City Under the Stars

8

THEIR PROGRESS WAS SLOW, for they had to constantly scan the land before them for potential dangers and, though Phillips (if that’s who it is) carefully charted their way on gridded mapping paper, their compasses did not work here at all, so they had to rely on dead reckoning, with the Cathedral as their one fixed landmark.

Shortly after their midday break for lunch, the buildings drew away and they found themselves facing a grid of enormous stones, twice the height of a man, set up like menhirs, all dissimilar, with between them gravel and nothing more. They stretched as far as the eye could see to either side and looked to extend as far ahead. At the sight of them, Hanson immediately turned and began walking east.

“Hold it right there,” Delgardo snapped. “Where do you think you’re going?”

“I told you. Never go through anything, under anything, inside anything, or between anything. If you want to survive. Sir.”

Delgardo looked scornful. “Have you ever heard of gongshi, Hanson? No, of course you haven’t. Chinese scholar’s stones. Rocks that were selected for their aesthetic value and used as objects of meditation. Look at these things, what do you see? No two of them are alike. Different kinds, different shapes. What we’ve got here is somebody’s rock collection. Probably the owner liked to wander through it, thinking profound thoughts. None of us are afraid of a rock garden, am I right?” Lowering his voice so he couldn’t be overheard, Delgardo added, “And I’ll put three rounds through your skull if you don’t lead us straight across. Maybe you’d survive that. But I don’t think you’d enjoy the experience much.”

So, having no choice, Hanson led the troop into the rocks.

It was eerily quiet among the great stones. Not a bird or insect was anywhere to be seen or heard. The only sound was the crunch of gravel underfoot. Nobody spoke a word. Somehow, this near-silence translated, in the inner reaches of his brain, into a sensation of profoundest peace. After a few minutes, Hanson found his thoughts wandering back to his youth, to the days when his wife, Becky, was still alive and he was in possession of his full force of strength and vigor. Those were good times, though they had seemed hard enough then. He’d put in his ten hours at the factory, shoveling coal, and sometimes have a watery beer with friends in somebody’s basement speakeasy before returning home to his wife and dinner. There was never enough money to keep lots of lights burning, so in his memories, Becky’s face had a warm orange glow, all the rest of the world falling away from her into darkness. For the first few years, they two were so very, very happy.

He didn’t like to think about what came after.

Better to cast his thoughts further back, to his childhood, when he had been the protector of his little sister from schoolyard bullies. He’d always been larger than the other kids in his class, so at recess the little bastards would sometimes deftly arrange, by lies and rumors, for him to fight an upperclassman. Sometimes he’d win and sometimes not. But the image of him as a bruiser, with blood on his knuckles and a glower on his face, lingered and he rarely had to do more than growl a word or two of warning to keep the bullies away from her. She’d died young, his sister had, but while she lived, she adored him, had little—

Little—

Why couldn’t he remember her name?

Hanson stumbled and drew himself to a stop. Head swimming, he put out a hand to keep from falling, and felt himself lurch against one of the standing stones. Delgardo, who had been following in his wake, brushed past as if he weren’t there. The others, too, he saw, were plodding along steadily, eyes half closed, heads bowed, like so many sleepwalkers. They passed him by without a glance, and he had to dance backward to avoid being stepped on by the Stumper, which, had it been a foot or two wider would have been scraping against the rocks to either side of it.

“Everybody! Everybody!” Hanson shouted. “Wake up!” He grabbed hold of the kid who was leading the Stumper by a rope and shook his shoulders. The soldier snorted and his eyes fluttered open. Then he ran forward to shake—Phillips, was it?—and then Barker, and then he and Barker were running up and down the line, shouting and shaking, until everyone was awake again.

With puzzled expressions, the men listened to Hanson as he tried to explain: that the rocks were somehow mesmerizing them all, putting them into a half-sleep for whatever purpose he couldn’t say, it was possible the rocks were making them forget things, maybe they ate memories, he couldn’t say, but… “Listen to me!” Sergeant Barker said. “The first one of you falls asleep, I will kick your ass halfway to the moon. Understand?”

“Sir! Yes, sir!” the men said, as one.

“A’right. Now. Double time! March!”

They were moving again, fast this time. The sergeant danced up and down the line, shouting and punching, keeping everyone going. And it worked. In less than an hour they were out of the rock garden.

