Strength of Stones

by Greg Bear

  “She’ll do,” another young one said.

  They pulled her to the ground, took off her robes, and raped her. She ignored them, dreaming of the living cities and their cool green spires, assuaging her thirst with the memories.

  When they were done, they left her in the waning daylight and continued patrolling south. She stood and gathered her supplies, then found a scrawny bush and slept under it. It was harder getting up to the pale dawn, harder to walk under the growing heat. She rationed her water carefully, but ate the food quickly. Different masters controlled her actions. Her stiff, knotted hair crackled in the heat.

  Another party of soldiers passed by. She was like a ghost, lurching into the thin breeze, arms held out. Somewhere behind her was the empty water sack and the last of the crumbs. Her clay necklace lay under the bush where she’d slept. The soldiers watched her with mixed fear and disgust, then went south to join their army. Rifle fire echoed across the river plain.

  By nightfall she was sitting under cottonwood trees and drinking from a shallow spring. She was sure she had entered the first stage of Paradise. Still, the men said that in Paradise women served, and she didn’t like that idea. Ifrits did not serve. They were mean as scorpions when crossed.

  In the morning she ate a few shreds of grass and nuts dug from a seed-pod, which made her faintly ill. By afternoon, following an overgrown dirt path, she found a Habiru village. It had been burned to the ground and the stone walls knocked over, probably by evil giants. The village overlooked the plain and from its southern end she had a good view of the two river beds and Akkabar. Holding her nose against the lingering smell of dead flesh, she looked back at her home and squinted. Smoke was rising from the center of the town. A grey mass of specks surrounded the mud and stone walls. In an hour, the pillar of smoke was black and tall. “I really am an ifrit,” she murmured. “Soldiers rub the walls and out I pour in a cloud of soot, to sit in the hills and laugh.”

  She left the dead Habiru village and followed the road to a high grassland beyond, swatting at the insects which clung to her bare, peeling arms. Her strength was rapidly fading. She managed to keep walking until her feet struck clear, glass pavement. Her legs still kicked after she fell.

  An hour passed and she lay motionless under the stars, eyes closed, lulled by a pleasant hum. Something beautiful was near. She opened her eyes and pulled a final moment of reason from her reserves. She was on her back, nearly dead. Beyond her feet was a tall, intricate arch, polished and green, glowing with its own light and exhaling a warm wind.

  Perhaps she was already dead. She was on the perimeter of a living city. The pavement around her should have bristled into an impenetrable barricade, keeping all humans out. Then her reason slipped away and she sang weakly to herself, until strong mandibles closed around her legs and shoulders and she was taken through the arch, into the pale underwater luminosity.

  Durragon the Apostate, commander of three thousand Chasers and a handful of Expolitan grumblers, felt a vague regret about the smoking Moslem town. He kicked aside a pile of rags filled with bloody meat and stood in the middle of the ruin, eyes half-closed, trying to think. The smell was awful. The Chasers were marvelous scrappers but no good at restraint. Still, they were the only thing between him and anonymity. They obeyed his orders with a kind of reverence, if only because he could kill any two of them in combat, and had. But it didn’t make much sense, economically speaking, to let them continue. It was time to risk their contempt and demand discretion in the looting.

  He put his hand on the bare, scabbed shoulder of his left-flank runner, Breetod, and spoke into his ear. “Take the three torchers into the market. I’m not happy with this, not happy at all. We could have lived here a while. Now even the grain stores are burned.”

  Breetod’s face fell into unhappy creases, but he ran off to carry out the orders. Durragon took out his pistol and loaded it thoughtfully. He walked through the rubble to where the market had been, sidestepping the charred bodies.

  The three torchers stood by the jagged black heaps of the market stalls, hands folded, grinning nervously. One of them took a step forward and was restrained by Breetod.

  “Dis we, no’ try t’—”

  “Quiet,” Durragon said softly. His stomach twisted. He didn’t like this at all, but it was necessary. Without him, they would still be unorganized savages. They were like children. Sometimes their discipline had to be harsh. He took out his pistol. The torchers stopped smiling.

