City Under the Stars

5

THE THRONE WAS LOCATED in a windowless zone like a jet bead atop a slanted glass tower whose stairs took them a terrifying half hour to climb. From a distance, the tower looked like a syringe with a black drop of blood at its tip. Within, the walls and stairs alike were transparent, marked only by gleams of reflected and refracted light, making the ascent a sickeningly vertiginous experience. There was no other way to reach it, Cicero explained, because the powers it controlled were too great to be tapped on a whim, even a post-Utopian’s whim. At the top, within a hideously unstable region of blackness, they confronted the thing itself—an unornamented silver chair with armrests and a high back.

Boone had been here before.

“Control,” Boone said. “Even the City of God needs to be controlled. Especially the City of God.” He paced back and forth before the Throne, talking rapidly and with an unnatural energy. “There are many such towers, each tapping a fraction of the power of the Wall and responsible for the maintenance of a small segment of the lands within. From this chair, one man can control more power than is held by all the mortal nations combined. I have often come here to meditate upon whether to assume responsibility for that power.”

“Don’t!” Hanson said suddenly. He couldn’t explain the wave of apprehension that came over him, the fearful certainty that Boone was about to destroy them both; but he felt it nevertheless, down to the soles of his feet. “Just—don’t do it!”

Boone nodded, not listening. He stopped pacing and struck a pose, hands behind back, legs wide. “Hanson, we stand on the brink of history. It is our duty to humanity—our destiny, even—to tear down the Wall separating the Human Domain from the City of God.” He stared at the Throne without seeming to actually see it, his eyes gleaming and blank with excitement.

“Think of it, Hanson! For ages, we have been made helpless, impoverished by the presence of a City whose accomplishments we could never hope to duplicate, whose very existence made a mockery of all our aspirations. Now… now, we can make the Earth a garden, abolish human misery, free men to follow their better natures. We’ll fill the skies and roads with great vessels again, millions of them! We’ll build cities—human cities!—on the Moon, beneath the seas, at the poles. Can you picture it, Hanson?”

Hanson dumbly shook his head.

Boone laughed, a shallow, brittle laugh. “No. No, of course you can’t. But you’ll see—you’ll see.” He took a step toward the Throne, then convulsively whirled about, and, hugging himself, said, “It is a great responsibility I am assuming here, a terrible burden indeed. You see that, don’t you? By its very nature power must be apportioned, divided, distributed—and withheld. That is natural law. Fanatics and opportunists, the self-serving and corrupt, will be drawn to this point like moths to the flame. We must take steps to ensure that this power does not fall into the wrong hands.”

In all the crawling and uneasy blackness, the silver Throne was an island of calm matter. Not even aware he was doing it, Hanson stretched out a hand to touch it, to reassure himself with the cool feel of its solidity.

“Don’t!” Boone said. “Only I can touch the throne—it’s protected.”

Hanson whipped his hand away. He had been intending, once Boone stopped talking, to urge him one more time not to do this thing. But now, overcome with futility, he knew he would not. What would be the use? A man like Boone, smart as he was, would never listen to somebody like him. And why should he? He was nothing much in the brains department, he knew it—never had been. Look at the mess he’d made of his life, look at how, all the way along the line, it had been someone else—Gossard, Willis, Boone—who had saved him from the consequences of his own stupid, blundering actions. Without them, he never would have made it. Without them, he never would have been standing here in the first place, way up here above the City of God, at the place where all the power of Heaven could be commanded. Without them, he’d be a pile of weathering bones somewhere, already stripped of flesh, already forgotten.

Hanson felt himself flushing with shame, suffused with a dull, ponderous embarrassment that seemed to turn his limbs to lead, congeal him solid where he stood, incapable of speech or action. He was a proud man—pride was what had gotten him into all this in the first place, after all. That is, he was a proud man when he had something to be proud about… but it seemed like he hadn’t had that for a very long time. Certainly there was nothing to be proud about now, even though he was standing where no man had stood for who knew how many thousands of years. He’d gotten here in the first place through sheer blind blundering luck, and by taking advantage of the sharper wits of other men, and now that he was here, he really only half understood the situation, or what Boone was proposing to do, or the risks involved, or the rewards that might be gleaned. Even standing here before the Throne of God, even with all the strange and wondrous things that he’d been through, he hadn’t been changed or elevated or ennobled—he was still just the common working slob he’d always been. Just a dumb ox. So why should he interfere? What right did he have to an opinion?

