by Greg Bear
“They found humanity wanting.”
“Simply put. One of the original directives of the city was that socially destructive people—those who did not live their faith as Jews or Christians—would be either reformed or exiled. The cities were constantly aware of human activity and motivation. After a few decades they decided everybody was socially destructive in one way or another.”
“We are all sinners.”
“This way,” Thinner directed. They came to the moving walkway around the central shaft and stepped onto it, “The cities weren’t capable of realizing human checks and balances. By the time the problem was discovered, it was too late. The cities went on emergency systems and isolated themselves, because each city reported that it was full of antisocials. They were never coordinated again. It takes people to reinstate the interurban links.”
Jeshua looked at Thinner warily, trying to judge the truth of the story. It was hard to accept—a thousand years of self-disgust and misery because of bad design! “Why did the ships leave the sky?”
“This world was under a colony contract and received support only so long as it stayed productive. Production dropped off sharply, so there was no profit, and considerable expense and danger in keeping contact. There were tens of millions of desperate people here then. After a time, God-Does-Battle was written off as a loss.”
“Then we are not sinners, we did not break El’s laws?”
“No more than any other living thing.”
Jeshua felt a slow hatred begin inside. “There are others who must learn this,” he said.
“Sorry,” Thinner said. “You’re in it for the duration. We’ll get off here.”
“I will not be a prisoner,” Jeshua said.
“It’s not a matter of being held prisoner. The city is in for another move. It’s been trying to get rid of the architect, but it can’t—it never will. It would go against a directive for city cohesion. And so would you if you try to leave now. Whatever is in the city just before a move is catalogued and kept careful track of by watcher units.”
“What can any of you do to stop me?” Jeshua asked, his face set as if he’d come across a piece of steel difficult to hammer. He walked away from the shaft exit, wondering what Thinner would try.
The floor rocked back and forth and knocked him on his hands and knees. Streamers of brown and green crawled over a near wall, flexing and curling. The wall came away, shivered as if in agony, then fell on its side. The sections around it did likewise until a modular room had been disassembled. Its contents were neatly packed by scurrying coat-trees, each with a fringe of arms and a heavier frame for loads. All around the central shaft, walls were being plucked out and rooms dismantled. Thinner kneeled next to Jeshua and patted him on the shoulder.
“Best you come with this unit and avoid the problems here. I can guarantee safe passage until the city has reassembled.”
Jeshua hesitated, then looked up and saw a cantilever arch throwing out green fluid ropes like a spider spinning silk. The ropes caught on opposite bracings and the arch lowered itself. Jeshua stood up on the uncertain flooring and followed Thinner.
“This is only preliminary work,” Thinner said as he took him into the cyborg room. “In a few hours the big structural units will start to come down, then the bulkheads, ceiling, and floor pieces, then the rest. By this evening, the whole city will be mobile. The girl will be here in a few minutes—you can travel together if you want to. This unit will give you instructions on how to avoid injury during reassembly.”
But Jeshua had other plans. He did as Thinner told him, resting on one of the racks like a cyborg, stiffening as the girl came in from another door and positioned herself several aisles down. He was sweating profusely, and the smell of his fear nauseated him.
The girl looked at him curiously. “You know ’at dis you in fo’?” she asked.
He shook his head.
The clamps on the rack closed and held him comfortably but securely. He didn’t try to straggle. The room was disassembling itself. Panels beneath the racks retracted, and wheels jutted out. Shivering with their new energy, the racks elevated and wheeled out their charges.
The racks formed a long train down a hall crowded with scurrying machines. Behind them, the hall took itself apart with spewed ropes, fresh-spouted grasping limbs and feet, wheels and treads.
It was a dance. With the precision of a bed of flowers closing for the night, the city shrank, drew in, pulled itself down from the top, and packed itself onto wide-tread beasts with unfathomable jade eyes. The racks were put on the backs of a trailer like a flat-backed spider, long multiple legs pumping up and down smoothly. A hundred spiders like it carried the remaining racks, and thousands of other choreographed tractors, robots, organic cranes, cyborg monsters, waited in concentric circles around Mandala. A storm gathered to the south about Arat’s snowy peaks. As the day went on and the city diminished, the grey front swept near, then over. A mantle of cloud hid the disassembly of the upper levels. Rain fell on the ranks of machines and half-machines, and the ground became dark with mud and trampled vegetation. Transparent skins came up over the backs of the spider-trailers, hanging from rigid foam poles. Thinner crawled between the racks and approached Jeshua, who was stiff and sore by now.
“We’ve let the girl loose,” Thinner said. “She has no place to go but with us. Will you try to leave?”
Jeshua nodded.
“It’ll only mean trouble for you. But I don’t think you’ll get hurt.” Thinner tapped the rack, and the clamps backed away. Night was coming down over the storm. Through the trailer skin, Jeshua could see the city’s parts and vehicles switch on interior lights. Rain streaks distorted the lights into ragged splashes and bars. He stretched his arms and legs and winced.
