City Under the Stars

6

THERE WAS A WINDOW in one wall of his cell. Without it, Hanson later thought, he might have gone insane.

It was a narrow slit window, open to the air but set with stout iron bars, a horizontal slash in the pale stone in the eastern wall of his cell, and although it let the cold wind in, and sometimes snow in winter, Hanson treasured it for the air and light it also let through into the gloomy darkness of his cell. The cell wall bulged inward slightly here, and with a little scrambling, it was possible to reach the window and hook your arms around the bars. Hanson would hang there for a long time, until the muscles in his big arms screamed in protest, relishing the cold wind on his face, drinking in the sight of trees and birds and low rolling hills, sometimes looking out toward the eastern horizon where, just out of sight, waited the shining immensity of the Wall of the City of God. Sometimes at night you could see its sullen glow lighting up the dark underbellies of the clouds.

When his arms could stand the strain no longer, he would slump back into the smothering, claustrophobic darkness of his cell, where he had a hard narrow cot, a few rough blankets, a pot to relieve himself in. They rarely came for him anymore, and most of his days and nights were spent alone, his meals—rough but substantial fare, bread that he could smell baking somewhere on the premises early in the morning, big hunks of new cheese, sometimes an unidentifiable piece of meat or a bit of fruit in the summer—shoved in through a slot in the iron-bound oaken door twice a day; at least they hadn’t tried starving him yet, although they’d tried everything else. He rarely saw his captors anymore, although he could hear them passing in the corridor outside and had learned to recognize the individualities of their gaits, and to identify one guard by his habit of whistling jigs and cheerful little schottisches as he made his rounds. He hadn’t seen any of the other prisoners for months, and never had seen much of them, although occasionally he could hear them screaming, or crying hopelessly in the night, and one evening someone had begun wailing “What is this place? I don’t belong here! Let me out of here! Get me out of here!” over and over again for hours in a hideously wavering high-pitched voice, like a lost soul crying out from some deep pit of Hell, until finally it was cut off in mid-cry, followed by an ominous silence.

Hanson almost—almost—regretted that they didn’t come to take him for questioning anymore.

His first day here, after soldiers quick-marched him from the City of God, which he had been caught coming out of, returning from a place no man had ever successfully entered in who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of years, they had dragged him to the warden’s office. The warden had sat behind his scarred wooden desk and studied him dispassionately, as though he were some curious kind of bug.

“So, you claim to have been inside the City of God?” the warden asked, in a gravelly voice.

“Ai,” Hanson said, and began to tell his story, but the warden, a pale, hulking fat man who reminded Hanson oddly of his long-lost friend Gossard, although a more brutish, corrupted Gossard with a hard face and harder eyes, surged to his feet and waved a fist the size of a ham at him. “Save your lies!” the warden screamed. “We’ll get the truth out of you soon enough!” And when Hanson had started to protest, he’d swarmed into him, hitting him with his rock-hard ham fists, knocking Hanson to the ground, then kicking him twice in the ribs.

As Hanson looked up at him from the floor through a blaze of pain, the guards joined in on the fun, drawing hardwood truncheons from their belts and striking him over and over, smashing his rib cage when he held his arms before his face and then his face when he wrapped his arms about his torso. Two or three times he tried to rise to his feet and was clubbed back down. They worked steadily, methodically, and then, when Hanson honestly believed he was feeling as much pain as a human being could feel without actually dying, they stopped. There was a brief silence and then warm drops of water spattered over his face and body. Hanson’s eyes were swollen shut by then, but he managed to open one just wide enough to see that the warden had unbuttoned his fly and taken out his thick ugly cock, and was calmly and methodically pissing all over him.

When he was done at last, the warden buttoned himself up again and made a flicking, dismissive gesture, like a man shooing a fly, and the guards had pulled Hanson up off the floor and dragged him through a maze of stone corridors for the first time to his cell, where they left him curled into a ball in the dirt, shuddering with nausea and shame, the rank smell of the other man’s urine in his hair and nose, soaking his clothes.

The warden, whose name was Overton, later explained to Hanson, in one of those phases of interrogation where he would become ramblingly conversational, almost chatty, that this was a sound psychological technique, establishing dominance at once and breaking down any image the prisoner might have of himself as brave and noble and heroic by shaming and humiliating him. “No man can think of himself as heroic when his clothes are steaming with another man’s piss, eh? Of course,” Overton said, tapping a pale finger alongside his nose and winking, “the man who came before me would have raped you. Raped you and enjoyed it, too. Old Auxley was a vicious bastard. But the way I see it, there should always be something held in reserve. That’s kinder in the long run, it heads off unwise actions. Just remember: no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.”

