String City Read online

  Below the button was a toggle switch and a digital readout. On the edge of the case was a much smaller button marked STANDBY. On the back of the compact was a tiny label that read:

  WHEN COUNTER REACHES ZERO, THIS DEVICE WILL SELF-DESTRUCT.

  I flicked the toggle switch. The mirror clouded over. The air shook. The brass case jangled like Christmas and got so hot I dropped it on the cement floor. The lid snapped shut and it fell silent. I picked it up. It was cold again.

  A red light blinked slowly on the front, and then someone spoke behind me.

  “Okay.” The voice was eerily familiar. “This is kind of weird.”

  I dropped the compact in my pocket and turned to look at myself.

  5

  YOU THINK YOU know who you are. Every time you shave, the mirror throws back the face that’s always been there. Oh, that face changes over time—more wrinkles and stiffer stubble and those nasty shocks of grey at the temple—but it’s all still you. But when you come face to face with yourself—your real self—you discover you didn’t know diddly.

  He was shorter than I’d imagined, with a stoop to the left. Heavier too, especially in the gut. But me, without a doubt.

  “So what’s the deal?” he said.

  “You’re a doppelganger.” I pulled out the compact and waggled it. “I just created you.”

  “So what are you now? A god?”

  “No, just a guy in a spot.”

  “So what’s new?”

  “Look, I don’t have much time. I need you to mind the office while I check out a case at the Tartarus Club. It won’t take long.”

  “Tartarus Club? You getting mixed up with Titans again?”

  “Not by choice.”

  “How’s business?”

  “Don’t you know?”

  The doppelganger’s brow creased. “I remember last year, and before. Anything more recent, I’m kind of fuzzy.” He pointed to the compact. “Maybe that thing works off an old backup.”

  I had no idea how the device worked at all, but the idea that something was constantly backing me up sent needles down my spine.

  “So how’s business?” he repeated.

  I shrugged. “Good and bad.”

  “Which is it today?”

  “Mostly bad.”

  “Figures.”

  The conversation trickling down the stairs was getting louder. The doppelganger cocked his head. “How many folk up there?”

  “Enough.”

  “Mood?”

  “I’ll give you one guess.”

  He plunged his hands in his pockets. “So you get to ride the range while I clean the shit from the back porch.”

  “You’re me. What’s the difference? Like I said, I won’t be long.”

  “That’s not what bugs me. What about me? How long do I get?” He pointed to the compact.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  “Check the label.”

  On the back of the compact was a small white panel printed with minuscule text. I scanned it, mouthing the words.

  “See your reading hasn’t improved,” said the doppelganger.

  “Shut up. It says here that, once activated, you’ve got a lifespan of two hours. Putting you on standby stretches that out; it pauses the countdown until you’re reactivated. Means you’re unconscious though.” I looked him square in the eye. It should have been like looking in a mirror, but it wasn’t.

  He studied the tokamak’s pressure gauge. “This thing always runs hot.” He nudged the dial down two degrees.

  “Clock’s ticking,” I said. “You going to help or not?”

  “I get a choice?”

  “We all get a choice.”

  “Save the platitudes, buddy. This is you you’re talking to.”

  “What can I say? You know me too well.”

  “Too right I do.” The doppelganger started pacing up and down the cellar. He kept to the shadows, carefully avoiding the dust motes. Just the way I do. “Only, a guy gets to thinking... what’s in this for me?”

  “What’s in it for any of us? Look, you get to do what you do. What I do. Hell, up until two minutes ago you didn’t even exist.”

  He stopped in a pool of shadow. Under the brim of his fedora, his face was invisible. “The folk up in the office. They’re mad at you?”

  “Put it this way: if you can’t talk them down, this place goes up in flames.”

  “Hell of a responsibility to give someone you only just met.”

  “You know, I already feel like I’ve known you my whole life.”

