Strength of Stones

  “Yes,” Kahn said.

  “He certainly isn’t very cooperative.” Arthur sniffed.

  “I’m not sure we should expect him to cooperate. We’re moving in on his game.”

  “What’ll we do?”

  “You forget, I designed this city. I may know it even better than Matthew does.” Kahn’s tone was defiant. “Take hold of my hand.”

  They walked down the path slowly, their eyes gradually acclimatizing until they could see the edge of the shaft. A flier waited for them, its guidance lights glowing faintly.

  “Looks like only our floor is dark,” Kahn said. “I don’t think Matthew is going to find quarters for us very soon. You’d better find a place for us to stay. The flier should be able to tell you where to look. If not, come back up and I’ll meet you here.”

  Arthur started to protest, but Kahn seated him firmly in the flier and stepped out. The flier began its leaf-motion drop.

  “I don’t know anything about polises!” Arthur shouted as he descended.

  “You’re under my protection,” Kahn said. “Besides, I doubt the city could hurt you even if you weren’t.”

  Kahn turned away from the shaft and followed the path a little way into the forest. Then he stopped and sat on a grass hummock. He reflexively rubbed his face with his hands. He regretted sending Arthur off so abruptly, but he needed time to be alone, to think over what he had learned from the packet.

  He was obviously no superhuman; the simulacrum could get confused, grow brain-weary if not tired, experience near-despair. For nearly two and a half weeks, he had faced up to failure after failure—and now, facing another, he wished his body could tremble, feel squeamish, mirror in some way his emotions. But his hands were steady and of course he had no stomach per se; he was alone, he couldn’t even refer to himself.

  He shut his eyes and allowed a few moments of wandering thought. In his organic body he had never been much for abstractions; the religions of God-Does-Battle had always seemed weak because of their reliance on abstractions, and supernatural ones at that. Pearson’s lessons in kaballah had fascinated him in a perverse way, but had never taken hold; that they should flower in Jeshua was ironic, to say the least. In the simulacrum, however, he found abstractions remarkably easy to deal with. Not distracted by mortal flesh, when he closed his eyes he became like the city mind speeding through its ComNet, unencumbered, fluid. Had he known this years before, he might have had simulacra made to help him with the theoretical side of architectural planning… especially in the area of social design. He might have foreseen the problems on God-Does-Battle.

  The exhaustion crept up on him suddenly and all his thoughts came to a standstill. For a moment, he felt like a body without a mind, as if some logical process had slipped and disengaged everything except the most basic awareness.

  Some dim, whispering third level speculated the simulacrum was failing ahead of time; it didn’t worry him. He sat on the hummock, still as the trees in the breezeless night air, his eyes closed, and simply listened to the distant sounds of Resurrection.

  “Okay,” he said after a half hour had passed. He opened his eyes. The forest was still dark, which was just as well. He was going to mentally recall some of the packet material, slow it down. The simulacrum’s abilities were clearer to him now. He hadn’t been using them to anywhere near their full extent.

  First, Throne. There was absolutely no mention of what the Bifrost was, or even what it looked like within the city; the original Kahn’s transmissions must have been spur-of-the-moment. So he could not tell what the Bifrosts did. But Throne, according to legend, was gone.

  He focused on Thule, Pearson’s final home (did he live to see the exiling?), home of heretics and heresies, insect city in a network of largely botanical cities.

  The abstraction that came to his mind this time, from the tapes and from his own memory, was fear. It was cool, separated from his anatomy, almost metaphysical.

  He would have to go to Thule, and he didn’t relish the thought at all.

  Arthur sat in the most beautiful room he had ever seen in his life, dejected. For the first hour, he had looked at the shelves of sculptures and examined the intricately decorated wail, tracing the abstract floral patterns and geometrics with his fingers. The way the figures fit together, yet were all the same shape, amazed him. When he grew tired of being amazed, he hefted each sculpture, running his thumb over the smooth, silvery metal. They flowed like a closely bound fountain of water, yet came apart into cubes and pyramids, and into other figures—crosses, many-sided things he didn’t know the names for—which couldn’t be put back together again. No matter how he tried, the puzzle eluded him. He finally put the pieces back on the shelf.

