Zalophus does not know this. But that other thing, that mote of human consciousness trapped within him— it sees and understands. Ucalegon the Prince of Storms is coming; Baratdaja the Healing Wind is shrieking northward across the peninsula. Beneath the domes of Araboth the Ascendants dream of blood and steel, the Architects of grids of light; but Outside the Green Country grows nearer. Somewhere within the ancient whale’s brain that jot of humanity sees the Green Country, and it understands and remembers. The tiny imprisoned voice exults, to have glimpsed it thus for one last moment; and then is forever silenced.
If Hobi had been a more patient young man, he might have waited for Nasrani Orsina to return. If he hadn’t been so frightened by his father’s madness, he might have recalled that it was unusual for more than a few days to pass without a visit from the exile. Nasrani and the Architect Imperator were both grand masters at the intricate and ancient word-game tanka, which involved creating an image in five words. Not surprisingly, Sajur Panggang was adept at verbal landscaping—
Sanguine tapestry,
moldering leaves:
Autime—
Never mind that he had never seen real leaves moldering anywhere, save within the vivarium. Nasrani did not share his friend’s sentimental disposition but preferred a type of verbal portraiture, often scabrous. For example,
Drooling imbecile,
his clothes
smell—
An unkind reference to a member of the Reception Committee who had annoyed Nasrani during his brief incarceration. Nothing save an event of truly calamitous proportions—say, the murder of one of Nasrani’s sisters—would have canceled the weekly tanka game, with its bursts of rude and delighted laughter and the scent of Amity heavy in the air. If Hobi had been a patient and prudent young man, he might have waited—although, as it turned out, he would have waited in vain.
But Hobi was not that sort of young man. In twelve hours Sajur Panggang had not moved from his chair by the ruined mercury lamp. The replicant Khum brought him tea and whiskey and cardamom-flavored cakes, but Sajur only sat, snoring loudly or else waking to finger Prophet Rayburn’s crucified image among the slivers of broken glass. He did not hear Hobi when the boy spoke to him; he did not fight when his son and the replicant tried to move him, only let his body grow slack and slumped back grinning in the chair. Hobi finally left him alone, sickened and terrified. He tried to tune into the ’files for news of the inquisition or reports of executions, but the ’files had been locked: the screens showed only the calm eyes of the Architects and the words Sorry out of service. Tomorrow it would be Æstival Tide; the ’files should be showing preparations for the Great Fear, the immense Lahatiel Gates being oiled and primed to open, the prostitutes and imperial courtesans and myriad cultists costumed in hideous array for the timoring rites and mad rush into the sea.
But without the ’files Hobi couldn’t see any of this. He felt like a prisoner, although he really was not—the doors were not locked, he could come and go as he pleased; but Hobi was afraid to leave. No one called; there were no visitors. Khum brought him lunch and poured endless glasses of brandy; his father snored and grinned, until Hobi thought he might go mad as well. Once the entire chamber trembled. The brandy in Hobi’s glass rocked back and forth, and one of Sajur’s holographic anaglyphs glittered into view and just as quickly sputtered into black again. Too stunned to move, Hobi waited for nearly an hour, certain that this was it: the breach he had seen on the monitors only a few weeks ago had finally spread to the very domes, and the entire city was going to come crashing down around him.
But nothing happened. Sajur did not speak, or seem to notice. There were no aftershocks, no emergency bulletins on the still-dead ’files. Nothing. Finally the boy got up and stumbled to his room. He reached beneath his bed and withdrew a small silver flask, the last of the Amity he had hidden away. He drank it, sitting on the floor and leaning with eyes closed against the bed.
So. His father had gone mad. Terrifying as the realization was, it was neither unusual nor even unexpected. Each year a score or so of the Orsinate’s inner cabal went insane, varying from Musach Alvin’s unsuccessful attempt at flying from a third-floor balcony to Shiyung Orsina’s increasingly ridiculous involvements with bizarre religious sects. As a blood relation of the Orsinas, Sajur Panggang was practically doomed by birth to some form of mental anomaly. Fortunately Hobi was too young to consider even momentarily the notion that he himself might be similarly affected one day.
