Strength of Stones

  “I’m confused,” he said.

  “Stay for the evening,” she suggested. “Then will you make thought come clear of confusion.”

  He followed her to his room near the peak of the city. The room hadn’t been changed. Before she left him there, he asked what her name was.

  “Anata,” she said. “Anata Leucippe.”

  “Do you get lonely in the evenings?” he asked, stumbling over the question.

  “Never,” she said. She laughed and turned half-away from him. “An’ now certes am dis em, you no’ trustable!”

  She left him by the door. “Eat!” she called from the comer of the access hall. “I be back, around mid of the evening.”

  He smiled and shut his door, then turned to the kitchen to choose what he was going to eat.

  Being a whole man, he now knew, did not stop the pain of fear and loneliness. The possibility of quenching was, in fact, a final turn of the thumbscrew. He paced like a caged bear, thinking furiously and reaching no conclusions.

  By midnight he was near an explosion. He waited in the viewing area of the terrace, watching the moonlight bathe God-Does-Battle like milk, gripping the railing with a strength that could have crashed wood. He listened to the noise of the city. It was less soothing than he remembered, neither synchronous nor melodic.

  Anata came for him half an hour after she said she would. Jeshua had gone through so many ups and downs of despair and aloofness that he was exhausted. She took his hand and led him to the central shaft on foot. They found hidden curved stairwells and went down four levels to a broad promenade that circled a widening in the shart. “The walkway, it doesn’t work yet,” she told him. “My tongue, I’m getting it down. I’m studying.”

  “There’s no reason you should speak like me,” he said.

  “It is difficult at times. Dis me—I cannot cure a lifetime ob—of talk.”

  “Your own language is pretty,” he said, half-lying.

  “I know. Prettier. Alive-o. But—” She shrugged.

  Jeshua thought he couldn’t be more than five or six years older than she was, by no means an insurmountable distance. He jerked as the city lights dimmed. All around, the walls lost their bright glow and produced in its stead a pale lunar gleam, like the night outside.

  “This is what I brough’ you here for,” she said. “To see.”

  The ghost-moon luminescence made him shiver. The walls and floor passed threads of light between them, and from the threads grew spirits, shimmering first like mirages, then settling into translucent sharpness. They began to move.

  They came in couples, groups, crowds, and with them were children, animals, birds, and things he couldn’t identify. They filled the promenade and terraces and walked, talking in tunnel-end whispers he couldn’t make out, laughing and looking and being alive, but not in Jeshua’s time.

  They were not solid, not robots or cyborgs. They were spirits from ten centuries past, and he was rapidly losing all decorum watching them come to form around him.

  “Sh!” Anata said, taking his arm to steady him. “They don’t hurt anybody. They’re no’ here. They’re dreams.”

  Jeshua clasped his hands tight and forced himself to be calm.

  “This is the city, what it desires,” Anata said. “You want to kill the polis, the city, because it keeps out the people, but look—it hurts, too. It wants. What’s a city without its people? Just sick. No’ bad. No’ evil. Can’t kill a sick one, can you?”

  Each night, she said, the city reenacted a living memory of the past, and each night she came to watch.

  Jeshua saw the pseudolife, the half-silent existence of a billion recorded memories, and his anger slowly faded. His hands loosened their grip on each other. He could never sustain hatred for long. Now, with understanding just out of reach, but obviously coming, he could only resign himself to more confusion for the moment.

  “It’ll take me a long, long time to forgive what happened,” he said.

  “This me, too.” She sighed. “When I was married, I found I could not have children. This my husband could not understand. All the others of the women in the group could have children. So I left in shame and came to the city we had always worshipped. I thought it would be, the city, the only one to cure. But now I don’t know. I do not want another husband, I want to wait for this to go away. It is too beautiful to leave while it is still here.”

  “Go away?”