  Other Chasers stood around, grim and silent. He motioned them away from his line of fire.

  “Day-o,” the youngest torcher moaned.

  His teeth gritted, Durragon pulled the trigger three times. The Chasers broke up and walked to the outskirts of the ruins, where their camp-followers waited. The rest of the marauders were on the other side of the town, searching the rubble for scraps of molten gold and silver. Akkabar had been a poor town. They weren’t likely to find much.

  Reah thought a clear, untroubled thought for the first time in ten years. She stood in the middle of a clean white room with a bunk in one corner, a green-tinted window along one wall, and a very strange desk which might have been a wash basin. Something like music came out of the ceiling, which was a flowing, oily gold color. She turned around slowly and saw the open doorway and a hall beyond. Her hair was clean and straight, even faintly scented. She wore a white gown, not flattering—she had let herself go too long to be flattered by clothing—and a pair of sandals made from some soft fiber. It was delightful. She waited a moment for the uncertainties and clouds of insects to rise in her head, but all was still. She had a mild headache and was hungry, but she was no longer an ifrit.

  She walked out the door and through the clean white hall until she reached a balcony, two floors above a courtyard. The music followed her. She peered over the railing. The floor of the circular mall below was an indescribable gray-green color. Looking closer, she saw it wasn’t a solid color at all—the floor was a mosaic of tiny moving patterns, forming geometric forests with the slowness of a burning candle. A hundred meters away, four people dressed in white and orange robes strolled on the edge of the mall. Birds flew over them, through a wide gateway flanked by green arches. Her throat seized up and she thought she was going to cry.

  “Hello,” a male voice said behind her. She turned to look, lower lip quivering. He was about thirty, with black hair and dark, tan skin, a few centimeters taller than Reah but not much stockier. His nose was small with delicate nostrils, and his eyes were gray like fine clay dirt. He looked well-fed and healthy.

  “I’m in a city, aren’t I?” she said. “But it’s supposed to be empty.” Her hands fluttered nervously across the front of her robe, reaching for frayed ends of a shawl she no longer wore.

  “This one doesn’t have much control any more. It’s dying, like an old person. Some parts still work, others don’t. It lets sick people in. Can we help you?”

  “I’m better now… I can feel it. Is this a hospital?”

  “All cities were made to treat their citizens. You’re the one found on the paving outside—from a Moslem town, right?”

  “I saw Akkabar burning. My town. Was I dreaming?”

  The man shook his head. “Akkabar was destroyed two weeks ago. We watched it from the Tower Plaza, near the top. I don’t think many escaped. You’re the only one in Resurrection. That’s what this city is called. You must have walked fifty, sixty kilometers.”

  She thought that over for a moment, then held her hand out to touch him and see if he was real. He looked down at her fingers on his arm and she withdrew them quickly, hacking away. “I—we heard stories that the cities made things like people… shaped like us. There was one in Akkabar when I was a girl. Someone killed him in a duel. He was like a plant and a machine inside. Are you human?”

  “Flesh and blood. All of us are. Most of us come from Bethel-Yakoh. Why don’t you go back to your room—”

  “I’d rather stay here.”

&nbs
p; “Whatever you want.”

  “Did the city fix you, too?”

  He nodded. “Most of Expolis Capernahum was slaughtered by Durragon and his Chasers. We were wounded.”

  Reah shook her head slowly, not knowing what to believe. “I remember walking through a Habiru village. Yours?”

  “Probably not. I’m from twenty kilometers northeast of here.”

  “When will Durragon come for us?”

  The man smiled. “He won’t. The city only lets injured people in. We’re all of a kind here. Patients.” He pulled up a sleeve and showed her his upper arm. It was covered with a milky-white, skin-tight bandage.

  Reah looked up and closed her eyes. Above the mall, a shaft of orange and red and white seemed to extend to infinity. She looked again and saw that the white bands were circles of rectangular balconies, and the red horizontal strips were massive support beams. Orange trim relieved the red with abstract and geometric designs. It was pure magic, an air shaft in a living city. She was no longer an ifrit, but she was still surrounded by the stuff of legends. “Who is Durragon?”

