There was no more time for social niceties, preambles and small talk.

  “The main thing now is to find out how much time we have left,” the mayor announced dryly.

  The plenary session was strangely subdued, resigned, so much concern lingering in everyone's minds, so much so that it had pushed them beyond the stage of bickering and mutual accusations and into a state of passive stupor. The assembled people —current and retired councilors, as well as influential citizens, businessmen, and representatives of various religious sects— spoke little, avoiding each other's gaze.

  Given the nature of the emergency, the most prominent members of the scientific community had also been summoned this time, but they had retreated to a row of seats near the wall, looking more like wooden silhouettes than real people.

  Sitting on the golden pew, from his raised pulpit, Attan Ze watched in disbelief as the small crowd allowed him to speak without even trying to interject, without noise, without giggling. In his fingers, the gavel he used to enforce silence remained motionless, unused. The old wood had seen a lot, he thought, stroking the handle, now riddled with a network of small cracks.

  Notable Massimari, dean of the ceramists, asked for permission to speak with a barely implied gesture, raising his hand anxiously. He even waited for approval before sharing his thoughts.

  “So, if we assume that the trolley was right and that the calculations of our scholars are correct, we can say that the telluric movement took ten days to reach Zerafia from the mines, that is, to travel just over twenty-five miles...”

  “I'm afraid it's not that simple,” the young scientist, Master Maff's assistant, interjected, shifting nervously in his seat. He had left his lab coat in the lab for the occasion, replacing it with brightly colored garments that seemed to be made of strips barely held together by a few stitches here and there, and that unfolded with every movement, revealing far too much of his grayish skin.

  What kind of private life did this guy have, the mayor suddenly wondered. He had only seen clothes like that in dance halls. Samavorians. They got drunk on liquor that would pierce anyone else's digestive system, enjoyed tickling their leathery skin with fire. Perhaps the technician was one of those who craved the thrill of being strung up in the Faspath void, with only a lanyard tied to his ankle to save him. Not exactly the kind of level-headed person one would hope to find in charge of a scientific study on which the safety and well-being of all depend.

  But who am I to talk?

  “It is not very realistic to assume that the phenomenon is progressing at a constant rate. It probably follows an exponential trend. If you allow me to illustrate...”

  “We understand,” Attan Ze interrupted. The effort to maintain a neutral tone hardened his voice, altering the natural musicality of his timbre.

  “But if you don't even know what it is, the phenomenon!” someone grumbled from the right side of the semicircle of benches.

  Finally. It was despicable to see the city council descend into brawls and street market riots, but to witness such depression was far worse. The mayor tried to find out who had spoken, but the anonymous protester fell silent again, and no one batted an eyelid at his intervention.

  “Let's assume we have very little time,” Attan Ze said after an unproductive wait. “And by very little, I mean a day or two. No news from the expedition, is there?”

  He had turned to the mining company representative in the front row of bankers and shippers. The man, a dry figure in blue, shook his head without emotion, his white face furrowed with lines like marble carvings.

  “They may have been able to save themselves,” Master Maff explained. “If they saw the movement from afar, or suspected something, they may have headed for the surface.”

  “We wish them luck,” sighed the mayor. “But at this point, the surface can only be our destination as well. I'm sure some of you have already begun making arrangements to move what can be salvaged as soon as possible.”

  He noticed movement in the group of traders and exchanges of glances that said a lot. These people always had a contingency plan ready, and that was good, even better if they would share it with everyone.

  Scalpi, the president of the air transport company, let out a big cough.

  “Do we just give up? Do we run away, do we give up?” he shouted, and his more than a protest sounded like a cry, the tantrum of a frightened child, even though it came from a well-planted big man with a voice made hoarse from smoking.

  Attan Ze smiled at him.

  “What choice do we have? We cannot move the city elsewhere. As painful as it is to admit, our home's days are numbered, and we cannot afford to mourn it.”

  No. Against his will, Attan Ze leaned against the railing of his desk for a moment, lowering his head to hide his face. A contraction from within, starting at chest level, had overwhelmed him with a spasm of pain, and a wave of tears had gathered behind his eyes. His eyelids closed, his fists clenched, and he swallowed hard several times. Losing control would have been the worst.

  What did his dreams of flying in an infinite sky, unbounded by cracks and surfaces, with no shadows and no lights too intense, with nothing to define an above and a below, lead to? The stupendous images given to him by the trolley would have been Nelatte's last records, what could have been passed on to a hypothetical posterity, and no one had ever seen them from life. Glimpses of inhuman beauty never enjoyed by any of the inhabitants, destroyed before it could be discovered that they existed.

  The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

  Attan Ze Kosh was not born in Nelatte. Attan Ze Kosh was no longer even sure, after decades had passed without consequence, that he had been born anywhere, that he had evolved from a primitive creature and learned what he knew along the way. When he looked at his past, he found an even, constant expanse, a seamless ribbon of time in which he had always been who he was. And he had always cared for the web city in many ways.

