MANDALA

 

By Greg Bear

 

 

The city that had occupied Mesa Canaan was now marching across the plain. Jeshua watched with binoculars from the cover of the jungle. It 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 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, 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 was marching toward the Arat range. It 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 river-banks 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. Renold stepped back and looked up in 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 scream. 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’s.

 

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

 

“Enough, Jeshua,” Sam Daniel said softly.

 

“The law is taking away 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.”

 

“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 at the base of a hill, near an old gate leading from the village proper. He was gasping painfully, and his face was wine-red. Sweat gnarled his hair. In the thicket of his mind he searched 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 could alter, replace, or repair anything in the human body. That’s what was lost when the cities grew disgusted and cast the people out.”

 

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

 

Five miles ahead he saw the city that had left Mesa Canaan. It had reassembled itself below the mountains of Arat. It gleamed in the sun, as beautiful as anything ever denied mankind. The walls began to glow as the sky darkened, and in the evening silence the air hummed with the internal noises of the city’s life. Jeshua slept in a gully, hidden by a lean-to woven out of reeds.

 

In the soft yellow light of dawn, he looked at the city more closely, lifting his head above the gully’s muddy rim. The city began with a ring of rounded outward-leaning towers, like the petals of a monumental lotus. Inward was another ring, slightly taller, and another, rising to support a radiance of buttresses. The buttresses carried a platform with columns atop it, segmented and studded like the branches of a diatom. At the city’s summit, a dome like the magnified eye of a fly gave off a corona of diffracted colors. Opal glints of blue and green sparkled in the outside walls.

 

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.

 

Jeshua stopped a hundred yards from the glassy steps beneath the outer petals of the city. Broad, sharp spikes rose from the pavement and smooth garden walls. The plants within the garden shrank away 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 walked closer.

 

He faced the tangle of sharp spines and reached to stroke one with a hand. It shuddered at his touch.

 

“I haven’t sinned,” he told it. “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.

 

He sat on a hummock of grass outside the perimeter and clasped his stomach with his hands to ease the hunger and pressure of his sadness. He looked up at the city’s peak. A thin silvery tower rose from the midst of the columns and culminated in a multifaceted sphere. The sunlit side of the sphere formed a crescent of yellow brilliance. 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.

 

Jeshua knew from long hikes in his adolescence that a large entrance to Sheol yawned two miles farther west. By noon he stood in the cavernous entrance.

 

The underground passages that made up Sheol had once been service ways for the inorganic cities of twelve centuries ago. All of those had been leveled and their raw material recycled with the completion of the living cities. 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 became the homes of disgruntled expolitans, not unlike Jeshua.

 

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

 

He looked around 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 his legs.

 

Before he scrambled down the debris-covered slope, he looked back. The expolitans from Ibreem were only a few hundred yards away.

 

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 in the shadows for a while until he saw that they weren’t following.

 

A mile into the tunnel, he saw lights. 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 matter how hungry he was.

 

The floor ahead had been lifted up and dropped. A lake had formed within the rimmed depression. Ripples shivered with oily slowness from side to side. Jeshua skirted the water on jagged slabs of concrete. He saw something long and white in the lake, waiting in the shallows, with feelers like the soft feathers of a mulcet branch. It had large grey eyes and a blunt rounded head, with a pocketknife assortment of clippers, grabbers, and cutters branching from arms on each side. Jeshua had never seen anything like it.

 

God-Does-Battle was seldom so bizarre. It had been a straightforward, slightly dry Earth-like world, which was why humans had colonized in such large numbers thirteen centuries ago, turning the sluggish planet into a grand imitation of the best parts of ten planets. Some of the terraforming had slipped since then, but not drastically.

 

Water splashed as he stepped on the solid floor of the opposite shore. The undulating feathery nightmare glided swiftly into the depths.

 

The lights ahead blazed in discrete globes, not the gentle glows of the walls of the living cities. Wiring hissed and crackled in the vicinity of a black metal box. 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. Half of the tunnel ahead was blocked by a hulk. It was thirty feet wide and some fifty long, rusting and frozen in its decay. It had been man-operated, not automatic—a seat bucket still rose above a nest of levers, pedals, and a small arched instrument panel. As a smith and designer of tools and motor-driven vehicles, Jeshua thought there were parts of the rail-rider that didn’t seem integral. He examined them more closely and saw they hadn’t come with the original machine. They were odds and ends of mobile machinery from one of the cities. Part machine, part organism, built 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 silence. They were dead now, and what could not rot had long since dusted away. The rest was glazed with rust and decay.

 

In the tunnel beyond, stalactites of concrete and rusted steel bristled from the ceiling. Fragments of pipes and wiring hung from them on 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 been stripped away by scavengers.

 

Jeshua walked beneath the jagged end of an air duct and heard a susurrus. He cocked his head and listened more closely. Nothing. Then again, almost too faint to make out. The plastic of the air duct was brittle and added a timbre of falling dust to the voices. 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 voices stopped. The can crumpled and dropped him to the hard floor, making him yelp like a boy. He stood on wobbly legs and walked farther into the tunnel.

 

The lighting was dimmer. He walked carefully over the shadow-pocked floor, avoiding bits of tile and concrete, fallen piping, snake wires and loose strapping bands. Fewer people had been this way. Vaguely seen things moved off at his approach: insects, creepers, rodents, some native, some feral. What looked like an overturned drum became, as he bent closer, a snail wide as two handspans, coursing on a shiny foot as long as his calf. The white-tipped eyes glanced up, cat-slits dark with hidden fluids and secret thoughts, and a warm, sickening odor wafted from it. Stuck fast to one side was the rotting body of a large beetle.

 

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

 

He regretted his decision. He wondered how he could return to the village and face his punishment. To live within sight of Kisa and Renold. To repair the water trough and do labor penance for the stall owners.

 

He stopped to listen. Water fell in a cascade ahead. The sound drowned out anything more subtle, but sounds of a squabble rose above. Men were arguing and coming closer.

 

Jeshua moved back from the middle of the tunnel and hid behind a fallen pipe.

 

Someone ran from block to block, dancing agilely in the tunnel, arms held out in balance and hands gesturing like wing tips. Four others followed, knife blades gleaming in the half-light. The fleeing man ran past, saw Jeshua in the shadows, and stumbled off into black mud. Jeshua pushed against the pipe as he stood and turned to run. He felt a tremor through his hand on the wall. A massive presence of falling rock and dirt knocked him over and tossed debris around him. Four shouts were severed. He choked on the dust, waving his arms and crawling.

 

The lights were out. Only a putrid blue-green swamp glow remained. A shadow crossed the ghost of a pond. Jeshua stiffened and waited for the attacking blow.

 

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

 

The voice sounded like it might come from an older boy, perhaps eighteen or nineteen. He spoke a sort of English. It wasn’t 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 Expolis 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 fought I spek. Who appel?”

 

“What?”

 

“Who name? You.”

 

“Jeshua,” he said.

 

“Jeshoo-a Iberhim.”

 

“Yes, Expolis Ibreem.”

 

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

 

“No, I’m not lost. I’m running.”

 

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

 

Jeshua slowly wiped mud from his pants with broad hands. Dirt and pebbles scuttled down the hill where the four lay tombed.

 

“Slow,” the boy said. “Slow, no? Brainsick?” The boy advanced. “Dat’s it. Slow you.”

 

“No, tired,” Jeshua said. “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. “Big, you. Skeez, maybe tight.” The hand gripped and tested. Then the shadow backed off. Jeshua’s eyes were adjusting, and he could see the boy’s thinness.

 

“What’s your name?” he asked.

 

“No’ matta. Go ‘long wi’ dis me now.”

 

The boy led him to the hill of debris and poked around in the pitchy black to see if they could pass. “Allry. Dis way.” Jeshua climbed up the rubble and pushed through the hole at the top with his back scraping the ceramic roof. The other side of the tunnel was dark. The boy cursed under his breath. “Whole tube,” he said. “Ginger walk, now.”