A tall tractor unit surmounted by a blunt-nosed cone rumbled up to the trailer and hooked itself on. The trailer lurched and began to move. The ride on the pumping man-thick legs was surprisingly smooth. Mandala marched through the rain and dark.
By morning, the new site had been chosen.
Jeshua lifted the trailer skin and jumped into the mud. He had slept little during the trek, thinking about what had happened and what he had been told. He was no longer meek and ashamed.
The cities were no longer lost paradises to him. They now had an air of priggishness. They were themselves flawed. He spat into the mud.
But the city had made him whole again. Who had been more responsible: the architect or Mandala itself? He didn’t know and hardly cared. He had been taken care of as any unit in Mandala would have been, automatically and efficiently. He coveted his new wholeness, but it didn’t make him grateful. It should have been his by a birthright of ten centuries. It had been denied by incompetence—and whatever passed as willful blindness in the cities.
He could not accept it as perpetual error. His people tended to think in terms of will and responsibility.
The maze of vehicles and city parts was quiet now, as if resting before the next effort of reassembly. The air was misty and grey with a heaviness that lowered his spirits.
“’Ere dis you go?”
He turned back to the trailer and saw the girl peering under the skin. “I’m going to try to get away,” he said. “I don’t belong here. Nobody does.”
“Lissy. I tol’ de one, T-Thinner to teach dis me … teach me how to spek li’ dis you. When you come back, I know by den.”
“I don’t plan on coming back.” He looked at her closely. She was wearing the same shift she wore when he first saw her, but a belt had tightened it around her waist. He took a deep breath and backed away a step, his sandals sinking in the mud.
“I don’ know ’oo you are… who you are… but if Th-Thinner brought you, you must be a good person.”
Jeshua widened his eyes. “Why?”
She shrugged. “Dis me just know.” She jumped down from the trailer, swinging from a rain-shiny leg. Mud splattered up her bare white calves.
“If you, dis me,
t’ought… thought you were bad, I’d expec’ you to brute me right now. But you don’. Even though you neba—never have a gol before.” Her strained speech started to crack, and she laughed nervously. “I was tol’ abou’ you ’en you came. About your prob—lem.” She looked at him curiously. “How do you feel?”
“Alive. And I wouldn’t be too sure I’m not a danger. I’ve never had to control myself before.”
The girl looked him over coquettishly.
“Mandala, it isn’t all bad, no good,” she said. “It took care ob you. Dat’s good, is it no’?”
“When I go home,” Jeshua said, drawing a breath, “I’m going to tell my people we should come and destroy the cities.”
The girl frowned. “Li’ take down?”
“Piece by piece.”
“Too much to do. Nobod can do dat.”
“Enough people can.”
“No’ good to do in firs’ place. No’ tall.”
“It’s because of them we’re like savages now.”
The girl shimmied up the spider’s leg again and motioned for him to follow. He lifted himself and stood on the rounded lip of the back, watching her as she walked with arms balancing to the middle of the vehicle. “Look dis,” she said. She pointed to the ranked legions of Mandala. The mist was starting to burn off. Shafts of sunlight cut through and brightened wide circles of the plain. “De polis, dey are li’ not’ing else. Dey are de…” She sighed at her lapses. “They are the fines’ thing we eba put together. We should try t’save dem.”
But Jeshua was resolute. His face burned with anger as he looked out over the disassembled city. He jumped from the rim and landed in the pounded mud. “If there’s no place for people in them, they’re useless. Let the architect try to reclaim. I’ve got more immediate things to do.”
The girl smiled slowly and shook her head. Jeshua stalked off between the vehicles and city parts.
Mandala, broken down, covered at least thirty square miles of the plain. Jeshua took his bearings from a tall rock pinnacle, chose the shortest distance to the edge, and sighted on a peak in Arat. He walked without trouble for a half hour and found himself approaching an attenuated concentration of city fragments. Grass grew up between flattened trails. Taking a final sprint, he stood on the edge of Mandala. He took a deep breath and looked behind to see if anything was following.
He still had his club. He held it in one hand, hefted it, and examined it closely, trying to decide what to do with it if he was bothered. He put it back in his belt, deciding he would need it for the long trip back to his expolis. Behind him, the ranks of vehicles and parts lurched and began to move. Mandala was beginning reconstruction. It was best to escape now.
He ran. The long grass made speed difficult, but he persisted until he stumbled into a burrow and fell over. He got up, rubbed his ankle, decided he was intact, and continued his clumsy springing gait.
In an hour he rested beneath the shade of a copse of trees and laughed to himself. The sun beat down heavily on the plain, and the grass shimmered with a golden heat. It was no time for travel. There was a small puddle held in the cup of a rock, and he drank from that, then slept for a while.
He was awakened by a shoe gently nudging him in the ribs.
“Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod,” a voice said.
He rolled from his stomach and looked into the face of Sam Daniel the Catholic. Two women and another man, as well as three young children, were behind him jockeying for positions in the coolest shade.
