City Not Long After Read online

  PRAISE FOR THE WRITING OF PAT MURPHY

  The Falling Woman

  Winner of the Nebula Award for Best Novel

  “A lovely and literate exploration of the dark moment where myth and science meet.” —Samuel R. Delany

  “Murphy’s sharp behavioral observation, her rich Mayan background, and the revolving door of fantasy and reality honorably recall the novels of Margaret Atwood.” —Publishers Weekly

  “Murphy’s convincing modern setting is a marvelous foil for her frighteningly alien Mayan ghost, and the archeological material, besides being fascinating in its own right, is put to excellent use in the plot.” —Newsday

  The City, Not Long After

  “A grand adventure.” —San Francisco Chronicle

  “In Ms. Murphy’s skillful hands, the showdown between art and power takes on mythic dimensions… . No one comes out of this confrontation unchanged, including the reader.” —The New York Times Book Review

  Points of Departure

  “There is something of Borges’s absurdist fables and of the fey, fog-haunted feel of Celtic myth to [Points of Departure]. This collection reverberates with the sound of the author’s unmistakable voice, a poetic blend of the everyday and the never-never.” —Elle

  “Brilliant, passionate, and dangerous as only the clearest visions can be … Murphy creates seamless blends of ideas and emotions, holistic works where genres mingle so the reader does not stop to ask if this is sf, fantasy, or horror… . These tales unite the power of a force of nature with the subtlety of the human heart.” —Locus

  Wild Angel

  “A charming adventure.” —The Denver Post

  “A delightful cross-genre mix with elements of mystery, western and fantasy/adventure infused with a feminist sensibility.” —Rambles.net

  “Faithful to the spirit of Edgar Rice Burrough’s Tarzan tales and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book, this [is the] story of a young girl’s courage and resourcefulness.” —Library Journal

  Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell

  “Set on a cruise ship that blithely steams through the Bermuda Triangle, this savvy romp buttresses its nonstop action with quantum-mechanical insights into the nature of the universe and postmodern noodling about the nature of writing and reading.” —The New York Times Book Review

  “This cerebral equivalent of a roller-coaster ride … is replete with absorbing ponderings on the nature of reality and the nature of the novel… . The questions of who is in charge, who is real and whether the answers to those questions matter will leave readers pleasantly dizzy.” —Publishers Weekly

  “A paean to the potentialities of imagination, foaming quantum uncertainties, and the sheer plasticity of human reality.” —Analog Science Fiction and Fact

  The Shadow Hunter

  “The clash of prehistoric shamanic traditions with future technology makes for a gripping tale—the first novel written by this Nebula Award-winning author.” —Publishers Weekly

  The City, Not Long After

  Pat Murphy

  For Ned

  Who understands Danny-boy better than I ever will

  AND

  For Richard

  You might as well get used to it—

  sooner or later, they’re all for you

  Contents

  Prologue

  Part 1: City of Dreams

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part 2: The Mystery and Melancholy of a Street

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part 3: Art in the War Zone

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  PROLOGUE

  THE EARLY MORNING BREEZE BLEW through the vegetable garden in Union Square, shaking the leaves of the bean plants and the lacy carrot tops. The city of San Francisco was asleep. The city was dreaming.

  In the Saint Francis Hotel, just off the Square, Danny-boy was dreaming of the color blue. With a paint roller on a long pole, he painted the sky. He had been at work for many hours. At least half of the expanse above him was smeared with paint of a thousand different shades: royal blue, navy, turquoise, baby blue, teal, the fragile hue of robins’ eggs, the treacherous blue-gray of the ocean at dusk. Toward the horizon, where Danny-boy’s roller had not yet reached, the blues faded to misty gray. But overhead, luminous colors swirled and flowed like the water in a river.

  In the middle of the changing pattern, two patches of blue-gray coalesced. Bright eyes watched Danny-boy from the center of the sky. Dark blue shadows defined the angles of a face, the curves of a woman’s body. As Danny-boy stared upward, a young woman stepped out of the sky, looking more than a little confused.

  The city slept, and its dreams drifted through the minds of its inhabitants, twisting and changing their thoughts.

  The man who called himself The Machine dozed on a narrow cot at the back of his workshop. In his dream, he was constructing an angel from objects he had gathered. The angel’s bones were pipes from the plumbing of an old Victorian mansion; its muscles were masses of copper wire, torn from the cables that ran beneath the city streets. On the angel’s massive wings, thousands of polished bottlecaps overlapped, making a pattern of scallops like the scales on a fish.

  The Machine welded the last bottlecap to the wing and stepped back to admire his work. As he gazed up at the angel, he realized suddenly that his creation was not complete. Its chest was hollow: it had no heart.

  He heard footsteps and glanced behind him. A woman was walking toward him, carrying something in her cupped hands. He could not see what she carried, but he could hear the steady pounding of a heartbeat, keeping time with her footsteps.

  Dawn broke in the city: gray light shone on the gray stone buildings that surrounded the Civic Center Plaza. The statues on the facade of the public library showed signs of neglect. Over the years, pigeons had adorned the statues’ heads with streaks of white and deposited a clutter of feathers and broken nests at their feet.