They left him alone in his cell for two days in his stiff, stinking clothes, without food or water, and on the third morning they dragged him to a windowless downstairs room whose walls were padded with blankets and straw. While Overton sat motionless and silent on a stool, the other guards “questioned” Hanson with practiced efficiency, making him run over his story again and again while they first beat him bloody with their fists, then put burning slivers under his fingernails, then seared his flesh with red-hot irons, then slowly crushed his foot in an iron vise. Hanson was not even remotely heroic through all this. He had been hurt before in his life, accidents at work, bar fights, had even been stabbed once, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for this kind of methodical torture, his body ripped open, his skin blistered and blackened, his bones crushed. He screamed his throat raw, cried, begged, and, toward the end, pleaded that he’d tell them anything they wanted to hear if they’d just stop. Throughout the procedure, Overton sat in complete silence, sometimes leaning forward intently, sometimes frowning slightly, as if that particular interrogation technique wasn’t being carried out to his complete satisfaction.

Finally, Overton made another of his sharp, dismissive gestures, and the guards dragged Hanson back to his cell, where he huddled on his cot, moaning, oozing blood, shivering with pain and fever.

In the morning, he felt fine. His burns had healed, his skin had reknitted itself, his bruises had vanished, and his foot was once again uncrushed and whole.

The guards looked in on him and then went hurriedly away, and in a few moments, Overton was there, peering puzzledly at him, and then prodding Hanson’s unmarked shoulder where his skin had been burnt and blackened with hot irons the day before. He gestured impatiently, and the guards dragged Hanson away to the basement room, where they did it all again.

This went on for days, the guards torturing Hanson while he begged them to just tell him what they wanted him to say and he’d say it, Hanson’s wounds miraculously healing at night, leaving him hale enough to be tormented again the next day.

One day in the windowless room, Overton, who until now had been silent during their sessions, greeted Hanson with an apologetic smile and said, “I’m sorry about this, Hanson, I really am. It’s nothing personal. It’s just my job.” Two guards seized Hanson and wrestled him down into a chair, while another stretched Hanson’s arm out across a thick wooden butcher’s block that hadn’t been there before that day. They strapped Hanson’s arm in place, and one of the guards picked up an ax.

“For the love of God,” Hanson said, his voice cracking shrilly in terror in the middle of the words, “don’t do this!”

Overton shrugged philosophically. “Consider it a scientific experiment,” he said, and then gestured to the guard, who stepped forward, hefted the ax, swung it aloft, and then cut Hanson’s hand off with one crashing blow.

Hanson screamed. It actually didn’t hurt as much initially as some of the other things that had been done to him in that room, but he could see blood fountaining from the stump of his wrist, and his throat squeezed shut with fear. Light rapidly drained from the world, the periphery of his vision going first, everything narrowing down to a cone. The room filled up with darkness.

The last thing he saw was Overton leaning forward to peer at him, and then laughing whimsically and saying, “Let’s see him grow that back!”

He did. It took almost two days for Hanson’s hand to grow back, another day for him to recover full use of his fingers.

Overton came to Hanson’s cell, stared at the regrown hand, and left without a word, looking frightened. The guards also gave him fearful looks out of the corners of their eyes, showing the whites, and backed out of the cell, closing the door behind him.

There were no more torture sessions after that. Two or three times a week, Hanson—who had by this point been allowed a change of clothes—would be “invited” to Overton’s office, where Overton would be sitting at his desk, head bowed over some papers. “Sit down,” he would always say. “I’ll be right with you.” As if they two had a professional relationship, as if Hanson were his client and had an appointment to be here, as if he were simply providing a service that Hanson required—as if the days Hanson had spent in the torture chamber had never happened at all. He would be placed in a straight-backed wooden chair in front of Overton’s desk, sometimes given a cup of chicory or even a mug of applejack, and encouraged to “have a nice talk” with Overton, who wrote everything Hanson said down in a notebook in a surprisingly neat and even delicate hand. Hanson cooperated with this process as best he could, anxious to keep Overton in what Hanson thought of as “Good Overton” mode; he was already all too familiar with “Bad Overton.” After a while, though, having gone over his experiences in the City of God—it seemed they believed now, belatedly, that he’d really been inside the Wall—in exhausting detail more than once, he ran short of things to say, and Overton filled the gap by rambling on about himself, becoming expansive and discursive, and not a little self-aggrandizing, boasting about his position and his prowess, telling Hanson all about the problems and tribulations of running a prison full of recalcitrant hard-core prisoners who didn’t understand all the lengths he went to in order to help them. Hanson found this more than a little creepy, but it was better than being burned with red-hot irons, even if his flesh was going to heal the next day, so he did his best to play up and look interested and attentive.

