City Under the Stars

4

HE AWOKE IN DAYLIGHT, lying on his back in a meadow, shaded by an elm tree bearing vivid orange fruit. A gentle breeze touched him. It carried the mingled scents of sandalwood and wintergreen.

A tall, inhumanly thin man in a charcoal gray tunic stood watching over Hanson. He had a kind face. On seeing Hanson awake, he smiled. “Welcome home,” he said.

Home? Hanson rolled over and levered himself up on an elbow, and then rose to his feet. He looked around and knew for a certainty that he had passed all the way through the Wall.

Heaven was not as he’d imagined it.

No, that was wrong. Hanson had never been able to imagine what Heaven might actually be like. Oh, when he was young, he’d been as free with a crudely ribald speculation as anyone, but as far as what it might be like to actually stand in the City of God—

Whatever it was, it wasn’t this.

He looked across a vast lawn freckled with occasional pairs of silver dots or circles—gently rolling land that stretched as far as the eye could see, and all well-manicured, trimmed, as if someone were mad enough to mow it all. Not that any man could. It would’ve taken a hundred mowers, in constant motion, tireless, insanely devoted to their task… He shook his head. There were—buildings?—here and there, isolated from each other, immaculate and pointless. A cone larger than any single structure Hanson had ever seen, delicately balanced on its point and canted to one side. A red glass sphere caught in arches of congealed lightning. What could only be a baby’s arm magnified a million times, sticking out of the earth, fingers gently moving in a way that was undeniably alive.

It did not look right. Hanson knew there was some other way that Heaven should look, though he lacked the ability to put it into words. More beautiful, somehow. More symmetrical, perhaps. It should be bizarre and wonderful and, yes, strange, certainly strange. But not like this. Never like this. He turned back to the thin man, who was still waiting patiently on him. “Are you… an angel?”

An urbane, undeniably sympathetic, and self-dismissive gesture. “I am a function. You have been in the lands of the Renunciates for so long a time that you can no longer recall your origins. Until you recover your memory, you may call upon my services as your interface and guide.”

“My memory,” Hanson said flatly. He could make sense of none of this.

“Your friend is anxious to see you.”

He cast his mind back, awkwardly groping for meaning. Anyone who could have been counted a friend of his, by however loose a reckoning, was either long dead or left behind in Orange; he had no friends anymore, not unless you counted the Preacher, and he—“My friend is dead.”

“Not any longer.”

The Preacher sat in the grass of a nearby hollow, running a finger around and around the inside of his mouth, admiring his perfect new teeth. He smiled broadly at Hanson. “Quite a set of choppers, eh?” Then, indicating the thin man, “Don’t pay any mind to Cicero. He’s not real.”

“He said he was a function.”

“It means the same thing. I told him to let you sleep, figured you could use it. Me, I’ve been up for hours. How do you feel?”

“Fine,” Hanson said uncomfortably. He slapped his hands together, and then, as he realized what he’d done, raised them up to his face in wonderment: the places on the palm and the tip of the one finger that the Wall had eaten away had been completely, magically healed. And, now that he thought about it, he really did, he felt just fine! A hundred small aches and aggravations were gone, from the sour tooth that had nagged dimly from the back corner of his mouth for as long as he could remember to the thorn scratches and sticker-rashes he’d incurred blundering into the mile-a-minute vines last night—gone, as if they had never been. He rotated his neck and it didn’t make the little crackling noises that he had grown accustomed to. Even the gut-pain of the Crab, by God, even that was gone! Something moved deep within him, a small and hurtful aching sensation so alien to his nature that it took him a second to identify it.

Hope.

“By God,” he breathed. “By God, Preacher, I—”

“Boone!” the little man snapped. “My name is J. Pickett Boone, and don’t you forget it!”

Startled, Hanson looked hard at him. There was a clear light in Boone’s eyes; the mental confusion of earlier was gone. He held himself like a supervisor now. Not only his body had been healed by his passage into Heaven, it seemed, but his mind as well. And with his newfound clarity of thought must surely have come memories of his association with the outlaw band, and humiliation about the services he had provided them in his long evasion of the Wall. Boone was glaring up at him with a fierce intensity, fists clenched, trembling, like a terrier-dog working itself up to attack a bull. Hanson found that he despised Boone less than before, and, paradoxically, disliked him more.

