Strength of Stones (17 page)

"Probably thousands of them."

"I don't see what you mean -- "

"The city is here to take care of all the children it can. The sick ones, those who have no chance outside. I am directing it." She looked at the two others and gauged them by their expressions. _They aren't with him any more,_ she thought. "I can use your help. It'll be difficult doing it by myself."

"There isn't enough space now, or facilities."

"Nonsense." She returned her shrewd gaze to his face. "You're a leader. At least, you were for a time. You can help."

"I -- "

She pushed her verbal advantage home. She was ahead of him; he was weakening. "Or you can leave."

"No," he said, grinning. "I can't do that."

"Then come with me." She walked past him. They stumbled out of her way and Durragon spun around, his face flushed. He was frowning and his fists kept opening and closing. "Come," she repeated, looking back at them. "I'll show you all you need to know." She continued walking. She trusted them -- or Durragon, at least -- about as much as she trusted a scorpion. But even with her back turned, she felt no fear. She was in control.

Durragon held Ezeki and Musa back when they tried to follow. "Later," he called out. "We'll go with you later."

Ezeki gave him a puzzled glance. "Let her go," Durragon growled. "We'll see what's in the tower."

But the door wouldn't open for them.

In the apartment, with the door closed and a worker posted, she rested and felt some of her self-confidence slip away. They had caught her by surprise, had come so _close ..._ And she had behaved like a fool. What had she seen in the expressions of the old man and the Moslem? Had she seen enough to expect them to stand up for her against Durragon? She shook her head and tears started up in her closed eyes. She was so weak, and what she had felt earlier had been a moment of girlish stupidity, weakness ... exaltation. Molecules fitting together! Youth and beauty forever! Bitterness and death, more likely.

She swallowed back a clot of phlegm and tried to feel for the joining again, the ecstasy. It wasn't there now. How could she be sure it had ever been there? Would it protect her from Durragon? If she was wrong, and the old man and the Moslem weren't sympathetic to her, then in time there was nothing on her side. Nothing except a still-huge mass of contradictions, neurosis and fear ... the city. Resurrection.

Could she get the two apart from Durragon, talk to them? It wasn't likely.

"Think of the young ones," she said out loud, but the confusion remained.

While Durragon slept, Musa met Ezeki on a parapet looking over the central shaft, several floors below the Apostate's quarters. They sat and drank their health with the city's wine, which left their heads clear. "I'd like something with more persuasion to it right now," the old man said, lifting his glass and peering through the amber fluid.

"In the Earth days, my people would not drink anything ... ah ... persuasive. Nor would the more orthodox Moslems on God-Does-Battle. So I am chastened by Resurrection."

"What are we going to do?" Ezeki asked.

"He'll kill her soon," Musa said.

"We've been with him for five years. I don't know any other way."

"The city shows us another way."

Ezeki shook his head despondently. "I'd leave him. I really would. But what can we do with a city like this? Get healed, then thrown out?"

"We're healed now."

"Then we'll be thrown out any time. But if he kills her, takes over ... perhaps we can stay. The city let her stay."

"Yes, but why?" Musa asked. Ezeki shook his head. "Perplexing."

"She wants to help children, crippled children. Did you see the way she looked at us? Perhaps we could work for _her,_ instead of him."

"Crippled children! Sick kids! She's a dreamer," Ezeki said. "I was a dreamer, once. Now I'm just an old fool with pretensions to learning. And the city doesn't even leave me my pride. It shows me how ignorant I am."

"We could kill him, now," Musa whispered. "In his sleep. She would reward us."

Ezeki stared steadily at the Moslem. "We're crazy, as crazy as she is."

"Then perhaps it's best the whole forsaken planet should go crazy again. Sanity hasn't been much good for us, has it?"

Ezeki started to get to his feet, then hesitated. Musa rose all the way. "Now?" the old man asked. The Moslem nodded. "If we get thrown outside, the Chasers will probably kill us."

"What will we use?"

