City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  He clutched the Throne’s arms. “Show me where we are.”

  Cicero gestured, and the tower, walls and stairs and ceiling alike, became transparent.

  Hanson stared over the City to the Wall, and over it as well, as if from a height even greater than the tower’s: stared upon a landscape rendered toylike by distance, like a cunningly crafted panorama or three-dimensional map, but one in which things moved and changed position, as in the image cast by a camera obscura (one of which he’d seen in the Courthouse in Orange, as a boy) so that you could see horses and transports moving on the roads, and people working in the fields, and cows wandering as they grazed, and trees swaying in the wind. Through some post-Utopian magic, it seemed like he could see everything at once, see it all clearly and distinctly, no matter how far away it was, his whole old world laid out at his feet. First there were the Utopian ruins overgrown in calamity weed and scrub oak; somewhere down there was the clearing in which he’d met Boone. Then the road up which the transport had come so very long ago, leading back to the ancient highway that stretched back to the south, past the SI garrisons and gypsy camps, the tiny crossroads towns, the vast glinting silver snake of the river, the high iron bridge over the Hudson, and on to the patchwork of hardscrabble farms beyond, which clung precariously to a series of gently rolling hills like the folds of a carelessly thrown quilt. Then, finally, by the horizon, a low gray smear of buildings where Orange was. Leaning forward, looking closer, he could make out the fetid streets of the Bog, rising up into Blackstone (he almost thought he could see the window of his old apartment, where he had lived with Becky for so many bittersweet years), and then up into the Swank, tidy tree-lined squares surrounded by fine old brick-and-iron buildings. He could see the rusty-orange Courthouse dome, one of the few specks of color in a sea of brown wood and gray brick, and imagined that if he could somehow see within the dome itself he would see himself as a small child staring fascinated at the table where the image from the camera obscura shifted and glittered, as if the Utopian optics through which he was looking could somehow let him see back through time as well as off through space (as who knew if they could not?) . . . And then, raising his eyes, up the slopes of Industry Hill to the highest point in Orange, he saw at last the massive ugly bulk of the State Factory, where he had slaved away the best days of his life, where he had poured out his youth like water onto thirsty ground. If he leaned forward a bit more, he could see the lip of the Pit itself, and tiny figures moving on it, shoveling, turning away to dump their coal onto the pile, turning back to shovel again, bending and straightening, their tiny matchstick arms and legs scissoring, and perhaps one of them was Gossard, or the New Man, or—recalling his fancy of a moment before—perhaps even Hanson himself, staring at the Wall of the City of God as he shoveled, thinking all the while about God staring back at him with a huge watery eye, tall as the sky.

  Something caught in Hanson’s throat, and he blinked back sudden tears. No one knew better than he not to romanticize the world stretched out there below, no one knew better than he the miseries and brutalities it contained, the sickness and the poverty and the filth, the tyranny and murder. From up here, you couldn’t see the crooked politics and institutionalized cruelties that were housed beneath the Courthouse dome that looked so picturesque and attractive. From up here, you saw only the pastoral beauty of the fields and the patchwork farms; you didn’t see the grotesquely mutated animals and the cows with cancerous running sores and the “sour spots” in the fields, places too thoroughly drenched in ancient chemical poisons for anything to ever grow there again for millennia to come. Hanson knew all that, none knew it better.

  And yet, even so, he was homesick.

  He wanted to go home, wherever home was. Maybe not back to Orange, necessarily, but home. Back to the human world. Back where he belonged. Back to where children went fishing in the summertime and women leaned out of windows to catch a breath of air at evening, back to where cows grazed and people drank beer and laughed, back to where folks fell in love and had babies and grew old and died. Away from the inhuman, unchanging, cruel and incomprehensible alien splendor of this place.

  “All that you can see, from here to the Wall,” Cicero said, “is subject to your manipulation.”

  “How do I turn off the Wall?” Hanson asked gruffly.

  “A twenty-mile section of it is under your control.” Cicero waved a hand, indicating an arc reaching from horizon to horizon. “It can only be turned off by depriving this entire segment of the City of all higher functions. I do not advise it. If, however, that is what you wish to do, I will guide you through the protocol.”