He dropped his eyes. “Didn’t mean anything by it,” he mumbled.

For a long, still moment, Boone’s face remained closed, tight, hostile. Then he made a curt, dismissive gesture. The balance of power between them had shifted, subtly but surely; immediately, Hanson regretted having let the moment slide by the way he had. But it was too late, no use trying to put the egg back into the shell, what was done was done. The little man stood and stretched and looked searchingly about him, staring into the middle distance where the grassland rose in great arched ribs, under which birds flew and atop which were trees and grazing deer, and beyond, at the ranges of what were either strange mountains or even stranger buildings. Boone looked upon the bizarre structures of Heaven with shrewd, knowledgeable eyes; they clearly did not seem strange to him…

Cicero stood nearby with that blank, alert look of his. Hanson felt oddly reluctant to address his questions to him. Lowering his voice, he said, “Boone, I can’t make any sense out of”—he swept a hand to take in everything, the buildings he could almost comprehend one at a time but could not assemble into a single coherent picture, could not seem to hold in his mind all at the same time—“all this.”

“Are you a religious man?” Boone asked.

The question took him aback, it had been so long a time since anybody had asked him anything remotely like it. Religion was not the sort of thing a man like him was expected to have an opinion on. “I don’t think so.”

“Then maybe there’s some slight chance of your understanding.” The little man spoke in a fussy, professorial manner, falling back to the rhythms and cadences of his long-forgotten former life. “Hanson, the City of God isn’t any such thing. Got that? It’s not inhabited by gods or angels or anything of the sort, but by people. People like you and me.”

“Uh…”

“Did you ever try to imagine what it was like to live in the time of the Utopians?”

“Well—yeah. Sure. A little, sometimes.”

“Not exactly easy, was it? Once you got past having all the food and clean water you ever wanted, good clothes, a soft bed, and never having to do sweat-work again in your life, could you picture exactly what you’d be doing with all that wealth, all those machines, how it would feel to be a Utopian?”

Hanson shook his head.

“Well, all that—the clean water, the limitless food, the ease and comfort, heat in the winter and cool breezes in the summer that squirt out of a machine at the twist of a knob—was just the beginning. Wealth creates wealth and knowledge builds upon knowledge. During the era of the Utopians, knowledge went into a period of exponential increase, and, in one grand surge—from my researches, I have reason to believe it happened within the span of a single human lifetime—people gained control of such immense powers and such total freedoms that… Well, it changed them. The people who resulted from this change—let’s call them the post-Utopians—would have been as incomprehensible to the Utopians as the Utopians are to us. They have wealth and power beyond your craziest dreams. Far beyond anything you even can imagine. They are like gods in their power, and yet they’re not gods. They are only post-Utopians. Remember that. They’re just people with all the technology, all the wealth, all the power anyone could ever want.”

Hanson could follow what Boone was saying. He could even understand it. But somehow he could not fit his head around it, could not encompass it, could not feel and accept the truth of it. It was all too strange. He struggled to put into words some reason why he could not entirely accept it. “But—” he began.

He stopped, swallowed, tried again.

“But then—why the Wall?”

“I don’t know.” Boone began walking and Hanson had no choice but to follow. Cicero trailed after them like an obliging shadow. “Let’s ask them.”

Not many paces distant were two silver metal plates, each roughly ten feet in diameter. With no particular emphasis, Boone strolled onto one. Hanson and Cicero followed.

Something like a twisty silver pillar, a metal cyclone, shot up from the other plate into the air, disappeared into the clouds, and then with a mad looping motion came rushing down upon them. Cicero’s hand squeezed Hanson’s shoulder reassuringly. “Wait.” He heard the word but could not parse its meaning, could not even attempt to run, could do nothing in fact but stand rooted where he was in horror. The crazy thought flitted through his head that now he knew how a mouse felt just before being stepped on by an horse, and then the cyclone slammed down upon them.

He blinked, and the pillar was gone.

