City Under the Stars

by Gardner Dozois

  “Ai.”

  “’Nuff said, then.” Barker slowed his pace, drifting back along the line. It touched Hanson that the sergeant would be looking out after him like that, though he doubted it was done out of any altruistic impulse. Men like Barker believed in keeping things calm, in damping things down before trouble had a chance to flare up. Hanson doubted very much that Barker could prevent the trouble that was brewing between him and Delgardo. But he admired him for trying.

  Not long after, the stream curved to block their way. Luckily, there was a lacquered red bridge: wooden, arched, with railings to either side, looking perfectly out of place in its ordinariness. After a brief consultation with Delgardo, Hanson went over it by himself, each plank making a musical sound as he trod on it. When he reached the far side safely, he waved and the others ran across in a storm of bridge-song.

  They were now beyond the previous explored areas, so there was no path to follow. Hanson asked Delgardo what they were looking for, and how he was supposed to find it when he didn’t know where they were going, but Delgardo had just looked scornful and said, “I’ll know it when I see it!,” although Hanson got the feeling that the smug air of superiority was only a facade to cover his own uncertainty. As Hanson had feared they would, they were heading toward the golden building-thing that had filled him with unease the night before. The Cathedral, he thought, and wondered where he had heard that name before. But at least it still seemed a good way off.

  They had stopped for a break when they were startled by a sudden cry of fear. One of the soldiers―Miller? Fiske? Hanson was still having difficulty remembering who was who―had wandered a bit ahead and was pointing at a stand of flowering dwarf sequoias. A dark silhouette no thicker than his hand and as large as an elephant was picking its way daintily out of the trees. It had five long legs, all of different sizes, that tapered to points at the bottom and joined to form a hunched, headless torso at the top. The soldier raised his rifle to shoot at it.

  Running with a speed he was amazed he was still capable of, Hanson managed to reach the soldier before he could fire and roughly seized the rifle barrel, pushing it to the side. “You don’t need to do that. It’s harmless. It’s a . . . a . . . a gardener. It plants seeds and trims trees, that’s all.” As they watched, the gardener paused to scoop a hole in the turf and then, with another limb, plucked a seedling from within its shadowy interior, and gently settled it into place. “A’n’t nothing to be afraid of.” Except, Hanson thought, for some other device, lurking unseen, that might take action to protect the gardener, if they looked like they might damage it. He’d run afoul of one such, before, and didn’t look forward to a second bout.

  “I’m not afraid of nothing!” the boy snapped. He snatched away his rifle and indignantly started back toward the others. His path, though, was different from the meandering way he had come for, with shocking abruptness, something seized him and slammed him to the ground. Struggling weakly, pressed flat to the ground, obviously unable to rise, he cried, “Help! Help! It’s crushing me!”

  The soldiers came running. At a barked order from Delgardo, two of them flung themselves down on the ground and crawled rapidly forward on their elbows to seize Dawkins—Hanson had decided it was neither Miller or Fiske, but rather Dawkins—by the ankles. Four more soldiers seized the legs of those two and pulled, so that, almost effortlessly, Dawkins was slid backward and out of the crushing zone, where gravity was, apparently, many times greater than it was in the ordinary world.

  Sergeant Barker unbuttoned Dawkins’s shirt and examined his torso with a gentleness that could not have been bettered by the boy’s own mother before pronouncing him shaken but fundamentally unhurt. “There’ll be bruising,” he said, “that’s all.”

  Hanson put a hand on the young man’s shoulder. “You’re lucky,” he said. “That’s good. Lucky is a good thing to be.” He paused, thought better of what he was about to say, and then thought better of not saying it. “Don’t push that luck too far, though, a’right?” Turning away, he shouted, “Somebody fetch me a sack of flour!”

  When one of the soldiers―Chan? Phillips? Marini?—had passed the flour to Hanson from the supplies on the Stumper, he dug a hand deep inside it and then flung the hand outward. White dust floated in the air. He took three steps forward and flung another handful. It too floated away. Two steps forward, a third fist of flour. This time, however, the flour drifted on the air—and then suddenly slammed to the ground.

