Welcome back to Reading the Weird, in which we get girl cooties all over weird fiction, cosmic horror, and Lovecraftiana—from its historical roots through its most recent branches.
This week, we continue N.K. Jemisin’s The City We Became with Chapter 13: Beaux Arts, Bitches. The novel was first published in March 2020. Spoilers ahead!
“I don’t care how many people they’re paying off or mind-controlling, even eldritch abominations can’t get a construction permit overnight in this city.”
Chapter 13: Beaux Arts, Bitches
Hong has dropped a bombshell on the borough avatars: For New York to live, the main avatar must consume them. As Chapter 13 opens, he’s obligingly explaining that London initially had more than a dozen subavatars. “Something” happened, leaving only one London and a safe city. Conversely, in the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, the Enemy killed Sodom before the two could merge, incinerating them in the “fire and brimstone” of a volcanic eruption. If New York “doesn’t hurry up and eat” the subavatars, a similar catastrophe will destroy the metropolis and chunks of several surrounding states. When Bronca suggests the “consumption” might be metaphor for some spiritual or even sexual union, Hong admits to ignorance of the exact process. From how it traumatized London’s primary, however, it can’t be good.
Manny reins in his impulse to attack someone; he’s become a man who controls violence, employing it for worthy purposes only. Still shaky from Aislyn’s attack, Paulo echoes Hong: Millions of lives hang on New York’s successful birth. The boroughs must find him and “do whatever is necessary.”
It’s Padmini who explodes, shoving Paulo. Seeing the damage she inflicts, Manny realizes how vulnerable the “foreign” city is to borough attacks, and how much the boroughs could harm each other. They mustn’t fight internally, or reject primary New York. The consequence would be utter destruction.
Manny emphasizes something different is happening with New York’s birth, something they don’t understand. Hong admits this is true. Brooklyn says that anything the primary does won’t be personal; lots of bad things aren’t. Millions of lives against their four? Not even a debate.
Hong counsels immediate action, telling the group about the blocks-wide blankets of white tentacles he saw from the plane. They’re forming structures, like the tower on Staten Island. From the gallery window, Veneza points out an anomaly rising from Bronca’s neighborhood: a cross between “a giant toadstool and the Gateway Arch in St. Louis”. Bronca needs to walk her streets, find out what’s going on. Manny and Veneza go along. To Bronca, everything feels wrong. But what shocks her is how the building housing locally-famous restaurant Murdaburger has become a rubble-strewn—and tendril-strewn—lot. A poster touts the luxury condos coming soon.
The poster includes a logo for the Better New York Foundation—but getting a permit for this “project” must have taken time. The people responsible must have been active for a while. White must have set traps in anticipation of New York waking. On-line searches reveal that Better New York is owned by TMW, LLC.
The TMW stands for “Total Multiversal War.” And it doesn’t only have its tentacles in New York, but in as-yet-unawakened cities around the world.
Hong claims the elder cities haven’t noticed this elsewhere, but Padmini makes him admit they haven’t been looking. Paulo sighs, as if to level a weary I told you so at Hong. He told the Summit that the Enemy’s behavior had changed. He had no idea it had taken on a human shape, but for sure he’d noticed its increasing intelligence, subtlety and malevolence. When New Orleans and Port-au-Prince were stillborn, the elder cities implied it was because the young cities of the Americas were awakening prematurely, without the strength to survive. Well, maybe not. Maybe something’s happening beyond this world, “some catalyst which has spurred the Enemy to evolve.” Paulo should have pursued the possibility, but he let Hong talk him into complacency.
Buy the Book
Africa Risen
“I just wanted to keep you safe,” Hong says, with a softness that makes the others wonder about the complexity of their relationship.
Brooklyn reminds them that they’re still missing Staten Island. Isn’t finding her the obvious next step? Manny dislikes the idea. Maybe he’s afraid of an avatar who’s shown herself violent, or maybe he shares Manhattanites’ “collective distaste for the littlest, least-loved borough?” With Hong urgently urging urgency, the boroughs decide one team will go after Staten Island, while the rest will go to City Hall to awaken or at least guard New York.
Suddenly there’s “a strange gravitic dip.” Something is rising from the other world, a “layer of wrongness” that interferes with their bonds to the city. They try to get out of the Center but can’t run fast enough; Manny uses a subway train construct to blast them to relative safety across the street. They watch a white column erupt from the ground without seeming to disturb the Center building. It flings itself up into huge, interlocking tendrils, solidifying into an eighty-foot-high tower.
