Strength of Stones

  “I may need your help,” Kahn said. “You wouldn’t want to miss this chance, would you?”

  Arthur’s throat bobbed. “No.”

  “There isn’t much time.”

  More than anything else, Arthur wanted to follow. If someone had opened a gateway to paradise, he couldn’t have been more interested. But he was terrified. He felt like a boy listening to Old Woman tales in New Canaan. He walked up to the tunnel, legs shaking. Kahn stepped through, and Arthur followed.

  The city seemed to breathe. Cool air blew steadily through the corridors, carrying a green smell and a flowery smell that was neither sharp nor cloying—in fact, that was almost unnoticeable until Arthur stopped and lifted his head to sniff. Kahn looked back. “Faster,” he said. “These are service-ways. There’s nothing down here for us.”

  Kahn led him down a hall to a blank wall. The floor lifted, the ceiling parted, and they were on an elevator, rising through a translucent shaft. Things hissed and sighed around them. Through the walls, Arthur could see fluids moving, vague white circles pulsing. His fear was subsiding. His hands still shook, but with excitement now.

  “It is beautiful, isn’t it?” Kahn asked, as if needing reassurance. Arthur nodded.

  Above, another ceiling parted, and they rose into a broad plaza. The floor beneath them sealed up. Kahn motioned him on. The architect was walking faster, almost running. They came to a heat shaft and Kahn whistled. From above, a leaf-shaped flying thing three meters across spiraled down and stopped a few centimeters from the shaft floor. Kahn took a seat on the vehicle and Arthur climbed in alongside.

  “City manager’s chambers,” he said.

  The leaf-vehicle responded by rising slowly, then accelerating until they were pushed back into their seats. Arthur gripped the armrests tightly, wanting to scream but embarrassed by his fear. Kahn seemed to take the ride so calmly—what was there to worry about?

  Kahn looked across at him and smiled, giving him a reassuring pat on the arm. “Just a few seconds,” he said. Arthur kept his eyes on his knees.

  The vehicle began to slow, moving toward the side of the shaft. Balconies and hallways leading off into green-lit depths flashed by. They rose above the lip of the shaft and the vehicle sidled over, then landed with a hum and several internal clicks. Kahn helped Arthur out.

  They were on top of the tallest tower, above most of the clouds. The starlight was bright and clear, and this high the air was cool and dry. The smell of greenery was stronger. Looking to the opposite side of the shaft, Arthur saw a fiat expanse of grass. Inlays of light in the sward seemed to send up beams which curved, then diffused, illuminating the area softly but clearly. On the other side, they were at the edge of a walkway. Glowing stripes of light streamed down the walkway, beckoning them through a forest of tall pines and aspen.

  “This way, please,” a voice instructed.

  “Who is that?” Arthur asked Kahn.

  “We are the aide of Matthew,” the voice replied. The accent was hard to cut through, but it wasn’t too thick to understand.

  “What is the ‘aide of Matthew’ function?” Kahn asked.

  “We are under the command of Matthew out of Reah.”

  “Where is the architect?”

  “You are the builder.”

  “Where is the agency I left in my place?” Kahn restated.

  “That function has been subsumed. Matthew has reorganized all city functions.”

  They followed the bands of light down the path. Through the trees, at the edge of the tower, they could see a bright warm glow surrounding a building. The building was about ten meters tall and just as wide, cylindrical, with a numeral 2 painted on one side. Beneath the 2 was a small omega.

  “I don’t recognize any of this,” Kahn said. “Everything’s been rearranged. The city’s about a third as large as it should be, even taking the enclave into account.”

  “This way, please,” the voice instructed. The bands of light led up to the edge of the building, beneath the omega. A circular door slid aside. Kahn looked into the darkened interior. “This is the city manager’s chamber?”

  “It is a reconstructed portion,” the voice said.

  “Where’s the rest? This is too small.”

  “Matthew no longer needs the chamber for his work. Its function has been subsumed.”

