City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  Keep your mouth shut, then, ox, he told himself bitterly. Let the smart men decide how to run the world. Just as you always have.

  But, even with all of that running in his head, he couldn’t help but feel a chill slice through him when Boone stepped up to the Throne. His mouth had gone dry with fear, and, when Boone reached forth a hand and actually touched the Throne, lightly, caressingly, Hanson felt the small hairs along his spine and on the back of his neck stir and stand up, one by one by one.

  “I still don’t think you should do this,” Hanson said, in spite of himself, unable to keep the terror out of his voice.

  “Don’t worry,” Boone said distractedly. “It’s perfectly safe—for me.” For a long still moment, he made no sound, and then he shook himself, gathering all his will and purpose. “Well,” said Boone. “Here it is, then, the moment when History turns, when Mankind’s destiny awakes from its long slumber!” He hovered over the Throne a moment, unable to work up the nerve to sit down and unwilling to retreat. “Now!”

  He sat.

  Grinning nervously, Boone gripped the armrests of the Throne. He took a deep breath. “This is a historic moment,” he told Hanson. “Impress it on your memory. Forget nothing!”

  Then he nodded to Cicero. “I am ready.”

  “As you will.”

  Five long needles of light converged upon Boone, piercing his skull.

  “Ah!” he cried.

  He stiffened, rising up slightly, and was silent.

  For a long time, the little man sat wordlessly, staring straight ahead of himself, so far as Hanson could determine, into nothing. “Boone . . .” He reached out a tentative hand, and then, as Boone’s wild eyes flicked in his direction, withdrew it. “Are you all right?”

  Boone said nothing.

  To Cicero, Hanson repeated, “Is he all right?”

  “That is a difficult question to answer simply.”

  Abruptly Boone raised a hand. “Watch this!” The shifting blackness surrounding them transformed itself, so that they were staring across great reaches of the City of God. He pointed past a range of fang-thin pyramids (or maybe they were patterned neon stalagmites, high as skyscrapers—there was no way for Hanson to tell) to a park-like region where a flock of flamingos clustered like great masses of scarlet flowers at the edge of a shallow lake. Then he made his hand into a fist.

  At Boone’s gesture, the lake exploded upward. Water shot skyward, and, geysering, froze into a hollow latticework tube of ice that twisted and glittered wildly in the sun. Through the mist thrown out by the fantastic exchange of temperatures, Hanson saw the charred bodies of the flamingos falling like cinders.

  “Do you know how much energy it took to do that? Fabulous amounts! More energy than was deployed by one of the nuclear weapons of antiquity. Oh, I wish you had the math to understand! It would stagger you to work out the figures!”

  Staring at the blue-ice spire, all twisty and interwoven angles through a fog so dazzlingly bright he winced to look upon it, Hanson felt his mouth go dry. He swallowed hard and said, “What—what’s it for?”

  “For?” Boone laughed like a child. “For no reason at all! For the joy of the thing! Because I felt like it. I made it, and I can unmake it, if I wish, just like—that!”

  He snapped his fingers.

  The construction shattered. And even as the great shards were falling, Boone gestured again, the darkness re-forming around them, so that they were snug in the tiny room again.

  “Now,” Boone said, suddenly businesslike. “We must make plans. First, the Wall will have to come down. No question about that. But those who wish to benefit from my accomplishment must be brought to heel. I know them, you see. Oh, yes, I know their type! They will brush us aside with a pat on the head and a warning not to meddle, if they can; force is their all. They must be taught respect.” He closed his eyes, thinking. “An object lesson, perhaps?” Then, offhandedly, “You can have my old rooms if you wish, Hanson. I think they’d suit you.”

  “You’re . . . you’re planning to live here?” Hanson said in horrified disbelief, staring about at the formless, crawling void that surrounded them.

  Boone’s eyes snapped open. “What? Of course I am! This room is the nexus, the focal point—anything I want can be brought to me here. Food. Books.” With an oddly defiant toss of his head, he added, “Women.”