They don’t dare approach. Even passing motorists sense and flee from the anomaly. An old-fashioned Checker cab halts before them. It’s Madison, Manny’s comrade in fighting the FDR eruption. The city has sent them a ride. Bronca directs a reluctant Veneza home. Madison will drive Manny and Paulo to City Hall. Bronca will drive Brooklyn, Padmini and Hong to Staten Island. Manny overhears Padmini warning her family to get out of the city, and Brooklyn telling her Dad and daughter to bug-out as planned.
As Veneza drives homeward, considering whether to wait around for “an interdimensional apocalypse,” something in her backseat gulps softly: da-dump.
This Week’s Metrics
Mind the Gap: Manny uses subway magic to rush everyone away from the Woman’s takeover of the Bronx Art Center. There’s gonna be a trolley problem along any minute now.
What’s Cyclopean: Padmini’s Tamil kvetching translates roughly to Why look at the sun after you’ve already been blinded? Or Why bother doing morning yoga if you got up late?
Anne’s Commentary
Last chapter-commentary, I started gnawing on the concept of Belief in this novel. It’s a big old thematic bone, or maybe a pervasive thematic tendon of the toughest sort, because I still have a lot of gnawing to do. Chapter Thirteen illustrates the ease with which believing what one wants to believe can infect organizations as well as individuals. Paulo describes telling the Summit of Born-Cities (as I wantonly designate it) that the Enemy was changing, becoming “smarter, more subtle, more malevolent.” His evidence? The stillbirths of New Orleans and Port-au-Prince: cities that should have been born alive instead of succumbing to Katrina and the 2010 Haitian earthquake.
Sounds like there’s a generational divide among Summit members, which at least partly overlaps with a divide between the elder cities of the Old World and the younger cities of the New World. According to Paulo, all the elder cities reject his concerns. So do “more than a few” of the younger ones. They do not believe him.
Why not? Paulo doesn’t state their reasons verbatim. I figure what the Summit officially said was some version of Hong’s “old-argument” rejoinder to Paulo: “The process [of city-birth] has not changed for centuries. Millenia! Why should it change now?” Ah, the argument from precedence, from history viewed as a stable state with negligible variations in its causes and effects. The dominant parties in any organization tend toward conservatism, status-preservation. As Bruce Hornsby’s song puts it: “That’s just the way it is/Some things will never change.” When you’re an “elder,” or a “younger” subservient to “elder-wisdom,” this is a comfortable thing to believe. That things don’t essentially change is a comfortable belief for most people. We know how to deal with the things that have “always” been, whereas change is a scary thing to contemplate, even for those it might benefit. As an Eeyore T-shirt I’ve seen puts it: “Things could be worse. I don’t know how, but they could be.”
It’s obvious how things could be worse if Paulo’s fears are legitimate. If the Enemy stays the same, essentially brutish, the Summit’s got this. If bad things happen to nascent cities like New Orleans and Port-au-Prince, it’s—well, how to put it in a nonjudgmental, a nonhurtful, way. We, the elders, know that these New World cities are at fault. Instead of saying they’re impatient, pushy, too damn cocky, let’s say they are “premature.” Instead of saying they’re too weak to be born, let’s say they simply haven’t the strength yet to survive the process. That sounds more sympathetic, doesn’t it?
Paulo’s not soothed by the Summit. He does, however, let Hong deter him from investigating the Enemy’s changes. He joins Hong in complacency. “Complacency” is a word to make Hong glare, because in fact Hong was not complacent. It’s because Hong shared some of Paulo’s unease that he played it down. Or, as Hong puts it in a for-him stunning show of emotional honesty, “I just wanted you to be safe.”
Manny and Bronca feel the “undercurrent” between the older cities strongly enough to exchange meaningful glances. Whoa, are these guys actually a thing? Is their inter-prickliness that of lovers-at-odds rather than rivals?
When Hong senses danger in investigating the Enemy’s changes, he betrays a share in Paulo’s perception of change. His emotional choice is to pretend disbelief. Or is it pretense if his emotion is strong enough? Does he not achieve the alternate belief that all’s the same, all’s well, because that’s what he so strongly wants to believe? And does Paulo achieve a tentative belief all’s the same, all’s well because he wants to share Hong’s belief? Hong, his mentor and lover.
For sure, a lot of sparks fly between these cities born or in the throes of birth. Primary New York insinuated himself into Paulo’s bed long enough to “give him a reason to let me back in later.” Manhattan has fallen in instant love with primary New York, whom he’s only glimpsed in vision and self-portrait. Other-than-erotically-charged sparks fly too, as in the instant antagonism between Bronca and Brooklyn. Padmini, the “nice one” of the boroughs, is goaded into anger and outright aggression at the seeming callousness of the older cities. Lord knows what lightning will arc between Staten Aislyn and the boroughs seeking her—we’ve seen how things went when Paulo approached.
