Strength of Stones

by Greg Bear

“Matthew’s here?” He tried to gather his thoughts, put everything in order through the fear and the compelling lassitude. But he was already dead—what could he fear?

  “Let’s go,” Kahn said, picking up the notebooks and sticking them under his arm. If the Bifrost was working, he could get back to Earth, perhaps make deals the way his original had made deals—trading concession for concession. For the moment, there was nothing he could do on God-Does-Battle.

  They left the primal Kahn’s chambers and walked quickly down the ramps and stairs. Arthur tried to stay calm, but his hands were trembling. He didn’t know how much more he could stand. In the same room—a man’s corpse, and a duplicate of the man—

  In the amphitheater, four shining framework pyramids stood between them and the steps to the stage. Two floated on either side of Matthew, who watched Kahn steadily, leaning on his jade-green staff.

  “They’re defense,” Kahn said to Jeshua in a whisper. “They’re the things that blew apart upstairs, made all the broken glass…”

  “You’re the builder,” Jeshua said. “How can they kill you?”

  “I don’t know. But they did once.”

  “I’m being escorted out,” Matthew said, his high-pitched voice cracking. “Would you care to join me, before my mother loses her fight? If she loses, we’re all dead.”

  “She said the way was open,” Kahn said. “We have to go now.” He held his hands out to the pyramids. “I am the builder. My word is—”

  They advanced on him, humming like hornets, their crystal struts clattering.

  “Thule doesn’t want us,” Matthew said to Arthur. “It only wants Kahn, and we can do quite well without him.”

  “I don’t—” Arthur began.

  “Your sun will burn you to a crisp!” Kahn lied. Then he knew his arrogance, saw it clearly.

  “You made your mistakes,” Matthew said. “If God wills it, we’ll live. If not, we won’t.”

  “I have to leave,” Arthur said, his face contorted. Matthew walked toward them, pyramids following. Arthur ran across the grass to the old man, his stomach tied in knots. He couldn’t control himself. He had to return to normality, to the run-down old farm or what was left of it, to familiar roads, away from the trod. Kahn’s path was not for him and never had been.

  Matthew took his upper arm and they walked quickly out of the amphitheater. At the gate, they were met by two more pyramids, and their escorts turned back to flank Kahn and Jeshua. “You don’t want to go with them?” Kahn asked. “I think Reah’s losing, wherever she is.”

  “I belong where you are going,” Jeshua said. “There’s nothing here for me.”

  “Then let’s go.” They walked toward the stage. The four pyramids drew in tighter, then backed away, humming. The closest to the stage broke formation and blocked their way. “Archon,” it said. “You made the cities.”

  Kahn nodded, stiffening.

  “You made the error. You are the demiurge, the false god who created the world with all its pain and evil. You stand between this world and the real God, who does not meddle.”

  “I’m no god.” But he didn’t try to deny responsibility. In its own insane, distorted Gnostic way, Thule was right. “And after what you did to your citizens, who are you to accuse me of crimes?”

  The humming grew higher in pitch.

  “You murdered them, against all my laws,” Kahn said. “You passed judgement on those who made you, just as you pass judgement on me. What a foul, ugly thing you are! I command you to follow your original programming.”

  One pyramid behind them shattered, throwing its crystal fragments across the grass and into the air. A mournful howl came from the walls rising in pitch. Bells seemed to be struck all around, and the amphitheater was filled with vague, distorted ghosts, like the flicker of a mirage—crowds rising from the seats in one section, then vanishing, the effect rippling around the central stage.

  “She’s still fighting,” Jeshua said. He dotted five points on his forehead and drew two meshed triangles between them.

  “So what are our chances now?” Kahn asked him. “Still going to gather the souls, fulfil your Kaballah?”

  “The Shekhinah is with us,” Jeshua said.

  “Archon,” the closest pyramid said pleasantly. “We must go through this again, each time you return, mustn’t we?”

  “I command you—”

  The remaining three pyramids splintered into a cloud of shards and flew at Kahn.

