Strength of Stones

by Greg Bear

  Durragon didn’t get much sleep until morning. The Chasers marched from one side of the camp to the other, staying a respectable distance from the spines, shouting at the top of their lungs. When dawn was well along and they hadn’t received any answer, the runner woke Durragon up and he groggily began to make other plans.

  Ezeki lay on his back in a tub of healing fluid, half-dreaming about his home village. A network of green and chrome manipulators hung in wait over his body. Earlier they had massaged and applied unguents; in a few days the wounds would be healed.

  And paradise would end. One way or another, the city—or the woman—would throw them out. Something had to be done before then.

  The fracas with the disbanded Tomoye had taught Ezeki several things about organic cities. Diffuse and huge as they might seem from the outside, they were controlled by a small number of tank-like brains. The one they had captured had not been very cooperative. He opened his eyes and sighed.

  “Bring Breetod to me, please,” he told the worker. It rolled out of the room. A few minutes later the flank runner came in, sniffing at his hand and arm.

  “They cleaned me up,” he said. “I’ve never smelled this good before.”

  “How do you like it?” Ezeki asked.

  The runner wrinkled his nose. “The smell is unfamiliar, and I can’t tell as much about my health as I could before—” he sniffed his arm-pit and shook his head—”but I don’t itch much, either. It’s acceptable.”

  “This expolitan, Belshezar—has he told you much about the city yet?”

  “He’s more your kind than mine. He hasn’t said a thing since he was bandaged. Musa would like to strangle the bitch.”

  “She looks like she can take care of herself. You might warn him. Besides, I think she’s telling the truth. She runs the city now.”

  “Why do you believe her?”

  “Does this city act like other cities?”

  “No.”

  “There it is. Something’s made it change.”

  “But she’s just an old expolitan—”

  “Not so old, maybe forty. Hard life. But she’s smart now, for whatever reason, and I think she has most of the city under control, but not all; otherwise why would it let us in? She was right—we were faking. She obviously doesn’t like having us here.”

  “So?”

  “We’ll meet today, before we get so perfumed and softened up we forget why we’re here. Bring everyone to Belshezar’s room—even the Chasers—and make sure the worker is not in attendance.”

  “Yes, but here the walls have ears for a fact.”

  “Then we’ll speak Habiru dialect. Whether she hears and understands or not, we’ll have a meeting.”

  “One other thing,” Breetod said before leaving. “I went to a higher balcony and watched the machines that broke out last night. They scattered in all directions.”

  Ezeki settled back into the warm fluid again and waved his hand. “Go get the others.”

  When the despair came, Reah feared that the past was returning again. She sat quietly in the control center, trying to find a way out of the darkness. It all seemed hopeless. Where was the dividing line between the possible and the absurd?

  She was furious. She clenched the soft edge of the seat and stared straight into the screen. She had been re-running the city’s history, trying to understand. The idiocy of God-Does-Battle’s first colonist was a hard stone in her throat. Understanding was no easier than forgiveness.

  They had put the planet in a shadow from which it had never escaped. Reah thought she knew one of the reasons. The religions of her ancestors had been masculine religions, with masculine gods and prohibitions against the ways of women. Women were unclean, little better than livestock. Nature was a conspiracy of the unclean female against the hardpressed male.

  Yet she had loved her husband once, and faithfully followed the codes of Islam. Her daughter’s future, she had known, would not be as bright as a son’s—

  She was tense again. She looked at the screens and tried to unlock her neck muscles. Son or daughter, husband or tyrant, they were all equal now. “Better I had no memory,” she murmured. The insect on her shoulder buzzed and she tapped its head.

  “The men are holding a meeting,” it said, relaying the coat-rack’s voice. “This unit is not allowed to attend. I believe they are well enough that the city might consider putting them out soon.”

  “Keep watching,” she said. They weren’t going to foul her plans. Now that she controlled a city, albeit a disarranged one, it was time to correct the masculine blunders and set God-Does-Battle aright. And where else to begin, except with children?

