Far Thoughts and Pale Gods

by Greg Bear

  “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 near an old gate that led to the village proper. He was gasping painfully, and his face was red as wine. Sweat gnarled his hair. In the thicket of his mind he was searching 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 can alter, replace, or repair anything in the human body. That’s what we lost when the cities grew disgusted and cast us out.”

  No city would let any real man or woman enter. But Jeshua was different. Real people could sin. Jeshua could not sin in fact, 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.

  Three miles ahead he saw the city that had left Mesa Canaan. The city had paused in its long journey. Its parts had crossed the plain and were gathering in a temporary site this side of Arat, where their highest tips gleamed in the sun, as beautiful as anything ever denied mankind. Rumbling, shivering sections of wall glowed faintly as the sky darkened, and the soft evening air hummed with the internal noises of a city planning to settle soon and resume its solitary life.

  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.

  The nearest entrances to Sheol opened about two miles away, but Jeshua could not take his eyes off the city. He approached the nearest pieces before night fell and slept in a gully, hidden by a lean-to woven out of reeds. Coming awake to the soft yellow light of dawn, he listened again to the noises, then lifted his head above the gully’s muddy rim and studied the city more closely. Some of the parts had formed a defensive ring of rounded, outward-leaning­ towers, like the petals of a monumental lotus. Inside them rose another ring, slightly taller, and another that was already sprouting a radiance of buttresses. The buttresses supported a platform topped with columns that were segmented and studded like the branches of a diatom. At the city’s rising summit, parts of a dome took a shape like the magnified eye of a dragonfly, emanating a corona of diffracted colors. Opal glints of blue and green sparkled along the outer walls.

  What if he tried to get inside before the city could find its final site, before it had finished rebuilding? The very thought made Jeshua ache. He stopped several dozen feet from the glassy steps beneath the city’s outer petals. Broad, sharp spikes rose from the pavement and smooth garden walls, blocking the steps like thorns. The plants within the garden shrank 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 moved closer and faced the tangle of spines, then reached to stroke one. It shuddered at his touch.

  “I haven’t sinned,” he told the city. He knew it was listening. “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.

  Sitting on a hummock of grass outside the perimeter, clasping his stomach to ease the hunger and pressure of his sadness, Jeshua looked up at the city’s peak. A thin silvery tower rose from the columns to support a multifaceted sphere. The sunlit side of the sphere formed a crescent of yellow brilliance. The city was refusing him. Nothing had changed. He wasn’t special in any way. He had to find another place to hide.

  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, perhaps searching for him.

  Jeshua knew from long hikes in his adolescence that a large entrance to the underground passages of Sheol yawned two miles west. By noon he stood in the cavernous opening. Sheol’s tunnels had once been service ways for the inorganic cities of twelve centuries before. With the completion of the living cities, all of the old cities had been leveled and their raw material recycled. 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 had become the homes of disgruntled expolitans, not unlike Jeshua. Others were homes to more dangerous inhabitants.

  Some of the living cities, just finished but not completely inspected, had thrown out their human builders during the Exiling, then broken down. Various of their 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 of those parts had died and disintegrated, but a few had found ways to survive, and rumors about them made Jeshua nervous.

  He looked around the opening 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 with his legs. Before he scrambled down the debris-covered slope, he looked back. The expolitans from Ibreem were only a few hundred yards behind him. 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 until they stopped shouting, their shadows backing away and fading. Then he resumed his journey.

  A few lights still blazed in discrete globes, unlike the diffuse, gentle glow of a wall in a living city. Wiring hissed and crackled around black metal boxes. Tracks began at a buffer and ran 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. A mile into the tunnel, 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 the 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 matt
er how hungry he was.