 

The pools beyond were luminous with the upright glows of insect larvae. Some were a foot long and solitary; others were smaller and grouped in hazes of meager light. Always there was a soft sucking sound and thrash of feelers, claws, legs. Jeshua’s skin crawled, and he shivered in disgust.

 

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

 

Jeshua caught none of the explanation but stepped more lightly. Dirt and tiles dropped in the water, and a chitinous chorus complained.

 

“Got dur here,” the boy said, taking Jeshua’s hand and putting it against a metal hatch. “Ope’, den go. Compree?”

 

The hatch slid open with a drawn-out squeal, and blinding glare filled the tunnel. Things behind hurried for 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 hulks of pipe valves and electric boxes. As the boy closed the hatch, Jeshua scraped at a metal cube with one hand and drew off a layered clump of moss. Four numbers were engraved beneath: “2278.”

 

“Don’ finga,” the boy warned. He had wide grey eyes and a pinched, pale face. 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?”

 

“Ten, fi’teen 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 En-glise, tone up 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 you just nod yes or no if you understand. You’ve found a way to get into a polis?”

 

Nod.

 

“Named Mandala. 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. ‘Tro me out.”

 

“How did you find your way in?”

 

“Dur? Dis big polis, it creep afta 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.”

 

The collapsed ceiling—or skyling, as the boy called it— of the anteroom formed a convenient staircase from the far wall to the surface. They climbed and stood on the edge, looking each other over uncertainly. Jeshua was covered with dark green mud. He picked at the caked rings with his hands, but the mud clung to his skin fiercely.

 

“Maybe, come fine a bod ob wet to slosh in.”

 

A branch of the Hebron River, flowing out of the Arat range, showed itself by a clump of green reeds a half mile from the tunnel exit. Jeshua drew its muddy water up in handfuls and poured it over his head. The boy dipped and wallowed and spumed it from puffed cheeks, then grinned like a terrier at the Ibreemite, mud streaming down his face.

 

“Comes off slow,” Jeshua said, scraping at his skin with clumped silkreeds.

 

“Why you interest’ in place no man come?”

 

Jeshua shook his head and didn’t answer. He finished with his torso and kneeled to let his legs soak. The bottom of the stream was rocky and sandy and cool. He looked up and let his eyes follow the spine of a peak in Arat, outlined in sunset glow. “Where is Mandala?”

 

“No,” the boy said. “My polis.”

 

“It kicked you out,” Jeshua said. “Why not let somebody else try?”

 

“Somebod alread’ tried,” the boy informed him with a narrowed glance. “Dat dey tried, and got in, but dey didna t’rough ray dur go. Dey—shee—one gol, dat’s all—got in widout de troub’ we aw ekspek. Mandala didna sto’ ‘er.”

 

“I’d like to try that.”

 

“Dat gol, she special, she up an’ down legen’ now. Was a year ago she went and permissed to pass was. You t’ink special you might be?”

 

“No,” Jeshua admitted. “Mesa Canaan’s city wouldn’t let me in.”

 

“One it wander has, just early yes’day?”

 

“Hm?”

 

“Wander, moob. Dis Mase Cain’ you mumbur ‘bout.”

 

“I know.”

 

“So’t don’ let dis you in, why Mandala an’ differs?”

 

Jeshua climbed from the river, frowning. “Appel?” he asked.

 

“Me, m’appel, not true appel or you got like hair by demon grab, m’appel for you is Thinner.”

 

“Thinner, where do you come from?”

 

“Same as de gol, we follow the polis.”

 

“City chasers?” By Ibreem’s estimation, that made Thinner a ruthless savage. “Thinner, you don’t want to go back to Mandala, do you? You’re afraid.”

 

“Cumsay, afraid? Like terrafy?”

 

“Like tremble in your bare feet in the dirtafy.”

 

“No’ possible for Thinner. Lead’er like, snake-skin, poke an’ I bounce, no’ go t’rough.”

 

“Thinner, you’re a faker.” Jeshua reached out and lifted him from the water. “Now stop with the nonsense and give me straight English. You speak it—out!”

 

“No!” the boy protested.

 

“Then why do you drop all ‘thu’s’ but in your name and change the word order every other sentence? I’m no fool. You’re a fake.”

 

“If Thinner lie, feet may curl up an’ blow! Born to spek dis odd inflek, an’ I spek differs by your ask! Dis me, no fake! Drop!” Thinner kicked Jeshua on the shin but only bent his toe He squalled, and Jeshua threw him back like a fingerling. Then he turned to pick up his clothes and lumbered up the bank to leave.

 

“Nobod dey neba treat Thinner dis way!” the boy howled.

 

“You’re lying to me,” Jeshua said.

 

“No! Stop.” Thinner stood in the river and held up his hands. “You’re right.”

 

“I know I am.”

 

“But not completely. I’m from Winston, and I’m speaking like a city chaser for a reason. And speaking accurately, mind you.”

 

Jeshua frowned. The boy no longer seemed a boy. “Why fool me, or try to?” he asked.

 

“I’m a free-lance tracker. I’m trying to keep tabs on the chasers. They’ve been making raids on the farmlands outside of Winston. I was almost caught by a few of them, and I was trying to convince them I was part of a clan. When they were buried, I thought you might have been another, and after speaking to you like that—well, I have an instinct to keep a cover in a tight spot.”

 

“No Winstoner has a tattoo like yours.”

 

“That part’s the truth, too. I did find a way into the city, and it did kick me out.”

 

“Do you still object to taking me there?”

 

Thinner sighed and crawled out of the stream. “It’s not part of my trip. I’m heading back for Winston.”

 

Jeshua watched him cautiously as he dried himself. “You don’t think it’s odd that you even got into a city at all?”

 

“No. I did it by trick.”

 

“Men smarter than you or I tried for centuries before they all gave up. Now you’ve succeeded, and you don’t even feel special?”

 

Thinner put on his scrappy clothes. “Why do you want to go?”

 

“I’ve got reasons.”

 

“Are you a criminal in Ibreem?”

 

Jeshua shook his head. “I’m sick,” he said. “Nothing contagious. But I was told a city might cure me, if I could find a way in.”

 

“I’ve met your kind before,” Thinner said. “But they’ve never made it. A few years ago Winston sent a whole pilgrimage of sick and wounded to a city. Bristled its barbs like a fighting cat. No mercy there, you can believe.”

 

“But you have a way, now.”

 

“Okay,” Thinner said. “We can go back. It’s on the other side of Arat. You’ve got me a little curious now. And besides, I think I might like you. You look like you should be dumb as a creeper, but you’re smart. Sharp. And besides, you’ve still got that club. Are you desperate enough to kill?”

 

Jeshua thought about that for a moment, then shook his head.

 

“It’s almost dark,” Thinner said. “Let’s camp and start in the morning.”

 

In the far valley at the middle of Arat, the Mesa Canaan city—now probably to be called the Arat city—was warm and sunset-pretty, like a diadem. Jeshua made a bed from the reeds and watched Thinner as he hollowed out the ground and made his own nest. Jeshua slept lightly that evening and came awake with dawn. He opened his eyes to a small insect on his chest, inquiring its way with finger-long antennae. He flicked it off and cleared his throat.

 

Thinner jack-in-the-boxed from his nest, rubbed his eyes and stood.

 

“I’m amazed,” he said. “You didn’t cut my throat.”

 

“Wouldn’t do me any good.”

 

“Work like this rubs down a man’s trust.”

 

Jeshua returned to the river and soaked himself again, pouring the chill water on his face and back in double hand-loads. The pressure in his groin was lighter this morning than most, but it still made him grit his teeth. He wanted to roll in the reeds and groan, rut the earth, but it would do him no good. Only the impulse existed.

 

They agreed on which pass to take through the Arat peaks and set out.

 

Jeshua had spent most of his life within sight of the villages of the Expolis Ibreem and found himself increasingly nervous the farther he hiked. They crawled up the slope, and Thinner’s statement about having tough soles proved itself. He walked barefoot over all manner of jagged rocks without complaining.

 

At the crest of a ridge, Jeshua looked back and saw the plain of reeds and the jungle beyond. With some squinting and hand-shading, he could make out the major clusters of huts in two villages and the Temple Josiah on Mount Miriam. All else was hidden.