Everything around him had changed. He was standing before a grove of orange-roofed mansions—palaces, almost—all raised high above the ground on impossibly thin stilts. For a giddy instant he thought they were floating, and then, when he realized the truth, feared the stilts would snap and send these massive structures smashing down upon him.

A great sphere of water hung over the stilted buildings, dwarfing them. What light came through it was wan and diminished, bathing the buildings in a wavering shadowy cool, as if they were under the sea.

“There.” Cicero pointed to a balcony, high above them. “A typical dwelling, selected, as you requested, to be as like those you are familiar with as possible. This one is in the Italianate style.” After a brief hesitation, Boone nodded. The silver-gray cyclone leaped up and slammed down upon them again, and they were standing on the balcony.

Hanson craned his head and stared up into the water. From here, the sphere was obviously not solid, but a bubble with walls mere yards deep, wrapped around a core of nothing. A shark swam by overhead, twisting its head from side to side, mouth opening and closing in little gasps.

A salt breeze wafted down from the bubble. Multicolored ribbons twisted and curled in the air between buildings and were gone. Staring out at a hundred other balconies, all empty, Hanson felt a sourceless, aching loneliness growing within him, the sort of emptiness one might feel in an abandoned city, an animal certainty that he was surrounded by nothing but vacancy and isolation.

“Where is everybody?” he asked.

Cicero looked regretful. “Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Elsewhere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They have followed… certain trends to their inevitable conclusion,” Cicero said. “Would you like to go inside now?”

Boone hesitated, irresolute. “Well, as long as we’re here, we might as well take a look.”

Cicero walked forward, and the wall parted for him. Boone ducked after.

Hanson had no choice but to follow.

He found himself in a clean, light-filled space. The ceiling was high, the pillars thin, and the leaded-glass windows opalescent. It was a fairy-tale structure, sculpted of moonlight and mist, of soft evening shadows and ice. Even standing within it he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe in its existence. It was too fine, too delicate. Hanson could not think back to a time when he’d been young enough to believe in such a place. Yet—here it was. It made him feel gross and crude by contrast, hairy and smelly as a troll, unworthy.

While he was gawking, Boone had been asking questions. Cicero was explaining to him how the cyclones worked. “—rotating you thirty-seven degrees in time, which is why it feels instantaneous; in actuality your rest-motion is only a few thousand kilometers per hour.” Boone nodded, frowning with concentration and understanding. “Similarly, this doorway is distributed in probability along a curve of thirty-nine thousand miles, so that…”

He led them into a room with enormous windows.

Entering, Hanson seemed to grow lighter, his movements unnaturally slow, like those of a man underwater, his head giddy with uncertainty, so that it seemed almost as if he had to push his foot down to bring it to the floor at the end of each step. Otherwise, it would’ve simply floated up and up, leaving him treading air.

“Where are—” Hanson began, and, somehow placing his feet badly, went tumbling over backward, his balance all wrong damnit, falling with impossible slowness and thrashing awkwardly as the floor came floating up toward him.

Cicero reached over to catch and steady him. “I could increase the local gravity gradient, if you wish,” he said, but whatever his offer might entail, it meant nothing at all to Hanson. Boone hid an amused smile.

Flushing, Hanson looked away, through the windows.

Glorious and terrifying views! A bright gray-and-white wasteland of rocks and sand, and, in the distance, a range of humped and rounded mountains. Long black shadows stretching toward forever under the blackest of skies.

The bleached skeleton of a giraffe lay on the barren soil just outside the window.

Low over the mountains hung… something. Something round and blue and streaked with white, as distant as the Moon, but far larger than the Moon ever was.

It was the Earth. Hanson recognized it from the faded Utopian pictures that were preserved in the Courthouse back in Orange, and which a disbelieving bailiff apathetically pointed out to disbelieving visitors as proof that human beings had once, long ago, left the surface of the Earth. This looked just like those pictures, only far more vivid. The colors were unimaginably brighter, the oceans the wildest blue, the clouds dazzling!

It was unbearable.

Hanson twisted wildly away, went tumbling, and more by luck than not, grabbed the doorway with one rough hand. All in a single surge of panic, he pulled himself through and back into the first room. For a long moment, he knelt there, eyes clenched tight. Madness! How could Boone stand it? After a minute or two he gathered himself together and spoke to the backs of the other two:

“I’m going outside. Just for a minute.”

