John Brunner - The Squares of the City

The Squares of the City

John Brunner

ISBN 0-345-27739-2

e-book ver. 1.0

INTRODUCTION

The story told by John Brunner in The Squares of the City held me

spellbound from beginning to end. It had a special attraction for me

because all the people in the book are chess-mad, and chess is my

favorite pastime. But even the reader who knows nothing about the

game will be thoroughly fascinated by this story in which the two chief

political antagonists in a South American country attempt to direct the

actions of their followers by using the unconscious but powerful influence

of "subliminal perception," a technique which may well threaten all our

futures.

Under its baleful persuasion, members of the two hostile parties

commit all sorts of crimes as they unknowingly carry out the actions

suggested to them by a confidant of their leaders who is an expert in

subliminal perception and who is the Director of the television network

that controls The City. Only gradually does one realize that The City is a

chessboard-its chief inhabitants taking actions that are the counterparts

of moves in a vicious game of chess being played out by their leaders.

The author has added an ingenious twist to his story which will be

particularly intriguing to chess fans. The game in which his characters

move as living pieces has not been artificially designed by him to suit the

progress of his plot. It had actually been played, move for move, some

seventy years ago in a match for the world championship between the

title holder, the American master William Steinitz, and the Russian

master Mikhail Ivanovich Tchigorin.

-Edward Lasker, M.E., E.E.

I

On the flight down from Florida I talked with my seat companion-or, to

be more exact, he talked at me. He was a European-born Jew in his

middle fifties whose family had been thrown out by a Nazi invasion early

in World War Two, but although he was very proud of the fact that he

spoke with a European accent and said so at least a dozen times-"You

have noticed my accent, of course!"-I didn't manage to establish his

actual place of origin.

He had not been "home" for four years, and in fact appeared to have

spent much more time in the States than he had in Aguazul, but there

was no questioning his fervor for his adopted country. He insisted on

addressing the stewardess in ludicrously bad Spanish-worse even than

mine-although on this route, of course, all the stewardesses spoke

English, Spanish, and Portuguese with equal fluency. And when the plane

was circling in toward landing, he almost climbed into my lap in an effort

to point past me through the porthole and indicate locations of interest in

Vados.

Eventually the stewardess commanded him sternly-in English-to fasten

his seat belt. I think it was more the fact that she addressed him in a

"foreign" language than the actual order that made him calm himself and

sit down. After that I was able to close my mind, if not my ears, to his

glowing descriptions.

I forebore to tell him (it would have been very unkind) that although I

had never set foot in Vados, I almost certainly knew more about the city

than he did-more indeed than any of its citizens who hadn't deliberately

tramped the streets for a week on end, exploring and observing. I knew

that ten years or so before they had gone to a barren, rocky stretch of

land and decreed that there should be a new capital city; they had built

roads and put wild mountain torrents into concrete conduits and hoisted

solar electricity generators into the surrounding hills, first on muleback

and then by helicopter into places where even a mule could not scramble.

Now it was a flourishing city of half a million people.

I had studied the essential structure of the city, too: developed

organically from four gigantic plazas or squares, modulated by the three

great traffic arteries-six-lane superhighways with ten-foot shoulders

clear from Astoria Negra and Puerto Joaquin on the coast, and

Cuatrovientos, the oil center on which the wealth of Aguazul-and

therefore the city-was ultimately based.

But, looking down on the reality as the plane nosed toward the airport

cut in the mountainside, I felt a stir of my seat companion's excitement.

For I suppose I had never before seen anything so completely of the

twentieth century.

"Ten years ago," I said to myself, "this was wasteland. Scrub. Rock.

And now look at it." A shiver of awe clambered down my spine. My

feelings must have shown in my expression, for my companion chuckled.

"Magnifico, no?" he said with a smirk of satisfaction, as though he

himself had been responsible for the graceful towers, the splendid

avenues, the richly flowering parks.

It did indeed look magnificent. But-if it was as good as it looked, I

wouldn't have been here. I hesitated over whether or not I should try to

explain, and in the end said nothing.