  The doppelganger’s hand jumped out of the shadows. Tentatively I shook it. It was creepy, like kissing your sister. “Okay, buddy,” he said, “you got yourself a deal. One condition though.”

  “Name it.”

  “I get to choose a new brand of coffee. That crap you drink tastes like donkey shit.”

  He vanished up the stairs. A few seconds later I heard the rumble of his voice as he spoke to the mob. I wondered if I’d done right. It felt like big things were on the move, things I couldn’t see.

  Bottom line was this: I didn’t trust myself an inch.

  I grabbed my leather coat from the peg at the foot of the cellar steps, turned it inside-out three times until it was made of oilskin and shrugged it on. I took two steps backward until my left heel lodged in an interbrane rift, and twisted both my feet to the right. Smooth as a symphony the dimensions opened up. I knelt down, closed my eyes and sniffed hard until I caught the scent of ramspeed lavender. I folded myself in half, in half again, and posted myself sideways through a slot in the world-wall, letting myself fall and fall until the westwise wind caught me up and blew me away between the strings.

  6

  A WORD ABOUT the cosmos.

  Some folk say it’s like one of those souvenir jars you can pick up by the ocean, all filled up with layers of colored sand. This layer’s icicle blue; this one’s envy green; this one shimmers with the fool’s gold of false promise. The layers are called branes, and they contain just about all the things you can imagine, along with plenty you can’t. Stars and comets, rocks and trees, crystal deserts, electric gods, lost souls, forgotten trinkets, worlds broken and whole—they’re all sandwiched inside that jar. There are lifetimes in there, and more besides.

  Now look closer. Just like the branes make up the cosmos, there’s something else makes up the branes. It’s what ties everything together, the stuff that lies coiled at the heart of it all.

  String.

  The trouble with string is that it’s forever getting tangled. Turn your back for a second and it sprouts more knots than your grandma’s knitting basket. Each knot is unique and each one warps the universe that surrounds it, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot. Some knots wind themselves so tight that the dimensions get twisted completely out of true, all eleven of them. Others rear up like coral cathedrals only to collapse under the weight of their own impossibility. Big or small, that’s the one thing these knots have in common—they never last.

  Except one.

  Nobody knows why this one knot lingers. Maybe it’s bigger than the rest, or older, or stranger, or all three or neither. In this one special place the cosmic string tangles into more of a knot than you ever saw before in your life. It’s more than a cathedral, more than a coral reef.

  The folk who live there call it String City.

  One more thing about the strings. Whenever they move, they vibrate, and when the strings vibrate, the cosmos sings. I’ve heard folk claim the whole cosmos is one gigantic violin. Others reckon it’s a twelve-string steel guitar, rocking out the middle-eight of space-time. Me, I’ve got a tin ear, but I can hear when the song of the strings is so out of key it sounds less like music and more like the contents of a ten scrapyards dropped from five miles high. Trust me, it’s not a tune you can hum.

  When I stepped between the strings that day, it was more than just listening to city life in a minor key. The chainsaw screeching told me at once that so
mething was wrong.

  Badly wrong.

  7

  BLOCKING MY EARS as best I could, I unfolded myself just enough to get my bearings.

  I knew straight away that I was off course. String City was nowhere in sight. Below me was a waterfall-growl that could only be the River Styx. As for the strings themselves... they were rolling like a typhoon ocean. They cracked like whips, lashing me with their atom-frayed ends. I sped through them like a shooting star, burning up.

  I tried to stop. Couldn’t. Tried to change direction, find some kind of beacon in the black. No dice. I was lost in the slash of the strings and the endless rumble of the underneath.

  Worse than that, I could hear the rising howl of the boundary wolves.

  I tried again to change course. The strings fought me all the way. I opened the tails of my coat, attempted an Immelman Turn around the bow wave of a passing brane. Still no luck. I tried dumping myself back into the nearest reality, even risked a dive through the corona of a wayward sun.

  Nothing worked.

  I began to panic.