  “The cities, they get old and they wander,” she said. “Not all things work good here now. Pieces are dying. Soon it will all die. Even such as Thinner, they die. The room is full of them. And no more are being made. The city is too old to grow new. So I wait until the beauty is gone.”

  Jeshua looked at her more closely. There was a whitish cast in her left eye. It had not been there a few hours ago.

  “It is time to go to sleep,” she said. “Very late.”

  He took her gently by the hand and led her through the phantoms, up the empty but crowded staircases, asking her where she lived.

  “I don’t have any one room,” she said. “Sleep in all of them at some time or another. But we can’t go back dere.” She stopped. “There. Dere. Can’t go back.” She looked up at him. “Dis me, canno’ spek mucky ob—” She held her hand to her mouth. “I forget. I learned bu’ now—I don’t know…”

  He felt a slow horror grind in his stomach.

  “Something is going wrong,” she said. Her voice became deeper, like Thinner’s, and she opened her mouth to scream but could not. She tore away from him and backed up. “I’m doing something wrong.”

  “Take off your shirt,” Jeshua said.

  “No.” She looked offended.

  “It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” he asked.

  “No.”

  “Then take off your shirt.”

  She began to remove it. Her hands hesitated.

  “Now.”

  She peeled it over her head and stood naked, with her small breasts outthrust, narrow hips square and bonily dimpled, genitals flossed in feathery brown. A pattern of scars on her chest and breasts formed a circle. Bits of black remained like cinders, like the cinders on his own chest—from a campfire that had never been. Once, both of them had been marked like Thinner, stamped with the seal of Mandala.

  She turned away from him on the staircase, phantoms drifting past her and through her. He reached out to stop her but wasn’t quick enough. Her foot spasmed and she fell, gathering into a twisted ball, down the staircase, up against the railings, to the bottom.

  He stood near the top and saw her pale blue fluid and red skinblood and green tissue leaking from a torn leg. He felt he might go insane.

  “Thinner!”he screamed. He kept calling the name. The lunar glow brightened, and the phantoms disappeared. The halls and vaults echoed with his braying cry.

  The cyborg appeared at the bottom of the staircase and knelt down to examine the girl.

  “Both of us,” Jeshua said. “Both lies.”

  “We don’t have the parts to fix her,” Thinner said.

  “Why did you bring us back? Why not let us stay? And why not just tell us what we are?”

  “Until a few years ago there was still hope,” Thinner said. “The city was still trying to correct the programs, still trying to get back its citizens. Sixty years ago it gave the architect more freedom to try to find out what went wrong. We built ourselves—you, her, the others—to go among the humans and see what they were like now, how the cities could accommodate. And if we had told you this, would you have believed? As humans, you were so convincing you couldn’t even go into cities except your own. Then the aging began, and the sickness. The attempt finally died.”

  Jeshua felt the scars on his chest and shut his eyes, wishing, hoping it was all a nightmare.

  “David the smith purged the mark from you when you were a young cyborg, that you might pass for human. Then he stunted your development that you might someday be forced to come back.”

  “My father w
as like me.”

  “Yes. He carried the scar, too.”

  Jeshua nodded. “How long do we have?”

  “I don’t know. The city is running out of memories to repeat. Soon it will have to give up… less than a century. It will move like the others and strand itself someplace.”

  Jeshua walked away from Thinner and the girl’s body and wandered down an access hall to the terraces on the outer wall of the city. He shaded his eyes against the rising sun in the east and looked toward Arat. There, he saw the city that had once occupied Mesa Canaan. It had disassembled and was trying to cross the mountains.

  “Kisa,” he said.

  Many of the cities did not die quickly. They lingered on for more years, some as if by force of will, others by the fortune of their kind environments. Wherever they stood, the humans in their shadows lived with their minds fixed on a past splendor they could never have again… so they believed, for the universe was a hard place, and God’s judgement harsh.

  But not all exiles accepted that judgement.

