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‘There’s no one here from Turn?’ I said, puzzled.
‘Only us two.’
‘Shit. He isn’t here then.’
‘No. But I did hear something that might interest you.’
‘What?’
Snedd looked at his brother.
‘Tell him whatever you know,’ Ji nodded. ‘We can’t do anything with this. This is Stark’s kind of problem.’
‘Okay.’ Snedd took a piece of spicy chicken from the plate the old man was handing round. I passed on that, but took another turn at the avocado dip. ‘It’s virtually nothing, anyway. I heard that someone from the Centre came through here a couple of days ago. I don’t know who had him: there was no word on that.’
‘How could you have found that out?’ Ji asked irritably. ‘I put the word round and there was nothing.’
‘Ah, but that’s just it,’ said Snedd smugly. ‘I didn’t put the word out. The word came to me. Whoever had him was looking for me. They tried in Turn first, then somehow traced me here.’
Ji laughed. ‘Why the fuck would they want you?’
‘Well, that’s what I wondered. If they wanted the hardest man around, they’d go straight for you. The most organised, straight for you. So that’s not what they wanted. They wanted something I might be able to give them, that you couldn’t.’
‘And what’s that?’ I asked, beginning to suspect the answer.
‘I think they wanted to know how to get into Stable Neighbourhood.’
Pretty soon afterwards we relocated to BarJi, and the après-fight party was in full swing when I left. It’s rare that the leaders of both gangs are involved, so the atmosphere was unusually good. Once the news gets out that there are now two of those lunatics, the other gang leaders in Red are going to get very nervous indeed. Fyd shook my hand at the door, which, though it nearly broke my fingers, was kind of nice. Being on the right side of him struck me as a good place to be.
I reached the Department of Doing Things Especially Quickly just before 9.00 p.m. The elevator was now reciting the history of the Department the way it was supposed to, which made me glum until I realised it was making up all of the dates.
‘Way to go,’ I whispered to it as I got out. ‘Fight ’em from within.’
‘Right on,’ it whispered back.
Zenda’s office was empty, so I hung around for a while. Royn popped her head in briefly, and said that she was on her way, but could be late. I frowned to myself. Zenda is never late, not even for me. That’s another of the things I like about her.
She arrived at 9.03. In the Centre that was like turning up after everyone else had died of old age, and I let her get a drink before I said a word. She sat heavily in her chair and stared straight ahead for a moment, and then looked up at me.
‘Trouble?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said, but she was lying. After a pause she stabbed the button on her intercom and barked out an instruction to someone about a meeting in four days’ time. ‘Okay,’ she sighed, ‘what do you have?’
‘Alkland is not in Red,’ I said.
‘Shit.’
‘But I think I know where he might be.’
Zenda brightened considerably at this, and shone a smile at me.
‘Good man. Where?’
‘It’s not very good news, I’m afraid. I think he might have been taken into Stable.’
‘Stable? What the hell are you talking about?’
‘Think about it, Zenda. Whoever snatched Alkland is alarmingly together. Where’s the cleverest place in the area to hide someone?’
‘Somewhere where no one can go. Shit.’ She drummed her fingers on the table for a moment. ‘I’m going to have to go higher on this.’
She picked up the phone. After a moment she spoke to someone, telling them she needed to speak with C as soon as possible. She nodded at the reply, and replaced the phone.
‘I can’t authorise an incursion into a forbidden Neighbourhood. Shit, shit, shit.’
‘Zenda,’ I asked gently, ‘what is going on?’
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Nothing.’ She looked at me, and I looked at her and could see she was troubled, and she could see that I saw. Professional relationships are difficult, especially if you knew the person before. The better you know someone the wider the gap becomes between what you know and what you can say. There are some things you just can’t discuss in an office, not even huddled round the kettle in the kitchen area.
The intercom buzzed.
‘Impromptu Meeting time minus twenty seconds and counting,’ it barked. ‘Your participants are on their way, Ms Renn.’
Zenda stood to be ready to greet them, and then turned to me.
‘Of course, I didn’t ask if you’d be willing to try,’ she said, looking contrite. I smiled at her, trying to say something with my eyes. I think it got across, because she smiled back.
