The Stone War

by Madeleine E. Robins

  The boy roared. “Don’t lie! Tee-jin hate Jit so Jit hate Tee-jin. Don’t lie, Man!” And he filled Tietjen with the image of that autumn day on his street, filled him so there was no room for anything but the sight of Maia’s crushed body in the fading golden light, and of Jit, four stories tall, standing over him. The boy laughed, his long face twisted as though he were crying, and he bent to sweep one hand along the crowded sidewalk, pushing people like dolls until they lay crumpled against cars and stairways, crushing the shanties that leaned against brownstones. “Don’t lie!” He reached for Tietjen.

  At the moment the long fingers touched him, Tietjen was shocked by memories, none of them his: of the floods and earthquakes and fires and explosions, the bleak gray dawn of the morning after the disaster, of Rockefeller Center and the Public Library collapsed in on themselves, of the dead everywhere, of Gable and his monsters. A holocaust of stone and flesh, and nothing to stop it, no one to stop it. Jit’s hand closed around Tietjen, squeezing the memories into him, while he turned to swipe backhanded at the houses on the street, knocking out windows that rained glass onto the people below. Tietjen felt everything, more than anyone should feel: their terror, the terror of the city as it fell, the rage of the survivors, the ones who left. And one thing more, almost impossible to catch among the operatic emotions that flooded him.

  Tietjen stopped struggling. Remembered that what was happening was all memory and fantasy, real and unreal. What he had sensed, under everything else, was the boy’s fear. Jit was afraid.

  “Stop now,” Tietjen said firmly. He used the voice he had used when Chris threw a tantrum or Davy got overexcited. “Stop it.” He drew on that old voice, and the new strength he had, the city in him speaking to the city in the boy, stone calling to stone. “Stop now, Jit.” If the boy could change these dreams and memories, so could Tietjen. He thought himself as big as Jit, then larger, adult size to the boy’s adolescent slightness. Tietjen put his hand on Jit’s shoulder firmly. “Stop now. It’s time to stop.”

  The kid turned to Tietjen, but thrashed wildly, hands balled into fists, feet kicking, doing damage to the streetscape, not to Tietjen. “Stop hurting people. I’m the one you want to hurt.”

  “Jit kill you!” the boy answered, striking more viciously.

  Tietjen grabbed his hands and held them down. The boy struggled. Tietjen pulled him closer, until he was pinned against Tietjen’s chest. The image of the street around them was broken up by pictures of Irene, dead, Chris and Davy, dead, Ketch and Mack and Maia, all dead. Anything to hurt Tietjen. He shook them off.

  “You won’t kill me, and I won’t let you hurt anyone else,” he said quietly. “Tell me what I did, Jit.”

  The boy kept struggling, making a high, keening noise through his nose, like an animal in a frenzy of panic. Tietjen held on to the image of holding the boy, centering himself, calling on the stone he had discovered in himself, calling to the stone he could feel in Jit. He had never been this kind of calm before.

  Jit’s words, when they came, were almost lost in the whining. “It was a accident.” No broken lowspeak; the heartbroken sound of a very small child fearing the most awful consequences in the world. “Accident,” he said again.

  “Of course it was,” Tietjen said quietly. What? What would he say to Davy? “Whatever it was, you wouldn’t have done it on purpose, Jit. I know that. Tell me what happened and we can fix it.”

  Again the city all around them, quakes and fires and broken stone, death and fear. This time Tietjen saw Jit sleeping, curled up in a tunnel, light filtered through a grating, patterning his face and the pile of grimy blankets draped over him. He turned in his sleep, rolled from one side to the next as if he were dreaming. Then, he sat up, head back and eyes closed, hands at his side … and after a moment sank back again. In that moment Tietjen saw something flow from the boy, a flash of darkness, something indefinable. And he understood at last what the boy had done, and felt sick with horror.

  The kid was trembling in his arms. Mindlessly, Tietjen began to stroke his shoulder, murmuring, “It wasn’t your fault, it was an accident.” All the time he was thinking, I can’t forgive this. No one could forgive this. The boy’s trembling turned to struggling again. Tietjen held on to him. Tell me what it is and we can fix it, he had said. And he had tried to fix it, and the boy had tried to hurt him. What wasn’t he understanding?

  “Jit, why are you so angry with me? Did you”—he thought of how to say it—“did you have that terrible dream that hurt the city because you were angry with me?”

  The boy stilled in his arms, looked at Tietjen with tearless venom. One more memory played: himself, sitting in one of the windows at the Store on a dark night, looking out over the city. It was—it felt familiar, but it took Tietjen a few moments to remember. It was the night of the day they had won their fight with Gable’s people. It was the night he had believed that all their battles were over. He felt the breeze again, saw the velvety blackness of the city, clusters of shadow hinting at size and mass; glitter of distant windows in the moonlight; a festive awning of stars, their light uncontested by the city. Remembered his own memories that night. Then remembered Jit’s: Gable had been wrong: Tietjen was the father.

  Tietjen saw it all: Jit had helped to win the battle with Gable, had given them gifts. Jit had loved him. Now it begins, he had thought. And he had filled himself with anger, with rage as fiery and feral as anything that Jit had ever felt—at the thing that had hurt the city. At Jit.

  Tietjen wanted to laugh, it was so horrible. So much death and pain and fear—because he had cared so much for the city, and the boy had cared so much for him. What a sick, sad joke.