  Kahn stepped inside and the room lighted up. Arthur followed slowly after. In the middle of a blank room was a large chair mounted on a dais. The arms of the chair were covered with silvery nodes and dimples. A woman was sitting in the chair, motionless. She had long pepper-grey hair and a restful expression. Her robes shimmered like a rainbow. Her eyes appeared to be fixed on them, but as Kahn moved, he saw she was staring at the door, not them, with a vague smile. Arthur stayed by the door, hands clasped behind his back, returning the woman’s gaze.

  The entire figure was translucent, like an image from the city’s guide or teacher projectors.

  “She isn’t real, is she?” Arthur asked.

  “No.”

  Kahn walked completely around the chair. The chair, at least, was familiar and unchanged. The emptiness of the rest of the chamber disturbed him. Once, the city manager’s control center would have been filled with screens, displays, and communications equipment, all used to coordinate the city.

  When he came back within the line of the woman’s gaze, he noticed that a bead of light had appeared in her forehead. It grew brighter as he watched. The figure stood and filled with light like a vessel fills with water. She vanished. The air smelled faintly of roses.

  Arthur gave a shuddering sigh. “I’m—”

  “Sh,” Kahn said. He sat in the chair and put his fingers into the dimples, then looked into retinal projectors arrayed on the edge of an armrest.

  He seemed to fall into emptiness, with a vague glow far beneath. The emptiness became filled with a presence.

  You are the builder?

  “Yes,” he answered.

  You have been here before, not to this city, but to God-Does-Battle.

  “Yes, thirteen hundred years ago.”

  No… But the voice trailed off. It was a woman’s voice, but not immediately recognizable as such. Kahn could detect more familiar overtones—the combined voices of the old city, smoothly blended, indistinguishable. You are here again.

  “Yes. I only have three weeks left.”

  What will you do?

  “There is an emergency.”

  The voice seemed to ripple. An em/em/er/ergency.

  He was flooded with sudden information. The increased brightness of the sun was charted for him, but then, irrationally, compared with the decline of the living cities. Some attempt was made to explain the sun’s behavior with the rising into space of the souls of dead cities. “No, that is wrong,” he said.

  These are the views of Matthew.

  “Who is Matthew?”

  Our son/son/son we are not allowed to see.

  “Where is he?”

  The information seemed to grow fainter until he was simply sitting in the chair. He pulled his fingers out of the dimples and turned away from the armrest projectors. Then he removed the packet from the lining of his coat.

  “I’m going to be a little longer, Arthur.”

  “I’ll just sit,” Arthur said.

  Kahn found a slot in the arm and inserted the packet. He replaced his fingers and turned to the projectors.

  To his surprise, the packet’s first stream of information did not concern the early years of the cities. It had been updated, reset, and that meant someone on God-Does-Battle had tampered with the recorders—machines only he was supposed to know about.

  What had the mingled city-voice said a few moments ago—?

  The record took up his full attention. It would have taken weeks to play the packet back at a speed slow enough to allow him to absorb everything, so he selected for highlights. In doing that, he only caught snatches of a voice-over.

  “Cities have been chosen
for ”

  A kind of evacuation procedure, outlined in some detail, but with no mention of the final goal—which, he assumed, must be the Bifrost.

  One of the cities, Throne, had been on a harbor at the time of the record, about nine hundred years ago. It had stood just north of the river plain where Resurrection now rested. According to the Ascorias, Throne had long since walked and disappeared—but in the record, Throne was in position, healthy enough, and sported three new structures—needle-thin spires which rose above the towers and nearly met at an apex. His suspicions were confirmed when he caught the word “Bifrost” in the accelerated garble.

  Another city—Eulalia, which at one time had been occupied by Pentecostals—appeared in the record. Again, three spires rose above the city. Again, the city was on the shores of a natural harbor, where large numbers of people could be brought in by boat. (More evacuation plans—as if the record had been used as a kind of notebook. He scanned for source annotations and the record showed, “Transmission from Eulalia 2765/3/3”.)