  Hanson took a deep breath. “A’right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”

  He seized the chair’s grips. The needles converged upon his skull.

  To his surprise, it did not hurt. A glowing sensation radiated from the base of his spine, a pervasive warmth like the sun on a summer’s afternoon. Lucid calm flooded his brain and he became aware of a thousand distant structures and devices, not as any kind of detailed knowledge but in much the same way he was aware of parts of his own body, ignorant of their inner workings but, with the slightest concentration, in control.

  “What do I do now?”

  “Make yourself aware of the Wall.”

  “A’right.” He felt it now, within him, a glowing length of immaterial and impervious substance, reaching down three times farther into the bedrock than it extended above the ground. A thin, thin line reached even farther down, impossibly far, toward the core of the Earth, tapping energies incomprehensively greater than any he’d ever imagined. No phantom guardian appeared. No one challenged him. He did not ascend, descend, vibrate, scream. “What now?”

  “Imagine a blue triangle. Within it, imagine a yellow circle. Now imagine that circle turning red.”

  He did.

  Twenty miles of the Wall ceased to be.

  * * *

  It took Hanson three weeks to make his way out of Heaven to the mortal realm of York. He could still summon a cyclone by stepping on a silver pad, but he could not make it take him where he wanted to go. His first attempt carried him so far from the Wall that he was not tempted to try a second time, lest he lose himself so thoroughly he might never find his way out again.

  Without Cicero, the City of God was unspeakably dangerous, capricious in unforeseeable ways. There was, so far as he could tell, no malice to it, but he was like a child lost in a steel mill; power was everywhere and he did not understand its purposes. The post-Utopians hadn’t turned off any of their machines before they had gone away to wherever it was they had gone. And Cicero, who understood its workings, was gone too, canceled out along with the twenty miles of Wall, never mentioning that he was one of the “higher functions” that Hanson’s command would send to oblivion. Hanson found he missed Cicero more than he did Boone, though the one was only a function and the other a real human being.

  It was an awful thing to have to admit to himself.

  He lived off rain water and what vermin he could catch, and he was often sick. It was a hellish time for him. But he kept going, determined that if he were going to die, he would at least make it to the Human Domain first. He would die on his own side of the Wall.

  When finally, starving, Hanson crossed over into the borderlands of York, he was taken prisoner by a troop of State soldiers. They were out in force, establishing a string of camps where the Wall had been, digging ditches and earthwork ramparts, re-creating a crude parody of the Wall in order to control access to the City of God and its many presumed treasures. They were all of them badly spooked by this turn of events, fearful and uncertain of what the future would bring. An unquestioned chock of their reality had crumbled without warning, and if that could happen, then who was to say what else might or might not?

  “Hands up!” the soldier shouted. He held his rifle too tensely. He was ungodly young, a child really. When Hanson obeyed, he eased hardly at all, remaining as taut as an overwound spring. �
�You’re in bad trouble, mister.”

  “A’right,” Hanson said. His head swam dizzily; he had to fight down a suicidal urge to caper and dance. But even in his weak and giddy state, he was particularly anxious not to be shot, not at this late date. “Y’caught me. You’re the boss. I’ll do whatever you say.”

  “Where’d you come from, anyway? How’d you get past the line?”

  Line? “I came from the east.” He gestured with his head, keeping his hands up as steady as he could. “Beyond where the Wall used to be.”

  The boy’s eyes widened.

  Two more soldiers came out of the woods. They both looked tough, but one looked mean as well.

  “What you got?” one asked.

  “This’n says he come from over the Wall.”

  “Yeah, right.”

  “So what do we do with him?”

  The soldiers glanced one at another. There was an uneasy moment of balance when Hanson’s fate could have gone any which way. The mean-looking soldier cocked up his mouth to one side, and, unslinging his rifle, said, “Too much fucking trouble to walk him back, if you ask me . . .”

  The boyish soldier gaped at him, too horrified to interfere.