They were lost in talk. Neither of them responded.

He went outside, and it was afternoon. Only a minute before, when he had entered the room, it had been morning. But there was no mistaking it—the sun, wan and silvery through the water-bubble, had risen higher, the stilted shadows of the buildings had grown longer. He had lost hours, somehow.

Weakly, Hanson leaned against the balustrade, staring not up at the marine animals or out at the bizarrely contoured horizon, but into empty space, at nothing. A tangle of colored ribbons floated in the air, twisting between buildings, a whimsical carnival brightness, and when part of it drifted by him, he reached up impulsively to touch it. One ribbon playfully wrapped itself about his wrist like a tendril, and he found himself standing on a balcony on the building opposite staring into his own startled eyes. He was in both places simultaneously, and then in a third on an entirely different building, staring out into the fields of Heaven where something like a shark’s fin—triangular, dark, immense—lifted up from the grass and slowly subsided. All three Hansons were aware of the others’ thoughts, but their thoughts were not identical but divergent, different in the qualities of their fear and dismay.

The ribbon released his wrist, and he was one and alone again.

He lurched back from the balustrade and across one of the silver plates. A cyclone slammed down on him.

Then off.

When Hanson stumbled from the plate, he found himself in a windblown hall. Down its center, unsupported, hung a line of vast stone bells. They were as gray and rough-looking as granite, but when he wonderingly reached up a finger to touch one, it boomed as if struck by a maul, a deep and despairing vibration that shook his body like the sound of God sobbing.

“Naw.” He stepped back from the bell, shaking his head, profoundly disturbed by something he could not put a name to. “Not like that. Naw, not like—that.”

At the far end of the hall was another pair of circles—more cyclone plates. He hurried toward them, shamblingly at first, then faster. The all but imperceptible breeze of his passage brushing against the bells set up an echoing clamor, a turbulent ocean of sound that surged and swelled about him, filling him with primal dread, driving him to greater speed, so that when he reached the plate he was practically running. His feet touched one circle. A metal pillar rose from the other and slammed down upon him.

Silence.

He was in a room full of shadows and jumbled shapes. Something shifted slightly to one side. There were other furtive movements to the other side, up ahead, just behind. With a start, Hanson realized that he was not alone. The room was filled with prowling animals, great cats the size of cougars. There was painfully little light, but they had, he thought, human faces, and they spoke with the voices of women.

“Oh, baby,” one murmured, “let me rip you open.”

“My fangs are long,” said another.

“My claws are sharp.”

“My breasts are heavy with milk.”

They prowled one over the other, haunches high in the darkness, too many, the light too dim, for Hanson to determine their number. Their eyes and teeth flashed in the gloom. They were in constant motion, slinking, stalking.

“See my long pink tongue.”

“Smell my hindquarters.”

“Imagine my teeth piercing your lips, tearing the flesh off of your face.”

“I’ll make sure you suffer a long, long time.”

“Oh, honey.”

Their voices overlapped in a kind of moaning chorus. Their eyes materialized and disappeared behind flirtatious lashes.

“Poor baby. It’s been so long since you experienced anything with intensity.”

“We’ll make you feel something.”

“I’ll pull out your intestines an inch at a time—slowly, slowly.”

It was terrifying. It was too much. Hanson found himself pulling in upon himself, wrapping arms about his body, shivering. It wasn’t fair! He didn’t know any of the rules here, any of the assumptions. Cicero, he thought. If only Cicero were here, he’d know what to do.

“It’s all right,” Cicero said. “I’m here.” He strode through the cat-women as if either he or they were not entirely real, completely ignored by them all. “If you’ll look down, you’ll see a set of parallel lines glowing faintly on the floor. They mark a safe passage from the one plate to the other. So long as you stay between them, you’re perfectly safe.”

He took Hanson’s arm, led him across the room.

Wobbly, Hanson allowed himself to be led. “How did you find me?” he asked. “How did you know I—?” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence.

“I am a function.”