When Delgardo had called a halt, Hanson drew him aside. “Listen. Sir. There’s something you need to know.”

“I was trying to remember…” Delgardo said in such an unguarded, puzzled way as to seem, for the briefest and most fleeting of moments, almost human. “A girl I knew. She…” He shook his head. Then, registering how Hanson was looking at him, “What is it?”

“There were a dozen of us when we started out, right?”

Delgardo squinted at him, as if he were something unexpected and not particularly pleasant. “Yeah. So?”

“I only count eleven now. But… I can’t quite remember who we’ve lost.”

Delgardo was still for a long moment, clearly running over the roster in his mind and failing to come up with a name. At last he said, “Well, whoever he is, he’s not coming back. Don’t say anything about this to the men. That’s an order, Hanson.”

“Yes, sir.” Hanson didn’t like being polite to the bastard. But Delgardo looked like he would make Hanson sorry if he wasn’t.

“Fifteen minutes!” Delgardo said at the top of his voice. “Then we get going again.”

They were following an open space between enormous cylinders that Hanson did his best not to look at, because they were covered with what appeared to be beetles the size of his hand and in constant motion, when Hanson saw that ahead of them was a narrow silver arch. It was three times as tall as a man and, because it touched the cylinders to either side, impossible to walk around. Reflexively, without even thinking, Hanson turned away.

“Halt!” Delgardo commanded. Then, “Why are you going out of your way here? You know something about this hoop?”

“Never go through anything,” Hanson mumbled. “Never go underneath anything. Never put your hand inside anything. It might be safe, it might not. Best way is to never find out.”

“But you don’t know anything specific about this thing? You haven’t seen its like before?”

“No,” Hanson said, “sir.”

Delgardo pulled up a handful of grass, bringing up a clod of dirt with it. He threw the thing through the hoop and it fell to the ground with a soft plop. Then he unsnapped his holster and with meaningful intensity, said, “Looks fine to me. Walk on through.”

Everybody stood motionless, staring at Hanson. They were none of them his friends and they all carried weapons with a confidence that said they knew how to use them. He swiftly added up all his options and, as usual, came up with zero. Then he took a deep breath and obeyed.

He walked through the hoop.

Nothing happened.

“You see?” Delgardo said and, jauntily stepping through the hoop himself, waved for the soldiers to follow him.

Hanson was looking forward and so did not see what happened next, for which he would be forever grateful. However, what he heard as the first of the soldiers passed through the hoop was a strangely liquid sound which made him spin around in his tracks. Just in time to see a tangle of what looked to be internal organs slump to the ground. Blood poured freely from it.

On the far side of the hoop, one of the soldiers bent over and threw up. “He’s been turned inside-out,” another whispered in horrified awe. “Oh shit, Lopez,” Sergeant Barker said, making the sign to ward off the Evil Eye. “Poor kid!”

What had been Lopez lay all in a heap, his innards glistening in the sun. Intermingled with them were bones, strangely twisted into shapes that Hanson’s mind could not quite manage to make sensible. At the center of it all was what had to be a core of muscles and skin and cloth. It smelled like the foulest sewer in creation.

The whole wet mass twisted and flopped, suggesting that the soldier was still alive and attempting to bring his body under control again. And it made a noise—a high, weak shrill like violin strings being stroked by someone with no idea how to play them. Which could only be, Hanson realized with horror, the man trying to scream.

“You,” Delgardo said, pointing to the nearest soldier. “Front and center.”

The soldier snapped to and stood at attention. His face was stone. You had to look at his eyes, which were showing the whites, to see how scared he was.

The screaming continued, a high, unbearable noise.

“Right there—” Delgardo pointed down at a bright pink mass that was surely the brain. “Stomp down on it hard.”

“Sir!” the soldier said, but he didn’t move, just stood swaying and sweating and looking as if he was about to throw up.

“Oh, for the love of—” Delgardo pushed the soldier roughly aside. He stepped forward, raised his foot, and stomped.

There was a squelching noise and everybody looked away.

But the screaming stopped.

Delgardo glared at Hanson as if he’d been the one to ignore a direct order, then snapped, “Burial detail! You, you, and you. Be careful you don’t step through the hoop.”

