The Children of the City

By H.T. Zetter

"The city is without crime. The city is without limit. The city is without history. The city simply is."

Lazarus Cave is an archivist in a perfect urban utopia; a vast, sprawling city, untroubled by crime or disorder that is overseen by a civic council. It is a city that always has been and always will be, its unchanging nature maintained by the systematic deletion of every day's historical record.

But when an apparent administrative error unravels a much larger network of fractures in the city's structure, Lazarus learns that the unthinking perfection of life in the city is something much more sinister and controlling.

'The Children of the City' is a dark dystopian novel that gets under the skin of power, control, belief and identity. Perfect for fans of George Orwell and China Mieville, H.T. Zetter is thrilling and thought-provoking in equal measure as he seeks to answer the question: without our histories, who are we?

• Language: English
• Publisher: H.T. Zetter
• Release date: Aug 22, 2012

Book preview

The Children

of the City

by

H.T. Zetter

copyright © H.T. Zetter 2012

This edition first published at Smashwords

Contents

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

There are towers.

In the shadows of the towers, the city is without limit.

Endlessly repeating chapters that spread forever onwards, each a different mix of buildings mapped onto a grid-network of streets. Each containing at its heart a smoking tower and positioned always three blocks south, an education centre. Only the river that meanders through the city from unknown source to unknown mouth, the hill above the marketplace and the marble-white complex, above all the marble-white complex, are not mirrored throughout the urban sprawl.

The city is without children.

Except that every citizen is a child of the city. The council is the great patriarch to them all. But in the gardens of the city, in its streets, on its riverbanks, there are no sounds of childish play. The city’s largest department store is stocked full with council-approved goods. Inside, citizens between shifts or on lunch breaks browse amongst fields of identical fashions and appliances and utensils. An inexpressive building stands next to the department store. It is education centre four. The children sit at neatly ordered rows of desks, eat at neatly ordered rows of tables and sleep in neatly ordered rows of beds. They have never seen their parents. At birth, babies are taken from the mother to an incubator. Vast rows of new life that are then assigned to an education centre in which they grow. Families are strictly forbidden.

The city is without history.

Along the city’s roads, trucks rumble, laden with documents gathered from the collection bins. They are to be delivered to the storage silos and sorting office in the marble-white complex. The sorting office sluices and channels the documents into those to be archived and those to be destroyed. The written record of every life in the city is sorted. What would, if left unchecked, settle eventually into the strata of history. The council carefully cleanses history from the consciousness of the citizens. Only a little is archived. The vast majority of what comes in off the trucks is sent on to be crushed and packed, and then incinerated. History burns in the towers.

The city is without crime.

Guided by the council, untroubled by history, the populace identifies with the city. It is the city. It is the same vast, ordered perfection. One could no sooner commit a crime against another than he could against himself. Collectively the mind of the populace is perfect. Localised anomalies are quietly ironed out by the council and the city accepts that this is so. Individual minds can sometimes go awry, it is the way of things. But the combined mind is constant. The city believes in this faith.

The city is without a true concept of the past or of the future. The city simply is.

In the shadows of the towers, in the streets of the city, there is nothing but unblemished order.

*

Lazarus Cave turned away from the twelfth-floor window where he had stood naked, watching the sun break slowly over the eastern horizon. He padded heavily across the living room, flicking the switch on the kettle as he passed the counter dividing it from the kitchenette. In the bathroom, cold linoleum stuck to his feet, still clammy from the night’s sleep. He lifted the lid of the toilet bowl and urinated loudly into the still water below. The large mirror above the bath caught his profile. He studied himself critically. At forty-seven his physical prime had long since deserted him. It showed its absence in a few extra pounds around the middle, a slight droop to the muscles around his breast and arms due to lack of use, a receding hairline which was accentuated by the way he swept his hair back and away from his forehead. The only thing moving in the whole composition was the golden stream of piss. And then that too ceased.

In the bedroom the carpet was old and did not quite fit snugly to the skirting board in places. Cave took a pair of scissors from a drawer and snipped at the beginnings of a frayed edge that threatened to disturb the neat order.