  But first the city had to be relocated.

  She summoned the homunculus, now permanently dressed in the red of the architect.

  “The city can move as soon as it’s ready,” she said.

  “One transport has returned with information from the old alluvial plain,” the figure said.

  “I didn’t send any transport there.”

  “This unit found it appropriate to check conditions before moving.”

  She smiled. The city was thinking for itself, at least occasionally. “What did it find?”

  “Conditions are good. There is a deep flow of water and the soil is conducive to city maintenance.”

  “Now that the suppliants are well, isn’t it time to put them out?”

  “Tomorrow they will be escorted from the city,” the architect said. “Not before.”

  Reah nodded. She knew her limits better now. There was no use arguing.

  Durragon called the captured cylinder before him and stood in front of it—if it had a front—holding a finger to his lip and sucking on its tip. “You acknowledge my control over you?”

  “This unit has been lifted from any established chain of command. Since it is this unit’s duty to serve in a heirarchy, your orders will not be ignored.”

  The cylinder’s voice was scratchy and haggard, as if from long disuse or internal wear. Durragon didn’t like the cylinder’s answer. There was something defiant about it, no matter how faint the tinge.

  “No more riddles. Speak clearly. If I control you, then I control all the captured parts of Tomoye?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do I control you?”

  A pause, then, “Yes.”

  “Good.” He wished Ezeki was there. The Habiru could split verbal hairs far better than he. “Do you know how other cities are put together? Where their nerve centers are?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “That was not my function.”

  “Could you point them out to us if we took you inside?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do they look like you?”

  Silence. He repeated the question.

  “There is much variety, depending on the city. Some do.”

  “De polis!” a Chaser shouted. Durragon turned and looked up. The higher reaches of the city were disassembling. It was preparing to move. He put his hand on the cylinder’s smooth surface. “You’ll help us infiltrate the city, won’t you?” He wanted to sound more masterful, but the change had caught him by surprise.

  The cylinder didn’t answer.

  Reah watched the huge, spider-legged transports as they waited in the larger corridors and received rows of structural pieces. At other times, many of the transports served as bulkheads themselves, or as portions of buttresses and awesome support beams which crossed the entire city. Now the city was coming apart layer by layer, following a plan first put to use when they were erected a thousand years ago. Every part carried its own memory. Ancillary control units coordinated the motions. And throughout the city, the architect watched over everything.

  She had played her part. In a few more hours the city would pour across the plain and through the hills, heading toward the old river bed and Akkabar.

  She watched from a balcony overlooking one of the largest enclosed spaces within the city. A kilometer above
the ground, the assembly hall spanned the central tower. Its floor was six hundred meters across. Light poured down from transepts windows where hall and tower joined. Stained transparencies shifted designs continually, automatically, turning the floor into a gigantic kaleidoscope, a garden of light-flowers which, by night, became a ghostly promenade for images from times long past. Reah had never found the nerve to walk across the assembly hall at night, for it was there that the city concentrated its dreams and recollections, resurrecting visions of men and women in simple, wonderful clothes, children running naked except for armbands and tiaras, strange animals conjured from the experiments of the city-builders.

  Until now, Reah had never grasped the true size of the city. Her eyes were lost in the complexity of transports and parts gathering in rows on the assembly floor. As she watched, even the transepts began to come down, supported by new-spun cables and the cooperative limbs of lower sections. Hand-by-hand, slung from webs, walking and rolling and even flying, Resurrection spread itself out on the grasslands, moving its perimeter of spines and pushing back Durragon’s army. But the time would come, Reah knew, when the spines themselves would disassemble, and she would have to rely on the uncoordinated mobile defenses to keep the men from breaking through.

  The insect buzzed on her shoulder and she tapped its head.