When the body had been properly buried—nobody commented on the color or the texture or the smell of the soil it was interred in—Delgardo, who hadn’t looked at Hanson once in the time it took to dig the grave, said to the man who’d been leading the Stumper, “Stretch out your hands as far apart as you can, and then cut me a length of rope exactly that long.” Then, to Hanson, “Take off your shirt.”

“It wasn’t me that—”

“You had one job,” Delgardo said with icy calm. “To keep us safe. Yet you let Lopez walk through that hoop. For that, you get ten lashes. I’d like to make it a hell of a lot more, but we still need you ambulatory. Consider yourself lucky. Now, take your shirt off, you damned ape!” he roared, his voice rising for the first time. He made a good pretense of outrage, but as Hanson unbuttoned his shirt, he knew what was really going on here. Delgardo had just gotten one of his own men killed; if he was to continue leading them at all effectively—and one of them had already been at the point of mutiny—he needed to slough off the blame on somebody else: a scapegoat. Hanson. It wasn’t fair, but it did make a kind of sense, and that made the punishment that followed just a little easier to bear. Not much, but some. At least something made sense in this mad city. At least something could be understood.

It was working, too. Hanson could tell that by the way the soldiers’ jaws tightened and their eyes glistened as they watched each lash fall. It was clear to see how much they were enjoying this. Somebody even laughed when he cried out in pain. They hated him and they savored every blow. Delgardo was one of them, but Hanson was the stranger, the outsider, and it was his fault they were here, in this awful place. If they hadn’t been here, if they hadn’t had to bring Hanson here, Lopez would still be alive.

Alone among them all, only Sergeant Barker stared down at the ground during the punishment. It struck Hanson that he had a disappointed look on his face, as if his problem child—Hanson—had, somehow, let him down. After one long glance, Hanson determined to look anywhere but at him. Somehow, his quiet disapproval made the ordeal worse.

At last, his punishment was over. Hanson got painfully to his feet and clumsily began to button his shirt. Delgardo turned away, avoiding eye contact. Perhaps he felt some guilt over Lopez’s death, perhaps even some embarrassment for sloughing off the responsibility onto Hanson, for he certainly must know whose fault it really was that Lopez had been killed, and know also that Hanson knew that he knew, no matter how much rage he pretended to feel to cover it up.

On the third day, they were walking through vast lawns with scattered clumps of fruiting elms and the occasional building-or-artifact which Delgardo made no attempt to examine, when the trees abruptly gave way to what appeared to be a forest of termite mounds. Some were small and others as large as buildings and there were thousands upon thousands of them. The Cathedral loomed up on the far side, drawing Delgardo onward like his own personal North Star or maybe that white whale that old wives told little children about, perpetually hunted by a mad sea-captain yet somehow always escaping at the last minute. Hanson remembered those stories fondly, remembered how he’d always rooted for the whale, though even then he’d suspected that in the real world it would long ago have been killed, flensed, and its blubber rendered down into lamp oil.

Delgardo, though, was not looking at the Cathedral but at the termite mounds. Rubbing his chin, he said, “Let’s go take a look, just you and me.” After telling his men to take a break—they could use it too; to a man, they looked ashen for weariness and want of sleep—he led Hanson to the nearest mound. Up close, they could see that the surfaces of the things were riddled with tunnels and that little metal insects came and went from them.

Delgardo picked up an insect and examined it closely. “It’s a machine of some kind. And it’s carrying a speck of metal. Copper, I think.” He set the insect-machine on the mound and it disappeared into one of the tunnels. Then he laid a hand on the mound. “The surface is crumbly, like dried clay,” he said to nobody in particular. Pressing his ear to it, he said, “There’s a grinding noise, like thousands of tiny gears. Some parts of the surface are warmer than others. Over there, I see one with a slick of ice on its north side. Wait here.”

At an imperious wave from Delgardo, the soldier in charge of the Stumper made it kneel. Delgardo rummaged within, came up with a shovel, and returned, whistling, with it slung over his shoulder. “Watch and learn,” he said, and swung the shovel with all his might. The dried surface exploded into powder, and metal insects rained down from the mound, clattering to the ground.

Five strong blows and the top of the mound was gone, revealing what looked to be a half-melted machine in its interior. It was as bright as quicksilver and had what looked to be many-fingered arms, at least a dozen of them. “There!” Delgardo said proudly. He shoved the shovel in the ground, adding, “Do you see it now?”

