Venging

by Greg Bear

  "'Ere dis you go?"

  He turned back to the trailer and saw the girl peering under the skin. "I'm going to try to get away," he said. "I don't belong here. Nobody does."

  "Lissy. I tol' de one, T-Thinner to teach dis me… teach me how to spek li' dis you. When you come back, I know by den."

  "I don't plan on coming back." He looked at her closely. She was wearing the same shift she wore when he first saw her, but a belt had tightened it around her waist. He took a deep breath and backed away a step, his sandals sinking in the mud.

  "I don' know 'oo you are… who you are… but if Th-Thinner brought you, you must be a good person."

  Jeshua widened his eyes. "Why?"

  She shrugged. "Dis me just know." She jumped down from the trailer, swinging from a rain-shiny leg. Mud splattered up her bare white calves.

  "If you, dis me, t'ought… thought you were bad, I'd expec' you to brute me right now. But you don'. Even though you neba—never have a gol before." Her strained speech started to crack, and she laughed nervously. "I was tol' abou' you 'en you came. About your prob—lem." She looked at him curiously. "How do you feel?"

  "Alive. And I wouldn't be too sure I'm not a danger. I've never had to control myself before."

  The girl looked him over coquettishly.

  "Mandala, it isn't all bad, no good," she said. "It took care ob you. Dat's good, is it no'?"

  "When I go home," Jeshua said, drawing a breath, "I'm going to tell my people we should come and destroy the cities."

  The girl frowned. "Li' take down?"

  "Piece by piece."

  "Too much to do. Nobod can do dat."

  "Enough people can."

  "No' good to do in firs' place. No' tall."

  "It's because of them we're like savages now."

  The girl shimmied up the spider's leg again and motioned for him to follow. He lifted himself and stood on the rounded lip of the back, watching her as she walked with arms balancing to the middle of the vehicle. "Look dis," she said. She pointed to the ranked legions of Mandala. The mist was starting to burn off. Shafts of sunlight cut through and brightened wide circles of the plain. "De polis, dey are li' not'ing else. Dey are de…" She sighed at her lapses. "They are the fines' thing we eba put together. We should try t'save dem."

  But Jeshua was resolute. His face burned with anger as he looked out over the disassembled city. He jumped from the rim and landed in the pounded mud. "If there's no place for people in them, they're useless. Let the architect try to reclaim. I've got more immediate things to do."

  The girl smiled slowly and shook her head. Jeshua stalked off between the vehicles and city parts.

  Mandala, broken down, covered at least thirty square miles of the plain. Jeshua took his bearings from a tall rock pinnacle, chose the shortest distance to the edge, and sighted on a peak in Arat. He walked without trouble for a half hour and found himself approaching an attenuated concentration of city fragments. Grass grew up between flattened trails. Taking a final sprint, he stood on the edge of Mandala. He took a deep breath and looked behind to see if anything was following.

  He still had his club. He held it in one hand, hefted it, and examined it closely, trying to decide what to do with it if he was bothered. He put it back in his belt, deciding he would need it for the long trip back to his expolis. Behind him, the ranks of vehicles and parts lurched and began to move. Mandala was beginning reconstruction. It was best to escape now.

  He ran. The long grass made speed difficult, but he persisted until he stumbled into a burrow and fell over. He got up, rubbed his ankle, decided he was intact, and continued his clumsy springing gait.

  In an hour he rested beneath the shade of a copse of trees and laughed to himself. The sun beat down heavily on the plain, and the grass shimmered with a golden heat. It was no time for travel. There was a small puddle held in the cup of a rock, and he drank from that, then slept for a while.

  He was awakened by a shoe gently nudging him in the ribs.

  "Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod," a voice said.

  He rolled from his stomach and looked into the face of Sam Daniel the Catholic. Two women and another man, as well as three young children, were behind him jockeying for positions in the coolest shade.

  "Have you calmed yourself in the wilderness?" the Catholic asked. Jeshua sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had nothing to fear. The chief of the guard wasn't acting in his professional capacity—he was traveling, not searching. And besides, Jeshua was returning to the expolis.

  "I am calmer, thank you," Jeshua said. "I apologize for my actions."

  "It's only been a fortnight," Sam Daniel said. "Has so much changed since?"

  "I…" Jeshua shook his head. "I don't think you would believe."

  "You came from the direction of the traveling city," the Catholic said, sitting on the soft loam. He motioned for the rest of the troop to rest and relax. "Meet anything interesting there?"

  Jeshua nodded. "Why have you come this far?"

  "For reasons of health. And to visit the western limb of Expolis Canaan, where my parents live now. My wife has a bad lung ailment—I think an allergic reaction to the new strain of sorghum being planted in the ridge paddies above Bethel-Japhet. We will stay away until the harvest. Have you stayed in other villages near here?"

  Jeshua shook his head. "Sam Daniel, I have always thought you a man of reason and honor. Will you listen with an open mind to my story?"

  The Catholic considered, then nodded.

  "I have been inside a city."

  He raised his eyebrows. "The one on the plain?"

  Jeshua told him most of the story. Then he stood. "I'd like you to follow me. Away from the rest. I have proof."

  Sam Daniel followed Jeshua behind the rocks, and Jeshua shyly revealed his proof. Sam Daniel stared. "It's real?" he asked. Jeshua nodded.

  "I've been restored. I can go back to Bethel-Japhet and become a regular member of the community."

  "No one has ever been in a city before. Not for as long as any remember."

  "There's at least one other, a girl. She's from the city chasers."

  "But the city took itself apart and marched. We had to change our course to go around it or face the hooligans following. How could anyone live in a rebuilding city?"

  "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 are—human beings! Would you kick a dog from your house because it dreams of hunting during Passover—or Lent? Then why should a city kick its citizens 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."

  "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.

  "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 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 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, 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, ge
nitals 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 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."