  The record then switched to words only, and he had to slow to pick up what was being said. The voice was familiar, even though using brevity code and distorted by the re, cord’s occasional lack of fidelity.

  “City reacting badly. Coronet rebels. RelAuth blocks. Bifrost allowed, no object my presence, but no agreem on exiles. Aband Eul, on to—”

  Thule, the third city, was even farther south, on the continent of Brisbane near the south pole. The record showed fields of ice and snow, bleak volcanic scarps, pale, rugged landscapes. Kahn had built Thule for the Asian Jews. That was the city where George Pearson had finally gone to live after his disputes with the Judaeo-Christian Councils. Again, three spires rose above the crystal towers.

  The record was blank in many places now. Suddenly, it slowed and the voice took over, not using brevity code, tinged with anger and despair.

  “Thule was the last city to exile its citizens. Under Pearson’s last years as mayor, it became a city of heretics. The councils had exiled Pearson for his heresy—Gnostic leanings, I gather, since the city is now Gnostic—so Pearson retaliated by opening Thule to everyone the council rejected. In the last few years, the councils were eating themselves alive, and what the cities did later was only a kind of imitation. Heresy was everywhere. Only the Moslems kept their calm, and they were a minority here. Thule accepted them all—neo-Nestorians, Arians, rabid mystics, Manicheans of course. Now, Thule is the last hope, something I am not very happy about. All other cities fight me when I announce I’m bringing exiles back, but Thule is calm, quiet…”

  Kahn had designed Thule with substantial differences. Its source material had been more insectoid than botanical, and its programming—at the request of the Asian Jews—had been made more flexible, to allow for whatever changes of creed the inhabitants might undergo. Kahn had never been happy about the result. He had considered Thule a particularly volatile product, not exactly dangerous, but sufficiently unstable to make him uneasy. Apparently Pearson had taken advantage of that instability.

  Distracted by his own musings, he stopped the record and rewound it to catch what he had missed. But abruptly the record faded and stopped. Them was a blank of several seconds, then the mechanical recording returned with the early centuries of the cities.

  At the moment, he was more interested in the voice than in the details of city history. He wound back further and replayed the tense, angry words, then searched for annotations. He found a numeric code click and had it translated and displayed for him. “Transmission from Thule,” the code label read, “2766/1/5.”

  The speaker had moved from Eulalia to Thule after failing to accomplish his tasks in both Throne and Eulalia.

  There was logically only one person who knew about the recorders, one person who could get into the cities after the Exiling.

  The original Robert Kahn had returned to God-Does-Battle nine hundred years ago—four hundred years after the simulacrum was memorized—to set things right. He had constructed the Bifrosts in three cities, and failed in at least two. And he had left a sketchy, idiosyncratic record by transmitting to all the secret recorders that could still receive. Nine centuries ago, most of the cities had been intact.

  He pulled his fingers out of the cups and closed his eyes. Someone was calling for him. In the seconds that it took to re-orient to externals, he heard footsteps, words exchanged, then a high-pitched, crackling voice. He was numbed for an instant by the thought of opening his eyes and staring at himself still trying to save God-Does-Battle…

  Arthur was calling his name and had stepped to one side of the doorway.

  In the half-circle stood an old man, his skin as brown as wood, naked except for a pair of white boxer shorts. He carried a translucent, jade-colored cane in one hand, leaning on it and repeating, above Arthur’s voice, “Who the hell are you two? How did you get into my city?”

  “I’m Robert Kahn.”

  The old man smiled grimly and shook his head. “No, I don’t think you are.”

  Kahn stepped down from the chair. “Are you human?” The old man said nothing.

  “I am the builder,” Kahn said. “My word is—”

  “That nonsense is useless on me. I’m not a city part and I can’t be controlled by formulas. I can see how you got in here, sham that you are. But who is this?” He pointed to Arthur.

  “His name is Arthur Sam Daniel.”