Keep your mouth shut, then, ox, he told himself bitterly. Let the smart men decide how to run the world. Just as you always have.

But, even with all of that running in his head, he couldn’t help but feel a chill slice through him when Boone stepped up to the Throne. His mouth had gone dry with fear, and, when Boone reached forth a hand and actually touched the Throne, lightly, caressingly, Hanson felt the small hairs along his spine and on the back of his neck stir and stand up, one by one by one.

“I still don’t think you should do this,” Hanson said, in spite of himself, unable to keep the terror out of his voice.

“Don’t worry,” Boone said distractedly. “It’s perfectly safe—for me.” For a long still moment, he made no sound, and then he shook himself, gathering all his will and purpose. “Well,” said Boone. “Here it is, then, the moment when History turns, when Mankind’s destiny awakes from its long slumber!” He hovered over the Throne a moment, unable to work up the nerve to sit down and unwilling to retreat. “Now!”

He sat.

Grinning nervously, Boone gripped the armrests of the Throne. He took a deep breath. “This is a historic moment,” he told Hanson. “Impress it on your memory. Forget nothing!”

Then he nodded to Cicero. “I am ready.”

“As you will.”

Five long needles of light converged upon Boone, piercing his skull.

“Ah!” he cried.

He stiffened, rising up slightly, and was silent.

For a long time, the little man sat wordlessly, staring straight ahead of himself, so far as Hanson could determine, into nothing. “Boone…” He reached out a tentative hand, and then, as Boone’s wild eyes flicked in his direction, withdrew it. “Are you all right?”

Boone said nothing.

To Cicero, Hanson repeated, “Is he all right?”

“That is a difficult question to answer simply.”

Abruptly Boone raised a hand. “Watch this!” The shifting blackness surrounding them transformed itself, so that they were staring across great reaches of the City of God. He pointed past a range of fang-thin pyramids (or maybe they were patterned neon stalagmites, high as skyscrapers—there was no way for Hanson to tell) to a park-like region where a flock of flamingos clustered like great masses of scarlet flowers at the edge of a shallow lake. Then he made his hand into a fist.

At Boone’s gesture, the lake exploded upward. Water shot skyward, and, geysering, froze into a hollow latticework tube of ice that twisted and glittered wildly in the sun. Through the mist thrown out by the fantastic exchange of temperatures, Hanson saw the charred bodies of the flamingos falling like cinders.

“Do you know how much energy it took to do that? Fabulous amounts! More energy than was deployed by one of the nuclear weapons of antiquity. Oh, I wish you had the math to understand! It would stagger you to work out the figures!”

Staring at the blue-ice spire, all twisty and interwoven angles through a fog so dazzlingly bright he winced to look upon it, Hanson felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed hard and said, “What—what’s it for?”

“For?” Boone laughed like a child. “For no reason at all! For the joy of the thing! Because I felt like it. I made it, and I can unmake it, if I wish, just like—that!”

He snapped his fingers.

The construction shattered. And even as the great shards were falling, Boone gestured again, the darkness re-forming around them, so that they were snug in the tiny room again.

“Now,” Boone said, suddenly businesslike. “We must make plans. First, the Wall will have to come down. No question about that. But those who wish to benefit from my accomplishment must be brought to heel. I know them, you see. Oh, yes, I know their type! They will brush us aside with a pat on the head and a warning not to meddle, if they can; force is their all. They must be taught respect.” He closed his eyes, thinking. “An object lesson, perhaps?” Then, offhandedly, “You can have my old rooms if you wish, Hanson. I think they’d suit you.”

“You’re… you’re planning to live here?” Hanson said in horrified disbelief, staring about at the formless, crawling void that surrounded them.

Boone’s eyes snapped open. “What? Of course I am! This room is the nexus, the focal point—anything I want can be brought to me here. Food. Books.” With an oddly defiant toss of his head, he added, “Women.”

Hanson twisted his mouth sourly. He understood well enough what was going on here, for he’d seen it happen before. Dumb as he might be, he wasn’t so stupid he couldn’t smell shit when somebody pushed his nose into it. Boone was turning himself into a boss. Seemed you couldn’t get rid of them. Kill all the bosses, and the quiet guy who’d worked alongside you all his life and never once did anybody dirt would step forward to fill the vacancy and become a boss himself, and next thing you knew you were eating dust at his feet, right back where you’d always been. Nothing ever changed; it seemed like nothing ever really could change. He clenched and unclenched his fists in helpless and baffled anger.

