If ever one were tempted to compare a city to a clock, or some other finely wrought old machine, then one cannot have in mind this city. It is now called Ligeti Spit, although the original settlers, on first arrival, had called it Breughelland. It lies at the far extreme of a spur of land, within a muddy estuary. The spur of land is but one among many, and was apparently chosen at some haste. It is not markedly any more suitable for the purpose than any other of the rather similar such marshy promontories that jut out into the cold waters.
There is a certain ragged grace to the place, great concrete towers punctuate the skyline, and a huge area of parkland lies at its centre, as if the growing city had decided to just get all of its green space out of the way, curtly in one single hasty move.
The city bristles with towers, some squat, some elegant, in so much as a collection of needles can ever aspire to such things. As with the buildings, so with the people. They vary from those who are painfully squat, perched awkwardly on high stools, drinking endless beverages boiling hot and strong with various stimulants. Their talk and observations are pithy and viciously opinionated brooking no scope for discussion or argument. Other residents are as needle thin, as their buildings. Angular in their grey clothing, ironed in creases only accentuating their spikiness. The needle thin residents apparently have no time to stop and talk, and are no less fierce in their views than their more sedentary compatriots.
At all times, at all places, all is struggle. The people are constantly travelling, but seldom do they journey together, they always have slightly different destinations, they are always jockeying for position, edging closer to the front of any queue, whenever any chance presents itself, their elbows are sharp, their eyes will never meet yours.
To the visitor it is never clear what the city does or what the people do. It is forever as if, when something is to all intents and purposes finished, the residents have found some new cunning way to wrestle out some further money by performing some further function on it. So they might be criticise things that others have made, or extract a fee from selling options to do things, or to refrain from doing things, but such options are so opaquely split up and bundled together, so that it is never quite clear what you actually be paying for.
There are sayings around the theme that whenever you are making a deal there, you are always on the wrong side of the deal, any profits you might have been promised turn to huge liabilities. It is a city of lawyers, endlessly tangling up the unwary in contracts and unwanted obligations, offering silky words and pie in the sky, until you end up a virtual slave, paying their usurious fees and rates until the day you die.
It is the busiest, the noisiest, the fastest of places, nothing is still, nothing is settled, there is neither good nor bad, in all that is there. The only merit is in the new, novelty is always valued, always praised for as long as the glossiness and factory fresh smell lasts, and then it too is condemned to, at best, the same impatient indifference as most else, or even the particular vituperation reserved for that which has recently fallen from favour.