Hanson stared at the thing, trying to see whatever it was that Delgardo saw. At last, baffled, he shook his head mutely.

“It’s a factory, you lout. The City needs machines to do its maintenance, and those machines are built—or assembled, or maybe even grown—right here. This is the mother lode. All we need do is post soldiers here and every time one of these factories hatches, snatch whatever comes out. This is everything I promised my superiors I’d find, and more. Enough for a promotion, a raise in pay, and a good start on a political career at an absolute minimum.”

“So we’re going back now?” Hanson asked, not really believing for an instant they were.

“Are you mad? Of course not. There’s so much more to be found! These are just things. What I’m after is power.” Something in Hanson’s expression amused Delgardo greatly, then, for he said, “Oh, no, no, no, not the crude sort of power that has to be employed on the likes of you because it’s the only thing that you understand. Not the power to hurt and to kill and to create misery. Every human being in existence has that power. I’m talking about the power to shape history, to bring about real, significant change, to remake the world in my own image. That’s what I’m after.”

What you’re after is death, Hanson thought. But he didn’t say it out loud.

By twisty, laborious ways, the patrol passed through the factories and finally came to the last of the mounds. The land beyond was fair and open and carpeted with low, blood red grasses. The usual variety of enigmatic structures, all potentially lethal, rose up here and there. But the golden Cathedral was nowhere to be seen.

Delgardo cursed and spat when he realized that, and, spinning, seized Hanson by the arm. “You’ve led us astray, you coward! You traitor! Deliberately too, I’ll bet anything you did.”

With an angry jerk of his thumb skyward, Hanson said, “Look up there. That’s the sun. Which means that way is east and that way west, so we’re facing due north. Factories to our back. We’re standing where the Cathedral was. Only it a’n’t here anymore. It’s as simple as that.”

“Buildings don’t just get up and walk away.”

“Here they do. Face it, Delgardo—the Cathedral just doesn’t want to talk with you.” Watching Delgardo’s face, Hanson thought fleetingly that the moment had come at last, the one he had been dreading all along, when they two would have to fight, most likely to the death. Truth be told, he suspected he might win. But in the aftermath, there would be the soldiers to deal with, and he knew for certain that would not go well for him. But he saw Delgardo, with an effort, rein in his anger, reasserting control over himself, and saw, too, behind his animal rage traces of uncertainty and, yes, even fear. Delgardo had no idea how to make the Cathedral come to him or, for that matter, how to keep himself alive while he tried. Out of nowhere, Hanson experienced a strange elation. We may be in Hell, he thought, but I know the rules here better than you do.

That evening, Hanson couldn’t help noting how listlessly the soldiers pitched tents, cooked food, ate, took up guard duty. They were all suffering from lack of sleep and none of them looked forward to the nightmares that would accompany what little sleep they might manage. By contrast, he and Delgardo were doing fine—courtesy of the key, he imagined. But as for the others… Nights filled with bad dreams and days with structures that hurt the eye to look upon and the mind to contemplate, accompanied by the constant possibility of sudden death, had taken their toll, breaking down the soldiers. Before too long they’d start getting careless, wander into buildings and get eaten by strange machines, lie down on the sleek ceramic plates that Sergeant Barker had warned that, on an earlier incursion, he had witnessed turn men into animals like nothing anybody had ever seen. Not long after that, the survivors would begin to suspect the worst of one another before remembering at last that they had weapons and the training to use them. He sat up, thinking, for a time and then went to Delgardo’s tent, which was, of course, twice the size of anyone else’s. He rattled the flap and said, “Get your clothes on. We need to talk.”

Delgardo dressed and followed Hanson away from the tents. They walked around a dome whose surface glowed with images of what might be rocks or, equally plausibly, platelets of blood, floating silently, occasionally bumping into one another, and noiselessly bouncing apart, shedding flowers like sparks. There, out of sight of the camp, they stopped.

“So?” Delgardo said.

“I’ve been watching the men. You must see it too. A few more days of this is going to kill them.”

Delgardo grinned a shark’s grin that seemed to have too many teeth in it for anything human. “Why, Hanson,” he said, “that’s what they’re here for, isn’t it? To die a little, if called upon. What the hell do you think a soldier is if not somebody who’s paid to die for you?”

“Send them back.” The soldiers had the maps they had made on the way in. The sun would orient them. The thought of getting out of this madness would give them focus, keep them wary. Hanson was sure they could make it out alive, most of them, anyway, and possibly all.

