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

around and out into the street—he walked quickly, keeping his head down. By the factory’s front gate stood a pale giant of a man, banging a rod arrhythmically on the cobbles, marking the last trickle of grey workers into the yard.
    “In or out? Hey, you—come on, in or out?”
    Arjun pointed, questioningly, at himself, and the huge foreman repeated: “In or out?”
    Arjun demurred, backed away. “No, I …” The foreman locked the gate in his face.
    Machines began booming. Someone was shouting as Arjun walked away, briskly, soon breaking into a run.
    B ut running wasn’t a good idea—not in this Age. Men stood smoking on every corner, and any of them might have been policemen. Suspicious faces watched from the windows. An omnibus clattered by, pulled slowly by four looming bony horses, a rustingcage packed with pale men. Workers? Prisoners? It didn’t matter. Their grey eyes tracked him enviously as he ran. Running screamed:
I am an alien here. A ghost. I am lost.
Arjun forced himself to slow down, walked with his hands in his pockets.
    He
was
lost. He didn’t understand the street signs. Numbers, letters, code repeated. He walked for a while down 1121 Street, past empty concrete sheds, past the thrusting black towers of the Patagan Sewer & Piping Plant Seventeen, past crumbling tenements, past a patch of yellow grassland that smelled of sewage. The numbers of the cross streets climbed and fell. Which way was he headed? The plan of the city seemed willfully confused, maliciously hidden from him. Where was Carnyx Street?
    It was an unmusical city, or an unmusical
time
in the city. The clang and crash of the factories set its rhythm. The shift whistles and bells were its only music. Arjun passed no theaters, no music-halls, no churches, no choirs. He found this deeply upsetting, deeply disorienting, as if he was blind or deaf; as if he was missing a sense that he had no name for, and had forgotten how to use.
    The streets emptied and filled again. Grey mobs of men stood silently by factory gates. Little groups of women scuttled through the shadows, and their harsh laughter echoed off high fences. Shrill children played in an empty lot, among the rusting wheel-less skeletons of junked omnibuses.
    Was it safe to ask directions?
    Probably not. It wasn’t safe to be an alien here.
    Three young men in smart black coats strutted down the street, sharing some hilarious joke, which the tallest was embellishing with closed-fist gestures of violence. Arjun slipped into an alley and pressed himself against the wall. He stared at his feet and listened to them go by.
    His shoes were caked with yellow sulphurous mud. His trousers were torn and blotched. Both hands were bloodied, and his bandages unspooled into dirty rags. His shirt was a disgrace. He ran his hand unthinkingly through his hair—it was wild enough, and now it was bloody, too. An alien? He laughed. Nothing so grand. He looked like a mad tramp. He looked like an escaped psychopath. He couldn’t ask for help looking like this.
    A poster on the alley wall showed a picture of the Mountain, jetblack, limned with lurid red. vigilance, it said underneath, and below that, in smaller text,
Join the Civic League.
The art had the bitter, strained quality of war propaganda everywhere.
    What War were they waiting for? What enemy were they afraid of?
    A paranoid time.
    One of Arjun’s jacket’s pockets had torn on a fence somewhere, and he’d lost the bread and cheese he’d stolen. In the other pocket the knife still rested heavily.
    T wenty minutes later a young woman passed by the alley, holding her skirts and sprinting, running late. She was the first person Arjun had seen who was by herself.
    Well, it wasn’t the first shameful thing he’d done.
    She shrieked when he grabbed her and struggled as he muffled her mouth with his bandaged hand. He pulled her into the alley and she went silent at the sight of the knife.
    “Don’t make a sound,” he told her. His voice