fever, but she did not say so. Instead, she said, “Londoners are angry, irrational people. Don’t they complain that Quercus has torn their homes down?”
Dr Crumb shook his head. “We have both had bad experiences of the London mob,” he admitted. “But it seems they are not entirely deaf to reason. They know that these tents in which they are forced to live are a temporary measure. Soon they will be rehoused in the buildings we just saw: clean, healthy, efficient buildings, far better than their slums and hovels in the old London. And there are lot of new Londoners now; people who came south with Quercus, or who have flooded in since to help with the building, knowing that there are good wages to be had here, and a rational government to guard and guide them.”
“Rational?” exclaimed Fever, remembering her meeting with Quercus and the Movement, fierce northern warriors aboard their trundling traction castle.
“Oh yes, Fever. The Movement has always been one of the smallest of the nomad nations, and it has survived by being more modern and forward-thinking than its rivals. Nikola Quercus is a deeply rational man, and he is advised by rational men. For instance, I suggested to him that free workers are more efficient and humane than slaves, and he agreed. Not only has he freed all the slaves which the Movement brought south, he has purchased whole regiments of slaves from the southlands, and freed them all as soon as they arrived in London.”
“And did they not just return to their own homes?”
“A few did, but most saw that it was more rational to stay. They earn good money here, and live in tents provided by the council, which also provides schooling for their children and doctors for the sick and pensions for the old.”
“How can Quercus afford all that?”
“Oh, the workers pay a portion of their wages back to him as tax. We all do. It funds our welfare, and helps to pay for this new city on which we shall soon live. Of course, better paid people like myself and Wavey pay a larger proportion of our earnings than the humble labourers.”
“I suppose that is a rational system,” admitted Fever.
“It is good for everyone,” said Dr Crumb. “It means that it is in the interests of the commoners to support Quercus and what he is doing here. All down the centuries kings and councils have tried to tame the London mob with guns and soldiers, and Quercus has achieved it through the application of reason. Soon all the junk and clutter of the bad old London will be gone. In its place will be a shining new city of science and progress, not tied to one place but free to roam and grow as reason demands. . .”
Fever reached out and fondled the taut rope which formed a handrail at the platform’s edge. She could feel it quivering; throbbing like a live thing with the beat of the work being done in the heart of the new city. It is rational, she told herself. If Dr Crumb sees it, why can’t I? It is rational, and the changes that Quercus is making here are good. And she knew that she should be grateful to have a chance to help. She should feel happy to be home.
4
ANCESTRAL VOICES
ar, far, far to the north, where the ground was ice and the night skies filled with shifting light, the rolling empire of Arkhangelsk was on the move again. Centuries had passed since its founders abandoned the deep-frozen harbour on the White Sea that had given it its name. Peoples from all over the north had joined their caravan as it journeyed on and on, creeping across the world’s steep face in endless search of fuel and pasturage. Their fighting men and landships were away battling the Movement’s northern army in the Fuel Country, but still the empire rolled, the huge heart-fortress of the Great Carn grinding along amid a ring of smaller traction-houses, and behind them the Kometsvansen, a tail of barges and wagons and mammoths and reindeer herds which stretched for eighty miles across the tundra.
If there had still been people in the Ancients’ legendary skycastles, thought Cluny Morvish, they would have been able to look down from space and wonder at the Kometsvansen as it went creeping across the snows of Heklasrand like a line of ants; the biggest parade the world had ever seen. How astonished they would be at the power and glory of Arkhangelsk! It made her feel proud as she stood upon the balcony of her family’s rolling fort and watched the other vehicles spread out astern in the light of the First Frost Moon; all those campavans and wanigans, with a few spiky landships snarling up and down the fringes of the convoy, keeping watch for raiders.
Where was it going? The little people back there in the Great Carn’s wake did not care; they followed h
is heart-fort without question, as their fathers and their fathers’ fathers had. But Cluny’s family had a fort of their own to steer, and Cluny’s father was a Carn, and privy to the decisions that the Great Carn made in his high council chamber. Cluny was only a maiden, seventeen winters old, but since her older brother Doran died her father had taken her more and more into his confidence, so she knew how hard such decisions had become.
