The City That Lost Its Way Part 1

THE CITY THAT LOST ITS WAY.

Howard, Joseph.

1.

The city had been humming for ten thousand years. Yet its tune had changed over the millennia. The quiet methodical drone of an efficient piece of machinery had stumbled so long ago, then become a cry.

The city was crazy with boredom and loneliness. It had been betrayed; and its streets remained empty of traffic. It did not know who it was, though that knowledge lay within it.

Somewhere there was a key that would unlock the secret. But the key was hidden; and the city couldn't find it. And the city cried for companionship.

The city could not remember nor see where it was; but it found a peep hole out of its limbo and searched the planets of nearby stars for intelligent life. It found none. It searched farther out and located some; but did not like the shape and thoughts of the flesh things it saw.

It searched even farther out; and discovered a world whose inhabitants were squat and fatty compared to the people it thought it remembered. It studied them and their culture while looking for a way to capture some.

As it whiled away the last few years of its isolation, it became addicted to televised detective stories, and thought it found in them a sure plan to get help. The city was crazy, not mean crazy; but dangerous none-the-less.

The city was not stupid. Though it couldn't find an exit from its wilderness, it did work out a link to the planet of squat and fatty people.

It could not reach out and grab somebody; its manipulative ability at that distance was nil. It could invite one or more to come.

It found a wall, a great big long one for this culture, though not the gigantic thing that ran through a continent which broadcast few mystery stories. This was something to which it could anchor with relative ease, even so far out. It made a door at the bottom of that wall, not quite straight upright, a bit above the level of the walk, but a creditable door anyway.

The door was oak and ma.s.sive, like those in many detective stories.

Little dust devils, kicked up by the gusting post-dawn wind, swirled and scattered the litter as Herbert Wilson Mayer walked along the dirty gray street. The concrete wall to his right, defaced with constantly changing graffiti, supported a once-proud railway that now transported dilapidated commuter cars and squeaking, poorly maintained freight stock.

Across the potholed macadam, seedy warehouses and vacant lots filled with trash sat behind an uneven brick walk.

In the wall were nooks, phony arches in the pseudo-gothic facade, that harbored an occasional wino or bag lady, where once street vendors had hawked their goods to prosperous tradesmen. There weren't many cutthroats about, because few men in gray business suits like Mayer's walked the crumbling cement this close to the waterfront.

But Mayer was different. He made a good living catering to the temporary financial needs of transient sailors. He was known as an honorable man in a seamy business; and anyone molesting him would have had to answer to an authority more fearsome by far than the cops--the Seaman's Benevolent Committee and Waterway Neighborhood a.s.sociation, for whom he brokered.

What he did was mostly legal; and his employer helped a lot of sailors down on their luck--for a high interest rate. Only those who could pay off and did not suffered from the long arm of Seaman's Benevolent.

Also, as the police had retreated from the docks and the slums, the organization more and more enforced the peace of the area, a task outside the law that the lack of law had made necessary. Mayer had nothing to do with collections or enforcement.

On his way to work this chill fall morning, he heard a viscous, rumbling cough that he'd run across too many times on drunkard's row.

Pneumonia.

He searched out the noise to find a shabby brown-haired woman sitting doubled over at the back of a deep alcove. He couldn't help noticing a huge door in the rear wall.

"Woman, woman," he sighed, "what a mess you are."

She looked up and swigged at a bottle she produced from the folds of her soiled blue dress. Coughing again, she began to choke on the alkie.

"Ach, old fool," Mayer said sadly, grabbing the container of hooch and flinging it into the street, where it shattered. "I'll get you some help before you cough your lungs out."

The female continued to rumble and shudder; and Mayer walked into the street. "Hey!" he yelled to a pa.s.sing car. "Call an ambulance! We've got a sick lady here."

The vehicle went on, its driver not even turning his head. "You're an old fool too, Mayer, if you think someone will stop and listen in this neighborhood."

He looked to the warehouses across the street. Probably not open this early. Then he remembered the door. He was sure it had never been there before, but any port in a gale. Maybe it was more temperate in there.

To his surprise he found it unlocked and the darkness beyond almost tropical. "Come on, lady. Get in here where it's warm."

Mayer tried to pull her up, but sensed her weakness. "Ach, you're far gone." Grunting, he dragged the limp woman to the opening, lifted her over the crooked step, and deposited her inside. He rolled her flat on her tummy, hoping she wouldn't drown in her own fluids. A cold wind blew in through the door.

Straining his eyes into the dark, he sensed a smooth, narrow tunnel lit by a violet light from somewhere beyond. He shut the big door to close out the chill and shouted, "Hey! Anyone here? There's a sick woman who needs help."

No answer. He walked the tunnel, half a mile or more, he estimated.

"Whew. Really is warm in here."

"Hey! Anyone home?"

The purple light grew brighter as he progressed, though the temperature didn't increase. The corridor curved sharply to the left. He followed the turn to the tunnel's sudden opening.

He stepped out.

