Strength of Stones

by Greg Bear

  The block—cornerstone of the great Aquinas Gate archway—was a wreck. How it had produced him at all was a wonder. The walls around it were grey and cracked, dry-looking. The pipes lacing back and forth through the arch, integrated into the overall floral design, were empty of fluid.

  Outside the Aquinas gate was a broad plaza covered with mounds of dirt and pitted with holes as if people had been digging for buried treasure. Evidence of fire was clear in scorched walls, piles of blackened ash. He glanced up at the ceiling within the city, beyond the arch. The vault was still there, great upside-down beehive-like shafts of basalt hollowing to form the dome a hundred meters above the floor. But everything was grey, not vibrant green and sky blue and violet.

  A huge part of the city—perhaps all of it—was dead. As far as he could see down the walkway to the main heat shaft, a kilometer away, the walls and buttresses and pipes were lackluster.

  He walked out onto the plaza, avoiding the pits, until he reached a spreading field filled with large chunks of broken silicate. He stepped out of the city’s shadow and looked back. The sun was brighter than he remembered—brighter and hotter. Around the city there was nothing but a plain of dry grass, isolated scrub trees, and a crude dirt road.

  He squinted at the city’s towers. The lines had changed. It was obviously the city of Fraternity, and from this direction he could make out—with some difficulty—the abstracted portrait of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the central tower, but—

  Like a sand castle in the rain, the outline had eroded. Up and down the heights, marks of burning and decay and vandalism vied with collapsed supports and walls for first place in the game of destruction.

  The whole city was dead.

  He was still naked. He had to return to the city for the clothes—and to retrieve the record. His work on the one hundred and fifty-three cities of God-Does-Battle had at times been so frustrating and arduous that he had decided to leave a secret network of city recorders, in case something should go wrong and he be blamed. But he had never considered anything like this…

  How long had it been? More than two centuries—perhaps much more. He stepped back into the shadow and re-entered the corpse of Fraternity.

  Arthur Sam Daniel wasn’t surprised to see the oddly dressed stranger traveling the road past his small farm. Just the day before, a large, dark man carrying a talking head under his arm had gone in the same direction. Arthur’s grandmother had often told him about “trods,” or spirit roads. It was common knowledge that God-Does-Battle was a haunted world; times were changing, and apparently the trods were shifting. Arthur sat on the wooden bench under the mulcet tree, ten meters from the road and the stranger and twenty or so from the house, wondering if he had time to run back before it got him.

  It stopped by the fencepost. Arthur could see that it wasn’t sweating, despite the heat. It spoke a few words. Though the stranger’s language sounded familiar, he couldn’t quite understand. After another attempt, the stranger shook its head.

  “Are you human?” Arthur asked loudly, poised to leave the bench and run if need be. “Or maybe a spirit?”

  Of course, it could also be a city part. New Canaan had been plagued with mimics for almost a generation.

  The stranger looked puzzled, then smiled. It said something in what Arthur recognized as Hebrew, but the Daniel families hadn’t spoken Hebrew since leaving Bethel-Japhet during the break Wars. The Daniels had been Catholic then, but had learned Hebrew in the Expolis Ibreem to be neighborly.

  It was truly hot—the hottest summer in Arthur’s forty-five years. Even if the stranger didn’t sweat, it might be thirsty. Arthur brushed off his pants legs nervously and stood to face it. “Well, whatever you are, the least I can do is offer a drink of water. Come on in.” He gestured for the stranger to follow him between the withered thorn bushes to the house. Hospitality was one of the few pleasures left to Arthur these days. The stranger shaded his eyes to look, then complied.

  “Nan!” Arthur called to his daughter from the front porch. He looked over his shoulder; the stranger was a few steps behind. “We have a guest.”

  “Who’s that?” A woman’s voice inquired from inside.