When we parted in the customs hall of the air terminal, my temporary

acquaintance insisted on shaking my hand and giving me his card. The

name on it was Flores, with an address on Madison Avenue and another

right here in Vados.

Flores. Blum? I wondered. Rosenblum? Possibly; the intervening

years had smoothed out his vaunted European accent till it was

cosmopolitan, featureless.

He was torn between a desire to continue bragging of his adopted

homeland to a stranger and the wish to take his place in the citizens' line

at the customs desk, asserting his national rights. In the end the latter pull

triumphed. But before we separated, his hand shot out and indicated a

picture placed- not conspicuously, but visibly-behind the customs officers.

"That's a great man!" he said impressively. "The man they named

Vados for, of course. El Presidente!"

I was apparently the only alien aboard the plane this flight, and, as

happens most places these days, the natives received precedence. I went

to a bench across the narrow hall and lit a cigarette, composing myself to

wait.

The hall was quiet, lined with sound-absorptive material; although the

sun beat down pitilessly on the gray concrete of the runways outside, in

here it was cool. The light came through high green louvers, and not a

single fly buzzed through the still air. That in these latitudes was an

achievement. I occupied myself by looking at the picture. It was not only

that I was interested in the appearance of a man who could have a city

called after him in his own lifetime, and a capital city, moreover. He was

also indirectly my new employer. Officially I would be responsible to the

Ciudad de Vados city council, but Vados was mayor of the city as well

as president of the republic, and from everything I had heard it seemed

that what he said was what counted.

The portrait-which, of course, had no caption-showed el Presidente in

a plain white suit. A thin black tie seemed to cut his chest into equal

halves. His heavy-set body was carried erectly, in a military posture; he

gave the impression of tall-ness, and I knew he was in fact over six feet.

He had been taken gazing directly into the camera and so directly at me

where I sat studying him. The picture was very well done and suggested

a certain immediacy of presence. His face was very pale in contrast to

his thin black moustache and smooth dark hair. He grasped a

gold-knobbed swagger cane in both hands as if intending to twist the

ends in opposite directions and make it as spiral as a piece of

sugar-candy.

Juan Sebastian Vados. A lucky man, an astute man. And, Flores had

claimed, a great man. Certainly a brilliant one: for more than twenty

years now he had ruled Aguazul, and he had prosperity and contentment

to show for it-not to mention Ciudad de Vados, the greatest showpiece of

all.

I grew aware that I was being beckoned. I dropped my cigarette in a

sand bowl and crossed the resilient floor to the customs desk. A porter

trundled my bags down a roller conveyor to within reach of the official

who had waved to me. This was a swarthy man in a severe black

uniform with silver rank badges; his fingers were discolored with the blue

chalk used for okaying passengers' bags.

He glanced down at the passenger manifest and said in a bored tone,

"Quiere Vd. decirme su nombre?"

"Me llamo Boyd Hakluyt," I told him, reaching into my pocket for my

passport. "Habla Vd. ingles?"

He put his elbow on the desk top, hand outstretched. "Si," he agreed.

"The senor is Norteamericano?"

"No, Australian. I've been in the States some time." His eyebrows

arched a little as he studied my Australian passport. Quite probably he

hadn't seen one before. "And what is it brings the senor to Aguazul?" he

asked, as though genuinely interested. "Tourism, yes?"

He took up the stub of blue chalk lying nearest his hand and began to

move it toward my bags. I told him no, in fact I was working in Vados as

of the following day.

His eyes narrowed a very little. The hand with the chalk stopped an

inch from the first bag. "So?" he said. "And what is the senor's

profession?"

"I'm a traffic analyst," I answered. "I specialize in such problems as

how to get cars moving faster in busy streets, how to prevent people

blocking the exits at subway stations-"

He nodded impatiently. "Yo comprendo," he snapped, as if I had

implied he was of inferior intelligence. "And what do you do here in

Vados?"

