Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  Constantia saw him, too, and they regarded each other like strangers, then joined hands as best they could. She borrowed a knife from one of her father’s soldiers and cut his ropes away. Around them the brightest dreams of all began to swirl, pure white and blood-red and sea-green, coalescing into visions of all the children they would inno­cently have.

  I gave them a few hours to regain their senses—and to regain my own. Then I stood on the bishop’s abandoned podium and shouted over the heads of those on the lowest level.

  “The time has come!” I cried. “We must all unite now; we must unite—”

  At first they ignored me. I was quite eloquent, but their excitement was still too great. So I waited some more before speaking again, and was shouted down. Bits of fruit and vegetables flew up to again bejewel my rough skin.

  “Freak!” they screamed, and drove me away.

  I crept along the stone stairs, found the narrow crack, and hid in it, burying my beak in my paws, wondering what had gone wrong. It took a surprisingly long time for me to realize that, in my case, it was less the stigma of stone than the ugliness of my shape that doomed my quest for leadership.

  I had, however, paved the way for the Stone Christ. He will surely take His place now, I told myself. So I maneuvered along the crevice until I came to the hidden chamber and the yellow glow. All was quiet within. I met first the monster, who looked me over suspiciously with glazed gray eyes. “You’re back,” he said. Overcome by his wit, I leered, nodded, and asked that I be presented to the Christ.

  “He’s sleeping.”

  “Important tidings,” I said.

  “What?”

  “I bring glad tidings.”

  “Then let me hear them.”

  “His ears only.”

  Out of the gloomy corner came the Christ, looking much older now. “What is it?” He asked.

  “I have prepared the way for You,” I said. “Simon called Peter told me I was the heir to his legacy, that I should go before You—”

  The Stone Christ shook His head. “You believe I am the fount from which all blessings flow?”

  I nodded, uncertain.

  “What have you done out there?”

  “Let in the light,” I said.

  He shook His head. “You seem a wise enough creature. You know about Mortdieu.”

  “Yes.”

  “Then you should know that I barely have enough power to keep myself together, to heal myself, much less to minister to those out there.” He gestured beyond the walls. “My own source has gone away,” He said mournfully. “I’m operating on reserves, and those none too vast.”

  “He wants you to go away and stop bothering us,” the monster explained.

  “They have their light out there,” the Christ said. “They’ll play with that for a while, get tired of it, go back to what they had before. Is there any place for you in that?”

  I thought for a moment, then shook my head. “No place,” I said. “I’m too ugly.”

  “You are too ugly, and I am too famous,” He said. “I’d have to come from their midst, anonymous, and that is clearly impossible. No, leave them alone for a while. They’ll make me over again, perhaps, or better still, forget about me. About us. We don’t have any place there.”

  I was stunned. I sat down hard on the stone floor, and the Christ patted me on my head as He walked by. “Go back to your hiding place; live as well as you can,” He said. “Our time is over.”

  I turned to go. When I reached the crevice, I heard His voice be­hind, saying, “Do you play bridge? If you do, find another. We need four to a table.”

  I clambered up the crack, through the walls, and along the arches over the revelry. Not only was I not going to be Pope—after an appointment by Saint Peter himself!—but I couldn’t convince someone much more qualified than I to assume the leadership.

  It is the sign of the eternal student, I suppose, that when his wits fail him, he returns to the teacher. I returned to the copper giant. He was lost in meditation. About his feet were scattered scraps of paper with detailed drawings of parts of the Cathedral. I waited patiently until he saw me.

  He turned, chin in hand, and looked me over. “Why so sad?”

  I shook my head. Only he could read my features and recognize my moods.

  “Did you take my advice below? I heard a commotion.”

  “Mea maxima culpa,” I said.

  “And … ?”

  I hesitantly made my report, concluding with the refusal of the Stone Christ. The giant listened closely without interrupting. When I was done, he stood, towering over me, and pointed with his ruler through an open portal.

