Strength of Stones (16 page)

He was inside the city! The thought both plagued and delighted him. Why had it taken him in? Just because he was injured? Did it matter? He was where he wanted to be. Whatever God or gods controlled his fate had seen fit to bless him with an unequalled opportunity.

He heard a footstep and turned his head to the doorway. Ezeki Iben Tav stood there. Musa Salih was behind him.

"General," Ezeki said, nodding slightly.

"Where is Breetod? The others?" If he had a loyal flank runner, perhaps he could regain control of the Chasers.

"They're dead," Ezeki said. "They were killed when the city tried to move."

"But I was dead, and the city brought me back to life."

"You were not dead," the worker said. "You had a chest wound and a fractured skull. This city cannot resurrect the dead."

"The city no doubt has a different definition of death than we are used to," Ezeki said. "You may have been dead, General, in one way or another." The old man was standing stiff, his fists clenched.

"Whatever, the plan had worked. We're inside."

"Not for long. We'll be thrown out again."

"Tell me everything that's happened," Durragon said. "Brief me."

Ezeki hesitated, then began a disjointed, muddled description. His mind seemed elsewhere. Durragon frowned and tried to draw him out on several points. Musa added details.

"How were you wounded?" Ezeki asked when he was finished.

Durragon shook his head. "That isn't important. Now that we control the city, we'll change everything."

"We don't control the city," Musa said. "A woman does. A madwoman."

"The city manager is not insane," the worker said.

"The city isn't too bright, either," Musa commented, showing his teeth.

"You haven't ... reasoned with her? Days, weeks in the middle of our goal, and you haven't taken advantage of your position?"

"We were waiting for you," Ezeki said softly. "We're not going to stay in the city any longer than it wishes. And I suspect neither will she."

"We'll find ways."

Ezeki sighed and looked away. "You are the General."

Durragon sensed something unpleasant in the old man's tone. "You couldn't hold this city if it was a starving dog and you had a bag of meat! You're a half-lettered pedant. What do you know about command?"

"Nothing," Ezeki said, surprised at the outburst. Good, Durragon thought. If I can surprise them, I can still control them.

"So!" Durragon laughed and straightened, wincing at the stretched skin on his ribs. "We'll have to get along as best we can."

"Yes, General," Musa said.

"I need rest. I must get well soon."

They nodded and left the cubicle. Ezeki looked like he was close to tears. "He'll have me killed when we get outside," he said.

"No, he won't. He's no better than we are now." Musa's eyes narrowed. "He lost the Chasers. Something happened out there; someone tried to kill him -- not the city. He bungled his command!"

An hour earlier, Reah had opened her eyes to the kaleidoscopic flow of the ceiling, moaned, and rolled over in bed. She hadn't changed her position since. She felt like one of the damned. The operation itself hadn't been painful, but she was torn into a multitude of dissenting, condemning parts. Suddenly she jerked up in bed, screaming," Where's the child? What have you done with it?"

There were no workers in the apartment and the louvres on the nearby desk screen didn't open. The panels above the bed which concealed medical equipment hadn't closed all the way, and she heard a faint ticking behind them. She tried to pry them open and broke a fingernail. She rose to her knees on the bed and pounded on the doors.

"Answer me!"

The ticking stopped. She backed away, shuffling across the bedclothes, which were trying to rearrange themselves beneath her knees. "Where is everything?" She felt close to panic. Had she pushed the city too far? Had it finally just given up and died?

The apartment door slid open and a worker entered.

"Do you need help?" it asked, holding up one brassy limb.

She stammered, then closed her mouth and shook her head. "It was a dream," she said. "I dreamed I had a child."

"You did," the worker said.

She nodded slowly, then sat in the desk chair. "What are you going to do with it?"

"It will be brought to term."

"And then?"

"You have renounced all claim to the child."

"Yes," she said. "What would I do with such a thing? A monster. An abomination." Her voice rose. "Why let it live?"

