Venging

by Greg Bear

  Jeshua tightened the straps on his sandals and followed.

  Bethel-Japhet was a village of moderate size, with about two thousand people. Its houses and buildings laced through the jungle until no distinct borders remained. The stone roadway to the Synedrium Hall seemed too short to Jeshua, and the crowd within the hearing chamber was far too large. His betrothed, Kisa, daughter of Jake, was not there, but his challenger, Renold Mosha Iben Yitshok, was.

  The representative of the seventy judges, the Septuagint, called the gathering to order and asked that the details of the case be presented.

  "Son of David," Renold said, "I have come to contest your betrothal to Kisa, daughter of Jake."

  "I hear," Jeshua said, taking his seat in the defendant's docket.

  "I have reasons for my challenge. Will you hear them?"

  Jeshua didn't answer.

  "Pardon my persistence. It is the law. I don't dislike you—I remember our childhood, when we played together—but now we are mature, and the time has come."

  "Then speak." Jeshua fingered his thick dark beard. His flushed skin was the color of the fine sandy dirt on the riverbanks of the Hebron. He towered a good foot above Renold, who was slight and graceful.

  "Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod, you were born like other men but did not grow as we have. You now look like a man, but the Synedrium has records of your development. You cannot consummate a marriage. You cannot give a child to Kisa. This annuls your childhood betrothal. By law and by my wish I am bound to replace you, to fulfill your obligation to her."

  Kisa would never know. No one here would tell her. She would come in time to accept and love Renold, and to think of Jeshua as only another man in the Expolis Ibreem and its twelve villages, a man who stayed alone and unmarried. Her slender warm body with skin smooth as the finest cotton would soon dance beneath the man he saw before him. She would clutch Renold's back and dream of the time when humans would again be welcomed into the cities, when the skies would again be filled with ships and God-Does-Battle would be redeemed—

  "I cannot answer, Renold Mosha Iben Yitshok."

  "Then you will sign this." Renold held out a piece of paper and advanced.

  "There was no need for a public witnessing," Jeshua said. "Why did the Synedrium decide my shame was to be public?" He looked around with tears in his eyes. Never before, even in the greatest physical pain, had he cried; not even, so his father said, when he had fallen into the fire.

  He moaned. Renold stepped back and looked up in anguish. "I'm sorry, Jeshua. Please sign. If you love either Kisa or myself, or the expolis, sign."

  Jeshua's huge chest forced out a scream. Renold turned and ran. Jeshua slammed his fist onto the railing, struck himself on the forehead and tore out the seams of his shirt. He had had too much. For nine years he had known of his inability to be a whole man, but he had hoped that would change, that his genitals would develop like some tardy flower just beyond normal season, and they had. But not enough. His testicles were fully developed, enough to give him a hairy body, broad shoulders, flat stomach, narrow hips, and all the desires of any young man—but his penis was the small pink dangle of a child's.

  Now he exploded. He ran after Renold, out of the hall, bellowing incoherently and swinging his binoculars at the end of their leather strap. Renold ran into the village square and screeched a warning. Children and fowl scattered. Women grabbed their skirts and fled for the wood and brick homes.

  Jeshua stopped. He flung his binoculars as high as he could above his head. They cleared the top of the tallest tree in the area and fell a hundred feet beyond. Still bellowing, he charged a house and put his hands against the wall. He braced his feet and heaved. He slammed his shoulder against it. It would not move. More furious still, he turned to a trough of fresh water, picked it up, and dumped it over his head. The cold did not slow him. He threw the trough against the wall and splintered it.

  "Enough!" cried the chief of the guard. Jeshua stopped and blinked at Sam Daniel the Catholic. He wobbled, weak with exertion. Something in his stomach hurt.

  "Enough, Jeshua," Sam Daniel said softly.

  "The law is taking away my birthright. Is that just?"

  "Your right as a citizen, perhaps, but not your birthright. You weren't born here, Jeshua. But it is still no fault of yours. There is no telling why nature makes mistakes."

  "No!" He ran around the house and took a side street into the market triangle. The stalls were busy with customers picking them over and carrying away baskets filled with purchases. He leaped into the triangle and began to scatter people and shops every which way. Sam Daniel and his men followed.

