Topside: eleven days above the smog

Every city on earth is built the same way now, and ours is no different. At the bottom is the Undercroft: the drains, the flooded stations, the warrens, us. In the middle are the Midlevels: the factory decks, the Bureau floors, the tram lines, and the people who stamp and weld and file to keep their quarter blue. And above the smog, where none of us has ever been, is Topside. I went up on the first of the month and came back down on the eleventh.

Getting up

The lifts that serve Topside run from the Midlevels freight halls, never lower. I went up in a laundry cart with a dead woman's pass sewn into my collar and six sheets of clean linen on top of me. The ride takes four minutes. For the last forty seconds the shaft walls go from black to brown to white, and then the doors open and you are standing in sunlight.

What is up there

White towers, forty of them over our sector alone, joined by glass bridges. Gardens on every terrace: real grass, apple trees, a pond with fish in it. The smog is below you. From the edge of a terrace it looks like a floor, grey and flat, and the citizens call it 'the weather', as if it were a thing that happened somewhere else.

The people are clean and slow. Every one has a small silver stud behind the left ear, the implant, and every one of them smiles when you look at them. Nobody hurries. Nobody queues. Nobody files a 27-B, because nobody Topside has ever needed to declare that they exist. It is simply assumed.

Breakfast comes from a slot in the wall of every flat: bread, fruit, and a blue pill in a paper cup printed CONTINUANCE IS CARE. Everybody takes it. I palmed mine every morning and on the third day a card came through the slot asking kindly whether I was feeling unwell.

A woman on the tram asked me what rain felt like. She was not being unkind. She had read about it. (Sparrow, debrief, 12 October)

What it is built on

In the middle of the central garden, among the roses, there is a round hole with a brass railing. Warm air comes up out of it. If you lean over you can see the trunk cables, each one as thick as a tube tunnel, falling away down through the Midlevels, down past the Undercroft, into the core. Every tower, every lift, every implant and every telescreen in the city runs down that hole. So, I am told, does every city from here to Lagos. Topsiders throw coins into it for luck.

The glass lifts in the towers have a button marked for each Topside floor and one marked M, for the Midlevels. There is no button for the Undercroft. It is not on their maps. When I told a gardener there were people living under the water, he laughed, and then he stopped, and then he took his pill early.

What I brought down

A map of the service shafts, drawn on the inside of a pillowcase. The lift timetable. The route the trunk cables take through the Midlevels, and three places where they come close enough to the Undercroft to touch. I cannot say more than that here.

I also brought down this. They are not our enemies up there. They are the Continuance's garden, and they have never been let out of it. Every loop has an end. When we find this one, some of them are going to see rain for the first time.