Raising the Stones

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “It would be listed, wouldn’t it?” Lurilile demanded.

  Notadamdirabong shook his head uncertainly. “I don’t know. Maybe not. To keep bad guys from finding it. In which case, it might not be red, either.”

  “What in hell am I looking for then!”

  Rasiel shrugged, fighting impotent tears. “I don’t know. The one in the Authority Chambers robing room is behind a painted panel. I haven’t even seen that one in twenty years.”

  “Shit,” she hissed in disbelief. “I’ve got the key and no damned idea where the lock is or what the damned lock looks like.”

  “You can try the phrase everywhere. Maybe it’s an ear tied into the general information banks.”

  “I can stand on my head and whistle the Ahabar battle anthem, too. It would probably do just about as much good. Are you two going to go, or do I have to do that by myself, as well?”

  Shamefaced, Rasiel Plum agreed to go. Lurilile keyed Phansure as the destination. “Don’t forget to tell them the Final Command before they come up here to help me, Rasiel Plum. I may not be around when they arrive.”

  When he had gone, she keyed Thyker and gave Cringh a hug before pushing him through. He was a nice old man. Pleasant to be with, with no sexual pretensions. She had enjoyed his company. She was glad he wasn’t going to die, not just yet, artifact or no.

  She had not mentioned it to either of them, but she found it very ominous that there were no crowds jostling their way into this area. Surely she was not the only person still on Authority who knew of the Door in Supply as a way of escape.

  • Sam Stood on a low hill in darkness. Before him were the sparkles that told of arriving soldiers. Now and then the earth shook. Now and then a meteor streaked across his field of vision. These accidents became less and less frequent. Finally, they stopped altogether. Now there was only the recurrent glitter of soldiers or scouts or whatever they were, arriving on the surface, at first singly, then by the dozens.

  A thing arrived at the foot of the hill and rolled clankingly around the base of it toward the southeast. It was three times Sam’s height, perhaps ten feet across and four times that in length. It had several turrets on it, arms equipped with pinchers and grabbers, grills and eyes, and structures Sam could imagine no use for whatsoever. It was obvious he could not extrapolate from known agricultural machines. The thing that clanked away beneath him was designed to do more than merely kill quickly and cleanly. It was designed to kill, yes, but to do so torturously, slowly, with maximum pain and observable horror.

  “Hi,” called Sam, without planning to.

  The turret at the top of the thing swiveled. Gadgets got a fix on him almost at once.

  “Who is the God of Voorstod?” The machine bellowed.

  It took Sam a moment to identify the familiar words, familiar and yet so out of context in this place. These were words that belonged to the mists and the stones of Voorstod, not to the wondrous vistas of Hobbs Land.

  “The One, the Only, the Almighty God, in whose light all other gods are shown to be false idols created by men,” Sam called in a loud voice. They were the words Phaed had trained him to use in response to that particular question. So the machines had been programmed with the words of Scripture. With the documents of doctrine. He should have known that. Perhaps he had known that. Perhaps that was why he was here.

  The machine made a weaving motion of jointed arms, a clattering of servo-mechanisms. Then, abruptly, it turned and went the way it had originally started, southeast, away, leaving Sam behind.

  “Oh, I learned my lesson well, Phaed,” Sam commented to himself as he went down the hill toward the sounds he could hear faintly accumulating before him. Like the accumulating sound of a sea, when the tide turns. Like the sound of a rain storm, growing from a gentle sprinkle to a torrent.

  “What is the desire of the One God?” came the challenge from the darkness confronting him.

  “That all living things shall acknowledge him,” cried Sam.

  “And how is this to be achieved?”

  Sam shook his head and bellowed, “By teaching those who will learn, and by killing all others.”

  The creature clanked past, its lenses fixed on some unimaginable epiphany. It was not programmed to teach, therefore it would kill.

