by Clay Gilbert
“Hello, Shadow,” the old man said. “Who’s your friend? He looks a little … new to the Forgotten City.” “He is.” Shadow put a hand on Eternity’s shoulder and nudged him forward. “This is Eternity. He was Ace’s friend.”
Eternity was, all at once, very awareof his appearance. The grey robes he wore were torn and dirty, and a stubble of hair had begun to show on his previously shaved head. Nothing to be too proud of, but enough to break Regulations. His shoes were torn as well.
“Eternity,” said Shadow, indicating the old man, “this is—” The old man interrupted. “Shadow,” he said with a smile, “I know who I am, and I am at least as capable as you of explainingmyself to yourfriend. Myname is Sentinel. It was a weightyname when Ifirst chose it. A fact I’m sure you can appreciate, Eternity, given your own choice. I was younger then, though not as young as you or Shadow.” He smiled again and chuckled. “I fear that now, in my old age, I have come at last to look the part.”
“Sentinel’s the oldest person in the Forgotten City,” Shadow told Eternity. “So I hear,” he added, with a glance at the old man.
“You talk too much, Shadow,” said Sentinel. “Come, Eternity. There’s a room upstairs where you can have a bath, and then we’ll get you something clean and new to wear.”
* * * *
“A safe evening to you all, Citizens.”
There’s still no word on the whereabouts of a boy reported missing from Central Sector over a month ago. He is believed to have been kidnapped by a gang of the rebels responsible for the recent violence in Govsec. In other news—”
Jacob wished he could silence the voice from the glass wall. He thought of breaking it, but theyhad other ways of making known what they wished known if they were driven to use them. He wished he could sleep, but he knew that possibility had passed for now. He’d slept no more than a few hours on any of the nights—five weeks’ worth of nights gone now— since his son disappeared. The newsperson called it a kidnapping, but Eternity’s father knew that was a lie. His son had run away.
For the Providers’ sake! I only told him to stay in to keep him safe. If he was scared—if he wasn’t happy—why couldn’t he tell me? But even then, what could I have done?
He sat alone in the darkness and wept.
* * * *
No one from the City would know me now.
Eternity looked into the ancient mirror that stood in one cluttered corner of Sentinel’s shop. In its reflection, he saw himself as he always wished he had the freedom to be, yet had never been able to precisely imagine. He wore a pair of faded denim jeans, with a jacket of the same material. Beneath the jacket, he wore a black, short-sleeved shirt. On his feet were a pair of black, leather boots like the ones Ace had worn.
He smiled, running his hands over the stubble on his head. Yeah, it’s no big deal right now, but one of these days, it’ll be as long as yours was, Ace.
None of these outward appearances would have mattered, though, had it not been for the change he saw reflected from the eyes of the boy in the mirror. In his eyes, shone the look of freedom Eternity recognized in Ace when he first caught sight of him on the evening report.
No, they wouldn’t know me now.
“My name is Eternity,” whispered the boy in the mirror, and the look on his face was one of power and joy.
* * * * Eternity, Shadow, and Sentinel sat in a back room, closed off from the rest of the shop. Outside, it was dusk, and there was little sound in the streets.
“All right,” said the old man. “I’ll tell you my story. Maybe it’s time to tell it again now, since I’ve told it only to a few, and all of them are gone.”
“Why now?” Eternity asked. “Because I feel as Shadow does: that there’s something special about you, Eternity, and maybe there’s something you can learn from this. In any case, I grew up in the City, and I truly believed in the Providers. I couldn’t wait until I was eighteen and old enough to do my part for them. By the time that time came, I would have been content to do anything I was told to do, but the job I was offered was special. Well, that’s how I saw it, anyway. I was given the task of being one of the guards at the Towers. Have you seen them, Eternity?”
“Well, yeah. On the screencasts—not up close.” Eternity remembered seeing the pairs of robed guards flanking the entrance to the great black buildings that some said housed the Providers themselves.
