The Broken God Machine

by Christopher Buecheler

  “I don’t understand anything this damned thing is saying,” Pehr muttered. “What in the world is DNA?”

  “Deoxyribonucleic acid – DNA is a nucleic acid containing the genetic instructions by which all known living entities are assembled. The main …” The thing began reading off by rote a great set of information that, to Pehr, might as well have been spoken in the foreign language it had used earlier.

  “Pehr, make it stop!” Tasha hissed.

  “I … you, thing, uh … damn your eyes, what was your name? Ardis! Ardis, please stop.”

  The guardian – Ardis – ceased speaking immediately and looked at him expectantly.

  “What lies at the end of this pass?” Tasha asked it.

  “Why, this pass leads to Havenmont, the last city of man! Surely you’ve heard of Havenmont, Miss Samhad.”

  “I … well, of course, Ardis,” Tasha said, and she fell silent. Pehr looked back at her again, and Tasha shook her head, sighing. They were equipped with so little information that it was impossible to ask meaningful questions or parse the answers that the guardian was giving them.

  “What now?” Pehr asked her.

  “We should go on,” Tasha replied. “I need to see the city.”

  “Just two hundred more feet,” Ardis broke in, “and you shall see the greatest work of man since before the Great Destruction.”

  Pehr felt a nasty shock run through his body at these words. To hear something that was a legend to both him and Tasha referenced as casual fact by this strange thing was an unexpected and unpleasant surprise.

  “Yes,” he growled. “Thank you, Ardis. I think you can go back to your post now. Will we meet any more guards on the path?”

  “Not until you reach the city proper, Mister Prime Minister.”

  “Will they trouble us?”

  “Not at all! You and your guest are most welcome here.”

  “I see. Thank you, Ardis.”

  “It has been my utmost pleasure, sir,” Ardis told them, and without further comment it leaned back against the canyon wall and returned to its inactive state. Pehr turned to Tasha, who was unable to hide a small smile.

  “What in the name of the Gods is a Prime Minister?” Pehr asked her, and Tasha’s grin widened.

  “What in the name of your gods is a Mombutabwe?” she asked back, and Pehr laughed.

  “Two hundred more feet,” he said. “Perhaps then we will find out.”

  * * *

  Neither Pehr nor Tasha had ever seen a city or had any real understanding of what one was, and so when at last they came to the edge of the path and beheld the vista spread wide before them, neither could at first find words to express what they were feeling. It was Tasha who finally spoke.

  “It’s so sad …”

  In the valley below them, secreted away between the mountain peaks, stood the ruins of something so vast and intricate that even in utter decay it was one of the most beautiful sights Pehr had ever laid eyes on. Towers of metal and stone rose from the ground and seemed to stretch up to touch the heavens themselves. Some had fallen over the course of the preceding millennia, and others now leaned at drunken angles, barely supporting their own weight. Most of the windows were empty, but at the tallest tips of some structures there glinted a material Pehr didn’t know that glowed like brightly polished metal under the falling sun’s rays.

  Pehr’s eyes couldn’t seem to find a place to rest, moving constantly over the skeletal remains of this once-great metropolis. There were bridges and arches, buildings of all shapes and sizes. Near the center of the city was a gigantic domed structure topped with a statue that couldn't have been less than ten times Pehr’s height. It portrayed a man in a long coat, pointing with one outstretched finger toward the heavens.

  To the west there was a series of low buildings with arched roofs constructed from metal grid work. Two of these roofs had caved in at their centers, the metal beams corroded, twisting inward as if bashed by gigantic fists from the sky. To the east was a wide, flat expanse of grey – a basin of some sort. There was water collected at its bottom.

  He was surprised that in all this time, the city hadn't been overtaken by vegetation; its streets seemed largely clear of grass or vines, and the only trees he could see were huddled together in one large, green triangle near the center of the city grid.

  “See the garden, there, in the center?” Pehr asked, pointing. “How has it not overrun everything else?”

  “Who can say?” Tasha replied. “The people who built this place knew many things that have been lost.”

  “What if they’re still here?” Pehr asked her. “Just because we can’t see any, it doesn’t mean …”

  He let his own voice fade away, aware of how foolish he sounded. This place had been deserted since a time so long ago that it made his head spin just to contemplate it. How many generations had lived in the city’s shadow, oblivious to its existence?”

  “There is nothing down there that lives … or, at least, nothing human,” Tasha said. “This ‘greatest work of man since the Great Destruction’ has been in ruins for ages.”

  “What terrible thing could have driven man away from this place?” Pehr asked.

  “That is the very question we have come to answer.”

  Pehr feared the answer to that question, but it was impossible to look down upon the city and not desire further explanation, impossible to contemplate the ruins without wondering how they had come to reach this point. How had it come to be abandoned?

  “Where did they go?” he mused aloud.

  “Could it have been your Lagos?” Tasha asked him.

  “I don’t think so. If the Lagos had ever found this place, they would be here still. I don’t believe they have ever gotten past the guardians.

  Tasha stretched, hands balled into fists and arms reaching for the heavens, her back arched, belly sticking out. She yawned and said, “We won’t find the answer up here. We should make for the building with the statue.”