  “I don’t know,” Arthur said. “I’ve decided you’re human,” he said to the stranger, opening the door. “But my decisions don’t mean much around here. I wasn’t sure because of those clothes, you know.” The stranger wore a fancier outfit than any that the Canaan Founders could produce, that was for sure. Arthur especially admired the boots that seemed to flow right down from the pants, and the way there were no buttons or zippers visible. “You spoke a bit of Hebrew there, but I’ve forgotten mine since I was a kid.” Nan met them in the front room, rubbing her hands on black coveralls.

  “Who is he?” she asked suspiciously.

  “Doesn’t speak like us,” Arthur said.

  “Why did you invite him in? What if he’s a city part or something? He could be dangerous.”

  The stranger glanced around the front room, a worried look on his face. The structure of the house was primitive but sound—a strong wood frame with glazed brick walls—but litter and filth speckled the front room and adjoining kitchen. The fireplace was almost choked with ashes, and the pot hanging over it on black east-iron rods was caked with remains of old meals. The floor, except for well-worn trails, was centimeters deep in dust. Arthur and his daughter had not cleaned since the dust storms three months before.

  “Haven’t been keeping it as well as we should,” Nan said guiltily. She was thirty years old, at least, going premature grey, with a thin face weighed down by lines of worry. Arthur was balding, with long fringes of hair around his crown. He wore coveralls much like Nan’s.

  “No need, just ourselves alone here,” he said.

  “I see,” Kahn said, and Arthur understood him. The accent wasn’t quite right, but at least they could talk. Arthur smiled.

  “You been away a long time?”

  “I’m not actually back yet,” Kahn said. “Sorry, I’m certainly not here to speak in riddles. By the way, do you understand me?”

  “Pretty well now. Just forgot for a minute there?”

  Nan clearly didn’t like the stranger in her house. She backed away and held her hands clasped in front of her.

  “I’m a quick study at languages. Yours is a bit like English, with a touch of evolution clocked in. There’s a machine in my head which lets me extrapolate rapidly, memorize, compute.” At least, there was something in the simulacrum which imitated the original machine he had had implanted decades ago. Strictly speaking, he was all machine now.

  “In your head?” Nan asked. “How? You from the polises?”

  The stranger didn’t answer. The woman’s tone was distinctly unfriendly. “What happened here?” he asked, holding out his arms.

  “Dust mined the crops two years running,” Arthur said. My wife left with my other daughter to find work with the Canaan Founders, didn’t come back.”

  “No, I mean, why aren’t you living in the cities—the polises?”

  That stumped Arthur for a moment. Then he looked the stranger’s clothes over more closely, seeing how truly unique they were. “Maybe you should tell us where you’re from, first. Then I’ll tell you what I know. Who are you?”

  “My name is Kahn,” the stranger said. “Robert Kahn.”

  “That’s a peculiar name—not peculiar, not like no one could have it,” Arthur said, “but more like nobody wants to have it.”

  “Why?”

  Arthur and Nan exchanged glances. “Go get us some water,” he told her. “That’s the name of the man who built the polises. You don’t look that ignorant. You should know about him.”

  “I did build the cities,” the stranger said.

  Arthur smiled tolerantly. He had the man pegged now. He had met someone like him when he was conscripted twenty-four years ago—a fellow who had tried to get out of service by acting crazy. “Don’t tell the Canaan Founders that. They have a bone to pic
k with you.” He chuckled. “You got us in this mess, long time ago. Just watch your tongue around them. Us, we haven’t got anything against you—we’re tolerant enough.”

  “I take it something went wrong.”

  “You’re not playing the fool for me, axe you?”

  “Not at all,” the stranger said, face perfectly serious. “I’m here to look over my work, check up on things. Looks like a great many things have gone wrong, and I’ve returned a lot later than I should have. Does anyone live in the cities—the polises?”

  Arthur didn’t answer. He pulled up a chair for the stranger and shouted at Nan to hurry up with the water. She came into the room hauling a full bucket, with two dirty tin cups in one hand.

  “How long has it been?” the stranger asked.

  “You think I’m so ignorant I don’t know what year it is?” Arthur shot back, getting angry now. “I’m no fool, and you’re no spook, you can’t get away with baiting me that way!”