The worker didn't answer. Such a question was beyond its capacity to understand, Reah thought. It could edit out her words when they made no sense, just as it would edit out a burp, or a stammer. "What do I care, anyway?" she asked.

"It's done with." She pointed to the screen. "This apartment isn't complete. Find me something more suitable."

"Of course," the worker said, and went out the door, motioning for her to follow.

It had been a week since the journey. Ezeki had spent the time learning how to use the apartment screens. Though the service was erratic, he was spellbound. He could learn more in one week than he had learned in all his past years. Musa saw very little of him.

Durragon had left the hospital and wandered through the city. The beauty was staggering. He wanted the city very badly. It had always been difficult for him to appreciate something until he knew he owned it completely. Now, with the opportunity to do so many things, he did nothing but walk and take a speculative inventory. His plans grew.

From the rebuilt control center, Reah followed their movement -- watched Musa sitting in a courtyard, sunning himself; watched Ezeki through the receiver in his screen; but most carefully of all, watched Durragon as he paced and explored.

She did not show herself. She stayed in the reduced central tower performing her own inventory, assessing the city's new limitations and damage. How many children could she accommodate now? What did she care? She couldn't accept her own child -- why ask for thousands not her own? All her life she had been compassionate, even when oppressed. Now she found it difficult to care.

But the children would be coming whatever she thought or felt, and having started the project, she couldn't bring herself to give up. With a worker beside her chair, and the equipment waiting at her fingertips, she half-heartedly began to arrange things. Apartments had to be cleaned out, but so many workers had been lost in the move. She felt a flash of anger again. "Why can't you throw him out?" she asked for the tenth time.

"He is not completely healed."

"He's the one who almost destroyed us!"

The voice of the homunculus was flat and expressionless. "The city still has functions to fulfill."

How Reah hated! The tears would not come, however. She wasn't even sure what she hated any more -- was it Durragon, or that terrifying spark she felt whenever she assumed the complete mantle of the city? That spark which in turn, seemed to hate her...

With evening, she took her walk, stiff-legged and slow, around the upper promenade. The worker followed her.

She watched the Chasers.

She thought of Abram Iben Khaldun, ages dead, and of her daughter. What would the new child be like? Where did the city keep it? Slowly, her anger turned away from her insides -- still fertile, like seeds in a dead, dry fruit -- and even away from the thoughtless scum who had raped her.

She could not hate the helpless and defenseless, not even the ignorant and crude. All together, they were common victims. They were products of an evil that went beyond understanding, of a philosophy that had wormed into the brilliance of the city-dwellers and designers. But she could not even hate them. Perhaps they had suffered most of all.

Whom did she hate? She stopped and felt the pressure build behind her face as if she were a pot coming to a boil. She lifted her hands. "Allaaa-a-ah!" she wailed. "Help me! You despise me, you torture me, help me-e-e!"

She was on her knees, lifting her hands. The tears poured down her face. That was weak, very weak; that was giving in to the madness again ... to the insects buzzing, the bells ringing, the filth and scavenging. But she couldn't stop. Her thin body shook. Her colorful robes formed a wrinkled circle around her, the contours changing with her spasms.

She looked up, beseeching. "Allah, all my life I have served you, never cursed you -- not until I became mad and entered this city -- all my life I have been a good Moslem woman, obedient and faithful. Not once did I dream of being more than I was, yet you visited grief upon me time and again until I broke. What are you testing me for?" She had an image of a club of males -- _djinn_ and prophets and men risen to Paradise -- around a shadowy, masculine Allah, with Mohammed at their fore, in a city of jeweled minarets and stone walls and gold walls and gates of pearl ... all looking down on her, mildly amused. They had risen above life, and how the suffering of those still in the material realm seemed like the scuttling of ants to them. She was an object of pitying amusement. She would never attain such heights. She was a woman, barely possessed of a soul, bound to Earth, her tides determined by the motions of a moon so far away it was beyond consideration. Her blood flowed and ebbed, she was unclean, she bore the gate of creation, she was an object of desire and disgust. She was not even most desirable. For children, go to a woman. For pleasure, go to a young boy. For delight, go to a melon! Such had been the dirty rhymes thrown at her when she had been a child, by boys and even other girls, blaspheming as all children will do when not supervised. They hardly knew what the words meant. She had always wondered what men did with a melon, until finally she had learned that merely eating a melon was considered better, more desirable than consorting with a woman. That was the ultimate refinement, in discernment.