  “Don’t look back,” Matthew said. “Lot’s wife, remember?”

  But Arthur couldn’t take his eyes away from Thule. Matthew darkened the glass to the rear of the aircraft.

  Above Thule, the flier’s silvery cube fused.

  Thule withered under the sudden fireball, its spires blackening, falling away like the legs of a locust burned in a spyglass beam.

  Arthur put his hands over his eyes.

  “You’ll go back to New Canaan,” Matthew said, but Arthur hardly heard him. It seemed as if his heart had been torn away and his chest filled with pebbles.

  Jeshua dragged the simulacrum up the steps, kicking away the fragments. Above, there was a roaring, and the darkness rippled like a pool of oil.

  “Do it,” Kahn said, quite clearly. He was still rational, calm, even though his body—filled with shards—could hardly move.

  Jeshua picked him up and pushed him into the Bifrost, then stepped in behind, feeling heat at his back. The black tectangle wavered again, then melted away with the amphitheater and stage.

  In Thule’s city mind, the baffle stopped. Reah stood free for a moment, her responsibilities ended. In her moment of calm, she felt a warm glow all around, then blinding light. Even now, a century dead, she tried to turn away.

  But the glow surrounded, bathed. She could sense a giant molecule rising, addressing her.

  Ready?

  She had gotten Matthew out of Kahn’s way, at the very least. She had not controlled the city perfectly; its strongest impulses had slipped past her. But even if she had failed, her part was done. She asked no questions, and dropped her scattered thoughts and fears. Ready. She joined.

  Three points of a triangle—that had been the display on the tapas Danice had given him: Earth, God-Does-Battle, Infinity. Which point of the triangle was their destination?

  Kahn was still alive in the darkness, still thinking. He could feel Jeshua’s hand touching his.

  He heard a voice. It was Danice. “Darling!” she said.

  “I—” he started to answer, but he was forming. Jeshua stood beside him. “Darling!” the voice repeated. They were on a huge platform. Alone.

  “You’ve finally come to us,” the recording of Danice continued. “Time is very short. Your people must follow instructions implicitly. I hope to be with you… in eternity!” Her symbol—a rose with an imbedded star—appeared in front of him.

  He was weak, but not in pain. Jeshua supported him by the arm. The platform was open on one side to space, or so it seemed—an enormous transparent wall. Among the stars was the framework sphere he had seen in the notebook. He had dropped both notebooks when the pyramids exploded. Kahn’s head slumped and Jeshua held him by the back of the skull so he could see. He was like a puppet in the mimic’s arms.

  “He wasn’t taking everybody back to Earth,” Kahn said. “Who?” Jeshua asked softly.

  “I… I wasn’t. He was doing something else.”

  The Bifrosts, obviously, had been designed to bring all of God-Does-Battle’s inhabitants to the platform. Squinting, he could see they were in a long hall of such platforms, gently curving, the end of the arc barely visible to either side through the transparent wall. Thousands of platforms. More than would be needed just for God-Does-Battle. This one staging area alone—hundreds of kilometers square—would have sufficed. The scale was overwhelming. “I built this…” It was half a question.

  On the opposite side from the transparent wall were more gateways, their blackness as rich as the entrance in Th
ule.

  A sign appeared in the air over their heads. Thousands of similar signs flashed across the platform. A gentle masculine voice repeated what was written on the sign. In the background, other voices read in other languages. He could imagine hundreds of millions of people filing from the Bifrost exits to the secondary gateways, being prepared by the messages for what they were about to experience.

  You are about to join in the greatest adventure. You will lose only those things which have held you back… you will lose only pain, confusion, hatred. Your privacy will still exist. You will be one among billions, but all will be friends, all will work together. No one will command another, for the resources are vast. You sacrifice only your body, and not even that, for they will be stored in perfect condition, should the time come when you wish to use it again.