  Hanson grunted in satisfaction. The other times he had tried this trick, he’d had to use sand. Flour was much better. He flung further handfuls to either side of the stain. They too slammed downward.

  Systematically, with meticulous caution, Hanson walked up and down the sharp-edged line of white, until it was clear that it was wider in one direction than the other. He continued to fling flour and follow the narrow white triangle he was creating until its two sides fined down to a point, touching a small, glowing purple tile set in the ground. It could have been covered by a thumb. “A’right. It’s marked now. Just go ’round by the front and you’ll be fine.”

  Delgardo, smiling, turned to Hanson. “Is this something you saw before?”

  “Ai.”

  “Did it never occur to you to dig there, when you found one of these spots?”

  “No,” Hanson answered, not seeing the point, “it never did. Sir.”

  “Manshogger!” Delgardo said, almost fondly. Then, turning back to his men, he commanded, “Shovels out! Dig here!”

  Several minutes’ painstaking work unearthed . . . something. It was deep red, the size of a man’s forearm, slick-surfaced, and smelled of cinnamon. Delgardo passed a hand over its surface and it turned emerald green. “It’s off now,” he said, and tossed it to one of his men. “Wrap that up and stow it away in the Stumper.” Then, raising his voice, “We made our first find, boys!”

  They cheered.

  To his horror, Hanson heard himself ask, “What is it?”

  “No idea,” Delgardo said cheerily, giving him a hearty whack between the shoulder blades. “Down at the front, they’ve figured out how to put it to good use and they call it a gravity gun. But I seriously doubt it was ever intended to be used as a weapon, don’t you?”

  Hanson shrugged.

  “We manshoggers, though . . . We can turn almost anything into a weapon. That’s our gift. It’s what separates you and me from the animals.” Without transition, Delgardo pointed toward the distant golden building. “We’ve been walking for hours and the Cathedral hasn’t gotten any closer. How far away do you think it is? How big do you think it is?”

  “I’ve got a bad feeling about that thing. I don’t think we should go there,” Hanson said, remembering only at the last instant to add, “sir.” He did not mention the sensation, which he could not shake, that it was studying him, nor his suspicion that it was keeping its distance, moving on enormous legs, perhaps, the way some of the structures in the City could, while it made up its mind what to do about them. Nor did he ask how Delgardo knew its name.

  Delgardo laughed. “You want to live forever, Hanson?” he said sarcastically. Then he shouted to the soldiers, “Get your asses in gear, boys! I bet we can reach that sumbitch by sundown.”

  Not long after that conversation, they lost their first soldier.

  8

  THEIR PROGRESS WAS SLOW, for they had to constantly scan the land before them for potential dangers and, though Phillips (if that’s who it is) carefully charted their way on gridded mapping paper, their compasses did not work here at all, so they had to rely on dead reckoning, with the Cathedral as their one fixed landmark.

  Shortly after their midday break for lunch, the buildings drew away and they found themselves facing a grid of enormous stones, twice the height of a man, set up like menhirs, all dissimilar, with between them gravel and nothing more. They stretched as far as the eye could see to either side and looked to extend as far ahead. At the sight of them, Hanson immediately turned and
began walking east.

  “Hold it right there,” Delgardo snapped. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  “I told you. Never go through anything, under anything, inside anything, or between anything. If you want to survive. Sir.”

  Delgardo looked scornful. “Have you ever heard of gongshi, Hanson? No, of course you haven’t. Chinese scholar’s stones. Rocks that were selected for their aesthetic value and used as objects of meditation. Look at these things, what do you see? No two of them are alike. Different kinds, different shapes. What we’ve got here is somebody’s rock collection. Probably the owner liked to wander through it, thinking profound thoughts. None of us are afraid of a rock garden, am I right?” Lowering his voice so he couldn’t be overheard, Delgardo added, “And I’ll put three rounds through your skull if you don’t lead us straight across. Maybe you’d survive that. But I don’t think you’d enjoy the experience much.”

  So, having no choice, Hanson led the troop into the rocks.

