Author: Morris Hinkle

Morris Hinkle

“How often does it happen, lad? You’ll never see another in your lifetime.”

The driver of the cart had not stopped talking since he’d found the boy, hot and alone, on the side of the road. The boy had the impression that he had never actually started talking, that he had been born with words tumbling out of his mouth and evaporating into the desert air.

“Once in a lifetime, that’s what this is. Lucky to see it. Lucky to live it. And what a business opportunity! Lucky, lucky. Born at the right time, you and me.”

The boy tucked his head over his knees and watched the road appear behind them in lurches. It was a new road, only as old as the city itself, but the sand had already been pressed darker than the dunes shifting all around them.

He had a lot of time to study the road. They moved when the cart before them did. They stopped when the cart before them stopped. The sun beat down and made the ground shimmer and crack.

It was cool enough under the cart’s canopy. The driver sat with his feet up, ankles crossed over his front bar. He busied himself eating a fresh fruit, his hand held under his scarf to protect the intimacy of his lips. The boy could hear him slurping at the liquid spilling from the ripe flesh. A spill of words. A slurp of nectar. Repeated again and again.

“You can see the shape of it now, clear as day.” Slurp. “Damn, it’s a young one! I’ve never seen a city this young before.” Slurp. “What a face. Don’t you want to look?”

The boy tucked his marked hand between his knees and watched the road.

It was sunset by the time they drew close to the city. Guards grew from dots of holy red to fully articulated figures, armed and serious. Flashes of orange sparked as the papers they examined caught and reflected the dying sun.

“It’s business approval for me,” the driver told the boy. “Paid a pretty penny to make sure these were all in order. No, we won’t have any trouble getting through with these.” His voice was pink and misty with confidence. “Well, I won’t at least. Better get yours out, son.” He spent the next few moments shuffling, rearranging, checking. His papers pulled off each other with a drier version of the noise his mouth had made over the fruit.

“Can’t get into a city as fresh as this one without good papers.” Strp. “They don’t let in just anyone, you know!” Lick, strp. Then, as they got closer to the guards and the boy still did not move—“You do have papers, don’t you?”

The guards took their time checking over the driver’s stack. “Business papers are often forged,” they explained. “Anything to get into the city.” The scavenging animals circled on the hot drafts overhead.

The driver pulled up his scarf so they could check his likeness against the one he carried. “Sorry, so sorry for the impropriety. You understand.”

“Yes, yes. A city as young as this . . . .”

“What about you, lad?” The guard that asked leaned down to do it. His voice was kind, if tired. He wore an anatomical heart pendant around his neck. There was a black mark on the back of his left hand.

“I picked him up on the roadside,” the driver was quick to say. “I don’t know him.”

The boy revealed his face, offering up a single paper. The guard frowned at the lonely sheet, confused. Then he let out a little gasp. He showed it to the other guard, who began to stare at the boy.

The boy hunched further over his knees.

“It is an honor,” the guard with the pendant said as he handed back the paper. He did not hide the way he stared. The boy pulled his cloth up quickly, trying not to meet the guard’s eyes. “May I be the first to welcome you to this great city.”

“Thank you,” the second guard said, “to you and your family.” The boy could hear it in his voice: sorry, so sorry for the impropriety. The back of his left hand was unmarked.

“What’s this?” the driver asked. “What’s this?” But no one was paying attention to him anymore.

The boy had never been in a city before. Or, rather, he had never been in a city that still lived. He’d had the privilege of living in bones, in a place where the nutrients of a dying city had soaked into the eternal desert and created a rare oasis. He had looked up and seen stars framed in ribs, not endless walls of flesh. His feet had touched grass and sand, not tile and bone. He’d worried about burning his own skin and had never considered the impact of the sun on another.

As a child, he had been fascinated by the idea of the living cities. In school they had been presented as the height of civilization—of technology, of magic, of societal sacrifice. They were what made it possible for humanity to exist.

“Propaganda,” his father told him. “To make people feel better about having to live in those places.” His parents had been wealthy—not so wealthy that they had lived in the green, but wealthy enough that he had grown up knowing what green was, rather than only red and white and whatever color the sand took as the sun flashed against it and blinded you.

