The Ballad of Aleph and Sigma

In a folded valley deep in the mountains, a lake: long and narrow, cold and deep - the story of Aleph and Sigma begins and ends here. For hundreds of years, these two cities have grown apart, together - astride the lake, they are shaped and distorted by each other, twin sentinels reflected and reflecting.

Aleph and Sigma, different in so many ways, are nonetheless tied to each other's fate. In both cities, the children tell the same story by torchlight as crumbling books at rest in the archives. Probably the tale is a lie, but a convenient one: a lie which structures and gives meaning, and which, in doing so, makes itself truth. This founding myth tells the tale of a lone settler and his two sons. Bewitched by the lake's deep blue clarity, they followed as it twisted through a towering mountain range. Far along, surrounded by tall peaks, the lake narrowed; on the western shore there was a grove of beech trees, in the east a grassy field sloped gently down to the lake's shore. Here, the man and his sons stopped and made a life: hunting in the beech forest, raising cattle on the opposite shore, and ferrying back and forth across the still, quiet lake. In time the boys grew, but in different directions. Aleph, the younger son, stayed mostly close to home, preferring to hunt and forage with his father on the Western shore. Here the evergreen forest enclosed and protected them; gnarled limbs, weathered and twisted with age marked hundreds of years of growth, and the complex ecosystem provided them with shelter and sustenance. Aleph's older brother, Sigma, soon felt constrained by family and forest. He would spend ever more time on the Eastern shore, tending cattle and enjoying the wide open space and sky. Unlike the beech forest opposite, the pasture changed radically with the seasons. In the winter, Sigma would crunch through snow carrying armfuls of hay. As the snow melted, wildflowers would burst from the earth and bloom in purples, blues and yellows, whilst the livestock would graze through the long, warm summer. In autumn, Sigma would harvest hay and burn the undergrowth, sending a column of black, corporeal smoke as an uncoded message to his younger brother. Some nights, Sigma would dream of burning the beech forest down – setting the valley ablaze and renewing its cold, ancient soil. Some nights, Aleph would stare angrily at the orange glow across the lake, imagining his brother had finally consumated his gospel of renewal, and in so doing consumed himself. When their father died, the two sons – grown now – made a funeral pyre of the raft that was their only connection to one another. Floating between the two shores, they set the vessel alight and returned the old man to the lake he so loved. Wordlessly, the brothers dove into the deep, cold water and swam in opposite directions: Aleph to the forest and Sigma to the pasture, never to meet again.

At the highest levels of the tallest tower in Sigma, the city's smartest men and women maintain an observatory. Their telescopes and cameras do not stare up at the night sky – the light from the city is too bright. Rather, they are philosophers and anthropologists looking West at this city's rival, counterpart, and constant companion. To the naked Sigman eye, Aleph takes the form of a vast informal cacophany. Rising from the Eastern shore, there is nothing for the gaze to hold onto – it seems blurred at the edge, with no clear shape to communicate scale or function. The city occupies the valley in every dimension, rising more than two hundred metres up the mountainside. With its back grafted to the steep cliffs and its feet planted on the valley floor, Aleph has crept inwards into space. Aggregating layer by layer, the city has become a craggy, open air amphitheatre, facing out towards the lake and to Sigma beyond. Such is Aleph's growth that today it reaches out onto the lake itself - tendrils extend laterally from the shoreline, ramshackle huts on makeshift pontoons connected by a network of gangplanks. Peering through their telescopes, the Aleph-watchers study the city in more detail. They see that this is not the homogeneous mass it seems from a distance – rather, the entire city is built of tiny, room-sized components in a riot of colours, each receding or protruding from its neighbours apparently at random. Nor is it as solid as it might seem: tall thin canyons slice through Aleph's bulk at various levels, criss-crossed by bridges and cables, prying open the city to fresh air and light. At the leading edge of the growing city a forest of beams and columns project into the void – a three-dimensional urban superstructure upon which the next layer of Aleph accrues. Over time, the Sigmans have seen this network fill in and grow, the city's edge blurred by the hit-and-miss array of constructed frames and unfinished infill. With their most powerful devices, the voyeurs in their sky-high observatory can zoom in again, to see their neighbour at a larger scale. As the surface comes into focus they see an entwined network of transport zigzagged across the tall, complex leading edge of the city. Stairways and walkways, elevators, escalators, funiculars and cable cars operated by gears, belts and counterweights in constant motion animate the facade as Alephites scurry back and forth. As the city expands the cable cars also shift – base stations are reconstructed, cables realigned and the service starts again, now at the bleeding edge of this growing megastructure. Training their lenses closer still, the Sigmans witness the ordinary life of the city laid before their eyes. Washing hangs from open windows in the morning sun. A boy leans precariously over a balcony, struggling to untangle a kitestring caught in his neighbour's antenna. A young couple sit on a corrugated metal roof, their legs dangling into the long void – he stands up and, to her horror, leaps playfully to an adjacent roof, nearly losing his footing as he lands. Finally, the observers' gaze alights on a tiny square of remnant beech forest by the lake shore. Surrounded on three sides by the towering walls of the city, the grove is gnarled, weathered, and empty. Yet it grows, still, as forests always have: slowly, inexorably and sovereign only to itself.

