Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  “I don’ know ’oo you are … who you are … but if Th-Thinner brought you, you must be a good person.”

  Jeshua widened his eyes. “Why?”

  She shrugged. “Dis me just know.” She jumped down from the trailer, swinging from a rain-shiny spider leg. Mud splattered up her bare white calves. “If you, dis me, t’ought … if I thought you were bad, I’d ekspek’ you to brute me right now. But you don’. Even though you neba—never have a gol before.” Her strained speech started to crack and she laughed nervously. “I was tol’ abou’ you ’en you came. About your prob-lem.” She inspected him. “How do you feel?”

  “Alive. And I wouldn’t be too sure I’m no danger. I’ve never had to control myself before.”

  The girl looked him over curiously, coquettishly.

  “Mandala, it isn’t all bad,” she said. “It took care ob you. Dat’s good, is it no’?”

  “When I go home,” Jeshua said, drawing a breath, “I’m going to tell my people we should come and destroy the cities.”

  The girl frowned. “Li’ take down?”

  “Piece by piece.”

  “Nobod’ can do dat.”

  “Enough people can.”

  “No’ good in firs’ place. No’ ’tall.”

  “It’s because of them we’re like savages now.”

  The girl shimmied up the spider leg and motioned for him to follow. He lifted himself and stood on the rounded lip of the back, watching her as she walked with arms balancing to the middle of the vehicle.

  “Look all dis,” she said, and pointed around the ranked legions of Mandala. The mist was starting to burn off. Shafts of sunlight cut through and brightened wide circles of the plain. “De polis, dey are li’ not’ing else. Dey are de …” She sighed at her lapses. “They are the fines’ thing we eba put together. We should try t’save dem.”

  But Jeshua was resolute. His face burned with anger as he looked out over the disassembly. He jumped from the rim and landed in the pounded mud. “If there’s no place for people in them, they’re useless. Let the architect try to reclaim. I’ve got more immediate things to do.”

  Jeshua stalked off between the vehicles and city parts.

  The girl shook her head sadly.

  Mandala, broken down, covered at least thirty square miles of the plain.

  Jeshua took his bearings from a tall rock pinnacle, chose the shortest distance to the edge, and sighted on a peak in Arat. He walked without trouble for half an hour, and found himself passing through a widely scattered group of city fragments. Grass grew up between flattened trails. With a final sprint, he stood on the edge of all that had once been Mandala. He took a deep breath and looked behind to see if anything was following. He still had his club. He hefted it in one hand and examined it closely, trying to decide what he would do if he were attacked. He then slipped it beneath in his belt. He might need it for the long trip back to the expolis.

  Behind him, the far reaches and ranks of transports and parts lurched and swirled like a flowing tide. Mandala was beginning its reconstruction. Best to escape now.

  He ran.

  The long grass made running difficult, but he persisted until he stepped into a dry creeper burrow and fell. He got up, rubbed his ankle, and continued with a clumsy, springing gait. In an hour he rested beneath the shade of a copse of trees and laughed to himself. Nothing so ridiculous as a whole man fleeing his salvation!

  The sun beat down heavily on the plain and the grass shimmered with golden heat. It was no time to travel. Finding a small puddle of rain water in the cup of a rock, he drank from that and then slept.

  A shoe gently nudged his ribs.

  “Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod,” a voice said.

  He rolled over and looked into the face of Sam Daniel the Catholic. Two women and another man, as well as three young children, stood behind him, jockeying for position in the coolest shade.

  “Have you found peace in the wilderness?” the Catholic asked.

  Jeshua sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had nothing to fear. The chief of the guard wasn’t acting in his professional capacity—he was traveling, not searching. And besides, Jeshua was returning to the expolis.

  “I am calmer, thank you,” Jeshua said. “I apologize for my actions.”

  “It’s only been a fortnight,” Sam Daniel said. “Has so much changed since?”

  “I …” Jeshua shook his head. “I don’t think you would believe.”