  The floor ahead had been lifted by some past seismic event, and then dropped. A lake had formed within the rimmed depression. Ripples shivered with oily slowness from side to side. Jeshua skirted the water, step by step, on broken slabs of concrete. Something long and white waited in the lake’s shallows, waving feelers like the soft feathers of a mulcet branch. It had large gray eyes and a blunt rounded head, with a pocketknife assortment of clippers, grabbers, and cutters branching from arms on each side. Water splashed as he stepped on the solid floor of the opposite shore. The undulating feathery nightmare glided swiftly into the depths. Jeshua had never seen anything like it. God-Does-Battle was seldom so bizarre. It had been a straightforward, slightly dry, Earth-like planet, which was why humans had colonized in such large numbers thirteen centuries ago, turning their new home into a grand imitation of the best parts of ten worlds. Some of the terraforming had slipped since then, but rarely so drastically.

  Half of the tunnel ahead was blocked by a hulk, thirty feet wide and some fifty long, frozen in rust and decay. A seat bucket rose from a nest of levers and a small arched instrument panel. The hulk, whatever its use, had been man-operated. As a smith and designer of tools, Jeshua saw there were parts on the rail-rider that hadn’t come with the original—odds and ends of mobile machinery from one or more of the cities. Part machine, part organism, equipped 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 stillness and silence.

  In the tunnel beyond, stalactites of concrete and rusted steel bristled from the ceiling. Fragments of pipes and unraveled runs of wire hung from 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 long since been stripped by scavengers.

  Jeshua walked beneath the jagged end of an air duct and heard a rustling, and then voices, deeper in the tunnel. He cocked his head and listened more closely. Nothing. Then again, too faint to make out. 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 plastic of the duct was brittle and added a timbre of falling dust to the voices.

  Then they stopped. The can crumpled under him and he dropped to the hard floor, yelping like a boy. Unhurt, he rose again on wobbly legs and walked farther into the tunnel. The lighting here was even dimmer. He stepped carefully over the shadow-pocked floor, avoiding bits of tile and concrete, fallen piping, snaking wires, and loose strapping bands. Fewer people had been this way. Vaguely seen things moved off at his approach: insects, creepers wet and dry, rodents, some native, some feral. What looked like an overturned drum became, as he bent closer, a snail wide as two hand spans, coursing on a shiny foot as long as his calf. The white-tipped, cat-slit eyes leaned his way, dark with secret thoughts, and a warm, sickening odor wafted up. Stuck fast to one side was the rotting body of a large beetle.

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

  Already, Jeshua regretted his decision to run away. He wondered how he could return to the village and face his punishment, live within sight of Kisa and Renold—repair the shattered trough and do penance for the stall owners.

  Water fell in a cascade ahead. He stopped to listen. The splashing and its echoes drowned out more subtle sounds, but something of a sharp, squabbling nature rose above. Men were arguing—and coming closer. Jeshua moved back from the middle of the tunnel and hid behind a fallen pipe.

  A slender young male, dressed in rags, ran and jumped from block to broken block, dancing down the tunnel, arms held out and hands flexing like wing tips. Four other men followed, knife blades gleaming in the dim light. The fleeing boy ran past, saw Jeshua in the shadows, and, startling, stumbled off into black mud.

  Jeshua pushed against the pipe and stood to run. A wide piece of concrete tilted under his weight, and through his hand, pressed against the wall, he felt a violent tremor. A massive presence of falling rock and dirt knocked him over and tossed chunks of concrete.

  Four shouts were abruptly silenced.

  He choked on the dust as he crawled from under the stony pile. The lights had gone out. Only a putrid, swampy glow remained, coming from a shallow pond. A shadow obscured this blue-green glow, then came closer.

  Jeshua stiffened, ready to strike out and roll away.

  “Who?” the shadow said. “Go, spek. Shan hurt.”

  It was the boy. He sounded young, maybe eighteen or nineteen. He was speaking a sort of English, not 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 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.

  Dirt and pebbles scuttled down the mound where the four lay entombed.

  “Jeshoo-a,” the boy said. “Iberhim.”

  “Yes, Expolis Ibreem.”

  “No’ far dis em. Stan’ an’ clean. Takee back.”

  “I’m not lost. I’m running.”

  “No’ good t’stay. Bugga bites mucky, bugga bites you more dan dey bites dis me.”

