Something deep inside Hanson told him that Delgardo was wrong; that he didn’t understand a thing about what was inside of him, and possibly never could understand it. Delgardo was a savage recasting strange technologies into terms he could understand: magic and tiny machines. But he only said, through gritted teeth, “Suppose it didn’t work? Suppose I’d died?”
Delgardo shrugged, as if that was a matter of little consequence. “That would have been too bad,” he said indifferently. “Now, since you didn’t die, however, we must go on to discuss other matters of great importance!”
He tidied up the sheaf of papers again, then stared portentously at Hanson for a number of long silent moments. “It’s a funny thing,” he said. And waited.
“What is, sir?” One of the first things Hanson had learned from Overton was to respond politely when Overton paused that way if he wanted to keep him in “Good Overton” mode. Sometimes it helped. Sometimes it made the session go more smoothly. Not always.
Delgardo’s mouth curled up in a wry little smile, as if he was about to wink and impart a confidence. “The sovereign Government of the State of York has sent hundreds of men into the City of God, and, funny thing, sooner or later they all die! They die or else they’re . . . changed. Not a one of them has lasted a fraction as long as you did. Not a one of them has been able to close down any other sections of the Wall, other than the one you closed. Why do you imagine that is?”
“I’ve told you everything I know,” Hanson said.
“I’m sure you have,” Delgardo said in a way that indicated he didn’t believe any such thing. “But here’s the odd part. We give them all the information we’ve learned from you and from others who’ve gone into the City, but it doesn’t seem to do them any good. We’re still restricted to that one section of the City that was opened when you left it, and no one can go deep into it or find a way shut down the rest of the Wall. Most of the City, vast areas, are still unreachable! And these are tough, capable men. Trained soldiers. Clever young men. Frankly, much cleverer and tougher and more capable than you ever were, as far as I can tell. We send them out, and, sooner or later, they don’t come back. We don’t make any progress at all. Now isn’t that funny?”
Hanson didn’t say anything.
Delgardo stared at him. “Has anybody told you we’re at war?”
Startled, Hanson said, “No, sir. I’ve heard no news in here. The guards never talk to me, and Overton never talked about what was happening on the outside.” The firefight he’d seen on the road had been a hint, of course—but nothing so definite as what he’d just heard; it could have been a skirmish with bandits or outlaw gangs like the one he’d once briefly joined himself. Nobody had claimed that the war had actually begun. “Is it the South?”
Delgardo looked at him.
“That . . . that we’re fighting with, I mean.” Then, as the silence grew uncomfortably long, he added, “Sir.”
Now Delgardo smiled sadly in a way that made Hanson’s blood run cold with fear. “Oh, Carl, Carl, Carl,” he said. “What difference can it possibly make to you, of all people?” His voice took on a reminiscent tone. “Remember when you were in that dark place with the cat-women? Remember how frightened you were, how you thought then that you might die, and you didn’t even know why?” Hanson felt the hair on his arms prickle with alarm. He really had read Hanson’s testimony closely, and with unsettling comprehension and attention to detail. This was someone much more intelligent than Overton, and, as a result, probably much more dangerous. “This war is something like that. The who and why of it don’t matter, only what might happen to us all as a result.” He leaned forward, as if he’d just made a telling argument and was going to follow up on it. “This friend of yours, the one you call Cicero . . .”
“He wasn’t a real person, I don’t think. He said he was a function.”
“Yes, yes, you’ve said that already. The question is, why hasn’t anybody else seen him? So many have gone in, and of those who have come back out, not one has reported anything like him.”
“It was Boone that he talked to,” Hanson said. He was treading on dangerous ground here, perilously close to the tiny knot of information he had managed to withhold from the interrogators—that, through Cicero, who was willing to obey him because he held the key within him, he was able to control the City of God, at least to some extent. It was not a power he wanted, he had turned his back on it and walked away. It was not a power anybody should have. It was certainly not a power he wanted Delgardo to have. “Boone gave him orders. He wouldn’t obey me.”
“Yet he rescued you that time. With the cats. Why is that?”
“I . . . I dunno. Maybe Boone told him to.”
“And why would Boone do that?”
“I dunno. Boone liked me. Boone was my friend.”
“You know more than you’re telling,” Delgardo said. He was silent for so long then, staring at Hanson, that, in spite of the desperateness of his situation, Hanson began to get bored and started to fidget.
“I tell you what, my dear old friend,” Delgardo said at long last. “I believe that you’re concealing vital information in a time of war. Now, for that, I could send you back to the torture chamber and try to rip the truth out of you. But instead I’ll make you a generous offer.” He held up a long pale finger. “You’ll come back to the City of God with us, with me and a small party of picked men. There you’ll guide us around, show us everything you know, and we’ll see if maybe this Cicero of yours will come out for you. If he does come out and talk to you again, as he hasn’t done for anyone else, maybe we can get him to open the rest of the City up for exploration, and we can find some juicy new piece of Utopian technology that will make a decisive difference in the war, unlike the ones we’ve already exploited.” He smiled brightly at Hanson. “If you do that, then the treason you’ve committed will be forgiven and forgotten, all your crimes will be forgiven and forgotten, even the murder of Oristano”—Hanson looked up in surprise; he knew about that too?—“back in Orange, and we’ll let you go free. Free! Yes, a generous offer, I know, considering the magnitude of your crimes, but extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures!” He beamed at Hanson, as if he expected him to gush with gratitude. “So, what do you say?”