“They’re not your pals, Hanson. I’m sure you’ve noticed that fact. They don’t even like you—and, yes, I acknowledge that’s primarily my doing.” Delgardo spread his arms and made a theatrical little bow. “So why should you, much less I, care about their well-being?”

“They’re… they’re people, after all,” Hanson mumbled. By the light of the dome, he could see how much Delgardo was enjoying this verbal sparring match. Of course, he’d never been much of a talker, or very good at logic, but the imbalance of competence clearly didn’t bother Delgardo one bit. A duel in which the opponent was unarmed and he held a battle ax would only make the whole affair that much sweeter to him.

“Why, so is everybody. So are the Southerners and we mowed them down without mercy not a week ago. They didn’t ask for special treatment, did they? No, and didn’t get any. So why should I—” Delgardo stopped, frozen in mid-speech by a sudden realization. “You know something! You big, stupid bastard, you know something about the Cathedral, and you’ve been keeping it from me.”

“Ai.”

With a wordless cry of rage, Delgardo ran at Hanson, fists balled. Hanson had never been a particularly skilled fighter, but he was strong as an ox, and he knew how to punch. His huge fist crashed into Delgardo’s face. A flare of pain in Hanson’s hand, the sound of breaking bone, a spurt of blood, and Delgardo went down as if he’d been shot, sprawled flat on his back.

Hanson waited.

For a long time Delgardo did not move. Time enough for Hanson to slip away and disappear into the jungle of strangeness that he knew a hundred times better than Delgardo ever would. Instead, he stood motionless, listening to the man’s ragged breathing. At last, Delgardo moaned, rolled over on his side, and sat up. Drawing a silk handkerchief from his pocket, he used it to stanch the flow of blood from his nose. He glared at Hanson with hatred that burned like a flame, but there was a touch of respect intermingled therein as well, something that Hanson had never seen before in him.

“The Cathedral has been thinking about what to do with us and it’s just about made up its mind. Right now it’s waiting for me to accept that I have no choice but to talk to it.” Hanson could not have said how he knew all this, but he did. “You want to get into the Cathedral? I can make it happen. Only, you have to send your men home first. That’s my price.”

Slowly Delgardo got to his feet, handkerchief to nose. “You do realize,” he said casually, “that when all this is over, I’m going to make you pay, and pay dearly, for hitting me.”

Hanson gaped at him in astonishment. “You honestly think that we’re both going to get out of this alive?” Something rose up within him, an unfamiliar tickling, and, while Delgardo stared at him in disbelief, he found himself first chortling and then roaring with laughter.

He laughed until he cried. Long before he was done, Delgardo had stomped away, back to his tent.

That night, for the first time since entering the City of God, Hanson slept well.

In the morning, Hanson awoke to discover that the Cathedral was looming over the camp, its walls not a hundred paces distant, and dazzling to look upon. Up close it was as large as a mountain—no, larger! The soldiers appeared dazed and confused, save for the two night guards, whom Sergeant Barker was bawling out while they frantically tried to explain that they’d been alert all night and nothing had happened, nothing had moved, the Cathedral was just there when the sun came up.

Delgardo, meanwhile, had his head tilted back and was gawking up at the spires that glittered and gleamed in the morning sunshine. He turned away from the Cathedral, saw Hanson, and they exchanged a glance. Believe me now? Hanson thought, knowing that his onetime torturer and now open enemy would be able to read it on his face. Delgardo gave him a short, sharp nod, and then turned to the sergeant. “Lay off those men! This has nothing to do with them. Send somebody to my tent to fetch the folding chair and my portable writing desk.”

Then, sitting with the writing desk on his lap, Delgardo delicately filled his pen from a bottle of ink and wrote out a letter, which he read aloud at the end of each sentence loudly enough for all to hear, explaining that the troop was returning to base without him by his express command, and concluding: We have made great discoveries and I confidently expect to make many more. He signed the document with a flourish, blew on the ink to help it dry, then folded it and sealed it with wax and his signet ring.

Delgardo handed the letter to Sergeant Barker, saying, “You have your orders. Break camp and make for base. Be sure to bring along all my effects. If this goes as I believe it will, they’ll be sacred relics one day and kept in a museum for all to admire.”