  “Do you see that out there?” he asked. The ruler swept over the forests beyond the island, to the far green horizon. I replied that I did and waited for him to continue. He seemed to be lost in thought again.

  “Once there was a city where trees now grow,” he said. “Artists came by the thousands, and whores, and philosophers, and academics. And when God died, all the academics and whores and artists couldn’t hold the fabric of the world together. How do you expect us to succeed now?”

  Us? “Expectations should not determine whether one acts or not,” I said. “Should they?”

  The giant laughed and tapped my head with the ruler. “Maybe we’ve been given a sign, and we just have to learn how to interpret it correctly.”

  I leered to show I was puzzled.

  “Maybe Mortdieu is really a sign that we have been weaned. We must forage for ourselves, remake the world without help. What do you think of that?”

  I was too tired to judge the merits of what he was saying, but I had never known the giant to be wrong before. “Okay. I grant that. So?”

  “The Stone Christ tells us His power, his charge is running low. The breast of Mary is no longer full, the light of God has been replaced with a different light. If God weans us from the old ways, we can’t expect His Son to replace the nipple, can we?”

  “No …”

  He hunkered next to me, his face bright. “I wondered who would really stand forth. It’s obvious He won’t. So, little one, who’s the next choice?”

  “Me?” I asked, meekly. The giant looked me over almost pityingly.

  “No,” he said after a time. “I am the next. We’re weaned!” He did a little dance, startling my beak up out of my paws. I blinked. He grabbed my vestigial wing-tips and pulled me upright. “Stand straight. Tell me more.”

  “About what?”

  “Tell me all that’s going on below, and whatever else you know.”

  “I’m trying to understand what you’re saying,” I protested, trembling.

  “Dense as stone!” Grinning, he bent over me. Then the grin went away, and he tried to look stern. “It’s a grave responsibility. We must remake the world ourselves now. We must coordinate our thoughts, our dreams. Chaos won’t do. What an opportunity, to be the architect of an entire universe!” He waved the ruler at the ceiling. “To build the very skies! The last world was a training ground, full of harsh rules and strictures. Now we’ve been told we’re ready to leave that behind and move on to something more mature. Have I taught you any of the rules of architecture? I mean, the aesthetics. The need for harmony, interaction, utility, beauty?”

  “Some,” I said.

  “Good. I don’t think shaping the universe anew will require any better rules. No doubt we’ll need to experiment, and perhaps one or more of our great spires will topple. But now we work for ourselves, to our own glory, and to the greater glory of the God who made us! No, ugly friend?”

  Like many histories, mine must begin with the small, the tightly focused, and expand into the large. But unlike most historians, I don’t have the luxury of time. Indeed, my story is far from finished.

  Soon our legions—we, the pupils of Viollet-le-Duc—will begin our campaigns. Kidnapped from below, brought up in the heights, taught as I was—most of the children of stone and flesh have been schooled pretty thoroughly.<
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  We’ll soon begin returning them, one by one, to the lower levels of the Catherdral, to the forest—to the far horizons.

  I teach off and on, write off and on, observe all the time. The next step will be the biggest. I haven’t any idea how we’re going to do it.

  But, as the giant puts it, “Long ago the roof fell in. Now we must push it up again, strengthen it, repair the beams.” At this point he smiles to our pupils. “Not just repair them. Not just restore them. Replace them! Now we are the beams. Flesh and stone have united into a substance so much stronger.”

  Ah, but then some dolt will raise a hand and inquire, “What if our arms get tired, holding up the sky?”

  Our task, I think, will never end.

  Mandala

  In the mid-seventies, I was beginning to place stories in a number of fine markets, and had already produced one novel, Hegira, which was making the rounds of New York publishers. It would be published by Dell in 1979.

  When I sold to Analog and Galaxy and The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, I was very pleased; I had been submitting to these magazines for almost a decade. When I started selling to Terry Carr and Robert Silverberg, I had the feeling I was truly on my way. Hardcover original anthologies were in their prime!

  Due to backlog at Silverberg’s New Dimensions, “Mandala” took several years to get published. I almost immediately added two more stories and sold the book-sized manuscript as Strength of Stones to Ace.