  “Father’s a very intelligent man,” Nan said quietly, putting the bucket on the table and handing out the glasses.

  “We’ve been through rough times. We’re not tidy here, but we’re not simple.”

  “I’m not teasing or baiting you or anything, sir. I honestly don’t know how long it’s been since you lived in the polises.”

  “I didn’t ever live there. Nobody for fifty generations has lived there. It’s been nearly eleven hundred years.”

  “What’s the date—the Christian date?”

  “No such thing now. I don’t know.”

  “Apollo year?”

  “Don’t know that either.”

  Kahn ignored the dirt on the cup and swallowed a cold draught of water. It was a nervous gesture more than anything else—the simulacrum needed a minimum of water and no other kind of sustenance.

  “Inside pumps don’t work, so we raise water from the well,” Arthur said, tapping his bony fingers on the wood table top.

  “The water’s fine,” Kahn said. Eleven hundred years!

  “It’s hot today, no denying it.” Nan wiped sweat from her forehead and poured more water into their cups.

  Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod put down Thinner’s head in the shade of a withered mulcet tree. “Just plant me here somewhere and I’ll replace this poor bush,” the head said, grimacing. “A headfruit tree.”

  Jeshua had carried Thinner for three weeks, covering at least eight hundred kilometers. The head kept him company. Your jokes are getting worse,” Jeshua said, sitting down against a rock.

  “It’s the heat.”

  Jeshua lay back in the grass and rubbed his back in it. His clothes were covered with dirt and grass stains, but none of the dirt was his own. For over a century he had known how to shut off the artificial sweat and excretory systems in his body, making him cleaner than either a real human or a pure machine. Getting used to not being human had taken him some time.

  “Come on,” Thinner said. “Don’t sulk. What would we be doing right now in the city, anyway—”

  “I don’t sulk,” Jeshua said darkly. “And if we were in Mandala, I’d be studying kaballah, meditating, fixing whatever could be fixed.”

  “Which wasn’t much, the past few years. I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did.”

  “We tried,” Jeshua admitted. They had had this conversation at least two dozen times already. It was like making the first four or five moves in a game of chess, each opponent knowing the exact piece and square the other would use, so familiar the board could be set up that way, and the real game begun. For Jeshua and Thinner, the real game was figuring out where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there.

  “So we did everything we could. It was a lost cause,” Thinner said.

  “Not according to my studies.”

  The head made a sound like a sigh. “‘The vessel of the Holy One Blessed Be He has broken and scattered its drops of worthy oil into the nether reaches… One part in Mandala, another in each city, and now the parts must gather themselves together again.’”

  “You’re memorizing me,” Jeshua said, smiling.

  “It’s about the only thing I can memorize any more.”

  “I feel it inside,” Jeshua said, looking across the grey-brown grassland and the waves of heat. “Don’t you?”

  “Some of the words strike home,” Thinner said. “But wishes don’t bring rain.” The head rolled over. “Prop me up again,” he said stoically. “I just find it ridiculous that two city parts would sit around discussing human religion.”

  “We go where we must.”

  “I’d much prefer Resurrection.”

  “If we go to Resurrection, our cause will be lost there, too. All the cities are dead or dying.”

  “Not Resurrection, not yet,” Thinner said. “That’s my faith.”

  “The regathering will occur at the Bifrost. If we go there first, we don’t waste time, take chances.”

  “We don’t even know what the Bifrost is. Or how to get there, exactly. Communications haven’t been the best for some time… we don’t even know if it still exists!”

  “It must. And I think the signals came from Throne.”

  “Fine, but do we know where Throne has moved? No. In Resurrection, there could be information—a library. You could study in the library, pin down your prophesies more precisely.”

  “And you could find spare parts—perhaps another body,” Jeshua said.

  “That has occurred to me once or twice, I’m not sure I can last long enough to get to the Bifrost. Or you. Look at your skin.”

  Jeshua pulled a flap of skin together on his arm and fastened it. It was getting worse now, opening and showing the green capillaries and silver-white bones whenever he wasn’t vigilant.

