City Under the Stars

3

HANSON STOOD THERE for a long time, staring at the train pulling away until it had dwindled to a distant string of moving red jewels, and then, after it had vanished completely, at the empty road itself, a gray streak through blackness.

The night gathered around him. Crows exploded up out of the trees on the crest of a distant hill, startled by some noise in the forest, wheeling against the darkening sky and crying out harshly as they flew, in some guttural language he could not understand, finally settling back down into the treetops again. Then there was only silence, broken occasionally by the soughing of the wind through the trees, and by the distant and plaintive chime-like sobbing of some unknown creature far away among the trees in the dark.

At last, when he could stand the quiet and the black eventlessness no longer, he stooped to pick up his knapsack. The gun was still there, wrapped in his second pair of trousers. He stuck it in his belt.

There was a trail, hardly more than a deer run, that ran through the clearing here at right angles to the road, and briefly he vacillated between the two directions it proffered him. Then, because it hardly mattered, he chose one at random, and started walking.

The sun had gone out of the sky entirely now, the last orange cloud of sunset guttering from red to purple-gray to sullen black, and only the soft light from the Wall suffused the wood, flushing it with an unearthly coral glow that cast strange iridescent shadows with blood red edges. Hanson had been traveling for hours, following the trail through the rubble of Utopian ruins, imperishable foundations filled with waters rust-red and turquoise-blue from chemical poisons leached out of the surrounding soil, and the occasional rotting and incomprehensible machine, the remnants of a centuries-long Retreat from the bright dwellings of the Utopians. He pushed his way through woods spotted with feral ornamentals and fruit trees that over the ages had drifted away from their original functions and now produced fruit indigestible to human stomachs… or that perhaps had been designed in the first place to feed unknown and long-vanished races, strange and inhuman races that had been so thoroughly forgotten that neither their names nor even the memory of their presence had survived, save only for the trees. In all this time, he had seen nobody and arrived nowhere, but only walked, unthinking, like an automaton.

Then he saw the glint of firelight up ahead.

He stopped. Whoever or whatever was before him, it was probably best to avoid them altogether. Only outlaws, bandits, or worse would be out in these unwholesome ruins. Honest men would have no reason to be here.

Thinking this, he could almost have laughed. He had nothing in common with honest men anymore. He was an outlaw himself now, cast out from human company like a manshogger or pariah dog.

In the darkness, somebody coughed.

Hanson stiffened in astonishment. The cough had been quiet and deliberate, a noise he was meant to hear. There was a lookout guarding the path, unseen, and he had just been warned that if he tried to turn away now, he was as good as dead. No help for it, he had to go forward, follow the light to its source, seek common cause with whatever human refuse clustered about its warmth. He belonged there now, after all, didn’t he?

Pushing through a stand of bamboo, he entered a clearing. Dark forms hunkered about the campfire, as stolidly motionless as so many apes. They looked up incuriously at his approach, firelight flickering in their eyes. There were at least a dozen of them, perhaps as many as fifteen or sixteen; the half-light, guttering and then flaring again sporadically, made it hard to tell exactly. The pale, near-human corpse of a thant, spitted on a stick, was roasting over the fire. The peculiar stench of the roasting meat filled the clearing, thick and pungent and strange, hovering uneasily somewhere between appetizing and nauseating.

With a swagger he did not feel, Hanson strode into the light, ostentatiously loosening the gun in his belt, making sure they all got a good look. Paradoxically, the bright fire gathered darkness about itself, blinding him, making him perfectly vulnerable. He cleared his throat. “Who’s boss here?”

For a long moment nobody moved. It was as if he had asked a deeper and more profound question than they were prepared to address, as if he’d challenged them to count the stars in the sky or riddle him the meaning of human pain or draw a street map of the City of God.

He was sweating now; the fire seemed to roar up inside of him. He kept one hand firm on the butt of the revolver, though it was really useless here—easiest thing in the world to come up from behind and brain him with a rock if that’s what they had a mind to do. The gun, the fabulously valuable gun, only made him so much less secure, for it gave them something to gain from his death.