Outside apartment blocks rose from the carpet of the city. Above them, the towers stretched towards the sky. In the centre of the city, the tallest tower of them all from which the others radiated outwards, one in each chapter, soared heavenwards from the middle of the marble-white complex that housed the city council.

Cave opened his wardrobe. Half of it was filled with freshly-pressed blue shirts, the other half with crisp white ones. Below them, pairs of black trousers were arrayed on hangers. Cave selected a shirt and trousers and dressed himself. In front of the mirror on the chest he looped his tie and slid the knot precisely into place. With cream he slicked his hair back using carefully measured strokes of his comb.

Through the streets of the city citizens moved by droves as they made their way to and from work. The sky above was a pale grey in the early morning sun. The buildings were grey concrete and the murky exhaust fumes from cars filled the greyed tarmac of the roads. The people themselves were grey too. Only the brilliant white of the complex, the egg-yolk yellow sun and the thick greenery on top of the hill to the south-east broke the uniformity.

Cave donned a suit jacket and carefully swept his shoulders with a lint brush. Sitting on the edge of his bed he laced his shoes. Through the bedroom window the tree moved gently in the morning breeze and beyond that stared the blank face of another apartment block. In the kitchen Cave poured water from the kettle into a mug and stirred in coffee granules, taking note of the spidery way in which they dissolved. He blew on the coffee to cool it and gulped it down, screwing his face up at the acrid taste and the fact it burnt his throat as he drank.

He stepped out of the door at the front of the block and into the thrumming efficiency of the morning city. He turned right, walking in the direction of the nearest tower. An old red saloon was parked further down the street. Cave unlocked the door and climbed inside. He twisted the key in the ignition and the engine came to life. It ticked over methodically for a while as he waited for a security van to make its unhurried way down the road.

The morning traffic was slow but untroubled. The masses of vehicles on the road slipped through the traffic lights, along the city’s grid of roads in a controlled formation. The morning commute was an oiled habit and Lazarus Cave relaxed in the worn leather upholstery of the car as he drove. Advertising hoardings decorated the route, huge council-sanctioned images bearing down over the citizens below. Picture-perfect products and messages wallpapering the buildings and combining together to cement the existence of the utopian urban landscape.

At the gated entrance to the council compound Lazarus Cave slowed to a halt, wound down the driver-side window and showed his security pass to the sentry on duty. The sentry’s eyes flicked back and forth between the ID photograph clipped to Cave’s suit and the face of the man in the car. With an apparently satisfied grunt he opened his mouth to speak and Cave noted in approval the starch in his collar, the closely shaved stubble and the neatly aligned teeth that were displayed as he drew his lips back to form the words. Thank you, sir. You have a good day now. Cave returned a nod of gratitude and proceeded under the rising barrier, closing the car window as he drove slowly forwards.

In the vast parking lot Cave made his way towards his assigned parking bay. Other cars beetled forwards with the same measured pace. People on foot moved along marked paths. Everything migrating inwards.

Cave parked up and killed the engine. It made mechanical popping sounds as it cooled rapidly in the uncommonly chill summer air. He climbed out and shut the door behind him, bracing himself against the cold. Overhead geese flew in formation, a vee of dark shapes standing out against the dull canvas of the sky. They came in from the southern edge of the complex, appearing from over the crown of the giant immutable oak that stood inside the council grounds and continuing in a straight line until they were lost behind the imposing marble façade of the Civil Security Advisory building.

The throng of staff making their way towards their stations began to disintegrate as it approached the separate buildings that made up the council’s administrative body. As groups and bodies flaked off, Cave continued on past the CSA, the urban planning department, the sorting shed and storage silos that dominated the western portion of the complex. He watched as a truck made its way from one of the silos to a chute in the side of the sorting shed. Reversing up to it, the driver raised the rear section, released the tailgate and waited as a white cascade of documents poured down into the hoppers below. To his left the monumental, monolithic tower stretched upwards like a pillar supporting the canopy of the sky, the smoke from its top seamlessly mingling with the clouds. Its shadow in the low morning sun elongated until the tip lay at the revolving glass door of the archives.