‘Thank you.’
The door banged open and C glided in, with Darv in close attendance.
The meeting didn’t last very long. I told C what I’d found out, and he agreed with my conclusions. The fact that I was still in one piece after two visits to Red and being in the front line of a gang war between two Turn psychopaths was not lost on Darv, and though he was no more polite, he seemed to accept that I was indeed the man for the job.
The job being, of course, risking almost certain execution and/ or instant death, melodramatic though that sounds. There was no question but that the job was going to go ahead, and that made me think a little. Forbidden Neighbourhoods, particularly Stable, are very, very protective of their privacy, and the Centre is supposed to respect that. If I was going to get top level go-ahead for an incursion, something pretty major was at stake. I was beginning to wonder if I knew everything I ought to, if this was just going to be a normal job after all.
‘Well,’ said C, leaning back in his chair. ‘There does appear to be only one option. Ms Renn suggested you for this job, Mr Stark. She said that not only were you the best at what you did, but also that you had never turned your back on anything once you’d started. Does this set a precedent?’
‘No,’ I said, gazing levelly at him and saying what he expected to hear, ‘and I take it this conversation never took place.’
He smiled gently, and nodded.
‘Ms Renn is a good judge of character.’
He stood and left the room without another word. Darv, grunt that he was, took the time to spell out exactly how disinterested the Centre was going to be in any trouble I got myself into, and then he left also. As I watched him go I felt unreal for a moment, was aware of the world around me. It passed. It always does.
Zenda saw me to the door.
‘Be careful, Stark,’ she said.
‘I will,’ I said, kissing her hand, feeling for once a fragile pool of intimacy in the administrative desert. ‘And if there’s anything I can do, should whatever it is that isn’t wrong get any worse, call me.’
She nodded quickly twice, and I left.
Four (#ulink_a7b3f145-83d3-5ff2-aebb-6b2940fb0a65)
On the way back to my apartment I did what I could to come up with a plan of attack. For reasons of my own I was actually pretty excited at the idea of seeing the inside of Stable, but like everybody else, I knew next to nothing about it. What little I did, including the only possible method of entry, I knew from Snedd. I had the notes I’d got him to make after being released from there with numbers on his forehead, but they were very patchy. He didn’t understand why I was so interested in the inside of a Neighbourhood I could never go into, and he wasn’t in the best of moods at the time.
There was no point going back into Red to talk to him now: after eight years, many of them spent out of his head, there was little chance he was going to remember anything new. All I could do was memorise what I had, and try to replicate his entry.
I remembered him being very insistent on one thing: if you’re going to try to break in, do it during the day. Most of the Neighbourhoods are geared for twenty-four-hour living, though activity does thin out a lot at night. It’s only places like Red that go full on all the time. But Stable, Snedd had said, shuts tight at 11.00 p.m. That had been his mistake. He’d broken in at night, because that’s what you generally do, to find himself the only moving person.
Apart from the Stable police, that is. That’s why he’d been caught, and that’s why he was a living time-bomb. He’d been lucky, too. By chance he’d been caught in a built-up area: had it been possible, the police would simply have shot him on sight.
By the time I was near my mono stop the walls of the carriage looked like an explosion in a paint factory as they strove to meet the challenge of evoking my mood. In most Neighbourhoods I have a contact, I have an angle, I have some way of protecting myself, of keeping this just a dangerous game. In the Centre I have Zenda. In Red I have Ji. In Natsci I have a guy called Brian Diode IV, who can break the security code of just about any computer in The City, given the time and enough pizza. In Brandfield I know a girl called Shelby who has a two-person heliporter, which has saved my life more than once.
And so on, and so on. In Stable I had nothing. Blending in was not going to be easy, always assuming I could gain entry in the first place, and if I didn’t, I was going to die.
Also, what the hell was going on in the Centre? I’ve known Zenda a long time, and I’d never seen her looking the way she had tonight. A little paranoia was natural in a Neighbourhood where absolutely everybody was trying to clamber over the top of everybody else, but she hadn’t been looking paranoid. She’d looked like something was worrying her, but she wasn’t sure what it was. I found that very worrying.