 

In two days they crossed Arat and a rilled terrain of foothills beyond. They walked through fields of wild oats. “This used to be called Agripolis,” Thinner said. “If you dig deep enough here, you’ll come across irrigation systems, automatic fertilizing machines, harvesters, storage bins—the whole works. It’s all useless now. For nine hundred years it wouldn’t let any human cross these fields. It finally broke down, and those parts that could move, did. Most died.”

 

Jeshua knew a little concerning the history of the cities around Arat and told Thinner about the complex known as Tripolis. Three cities had been grouped on one side of Arat, about twenty miles north of where they were standing. After the Exiling, one had fragmented and died. Another had moved successfully and had left the area. The third had tried to cross the Arat range and failed. The major bulk of its wreckage lay in a disorganized mute clump not far from them.

 

They found scattered pieces of it on the plain of Agripolis. As they walked, they saw bulkheads and buttresses, most hardy of a city’s large members, still supported by desiccated legs. Some were fifty to sixty yards long and twenty feet across, mounted on organic wheel movements. Their metal parts had corroded badly. The organic parts had disappeared, except for an occasional span of silicate wall or internal skeleton of colloid.

 

“They’re not all dead, though,” Thinner said. “I’ve been across here before. Some made the walk a little difficult.”

 

In the glare of afternoon they hid from a wheeled beast armored like a great translucent tank. “That’s something from deep inside a city—a mover or loader,” Thinner said. “I don’t know anything about the temper of a feral city part, but I’m not going to aggravate it.”

 

When the tank thing passed, they continued. There were creatures less threatening, more shy, which they ignored. Most of them Jeshua couldn’t fit into a picture of ancient city functions. They were queer, dreamy creatures: spinning tops, many-legged browsers, things with bushes on their backs, bowls built like dogs but carrying water—insane, confusing fragments.

 

By day’s end they stood on the outskirts of Mandala. Jeshua sat on a stone to look at the city. “It’s different,” he said. “It isn’t as pretty.” Mandala was more square, less free and fluid.

 

It had an ungainly ziggurat-like pear shape. The colors that were scattered along its walls and light-banners—black and orange—didn’t match well with the delicate blues and greens of the city substance.

 

“It’s older,” Thinner said. “One of the first, I think. It’s an old tree, a bit scabrous, not like a young sprout.”

 

Jeshua looped his belt more tightly about his club and shaded his eyes against the sun. The young of Ibreem had been taught enough about cities to identify their parts and functions. The sunlight-absorbing banners that rippled near Mandala’s peak were like the leaves of a tree and also like flags. Designs on their surfaces formed a language conveying the city’s purpose and attitude. Silvery reflectors cast shadows below the banners. By squinting, he could see the gardens and fountains and crystalline recreation buildings of the uppermost promenade, a mile above them. Sunlight illuminated the green walls and showed their mottled innards, pierced the dragonfly buttresses whose wings with slow in-out beats kept air moving, and crept back and forth through the halls, light wells, and living quarters, giving all of Mandala an interior luminosity. Despite the orange and black of the colored surfaces, the city had an innate glory that made Jeshua’s chest ache with desire.

 

“How do we get in?” he asked.

 

“Through a tunnel, about a mile from here.”

 

“You mentioned a girl. Was that part of the cover?”

 

“No. She’s here. I met her. She has the liberty of the city. I don’t think she has to worry about anything, except loneliness.” He looked at Jeshua with an uncharacteristic wry grin. “At least she doesn’t have to worry about where the next meal comes from.”

 

“How did she get in? Why does the city let her stay?”

 

“Who can judge the ways of a city?”

 

Jeshua nodded thoughtfully. “Let’s go.”

 

Thinner’s grin froze and he stiffened, staring over Jeshua’s shoulder. Jeshua looked around and surreptitiously loosened his club in his belt. “Who are they?” he asked.

 

“The city chasers. They usually stay in the shadow. Something must be upsetting them today.”

 

At a run through the grass, twenty men dressed in rough orange-and-black rags advanced on them. Jeshua saw another group coming from the other side of the city perimeter. “We’ll have to take a stand,” he said. “We can’t outrun them.”

 

Thinner looked distressed. “Friend,” he said. “It’s time I dropped another ruse. We can get into the city here, but they can’t.”

 

Jeshua ignored the non sequitur. “Stand to my rear,” he said. Jeshua swung his club up and took a stance, baring his teeth and hunkering low as his father had taught him to do when facing wild beasts. The bluff was the thing, especially when backed by his bulk. Thinner pranced on his bandy legs, panic tightening his face. “Follow me, or they’ll kill us,” he said.

 

He broke for the glassy gardens within the perimeter. Jeshua turned and saw the polis chasers were forming a circle, concentrating on him, aiming spears for a throw. He ducked and lay flat as the metal-tipped shafts flew over, thunking into the grass. He rose, and a second flight shot by, one grazing him painfully on the shoulder. He heard Thinner rasp and curse. A chaser held him at arm’s length, repeatedly slashing his chest with a knife. Jeshua stood tall and ran for the circle, club held out before him. Swords came up and out, dull grey steel spotted with blood-rust. He blocked a thrust and cut it aside with the club, then killed the man with a downward swing.

 

“Stop it, you goddamn idiots!” someone shouted. One of the chasers shrieked, and the others backed away from Jeshua. Thinner’s attacker held a head, severed from the boy’s body. It trailed green. Though decapitated, Thinner shouted invective in several languages, including Hebrew and Chaser English. The attackers abandoned their weapons before the oracular monster and ran pale and stumbling. The petrified man who held the head dropped it and fell over.

 

Jeshua stood his ground, bloody club trembling in his loosening hand.

 

“Hey,” said the muffled voice in the grass. “Come here and help!”

 

Jeshua spotted six points on his forehead and drew two meshed triangles between. He walked slowly through the grass.

 

“El and hell,” Thinner’s head cried out. “I’m chewing grass. Pick me up.”

 

He found the boy’s body first. He bent over and saw the red, bleeding skin on the chest, pulpy green below that, and the pale colloid ribs that supported. Deeper still, glassy machinery and pale blue fluids in filigree tubes surrounded glints of organic circuit and metal. The chaser nearby had fainted from shock.

 

He found Thinner’s head facedown, jaw working and hair standing on end. “Lift me out,” the head said. “By the hair, if you’re squeamish, but lift me out.”

 

Jeshua reached down and picked the head up by the hair. Thinner stared at him above green-leaking nose and frothing mouth. The eyes blinked. “Wipe my mouth with something.” Jeshua picked up a clump of grass and did so, leaving bits of dirt behind, but getting most of the face clean. His stomach squirmed, but Thinner was obviously no mammal, nor a natural beast of any form, so he kept his reactions in check.

 

“I wish you’d listen to me,” the head said.

 

“You’re from the city,” Jeshua said, twisting it this way and that.

 

“Stop that—I’m getting dizzy. Take me inside Mandala.”

 

“Will it let me in?”

 

“Yes, dammit, I’ll be your passkey.”

 

“If you’re from the city, why would you want me or anyone else to go inside?”

 

“Take me in, and you’ll discover.”

 

Jeshua held the head at arm’s length and inspected it with half-closed eyes. Then, slowly, he lowered it, looked at the tiled gardens within the perimeter, and took his first step. He stopped, shaking.

 

“Hurry,” the head said. “I’m dripping.”

 

At any moment Jeshua expected the outskirts to splinter and bristle, but no such thing happened. “Will I meet the girl?” he asked.

 

“Walk, no questions.”

 

Eyes wide and stomach tense as rock, Jeshua entered the city of Mandala.

 

“There, that came more easily than you expected, didn’t it?” the head asked.

 

Jeshua stood in a cyclopean green mall, light bright but filtered, like the bottom of a shallow sea, surrounded by the green of thick glass and botanic fluids. Tetrahedral pylons and slender arches rose all around and met high above in a circular design of orange and black, similar to the markings on Thinner’s chest. The pylons supported four floors opening onto the court. The galleries were empty.

