The Third Bear

by Jeff VanderMeer

  What do you want it to mean?

  Despite the bed, you don't sleep well that night. You never do in enclosed spaces now, even though the desert harshness has expended your patience with open spaces, too. You keep seeing a ghost city superimposed over the border town. You see yourself flying through like a ghost, approaching ever closer to the phantom City, but becoming more and more corporeal, until by the time you reach its walls, you move right through them.

  In your book, you have written down a joke that is not really a joke. A man in a bar told it to you right before he tried to grope you. It's the last thing you remember as you finally drift away.

  Two men are fighting in the dust, in the sand, in the shadow of a mountain. One says the City exists. The other denies this truth. Neither has ever been there. They fight until they both die of exhaustion and thirst. Their bodies decay. Their bones reveal themselves. These bones fall in on each other. One day, the City rises over them like a new sun. But it is too late.

  You loved Delorn. You loved his sly wit in the taverns, playing darts, joking with his friends. You loved the rough grace of his body. You loved the line of his jaw. You loved his hands on your breasts, between your legs. You loved the way he rubbed your back when you were sore from sentinel duty. You loved that he fought his impatience and his anger when he was with you, tried to turn them into something else. You loved him.

  Day Two

  On your second day in the border town, you wake from dreams of a nameless man to the sound of trumpets. Trumpets and... accordions? You sit up in bed. Your mouth feels sour. Your back is sore again. You're ravenous. Trumpets! The thought of any musical instrument in this place more optimistic than a drum astounds you.

  You quickly get dressed and walk out to the main street in time to watch yet another funeral procession for a man not yet dead.

  The sides of the streets are crowded and noisy - where have all these people come from? - and they are no longer drab and dull. Now they wear clothing in bright greens, reds, and blues. Some of them clap. Some of them whistle. Others stomp their feet. From the edge of the crowd it is hard to see, so you push through to the front. A man claps you on the back, another nudges you. A woman actually hugs you. Are you, then, suddenly accepted?

  When you reach the curbside, you encounter yet another odd funeral procession. Six men dressed in black robes carry the coffin slowly down the street. In front and back comej ugglers and a few horses, decorated with thin colored paper - streamers of pale purple, green, yellow. There is a scent like oranges.

  To the sides stand children with boxy holographic devices in their hands. They are using these toys to generate the images of clowns, fire eaters, dancing bears, bearded ladies, and the like. Because the devices are very old, the holograms are patchy, ethereal, practically worn away at the edges. The oldest holograms, of an m'kat and a fleshdog, are the most grainy and yet still send a shiver up your spine. Harbingers from the past. Ghosts with the very real ability to inflict harm.

  But the most remarkable thing is that the man in the coffin is, again, not dead! He has been tied into the coffin this time, but is thrashing around. He looks foreign, with a cast to his skin that's neither dark nor light.

  "Put it back in my brain!" he screams, over and over again. "Put it back in my brain! Please. I'm begging you. Put it back!" His eyes are wide and moist, his scalp covered in a film of blood that looks like red sweat.

  You stand there, stunned, and watch as the procession lurches by. Sometimes someone in the crowd will run out to the coffin, leap up, and hit the man in the head, after which he falls silent for a minute or two before resuming his agonized plea.

  You watch the dogs. They growl at the man in the coffin. When the coffin is past you, you stare at the back of the man's neck as he tries to rise once again from "death." The large red circle you see there makes you forget to breathe for a moment.

  You turn to the person on your left, a middle-aged man as thin as almost everyone else in town.

  "What will happen to him?" you ask, hoping he will understand you.

  The man leers at you. "Ghost, they will kill him and bury him out in the desert where he won't be found."

  "What did he do?" you ask.

  The man just stares at you for a moment, as if speaking to a child or an idiot, and then says, "He came from the outside - with a familiar."

  Your body turns cold. A familiar. The taste of lime. The sudden chance. Perhaps this town does have something to add to the book. You have never seen a familiar, but an old woman gave you something her father had once written about familiars. You added it to the book:

  The tube of flesh is quite prophetic. The tube of flesh, the umbilical, is inserted at the base of the neck, although sometimes inserted by mistake toward the top of the head, which can result in unexpected visions. The umbilical feeds into the central nervous system. The nerves of the familiar's umbilical wind around the nerves in the person's neck. Above the recipient, the manta ray, the familiar, rises and grows full with the knowledge of the host. It makes itself larger. It elongates. The subject goes into shock, convulses, and becomes limp. Motor control passes over to the familiar, creating a moving yet utilitarian symbiosis. The neck becomes numb. A tingling forms on the tongue, and taste of lime. There is no release from this. There should be no release from this. Broken out from their slumber, hundreds are initiated at a time, the tubes glistening and churling in the elision of the steam, the continual need. Thus fitted, all go forth in their splendid ranks. The eye of the City opens and continues to open, wider and wider, until the eye is the world.

  So it says in The Book of the City, the elusive City, the City that is forever moving across the desert, powered by...what? The sun? The moon? The stars? The sand? What? Sometimes you despair at how thoroughly the City has eluded you.