Also, who the hell were we dealing with? Any gang who could not only steal an important Actioneer but then sneak him into a forbidden Neighbourhood and keep him there undetected was a group of serious over-achievers. If they found out I was looking for them then the Stable police were going to be the least of my problems, and I wouldn’t have Ji or even Snedd around to help.
How do I get myself into these positions? Why do I do this job? Why do I still need this safety net, this thing to be? Isn’t it time to say goodbye now?
There was a quiet pinging sound, and I looked up to see that the walls were fading to a uniform black. I’d broken the carriage’s mood detector.
Bugger this, I thought. I had to wait till tomorrow anyway. I was going to take a break. I was going to find my cat.
I stayed on the mono to the far side of Colour, and then got off at the transfer portal. I had to go through another Neighbourhood to get where I was going, which meant buying another ticket. An attendant inspected me at the gate, checked that I was wearing quiet shoes, and nodded. I went over to the ticket office and pointed on the map at where I wanted to go. The man behind the counter nodded, and held up three fingers. I handed him three credits as quietly as I could, and he passed me a ticket. Then I tiptoed over to the platform and waited.
The next Neighbourhood along from Colour is Sound, so named because they don’t allow any. When the mono arrived it pulled up with barely a whisper, and the doors opened silently. I stepped into the carriage and sat carefully down on the padded seat. My journey wasn’t going to take that long: Sound isn’t very big, thank Christ. It gives me the creeps.
The carriage was empty. The Sounders have one hour every evening where they’re allowed to go into a small room and shout their heads off, and I was bang in the middle of that hour. I still couldn’t make any noise though, as the carriages have microphones all over the place. If you make any noise a silent alarm goes off somewhere and they come and throw you silently off the mono, and you have to walk silently down the silent streets instead, which is even worse.
So I sat and thought, trying to calm my mood and also to remember as much as possible of what Snedd had told me about Stable.
There wasn’t much. The Neighbourhood had been forbidden right from the start. When The City reorganisation had started to take place, Stable had simply built a wall all around itself, shut out the sky, severed all connections with the outside world and pretended it didn’t exist. The first generation knew it did, of course, but they were forbidden to tell their children. They were happy not to: the first generation stayed in Stable because they liked it that way.
They were all long dead now, and the sixth and seventh generations had no idea the outside world existed. As far as they knew, the whole planet apart from the area they lived in had been destroyed in a nuclear war. They could walk up to the walls and see through windows and sure enough, outside was just a barren red plain blown with radioactive sand. The windows were in fact vidiscreens maintained by the authorities whose job it was to keep things going on the way they were.
The very last thing those authorities want is for anyone to make it in from the outside: it would blow the whole thing and trash hundreds of years of desired deception. Desired, because I’m not talking about repression here. The Stablents aren’t kept in ignorance against their will. It’s all they know, and it’s all they want to know.
A couple got on the mono and tried to engage me in conversation, but as my signing isn’t too hot it was a rather stilted dose of social interaction. They’d clearly been shouting, and looked flushed and excited, obviously keen to get home and make mad, passionate, silent love. After a while they left me to my own silent devices, though they did both keep pointing at my shirt, giving me the thumbs up and smiling broadly. I couldn’t work out what they meant.
At the portal exit I stood still for a moment, gearing myself up, flexing my weirdness-resilience muscles. Sound is a weird Neighbourhood, but where I was going now was far weirder. I was going into the Cat Neighbourhood.
A long time ago, some eccentric who’d gained control of a largely disused Neighbourhood decided to leave it to the cats. The place was a complete mess, falling down and strewn with rubbish and debris. He forced the few remaining people out, built a wall round it and then died, making it irrevocably clear in his will that no one was to live there henceforth except cats.
Ho ho, thought everyone, what a nut. We’ll leave it a couple of years, and then move in. A cat Neighbourhood, ha ha.
