City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

When Hanson stumbled from the plate, he found himself in a windblown hall. Down its center, unsupported, hung a line of vast stone bells. They were as gray and rough-looking as granite, but when he wonderingly reached up a finger to touch one, it boomed as if struck by a maul, a deep and despairing vibration that shook his body like the sound of God sobbing.

  “Naw.” He stepped back from the bell, shaking his head, profoundly disturbed by something he could not put a name to. “Not like that. Naw, not like—that.”

  At the far end of the hall was another pair of circles—more cyclone plates. He hurried toward them, shamblingly at first, then faster. The all but imperceptible breeze of his passage brushing against the bells set up an echoing clamor, a turbulent ocean of sound that surged and swelled about him, filling him with primal dread, driving him to greater speed, so that when he reached the plate he was practically running. His feet touched one circle. A metal pillar rose from the other and slammed down upon him.

  * * *

  Silence.

  He was in a room full of shadows and jumbled shapes. Something shifted slightly to one side. There were other furtive movements to the other side, up ahead, just behind. With a start, Hanson realized that he was not alone. The room was filled with prowling animals, great cats the size of cougars. There was painfully little light, but they had, he thought, human faces, and they spoke with the voices of women.

  “Oh, baby,” one murmured, “let me rip you open.”

  “My fangs are long,” said another.

  “My claws are sharp.”

  “My breasts are heavy with milk.”

  They prowled one over the other, haunches high in the darkness, too many, the light too dim, for Hanson to determine their number. Their eyes and teeth flashed in the gloom. They were in constant motion, slinking, stalking.

  “See my long pink tongue.”

  “Smell my hindquarters.”

  “Imagine my teeth piercing your lips, tearing the flesh off of your face.”

  “I’ll make sure you suffer a long, long time.”

  “Oh, honey.”

  Their voices overlapped in a kind of moaning chorus. Their eyes materialized and disappeared behind flirtatious lashes.

  “Poor baby. It’s been so long since you experienced anything with intensity.”

  “We’ll make you feel something.”

  “I’ll pull out your intestines an inch at a time—slowly, slowly.”

  It was terrifying. It was too much. Hanson found himself pulling in upon himself, wrapping arms about his body, shivering. It wasn’t fair! He didn’t know any of the rules here, any of the assumptions. Cicero, he thought. If only Cicero were here, he’d know what to do.

  “It’s all right,” Cicero said. “I’m here.” He strode through the cat-women as if either he or they were not entirely real, completely ignored by them all. “If you’ll look down, you’ll see a set of parallel lines glowing faintly on the floor. They mark a safe passage from the one plate to the other. So long as you stay between them, you’re perfectly safe.”

  He took Hanson’s arm, led him across the room.

  Wobbly, Hanson allowed himself to be led. “How did you find me?” he asked. “How did you know I—?” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence.

  “I am a function.”

  “Oh.” The cat-women paced him, musky-smelling and avid-faced. Growling their lust. Ignoring them as best he could, Hanson asked, “Why? Why would anybody want—” He swept out an arm to encompass them all. “—this?”

  “You have been a long time away indeed,” Cicero said, “to have forgotten the need for such entertainments.”

  They stepped on the plate—

  —a grove of slim buildings so tall that the rivers of water falling from their fluted tops dissolved into rainbows and mist long before they could reach the ground.

  —a stone cathedral floating within a sad brown sunset, which stared at him with a hundred human eyes.

  —a twilight plane where armies of metal giants fought with axes and clubs, while small and tireless servitor machines retrieved the scrap and climbed their sides to rebuild the damaged parts.

  —a small room smelling of chickens and new-mown hay, where blue flames flickered over revolving bowls of mercury.

  —a tangle of snakes that raised agonized heads as large as houses against a steel-plate sky.

  —an incandescent mushroom cloud, strangely still and unchanging, like a snapshot of some catastrophic explosion, a frozen instant of horrified time.