  And not all the cities, either, for a few were decaying in quite unexpected ways…

  Book Two

  3460 A.D.

  Resurrection

  IT was the middle of the month Tammuz, and drought was on the land. The village of Akkabar squatted near the confluence of two streams normally deep enough for commerce, in an otherwise barren and featureless expanse where a single broad river had once flowed into the sea. The streams were now cracked mud. Some villagers thought the water table had dropped below most of the town’s wells; others thought it was punishment from Allah for a multitude of sins. Yet where could one direct his prayers for forgiveness? They had all foresaken the Earth over a thousand years ago. Under the hot blue skies of God-Does-Battle, none could remember which direction Mecca was.

  At forty, Reah was an ill-favored picker of rags and bagger of bones. She had decided, quite rationally, to take the way of the ghouls, trod only by nightmares and ifrits, of whom she might be one: a singularly well-disguised ifrit. Gradually her mind clouded in earnest and she went about scavenging trash. All this had come to pass in the ten years since the death of her husband and daughter in a fire.

  Leavings in the town dump were sparse. She stood in her black cloak, face veiled against the dust and sun, dark eyes looking over the piles of broken rock, dry-dead livestock, broken pottery, old splintered boxes and a digging cat. Her worn sandals scuffed the baked dirt uncertainly. She turned and looked back at the northern gate of Akkabar. There was no longer enough here to keep her alive. People weren’t throwing enough away.

  She shuffled through the town gates, passing between sleepy guards too tired to kick her. She could satisfy her thirst at one of the few public wells still producing water, but hunger was pushing her hard. Drawing from her last resources of wit she waited for nightfall, stripped down in the moonlit empty square, and washed her only robe until it looked presentable enough to be worn by a poor wife. She affixed the cowl and veil so her scraggly hair wouldn’t show through. With morning she waited on the outskirts of the market.

  After the town dealers had set up their booths, she walked between the rows and pretended to examine the haft-empty bins of produce. Boys with fly-whips watched her through slitted eyes as she looked at this shriveled fruit, then that. When she thought they weren’t paying close attention, she withdrew one hand into a sleeve, clutching a half-rotten orange. The hand emerged empty.

  She had palmed three pieces of fruit and was looking for the best route to leave when the market square manager appeared in front of her like a djinn out of the dust. “Who are you, woman?” he asked. She looked up and shook her head.

  “You know what it means to steal?”

  Reah turned and tried to shuffle away. The manager grabbed her arm and an orange fell from the sleeve. One of the boys laughed and retrieved the fruit. “These are hard times,” the manager said. “We all need to eat.” Reah looked at him hopefully. “Those who steal, steal from the mouths of our children. You know that?” His face was reddening and his eyes were elsewhere. Some inner fury was building and all of Reah’s humble slouch and scared eyes couldn’t satisfy it.

  “Thieves have their hands cut off,” he growled. “So it is written, billah! So our fathers would have done it long ago. But in our misery and exile we’ve forgotten these laws. Now it is time to remember!”

  Reah shook her head again, afraid to speak.

  “I stoned a thief here last week!” the manager shouted, raising his hand. He brought it down on her head and she sprawled in the dirt. “Brothers, here’s a thief! Spawn of Iblis, a stealer of food!”

  The morning shoppers crowded around. Reah found no sympathy in their eyes. She stood and raised her hands defiantly, swaying back and forth, trying to make them go away with her power. They would learn better, tangling with an ifrit.

  A rock whistled from the circle and struck her on the back. She forgot her fear and hunger and ran. The crowd followed like a single beast. She dodged a stone and fell against a slow-moving cart, then to the ground. The crowd circled again. She looked at their feet swinging under their robes and heard bells. A crowd of bronze bells circled her, ringing, buzzing like insects. Among them she saw a man with a strong face, a muezzin perhaps but still part of the crowd, eyes pitiless and glazed, slightly upturned, looking at the sky, stone clutched in his hand. He raised the hand.

  She stood and clung to him. “I am thy suppliant,” she rasped. “No one can deny my need.”

