by Greg Bear
“They’re not all dead, though,” Thinner said. “I’ve been across here before. Some made the walk a little difficult.”
In the glare of afternoon they hid from a wheeled beast armored like a great translucent tank. “That’s something from deep inside a city—a mover or loader,” Thinner said. “I don’t know anything about the temper of a feral city part, but I’m not going to aggravate it.”
When the tank thing passed, they continued. There were creatures less threatening, more shy, which they ignored. Most of them Jeshua couldn’t fit into a picture of ancient city functions. They were queer, dreamy creatures: spinning tops, many-legged browsers, things with bushes on their backs, bowls built like dogs but carrying water—insane, confusing fragments.
By day’s end they stood on the outskirts of Mandala. Jeshua sat on a stone to look at the city. “It’s different,” he said. “It isn’t as pretty.” Mandala was more square, less free and fluid. It had an ungainly ziggurat-like pear shape. The colors that were scattered along its walls and light-banners—black and orange—didn’t match well with the delicate blues and greens of the city substance.
“It’s older,” Thinner said. “One of the first, I think. It’s an old tree, a bit scabrous, not like a young sprout.”
Jeshua looped his belt more tightly about his club and shaded his eyes against the sun. The young of Ibreem had been taught enough about cities to identify their parts and functions. The sunlight-absorbing banners that rippled near Mandala’s peak were like the leaves of a tree and also like flags. Designs on their surfaces formed a language conveying the city’s purpose and attitude. Silvery reflectors cast shadows below the banners. By squinting, he could see the gardens and fountains and crystalline recreation buildings of the uppermost promenade, a mile above them. Sunlight illuminated the green wails and showed their mottled innards, pierced the dragonfly buttresses whose wings with slow in-out beats kept air moving, and crept back and forth through the halls, light wells, and living quarters, giving all of Mandala an interior luminosity. Despite the orange and black of the colored surfaces, the city had an innate glory that made Jeshua’s chest ache with desire.
“How do we get in?” he asked.
“Through a tunnel, about a mile from here.”
“You mentioned a girl. Was that part of the cover?”
“No. She’s here. I met her. She has the liberty of the city. I don’t think she has to worry about anything, except loneliness.” He looked at Jeshua with an uncharacteristic wry grin. “At least she doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal comes from.”
“How did she get in? Why does the city let her stay?”
“Who can judge the ways of a city?” Jeshua nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s go.”
Thinner’s grin froze and he stiffened, staring over Jeshua’s shoulder. Jeshua looked around and surreptitiously loosened his club in his belt. “Who are they?” he asked.
“The city chasers. They usually stay in the shadow. Something must be upsetting them today.”
At a run through the grass, twenty men dressed in rough orange-and-black rags advanced on them. Jeshua saw another group coming from the other side of the city perimeter. “We’ll have to take a stand,” he said. “We can’t outrun them.”
Thinner looked distressed. “Friend,” he said. “It’s time I dropped another ruse. We can get into the city here, but they can’t.”
Jeshua ignored the non sequitur. “Stand to my rear,” he said. Jeshua swung his club up and took a stance, baring his teeth and hunkering low as his father had taught him to do when facing wild beasts. The bluff was the thing, especially when backed by his bulk. Thinner pranced on his bandy legs, panic tightening his face. “Follow me, or they’ll kill us,” he said.
He broke for the glassy gardens within the perimeter. Jeshua turned and saw the polis chasers were forming a circle, concentrating on him, aiming spears for a throw. He ducked and lay flat as the metal-tipped shafts flew over into the grass. He rose, and a second flight shot by, one grazing him painfully on the shoulder. He heard Thinner rasp and curse. A chaser held him at arm’s length, repeatedly slashing his chest with a knife. Jeshua stood tall and ran for the circle, club held out before him. Swords came up, dull grey steel spotted with blood-rust. He blocked a thrust and cut it aside with the club, then killed the man with a downward swing.