 

“You can put me down here,” Thinner said. “I’m broken. Something will come along to fix me. Wander for a while if you want. Nothing will hurt you. Perhaps you’ll meet the girl.”

 

Jeshua looked around apprehensively. “Would do neither of us any good,” he said. “I’m afraid.”

 

“Why, because you’re not a whole man?”

 

Jeshua dropped the head roughly on the hard floor, and it bounced, screeching.

 

“How did you know?” he asked loudly, desperately.

 

“Now you’ve made me confused,” the head said. “What did I say?” It stopped talking, and its eyes closed. Jeshua touched it tentatively with his boot. It did nothing. He straightened up and looked for a place to run. The best way would be out. He was a sinner now, a sinner by anger and shame. The city would throw him out violently. Perhaps it would brand him, as Thinner had hinted earlier. Jeshua wanted the familiarity of the grasslands and tangible enemies like the city chasers.

 

The sunlight through the entrance arch guided him. He ran for the glassy walkway and found it rising to keep him in. Furious with panic, he raised his club and struck at the spines. They sang with the blows but did not break.

 

“Please,” he begged. “Let me out, let me out!”

 

He heard a noise behind him and turned. A small wheeled cart gripped Thinner’s head with gentle mandibles and lifted its segmented arms to send the oracle down a chute into its back. It rolled from the mall into a corridor.

 

Jeshua lifted his slumped shoulders and expanded his chest. “I’m afraid!” he shouted at the city. “I’m a sinner! You don’t want me, so let me go!”

 

He squatted on the pavement with club in hand, trembling. The hatred of the cities for man had been deeply impressed in him. His breathing slowed until he could think again, and the fear subsided. Why had the city let him in, even with Thinner? He stood and slung the club in his belt. There was an answer someplace. He had little to lose—at most, a life he wasn’t particularly enjoying.

 

And in a city there was the possibility of healing arts now lost to the expolitans.

 

“Okay,” he said. “I’m staying. Prepare for the worst.”

 

He walked across the mall and took a corridor beyond. Empty rooms with hexagonal doors waited silent on either side. He found a fountain of refreshing water in a broad cathedral-nave room and drank from it. Then he spent some time studying the jointing of the arches that supported the vault above, running his ringers over the grooves.

 

A small anteroom had a soft couchlike protrusion, and he rested there, staring blankly at the ceiling. For a short while he slept. When he awoke, both he and his clothes were clean. A new pair had been laid out for him—standard Ibreem khaki shirt and short pants and a twine belt, more delicately knitted than the one he was wearing. His club hadn’t been removed. He lifted it. It had been tampered with—and improved. It fitted his grip better now and was weighted for balance. A table was set with dishes of fruit and what looked like bread-gruel. He had been accommodated in all ways, more than he deserved from any city. It almost gave him the courage to be bold. He took off his ragged clothes and tried on the new set. They fit admirably, and he felt less disreputable. His sandals had been stitched up but not replaced. They were comfortable, as always, but sturdier.

 

“How can I fix myself here?” he asked the walls. No answer came. He drank water from the fountain again and went to explore further.

 

The ground plan of Mandala’s lowest level was relatively simple. It consisted mostly of trade and commerce facilities, with spacious corridors for vehicle traffic, large warehouse areas, and dozens of conference rooms. Computing facilities were also provided. He knew a little about computers—the trade office in Bethel-Japhet still had an ancient pocket model taken from a city during the Exiling. The access terminals in Mandala were larger and clumsier, but recognizable. He came across a room filled with them. Centuries of neglect had made them irregular in shape, their plastic and thin metal parts warping. He wondered what portions of them, if any, were alive.

 

Most of the rooms on the lowest level maintained the sea-floor green motif. The uniformity added to Jeshua’s confusion, but after several hours of wandering, he found the clue that provided guidance. Though nothing existed in the way of written directions or graphic signs or maps, by keeping to the left he found he tended to the center; and to the right, the exterior. A Mandalan of ten centuries ago would have known the organization of each floor by education, and perhaps by portable guidebooks or signalers. Somewhere, he knew, there had to be a central elevator system.

 

He followed all left-turning hallways. Avoiding obvious dead ends, he soon reached the base of a hollow shaft. The floor was tiled with a changing design of greens and blues, advancing and flowing beneath his feet like a cryptic chronometer. He craned his neck back and looked up through the center of Mandala. High above he saw a bluish circle, the waning daytime sky. Wind whistled down the shaft.

 

Jeshua heard a faint hum from above. A speck blocked out part of the skylight and grew as it fell, spiraling like a dropped leaf. It had wings, a thick body for passengers, and an insect head, like the dragonfly buttresses that provided ventilation on Mandate’s exterior. Slowing its descent, it lifted its nose and came to a stop in front of him, still several feet above the floor. The bottoms of its unmoving transparent wings reflected the changing design of the floor.

 

Then he saw that the floor was coming to a conclusion, like an assembled puzzle. It formed a mosaic triskelion, a three-winged symbol outlined in red.

 

The glider waited for him. In its back there was room for at least five people. He chose the front seat. The glider trembled and moved forward. The insect-head tilted back, cocked sideways, and inspected its ascent. Metallic antennae emerged from the front of the body. A tingling filled the air. And he began to fly.

 

The glider slowed some distance above the floor and came to a stop at a gallery landing. Jeshua felt his heartbeat race as he looked over the black railing, down the thousand feet or so to the bottom of the shaft.

 

“This way, please.”

 

He turned, expecting to see Thinner again. Instead there waited a device like a walking coat-tree, with a simple vibration speaker mounted on its thin neck, a rod for a body, and three appendages jointed like a mantis’s front legs. He followed it.

 

Transparent pipes overhead pumped bubbling fluids like exposed arteries. He wondered whether dissenting citizens in the past could have severed a city’s lifelines by cutting such pipes—or were these mere ornaments, symbolic of deeper activities? The coat-tree clicked along in front of him, then stopped at a closed hexagonal door and tapped its round head on a metal plate. The door opened. “In here.”

 

Jeshua entered. Arranged in racks and rows in endless aisles throughout the huge room were thousands of constructions like Thinner. Some were incomplete, with their machinery and sealed-off organic connections hanging loose from trunks, handless arms, headless necks. Some had gaping slashes, broken limbs, squashed torsos. The coat-tree hurried off before he could speak, and the door closed behind.

 

He was beyond anything but the most rudimentary anxiety now. He walked down the central aisle, unable to decide whether this was a workshop or a charnel house. If Thinner was here, it might take hours to find him.

 

He stared straight ahead and stopped. There was someone not on the racks. At the far end of the room, it stood alone, too distant to be discerned in detail. Jeshua waited, but the figure did not move. It was a stalemate.

 

He made the first step. The figure darted to one side like a deer. He automatically ran after it, but by the time he’d reached the end of the aisle, it was nowhere to be seen.

 

“Hide and seek,” he murmured. “For God’s sake, hide and seek.”

 

He rubbed his groin abstractedly, trying to still the flood of excitement rushing into his stomach and chest. His fantasies multiplied, and he bent over double, grunting. He forced himself to straighten up, held out his arms, and concentrated on something distracting.

 

He saw a head that looked very much like Thinner’s. It was wired to a board behind the rack, and fluids pulsed up tubes into its neck. The eyes were open but glazed, and the flesh was ghostly. Jeshua reached out to touch it. It was cold, lifeless.

 

He examined other bodies more closely. Most were naked, complete in every detail. He hesitated, then reached down to touch the genitals of a male. The flesh was soft and flaccid. He shuddered. His fingers, as if working on their own, went to the pubic mound of a female figure. He grimaced and straightened, rubbing his hand on his pants with automatic distaste. A tremor jerked up his back. He was spooked now, having touched the lifeless forms, feeling what seemed dead flesh.

 

What were they doing here? Why was Mandala manufacturing thousands of surrogates? He peered around the racks of bodies, this way and behind, and saw open doors far beyond. Perhaps the girl—it must have been the girl—had gone into one of those.

