The Waking Engine (2 page)

That was a sight that made Cooper’s gut twist. Could he hear crying? He looked to his acquaintance. “Where is here?” he asked again.

Asher’s eyelashes were the color of smoke, and the silence stretched until it became an answer of its own.

Cooper made it back down to the living room in a blur, where Sesstri explained matters more thoroughly. “Listen to me very carefully. This may sound complicated, but it’s not: the life you lived, in the world you called home, was just the first step. A short step. Less than a step. It’s the walk from your house to the barn, and what you think of as death is nothing more than the leap up into the saddle of your trusty pony. When you die there, you wake up, well, not here usually—but someplace else. In your flesh, in your clothes, older or younger than you remember being, but you, always you.”

Cooper nodded because it was all he could do.

“There are a thousand thousand worlds, each more unlike your home than the last. Where you end up, or how you get there, nobody really knows. You just do. And you go on. Dying and living, sleeping and waking, resting and walking. That’s how living works. It’s a surprise for most of us, at first. We think our first years of life are all we’ll ever see.” She paused, her thoughts turning inward. “We are wrong.”

Cooper said nothing. He was dead and he was going to live forever?

Sesstri considered him and drew a long breath, raked her fingernails through her morning-colored hair. “Life is a very, very, very long journey. Sometimes you go by boat, sometimes by horse. Sometimes you walk for what seems like forever, until you find a place to rest.”

“So . . .” Cooper drawled, deliberately obtuse because humor seemed the only way he could go on breathing. “I have a pony?”

Asher chuckled. Sesstri didn’t.

“There is no pony!” she snapped. “The pony was a mere device. In the country of my origin, we smother our idiots and mongoloids at birth. You are fortunate to have been born into a more forgiving culture.” Asher’s chuckle grew into laughter.

Sesstri rested her palms on her knees and made an obvious show of being patient. “Let me say this as plainly as possible. There are a nearly uncountable number of universes—universes; mind you, when we speak of ‘the worlds’ we speak of whole realities—most of which are populated to a greater or lesser extent with people. Universes with planets that are round, or flat, or toroid—and others with space that conforms to no geometry or cosmology you or I would recognize from home. On most of these worlds, people are born, and live, and die. When we die, we don’t cease to exist or turn into shimmering motes of ectoplasm or purple angels or anything else you may have been brought up to believe. We just . . . go on living. Someplace else.”

“People call it the ‘dance of lives,’ ” Asher interjected, miming a jig.

Sesstri cocked her head for a moment as if tucking away a fact, then widened her eyes to ask if Cooper followed her so far. He nodded, hungry for Sesstri to continue even though he had already swallowed a bellyful of follow-up questions. Toroid? Which was it, worlds or universes—or was that distinction itself subject to variation? She was a much better instructor than Asher, and Cooper’s only option was to learn.

“There’s little logic behind where we go, although a great many thinkers have spent a great deal of time failing to prove otherwise. I might have succeeded. We live and die, then wake somewhere new. We live on, die again, then wake once more. In a sense you’re right—it is a kind of prison sentence, and life will exhaust you at every opportunity. It’s a slow and painful way to travel, but that’s life: painful and slow. And very, very long.” When she finished, she looked at Cooper with a mixture of doubt and expectancy, waiting for the inevitable reaction of shock and confusion, but it did not come.

“Welcome to the Guiselaine!” Asher sang out, his arms spread wide. “The best worst district in the whole nameless sprawl.” He and Cooper stood atop a brick bridge that straddled a foaming brown canal. Foot traffic, rickshaws, and carts of every design pushed past them toward the warren of crooked alleys and side streets that comprised the Guiselaine, and Asher grabbed Cooper’s wrist, pulling them into the crush. Cooper resisted, but Asher dragged him along anyway; the man was strong. The crowd eddied around a small fountain square at the far side of the bridge before swarming into a tangle of shadowy lanes where the walls tilted overhead, hiding the sky behind half-tunnels of stone and wood and daub.

The two men waded through a river of dirty faces, citizens of a dozen flavors—the rich mixed with the poor mingled with the alien, all distracted by conversation or the challenge of a swarming market at noon. Asher steered through the crowd expertly, his gray face and white- crowned head breaking above the rabble like the prow of a ghost ship, fey and proud—a ship of bones, a ship of doves.