  “I admit I’d like to have some means of walking around without being carried. I wouldn’t even mind being a remote again. I’m tired of being a cripple.”

  Jeshua held his fingers in an inverted pyramid, elbows on his knees. “It is the suffering of the—”

  “Birth pangs of the age of the messiah,” Thinner said. Jeshua looked at him mournfully.

  “The texts are very clear.”

  “I’ve never found them so. You’ve been at them for fifty years—Rab City Part Jeshua, combing out hidden secrets from the books like fleas from a beggar!”

  “We’re machines,” Jeshua said, his expression showing he was about to return bait for bait. “Machines don’t suffer.”

  “Tube waste,” Thinner said. “We mimic. We were made to play the roles. Let them decide if we’re faking it.” By them he meant humans. “We’re as real as they are.” The pair had been avoiding humans since leaving Mandala. In Mandala, of course, there had been no humans at all. They had grown used to living alone, and life in the city had inevitably rubbed in an aversion to humans. Even Jeshua, who had grown from a small child believing he was human and living with them, felt vaguely misanthropic.

  He had been alive for more years than he cared to remember now, never aging, learning how to use his body all over again. He could still eat human food if he wished, and be sustained that way. Thinner could not. Jeshua had to periodically peel off the tip of a finger (which was getting worn, too, and dropping away at awkward moments) to give Thinner some of the nourishment his body had processed. Above the metal and colloid, blue and green chemicals, cables and valves and sensors, was the sandy flush of skin and the dark, thick hair. Despite the years, the image of Jeshua’s exterior still haunted him with humanity, and in that way he would always be human, not a city part.

  Thinner’s body surrogates had never quite taken. With the breakdown of the last—a wheeled water-sprinkler which had tended the city’s gardens—Thinner had resigned himself to being bodiless. Jeshua didn’t mind carrying the head around. He had long since come to regard Thinner as his only friend, and, like him, one of the last living parts of Mandala.

  He stood up and brushed off his clothes. Thinking of Mandala was depressing. He reached
down with his broad, rugged hands, but Thinner objected.

  “Just a moment. We don’t talk as much when we walk, and I’d like to get this settled now.”

  Jeshua shrugged. “All right. But we’re just bickering to give us an excuse to keep moving. I don’t think either of us wants to decide. We don’t know where Resurrection is now, and what if one is gone, or the other, and we make the wrong choice? We might find out how things really are.”

  Thinner’s jaw moved as if he were swallowing. “We’re very naive out here. Sooner or later, if we keep moving, as ignorant as we are, we’re going to be caught, killed, put on display—whatever. We’re freaks. I am an obvious freak, but you’re no less one. If we got to Resurrection, not only might we get the information we need, but we might be able to ride a transport part to the Bifrost.”

  Jeshua considered. There was nothing in the texts forbidding such a sidetrip—just the risk of encountering humans. If they find out what we are—”

  “Don’t,” Thinner said. Wherever they had been, even the dead cities had been scourged—burned, used for the dumping of trash, destroyed when possible. With the death of Mandala through its own madness and decay, they had had to face a sobering fact.

  Most of the cities—dying for lack of the citizens they had once exiled—were no longer able to defend themselves.

  The time for humanity’s vindication was at hand.

  Kahn finished his explanation. Arthur stared at the opposite wall, the cords in his throat working.

  “If you really are from a polls—”

  “From Fraternity,” Kahn repeated.

  “—Then I’m not sure you should stay in this house.”

  Arthur got up from his chair and stood by the table. “We’re supposed to report rogue parts.”

  “I’m not a part.”

  “You’re a ghost,” Nan said. “Someone who should be dead by now.”

  “Whether or not I’m dead, somewhere else, has no bearing on my existence here,” Kahn said. “I’m not a ghost.” He reached out and gripped Nan’s arm, making her jump in her seat. “Feel. I’m as solid as you are.”

  “You claim you’re like a picture, then,” Nan said, slowly pulling her arm from his fingers. “Except… round.”