 

He walked past the rows. The air smelled like cut grass and broken reed stems, with sap leaking. Now and then it smelled like fresh slaughtered meat, or like oil and metal.

 

Something made a noise. He stopped. One of the racks. He walked slowly down one aisle, looking carefully, seeing nothing but stillness, hearing only the pumping of fluids in thin pipes and the clicks of small valves. Perhaps the girl was pretending to be a cyborg. He mouthed the word over again. Cyborg. He knew it from his schooling. The cities themselves were cybernetic organisms.

 

He heard someone running away from him, slap of bare feet on floor. He paced evenly past the rows, looking down each aisle, nothing, nothing, stillness, there! The girl was at the opposite end, laughing at him. An arm waved. Then she vanished.

 

He decided it was wise not to chase anyone who knew the city better than he did. Best to let her come to him. He left the room through an open door.

 

A gallery outside adjoined a smaller shaft. This one was red and only fifty or sixty feet in diameter. Rectangular doors opened off the galleries, closed but unlocked. He tested the three doors on his level, opening them one at a time with a push. Each room held much the same thing—a closet filled with dust, rotting and collapsed furniture, emptiness and the smell of old tombs. Dust drifted into his nostrils, and he sneezed. He went back to the gallery and the hexagonal door. Looking down, he swayed and felt sweat start. The view was dizzying and claustrophobic.

 

A singing voice came down to him from above. It was feminine, sweet and young, a song in words he did not completely catch. They resembled Thinner’s chaser dialect, but echoes broke the meaning. He leaned out over the railing as far as he dared and looked up. It was definitely the girl—five, six, seven levels up. The voice sounded almost childish. Some of the words reached him clearly with a puff of direct breeze:

 

“Dis em, in solit lib, dis em... Clo’ed in clo’es ob dead...”

 

The red shaft vanished to a point without skylight. The unfamiliar glare hurt his eyes. He shaded them to see more clearly. The girl backed away from the railing and stopped singing.

 

He knew by rights he should be angry, that he was being teased. But he wasn’t. Instead he felt a loneliness too sharp to sustain. He turned away from the shaft and looked back at the door to the room of cyborgs.

 

Thinner stared back at him, grinning crookedly. “Didn’t have chance to welcome,” he said in Hebrew. His head was mounted on a metal snake two feet long; his body was a rolling green car with three wheels, a yard long and half a yard wide. It moved silently. “Have any difficulty?”

 

Jeshua looked him over slowly, then grinned. “It doesn’t suit you,” he said. “Are you the same Thinner?”

 

“Doesn’t matter, but yes, to make you comfortable.”

 

“If it doesn’t matter, then who am I talking to? The city computers?”

 

“No, no. They can’t talk. Too concerned with maintaining. You’re talking with what’s left of the architect.”

 

Jeshua nodded slowly, though he didn’t understand.

 

“It’s a bit complicated,” Thinner said. “Go into it with you later. You saw the girl, and she ran away from you.”

 

“I must be pretty frightening. How long has she been here?”

 

“A year.”

 

“How old is she?”

 

“Don’t know for sure. Have you eaten for a while?”

 

“No. How did she get in?”

 

“Not out of innocence, if that’s what you’re thinking. She was already married before she came here. The chasers encourage marriage early.”

 

“Then I’m not here out of innocence, either.”

 

“No.”

 

“You never saw me naked,” Joshua said. “How did yon know what was wrong with me?”

 

“I’m not limited to human senses, though El knows what I do have are bad enough. Follow me, and I’ll find suitable quarters for you.”

 

“I may not want to stay.”

 

“As I understand it, you’ve come here to be made whole. That can be done, and I can arrange it. But patience is always a virtue.”

 

Jeshua nodded at the familiar homily. “She speaks Chaser English. Is that why you were with the chasers, to find a companion for her?”

 

The Thinner-vehicle turned away from Jeshua without answering. It rolled through the cyborg chamber, and Jeshua followed. “It would be best if someone she was familiar with would come to join her, but none could be persuaded.”

 

“Why did she come?”

 

Thinner was silent again. They took a spiral moving walkway around the central shaft, going higher. “It’s the slow, scenic route,” Thinner said, “but you’ll have to get used to the city and its scale.”

 

“How long am I going to stay?”

 

“As long as you wish.”

 

They disembarked from the walkway and took one of the access halls to an apartment block on the outer wall of the city. The construction and colors here were more solid. The bulkheads and doors were opaque and brightly colored in blue, burnt orange, and purple. The total effect reminded Jeshua of a sunset. A long balcony in the outer wall gave a spectacular view of Arat and the plains, but Thinner allowed him no time to sightsee. He took Jeshua into a large apartment and made him familiar with the layout.

 

“It’s been cleaned up and provided with furniture you should be used to. You can trade it in for somewhere else whenever you want. But you’ll have to wait until you’ve been seen to by the medical units. You’ve been scheduled for work in this apartment.” Thinner showed him a white-tile and stainless-steel kitchen, with food dispensers and basic utensils. “Food can be obtained here. There’s enough material to customize whatever comes out of the dispensers. Sanitary units are in here and should explain themselves—”

 

“They talk?”

 

“No. I mean their use should be self-evident. Very few things talk in the city.”

 

“We were told the cities were commanded by voice.”

 

“Not by most of the citizens. The city itself does not talk back. Only certain units, not like myself—none of the cyborgs were here when humans were. That’s a later development. I’ll explain in time. I’m sure you’re more used to books and scrolls than tapes or tridvee experiences, so I’ve provided some offprints for you on these shelves. Over here—”

 

“Seems I’m going to be here for a long time.”

 

“Don’t be worried by the accommodations. This may be fancy by your standards, but it certainly isn’t by Mandala’s. These used to be apartments for those of an ascetic temper. If there’s anything you want to know when I’m not here, ask the information desk. It’s hooked to the same source I am.”

 

“I’ve heard of the city libraries. Are you part of them?”

 

“No. I’ve told you, I’m part of the architect. Avoid library outlets for the moment. In fact, for the next few days, don’t wander too far. Too much too soon, and all that. Ask the desk, and it will give you safe limits. Remember, you’re more helpless than a child here. Mandala is not out-and-out dangerous, but it can be disturbing.”

 

“What do I do if the girl visits me?”

 

“You anticipate it?”

 

“She was singing to me, I think. But she didn’t want to show herself directly. She must be lonely.”

 

“She is.” Thinner’s voice carried something more than a tone of crisp efficiency. “She’s been asking a lot of questions about you, and she’s been told the truth. But she’s lived without company for a long time, so don’t expect anything soon.”

 

“I’m confused,” Jeshua said.

 

“In your case, that’s a healthy state of mind. Relax for a while; don’t let unknowns bother you.”

 

Thinner finished explaining about the apartment and left. Jeshua went out the door to stand on the terrace beyond the walkway. Light from God-Does-Battle’s synchronous artificial moons made the snows of Arat gleam like dull steel in the distance. Jeshua regarded the moons with an understanding he’d never had before. Humans had brought them from the orbit of another world, to grace God-Does-Battle’s nights. The thought was staggering. People used to live there, a thousand years ago. What had happened to them when the cities had exiled their citizens? Had the lunar cities done the same thing as the cities of God-Does-Battle?

 

He went to his knees for a moment, feeling ashamed and primitive, and prayed to El for guidance. He was not convinced his confusion was so healthy.

 

He ate a meal that came as close as amateur instructions could make it to the simple fare of Bethel-Japhet. He then examined his bed, stripped away the covers—the room was warm enough—and slept.

 

* * * *

 

Once, long ago, if his earliest childhood memories were accurate, he had been taken from Bethel-Japhet to a communion in the hills of Kebal. That had been years before the Synedrium had stiffened the separation laws between Catholic and Habiru rituals. His father and most of his acquaintances had been Habiru and spoke Hebrew. But prominent members of the community, such as Sam Daniel, had by long family tradition worshiped Jesus as more than a prophet, according to established creeds grouped under the title of Catholicism. His father had not resented the Catholics for their ideas.

