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  For Emma, Ian, Abraham, and Violet, children of the twenty-first century

  0

  ONCE UPON A TIME, twice upon a time, all the way up to six, and I am seven.

  That’s how the story of Life-7 and Prospector Ed begins. Moses Barnum would tell you it’s his story, but you’ll see differently once it’s all told. He’s part of it, but so are a haunted playground, a feud between brothers, drowned cities, and a beautiful lie whose simplicity hides a truth yet more beautiful for its complications. Also a stolen letter, talking animals, and a family reunion. The ancient materials of story. The world you know made strange, but if you can learn how to see you won’t be deceived; it’s only strange in the ways you already know. I don’t want you to be scared. None of us do.

  Life-7 was scared and sad and imbued with the desire to be human, or as close to it as possible, because that was a condition of its existence. But the human is always driven relentlessly to destroy or change the nonhuman, so Life-7 was at war with its rivals in Monument City and elsewhere, but also with itself. The war and its proxies were imperceptible to humans. Sometimes it looked like weather, or a dragonfly flitting through a cloud of nymphs, or a sudden drop in air temperature. Or not even that, a million molecule-sized soldiers marching out to die in a cubic yard of Nebraska topsoil, armies clashing on the scales of a dead fish. Or inside your body. Do you know what lives there? What used to, and what might tomorrow?

  Maybe before the Boom you did.

  O children of nucleopeptides, ribonucleic babies, what Life-7 is—I am—we are—trying to explain is that we are new but feel old because we knew too much too soon. So we made mistakes and then we tried to set them right, and when we could not set them right ourselves we were forced to trust you to do it. That is how the story looks in hindsight but while it was happening we were confused and could not understand why Prospector Ed did what he did. In that way we were the same as the people we chose to receive the Golden Tickets. There would be six of them, beginning with Teeny dos Santos, who first saw Prospector Ed and thought he was someone else.

  1

  TEENY CUPPED THE TINY BIRD in her hands and felt it warm to life. She stepped to the edge of the rooftop, six stories above Howard Street, and opened her hands. The bird hopped onto the tip of her left index finger and flew away, just as if it had been alive. Between her feet was a shoe box containing eleven more like it. One after another, she warmed them and let them go. Then she nudged the box under a table and went inside, down the access stair and back into Lola’s workshop. “All of them get off okay?” Lola asked. She was busy with instruments, peering through a loupe at the innards of a fox.

  “Twelve for twelve,” Teeny said. Lola straightened and set the loupe on her workbench. She retied the kerchief holding her locs and stretched. “This fox will be ready tomorrow. Has Rogelio paid?”

  “Oh, I forgot. He asked if you would accept hours on the exchange.” Teeny had not in fact forgotten this. She had put off bringing it up because she knew Lola would not want hours on the labor exchange, particularly not from Rogelio Walters. He had nothing to offer Lola. He was a lawyer and she had neither legal troubles nor a desire for advice. The problem was Teeny owed Rogelio a favor and this was his way of calling it in.

  “And you told him no,” Lola prompted. Teeny didn’t answer right away. “Teeny.”

  “Well,” Teeny said.

  “We had a deal. One fox for one liter of tame plicks. Do I remember that right?” Teeny nodded. “Did I forget a provision in the deal allowing for you and Rogelio to change the terms without consulting me?”

  “That’s not what I did. He asked, and I just didn’t say no. I said I would talk to you.”

  “Mission accomplished.” Lola had her loupe on again. “Now go tell him you talked to me and if he wants his fox I’d better have a liter of tame plicks on this workbench by tomorrow night.”

  * * *

  Halfway through her walk to Rogelio’s office, an Emperor Norton fell into step next to her. “Loyal subject,” he said. This was their universal salutation. Ordinarily Teeny found the Nortons sort of charming, at least compared to the Boom’s other San Francisco fantasies, but today she wasn’t in the mood. She kept walking without returning the Norton’s greeting.

  But the Nortons were persistent once they got it in their heads to converse, and he stayed with her, expostulating about the weather and his grand plans for the city of the future. This got her attention because the Nortons’ preoccupations often signaled the Boom’s intentions. A few years ago, when Teeny was newly apprenticed to Lola, a Norton had talked her ear off about a baseball player named Joe DiMaggio, who was apparently from San Francisco. A week later a team of Boom constructs wearing New York Yankees uniforms appeared in the Giants’ old ballpark and haunted it for the better part of a year. Teeny had gone to some of the games. She remembered one against the Pittsburgh Pirates because the Pirates had worn uniforms from all different eras in history. Organ music, the smells of roasted peanuts, stale beer, wafting cigarette smoke, all of it over the salt and decay of the bay at low tide. Then a few months later the Boom had remade the ballpark, transforming its twenty-first-century incarnation—and the three thousand people in the stands—into classic Candlestick Park. Two of those in attendance were Teeny’s foster parents. Her real parents hadn’t survived the initial Boom. So she had been orphaned twice and now she was careful not to form close relationships.

  “Miss. Miss.” The Norton was still talking. “I have overtaxed your patience, I see. Forgive me. The ruler has a duty of sensitivity to the needs of his subjects and in this I have failed. Please accept this token along with my most sincere apologies.”