“The job filled me with pride,” Sentinel continued. “I felt as if this were a task the Providers themselves had selected me to perform. No one’s ever made to do anything in the City, you see. Every position, lofty or meek, is filled by Citizens, and whatever they may think, no one’s really above anyone else. Except, of course, the Providers themselves. That’s why it’s so hard to resist the lie of life in the City—because the lie one tells oneself is always the most powerful.”
Eternity held up his hand for silence, a gesture he realized a moment later might be seen as rude. Too late now. “They didn’t threaten anyone?” he asked. “Not explicitly. The Providers never made an appearance on the late report”—at this the two youths exchanged grins and snickered—“to threaten anyone, nor did they tell anyone, by any other means of communication, that they’d be killed. But the sense of a threat was there nonetheless—enough of a threat to prevent anyone, including myself, from venturing too high in either of the Towers. Would you, Eternity, venture into the palaces of gods?”
One day, maybe, he thought, but said nothing. “However,” Sentinel continued, “no one is safe from the man who thinks he’s doing what his gods tell him to. There were two of us on guard at the Towers that night. It was late—I’m not sure exactly how late—when we glimpsed shapes in the darkness coming toward us. As they got closer, we could see that they wore the robes of citizens. Ordinarily, though, no one walked the streets in Govsec that late— besides the Tower guards that is.”
Sentinel paused, and Eternity saw a troubled look come into the old man’s eyes before he continued. “They kept coming, and we called out to them. Ithought for suretheyhad to have heard us. Theydidn’t giveanysign. Theyjust kept walking.”
“Did they have guns?” Eternity asked. “We thought theyhad to. We thought theyhad to be enemies of the City—yes, the screencasts talked about those back in my time, too. We thought that was the only reason they wouldn’t have told us who they were. We thought—but we didn’t see any guns, and theyjust kept coming. I’m not quite sure how close they were when the guard on duty with me decided he was tired of waiting for them to answer and shot one of them with a lasgun. I didn’t even know he had it. It all happened so fast. The gun was just there in his hand, then the flash of the blast and one of the strangers fell, then the other one ran. But not before I got a good look at the fear in his eyes. The other guard—just stood there like he was waiting for the runaway to return. If he had, I’m sure he’d have been shot too. What scared me the most that night wasn’t the strangers approaching us or their silence. It was the look in the other guard’s eyes—the look of a man who feels he’s served his gods well.”
Eternity looked across the table at Shadow, and knew the shell-shocked expression in the other boy’s eyes was reflected in his own. “What’d you do after that night?” Eternity asked.
“I didn’t go back home,” Sentinel said. “I spent two years wandering the City. Everywhere I went, two faces followed me—the slayer and the slain. I forgot all about duty and devotion—mygods had forsaken me. Ihad seen a man killed in cold blood to protect their secrets—and at my young age, I believed god needed neither secrets nor protectors.
“I’d heard of a rebel community somewhere in the City. I bought a hovercycle and searched every sector by air and, where I could, on foot. I never found it. Believing the rebels to be a myth or, worse, alie, Iset out forwhatever layoutside the City, not knowing even if there was anything out there to find. But if I couldn’t be free of the Providers within the City’s confines, I’d be freeof them beyond it. In desperation, I went west�
��toward the Deserted Sector.
“I was struck with fear as I neared the Deserted Sector. All of my resolve, all my defiance of the Providers seemed to melt away. I was shaking. What if the Providers somehow sensed my disobedience? I was suddenly sure I would crash into the Deserted Sector and die, alone and a traitor. Then, the Wall was there in front of me. I panicked, barely managing to steer my cycle over.
“I can’t describe the relief that washed over me as I beheld the Forgotten Cityfor the first time. Isuspect you both know how I felt. The Forgotten City was newer in those days. Those who built it had just begun to feel safe enough from Them to risk putting down roots. It was just this part, where we Oldtimers live.” A warm smile broke across Sentinel’s face again and was gone as quickly as it had come. “I was able to maneuver the cycle to the road below, which ran through the Forgotten City then, just as it does today, although it was narrower then. From that point on, I remember little else. I think I fainted. At least, I remember looking up at people standing over me. I remember being asked what my name was. ‘Sentinel,’ I remember saying, and I have never since refused the name.