  “This unit cannot locate the wounded suppliants,” the coat-rack said. “The architect has been informed they are missing, but all faculties are now concentrated on moving and outside defense.”

  Reah looked away from the assembly floor. “Bring me a quick corridor transport and join me here. We’ll look for them ourselves.”

  Ezeki peered into chamber after chamber, trying to find something which by any stretch of conjecture would serve the purpose of a command center. The city had to have one—but where?

  Belshezar came running after him. “Musa Salih says the city is taking itself apart,” he said, out of breath. “I think it’s getting ready to move.”

  “There’s no control center down here. It must be up near the tower—and that’s where she is, too.”

  “No, she isn’t. The tower’s already come down. There’s nothing to do except leave, if we can.”

  Ezeki shook his head. “We can follow it, wait until it reassembles.”

  “It won’t! Cities go to the mountains and die.”

  “Not if they have someone rational behind them.”

  “But the woman isn’t rational. She’s insane.”

  Ezeki took a last look into a small storage room and shrugged. “What good is coming here at all, then? She’s won.”

  Belshezar grimaced. “No. I can take us to the upper levels, just below the tower. Most of the promenades are still standing. If we can find a control drum like the one Durragon captured, it may tell us more.”

  Musa Salih strolled into the entrance archway, smoking his crusted pipe. He watched with amusement while Ezeki tried to query a cube similar to the one which had followed the woman. “It doesn’t talk,” he told them as the device walked off on its interrupted business. “It must just be a relay, a messenger.”

  Musa pointed with his pipe-stem. “Gentlemen, Breetod is trying to throw a stone over the outer barrier, but it keeps shifting. He’s very angry. He wants to get a message to Durragon. That’ll keep him busy, but what are we going to do?”

  “Follow me,” Belshezar said. Musa glanced at Ezeki and they walked after him.

  “One unit reports they are leaving the lower levels,” the coat-rack said. “They seem to be looking for you.”

  “Good. Then we’ll wait.” She felt for the knife in her robes. The coat-rack suddenly trembled and halted. She turned to look at it. The insect buzzed off her shoulder.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “A failure—”

  The floor buckled and jumped beneath them. A few meters from where they stood, in the broad vehicle corridor below the assembly hall, the walls gapped and groaned. A ramble echoed around them, followed by an ear-splitting squeal. The floor tilted and Reah fell on her hands and knees. The coat-rack rolled and toppled. As she began to slide, her hands struggled to get a grip on the floor. The cracks in the walls and ceiling grew. Fluids from ruptured city parts cascaded through the cracks, steaming and throwing up mists of alcohol.

  Reah rolled over on her back and flattened out. As she watched, one whole section of a side tower separated and arced over, collapsing as it fell. The entire city seemed to be roaring. She blocked her ears with her hands, then put them on the floor again to keep from sliding. The end of the corridor was open to the air now. Across the gap she could see flying debris and a rising cloud, and beyond that remnants of the tower leaning against an outer ring of the city, swaying crumbling and falling.

  The coat-rack flexed to right itself, then started rolling. At the last, it tried to flatten its arms and stop but it disappeared over the edge of the floor. For seconds the city was quiet. Reah lay with mouth open, a pain in her knees, her head vibrating with echoes of the scream.

  Then the alarms went off. Automatic voices urged occupants of apartments to remain calm. The whole city was frantically murmuring and warning and relaying damage information. Reah crawled out of the way of a transport. It tried to block off the corridor but instead, with a grinding of treads, made the floor dip farther and sailed off into the pit.

  After several minutes, the buttresses and supports far below made a titanic effort and what was left of the tower sorted itself into temporary equilibrium. Reah felt this as a shiver and a slow, elevator-like rise. Then the corridor was level and she stood experimentally, almost collapsing because of the trembling of her knees.

  Reah could guess what had happened. Some of the weaker structures, unable to rely on totally dead parts, had collapsed and taken the side tower with them. Moving the city had been a calculated risk in the first place, and now the risk had come due. “How much?” she asked herself. “How much is lost?” Then, standing on the jagged rim of the floor, she began to weep.

