“Woo! Drugs! Parties! More parties! A bit of composition! That’s all fun, right? Wrong! Sooo many things to plan behind the scenes! Fobbing off the right amount of publicity while making other obvious public appearances. Don’t get me started on how many eidolons we have to consult to keep on the leading edge of trends. ‘Too many’ is the answer. But when everything comes together, at just the perfect time, then it’s a beautiful spectacle, is show business. Oy, Genm! Either pass the bottle here or make another one!”
-Leeland Ockerbmen, leading vocalist of Shear Boot, after transferring from chain-punk outfit Gigeliglessssil, and before needing to be revived due to a fatal overdose
Eihks had had the opportunity to bring a couple of foreigners into the fold of his adopted city over the years. In each case, they’d reacted almost exactly the same way: amazement and childlike awe. The second of these guests had soon after become hysterical, thinking he’d been brought to some eschatological house of ill repute.
They came up to the place where her planet’s surface ran into the semi-permeable tuning field barrier stretching across it. The slowly congealing ghostly and half-solid sight of the city’s architectural hodgepodge gave his karkshesh companion a stricken but not woeful look.
The tuning field was a bit of a special case; not an Ullos container, not a normal folding junction setup, not a modified skein to keep one side’s characteristics constant and stable, but somewhere between them. It represented sixty or seventy thousand days’ worth of effort by some of Rhaagm’s very best and best-paid High Arsonists. It also made transitioning from Ktsn’s home to Eihks’s home a far more bearable experience for newbies to the whole “folding” thing. But they didn’t cross it just yet.
“Take it all in,” he said, as they walked up to the border. On one side of existence, the planet continued in its natural everyday way. Field led to more field, as field is wont to do. But - topologically close enough that it nudged into traditional senses - overlying it was the mathematical perfection of redmetal sidewalk. The tint of the anankite caught the sunlight (both that of the local star, which they’d kept around for the karkshes’ benefit, and Rhaagm’s own light-bringer) and positively threw the sparkle straight across the spectrum from ultraviolet to radio-wave frequencies. It was hard to describe or get a grasp of city building motif without seeing it; different styles all clamoring for attention, but a strangely civil sort of clamoring where every structure had a time and place to call its own.
He had confidence in the High Arsonists and others who’d put together the system for containing a whole planet in a fraction of its volume. He really did. Even so, Eihks had Ktsn hold hands to reduce the chance of one of them experiencing those fun things that occasionally happened when a person freaked out on such borders. Stuff like having one’s atoms’ electric charges get inverted or being turned into an abstract concept was vanishingly infrequent, and usually the result of someone deliberately courting disaster.
He’d personally had enough go wrong for one day, though… and some of it perhaps not by accident.
As they passed through the barrier in the Rhaagm direction and not the Gegaunli-karkshesh-planet direction, Eihks spotted the same auditor and same official from before. They waited on the same spot on the same wide sidewalk, both angled vaguely toward him. He frowned, waving to indicate that he noticed their attention and reciprocated.
“Hang on just a moment,” he said to Ktsn. “Need to talk with these people. DON’T GO ANYWHERE.”
The last was delivered with a stern pointing finger, but he knew he needn’t have worried. Between her wild staring and total bafflement, she didn’t look like she was going to so much as lift a foot without him pulling her along.
“Hello, again,” he said to the official in Rhaagmini.
The official bobbed up and down a bit, making little effort to maintain neutral buoyancy.
“Hello, Mr. Richard.”
No outward sign of recognition more significant than the acknowledgement of a returning client. However, the floating old soul also wasn’t acting precisely like it had during their previous engagement. Eihks, in his long-pedigreed history of dealing both with alien entities and with the art of engaging a provider from the client’s side of the counter, had learned certain tells for judging when a situational paradigm changed.
Such was the case now.
“Good afternoon again…”
A pause.
“I don’t believe I got your name when we met.”
“Llj!tL,H!!p.ttp’ppppppp.qip.”
The creature’s cerv-mesh made an auditory sequence resembling an organic lifeform getting hit by fifteen kilograms of thermite, a panicked stipp, a rapidly-deflating balloon, and a brick, in that order. At the same time, it abruptly flowed through a slew of color and texture shifts, landing on something like moss-covered sulfur before it returned to its original form.
“Thank you,” said Eihks, and didn’t bother to try attempting the name himself.
“You have brought a native with you,” the creature he’d decided to shorthand as Llj observed.
Eihks frowned.
“I have invited her to accompany me to the rest of the city she now calls her own.”
“The terms of the contract maintain that the asylees cannot be left unattended within city bounds until they are certifiably integrated,” the auditor said, having closed the distance while he wasn’t looking.
“I am aware of that,” the explorer replied, and he had to rein in his temper a little. “I and she will be going to my residence, and I do not once anticipate being farther than three meters from her between here and there.”