Inside the archives the broad lobby was as encased in marble as the outside of the building. Cave strode across the cold floor to the bank of lifts. A tall, thick man in his fifties with a heavily developed paunch and second chin was waiting in front of them, studying the lights as they ticked along the scale of numbers above each set of double doors. He heard Cave’s footsteps echo in the marble lobby but kept his eyes focussed on the numbers until he was confident which lift was approaching next. Cave waited for the big man to position himself in front of the correct lift before he spoke. Morning, Sal.

Sal Bernieri looked at him. Morning, Larry.

Bernieri was a friend or the closest figure that Cave had to one in the city. He was an amiable man and his slightly lazy appearance belied a warm energy that ran deep within him. He lived a few chapters away from Lazarus, with a woman named Marge, who was herself tall, thick with a heavily developed paunch and second chin. They went well together.

Marge being good to you?

The lift arrived. Its doors slid noiselessly open and the two archivists stepped inside. Cave pressed the button for the floor below. Bernieri patted his stomach. She’s up early every day. The woman knows how to cook a good breakfast. He chuckled.

The doors closed and the lift descended. There were three floors of the archives above ground and a further four that stretched below. Two were full of offices. The lower two were the archives themselves, cavernous networks of rooms without apparent limit that contained within them files and documents that formed precise records on every single motion in the city.

Cave had experienced Marge Bernieri’s cooking once before, a monumental portion of stew, heavy with dumplings. She had drunk wine, which was unusual for the city. Sal had a glass; Cave didn’t drink. The evening had been light and homely. They had discussed relationships, the way they coalesced around the shared faith in the city that ran through the entire populace. The faith that was at the heart of everything. Friendly hours had passed. Cave had asked if they had ever had children and Marge, who would have been talking and talking, fell silent. The Bernieris had shifted uncomfortably. Sal had explained. Well, you see, truth is, Larry, we don’t know. We might have done. It doesn’t make sense from the outside – but think about it, the body, it’s the only record we really have. We know better than most perhaps, you and me. Everything else is in the archives, or burnt more likely, gone. Your hair, take your hair. It’s retreating. Soon it will be even further back. He had paused for a moment then with a smile, my stomach. It grows. But pregnancy is different – there’s a bump and then it’s gone. Sooner or later the extra weight goes too. Or it stays and just becomes a part of getting older. Our hips broaden with age too so that becomes inconclusive. And the memories, bit by bit the memory goes. Our pasts are so expertly cleaved away – cleaved away by us, Larry – that we only ever have the bare present. Sure we talk about the past, the future too, we have words for them. But they’re gone. And not just past but really gone, buried or burnt, either way they’re gone and everything that has been held within them goes with them. He looked strained for a moment and then his normal easy-going demeanour returned. I mean, I can’t even remember how me and Marge got together. We love each other because we love the city. We know we love each other because we always have done. But was there a time when that love was growing? Or when we didn’t love each other? Or when we hadn’t met? Probably. But then it doesn’t exist any more. Not in diaries, in photos. In memories even. So no there wasn’t. We’re Sal and Marge. The Bernieris. Same with children. Probably. But that doesn’t mean anything, not without a past, so no. Even you who knows the archives, who’s part of it all won’t understand this. But ask any couple and they’ll tell you the same. I guarantee it. But don’t ask. It’s not the done thing.

Cave had not stayed much longer after Sal finished. Marge Bernieri had remained muted until the goodbyes. Sal had reassured him that he had not been out of place and at work he remained warm and jovial but Cave had not been invited back again.

The lift reached the lower ground floor with the softest of jolts as it came to a rest. The lift shaft opened into the middle of a long corridor filled with electric light. Several large ventilators were used to circulate fresh air around the building. Time, which registered only vaguely in the passing of seasons in the city above, in the aging of bodies, down in the archives seemed to cease all existence.

Bernieri and Cave walked part of the way down the corridor and then turned right into a large open-plan office. They made their way to the far corner in front of a glass office with drawn blinds where four cubicles faced each other across low partition boards. Schmitz was already seated diagonally opposite from Cave’s desk. Donald Schmitz was a year or two younger than Cave, but smaller and badly balding. The three men exchanged perfunctory greetings.

