The Venging (18 page)

"I survived its disassembly. There are ways." And he told about the architect and its extensions. "I've had to twist my thoughts to understand what I've experienced," he said. "But I've reached a conclusion. We don't belong in the cities, any more than they deserve to have us." "Our shame lies in them." "Then they must be destroyed." Sam Daniel looked at him sharply. "That would be blasphemous. They serve to remind us of our sins." "We were exiled not for our sins, but for what we arehuman beings! Would you kick a dog from your

house because it dreams of hunting during Passoveror Lent? Then why should a city kick its citizens

(127 of 197) out because of their inner thoughts? Or because of a minority's actions? They were built with morals too rigid to be practical. They are worse than the most callous priest or judge, like tiny children in their self-righteousness. They've caused us to suffer needlessly. And as long as they stand, they remind us of an inferiority and shame that is a lie! We should tear them down to their roots and sow the ground with salt." Sam Daniel rubbed his nose thoughtfully between two fingers. "It goes against everything the expolises stand for," he said. "The cities are perfect. They are eternal, and if they are self-righteous, they deserve to be. You of all should know that." "You haven't understood," Jeshua said, pacing. "They are not perfect, not eternal. They were made by men" "Papa! Papa!" a child screamed. They ran back to the group. A black tractor-mounted giant with an angular birdlike head and five arms sat ticking quietly near the trees. Sam Daniel called his family back near the center of the copse and looked at Jeshua with fear and anger. "Has it come for you?" He nodded. "Then go with it." Jeshua stepped forward. He didn't look at the Catholic as he said, "Tell them what I've told you. Tell them what I've done, and what I know we must do." A boy was moaning softly. The giant picked Jeshua up delicately with a mandibled arm and set him on its back. It spun around with a spew of dirt and grass, then moved quietly back across the plain to Mandala. When they arrived, the city was almost finished rebuilding. It looked no different from when he'd first seen it, but its order was ugly to him now. He preferred the human asymmetry of brick homes and stone walls. Its noises made him queasy. His reaction grew like steam pressure in a boiler, and his muscles felt tense as a snake about to strike. The giant set him down in the lowest level of the city. Thinner met him there. Jeshua saw the girl waiting on a platform near the circular design in the shaft. "If it makes any difference to you, we had nothing to do with bringing you back," Thinner said. "If it makes any difference to you, I had nothing to do with returning. Where will you shut me tonight?" "Nowhere," Thinner said. "You have the run of the city." (128 of 197) The Venging "And the girl?" "What about her?" "What does she expect?" "You don't make much sense," Thinner said. "Does she expect me to stay and make the best of things?" "Ask her. We don't control her, either." Jeshua walked past the cyborgs and over the circular design, now disordered again. The girl watched him

steadily as he approached. He stopped below the platform and looked up at her, hands tightly clenched at his waist. "What do you want from this place?" he asked. "Freedom," she said. "The choice of what to be, where to live." "But the city won't let you leave. You have no choice."

"Yes, the city, I can leave it whenever I want." Thinner called from across the mall. "As soon as the city is put together, you can leave, too. The inventory is policed only during a move."

Jeshua's shoulders slumped, and his bristling stance softened. He had nothing to fight against now, not immediately. He kept his fists clenched, even so. "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.

(129 of 197) "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 corner 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 strength that could have crushed 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 shaft. "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 meI cannot cure a lifetime obof 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 (130 of 197) 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 lookit 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 worshiped. 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, (131 of 197) The Venging 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' nowI 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 chestfrom 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.

(132 of 197) The Venging "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 ourselvesyou, her, the othersto 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 was 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 then 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. |Go to Contents |