  Hanson twisted his mouth sourly. He understood well enough what was going on here, for he’d seen it happen before. Dumb as he might be, he wasn’t so stupid he couldn’t smell shit when somebody pushed his nose into it. Boone was turning himself into a boss. Seemed you couldn’t get rid of them. Kill all the bosses, and the quiet guy who’d worked alongside you all his life and never once did anybody dirt would step forward to fill the vacancy and become a boss himself, and next thing you knew you were eating dust at his feet, right back where you’d always been. Nothing ever changed; it seemed like nothing ever really could change. He clenched and unclenched his fists in helpless and baffled anger.

  “First, though—the Wall.” Boone lifted his arms grandly.

  The blackness before him bulged.

  “What—?” Boone began.

  A fierce and armless man strode up to the Throne, as stern and beautiful as an angel. His robes were afire, burning continuously without being destroyed. The smell of roasting flesh was nauseating. He frowned down upon Boone with blinded eyes whose sockets were encrusted with dried blood.

  “My proud brother,” the phantom said. “You have returned.”

  Boone’s eyes widened in astonishment for the briefest of instants, then narrowed again, shrewdly. “I’m not your brother.”

  “You are a Renunciate. It is the same thing.”

  “I don’t know what that means.”

  “It means you are human,” Cicero said mildly, “of the race which built the City, but one of those who, given the opportunity to enter it, turned away.”

  Carefully, Boone said, “I am a Utopian—a citizen. You cannot question my authority.” He slapped his chest. “I hold the key within me.”

  “You are no citizen!” The phantom pointed sternly at Hanson. “He is a citizen. He holds the key to the City within him. You are allowed in the City only as his property. But even as his property, you have gone too far!”

  It was the briefest of looks Boone threw Hanson, but one that spoke eloquently of hurt and betrayal, a look that pierced Hanson to the core of his being, that made him want to throw up his hands and protest his innocence. I didn’t mean to do it, he wanted to cry. The key left you for me when you died. It wasn’t my idea! If I’d known it was important—

  But Boone, ever pragmatic, had already turned back to argue with his opponent. “Damnit, you can’t condemn me for something I never did. I’m not one of your ancient enemies. Those who refused to enter the City with you are dead long ages ago. I didn’t make that decision. I would have chosen differently.”

  “No matter! You are a Renunciate. The sin is in the seed. Time cannot expunge it. Your kind shirked the peril, the challenge, the transforming glory and horror, and for what purpose? In order to cling to your humanity! Your betrayal is not forgotten and can never be forgiven. It is too late for regrets.”

  “Listen!” Boone cried. “Those issues that divided your kind and mine are long dead. Yes, we were separated—let now the two streams reunite! It’s time we were reconciled.”

  A short, angry slash of the head. “No!” The phantom’s face was dark as thunder. “Too late, too late!”

  “It’s never too late!”

  “It was always too late for you.” Now the flames blazed hotter, so that the apparition became almost painfully bright, dazzling and terrible. “Look—see the price we paid for perfection!”

  Briefly, Hanson saw the raw and bleeding wound where the man’s genitals had been. He turned his head away, sickened.

  “I tore off those parts with my own teeth and, oh, how I savored the pain of it! Could you have done as much?”<
br />
  Boone could not speak.

  The phantom smiled disdainfully as the flames burned low again. “I thought not. You came here seeking power and knowledge. Very well. Drink deep of both. Learn what we learned!”

  Boone screamed.

  It hurt the eye to look at him. He seemed to be vibrating; a kind of still motion possessed him, as if he were simultaneously shooting rapidly upward in the air and descending with equal speed into the ground. And yet he went nowhere. Boone’s body had taken on the blurriness of extreme speed, a sort of translucence with nothing visible behind it. His face tensed, stretched, lengthened like cold taffy relentlessly pulled. His mouth stayed open, stretched to its extreme.

  He screamed.