  The light and heat from this last were excruciating. Hanson threw a hand over his watering eyes, his stinging face, and cried, “Where are we going?”

  “Why, wherever you want,” Cicero said. “We have been traveling at random, while I awaited your directions.”

  “Then take me home.”

  Cicero smiled encouragingly. “And where is that?”

  It was as if one of the cat-women had arisen out of nowhere to present him with a riddle encompassing the purpose and end of human life. Hanson’s mind was blank; for a long moment he could think of no possible destination to offer in response. Then, “Boone,” he said finally. “Take me back to Boone.”

  * * *

  There was a light dusting of yellow pollen on the balcony, and a springlike coolness to the air. Cicero gestured Hanson through a doorway and into an unfamiliar room. The walls were lined with dark wood paneling and shelves of leather-bound books. Squares and scrolls hung unsupported in the air, a dozen or more, some bright with moving images, others filled with cryptic text. Boone looked up from a writing desk, and, with a wild cry, stood. Papers scattered from him like birds. He ran through the squares and scrolls as if they did not exist, and hugged Hanson with all his strength.

  “Aw, now,” Hanson muttered in confusion. “C’mon, now.” Embarrassed, he patted the man’s back once, twice, feather-light and reluctant touches.

  Boone stepped back, smiling through his tears. “Where the hell have you been? I stayed here, made this my camp, hoping against hope that you’d—well, that hardly matters. You’re back now, that’s all that matters. Only—where have you been?”

  “I was—” Hanson spread his hands and looked down into them helplessly as if they might contain an answer that was nowhere else to be found. He did not know where he had been. “I think I found some post-Utopians.” Boone started and shot him an odd look. “They were . . . strange. Like cats.”

  “Those were not citizens,” Cicero corrected gently. “They were a function. Like me.”

  “Oh, shut up.” Boone wiped away his tears and put his hands on his hips. He glared up at Hanson, who, abruptly and with an odd sense of dislocation, realized that he had somehow acquired a mustache and a trim little goatee. “I suppose you think that was funny? I suppose you think you can just follow whatever damn-fool notion enters your head? Well, I have news for you. From this moment on, you’re not going anywhere without my express permission. You got that? I don’t want you going to the shithouse to jerk off without telling me first.”

  Hanson flushed. His muscles bunched and knotted under the lash of Boone’s words. He felt that all-too-familiar burning sensation at the back of his throat, the bitter fire of resentment forcibly suppressed. He could crush the little man in his bare hands, if he wanted to, and you’d think that Boone would by God respect that, would at least grant him the elementary caution one gave a manshogger or factory machine with a known history of mangling its operators. It griped him that he did not.

  But he needed Boone, and they both knew it. The City of God was comprehensible to Boone in ways it was not to Hanson; he needed the little man’s direction and guidance. Ducking his head, he felt the old habits of submission, of obedience, of silence, the reflexive knuckling under to the loudest voice, come over him like an old, heavy, and detested coat. “It was only a little while.”

  “A little while! Eight months you were gone, and you call it—” Boone’s voice rose sarcastically “—a little while?�
�

  Hanson lifted his hands, palms up, baffled. “Eight months? But—” Boone silenced him with a look. And though he was trying to hide it, there was less anger than fear in that look: fear and loneliness. Eight months Boone had spent by himself, without human company, enduring an isolation that would be a burden for even the strongest man, and would break or even kill the weak; the gods alone knew what he’d been through, or how he had withstood it.

  For long minutes, Boone simply stared at him, as if afraid he was about to turn away and stalk off once more. Then, stooping, he began to gather up his papers. “These are my notes,” he said. “Oh, nothing formal, you understand. Just jottings, really. I spent the winter researching the City’s records. If you want to call them that. There’s enough information available here to drown in, but none of it’s organized at all usefully, nothing is presented in any kind of—well, never mind.” He passed a hand over his eyes, wiping them clean of tears.

  “You’ve moved,” Hanson said.

  “Eh? What? Nothing of the sort!”

  “The room I saw before had pillars. And windows . . .”