  ‘You came from the direction of the traveling city,” the Catholic said, sitting on the soft loam. He motioned for the rest of the troop to rest and relax. “Meet anything interesting?”

  Jeshua asked, “Why have you come this far?”

  “For reasons of health. And to visit the western limb of Expolis Canaan, where my parents live now. My wife has a lung ailment—I think an allergic reaction to the sorghum being planted in the ridge paddies above Bethel-Japhet. We’ll keep away until the harvest. Have you stayed in other villages nearby?”

  Jeshua shook his head. “Sam Daniel, I have always thought you a man of reason and honor. Will you listen with an open mind to my story?”

  The Catholic considered, then nodded.

  “I’ve been inside a city.”

  Sam Daniel raised his bushy eyebrows. “The one on the plain?”

  Jeshua told him most of the story. Then he stood. “I’d like you to follow me. Away from the rest. I have proof.”

  Sam Daniel followed Jeshua behind the rocks, and Jeshua shyly revealed his proof.

  Sam Daniel stared.

  “It’s real?” he asked.

  Jeshua nodded. “I’ve been restored. I can go back to Bethel-Japhet and become a regular member of the community.”

  “No one has ever been in a city before. Not for as long as anyone remembers.”

  “There’s at least one other, a girl. She’s from the city chasers.”

  “But the city took itself apart and marched. We had to change our course to go around it or face the hooligans following. How could anyone live in a rebuilding city?”

  “There are ways.” And he told about the architect and its extensions. “I’ve had to twist my thoughts to understand what I’ve experienced, but I’ve reached a conclusion. We don’t belong in the cities, any more than they deserve to have us.”

  “Our shame lies in them.”

  “Then they must be destroyed.”

  Sam Daniel looked at him sharply. “That would be blasphemous. They serve to remind us of our sins.”

  “We were exiled not for our sins, but for what we are—human beings! Would you kick a dog from your house because it dreams of hunting during Passover—or Lent? Then why should a city kick its citizens out because of their inner thoughts? Or because of a minority’s actions? They were built with morals too rigid to be practical. In their self-righteousness, they are worse than the most callous priest or judge. They’ve caused us needless suffering, and as long as they stand, they remind us of an inferiority and shame that is a lie. We should tear them down to their roots and sow the ground with salt!”

  Sam Daniel rubbed his nose thoughtfully. “The cities are perfect and eternal,” he said. “If they’re self-righteous, they deserve to be. You of all should know that.”

  “You haven’t understood,” Jeshua said, pacing. “They are not perfect, not eternal. They were made by men—”

  “Papa! Papa!” a child screamed. They ran back to the group. A black, tractor-mounted giant with an angular, birdlike head and five arms sat ticking quietly near the trees. Sam Daniel called his family to the center of the copse and looked at Jeshua with fear and anger.

  “Has it come for you?”

  Jeshua nodded.

  “Then it’s all true. Go with it! Leave us be!”

  Jeshua stepped forward. He didn’t look at the Catholic as he said, “Tell the rest what I’ve told you. Tell them what I’ve done, and what I know we must all do.”

  A boy clung to Sam Daniel’s legs and softly moaned.
>
  The giant picked up Jeshua with a clawed arm and set him delicately on its back. It spun around with a spew of dirt and grass, then moved quietly back across the plain to Mandala. When they arrived, the city was almost finished rebuilding. It looked no different from when he’d first seen it, but its colorful, re-emerging order now seemed ugly and pointless. He preferred the human asymmetry of brick homes, wandering fields, stone walls. The city’s soft, efficient noises made him queasy. His reaction grew like steam pressure in a boiler, and his muscles felt tense as a snake about to strike.

  The giant set him down on the city’s lowest level, near the central shaft. Thinner met him there. Jeshua saw the girl on a bridge extending across the circular design.

  “If it makes any difference, we had nothing to do with bringing you back,” Thinner said.