And then the cats started to arrive. From all over The City, one by one at first, and then in their droves, the cats appeared. Cats who didn’t have owners, or had cruel ones, cats who weren’t properly looked after, or just wanted a change, cats in their hundreds, and then thousands and then hundreds of thousands, moved into the Neighbourhood.
Interesting, everybody thought.
After a while a few people decided to visit the Neighbourhood, and they discovered two things. Firstly, if you don’t love cats, they won’t let you in. They simply will not let you in. Secondly, that there was something very weird going on. The rubbish and debris had disappeared. The buildings had been cleaned. The grass in the parks was cut. The whole Neighbourhood was absolutely and immaculately clean.
Interesting, everybody thought, slightly uneasily.
The lights work. The plumbing works. People who go into the Neighbourhood to visit their cats sleep in rooms that are as clean as if room service has just that minute left. Each block has a small store on one corner, and there is food in that store, and it’s always fresh. A cat sits on the counter and watches you. You go in, choose what you need, and leave.
Nobody knows how they do this. There are no humans living in the Neighbourhood, absolutely none. I know, I’ve looked. There are just a hell of a lot of cats. Some live there all year round, some just for a few months. They chase things, roll around in the sun, sleep on top of things and underneath things and generally have a fantastic time. And the lights work, and the plumbing works, and the place is immaculately clean.
I walked down the steps from the mono portal and towards the main gate. A huge iron affair, it opens eerily as you approach, and then shuts silently after you. On the other side lies the Path, a wide cobbled street that leads into the heart of the Neighbourhood. The Path has streetlights all along it, old-fashioned lantern types that spread pools of yellow light along the way.
Cat Neighbourhood is a perfectly peaceful place, particularly at night, and I was in no hurry as I walked slowly between the tall old buildings. All around everything was quiet, everything was calm, like a living snapshot from a time long past. For a while the street was deserted, and then in the distance I saw a pale cat walking casually towards me. We drew closer and closer, and when we were a few yards apart the cat sat down, and then rolled over to have his stomach rubbed.
‘Hello, Spangle,’ I said, sitting down to give him a serious tickling. ‘How did you know? How do you guys always know?’
Next morning I was on the mono at 7.00 a.m., hotwired on coffee and feeling tired but alert. I was carrying my gun, a few tricks of the trade and nothing else.
We’d got back to the apartment around midnight, and Spangle had a brilliant time poking around the upturned furniture and bits and pieces while I sorted through my messages. Most were from the contacts I’d phoned that morning, all saying they hadn’t heard anything. There was also a photo of most of someone’s brain, transfaxed by Ji and Snedd, doubtless stoned out of their minds. Then with the aid of a lot of coffee I’d worked through the notes I had on Stable, trying not so much to memorise it as assimilate it, make it a part of me. I got to bed about three o’clock.
I made it to the far side of Red at nine-thirty, and clambered gratefully off the mono. There’d been six fatalities during the Red section of the journey, and the prostitutes had been doing heavy trade in a variety of far from straightforward positions. One of their pimps started to give me a pretty hard time for no very good reason, but I showed him my gun, which has Ji’s mark on it. That did the trick, so much so that he offered me a freebie instead. Which I declined, I’ll have you know.
The far portal in Red is always deserted: the next Neighbourhood is empty, and there’s no reason for anyone to get off there. I ran a quick mental check, making sure there was nothing I’d forgotten, and then climbed over the barricade.
When I poked my head out the other side, I saw that the sun was shining steadily and that the day was going to be rather nice. Not that the Stablents would ever know that, of course: all they’d ever see was the everlasting swirl of fake radioactive dust. I stepped out onto the metal balcony and stared across the Neighbourhood at the wall I was going to have to get past.
The wall round Stable is very, very high. Between it and me was a network of metal walkways and bridges which interconnected clusters of metal buildings. The whole of the bottom of this narrow Neighbourhood is filled with water, and today it was sluggishly stirring in the light breeze. A long time ago Royle Neighbourhood was very popular, a rather bijou town-on-water affair. Unfortunately Red, Stable and Fnaph Neighbourhoods all started pumping their waste into the water via pipes in their Neighbourhood walls, and it wasn’t long before the area was uninhabitable and abandoned. One thing I was going to be very careful to do in the next hour was to not fall in the water.