  In the Golden Sphere, you will experience peace, a clarity of thought and purpose such as you have never known. The sphere will move from point to point in the universe, like a vast starship, but not subject to all the laws of nature as a starship is. Nothing in this universe can harm it. Should unforeseen damage occur, the network will automatically transfer all consciousness back to the bodies in their capsules, and you will go back through the staging areas to your various worlds. Other spheres wait to be activated if needed, and the journey will continue not long after…

  It sounded like the prospectus for a long, grand vacation. Kahn felt a tug of unease. He had advocated this? It resembled the typical spiel of the cults and religions he had despised for centuries; the promises of the religions which, in their misapplication, had destroyed God-Does-Battle.

  You will have access—by request and permission—to any memory in any other mind. On the journeys, which could conceivably take us from one end of the universe to the other, from the beginning of time to the end, you will experience what all living things have experienced. Mysteries will unfold, for in this joining you will be—along with the rest of human-kind—far more capable of understanding, analyzing, feeling. Your senses will expand a millionfold. The Golden Sphere is that state desired by mystics and saints, artists and laborers, scientists and philosophers: the state of Freedom.

  The state of change within near-perfection, of achievement within happiness.

  Now it is time for you to pass through. Welcome.

  We are now become as Gods.

  “Take me down to the gate,” Kahn said. Jeshua picked him up and they walked to the nearest rectangle of darkness. The original Kahn had designed something so incredible that his earlier self couldn’t believe in it. And enough people had believed in the Golden Sphere that it had been built. But had it ever been used? Successfully? Or was it all some enormous boondoggle, and had Matthew been right to thwart him in trying to transport the people of God-Does-Battle?

  The question was, simply put: did Kahn trust his later, seemingly more advanced self? He had failed on God-Does-Battle—

  He was more than a little afraid. “Go through,” he told Jeshua. The mimic obeyed.

  They materialized on yet another platform, much smaller, surrounded by floating panels of instrumentation. A technician’s eyrie, by the look of it. They were within the framework sphere. Within a few meters of the eyrie walls were glittering transparent cylinders, each containing a body, held in place by bronze-colored piping. They were ranked in layers for as far as he could see, millions, perhaps billions of them.

  Capacity in the Golden Sphere, the notebook had said, was one trillion.

  Male and female—and types he couldn’t place—the bodies seemed alive, but the faces were quite blank.

  “Go on,” he ordered. Jeshua carried him into a smaller darkness at the opposite end of the eyrie. Why weren’t they just deposited in the sphere, with all the other passengers? Why go from the platform to technical centers?

  They came out in another eyrie, this one looking out across the middle of the framework sphere. There was a vast hollow. From the innermost surface, thin metal arms (thin! They must have been hundreds of meters wide) reached inward to grasp at nothing. Whatever they had once held—the Golden Sphere, apparently—was gone.

  “We missed the boat,” Kahn said.

  “Is this where the regathering was to happen?” Jeshua asked solemnly. “Where all the souls would join, all the sparks come together?”

  “In a manner of speaking,” Kahn said weakly. He would have been the first in the staging area, if the plan had worked. Danice had left a recording for him, and had gone on ahead. After centuries of marriage, she had still trusted him—and Danice had been a very level-headed woman. Perhaps it had worked.

  What could he do if it hadn’t?

  “The vessel has received the drops of precious oil?”

  “I don’t know.” As always. “I suppose it has.”

  “Then why have we been left behind?”

  “We’re fakes,” Kahn said. “We don’t deserve it.”

  “What about the people of God-Does-Battle?”

  “They’re out of the picture.” Not entirely his fault, either. Their philosophies had been as much responsible for the disaster as he had been. “I guess none of us deserve to be hied off the God’s waiting sephiroth.”

  “The next gate?” Jeshua asked. Kahn nodded. There was nothing here for them. They moved to the third point of the triangle.

  Emerging from darkness into cloudy daylight, Kahn slumped to his knees, twitching, and Jeshua took hold of him again.

  Kahn could feel the simulacrum failing, having endured as much as it was capable of enduring. It eased him gently, without pain.

  “Where are we now?” Jeshua asked.