  “A tyrant, a butcher.” The man’s lips curled, almost theatrically. “He wants to be a new Herod, a Caesar.”

  Her thoughts seemed to hiccup. She wasn’t used to thinking clearly. How much easier to drift from distortion to distortion… and how much more terrifying! She remembered nothing but fear. She followed the man back to her room and sat on the bunk, smelling the cleanness, the order, the kindness. “You,” she called as the man started to leave. He turned and raised an eyebrow. “You know…” She paused. “I’ll never be afraid again, not that way.”

  He nodded. “My name is Belshezar Iben Sulaym. And yours?”

  “Reah,” she replied. “Wife to Abram Khaldun.”

  “Is he dead?”

  “Years dead,” she said.

  “You were still weeping for him, three nights ago.”

  “No more. Nothing is worth that much grief.”

  He smiled sympathetically and left.

  “Gerat, Manuay, Persicca and Tobomar; they have sacked four towns and found sixteen hundred head of cattle. Captured three hundred women and young boys, recovered three hundred tons of various grains, and some weapons which I let them keep.” Breetod read the list slowly, squinting at the scrawled figures. His opposite, the right flank runner Nebeki, sat chewing a flap of giant snail flesh, nodding as the names of the troop leaders were read off.

  “Ferda, Comingory and Flavin; they have sacked two coop farms and a village. Fifty cattle, twenty-seven women, ten tons of grain.”

  “They killed too many,” Durragon said. His leather camp chair creaked as he leaned forward in the hot shadow. A bead of sweat fell from his nose and splashed on the leather floor. “Cut their share by a tenth and lash Comingory across the open palm, twice.”

  “Too much shame,” Nebeki advised. “A tenth cut is enough, sir, if I may speak.”

  Durragon shrugged. “Tell him he deserves the lash, but I have high hopes for his strength in future raids, and graciously spare him. Is that all?”

  Breetod assented and looked at Durragon with crazed, dogs-blue eyes as the Apostate walked to the tent flap and lifted it. “No more towns left,” he said. “And I always wanted to put my capitol here. Now, because of our… perhaps it is best to say enthusiasm, I can’t even support my army here. Not for another three or four years. So where next?”

  Nebeki dropped his scraps into a wooden bowl and wiped his hands on a towel hung from a tent-pole. “Before we go, sir, we can try the city on the high plain.”

  “We can’t get in.”

  “My runners passed it a week ago. They say it’s dying fast. A third of its towers are grey. Soon the spikes will go down and we can hunt for weapons and jewelry, even machinery if we can tame it.”

  Durragon scowled. He had lost a finger to a marauding city part as a child. The beasts that poured out of a dead city were too unpredictable for his taste; his father had made a living taming them, but the predilection wasn’t hereditary.

  “Water supply and good land,” Breetod said. “A city always puts its roots down in fine soil. We can settle around it and wait a few months for it to die.” He savored the idea of a rest.

  Durragon cocked his head to one side, thinking hard for several minutes while his flank runners were respectfully silent, then agreed with a barely perceptible nod. “Breetod will keep track of the bearers and the loot. We’ll return to Expolis Capernahum. Maybe a few of the Habiru have rebuilt and we can trade with them for seed, plant a crop while we sit.”

  Nebeki looked at Breetod, who returned his glance with a warning purse of the lips. Despite Durragon’s ancestry, he knew little about either the Habiru or farming. Neither the survivors nor the land they were in would be tractable, but there was little chance of danger—just boredom.

  Reah sat before the console with a grim expression. She knew she was ignorant, and therefore helpless, but the idea of talking with something not human was more than she could calmly accept. Belshezar watched from the other side of the apartment, leaning against a white ceramic ovoid half-buried in the floor. Beside him was a black-haired, sharp-faced woman named Rebecca. Behind them, under the broad picture-window which overlooked a promenade and indoor park, was a pile of rubble which had once been furniture. Reah swiveled on her bench.

  “Everyone in Resurrection had one of these?”

  “Every apartment,” Belshezar said. “They were as common as windows and more important. Children learned from them, the people saw what was happening to their world in them.”