“Oh.” The cat-women paced him, musky-smelling and avid-faced. Growling their lust. Ignoring them as best he could, Hanson asked, “Why? Why would anybody want—” He swept out an arm to encompass them all. “—this?”

“You have been a long time away indeed,” Cicero said, “to have forgotten the need for such entertainments.”

They stepped on the plate—

—a grove of slim buildings so tall that the rivers of water falling from their fluted tops dissolved into rainbows and mist long before they could reach the ground.

—a stone cathedral floating within a sad brown sunset, which stared at him with a hundred human eyes.

—a twilight plane where armies of metal giants fought with axes and clubs, while small and tireless servitor machines retrieved the scrap and climbed their sides to rebuild the damaged parts.

—a small room smelling of chickens and new-mown hay, where blue flames flickered over revolving bowls of mercury.

—a tangle of snakes that raised agonized heads as large as houses against a steel-plate sky.

—an incandescent mushroom cloud, strangely still and unchanging, like a snapshot of some catastrophic explosion, a frozen instant of horrified time.

The light and heat from this last were excruciating. Hanson threw a hand over his watering eyes, his stinging face, and cried, “Where are we going?”

“Why, wherever you want,” Cicero said. “We have been traveling at random, while I awaited your directions.”

“Then take me home.”

Cicero smiled encouragingly. “And where is that?”

It was as if one of the cat-women had arisen out of nowhere to present him with a riddle encompassing the purpose and end of human life. Hanson’s mind was blank; for a long moment he could think of no possible destination to offer in response. Then, “Boone,” he said finally. “Take me back to Boone.”

There was a light dusting of yellow pollen on the balcony, and a springlike coolness to the air. Cicero gestured Hanson through a doorway and into an unfamiliar room. The walls were lined with dark wood paneling and shelves of leather-bound books. Squares and scrolls hung unsupported in the air, a dozen or more, some bright with moving images, others filled with cryptic text. Boone looked up from a writing desk, and, with a wild cry, stood. Papers scattered from him like birds. He ran through the squares and scrolls as if they did not exist, and hugged Hanson with all his strength.

“Aw, now,” Hanson muttered in confusion. “C’mon, now.” Embarrassed, he patted the man’s back once, twice, feather-light and reluctant touches.

Boone stepped back, smiling through his tears. “Where the hell have you been? I stayed here, made this my camp, hoping against hope that you’d—well, that hardly matters. You’re back now, that’s all that matters. Only—where have you been?”

“I was—” Hanson spread his hands and looked down into them helplessly as if they might contain an answer that was nowhere else to be found. He did not know where he had been. “I think I found some post-Utopians.” Boone started and shot him an odd look. “They were… strange. Like cats.”

“Those were not citizens,” Cicero corrected gently. “They were a function. Like me.”

“Oh, shut up.” Boone wiped away his tears and put his hands on his hips. He glared up at Hanson, who, abruptly and with an odd sense of dislocation, realized that he had somehow acquired a mustache and a trim little goatee. “I suppose you think that was funny? I suppose you think you can just follow whatever damn-fool notion enters your head? Well, I have news for you. From this moment on, you’re not going anywhere without my express permission. You got that? I don’t want you going to the shithouse to jerk off without telling me first.”

Hanson flushed. His muscles bunched and knotted under the lash of Boone’s words. He felt that all-too-familiar burning sensation at the back of his throat, the bitter fire of resentment forcibly suppressed. He could crush the little man in his bare hands, if he wanted to, and you’d think that Boone would by God respect that, would at least grant him the elementary caution one gave a manshogger or factory machine with a known history of mangling its operators. It griped him that he did not.

But he needed Boone, and they both knew it. The City of God was comprehensible to Boone in ways it was not to Hanson; he needed the little man’s direction and guidance. Ducking his head, he felt the old habits of submission, of obedience, of silence, the reflexive knuckling under to the loudest voice, come over him like an old, heavy, and detested coat. “It was only a little while.”

“A little while! Eight months you were gone, and you call it—” Boone’s voice rose sarcastically “—a little while?”