  He looked down on her and the crowd stopped. His eyes cleared and he cursed under his breath.

  “Ullah yáfukk’ ny minch!” the strong man exclaimed. Only a muezzin or a scholar would speak the old tongue so well.

  “Allah wills it,” she whispered, eyes almost commanding him. “You cannot refuse.”

  The man shook his head and raised his hand to stop the crowd. So was the custom—he could not deny a suppliant. She was in his care now and by his faith he must keep her from harm, at least for the moment. The crowd paced around them restlessly. Reah looked over his shoulder at the stones and hands and cold faces. “Wolves,” she said. “I will fly before wolves.”

  “Stop,” the man said. “She’s not in her right mind. It isn’t just to stone the sick—”

  “Even the sick must obey the law,” the manager said. She looked up into the strong man’s face.

  “He’s right,” he said. “You have to leave the town or they’ll stone you.”

  She nodded. There was little about the next hour that she remembered. Only the dipper of water, the giving of a knapsack filled with stale bread and a few figs, the cup of leban from the near-empty jar of the muezzin’s wife. He brought out a worn water-skin and took her to the south gate, pointing her direction. She must circle around Akkabar and head north, but not until dusk. Her life in Akkabar was over. He said a prayer for her and sat under the shadow of an abandoned lean-to by the gate.

  “At night,” he said. “When it is cool. Shalaym alaycham.” For the prayer and the farewell he fell into the more colloquial tongue of the city politicians. He gave her the skin of water and returned through the gate.

  Reah looked out steadily at the flat river plain until her eyes watered. She slept for a while and awoke to the distant sounds of hunting night-insects. Dusk was settling. She stood carefully, dusted her cloak off, and began to walk around the walls until she was going north.

  To the north lived the Habiru, more prosperous than the Moslems but still cursed. They might give her food and shelter. She fingered a string of clay beads as she walked, saying scattered prayers, long-engrained thanks for choice rags, clean bones, bits of metal and glass or edible food.

  No living city had ever wandered onto the alluvial plain. A thousand years ago, before the Exiling, the old river had flowed across all of this land. In the memory of the cities, water still ran here. They stayed on the other side of the mountains, or in the foothills six kilometers away. Reah shaded her eyes and saw the
outline of towers directly north. There was nothing for her in a living city.

  She had been close to one of the cities as a young girl, on a trip with her father and mother to barter with the Habiru. That was before trade restrictions had tightened between Christians, Jews, and the few Moslem communities. It had been a glorious thing, its towers glowing and humming in the night, like a magic green tree filled with insects. They had camped under the light of two full moons, sharing a picnic supper with the families of her father’s business partners. One of the old women, a spinner of tales to three generations, had told them first about the building of the moons, how trained birds big as mountains had hauled loads of mud-brick into the sky. One of the young men, testing his masculine authority, had offered an alternate version—that the moons had been brought from other worlds. Reah preferred the first version now. The families had gone over the old stories about the living cities, how the prodigal Jew Robert Kahn had designed them to the specifications of the Last of the Faithful… how they had been built from the seeds of a thousand altered species, and made to incorporate steel and stone and other materials which were now lost secrets… and, as the night grew old and the fires cooled, they listened with damp eyes to the Exiling.

  She shuffled under the sun, host to a swarm of unorganized memories. She didn’t see the troop of men keeping step with her to one side, laughing and shushing each other.

  “Woman, where are you from?” one called.

  She turned and squinted at them, then continued walking. They came closer.

  “She’s from the town,” one said. “Durragon’s there now …”

  They blocked her path. The largest of them reached out and pulled back her cowl. “Hag, dis ol’ gol, hag all aroun’. Hard by t’use dis ol’ gol.”

  “She’s a woman,” another said. The older men backed away, smiling and shaking their heads. The younger ones closed in, faces troubled. “Dis em neba had a gol befo’, ol’, bri’ o de skin, nor kine’t all!”