Under the pervasive woodsmoke and the unsettling odor of the roasting thant, he could smell where they went to shit, not bothering even to put a decent distance between themselves and their leavings, and this told him a great deal about the sort of men they were. Careless men. Irresponsible men. He felt a gut-deep disapproval of the lot of them. Even outlaws—no, make that especially outlaws—needed discipline.

But they were dangerous nonetheless, perhaps even more dangerous for that very lack of discipline.

A frighteningly ordinary-looking man stood up. “Name’s Mahoney.” He looked a little to either side, as a man with dogs might, if he were not perfectly secure in his control of his hounds. “Ye’re a far way from home.”

“Ayah.” As nonchalantly as he could, Hanson said, “Looking for someone to hook up with.”

Mahoney considered the gun, looked at the imposing size and bulk of Hanson, and drew the obvious conclusions. “Ever kill a man?”

Hanson nodded slowly. “I guess.” The words hung heavy before him. It was the first time he had admitted his terrible crime aloud.

Mahoney twisted his hand strangely and a knife appeared in it. He walked toward and then past Hanson, to the remains of the thant charring over the fire, and sliced off a slab.

“Go back to your post,” he said to the still-unseen man behind Hanson. Then he thrust the meat into Hanson’s hands. “Eat.”

So it was, with a one-word command and a mouthful of meat so repugnant that he barely managed to force it down, that Hanson joined the band of outlaws. He was ravenous, but after that first bite, he quietly set the meat aside. He had proved his obedience. Maybe tomorrow there’d be something more wholesome to eat. And if not… well, he’d see.

Suddenly, a little man leaped up on top of a log to the smoky side of the campfire. The firelight leaped and jumped on his sunken features, and he worked his loose and toothless mouth for a bit before he spoke. “Praise God!” he cried. Then, lowering his voice so that he was speaking almost confidentially, “We are all of us insane. And yet, it is not our fault!”

With good-natured disdain, the outlaws turned to look at him.

“We can’t help it. It’s the Wall’s fault. Its existence forces us to acknowledge that our reality is out of phase with our desires. But we cannot admit this. We cannot. So, in denying it, we go mad. This is called cognitive dissonance.”

Sitting on the log beside him, Mahoney grinned wolfishly. “The Preacher’s in one of his moods. This oughta be good.”

“Angels used to walk the Earth, indistinguishable among men. They could pass through the Wall at will, because they had subjugated themselves to the will of Heaven. And, if angels could do so, then why not you and I?”

“Tell it, Preach,” one of the men said sardonically.

Encouraged, the little man waved his arms. He spoke feverishly, with a passionate intensity. “Man and Heaven must be reconciled. Once I was a great man, a worldly man, learned in all the things that did not matter. I spent my days among the archives of Harrisburg. Until finally I realized that Reconciliation was my destiny, and began the search for the key.” He looked around to either side. “And I found it!” he said triumphantly. “I found the key to Heaven, and I hold it within me. Right in here!” He slapped his chest enthusiastically. “It’s wrapped around my heart, dearer than life, closer than breath, and it will open the—” He faltered and paused. “Open the—” His voice trailed off, and he looked around vaguely. “What was I about to—?”

One of the men pursed his lips and made a lewd sucking noise. The others laughed uproariously. The light of fanaticism went out of the little man, his face collapsing into pathos and misery, body slumping like a balloon with a slow leak.

Hanson felt sickened. There was only one reason such a group of men would tolerate this broken creature. Worse, to survive here, to gain their acceptance, to be recognized as one of their kind, a man who didn’t set himself above his fellows, he would have to avail himself of the Preacher’s services as well. And he didn’t think he could. There were limits, there had to be limits, to what a man would do to survive. Let it pass, he told himself, nobody’s expecting you to do anything tonight, no sense borrowing trouble.

Not much more was said that evening. A joke or two, the purport of which was beyond Hanson’s comprehension, some lifeless verbal scuffling between two men whose hatred for each other aroused no passion, and some quiet, inconsequential talk about a planned raid on an outlying farmhouse—Hanson got the impression that the ambitions of these men did not extend very far. They were as good as dead already, and most likely knew it. Thinking about things would only make them worse.