  The floor was soft to his feet, like grass, but even here there were designs, and the designs changed completely at least four times in the hour. His eyes grew tired, trying to fathom the process. When his mouth was dry, he asked for something to drink—as the pipe-joint guide had instructed him—and cups of fluid appeared on the table in the center of the room. He sampled each in turn, found a variety of fruit juices and something that tasted like wine, and downed the wine. Several glasses of the stuff had no effect on him. Disgusted, he sat in a rounded nook, leaned back in the formfit chair, looked at the pearly ceiling—that sort of thing was popular in Resurrection—and thought of New Canaan West, the dying farm, the heat. His daughters and wife. The Founders. What would they think, seeing him here now, where none of them had ever been? He smiled and patted the chair arms with his hands, then slammed them. They yielded just enough to absorb the blow.

  “I’m bored,” he said well into the second hour.

  “What do you wish to entertain you?” the pipe-joint city part asked.

  “What are my choices? The hell with that—I want to see Kahn again.”

  “We have dances, dramas, diversions, Or you may join the education net.”

  “Sure. Anything.” It was a prison, no matter how beautiful it was, or how temporary. Kahn or somebody had tricked him; the door wouldn’t open. He was trapped. He fought off a momentary touch of panic. He didn’t know anything about cities. What if it should start to move? He had never seen one move. How would it transport a room? Break it down, or shrink it up, with him inside?

  “Forget that,” he ordered himself.

  “Forget what, sir?” the city part asked.

  “Nothing.”

  He stood up from the chair and walked to the table. “I’m hungry.” The part asked what he would like, and after going through the whole routine, another variety appeared on the table. Arthur looked underneath, but the top was no more than a centimeter thick. Another thing he couldn’t puzzle out.

  He picked at a bowl of fruit and slices of something like cheese, but creamier than he was used to. As he bit into an apple, he felt someone was watching him. He turned.

  In the center of the room stood a woman. She was dressed in a long green gown and her hair was pepper-grey, thick and wiry. He could see through her. There was a star shining in her forehead. It was the woman who had sat in the chair at the top of the tower… it was Reah.

  He put the apple down. This time, he was sure she was staring at him. Her mouth moved, as if to ask a question, but no sound came out. He backed away. She raised an arm, fingers spread, smiling. He was terrified. Ascoria had said she was dead, but this wasn’t just some magic trick or projection. She was looking at him, following him with her eyes!

  “Who is that?” he asked, pushing the words across a dust-dry tongue.

  “Who is who?” the part asked.

  “There,” he pointed.

  The woman shook her head and held her finger to her lips. Except for being translucent and silent, she was every bit as alive as he was. She mouthed a word carefully, and he thought he could tell what it was:

  Welcome.

  “Thank you,” he said. The room wasn’t built for hiding in. He could see her from the nook, and he wasn’t about to turn his back on
her—so he had to stand his ground, make the best of things.

  Where? She pointed with a skinny finger. Where from? “New Canaan,” he said hesitantly. “Outside Expolis Ibreem, not too far from here. Where they don’t like cities or what come out of them.”

  She nodded, then turned and faded. Before she vanished completely, she walked toward a wall—and passed right through it.

  “Jesus, Jesus,” Arthur said softly. He picked up the fruit again, then looked at it long and hard. Perhaps it was best not to eat anything. His grandmother had told him about eating fruit from trees that grew on spirit paths, and how it might make you a spirit yourself. He hadn’t considered that possibility before. There were a lot of dangerous things he probably didn’t know about. The panic rose again. He clutched himself with his arms and sat on a small chair near the table, water rising in his eyes, his stomach churning.

  He decided to lie down. Almost immediately, he fell asleep. On the edge of dreams, he felt a loving touch somewhere inside his head. Then, as it had done for seventy-five years, the city’s education net went to work.