  He screamed, and the scream went on and on, independent of the air in his lungs, endless, eternal, a condition of existence, a cry of pain and fear that stretched from the beginning of time to its end, like the shrill note of a violin string endlessly stroked, always on the verge of snapping and yet continuing, impossibly continuing. It simply was.

  Hanson seized Cicero by the shoulders and shook him. “We’ll leave!” he cried. “Tell him,” pointing to the phantom, “to let Boone go, and we’ll leave. Tell him!”

  “He cannot be reasoned with. Despite his appearance, despite his words, he is not a citizen. He is only a security function.”

  Hanson spun away, reaching for Boone, but Cicero stopped his hand. Slight though he was, Cicero was impossibly strong; Hanson, for all his muscle and bulk, could not free himself from his grip. “It would be extremely dangerous to touch him. It might kill you.”

  “You!” Hanson shouted to the phantom. “You can stop this!”

  The phantom turned his sightless frown upon Hanson, but said nothing.

  Now the air about Boone was streaking, congealing into vertical strings of shattered light, greenish, as if the vibrations from the Throne were threatening the structure and nature of space about it. Boone hung agonized at the very center of this twisting chaos. His eyes were wide with pain, but sane. Unbearably sane.

  His scream went on and on, unendurable.

  “Cicero!” Hanson cried again. “He’s dying!”

  “No. He is suffering, but he will not die. He will not be allowed to die. He will wait here as a warning to all who would aspire beyond their state. The years will pass, and then the decades, and then the centuries. To him, the agony will be eternal.”

  “Get him off, damn you!”

  “He is beyond rescue. The security function is implacable and absolute. A Renunciate has sat upon the Throne—he must be punished.”

  As if in a dream, Hanson felt his hands go to his belt. His gun was still there—the gun he had retained simply because it was the only thing besides Boone that he had brought with him to the City of God, the only thing he possessed that was undeniably his own.

  He pulled it out.

  This was not him acting; it was his body, obeying no conscious impulse of his own, but only the implacable logic of Boone’s unending scream. Hanson watched, horrified, from a place behind his eyes as the gun swam into view. He expected Cicero to step forward to stop him. He expected the guardian function to confront him.

  Neither did.

  Awkwardly he slid the safety to off. He cocked back the heavy hammer. He raised the muzzle toward the blind-eyed guardian brooding over Boone’s suffering. But when he did, the guardian turned upon him so unconcerned and disdainful an expression that Hanson knew without being told that it was useless, that mere bullets could not stop so powerful a being.

  Stepping close to the Throne he raised the gun in both hands, so that it pointed right at the center of Boone’s face, at a spot directly between the man’s eyes. The agonized eyes that did not look at the gun but right through it, as if it hardly existed and certainly didn’t matter, boring into Boone’s eyes and pleading as clearly as words ever did:

  Kill me.

  I can’t, he thought, even as his finger clenched around the trigger, squeezing it tight, fighting the balky mechanism of its action, a simple movement that was taking forever it seemed, impossible that it could go on so long, as if time had frozen to a gelid flurry, slowed, solidified, and then—finally—stopped.

  The gun fired, with an appalling explosion of sound so loud it seemed to shatter Hanson’s ears.

  All in an instant, Hanson’s hands went flying up and back, the recoil spinning the revolver itself through the air and sending it clattering across the floor. Boone’s head slammed back into the Throne and bounced forward again. Flecks of blood and gore were everywhere, tiny droplets landing on Hanson’s knuckles, his shirt front, his face. Boone’s body pitched forward and fell heavily to the floor, facedown, as limp as a sack of laundry.

  Silence.

  The guardian turned to Hanson.

  “You may assume control of the node now, if you wish.”

  Hanson raised his head, heavy with guilt, wordless with disbelief.

  “It’s true,” Cicero said. “There’s no danger to you. I know you believe yourself to be a Renunciate, but by testimony of the key you carry within yourself, you are not. You are a citizen. All functions must respect you. The security function would never offer you harm, not even to save the City itself.”

  Hanson shook his head bullishly, a rejection not so much of any specific words or actions as of everything: Boone’s death, the raid on the brigand camp, his flight from Orange, the Pit, his childhood, his birth, everything.

