She, like Vepp, had been a clever one, celebrating every number-story that he brought to her. On the plains, Umma would have been a witch-woman. A distant clock-tower belled the buzzah episode ended with a close-up of the heroine’s anguished features. Most workers were already at their posts, pulling levers, feeding furnaces. The snowy wind was a variable Lunagrad’s gray buildings were variables also. Walking downtown, clutching the collar of his coat against the cold, he observed the invariables: blue sun, white sky. He cradled her inside his chest, inside a cry that only he could hear, a zero-source for all his numbers. Fortunately, Vepp could hold her true memory apart from buzzah. Ever since her murder-how many sleeps ago?-she’d been featured in his morning broadcast. At this very moment-he refused to pay attention-the heroine of a buzzah drama was wearing his dead mother’s face. Love and strife existed in his number-world as they did, Vepp supposed, in any real world-except that numbers didn’t suffer numbers didn’t die. Numbers were busy today, Vepp noted as he descended the rickety stairs to street level. His numbers created a swirled world all their own. Vepp didn’t care about counting up and counting down. His math was not the sort needed in the factories. He could watch numbers cascading and arranging themselves in his head all day-better than buzzah. Vepp, clever Vepp, knew too much about math already. Among the Readers, it is believed that this “scroll-script” holds the secret to the nature of reality.Īfter Ulla left for work at the start of each day, young Vepp, the orphan boarding with her, would sneak outside, leaving his T-puppet to teach math to an empty room. Fresh Builds are temporarily covered in a white wormlike script from which all citizens, apart from a few select Readers, must avert their eyes in order to avoid mental derangement. The city’s structures are mutable, erupting unpredictably in new “Builds”. But Lunagrad’s automated system is the true ruler of the city, assigning factory work to the citizens, rewarding them with entertaining brain-broadcasts called “buzzah.” The birth rate drops to zero instead of dying, the people-whose genetic programs have been modified by the city-devolve to embryos that are put in storage for later rebirth. Eventually, the citizens appoint a despotic mayor whose rule becomes dynastic. The pastoralists invade the empty city, battling each other at first but then coming to an uneasy cohabitation. By mythic coincidence, all tribes simultaneously arrive at the gates of Lunagrad, an automated city. Pastoral tribes wander across the snowy fields of Dayside under a cold blue sun that never changes its position in the sky. The world Hurth does not turn, but is forever divided into Dayside and Nightside.
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