  It was eerily quiet among the great stones. Not a bird or insect was anywhere to be seen or heard. The only sound was the crunch of gravel underfoot. Nobody spoke a word. Somehow, this near-silence translated, in the inner reaches of his brain, into a sensation of profoundest peace. After a few minutes, Hanson found his thoughts wandering back to his youth, to the days when his wife, Becky, was still alive and he was in possession of his full force of strength and vigor. Those were good times, though they had seemed hard enough then. He’d put in his ten hours at the factory, shoveling coal, and sometimes have a watery beer with friends in somebody’s basement speakeasy before returning home to his wife and dinner. There was never enough money to keep lots of lights burning, so in his memories, Becky’s face had a warm orange glow, all the rest of the world falling away from her into darkness. For the first few years, they two were so very, very happy.

  He didn’t like to think about what came after.

  Better to cast his thoughts further back, to his childhood, when he had been the protector of his little sister from schoolyard bullies. He’d always been larger than the other kids in his class, so at recess the little bastards would sometimes deftly arrange, by lies and rumors, for him to fight an upperclassman. Sometimes he’d win and sometimes not. But the image of him as a bruiser, with blood on his knuckles and a glower on his face, lingered and he rarely had to do more than growl a word or two of warning to keep the bullies away from her. She’d died young, his sister had, but while she lived, she adored him, had little—

  Little—

  Why couldn’t he remember her name?

  Hanson stumbled and drew himself to a stop. Head swimming, he put out a hand to keep from falling, and felt himself lurch against one of the standing stones. Delgardo, who had been following in his wake, brushed past as if he weren’t there. The others, too, he saw, were plodding along steadily, eyes half closed, heads bowed, like so many sleepwalkers. They passed him by without a glance, and he had to dance backward to avoid being stepped on by the Stumper, which, had it been a foot or two wider would have been scraping against the rocks to either side of it.

  “Everybody! Everybody!” Hanson shouted. “Wake up!” He grabbed hold of the kid who was leading the Stumper by a rope and shook his shoulders. The soldier snorted and his eyes fluttered open. Then he ran forward to shake—Phillips, was it?—and then Barker, and then he and Barker were running up and down the line, shouting and shaking, until everyone was awake again.

  With puzzled expressions, the men listened to Hanson as he tried to explain: that the rocks were somehow mesmerizing them all, putting them into a half-sleep for whatever purpose he couldn’t say, it was possible the rocks were making them forget things, maybe they ate memories, he couldn’t say, but . . . “Listen to me!” Sergeant Barker said. “The first one of you falls asleep, I will kick your ass halfway to the moon. Understand?”

  “Sir! Yes, sir!” the men said, as one.

  “A’right. Now. Double time! March!”

  They were moving again, fast this time. The sergeant danced up and down the line, shouting and punching, keeping everyone going. And it worked. In less than an hour they were out of the rock garden.

  When Delgardo had called a halt, Hanson drew him aside. “Listen. Sir. There’s something you need to know.”

  “I was trying to remember . . .” Delgardo said in such an unguarded, puzzled way as to seem, for the briefest and most fleeting of moments, almost human. “A girl I knew. She . . .” He shook his head. Then, registering how Hanson was looking at him, “What is it?”

  “There were a dozen of us when we started out, right?”

  Delgardo squinted at him, as if he were something unexpected and not particularly pleasant. “Yeah. So?”

  “I only count eleven now. But . . . I can’t quite remember who we’ve lost.”

  Delgardo was still for a long moment, clearly running over the roster in his mind and failing to come up with a name. At last he said, “Well, whoever he is, he’s not coming back. Don’t say anything about this to the men. That’s an order, Hanson.”

  “Yes, sir.” Hanson didn’t like being polite to the bastard. But Delgardo looked like he would make Hanson sorry if he wasn’t.

  “Fifteen minutes!” Delgardo said at the top of his voice. “Then we get going again.”

  * * *

  They were following an open space between enormous cylinders that Hanson did his best not to look at, because they were covered with what appeared to be beetles the size of his hand and in constant motion, when Hanson saw that ahead of them was a narrow silver arch. It was three times as tall as a man and, because it touched the cylinders to either side, impossible to walk around. Reflexively, without even thinking, Hanson turned away.