At the highest peaks of Aleph, the city's smartest men and women maintain an observatory. Their telescopes and cameras do not stare up at the night sky – the light from the city is too bright. Rather, they are philosophers and anthropologists looking East at this city's rival, counterpart, and constant companion. The towers of Sigma are arrayed on a foursquare grid, each block one tower and each tower one block. Lined up row after row, every building is a singular entity; soaring, curving, twisting, and stepping back, but never penetrating the projected boundaries of the street-edge below. The total impression of Sigma is a kind of schizoid regularity, a riotous sameness rising hundreds of metres in the air, each tower seeking to out-dazzle its neighbours: exercising total control over its small block, and no influence over anything else. In this way, the wise men of Aleph can see through the heart of Sigma, down the straight-line canyon of built form to the steep, forested cliffs which hem that city in on three sides. Like the Alephites, the people of Sigma have begun to outgrow their city, creating new blocks on massive floating pontoons, extending the long, open corridors out onto the lake's surface. As the day waxes and wanes, Sigma's field of towers throw shadows across on one another, their shining glass faces bouncing sunlight back and forth. Focusing their telescopes, the Sigma-watchers see a network of electric tracks and tiny white vehicles whisking smoothly from portals in the base of each tower. These efficient, windowless shells hide the Sigmans themselves, their automated rail-cars carrying them mutely between towers, each its own self-contained interior landscape. Through generations of close observation, the Alephites have discovered a pattern to the birth, life and renewal of Sigma's urban form. Every tower on every lot has a fixed lifespan of precisely 20 years. When a building reaches its expiry date, the watchers see a rapid-fire sequence of changes. First, activity increases: the anonymous white vehicles come and go at a frantic pace, shuttling back and forth to destinations unknown. Next, the tower goes dark: Over a number of days, fewer and fewer lights appear every evening, until the building resembles a knocked-out tooth in Sigma's gaudy lakefront face. Finally, without further warning, the watchers are startled from their routine by a sequence of muffled, staccato explosions. Rushing out into the early morning air, they stand together and watch columns crack and crumble, great sheaths of glass slough away and shatter, the whole edifice collapsing into its own footprint. They know that this is no accident – they know that within the year, this tall heap of pulverised steel and concrete will rise again, and Sigma's cycle of creative destruction will continue. Late every afternoon, the Alephites must divert their instruments: the bright, clean glass of the towers opposite reflect the sun as it drops lower in the Western sky, a mosaiced circle tracking across the face of that city and spearing into gaps to fill the streets with great shafts of light. When the sun sets and the lights turn on, the watchers return. Only now can they see the people of Sigma, fluorescent back-lighting thwarting the cold opacity of reflective glass. Only now can they see the young woman, curled up on a chair in an apartment stacked ceiling-high with old books. The two men, working late into the night at adjacent cubicles, bouncing stress-balls back and forth over the thin partition. Only now can they see the lonely figure, room lit by a blue TV glow, who stands for hours staring back across the lake – mute, his thoughts unknown. Every year, on the first night of autumn, a great fire flares on the shores of Sigma. In a field of dry grass on the edge of the lake a pyre is built, piled ten storeys high, and set alight. The flames send Sigma's message leaping and flaring through the cold air to their rivals across the lake: to grow we must burn; only through destruction can we create anew.