 

At that communion, not only had Habiru and Catholic worshiped, but also the now-separate Muslims and a few diverse creeds best left forgotten. Those had been difficult times, perhaps as hard as the times just after the Exiling. Jeshua remembered listening to the talk between his father and a group of Catholics—relaxed, informal talk, without the stiffness of ceremony that had grown up since. His father had mentioned that his young son’s name was Jeshua, which was a form of Jesus, and the Catholics had clustered around him like fathers all, commenting on his fine form as a six-year-old and his size and evident strength. “Will you make him a carpenter?” they asked jokingly.

 

“He will be a cain,” his father answered.

 

They frowned, puzzled.

 

“A maker of tools.”

 

“It was the making of tools that brought us to the Exiling,” Sam Daniel said.

 

“Aye, and raised us from beasts,” his father countered.

 

Jeshua remembered the talk mat followed in some detail. It had stuck with him and determined much of his outlook as an adult, after the death of his father in a mining accident.

 

“It was the shepherd who raised us above the beasts by making us their masters,” another said. “It was the maker of tools and tiller of the soil who murdered the shepherd and was sent to wander in exile.”

 

“Yes,” his father said, eyes gleaming in the firelight. “And later it was the shepherd who stole a birthright from his nomad brother—or have we forgotten Jacob and Esau? The debt, I think, was even.”

 

“There’s much that is confusing in the past,” Sam Daniel admitted. “And if we use our eyes and see that our exile is made less difficult by the use of tools, we should not condemn our worthy cains. But those who built the cities that exiled us were also making tools, and the tools turned against us.”

 

“But why?” his father asked. “Because of our degraded state as humans? Remember, it was the Habirus and Catholics— then Jews and Christians—who commissioned Robert Kahn to build the cities for God-Does-Battle and to make them pure cities for the best of mankind, the final carriers of the flame of Jesus and the Lord. We were self-righteous in those days and wished to leave behind the degraded ways of our neighbors. How was it that the best were cast out?”

 

“Hubris,” chuckled a Catholic. “A shameful thing, anyway. The histories tell us of many shameful things, eh, lad?” He looked at Jeshua. “You remember the stories of the evil that men did.”

 

“Don’t bother the child,” his father said angrily.

 

Sam Daniel put his arm around the shoulder of Jeshua’s father, “Our debater is at it again. Still have the secret for uniting us all?”

 

Half-asleep, he opened his eyes and tried to roll over on the bed.

 

Something stopped him, and he felt a twinge at the nape of his neck. He couldn’t see well—his eyes were watering and everything was blurred. His nose tickled and his palate hurt vaguely, as if something were crawling through his nostrils into the back of his throat. He tried to speak but couldn’t. Silvery arms weaved above him, leaving grey trails of shadow behind, and he thought he saw wires spinning over his chest. He blinked. Liquid drops hung from the wires like dew on a web. When the drops fell and touched his skin, waves of warmth and numbness radiated.

 

He heard a whine, like an animal in pain. It came from his own throat. Each time he breathed, the whine escaped. Again the metal things bobbed above him, this time unraveling the wires. He blinked, and it took a long time for his eyelids to open again. There was a split in the ceiling, and branches grew down from it, one coming up under his vision and reaching into his nose, others holding him gently on the bed, another humming behind his head, making his scalp prickle. He searched for the twinge below his neck. It felt as if a hair was being pulled from his skin or a single tiny ant was pinching him. He was aloof, far above it, not concerned; but his hand still wanted to scratch and a branch prevented it from moving. His vision cleared for an instant, and he saw green enameled tubes, chromed grips, pale blue ovals being handed back and forth.

 

“A anna eh uh,” he tried to say. “Eh ee uh.” His lips wouldn’t move. His tongue was playing with something sweet. He’d been given candy. Years ago he’d gone for a mouth examination—with a clean bill of health—and he’d been given a roll of sugar gum to tongue on the way home.

 

He sank back into his skull to listen to the talk by the fireside again. “Hubris,” chuckled a Catholic.

 

“Habirus,” he said to himself. “Hubris.”

 

“A shameful thing, anyway—”

 

“Our debater is at it again. Still have the secret for uniting us all?”

 

“And raised us from beasts.”

 

Deep, and sleep.

 

* * * *

 

He opened his eyes and felt something in bed with him. He moved his hand to his crotch. It felt as if a portion of the bed had gotten loose and was stuck under his hip, in his shorts. He lifted his hips and pulled down the garment, then lay back, a terrified look coming into his face. Tears streamed from his eyes.

 

“Thanks to El,” he murmured. He tried to back away from the vision, but it went with him, was truly a part of him. He hit the side of his head to see if it was still a time for dreams. It was real.

 

He climbed off the bed and stripped away his shirt, standing naked by the mirror to look at himself. He was afraid to touch it, but of itself it jerked and nearly made him mad with desire. He reached up and hit the ceiling with his fists.

 

“Great El, magnificent Lord,” he breathed. He wanted to rush out the door and stand on me balcony, to show God-Does-Battle he was now fully a man, fully as capable as anyone else to accomplish any task given to him, including—merciful El!— founding and fathering a family.

 

He couldn’t restrain himself. He threw open the door of the apartment and ran naked outside.

 

“BiGod!”

 

He stopped, his neck hair prickling, and turned to look.

 

She stood by the door to the apartment, poised like a jack-lighted animal. She was only fourteen or fifteen, at the oldest, and slender, any curves hidden beneath a sacky cloth of pink and orange. She looked at him as she might have looked at a ravening beast. He must have seemed one. Then she turned and fled.

 

Devastated in the midst of his triumph, he stood with shoulders drooped, hardly breathing, and blinked at die afterimage of brown hair and naked feet. His erection subsided into a morning urge to urinate. He threw his hands up in the air, returned to the apartment, and went into the bathroom.

 

After breakfast he faced the information desk, squatting uncomfortably on a small stool. The front of the desk was paneled with green slats, which opened as he approached. Sensor cells peered out at him.

 

“I’d like to know what I can do to leave,” he said.

 

“Why do you want to leave?” The voice was deeper than Thinner’s, but otherwise much the same.

 

“I’ve got friends elsewhere, and a past life to return to. I don’t have anything here.”

 

“You have all of the past here, an infinite number of things to learn.”

 

“I really just want out.”

 

“You can leave anytime.”

 

“How?”

 

“This is a problem. Not all of Mandate’s systems cooperate with this unit—”

 

“Which unit?”

 

“I am the architect. The systems follow schedules set up a thousand years ago. You’re welcome to try to leave—we certainly won’t do anything to stop you—but it could be difficult.”

 

Jeshua drummed his fingers on the panel for a minute. “What do you mean, the architect?”

 

“The unit constructed to design and coordinate the building of the cities.”

 

“Could you ask Thinner to come here?”

 

“Thinner unit is being reassembled.”

 

“Is he part of the architect?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Where are you?”

 

“If you mean, where is my central position, I have none. I am part of Mandala.”

 

“Does the architect control Mandala?”

 

“No. Not all city units respond to the architect. Only a few.”

 

“The cyborgs were built by the architect,” Jeshua guessed.

 

“Yes.”

 

Jeshua drummed his fingers again, then backed away from the desk and left the apartment. He stood on the terrace, looking across the plains, working his teeth in frustration. He seemed to be missing something terribly important.

 

“Hey.”

 

He looked up. The girl was on a terrace two levels above him, leaning with her elbows on the rail.

 

“I’m sorry I scared you,” he said.

 

“Dis me, no’ terrafy. Li’l shock, but dat all mucky same-same ‘ereber dis em go now. Hey, do, I got warns fo’ you.”

 

“What? Warnings?”

 

“Dey got probs here, ‘tween Mandala an’ dey ‘oo built.”

 

“I don’t understand.”

 

“No’ compree? Lissy dis me, close, like all dis depen’ on’t: Dis em, was carry by polis ‘en dis dey moob, week’r two ago. Was no’fun. Walk an’ be carry, was I. No’ fun.”

 

“The city moved? Why?”

 

“To leeb behine de part dis dey call builder.”