“It’s gauche,” his mother would agree. “Living caged in flesh. Can you imagine it?”

“The damn government is all over you in those places. You can’t do this, you have to do that. Regulations, regulations, regulations. No, trust me. You’re lucky to see the sky.”

Still, he had been curious. He and his brother had poured over illustrated books page by page, late into the night, their marked hands crossing over each other as they shared the joy of discovering what else might exist outside of their comfortable home. Under cover of darkness, they had promised each other that, one day, they would see those cities in person.

He was finally here. The boy pulled his hood further over his eyes and fought the urge to vomit.

“Where do you want to go?” They were the first words the driver had spoken since the checkpoint. “Really, it’s no problem. I’m happy to take you wherever you want. The Heart, I’m sure. I’d have to hitch the beasts, but if anyone has a right to skip the lines, it would be—”

“Where are you going?” the boy interrupted.

“I was headed to market. But I’m not sure that you’d . . . . I mean, it’s not very . . . .” The driver trailed off.

There had been markets in the book, filled with still people that shone with gloss as the pages turned. The idea of it had always bored him. What was exciting about a market? There were technological marvels to behold; there were sutures and ribs that divided and returned and the extraction of bones to make homes. Why would he want to look at people when he could look at the way they had learned to take a body and turn it into infrastructure?

Bile rose in his throat. He had to choke it down before he could respond. “I think,” he said, almost as if he were in a dream, “that the market would be best.”

The market smelled like iron.

“You sure you don’t want to go to the Heart?” the driver asked. Again.

“Thank you,” the boy told him, “for the ride.” He held out a small coin.

The driver pulled away, slipping his hands into his pockets and pulling them behind his back. “Oh, no,” he explained. “I really can’t accept that. It wasn’t any trouble.”

As children, the boy and his brother had often played this game. “Oh, no, it was an honor.” “No, the honor was mine,” they would trade, one with hands in pockets behind his back, one with a coin that must be placed in those pockets. It was a dance they mimicked from court proceedings and the dinners their father hosted and attended, one they unconsciously rehearsed so they could take part in it when it mattered.

It mattered now. The boy did not take part. He placed the token on the seat of the cart, turned, and walked away.

There were many, many people in the market. The boy was sure there would be many, many more once the long line out in the desert was sorted through, once permanent vendors found and fought for and won their favorite spots and the loyalty of their customers, once the market visas for visiting shops were allotted. The ministers had been happy to talk about the vibrant commerce of a city, and he had been happy to listen. It was the only part he could follow. It was the only thing that still made sense.

Still, it was one thing to hear a minister say there would be a market and another thing to watch the vendors set up their stalls. The air was thick and strangely wet. Voices caught rather than carried as if even they weren’t sure of their direction in this new city.

An argument caught his ear. He turned towards it without thinking, drawn by the way the sharp conversation cut through the air.

“—my last city,” the man was saying. He looked glum. A drill hung limply in his hand, looking heavier than it had any right to be. “No one complained about it there.”

A small woman stood before him. It was her fury that hung heavy on his drill. “This one is young.” She enunciated every word as if she were speaking to a child. “You’ll hinder his growth. You’ll hurt him.”

“It’s just a shell. Meat and bones. It’s not like it’s alive.”

The small woman snatched the drill from his hands. “I’ll see to it that you lose your license for that.”

“Try it. Take it up in the Heart itself if you have the money or the balls. Better yet, why don’t you—”

A crowd began to gather. The boy moved on.

If the boy had looked up, he would have seen sinew, and muscle, and the honored stitchwork that was needed to hold these things together. He would have seen layers upon layers of homes, then businesses, then homes again, as neighborhoods took shape within the framework of the city’s body. He would have seen the engineers hanging from scaffolding, could have watched them rework the bone and blood until they sustained not only the city body but the city occupants as well.

He did not look up. It was enough—almost too much—to smell the iron in the air, and to feel the way the ground gave way slightly under his feet.

Stepping directly on the city was supposed to be a crime. There were many things that were supposed to be crimes. He had them listed in a small book in his breast pocket, bound in red.

