There is a road that runs beneath the Big Arch, from Soulfields down to Cassiopeia Row; the atlases can never agree on a name for it, but then the atlases never get anything right when it comes to the Orthogon. Planet-born cartographers find it very difficult to deal with the radiant, ostentatious geometry here; it makes them slow, stops them in their tracks in the middle of the street saying things like, “Hang on, but I thought – wasn’t this – ” and doing their best to get themselves run over by a passing tram. One time I saw a gleaming brand new angle-laser surveyance kit be smashed to smithereens by the 62 heading anticlockwise towards the Saragol Steps. Its owner had been too preoccupied with trying to figure out the apparent magnitude of the gigantic billboards above Po Square, unable as she was to simply use a measuring wheel to find out how far away they were.
It’s not just the cartographers, to be honest. Most planet-born folk struggle here, and once their business is done they hurry home to their big open hungry skies. I saw a sky once, when I was studying on Balthasar. It was awful. It had an imminent hugeness I can’t begin to describe. I spent most of the semester indoors, which probably improved my grade but did nothing to convince me after I finished that it was worth going anywhere other than home. When I stepped off the shuttle at Rimways and looked up at the city, I breathed a long, happy lungful of tame Orthogonal air and felt happy for the first time in months. I stayed on the runway a long time watching the Pisa District rotate out of view to be replaced with the Hsei-Hung Quarter, all criss-crossed with the elevated tramways and the pod network weaving through like roots. Eventually the steward had to ask me to move along. On the Orthogon, time is energy, after all.
So this road. I lived at number 722 for a while, in a big dysfunctional commune that I found through a friend from Balthasar. It suited me well enough at the time but looking back I’m not sure I shouldn’t have left after the third or fourth big argument between the couple on the second floor which resulted in someone getting hospitalised. Instead, in the end what drove me out was how my writing equipment kept getting stolen for hookah smoking. (I never did figure out who was doing that.) So there I was, literally storming off in a huff with my clothes in one bag and my books in the other, waiting for the street to synchronise with Kishana Bay View so I could make my way to my brother’s and crash on his floor – when I noticed something in the city streets.
Alignment.
It flashed and was gone. I blinked. Kishana Bay had clicked into place and people were starting to cross. I only had a few moments to do the same, otherwise I’d have to wait another hour and a half. But my head was full of angles.
For a moment, from where I was looking, with Hsei-Hung just setting on the horizon and the Pyramid ascending – all the lines and mechanisms of the Orthogon had momentarily aligned. Relative to me, they were all oriented towards the same vanishing point.
This was absurd. I’d never heard of such a thing. The city didn’t do that. It would imply the layout of streets followed some sort of logical system. But the Orthogon had grown outwards from seed, chaotically, deliberately without pattern or plan. The whole point of the city – the reason they built it in the first place – was to be safe from the Gridlock.
That meant if there was in fact a hidden order to the Orthogon – an order which manifested itself only at particular times, only visible from certain vantage points –
Then something was going on which the city didn’t want us to know about.
And we were all in terrible trouble.