“Stop it, you goddamn idiots!” someone shouted. One of the chasers shrieked, and the others backed away from Jeshua. Thinner’s attacker held a head, severed from the boy’s body. It trailed green. Though decapitated, Thinner shouted invective in several languages, including Hebrew and Chaser English. The attackers abandoned their weapons before the oracular monster and ran pale and stumbling. The petrified man who held the head dropped it and fell over.
Jeshua stood his ground, bloody club trembling in his loosening hand.
“Hey,” said the muffled voice in the grass. “Come here and help!”
Jeshua spotted six points on his forehead and drew two meshed triangles between. He walked slowly through the grass.
“El and hell,” Thinner’s head cried out. “I’m chewing grass. Pick me up.”
He found the boy’s body first. He bent over and saw the red, bleeding skin on the chest, pulpy green below that, and the pale colloid ribs that supported. Deeper still, glassy machinery and pale blue fluids in filigree tubes surrounded glints of organic circuit and metal. The chaser nearby had fainted from shock.
He found Thinner’s head facedown, jaw working and hair standing on end. “Lift me out,” the head said. “By the hair, if you’re squeamish, but lift me out.”
Jeshua reached down and picked the head up by the hair. Thinner stared at him above green-leaking nose and frothing mouth. The eyes blinked. “Wipe my mouth with something.” Jeshua picked up a clump of grass and did so, leaving bits of dirt behind, but getting most of the face clean. His stomach squirmed, but Thinner was obviously no mammal, nor a natural beast of any form, so he kept his reactions in check.
“I wish you’d listen to me,” the head said.
“You’re from the city,” Jeshua said, twisting it this way and that.
“Stop that—I’m getting dizzy. Take me inside Mandala.”
“Will it let me in?”
“Yes, dammit, I’ll be your passkey.”
“If you’re from the city, why would you want me or anyone else to go inside?”
“Take me in, and you’ll discover.”
Jeshua held the head at arm’s length and inspected it with half-closed eyes. Then, slowly, he lowered it, looked at the tiled gardens within the perimeter, and took his first step. He stopped, shaking.
“Hurry,” the head said. “I’m dripping.”
At any moment Jeshua expected the outskirts to splinter and bristle, but no such thing happened. “Will I meet the girl?” he asked.
“Walk, no questions.”
Eyes wide and stomach tense as rock, Jeshua entered the city of Mandala.
“There, that was easier than you expected, wasn’t it?” the head asked.
Jeshua stood in a cyclopean green mall, light bright but filtered, like the bottom of a shallow sea, surrounded by the green of thick glass and botanic fluids. Tetrahedral pylons and slender arches rose all around and met high above in a circular design of orange and black, similar to the markings on Thinner’s chest. The pylons supported four floors opening onto the court. The galleries were empty.
“You can put me down here,” Thinner said. “I’m broken. Something will come along to fix me. Wander for a while if you want. Nothing will hurt you. Perhaps you’ll meet the girl.”
Jeshua looked around apprehensively. “Would do neither of us any good,” he said. “I’m afraid.”
“Why, because you’re not a whole man?”
Jeshua dropped the head roughly on the hard floor, and it bounced, screeching.
“How did you know?” he asked loudly, desperately. “Now you’ve made me confused,” the head said.
“What did I say?” It stopped talking, and its eyes closed. Jeshua touched it tentatively with his boot. It did nothing. He straightened up and looked for a place to run. The best way would be out. He was a sinner now, a sinner by anger and shame. The city would throw him out violently. Perhaps it would brand him, as Thinner had hinted earlier. Jeshua wanted the familiarity of the grasslands and tangible enemies like the city chasers.
The sunlight through the entrance arch guided him. He ran for the glassy walkway and found it rising to keep him in. Furious with panic, he raised his club and struck at the spines. They sang with the blows but did not break.
“Please,” he begged. “Let me out, let me out!”
He heard a noise behind him and turned. A small wheeled cart gripped Thinner’s head with gentle mandibles and lifted its segmented arms to send the oracle down a chute into its back. It rolled from the mall into a corridor.
Jeshua lifted his slumped shoulders and expanded his chest. “I’m afraid!” he shouted at the city. “I’m a sinner! You don’t want me, so let me go!”