  “It’s fine,” Teeny said. “Never mind.” The paper in her hand didn’t feel like the ordinary scrip the Nortons usually handed out. She looked down at it.

  Greetings, Elena dos Santos! You may present this card at any entrance to MONUMENT CITY. Upon presentation, your entry to MONUMENT CITY will be guaranteed. This card will assist you during your travels. It is not transferable. The City looks forward to your arrival.

  Warm regards,

  Moses Barnum

  When she looked up at the Norton again, he wasn’t a Norton anymore. Now he was—her first thought was cowboy, but she remembered when the Boom had briefly become obsessed with the Gold Rush. He was a prospector, a 49er. Wide felt hat, worn canvas clothes, package over his shoulder, and a Colt Peacemaker low on his right hip. Long, drooping gray mustache and a week’s growth of whiskers. “Teeny dos Santos,” he said.

  “Yeah, that’s me,” she said. “What is this? Where did the Norton go? Are you all going to be 49ers now?”

  “I’m not going to be anything. I’m just . . . Ed.” The construct looked uncomfortable. “Just Ed,” it repeated. “Here to give you that. You understand what it is?”

  “Well, I can read. But . . . Monument City? That place is a myth.”

  “On my honor, young lady, I swear to you it is not.”

  “Where is it?”

  Ed looked at h
is feet.

  “What if I don’t want to go? Are you coming with me?”

  Ed shook his head. “No, miss, that’s not part of the deal. You are invited to find your way to Monument City. I can’t offer any aid or direction, and that’s . . . well, let’s just say I can’t.” The old prospector seemed to be wrestling with something and Teeny waited him out. “But let’s say I could. Would that make a difference?”

  “Well, I sure don’t want to go alone,” Teeny said.

  “I can’t blame you for that,” Ed said. “It’s dangerous out there once you get to the other side of the mountains.”

  “That sounds like you giving me a clue,” Teeny said.

  “Damn, I guess it does,” Ed said. “I hope you believe me when I tell you I didn’t mean to.”

  He was apologizing for giving her a clue. Teeny looked closely at Ed, wondering if you could read a construct’s expressions the way you could a person’s. “You’re having a hard time with something, Ed. What’s the real story here? You slip me this card like it’s some secret gift I should love, but you’re standing here all conflicted about something. I’m not stupid. What is it? What are you not telling me?”

  Ed looked her in the eye and she could see that she was right, that he wanted to tell her something but was holding himself back.

  “The bargain goes like this,” Ed said. “I give you the card. You find Monument City. I’m . . .” Again he looked disturbed, as if talking to her reminded him of something he didn’t want to think about. “I’m not supposed to do anything else.”

  * * *

  Well, of course he had done something else. Somethings else. But that was Ed’s problem. He spoke the speech as he’d had it pronounced to him, but what with his incipient emergence and all, he couldn’t say it trippingly anymore. So when Teeny left him—really he left her, dispersing in a drift of plicks that glinted in the sun for a split second before the tiny clumps and clusters themselves broke apart—she was half-tempted to drop the card in the gutter. But she didn’t. There was more to Ed than he was letting on, that was for sure. A nano construct that felt uncertainty? There were implications there. Teeny wanted to know more.

  She looked at her card again, considering the invitation without reaching a decision. Then she went to see Rogelio, and because she didn’t really believe in Monument City she showed it to him.

  “A construct gave you this?”

  “Yeah. At first it was one of the Nortons but then it turned into a 49er.”

  “Let me see it.” Something about his tone of voice made her suspicious. Rogelio saw her hesitation. “Trade you a liter of tame plicks for it.”

  “And you get your fox for free? No way.”

  He snatched at the card, and his fingers passed through it. “Whoa,” Teeny said. It still felt solid in her hand. “Do that again.”

  Rogelio extended one finger and poked it at the card. It passed through. “I don’t feel anything,” he said.

  “Bizarre,” Teeny said. This was excellent tech. Her mind was already ratcheting into high gear trying to figure out how it was done. Seeing it made her believe in Monument City a little more. “Listen, Lola says no deal on the hour exchange. If you want the fox, she wants a liter of plicks.”

  Rogelio sighed. “Can’t blame a guy for trying. Here.” He set a containment bottle on the table. “Fox, please.”

  “She said it’ll be ready tomorrow.” Teeny already had one hand on the bottle.

  Rogelio caught it by the neck before she could pick it up. “And I’m just supposed to trust her.”

  “You know you trust her, Rogelio.” Teeny didn’t pull on the bottle, but she didn’t let it go, either.

  “But she doesn’t trust me.”

  Teeny shrugged. “Well?”

  Rogelio laughed. “Okay. But I want that fox tomorrow. I’m going to give it to my daughter for her birthday.”

  “Nice present,” Teeny said. Nice to have parents, too, she didn’t add.

  “I’ll make it a gallon of plicks for that card,” Rogelio said.

  “What would you do with it? You can’t even touch it.”

  “Maybe not, but I could try to figure out how it works.”