Musa pulled out a crudely made folding knife. "I clean my fingernails with it," he said, grinning wickedly.

They went to Durragon's apartment. When they got there he was gone.

The general had come awake and found himself alone, unable to sleep. As the two men searched frantically for him below, he stood by the tower door, deep in thought. He felt good now, almost as if he could will things just by thinking. The woman was strong, but he was stronger. And he had made up his mind. "I will get in there," he said, "and I will control the city, just as she does."

He stared hard at the door, trying half seriously to make his strength manifest. When the door opened, he jumped back, the hair on his neck prickling. The old woman stood there. "Neither of us can sleep," she said. "Can insomniacs ever be enemies?"

"We've both been planning," he said. "Maybe we can plan together." There was something disturbing about her, a placid acceptance he had never seen before. His words might not have even been heard, but for her turning inward and motioning him to follow with a crooked finger. Durragon stared at the control center.

The charts, the throne, the ranked screens and odd machinery ... it was terrifying, and more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. It was powerful. It was the navel of the world.

"Why let cripples into the city?" Durragon asked. "They won't know what to do with themselves. The city should belong to those who can best use it."

Her expression was almost apologetic.

"I have a plan," he continued. "I thought you'd ... like to hear it. We can rebuild the planet, make it like it was. We have to find the place where the city grows new parts -- "

"No," Reah said. "We'll start a new way. Someday, perhaps we won't even need cities. We'll use the fragments of the old world to help lay foundations for the new."

Just like that, her words made him seem like a savage, a child again. She was babbling, he decided. His ears hurt him and he tried not to listen -- but she went on. She took him around the room, showing him things and telling him their names, using words he didn't understand, magic words, powerful words. Her control was daunting, but she was no better and no smarter than he. That was obvious. If she was gone, he could take control as easily as she had. She was mad! A city filled with cripples. It was obscene.

He watched her closely, waiting.

"I've been listening to the city for days now," she said. "For a while, it kept me here because I was -- " The briefest of pauses. "I was ill. But now I'm well, as well as I can hope to be, and it still lets me stay. Perhaps it's made a decision. Perhaps it needs me. And if it needs me, it needs us..."

He came closer. He pulled a wire out of his pocket. He had wrapped the ends in tough bedsheet fabric, rolls of it, and spliced the pieces together to form handles. It would be like the death Perja had planned for him.

She had her back to him. A worker rolled in through the door. Behind the worker, eyes wide, walked Musa and Ezeki.

Durragon stepped forward, wrapped the wire around her neck, applied his knee to her upper neck, pulled back her chin, and felt the snap. He loosed the wire and backed away. The body fell to the floor.

The worker rushed past him. It brought out a net, like strands of hair made from silver, and laid it over the woman's head. No, that wouldn't do -- Durragon kicked at the worker

And almost broke his foot. It seemed rooted to the floor.

Musa stood and stared, slack-jawed, but Ezeki shook his head wildly and grabbed the Moslem's knife from his hands. "Damn YOU!" he screamed. Durragon half-turned.

Reah, vision dimming, felt the net around her and was again in the vast space with the textures of tradition. But this time the spark was a sun, rising under her, and its rage was beyond all measure.

Then there was an enormous time.

It was the middle of the month Sivan, a calm, dry day in the village of Akkabar. The smooth walls of the city's inner circle surrounded the town. Near the main school, a stream of water passed from the wall -- not under it, but through a surface slick as glass -- and meandered out one side of the main gate. There were four gates in the inner wall, but none of them lead into the city. Instead, broad tunnels let the citizens pass to the outside.

Ezeki Iben Tav sat at the front of the main classroom in the school near the river. He had just finished a lesson in history and the students were writing on slate tablets. They were beautiful children, and more of them came every day. The dormitories the villagers had built were now almost full of children, yet still transports delivered the sick and retarded and lame to the outer barricades. The city took them in, healed them, and weeks later, at night released them in Akkabar. They were healthy and bright, just the sort of children bereaved parents might be willing to adopt. The supply of parents was small, but with such children, what matter if each parent adopted a hundred, a thousand? The city provided. Fruit grew along the inner walls, and other foods -- grain, fodder for cattle -- rose out of the ground with little tending now that the water supply was assured.