The last time Overton had Hanson brought to his office, though, before Hanson had even had a chance to sit down, Overton had frowned and said, “I have asked for advice on your case. The responsibility has been passed on. There’s nothing more I can do.” He then gestured dismissively, impatiently, as if Hanson was wasting his valuable time by importuning him with unreasonable requests about inconsequential matters. The guards hustled Hanson away, back to his cell.

After that, he was left alone. They never came for him anymore, no one asked him any more questions. In fact, he barely saw another living soul from one week to the next, except when the guards came into his cell to empty his slop jar, keeping a wary, almost frightened eye on him while they did so, and refusing to speak.

He was left alone in his cell, only occasionally hearing another human voice far off somewhere in the corridors outside. He learned to relish and even long for the off-key whistling of the guard as he went by on the other side of the door, a sound other than his own breathing, and eventually learned which tunes the guard most liked to whistle. Once he started whistling the same jig that the guard was whistling as he passed, and the guard’s whistling cut off with a frightened abruptness and didn’t start up again for several days.

He lost track of time. Had months gone by, or years? Winter came, and left, and came again.

Hanson looked out his window. It was the only thing left to him, his lifeline to the world beyond his cell, and he drank in the bright, moving, multicolored normality that came in through it like a man desperately breathing through a hole in the ice.

He came to know every branch visible in every tree, the shape and size and colors of their leaves and berries, where every bird had its nest. He learned to identify the different kinds of birds by their calls, and even, through patient listening, came to gain some idea of what information those calls contained, whether it was “This is my tree!” or “I want a mate!” or “Look out for the fox!” There were marmoset-like little creatures living in the rocks at the near end of the field, and he watched avidly as they went about their daily dramas, squabbling over territory and mates, whistling shrill alarm calls and hiding from predators—or presumed predators, since Hanson never saw any—in amongst the rocks; one whole summer they tried doggedly to teach themselves how to light a fire, making piles of branches and dry tinder, breaking Hanson’s heart by failing again and again and again. Occasionally, a bee or a fumblefoot would buzz by the window, sometimes even coming in through the bars to zip around inside the cell before finding their way back out again. One glorious day, a hawk struck a pigeon just outside the window, and carried it to a nearby stump to eat, tearing at the pigeon’s breast and releasing a swirling cloud of torn white feathers as it fed that rose and danced on the wind, Hanson luxuriating in the motion—motion! A flurry of blessed activity and change in a static world! Something different!—like a man dying of thirst who’s been offered cool water. Very occasionally, the highlight of the week, the memory of which he would cherish and turn over in his mind again and again until it was polished smooth, riders on horseback or a wagon would pass in the curve of the road visible at the far end of the meadow. Once, in the dog days of summer, heat hanging in the air as thick as honey, he saw a naked little boy driving a herd of bedraggled, ulcerated, two-headed goats before him. In the spring and fall, deer would sometimes come out of the deep woods near the marmoset rocks, some of them bearing glossy radiation scars from where they’d come in contact with one of the old “hot spots,” and blink at him with their sad, liquid eyes. If he spoke to them, trying to coax them closer, or perhaps just to hear his own voice, they would vanish like ghosts.

There was a ruined wall in the middle distance, partway between him and the road, a tumbled fall of stone and crumbling brick marking the spot where some building had once stood. Halfway up the remains of the wall, there was a shallow horizontal ledge where windblown dirt had collected, and there a tree, one of the hardy kind that sprouts like weeds, had taken root and grown, clinging precariously to the side of the wall. Hanson became fascinated by this sickly little tree, perhaps because he could never decide whether it symbolized hope—life persisting against all odds, clinging to the thinnest possible margin to survive, but surviving nevertheless—or futility, since although it struggled to grow, it really had no place to grow to, was already stunted and yellowed by lack of nutrients, and sooner or later must wither and die. It struck Hanson forcefully that one of those things was the perfect metaphor for human life on Earth. But which one?