“The City Unspoken has many quarters, but for my money, the Guiselaine is the one to see,” Asher confided to Cooper as they ducked onto one of the broader thoroughfares. “A most deplorable gem of a borough.” He waved a gray hello to friendly faces Cooper was too distracted to make out. “All tangled streets and hidden treasures. Harmless fun during the day, quite another story after dark. Which is, of course, when I like it most.” Asher spread his hands in a mock- spooky gesture, and Cooper grinned in spite of himself. He took Asher’s hand and gripped it tightly as they darted through the busy world. Whatever had happened to him had dispossessed him wholly, and Cooper found his head full of odd whispers. The crowd didn’t seem to help.

They stopped to stare into the window of a shop that displayed an array of the strangest stemware Cooper had ever seen: scrimshawed goblets carved from human skulls, pale leather wineskins that bore the sewn-up eyes and mouths of human faces, and a ghastly masterpiece that dominated the display—a silver decanter set within the corpse of a toddler boy, plasticized by some grim process, whose split skull and abdomen cradled the silver vial while shining filigree slithered around its chubby limbs. It looked like some metal parasite had emerged to gorge itself upon the child, slipping silver tentacles around every spare feature of flesh. Looking at the decanter, Cooper felt detached from the horror, somehow, his head running a line of practical questions. How do you cleave a child so cleanly from crown to belly? How do you work silver so intricately, without burning the flesh or ruining the composition? How do you get a child to make such a beatific expression as you bisect the front of his face? There was no life here to sense, no sensitivity. Just art, artifice, and commerce.

Those were things he could understand, at least. He’d spent most of his life thus far as a consumer—why should life change, wherever it went? Wasn’t that the gist of Sesstri’s lecture?

“Come on, Cooper,” Asher complained, tugging at the newcomer’s wrist. “Bells, but you’re slow.”

A man with black skin—not brown, black—knelt over the body of a child, a boy, who stared at the sky with an uncomfortable intensity. ComeOnSabbiComeOn, the man said, except he didn’t. Cooper wasn’t close enough to hear and, in any event, the man hadn’t moved his lips. SabbiSabbiLookAtDaddy, Cooper heard again as they neared—the man felt terrified.

How do I know what that man feels? Cooper asked himself. But he did.

Cooper looked to Asher to see if he’d heard, too, but Asher appeared oblivious. Cooper looked to the black man as they passed him, but the man did not even see them, cupping his son’s cheeks in his carbon-dark skin. SabbiComeBackAround! DaddyNeedsYou!

The passersby did not hear, either. Cooper thought he would have known if they heard the man but ignored his suffering, because he saw that every day in New York. No, he’d heard words that hadn’t been spoken. Him, and only him.

“Asher,” Cooper began, beginning to freak out as they turned a corner into a ramshackle courtyard where a dusk- skinned woman in a tattered dress leaned against the wall by an alleyway, pressed by a rat-faced man with bulging eyes and shaky hands. Her hair was curled and coiled atop her head but was caked with dust—like a wig left out of its box for a decade or two.

Something stopped Cooper in his tracks. Asher looked back, impatient, but Cooper stared in horror at the woman and her accoster, distracted from his own thoughts.

She had a sad face painted brightly to obscure the truth, and she laughed like a schoolgirl every time the small man spoke, flashing a smile that never touched her eyes. He cupped a hand to her breast and she held it there, whispering encouragement. He drew a lazy line across her throat with one finger and dripped words into her ear. She licked her lips and pressed against him, but inside she was screaming. Cooper knew, because he could hear it.

NoNoPleaseNotAgain. He could hear it. Words that weren’t spoken. Fear.

NoNoNeverICan’tBreathe ICan’tBreatheKillMePleaseKillMe, KillMe- DeadAndMakeItStickThisTime, MakeItStickThisTimeICan’tBearToWakeUpAgain.

“Stop it!” Cooper yelled, dashing forward. “Stop! Asher, help, he’s going to kill her!”

Asher barked a laugh, and caught Cooper’s arm as he shot by. “Of course he is, Cooper.” He waved an apology to the woman and the ratfaced little man. “Apologies, do carry on.” They did.

Asher pulled Cooper close and growled, “Please don’t do that. You neither know our customs nor have the moral authority to intervene. And you make me look bad.”

“What is she?” Cooper asked, aghast, as the woman and her paramour withdrew into the gloom of the alley.