  “If it makes any difference to you, I had nothing to do with returning. Where will you shut me in tonight?”

  “Nowhere,” Thinner said. “You have the run of the city.”

  “And the girl?”

  “What about her?”

  “What does she expect?”

  “You don’t make sense,” Thinner said.

  “Does she expect me to stay and make the best of things?”

  “Ask her. We don’t control her, either.”

  Jeshua walked past the cyborgs and over the circular design, now disordered again. The girl watched him as he approached. He stopped below the bridge and looked up at her, hands tightly clenched by his waist.

  “What do you want from this place?” he asked.

  “Freedom,” she said. “The choice of what to be, where to live.”

  “But the city won’t let you leave. You have no choice.”

  “Yes, the city—I can leave whenever I want.”

  Thinner called from across the mall. “As soon as the city is put together, you can both leave. The inventory is policed only during a move.”

  Jeshua’s shoulders slumped and his bristling stance softened. He had nothing to fight against now, not immediately. Even so, he kept his fists clenched.

  “I’m confused,” he said.

  “Stay for the evening,” the girl suggested. “Then will your thoughts come clear.”

  He followed her to his room near the peak of the city. The room hadn’t been changed. Before she left him there, he asked what her name was.

  “Anata,” she said. “Anata Leucippe.”

  “Do you get l-lonely in the evenings?” he asked, stumbling over the question like a child in a field of corn stubble.

  “Never,” she said. She laughed and turned half away from him. “An’ now certes am dis em, you no’ trustable!”

  She left him by the door. “Eat!” she called from the corner of the access hall. “I be back around mid of the evening.”

  He shut his door, then turned to the kitchen. Being a whole man did not stop the pain and fear of loneliness. The possibility of quenching was in fact a final turn of the thumbscrew. He paced like a caged bear, thinking furiously but reaching no conclusions.

  By midnight he was near an explosion. He waited in the viewing area of the terrace, watching moonlight bathe God-Does-Battle­ like milk, gripping the railing with a strength that could have crushed wood. He listened to the noise of the city, less soothing than he remembered, neither synchronous nor melodic.

  Anata came for him half an hour after she said she would. Jeshua had gone through so many ups and downs of despair and aloofness that he was exhausted. She took his hand and led him to the central shaft. They found hidden curved stairwells and descended four levels to a broad promenade that circled a wide level of the shaft.

  “The walkway, it doesn’t work yet,” she told him. “I’m studying. My tongue, I’m getting your words.”

  “There’s no reason you should speak like me,” he said.

  “It is difficult. Dis me—I cannot cure a lifetime ob—of talk.”

  “Your own language is pretty,” he said, half-lying.

  “I know. Prettier. Alive-o. But—” She shrugged.

  Jeshua thought he couldn’t be more than five or six years older than she was, by no means an insurmountable distance. He jerked as the city lights dimmed. All around, the walls lost their bright glow and produced in its stead a pale lunar gleam, like the night outside.

  “This is what I brough’ you here for,” she said. “To see.”

  The ghost-moon luminescence made him shiver. The walls and floor exchanged long, curling threads of light, and from the threads grew spirits, shimmering first like mirages, then settling into translucent steadiness. They came in couples, groups, crowds, and with them were children, animals, birds, and other things he couldn’t identify.

  They began to move.

  They filled the promenade and terraces and walked, talking in tunnel-end whispers he couldn’t quite make out, laughing and looking and being alive—but not in Jeshua’s time. They were not solid, not robots or cyborgs. They were spirits from ten centuries past, and he was rapidly losing all decorum watching them come to form around him.

  He groaned and tried to escape from the ghosts.

  “Sh!” Anata said, taking his arm. “They’re just dreams. They don’t hurt anybody.”

  Jeshua clasped his elbows and forced himself to be calm.

  “This is what the city desires,” Anata said. ‘“You want to kill it because it keeps out the people, but look—it hurts, too. It wants. What’s a city without people? Just sick. No’ bad. No’ evil. Can’t kill a sick one, can you?”