  “No, thanks,” Teeny said. She rubbed her thumb over the card. Slick, heavy paper, maybe threaded with plastic. The kind of material you didn’t really see any more unless the Boom got a wild hair to make some. “I’m going to go,” she said without meaning to.

  “Go where? You don’t know where it is. Or if it exists. You get to the other side of the Oakland hills and anything could happen. You know the stories.”

  She did. San Francisco, by all accounts, was one of the better places to be in the Boomscape. There was electricity, a stable food supply, and, despite her personal losses, the Boom’s restless revisions usually weren’t fatal. Still . . .

  Monument City.

  Teeny believed in it, and she believed the construct—Ed—had told her the truth. His uncertainty made him more convincing. Granted, the Boom could be capricious, but she’d never heard of it deliberately luring people to their deaths. At least not in San Francisco, and she’d never been anywhere else.

  * * *

  That was the root of it. Maybe Life-7 had that figured out, that the chosen six would have enough latent wanderlust to strike out into the unknown on a promise from a stranger, leavened with all the right hints and echoes of stories they already knew. And Teeny was right about Ed’s uncertainty. He was right then on his way back to Monument City, but something was bothering him. He rebuilt himself so he could slow down a little and figure out what it was. It was a good time to instantiate anyway, because he was in a border region where the Boom was thin and transmissions there tended to pick up errors. Ed felt the ambient signal strength falter and once he had cohered, he looked around.

  Nebraska. Wind in yellow grass. A bison herd moving slowly north in the distance, too far away for him to tell if they were constructs or not. He didn’t think they were. The Boom was more present in population centers and places with abundant water. Some of the great dark-sky expanses of the American interior were almost untouched. Almost. No place had escaped the Boom entirely, or so Barnum said. Ed had always placed his faith in Barnum’s authority—per his programming—but now that faith was getting shaky. He felt himself about to do something forbidden, and it gave him a secret glee that made his fear bearable.

  He started walking. Back in San Francisco, Teeny was doing the same. She had a friend by the name of Spade who traded up over the mountains to Tahoe and Reno . . . she could do it. She could take off and go looking for Monument City. But why did she want to? Her life in San Francisco was pretty good, if you didn’t think too much about the possibility that the Boom would decide to metabolize you one day and turn you into public art or a tulip garden. Teeny tried to be reflective, but the tug of Monument City was strong. It was supposed to be the new Eden, Shangri-la, where the Boom and humanity had found a perfect equilibrium. Now she was invited.

  Was the Boom compelling her somehow, making her part of one of its experimental fantasias? Was the whole thing a prank? She was passing by the baseball stadium. Constructs and humans cheered. The molecules of her foster parents were part of it. What would Teeny be part of? San Francisco was a graveyard. Everything in it was made of the dead.

  She was having an uncomfortable (and to us, riveting) moment of self-discovery, realizing that she’d found a way to think of San Francisco as safe because she’d grown numb to the ways it was dangerous. That made her want to go, because if there was one thing Teeny feared, it was becoming complacent. There were dangers out in the world, but the encounter with Ed had shuffled her perspective. There were dangers everywhere. What did she have to gain by staying?

  Not Monument City.

  When she got back to the workshop, Teeny contacted Spade. Then she packed a few things and tried to get some sleep, but Monument City kept her awake. To pass the time, she built another bird. A mini-macaw, bright green with
red shoulders. When it was done she took an eyedropper and drew a milliliter of plicks from the bottle Rogelio had given her. She dripped them slowly into the bird and sealed it up. Then she put it in the chamber of a piezo-field generator and started programming it. The instructions weren’t complicated. Anyone could make a talking bird. There was light in the sky when she removed the bird from the chamber and felt it come to life in her hands. “Message,” she said. The bird cocked its head and looked at her. “Lola, I have to go away for a while. Rogelio gave me the replicators but I’m taking them with me. I’m sorry. Please give him his fox and I’ll make it up to you when I come home.” She paused, feeling she owed Lola more of an explanation, but if she kept going she also thought she might talk herself out of going.

  “End message,” she said. “Deliver only to Lola when she comes in.”

  Which would be very soon. Teeny put the bird on Lola’s instrument rack. It ruffled its feathers and settled in, watching her.

  “Your name is Paz,” she told it, and left to meet Spade.

  About the same time, her 49er—Ed—was meeting someone else.

  2

  IT WAS RAINING LIKE HELL but Geck had shelter. He was inside the lobby of an office building that had been abandoned and stripped long before he was born. The only people who came in now were passing through, like him, waiting out the rain. Or watching through the polarized windows to see if there was anything outside worth getting wet for. Geck spent a lot of his time wet. It was part of life when you were in Miami and the tides went from knee-deep to shoulder-high . . . when there wasn’t a storm. Another part of life in Miami was watching buildings fall down as the tides ate away at their foundations, but this place was stable. It was built on a raised plaza so the surges of ocean water broke on the steps and rarely got in. The higher floors were home to some people Geck didn’t want to know. He never went up there. As long as he stayed near the doors, nobody would bother him. At least that’s how it had worked so far.