Bronca, borough-born, has deepened her connection with noncity Veneza to a point of poignant vulnerability on both sides. This makes Bronca do the tough-love thing of sending Veneza away from the fight, telling her she’s incapable of helping when really Bronca is incapable of accepting the risk to Veneza. Fortunately Veneza, though hurt, realizes what’s behind her dismissal, and Bronca realizes she realizes it.
Unfortunately, we don’t always know how to protect the ones we love. Especially during an interdimensional apocalypse where things can go da-dump into your backseat from the Woman in White’s “staging area.” Da-dump, such a cute and innocuous sound, right?
Too bad what makes it is probably neither.
Ruthanna’s Commentary
So maybe I should have expected “the main avatar will consume you” to result in an argument about ethics. And about the definition of “consume.” Really, I’m not sure what else could have resulted—it’s not like the sub-avatars were all going to wander off and abandon the plot.
Or let New York and its surroundings collapse into the ocean. Those are sure some stakes.
The list of failed cities is growing. Some have fallen into myth, like Atlantis, Sodom, and Gomorrah. Some we’ve heard of. I’m honestly not sure how I feel about the story of New Orleans’s stillbirth. It fits with the clusterf*** of incompetence and racism that was the handling of Katrina. At the same time, I don’t know, it feels disrespectful of the city’s sheer resilience to say that it isn’t alive. And then again, I would’ve marked New York as alive well before the time of cell phones. So the sense of a city as alive and thriving is necessary for it to awaken and break universes, but not sufficient. It’s a whole state change (sorry not sorry).
The Woman’s people probably have a science to explain that change. Kaiju may hatch at their own pace, but the folks who live in stomping range need more urgently to forecast the birth of living natural disasters. Or if they can’t forecast, to prepare for them. Which, indeed, it turns out that they’ve been doing. Total Multiversal War, LLC, via the Greater New York Foundation and its ilk, has been getting ready to kill new hatchlings as soon as the shell starts to crack. For those who were wondering about the point of attacking cities after birth, I think we’ve got our answer. The ultimate goal is to get them before they punch through.
And the best way to do that is to get rid of the species that puts all this pressure on space-time in the first place. No wonder the Woman keeps burbling regretfully about human extinction. No humans, no cities.
Except, what did the Woman tell Aislyn? “We’re both composite entities for whom the boundaries of space, time, and flesh have meaning.” Does her kind of composite entity really tread so lightly on the rest of the multiverse? They certainly do seem to have a lot of capacity for screwing with other people’s physical laws—what do their fungous tendrils do when they’re closer to home?
Perhaps, in this multiverse, it’s not possible to live without complicity. So what do we choose to do about that harm? Should we keep our cities small and fragile, for the rest of the multiverse’s sake? Could we, if we tried, or would we just make ourselves small and fragile and yet still destructive? When do we eat to survive, and when do we offer ourselves up to be eaten? And so we come back around to the ethical argument.
And to the definitional one. I have a feeling that sub-avatars aren’t just tasty steaks. Everyone has been experiencing regular get out of my mind flinches, drawn to the other avatars and pushing them away. Maybe eat is a less accurate word than absorb. And then you get… a composite entity. For whom the boundaries of space, time, and flesh has meaning.
Which is maybe better than just getting et. But maybe also more ongoingly uncomfortable, given Hong’s descriptions of the others who’ve gone through it. I imagine a traumatic self-loss, inextricable with the becoming. And certainly, alas, not compatible with asking your central avatar out on a date.
Next week, sometimes disaster investigation requires an extremely last-ditch fallback option. Join us for Vivian Shaw’s “Black Matter”.
Ruthanna Emrys’s A Half-Built Garden is now out! She is also the author of the Innsmouth Legacy series, including Winter Tide and Deep Roots. You can find some of her fiction, weird and otherwise, on Tor.com, most recently “The Word of Flesh and Soul.” Ruthanna is online on Twitter and Patreon, and offline in a mysterious manor house with her large, chaotic household—mostly mammalian—outside Washington DC.
Anne M. Pillsworth’s short story “The Madonna of the Abattoir” appears on Tor.com. Her young adult Mythos novel, Summoned, is available from Tor Teen along with sequel Fathomless. She lives in Edgewood, a Victorian trolley car suburb of Providence, Rhode Island, uncomfortably near Joseph Curwen’s underground laboratory.