  Ezeki’s arm hung broken by his side. He howled into the dust and gloom, cursing God, cursing his mother and father, cursing all who had helped him stay alive in the past—anyone who had contributed to the present horror. Breetod, Belshezar and the Chasers lay under head-high mounds of squirming, green-bleeding rubble. Musa Salih was nowhere to be seen. From all around, fine mists of choking fluid filled the air, and sounds of screaming matter tortured beyond structural endurance.

  As the noise subsided to the distant buzzing of alarms, Ezeki sat on a fallen column with a shuddering breath. Then he took his hand away from his forearm and looked at the skin. The bones weren’t protruding. If necessary, he could set it himself—not very well, perhaps, but enough to stay alive and heal.

  And—if the whole city hadn’t just died—perhaps he had an advantage now…

  “Who’s there?” someone called. “Is anyone alive?”

  It was Musa Salih. “Here,” Ezeki shouted. “El and Hell, I’m an old man and I don’t want to see any more of this shitful life.”

  Salih appeared out of the gloom, wiping dust from his face and smiling broadly. “That was something, wasn’t it?” he said. “Looks like the woman overstepped her bounds. This city is too old to move.”

  “I’ve broken my arm,” Ezeki said.

  “I think the hospital is still there. Here, walk with me.” Hanging on to Salih’s shoulder, Ezeki climbed over the low mounds of debris into the clean corridors of the intact lower levels. “What fell?” he groaned.

  “I don’t know. Everything is frantic. Workers running everywhere, going crazy. Voices, ghosts, Prophet’s beard! It’s a nightmare. From Paradise to—hey! I’m scratched on the hands and feet and you have a broken arm. What about Breetod and the others?”

  “Dead,” Ezeki said.

  “City has to fix us up again. Let’s go.”

  In the quiet, cool green rooms of the hospital, Ezeki lay on a soft bench and closed his eyes. The net of med
ical tools closed over him. Something burst above his face, a flash of pulsating green, and he fell asleep.

  Musa watched without expression as his hands and feet were treated. Life was too ironic for words, so he said nothing and thought nothing. No matter what man attempted, Allah was the only victor. And what did Allah win? Nothing but the satisfaction of holding and throwing the die…

  “Can the city recover?” she asked the homunculus. The screens and projectors were relaying information from the architect’s remaining sensors. The apartment’s information center couldn’t compare with the control room in the now-dismantled central tower, but for the moment there was nothing else available. She felt half-blind.

  “There is much damage, but mostly in areas already dead or dying. This may save time clearing dead units, in fact. Your worker was destroyed?”

  “Yes. Only the flying thing is left.”

  “A new unit will be assigned to you. There were intruders killed in the fall. Two are alive. Medical units are tending to them. Pardon. Thinking interference—”

  The homunculus faded and turned to purple, a color she hadn’t seen before. “Evaluation of city net viability—”

  Then to green.

  “Construction coordinator. An emergency survey vehicle is being readied for the City Manager. The architect will act as interface. As of now, the functions of religious coordinator, central teaching authority, metabolism authority, ComNet authority have been terminated. City motion authority is in command.”

  Then back to red.

  “The city manager will please follow a projected guide to the emergency vehicle.” Reah nodded and looked around. A male figure emerged from the wall and motioned for her to follow.

  Near the ground level, a vehicle mounted on treads, with a large cab and attendant workers stored in recesses in the outer skin, rolled up beside her and stopped. It bounced slowly on shock absorbers. It was smaller and lighter than most of the transports and obviously not made from the same organic material. She followed the projection up a short flight of steps into the cab and found a comfortable, form-fitting seat. On the arm-rests were finger-cups and three black retinal projectors hung just above the level of her eyes. She fitted her fingers, looked into the guide-lights and—