  With his broad hands, Jeshua wiped mud from his pants.

  “Slow, you,” the boy said. “Brainsick?” The boy advanced. “Dat’s it. Slow.”

  “Just tired,” Jeshua said, looking up. “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. The hand gripped and tested. “Big, you. Big and slow. Tight skeez, maybe.” Then he backed off. Jeshua’s eyes were adjusting and he could see how thin the boy was.

  “What’s your name?” he asked.

  “No’ matta. Go ’long wi’ dis me now.”

  The boy led him up the mound of debris and poked around in the pitch black to see if they could pass. “Allry. Dis way.” Jeshua pushed through a hole at the top, his back scraping the ceramic roof. The other side of the tunnel was equally dark.

  The boy cursed under his breath. “Whole tube down,” he said. “Ginger walk, now.”

  The pools beyond were luminous with the upright glows of insect larvae, some a foot long and solitary; others smaller and gathered in hazes of pale green light. Always there was a soft sucking sound. A thrash of feelers, claws, legs. Jeshua’s skin itched at that sound, and he shivered in disgust.

  “Sh,” the boy warned. “Skyling here, sout’ go, tro loud.”

  Jeshua caught none of this but stepped more lightly. Dirt and tiles fell into the water, and a chitinous chorus complained.

  “Got dur here,” the boy said, taking Jeshua’s hand and putting it against a metal hatch. He had wide gray eyes and a pinched, pale face. “Ope’, den go. Compree?”

  The hatch slid open with a drawn-out squeal and blinding glare filled the tunnel. Things behind hurried back into the shadows. Jeshua and the boy stepped from the tunnel into a collapsed anteroom open to the last light of day. Vegetation had swarmed into the wet depression, decorating parades of pipe valves and more electrical boxes. As the boy closed the hatch, Jeshua scraped at a metal case with one hand and drew off a layered clump of moss. Four numbers were engraved beneath: “2278
.”

  “Don’ finga,” the boy warned. A grin spread between narcissus-­white cheeks. He was tight-sewn, tense, with wide knees and elbows and little flesh to cover his long limbs. His hair was rusty orange and hung in strips across his forehead and ears. Beneath a ragged vest, his chest bore a tattoo. The boy rubbed his hand across it, seeing Jeshua’s interest, and left a smear of mud behind.

  “My bran’,” the boy said. The “brand” was a radiant circle in orange and black, with a central square divided by diagonals. Triangles diminished to points in each division, creating a vibrant skewedness. “Dat put dere long ‘go by Mandala.”

  “What’s that?”

  “De gees run me, you drop skyling on, woodna dey lissen wen I say, say dis me, dat de polis, a dur go up inna.” He laughed. “Dey say, ‘Nobod eba go in polis, no mo’ eba.’”

  “Mandala’s a city, a polis?”

  “Twenty-nine lees fr’ ’ere.”

  “Lees?”

  “Kileemet’. Lee.”

  “You speak anything else?” Jeshua asked, his face screwed up with the strain of turning instant linguist.

  “You, ’Ebra spek, bet. But no good dere. I got better Englise, tone a bit?”

  “Hm?”

  “I can … try … this, if it betta.” He shook his head. “Blow me ou’ to keep up long, do.”

  “Maybe silence is best,” Jeshua said. “Or just nod yes or no if you understand. You’ve found a way to get into a a polis named Mandala?”

  Nod.

  “Can you get back there, take me with you?”

  Shake, no. Smile.

  “Secret?”

  “No secret. Dey big machee … machine dat tell dis me neba retourn. Put dis on my bod.” He touched his chest. “Throw me out.”

  “How did you find your way in?”

  “Dur? Dis big polis, it creep affa exhaus’—sorry, moob afta run outta soil das good to lib on, many lee fro’ ’ere, an’ squat on top ob place where tube ope’ ri’ middle ob undaside. I know dat way, so dis me go in, an’ out soon afta … after. On my—” He slapped his butt. “Coupla bounce, too.”