by Greg Bear
Behind him he could feel the woman, the warmth from the star in her forehead. She was guiding him in his flight, guiding his dream—
He started awake at the sound of the apartment door sliding open.
“Arthur?”
“Yes, I’m here.”
Kahn entered, followed by Jeshua and somebody familiar-the red-headed figure from the dream.
“We’re leaving now,” Kahn said.
“Oh.” Arthur struggled up from the couch and stood on wobbly legs. “Where?”
“Matthew doesn’t want us here, isn’t going to cooperate. But I know where the Bifrosts are.”
“More than one?” Jeshua asked. Kahn nodded. “How do we get there? More walking?”
“No,” Kahn said. “We have transportation.”
“Oh.” Arthur rubbed his eyes. “Is that the head?” he asked, looking at Thinner.
“That I was,” Thinner said.
“Oh.”
They stood silent for a few awkward seconds.
“I’ve been dreaming—” Arthur started, but Kahn interrupted.
“We’ll go to the heat shaft. There’s a city transport waiting there, unless Matthew has interfered again.”
Thinner was regarding Arthur fixedly, which made him uncomfortable. There was something familiar in the stare. “I’m ready,” Arthur said quickly. “I’d never get used to all this.” He motioned at the apartment.
In the heat shaft, a large white object like a smooth clay dove hovered, hatch open for them to enter. In basic form it resembled an airplane Arthur had seen the Founders flying, but much sleeker.
As they boarded the craft, Jeshua looked down on Kahn with an unfamiliar, almost queasy reverence. It was built in to him that he should obey the builder, even at the widest limit of his freedom; yet if it had been different, he would have obeyed anyway. He could feel the forces of regathering and redemption working within Kahn, within the Shekhinah which surrounded them. He sat awkwardly in a seat barely large enough to hold him, felt supple restraint close around his chest and legs, watched the others being gently wrapped in white bands. They sat in a circle near the center of the craft, beneath a transparent portal as wide as the cabin.
Thinner closed his eyes and laid his hand on Jeshua’s.
Kahn took his seat at a console beneath a forward-facing blister.
The craft rose slowly, and sections of the walls around them became transparent. Their seats seemed suspended in a cage of wide, fiat white bars.
Above the city, looking out across the enclave and the smaller towers, Kahn told the craft, “We are going to Eulalia.”
“Where’s that?” Arthur asked quietly.
“It’s a city south of us,” Thinner said. “Used to be inhabited by Pentecostals.”
“Ever been there?” Arthur felt awkward sitting next to the mimics, without Kahn mediating.
“No,” Jeshua said, smiling as if at some secret joke. “It’s across the sea. Last we heard, it was surrounded by Pentecostal expolises. They were being very zealous, wouldn’t allow the city to move. They built concrete barricades all around, higher than the city parts could climb.”
“How long ago was that?”
“Fifty years.”
“Oh.” He leaned his head back and looked up at the blue sky. A cloud was floating past in the morning light. Suddenly, the cloud shifted and disappeared.
The craft accelerated above the river plain, banked, and headed south.
Kahn felt like his entire thorax was filled with expanding lead. He couldn’t call the sensation dread, or fear—it had too much of something else, directed toward Arthur and the city parts. They were such pure symbols of his failure.
Matthew watched Kahn’s commandeered aircraft vanish to a pale point in the brightening sky. He sat beneath a tent looking south from a broad portico. Another aircraft waited just beyond the edge of the portico, but Matthew was in no hurry. He knew where Kahn’s final destination lay. And he knew about Reah’s capabilities; he had opposed her long enough, in silent warfare, not to be surprised by anything she did.
She had controlled city part repairs. At one time, she had overseen the education net for the children brought in from outside. And she had controlled the medical facilities.
He was reminded of her control with every creak and twinge of his aging body, with every failure of memory and intellect. She was dead; she was immortal, not human. And she had allowed her son to grow old. It was the only way she could guarantee eventually wresting his part of the city away from him. When he died, he would have been on her home territory…
But now, Reah was no longer in the city mind.