As he stared from his window, the world gradually changed, and not just with the changing of the seasons.

On a cold, cloudless night, clinging to the window bars, it was sometimes possible to watch the Bear or the Scorpion or other constellations rising over the edge of the Earth. He was watching, one night, when there arose an actinic purple glow on the northern horizon that sponged away the stars. From then on, the fizzing purple glow was always there, dimly visible even in the daylight if you shaded your eyes to look.

A few days later, a ragged wave of refugees came south down the road, grim, silent men and women carrying bindles and dragging sledges piled with household goods, herding both straggling children and straggling pigs and sheep along before them. For most of a day they streamed past, looking down or inward, not speaking, and then they were gone, around the bend in the road and out of sight.

Sometime later, there was a brief firefight down there at the bend of the road, small groups of men in unfamiliar uniforms blazing away at each other, some with guns, some with weird-looking implements that emitted flashes of light. Hanson clutched the bars of his window tight, reveling in the sudden flurry of action and drama, not stopping to worry that a stray bullet might hit him. Would it even kill him if it did? After a while, the firefight moved off into the woods, leaving bodies sprawled lifelessly across the road until someone from the prison with a mule and wagon came out and hauled them away. In retrospect, it occurred to Hanson to be ashamed that the killing down there had been nothing but a welcome diversion to him, a break in the numbing routine; they were men who had died down there, after all, spilling their blood and giving their lives to inadvertently provide his vicarious entertainment. Prison was changing him, wearing him thin, making him less human.

At night now, when the prison itself was quiet, he could hear strange booming noises off in the distance, ponderous and slow and very far away, like the footsteps of some unimaginably huge beast, and occasionally there were strange wailings and unearthly shriekings that put the hairs up on the back of his neck. Lights flared on the horizon, dimmed, flared again, pulsed rhythmically.

One moonless night, peering from his window, Hanson had seen a huge indistinct shape like an immense metal spider go by, momentarily occulting the stars as it passed, padding soundlessly up the road.

There were strange things abroad in the world now.

The world was changing, becoming an unfamiliar place, leaving him behind. He’d felt trapped, buried, in the State Factory in Orange, his life crushed beneath its smothering weight, compelled to recognize that his whole existence had been for nothing, that it had no point or reason at all. Once he had had dreams and a wife. Both were long dead. Even after he’d been forced to flee Orange and miraculously found his way through the Wall surrounding the City of God, possibly the first man ever to do so, how much credit could he take for that? The only extraordinary thing he’d ever done in his life—and that mostly against his will, from necessity, being driven by forces beyond his control and by the will of other, better men—had been to enter the City of God, and decline an opportunity to assume godlike power… and, almost as an afterthought as he left, to shut off one section of the Wall. Was all this strangeness his fault, for having let men into the City of God, where they were not supposed to go?

If so, then the one moment of significance in his futile, meaningless life, for better or worse, was behind him now. From here on, it would make no difference that he’d ever been born.

It was clear that he’d never get out of here. It was clear that he’d die here, and be absorbed tracelessly into the dark river of anonymous and forgotten dead who stretched back to the very beginnings of humanity, most of them having lived and died without leaving so much as a mark on the slick, impervious surface of the world, nor any indication that they’d ever been there at all.

One morning in late winter or early spring, there were horses waiting impatiently in the forecourt, eight or ten of them, blowing steam from their noses and scraping with their hooves at the glittering hoarfrost that coated the cobblestones. Hanson could just see them from here, if he pressed his face out as far as it would go between the cold metal of the bars. Of the riders, there was no sign; they must have entered the prison. For no particular reason, he felt a thrill of unease—someone important must be visiting.

An hour or so later, he heard footsteps approach his cell door and stop in front of it, then the rattling of the lock as someone fumbled with it. He sat up on his cot, feeling an odd surge of mingled anxiety and anticipation.

The door swung open. The whistling guard stood there, accompanied by two of his fellows, all wearing truncheons at their belts. “On your feet, freak,” the guard said.

They hustled him down the familiar corridor to Overton’s office, but Overton wasn’t there. Instead, a tall, almost painfully thin man sat behind Overton’s desk, and unfolded himself to get to his feet as Hanson entered. He was expensively, almost foppishly, dressed, with lace at his sleeves and ruffles on his silk blouse, and wore thigh-high riding boots of gleaming black leather.