  “And the mimics came with you, too, I suppose. Well, that isn’t my jurisdiction. Mother takes care of that.” His emphasis on the word “Mother” was slightly acid. He reached up to scratch his chest. “Pardon my appearance,” he said, his voice low and ragged. “I haven’t seen living people this close for twenty-five years. But you aren’t exactly alive, are you?”

  “I’m a simulacrum.”

  “I’ve been expecting one. You look like him. And the city, of course, must obey your orders, let you in. A lot has changed since you last came. You know that?”

  “I can see.”

  “Why are you here now?”

  Kahn saw no reason to withold information. “I was supposed to return a long time ago. I wanted to look over the work, see that everything was functioning properly.”

  The old man laughed a single, tight-lipped bark.

  “Perhaps I could have done something,” Kahn continued, uncomfortable in the old man’s steady glare. “There have been problems, I can see.”

  “The greatest of all understatements, surely. I’ve spent my entire life trying to undo your sabotage. Do you know who I am?”

  “I think so.”

  “Matthew. Would-be son of Reah.”

  “I see.”

  There was a moment of silence. Despite his defiance, Matthew seemed more than a little nervous. “Now that I’m here,” Kahn said, “perhaps we—”

  “None of this makes any sense!” Matthew cried out. “You have no right to keep popping up. No right at all.” He seemed to deflate, his chest sinking, shoulders inclined, head bowed.

  “Do you operate this city, or have any control over it?” Kahn asked.

  The old man nodded.

  “Then you can help me. We must organize all the cities still alive, re-program them, build more cities. I’ll certainly need help. Some functions have been changed here—”

  “I’ve dismantled them,” Matthew said, straightening. He flicked his rod at Kahn. “Resurrection’s mind has been reorganized. I control everything by my voice and presence. Except for what Reah watches over, of course. And I’ve even made some inroads there in the last twenty-five years.”

  “Where is Reah?” Arthur asked. Matthew looked down on him with mingled contempt and anxiety.

  “She’s long dead. Stored in the city. As I suppose I’ll be when I die. These were her chambers. Stand back from her chair… you have no right to sit there.”

  “How long have you been here?” Kahn asked.

  “A century. Every year of it, trying to put right what you destroyed. Your little
time-bombs in the city minds.”

  “Listen, Matthew—”

  “I stopped letting people in twenty-five years ago,” Matthew stepped forward one stride. “For seventy-five years there was no peace, only children, schools, hospitals, ignorance and confusion. No peace. Now I’m used to being alone. Not that any of them ever saw me clearly. I stayed away after I grew older. You know, I sympathize with you, hating the people on this planet.” Kahn flinched. “They’re not easy to love. But you didn’t have to sabotage!”

  “I didn’t sabotage anything,” Kahn said, holding back his anger as best he could. “I never hated the people.”

  “How appropriate.” Matthew turned away from him. “You came back nine hundred years ago and tried to make up for your sins. You failed. And now you send a ghost, to look over a world filled with other kinds of ghosts … the ghosts of dead dreams. Do you have any feeling for how they felt, the exiles? After the cities cast them out? How they felt they were the sinners, and longed to be allowed back in? For a thousand years, there was no progress, only guilt. But it was your cities that were unworthy. I’ve been raised in one. I know. Great, overgrown dreaming monstrosities. Beautiful monstrosities. The only way to put my people right is to let the cities die natural deaths, not to rebuild. And you won’t take my people away from me! You tried even before I was born, and you failed. Don’t try again.” He started to walk out the door.

  “I need more information,” Kahn said. They followed him outside and along the path. “Facilities to find out what happened.”

  “Not available,” Matthew muttered.

  “Then they’ll have to be made available,” Kahn said, seething.

  “Oh?” Matthew smiled back over his shoulder. “I can tell you whatever you need to know.”

  “I doubt it,” Kahn said. Then he and Arthur stopped. The old man had disappeared. They stood on the lighted path. One by one, the lights went out. Only the starlight above remained for them to see by.

  “Is he real?” Arthur asked softly in the dark.