  “Mandala” still stands up well on its own. It’s a story of not truly belonging to a society one loves, for reasons that nobody will ever quite understand.

  The final decade of Earth’s twentieth century was cataclysmic. Moslem states fought horrible wars in 1995, 1996, and 1998, devastating much of Africa and the Middle East. In less than five years, the steady growth of Islam during the latter half of the century became a rout of terror and apostasy, one of the worst religious convulsions in human history.

  Christian splinter cults around the world engaged in every imaginable form of social disobedience to hasten the long-overdue­ Millennium, but there was no Second Coming. Their indiscretions rubbed off on all Christians.

  As for the Jews—the world had never needed any reason to hate Jews.

  The far-flung children of Abraham had their decade of unbridled fervor, and they paid for it. Marginally united by a world turning to other religions, and against them, Jews, Christians, and Moslems desperately harked back to ages past to find common ground, and ratified the Pact of God in 2020.

  Having spoiled their holy lands, there was no place on Earth where they could live together. And so, in the last years of the twenty-first century, they looked outward. The Heaven Migration began in 2113. After decades more persecution and ridicule, the faithful pooled their resources to buy a world of their own. That world was renamed God-Does-Battle, and it was tamed by the wealth of the heirs of Christ, Rome, Abraham and OPEC.

  They hired the greatest human architect to build their new cities for them. He tried to mediate between what they demanded, and what would work best for them.

  He failed.

  The city that had occupied Mesa Canaan now marched across the plain toward Arat. Jeshua watched with binoculars from the cover of the jungle. The city had disassembled just before dawn, walking on elephantine legs, tractor treads, and wheels, with living bulkheads upright, dismantled buttresses given new instructions to crawl instead of sup­port; floors and ceilings, transports and smaller city parts, factories and resource centers, all unrecognizable now, like a slime mold soon to gather itself in its new country.

  The city carried its plan deep within the living plasm of its fragmented body. Every piece knew its place, and within that scheme there was no room for Jeshua, or for any man. The living cities had cast them all out a thousand years before.

  He lay with his back against a tree, binoculars in one hand and an orange in the other, sucking thoughtfully on a bitter piece of rind. No matter how far back he probed, the first thing he remembered was watching a city break into a tide of parts and migrating. He had been three years old, two by the seasons of God-Does-Battle, sitting on his father’s shoulders as they came to the village of Bethel-Japhet to live. Jeshua—ironically named, for he would always be chaste—remembered nothing of importance before coming to Bethel-Japhet. Perhaps it had all been erased by the shock of falling into the campfire a month before reaching the village. His body still carried the marks: a circle of scars on his chest, black with the tiny remnants of cinders.

  Jeshua was huge, seven feet tall flat on his feet. His arms were as thick as an ordinary man’s legs, and when he inhaled, his chest swelled as big as a barrel. He was a smith in the village, a worker of iron and caster of bronze and silver. But his strong hands had also acquired delicate skills to craft ritual and family jewelry. For his trade he had been given the surname Tubal—Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod, craftsman of all metals.

  The city on the plain moved with faultless deliberation. Cities seldom migrated more than a hundred miles at a time or more than once in a hundred years, so the legends went; but they seemed more restless now.

  He scratched his back against the trunk, then put his binoculars in a pants pocket. His feet slipped into the sandals he’d dropped on the mossy jungle floor, and he stood, stretching. He sensed someone behind him but did not turn to look, though his neck muscles knotted tight.

  “Jeshua.” It was the chief of the guard and the council of laws, Sam Daniel the Catholic. His father and Sam Daniel had been friends before his father disappeared. “Time for the Synedrium to convene.”

  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. It was a deep and frightening sound. Renold stepped back and looked up in fear and 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 roar. 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.

  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 up their skirts and fled for their 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, then wobbled, weak with exertion. Something in his stomach hurt.

  “Enough, Jeshua,” Sam Daniel said softly.

  “The law is taking 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.”