She had joined the false Kahn on his journey.
He let the hot morning wind blow across his skin and shaded his eyes against the blowtorch glare of the sun, bright even through the tent fabrics.
Arthur looked down on the flat expanse of water. They had crossed over into night again, and two moons cast twin arcs of wave-textured light across the sea.
He had given up worrying. The marvels were coming so thick and fast that he simply planted an almost animal trust in Kahn.
Kahn remained in the blister beside the emergency operations console. Charts were projected into his eyes and he checked their course every few minutes, a gesture of nerves. At least he didn’t grow tired. While Arthur slept and the mimics talked softly, he ordered the craft higher, until the atmosphere was as black as space and the horizon was a purple line of sunrise. When the sun appeared, he darkened the windows.
Four hours from Resurrection, they flew over land again. Up from dazzling yellow sand beaches rose sharp-spined mountains covered with thick foliage. Inland, the mountains merged into tablelands and valleys. A wide fjord cut from the sea into the tablelands, and in a natural bowl-shaped Valley adjacent to the fjord was Eulalia. Three needle-thin spires rose from the Pentecostal city, just as Kahn had seen in the record. The craft dropped steadily, improving his view.
Within its concrete barrier, Eulalia was dead. Close-up, the spires were pitted, rusted, ready to collapse. The city itself was little more than a shell. Still, he had to look to be sure. The craft descended a dilapidated heat shaft.
Many structural parts and virtually all detail parts—walls, floors—lay in ruins, the decay far more advanced than in Fraternity. The heat shaft broadened and they saw collapsed promenades leaning outward at crazy angles, buttresses fallen in rows like soldiers fainted in parade-ground heat. And at the very center, the city had been hollowed, burned out, by some kind of explosion.
He was satisfied that the Bifrost no longer existed in Eulalia. The destruction was so complete that he decided not to investigate any further.
He carefully maneuvered the craft back up the shaft, then slowed as something caught his eye. There were bodies scattered across a tilted and cracked promenade. He brought the craft as close to the leaning surface as he dared. “Jeshua,” he said. “What are those?”
Jeshua looked out his window, which gave a better view. “Dead city parts,” he said. “Mimics and others… servants, all kinds.”
“What are mimics doing in Eulalia?”
Arthur frowned. “Matthew sent them,” he said finally.
“How do you know?” Kahn asked.
“I can see them leaving Resurrection, in my memory. I don’t know how… I was having dreams in the city…”
“Why would he send them?” Kahn asked, but he could guess. To destroy the Bifrost. No more than twenty-five years ago, Eulalia had been alive and whole, or so the record showed.
He flew out of the city and did a quick tour of the surrounding valley floor. The Pentecostal villages had moved or been forced to move. Their vigil over Eulalia had ended.
“We’re going south,” he said. Matthew had indicated Thule was still intact. Now he was curious as to why Thule had survived Matthew’s crusade.
As the craft gained altitude, Kahn lapsed into that speculative frame which was the closest thing to sleep. He lo
st track of the hours.
Arthur became hungry and the craft fed him. The craft also took care of Jeshua’s and Thinner’s needs.
They flew low over desert, sometimes passing villages and clusters of nomads. Here, the season was cooler, closer to whatever winter the bright sun allowed, and the desert was at least tolerable. In the summer, it would not be. Arthur wondered where the people would go then, whether they would leave at all or just die, clinging to tradition and hope.
He looked across the cabin at the mimics. He couldn’t shake the notion that there was something familiar about Thinner—something he had seen in his dreams. Gestures, eyes. Arthur shrank back into his seat. His fear was returning. He felt his humanity acutely, going to the restroom every hour or so, while the others needed no such facilities. He felt like curling up into a ball, sleeping. In time, he did sleep again, but fitfully.
When he awoke, Kahn said they were still flying south, over the Sea of Galilee. Before God-Does-Battle had been purchased, the Sea of Galilee had been called Cold’s Sea, after a geographer aboard the first colony ship. When the new owners had moved in, they had stretched Earth’s Middle East and Bible lands around the planet like a sheet of rubber.