  The soldiers let him alone. They challenged him and let him alone when he responded. After the soldiers, would come the prophets. And their followers. He was going there, where they were. He counted sparkles of light, to his right and to his left. A rank of soldiers some hundreds long, some hundreds deep. Enough to kill every person upon Hobbs Land ten thousand times over. He walked through them, answering their challenges, not breaking stride, his legs moving of themselves.

  Strange. One had legs, and a body and a face, and one did not think of that often. One had joints and skin covering the lot, and one did not think of that. Parts were obedient, doing what they were required to do. Sometimes they ached, if badly used, but they were not treacherous. Now, among these great warriors, all human parts seemed ludicrous and inadequate. What could they do but die? What good were arms against these? How fast could legs run in a race against death?

  Assume there were no monsters. Assume there was only death, as there had always been death. Inevitable. The end of man as of everything. Which arms could not oppose nor legs outrun nor eyes find a place deep enough to hide oneself in. Then what was the task of man? Of a hero? What was man to do when there was nothing man could do? Why did he walk calmly forward, separated from his own terror only by a thin wall of something strange and flexible and yet quite impervious.

  Something which was not death.

  “Birribat Shum?”

  “Yes.”

  “Elitia Kruss?”

  “Yes.”

  “Horgy Endure?” he almost laughed.

  “Yes. That too.”

  “The God knows what I know,” he said to himself, not needing an answer. The God knew what everyone knew, and what everyone was. And if Sam could find a prophet or a follower and make him stand still long enough, the God would find out what he knew as well.

  If there was time.

  “What is the place of women in the creation of the One God?” bellowed a monster from a hundred yards away.

  “Women have no place,” cried Sam. “They are not followers of God, they are merely processes by which followers may be created.”

  As Maire was considered to be. Phaed had told him of the Paradise of the Faithful. Food and drink and virgins. Gardens and virgins. An ecstasy of the senses for the men who had died in the faith, and no mention of the women. “They are to be kept private, kept quiet, kept healthy until they have borne children, and then they may be disposed of.” His mind finished the quotation.

  China Wilm. Saturday Wilm. Maire Manone. All the women. Disposed of.

  “What are the numbers of those who will acknowledge the One God in the last days?” trumpeted a huge, rolling monster, aiming its cannon at Sam.

  “If there is one of the Faithful, and that one the only living one, one is enough,” Sam replied.

  Jeopardy Wilm. Willum R. Dern Blass. Spiggy Fettle. All the men who were not of the Faithful, also disposed of.

  The nonlegendary. The day-to-day scufflers. The watch-to-watch managers. The growers of food. The builders of houses. Those who lay on their bellies in the grass, watching bugs. Those who listened for birdsong. Those who would not overbreed or overbear. The co-existers. Disposed of. In order that the last man living may be one of the Faithful to utter the name of Death.

  But, whispered Sam, if there is one of the Gods, that one is enough for the utterance of a different name.

  Sam walked on toward the west. Somewhere ahead of him was Phaed Girat.

  • Settlement One was already awake and moving when Theor and Emun returned. There were two dozen fliers being stuffed with persons, cats, and almost no baggage.

  “Where did the fliers come from,” Emun asked China Wilm.

  “The
y showed up,” she said. “We’re first in line. Then the fliers will evacuate Two and Four, then Three and Ten, then Eleven and CM. Meantime, Five through Nine are putting together food supplies for all of us. They’re farther east and will be last out.” She was not in a panic. She sounded very matter of fact.

  “Where’s everyone going?”

  “To the escarpment,” she replied. “The first few loads have gone already.”

  Theor Close decided Sam had been right. The God knew what they all knew. He might as well go along with everyone else.

  • The convict laborers were wakened by Dern Blass, who trumpeted orders, some of them contradictory, and then left Howdabeen Churry to sort it out. It took a few moments before the sleepy off-shift understood what was happening.

  “Voorstoders?” Shan Damzel asked, disbelievingly. “How did they get access to the army?”

