THE LANGUAGE OF CITY WALLS

1560 4D

After years of seeing the entwined lines and shapes inlaid in the walls and floors of the underground streets of Gran Dar, I’ve started learning their secrets. These long skeins of still-gleaming metal are not decorations. They’re inscriptions.

I didn’t have any such idea when I first looked at them. In many ways, the lines that ran continuously down long corridors and around bends resembled the traces of an antique oscilloscope: waveforms of a complex and nonrepeating character. They didn’t seem to repeat themselves, so they carried information, but in what form? I couldn’t tell.

Other pretty markings mixed with the waves looked frustratingly meaningful. These metal-enamel blends of many subtle colors never seemed to repeat in any overall pattern or design. They made knots and weaves that twined with the long strands I described earlier, and appeared at irregular intervals along the strands. Just to transcribe digitally all the designs inlaid along just one wall of just one street took me two years.

The transcription was just as confusing as its source. The transcription presented no apparent pattern I could analyze. Three more years passed. I was ready to abandon the project and mount the transcribed wall pattern in my own apartment as a work of art. Then one day I sat down at Caladrina‘s and told madman Marko about it.

Marko had no interest in my work. He was a wild thing of the City, usually adrift in some chemical haze but brutally coherent in his own obsession: mathematical analysis. We were eating some of Caladrina‘s spiced arthropods – the kind with the slightly bitter, salty flavor, the ones whose name I can’t remember. I started to tell him about the inscriptions.

“I know, I know,” he waved dismissal at me, his mouth half full. “Quit fooling with it, Deng. You have no idea, do you?”

“Well, not yet,” I said, “but–“

He barked a laugh, spat out a toothpicky crableg. “Got to go up to Nagrasai. Two women and another guy. Try transforms. Han-o, D.” With that brief parting salute, he was gone.

Transforms? I wasn’t the mathematician he was, but I sat and played with one of the snacks, drawing thin lines on the tabletop in the spilled brew. Did he mean codes of some kind?

“Did he leave you with the check again?” It was Caladrina.

Damn. “Yes, he did. Do you know any mathematicians or engineers?”

He was staring across the restaurant to where a group of strangely-dressed people had just entered. “Thringe,” he muttered.

“Caladrina?”

“Uh… yes?”

Since he seemed frozen where he stood, I turned to look at the group. They wore capes, and not much underneath. A girl in the group glanced over at him. Her skin danced and shimmered with fleeting patterns of color and shade, and her head was devoid of hair.

“Who is that?”

“Don’t you know? That’s Thringe. Winjilles Thringe. The singer.” I apparently looked lost; he rolled his eyes and said, “Oh never mind. Just pay Essa. I’ll talk to you later.” With a wave of his hand, he hurried to the entrance where the caped group waited. He approached, then recoiled a bit, gestured them to a table, and then stood stock still as the girl brushed past him, her cape sliding open to flash him her bare breast.

He fiddled with menus, stumbled over a chair, and came past me as if I were invisible.

Essa sidled up to my table. “Want anything else?” She touched up her silver hair with a stylus and smiled lopsidedly, inclining her head back toward the scene that had just played out. “That was less fun to watch. Wonder why she’s messing with him like that?”

“Who’s Thringe?” I got out my small stack of metal and paid the tab.

“Go down to Joovlie’s and find out.” Essa scooped up the money and swayed off. She swiveled at the kitchen door and added, “But I don’t think you’d like it there.”