“First, though—the Wall.” Boone lifted his arms grandly.

The blackness before him bulged.

“What—?” Boone began.

A fierce and armless man strode up to the Throne, as stern and beautiful as an angel. His robes were afire, burning continuously without being destroyed. The smell of roasting flesh was nauseating. He frowned down upon Boone with blinded eyes whose sockets were encrusted with dried blood.

“My proud brother,” the phantom said. “You have returned.”

Boone’s eyes widened in astonishment for the briefest of instants, then narrowed again, shrewdly. “I’m not your brother.”

“You are a Renunciate. It is the same thing.”

“I don’t know what that means.”

“It means you are human,” Cicero said mildly, “of the race which built the City, but one of those who, given the opportunity to enter it, turned away.”

Carefully, Boone said, “I am a Utopian—a citizen. You cannot question my authority.” He slapped his chest. “I hold the key within me.”

“You are no citizen!” The phantom pointed sternly at Hanson. “He is a citizen. He holds the key to the City within him. You are allowed in the City only as his property. But even as his property, you have gone too far!”

It was the briefest of looks Boone threw Hanson, but one that spoke eloquently of hurt and betrayal, a look that pierced Hanson to the core of his being, that made him want to throw up his hands and protest his innocence. I didn’t mean to do it, he wanted to cry. The key left you for me when you died. It wasn’t my idea! If I’d known it was important—

But Boone, ever pragmatic, had already turned back to argue with his opponent. “Damnit, you can’t condemn me for something I never did. I’m not one of your ancient enemies. Those who refused to enter the City with you are dead long ages ago. I didn’t make that decision. I would have chosen differently.”

“No matter! You are a Renunciate. The sin is in the seed. Time cannot expunge it. Your kind shirked the peril, the challenge, the transforming glory and horror, and for what purpose? In order to cling to your humanity! Your betrayal is not forgotten and can never be forgiven. It is too late for regrets.”

“Listen!” Boone cried. “Those issues that divided your kind and mine are long dead. Yes, we were separated—let now the two streams reunite! It’s time we were reconciled.”

A short, angry slash of the head. “No!” The phantom’s face was dark as thunder. “Too late, too late!”

“It’s never too late!”

“It was always too late for you.” Now the flames blazed hotter, so that the apparition became almost painfully bright, dazzling and terrible. “Look—see the price we paid for perfection!”

Briefly, Hanson saw the raw and bleeding wound where the man’s genitals had been. He turned his head away, sickened.

“I tore off those parts with my own teeth and, oh, how I savored the pain of it! Could you have done as much?”

Boone could not speak.

The phantom smiled disdainfully as the flames burned low again. “I thought not. You came here seeking power and knowledge. Very well. Drink deep of both. Learn what we learned!”

Boone screamed.

It hurt the eye to look at him. He seemed to be vibrating; a kind of still motion possessed him, as if he were simultaneously shooting rapidly upward in the air and descending with equal speed into the ground. And yet he went nowhere. Boone’s body had taken on the blurriness of extreme speed, a sort of translucence with nothing visible behind it. His face tensed, stretched, lengthened like cold taffy relentlessly pulled. His mouth stayed open, stretched to its extreme.

He screamed.

He screamed, and the scream went on and on, independent of the air in his lungs, endless, eternal, a condition of existence, a cry of pain and fear that stretched from the beginning of time to its end, like the shrill note of a violin string endlessly stroked, always on the verge of snapping and yet continuing, impossibly continuing. It simply was.

Hanson seized Cicero by the shoulders and shook him. “We’ll leave!” he cried. “Tell him,” pointing to the phantom, “to let Boone go, and we’ll leave. Tell him!”

“He cannot be reasoned with. Despite his appearance, despite his words, he is not a citizen. He is only a security function.”

Hanson spun away, reaching for Boone, but Cicero stopped his hand. Slight though he was, Cicero was impossibly strong; Hanson, for all his muscle and bulk, could not free himself from his grip. “It would be extremely dangerous to touch him. It might kill you.”

“You!” Hanson shouted to the phantom. “You can stop this!”

The phantom turned his sightless frown upon Hanson, but said nothing.