  In a tree that grew in the Plaza, a gray-muzzled monkey, one of the oldest of the troop that lived in the city, dreamed of the Himalayas. Icicles hanging from the eaves of a temple roof melted in the morning sun. Drops of falling water struck a bell, and the metal rang with a musical note. The water trickled away, whispering and crackling softly as it melted a path through the snow. The monkey stirred in its sleep. Changes were coming.

  The sun was rising when Ms. Migsdale stepped from her house on Kirkham Street and headed for Ocean Beach. She wore sensible walking shoes, woolen stockings, a tweed skirt and man-tailored blouse, and an overcoat that would protect her from the wildest storm. Ms. Migsdale believed in clothes made to last.

  The delicate watch on her wrist seemed incongruous: a dainty bit of gold with sparkling diamonds set around a tiny watchface. Ms. Migsdale had found the watch in a gutter near a jewelry store, dropped by looters as they fled. Though she would not touch any of the sparkling baubles that grew dusty in the display windows of other stores, she had taken the watch from the gutter, justifying it to herself by saying that she had found
it, she hadn’t taken it. Finders keepers.

  Before the Plague, Ms. Migsdale had lived alone. She had worked as a librarian at a nearby elementary school. After the Plague she continued living in the same small house, dedicating herself to publishing the New City News and sending messages out to sea.

  Each day, at ebb tide, she walked along the beach, carrying a shopping bag. In the bag were a dozen green glass bottles that had once contained wine. Now the bottles held squares of white paper on which Ms. Migsdale had typed messages.

  Each note was different. On some, she wrote proverbs or quotations. (“Opinions are like noses: everyone has one.”) On some, she wrote short statements of her beliefs. (“I do not believe in God and I must assume, therefore, that God does not believe in me.”) And on some, she wrote poetry—haiku, rhymed couplets, sonnets, and an occasional villanelle.

  The bottles rattled and clinked in her shopping bag as she walked down the cement stairs to the beach. Seagulls took flight at her approach, shrieking as the wind caught them and blew them away like dirty scraps of paper. The retreating tide had littered the beach with clumps of seaweed and bits of driftwood. On her return trip, she would fill her bag with driftwood to burn in her wood stove.

  When she reached the water’s edge, Ms. Migsdale set the shopping bag on the sand and swung her right arm in wide circles to loosen the muscles. Then she selected a bottle and waited until a wave crashed on the beach and began its retreat to the sea. Taking a running step onto the wet sand, she threw the bottle with a graceful overhand pitch, a throwing style she had perfected over the years. The bottle arced high, tumbling end over end before splashing into the water just past the breakers. Ms. Migsdale took a step back so that her shoes were out of reach of the next wave, and watched as the bottle bobbed in a passing swell.

  Ms. Migsdale liked this time of the day, when she was awake but the rest of the city was still sleeping. Sometimes she saw things that emerged from the city’s dreams: Once a mermaid with long dark hair sang to Ms. Migsdale in a language she could not understand. Another time she met a wolf loping along the sand. The animal wore a red kerchief around its neck and smiled at her as it passed, a casual greeting between neighbors.

  Ms. Migsdale picked up her shopping bag and strolled along the water’s edge. A flock of small brown shorebirds that moved like clockwork toys ran just ahead of her, peeping furiously. The flock split to rush around a clump of kelp and reunited on the far side.

  Ms. Migsdale hesitated beside the kelp, noticing the glitter of glass among the tangled strands. Sometimes she found her own bottles, washed back to shore. With the toe of one of her sensible shoes, she nudged the kelp aside, revealing an amber-colored bottle that had once held Scotch. Not one of hers. She pulled it from the seaweed. Through the brown glass she could see a ragged­looking scrap of paper.

  Her hands shook as she unscrewed the bottle’s plastic top. In fifteen years of sending messages, she had never once received a reply. She tried to shake the note out, but the paper wedged in the bottleneck and did not move. Realizing the futility of that approach, she scooped up her shopping bag and hurried toward the seawall, where winter storms had deposited rocks of all sizes.

  With her strong right arm, she swung the bottle against a boulder. The brown glass shattered, sending chips flying in all directions. She snatched the scrap of paper from the bottleneck and unfolded it.

  The paper had been torn from a newspaper published before the Plague. The message read: “A stranger brings interesting news. Join with like-minded friends to prevent interference in your affairs. Look ahead.”

  Ms. Migsdale recognized the writing style and the typeface: the scrap had been part of the daily horoscope column that had once been published in a local newspaper. She read the words again, then slipped the paper into her pocket. Without her usual ceremony, she flung her remaining bottles out to sea and headed for home.

  “Join with like-minded friends …” the note had said. She wondered what her friend Edgar Brown would think of this.

