Gears of the City by Felix Gilman Read Free Book Online Page A

buying?”
    “Ruth, where are we?”
    She went downstairs; she returned with her arms full. “All right. Here’s a few of Fosdyke and environs. There’s not much call for them.
    Who needs maps to see where they already are? We’re stuck here in real life and that’s bad enough.”
    “Thank you, Ruth.”
    There was nothing there that Arjun recognized. This was a place where the streets were straight and square: a grid, a cage. For the most part they had numbers, not names, though a few were named for the factory complexes they bordered, or the Combines that owned them. Zones of authority were marked out—Holcroft Municipal Trust, Patagan Sewer & Piping, Woeck Oil, Carlyle Syndicated, Standard Auto. Where other ages of the city might have had parks, they had
Undeveloped Area {Ownership Disputed)
or
Reclamation Zones
— empty space penned in by the cage of streets. In a handful of spots the maps
knotted
, the ugly gridlike regularity was interrupted, the streets tangled like still-living things. Ruth’s finger picked out Carnyx Street—”That’s us. That’s where we are”—in the coils of one such area. But those places were so few, and everything around them was so coldly ordered; it made Arjun think that this part of the city had to be very, very old, and very tired.
Condemned Area
—
Poisons. Condemned Area
—
Unknown.
This Age of the city was
very
old; poisons and worse things accumulated.
    The glass on the window was yellow-grey and streaked with soot. The sky looked sick. A shadow intruded on the lower-left quarter of the skyline, half obscured and half abstracted by distance and by greasy shameful clouds—a shadow that might have been the Mountain. It seemed too large to be contained by the window’s pathetic frame. It seemed to press past its bounds. Arjun lay back so that he couldn’t see it anymore.
    Ruth sat again. “Tell me what you remember, Arjun. About where you’re from, I mean; about other places.”
    He shrugged. “I don’t know.” He gave up trying to recall and in the same instant a name came to him. “I remember a place called the Iron Rose.”
    “It sounds beautiful.”
    “I think it was a prison.”
    “I’ve never heard of it, Arjun. Where was it? If I bring you up the maps we can look for it together.”
    “Let me come down. I feel much better. I want to move and work.”

    R uth found Arjun some old clothes, to replace his bloody rags. Grey flannel trousers of a straight stove-pipe cut; a plain shirt, with patches; inelegant contraptions called
suspenders
, which Ruth had to help him fasten. Everything sagged on him like an empty sack, like an old man’s face; the original owner had been shorter than Arjun, but fatter.
    Ruth put a hand to her mouth and laughed. “The Dad was a fat man, there’s no denying it. You look like a boy in his dad’s suit.”
    “Oh. Am I young?”
    Ruth lowered her hand. She seemed unsure what to say. She shrugged and waved her hand to say
yes and no.
    “Do you have a mirror?”
    T he Low sisters had two shops on Carnyx Street: Nos. 27 and 29. The establishments were connected by a bell rope. Arjun said it was a charming arrangement; Ruth shrugged.
    Ruth kept shop in No. 27, where they sold a few books, but not many; Fosdyke’s factory workers were mostly illiterate. The bosses did not read. Their wives and daughters sometimes did, but they sent south for their reading matter and would not be seen on Carnyx Street, which was disreputable. Ruth sold a few picture books, most of which, to be honest, were illustrated smut. She also sold music; in dusty sleeves along the walls were black discs, deeply grooved, which Ruth said could by their spinning, by codes engraved in them, cause music to be played, on certain rare machines that weren’t manufactured anymore. If you were an enthusiast—and those, too, weren’t being made much these days—you had to assemble them for yourself out of junk parts and stolen wire and love.
Machines
, Ruth