Like Hu, the abandoned buildings in Royle are empty husks, and I walked carefully to avoid making a clang which would echo round the town. If you step too heavily in Royle it sets off a vibration which travels all the way round the Neighbourhood, getting more and more amplified till by the time it gets back it can plang you forty feet into the air. As I negotiated my way across the rusting walkways, heading for the Main Square, I peered at the white wall in the distance, gearing myself up, trying hard to think like a Stablent.
By the time I reached the Square, which is the biggest open area in the Neighbourhood, I was mentally exhausted and beginning to think I’d find it easier passing myself off as an Fnaphette. They believe that each man has a soul shaped like a frisbee and spend their whole lives trying to throw themselves as high as possible, trying to get to heaven. I stopped for a cigarette.
It must have been quite a feat of engineering for its time, Royle: the Square, which is about a quarter of a mile to a side, is made entirely out of one sheet of steel. I’d been there once before, a few years ago, just to see what it was like. It hadn’t changed much, and was better preserved than the bridges and walkways.
What I like to do in empty Neighbourhoods is half close my eyes and try to imagine what they were like when they were still alive. As I sat I tried to re-enter a time when thousands of people walked across the Square every day, when the wealthy and cultured had flocked to the metal opera house down the other end, when the metal cafeés and shops along the sides had thronged with chattering life, when the Neighbourhood had been one taut sculpture of gleaming steel poised above clear water. It must have been pretty flash, I think, and now it was just a rather strange and alien scrapyard teetering above a sewage tank.
As I sat there on the warm metal, two of my senses suddenly sent up messages at once. My hand registered the faintest of vibrations, and my eyes discerned some minute movement down the far end of the Square. I couldn’t make out more than that through the gleam of the sun off steel, but the message was clear: someone else was sightseeing this morning. I stood up and peered that way again, shielding my eyes, but was still unable to see anything. It could just have been some vagrant from Red: Royle is occasionally used as a hide-out by those who’ve run foul of someone like Ji. That was the most probable explanation. There was no reason for me to feel a little odd, as if some nerve had been touched. Probably just a vagrant. Either way it was time to be going.
Within another fifteen minutes I was about two hundred yards away from the massive wall that penned in the half-million inhabitants of Stable, and began to choose my route amongst the interconnecting bridges more carefully, heading towards the area Snedd had told me about eight years ago. After a few moments I spotted the distinctive building he had mentioned and headed for it, taking a few risks on shaky walkways but eventually getting there in one piece.
The building was unmistakable from Snedd’s description. It looked as though a borderline insane architect had bloodymindedly set out to create the most alarming building of all time out of gleaming metal, and had succeeded beyond his wildest dreams. Strange little towers and extrusions stuck out of it at disturbing angles, all of them different. Either the architect had lost his protractor before starting the job, or he’d deliberately broken it and stuck it back together wrongly.
Round the other side was a peculiar balcony and, first testing it with my hand, I braced myself carefully and leant over to peer at the base of the wall just above where it went down into the water. Still about fifty yards away, the area was rather confused, covered in many generations of bracing struts and twisted metal, and it took a while before I found what I was looking for.
Then I saw it: a small hole, about three feet above the waterline. Using it as a marker, I left the balcony and headed down the walkways that led in the right direction towards the wall.
One of the reasons that Ji and Snedd make such a terrifying couple is that they are not exactly the same. They’re both primarily extremely dangerous psychopaths, to be sure, but within that there are shades of difference that make them a complementary pair. Ji favours a head-on approach to everything, whereas Snedd will often think a little longer, and sometimes finds a way of slipping round the side. Ji will simply destroy anything that’s in his way, but Snedd might try asking it to move first. Snedd also has an ability to Find Things Out which is frankly extremely impressive even to me, and I spend my life doing it. The fact that he is still alive after eight years of one-year countdowns is testament to that: to the best of my knowledge no one else has ever managed to find a way round DNA expiration. Snedd had managed to get into Stable as a result of one of those little pieces of information, and I was relying on it still being true.