At the thought of returning to the City of God, of plunging again into those shining, alien, bewildering, incomprehensible spaces, Hanson felt such a wave of terror that the blood drained from behind his eyes and he almost passed out. He feared the torture chamber, yes, but he feared that more, feared it on a deep instinctual level that was almost cellular, that filled him with such dread that he thought his lungs would stop working.
“I—can’t,” he managed to choke out at last, not daring to look at Delgardo. “I can’t ever go back there! Don’t ask me to! You don’t know, you don’t know what it’s like! I can’t do it, I can’t go back there again! I just—can’t.”
Delgardo smiled sadly. “That was the wrong answer,” he said, and rapped sharply on his desk. The whistling guard came in and hit Hanson behind his ear with a truncheon, and they dragged him away, only partially conscious, and locked him back in his cell again in the dark. He could hear Delgardo sighing regretfully behind him as he went.
Early the next morning, just after dawn, the guards filed silently into Hanson’s cell and shoved a leather bag over his head and down over his chest. Then they shackled his hands behind his back. Without a word being spoken, they dragged him from his cell and off through the long maze of corridors, Hanson stumbling blindly along, struggling to breathe through the thick, stifling enclosure of the leather bag, struggling to fight back the rising tide of panic.
He was about to die. It seemed impossible that he could still care after all he’d already been through. But he did.
Could they kill him? Hanson didn’t know, but they could certainly try—cut him completely to pieces maybe, or douse him with oil and set him on fire. There must be limits to his “immortality.” Maybe the
y’d succeed in killing him, maybe not, but he didn’t want to find out which it was. Suppose he was still alive after they’d cut him to bits, or burned him black in the fire? Suppose he lived like that forever, in unending agony? Even if it did succeed in killing him, just the thought of going through that kind of ordeal, enduring that kind of pain, far, far worse than anything he’d suffered to date, loosened his bowels and made them rumble.
At last they came to a stop. Hanson waited inside the smothering darkness of the bag for several endless moments, choking and gasping, and then the bag was yanked abruptly from his head.
They were outside the prison, on the stone steps that led down to the forecourt. Cool air touched his face in the instant that the leather hood was whisked away, and light filled Hanson’s eyes. He stood blinking, feeling wind ruffle his hair, feeling sunlight on his skin, smelling the turned-earth smell as the world began to warm toward spring. There were green buds just beginning on the trees, and birds were singing. Involuntarily, Hanson began to cry. He knew that he should be ashamed of the tears running down his cheeks, ashamed at having been unmanned, but he couldn’t stop himself.
At his elbow, Delgardo said, “Maybe I can’t kill you, although we could make it very unpleasant for you trying, but Hanson, my boy, we can certainly keep you here. Keep you here, and lock you away in the deepest dungeon so that you never see the sun again, ever, or feel the wind on your face. Keep you here forever, or as long as it takes you to finally die, even if it’s a hundred years. Even if it’s a thousand years! A thousand years of darkness and misery! Of nothingness! Locked away from the world! Or—” He paused. “—you can be brave enough to go back to the City of God, no matter how terrible a place it is, and be free. Free! Be given the world again! Be alive and out and about in the world again! Part of life, not sunk in darkness and enclosure, but really and truly living again!”
He lowered his voice to a whisper, his breath a soft tickle in Hanson’s ear. “I can undo the shackles and you can walk down these steps and be part of the world again. Or you can turn around and go back inside. Back to four stone walls and a darkness that never ends. The choice is yours.”
Hanson looked out across the meadow, watching the breeze ruffle the tall grass. He could see his tree from here, the one growing in a cramped niche on the side of a ruined wall, and it seemed to him that no matter how stunted and sickly it was, it was still alive, still surviving, and that therefore, as long as it did still live, there was still hope for it. And that the same applied to him, and maybe to the whole damned human race.
Or was he just rationalizing, taking the easy way out, refusing to make the hard right choice? Taking instead a way that he and maybe the whole world would come to bitterly regret? Because they’d broken him, because he’d reached his limits and just couldn’t take it anymore, be damned to the consequences?
If so, well . . . So be it, then.
“All right, Delgardo, you incredible bastard,” Hanson said, “let’s go back to the City.”
7
THERE WERE TEN HEAVILY armed mounted soldiers, plus Delgardo. They had brought an extra horse for Hanson, and laughed openly at him when he failed at his first two attempts to mount it, sliding to the ground while the horse snorted and moved about uneasily, as if it didn’t like his smell. At last, painfully, he hauled himself into the saddle. The beast rolled an eye back at him and snorted again, but then settled down resignedly. Hanson had only had a couple of occasions to ride a horse in his entire life, and he’d forgotten the strange feeling of all that breathing, moving muscle under him that he was somehow supposed to control; it took him a few tries to get the horse moving in the right direction, eliciting more laughter all around, but at last they set off.