Mahoney leaned close and spoke into his ear. “Tomorrow,” he said quietly, “I’ll need you to take care of a little problem for me.” Drawing back, he gave Hanson a sharp look to make sure he understood.

“A’right,” Hanson said. Maintaining an outward calm, though his heart was pounding like a jackhammer. He understood well enough. He had just agreed to kill a man and he didn’t even know who.

Mahoney blew his breath out noisily. “That’s a’right then.” He stood briskly, and slapped Hanson on the back. “We sleep in the ruins. Pick yourself out a spot.”

He disappeared into the darkness. Several of the others were already gone.

So they had not even bothered to build themselves shelters. Somehow Hanson was not surprised. He scouted out a flat spot in the angle of two ancient walls, and laid out his blanket preparatory to sleep.

The Preacher came stumbling around the corner, stopped, and stood blinking and bewildered. “This is—” he began. “I was—that is, I was sleeping here and I, I—” His mouth opened and closed, gulping against tears.

Disgusted with the little monkey-faced creature, Hanson gathered up his blanket. “Oh, hell,” he grumbled. “Take it, if y’ want it. I’ll find another spot.” He left, sickened by the pathetically grateful expression that flooded the Preacher’s face, the moist and worshipful look that came into his eyes.

Hanson was caught in an endless, looping dream when the raid began. He was on the transport again, rolling up and down to the rhythm of life on the roads. It was a long, easy rhythm; it lent itself to a watchful contemplation that was an edge away from sleep, and yet was almost preternaturally alert. There was nothing to mark it but the passage of the sun, rolling up across the arch of sky, under the horizon, up again, and the roads themselves, slipping endlessly under the transport, sometimes paved, sometimes mud, sometimes sunbaked and dusty, the trees along the roadside white with the dust kicked up by the transport, as if they had been hit by a blizzard in the midst of summer. The heat would be rising in waves from the deckplates, shimmering vision. The sky would be dazzlingly blue, and the sun a hot copper penny in it, except when the dust-trail would shift and swirl around the transport itself, and then the sky would become dirty white, and the masked sun would become a smoldering bloodshot eye. Always the endless moving ribbon of the road sliding smoothly toward them, being swallowed by the prow of the transport, with new road always coming into being ahead of them, around the next curve or over the next hill, sliding forward to be swallowed in its turn. And occasionally a hamlet or village, borne up by the current of the road, bobbing nearby for an instant, and then whirled away behind, like a drowsy, peasant-infested, cow-carrying chip of driftwood. He would become aware that he had dreamed this before and then immediately lose all assurance that this was so. So he would anxiously relive the nonevents of traveling the roads, the muted waterfall thunder of the engine, the constant swaying of the transport and the relentless thudding of the treads, the trees, the road, the villages, Willis’s grunted orders, Brigault’s sudden and pointless laughter. Until he forgot what he was worrying about and it all began again.

He awoke to explosions.

Men were shouting, screaming, running. A bullet splintered bark from a tree not five yards from him and there were bright lights and dark shapes beyond the dying embers of the campfire, down the path up which he had come. Savage shouts echoed through the ruins, and another bullet sizzled through the air.

In a panicked instant, Hanson was on his feet, quivering and frozen motionless, like a jack-lighted deer. Somebody slammed into him, cursed, and was gone, along with Hanson’s paralysis. He grabbed at his shirt to keep from losing the gun, which he’d carefully stuck between undershirt and belt before turning in. It did not occur to him to use it.

Stumblingly at first, and then faster, he began to run. Men were shouting and crashing into things, running ahead of him, up the path. He followed blindly. Somebody grabbed his arm and he lashed out without looking, his fist smashing into a face. But whoever it was did not let go, but wrapped both arms around his waist.

Turning, he stared down into the Preacher’s fearful face.

“Don’t!” the Preacher gasped. “For God’s sake, don’t! That’s just what they want you to do. They’re just beaters. The SIs will be up the trail, waiting. I’ve seen it before! And politicians—it’s a sport to them, ambushing rievers, they get to notch bandits without any risk to themselves. Sometimes they take souvenirs.”

The old man’s unexpected lucidity broke through the haze of fear and instinct. Hanson stopped and looked around. A flare screamed high into the night. Bright lights, harsh shadows. “What should we do?”