“Ah, Hanson,” he said, his face breaking into what seemed to be a broad, genuinely good-spirited grin. “I’m very glad to meet you at last.” It sounded like he really was. “I’m Salvatore Delgardo,” he said. Then, without changing expression or taking his eyes off Hanson, he said to the guards standing close behind, “Hold him.”

Two guards seized Hanson from either side, holding him fast.

Then, before Hanson had a chance to struggle or even react, Delgardo came forward around the desk, picked up a broad-bladed knife, and, with one swift motion, cut Hanson’s throat.

Hanson tried to scream, but could only make a strangling noise. The world did a slow somersault. He didn’t realize that he had fallen to the floor until he saw Delgardo standing over him. Delgardo had taken a cup from the desk, and now leaned close over Hanson and filled it with the blood that pumped from Hanson’s throat, being fastidiously careful not to splash any blood on his shirt. As Hanson watched in horror and amazement, his eyes already dimming, Delgardo raised the cup of blood to him in salute, and then drank it down in a single gulp.

The last thing Hanson heard was Delgardo’s cheerful voice saying, “Hanson, we’re going to be the greatest of friends!”

Hanson awoke that night in his cell, and instinctively clutched at his throat, but the wound was gone. He lay motionless in the darkness for a long time, listening to voices rise and fall somewhere off in the depths of the prison, too far away to make out the words. A door slammed somewhere with iron finality. The full moon looked in between the bars of the window like a fat bone-white face.

In the morning, they came for him again. He was taken to a part of the prison he’d never seen before, what must be the guards’ quarters, given water and coarse potash soap to wash with and new clothes, plain but sturdy, and had his hair cut short by a scowling, sour-smelling old woman—the first woman Hanson had seen, he realized, in however many years he had wasted away in his cell. Then they took him back out through the corridors to Overton’s office—or he supposed it was Delgardo’s office now. Overton seemed to be gone.

Delgardo was behind the desk, reading through a thick file of papers. He looked up, said, “Ah, Hanson! Come in, come in!” in a jovial tone, swept the papers into a sheaf and tamped them straight, then opened a drawer and made the papers disappear into it. He waited until Hanson, in response to his gesture, had sat down and the guards had left the room, then raised his hand portentously, with great significance, and stretched it out, palm first, toward Hanson. “I must thank you, my dear friend,” he said, “for making me immortal.” Hanson stared at him. “The first thing I did after they dragged you from the room,” Delgardo continued, “was slice my own hand, right here across the palm. Sliced it wide open. And look!” He brandished the hand theatrically in Hanson’s face. “The wound closed up! The wound is gone! I can’t be hurt!”

“You can be hurt,” Hanson said dully. “Believe me, you can.”

Delgardo chuckled. “Perhaps,” he said, “but it’s going to be damn difficult to kill me. Just like you.” He took the sheaf of papers out of the drawer again and flattened them on the desk, smoothing them lovingly with his long musician’s fingers. “That fool Overton had it all written down, but couldn’t ever see it. I’m surprised that oaf could even read! Whereas I have pored over every word again and again, for months, and it’s all here, in Boone’s explanations to you.” He pointed a finger at Hanson dramatically. “Cicero pumped your blood full of little machines that keep you healthy and repair any damage to you.” He was referring to events and people—well, Boone had been a person, anyway—from so long ago that Hanson had almost stopped believing in them. “By drinking your blood, I now have the same little machines within me! So I too am immortal!” He smiled broadly. “Once I read about your hand growing back, I knew what I had to do! Cut your throat!” He laughed good-naturedly.

Something deep inside Hanson told him that Delgardo was wrong; that he didn’t understand a thing about what was inside of him, and possibly never could understand it. Delgardo was a savage recasting strange technologies into terms he could understand: magic and tiny machines. But he only said, through gritted teeth, “Suppose it didn’t work? Suppose I’d died?”

Delgardo shrugged, as if that was a matter of little consequence. “That would have been too bad,” he said indifferently. “Now, since you didn’t die, however, we must go on to discuss other matters of great importance!”

He tidied up the sheaf of papers again, then stared portentously at Hanson for a number of long silent moments. “It’s a funny thing,” he said. And waited.

“What is, sir?” One of the first things Hanson had learned from Overton was to respond politely when Overton paused that way if he wanted to keep him in “Good Overton” mode. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it made the session go more smoothly. Not always.