Hanson lifted his hands, palms up, baffled. “Eight months? But—” Boone silenced him with a look. And though he was trying to hide it, there was less anger than fear in that look: fear and loneliness. Eight months Boone had spent by himself, without human company, enduring an isolation that would be a burden for even the strongest man, and would break or even kill the weak; the gods alone knew what he’d been through, or how he had withstood it.

For long minutes, Boone simply stared at him, as if afraid he was about to turn away and stalk off once more. Then, stooping, he began to gather up his papers. “These are my notes,” he said. “Oh, nothing formal, you understand. Just jottings, really. I spent the winter researching the City’s records. If you want to call them that. There’s enough information available here to drown in, but none of it’s organized at all usefully, nothing is presented in any kind of—well, never mind.” He passed a hand over his eyes, wiping them clean of tears.

“You’ve moved,” Hanson said.

“Eh? What? Nothing of the sort!”

“The room I saw before had pillars. And windows…”

Boone made a dismissive gesture. “Bah! It takes nothing to reconfigure a room. You have no idea the kind of wealth that’s fallen into our hands. And power—power unimaginable in our old lives!” Papers gathered, he stood behind his desk, tamping them into a neat stack, and, with that simple gesture, regained all of his lost authority. “But this must be bewildering to you. How to explain? Where to begin?”

He thought for a moment.

“I was wrong,” Boone said. “Remember when I told you the post-Utopians were people like you and I? I was wrong. I’ve opened windows into their lives and… they were different. Different in ways that made them not even remotely human. I think they destroyed themselves, but I’m not sure.”

“Destroyed themselves? You mean, like—suicide?”

“Possible—barely. Burned themselves out, more likely. Transfigured themselves, perhaps. Indications go both ways. Let me replay for you a conversation you have doubtless long forgotten.” With a wave of his hand, Boone swept the squares and scrolls to either side, leaving one, bright as a window, hanging in the center of the room. Through it, Hanson saw the balcony outside and, upon it, Cicero talking to a hulking brute of a man.

“Where is everybody?” the big man asked.

(Startled, Hanson realized it was himself.)

“Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Elsewhere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They have followed… certain trends to their inevitable consequences.”

Boone gestured brusquely, waving the scroll out of existence. “Such things I have discovered. You cannot imagine. Fantastic, incredible things! I’ve tasted in surrogate the ineffable pleasures the post-Utopians discovered for themselves, glimpsed darkly, as if through a scrim, their activities and preoccupations. Oh, I am not a scholar for nothing! But where have the post-Utopians gone? What became of them? In this one crucial respect, I am as ignorant as you.” He turned to Cicero: “Let me ask you again: Where have they gone?”

“Elsewhere.”

“Where elsewhere?”

“You would not understand.”

“Are they dead?”

“No.”

“Will they ever come back?”

“They never went away.”

“The hell with you!” To this point the exchange had proceeded with the lifeless quality of a catechism, a rote repetition of questions and answers unvarying and long committed to memory. But now Boone stood, and, hands behind his back, savagely strode to and fro, as if building up his courage. There was a wild light in his eyes. Finally he asked, “Will we see them again in recognizable form—as something roughly human, capable of communicating and interacting with us?”

“By the nature of what happened,” Cicero said, “that cannot be.”

“You see?” Boone turned triumphantly to Hanson. “You see? The City of God—its buildings and parks, its powers and potentials, the land, the sea, everything—is ours. Ours to control, ours to command. It belongs to us!”

Hanson glanced uneasily at Cicero.

Cicero said nothing, waited patiently.

“I dunno,” Hanson said. It didn’t seem right to him, somehow, to make such claims. It didn’t seem safe. In his experience, everything had a price, even things you didn’t get, and that price was always more than any sane man would agree to pay, given the choice. Not that you ever got the choice. The balance was enforced from afar, by powers immaterial and unlocatable, nothing you could even identify, much less get your hands on. “Maybe we oughta just take our time here, not do anything rash.”

“No! I’ve waited too long. Your coming back now is a sign. We have to act immediately, right now, without delay.” With a slash of one hand, Boone made all the scrolls and squares disappear. The room looked monkishly bare without them. Turning to Cicero, he said, “Take us to the Throne of God.”

“The local utility node, you mean?”

“Whatever you want to call it—bring us there.”

Cicero nodded. “As you wish.”