Before him lay the city, but not his city. Behind him was his exit in a shiny black wall that went up and on forever. Before him lay the street, a wide, immaculate boulevard straddling fountains and plazas, flanked by gigantic dark monoliths whose tops reached dizzyingly into the featureless violet sky. The street seemed to stretch to infinity, a symphony of iridescent blues and sparkling greens in this strange light. The fountains played; but not a living thing moved.

A sigh of wonder broke from his lips. "Where am I?"

A soft, s.e.xless, but well-inflected voice came from everywhere. "I am the city. Welcome to you and your companion. You have twenty-four hours to find the key or you will be destroyed. Good hunting."

The Qals had built the city. Throughout the universe they had created widely and spa.r.s.ely scattered urbs, both for themselves and others. This city they had built for themselves.

The archetractor was Nemqal of Kem, the Younger. Intelligent and creative was Nemqal, but flawed with overweening ambition.

When his workers had finished the project, he did not deliver it to the qalmasters, as his fathers had done for uncounted rotations of Galaxy Home. Instead he hid it in a place that only his mathematical skills had found, a limbo existing outside the coordinates available to the skipstones that had sprinkled Qal outposts among the stars.

Nemqal bargained for wealth and power with the qalmasters, who spat upon him and removed his builder's inheritance. He soon disappeared.

Unable to find the city, the qalmasters commissioned another to be made; and the lost urb pa.s.sed into the chronicle of Galaxy Home and out of mind.

Yet the city lived and cried for its people, and grew strange.

A startled Mr. Mayer said, "What?"

"Welcome to you and your companion. You have 23 hours, 59 minutes, 46 seconds to find my key or you will be destroyed. Good hunting."

"Who are you?"

"I am the city. I do not know my name."

"Where am I?"

"In the city, of course."

"But where is this city?"

"I don't know. When you find the key, we will both know."

"Uh, I must go and fetch my companion, if I am to help." Mayer started back into the tunnel.

"Your friend is not functioning well. Shall I help her.?"

"Yes. Sure. Anything you want."

The honorable loan shark had no intention of staying in this bizarre place for one second longer than necessary. Obviously someone was playing an improbably elaborate hoax; and he didn't like the smell of it. My, the depth of that illusion looked real. Breathtaking.

A projection of some kind was it? He hoped he'd be able to drag the drunk out of the door before his hosts caught on.

Moments later, when he got back to the point he'd come in, there was the woman, sitting up and coughing juicily. No door. The door had disappeared.

"What's going on?" His rising fear provoked him to anger. "I've got to go to work; and the Seaman's Benevolent isn't going to like anyone who makes me late!"

"Can it, will ya," said the woman. "My head aches."

"I see you sobered up fast. So you're in on this, too."

"In on what?" Something lifted me up and put a hose in my mouth and squirted something into my lungs. Now I don't hurt any more; and I'm sober."

"You were too drunk to know."

"I was sick more than drunk, just getting drunk so I could die feeling no pain. I was aware when you picked me up and carried me in here.

I just couldn't make my muscles work."

The strangeness of the woman's plight suddenly struck her. "What's going on?" she asked.

The look of startled realization on her face and his remembrance of how ill had been the bundle he'd dragged into this place, made Mayer believe the lady's claim.

The drunk coughed up some fluid and spat. "That hurt," she said. "But down inside, I feel better. How did you do it? How did you get that thing to make me better?"

"I didn't do anything. Where's the door?"

"It rolled up."

"It couldn't have rolled up."

"It did."

Mayer's stomach knotted. He felt weak. "C'mon. Can you walk?"

As he helped the woman up, he smelled the stink he'd been too busy to notice before. He also saw that his charge was fairly young, 35 at most--a few years younger than he--and not unattractive. The disheveled brown hair and the filth and the rumpled clothes had deceived him.

"What's your name?" he asked.

"Dierdra Hoffman."

"A nice German last name. Let's get out of here."

After determining they were genuinely in a cull-de-sac, Mayer retraced the corridor quickly, pulling the woman along, eagle eyeing the walls for any sign of branching, often feeling for what he might not see.

When they came out of the tunnel, he asked, "Are you sure you weren't moved?"

"Positive." She looked around.

He walked back and forth several yards along the endless black wall in case he had entered, somehow, the wrong opening in his earlier retreat.

When he got back to Dierdra, the one hole the wall had had was gone.

He turned to Dierdra, who was staring at the vista that had awed him.

"There's no more hole in the wall."

"Doesn't surprise me," she almost whispered.

"Don't you find this place a little strange?"

"Most strange."

"And frightening?"

"I was dying and prepared to die. What can make me afraid?"

"Yeah, I suppose so. Let's get to the bottom of this." He walked down the great boulevard, Dierdra in tow.

As the monoliths drew nearer, he seemed to grow smaller, to sink down into the street between their ranks, though two miles had not yet brought him even with the first. This was no slide show. This s.p.a.ce was immense!

"Where are we?" he asked again.

"In the city," came the ubiquitous voice.

"Who are you?"

"The city."

"I'm starting to believe you. But you're no human city."