  "He's gone berserk!" Renold shouted from the rear. "He tried to kill me!"

  "I've always said he was too big to be safe," growled one of the guard. "Now look what he's doing."

  "He'll face the council for it," Sam Daniel said.

  "Nay, the Septuagint he'll face, as a criminal, if the damage gets any heavier!"

  They followed him through the market.

  Jeshua stopped at the base of a hill, near an old gate leading from the village proper. He was gasping painfully, and his face was wine-red. Sweat gnarled his hair. In the thicket of his mind he searched for a way out, the only way now. His father had told him about it when he was thirteen or fourteen. "The cities were like doctors," his father had said. "They could alter, replace, or repair anything in the human body. That's what was lost when the cities grew disgusted and cast the people out."

  No city would let any real man or woman enter. But Jeshua was different. Real people could sin. He could be a sinner not in fact, but only in thought. In his confusion the distinction seemed important.

  Sam Daniel and his men found him at the outskirts of the jungle, walking away from Bethel-Japhet.

  "Stop!" the chief of the guard ordered.

  "I'm leaving," Jeshua said without turning.

  "You can't go without a ruling!"

  "I am."

  "We'll hunt you!"

  "Then I'll hide, damn you!"

  There was only one place to hide on the plain, and that was underground, in the places older than the living cities and known collectively as Sheol. Jeshua ran. He soon outdistanced them all.

  Five miles ahead he saw the city that had left Mesa Canaan. It had reassembled itself below the mountains of Arat. It gleamed in the sun, as beautiful as anything ever denied mankind. The walls began to glow as the sky darkened, and in the evening silence the air hummed with the internal noises of the city's life. Jeshua slept in a gully, hidden by a lean-to woven out of reeds.

  In the soft yellow light of dawn, he looked at the city more closely, lifting his head above the gully's muddy rim. The city began with a ring of rounded outward-leaning towers, like the petals of a monumental lotus. Inward was another ring, slightly taller, and another, rising to support a radiance of buttresses. The buttresses carried a platform with columns atop it, segmented and studded like the branches of a diatom. At the city's summit, a dome like the magnified eye of a fly gave off a corona of diffracted colors. Opal glints of blue and green sparkled in the outside walls.

  With the help of the finest architect humanity had ever produced, Robert Kahn, Jeshua's ancestors had built the cities and made them as comfortable as possible. Huge laboratories had labored for decades to produce the right combination of animal, plant, and machine, and to fit them within the proper designs. It had been a proud day when the first cities were opened. The Christians, Jews, and Moslems of God-Does-Battle could boast of cities more spectacular than any that Kahn had built elsewhere, and the builder's works could be found on a hundred worlds.

  Jeshua stopped a hundred yards from the glassy steps beneath the outer petals of the city. Broad, sharp spikes rose from the pavement and smooth garden walls. The plants within the garden shrank away at his approach. The entire circuit of paving around the city shattered into silicate thorns and bristled. There was no way to enter. Still, he walked closer.

  He faced th
e tangle of sharp spines and reached to stroke one with a hand. It shuddered at his touch.

  "I haven't sinned," he told it. "I've hurt no one, coveted only that which was mine by law." The nested spikes said nothing but grew taller as he watched, until they extended a hundred yards above his head.

  He sat on a hummock of grass outside the perimeter and clasped his stomach with his hands to ease the hunger and pressure of his sadness. He looked up at the city's peak. A thin silvery tower rose from the midst of the columns and culminated in a multifaceted sphere. The sunlit side of the sphere formed a crescent of yellow brilliance. A cold wind rushed through his clothes and made him shiver. He stood and began to walk around the city, picking up speed when the wind carried sounds of people from the expolis.

  Jeshua knew from long hikes in his adolescence that a large entrance to Sheol yawned two miles farther west. By noon he stood in the cavernous entrance.

  The underground passages that made up Sheol had once been service ways for the inorganic cities of twelve centuries ago. All of those had been leveled and their raw material recycled with the completion of the living cities. But the underground causeways would have been almost impossible to destroy, so they had been blocked off and abandoned. Some had filled with groundwater, and some had collapsed. Still others, drawing power from geothermal sources, maintained themselves and acted as if they yet had a purpose. A few became the homes of disgruntled expolitans, not unlike Jeshua.

