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Authors: Yves Meynard
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Edge Nain, tall and thin, his hair an upswept brush, walks point. He carries little protection, unshakeably convinced his wits and faith will see them all through. Ras hangs back several paces as always, his soundsuit unzipped to display his scarred chest; his head is a gleaming copper sphere, and his augmented muscles advertise he needs no weapon to defend himself and his companions from ill-meaning fools. Kel strides between them, nearly as tall as Edge Nain but, unlike him, ill-proportioned, his extremities too big for his body. Yet his features are startlingly beautiful, an angelic doll’s face set on a too-big skull, long-lashed eyes the blue-green of seawater.
As they walk, the three dreamweavers pray. Their belief is not the sharp and acid belief of those who fear, it is not the dull and musty belief of those who used to fear but no longer care; it is the hard and cold belief of those who
know
.
This is Ras’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, make me a success at the performance, let me be noticed picked up contracted sold traded REMEMBERED
.
This is Edge Nain’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, let it all go well; all I ask is for us not to go to pieces, even if we don’t make it, let us accept it in peace
.
This is Kel’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, I want to meet a girl, a good girl, a hot one, but a true one, with a heart of flesh not gold, oh please, Sweet Jesu.
. . .
Set down in the Dust Belt of the North American plains, Yerusalom has fertilized the barren land with abstractions: money, hope, ambition, greed. Twenty-five years after taking root in Earth’s soil, it is surrounded with the pulsing life that is commerce. Streams of vehicles flow in and out of the city, carrying raw materials and finished goods, foodstuffs and drugs, liquid oxygen and dried seahorses, personal weapons and one-time encryption pads. Streams of data enter and leave, borne along superconducting wires, some even consigned to unbound photons blaring through the atmosphere, for anyone to intercept—if they dare.
The shadow and the light of Yerusalom have reached throughout the commercial sphere of Earth. Its presence has pulled its host nation out of a downward spiral, and by contagion the rest of the world has also benefited. Hard to say how many tens of millions owe their livelihood, if not their very life, to the shining alien city that endlessly consumes all that is poured into its brazen mouth. How could one then balk at a few hundreds of thousands dead of mysterious new diseases, the odd backward nation’s political collapse from economic pressures too intense to bear? Change, after all, always hurts. Adapt or die; it’s an old, old story.
The self-built edifices that border Faro Street come in every shape; their only constant is hugeness. Here a steep five-sided pyramid, three hundred metres high; there an arboreal structure rising from a central stem, recursively fanning out until a single two-metre wide room stretches to ten metres in height. A smoothly swollen dome, looking frozen in the act of erupting from the ground, squats across the street from a disturbingly not-quite-organic fortress that drips angular turrets, like an inverted Gaudi cathedral rendered at low resolution. All of the buildings shine with their own light, in great sheens of fluorescent colours. Windows open into their facades like geometric bits of the interstellar void. Above their doors, small digits flicker in red, indicating the one-time entrance fee, the visiting fee, the long-term residence fee. . . . In Yerusalom everything has a price—not even the air you breathe is free. Though at least it is unmetered: since it would not have been cost-effective to implant oxygen-usage monitors in every citizen, a flat breathing-tax is incorporated into the baseline living fee. Panting and gasping come at no extra charge.
In defiance of rational use of land space, a vast network of irregular alleyways, sunk in the shadows cast by secondary
Edge Nain, tall and thin, his hair an upswept brush, walks point. He carries little protection, unshakeably convinced his wits and faith will see them all through. Ras hangs back several paces as always, his soundsuit unzipped to display his scarred chest; his head is a gleaming copper sphere, and his augmented muscles advertise he needs no weapon to defend himself and his companions from ill-meaning fools. Kel strides between them, nearly as tall as Edge Nain but, unlike him, ill-proportioned, his extremities too big for his body. Yet his features are startlingly beautiful, an angelic doll’s face set on a too-big skull, long-lashed eyes the blue-green of seawater.
As they walk, the three dreamweavers pray. Their belief is not the sharp and acid belief of those who fear, it is not the dull and musty belief of those who used to fear but no longer care; it is the hard and cold belief of those who
know
.
This is Ras’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, make me a success at the performance, let me be noticed picked up contracted sold traded REMEMBERED
.
This is Edge Nain’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, let it all go well; all I ask is for us not to go to pieces, even if we don’t make it, let us accept it in peace
.
This is Kel’s prayer:
Sweet Jesu, I want to meet a girl, a good girl, a hot one, but a true one, with a heart of flesh not gold, oh please, Sweet Jesu.
. . .
Set down in the Dust Belt of the North American plains, Yerusalom has fertilized the barren land with abstractions: money, hope, ambition, greed. Twenty-five years after taking root in Earth’s soil, it is surrounded with the pulsing life that is commerce. Streams of vehicles flow in and out of the city, carrying raw materials and finished goods, foodstuffs and drugs, liquid oxygen and dried seahorses, personal weapons and one-time encryption pads. Streams of data enter and leave, borne along superconducting wires, some even consigned to unbound photons blaring through the atmosphere, for anyone to intercept—if they dare.
The shadow and the light of Yerusalom have reached throughout the commercial sphere of Earth. Its presence has pulled its host nation out of a downward spiral, and by contagion the rest of the world has also benefited. Hard to say how many tens of millions owe their livelihood, if not their very life, to the shining alien city that endlessly consumes all that is poured into its brazen mouth. How could one then balk at a few hundreds of thousands dead of mysterious new diseases, the odd backward nation’s political collapse from economic pressures too intense to bear? Change, after all, always hurts. Adapt or die; it’s an old, old story.
The self-built edifices that border Faro Street come in every shape; their only constant is hugeness. Here a steep five-sided pyramid, three hundred metres high; there an arboreal structure rising from a central stem, recursively fanning out until a single two-metre wide room stretches to ten metres in height. A smoothly swollen dome, looking frozen in the act of erupting from the ground, squats across the street from a disturbingly not-quite-organic fortress that drips angular turrets, like an inverted Gaudi cathedral rendered at low resolution. All of the buildings shine with their own light, in great sheens of fluorescent colours. Windows open into their facades like geometric bits of the interstellar void. Above their doors, small digits flicker in red, indicating the one-time entrance fee, the visiting fee, the long-term residence fee. . . . In Yerusalom everything has a price—not even the air you breathe is free. Though at least it is unmetered: since it would not have been cost-effective to implant oxygen-usage monitors in every citizen, a flat breathing-tax is incorporated into the baseline living fee. Panting and gasping come at no extra charge.
In defiance of rational use of land space, a vast network of irregular alleyways, sunk in the shadows cast by secondary
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