Now the air about Boone was streaking, congealing into vertical strings of shattered light, greenish, as if the vibrations from the Throne were threatening the structure and nature of space about it. Boone hung agonized at the very center of this twisting chaos. His eyes were wide with pain, but sane. Unbearably sane.

His scream went on and on, unendurable.

“Cicero!” Hanson cried again. “He’s dying!”

“No. He is suffering, but he will not die. He will not be allowed to die. He will wait here as a warning to all who would aspire beyond their state. The years will pass, and then the decades, and then the centuries. To him, the agony will be eternal.”

“Get him off, damn you!”

“He is beyond rescue. The security function is implacable and absolute. A Renunciate has sat upon the Throne—he must be punished.”

As if in a dream, Hanson felt his hands go to his belt. His gun was still there—the gun he had retained simply because it was the only thing besides Boone that he had brought with him to the City of God, the only thing he possessed that was undeniably his own.

He pulled it out.

This was not him acting; it was his body, obeying no conscious impulse of his own, but only the implacable logic of Boone’s unending scream. Hanson watched, horrified, from a place behind his eyes as the gun swam into view. He expected Cicero to step forward to stop him. He expected the guardian function to confront him.

Neither did.

Awkwardly he slid the safety to off. He cocked back the heavy hammer. He raised the muzzle toward the blind-eyed guardian brooding over Boone’s suffering. But when he did, the guardian turned upon him so unconcerned and disdainful an expression that Hanson knew without being told that it was useless, that mere bullets could not stop so powerful a being.

Stepping close to the Throne he raised the gun in both hands, so that it pointed right at the center of Boone’s face, at a spot directly between the man’s eyes. The agonized eyes that did not look at the gun but right through it, as if it hardly existed and certainly didn’t matter, boring into Boone’s eyes and pleading as clearly as words ever did:

Kill me.

I can’t, he thought, even as his finger clenched around the trigger, squeezing it tight, fighting the balky mechanism of its action, a simple movement that was taking forever it seemed, impossible that it could go on so long, as if time had frozen to a gelid flurry, slowed, solidified, and then—finally—stopped.

The gun fired, with an appalling explosion of sound so loud it seemed to shatter Hanson’s ears.

All in an instant, Hanson’s hands went flying up and back, the recoil spinning the revolver itself through the air and sending it clattering across the floor. Boone’s head slammed back into the Throne and bounced forward again. Flecks of blood and gore were everywhere, tiny droplets landing on Hanson’s knuckles, his shirt front, his face. Boone’s body pitched forward and fell heavily to the floor, facedown, as limp as a sack of laundry.

Silence.

The guardian turned to Hanson.

“You may assume control of the node now, if you wish.”

Hanson raised his head, heavy with guilt, wordless with disbelief.

“It’s true,” Cicero said. “There’s no danger to you. I know you believe yourself to be a Renunciate, but by testimony of the key you carry within yourself, you are not. You are a citizen. All functions must respect you. The security function would never offer you harm, not even to save the City itself.”

Hanson shook his head bullishly, a rejection not so much of any specific words or actions as of everything: Boone’s death, the raid on the brigand camp, his flight from Orange, the Pit, his childhood, his birth, everything.

With a respectful nod, the security function stepped backward, dissolving into blackness.

“Shall I clear this away?” Cicero indicated Boone’s body.

Appalled, Hanson opened his mouth to say who knew what, and then caught control of himself and closed it again. Cicero didn’t know any better—he was only a function. He wasn’t real. Hanson slumped, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Take it away, bury it.”

“And this?”

Cicero held up the gun.

“Bury it along with him.”

Then, because Boone had after all been a man of the cloth, he added, “Raise a stone or a sun-cross or something over it. Something appropriate.” It was a hell of a thing for a man to die so far from home. A hell of a thing to pass unnoticed and unremarked by anyone you ever knew.

He stood waiting while Cicero picked up the body in his arms, stepped into darkness, and returned unencumbered. Then he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

Cicero led him to the stairwell. When he looked down it, he threw up.