  Jit broke away from Tietjen’s grasp. “Tee-jin lied,” he said again. “Tee-jin lying right now.”

  He was right, Tietjen thought hopelessly. He had lied, without knowing it. How could he forgive the boy for laying waste to New York? For killing Ketch? For creating the monsters who had killed Maia. For making Barbara his tool, stripping her of herself and using her to speak his outrage. You don’t forgive things like that.

  But Barbara had forgiven him. Or at least loved him enough to see past her hurt. And this kid, who was almost man-sized but thought and felt like a kid Davy’s age—he was all hurts, all loneliness. I can’t forgive him, Tietjen thought. Maybe that’s not what he needs.

  Quietly he spoke. “It’s all right. You didn’t know, and I understand that now. I’m sorry I hurt you; I hope you can forgive me. But it’s over now, Jit. It’s okay.” He took the boy in his arms again and rocked slightly, feeling the motion comfort himself as much as the boy. Tietjen breathed deeply. “It’s okay. Nothing you could do would keep me from loving you—not now that I know you. It’s okay.” He said the words over and over until they were nonsense on his tongue, and kept saying them still. The boy stopped moving, stopped trembling, seemed at last to have fallen deeply asleep, and still Tietjen repeated the words, listening to the truth of them that became clearer with each repetition.

  The streetscape, the images of the blasted city, everything faded until there was only Tietjen and Jit, rocking together, silent and unseeing.

  It was hot. Tietjen moved and felt his muscles work, not the gliding, frictionless motion of nowhere but the movement of reality. Something hot trickled down the back of his neck. He could smell his own sweat, and see the redness of sunlight through his eyelids. He opened his eyes.

  He was standing among the stone animals. He could not tell how long he had been there—the sun was still high in the sky. A few feet away the boy lay on his side, curled up as if against the cold. Tietjen reached a hand out to feel the pale skin which was sweaty and cool. Shock, he thought distantly. Shock.

  He turned and looked north. Barbara was standing there, watching. He waved at her. Waved again, when she was slow to move toward him.

  “Are you okay?” she called when she got a little closer.

  “Okay,” he called. “You?”

  She made a fa
ce at him; he wanted to laugh. “I’m peachy. Fine as frog hair. Wasn’t he there?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Wasn’t the boy there?” she asked again. She was almost abreast of him, and followed his glance. Then she started, as if she’d suddenly seen a snake. “Jesus. What happened to him?”

  Tietjen ignored the question for a moment. “How long have I been here?”

  She blinked. “You’ve been standing there for about twenty minutes. I was afraid he’d—I don’t know. Frozen you in place, or sucked your brains out or something. I couldn’t walk away, but I was getting-nervous.”

  Tietjen put an arm out and around her shoulders. “I’m sorry.” He knelt at Jit’s side and felt the boy’s skin. Still sweaty and cool. Pensively, Tietjen took off his shirt and draped it around the boy.

  Barbara frowned. “That’s sweet. What the hell happened? What’s going on?”

  “He tried to hurt me, but I was a little tough to swallow, I guess.” Tietjen smiled. “I want to go home. Are you hungry? I’m hungry.” From Central Park he thought he heard birdsong, and there was something else, a faint ringing he knew he should recognize.

  Barbara looked at him, her mouth gaping theatrically. “You’re a little tough to swallow? I guess so. You want to go home?”

  Tietjen nodded. “I do. Don’t you?”

  “Ye-e-es. And what about him?”

  Tietjen pulled the boy into his arms, awkwardly, and tried to stand. It had been easier in his head, but then, things usually are. “We bring him.” The ringing came from the west, faintly. From over the Hudson, he realized. There are boats on the Hudson, going downriver. He’s let us loose again; we’re free.

  “We bring this boy back to the Store?”

  “To the Store.”

  “After what he’s done?” Barbara asked.

  Tietjen shook his head and shifted the kid’s weight in his arms. “You don’t know the half of it,” he said. “Come on, let’s go home.”

  It was time for the World to come back. Time to go home. They started back across the Park, empty of shadows.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  This book was a very long time in coming together, and many people helped it on its way: the Cambridge Science Fiction Workshop; the Clarion Writers Workshop, 1981; Elaine Rado, Steve Popkes, Melissa Ann Singer, M. Lucie Chin, Connor Cochran, Duncan Eagleson, Laura J. Mixon, Claire Eddy, Kij Johnson, Donald Keller, Shira Daemon, Patty Fuller, Stephanie Smith, Margaret Bishop, Barbara Krasner, Jane Brown, and Danny Caccavo, all of whom have read, suggested, raged, soothed, and otherwise been friends and critics when either or both were needed. Gratitude also to my online correspondents and my coworkers at Acclaim Comics, who encouraged me through the last stages of Terminal Book.

  I got much needed assistance from the Maps Office of the New York City Parks Department, including (slightly bemused) help with Central Park tunnel maps; from the Library of the American Museum of Natural History with data on Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins and his stone dinosaurs; from Sage Walker, who told me cool stuff about dead bodies and amputations; and from the staff of the Bookstore Cafe at Barnes and Noble’s branch at 82nd and Broadway, who let me sit and finish the book when home and children became too distracting. Enormous gratitude goes also to my excellent—and very patient—editor, Patrick Nielsen Hayden, and his equally excellent wife, Teresa, without whom, etc., and to my friends and former coworkers at Tor, a place where people truly love puttin’ out books.