 

“The architect? You mean, Thinner and the information desks?”

 

“An’ too de bods ‘ich are hurt.”

 

Jeshua began to understand. There were at least two forces in Mandala that were at odds with each other—the city and something within the city that called itself the architect.

 

“How can I talk to the city?”

 

“De polis no’ talk.”

 

“Why does the architect want us here?”

 

“Don’ know.”

 

Jeshua massaged his neck to stop a cramp. “Can you come down here and talk?”

 

“No’ now dis you are full a man----Too mucky for dis me, too cashin’ big.”

 

“I won’t hurt you. I’ve lived with it for all my life—can live a while longer.”

 

“Oop!” She backed away from the rail.

 

“Wait!” Jeshua called. He turned and saw Thinner, fully corporeal now, leaning on the rounded corner of the access hall.

 

“So you’ve been able to talk to her,” Thinner said.

 

“Yes. Made me curious, too. And the information desk.”

 

“We expected it.”

 

“Then can I have some sound answers?”

 

“Of course.”

 

“Why was I brought here—to mate with the girl?”

 

“El! Not at all.” Thinner gestured for him to follow. “I’m afraid you’re in the middle of a pitched battle. The city rejects all humans. But the architect knows a city needs citizens. Anything else is a farce.”

 

“We were kicked our for our sins,” Jeshua said.

 

“That’s embarrassing, not for you so much as for us. The architect designed the city according to the specifications given by humans—but any good designer should know when a program contains an incipient psychosis. I’m afraid it’s set this world back quite a few centuries. The architect was made to direct the construction of the cities. Mandala was the first city, and we were installed here to make it easier to supervise construction everywhere. But now we have no control elsewhere. After a century of building and successful testing, we put community control into the city maintenance computers. We tore down the old cities when there were enough of the new to house the people of God-Does-Battle. Problems didn’t develop until all the living cities were integrated on a broad plan. They began to compare notes, in a manner of speaking.”

 

“They found humanity wanting.”

 

“Simply put. One of the original directives of the city was that socially destructive people—those who did not live their faith as Jews or Christians—would be either reformed or exiled. The cities were constantly aware of human activity and motivation. After a few decades they decided everybody was socially destructive in one way or another.”

 

“We are all sinners.”

 

“This way,” Thinner directed. They came to the moving walkway around the central shaft and stepped onto it. “The cities weren’t capable of realizing human checks and balances. By the time the problem was discovered, it was too late. The cities went on emergency systems and isolated themselves, because each city reported that it was full of antisocials. They were never coordinated again. It takes people to reinstate the interurban links.”

 

Jeshua looked at Thinner warily, trying to judge the truth of the story. It was hard to accept—a thousand years of self-disgust and misery because of bad design! “Why did the ships leave the sky?”

 

“This world was under a colony contract and received support only so long as it stayed productive. Production dropped off sharply, so there was no profit, and considerable expense and danger in keeping contact. There were tens of millions of desperate people here then. After a time, God-Does-Battle was written off as a loss.”

 

“Then we are not sinners, we did not break El’s laws?”

 

“No more than any other living thing.”

 

Jeshua felt a slow hatred begin inside. “There are others who must learn this,” he said.

 

“Sorry,” Thinner said. “You’re in it for the duration. We’ll get off here.”

 

“I will not be a prisoner,” Jeshua said.

 

“It’s not a matter of being held prisoner. The city is in for another move. It’s been trying to get rid of the architect, but it can’t—it never will. It would go against a directive for city cohesion. And so would you if you try to leave now. Whatever is in the city just before a move is cataloged and kept careful track of by watcher units.”

 

“What can any of you do to stop me?” Jeshua asked, his face set as if he’d come across a piece of steel difficult to hammer. He walked away from the shaft exit, wondering what Thinner would try.

 

The floor rocked back and forth and knocked him on his hands and knees. Streamers of brown and green crawled over a near wall, flexing and curling. The wall came away, shivered as if in agony, then fell on its side. The sections around it did likewise until a modular room had been disassembled. Its contents were neatly packed by scurrying coat-trees, each with a fringe of arms and a heavier frame for loads. All around the central shaft, walls were being plucked out and rooms dismantled. Thinner kneeled next to Jeshua and patted him on the shoulder.

 

“Best you come with this unit and avoid the problems here. I can guarantee safe passage until the city has reassembled.”

 

Jeshua hesitated, then looked up and saw a cantilever arch throwing out green fluid ropes like a spider spinning silk. The ropes caught on opposite bracings and allowed the arch to lower itself. Jeshua stood up on the uncertain flooring and followed Thinner.

 

“This is only preliminary work,” Thinner said as he took him into the cyborg room. “In a few hours the big structural units will start to come down, then the bulkheads, ceiling, and floor pieces, then the rest. By this evening, the whole city will be mobile. The girl will be here in a few minutes—you can travel together if you want to. This unit will give you instructions on how to avoid injury during reassembly.”

 

But Jeshua had other plans. He did as Thinner told him, resting on one of the racks like a cyborg, stiffening as the girl came in from another door and positioned herself several aisles down. He was sweating profusely, and the smell of his fear nauseated him.

 

The girl looked at him curiously. “You know ‘at dis you in fo’?” she asked.

 

He shook his head.

 

The clamps on the rack closed and held him comfortably but securely. He didn’t try to struggle. The room was disassembling itself. Panels beneath the racks retracted, and wheels jutted out. Shivering with their new energy, the racks elevated and wheeled out their charges.

 

The racks formed a long train down a hall crowded with scurrying machines. Behind them, the hall took itself apart with spewed ropes, fresh-sprouted grasping limbs and feet, wheels and treads.

 

It was a dance. With the precision of a bed of flowers closing for the night, the city shrank, drew in, pulled itself down from the top, and packed itself onto wide-tread beasts with unfathomable jade eyes. The racks were put on the backs of a trailer like a flat-backed spider, long multiple legs pumping up and down smoothly. A hundred spiders like it carried the remaining racks, and thousands of other choreographed tractors, robots, organic cranes, cyborg monsters, waited in concentric circles around Mandala. A storm gathered to the south about Arat’s snowy peaks. As the day went on and the city diminished, the grey front swept near, then over. A mantle of cloud hid the disassembly of the upper levels. Rain fell on the ranks of machines and half-machines, and the ground became dark with mud and trampled vegetation. Transparent skins came up over the backs of the spider-trailers, hanging from rigid foam poles. Thinner crawled between the racks and approached Jeshua, who was stiff and sore by now.

 

“We’ve let the girl loose,” Thinner said. “She has no place to go but with us. Will you try to leave?”

 

Jeshua nodded.

 

“It’ll only mean trouble for you. But I don’t think you’ll get hurt.” Thinner tapped the rack, and the clamps backed away. Night was coming down over the storm. Through the trailer skin, Jeshua could see the city’s parts and vehicles switch on interior glows. Rain streaks distorted the lights into ragged splashes and bars. He stretched his arms and legs and winced.

 

A tall tractor unit surmounted by a blunt-nosed cone rumbled up to the trailer and hooked itself on. The trailer lurched and began to move. The ride on the pumping man-thick legs was surprisingly smooth. Mandala marched through the rain and dark.

 

By morning, the new site had been chosen.

 

Jeshua lifted the trailer skin and jumped into the mud. He had slept little during the trek, thinking about what had happened and what he had been told. He was no longer meek and ashamed.

 

The cities were no longer lost paradises to him. They now had an air of priggishness. They were themselves flawed. He spat into the mud.

 

But the city had made him whole again. Who had been more responsible: the architect or Mandala itself? He didn’t know and hardly cared. He had been taken care of as any unit in Mandala would have been, automatically and efficiently. He coveted his new wholeness, but it didn’t make him grateful. It should have been his by a birthright of ten centuries. It had been denied by incompetence—and whatever passed as willful blindness in the cities.

 

He could not accept it as perpetual error. His people tended to think in terms of will and responsibility.

 

The maze of vehicles and city parts was quiet now, as if resting before the next effort of reassembly. The air was misty and grey with a heaviness that lowered his spirits.