  Talking quickly, saying any fool thing that came into his head, Hanson said, “Hey, any of you boys come from Orange? That’s where I’m from, that’s my neck of the woods. Maybe you got family back there? What are their names? Might be I know them.” Crazy, nonsensical stuff he was saying, but it didn’t matter—anything to establish contact.

  The third soldier stared hard at him. Then—

  “Fuck it,” he said, and pushed the rifle barrel out of line, away from Hanson. The mean-looking one gave him an angry look, then turned his head to the side, spat, and re-slung his rifle.

  The soldier who’d just saved Hanson’s life looked tired. “We’ll take him to camp. He can answer questions there.”

  They tied his hands behind his back and started down the road. Hanson went quietly. He knew his answers would not please their superior officers. Their questions would be all wrong. It didn’t matter, though. He had done his part.

  He had opened the City of God for them.

  It might be some good would come of it. Anything was possible. He didn’t intend to dwell on it, though. What they did with it was their concern, not his.

  They walked on in silence for a while. Hanson felt weak and dizzy. After a mile or so, one of the soldiers struck a narc on his thigh, took a long drag to get it started, and stuck it in Hanson’s mouth.

  He mumbled his thanks. They wouldn’t untie his hands, but after he’d sucked in, the young soldier who’d captured him took the narc out again so he could exhale.

  The two older soldiers tended to keep a cautious distance from him, but the younger one hung at his side, not frightened any longer but curious, intrigued, obviously thinking over what Hanson had said earlier. Finally, he couldn’t keep his questions in any longer. “You really been”—he made a gesture with his head—“back there?”

  Hanson nodded wordlessly.

  “Inside the City, I mean.”

  “Ai. S’pose I have.”

  “You ever seen . . . you know?”

  The kid asked it in a hushed kind of way, the religious feelings of his childhood apparently not entirely dead yet, for the blasphemy of a ragged drifter like Hanson claiming to have come from the City of God was clearly thrilling and alarming to him. His buddies, skeptical, intrigued, moved a little closer to hear Hanson’s answer.

  “You mean God?” Hanson began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Stumbling to a halt, he managed to control himself, to still the painful laughter for just long enough to look into the boy’s anxious face and say, “Fool! D’you mean to say you ain’t heard yet? God is dead!”

  He doubled over then, roaring with laughter. His eyes filled with tears, and still he couldn’t stop. He laughed until he choked.

  The soldiers waited until he could breathe again. Then they yanked him upright and double-checked his bonds.

  They all four headed down the road.

  6

  THERE WAS A WINDOW in one wall of his cell. Without it, Hanson later thought, he might have gone insane.

  It was a narrow slit window, open to the air but set with stout iron bars, a horizontal slash in the pale stone in the eastern wall of his cell, and although it let the cold wind in, and sometimes snow in winter, Hanson treasured it for the air and light it also let through into the gloomy darkness of his cell. The cell wall bulged inward slightly here, and with a little scrambling, it was possible to reach the window and hook your arms around the bars. Hanson would hang there for a long time, until the muscles in his big arms screamed in protest, relishing the cold wind on his face, drinking in the sight of trees and birds and low rolling hills, sometimes looking out toward the eastern horizon where, just out of sight, waited the shining immensity of the Wall of the City of God. Sometimes at night you could see its sullen glow lighting up the dark underbellies of the clouds.

  When his arms could stand the strain no longer, he would slump back into the smothering, claustrophobic darkness of his cell, where he had a hard narrow cot, a few rough blankets, a pot to relieve himself in. They rarely came for him anymore, and most of his days and nights were spent alone, his meals—rough but substantial fare, bread that he could smell baking somewhere on the premises early in the morning, big hunks of new cheese, sometimes an unidentifiable piece of meat or a bit of fruit in the summer—shoved in through a slot in the iron-bound oaken door twice a day; at least they hadn’t tried starving him yet, although they’d tried everything else. He rarely saw his captors anymore, although he could hear them passing in the corridor outside and had learned to recognize the individualities of their gaits, and to identify one guard by his habit of whistling jigs and cheerful little schottisches as he made his rounds. He hadn’t seen any of the other prisoners for months, and never had seen much of them, although occasionally he could hear them screaming, or crying hopelessly in the night, and one evening someone had begun wailing “What is this place? I don’t belong here! Let me out of here! Get me out of here!” over and over again for hours in a hideously wavering high-pitched voice, like a lost soul crying out from some deep pit of Hell, until finally it was cut off in mid-cry, followed by an ominous silence.

  Hanson almost—almost—regretted that they didn’t come to take him for questioning anymore.

  His first day here, after soldiers quick-marched him from the City of God, which he had been caught coming out of, returning from a place no man had ever successfully entered in who knew how many hundreds or even thousands of years, they had dragged him to the warden’s office. The warden had sat behind his scarred wooden desk and studied him dispassionately, as though he were some curious kind of bug.

  “So, you claim to have been inside the City of God?” the warden asked, in a gravelly voice.

  “Ai,” Hanson said, and began to tell his story, but the warden, a pale, hulking fat man who reminded Hanson oddly of his long-lost friend Gossard, although a more brutish, corrupted Gossard with a hard face and harder eyes, surged to his feet and waved a fist the size of a ham at him. “Save your lies!” the warden screamed. “We’ll get the truth out of you soon enough!” And when Hanson had started to protest, he’d swarmed into him, hitting him with his rock-hard ham fists, knocking Hanson to the ground, then kicking him twice in the ribs.

  As Hanson looked up at him from the floor through a blaze of pain, the guards joined in on the fun, drawing hardwood truncheons from their belts and striking him over and over, smashing his rib cage when he held his arms before his face and then his face when he wrapped his arms about his torso. Two or three times he tried to rise to his feet and was clubbed back down. They worked steadily, methodically, and then, when Hanson honestly believed he was feeling as much pain as a human being could feel without actually dying, they stopped. There was a brief silence and then warm drops of water spattered over his face and body. Hanson’s ey
es were swollen shut by then, but he managed to open one just wide enough to see that the warden had unbuttoned his fly and taken out his thick ugly cock, and was calmly and methodically pissing all over him.

  When he was done at last, the warden buttoned himself up again and made a flicking, dismissive gesture, like a man shooing a fly, and the guards had pulled Hanson up off the floor and dragged him through a maze of stone corridors for the first time to his cell, where they left him curled into a ball in the dirt, shuddering with nausea and shame, the rank smell of the other man’s urine in his hair and nose, soaking his clothes.

  The warden, whose name was Overton, later explained to Hanson, in one of those phases of interrogation where he would become ramblingly conversational, almost chatty, that this was a sound psychological technique, establishing dominance at once and breaking down any image the prisoner might have of himself as brave and noble and heroic by shaming and humiliating him. “No man can think of himself as heroic when his clothes are steaming with another man’s piss, eh? Of course,” Overton said, tapping a pale finger alongside his nose and winking, “the man who came before me would have raped you. Raped you and enjoyed it, too. Old Auxley was a vicious bastard. But the way I see it, there should always be something held in reserve. That’s kinder in the long run, it heads off unwise actions. Just remember: no matter how bad things are, they can always get worse.”

  They left him alone in his cell for two days in his stiff, stinking clothes, without food or water, and on the third morning they dragged him to a windowless downstairs room whose walls were padded with blankets and straw. While Overton sat motionless and silent on a stool, the other guards “questioned” Hanson with practiced efficiency, making him run over his story again and again while they first beat him bloody with their fists, then put burning slivers under his fingernails, then seared his flesh with red-hot irons, then slowly crushed his foot in an iron vise. Hanson was not even remotely heroic through all this. He had been hurt before in his life, accidents at work, bar fights, had even been stabbed once, but nothing in his experience had prepared him for this kind of methodical torture, his body ripped open, his skin blistered and blackened, his bones crushed. He screamed his throat raw, cried, begged, and, toward the end, pleaded that he’d tell them anything they wanted to hear if they’d just stop. Throughout the procedure, Overton sat in complete silence, sometimes leaning forward intently, sometimes frowning slightly, as if that particular interrogation technique wasn’t being carried out to his complete satisfaction.