  “Halt!” Delgardo commanded. Then, “Why are you going out of your way here? You know something about this hoop?”

  “Never go through anything,” Hanson mumbled. “Never go underneath anything. Never put your hand inside anything. It might be safe, it might not. Best way is to never find out.”

  “But you don’t know anything specific about this thing? You haven’t seen its like before?”

  “No,” Hanson said, “sir.”

  Delgardo pulled up a handful of grass, bringing up a clod of dirt with it. He threw the thing through the hoop and it fell to the ground with a soft plop. Then he unsnapped his holster and with meaningful intensity, said, “Looks fine to me. Walk on through.”

  Everybody stood motionless, staring at Hanson. They were none of them his friends and they all carried weapons with a confidence that said they knew how to use them. He swiftly added up all his options and, as usual, came up with zero. Then he took a deep breath and obeyed.

  He walked through the hoop.

  Nothing happened.

  “You see?” Delgardo said and, jauntily stepping through the hoop himself, waved for the soldiers to follow him.

  Hanson was looking forward and so did not see what happened next, for which he would be forever grateful. However, what he heard as the first of the soldiers passed through the hoop was a strangely liquid sound which made him spin around in his tracks. Just in time to see a tangle of what looked to be internal organs slump to the ground. Blood poured freely from it.

  On the far side of the hoop, one of the soldiers bent over and threw up. “He’s been turned inside-out,” another whispered in horrified awe. “Oh shit, Lopez,” Sergeant Barker said, making the sign to ward off the Evil Eye. “Poor kid!”

  What had been Lopez lay all in a heap, his innards glistening in the sun. Intermingled with them were bones, strangely twisted into shapes that Hanson’s mind could not quite manage to make sensible. At the center of it all was what had to be a core of muscles and skin and cloth. It smelled like the foulest sewer in creation.

  The whole wet mass twisted and flopped, suggesting that the soldier was still alive and attempting to bring his body under control again. And it made a noise—a high, weak shrill like violin strings being str
oked by someone with no idea how to play them. Which could only be, Hanson realized with horror, the man trying to scream.

  “You,” Delgardo said, pointing to the nearest soldier. “Front and center.”

  The soldier snapped to and stood at attention. His face was stone. You had to look at his eyes, which were showing the whites, to see how scared he was.

  The screaming continued, a high, unbearable noise.

  “Right there—” Delgardo pointed down at a bright pink mass that was surely the brain. “Stomp down on it hard.”

  “Sir!” the soldier said, but he didn’t move, just stood swaying and sweating and looking as if he was about to throw up.

  “Oh, for the love of—” Delgardo pushed the soldier roughly aside. He stepped forward, raised his foot, and stomped.

  There was a squelching noise and everybody looked away.

  But the screaming stopped.

  Delgardo glared at Hanson as if he’d been the one to ignore a direct order, then snapped, “Burial detail! You, you, and you. Be careful you don’t step through the hoop.”

  * * *

  When the body had been properly buried—nobody commented on the color or the texture or the smell of the soil it was interred in—Delgardo, who hadn’t looked at Hanson once in the time it took to dig the grave, said to the man who’d been leading the Stumper, “Stretch out your hands as far apart as you can, and then cut me a length of rope exactly that long.” Then, to Hanson, “Take off your shirt.”

  “It wasn’t me that—”

  “You had one job,” Delgardo said with icy calm. “To keep us safe. Yet you let Lopez walk through that hoop. For that, you get ten lashes. I’d like to make it a hell of a lot more, but we still need you ambulatory. Consider yourself lucky. Now, take your shirt off, you damned ape!” he roared, his voice rising for the first time. He made a good pretense of outrage, but as Hanson unbuttoned his shirt, he knew what was really going on here. Delgardo had just gotten one of his own men killed; if he was to continue leading them at all effectively—and one of them had already been at the point of mutiny—he needed to slough off the blame on somebody else: a scapegoat. Hanson. It wasn’t fair, but it did make a kind of sense, and that made the punishment that followed just a little easier to bear. Not much, but some. At least something made sense in this mad city. At least something could be understood.