“It was accurate, after all. A sentinel or guard was what I’d been in my short period of service to the Black City. After the incident at the Towers, I became my own sentinel, guarding myself against the greyness and paranoia of the Providers. Now, in more than one sense, I am a sentinel for history. I remember truths that I fought hard to keep hold of, and Ipreserve them against the lies we live with now and the ones that still might be coming down the road.
“Sometimes, in the darkness of dreams, I imagine the faces of the slayer and the slain staring wide-eyed at me from the dark the waytheydid that night at the Towers. The two faces in the dream, though … They’re both mine.”
Eternity and Shadow sat in silence when Sentinel finished speaking. “That’s amazing,” Shadow said after a few moments. “Gotta admit, Sentinel, I thought you’d been here forever.” He grinned.
“Not quite forever, I’m pleased to say,” Sentinel laughed. “What is it, Eternity?” he asked, noticing the serious look on the other youth’s face.
“You mentioned the ones who built the Forgotten City,” said Eternity. “I thought maybe Ace did, or some of his people. Who were they? The ones who were here first, I mean? Are there any of them left?”
“I’ll tell you what I know about them,” Sentinel said. “No. Better than that. I’ll take you to one of them.”
CHAPTER SIX Emily wished she could go home. Living in Eastern Sector with her family,andthen working in Studio Block, she’d had an idea that the City was large. Being alone in it, though, with no one to depend on and nowhere to go, she felt as if she were adrift in the endless sea of stars, with nothing to stop her from falling through darkness forever. She wished for the oblivion of Their voices in her head, of the feeling of unity she had before she started to disbelieve. That was another time, another part of herself she could never get back. Despite everything—despite the anger still smoldering inside her—the doubt was still there.
One thing’s for sure: I can’t disappear here. Too many people know who I am. I’d just get dragged right back into my old life, and I don’t want that. I don’t know exactly what I want yet, but not that. She walked toward Western Station, where she saw a skycar arriving beneath the platform marked NORTHBOUND. Nothing much happens in the north of the City. Should be quiet enough, give me time to think. Her passage obscured by the glare of the rising sun, Emily boarded the skycar and headed toward her uncertain future.
* * * * “When all the rest of them left,” Sentinel was saying to Eternity and Shadow, “Dhania alone stayed behind. That in itself was surprising. They weren’t much for staying in one place.”
As they walked, Eternity found himself amazed at how different the Oldtimers’ settlement was from anything he’d seen in the Black City. The houses here were not a simple matter of efficiency and utility. They were as distinct from one another as Eternity imagined their owners to be, planted like seeds in the soil of this wasteland, sprouting from the blasted earth like desert blossoms, beautiful and enduring.
The dwelling they stopped at looked both natural and grand. Eternity thought that, once again, here was a sight that could never exist in the Cityhe’d left behind. If anything, it looked like a relic of that world he knew only from the piecemeal histories imparted to him by the thoughtfeeds. The building looked as though it had not so much been built as coaxed or conjured from the ground.
“Eternity, Shadow,” Sentinel said, as they stepped off the winding staircase which led to the house’s wide wooden porch, where an old woman waited for them, “This is Dhania.” When Eternity and Shadow started to enter, Sentinel motioned for them to stop. “Wait until you’re asked,” he said.
“You always did stand too much on the kinds of formality that don’t matter,” Dhania said to Sentinel, with a smile and a look in her eyes that made her seem fifty years younger in an instant.
“May the gods bless your coming and you’re going,” she told the two youths.
“The gods?” asked Eternity. “Do you mean the Providers?” “No, lad,” Dhania said. “Those idols are just babes next to the Mother and Father of All, and never will those Towers hold down anyone who knows themselves a son or daughter of the Earth Mother and the Lord of the Wheel.”