It was strange, very strange, to be riding across the meadow he’d studied from his window for so long, watching the little marmoset-like creatures scatter and dive into their holes in the rocks to hide at their approach, and Hanson experienced a wave of dizziness and unreality that almost made him fall from his horse, and it took him a moment to convince himself that this wasn’t a dream, that it was really happening, that he was outside, and let the world settle again around him.
At the bottom of the meadow, they turned onto the road where the firefight had happened, and which the refugees from some battle somewhere had streamed down, and he turned in his saddle to watch until the grim bulk of the prison disappeared from sight. As it did, he felt another wave of unreality, and then, the last thing he’d ever expected to feel, a surge of hope, and he prayed that he’d never see that place again in his life. The thought of returning and being interned again in its airless depths filled him with horror. He realized that Delgardo was right—better to take his chances with whatever destiny had in store for him in the City. Even if it killed him, maybe it would at least be a quick death. Better that than going back to where he’d rotted for so long.
As he became more comfortable with the unfamiliarity of riding, he began to pay less attention to controlling his mount and more attention to breathing in the world around him, an unbelievable luxury he’d almost forgotten during the time when all he could experience of life was a slit-window in a stone wall. A breeze had come up from the south, smelling of spring, the first wildflowers were opening to either side of the road, and there was a kind of tree growing in clusters here that he was unfamiliar with, leaves a bright vivid red, as though it was burning, flaming with life. Even the pungent smell of his horse’s sweat was welcome.
He was still convinced that they were all headed for their deaths—but Death was not here yet; there was still time to enjoy a few more heartbeats, a few more breaths, luxuriate in the sultry breeze rich with the smell of life. Life, for however long it lasted, was its own reward, its own reason for being, and Hanson thought again about his poor stunted tree, trying somehow to grow in inhospitable soil in a niche in a ruined rock wall; if it could think, would it rather it had never existed, or would it be grateful for whatever time it had been given? Existence was the greatest gift imaginable. Maybe that was why life was so filled with misery and heartbreak—because something so valuable required the highest price imaginable, just so it could be properly appreciated.
As their party approached another stand of the flametrees, they flushed a small herd of hoppers, who bounded across the road in front of them with prodigious leaps. Delgardo stood up in his stirrups, stretching his arms wide to either side in a flamboyant, look-at-me gesture, then drew a long-barreled pistol from a saddle holster and snapped off a seemingly casual and unaimed shot that nevertheless caught one of the hoppers in mid-leap and sent it crashing to the ground, where it twitched and gasped among the dust of the road. “Fresh meat tonight, boys!” he crowed, well-pleased with himself, and dispatched two of the soldiers to finish off the dying hopper, dress and quarter it, and store the hurriedly wrapped meat behind their saddles. While this was going on, Delgardo, still standing in his stirrups, grinning broadly, made his horse prance in a little circle, as though he were waiting for applause, and it didn’t seem to bother him that none came.
He couldn’t be more pleased with himself, Hanson thought, shaken out of his philosophical musings. He doesn’t need anybody else to applaud for him, he’ll do it for himself. Hanson had run across men like this a few times before, usually members of the aristocracy, with the unquestioned assumption of superiority that growing up rich gave you. With a chill, Hanson realized that Delgardo’s ego was so vast and swollen that not only did he think he was the most important person in the world, expecting acknowledgment and admiration from everyone else for that fact, but he thought that he was the only person in the world, the only real person, with everyone and everything else reduced to the role of unimportant spear-carriers in the unique and miraculous drama of his life. Such people were dangerous. He’d already known that Delgardo was dangerous, of course—he’d cut his throat, after all, even if he wasn’t really expecting Hanson to die—but now the realization set deeper in that Delgardo would s
acrifice him, or anybody else, in a heartbeat if it enabled him to get what he wanted. He’d have to be very cautious with how he behaved toward Delgardo if he wanted to get out of this alive—but then, he realized, with a curious kind of relief, that really didn’t matter. The City would kill them all anyway.
After an hour or so on the road, they turned east, toward the City of God.
* * *
The road leading to the City of God had been considerably widened since Hanson had seen it last. Back then, when he was marched to captivity, hands tied behind his back, it had been little more than a track in the forest. Now it was big enough to accommodate a constant flow of mule-drawn army wagons, those headed inward loaded with food and supplies, those outward mostly empty, though some few were heavily laden and those few covered with heavy canvas tarps and guarded by more armed soldiers than seemed necessary.
“The fewer questions you ask, the less you’ll have to regret,” Delgardo said when he caught Hanson staring at one of those wagons. But Hanson had known better than to ask questions out of simple curiosity for longer than he cared to remember. It was one of the first things that got beaten out of you in school. He simply looked away—away from the wagons, away from the guards, away from Delgardo’s hard stare. He heard a snort of scornful amusement from the man as he did so, but he didn’t rise to the bait.
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