  Boone made a dismissive gesture. “Bah! It takes nothing to reconfigure a room. You have no idea the kind of wealth that’s fallen into our hands. And power—power unimaginable in our old lives!” Papers gathered, he stood behind his desk, tamping them into a neat stack, and, with that simple gesture, regained all of his lost authority. “But this must be bewildering to you. How to explain? Where to begin?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “I was wrong,” Boone said. “Remember when I told you the post-Utopians were people like you and I? I was wrong. I’ve opened windows into their lives and . . . they were different. Different in ways that made them not even remotely human. I think they destroyed themselves, but I’m not sure.”

  “Destroyed themselves? You mean, like—suicide?”

  “Possible—barely. Burned themselves out, more likely. Transfigured themselves, perhaps. Indications go both ways. Let me replay for you a conversation you have doubtless long forgotten.” With a wave of his hand, Boone swept the squares and scrolls to either side, leaving one, bright as a window, hanging in the center of the room. Through it, Hanson saw the balcony outside and, upon it, Cicero talking to a hulking brute of a man.

  “Where is everybody?” the big man asked.

  (Startled, Hanson realized it was himself.)

  “Gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “They have followed . . . certain trends to their inevitable consequences.”

  Boone gestured brusquely, waving the scroll out of existence. “Such things I have discovered. You cannot imagine. Fantastic, incredible things! I’ve tasted in surrogate the ineffable pleasures the post-Utopians discovered for themselves, glimpsed darkly, as if through a scrim, their activities and preoccupations. Oh, I am not a scholar for nothing! But where have the post-Utopians gone? What became of them? In this one crucial respect, I am as ignorant as you.” He turned to Cicero: “Let me ask you again: Where have they gone?”

  “Elsewhere.”

  “Where elsewhere?”

  “You would not understand.”

  “Are they dead?”

  “No.”

  “Will they ever come back?”

  “They never went away.”

  “The hell with you!” To this point the exchange had proceeded with the lifeless quality of a catechism, a rote repetition of questions and answers unvarying and long committed to memory. But now Boone stood, and, hands behind his back, savagely strode to and fro, as if building up his courage. There was a wild light in his eyes. Finally he asked, “Will we see them again in recognizable form—as something roughly human, capable of communicating and interacting with us?”

  “By the nature of what happened,” Cicero said, “that cannot be.”

  “You see?” Boone turned triumphantly to Hanson. “You see? The City of God—its buildings and parks, its powers and potentials, the land, the sea, everything—is ours. Ours to control, ours to command. It belongs to us!”

  Hanson glanced uneasily at Cicero.

  Cicero said nothing, waited patiently.

  “I dunno,” Hanson said. It didn’t seem right to him, somehow, to make such claims. It didn’t seem safe. In his experience, everything had a price, even things you didn’t get, and that price was always more than any sane man would agree to pay, given the choice. Not that you ever got the choice. The balance was enforced from afar, by powers immaterial and unlocatable, nothing you could even identify, much less get your hands on. “Maybe we oughta just take our time here, not do anything rash.”

  “No! I’ve waited too long. Your coming back now is a sign. We have to act immediately, right now, without delay.” With a slash of one hand, Boone made all the scrolls and squares disappear. The room looked monkishly bare without them. Turning to Cicero, he said, “Take us to the Throne of God.”

  “The local utility node, you mean?”

  “Whatever you want to call it—bring us there.”

  Cicero nodded. “As you wish.”

  5

  THE THRONE WAS LOCATED in a windowless zone like a jet bead atop a slanted glass tower whose stairs took them a terrifying half hour to climb. From a distance, the tower looked like a syringe with a black drop of blood at its tip. Within, the walls and stairs alike were transparent, marked only by gleams of reflected and refracted light, making the ascent a sickeningly vertiginous experience. There was no other way to reach it, Cicero explained, because the powers it controlled were too great to be tapped on a whim, even a post-Utopian’s whim. At the top, within a hideously unstable region of blackness, they confronted the thing itself—an unornamented silver chair with armrests and a high back.