“Have you calmed yourself in the wilderness?” the Catholic asked. Jeshua sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had nothing to fear. The chief of the guard wasn’t acting in his professional capacity—he was traveling, not searching. And besides, Jeshua was returning to the expolis.
“I am calmer, thank you,” Jeshua said. “I apologize for my actions.”
“It’s only been a fortnight,” Sam Daniel said. “Has so much changed since?”
“I…” Jeshua shook his head. “I don’t think you would believe.”
“You came from the direction of the traveling city,” the Catholic said, sitting on the soft loam. He motioned for the rest of the troop to rest and relax. “Meet anything interesting there?”
Jeshua nodded. “Why have you come this far?”
“For reasons of health. And to visit the western limb of Expolis Canaan, where my parents live now. My wife has a bad lung ailment—I think an allergic reaction to the new strain of sorghum being planted in the ridge paddies above Bethel-Japhet. We will stay away until the harvest. Have you stayed in other villages near here?”
Jeshua shook his head. “Sam Daniel, I have always thought you a man of reason and honor. Will you listen with an open mind to my story?”
The Catholic considered, then nodded.
“I have been inside a city.”
He raised his eyebrows. “The one on the plain?”
Jeshua told him most of the story. Then he stood. “I’d like you to follow me. Away from the rest. I have proof.”
Sam Daniel followed Jeshua behind the rocks, and Jeshua shyly revealed his proof. Sam Daniel stared. “It’s real?” he asked. Jeshua nodded.
“I’ve been restored. I can go back to Bethel-Japhet and become a regular member of the community.”
“No one has ever been in a city before. Not for as long as any remember.”
“There’s at least one other, a girl. She’s from the city chasers.”
“But the city took itself apart and marched. We had to change our course to go around it or face the hooligans following. How could anyone live in a rebuilding city?”
“I survived its disassembly. There are ways.” And he told about the architect and its extensions. “I’ve had to twist my thoughts to understand what I’ve experienced,” he said. “But I’ve reached a conclusion. We don’t belong in the cities, any more than they deserve to have us.”
“Our shame lies in them.”
“Then they must be destroyed.”
Sam Daniel looked at him sharply. “That would be blasphemous. They serve to remind us of our sins.”
“We were exiled not for our sins, but for what we are—human beings! Would you kick a dog from your house because it dreams of hunting during Passover—or Lent? Then why should a city kick its citizens out because of their inner thoughts? Or because of a minority’s actions? They were built with morals too rigid to be practical. They are worse than the most callous priest or judge, like tiny children in their self-righteousness. They’ve caused us to suffer needlessly. And as long as they stand, they remind us of an inferiority and shame that is a lie! We should tear them down to their roots and sow the ground with salt.”
Sam Daniel rubbed his nose thoughtfully between two fingers. “It goes against everything the expolises stand for,” he said. “The cities are perfect. They are eternal, and if they are self-righteous, they deserve to be. You of all should know that.”
“You haven’t understood,” Jeshua said, pacing. “They are not perfect, not eternal. They were made by men—”
“Papa! Papa!” a child screamed. They ran back to the group. A black tractor-mounted giant with an angular bird-like head and five arms sat ticking quietly near the trees, Sam Daniel called his family back near the center of the copse and looked at Jeshua with fear and anger. “Has it come for you?”
He nodded.
“Then go with it.”
Jeshua stepped forward. He didn’t look at the Catholic as he said, “Tell them what I’ve told you. Tell them what I’ve done, and what I know we must do.”
A boy moaned softly.
The giant picked Jeshua up delicately with a mandibled arm and set him on its back. It spun around with a spew of dirt and grass, then moved quietly back across the plain to Mandala.
When they arrived, the city had almost finished rebuilding. It looked no different from when he’d first seen it, but its order was ugly to him now. He preferred the human asymmetry of brick homes and stone walls. Its noises
made him queasy. His reaction grew like steam pressure in a boiler, and his muscles felt tense as a snake about to strike.
The giant set him down in the lowest level of the city. Thinner met him there. Jeshua saw the girl waiting on a platform near the circular design in the shaft.
“If it makes any difference to you, we had nothing to do with bringing you back,” Thinner said.
“If it makes any difference to you, I had nothing to do with returning. Where will you shut me tonight?”
“Nowhere,” Thinner said. “You have the run of the city.”
“And the girl?”
“What about her?”
“What does she expect?”
“You don’t make much sense,” Thinner said.
“Does she expect me to stay and make the best of things?”
“Ask her. We don’t control her, either.”
Jeshua walked past the cyborgs and over the circular design, now disordered again. The girl watched him steadily as he approached. He stopped below the platform and looked up at her, hands tightly clenched at his waist.
“What do you want from this place?” he asked.
“Freedom,” she said. “The choice of what to be, where to live.”
“But the city won’t let you leave. You have no choice.”
“Yes, the city, I can leave it whenever I want.”
Thinner called from across the mall. “As soon as the city is put together, you can leave, too. The inventory is policed only during a move.”
Jeshua’s shoulders slumped, and his bristling stance softened. He had nothing to fight against now, not immediately. He kept his fists clenched, even so.