  You stand in the crowd for a long time. You let the crowd hide you, although what are you hiding from? A hurt and a longing rise in your throat. Why should that be? It's not connected to the man who will be dead soon. No, not him - another man altogether. For a long, suffocating moment you seem so far away from your goal, from what you seek, that you want to scream as the man screamed: Give me back the familiar!

  In this filthy, run-down backwater border town with its flaking enigmatic dome, where people believe in the ghost of the City and kill men for having familiars - aren't you as far from the City as you have ever been? And still, as you turn and survey your fate, does it matter? Would it have been any different walking through the desert for another week? Would you have been happier out in the Nothing, in the Nowhere, without human voices to remind you of what human voices sound like?

  Once, maybe six months before, you can't remember, a man said to you: "In the desert there are many other people. You walk by them all the time. Most all of them are dead, their flesh flapping off of them like little flags." A bitterness creeps into the back of your throat.

  You look up at the blue sky - that mockery of a sky that, cloudless, could never give anyone what they really needed.

  "We should harvest the sky," Delorn said to you once. You remember because the day was so cool for once. Even the sand and the dull buildings of your town looked beautiful in the light that danced its way from the sun. "We should harvest the sky," he said again, as you sat together outside of your house, drinking date wine. It was near the end of another long day. You'd had guard duty since dawn and Delorn had been picking the last of the summer squash. "We should take the blue right out of the sky and turn it into water. I'm sure they had ways to do that in the old days."

  You laughed. "You need more than blue for that. You need water." "Water's overrated. Just give me the blue. Bring the blue down here, and put the sand up there. At least it would be a change."

  He was smiling as he said it. It was nonsense, but a comforting kind of nonsense.

  He had half-turned from you as he said this, looking out at something across the desert. His face was in half-shadow. You could see only the outline of
his features.

  "What are you looking at?" you asked him.

  "Sometimes," he said, "sometimes I think I can see something, just on the edge, just at the lip of the horizon. A gleam. A hint of movement. A kind of .. presence."

  Delorn turned to you then, laughed. "It's probably just my eyes. My eyes are betraying me. They're used to summer squash and date trees and you."

  "Ha!" you said, and punched him lightly on the shoulder. The warmth you felt then was not from the sun.

  The rest of the day you spend searching for the familiar. It might already be dead, but even dead, it could tell you things. It could speak to you. Besides, you have never seen one. To see something is to begin to understand it. To read about something is not the same.

  You try the tavern owner first, but he, with a fine grasp of how information can be dangerous, refuses to speak to you. As you leave, he mutters, "Smile. Smile sometimes."

  You go back to the street where you found the courier. He isn't there. You leave. You come back. You have nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. You still have enough money left from looting desert corpses to buy supplies, to stay at the tavern for a while if you need to. But there's nothing like rifling through the pockets of dead bodies to appreciate the value of money.

  Besides, what is there to squander money on these days? Even the Great Sea rumored to exist so far to the west that it is east is little more than a lake, the rivulets that tiredly trickle down into it long since bereft of fish. It's all old, exhausted, with only the City as a rumor of better.

  You come back to the same street again and again. Eventually, near dusk, you see the courier. You plant yourself in front of him again. You show him your money. He has no choice but to stop.

  "There is something you did not tell me yesterday," you say.

  The courier grins. He is older than you thought - now you can see the wrinkles on his face, at the sides of his eyes.

  "There are many things I will not tell a ghost," he says. "And because you did not ask."

  "What if I were to ask you about a familiar?"

  The grin slips. He probably would have run away by now if you hadn't shown him your money.

  "It's dangerous."

  "I'm sure. But for me, not for you."

  "For me, too."

  "It's dangerous for you to be seen talking to me at all, considering," you say. "It's too late now - shouldn't you at least get paid for the risk?"

  Some border towns worship the City because they fear it. Some border towns fear the City but do not worship it. You cannot read this border town. Perhaps it will be your turn for the coffin ride tomorrow.

  The courier says, "Come back here tomorrow morning. I might have something for you."

  "Do you want money now?"

  "No. I don't want to be seen taking money from you."

  "Then I'll leave it in my room, 2E, at the tavern, and leave the door unlocked when I come to meet you."

  He nods.

  You pull aside your robe so he can see the gun in your holster.

  "It doesn't use bullets," you say. "It uses something much worse."

  The man blanches, melts into the crowd.

  He wanted a child. You didn't. You didn't want a child because of your job and your duty.

  "You just want a child because you're so used to growing things," you said, teasing him. "You just want to grow something inside of me."

  He laughed, but he wasn't happy. That night, you still can't sleep. Your head aches. It's such a faint ache that you can't tell if it's from the stone in your head. This time the sense of claustrophobia and danger is so great that you get dressed and walk through the empty streets until you have reached the desert. Standing there, between the town and the open spaces, it reminds you of your home.

  There's a certain relief, the sweat drying on your skin although there is no wind. You welcome the chill. And the smell of sand, almost like a spice. Your headache is worse, but your surroundings are better.