  “Presumably the same way we got access to Hobbs Land,” snorted Mordy Trust. “Through subterfuge, lies, and sneakiness. How isn’t going to help us right now. What are we to do?”

  “Dern says we may be evacuated to the escarpment after everyone else has gone. Which is only fair, I suppose, from their point of view. Blass says we can go to Thyker through the Door if we want, but it’s chewing up one shipment in five right now. He suggests we pack some food for ourselves and the others. He also suggests we might ask for some weapons, which might not be a bad idea. According to Blass, the army is west of Settlement One, moving rather rapidly.”

  “How did he find out?”

  “He says the God Horgy Endure told him,” said Churry with an expressionless face.

  Shan heard this without a quiver. The interesting thing about the Hobbs Land Gods was that they did tell the settlers things and the things were always true. Not commands. Not beliefs. Just things. Like, it’s going to rain. Like, there’s a fire in the chemical stores. Like, that yellow cat just had five kittens, tell her how pleased you are. Like, somebody is hurt out behind the tread repair shop.

  Now: the army of Enforcement is coming. Get out fast.

  Shan went to help the men who were loading food, wondering only briefly if he had been swallowed yet.

  • On Authority, Lurilile went on soft feet down endless metal aisles, listening for sounds she did not hear. Soft whish of air, rumble of liquids in pipes, clutter-clutter sound of fans, wink and beep of monitoring devices, dials quivering, light arrays flickering, all normal, all usual. Why no sounds from above?

  She almost passed by the main environmental monitoring station. Inside the half-glassed door, banks of stages showed here, there, everywhere, with telltales beside them reading off temperature and humidity and parts per millions of pollutants. Pollutants off the scale. Temperatures above levels where humans could live. Fiery temperatures. Flames dancing on the screen among charred bones.

  “Where?” she breathed.

  The great library of the Religion Advisory, said the stage.

  “A key for the last lock,” she said firmly.

  No magic. The flames went on. Wherever the ear she needed to reach was, it was not here.

  “Schematic of the supply area,” she commanded.

  It swam onto the stage before her.

  “Command module for Enforcement,” she ordered.

  A quivering as the memory searched and did not find.

  “Command override,” she said desperately.

  Nothing.

  “Find command override and give it this message,” she told Archives. “A key for the last lock. Implement.”

  Again that searching quiver. Oh, Archives wanted to please, wanted to find whatever it was she was searching for, but it could not. No one had told it where the thing was. Or, it knew the thing under another name.

  What other name?

  “Where is the last lock?” she asked.

  Nothing.

  “Where does the key go?”

  “What key?” asked the stage. “Define key.”

  Lurilile sat for a moment more, gathering strength. Surely when they ran out of people to kill on the upper levels, they would come down here. Was there anywhere to hide? What were her chances of finding what she sought? Could she in good conscience go home, to Ahabar, to cry on her father’s shoulder?

  What would Queen Wilhulmia do, in this situation?

  After a time, she left the small room and began her search once more.

  EIGHT

  • Shallow under the soil, the radiating mounds had lain, dormant, as the people from Thyker had said, but they were dormant no longer. Urgent information had come to them and shocked them into burgeoning growth. As they pushed upward, the soil had grown shallower still, cracking above them, falling away from the emerging shapes beneath, revealing hard wooden structures which came straight from the ground like walls, echoing beneath curious knuckles like a knocked door.

  Eleven radiating walls were all there were at first, eleven spokes from a central hub. When they had shed the soil from their tops, however, a groove formed and deepened along the top of each, splitting each wall into two, and then into two again. Forty-four radiating walls, a hundred feet long, moved slowly upward and apart, thickening and lengthening as they grew, thrusting upward at their centers, arching high into gigantic wickets, fifty feet high at the center, rising still higher as the ends flattened and joined into a solid outer wall and into a central ringwall, pierced by smaller arches. Here and there the outer wall puckered, dimpled, and opened to make a mansized hole into which children raced, shrieking, only to race out again, stunned at the strangeness of the open-topped, torus-shaped enclosures.