“We’ve got to get away from the path,” the Preacher said. “This way.” Tugging at Hanson’s arm, he half pulled him over a pile of crumbling bricks and between two ruined walls. Awkwardly, Hanson let himself be led. Behind them, two SIs stooped over a fallen bandit, machetes in hand, hacking wildly, the blades flashing in the smoky light from the Wall as they rose and fell, rose and fell. One SI looked up and, seeing them, shouted.

They struggled deeper into the darkness.

Together he and the Preacher forced their way through a nightmare of noise-filled woods, stumbling over low walls, ducking under loops of vampire weed and blundering into tangles of mile-a-minute vines, flinching every time a bullet pierced the air with its shrill whine or a phased sonics cannon blanketed the area with an awful split-second of unbearable silence. There was nothing but fear and confusion in Hanson’s mind. He’d left his knapsack behind. He had nothing now but his gun and the clothes on his back.

Then the Preacher fell and did not get up.

“Stand, damn you!” Hanson seized the Preacher’s shoulder to give him an impatient shake, but his hand came away wet and sticky. He looked at it wonderingly.

Blood.

He stared down at the wrinkled old man, saw the grayness in his bruised face, how the clothes down one side of his body were black with blood. He’d been wounded all along, kept going by hysteria and fear. A flare went up in the air, and doubled shadows from it and the Wall danced in all directions. The little man wasn’t going to make it. It was a miracle he’d lasted this long. Hanson couldn’t take him along, wherever he was going—it would be useless. The Preacher needed a doctor, and Hanson had no doctoring in him; he could splint a leg or tie a tourniquet, and had several times, back at the factory, but that was it—the kind of gunshot wound the Preacher had was far beyond him. Best to keep moving and let the Preacher fend for himself as best he could, live or die as the gods willed. There was no time now for sentiment…

Cursing himself for a fool even as he did it, Hanson bent down and scooped the little man up in his arms.

“They killed an angel in Harrisburg,” the Preacher said suddenly. He did not open his eyes. “It’s in the records—not that anybody but me ever bothered to read the records… Used to do that a lot, back then, the angels. Angels passing through the Wall…”

“Don’t talk,” Hanson said. He started walking, too tired, too burdened, to run any more. If the SIs caught him, they caught him. It was hard even to care.

But the Preacher went on unheeding. “So close… I came so very close. I was not an inconsequential man… but I was afraid. Couldn’t take those final steps. I had the key to Heaven in me, and I couldn’t go.” He started to weep. “At night, I hear its voice, calling, calling… it’s never still. I’m going to die, aren’t I?”

Embarrassed, Hanson repeated, “Don’t talk.”

“Take me to the Wall,” the Preacher said, with surprising force. “I want to get that far at least. Bury me there. So I can say I went the distance.”

“Yah, sure.” Hanson’s step was slowing, and the weight of the body in his arms seemed heavy beyond endurance. He didn’t think he could go much farther. The night, so full of noise for the duration of their flight, now sank back down into silence, either because of distance or because the SIs and their political masters had finished having their fun and departed.

They came upon an overgrown Utopian road over which meandered a narrow trail, probably not even human-made but rather something created by coyotes or wyverns or thants as they wandered in their dream-sunk and instinctual rounds, and Hanson decided that it could not possibly be the same as the one that passed through the bandit camp. At any rate, safe or not, he was tired of fighting his way through the brush. The woods were preternaturally silent, not so much as a cricket or a knacker stirring. The only sound came from the Wall, a soft humming and buzzing like an infinite swarm of bees heard from a million miles away.

Abruptly, the Preacher gave a shudder and went still in his arms. With a cold seizure of the heart, Hanson knew that he was dead. He stared down at the man, so small, so light, and as he stared, a metal rod burst out of the Preacher’s chest, passing through skin and muscle and cloth as if they did not exist, gleaming, quicksilver fast. It bent, unfolded several joints, and then plunged into Hanson.

With a cry of horror, he stumbled back, slapping wildly at his chest with both hands, letting the Preacher’s corpse fall to the ground. The rod had already disappeared into him as completely as if it had never been there, sinking out of sight within his chest, leaving no trace of its existence behind.