The half-built market only had a small tile path. It was clear that it was meant to act as a temporary footpath until they could build the beautiful, lasting streets that would come. It was also clear that whoever had thought a path a few tiles wide would suffice had never been to a market. Men, burdened and blinded by stacks of product, commandeered the whole track or forwent it completely. Others crisscrossed the open spaces as they built stalls and dismantled carts, porting supplies and instructions to the others who built stalls and dismantled carts. Every time the boy was forced to step off the path onto the soft, forgiving surface of the city itself, he felt as if he might cry.

He caught, suddenly, the smell of meat pies in the thick of the iron and wet. In this overwhelming newness, the familiar scent made him dizzy with nostalgia. He found the shop quickly. It was the only one with smoke churning from its chimney. That was against the rules, too. No chimneys except for the holy kilns. The priests were supposed to enforce this strictly, to maintain air quality and protect the precious lungs. Two priests were leaving the shop, chatting happily as they snacked on fresh pies.

He ducked under the cloth to find a warm space overfull with the smell of pies and the words falling from the shopkeeper’s mouth. She gave a quick nod to the boy, but her attention was on a man cracking open boxes and unloading the contents in the corner. He stood pressed against the wall, trying to find space for leverage in all the clutter.

“—expect me to respect a clean-handed inspector. There are only two types of people who have clean hands. The rich and the ones who think they should be rich. Then again, there are only two types who enter the pool. How many, kid?”

The boy held up two fingers.

“The devout and the desperate.” She shook her head as she popped two steaming pies into a bag. Her large heart pendant swung in time with her movements. “This one is devout. You can tell his family wasn’t starved, can’t you?”

The man unloading boxes tried to wave her words away, his face pinched.

“What? Am I wrong? I don’t know what they were thinking, choosing a kid with this much fat.” She handed the pies to the boy. “Two, huh? Bought one for a lucky girl?”

The boy paid for the pies and ducked out of the door.

His father used to buy them pies. His mother never did. “Not that greasy food again,” she’d complain when he brought them home. “It’s bad for the children.”

“It’s a good thing I bought these all for myself, then,” his father would rib. He would split the pie bag at its seams, spreading it out like a tablecloth. The boys would sit, giggling, giddy with expectation, as they watched him lay the pies out like fine dining. He always made such a show of arranging them as if it were a table for one. “Since no one else wants any.”

Their mother would come to the table, taking a pie from the pile with a huff and look of disdain and then she would proceed to eat more than anybody else. Those were the best days, pie days. They could even get his mother to laugh, sometimes.

His father also used to buy them gifts. Every year when the tax breaks went into effect and the pool bonuses came, so too came a pile of presents for the boy and his brother. They had loved that part of the year.

His mother had not. “They’re not one of your investments!” he’d heard her shout once. He’d been carefully supervising his brother as he played with the brand new horse their father had bought them. It was made out of beautifully painted wood and every joint could be moved independently.

“You two have made me good money this year,” he’d told them, laughing, as they unwrapped the gift. They would tell that to the other boys in school when they bragged about their new toys. We make our father good money. You should enter the pool. The chances of being chosen are so slight, and the tax breaks so great. Things their father had said around them. Things they repeated to each other as they lay on their stomachs and stared at the wonderful images of those civilized, living cities.

The new path the engineers had laid dumped him onto what seemed to be a main street, so he took that. Then he found a small set of stairs that led up and so up he went, first to a platform, then to another, until he was high enough to look down and see the busy mass that was the blossoming market. He clutched the warm bag in his hands. He imagined the grease on his tongue, in his stomach. He had to close his eyes and breathe for a long time before he could continue to climb.

The air around him shuddered noticeably here. If he looked to his left he could have peered through the ribs to see the lungs, working to pump oxygen to the living flesh that kept the ever burning sun at bay. If he looked to the right, he would see that flesh at work, close enough to touch.

He looked at his feet. The stairs were brown tile. The platforms were slightly lighter brown tile. He continued to climb.

He heard the next platform before he saw it. First it was a hum of voices, trickling down the tile steps. Then it became a cascade, the structure shaking with the force of hundreds of feet moving at once.