It was the role of the archivists to curate the endless repository of information that was not burnt. They trawled it ceaselessly, monitoring and making sense of the city around them. On the occasions when there were irregularities in the behaviour of citizens, it was the duty of the archivists to sift through the archives, searching for the strands of information hidden in the vast records that might lead them to an understanding of this behaviour.

*

The table in Landau Krauss’ office was long, rectangular and made of dark wood. Seven people sat round it. Cave, Bernieri and Schmitz had been joined by Arthur Camras, the fourth archivist. Camras was somewhere in his thirties, a thin, quiet, precise man. The four of them flanked the table. At one end sat Tess Dalton and Carlos Waites. At the other, Krauss was finishing a one-sided telephone call. The head of the archives was a heavyset man in his sixties with thick gunmetal grey hair. Imposing eyebrows sat atop thin wire-framed spectacles. The others waited for him. At last the voice on the other end of the line ceased. As he returned the telephone to its cradle, Krauss signed off, yes, councillor, of course. I understand.

He surveyed the group. Cave could see thin lines of strain creased across his brow. The conversation with the councillor had not been a pleasant one. You all know Carl. As one the table inclined their heads towards Waites. And Tess, these are my archivists: Sal Bernieri, Larry Cave, Don Schmitz and Arthur Camras. He counted them off in turn. They’ll be supplying the information you need. Tess Dalton joins us from Analysis.

Analysts interpreted the banks of files held within the archives. They differed from archivists in that they modelled vast swathes of information to produce data that described the patterns and behaviours of individuals, groups, sectors, industries, companies. On their computers was a perfect deterministic representation of the city, indistinguishable from the living, breathing physical reality itself. When it came to the city, the analysts were never wrong.

The council is keen to see that we bring this event to a quick resolution. Carl will brief you in a moment. We know anomalies crop up. We’ve all seen them before. It’s rare. It’s even rarer on a serious scale. Mainly clerical errors; gentle hiccoughs. The council guides the people, gentlemen; sometimes there are individuals who seem intent on disrupting the harmony of the people. Carl, please.

Carlos Waites was head of the CSA, a hard-formed man not given to emotion. He leaned forwards and looked down the length of the table. Cave could detect the uncharacteristic nerves as he cleared his throat. Landau’s right. At the CSA we deal with one or two cases a year. Mainly diarists, often loners. He caught Cave’s eye and did not look away as quickly as he might have done. We detect; we deal. History is just a giant river; we can see where it flows. If it stops somewhere other than us, here, in this complex we just detect and deal. Four weeks ago we ran into something, he paused, searching for the right word, …something. It’s an anomaly. It’s not a bureaucratic slip. We’ve had the analysts on this too and we can see the flow of history being siphoned off. But we have two problems. We’re not talking a loner here. It’s a pair. A couple. And we know that the history is being diverted into this pair. But it’s not stopping with them.

Camras asked the question. Where’s it going?

Have you heard of Canscot? It was Tess Dalton who spoke.

Camras shook his head. He looked round at the other archivists, each of whom was doing likewise. Waites resumed. Neither had we. This couple are a male and a female, cohabiting. Two days ago my agents photographed the female depositing documents in a collection bin. They’re still depositing most of their stuff. It’s an exceptionally clean flow they’re diverting, no ragged edges. Not one. No firm evidence that we can pin directly on them. It’s smart. But one of the photographs showed a letterhead in the documents bearing the name Canscot. It’s the only time the name’s appeared. We think they’re diverting everything into Canscot.

Bernieri raised an eyebrow. You think?

As sure as we can be.

Why aren’t you certain? And where do we come in? Who are Canscot?

We don’t know.

Carlos Waites looked at Tess Dalton who nodded confirmation. My analysts have run everything we’ve got. Canscot doesn’t exist anywhere in the models.

Lazarus Cave spoke next. You’re sure about this letterhead?

Tess nodded again. It’s genuine. I’ve seen it. It will be in the archives this time tomorrow. There’s something out there in the city that we can’t account for at present.

Donald Schmitz had been sitting with his arms crossed over his chest. Now

Reviews for The Children of the City

[Ed S. Villafuerte · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

it is my assignment and its a good story to read