What Hanson needed now, more than anything, was sleep. He was still standing, and that was all. Months might have gone by for Boone and Cicero, but for him, Hanson, by the clock of his heart, it had only been three days since he’d had his shoveling contest with the New Man back in the Pit in Orange. In fact, this was still the third evening, as far as he was concerned, although enough had happened in those three days to make it seem like a lifetime had passed, and in all that time he’d only had a fitful nap here and there, not really a decent night’s sleep since leaving Orange. He was tired enough to make him believe that he had been awake and on his feet for every second of those eight months that Boone claimed had passed. Every cell in his body yearned for nothingness, darkness, oblivion.

At his direction, Cicero led him back to the spider-legged houses and into Boone’s bedroom. It was spare and almost empty, with a small rectangular pad in its center, not much different from a working-class man’s futon back in Orange. “Lie here,” Cicero said, “and you will be refreshed.”

With a nod, Hanson lay down on the pad. It was of an almost neutral texture, neither soft nor hard, just yielding enough to avoid discomfort, a trifle cool to the touch at first and then warm. He closed his eyes.

Five minutes later he opened them again.

He was wide awake.

Lying on the pad had refreshed his body, cleansed it of fatigue poisons, and returned it to peak strength and vigor. Physically he was in terrific shape. Mentally, however, he felt the same as before—wasted, blasted, sick to the very pit of his being with the mere fact of existence.

He sat up, alert, unblinking, and knew then with an awful clarity that he was never going to be able to make any kind of life for himself here, that Heaven was simply not for the likes of him. He didn’t know where home was for him anymore—perhaps there was no home for him anymore. But, wherever it was, it wasn’t here.

He stood.

He walked out to the balcony.

He walked back in.

He walked back out.

Finally, there was no help for it. He was beyond evasions now.

Without looking at Cicero, he said, “Take me to the Throne of God.”

No trace of Boone’s violent end remained. Every least particle of blood had been cleaned away in his absence. The room was as sterile and empty as if no one had walked here for a thousand years. Or as if no one ever had walked here, since the first recorded tick of time.

Hanson sat gingerly down on the Throne, his body tensed and aching to leap up and away from its cold electric touch. He felt a surge of icy terror, but fought it down. This was the one moment in his life when he had a chance to actually change things, probably the one moment in the lives of all the hundreds of ancestors who’d striven and fought and toiled to produce him in the first place, who had lived their lives and broken their hearts and died without ever encountering a single moment where anything they did had even the remotest chance of effecting a real change in the world. This was the only chance any of them would ever have, even if he went back to the human world and had a dozen children and they lived a thousand generations more. This was the one chance for all of them, that chain of lives stretching back into the distant past and ahead into the unimaginable future. This one moment, here and now. He had to give it his best shot, and hope that things would work out all right. He didn’t really know what he was doing, or what the consequences of it might be, but he knew he had to try. Perhaps it had been no different for God Himself, in the Beginning, when He’d set out to create the world.

He clutched the Throne’s arms. “Show me where we are.”

Cicero gestured, and the tower, walls and stairs and ceiling alike, became transparent.

Hanson stared over the City to the Wall, and over it as well, as if from a height even greater than the tower’s: stared upon a landscape rendered toylike by distance, like a cunningly crafted panorama or three-dimensional map, but one in which things moved and changed position, as in the image cast by a camera obscura (one of which he’d seen in the Courthouse in Orange, as a boy) so that you could see horses and transports moving on the roads, and people working in the fields, and cows wandering as they grazed, and trees swaying in the wind. Through some post-Utopian magic, it seemed like he could see everything at once, see it all clearly and distinctly, no matter how far away it was, his whole old world laid out at his feet. First there were the Utopian ruins overgrown in calamity weed and scrub oak; somewhere down there was the clearing in which he’d met Boone. Then the road up which the transport had come so very long ago, leading back to the ancient highway that stretched back to the south, past the SI garrisons and gypsy camps, the tiny crossroads towns, the vast glinting silver snake of the river, the high iron bridge over the Hudson, and on to the patchwork of hardscrabble farms beyond, which clung precariously to a series of gently rolling hills like the folds of a carelessly thrown quilt. Then, finally, by the horizon, a low gray smear of buildings where Orange was. Leaning forward, looking closer, he could make out the fetid streets of the Bog, rising up into Blackstone (he almost thought he could see the window of his old apartment, where he had lived with Becky for so many bittersweet years), and then up into the Swank, tidy tree-lined squares surrounded by fine old brick-and-iron buildings. He could see the rusty-orange Courthouse dome, one of the few specks of color in a sea of brown wood and gray brick, and imagined that if he could somehow see within the dome itself he would see himself as a small child staring fascinated at the table where the image from the camera obscura shifted and glittered, as if the Utopian optics through which he was looking could somehow let him see back through time as well as off through space (as who knew if they could not?)… And then, raising his eyes, up the slopes of Industry Hill to the highest point in Orange, he saw at last the massive ugly bulk of the State Factory, where he had slaved away the best days of his life, where he had poured out his youth like water onto thirsty ground. If he leaned forward a bit more, he could see the lip of the Pit itself, and tiny figures moving on it, shoveling, turning away to dump their coal onto the pile, turning back to shovel again, bending and straightening, their tiny matchstick arms and legs scissoring, and perhaps one of them was Gossard, or the New Man, or—recalling his fancy of a moment before—perhaps even Hanson himself, staring at the Wall of the City of God as he shoveled, thinking all the while about God staring back at him with a huge watery eye, tall as the sky.