The auditor up-signed.
“So long as you are aware,” she said. She stepped back a few paces.
“I-” Eihks began, looking at Llj again. He had to stop when a titanic freight disk passed by on the road. It didn’t actually kick up any wind with its movement, but it seemed to deform local gravity by a considerable degree with its sheer mass. The idiot driving the thing had some chain-punk band turned up to a volume that was either illegal on public thoroughfares or ought to have been.
“I would like to pick up my personal effects again, if you please,” he said, when the moving travesty had left their presence. “Most of those knives and such don’t mean a great deal in the grand scheme of things, but they’re missed nevertheless.”
The hamper from earlier reappeared, positively overflowing with goods belonging to non-Eihks people, before the official shuffled the contents around. It also produced the wedge shape that was White Essay, which Eihks gingerly took and transferred to its original placement with a grimace. In a reverse conjuring act, he rapidly stowed his returned possessions away on his person, and relaxed ever so slightly when Lusendrad got strapped back into its proper location.
“Thanks.”
Eihks turned to the karkshesh farmer, who was now evenly dividing her interest between the people discussing matters tangential to herself and the many sights of the world around her.
“Ktsn, time to go,” he said, in a tongue she could actually comprehend. After startling, she gave that handclap that was the affirmative equivalent of an up-sign.
As she absently took his hand, he chin-thumbed a farewell to the odd pair.
“In case you’ve heard,” he said to them over his shoulder, “the rumors have truth.”
He didn’t hang around to see how they took it.
“Anyway, welcome to the rest of Rhaagm!” he told the woman beside him. “Don’t ask to get a full tour,” he added in a half joking tone, “it’d be several times forever before we’d get done.”
“There is no sky!” Ktsn eventually half-breathed, looking at the next-up layer of the city. “And yet, that right there is the sun, is it not?”
It was. The simulation of an uncluttered sky actually didn’t grace too many districts, or terribly large sections of those districts where it did occur. The lack of faux planetary atmospherics was one of the strange and apparently contradictory swarm of little character markers that reflected the local culture of the current epoch. Actually seeing the metal and ceramic and binder medium and various tuning fields that comprised the city’s structural organs was a form of visual debugging and pragmatically useful for some citizens. That alone was enough to keep the trend of giving up sky for sky-obscuring stuff going strong. And up there, neatly peeking through the opaque material in a way that ought to have required some clever reconfiguring of thermodynamics, a bright small orb hung.
“There was a saying that went out of style a while ago,” said the human. “‘There’s the sunshine-blessed and there’s the imaginary.’ Everything that isn’t indoors or otherwise carefully planned out to operate under certain meteorological rules sees the Rhaagm sun. ‘Indoors,’ according to the city’s definition, is something we grasp very well; how the sun actually does what it does is less so.”
He pointed to one side.
“You see that long tall spindly thing over yonder, that’s also showing through similarly ‘opaque’ material? That’s the Tower of Rhaagm. Now, you can know that your planet is technically but not yet officially part of the city because we couldn’t see that thing from your house. If it were, then… well. A lot of other things would be different besides, but we also would have picked out that big old toothpick from your neighborhood.”
There was quiet for half of a minute, then. They meandered down the sidewalk, moving at that pace that all good leisure assumes in due time, one gawping, the other taking the chance to change his every-day mental filters. It was a fantastic place, the Parsed City-State. Infinite distance in multiple directions and highly disparate senses, best described by outlining a very strangely-dimensioned manifold and making a fractal from it.
To the opposite side from where Ktsn’s home was stretched out like a biopsy sample, the industrial-growth fields were stretched out like a massive garden. A hundred hundred flavors of synthwood sprung from the dirt: crystalwillow, steelteak, plastic-oak, enamel-oak, trees that shed tungsten cones, trees that had cores of exotic matter wrapped in vacuum-tight phloem. A hundred hundred ways to say, “Yes, we CAN engineer life out of uproariously inappropriate chemistry, what of it?” The greenware moderating systems between them positively seethed with digital legions that chose to be unseen and unheard.
In the farther distance, hemming in the park on every side, buildings of numerous styles and sizes huddled into subsets representing the bleary hazy madness that was the cross-section of society as a whole. Hives and half-hovels, reefs and condominia, avant-garde cathedrals beside neo-Ulther style high-rise living-houses, a thousand garages around one supermassive stadium. No single material predominated the construction patchwork, and no single material lacked use on some building somewhere. Frequently, they stacked one upon another; stories chewed apart by midair plazas, separating completely irreconcilable differences in design. Each geological layer of the city was technically just that, a slapdash existentially-large bedrock platform hoisted n-plus-one kilometers high by the mysteries of Rhaagm and buildings’ vertebrae.
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