  Green louvres on the console swung open at her touch and a fluid turquoise triangle shimmered on the flat screen. Beneath the screen was a plate about thirty centimeters across with two keyboards on either side, designed to fit the viewer’s fingers with a minimum of effort. She touched the index finger button and a human image appeared on the plate, palm-high, a sexless homunculus dressed in skin-tight black.

  “May I answer?” it asked, speech thickly accented.

  “It’s hard to understand,” Reah said, looking back at them. Belshezar was tapping his fingers on the ovoid, looking across at Rebecca with a tolerant smile. “It’s English the way they spoke it a thousand years ago,” Rebecca said.

  “What do I do now?”

  “Ask it questions.” She tossed back her red hair. “It’ll answer your question.”

  “Not just any question,” Belshezar corrected. “Remember—the cities haven’t been inhabited for centuries. The memory files aren’t up to date. It doesn’t know about a lot of outside events—though it does seem to know a few things about other cities. We suppose they talk to each other now and then. Excuse us, we have to meet friends elsewhere—can you take care of yourself here?”

  Reah nodded hesitantly. “Good,” Belshezar said. He patted her lightly—almost condescendingly—on the shoulder and left her alone in the apartment. She sniffed the cool air and bent closer to examine the homunculus. It returned her gaze steadily. She couldn’t tell if it was male or female, and the voice was no clue. The people in those times, before the Exiling, must have been very different, even though they shared the faiths of Yahweh and Allah. “I’m ignorant,” she said hesitantly. “That makes me weak. I need to learn.”

  “Where shall we begin?” the homunculus asked.

  “I wish to know what happened. History. Then I’d like to be generally educated.”

  “We’ll mix them, okay? Listen and watch close, pupil.”

  For the first day’s lessons, the console taught her in real time, and it went slowly. The next day, it told her to insert her fingers into the accelerated transfer terminals, little depressions above the keyboards. She felt a prickly sensation, then a warmth up her backbone and a bright spot between her eyes. The learning went more rapidly. On the third day, it told her how to look into patterns generated by special projectors around the screen. On the fourth day she was much less weak, and very little like the old Reah.

>   Breetod presented the tamed city part to Durragon on his birthday. It had been captured a week earlier by a band of Chasers hunting on a mountain ridge fifteen miles north. It wasn’t graceful—it looked more like a sawhorse than a real horse—but it was large and fast and obeyed well enough. Durragon walked around it and looked it over without enthusiasm. He mounted and sat uncomfortably in the makeshift saddle.

  “We were thinking it should be called Bucephalus,” Breetod said. Nebeki smiled. The bodyguards and Durragon’s personal troops looked on, weary from the march.

  The thing’s back was smooth and soft as leather, but translucent and green like a young tree stem. Under the skin blue veins gathered in squares, and beneath them shone the paleness of metal parts and colloid bones. Its head was a cluster of eyes on flexible stalks. Its mouth was a tube through which it absorbed water and soil nutrients. There was a plug in one leg, now corroded over; it hadn’t had a city-provided meal in at least twenty years. Its gait was regular and comfort-able. “I don’t like the name,” Durragon said, dismounting. “What was it used for?”

  “In the cities, sir?” Nebeki asked hesitantly. “It was a toy for children, I think.”

  “I want another name.” He walked toward the shade of a cluster of mulcet trees. A table had been set up there, with charts spread across it, held down by stones. On one side of the table was an advisor, the old Habiru, Ezeki Iben Tav. Ezeki was lean and wrinkled, his forehead burned leather-brown by the sun, but his bald pate fading to almost white where it was usually covered by a ragged knit cap. He claimed to have been a teacher years before. He was using the cap to fan himself now as he traced a course on one map with his sharp-nailed finger. “What was Bucephalus?” Durragon asked him.

  “A brain disorder among the Politans in the early years of this planet,” Ezeki said. Durragon humphed and looked at the charts.

  “Why would anyone name a mount that?” he wondered.

  Sweating under the hot sun, Nebeki and Breetod were arguing. “I only spoke the truth,” Nebeki said. “And the name was yours, besides.”