Something caught in Hanson’s throat, and he blinked back sudden tears. No one knew better than he not to romanticize the world stretched out there below, no one knew better than he the miseries and brutalities it contained, the sickness and the poverty and the filth, the tyranny and murder. From up here, you couldn’t see the crooked politics and institutionalized cruelties that were housed beneath the Courthouse dome that looked so picturesque and attractive. From up here, you saw only the pastoral beauty of the fields and the patchwork farms; you didn’t see the grotesquely mutated animals and the cows with cancerous running sores and the “sour spots” in the fields, places too thoroughly drenched in ancient chemical poisons for anything to ever grow there again for millennia to come. Hanson knew all that, none knew it better.

And yet, even so, he was homesick.

He wanted to go home, wherever home was. Maybe not back to Orange, necessarily, but home. Back to the human world. Back where he belonged. Back to where children went fishing in the summertime and women leaned out of windows to catch a breath of air at evening, back to where cows grazed and people drank beer and laughed, back to where folks fell in love and had babies and grew old and died. Away from the inhuman, unchanging, cruel and incomprehensible alien splendor of this place.

“All that you can see, from here to the Wall,” Cicero said, “is subject to your manipulation.”

“How do I turn off the Wall?” Hanson asked gruffly.

“A twenty-mile section of it is under your control.” Cicero waved a hand, indicating an arc reaching from horizon to horizon. “It can only be turned off by depriving this entire segment of the City of all higher functions. I do not advise it. If, however, that is what you wish to do, I will guide you through the protocol.”

Hanson took a deep breath. “A’right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

He seized the chair’s grips. The needles converged upon his skull.

To his surprise, it did not hurt. A glowing sensation radiated from the base of his spine, a pervasive warmth like the sun on a summer’s afternoon. Lucid calm flooded his brain and he became aware of a thousand distant structures and devices, not as any kind of detailed knowledge but in much the same way he was aware of parts of his own body, ignorant of their inner workings but, with the slightest concentration, in control.

“What do I do now?”

“Make yourself aware of the Wall.”

“A’right.” He felt it now, within him, a glowing length of immaterial and impervious substance, reaching down three times farther into the bedrock than it extended above the ground. A thin, thin line reached even farther down, impossibly far, toward the core of the Earth, tapping energies incomprehensively greater than any he’d ever imagined. No phantom guardian appeared. No one challenged him. He did not ascend, descend, vibrate, scream. “What now?”

“Imagine a blue triangle. Within it, imagine a yellow circle. Now imagine that circle turning red.”

He did.

Twenty miles of the Wall ceased to be.

It took Hanson three weeks to make his way out of Heaven to the mortal realm of York. He could still summon a cyclone by stepping on a silver pad, but he could not make it take him where he wanted to go. His first attempt carried him so far from the Wall that he was not tempted to try a second time, lest he lose himself so thoroughly he might never find his way out again.

Without Cicero, the City of God was unspeakably dangerous, capricious in unforeseeable ways. There was, so far as he could tell, no malice to it, but he was like a child lost in a steel mill; power was everywhere and he did not understand its purposes. The post-Utopians hadn’t turned off any of their machines before they had gone away to wherever it was they had gone. And Cicero, who understood its workings, was gone too, canceled out along with the twenty miles of Wall, never mentioning that he was one of the “higher functions” that Hanson’s command would send to oblivion. Hanson found he missed Cicero more than he did Boone, though the one was only a function and the other a real human being.