  Arthur felt only vague dreams, one of them quite peculiar. He saw Jeshua, and next to Jeshua, another figure with carrot-red hair, rather like the head the mimic had carried. But the head had a body now, and from its brow came the fierce light of a star.

  Jeshua and Thinner were carried through the racks of replacement parts on a cart. The chamber was large and dark. Jeshua could see row after row of mimic human and animal bodies, like a mortuary—like the chamber he had visited on his first day in Mandala. The bodies were attached to the racks, held upright, and fed through tubes. Most were in bad shape—or, at least no better condition than he and Thinner. If these were the mimics that had haunted New Canaan, they had had a very rough time.

  The cart stopped beside a city-part that looked like it had been constructed out of old steel pipes, with straight arms and legs and rounded joints and a small sphere mounted on a thin neck. It bent over him.

  “Where are you from?” it asked.

  “Mandala.”

  “And the head?”

  “The same.”

  “What was your mission?”

  “We were built to go out among humans,” Jeshua said.

  “And to suffer the pain of the age.”

  “How long ago?”

  “A hundred and forty years, approximately.”

  “You’re a labelled city part—though the label has been effaced. Not a logical sequence of planning. Would you like to be made whole again?”

  He hadn’t thought about death since he’d found out he wasn’t human. Now he was being given a choice. The possibility of an end was very real, almost attractive.

  Still, it wasn’t entirely his decision. There was action to be fulfilled. “Yes,” he said.

  “Your repair will begin in a few seconds. There will be some disorientation, and then—”

  A moment like a tiny death, entering into the ComNet, swimming. Moving around some still point, above a red, glowing sea of thought, calm and warm… looking for Thinner, but not a sign of his presence. Where was he? Then, rising from some unseen position, a woman with pepper-grey hair and a star shining in her forehead. Jeshua recognized her immediately. His exultation was enormous. It was She who mingled with the Qellipoth, the Bride of God who sacrificed herself by going downward into misery to watch over the captive souls of the material realm, those scattered sparks of holy fire, sacred drops of oil, which had fallen into worldliness with the breaking of the Sefiroth, the manifold vessels of the Holy One, blessed be He. She seemed to stand over him.

  She addressed his thoughts, poking at them. Suddenly he wasn’t sure that he had ever properly mastered the complexities of Kaballah. Her judgement was stern, critical, yet sympathetic to his folly… perhaps because she recognized her own place in his thoughts, in the scheme.

  He opened his eyes. Thinner was standing over him, holding his chin with a strong, healthy hand.

  “Better?” Thinner asked.

  Jeshua nodded. The pain—ignored, but always present—was now truly gone. The awareness of damage to parts without pain was also gone.

  “You had enough left that was functioning, the city decided to patch you up,” Thinner said. “Me, they just put on the best body they could find. Takes much less time.” He removed Jeshua’s straps.

  “I have seen her,” Jeshua said, still slightly groggy.

  “Who?”

  “The bride of God, who gave herself to the false world that we might all be redeemed. I saw the Shekhinah.”

  Thinner nodded, neither agreeing nor disagreeing. Jeshua closed his eyes and swallowed, trying to remember the exultation.

  Kahn had returned to the stripped control chamber and skimmed through the rest of the packet. The recorders in other cities had continued to transmit information to one another long after most intercity communications had stopped. The picture slowly and painfully evolving in his mind was quite broad-based; the disaster had been manifold, horrifying in its completeness.

  The exiling had been carried out quickly everywhere but in Thule, and apparently without mercy or discrimination. Everyone—man, woman, child—had been forced to go from comfort and civilization to virtual anarchy.

  He cursed the people and organizations beyond God-Does-Battle who could have stepped in and brought things back under control, and didn’t; he cursed them, but he understood why. The entire planet had been in chaos. Fleets of thousands of ships would have been required to land sufficient troops and social engineers to bring back order. Kahn suspected —since he felt more than just a twinge of it in himself—that the ruling figures had regarded the situation as fitting and just. Jews, Christians and Moslems had not been looked upon with good will on Earth and elsewhere for some time.