  Tempted though he was by the prospect of learning more about this fascinating place, Pehr was also deeply concerned about walking into it unprepared. He said, “There may be animals, or any number of terrible things waiting for us down there.”

  “Terrible things like what?”

  Pehr knew that if he mentioned ghosts or spirits, demons or goblins, she would simply laugh it off, so he only shrugged. “I didn’t believe in the Lagos until I saw one face to face, but they’re real, and they’re terrible things.”

  “You just said that there could be no Lagos down there.”

  Pehr shook his head, unsure if Tasha was being obtuse on purpose. “What I’m saying, Tasha, is that we are walking into the unknown.”

  “You’ve done that twice before,” she reminded him. “First into the jungle, and then into the plains. You’ve survived both times.”

  “Those who traveled with me were not always so fortunate.”

  “I told you, Pehr, I do not fear dying in this place. I fear only missing things that I must not miss. I am going, whether you will come or not. If you don’t want to go, I won’t blame you. You can wait for me here, I suppose. I do not think any more of the guardians will bother me.”

  “I’m not letting you go into that place alone, whether you fear it or not,” Pehr said. Tasha favored him with a cool grin, having expected this answer.

  The road down to the city was steep and winding, and there were large sheets of metal posted along its edges, covered in all sorts of characters, some of them obscured by blooms of lichen. Neither could read them; Pehr’s people had no writing, and Tasha’s used only a very basic set of symbols to represent common things like tral or grass.

  Had they been able to read the signs, they might have chosen a more direct course through the city and thus been spared some of its wonders and its horrors alike. But they couldn't read the signs, and so after a moment more of quiet contemplation, they began to make their way down to the buildings below, walking side by side. Some
where in the city a bird of prey gave a long, shrieking cry that faded off into the air. There was no answer; this place was dead, and had been dead for thousands upon thousands of years.

  Chapter 18

  The streets on the outskirts of the city were not the clean, concise grid that made up its innermost sections, but instead a haphazard maze of twists and turns. Even to Pehr’s uneducated eye, the structures that lined these streets seemed slipshod and hastily built.

  Many of these lesser buildings were made not of metal but rather a curious material that seemed a strange fusion of sand and stone. Pehr saw that this was only a coating, however, and in many places it had flaked away from the substructure entirely. Most of the buildings had collapsed in upon themselves long ago, and of those that still stood he suspected there were few that would bear his weight should he attempt to explore them.

  Tasha left him no time to consider this course of action, moving comfortably through the twisting streets as if she had lived her entire life in this place. She seemed disinterested in this part of the city, though Pehr thought they could learn a great deal about its former inhabitants simply by peering into a few darkened interiors. When he suggested this to Tasha, she told him it didn’t matter; the people who had inhabited these buildings could not provide her with the answers she sought.

  “Can you not tell, Pehr? Those who lived here … they didn’t build this city. They came after, when the decline had already begun. That’s why there is no planning, no sense to the way the streets are laid out. After the real builders stopped their work, others came into the city like parasites to use what was left behind.”

  “Why didn’t they inhabit the places that already stood?”

  Tasha shrugged. “I do not know.”

  “But where did the builders go? Where did these ‘parasites’ go? How do you know all of this?” Pehr asked, striding along beside her and trying to take in the overwhelming amount of visual information with which the city was assaulting him. To his right there was some sort of covered cart, made of metal, that stood in the black and crumbled remains of what Pehr supposed must once have been its wheels. To his left there was a pile of corroded metal chunks in all shapes and sizes, so large that it dwarfed the one nearby structure that still stood. Tall poles of metal lined both sides of the road, capped by curious, bulbous protrusions.

  “Some by observation, some by guess,” Tasha said. “The rest we will need provided for us, but we will find out what happened to the inhabitants. Or the builders, at any rate. I don’t care about the parasites – no doubt they squandered what was left and moved on. That’s what parasites do.”

  “What a lovely vision,” Pehr said. Dusk was imminent, and the idea of being trapped for the night in this city with its countless ghosts was not doing anything for his mood.

  “I’m not here to make up pretty stories,” Tasha said. “Our legends said that the city of the Gods lay in these mountains, and truly, those who built this place would seem like gods to us … but they were only people, Pehr, and so were the parasites that came after. People do not always behave in ways that are pretty.”

  Pehr knew that this was true and he grunted an acknowledgment, continuing to walk and watch. The streets were becoming more orderly now, and some of the buildings were in much better shape. Some were tall, others squat. Most had large windows, their coverings long-since gone, and through some of these Pehr could see objects that he understood – here was a chair, there a table – even though they were shaped from materials that he did not know. On the side of one building, faded almost to the point of invisibility, Pehr could make out the image of what seemed a gigantic woman, mostly naked, drinking from what must once have been a brightly colored container.

  “We’ll not reach the center of the city before dark,” he said.

  “No.”

  “We have no way of making torches, and I’ve not seen a single piece of wood in this place. We can’t burn metal.”

  “Nor stone,” Tasha agreed. “I don’t think we will need torches, Pehr.”