What Hobi was more concerned about was the fact that the city was very probably falling into ruin, even as he gulped the last burning mouthful of Amity. In other circumstances he would have gone to his father for help. Now the only person he could think of turning to was Nasrani, but god knew where Nasrani was to be found. If he were to go to the margravines, they would either laugh at him or, worse, believe him; and upon discovering his father’s failure to halt the destruction, Hobi would no doubt be imprisoned and executed along with Sajur. One thing Hobi was certain of: the margravines would do nothing to aid the failing city or its people.
That was when he thought again of the Undercity, and Nasrani’s hidden children. The exile had said that the nemosynes knew things; that if only they could find a way to wake Nefertity, she might be able to help them relearn all the secrets lost to the centuries of the Long Night.
Hobi stood—unsteadily, the flask falling to the floor with a soft chink. He had that terrific clarity that Amity brings to an empty stomach and a head primed for dreaming. He knew what he must do. He had to find the nemosyne again; find Nasrani too, if he could, but Nefertity was most important. Just because Nasrani had never been able to wake her didn’t mean that Hobi couldn’t try. He was not unlettered in certain kinds of stories that his mother had been fond of, ancient tales that involved quests and tasks and very often the salvation of certain individuals, usually women, who through no fault of their own had come to be imprisoned in cells of glass or stone or even unfamiliar bodies. And while Hobi knew that Nefertity was no such thing, and the near-certain demise of Araboth a matter of considerable gravity, still he was rather a young boy, with a passionate (if shy) nature; and there had been all that Amity.
He dressed, choosing his clothes with care. A white shirt of heavy sueded silk that made his chestnut hair look darker, his fair skin even more pale. Moleskin trousers of a color so deep it could not (and was not) termed evergreen or viridian, even though there were forbidden hints of those shades in its nap. Hobi of course knew that they were green trousers, as did the furtive moujik tailor who had designed them for him for a timoring several months ago. He had planned to wear them when he joined his father and the margravines on the viewing platform for the opening of the Lahatiel Gate. Instead he would wear them for this final secret journey.
Because he was leaving; because there was really no reason for him to stay. His father was mad and would surely soon be dead, his mother was dead, indeed it seemed quite evident that soon everyone he knew, from that moujik tailor to the margravine ziz, would be dead. If he could somehow find Nasrani, he would warn him and enlist him in his endeavor. But otherwise he had his mind made up:
He would go back to the Undercity, find the nemosyne, and if he could not wake her, he would carry her with him, until they found some way to escape the coming holocaust.
Some way to get Outside.
It felt strange to be taking the gravator alone. Even though he had been there once before, only days earlier, the trip to the Undercity had grown fixed in Hobi’s mind, as though it were a beloved memory from his childhood. The little fountain with its statue of the timorata bubbling spearmint water; the heavy crimson drapes; the grinding of its gears as the chamber dropped level after level through Araboth’s glowing spectrum—periwinkle, scarlet, violet, every possible shade of purple deepening to the eternal night of the Undercity—all these things had in the last few days knit themselves around the boy’s heart, so that now the touch of those drapes against his cheek, th
e slant of wine-colored light as they passed through Principalities—all had become entwined with the calm and frigid face of Nasrani’s sleeping nemosyne. The amorphous terrors that had paralyzed him were gone, now that he had left Cherubim.
The trip to the Undercity could have lasted forever but in fact was over in a very few minutes. He jumped when the gravator announced its arrival on Angels. The doors fanned open, and a rush of fetid air greeted him as he approached them. He waited for a long minute, until the gravator repeated its announcement, somewhat peevishly, and the doors started to creak shut once more. Before they could close on him he jumped outside.