Delgardo’s mouth curled up in a wry little smile, as if he was about to wink and impart a confidence. “The sovereign Government of the State of York has sent hundreds of men into the City of God, and, funny thing, sooner or later they all die! They die or else they’re… changed. Not a one of them has lasted a fraction as long as you did. Not a one of them has been able to close down any other sections of the Wall, other than the one you closed. Why do you imagine that is?”

“I’ve told you everything I know,” Hanson said.

“I’m sure you have,” Delgardo said in a way that indicated he didn’t believe any such thing. “But here’s the odd part. We give them all the information we’ve learned from you and from others who’ve gone into the City, but it doesn’t seem to do them any good. We’re still restricted to that one section of the City that was opened when you left it, and no one can go deep into it or find a way shut down the rest of the Wall. Most of the City, vast areas, are still unreachable! And these are tough, capable men. Trained soldiers. Clever young men. Frankly, much cleverer and tougher and more capable than you ever were, as far as I can tell. We send them out, and, sooner or later, they don’t come back. We don’t make any progress at all. Now isn’t that funny?”

Hanson didn’t say anything.

Delgardo stared at him. “Has anybody told you we’re at war?”

Startled, Hanson said, “No, sir. I’ve heard no news in here. The guards never talk to me, and Overton never talked about what was happening on the outside.” The firefight he’d seen on the road had been a hint, of course—but nothing so definite as what he’d just heard; it could have been a skirmish with bandits or outlaw gangs like the one he’d once briefly joined himself. Nobody had claimed that the war had actually begun. “Is it the South?”

Delgardo looked at him.

“That… that we’re fighting with, I mean.” Then, as the silence grew uncomfortably long, he added, “Sir.”

Now Delgardo smiled sadly in a way that made Hanson’s blood run cold with fear. “Oh, Carl, Carl, Carl,” he said. “What difference can it possibly make to you, of all people?” His voice took on a reminiscent tone. “Remember when you were in that dark place with the cat-women? Remember how frightened you were, how you thought then that you might die, and you didn’t even know why?” Hanson felt the hair on his arms prickle with alarm. He really had read Hanson’s testimony closely, and with unsettling comprehension and attention to detail. This was someone much more intelligent than Overton, and, as a result, probably much more dangerous. “This war is something like that. The who and why of it don’t matter, only what might happen to us all as a result.” He leaned forward, as if he’d just made a telling argument and was going to follow up on it. “This friend of yours, the one you call Cicero…”

“He wasn’t a real person, I don’t think. He said he was a function.”

“Yes, yes, you’ve said that already. The question is, why hasn’t anybody else seen him? So many have gone in, and of those who have come back out, not one has reported anything like him.”

“It was Boone that he talked to,” Hanson said. He was treading on dangerous ground here, perilously close to the tiny knot of information he had managed to withhold from the interrogators—that, through Cicero, who was willing to obey him because he held the key within him, he was able to control the City of God, at least to some extent. It was not a power he wanted, he had turned his back on it and walked away. It was not a power anybody should have. It was certainly not a power he wanted Delgardo to have. “Boone gave him orders. He wouldn’t obey me.”

“Yet he rescued you that time. With the cats. Why is that?”

“I… I dunno. Maybe Boone told him to.”

“And why would Boone do that?”

“I dunno. Boone liked me. Boone was my friend.”

“You know more than you’re telling,” Delgardo said. He was silent for so long then, staring at Hanson, that, in spite of the desperateness of his situation, Hanson began to get bored and started to fidget.

“I tell you what, my dear old friend,” Delgardo said at long last. “I believe that you’re concealing vital information in a time of war. Now, for that, I could send you back to the torture chamber and try to rip the truth out of you. But instead I’ll make you a generous offer.” He held up a long pale finger. “You’ll come back to the City of God with us, with me and a small party of picked men. There you’ll guide us around, show us everything you know, and we’ll see if maybe this Cicero of yours will come out for you. If he does come out and talk to you again, as he hasn’t done for anyone else, maybe we can get him to open the rest of the City up for exploration, and we can find some juicy new piece of Utopian technology that will make a decisive difference in the war, unlike the ones we’ve already exploited.” He smiled brightly at Hanson. “If you do that, then the treason you’ve committed will be forgiven and forgotten, all your crimes will be forgiven and forgotten, even the murder of Oristano”—Hanson looked up in surprise; he knew about that too?—“back in Orange, and we’ll let you go free. Free! Yes, a generous offer, I know, considering the magnitude of your crimes, but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!” He beamed at Hanson, as if he expected him to gush with gratitude. “So, what do you say?”