  Each night, she said, the city reenacted these living memories of the past, no two alike, and each night she came to watch. Jeshua saw the whispering half-life of a billion recorded memories, and his anger slowly, painfully faded. His hands loosened their grip. He could never sustain hatred for long. Now, with understanding still just out of reach, he could only resign himself to a simmer of confusion.

  “It’ll take me a long, long time to forgive,” he said.

  “This me, too.” She sighed. ‘When I was married, I found I could not have children. My husband could not understand. All the other women could have children. So I left in shame and came to the city we had always worshipped. I thought it would be, the city, the only one to cure. But now, I don’t know. I do not want another husband. I want to wait for this to go away. These dreams, this pain. It is too beautiful to leave while the dreams are still here.”

  “Go away?”

  “The cities, they get old and they wander,” she said. “Not all things work good now. Pieces are dying. Soon it will all die. Even such as Thinner, they die. And no more are being made. The city is too old and too sad to grow new parts.

  “So I’ll wait until the beauty is gone.”

  Jeshua looked at her more closely. There was a whitish cast in her left eye. It had not been there a few hours ago.

  “It is time for me to sleep,” she said softly. “Very late.”

  She held up her hand, as they had just watched a lady do, a thousand years before. He took her raised hand and led her through the phantoms, up the empty but crowded staircases, then asked her where she lived.

  “I don’t have just one room,” she said. “I sleep in all of them at one time or another. But we can’t go back dere.” She stopped. “There. Can’t go back.” She looked up at him. “Dis me, canno’ spek mucky ob—” She held her hand to her mouth. “I forget. I learned bu’ now—I don’t know …”

  He felt a slow horror grind in his stomach.

  “Something is wrong,” she said. Her voice became deeper, like Thinner’s, and she opened her mouth to scream but could not. She tore away from him and backed away. “I’m doing something wrong!”

  “Take off your shirt,” Jeshua said.

  “No.” She looked offended.

  “It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then take off your shirt.”

  She began to remove it. Her hands hesitated.

  “Now.”


  She peeled it over her head and stood naked, with her small breasts outthrust, narrow hips square and bonily dimpled, genitals flossed in feathery brown. A pattern of scars on her chest and breasts formed a circle. Bits of black remained like cinders, like the cinders on his own chest—from a campfire that had never been.

  Once, both of them had been marked like Thinner, stamped with the seal of Mandala.

  She turned away from him on the staircase, phantoms drifting past and through her. He reached out to stop her but wasn’t quick enough. Her foot spasmed under her and she fell, gathering into a twisted ball, down the staircase, up against the railings, to the bottom.

  He stood near the top and saw her pale blue fluid and red skinblood and green tissue leak from a torn leg.

  He felt he might go insane.

  “Thinner!” he screamed, and turned, calling the name over and over. The lunar glow brightened. The phantoms disappeared. The halls and vaults echoed with his braying cry.

  The cyborg appeared at the bottom of the staircase and knelt to examine the girl.

  “Both of us,” Jeshua said. “Both lies!”

  “We don’t have the parts to fix her,” Thinner said.

  “Why did you bring us back? Why not just tell us what we are?”

  “Until a few years ago there was still hope,” Thinner said. “The city was still trying to correct the programs, still trying to get back its citizens. Sixty years ago it gave the architect more freedom to try to find out what went wrong. We built ourselves—you, her, the others—to go among the humans and see what they were like now, how the cities could accommodate. If we had told you this, would you have believed? As humans, you were so convincing you couldn’t even go into other cities, just your own. Then the aging began, and the sickness. The attempt finally died.”

  Jeshua felt the scars on his chest and shut his eyes, wishing, hoping it was all a nightmare.

  “David the smith purged most of the mark from you when you were small and young, that you might pass for human. The city had already put a block on your development, that you might someday be forced to return.”

  “My father was like me.”