  Elected to the highest office in the community, he had believed he could do even more, bring Nelatte to a level of prosperity never seen before, and then retire without expecting applause, as was the custom of a good politician.

  This shouldn't have happened to him of all people, he thought, tapping his gavel idly. Then he scolded himself for that whiny, selfish protest. When he raised his head, he was in control of his emotions again.

  Maff had interpreted his long silence as a signal to come forward and introduce other members of the scientific company, who stood up carrying a square tablet covered with a cloth. They placed it on the legs of an easel, a little to the left of the mayor's podium, tilted so that he could see it as well. Then, with a long prehensile tentacle, Dr. Iliqualoti removed the cloth covering the sign. A hiss of surprise spread through the room.

  “About moving the city,” he began, the gurgling voice of someone screaming underwater. “It's not really possible, unfortunately, even with more time. But here you can think about relocating the form of it, the concept of Nelatte. Have a look at this.”

  He invited the audience to observe the drawing, which everyone was already doing. The expressions on faces and muzzles, Attan Ze calculated, ranged from curiosity to disbelief to outright disgust at the reproduction of the most famous painting in the University Museum, a work whose author and provenance were still a mystery.

  He slowly brought the pastel scene into focus. A sharp sense of recognition stung Attan Ze Kosh painfully, awakening in him a new nostalgia for a scene he had known in the distant past.

  The right side of the drawing was taken up by a bulkhead supporting a pair of rails at mid-height; in the foreground hung a machine with a twisted shape. Two mechanical hands: one held a kind of funnel or trumpet, while the other turned a knob on the side of the mysterious bluish object. Dense, stringy drops fell from the pointed end of the funnel and spread out onto the terrain. The machine moved along the tracks with its hands, but it must also have had the ability to stretch and change its distance from the wall, because the stuff it was sowing had formed a sinusoidal curve.

  “I think you're all familiar with this figure,” the octopus-like presenter commented.

  Some people had laughed, others shook their heads, convinced that this was yet another nonsensical stunt by the usual head-in-the-clouds scientists.

  But Attan Ze knew what this was really about.

  “The Eggs Sower,” he murmured, and the smile he felt forming on his lips was a spasm of tension. Even he was not immune to fear.

  And the name had the effect that the design had missed. The audience fell silent again, and more than one face tightened in annoyance. Attan Ze saw Luoth in the second row, who had been scribbling and listening with one ear, pull out his handkerchief to wipe his forehead.

  In the museum, this painting was kept in a small room of its own, open only upon request. It seemed that no one could look at it for more than a few moments without feeling queasy.

  “The eggs are a metaphor. We have an object, a substance, an entity that holds the life force, the future. What form is better, more evocative, more instantly recognizable than an egg?” the scholar recited, and everyone followed him attentively despite the slurring that clouded his pronunciation.

  Attan Ze leaned back on the bench, resting his hands on the armrests and spreading his legs under the desk. The atmosphere had become, if possible, even more somber. It was clear to everyone that, despite its name and bizarre design, the Eggs Sower was no breakfast machine. And while some looked at the scientists' gadgets with a healthy skepticism, others were horrified by concepts they could not relate to their normal everyday experience.

  He ran his hand over his face. He was sweating, how strange. Where had he—yes, he—found this painting? He remembered taking it from someone's hands...

  “Every organism exists in the fertilized egg,” Iliqualoti continued. “It exists in potency, all the information about what it will become is there, in that drop of condensed matter. Even a city is an organism.”

  “Oh, come on!” snorted one of the merchants. “In the egg is the body of the creature, certainly not its history!”

  “That's because the embryo has no history yet. But what if we were able to take an adult being back to the state of an egg, to recapture, so to speak, every possible piece of information? By compressing it, summarizing it, so that we could unfold it in another place, another time?”

  “Like pajamas that you fold up in your baggage and take out again?” the other one said again, and then he let out a contemptuous laugh that was not imitated by the neighbors.

  “Now, we are talking about a city,” said the oldest of the councilors, in a voice barely louder than the rustle of dry leaves. “We should not mix things up.”

  The scientist gave him a dry bow with his big bulbous head.

  “No, indeed, a city is a very complex organism... No more complex than a living creature, but with a very different kind of complexity. The example was a bit off, I apologize.”

  “We give examples for your benefit, you don't have to take them literally,” Master Maff interjected with crossed arms.

  “A city is made up of a conglomeration of entities, diverse in nature and purpose,” the doctor continued. His soft arms drew curves in the air, hypnotic as a dance. “There is the purely physical and constructive part, the inanimate matter that makes it up, that forms the buildings, the streets, and everything we imagine in our mind's eye when we hear the word “city.” There are the inhabitants, its soul and lifeblood, its brain and memory. And there is its history, the way the city has moved through time, leaving a groove unique in shape and type, a characteristic imprint.”

  Attan Ze's mind meandered again. The furrow in time left by Nelatte must have looked more like a squiggle than a straight line. Perhaps it was a sine wave, like the one in the drawing.

  Or a circle.