  Kahn recognized the land the terminal rested on. Once it had been his. Forty acres lay between gentle hills on the African plains, surrounded by ancient Soleri cities. Even during daylight the cities had sparkled with lights and motion like giant termite mounds. Now they were still.

  Empty.

  “It’s Earth.” Kahn couldn’t hold back the arrogance now, the final grand gesture. “If I’m so entitled, I give it to you. What the hell, take the whole planet.” So be it. That was the way he was.

  Perhaps the older Kahn had learned humility. But he didn’t think so.

  The simulacrum paled. The skin became waxy and the limbs stiffened. Jeshua let the body down gently on the platform.

  He camped beside an artificial lake, listening to frogs and insect chirrups. Earth’s single moon was a scythe crescent, with a bright star hanging nearby—Sirius perhaps. He had set up a lean-to between two thick-trunked trees. The day before, he had carried two boxes down from the city on a mound a kilometer away. The boxes held books and tapes.

  He had eaten fruits and nuts, abundant in the nearby jungle. He had looked at monkeys, and they had tamely played around his feet on the pathways. Briefly, he had seen a large animal, some kind of cat.

  He subdued the pangs of loneliness. In time, perhaps, the people of God-Does-Battle would build spaceships and come to Earth—or perhaps skip that kind of travel entirely, and come by way of Bifrosts. Then he might have company again. But he would never have anyone like Thinner.

  He felt very old, very out of place. Yet he was on Earth, and he had always been curious about Earth.

  Perhaps the regathering wasn’t complete yet. Obviously, not all the drops of precious oil had been collected. He could always hope.

  Looking across the lake at the dark outline of the old city on the mound, his eyes were clear and his face was serene.

  Arthur heard the chug of motor tricycles coming up the path. He remained seated in the chair, turning his head slowly, heavy-lidded eyes blinking.

  Footsteps sounded on the front porch. He listened to the voices, then got up before the knocking began, swishing his tongue through his mouth to rid himself of the sour taste of his nap.

  He opened the door on the second knock. A thin, dark-haired man dressed in black and sweating in the heat smiled at him, the smile flickering between ingratiation and embarrassment. “Arthur
Sam Daniel?”

  “Yes,” he answered, looking over the man’s shoulder at the three others.

  “You told stories about city parts and Resurrection to the Founders, ten years ago, didn’t you?”

  “I did.”

  “Nobody believed you,” the thin young man said. “No.”

  “We found your story in the old files.”

  “So?”

  “Can you come with us? There’s a car waiting.”

  “I’m going someplace?”

  “Yes, sir. We need your help, and so do the Expolitans in Ibreem. We’re cooperating on this one, sir.”

  “I see.” He looked across the fields at the Founder tractors and the lines of white tents covering the plants, coming almost up to his house. “Well, let me get what I need.”

  “I’ll help, sir.”

  And he made the journey again, by car and truck and then by boat, across the flooded delta.

  Resurrection rose from the waters like a drowned cathedral. The enclave had been evacuated a year before, when the ocean reclaimed the dry flats. He was taken from the boat to the top of the city wall in a metal basket. All the silicate spines had withdrawn.

  Resurrection was dead.

  “Why do you believe me now?” he asked as they led him through the corridors to the heat shaft.

  “It’s just as you described it,” said a young woman carrying a black notebook. “It took us months to find the report, but the Founders keep everything on file.”

  “I know,” he said ruefully. “I didn’t see all that much here. What can I tell you?”

  They took a makeshift elevator up the heat shaft, up the tallest tower, until they stood in a dead, brown forest. “We need an identification,” the woman said.

  His arms and legs ached with tension. He didn’t want to show his fear, however, so he just stared at the unlit, scuffed path, his eyes wide. They took him to the cylindrical building with the 2 and the Omega on its side.

  A half-circle door was open. Two older men carrying black cases came up behind them, one carrying a crude tape recorder. “Mr. Daniel, we’d like to make your statements permanent. If you’d just speak close to this …”