To Cluny, her empire’s travels felt like the aimless pacing of a trapped animal in a cage. In the north the new volcanoes were spewing ash across the empire’s former pastures. In the east the Iron-horde of the Novaya-Khazak barred the way. In the west there was nothing but cold sea and cold, hard, hopeless, nightwight-haunted hills. And to the south there was the Movement; a small empire, but fierce in its defence of the Fuel Country, and greedy for material since it had conquered London. Just that day a merchant had brought word of the city that Quercus was remaking there. There had been a tattered pamphlet with a woodcut of the great tiers rising. Crude and unbelievable, yet it had unsettled Cluny, like a fingernail drawn across the blackboard of her mind; like a memory of some childhood nightmare. That was why she was up on the sterncastle that night instead of in her nice warm bed below. That was why she was watching the lights of the Kometsvansen through the veils of her freezing breath.
“We must move south soon, or perish,” she had heard her father say, when the Carns of the other traction-houses came aboard to talk over the merchant’s news. “Perhaps this mad moving city notion will draw the Movement’s strength away to London.”
“It will need oil,” said gloomy Carn Masgard. “A whole moving city? It will drink oil like I drink vodka, Carn Morvish. It will eat coal like a child eats cloudberries. The Movement will fight harder than ever to keep hold of the Fuel Country now.”
“We will defeat them,” said Carn Persinger. “These new electric guns our technomancers have contrived, these Tesla weapons. . .”
“They are not enough,” said Cluny’s father. “We lost twelve forts this past year alone. Twelve forts, a hundred landships, thousands of good men. . .” He did not need to remind them that he had lost a son as well.
Above Cluny’s head the northern sky fluttered its magic lights. In the far south-west the clouds flashed with gun-light as another assault got under way against the Movement mechanized divisions dug in around Hill 60. All this fighting, she thought, remembering how she had longed to go south with Doran the previous summer, and how it had not been allowed because she was a girl, and how Doran had not returned. He had fought bravely, the survivors said, but then the Movement had unleashed its Stalkers, and who could fight against the armoured dead? How stupid it all is, she thought. If only there could be peace.
But there was never peace; not among the nomad empires. The best you could hope for was a gap between one war and the next. Cluny turned from the rail and went below. She thought that she was tired enough now to fall asleep. Tomorrow, she would hunt. Rise early and ride hard, following the belling of the hounds till she had left all thought of wars and mobile cities behind.
She lay in bed and at last the familiar sound of the fort’s engines soothed her to sleep like a lullaby. Then the bad dream that had been sniffing around the edges of her mind ever since she heard that merchant’s tale saw its chance, and found its way in. It came at her like a boar out of a thicket and smashed her awake with a scream that brought guards and servants and the Carn himself all pounding on her chamber door.
She had not had such a nightmare since she was a little child. It left her whimpering like a baby. It was some minutes before she was able to tell them all what it was that the night had shown her.
“It was the city . . . Quercus’s new city. It is coming. It will devour us all!”
Four days later, when she had the same dream twenty times and was afraid to even close her eyes, they made her go across to the heart-fortress to tell it to old Nintendo Tharp, the Great Carn’s technomancer. In Tharp’s sanctum, down among the fort’s engines, candles flickered behind the screens of Ancient tellies and puddles of oil burned in Set-a-light dishes and a thousand talismans of wire and circuitry swung from the carved beams. Cluny’s father was there, and the Great Carn himself. They stood and watched while the technomancer circled Cluny, muttering his sacred runes and apps. Tharp had a long face like the face of an aged lizard and a long beard with bones and bits of circuit-board plaited into it. On his head he wore a thick leather cap with a steaming metal stove mounted on top; a samovar-hat in which he was brewing cloudberry tea for the Ancestors. The hot coals inside it shifted and rattled as he shuffled round the chair where Cluny sat with fragments of Ancient power-machines balanced on her head and wrists. He waved his hands in ritual movements, then reached up and turned the handle of the hat’s tap to fill three little glasses, which he set on the deck at Cluny’s feet.