The steps widened, spilling the boy out onto a platform filled with ornate tiles organized into intricate patterns. He stood in the entranceway, frozen by the sudden pour of noise and population. Throngs of city dwellers, some still in their desert cloaks, most in city clothes more suited to the dark and damp, milled about with a restless intention.

“—long to install the lifts,” he heard a man complain as he passed by. “I know it’s good to thank him, but these damn stairs—”

An energetic child bounced along the path, vibrant offerings in his marked hands. The child was right about the age where he could be chosen to be a city himself. His mother held the back of his shirt tight, knuckles white. The look in her eyes was so protective, so relieved, that the boy turned away.

Dark red robes were common here, so close to the Heart. This was the realm of the venerated engineers and architects who made a body into a city, a city into a home. A group of them passed so close to the boy he could smell the incense clinging to their robes.

“—from the sternum,” one finished.

“I’m worried about integrity,” said another. “The regrowth—”

The intricacies of the city structure were one of the things he had not asked the ministers. They had been hesitant to tell him. He had been hesitant to ask.

“—split that one into two, and then take—” he heard.

“—too hard, I’ve gone through three saws—” he heard.

“—peel the top layer off, and then get to scraping—” he heard.

He stopped listening. He pressed his veil to his face and kept his eyes on the way the tiles seemed to float in space.

A woman found him there, on the edges of the main stairwell, his hand pressed to his mouth, his eyes pressed to the tiles. “Are you alright?”

He shook his head slightly.

“Oh, darling.” She crouched until she came into his view. “Are you lost?”

He shook his head again.

“Ah.” She looked around at where they were. “First time in a living city?”

The boy nodded.

“Poor thing. I was a migrant, too. I remember how overwhelming it can be.” She rubbed his back soothingly. For a moment, she reminded him of his mother. “It helps if you stop thinking of it as a person.”

The boy thanked her and kept climbing.

It was night by the time he found the door leading outside.

It was only work crews up this far. He climbed into a service elevator with some men wearing harnesses and there it was—the pathway to the sky.

He stood and watched the birds drifting over the never-ending desert for a long time. It was never truly dark in the desert, the sand catching onto the light and sending it back into the air like a mist. Far, far away, he could see what looked like a human kneeling on the sand. There would be another if he turned to his right, and another to his left. And if he turned around, he would see the face of this city.

The harnessed crews were already hard at work on the shoulder in front of him, repairing cloth torn by the harsh winds. The city wore beautiful clothes. They were beautiful because he deserved the best, the ministers had told him. They were thick and repaired nightly to protect him from the next day’s sun. The only places that were not covered were his marked hand and his face.

Why would he cover his face? the ministers had told him. He’s family to everyone.

The boy turned. Then he sat down on the shoulder, looking up at the bare profile. The city’s eyes were shut, making him look as if he were asleep. The boy knew that they were sewn that way because the eyeballs had been liquified, that this was done to prevent them from boiling over in the heat. He knew that the stitches were made large as a part of tradition. The ministers had explained it to him in the months after they had chosen the new city. They had told him that these were painless procedures, because the first thing the engineers did was remove the part of his brain that allowed him to feel.

The bareness of the face revealed a small scar—a scar that had once been small, that was now rendered massive, a scar that had once felt personal but now seemed far too public—on the city’s chin. The boy had given him that scar. He had bled. It had hurt him enough to make him cry. It was about the same size as some of the stitches.

Their mother had chided him when she found them, crouched together, blood on their hands as they tried desperately to push back in what had already come out. “You’re the older brother,” she told him. “You need to protect him.”

But his father had only laughed. “Brothers get rough,” he said. “It’s no good to coddle them. This is how family is.”

“Violent?” his mother had snapped.

“Complicated.” Then he’d winked at the boy. “But you’d better be careful. He might just be bigger than you one day.”

The city before him would outlive the boy. Generations would be born within it. They would die in it. They would fall in love, and get married, and build houses and lives in it. This city would teem with life for hundreds of years. His brother would teem with life.

Looking at that familiar smile, at the stitched together eyes, the boy wondered if it was possible for his brother to be alive at all.

He took off his veil. He ripped the pie bag along the seams and laid it out like a tablecloth. He placed both pies on a pile in front of him.

“Since no one else wants any,” he told the city.

And the boy began to cry.