Hardfought

In the Han Dynasty, historians were appointed by the royal edict to write the history of lmperial China. They alone were the arbiters of what would be recorded. Although (133 of 197) various emperors tried, none could gain access to the ironbound chest in which each document was placed after it was written. The historians preferred to suffer death rather than betray their trust. At the end of each reign the box would be opened and the documents published, perhaps to benefit the next emperor. But for these documents, Imperial China, to a large extent, has no history. The thread survives by whim. Humans called it the Medusa. Its long twisted ribbons of gas strayed across fifty parsecs, glowing blue, yellow, and carmine. Its central core was a ghoulish green flecked with watery black. Half a dozen protostars circled the core, and as many more dim conglomerates pooled in dimples in the nebula's magnetic field. The Medusa was a huge womb of starsand disputed territory. Whenever Prufrax looked at it in displays or through the ship's ports, it seemed malevolent, like a zealous mother showing an ominous face to protect her children. Prufrax had never had a mother, but she had seen them in some of the fibs. At five, Prufrax was old enough to know theMellangee's mission and her role in it. She had already been through four ship-years of indoctrination. Until her first battle she would be educated in both the Know and the Tell. She would be exercised and trained in the Mocks; in sleep she would dream of penetrating the huge red-and-white Senexi seedships and finding the brood mind. "Zap, Zap," she went with her lips, silent so the tellman wouldn't think her thoughts were straying. The tellman peered at her from his position in the center of the spherical classroom. Her mates stared straight at the center, all focusing somewhere around the tellman's spiderlike teaching desk, waiting for the trouble, some fidgeting. "How many branch individuals in the Senexi brood mind?" he asked. He looked around the classroom. Peered face by face. Focused on her again. "Pru?" "Five," she said. Her arms ached. She had been pumped full of moans the wake before. She was already three meters tall, in elfstate, with her long, thin limbs not nearly adequately fleshed out and her fingers still crisscrossed with the surgery done to adapt them to the gloves. "What will you find in the brood mind?" the tellman pursued, his impassive face stretched across a hammerhead as wide as his shoulders. Some of the ferns thought tellmen were attractive. Not manyand Pru was not one of them. "Yoke," she said. "What is in the brood-mind yoke?" (134 of 197) "Fibs." "More specifically? And it really isn't all fib, you know." "Info. Senexi data." "What will you do?" "Zap," she said, smiling. "Why, Pru?" "Yoke has team gens-memory. Zap yoke, spill the life of the team's five branch inds." "Zap the brood, Pru?" "No," she said solemnly. That was a new instruction, only in effect since her class's inception. "Hold the brood for the supreme overs." The tellman did not say what would be done with the Senexi broods. That was not her concern. "Fine," said the tellman. "You tell well, for someone who's always half-journeying." Brainwalk, Prufrax thought. Tellman was fancy with the words, but to Pru, what she was prone to do during Tell was brainwalk, seeking out her future. She was already five, soon six. Old. Some saw Senexi by the time they were four. "Zap, Zap," she went with her lips. Aryz skidded through the thin layer of liquid ammonia on his broadest pod, considering his new assignment. He knew the Medusa by another name, one that conveyed all the time and effort the Senexi had invested in it. The protostar nebula held few mysteries for him. He and his four branch-mates, who along with the all-important brood mind comprised one of the six teams aboard the seedship, had patrolled the nebula for ninety-three orbits, each orbitincluding the timeless periods outside status geometrytaking some one hundred and thirty human years. They had woven in and out of the tendrils of gas, charting the infalling masses and exploring the rocky accretion disks of stars entering the main sequence. With each measure and update, the brood minds refined their view of the nebula as it would be a hundred generations hence, when the Senexi plan would finally mature. The Senexi were nearly as old as the galaxy. They had achieved spaceflight during the time of the starglobe, when the galaxy had been a sphere. They had not been a quick or brilliant race. Each great achievement had taken thousands of generations, and not just because of their material handicaps. In those times, elements heavier than helium had been rare, found only around stars that had greedily absorbed (135 of 197) huge amounts of primeval hydrogen, burned fierce and blue and exploded early, permeating the ill-defined galactic arms with carbon and nitrogen, lithium and oxygen. Elements heavier than iron had been almost nonexistent. The biologies of cold gas-giant worlds had developed with a much smaller palette of chemical combinations in producing the offspring of the primary Population II stars. Aryz, even with the limited perspective of a branch ind, was aware that, on the whole, the humans opposing the seedship were more adaptable, more vital. But they were not more experienced. The Senexi with their billions of years had often matched them. And Aryz's perspective was expanding with each day of his new assignment. In the early generations of the struggle, Senexi mental stasis and cultural inflexibility had made them avoid contact with the Population I species. They had never begun a program of extermination of the younger, newly life-forming worlds; the task would have been monumental and probably useless. So when spacefaring cultures developed, the Senexi had retreated, falling back into the redoubts of old stars even before engaging with the new kinds. They had retreated for three generations, about thirty thousand human