“Sir. Yes, sir.” The relief on Sergeant Barker’s face was almost painful to look upon.

Soon thereafter, Hanson and Delgardo were alone. “I’ve kept my end of the bargain,” Delgardo said. “Now it’s time you keep yours.”

The Cathedral rose steep and sheer in front of them, pinks and roses and corals blending into one another so that its surface seemed to shimmer. As they grew closer, Hanson could feel the heat it radiated, fierce and stinging; nevertheless, he forced himself to walk steadily toward it. Delgardo walked by his side. When Hanson glanced his way, he looked confident and unafraid, two traits that Hanson himself decidedly did not share. He kept walking anyway. He did not see that there was any other choice, the Cathedral wanted him to do this and it clearly had the power to enforce its wishes. Also, if Delgardo was going to make a grab for power, Hanson wanted to be there to make certain he didn’t get it.

When he came to the windowless, featureless side of the Cathedral, there was a searing blast of heat and a flare of agony. Then he was alone, in a moving bubble that kept pace with him as he walked, just as had happened when he had walked through the Wall itself. There was an opalescent light in here, although nothing to see by it, and the air was getting hotter with every step. A buzzing sound rose up, like millions of angry bees. As he pushed forward, the buzzing grew louder and louder, filling his head, making his teeth ache. By God, it was hot! The heat, too, kept increasing, until he was sure that his skin must be burning and blackening. Pain was a constant, impossible for him to ignore. The buzzing filled the whole world now, and he stumbled and nearly fell, but he kept pushing forward. Keep going, keep going—

Then, suddenly, he was in a room filled with cool gray light.

Delgardo stepped out of the wall and looked about with interest. “What now?” he asked.

“I… I don’t…”

“What is it?” Delgardo asked in an irritable voice. “What is it you don’t?”

“… feel so good.”

Then Hanson screamed as the key, which had lain quiescent within him for so long, came bursting out of his chest, sending him falling backward, uncoiling itself from within his guts, unfolding in a series of jointed cylinders, then twisting together again, melding, softening, changing color, becoming something else—and all the while, causing so much pain that Hanson had just reached the conclusion that he was about to die when, without warning, everything went dark.

When Hanson came to, he was lying on the floor of the featureless gray room. Nearby, Delgardo sat cross-legged, chatting with a woman similarly seated. Hearing him stir, Delgardo looked over his shoulder and amiably said, “So this is the secret you’ve been hiding, Hanson. Any other man would have told me everything about the key back in prison. But I see now that all my efforts were in vain. I could have keep torturing you until doomsday and you still wouldn’t have blabbed.” He applauded lightly. “Kudos to you, Hanson. Kudos!”

But Hanson wasn’t listening to Delgardo’s words. Instead, he stared, transfixed, at the woman sitting across the room from him.

“Becky?” he said.

He felt dazed, poleaxed. It was his wife, his dead wife, only somehow, miraculously, restored to the dewy flush of youth that had been hers when they first met—before the hard years, before the shortages, the food riots, the recurrent plagues. Before the stillbirths, the formal declaration that an unsympathetic doctor had so baldly made that she would never be able to produce a living child, before the…

Before the hemorrhagic infection that had carried her off.

Becky smiled that warm, loving smile that Hanson had missed so achingly for so many terrible years. “Hello, Carl.” She reached out and took his hand.

Hanson and Becky were strolling hand in hand together through the City of God. A light breeze, perfumed with cinnamon and sandalwood, ruffled her hair, and though they were surrounded by Utopian devices and dwellings, for the first time since passing through the Wall, Hanson felt not the least fear of the City, for he understood everything here, both what it did and why, from the glass clouds floating overhead to the halls of shadow and the soft burrowers underfoot. Hanson did not know how such knowledge was possible. He knew only that he was very, very happy and that it was all a Goddamned lie. To his horror, he began to cry.

Becky turned a face toward him that was all sweet, loving concern. “You mustn’t reject this, Carl. It can all, myself included, be yours.”

“You’re not Becky,” Hanson said. It was not so much a statement as a fervent plea that she somehow prove him wrong. Everything within him wanted this woman to be his wife, his one love, his Rebekah. Only his reason insisted that she wasn’t.