Immediately darkness engulfed him like a freezing wind. Hobi clapped his hands to his pockets and cursed: he had forgotten a lumiere. He started to sprint back into the gravator, but groaning like an old server it already had begun its slow ascent. He swore again, desperately; then heard from somewhere nearby a rustling sound, too loud to be something stirred by one of the ventricles— were there vents down here? When he held his breath the noise stopped. Heart pounding he waited to hear it again. But now there was only silence.
He thought he remembered which way to go. To the right; and yes, he found a wall there, damp and foul-smelling. His feet sank into some soft cold stuff as he walked on, one hand always on the wall. He tripped over chunks of concrete and once or twice splashed through shallow puddles. Always he kept one hand on the wall—that way, he thought, he could find his way back.
Once he stumbled. His foot hung in the empty air for what seemed like minutes, as he cried out, flailing, certain that he had fallen into the abyss that was shattering the Undercity like a porcelain cup. But it was nothing, just a gap in the walkway. He waited a few minutes, panting, and went on.
After a while it began to seem that it was not so dark here as he had first thought. At first he thought his eyes played tricks on him, making it seem as though there was a dimly lit doorway here, a glowing heap of embers there. But soon he discovered that there really was light, of a sort. A few feet in front of him something glowed like the remains of a fire nearly dead. He stopped to look at it more closely, and then in a spurt of bravery decided to walk over and investigate. When he removed his hand from the wall he had a horrible feeling, a vertiginous sense that he was going to pitch into some bottomless void: The impulse to fall back against the wall was nearly irresistible, but he bit his lip and stepped forward.
It was not the ash-heap he had expected, but a pile of stones, or broken concrete. They glowed a faint and ruinous green, not a solid color but pocked with different shades, here nearly yellow, there with a bluish sheen. He thought of the corpse-candles that were used in the rites of the Chambers of Mercy, tapers made from the organs of rasas destroyed illegally for such purposes. Hobi bit his lip, then touched one of the stones. His hand came away wet, and it too glowed. There was a foul odor of putrescence. He recalled the stories he had heard of rasas down here, and shuddered; but surely not even rasas would venture to the Undercity.
He wiped his hand on his trousers, leaving a long streak that faded into the darkness after a few minutes. He looked around in a futile effort to get his bearings and for the first time noticed that there were other scattered heaps glowing in the distance.
“Damn,” he whispered. He glanced down at the pile at his feet. It struck him suddenly that it might not be the artless heap he had first supposed. He nudged it with his foot. It didn’t budge. When he looked up again it seemed that those other dim pyramids might be beacons of a sort, or markers; but he could discern no order among them, only scattered fragments of light, dull green or blue like the veins of an odorous cheese. It seemed that his eyes finally were adjusting to the darkness. He could perceive immense shadows that must be buildings, and smaller shapes that were the ruins of skyscrapers or maybe autovehicles. Dark as it was, some faint, almost imperceptible light trickled down from the levels above. His eyes aching, he turned and stumbled off once more.
As he picked his way back to the wall Hobi tried to imagine what would use such primitive means of illumination or navigation. He had grown up hearing stories about naughty children and recalcitrant servants who fell or were pushed from their warm havens on Cherubim, and tumbled to Araboth’s primeval footing so far below. In the stories the children did not die, as they surely would if they were to actually slip from behind the protective barricades that ran along the outermost perimeters of each level. In the stories the children eventually found themselves in the Undercity, and it had always seemed to Hobi that it would be infinitely preferable to die. Mutated monsters were supposed to live there, creatures carelessly disposed of by the bioresearchers or dilettantes like Shiyung Orsina. Aardmen with too many eyes; hydrapithecenes that somehow flourished out of water; morphodites so hideous that even the jaded appetites of the Orsinate and their cohort had no use for them. All of these things (and betulamiæ whose treelike trunks had sprouted feet, and argalæ that snapped and clawed at their patrons, and things that went unnamed because gazing at them you were struck speechless) ended down on Angels, there to breed in the unkempt earth and ruined skyscrapers and abandoned refineries. Hobi had never questioned the veracity of such tales. Aristocrat’s children did fall sometimes, which was a shame because there were always too few of them, and servants and other hapless persons did get pushed, more often than you’d think. It had just always seemed so impossibly far away. The Undercity might as well have been Outside.