years, raising their broods on cold nestworlds around red dwarfs, conserving, holding back for the inevitable conflicts. As the Senexi had anticipated, the younger Population I races had found need of even the aging groves of the galaxy's first stars. They had moved in savagely, voraciously, with all the strength and mutability of organisms evolved from a richer soup of elements. Biology had, in some ways, evolved in its own right and superseded the Senexi. Aryz raised the upper globe of his body, with its five silicate eyes arranged in a cross along the forward surface. He had memory of those times, and times long before, though his team hadn't existed then. The brood mind carried memories selected from the total store of nearly twelve billion years' experience; an awesome amount of knowledge, even to a Senexi. He pushed himself forward with his rear pods. Through the brood mind Aryz could share the memories of a hundred thousand past generations, yet the brood mind itself was younger than its branch of individuals. For a time in their youth, in their liquid-dwelling larval form, the branch inds carried their own sacs of data, each a fragment of the total necessary for complete memory. The branch inds swam through ammonia seas and wafted through thick warm gaseous zones, protoplasmic blobs three to four meters in diameterdeveloping their personalities under the weight of the pastand not even a complete past. No wonder they were inflexible, Aryz thought. Most branch inds were aware enough to see thatespecially when they were allowed to compare histories with the Population I species, as he was doingbut there was nothing to be done. They were content the way they were. To change would be unspeakably repugnant. Extinction was preferable almost. But now they were pressed hard. The brood mind had begun a number of experiments. Aryz's team had been selected from the seedship's contingent to oversee the experiments, and Aryz had been chosen as the chief investigator. Two orbits past, they had captured six human embryos in a breeding device, as well as a highly coveted memory storage center. Most Senexi engagements had been with humans for the past (136 of 197) three or four generations. Just as the Senexi dominated Population II species, humans were ascendant among their kind. Experiments with the human embryos had already been conducted. Some had been allowed to develop normally; others had been tampered with, for reasons Aryz was not aware of. The tamperings had not been very successful. The newer experiments, Aryz suspected, were going to take a different direction, and the seedship's actions now focused on him; he believed he would be given complete authority over the human shapes. Most branch inds would have dissipated under such a burden, but not Aryz. He found the human shapes rather interesting, in their own horrible way. They might, after all, be the key to Senexi survival. The moans were toughening her elfstate. She lay in pain for a wake, not daring to close her eyes; her mind was changing and she feared sleep would be the end of her. Her nightmares were not easily separated from life; some, in fact, were sharper. Too often in sleep she found herself in a Senexi trap, struggling uselessly, being pulled in deeper, her hatred wasted against such power. When she came out of the rigor, Prufrax was given leave by the subordinate tellman. She took to theMellangee's greenroads, walking stiffly in the shallow gravity. Her hands itched. Her mind seemed almost empty after the turmoil of the past few wakes. She had never felt so calm and clear. She hated the Senexi double now; once for their innate evil, twice for what they had made her overs put her through to be able to fight them. Logic did not matter. She was calm, assured. She was growing more mature wake by wake. Fight-budding, the tellman called it, hate coming out like blooms, synthesizing the sunlight of his teaching into pure fight. The greenroads rose temporarily beyond the labyrinth shields and armor of the ship. Simple transparent plastic and steel geodesic surfaces formed a lacework over the gardens, admitting radiation necessary to the vegetation growing along the paths. No machines scooted one forth and inboard here. It was necessary to walk. Walking was luxury and privilege. Prufrax looked down on the greens to each side of the paths without much comprehension. They werebeautiful. Yes, one should say that, think that, but what did it mean? Pleasing? She wasn't sure what being pleased meant, outside of thinking Zap. She sniffed a flower that, the signs explained, bloomed only in the light of young stars not yet fusing. They were near such a star now, and the greenroads were shiny black and electric green with the blossoms. Lamps had been set out for other plants unsuited to such darkened conditions. Some technic allowed suns to appear in selected plastic panels when viewed from certain angles. Clever, the technicals. She much preferred the looks of a technical to a tellman, but she was common in that. Technicals required brainflex, tellmen cargo capacity. Technicals were strong and ran strong machines, like in the adventure (137 of 197) fibs, where technicals were often the protags. She wished a technical were on the greenroads with her. The moans had the effect of making her receptivewhat she saw, looking in mirrors, was a certain shine in her eyesbut there was no chance of a breeding liaison. She was quite unreproductive in this moment of elfstate. Other kinds of meetings were not unusual. She looked up and saw a figure at least a hundred meters away, sitting on an allowed patch near the path. She walked casually, as gracefully as possible with the stiffness. Not a technical, she saw soon, but she was not disappointed. Too calm. "Over," he said as she approached. "Under," she replied. But not by muchhe was probably six or seven ship years old and not easily classifiable. "Such a fine elfstate," he commented. His hair was black. He was shorter than she, but something in his