And yet in her deepest despair she still turned to Allah. "Allah," she murmured, head buried in her arms, bowing over. "Allah." The insects buzzed.

And ... what was it? She seemed to hear a song. She turned ... and her past fell away, as if she had all her life been falling down a long tunnel, and only now had emerged in sunlight. She felt herself lifted up and fitted to something, not like man to woman but ... she searched through her more recent education -- like a molecule fitting to another molecule. She was very small, but valued, and the thing she fitted against, so well, was huge and beyond knowledge, but loving. She removed her clothes and stood naked, surrounded by the sprawl of fabric. Her breasts were high, her stomach was flat, her hair was smooth and red-gold, and honey hung between her thighs. Then that was gone, too, and she was like a thin leaf of gold, wavering in an electric wind.

"What am I doing here?" she asked, and the larger molecule seemed to quiver with a vast, benevolent laughter.

_You are not quite ready after all_

"No," she said. "I'm not."

And she wafted down, neither sad nor despondent at the sudden release. She found herself fully clothed, walking with purpose and energy down a corridor of trees. She was laughing at each trunk, each spray of leaves. They had been carried by the city and lovingly protected from fire and Chasers, to be planted here, that she might walk among them. They were all parts of the city. And she was a part too, for the city had a soul. Distorted as it was, it lived and desired. Now she had to fulfill those desires and teach it how to survive, as a mother would teach her child.

Durragon stood fifty meters away, hidden by a stand of trees. Musa and Ezeki stood beside him. "That's the madwoman," he said. They nodded. "How does she control the city?"

"We don't know," Ezeki said. "We've only seen her a couple of times."

"She walks like she's drunk. Look how she reaches out and touches the trees. What's inside the tower?"

Reah entered a half-circle archway and a wide door closed behind her. Ezeki sighed and held out his hands. "We have only seen this place just now."

"You've been wasting time," Durragon said. "We have to talk to her, reason with her if that's possible. She looks harmless. A crazy old woman. If the city can do without her -- if we can control it the same way she does -- if she does -- " He cocked an eye at the two men -- "then we can do without her, too."

Musa looked down at his feet. He was tired of fighting and killing. The old Habiru must be tired as well, he thought. Yet Durragon was able to lead them around like gullible Chasers.

The children were coming, just a day or two away. She wondered how the parents had felt -- if there had been parents. Had the machines just snatched them away, or taken only those who were sick beyond help, or abandoned? Perhaps the villagers had been asleep and saw nothing, or perhaps they had regarded the machines as appointed angels. She sat in the chair, watching through the city's far-seeing eyes. Her legs ached, and her breasts no longer seemed as high, or her hair as bright and silken -- but that had been a vision. What remained was more important. The purpose, the energy. She closed her eyes to rest them. Outside it would be growing dark. She could return to her apartment, clean herself, lie down and rest, perhaps get up after a few hours and watch the stars, then use the screen, tap the city's memory less directly.

She got out of her chair stiffly. The screens and equipment dimmed and shut down behind her as she walked to the door. There were fewer workers now; none followed her. To feel more secure, she would post one in her apartment.

The air was cool and scented with the fragrance of pine. The sky above was a rich royal blue, streamered with flame-red clouds. Stars were appearing, and a scimitar moon. She looked ahead.

Three men stood in front of her. She stopped, hands by her side, puzzled. Durragon stepped forward and smiled.

"It's time to meet," he said.

"I see."

"We have to talk about what we can do for this city."

"There isn't much time now," she said cautiously, "the children will be coming in a day or two. I have to get things ready for them."

Durragon's smile faded slightly. "Children?" he said, with the merest flex of a question.