Musa came to the classroom and clapped his hands. It was time for the pupils' physical training. Musa taught them games and how to fight properly; the Chasers occasionally returned to Resurrection and skirmishes had taken place.

The older boys and girls stayed behind for a few moments to socialize. Ezeki looked out the open front of the classroom at the village then stepped into the sunlight, away from the reed awning, and shaded his eyes. A slender tower rose on the city's northern side.

He had only two regrets. There had been so little time for him to sample the knowledge the city contained. He would always be haunted by the memory, and by knowing he could never return. His second regret was that the children, bright as they were, emerged from the city haunted not only by the beauty they could not have, but by peculiar notions impressed on them. In time they seemed to come around. Ezeki was a good teacher and a good teacher of teachers. For their health and bounty it was a small price to pay.

The children told stories. In the city they had often encountered a figure they called, simply, Spirit-Woman. She came and went, neither smiling nor frowning, and a star glowed in her forehead. She might have led the star or been led by it, no one could tell.

They had occasionally seen another child, alive and not a ghost, but segregated from them, never allowed to play. The city had told the children, in the rare times it spoke, that the young one was Christ reborn, waiting to cleanse their sins in due time. That disturbed Ezeki. He could imagine the city cradling a stray infant but why was it allowed to stay?

Of all the mysteries and memories, one haunted him most. The city's final screams, the day he and Musa and Durragon's corpse had been thrown out into Akkabar ... the entire sky, burned with flaming brands, could not have screamed so heart-rendingly. After all, it had been betrayal stacked upon betrayal -- the attack on the woman, then the murder of Durragon. No holy city could stand such a thing. They were lucky it had carried out the woman's plan.

Was she still in the city, or her spirit, controlling it? The questions piled up and he smiled as he always did, then shook his head. Where was she now?

_Between the textured spaces, Reah felt her children enter and leave. There was one child who stayed, but she was never allowed to see him clearly. This disturbed her. She was constrained by the glowing spark, now reflected all around like a million bright searchlights in the fog. She was not alive, and she was not dead. While she sensed the presence of the huge molecule, she could not fit into it. Somehow, lacking everything, she was content. Long ago, her mother had told her that Paradise was not for women._

But while she did not command, neither did she serve. She wandered, thought when it was possible and appropriate, but usually just waited.

It was all a game, lapses of indefinite time between the fittings of huge molecules. Soon enough, others would do what she had done, or the cities would die and wither away like ants under a spyglass beam. Either way she would be freer than she had ever been before.

Still, she swam in a kind of pride. She had made important moves in the game. When she felt the pride, the molecular connection loomed up, seemed to query, Not ready yet, eh?

No, not yet...

The cities became fewer and fewer. Strength of will failed, environments changed; where they weakened, often enough Expolitans and Chasers moved in to finish them off. Centuries of bewilderment and self-accusation had hardened into anger and hatred.

As the numbers of cities dwindled, some reached out to the others, using communications links long abandoned. Dialogues were exchanged, shy, halting at first, then more extensive. Information passed from city to city, and queer stories were told, for in some cities marvelous things had happened.

The cities continued to die. Finally, as if tired of the pain of links suddenly silent, or the worse pain of links growing more feeble every day, the city talk stopped.

_The few still alive were silent, like stars in a dying universe, waiting for dust and defilement._

--------

*BOOK THREE*

3562 A.D.

_The Revenant_

WHATEVER else they took away from him, they could not touch the fact that he was a fine architect. He had created enough monuments that long after the petty disputes and clashes of personality were forgotten, his name would still --

For the merest moment, he was amazed that such a trivial line of thought could have been preserved in the simulacrum. Then he had a dizzying spiral of recursive wonders -- that he could be thinking about the miracle of such trivialities, and _thinking_ about thinking.