  Inside, the floor scooped down and covered itself with an ornamental fiber, almost a mosaic of nappy carpet in colors of gray and cream and green and rose. Into the ringwall arches vinelike tendrils twined and knotted to make ornamental grills, hard, almost metallic barriers between the outer ring and the central space where the tower thrust skyward in visible movement, massive-walled, open-topped, the buttresses of the tough, interconnected arches holding it stiffly erect as it grew.

  A flange extruded lengthwise on the top of each arch, grew tall and narrow, split in half lengthwise, spread to the sides like great leaves spreading beneath the sun, widened, overlapped, and then grew together to make a laminated roof, a continuous fabric, which wrinkled and ramified on its upper side, thickening itself with veins, roughening until it resembled thatch.

  The settlers who had been among the first evacuees watched this process by lantern light, their interest mixed with moderate apprehension. Prudently, they moved a distance away from the emerging temple-shape and those others developing behind it. They asked one another if this resemblance to the stone and thatch temples in the settlements was coincidence or whether one, either one, was a pattern for the other. They cautioned the children, but they, moved by perversity as much as curiosity, ignored prudence and caution to go darting inside, to run shrieking around the central space then plunge out to report on the mosaiclike floors, the woven grills, the whatever-it-was in the middle.

  At the bottom of the tower, they said, a mass was forming. A seething shape urgent with power, vibrating with force.

  “Is it like in the temples?” they were asked. “Is the thing in the middle a God.”

  “Maybe,” they said. “But a different kind. Like a storm cloud in the wind. All rolling around.” Other fliers came from the settlements, discharged their human and cat cargoes and ascended once more. From the air above the westernmost settlements, the soldiers of Enforcement could be seen far to the west, the newcomers said apprehensively, exchanging their apprehensions for wonder, and marveling with those who had come earlier when they saw the growths.

  Together the settlers built campfires in the narrowing spaces among the great growths, and the chain of these fires threw fitful glares upward onto the curving walls growing into the night. There were others, cried the irrepressible children, rushing in from explorations. Other ones growing beyond the light, growing up to meet the stars.
Others beyond the village. And others still beyond that. “Growing like mushrooms,” they cried. “Growing like asparagus.”

  Saturday and Jep Wilm joined hands and went into the nearest of the weird growths, finding their way around the floor to the place the ringwall door would have been in a settlement temple. In this templelike space there was no door. There was a grill, one they could see through, but they could not get their hands through to the convoluted tubes and corrugated shapes that were growing there, could not find the source of the strange, chemical smell that permeated the space. Saturday knelt, craning her neck as she tried to look through the grill upward, to the place the enclosure ended. She could not see the top.

  “I think it’s open up there. But it’s not saying anything,” she whispered to Jep.

  He shook his head. “Nothing.”

  “It’s not really like being in a temple. It’s more like being inside an engine. I feel movement all around. Like something running, very quietly.”

  “What’s it doing, do you think?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s something for us, or something against those things.”

  “The things from Enforcement?”

  “Yes. Them.”

  Outside once more, they stood staring at the tower outlined against the stars, faintly orange-flushed along its edges by the light of the circling fires. It might have been a huge smokestack, inclining slightly but unmistakably toward the south, supported around its circumference by the buttresses of the enclosing arches. It was even more like an enormous cannon, but Saturday and Jep had never seen cannon. With de-bonders available, no one needed cannon. Because of the vast difference in scale, they did not think of the launchers the settlers used to distribute trace minerals.

  Fliers came and went. People unloaded hastily packed crates of food and bedding, then settled down in the midst of mystery, only to get up and wander nervously about once more, putting their hands on the wooden walls, knocking as though for admittance. Anyone who liked could have gone inside. Only the children did so, daring each other to enter again and again. After a time, even the children stopped their incursions, driven out by the strange, powerful smell.