It was an awful thing to have to admit to himself.

He lived off rain water and what vermin he could catch, and he was often sick. It was a hellish time for him. But he kept going, determined that if he were going to die, he would at least make it to the Human Domain first. He would die on his own side of the Wall.

When finally, starving, Hanson crossed over into the borderlands of York, he was taken prisoner by a troop of State soldiers. They were out in force, establishing a string of camps where the Wall had been, digging ditches and earthwork ramparts, re-creating a crude parody of the Wall in order to control access to the City of God and its many presumed treasures. They were all of them badly spooked by this turn of events, fearful and uncertain of what the future would bring. An unquestioned chock of their reality had crumbled without warning, and if that could happen, then who was to say what else might or might not?

“Hands up!” the soldier shouted. He held his rifle too tensely. He was ungodly young, a child really. When Hanson obeyed, he eased hardly at all, remaining as taut as an overwound spring. “You’re in bad trouble, mister.”

“A’right,” Hanson said. His head swam dizzily; he had to fight down a suicidal urge to caper and dance. But even in his weak and giddy state, he was particularly anxious not to be shot, not at this late date. “Y’caught me. You’re the boss. I’ll do whatever you say.”

“Where’d you come from, anyway? How’d you get past the line?”

Line? “I came from the east.” He gestured with his head, keeping his hands up as steady as he could. “Beyond where the Wall used to be.”

The boy’s eyes widened.

Two more soldiers came out of the woods. They both looked tough, but one looked mean as well.

“What you got?” one asked.

“This’n says he come from over the Wall.”

“Yeah, right.”

“So what do we do with him?”

The soldiers glanced one at another. There was an uneasy moment of balance when Hanson’s fate could have gone any which way. The mean-looking soldier cocked up his mouth to one side, and, unslinging his rifle, said, “Too much fucking trouble to walk him back, if you ask me…”

The boyish soldier gaped at him, too horrified to interfere.

Talking quickly, saying any fool thing that came into his head, Hanson said, “Hey, any of you boys come from Orange? That’s where I’m from, that’s my neck of the woods. Maybe you got family back there? What are their names? Might be I know them.” Crazy, nonsensical stuff he was saying, but it didn’t matter—anything to establish contact.

The third soldier stared hard at him. Then—

“Fuck it,” he said, and pushed the rifle barrel out of line, away from Hanson. The mean-looking one gave him an angry look, then turned his head to the side, spat, and re-slung his rifle.

The soldier who’d just saved Hanson’s life looked tired. “We’ll take him to camp. He can answer questions there.”

They tied his hands behind his back and started down the road. Hanson went quietly. He knew his answers would not please their superior officers. Their questions would be all wrong. It didn’t matter, though. He had done his part.

He had opened the City of God for them.

It might be some good would come of it. Anything was possible. He didn’t intend to dwell on it, though. What they did with it was their concern, not his.

They walked on in silence for a while. Hanson felt weak and dizzy. After a mile or so, one of the soldiers struck a narc on his thigh, took a long drag to get it started, and stuck it in Hanson’s mouth.

He mumbled his thanks. They wouldn’t untie his hands, but after he’d sucked in, the young soldier who’d captured him took the narc out again so he could exhale.

The two older soldiers tended to keep a cautious distance from him, but the younger one hung at his side, not frightened any longer but curious, intrigued, obviously thinking over what Hanson had said earlier. Finally, he couldn’t keep his questions in any longer. “You really been”—he made a gesture with his head—“back there?”

Hanson nodded wordlessly.

“Inside the City, I mean.”

“Ai. S’pose I have.”

“You ever seen… you know?”

The kid asked it in a hushed kind of way, the religious feelings of his childhood apparently not entirely dead yet, for the blasphemy of a ragged drifter like Hanson claiming to have come from the City of God was clearly thrilling and alarming to him. His buddies, skeptical, intrigued, moved a little closer to hear Hanson’s answer.

“You mean God?” Hanson began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Stumbling to a halt, he managed to control himself, to still the painful laughter for just long enough to look into the boy’s anxious face and say, “Fool! D’you mean to say you ain’t heard yet? God is dead!”

He doubled over then, roaring with laughter. His eyes filled with tears, and still he couldn’t stop. He laughed until he choked.

The soldiers waited until he could breathe again. Then they yanked him upright and double-checked his bonds.

They all four headed down the road.