  What had started as a routine interdimensional hop from my office to the Tartarus Club was rapidly turning into a life-or-death struggle. Actually, given what lurked inside some of the seedier dimensions, I could easily end up neither alive or dead, but something a lot worse than either. I spent three more seconds wondering what the hell was going on, then turned all my attention to the only thing that mattered.

  Getting the hell out.

  Risky as it was, I let myself fully unfold. At once, hard wind battered me from all sides. Including inside. I flipped forward, snatched another look at the Styx. That river’s bigger than most oceans—hell, bigger than most worlds—and it’s all made of faces.

  A billion lost souls fixed me with white dead eyes and begged me to pull them free.

  I looked the other way. Far in the distance, the lights of String City flared, no bigger than dust motes. So small I could have eclipsed them just by holding up my thumb. I didn’t, just in case they didn’t come back.

  Instead, I took off my coat.

  We’d been through a lot together, that coat and me. All the same, I wondered if this was set to be our last adventure. One thing was for sure—this wasn’t the time to be undressing.

  But I had no choice.

  Working fast, I turned the coat inside-out four times until it was made of interlaced darning needles. Painful to wear, but useful if your intention is to thread cosmic string. Wincing, I put the coat back on. A thousand tiny pin-points jabbed my flesh as I waved my sleeves through the nearest skein of string. The needles slithered like shrimps through a fishing net.

  The Styx rose up beneath me. On the far shore, hairy shadows were gathering: the boundary wolves. They’d already sniffed me out and now they were looking for a taste. Boundary wolves think they’re guardians of the cosmos, but answer me this: would the guardians of the cosmos really lick their own ring-a-dings?

  Something yanked my arm. One of the darning needles had threaded itself into a loose strand of cosmic string. I allowed myself a small sigh of relief.

  Grabbing the string’s free end—making sure it didn’t take my fingers off in the process—I fed as much of it as I could through the rest of the needles. Once I’d threaded the coat with the cosmos, all I had to do was hang off the strings and glide my way down the braneway to the nearest dimensional snag.

  And hope the strings didn’t snap.

  The Styx fell behind me as I shot past. The ultimate zip wire. The howling of the wolves died away. Before me, String City blew up like a balloon.

  At last I was close enough to reality to open a fresh slot in the world-wall. I pulled it wide, shut my eyes and folded myself in half, in half again, until I was small enough to fit through. The song of the cosmos snapped into silence and I hit the deck, hard. As I rolled, I whipped off my coat—trust me, when you’re wearing a coatful of needles, gymnastics hurt—and turned it inside-out twice until it was made of shalloon. I threw the coat on again, came out of the roll and fetched up against something big and unyielding.

  I opened my eyes.

  I was standing in the shadow of something as vast as the Himalayas. The something bent down, bringing horns like cathedral spires to within inches of my face. I looked up into a face too epic for even the widest screen.

  “What kept you?” said Hyperion.

  8

  GIVING ME NO time to reply, Hyperion turned and lumbered up the steps into the casino’s main lobby. I felt the dimensions groan as he squeezed a body the size of a small moon into a building built mostly for regular folk.

  I followed, amazed that the Tartarus Club was still standing. All around was devastation, yet through the clouds of smoke and dust the casino’s marble columns still towered, though many were cracked and askew. The roof was a mess, and the neon sign that had once adorned it… well, I knew exactly what had happened to that.

  Hyperion led me deeper inside. Every step he took, I took two hundred. You never get over how big Titans are. We reached the main gaming floor and found it deserted. Abandoned cards lay strewn across empty tables; chips stood in piles beside stalled roulette wheels; slot machines beckoned, but there was nobody to take them by the arm. Empty of people, the casino was full of dust. I remembered how Hyperion had been coughing on the phone. I looked up and saw he’d put on a respirator. It looked capable of recycling enough air for a small city.