  Many had become dangerous. Some of the living cities, just finished and not completely inspected, had thrown out their human builders during the Exiling, then broken down. Various disembodied parts—servant vehicles, maintenance robots, transports—had left the shambles and crept into the passages of Sheol, ill and incomplete, to avoid the natural cycle of God-Does-Battle's wilderness and the wrath of the exiles. Most had died and disintegrated, but a few had found ways to survive, and rumors about those made Jeshua nervous.

  He looked around and found a gnarled sun-blackened vine hard as wood, with a heavy bole. He hefted it, broke off its weak tapering end, and stuck it into his belt where it wouldn't tangle his legs.

  Before he scrambled down the debris-covered slope, he looked back. The expolitans from Ibreem were only a few hundred yards away.

  He lurched and ran. Sand, rocks, and bits of dead plants had spilled into the wide tunnel. Water dripped off chipped white ceramic walls, plinking into small ponds. Moss and tiered fungus imparted a shaggy veneer to the walls and supports.

  The villagers appeared at the lip of the depression and shouted his name. He hid in the shadows for a while until he saw that they weren't following.

  A mile into the tunnel, he saw lights. The floor was ankle-deep with muddy water. He had already seen several of God-Does-Battle's native arthropods and contemplated catching one for food, but he had no way to light a fire. He'd left all his matches in Bethel-Japhet, since it was against thc law to go into the jungles carrying them unless on an authorized hunt or expedition. He couldn't stand the thought of raw creeper flesh, no matter how hungry he was.

  The floor ahead had been lifted up and dropped. A lake had formed within the rimmed depression. Ripples shivered with oily slowness from side to side. Jeshua skirted the water on jagged slabs of concrete. He saw something long and white in the lake, waiting in the shallows, with feelers like the soft feathers of a mulcet branch. It had large grey eyes and a blunt rounded head, with a pocketknife assortment of clippers, grabbers, and cutters branching from arms on each side. Jeshua had never seen anything like it.

  God-Does-Battle was seldom so bizarre. It had been a straightforward, slightly dry Earth-like world, which was why humans had colonized in such large numbers thirteen centuries ago, turning the sluggish planet into a grand imitation of the best parts of ten planets. Some of the terraforming had slipped since then, but not drastically.

  Water splashed as he stepped on the solid floor of the opposite shore. The undulating feathery nightmare glided swiftly into the depths.

  The lights ahead blazed in discrete globes, not the gentle glows of the walls of the living cities. Wiring hissed and crackled in the vicinity of a black metal box. Tracks began at a buffer and run off around the distant curve. Black strips, faded and scuffed, marked a walkway. Signs in Old English and something akin to the Hebraic hodgepodge spoken in Ibreem warned against deviating from the outlined path. He could read the English more easily than the Hebrew, for Hebraic script had been used. In Ibreem, all writing was in Roman script.

  Jeshua stayed within the lines and walked around the curve. Half of the tunnel ahead was blocked by a hulk. It was thirty feet wide and some fifty long, rusting and frozen in its decay. It had been man-operated, not automatic—a seat bucket still rose above a nest of levers, pedals, and a small arched instrument panel. As a smith and designer of tools and motor-driven vehicles, Jeshua thought there were parts of the rail-rider that didn't seem integral. He examined them more closely and saw they hadn't come with the original machine. They were odds and ends of mobile machinery from one of the cities. Part machine, part organism, built with treads and grips, they had joined with the tar-baby rail-rider, trying to find a place on the bigger, more powerful machine. They had found only silence. They were dead now, and what could not rot had long since dusted away. The rest was glazed with rust and decay.

  In the tunnel beyond, stalactites of concrete and rusted steel bristled from the ceiling. Fragments of pipes and wiring hung from them on brackets. At one time the entire tunnel must have been filled with them, with room only for rail-riders and maintenance crews walking the same path he was taking. Most of the metal and plastic had been stripped away by scavengers.

  Jeshua walked beneath the jagged end of an air duct and heard a susurrus. He cocked his head and listened more closely. Nothing. Then again, almost too faint to make out. The plastic of the air duct was brittle and added a timbre of falling dust to the voices. He found a metal can and stood on it, bringing his ear closer.

