Strength of Stones (9 page)

Reah looked up and closed her eyes. Above the mall, a shaft of orange and red and white seemed to extend to infinity. She looked again and saw that the white bands were circles of rectangular balconies, and the red horizontal strips were massive support beams. Orange trim relieved the red with abstract and geometric designs. It was pure magic, an air shaft in a living city. She was no longer an _ifrit,_ but she was still surrounded by the stuff of legends. "Who is Durragon?"

"A tyrant, a butcher." The man's lips curled, almost theatrically. "He wants to be a new Herod, a Caesar."

Her thoughts seemed to hiccup. She wasn't used to thinking clearly. How much easier to drift from distortion to distortion ... and how much more terrifying! She remembered nothing but fear. She followed the man back to her room and sat on the bunk, smelling the cleanness, the order, the kindness. "You," she called as the man started to leave. He turned and raised an eyebrow. "You know..." She paused. "I'll never be afraid again, not that way."

He nodded. "My name is Belshezar Iben Sulaym. And yours?"

"Reah," she replied. "Wife to Abram Khaldun."

"Is he dead?"

"Years dead," she said.

"You were still weeping for him, three nights ago."

"No more. Nothing is worth that much grief."

He smiled sympathetically and left.

"Gerat, Manuay, Persicca and Tobomar; they have sacked four towns and found sixteen hundred head of cattle. Captured three hundred women and young boys, recovered three hundred tons of various grains, and some weapons which I let them keep." Breetod read the list slowly, squinting at the scrawled figures. His opposite, the right flank runner Nebeki, sat chewing a flap of giant snail flesh, nodding as the names of the troop leaders were read off.

"Ferda, Comingory and Flavin; they have sacked two coop farms and a village. Fifty cattle, twenty-seven women, ten tons of grain."

"They killed too many," Durragon said. His leather camp chair creaked as he leaned forward in the hot shadow. A bead of sweat fell from his nose and splashed on the leather floor. "Cut their share by a tenth and lash Comingory across the open palm, twice."

"Too much shame," Nebeki advised. "A tenth cut is enough, sir, if I may speak."

Durragon shrugged. "Tell him he deserves the lash, but I have high hopes for his strength in future raids, and graciously spare him. Is that all?"

Breetod assented and looked at Durragon with crazed, dogs-blue eyes as the Apostate walked to the tent flap and lifted it. "No more towns left," he said. "And I always wanted to put my capitol here. Now, because of our ... perhaps it is best to say _enthusiasm_, I can't even support my army here. Not for another three or four years. So where next?"

Nebeki dropped his scraps into a wooden bowl and wiped his hands on a towel hung from a tent-pole. "Before we go, sir, we can try the city on the high plain."

"We can't get in."

"My runners passed it a week ago. They say it's dying fast. A third of its towers are grey. Soon the spikes will go down and we can hunt for weapons and jewelry, even machinery if we can tame it."

Durragon scowled. He had lost a finger to a marauding city part as a child. The beasts that poured out of a dead city were too unpredictable for his taste; his father had made a living taming them, but the predilection wasn't hereditary.

"Water supply and good land," Breetod said. "A city always puts its roots down in fine soil. We can settle around it and wait a few months for it to die." He savored the idea of a rest.

Durragon cocked his head to one side, thinking hard for several minutes while his flank runners were respectfully silent, then agreed with a barely perceptible nod. "Breetod will keep track of the bearers and the loot. We'll return to Expolis Capernahum. Maybe a few of the Habiru have rebuilt and we can trade with them for seed, plant a crop while we sit."

Nebeki looked at Breetod, who returned his glance with a warning purse of the lips. Despite Durragon's ancestry, he knew little about either the Habiru or farming. Neither the survivors nor the land they were in would be tractable, but there was little chance of danger -- just boredom.

Reah sat before the console with a grim expression. She knew she was ignorant, and therefore helpless, but the idea of talking with something not human was more than she could calmly accept. Belshezar watched from the other side of the apartment, leaning against a white ceramic ovoid half-buried in the floor. Beside him was a black-haired, sharp-faced woman named Rebecca. Behind them, under the broad picture-window which overlooked a promenade and indoor park, was a pile of rubble which had once been furniture. Reah swiveled on her bench.