  With a respectful nod, the security function stepped backward, dissolving into blackness.

  “Shall I clear this away?” Cicero indicated Boone’s body.

  Appalled, Hanson opened his mouth to say who knew what, and then caught control of himself and closed it again. Cicero didn’t know any better—he was only a function. He wasn’t real. Hanson slumped, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Take it away, bury it.”

  “And this?”

  Cicero held up the gun.

  “Bury it along with him.”

  Then, because Boone had after all been a man of the cloth, he added, “Raise a stone or a sun-cross or something over it. Something appropriate.” It was a hell of a thing for a man to die so far from home. A hell of a thing to pass unnoticed and unremarked by anyone you ever knew.

  He stood waiting while Cicero picked up the body in his arms, stepped into darkness, and returned unencumbered. Then he said, “Let’s get out of here.”

  Cicero led him to the stairwell. When he looked down it, he threw up.

  * * *

  What Hanson needed now, more than anything, was sleep. He was still standing, and that was all. Months might have gone by for Boone and Cicero, but for him, Hanson, by the clock of his heart, it had only been three days since he’d had his shoveling contest with the New Man back in the Pit in Orange. In fact, this was still the third evening, as far as he was concerned, although enough had happened in those three days to make it seem like a lifetime had passed, and in all that time he’d only had a fitful nap here and there, not really a decent night’s sleep since leaving Orange. He was tired enough to make him believe that he had been awake and on his feet for every second of those eight months that Boone claimed had passed. Every cell in his body yearned for nothingness, darkness, oblivion.

  At his direction, Cicero led him back to the spider-legged houses and into Boone’s bedroom. It was spare and almost empty, with a small rectangular pad in its center, not much different from a working-class man’s futon back in Orange. “Lie here,” Cicero said, “and you will be refreshed.”

  With a nod, Hanson lay down on the pad. It was of an almost neutral texture, neither soft nor hard, just yielding enough to avoid discomfort, a trifle cool to the touch at first and then warm. He closed his eyes.

  Five minutes later he opened them again.

  He was wide awake.

  Lying on the pad had refreshed his body, cleansed it of fatigue poisons, and returned it to peak strength and vigor. Physically he was in terri
fic shape. Mentally, however, he felt the same as before—wasted, blasted, sick to the very pit of his being with the mere fact of existence.

  He sat up, alert, unblinking, and knew then with an awful clarity that he was never going to be able to make any kind of life for himself here, that Heaven was simply not for the likes of him. He didn’t know where home was for him anymore—perhaps there was no home for him anymore. But, wherever it was, it wasn’t here.

  He stood.

  He walked out to the balcony.

  He walked back in.

  He walked back out.

  Finally, there was no help for it. He was beyond evasions now.

  Without looking at Cicero, he said, “Take me to the Throne of God.”

  * * *

  No trace of Boone’s violent end remained. Every least particle of blood had been cleaned away in his absence. The room was as sterile and empty as if no one had walked here for a thousand years. Or as if no one ever had walked here, since the first recorded tick of time.

  Hanson sat gingerly down on the Throne, his body tensed and aching to leap up and away from its cold electric touch. He felt a surge of icy terror, but fought it down. This was the one moment in his life when he had a chance to actually change things, probably the one moment in the lives of all the hundreds of ancestors who’d striven and fought and toiled to produce him in the first place, who had lived their lives and broken their hearts and died without ever encountering a single moment where anything they did had even the remotest chance of effecting a real change in the world. This was the only chance any of them would ever have, even if he went back to the human world and had a dozen children and they lived a thousand generations more. This was the one chance for all of them, that chain of lives stretching back into the distant past and ahead into the unimaginable future. This one moment, here and now. He had to give it his best shot, and hope that things would work out all right. He didn’t really know what he was doing, or what the consequences of it might be, but he knew he had to try. Perhaps it had been no different for God Himself, in the Beginning, when He’d set out to create the world.