“She’s a bloodslut,” Asher said coldly, but his eyes were downcast. “A life-whore. A stupid girl who signed the wrong contract somewhere along the way, and now she’s stuck here. She can’t die, so she sells her body and life to any jack with two dirties to rub together. He ruts her, guts her, then fills her mouth with coins.”

“Wait, what?” Cooper’s brain couldn’t quite gear itself up for the question of death. That poor woman didn’t seem dead, merely exhausted. But her thoughts, if that’s what he had heard . . . her fears . . .

“She can’t die,” Asher said, pointing to a pair of figures picking each other up from the dirt. One kept her gaze low, the other leaned against the bricks trying to catch his breath. Both looked too thin, too worn. “Not properly, anyway.”

“That’s horrible.” Cooper was shivering. “Her job is to let dirty little men kill her for money?” He couldn’t keep the disgust from his voice— what pathetic creature could survive that way, let alone turn a profit? Then again, if she couldn’t die, he supposed she had no choice but to survive. If that were the case, maybe it was no wonder her brutalized thoughts scraped the inside of his head.

Asher nodded. “Kill her, and whatever else they want to do to her. For money. Why else? Hurry up.” Asher nearly dragged Cooper down the street as bells began to toll in the distance. Bells and bells and bells, a city of them.

But Cooper’s thoughts were back in the alley with the woman who looked more . . . used than should have been possible. Here that seemed to be normal. What other nightmares were normal, here, that should be awful? Was hearing the fears of strangers as inconsequential as screaming inside, screaming for peace? He’d heard her, heard her panic inside his head. What did that make him? Deathlessness aside, Cooper couldn’t figure out what unnerved him more: the contents of her head, or the fact that he’d been exposed to them.

A few moments later came a brain-piercing scream that trailed off wetly. No one on the street seemed to notice. Asher saw Cooper’s discomfort, flashed his winning corpse smile, and pinched Cooper’s arm. “Don’t worry, really. A few hours from now her body will jerk upright, skin whole if not new—she’ll spit out her wad and be open for business again.”

“Oh.” Cooper’s stomach convulsed and he nearly tossed his toast. “No wonder she was screaming.” He smelled fried bread and crispy fish from a hawker they passed, and swallowed hard.

Asher gave him a funny look. “It’s just a little death, Cooper.”

“So death means absolutely nothing.” His body felt numb.

Asher shook his head. “No, that’s not at all what I—”

“—All my life, all everyone’s life, we’re so scared of—what, a travelogue? Death is a game, just part of the economy, and my life means— meant—means nothing?” Cooper bit out the words accusingly, like the City Unspoken and its deathlessness were all Asher’s fault.

Asher put his hand on Cooper’s chest and pressed him into the brick wall of the lane. His force was controlled and guided, just this side of dangerous. “Don’t say that. Don’t say that; death is the worst thing that can happen, so don’t ever say that.” This, too, passersby ignored; these were a people inured to every kind of disturbance. Had any of them been New Yorkers, once?

Cooper let that fuel his indignation. This metropolis was worlds worse than ignoring indigents and stealing taxis. “The worst thing that can happen is a nap and a brand new body, are you kidding me?”

Anger clouded Asher’s gray face. “Every time we die, a whole world dies. What do you think they’re saying about you right now, Cooper?” Asher shook his head in disbelief. “Is it ‘Oh, Cooper stepped off to another universe for a brief visit but we expect him to return shortly. Canapé?’ Or do you think there’s a funeral somewhere with your fucking name on it?” Asher was livid, but his skin showed not a pulse of blush. He let Cooper go, who doubled over at the thought of what his family and friends must be feeling.

Now came the fear and confusion that Sesstri had expected earlier. Cooper pictured his mother, obliterated by losing her only son. His father, cracked in half with grief. Life had been dull, but it had been. Cooper’s head reeled. How could I forget that? he screamed inside. How could I, for one single moment, doubt the totality of my death, back in the world where I lived?

“I apologize,” Asher nearly stammered, “I associate honesty with anger. It . . . explains a lot. Are you crying?”

Cooper couldn’t breathe. His family and friends—what nightmare must they be enduring? Sheila and Tammy would be screaming when they found his body in the apartment they shared. Mom would be turning in place, trying to put right something that could never be fixed and was the heart of her world. His dog, Astrid—would she sit by the door, waiting for him, wondering why he never came back to her? She wouldn’t understand, just ache. The same went for Cooper as for those he’d left behind. No understanding, just pain and loss and a false promise of peace at the end.