"Everyone in Resurrection had one of these?"

"Every apartment," Belshezar said. "They were as common as windows and more important. Children learned from them, the people saw what was happening to their world in them."

Green louvres on the console swung open at her touch and a fluid turquoise triangle shimmered on the flat screen. Beneath the screen was a plate about thirty centimeters across with two keyboards on either side, designed to fit the viewer's fingers with a minimum of effort. She touched the index finger button and a human image appeared on the plate, palm-high, a sexless homunculus dressed in skin-tight black.

"May I answer?" it asked, speech thickly accented.

"It's hard to understand," Reah said, looking back at them. Belshezar was tapping his fingers on the ovoid, looking across at Rebecca with a tolerant smile. "It's English the way they spoke it a thousand years ago," Rebecca said.

"What do I do now?"

"Ask it questions." She tossed back her red hair. "It'll answer your question."

"Not just any question," Belshezar corrected. "Remember -- the cities haven't been inhabited for centuries. The memory files aren't up to date. It doesn't know about a lot of outside events -- though it does seem to know a few things about other cities. We suppose they talk to each other now and then. Excuse us, we have to meet friends elsewhere -- can you take care of yourself here?"

Reah nodded hesitantly. "Good," Belshezar said. He patted her lightly -- almost condescendingly -- on the shoulder and left her alone in the apartment. She sniffed the cool air and bent closer to examine the homunculus. It returned her gaze steadily. She couldn't tell if it was male or female, and the voice was no clue. The people in those times, before the Exiling, must have been very different, even though they shared the faiths of Yahweh and Allah. "I'm ignorant," she said hesitantly. "That makes me weak. I need to learn."

"Where shall we begin?" the homunculus asked.

"I wish to know what happened. History. Then I'd like to be generally educated."

"We'll mix them, okay? Listen and watch close, pupil."

For the first day's lessons, the console taught her in real time, and it went slowly. The next day, it told her to insert her fingers into the accelerated transfer terminals, little depressions above the keyboards. She felt a prickly sensation, then a warmth up her backbone and a bright spot between her eyes. The learning went more rapidly. On the third day, it told her how to look into patterns generated by special projectors around the screen. On the fourth day she was much less weak, and very little like the old Reah.

Breetod presented the tamed city part to Durragon on his birthday. It had been captured a week earlier by a band of Chasers hunting on a mountain ridge fifteen miles north. It wasn't graceful -- it looked more like a sawhorse than a real horse -- but it was large and fast and obeyed well enough. Durragon walked around it and looked it over without enthusiasm. He mounted and sat uncomfortably in the makeshift saddle.

"We were thinking it should be called Bucephalus," Breetod said. Nebeki smiled. The bodyguards and Durragon's personal troops looked on, weary from the march.

The thing's back was smooth and soft as leather, but translucent and green like a young tree stem. Under the skin blue veins gathered in squares, and beneath them shone the paleness of metal parts and colloid bones. Its head was a cluster of eyes on flexible stalks. Its mouth was a tube through which it absorbed water and soil nutrients. There was a plug in one leg, now corroded over; it hadn't had a city-provided meal in at least twenty years. Its gait was regular and comfortable. "I don't like the name," Durragon said, dismounting. "What was it used for?"

"In the cities, sir?" Nebeki asked hesitantly. "It was a toy for children, I think."

"I want another name." He walked toward the shade of a cluster of mulcet trees. A table had been set up there, with charts spread across it, held down by stones. On one side of the table was an advisor, the old Habiru, Ezeki Iben Tav. Ezeki was lean and wrinkled, his forehead burned leather-brown by the sun, but his bald pate fading to almost white where it was usually covered by a ragged knit cap. He claimed to have been a teacher years before. He was using the cap to fan himself now as he traced a course on one map with his sharp-nailed finger. "What was Bucephalus?" Durragon asked him.

"A brain disorder among the Politans in the early years of this planet," Ezeki said. Durragon humphed and looked at the charts.

"Why would anyone name a mount that?" he wondered.