  You walk for a fair distance - this is what you've become most used to: walking - and then turn and look back toward the town. There is a halfmoon in the sky, and so many stars you can't count them. Looking at the lights in the sky, the sporadic dotting of light from the town, you think, with a hint of sadness, that the old stories, even those told by a holographic ghost, must be wrong. If humans had made it to the stars we would not have come to this. If we had gone there, our collapse could not have been so complete.

  You fell asleep, then, or so you believe. Perhaps your headache made you pass out. When you wake, it is still night, but your head pounds, and the stars are moving. At least, that is your first thought: The stars are moving. Then you realize there are too many lights. Then, with a sharp intake of breath, you know that you are looking at the ghost of the City.

  For you have seen the City before, if only once and not for long, and you know it like you know your home. This sudden apparition that slides between you and the stars, that seems to envelop the border town, looks both like and unlike the City.

  There were underground caverns near where you grew up. These caves led to an underground aquifer. In those caves, you and your friends would sometimes find phosphorescent jellyfish in the saltish water. By their light you would find and catch fish. They were like miniature lighted domes, their bodies translucent, so that you could see every detail of their organs, the lines of their boneless bodies.

  This "City" you now see is much like that. You can see into and through it. You can examine every detail. Like a phantom. Like a wraith. Familiars and people transparent, gardens and walls, in so much detail it overwhelms you. The City-ghost rises over the border town ponderously but makes no sound. The edges of this vision, the edges of the City crackle and spark, discharging energy. You can smell the overpowering scent of lime. You can taste it on your mouth, and your skull is filled with a hundred hammers as your headache spins out of control. You think you are screaming. You think you are throwing up.

  The City sways back and forth, covering the same ground.

  You start to run. You are running back toward the border town, toward this Apparition. And then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the City puts on speed - a great rush and flex of speed - and it either disappears into the distance or it disintegrates or...you cannot imagine what it might or might not have done.

  Sometimes you argued because he was sick of being a farmer, because he was restless, because you were both human.

  "I could do what you do," he said once. "I could join your team."

  "No, you couldn't," you said. "You don't have the right kind of discipline."

  He looked hurt.

  "Just like I don't have the skills to do what you do," you said.

  They seemed like little arguments at the time. They seemed like nothing.

  When you reach the outskirts of the border town, you find no great commotion in the streets. The streets are still empty. You spy a stray cat skulking around a corner. A nighthawk worshipping a lamp post.

  You approach the sentinel's chair. He peers down at you from the raised platform. It's the same sentinel from the other day.

  "Did you see it?" you ask him.

  "See what?" he replies.

  "The City! The phantom City."

  "Yes. As usual. Every two weeks, at the same time."

  "What do you see? From inside the town."

  He frowns. "See? A hologram, invading the streets. Just an old ghost. A

  molted skin - like the snakes out in the desert."

  Your curiosity is aroused. You hardly know this man, but something about his dismissal of such a marvelous sight bothers you.

  "Why aren't you excited?" you ask him.

  A sad smile. "Should I be? It means nothing." He stands on his platform, looking down. "It doesn't bring me any closer to the City."

  In his gaze, you see a hurt and a yearning that you recognize. You mistook his look when you first met him. He wasn't disappointed in you, but in himself. Maybe all reasons a
re the same when examined closely.

  You walk home through a border town so empty it might as well be a mirage itself. No one to document the coming of the wraith-City. How had it manifested? Had, for an instant, the dome of the border town and the dome of the City been superimposed as one?

  When people begin to ignore a miracle, does that mean it is no longer miraculous?

  A man stands in your room. You draw your gun. It's the courier. He has a sad look on his face. Startled, you draw back, but he puts out a hand in a gesture of reassurance, and you're so tired you choose to believe it.

  "It is not what you think," he says. "It's not what you think."

  "What is it then?"

  "I need a place. I need a place."

  In his look you see a hundred reasons and explanations. But you don't need any of them. This is a man you will never know, that you will never come to know. It doesn't matter what his reasons are. Lonely, tired, lost. It's all the same.

  "What's your name?" you ask.

  "Benkaad," he tells you.

  He sleeps on the bed with you, facing away from you. His skin is so dark, glinting black in the dim light from the street. His breathing is rapid and short. After a time, you put your arm around his chest. Sometime during the night, you reverse positions and he is curled at your back, his arm around your stomach.

  "There is a scar on the back of your head."

  "Yes. That's where the doctor put the stone inside of me."

  "The stone?"

  "The stone that pines for the City."

  "I see."

  He begins to rub your head.

  It is innocent. It is different. It's not like before.

  Once, you had to shoot someone - a scavenger, a rogue, a man who would have killed someone in your community. He'd gone bad in the head. It was clear from his ranting. He had a gun. He came out of the desert like a curse or a blight. Had he been crazy before he went into the desert? You'll never know. But he came toward the guard post, aiming his gun at you, and you had to shoot him. Because you let him get too close before you shot him - you shouting at him to drop his weapon - you had to shoot to kill.