In Aleph and Sigma alike, the eyes of the powerful turn outwards. For a politician in Aleph, to rise from your bed is to be confronted by your own fears: the view of Sigma across the cold, still water fills your vision, its very presence a rejoinder to the slow, accretive urbanism your city projects. For an administrator in Sigma, the experience is inverted: Aleph is a constant, maddening force that underminines your rigorous ideology of growth and renewal with its piecemeal make-do attitude. It is no coincidence that these two cities are so different: constant inter-surveillance has created a polarisation, both cities defining themselves by what they are not – as the opposite of that which confronts them every day. But Aleph and Sigma, in their quest to distinguish themselves from one another, have become more alike than they care to admit. To dig down, underneath the self-conscious identity they project across the water, is to find a striking similarity of governance and social structure. In chaotic-looking Aleph, the city's transport, services and superstructure are co-ordinated and controlled by a powerful central bureacracy, driven by politically motivated zeal to forestall demolition at any cost. In Sigma, it is the image-driven pursuit of cyclical renewal that necessitates a tight web of laws, regulations and restrictions; battles are fought and dissent suppressed to protect the integrity of this city's projected self-image. In crystallising their differences, Sigma and Aleph have also converged: their mutual antagonism has made them more alike than they know. Rhetorical foes and political kin, the citymakers of Aleph and Sigma lock eyes across the yawning gap: transfixed, they lose themselves in their own carnival-mirror reflection. Beneath, the people grow restless.

A month ago, the news she knew was coming slipped quietly through her mail slot: her building, now 20 years old, was scheduled for renewal. This tower, home for the better part of her life, felt like an extension of her own body – hard-wired in her brain, she knew its measure, understood the complex human relationships which governed its operation and could navigate them instinctively. Since the government men came to evict her, she had spent her days with Alephite friends, exiles and refugees who spoke wistfully of their former home. For years, the slow encroachment of the city had enabled smugglers to spirit a small number of people back and forth across the lake, but authorities on both sides had responded with swift and brutal force – gun cracks in the night, followed by screams and silence. In the past week, however, new rumours had flown through back-channels – a safer route across the lake, dry passage to Aleph. According to the excited buzz, a just-completed floating superblock had brought Sigma close enough to the ragged edge of Aleph, and enterprising smugglers were spiriting people and goods nightly across extendable, floating walkways. For her part, she was ready to make the journey – she resolved to go West, to a city wise enough to know the value of its own patrimony.

In the clear pre-dawn, wisps of fog hung low, shrouding darkened figures as they brushed silently past. The narrow gangplank dipped and swayed with their steps, ripples fanning out across the surface of the still lake. Standing still above the dark water, she saw dozens of people crossing hurriedly in both directions - men and women who had measured their city against the image of its neighbour, and found their hometown wanting. They, like she, were plunging blind into a place they knew only from afar, trusting that a deeper truth laid under the seductive image. She, like they, had her doubts. Turning, she looked back at the face of Sigma. She had never seen her city from the outside before but now, gazing up at its face in the dark, she felt a flush of nostalgia. She hesitated for a moment, then turned away and plunged into the waterborne leading edge of Aleph.

It took her an hour to navigate the two-hundred metres of barges and floating walkways buffering the lake's edge; twice, disoriented and beginning to panic, she clambered onto a corrugated roof to find her bearings. Stepping finally onto the ground of the city proper, she cast her gaze up at Aleph's animate facade, people and machines swarming across it in the yellow morning sun. A sheet of rough directions clutched in her left hand, she set out for a safehouse high in the city's upper reaches. Climbing a narrow staircase she stumbled and nearly fell, feet failing to find the rhythm of risers and treads slightly different to those at home. Aleph felt familiar in the abstract, but the details were all strange – strange sounds, smells and sensations which threatened to overwhelm her. Halfway up the face of the city, she stopped at a small landing to catch her breath. Sitting on a low, wide windowsill, she looked back at Sigma's foursquare grid and felt a drop of water on the top of her head. Startled, she twisted around to see a wall of mosses and ferns hanging above, an old man with a watering can waving apologetically down in her direction. Waving back and trying to decipher his unfamiliar accent, she almost missed the deep, sharp cracks which echoed up through the valley. Turning, she saw her former home shudder and collapse, dissolving in a white column of dust hung limp in the still morning air. Aleph – this strange city, vital and confounding, was her home now. Like Sigma, its true identity could not be envisioned through telescopes or ideated and enforced by politicians. In both places, the truth lay elsewhere: in the tangled network of people and places tied together into what we call a city. Looking out again, the sun glinting off the water's smooth surface, she envisioned it all in a moment of clarity. A million red threads multiplied a millionfold, tracing arcs through space and painting the air scarlet as they collide, cross and combine. Each thread evoking a million future, but tied backward to a single past: to two brothers, two shores and one lake, where the story of Aleph and Sigma begins and ends.

Note: The Ballad of Aleph and Sigma was first published in Inflection: Volume 01 by AADR/Spurbuch (2014).