‘I don’t follow.’
‘Them building like tree. Got big lot of root, stick in ground, right?’
‘Constructional feedlines, is that it? Leeching raw materials from the bedrock for repair and regrowth?’
‘Yeah. What I say. Like big tree. But like big tree in other way, too. Always grow up top. Unnerstan’?’ More hand gestures, as if he were shaping the outline of a mushroom cloud.
Perhaps I did understand. ‘You’re saying the growth systems were concentrated in the upper parts of the structures?’
‘Yeah.’
I nodded. ‘Of course. Those structures were designed to dismantle themselves as well as grow higher. Either way, you’d always want to add or remove material from the top. So the nerve centre of the self-replicating machinery would always rise with the structure. The lower levels would need fewer systems; just the bare minimum to keep them ticking over and for repairing damage and wear, and for periodic redesigns.’
It was hard to tell if Juan’s smile was one of congratulation — that I had worked this out for myself — or sympathy that it had taken me as long as it had.
‘Plague get to top first, carried by root. Start making top of building go wacko first. Lower down, stay same as before. By time plague got there, people cut root, starve building. No change any more.’
‘But by then the upper parts had already changed beyond recognition.’ I shook my head. ‘It must have been a terrible time.’
‘No shit, mister.’
We plunged into daylight, and I finally understood what Juan meant.
FIFTEEN
We were at the lowest level of Chasm City, far below the rim of the caldera. The street on which we ran crossed a black lake on pontoons. Rain was falling softly from the sky — from the dome, in fact, many kilometres above our heads. All around us, vast buildings rose from the flood, sides slab-sided and immense. They were all I could see in any direction, until — forestlike — they merged into a distant, detailless wall, like a bank of smog. They were encrusted — at least for the first six or seven storeys — in a barnacle-like accretion of ramshackle dwellings and markets, lashed together and interlinked with flimsy walkways and rope-ladders. Fires burned in the slums, and the air was even more pungent than in the concourse. But it was fractionally cooler, and because there was a constant breeze, it felt less stifling.
‘What’s this place called?’ I said.
‘This Mulch,’ said Juan. ‘Everything down here, street level, this Mulch.’
I understood then that the Mulch was less a district of the city than a stratification. It included perhaps the first six or seven storeys which rose above the flooded parts. It was a carpet of slum from which the great forest of the city rose.
Looking up, craning my neck to peer around the rickshaw’s roof, I saw the slab-sided structures ram skywards, perspective forcing them together at least a kilometre above my head. For most of that height, their geometries must have been much as their architects had intended: rectilinear, with parallel rows of windows, now dark, the edifices marred only by the occasional haphazard extrusion or limpetlike excresence. Up higher, though, the picture changed sickeningly. Although no two buildings had mutated in quite the same manner, there was something common to their shape-changing, a kind of uniform pathology which a surgeon might have recognised and diagnosed as stemming from the same cause. Some of the buildings split in two halfway up their length, while others bulged with unseemly obesity. Some sprouted tiny avatars of themselves, like the elbowed towers and oubliettes of fairytale castles. Higher, these structural growths bifurcated and bifurcated again, interpenetrating and linking like bronchioli, or some weird variant of brain coral, until what they formed was a kind of horizontal raft of fused branches, suspended a kilometre or two from the ground. I had seen it before, of course, from the sky, but the meaning of it — and its sheer, city-spanning scale — was only now apparent from this vantage point.
Canopy.
‘Now you see why I no take you there, mister.’
‘I’m beginning to. It covers the whole city, right?’
Juan nodded. ‘Just like Mulch, only higher.’
The one thing that had not been really obvious from the behemoth was that the Canopy’s dense entanglement of madly deformed buildings was confined to a relatively shallow vertical stratum; the Canopy was a kind of suspended ecology and below it was another world — another city — entirely. The complexity of it was obvious now. There were whole communities floating within it; sealed structures embedded in the Canopy like birds’ nests, each as large as a palace. Fine as gossamer, a mass of weblike strands filled the spaces between the larger branches, dangling down almost to street level. It was difficult to tell if they had come with the mutations, or had been some intentional human addition.
The effect was as if the Canopy had been cobwebbed by monstrous insects, invisible spiders larger than houses.
‘Who lives there?’ I knew it wasn’t a completely stupid question, since I had already seen lights burning in the branches; evidence that, no matter how distorted the geometries of those sick dead husks of buildings, they had been claimed for human habitation.
‘No one you wanna know, mister.’ Juan chewed on his statement before adding, ‘Or no one who wanna know you. That no insult, either.’
‘None taken, but please answer my question.’
Juan was a long time responding, during which time our rickshaw continued to navigate the roots of the giant structures, wheels jumping over water-filled cracks in the road. The rain hadn’t stopped of course, but when I pushed my head beyond the awning, what I felt was warm and soft; hardly a hardship at all. I wondered if it ever ended, or whether the pattern of condensation on the dome was diurnal; if it were all happening according to some schedule. I had the impression, though, that very little that happened in Chasm City was under anyone’s direct control.
‘Them rich people,’ the kid said. ‘Real rich — not small-time rich like Madame Dominika.’ He knuckled his bony head. ‘Don’t need Dominika, either.’
‘You mean there are enclaves in the Canopy where the plague never reached?’
‘No, plague reach everywhere. But in Canopy, them clean it out, after building stop changing. Some rich, they stay in orbit. Some never leave CC, or come down after shit hit fan. Some get deported.’
‘Why would anyone come here after the plague, if they didn’t have to? Even if parts of the Canopy are safe from residual traces of the Melding Plague, I can’t see why anyone would choose to live there rather than stay in the remaining habitats of the Rust Belt.’
‘Them get deported no have big choice,’ said the kid.
‘No; I can understand that. But why would anyone else come here?’
‘Because them think thing got to get better, and them wanna be here when it happen. Plenty way to make money, when thing get better — but only few people gonna get serious rich. Plenty way to make money now, too — less p’lice here than upside.’
‘You’re saying there are no rules here, are there? Nothing that can’t be bought? I’d imagine that must have been tempting, after the strictures of Demarchy.’
‘Mister, you talk funny.’
My next question was obvious. ‘How do I get there? To the Canopy, I mean?’
‘You not already there, you don’t.’
‘You’re saying I’m not rich enough, is that it?’
‘Rich not enough,’ the kid said. ‘Need connection. Gotta be tight with Canopy, or you ain’t nobody.’