Kahn spotted icebergs floating like overlarge whitecaps far below, then stretches of pack ice beneath the clouds. God-Does-Battle’s south polar region was extensively frozen over, with deep fingers of white reaching across the four continents of the southern hemisphere; but the ice was less dominant than it had been thirteen hundred years ago. The oceans were expanding. Soon—perhaps in months—the alluvial plain around Resurrection would be flooded.
The displays showed hundreds of kilometers of pack ice, then an edge of solid white which denoted the continent of Brisbane. Pearson’s colonizers had left these names alone—Brisbane, Asgard, Scott and Amundsen. By rights, Kahn thought, the Bifrost—whatever it was—should have been built on Asgard, but that continent was much farther south, buried deep under two kilometers of ice, still scarcely touched by the sun. Thule, the only arctic city, had been built on Brisbane. It must have been difficult for the original Kahn to settle on Thule, isolated as it was; obviously, he had had little choice.
Kahn spotted the triplet spires in the sunset. The aircraft began its descent. At five thousand meters, rough air shook it. Stabilizers took hold and their course smoothed. Thule grew on the darkening land, glittering in the pale yellow glow like a palace made of glass and ice.
Thule had been ruled by Jemmu Yoshimura, president of the Asian Jews, a tough little rabbi with scarcely any Japanese blood, but descended from a famous family. Except for the spires, Thule hadn’t changed much and was apparently still alive. Its twelve outer towers flashed with the changing angles of their approach. The central temple—part of which supported the easternmost spire—was as intricate and fascinating as when Kahn had finished it, a cold radiolarian sculpted in city parts.
The sunset reflected from it bathed his face and the cabin. A flat plain of snow surrounded the city, laced with roads leading to a harbor which no longer existed. Outlying areas of the city had stopped functioning, obviously, but for a kilometer around the snow was a thin layer of white and not a thick blanket; Thule’s environmental envelope still tempered the cold and storms.
The craft banked and Kahn looked down from an altitude of three thousand meters.
The snow and ice were covered with black specks.
“Entering city environment,” the craft said softly.
“Double back and take us lower, slower,” Kahn ordered.
They flew in a broad, unhurried circle over the snow within Thule’s environment.
The specks were bodies. Some were mimics contorted and in pieces, surrounded by sprays of city part fluid. The battle-field—for so it seemed—stretched right up to the now-familiar circle of silicate spines. Under the envelope, the bodies lay where they had fallen, frozen but kept free of covering snow.
“Transmit my voice,” Kahn said. “I am the builder…” He repeated the phrase twice.
Then a voice replied from the city, low-pitched and almost musical, seductively pleasant. “Welcome, Pontifex.”
Kahn raised an eyebrow. “I am not the pope,” he said. “Respond in an appropriate manner.”
“You are a builder of bridges, so you are Pontifex. You are also Archon,” Thule’s voice said.
Kahn leaned back and looked at his passengers. “What the hell is it talking about? Jeshua, you seem to be up on such things…”
“Pontifex means bridge-builder, I believe. Archon is a kind of demiurge.”
“Oh? And what is a demiurge?”
“The creator of the shadow world, standing between true Godhead and humanity.”
“I see.” Ghostic doctrine, he thought. He didn’t relish facing a city so full of strange conceits.
The aircraft slowed even more, spilling its air with a faint hiss, and drifted onto a glittering, sky-blue landing deck. Broad light-absorbing banners hung limp from stanchions at one end of the field. They fluttered briefly with the wash from the craft’s passage.
The door opened. The air was not as cold as Arthur expected, but it was cold enough. Kahn walked past them and stood in the doorway. If it was possible for a simulacrum to have premonitions, he was having one now, and it told him to leave, to put as many kilometers between them and Thule as he could.
He stepped down the ramp. The air was perfectly still under the city’s weather umbrella, silent.
The platform was deserted.