It was gone.

Hanson was tempted to dismiss the incident, the bizarre thing that had leaped out at him like some monstrous jack-in-the-box and then plunged into his body as easily as a hot knife going through butter, dismiss it as a hallucination brought on by fear and fatigue. But he could feel it inside him, a heavy weight in his chest that shifted his center of balance and altered his movements in subtle ways. He felt a different man with it in him, estranged from his own body, an exile sitting within the control-cab of his skull, staring horrified and dispassionate out of the eye-sockets. Worse, he could feel the device’s desires like a burden of guilt or regret gnawing at the back of his mind. It was anxious to go home, and told him so not in words but in a cold mechanical yearning so intense he felt naked and near-helpless before it.

He stood shivering for a long moment, then bent and picked the Preacher back up again.

The Wall was not far distant, a hundred yards or half a mile, he could not tell. But not far. All the woods around him blazed with its preternatural glow. He walked toward it, impelled by the horror behind him, by the burden in his arms, and by the alien machinery now wrapped around his heart. He could not help himself.

Up close, only a few steps away, closer than he’d ever heard of anyone coming to it, the Wall refused to resolve itself into solid substance. Little flickering motes of intense reddish-pink light swirled and crawled over each other, and the humming sound, though no louder than before, passed right through him; his entire body buzzed and vibrated like the sounding board of a guitar. The Wall loomed so high now that when he craned his head, it seemed to fill the universe, and he had the vertiginous sensation of falling into it. The thing in his chest seemed to leap up with joy.

I won’t, he thought wildly. I refuse! But he kept walking. The Wall filled his sight entirely, that terrible, unearthly dazzle. Briefly, he tried to lie to himself, to pretend that he was just going to bring the Preacher to the Wall he had spent his entire life journeying toward without ever reaching, and place his body there before it, like an offering to an angry God, so that He might be moved to pity and forgive His sinning children, especially that one in particular who was named Hanson. But being so close to the Wall seemed to lend the key strength; the buzzing rose up and overwhelmed Hanson’s thoughts in a great wave.

A hole opened in the Wall like a mouth, directly before him. It was big enough for a man to walk into. No, he thought. No!

He walked in.

The Wall closed behind him. He was in a moving bubble that kept pace with him. The walls provided enough light for him to see by and enough air to breathe. But it was warm, much warmer than the air outside had been. Sweat beaded up on his forehead, ran in rivulets from his armpits. It was ungodly hot in here! He kept walking, but more slowly now. His arms ached dreadfully, and his knees were starting to buckle. He cursed his weakness, hefted the Preacher’s body, and forced himself forward.

He kept walking straight ahead, until he was sure he should have passed through by now. How thick was the Wall anyway? How thick could it possibly be? The swarming buzz of microscopic bees made it hard for him to think.

On an impulse, he turned and walked at right angles to his previous path. The bubble tracked him perfectly. So it wasn’t guiding him! He returned, as best he could, to his previous path. But he was definitely lost now, somewhere within the reaches of the Wall, and it was growing hotter. His skull buzzed and stuttered, and his breath came in long, shuddering gasps. It was as hot as the inside of an oven. He was surprised that his hair hadn’t caught fire.

The Preacher’s body grew heavier and heavier. His step faltered, grew slower and slower, as though he were wading through mud. Finally, he stopped, and, groaning, sank to his knees in despair. The buzzing grew louder. He reached out a hand, and where his palm brushed against the glowing substance of the Wall, it suddenly stung like a thousand wasps. He whipped his hand back, and saw that it was all bloody, skin and flesh sliced away where he had brushed it against the Wall. Ignoring the pain, he extended the arm again, gingerly, index finger extended.

As he’d suspected, the second time he didn’t have to reach so far. The bubble was closing about him. There must be something he could do to stop its progress, but with the heat and noise increasing unbearably, he could not think what it was. He could not think. He could only sink down over the Preacher’s corpse, grateful that his ordeal was almost over, as the bubble dwindled around him and its molten substance wrapped itself about his skin in sudden and searing pain.

Hanson screamed.