She hugged his arm. “I am not and yet I could be.” A gardener moved gracefully past them, scattering little turquoise lizards in its wake. “You’ve probably guessed that I’m the key. But you have no idea what that is, do you?” Hanson shook his head and she sighed. “Link arms with me. I may not be your wife, but I’ve lived with you more intimately than even she did, and I’ve learned more about you than ever she could.” He did as she bade him, and she led him onward. “Do you see that menhir at the top of the hill before us?”

“The big stone, you mean?”

“Yes. Come with me there. I want you to meet my mother.”

The stone, when they came to it, was gray and weathered. It stood up on end and was twice as tall as either of them. Letting go of Hanson, Becky bowed deeply before it. “Mother, awaken!” The surface of the stone shimmered and flowed. A blast of heat went out from it and it changed color, brightening into fluid reds, pinks, corals, peaches. It was the same color as the Cathedral and Hanson got the distinct impression that they were somehow connected, that between them was a vast subterranean body of which the Cathedral was an outthrust knee, perhaps, and this stone but the tip of a raised pointer finger.

Though it terrified him, Hanson stood his ground. “What is…? You say this is your mother?”

Out of nowhere, a voice both female and infinitely sad, spoke. “I am the City… and I am so very, very lonely.”

At the end of their conversation, Becky—or the key, or whatever she really was—let go of Hanson’s hand and he was back in the gray room inside the Cathedral. Delgardo, that insufferable ass, immediately began talking. “Do you realize, Hanson,” he said, “that our ancestors were given the option of entering the City of God before its Wall was raised? While you were unconscious, I learned so much from this young lady! The idiots turned down the opportunity, some for religious reasons, others for politics, and still others because they feared the unknown. They were all damned fools. They could have had infinite wealth, and they chose misery instead. The Utopians called them the Renunciates and banned them—us—from the City forever.”

Annoyed, Hanson flicked his fingers in a dismissive gesture, one that, though he had no thought of it at the time, echoed that with which Overton used to dismiss him from their “conversations,” as he called them. “They’re dead and we’re alive. I’d say we got the better of the deal.”

“Not dead,” Becky said. “Transformed.”

“I don’t know what she means by that, Hanson,” Delgardo said, boyishly, transparently eager to move the focus of conversation back to himself, “though I asked a great many questions. The cogent point here is that they left behind a City that was built to serve people. What could it do? Welcome in more? But in very little time, the new City-dwellers would grow as decadent as the Utopians were. So it conceived the idea of an order of caretakers. People who would have control over the City’s resources but only share them with the worthy. Incorruptible guardians who would ensure that the City’s power was never misused. So Becky—the key—was sent out to find someone who could found that order.” It was obvious from his smug demeanor who Delgardo thought that Someone should be.

“It sounds good,” Hanson said, shaking his head like an ox. “I mean, it sounds good. But…” He thought of all the bosses he had known—perfectly decent men, some of them, before they’d been given the position, coworkers you’d be proud to share a drink with; others, of course, not—and what power over others had done to them. It turned them cruel, petty, erratic, vindictive. Remove the worst of bosses and replace him with the best of laborers and, within the year, their own mothers wouldn’t be able distinguish the new boss from the old. “Who guards us from the guardians?”

Becky laid a loving hand on his shoulder. Her eyes glowed. “You do.”

Delgardo shot to his feet, outraged. “No! Not him—not this oafish, blundering fool! He couldn’t be trusted to—”

“Mother?” Becky said. “We don’t need this one anymore.”

Golden tentacles arose from the floor, the walls, the ceiling, wrapping themselves about Delgardo, pinning his arms, holding his legs motionless, gagging his mouth. They were not burning hot, as when Hanson had walked through the Cathedral’s substance. But Delgardo was clearly helpless within their grip. His eyes were wide with fear.

Becky stood, pulling Hanson to his feet after her. “What do you want done with him? He can’t be allowed to live, obviously. Do you want him to die quickly, without pain—or slowly, in great agony?”

“He’s a bad man,” Hanson said, “and I don’t s’pose that he deserves to live. But I’ve killed two men in my time and that’s stain enough for a lifetime. Just… let him go, a’right? Out into the City to find his way home alone. That can be his punishment, I guess. Maybe he’ll learn better someday.”

Becky’s face melted into a look of purest joy. “You choose mercy! You’ve passed the final test.”

Then she nodded, and the tentacles contracted, soundlessly squeezing all the life from Delgardo’s body.