  "Moobed…" the duct echoed.

  "…not 'ere dis me was…"

  "Bloody poppy-breast!"

  "Not'ing… do…"

  The voices stopped. The can crumpled and dropped him to the hard floor, making him yelp like a boy. He stood on wobbly legs and walked farther into the tunnel.

  The lighting was dimmer. He walked carefully over the shadow-pocked floor, avoiding bits of tile and concrete, fallen piping, snake wires and loose strapping bands. Fewer people had been this way. Vaguely seen things moved off at his approach: insects, creepers, rodents, some native, some feral. What looked like an overturned drum became, as he bent closer, a snail wide as two handspans, coursing on a shiny foot as long as his calf. The white-tipped eyes glanced up, cat-slits dark with hidden fluids and secret thoughts, and a warm, sickening odor wafted from it. Stuck fast to one side was the rotting body of a large beetle.

  A hundred yards on, the floor buckled again. The rutted underground landscape of pools, concrete, and mud smelled foul and felt more foul to his sandaled feet. He stayed away from the bigger pools, which were surrounded by empty larvae casings and filled with snorkeling insect young.

  He regretted his decision. He wondered how he could return to the village and face his punishment. To live within sight of Kisa and Renold. To repair the water trough and do labor penance for the stall owners.

  He stopped to listen. Water fell in a cascade ahead. The sound drowned out anything more subtle, but sounds of a squabble rose above. Men were arguing and coming closer.

  Jeshua moved back from the middle of the tunnel and hid behind a fallen pipe.

  Someone ran from block to block, dancing agilely in the tunnel, arms held out in balance and hands gesturing like wing tips. Four others followed, knife blades gleaming in the half-light. The fleeing man ran past, saw Jeshua in the shadows, and stumbled off into black mud. Jeshua pushed against the pipe as he stood and turned to run. He felt a tremor through his hand on the wall. A massive presence of falling rock and dir
t knocked him over and tossed debris around him. Four shouts were severed. He choked on the dust, waving his arms and crawling.

  The lights were out. Only a putrid blue-green swamp glow remained. A shadow crossed the ghost of a pond. Jeshua stiffened and waited for the attacking blow.

  "Who?" the shadow said. "Go, spek. Shan hurt."

  The voice sounded like it might come from an older boy, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. He spoke a sort of English. It wasn't the tongue Jeshua had learned while visiting Expolis Winston, but he could understand some of it. He thought it might be Chaser English, but there weren't supposed to be chasers in Expolis Ibreem. They must have followed the city.…

  "I'm running, like you," Jeshua said in Winston dialect.

  "Dis me," said the shadow. "Sabed my ass, you did. Quartie ob toms, lie dey t'ought I spek. Who appel?"

  "What?"

  "Who name? You."

  "Jeshua," he said.

  "Jeshoo-a Iberhim."

  "Yes, Expolis Ibreem."

  "No' far dis em. Stan' an' clean. Takee back."

  "No, I'm not lost. I'm running."

  "No' good t'stay. Bugga bites mucky, bugga bites you more dan dey bites dis me."

  Jeshua slowly wiped mud from his pants with broad hands. Dirt and pebbles scuttled down the hill where the four lay tombed.

  "Slow," the boy said. "Slow, no? Brainsick?" The boy advanced. "Dat's it. Slow you."

  "No, tired," Jeshua said. "How do we get out of here?"

  "Dat, dere an' dere. See?"

  "Can't see," Jeshua said. "Not very well"

  The boy advanced again and laid a cool, damp hand on his forearm. "Big, you. Skeez, maybe tight." The hand gripped and tested. Then the shadow backed off. Jeshua's eyes were adjusting, and he could see the boy's thinness.

  "What's your name?" he asked.

  "No' matta. Go 'long wi' dis me now."

  The boy led him to the hill of debris and poked around in the pitchy black to see if they could pass. "Allry. Dis way." Jeshua climbed up the rubble and pushed through the hole at the top with his back scraping the ceramic roof. The other side of the tunnel was dark. The boy cursed under his breath. "Whole tube," he said. "Ginger walk, now."