  I was about to speak when a huge mirror fell from the wall behind a bar and smashed on the floor. As the shards of glass flew toward me, I folded my coat collar round until it was made of tungsten plate and flipped it up to make a hasty shield. The glass bounced off it and landed in a sea of torn green baize.

  “I can’t believe the place is still standing,” I said, turning my collar down again. “I saw the explosion. It looked like a nuke.”

  “Not a nuke.”

  The Titan sounded confident he knew what he was talking about. I thought back to what I’d seen. For all its devastating effects, the fireball itself had been relatively small. Less a ball than a spear, in fact, a line of purple flame heading straight up like a scratch on the filmstrip of the world.

  “Still, some kind of bomb?”

  “Yah. But the blast, it was kind of funky.”

  “Why would someone want to blow up the Tartarus Club?” I realised that was the wrong question. “Who would dare?”

  My head was spinning. The Titans are the biggest crime lords this city—or any other—has ever seen. You hardly dare breathe near a Titan... and you certainly don’t light a fuse under one.

  Hyperion led me up a huge staircase and into the security suite, a vast room packed with antique furniture and hi-tech surveillance equipment. An array of sixty-four monitors covered one entire wall. The remote cameras had been angled to show every corner of the casino, but most of the screens were obscured by smoke. Facing the monitors, sprawled on a megaton Chesterfield, was Hyperion’s brother, Oceanus, and two of their sisters, Rhea and Tethys. Like Hyperion, they looked more like geological phenomena than living beings.

  I shivered. Titans solo are bad enough. Titan families are something else. They take the notion of sibling rivalry and make it a life’s work. And Titans live a long time.

  “So here’s the gumshoe,” said Oceanus. The Titan dames said nothing, just allowed scowls like sinkholes to demolish their faces.

  “So what’s the deal?” I said.

  Oceanus stood. Beneath the Chesterfield, hydraulic rams moved to redistribute the weight.

  “We was robbed,” he said. “Take a look.”

  They took me into another room. It was even bigger than the first and full of rubble. The back wall looked like an upturned battlefield and the ceiling was open to the sky. In the center of the room, poking up from the middle of the devastation, was a safe. The door to the safe—a slab of dull metallic stuff as big as a football pitch—looked intact.

  “They started with drills, bangers, seismic b
ungs, everything,” said Hyperion, flicking a chunk of plaster off the door handle. “Lucky the safe’s charm-steel.”

  “Only luck we got is bad,” growled Oceanus.

  Trying to ignore the fact I had an angry Titan at each elbow, I made a quick circuit of the room, picking my way through the wreckage and looking for anywhere the safe might have been breached. Apart from a few scratches, all four sides seemed undamaged.

  “Is anything missing?” I asked.

  “The safe held,” said Hyperion. “Anyway, we have a suspect. One of the security golems. We found it just outside the blast radius, missing an arm.”

  “Suspect?” said Oceanus, glowering at Hyperion. “It’s open’n’shut. I say we strings the clayboy up and watches it stretch.”

  “That’s not how this is going to work,” said Hyperion, returning the glare.

  “Because why not?”

  “Because you are not the boss!”

  I held my breath.

  “The golem done it,” growled Oceanus. “Don’t tell me you don’t know it.”

  “Maybe it did. But we need an independent investigation. The gumshoe is here to prove it really was the golem—so that there is no argument.”

  “Who’s arguing?”

  “I just want us all to see eye to eye.”

  “I’ll poke your eye!”

  “As if you could, little brother!”

  The two Titans were nose-to-nose. Their lips had curled back to reveal teeth like civic sculptures. The ground shook.

  Rhea and Tethys walked up, and the shaking got a whole lot worse.

  “What do you want?” said Hyperion to the dames.

  “To put you two chumps straight, as usual,” said Tethys, the taller of the sisters. “Golems, they ain’t smart enough to set explosives, you know that, I know that. It was that guy in the hood, like I’m telling you. The one showed up on the security camera.”