He squatted on the pavement with club in hand, trembling. The hatred of the cities for man had been deeply impressed in him. His breathing slowed until he could think again, and the fear subsided. Why had the city let him in, even with Thinner? He stood and slung the club in his belt. There was an answer someplace. He had little to lose—at most, a life he wasn’t particularly enjoying.
And in a city, there was the possibility of healing arts now lost to the expolitans.
“Okay,” he said. “I’m staying. Prepare for the worst.”
He walked across the mall and took a corridor beyond. Empty rooms with hexagonal doors waited silent on either side. He found a fountain of refreshing water in a broad cathedral-nave room and drank from it. Then he spent some time studying the jointing of the arches that supported the vault above, running his fingers over the grooves.
A small anteroom had a soft couchlike protrusion, and he rested there, staring blankly at the ceiling. For a short while he slept. When he awoke, both he and his clothes were clean. A new pair had been laid out for him—standard Ibreem khaki shirt and short pants and a twine belt, more delicately knitted than the one he was wearing. His club hadn’t been removed. He lifted it. It had been tampered with—and improved. It fitted his grip better now and was weighted for balance. A table was set with dishes of fruit and what looked like bread-gruel. He had been accommodated in all ways, more than he deserved from any city. It almost gave him the courage to be bold. He took off his ragged clothes and tried on the new set. They fit admirably, and he felt less disreputable. His sandals had been stitched up but not replaced. They were comfortable, as always, but sturdier.
“How can I fix myself here?” he asked the walls. No answer came. He drank water from the fountain again and went to explore further.
The ground plan of Mandala’s lowest level was relatively simple. It consisted mostly of trade and commerce facilities, with spacious corridors for vehicle traffic, large warehouse areas, and dozens of conference rooms. Computing facilities were also provided. He knew a little about computers—the trade office in Bethel-Japhet still had an ancient pocket model taken from a city during the Exiling. The access terminals in Mandala were larger and clumsier, but recognizable. He came across a room filled with them. Centuries of neglect had made them irregular in shape, their plastic and thin metal parts warping. He wondered what portions of them, if any, were alive.
Most of the rooms on the lowest level maintained the sea-floor green motif. The uniformity added to Jeshua’s confusion, but after several hours of wandering, he found the clue that provided guidance. Though nothing existed in the way of written directions or graphic signs or maps, by keeping to the left he found he tended to the center, and to the right, the exterior. A Mandalan of ten centuries ago would have known the organization of each floor by education, and perhaps by portable guidebooks or signalers. Somewhere, he knew, there had to be a central elevator system.
He followed all left-turning hallways. Avoiding obvious dead ends, he soon reached the base of a hollow shaft. The floor was tiled with a changing design of greens and blues, advancing and flowing beneath his feet like a cryptic chronometer. He craned his neck back and looked up through the center of Mandala. High above he saw a bluish circle, the waning daytime sky. Wind whistled down the shaft.
Jeshua heard a faint hum from above. A speck blocked out part of the skylight and grew as it fell, spiraling like a dropped leaf. It had wings, a thick body for passengers, and an insect head, like the dragonfly buttresses that provided ventilation on Mandala’s exterior. Slowing its descent, it lifted its nose and came to a stop in front of him, still several feet above the floor. The bottoms of its unmoving transparent wings reflected the changing design of the floor.
Then he saw that the floor was coming to a conclusion, like an assembled puzzle. It formed a mosaic triskelion, a three-winged symbol outlined in red.
The glider waited for him. In its back there was room for at least five people. He chose the front seat. The glider trembled and moved forward. The insect-head tilted back, cocked sideways, and inspected its ascent. Metallic antennae emerged from the front of the body. A tingling filled the air. And he began to fly.
The glider slowed some distance above the floor and came to a stop at a gallery landing. Jeshua felt his heartbeat race as he looked over the black railing, down the thousand feet or so to the bottom of the shaft.
“This way, please.”
He turned, expecting to see Thinner again. Instead there waited a device like a walking coat-tree, with a simple vibration speaker mounted on its thin neck, a rod for a body, and three appendages jointed like a mantis’s front legs. He followed it.
