The City We Became (Great Cities #1) - N. K. Jemisin Page 0,2

to it. Come on, come on, fishy fishy. I need somewhere to sleep.

Then his eyes narrow and focus on mine again. “I had forgotten,” he says, in a faint wondering tone. “I almost… It’s been so long. Once, though, I was a boy of the favelas.”

“Not a lot of Mexican food in New York,” I reply.

He blinks and looks amused again. Then he sobers. “This city will die,” he says. He doesn’t raise his voice, but he doesn’t have to. I’m paying attention now. Food, living: These things have meaning to me. “If you do not learn the things I have to teach you. If you do not help. The time will come and you will fail, and this city will join Pompeii and Atlantis and a dozen others whose names no one remembers, even though hundreds of thousands of people died with them. Or perhaps there will be a stillbirth—the shell of the city surviving to possibly grow again in the future but its vital spark snuffed for now, like New Orleans—but that will still kill you, either way. You are the catalyst, whether of strength or destruction.”

He’s been talking like this since he showed up—places that never were, things that can’t be, omens and portents. I figure it’s bullshit because he’s telling it to me, a kid whose own mama kicked him out and prays for him to die every day and probably hates me. God hates me. And I fucking hate God back, so why would he choose me for anything? But that’s really why I start paying attention: because of God. I don’t have to believe in something for it to fuck up my life.

“Tell me what to do,” I say.

Paulo nods, looking smug. Thinks he’s got my number. “Ah. You don’t want to die.”

I stand up, stretch, feel the streets around me grow longer and more pliable in the rising heat of day. (Is that really happening, or am I imagining it, or is it happening and I’m imagining that it’s connected to me somehow?) “Fuck you. That ain’t it.”

“Then you don’t even care about that.” He makes it a question with the tone of his voice.

“Ain’t about being alive.” I’ll starve to death someday, or freeze some winter night, or catch something that rots me away until the hospitals have to take me, even without money or an address. But I’ll sing and paint and dance and fuck and cry the city before I’m done, because it’s mine. It’s fucking mine. That’s why.

“It’s about living,” I finish. And then I turn to glare at him. He can kiss my ass if he doesn’t understand. “Tell me what to do.”

Something changes in Paulo’s face. He’s listening, now. To me. So he gets to his feet and leads me away for my first real lesson.

This is the lesson: Great cities are like any other living things, being born and maturing and wearying and dying in their turn.

Duh, right? Everyone who’s visited a real city feels that, one way or another. All those rural people who hate cities are afraid of something legit; cities really are different. They make a weight on the world, a tear in the fabric of reality, like… like black holes, maybe. Yeah. (I go to museums sometimes. They’re cool inside, and Neil deGrasse Tyson is hot.) As more and more people come in and deposit their strangeness and leave and get replaced by others, the tear widens. Eventually it gets so deep that it forms a pocket, connected only by the thinnest thread of… something to… something. Whatever cities are made of.

But the separation starts a process, and in that pocket the many parts of the city begin to multiply and differentiate. Its sewers extend into places where there is no need for water. Its slums grow teeth; its art centers, claws. Ordinary things within it, traffic and construction and stuff like that, start to have a rhythm like a heartbeat, if you record their sounds and play them back fast. The city… quickens.

Not all cities make it this far. There used to be a couple of great cities on this continent, but that was before Columbus fucked the Indians’ shit up, so we had to start over. New Orleans failed, like Paulo said, but it survived, and that’s something. It can try again. Mexico City’s well on its way. But New York is the first American city to reach this point.

The gestation can take twenty years or two hundred or two