  “Why not?”

  She pointed up to one of the metal poles that lined the street, or more specifically to the bulb at its tip, and Pehr stopped in his tracks, taking conscious notice of something he had become peripherally aware of at some earlier time. As the sun continued to set and the dusk became heavier, the bulbs were glowing with an increasingly bright, slightly purple light.

  “Gods …” Pehr said in amazement.

  “No. Not gods and not magic. Just man, in some past when man was something closer to a god than he is now.”

  “How can we have left such miracles behind? Light without fire that comes with the setting of the sun? How can we have fallen so far?”

  “Help me find the answer,” Tasha said.

  “Where would you go?” Pehr asked her, and Tasha shrugged.

  “In my dreams, this place is … not like this. I think it is younger, and I think there are others. The memories are blurred and fuzzy except in those moments just after I wake.”

  “So you have no destination?”

  “I’ve been making for the building with the giant atop it.”

  “Do you recognize it?”

  Tasha gave him a small smile. “Only in that I recognize everything here, in some way. Pehr … would you build a giant stone man atop a building in the center of your city if whatever lay within was unimportant?”

  Pehr thought he would not. “Very well, so we make for the building with the dome.”

  “Yes, I think that’s the best idea,” Tasha said, and she turned her eyes ahead to the road they were following and began again to walk.

  Thus far, it hadn't been a difficult journey, and Pehr hoped that would remain the case. As they walked, though, questions began to spring into his mind, one after another. Why was the city not infested with wildlife? Why were there no signs that it had ever burned, despite what must have been countless lightning strikes during its long, slow decay? How were the glow-bulbs – whatever arcane workings they might contain – still functional after all these years? Why had the parasites, as Tasha called them, left so much lying unused and forgotten when they abandoned the city?

  This last question troubled him deeply. Everything he knew of human nature told him that the people would not lightly leave this place behind. Pehr himself had been willing to sacrifice his life to save his home, and the village from which he had come was little more than a collection of mud-brick huts clustered around a stone altar. This city was so far beyond the scope of his experience that he couldn't picture what sort of men and women might call it home, but neither could he imagine a scenario in which the entire group of them suddenly abandoned it.

  “Something is not right here,” Tasha murmured, as if echoing Pehr’s own thoughts.

  “Oh, many things, I think,” Pehr said.

  “Where are the birds and the animals? Is … is the city poisoned, like you said the circle of bone seemed to be?”

  “I don’t think so. We have seen plants – look, there is grass growing, and small trees. Tasha, don’t tell me nothing lives here.”

  “Pehr—”

  “Something dwells within this city. Something is tending it.”

  “I don’t think anything lives here, Pehr. I think that is the problem.”

  Pehr came to a halt in the middle of the street, and after a few more paces Tasha stopped as well, turning to look at him in confusion.

  “I’ve had enough of being kept in the dark,” Pehr told her. “If you know anything, tell me what it is so that we can face whatever’s ahead together.”

  Tasha looked pained. She turned away from him, surveying the city, and then looked back. “You’re asking me to explain things that are like … like distant forms in a downpour. Things that I dreamed when I was only a child!”

  “I'm asking you to tell me what you know.”

  “I don’t know anything!” Tasha cried. “I feel things. I see things that spark some small memory. I do not
know if we should turn left or right at any given crossing … except for the times when I do. I thought I would know everything. I thought it would become clear when I reached the mountains, but it hasn’t. I hate this. I hate it!”

  Of course she did; logical Tasha, trapped and held at the whim of some force she did not understand. Pehr put a hand to his face, rubbing it in frustration.

  “Pehr, I have told you everything I know as soon as I have known it. There is nothing alive in this city, except perhaps in the middle where the trees are. I don’t know what’s keeping the city groomed!”

  “Tasha … I believe you.” Pehr could hear the tiredness in her voice; not sleepiness, exactly, but instead a kind of deep exhaustion that seemed to be eating at the very core of her. There had been too many hours of traveling followed by the great strain of absorbing all that they had seen this day; he could feel it in his bones.

  “Pehr, we have to go.” Tasha was near tears, pacing and clearly frantic in her desire to keep moving. She was frightened, but frightened of what?

  We’re going to find out, Pehr thought, the knowledge coming to him in the same way, he supposed, that Tasha’s did. When the last glow of sunset falls behind the mountains and the city lies in darkness save the glow-bulbs, we’re going to find out, and it will be terrible.

  “I thought you were not afraid of dying here.”

  “I’m not.”

  “But you are afraid. Of what?”

  She bit her lower lip to keep it from trembling, took a breath, and looked up at him. “I am afraid for you.”

  There it was. Pehr already knew it, but he’d wanted to hear it from her mouth. Whatever dreams Tasha had been granted, whatever it was that she had seen, there was a chance yet that the city would kill him, and she knew it. That was why she was so panicked.

  “Can we reach the domed building before the last of the sunset goes?” he asked her.

  “Not if you keep standing there!” she said, and she took a step forward, glancing back over her shoulder. “Come on, Pehr! We can run if we have to.”