Sweating under the hot sun, Nebeki and Breetod were arguing. "I only spoke the truth," Nebeki said. "And the name was yours, besides."

"Ezeki told me about Alexander. You shouldn't have told him it was a toy. It'll make him reluctant to use it and we'll have to lead the litter."

_What to do with a fabled city..._

She took a drink of clear, cold water from a fountain in an upper-level park. The grass was tended by organic machines which ate the cuttings and fertilized the lawns. Irrigation hoses wormed underground and aerated the soil at the same time. The trees were trimmed by things with the attributes of giraffes, rose bushes and silvery shears. What struck her most of all was the coherent motif. Each part obviously belonged to the city as a whole, wearing just the right shapes with the proper angles and curves, carrying a certain neatness in every portion. Those places in the city which were completely healthy were like a child's dream as imagined by civic-minded adults -- beauty mixed with fantasy, utility with crazy ingenuity.

The loss of the cities must have driven the Expolitans nearly mad. God-Does-Battle was a fine world, capable of supporting as wide a variety of life as old Earth, but it was a hard, nature-bound place. She shook her head. The planet had adapted to humanity long generations ago, after the artificial controls had failed. Misery and despair and disease had returned; at times, it seemed God-Does-Battle was trying to eat them alive. Against these odds, the Expolitans had made a place for themselves, blunted the planet's attacks, and settled down to the sort of catch-as-catch-can existence that Reah and nine or ten generations before her grew familiar with. All that time, the cities had seemed to mock them.

But what could she do about it?

All the cities had been connected by formal communications links. Though each city had been autonomous, they had shared in the spiritual policing and had reported their progress to each other, hour by hour.

It had taken less than a century for the cities to make their final decision. One awful morning, the cities coordinated and cast out all their citizens. In accord with emergency procedures guaranteeing the ostracism of spiritually diseased communities, the links between the cities broke down. The people wandered homeless through the park-like forests and fields. There was wide-spread starvation, violence. No ship from outside dared to land, lest the cities commandeer their vehicles or the citizens destroy them in a frenzy.

By themselves, the cities could do nothing to change things. Some had apparently tried and failed. People would have to take the initiative. But for a thousand years they had tried and failed, too.

Could she manage any better?

Reah looked back on her life and saw herself as three different people: first, the contented, ignorant wife of the Moslem blacksmith; second, the insane harridan; and third, the comfortable, sane and very educated ... what? Redeemer of Resurrection?

None of the other inhabitants paid much attention to her, and on the whole she distrusted them. They were friendly but didn't seem to appreciate what had been given to them. They were almost irresponsible in the way they enjoyed Resurrection. Once, while walking, she caught Rebecca and Belshezar making love in an upper-level fountain. She shuddered. And yet ... They were only enjoying themselves after years of deprivation and past months of battle and agony. She felt the temptation to let loose, too, but laxity of body and character was not that far from laxity of mind, which she found abhorrent. Never again the fear.

As she sat on a bench in the park, near a sparkling column of glass carrying fluid nutrients to the highest reaches of the city, she began to fall in love again, not with luxury and ease, but with the idea her ancestors had once had. Outside there was no holiness in the suffering, and nothing to look forward to but a long, grinding crawl back to the level of society which had made the cities. Inside, there was hope of a sudden leap, benefiting from past experience.

To realize that, she had to learn how to control the city, and how to doctor it. Somewhere in the city's memory there had to be instructions. She stood on the grass and put her arms around the fluid-rushing column, eyes wet. "Allah, Allah," she said. "Preserve me! This is madness again, I can't dream such things. Only days ago I was filthy and near death. Who am I to wish to control Paradise?"

Then she wiped her eyes and stepped back, hands tingling from the living sound of the city's blood. This wasn't madness returning, or at least it was only madness fighting more madness -- the demented exile of a thousand years.

"It's time to go back," she whispered, uneasy about talking to herself. "We have fallen below humanity, and now we must return."

* * * *

Durragon looked across the field at the tide of the marching city. His neck hair was on end. "It came out of the western hills three hours ago," Breetod said. Now it was blocking the army's path.