Cluny had never liked Tharp. As a little girl she had always been secretly afraid that he might pick her or Doran or little Marten when he went looking for a sacrifice to blood the heart-fort’s wheels for Winterdeep. But Tharp was the only one who could say whether Cluny’s dream was just a dream, or something more, so she told it again, sitting statue-still for fear the magic machines would tumble off her head, while he waved rusty devices in front of her face, and her father waited in the background, scared for her and trying not to show it.
“I saw the new city,” she explained, struggling to keep her voice steady as she recalled the terrible vividness of her dream. “I saw Quercus’s new city finished, rolling across the earth. It was ten times bigger than this fortress. It was like a mountain, but with houses instead of rocks, and factories instead of crags, and wheels instead of foothills. And it had jaws. They opened, and there were furnaces and smithies inside. They closed, and dragged whole forts like this one into London’s belly. And I knew that nothing can stop it, and that if we let it, it will eat up all the world.”
In the light from behind the dead screens Tharp’s face was as impassive as a leather mask. Steam leaked from his hat. He held an Ancient talking-box against his ear, listening to spirit-voices that only he could hear.
“This dream was sent by the Ancestors,” he said at last. “It is a warning.”
Cluny let out a shaky sigh, and one of Tharp’s devices fell off her head and clattered on the deck. She had been hoping and hoping that the dreams were just dreams, and that the technomancer would have some potion that could stop them coming. She did not want to be the medium for messages from Arkhangelsk’s honoured dead. Why had the Ancestors picked on her? she wondered. Why her, of all people? She did not want to be important. . .
“This is a warning, Great Carn,” Tharp was saying. “The Ancestors have spoken to us from the World Without Time. They have shown this maiden a vision of the future. We must not ignore it.”
“But what can we do?” asked the Great Carn, fingering his beard. He was a soldier: technomancy gave him the jitters.
Tharp looked briefly blank. It was Cluny’s father who answered in the end. “We should ask Cluny, shouldn’t we?” he said. “It is her dream. What do you think we should do about it, Cluny-my-daughter?”
Cluny laughed nervously. She thought it was one of her father’s jokes. She knew nothing about politics and tactics. She was just a maiden. She’d have been given in marriage and busy with babies by now if she hadn’t been her father’s favourite. Yet they were all looking at her, even the Great Carn himself, waiting for her to tell them what should be done.
She remembered the thoughts that had come to her three nights before, up on the sterncastle. She said, “We must start telling people what the new London means. Not just our own people. Everyone. We must send envoys to the Suomi, the Novaya-Khazak, even to the Movement.”
“We are at war with the Suomi and the Novaya-Khazak!” roared the Great Carn. “It is the Movement who are building this crazy city!”
“Those wars must cease,” said Cluny. “This is more important. And not everyone in t
he Movement can want this new thing. They cannot all be crazy.”
Both the Carn and Cluny’s father looked outraged. They had not got where they were today by imagining that the enemies of Arkhangelsk could be anything but crazy. Talk of ending wars was womanish.
But Nintendo Tharp raised his bony hands, as if to warm them in front of Cluny’s wisdom. “It is the will of our Ancestors!” he said. “Let it be done! Let Cluny herself go to the Suomi, and the Novaya-Khazak, and the Movement. Let her tell them in her own voice of this thing the Ancestors have shown to her!”
5
VICTORY BALL
n London the year went on its way, down into the cold and dark of winter. Construction work continued by night and by day, the noise so ceaseless that Fever had quickly stopped noticing it. She worked with her father, drawing up plans, designing things, telling herself that this was what she liked doing best; it was like being small again, and back in Godshawk’s Head. Sometimes when she looked at the new city it seemed wonderful that human beings could build such things. Sometimes it looked like a madman’s nightmare coming to life. She still did not know what to feel about it, so she settled for feeling nothing.
From the north came word of battles and volcanoes. New fire-mountains were sprouting in Heklasrand, and their upflung ashes painted the sunsets gold and carmine. Up in the Fuel Country the Movement’s northern army was warring with the Arkhangelsk; there had been huge battles at a place they called Hill 60, and the reports said that the enemy had found a new type of weapon, an electric gun which scrambled the brains of the Movement’s Stalkers, destroying them or sending them flailing back in mindless fury through their own ranks. Twice, Hill 60 had almost been overrun; if it fell, the way would lie open for the Arkhangelsk to pour south across the dry North Sea to London.