  Boone had been here before.

  “Control,” Boone said. “Even the City of God needs to be controlled. Especially the City of God.” He paced back and forth before the Throne, talking rapidly and with an unnatural energy. “There are many such towers, each tapping a fraction of the power of the Wall and responsible for the maintenance of a small segment of the lands within. From this chair, one man can control more power than is held by all the mortal nations combined. I have often come here to meditate upon whether to assume responsibility for that power.”

  “Don’t!” Hanson said suddenly. He couldn’t explain the wave of apprehension that came over him, the fearful certainty that Boone was about to destroy them both; but he felt it nevertheless, down to the soles of his feet. “Just—don’t do it!”

  Boone nodded, not listening. He stopped pacing and struck a pose, hands behind back, legs wide. “Hanson, we stand on the brink of history. It is our duty to humanity—our destiny, even—to tear down the Wall separating the Human Domain from the City of God.” He stared at the Throne without seeming to actually see it, his eyes gleaming and blank with excitement.

  “Think of it, Hanson! For ages, we have been made helpless, impoverished by the presence of a City whose accomplishments we could never hope to duplicate, whose very existence made a mockery of all our aspirations. Now . . . now, we can make the Earth a garden, abolish human misery, free men to follow their better natures. We’ll fill the skies and roads with great vessels again, millions of them! We’ll build cities—human cities!—on the Moon, beneath the seas, at the poles. Can you picture it, Hanson?”

  Hanson dumbly shook his head.

  Boone laughed, a shallow, brittle laugh. “No. No, of course you can’t. But you’ll see—you’ll see.” He took a step toward the Throne, then convulsively whirled about, and, hugging himself, said, “It is a great responsibility I am assuming here, a terrible burden indeed. You see that, don’t you? By its very nature power must be apportioned, divided, distributed—and withheld. That is natural law. Fanatics and opportunists, the self-serving and corrupt, will be drawn to this point like moths to the flame. We must take steps to ensure that this p
ower does not fall into the wrong hands.”

  In all the crawling and uneasy blackness, the silver Throne was an island of calm matter. Not even aware he was doing it, Hanson stretched out a hand to touch it, to reassure himself with the cool feel of its solidity.

  “Don’t!” Boone said. “Only I can touch the throne—it’s protected.”

  Hanson whipped his hand away. He had been intending, once Boone stopped talking, to urge him one more time not to do this thing. But now, overcome with futility, he knew he would not. What would be the use? A man like Boone, smart as he was, would never listen to somebody like him. And why should he? He was nothing much in the brains department, he knew it—never had been. Look at the mess he’d made of his life, look at how, all the way along the line, it had been someone else—Gossard, Willis, Boone—who had saved him from the consequences of his own stupid, blundering actions. Without them, he never would have made it. Without them, he never would have been standing here in the first place, way up here above the City of God, at the place where all the power of Heaven could be commanded. Without them, he’d be a pile of weathering bones somewhere, already stripped of flesh, already forgotten.

  Hanson felt himself flushing with shame, suffused with a dull, ponderous embarrassment that seemed to turn his limbs to lead, congeal him solid where he stood, incapable of speech or action. He was a proud man—pride was what had gotten him into all this in the first place, after all. That is, he was a proud man when he had something to be proud about . . . but it seemed like he hadn’t had that for a very long time. Certainly there was nothing to be proud about now, even though he was standing where no man had stood for who knew how many thousands of years. He’d gotten here in the first place through sheer blind blundering luck, and by taking advantage of the sharper wits of other men, and now that he was here, he really only half understood the situation, or what Boone was proposing to do, or the risks involved, or the rewards that might be gleaned. Even standing here before the Throne of God, even with all the strange and wondrous things that he’d been through, he hadn’t been changed or elevated or ennobled—he was still just the common working slob he’d always been. Just a dumb ox. So why should he interfere? What right did he have to an opinion?