  Edgar Brown, the man most people called “Books,” smoothed the scrap of newsprint on his knee and peered at it. Ms. Migsdale waited impatiently. She liked Edgar, but found him exasperating at times. Ask him how to boil an egg, and he would shake his head in puzzlement. A week after he would emerge from the library with a bibliography listing sources that covered every aspect of the operation, from the denaturation of egg proteins at 100° C to the role of the egg in Chinese literature. Before the Plague he had been a research librarian at the University of San Francisco. He approached every problem with the same careful scholarship he had applied to major theological controversies.

  “I’d say it was torn from a newspaper,” he said at last. “Perhaps from the Examiner. I’ll compare the typeface, and—”

  “I know that,” Ms. Migsdale interrupted. “But what do you think of what it says?” She did not give him a chance to respond. “I think it means that trouble’s coming. That’s what I think.”

  “That seems like a hasty conclusion, Elvira,” Books said.

  “It may be hasty, but that doesn’t mean I’m not right.” She leaned back and looked across the Civic Center Plaza. They were sitting on the steps of the public library, where Books lived. Across the Plaza, Danny-boy and Gambit were constructing something of shiny aluminum reflectors and wire.

  “Gambit’s building an aeolian harp,” Books said. “He’s stringing wires from the top of City Hall down to the Plaza. The reflectors will amplify the sound that the wind makes when it blows through the wires.”

  Ms. Migsdale glanced at his face. “It’s no good trying to change the subject.”

  He frowned. “Well, suppose you’re right and trouble is coming. Remember when the Black Dragons decided to expand their territory into downtown? The city took care of that quickly enough.”

  “Ghosts,” Ms. Migsdale said. “The city scared them off with ghosts. But what if we’re up against someone who doesn’t scare as easily?”

  “I don’t see what you’re so worried about,” Books grumbled.

  “If something comes up, we’ll deal with it.”

  She shrugged, watching Danny-boy and Gambit. Tommy, Ruby’s son, was helping—or, more likely, getting in the way. The sunlight glinted on the aluminum reflectors and Ms. Migsdale suddenly felt sad, as if she were remembering this from some distant future, looking back on happy times.

  “I haven’t heard from Leon,” she said, admitting at last her real concern. Leon was one of the traders who always brought her news of the rest of the state of California. “I expected him a few weeks ago, but I haven’t heard.”

  “He’s been delayed, that’s all,” Books said.

  “Maybe.” She shivered, feeling a sudden chill. “At night, when I listen to the waves, they seem to whisper warnings.” Books rubbed his hands together nervously.

  “You feel it too.”

  “I suppose I do,” he admitted reluctantly. He put his arm around her shoulders and she was glad of that. He was a stubborn man, a stodgy man, but a good friend for all that. Together, they would weather whatever trouble came their way.

  PART 1

  City of Dreams

  CHAPTER 1

  SIXTEEN YEARS BEFORE MS. MIGSDALE found the bottle, Mary Laurenson had given birth to a daughter. Mary lay on a double bed in an abandoned farmhouse, clinging with both hands to the brass bedstead. With each contraction, she moaned in pain and fear, but no one was there to hear her.

  It seemed to her that the moaning came from some external source, only incidentally linked to her body. She could feel the cries vibrating in her throat, but she had no control over them. She could not stop them any more than she could control the contractions that racked her body.

  She was alone. When she had run away from San Francisco, she had wanted to be alone, wanted to crawl away and hide. But she had not imagined the consequences of that action.

  She had felt the first contractions early in the evening. Her water had broken
at midnight. Now sunlight shone through the window. In the almond trees outside, blackbirds sang and flitted from branch to branch. In the blessed moments when her muscles relaxed between contractions, she could hear the birds. But when the contractions came she could hear nothing but her own moaning and the pounding of her heart.

  Her body was no longer her own. For hours she had fought for control, struggling to breathe as she had been taught, to relax between the spasms. Now she gave up, letting her body do as it would. She released her grip on the bedstead and put her hands at her sides, trying to find a position that would free her from the pain. Another contraction, and she gripped the sweat-drenched quilt beneath her, tearing the fabric with her hands.

  Her mind was as willful as her body. She had no control over her thoughts. She hallucinated, imagining that her dead husband sat on the edge of the bed, telling her to breathe the way she had learned to breathe in class. What he asked was impossible: her body did as it wished and she had no say in the matter.

  “Help me,” she sobbed, reaching out to the ghost of her husband. Her hand passed through empty space. “Goddamn you, help me.” He vanished, fading into the golden sunlight that filled the room.

  Not sunlight, she realized suddenly. The golden light shone from a winged figure that stood beside her bed. She reached out and felt the warmth of the light on her hand.

  “I’ll help you,” the angel said. She felt the voice in her body, like the trembling in her legs and the contractions in her belly. “Let me name the child and I’ll help you.”

  She panted, arching her back with the next contraction. “Yes,” she cried. “Yes, help me. Please help me.” The warm light shone on her face and she closed her eyes against it.

  The contractions came closer together, one long unending rush of pain. She closed her eyes and concentrated on pushing. She felt the tearing as the baby’s head came free. Again she pushed, seeking relief from the pain that was ripping her apart.

  Relief came suddenly as the baby slid from her body. For a moment she lay quietly. Then the spasms returned as she pushed out the placenta.