“Warm the air, please,” Kahn said, his voice echoing from the distant walls. In a few seconds, the air became more comfortable. “Something’s responding,” he said to the others.
“You are the builder,” Jeshua said. “Shouldn’t the city obey your orders?”
“Resurrection did,” Kahn admitted.
“Is Thule any different?” Arthur asked. “Yes,” Kahn said. “We’ll have to be careful.”
Thinner nodded, looking around with a watchful but calm expression.
From across the plaza, they heard a sound like wind whistling through a narrow opening. Then a light appeared, resolving as it approached into a framework pyramid made of bars of crystal. Within the framework was a smaller, solid pyramid, seemingly made from gold, but giving off a warm light. Kahn didn’t recognize it—no city part had had such a design in his plans, even in Thule. It was possible Pearson had added such parts later.
The inner pyramid reversed itself in the frame, and the same rich voice came out of it. “Welcome, Builder. Thule has awaited your return. Your companions are also welcome.”
“What agency do you represent?” Kahn asked. “I am the religious coordinator.”
“May I address the architect?”
“The agency left in your place is no longer functioning,” the pyramid said.
“Who built you?”
“I am from the reign of Pearson.”
“Do you know what I’m doing here?” Kahn asked.
“You are here to attend the Bifrost.”
“And who am I?”
“You are an image of the Archon, Kahn.”
“Where is Kahn?”
“Standing before me.”
“And the original?”
“Transformed.”
Kahn stood silent for a moment, wondering how he should approach the situation. “Where is the Bifrost?”
“In the central amphitheater.”
“Is it still functioning?”
“It is intact, but only you can make it function.”
“I see.” He didn’t, however. He was more confused than ever. “Please take us there.”
“Certainly.” The pyramid floated slowly over the platform. “If you will follow…”
They walked across the plaza, under the pale blue-green arches and down a corridor whose walls and ceiling seemed made of ice crystals woven in geometric patterns. They came to the promenade surrounding a heatshaft and the pyramid halted.
“This wil
l be your transportation to the lower regions,” it said. The heat shaft vehicle resembled a giant snowflake, glittering in the cold white light reflected from the vent a hundred meters above.
“When we arrive,” Kahn said, “I would like to have four terminals waiting, and open access to the ComNet.”
“All things can be arranged,” the pyramid said in a pleasant tone.
Matthew stood on the snow-covered plain north of Thule. His aircraft and four pipe-joint city parts waited behind him, one part clutching a portable environment pack. He walked to the edge of a cluster of stiff, rime-covered bodies and looked down on them, frowning slightly.
Every other city had allowed his city parts to enter … Thule had rejected them. With one hand, he brushed away the frost, then backed up quickly. The body was human, skin desiccated but intact, lips drawn back in a mocking sneer. Resurrection’s mimics were mingled with the centuries-old bodies of Thule’s inhabitants. He bent down over the corpse, gingerly pulled back a stiff white coat—they had all worn clothes much too thin to keep them alive, even in the comparatively mild city environment zone—and saw a silver star of David on a lapel.
Matthew wandered from body to body, examining humans, mimics, city parts. The mimics and city parts were all badly mangled, pierced by shards of crystal. When he had sent Resurrection’s mimics out of the city, through tunnels dug beneath the river plain, he had expected few difficulties. But even when Eulalia and Throne had let his mimics inside, they had resisted his attempts to dismantle the Bifrosts. They had resisted Kahn, and they had resisted him. He had had to destroy Eulalia, finally, but Throne had come to the river plain, as if attracted by Resurrection’s healthy example, and with his overwhelming army of city parts he had killed the city from inside, dismantled it, carried it underground. He had used the materials to build the army of city parts and mimics which he sent to Thule.
Thule had never even let them inside. When they had tried to break through the city’s barriers, the battle had been incredibly short. The few that had survived returned with stories of legions of parts designed specifically to destroy.
With its Byzantine city mind, it could do almost anything. It had let Kahn in—the original Kahn—and then somehow thwarted him. And now it had swallowed the simulacrum.