"I'm supposed to suggest a solution to a traffic problem." This was

factually accurate, and as I said it, I felt again a tingle of excitement-the

same excitement that I had felt on first being assigned the job. Perhaps it

wasn't so much simple excitement as a sense of being awarded an

accolade-Ciudad de Vados was more than a brand-new city in the

circles where I worked; it was a byword for ultimate achievement in city

planning and traffic analysis. And to be chosen to improve on near

perfection was a kind of climax to a career.

Of course, it was to be expected that improvement had now become

possible; it was twelve years since the plans had been approved, and

there had been progress in that time. More to the point, the finest

analogue computers in the world couldn't get all the bugs out of a traffic

plan-experiment was the only way of establishing where faults might lie.

And yet...

The customs officer seemed to be affected by the same kind of

puzzlement as I. But he had a way of resolving it. He tossed the chalk in

the air and as it fell closed his hand around it with a gesture of finality. "I

shall require to examine your baggage, Senor Hakluyt," he said.

I sighed, wondering what had made him change his mind. But

experience had taught me it was always quicker not to raise objections.

So I said only, "Everything I have with me is my personal property, and I

checked with your consulate in Miami to make sure I wasn't bringing any

proscribed items."

"Puede ser," he answered noncommittally, and took my keys.

He asked questions about almost everything he found, but it was the

quantity of clothing I had with me that he harped on most. He kept trying

to insist that I could not possibly need everything I had brought; again and

again I had to explain that my work often took me out on highway and

other construction projects where there were no laundry facilities, and if

I was to dress reasonably well, I had to bring as much as this.

"Senor Hakluyt, then, is a very wealthy man?" he pressed, altering his

line of attack.

I resisted the growing temptation to make a smart crack in reply and

shook my head.

"The senor is not wealthy and yet has so much baggage," he said, as

though propounding a major philosophical paradox to himself. "Will the

senor tell me at what rate he is to be paid for the work he does in

Vados?"

That was a little too much. "Is it any of your business?" I countered.

He showed his teeth, with the air of a card-player producing a

fourteenth trump. I disliked him intensely from that moment on. "Senor

Hakluyt is perhaps not aware that I am a police officer," he purred. "But

I am-and it is therefore illegal to refuse an answer to any question I may

put."

I gave ground. "I'm being paid twenty thousand dolaros and expenses,"

I said.

He pushed down the lid on the last of my bags and slashed crosses on

each item with the blue chalk. Then he dusted his hands off against each

other in a way that suggested he was getting rid of something more than

just smears of chalk. "It is to be hoped, then, that the senor is generous

with his money," he said. "Perhaps it is there, the reason why be is not

already a wealthy man."

He turned on his heel and stalked away. The examination had taken so

long that the airline buses had all left for the center of town. I dug into

my inadequate knowledge of Spanish and managed to persuade a porter

to call me a cab and load my bags into it while I went to a change booth

and turned a few dollars into a supply of dolaros-crisp new

red-and-yellow paper bearing portraits of el Presidente, nominally at par

to the United States dollar but worth in actual purchasing power about

eighty-five cents. They were a monument to one of Vados's first great

achievements-the major currency reform he had carried through a year

after coming to power. It was said that he had called his new monetary

unit the dolaro in hope that it would become as hard a currency as its

North American original; by Latin American standards he had worked

miracles in even approaching this goal.

When I came to tip the porter who'd called my cab, I remembered

what the customs officer had said about being generous with my money.

By way of experiment I gave him two dolaros and looked for a reaction.

There wasn't one. He probably thought I was a tourist who couldn't be

bothered keeping track of foreign currency because he subconsciously

felt it wasn't real money anyway. I tried to shrug the whole thing off.

However, it wasn't until the cab was on its way down from the

mountainside airport that the matter was driven to the back of my mind.

The road swung around in a wide quarter circle to ease the sharp

descent into Vados, and since the air was clear and the sun was shining

brilliantly, I had a perfect bird's-eye view out over the area. I could even

make out Puerto Joaquin, forty-odd miles distant, as a dark blur where

the land merged into the ocean.