Eternity smiled. “I’d like to hear more about them.” “Come inside, all of you,” said Dhania. Dhania’s house was just as striking on the inside as it was on the outside. The walls were rounded, as if it had been hollowed out rather than built from the foundation up, and the room in which they found themselves was filled with the sorts of artifacts that Eternity had seen in Sentinel’s shop.
“Where did you find these?” Eternity asked at last. “They’re not like anything I’ve ever seen in the City.” “They’re part of mycollection,” she said, as if that explained everything. “That’s part of what my people did—what we do, assuming I’m not the last now. We collect things— collect civilizations, really, bit-by-bit. We gather up dead cultures, forgotten histories, and discarded myths. Some people called us Dreamwalkers. We used to call ourselves the Children of Memory, or sometimes simply ‘the Kind’, to show that we were part of the rest, but set apart, too. They didn’t understand why we wanted to preserve things. The Providers would rather everyone forget that there was a world before they got here—a world where people weren’t so quiet and afraid all the time.”
Eternity’s eyes weredrawn to a small slab of stone that stood in the corner, supported by carved wooden pillars with symbols on them, some familiar to Eternity from the thoughtfeed histories, others, completely foreign. Small wooden figures stood at either end of the slab—one feminine, with wide hips and rounded breasts, although she had no facial features to speak of, the other masculine, with what looked like horns sprouting from his head. The female figure held a globe in one upraised hand. The male figure seemed rooted upon a great wheel, of which he appeared to be himself a part.
“That’s them, isn’t it?” Eternity asked. “The Mother and Father of All?” Dhania nodded.
“I’ve never heard of them,” Eternity said.
“Of course you wouldn’t in the City. The Providers don’t want anyone to remember any worship but theirs or know anygods but them. If people remembered the Mother and the Father, they’d have to know that there’s a world somewhere that’s more than machines and cold, black buildings.” She stood up, motioning for Eternity and Shadow to follow. “Come on out back.”
Dhania led them down a staircase of stone. Before they even reached the bottom, Eternity was overtaken by the feeling he’d just passed through a portal into another world. Green vines twined along the railings of the staircase, and he could see bright shoots and blossoms of every conceivable color beneath him as they descended the steps into the garden below. Eternity caught sight of two stone statues that were larger reflections of the wooden ones inside, but he was too overwhelmed by the sight of the n
atural beauty that surrounded him to take much notice.
“How many places like this are there?” he asked Dhania. “I don’t know. In the City? Not many. And even in the Forgotten City, probably not as many as could be. But there area few,at least. Lots of people don’t know things will even grow in the Deserted Sector. It’s supposed to be such a wasteland out here. My people, though, we were travelers, nomads. Still are, if there’s any left but me, and when I was travelin’, we used to leave gardens like this behind us everywhere we went.”
Eternitypictured the path of the Children of Memory, a great swath of rainbow blossoms, tall corn, and golden grain, and he smiled. “We should learn to grow things again—not just flowers, but our food, too,” he said, gesturing to a ripening ear of corn that dangled from a nearby stalk.
“We’re slowly doing that, here. Your people—at least when Ace was in charge—didn’t seem all that interested in it. Maybe when someone new comes along, that can change.”
Eternity nodded. “Maybe so.” “We think the Mother and Father want us to take care of ourselves and take care of each other. They’ve put the things here that we need to do that, if we just use them. Come on, both of you. Let’s go back inside.”
Eternity couldn’t help noticing how quiet Shadow was when Dhania mentioned Ace. He still misses him. But then it wasn’t that long ago. I miss him too, and I barely knew him.
“Did you find anythingenlighteningin the garden?”Sentinel asked them when they came back inside. Dhania smiled at him.
“A few things,” Eternity said. “I understand the gardens, and the growing,” he said, turning back to Dhania, “but why the collections? Why remember people by picking up their leftover junk and saving it? And where did you find all of it anyway?”