But here he was, inching forward through the green-pocked darkness of the Undercity with some demented notion of going Outside, trying not to think of what might have gotten here before him. In the surrounding night he heard that faint susurrant noise, like water percolating through the ground or an animal moving among the glowing piles of rubbish. Beneath his hand the wall’s surface changed from something slick and steel-smooth to rough brick or stone, all of it thick with algae or moss that came away in heavy foul-smelling wads when he pulled his hand back. He breathed through his mouth now, wishing he’d brought something to cover his face; wishing he’d waited for Nasrani to show up again. But then he would recall his silent grinning father, and the face of Nefertity, the dull flickering of her glass and metal atomies; and that would make him move more quickly through the muck.
Beneath his hand the wall abruptly gave way. Hobi stopped, gasping for breath, then reached until he touched something metal. A heavy beard of mold and fungi hung from the corners of the door, just as he remembered it. He traced its outline until he found the small metal plate where Nasrani had inserted his key. He breathed deeply, leaned forward until his forehead touched the cold dank door, then pushed with all his might.
Nothing. It wouldn’t budge. He tried shoving against it with his shoulder, kicking it, pushing it again and again, until his clothes were soaked with mold and slime and he began to shiver from the chill. Finally he stopped, his head pounding with frustration. It had been madness for him to come here alone, no key, no lumiere, nothing. His eyes strained to make out anything of the door or what lay beyond it, but there was only darkness.
He stepped back and took one more deep breath. He stretched his hands out before him, lowered his head, and started to make one final lunge, when—
“ Mmmph! ” Hobi cried out. Something struck his back and he toppled, flailing helplessly at the rubble-strewn ground. A moment later and someone straddled him, someone large and heavy and reeking of decay. The smell made Hobi gag and he wept uncontrollably, his eyes streaming as its hands played across his face until they covered his mouth.
“Greet your Mother,” it said. Its voice was utterly toneless. A cold tongue snaked inside his ear, and icy hands pushed his face into the ground. “Greet your Mother, once-born.”
“Aaagh!” Hobi shut his mouth and struggled as the thing atop him pushed his face into the ground. The horrible thought seized him that it was his real mother the thing meant; that what he had watched burn at the Reisling Gallery a year before was not her corpse but “another’s, and this wa
s all part of some awful plot against his family by the Orsinate.
“Your Mother,” it hissed again. It grabbed him by the hair and pulled him up, then jammed its fingers into his mouth to pry it open. Hobi retched at the touch of rot and slime on his tongue. “Show some respect for your Mother —”
This time when it slammed his face to the ground his mouth was open. He choked, tasting dirt. The thing relaxed its hold a little, and gasping and sputtering Hobi finally pushed it from him. It seemed to be satisfied; he heard it step back, its feet splashing fetid water on him.
“Wha—” Hobi began, sobbing with fear and disgust as he tried to see what it was that had struck him. The unseen creature made a gurgling noise and cut him off, its glottal voice slow and measured.
“No questions. How did you get here?”
Hobi pointed vaguely, wiping his mouth and spitting. Filth dripped into his eyes as he strained to see what was there. Something as tall as he was, but wraith-thin. He dimly made out long lank hair, glowing with the same greenish phosphorescence he’d seen on the little pyramids, and a fish-white face. Something about it, the hair perhaps, or its voice, made him think of it as female. Abruptly one hand struck out at him like a snake, grabbing his chin. Its fingers were long and had very sharp nails. They felt pulpy, and seemed reluctant to touch him.
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