  But all that was long past. He could not avoid the fact that he was responsible, in part, for the biggest disaster in the history of organized religion. There was no one left to share the blame; generations by the score had come and gone.

  He put the packet into his coat lining and took two steps away from the chair.

  “Is it enough?”

  He looked back over his shoulder. Matthew was watching from the other side of the chamber, sitting on a raised portion of the floor. “Not nearly enough,” Kahn said.

  “But it’s all there. I’ve read your packets… two of them, anyway.”

  “You found the recorder in Resurrection.”

  Matthew nodded. “And in Throne. They even touch on what I’ve done, briefly. And on what you did.”

  “What happened to Throne?”

  “I guided it to the river plain, then dismantled it. I put it to good use.”

  “What sort of use?”

  Matthew’s face hardened and his lines seemed to deepen.

  “You might as well be a ghost. I’ve been fighting you and what you did. You resisted every time through your city programming, your Bifrosts—”

  “What are the Bifrosts?”

  “You can’t guess? That’s just as well. The best thing is for you to leave. I’m the one to fix what you’ve torn apart.” He held out thin, trembling hands.

  “You don’t know how,” Kahn said. “Have you communicated with the—with other worlds, our people out there?” Kahn pointed up, uncertain how sophisticated Matthew really was.

  “I tried once. The city fought me for months, but I finally convinced it to make a transceiver. It wasted its energy on a huge system, and I sent a signal out to the stars. Nothing came back. Nothing. We have been wrapped in our own box of dark, velvet sin. They have isolated us, and that is as it should be. Now we have the freedom to choose where we will go.”

  “Who’s this ‘we’?” Kahn asked. “You and who else?”

  “I am alone now.”

  “Then who are you, to think you can save God-Does-Battle without help—”

  “I am Matthew, son of Reah! My mother was Moslem, raped by pagans, killed by an apostate Jew-Christian! I am
more qualified than anyone to save these people, for I am all of them, born of hate and conflict and despair!” He lowered his voice. “My own mother chose to abort me rather than bring me into the world she knew. This city saved me, raised me as the new Christ.” He smiled. “Which I most emphatically am not. So I’ve taken up where my mother left off, guided Resurrection, helped it reorder itself. And I’ve destroyed what you started nine centuries ago.”

  “The Bifrosts?”

  “Yes. In Throne, in Eulalia.”

  “And in Thule?”

  “Thule is safe enough, left alone.”

  Kahn held out his hands. “Listen, I’m not your enemy, and I’m no more Satan than you are Christ. If you help, we can solve our problems together.”

  “In the final analysis, you probably have more power than I do,” Matthew said. “You can go places I can’t. You don’t need my help. I wouldn’t give it to you if you did.”

  “At the very least, let me look over your transceiver. Help from outside—”

  “There is nobody out there. I destroyed the transceiver when I saw it was useless.”

  “Damn you, Matthew, your people may die if we don’t do something!”

  “Perhaps that’s only fitting. Let God’s will be done. Go away, ghost. Vanish. Your companion is safe in a very comfortable room. Take him with you. Leave the mimics if you wish; I may be able to use them.”

  Matthew stood and walked slowly toward the door, leaning on his stick. “I’m old,” he said, as if answering an unasked question, “because I chose to grow old. You have no such grace in you.”

  When Kahn reached the door, the old man had disappeared again. “Ghost, ghost, I’m not the only ghost on this planet,” he muttered.

  Arthur was flying above the river plain. He saw Resurrection, and he saw beneath the ground, into tunnels radiating out from the city, going for hundreds of kilometers. The tunnels were filled…

  But not with people. Not this time.

  They were mimics. Thousands of them emerged from Resurrection, going out into the countryside, coming out of the ground, raising their arms to the hot, bright sun. They fanned out across New Canaan, were caught by Founders and tortured, dismantled.