But after a superficial glance around, I didn't again trouble to look so

far away. I was too fascinated by Ciudad de Vados in the immediate

foreground.

There was an impressive quality about the city that no amount of maps

and plans had been able to convey to me. Without the distraction of

Flores importuning me to look at things, I was able to soak up the true

magnificence of it all.

Somehow-it was hard to define how-those who had planned this city

had managed to give it an organic vitality akin to that of a giant machine.

There was a slumbering controlled power that could be felt, implying

business to be done; yet it was matched by a functional perfection that

meant economy, simplicity, unity without uniformity. Just about

everything, in fact, that idealistic city-planners had ever hoped for.

I told the cabdriver to pull off the road for a moment and got out to

stare down through the limpid air from the edge of a bushy bluff. I

recognized almost everything I could see: residential there, business

there, government offices there, the parks, the museums, the opera

house, the four great plazas, the viaducts carrying the superhighways.

Fantastic. On the surface not a single flaw. I stayed long enough on the

bluff to smoke half a cigarette; then I went back to the cab and told the

driver to take me into town. I went on staring out of the window as we

hurried down the mountainside.

Then something came between the window and the view, and I turned

my head barely in time to see a sort of shack parked-it didn't look

substantial enough for one to say it was built-alongside the road. I had

no chance to take in details, but that didn't matter; fifty yards farther on

there was another, and then a whole cluster of them-matchboard

shanties roofed with flattened oildrums, their walls made gaudy here and

there by advertising placards, ragged washing hung out to dry between

them on poles and lines. Naked or nearly naked children played around

the huts in company with straggly roosters, goats, and the odd emaciated

piglet.

I was so taken aback I had no chance to order the driver to stop again

before the road straightened for its final nose dive into Vados proper. But

as we passed the gate of the first real house on the outskirts-it was a

handsome colonial-style villa set among palms-I saw a peasant family

trudging up the hill: father carrying a bundle on the traditional strap

around his forehead, mother with one child in her arms and another

wearily plodding at her heels. They paid the cab no attention as it

hummed past, except to screw up their eyes against dust. A memory

filled my mind suddenly: the memory of a man I had met while working

on the clearance of an industrial slum area. He had been born there; he

had been lucky enough to climb out of it and all that it implied. And he

had said, as we talked about what was being abolished, "You know, I

always knew it wasn't permanent. That was what enabled me to get the

hell out, when other people gave up. Because it was a shock to me,

every time I saw a paving stone taken up, to find that there was earth

underneath-the aboriginal dirt. Most of the time the town seemed so

implacable, so solid and squat and loathsome-but whenever I was

reminded that the earth was underneath, I managed to see through that

facade and go on fighting."

It was as though cold water had been thrown in my face. I suddenly

saw a possible explanation of why I was here. And-in the most peculiar

way-the explanation frightened me.

II

The layout of Ciudad de Vados was so straightforward and logical it

would probably have been impossible for a cabby to try taking even a

complete stranger by a roundabout route. Nonetheless, force of habit and

professional interest made me follow the track of my cab on a mental

map, at the same time as I studied the buildings and the people on the

streets.

With the twentieth-century homogenization of culture, most of the

route we took could have been approximated in any large city in the

Americas or Western Europe, aside from obvious differences, such as

the language on the street signs and the frequent appearance of priests

and nuns in their religious habits. Here a trio of pretty girls in new

summer frocks stood waiting for a crosstown monorail; the high platform

was windy, and their skirts whirled as they laughed and chattered.

Below, a thoughtful youth in an open convertible eyed them with careful

consideration; a few yards away two respectable women debated

whether to be more disapproving of the girls for being attractive or the

boy for being attracted.

Huge stores, designed according to modern sales-promotion

techniques, proferred their goods; money flowed like a river Over their

counters. The cars and cabs whirled forward; despite the fact that the

traffic flow was nowhere near its theoretical optimum, there were still

fifty per cent fewer traffic holdups than I had ever before seen in a city

this size. Bright clothes and bright faces on the sidewalks; bright sunlight

on the bright light walls of the tall buildings and on the clean- incredibly

clean-streets.