Transparent pipes overhead pumped bubbling fluids like exposed arteries. He wondered whether dissenting citizens in the past could have severed a city’s lifelines by cutting such pipes—or were these mere ornaments, symbolic of deeper activities? The coat-tree clicked along in front of him, then stopped at a closed hexagonal door and tapped its round head on a metal plate. The door opened. “In here.”
Jeshua entered. Arranged in racks and rows in endless aisles throughout the huge room were thousands of constructions like Thinner. Some were incomplete, with their machinery and sealed-off organic connections hanging loose from trunks, handless arms, headless necks. Some had gaping slashes, broken limbs, squashed torsos. The coat-tree hurried off before he could speak, and the door closed behind.
He was beyond anything but the most rudimentary anxiety now. He walked down the central aisle, unable to decide whether this was a workshop or a charnel house. If Thinner was here, it might take hours to find him.
He stared straight ahead and stopped. There was someone not on the racks. At the far end of the room, it stood alone, too distant to be discerned in detail. Jeshua waited, but the figure did not move. It was a stalemate.
He made the first step. The figure darted to one side like a
deer. He automatically ran after it, but by the time he’d reached the end of the aisle, it was nowhere to be seen.
“Hide and seek,” he murmured. “For God’s sake, hide and seek.”
He rubbed his groin abstractedly, trying to still the flood of excitement rushing into his stomach and chest. His fantasies multiplied, and he bent over double, grunting. He forced himself to straighten up, held out his arms, and concentrated on something distracting.
He saw a head that looked very much like Thinner’s. It was wired to a board behind the rack, and fluids pulsed up tubes into its neck. The eyes were open but glazed, and the flesh was ghostly. Jeshua reached out to touch it. It was cold, lifeless.
He examined other bodies more closely. Most were naked, complete in every detail. He hesitated, then reached down to touch the genitals of a male. The flesh was soft and flaccid. He shuddered. His fingers, as if working on their own, went to the pubic mound of a female figure. He grimaced and straightened, rubbing his hand on his pants wit
h automatic distaste. A tremor jerked up his back. He was spooked now, having touched the lifeless forms, feeling what seemed dead flesh.
What were they doing here? Why was Mandala manufacturing thousands of surrogates? He peered around the racks of bodies, this way and behind, and saw open doors far beyond. Perhaps the girl—it must have been the girl—had gone into one of those.
He walked past the rows. The air smelled like cut grass and broken reed sterns, with sap leaking. Now and then it smelled like fresh slaughtered meat, or like oil and metal.
Something made a noise. He stopped. One of the racks. He walked slowly down one aisle, looking carefully, seeing nothing but stillness, hearing only the pumping of fluids in thin pipes and the clicks of small valves. Perhaps the girl was pretending to be a cyborg. He mouthed the word over again.
Cyborg. He knew it from his schooling. The cities themselves were cybernetic organisms.
He heard someone running away from him, slap of bare feet on floor. He paced evenly past the rows, looking down each aisle, nothing, nothing, stillness, there! The girl was at the opposite end, laughing at him. An arm waved. Then she vanished.
He decided it was wise not to chase anyone who knew the city better than he did. Best to let her come to him. He left the room through an open door.
A gallery outside adjoined a smaller shaft. This one was red and only fifty or sixty feet in diameter. Rectangular doors opened off the galleries, closed but unlocked. He tested the three doors on his level, opening them one at a time with a push. Each room held much the same thing—a closet filled with dust, rotting and collapsed furniture, emptiness and the smell of old tombs. Dust drifted into his nostrils, and he sneezed. He went back to the gallery and the hexagonal door. Looking down, he swayed and felt sweat start. The view was dizzying and claustrophobic.
A singing voice came down to him from above. It was feminine, sweet and young, a song in words he did not completely catch. They resembled Thinner’s chaser dialect, but echoes broke the meaning. He leaned out over the railing as far as he dared and looked up. It was definitely the girl—five, six, seven levels up. The voice sounded almost childish. Some of the words reached him clearly with a puff of direct breeze: