City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  A few miles later, from the top of a small rise, they got their first look at the Wall of the City of God. Hanson had seen it at a distance every day of his working life, as he slaved away up on an outdoor platform at the State Factory in Orange, and, to his sorrow, he had seen it close-up once before—but it was still a breathtaking sight, beautiful and terrible, so that his emotions snagged in his throat as he looked at it. The Wall, hundreds of feet high, stretched out of sight in either direction, extending more than five hundred miles from south to north. It glowed, smoldering with pinks and coral reds, and Hanson well remembered the heat it generated, like walking into a furnace if you got too close.

  The shining immensity of the wall had a black gap in it, directly ahead, as if someone had knocked out a great beast’s two bottom front teeth—marking the place where, long ago, Hanson had shut down that section of the Wall, allowing humans entry to the City of God beyond.

  Hanson had a wild moment of panic where he considered turning his horse around and making a break for it, galloping as fast as he could go—but it was hopeless. Delgardo would bring him down as easily as he had the hopper, or some of the other, much more experienced horsemen would catch up with him. Reluctantly, he followed the others down the hill toward the City, his fear growing as the Wall rose higher and higher above them.

  Since he’d last been here, an Army encampment had been built alongside the gap in the Wall, hundreds of tents clustered close around a few plain, obviously hastily slapped-together wooden buildings. As they rode up, Hanson saw detachments of soldiers working to raise a wooden palisade to replace the section of Wall that had been taken down. A second palisade surrounded the camp. Nearby was a cemetery and there were soldiers working there too, digging graves for canvas-wrapped corpses and filling them in again. Delgardo noticed him looking and said, “That’s right, Hanson. There was a big incursion from the South only three days ago, soldiers trying to drive us out and take over control of the City. There was a pitched battle in which hundreds died on either side. These are the poor bastards who lingered for a while in the hospital tents. See what you’ve wrought, eh? If you’d never opened up the City of God, those men wouldn’t have died.” He smiled gently at the graves. “And a lot more men are going to die in the future! All because of you.” He sounded oddly pleased at the prospect. Hanson tightened his jaw, but said nothing.

  In the camp, they surrendered their mounts to the quartermaster. Hanson learned that horses went mad with fear if you tried to take them into the City, and refused to go no matter how much you whipped them, even if you whipped them to death. They’d have to walk from here on. Nor were horses the only ones afflicted. When the soldiers stayed too long in the City, they had horrible dreams which grew worse with every passing night until they refused to sleep for fear of what they would see, grew rebellious and hard to command, and even—some of them—went mad. So, after a few abortive attempts to build a base inside the Wall resulted in an untold number of deaths and suicides and one near-mutiny, the officers had given in and raised the camp outside, at a respectful distance from the City of God, and, they hoped, from the malign influences it seemed to radiate.

  While their sergeant—a man with the unlikely name of Barker, usually appropriate enough for a sergeant, although Barker was a quiet man with tired, pouched eyes that had seen too much and knew that they were going to see more—went to arrange tents for them, they sat around in a rest area. Hanson was struck by what a glum and dispirited camp it was, lacking the horseplay and jocular shouted insults that would usually characterize a bunch of off-duty soldiers with nothing to do but wait for the mess hall to open as dusk came on.

  Once, when Hanson was a boy, he saw a “gorilla,” although it was more likely to have actually been one of those half-human hybrids that the ramshackle little nations to the west kept trying to use as soldiers. It was in a cage on a wagon in a pathetic little carnival that had passed through town, and all the children had come running out to jeer at it and poke at it with sticks between the bars. The ape had ignored them all, enduring everything, simply sitting and staring at nothing.

  That was how the soldiers sat, empty-eyed and uncaring, not looking at anything, nor so far as could be determined thinking anything either. Marshaling their strength for the next battle.

  It occurred to Hanson to wonder if York was losing this war. Then it occurred to him to wonder if there even was such a nation as the State of York anymore, or if it had been swallowed by the Stabilities of Portland or some other nation, or reorganized into some other political entity altogether. He had lost touch with the world in the years he’d rotted in prison, and the world hadn’t waited for him. So much had changed. Was there anyplace where he belonged anymore?

  That night, alone in his pup tent, the Wall smoldered through Hanson’s dreams, and for the first time in years, he felt the key move within his chest, as though the nearness to the City of God were bringing it back to life.

  The next morning, they marched into the City of God, the hair rising on the back of Hanson’s neck as they crossed through the palisade’s gate and into the City itself. The land before them had originally looked like a vast lawn or meadow, freckled with occasional pairs of silver dots—the plates that the Utopians had used to transport themselves instantaneously from place to place—now, however, encased in crude cages of metal bars so that nobody would blunder across them to be transported who-knew-where and, more likely than not, never be seen again. The land gracefully swelled and ebbed, a park essentially, with the occasional copse of flametrees. It should have been beautiful—it had been beautiful once. But it was scarred with pits and trenches hacked into the land and there were black smears where stands of trees had been chopped down and burned, for what purpose Hanson could not guess. To one side, a cluster of graceful buildings or machines or whatever-they-were intruded into the parkland and they looked wrong too, some of them streaked with soot, suggesting that the Army had tried to blast them open with explosives, others ashen and wilting, like dying plants.

  Down the center of the meadow was a dirt track that led straight from the camp then suddenly jogged to one side and, after a bit, abruptly to the other before driving straight into another grouping of maybe-buildings. Those earlier soldiers who had come to loot the City of God, it appeared, had undergone their share of unpleasant adventures.

  The soldiers were mostly quiet as they walked, even Delgardo seeming a bit overawed by the alien strangeness all around them, although there was some nervous speculation among the men about whether the old Utopians were somewhere inside the buildings—if buildings they were—staring ominously out at them, preparing to strike. Hanson knew better. There were no Utopians here, not in any form he understood or could recognize, anyway. But they had left thousands of their toys behind, still working, and most of them could be deadly if you blundered into them. One of the youngest soldiers, a pock-faced boy named Lopez, one cheek heavily scarred by a radiation burn, was the only one who seemed to be enjoying himself, enthusing about how beautiful and wonderful and strange everything was, until at last Sergeant Barker glumly told him, “Shut up, Lopez. You’re not on fucking vacation.” And Hanson surprised himself by adding, “Ai, it’s pretty, but anything here can kill you in a second, without any Goddamned warning. Don’t touch anything. Don’t go through anything. Don’t go under anything. And keep on the Goddamned path.”

  Delgardo glanced back at him, and then gestured for Hanson to take the lead, although Hanson could see it hurt his pride to surrender it. “Silly to bring the only one who’s been here before and then not use him as a guide, eh?” he said, and you could almost hear the unspoken words he shared with the rest of the men: Let him be the first one to die, if something goes wrong.

  Hanson walked at the front of the group thereafter. They traveled nearly five miles that day, cautiously but steadily, along ways that had been mapped out as safe by previous incursions into the City. Bringing up the rear of their party was the Stumper, a tremendou
s pair of metal elephant legs which had been fitted with a wooden wagon, wheels and axles excised, atop what would have been its waist had there been more of it. It looked like a walking basket piled high with food rations, barrels of water, and other supplies and was led by a soldier tugging it along at the end of a rope.

  Hanson had laughed involuntarily when he first saw the thing, and of course Delgardo demanded to know why. “Well, just look at it,” Hanson said. The Stumper was made of hundreds of sliding parts that eased in and out of each other so that in motion its gleaming surface seemed to flow like water. The basket-wagon atop it was crudely designed and clumsily built. “Whatever that thing is for, it for sure a’n’t just for humping cargo about. But this is the best your sort can do with it. You’re like a manshogger that’s found a rifle and all he can think to do with it is use it as a club.”

  To his surprise, Delgardo laughed, and though there were sneering overtones to it, on the whole the laughter sounded genuine. “You’re one hundred percent right, Hanson, we’re dealing with technology that’s unfathomably beyond our comprehension, and our very best uses of it are nothing but jury-rigged kludges. Yet, for all that, a manshogger with a club has a distinct advantage over a manshogger without one.”

  As dusk began to fall, they made camp at the edge of an open area where multicolored tentacles of light rose from a tangle of gently swaying mists, closed ends to form shimmering rings, dwindled as they ascended, and finally disappeared with soft, musical chimes. The spectacle was probably just for looks; nevertheless, Hanson was glad that there was a stream between them and it. The soldiers got to work pitching tents and digging a slit latrine. While they did, Hanson, who had been assigned no duties, stood apart from the rest, looking at the rising loops of prismatic mists. The buildings had closed around them and then opened up again into what he thought of as a park, though God only knew what function it might actually have served. The “park” was probably safe; he’d passed through its like many a time before and never been hurt by one. But there were structures in every direction that hurt his brain if he tried to make sense of their shapes: a twisted disk taller than the Courthouse in Orange, with a square hole punched through the left half of it; a braided noodle of bright red and yellow tubes that unraveled at the top and flopped downward without quite reaching the ground; an inverted pyramid made up of rotating rectangles that Hanson almost couldn’t pry his eyes away from. On the horizon, one structure soared high above the others, a series of intersecting arches with steep spires, like the sharp wings of bats hanging from a cave ceiling only reversed, which seemed to challenge the sky itself. It glowed the same eerie red-pink-gold as did the Wall itself, and that frightened him very much indeed.

  The longer he stared at the thing, the more convinced he became that it—or something within it, but most likely the building itself—was staring back at him, studying him, analyzing him. Making plans.

  It was making plans for Hanson specifically because he had the key within him. Delgardo believed in little healing machines because little healing machines were something a man could believe in and almost understand. But Hanson knew better. The truth was not only stranger than a man might believe, it was stranger than a man could believe. Somehow the key was protecting him and, for whatever unfathomable reasons, Delgardo as well.

  Periodically, Hanson would remember with a sudden rush of dread and loathing that was almost a seizure, the moment the key had seized him, a metal rod bursting out of Boone’s dead chest, unfolding several joints, and then plunging into Hanson’s chest, passing through skin and muscle and cloth as if they didn’t exist, sinking out of sight within his body and leaving no trace of its existence behind.

  Since then, it had always been with him, although sometimes when it was quiet inside him months and months would go by without him thinking of it at all. It was the key that had enabled him to pass alive through the Wall of the City of God, it was the key that had enabled him to seize control of the City for a critical moment, it was the key that had enabled him to shut down a section of the Wall, thus giving birth to the present they lived in now, it was the key that provided his limited “immortality,” that had cured his Crab, that kept him seemingly the same age no matter how much time had gone by, maybe by creating and replenishing the little machines in his blood that Delgardo believed in but more likely by some other process, one he would never be smart enough to understand.

  Throughout all the interrogations he’d endured at the prison, through all the torture and pain and mutilation and horror and humiliation, the one thing he’d never mentioned about his trip inside the City of God was the key. Sometimes it seemed as if the key itself was somehow keeping him from saying anything about it, since when they were ripping his fingernails out with red-hot tongs, and he was trying to come up with anything he could say to make them stop, and he tried to tell them about the key to see if that would please them, the words disappeared from his throat somehow, and he found himself unable to speak them no matter how cruelly his interrogators abused his flesh.

  Thank all the gods that might exist that he hadn’t told them, he thought now. If he had, then Overton would have written it down in his notes, and Delgardo would know about it. And if Delgardo knew . . . He was an intelligent man. It wouldn’t take him long to figure out that it was the key inside Hanson’s body that was replenishing his health, that was the real origin of Hanson’s “immortality.” And he wouldn’t hesitate for a moment to rip it out of Hanson’s body and claim it for his own.

  And suppose that Delgardo did claim the key? Suppose that made it possible somehow for him to somehow seize control of the City?

  That mustn’t happen.

  There was no way that Delgardo would relinquish the godlike power that Hanson had once refused. No, he would use it instead. Use it for his own ends, to achieve his every selfish desire and grandiose wish. He’d extend his power to affect the world outside the Wall, as Hanson had declined to do, shape it however he wanted, bend it to his will. His use of the power would grow more and more extravagant, until, with his ego, he’d try to make people worship him as a god. Which in a way, he would be―a vain, petty, cruel, ruthless god.

  Most of his life, Hanson had passively drifted with the tide, doing what he was supposed to do, asking no questions, making no trouble. Even him being back in the City again was the result of being swept along by the tide of someone else’s will; Delgardo had willed it, Delgardo had made it happen. All he’d done, however reluctantly, was do what he was told. Only twice in his life had he ever initiated and taken decisive action, when he’d killed Oristano the foreman, and when he opened a section of the City of God to the world. No, not even twice, because he’d been swept along on a tide of rage and pride and despair when he’d killed Oristano, unable to stop himself, hardly aware of what he was doing until it was over; there had been no planning or foresight involved, no conscious decision. So then, only one time in his miserable life had he ever decided to do something on his own, something that was his own idea, and had the will to actually make himself do it―when he’d taken down the Wall. That hadn’t turned out exactly as he’d hoped that it would. But at least he’d tried. At least he’d taken action.

  He couldn’t afford to be passively swept along any longer. He had to do something, not only to get out of this situation and save his own life, but to keep Delgardo from making the world an even more horrible place than it already was.

  He had to do something.

  But what?

  The soaring golden structure continued to leer down at him, silently, mockingly. At last, with a shiver, Hanson turned his back on the thing and trudged into the center of the camp, to reserve himself a place on the ground before the newly built fire and wait for food to be cooked and served.

  * * *

  That night, Hanson dreamed of his wife, Becky, carried away in the White Winter all those unhappy years ago. She was young and beautiful, with the dewy blush of youth on her skin, the way she had looked
when he first met her and seen in her everything he’d ever wanted or dreamed of. After she died, he’d locked away all memories of her in the deepest recesses of his mind, but they leaked out from time to time still. Looking at her, he began to weep for all they had once had and all he had lost forever. “Hanson,” she said. “This can’t go on. You’ve got to fight back.”

  “I know, Becky, I know, but . . . I can’t. I just can’t.”

  “You’ll be judged in the Cathedral. If you love me, you’ll—”

  But abruptly, he found himself in the military cemetery, searching among the graves for the body of his dead wife, unwrapping the canvas from corpse after corpse and searching the faces for her features. One canvas wrapping moved slightly as he approached and, suddenly filled with the certainty that she was after all still alive, he ripped open the cloth. Rats swarmed out, black and diseased, and when he flinched away in disgust, the corpse beneath them opened its eyes and was his old friend Boone, whose lipless mouth grinned madly and said, “Now it’s your turn to die. Ha! See how you like it!”

  * * *

  Nobody talked about it in morning, but from the sour expressions on their faces, Hanson was sure that he wasn’t the only one who’d suffered nightmares. After a cold breakfast, they broke camp and resumed their cautious march into the City. They hadn’t gone more than a mile when Hanson realized that Sergeant Barker had matched strides with him and they were walking abreast. Quietly, without looking his way, Barker said, “Stop baiting Delgardo.”

  “Eh?” Hanson did not look at Barker either but continued walking along, scanning the City ahead, looking for trouble.

  “Standing up to his kind don’t get y’nothing but trouble. He’s the commander. He’s got the law on his side, he’s got guns on his side, he’s got me on his side. You got nothing, an’ a man with nothing had best keep his head down. Hear what I’m saying?”