At the thought of returning to the City of God, of plunging again into those shining, alien, bewildering, incomprehensible spaces, Hanson felt such a wave of terror that the blood drained from behind his eyes and he almost passed out. He feared the torture chamber, yes, but he feared that more, feared it on a deep instinctual level that was almost cellular, that filled him with such dread that he thought his lungs would stop working.

“I—can’t,” he managed to choke out at last, not daring to look at Delgardo. “I can’t ever go back there! Don’t ask me to! You don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like! I can’t do it, I can’t go back there again! I just—can’t.”

Delgardo smiled sadly. “That was the wrong answer,” he said, and rapped sharply on his desk. The whistling guard came in and hit Hanson behind his ear with a truncheon, and they dragged him away, only partially conscious, and locked him back in his cell again in the dark. He could hear Delgardo sighing regretfully behind him as he went.

Early the next morning, just after dawn, the guards filed silently into Hanson’s cell and shoved a leather bag over his head and down over his chest. Then they shackled his hands behind his back. Without a word being spoken, they dragged him from his cell and off through the long maze of corridors, Hanson stumbling blindly along, struggling to breathe through the thick, stifling enclosure of the leather bag, struggling to fight back the rising tide of panic.

He was about to die. It seemed impossible that he could still care after all he’d already been through. But he did.

Could they kill him? Hanson didn’t know, but they could certainly try—cut him completely to pieces maybe, or douse him with oil and set him on fire. There must be limits to his “immortality.” Maybe they’d succeed in killing him, maybe not, but he didn’t want to find out which it was. Suppose he was still alive after they’d cut him to bits, or burned him black in the fire? Suppose he lived like that forever, in unending agony? Even if it did succeed in killing him, just the thought of going through that kind of ordeal, enduring that kind of pain, far, far worse than anything he’d suffered to date, loosened his bowels and made them rumble.

At last they came to a stop. Hanson waited inside the smothering darkness of the bag for several endless moments, choking and gasping, and then the bag was yanked abruptly from his head.

They were outside the prison, on the stone steps that led down to the forecourt. Cool air touched his face in the instant that the leather hood was whisked away, and light filled Hanson’s eyes. He stood blinking, feeling wind ruffle his hair, feeling sunlight on his skin, smelling the turned-earth smell as the world began to warm toward spring. There were green buds just beginning on the trees, and birds were singing. Involuntarily, Hanson began to cry. He knew that he should be ashamed of the tears running down his cheeks, ashamed at having been unmanned, but he couldn’t stop himself.

At his elbow, Delgardo said, “Maybe I can’t kill you, although we could make it very unpleasant for you trying, but Hanson, my boy, we can certainly keep you here. Keep you here, and lock you away in the deepest dungeon so that you never see the sun again, ever, or feel the wind on your face. Keep you here forever, or as long as it takes you to finally die, even if it’s a hundred years. Even if it’s a thousand years! A thousand years of darkness and misery! Of nothingness! Locked away from the world! Or—” He paused. “—you can be brave enough to go back to the City of God, no matter how terrible a place it is, and be free. Free! Be given the world again! Be alive and out and about in the world again! Part of life, not sunk in darkness and enclosure, but really and truly living again!”

He lowered his voice to a whisper, his breath a soft tickle in Hanson’s ear. “I can undo the shackles and you can walk down these steps and be part of the world again. Or you can turn around and go back inside. Back to four stone walls and a darkness that never ends. The choice is yours.”

Hanson looked out across the meadow, watching the breeze ruffle the tall grass. He could see his tree from here, the one growing in a cramped niche on the side of a ruined wall, and it seemed to him that no matter how stunted and sickly it was, it was still alive, still surviving, and that therefore, as long as it did still live, there was still hope for it. And that the same applied to him, and maybe to the whole damned human race.

Or was he just rationalizing, taking the easy way out, refusing to make the hard right choice? Taking instead a way that he and maybe the whole world would come to bitterly regret? Because they’d broken him, because he’d reached his limits and just couldn’t take it anymore, be damned to the consequences?

If so, well… So be it, then.

“All right, Delgardo, you incredible bastard,” Hanson said, “let’s go back to the City.”