I looked around, and the buildings said proudly, "Progress!" The

laughter on the faces of youths and girls said, "Success!" The satisfied

look of businessmen said, "Prosperity!"

But even in that moment, in my first hour in Vados, I found myself

wondering what the peasant family would have answered, trudging up

the hill toward their shantytown.

My hotel-the Hotel del Principe-was on the Plaza del Sur, one of the

four main squares of Ciudad de Vados. The squares had been named

unimaginatively enough after the four points of the compass. We were

nearing the end of the trip when that part of my mind that had been

following our route on an imaginary map warned me that we had taken a

wrong turn at a traffic signal. I was leaning forward to remonstrate with

the driver when I saw that the whole stream of cars and other vehicles

was being diverted from the entrance to the Plaza del Sur. I caught one

glimpse of the palms and flowers in the parklike center of the square, and

then the cab pulled in at the side of the road and the driver reached for a

cigarette.

I asked him what was happening; he shrugged an enormous and

expressive Latin American shrug.

"No tengo la culpa," he said defensively, but giving one brief glance

at the meter clocking up my fare. "It isn't my fault."

I opened the window and craned my head around. An excited crowd

(but where in Latin America is a crowd not excited?) had gathered at the

entrance to the square. It had a holiday atmosphere about it, for peddlers

were going to and fro with tamale wagons and trays of knickknacks, but

it was plain from the many parked trucks and cars bearing the neatly

lettered word POLICIA that there was nothing festive about whatever

had happened.

After a few minutes a line of police appeared from inside the square

and began to disperse the crowd with extravagant waves of their long

white batons. My driver snuffed his cigarette out, carefully returning the

unfinished butt to his pocket, and pulled the wheel down hard. We

crossed the road to an accompaniment of other cars' brakes shrieking

and entered the square.

Though there were still many people on the gravel walks between the

trees, there was no sign of anything police might have been needed to

break up. The single indicative point was that a man in a shabby cotton

uniform-a municipal street cleaner, perhaps-was going carefully about

picking up bits of paper that looked like leaflets and stuffing them in a

long gray bag.

The cab rolled around the square to the Hotel del Principe, a

white-and-bronze building with a kind of loggia along its line of frontage,

and three shallow steps underlining the effeclive facade. There were

three doors of plain glass in the glass face of the loggia; the cab halted

before the first of them.

Instantly a trio of ragged youths and one ragged girl, who had been

squatting on the sidewalk with their backs against the hardboard side of a

portable news kiosk, eyes screwed up against the sun, bounced to their

feet. They attempted to open the door, get my bags out, shine my shoes,

and show me the way up the hotel steps, all the time keeping one palm

free and poised to catch money if it flew in their direction. The

cab-driver didn't move from his seat; he merely spat into the gutter,

making the act convey a whole bookful of disgusted annoyance.

At the head of the steps a majestic commissionaire turned toward the

commotion. He summed it up in a glance and sent the ragged children

running with some awful and probably obscene threat in a raucous voice

and coarse accent. Then he walked down and opened my door.

"Buenos dias, senor," he said affably, but this time in so polite and

polished a voice I gave him a sharp stare, almost not believing this could

be the same man. "Es Vd.. el senor Hakluyt?"

I agreed that I was, and paid the driver, giving him a tip that proved

large enough to startle him out of his seat to help the hotel bellhop with

my bags. I looked around the plaza again.

"What was going on here just now?" I demanded. "Why had they

closed the square to traffic?"

The commissionaire interrupted himself in the middle of instructing the

bellhop. He turned a cool and sardonic eye on me. "I do not know,

senor," he said. "It cannot have been of much importance."

From which, naturally, I deduced that it was of very great

importance-sufficiently so to make a bad impression on a new arrival. I

reminded myself to find out at the earliest opportunity what it was.

John Brunner - The Squares of the City

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