 

“‘Ere dis you go?”

 

He turned back to the trailer and saw the girl peering under the skin. “I’m going to try to get away,” he said. “I don’t belong here. Nobody does.”

 

“Lissy. I tol’ de one, T-Thinner to teach dis me... teach me how to spek li’ dis you. When you come back, I know by den.”

 

“I don’t plan on coming back.” He looked at her closely. She was wearing the same shift she wore when he first saw her, but a belt had tightened it around her waist. He took a deep breath and backed away a step, his sandals sinking in the mud.

 

“I don’ know ‘oo you are... who you are... but if Th-Thinner brought you, you must be a good person.”

 

Jeshua widened his eyes. “Why?”

 

She shrugged. “Dis me just know.” She jumped down from the trailer, swinging from a rain-shiny leg. Mud splattered up her bare white calves.

 

“If you, dis me, t’ought... thought you were bad, I’d expec’ you to brute me right now. But you don’. Even though you neba—never have a gol before.” Her strained speech started to crack, and she laughed nervously. “I was tol’ abou’ you ‘en you came. About your prob—lem.” She looked at him curiously. “How do you feel?”

 

“Alive. And I wouldn’t be too sure I’m not a danger. I’ve never had to control myself before.”

 

The girl looked him over coquettishly.

 

“Mandala, it isn’t all bad, no good,” she said. “It took care ob you. Dat’s good, is it no’?”

 

“When I go home,” Jeshua said, drawing a breath, “I’m going to tell my people we should come and destroy the cities.”

 

The girl frowned. “Li’ take down?”

 

“Piece by piece.”

 

“Too much to do. Nobod can do dat.”

 

“Enough people can.”

 

“No’ good to do in firs’ place. No’ tall.”

 

“It’s because of them we’re like savages now.”

 

The girl shimmied up the spider’s leg again and motioned for him to follow. He lifted himself and stood on the rounded lip of the back, watching her as she walked with arms balancing to the middle of the vehicle. “Look dis,” she said. She pointed to the ranked legions of Mandala. The mist was starting to burn off. Shafts of sunlight cut through and brightened wide circles of the plain. “De polis, dey are li’ not’ing else. Dey are de...” She sighed at her lapses. “They are the fines’ thing we eba put together. We should try t’save dem.”

 

But Jeshua was resolute. His face burned with anger as he looked out over the disassembled city. He jumped from the rim and landed in the pounded mud. “If there’s no place for people in them, they’re useless. Let the architect try to reclaim. I’ve got more immediate things to do.”

 

The girl smiled slowly and shook her head. Jeshua stalked off between the vehicles and city parts.

 

Mandala, broken down, covered at least thirty square miles of the plain. Jeshua took his bearings from a tall rock pinnacle, chose the shortest distance to the edge, and sighted on a peak in Arat. He walked without trouble for a half hour and found himself approaching an attenuated concentration of city fragments. Grass grew up between flattened trails. Taking a final sprint, he stood on the edge of Mandala. He took a deep breath and looked behind to see if anything was following.

 

He still had his club. He held it in one hand, hefted it, and examined it closely, trying to decide what to do with it if he was bothered. He put it back in his belt, deciding he would need it for the long trip back to his expolis. Behind him, the ranks of vehicles and parts lurched and began to move. Mandala was beginning reconstruction. It was best to escape now.

 

He ran. The long grass made speed difficult, but he persisted until he stumbled into a burrow and fell over. He got up, rubbed his ankle, decided he was intact, and continued his clumsy springing gait.

 

In an hour he rested beneath the shade of a copse of trees and laughed to himself. The sun beat down heavily on the plain, and the grass shimmered with a golden heat. It was no time for travel. There was a small puddle held in the cup of a rock, and he drank from that, then slept for a while.

 

He was awakened by a shoe gently nudging him in the ribs.

 

“Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod,” a voice said.

 

He rolled from his stomach and looked into the face of Sam Daniel the Catholic. Two women and another man, as well as three young children, were behind him jockeying for positions in the coolest shade.

 

“Have you calmed yourself in the wilderness?” the Catholic asked. Jeshua sat up and rubbed his eyes. He had nothing to fear. The chief of the guard wasn’t acting in his professional capacity—he was traveling, not searching. And besides, Jeshua was returning to the expolis.

 

“I am calmer, thank you,” Jeshua said. “I apologize for my actions…”

 

“It’s only been a fortnight,” Sam Daniel said. “Has so much changed since?”

 

“I...” Jeshua shook his head. “I don’t think you would believe.”

 

“You came from the direction of the traveling city,” the Catholic said, sitting on the soft loam. He motioned for the rest of the troop to rest and relax. “Meet anything interesting there?”

 

Jeshua nodded. “Why have you come this far?”

 

“For reasons of health. And to visit the western limb of Expolis Canaan, where my parents live now. My wife has a bad lung ailment—I think an allergic reaction to the new strain of sorghum being planted in the ridge paddies above Bethel-Japhet. We will stay away until the harvest. Have you stayed in other villages near here?”

 

Jeshua shook his head. “Sam Daniel, I have always thought you a man of reason and honor. Will you listen with an open mind to my story?”

 

The Catholic considered, then nodded.

 

“I have been inside a city.”

 

He raised his eyebrows. “The one on the plain?”

 

Jeshua told him most of the story. Then he stood. “I’d like you to follow me. Away from the rest. I have proof.”

 

Sam Daniel followed Jeshua behind the rocks, and Jeshua shyly revealed his proof. Sam Daniel stared. “It’s real?” he asked. Jeshua nodded.

 

“I’ve been restored. I can go back to Bethel-Japhet and become a regular member of the community.”

 

“No one has ever been in a city before. Not for as long as any remember.”

 

“There’s at least one other, a girl. She’s from the city chasers.

 

“But the city took itself apart and marched. We had to change our course to go around it or face the hooligans following. How could anyone live in a rebuilding city?”

 

“I survived its disassembly. There are ways.” And he told about the architect and its extensions. “I’ve had to twist my thoughts to understand what I’ve experienced,” he said. “But I’ve reached a conclusion. We don’t belong in the cities, any more than they deserve to have us.”

 

“Our shame lies in them.”

 

“Then they must be destroyed.”

 

Sam Daniel looked at him sharply. “That would be blasphemous. They serve to remind us of our sins.”

 

“We were exiled not for our sins, but for what we are— human beings! Would you kick a dog from your house because it dreams of hunting during Passover—or Lent? Then why should a city kick its citizens out because of their inner thoughts? Or because of a minority’s actions? They were built with morals too rigid to be practical. They are worse than the most callous priest or judge, like tiny children in their self-righteousness. They’ve caused us to suffer needlessly. And as long as they stand, they remind us of an inferiority and shame that is a lie! We should tear them down to their roots and sow the ground with salt.”

 

Sam Daniel rubbed his nose thoughtfully between two fingers. “It goes against everything the expolises stand for,” he said. “The cities are perfect. They are eternal, and if they are self-righteous, they deserve to be. You of all should know that.”

 

“You haven’t understood,” Jeshua said, pacing. “They are not perfect, not eternal. They were made by men—”

 

“Papa! Papa!” a child screamed. They ran back to the group. A black tractor-mounted giant with an angular birdlike head and five arms sat ticking quietly near the trees. Sam Daniel called his family back near the center of the copse and looked at Jeshua with fear and anger. “Has it come for you?”

 

He nodded.

 

“Then go with it.”

 

Jeshua stepped forward. He didn’t look at the Catholic as he said, “Tell them what I’ve told you. Tell them what I’ve done, and what I know we must do.”

 

A boy was moaning softly.

 

The giant picked Jeshua up delicately with a mandibled arm and set him on its back. It spun around with a spew of dirt and grass, then moved quietly back across the plain to Mandala.

 

When they arrived, the city was almost finished rebuilding. It looked no different from when he’d first seen it, but its order was ugly to him now. He preferred the human asymmetry of brick homes and stone walls. Its noises made him queasy. His reaction grew like steam pressure in a boiler, and his muscles felt tense as a snake about to strike.

 

The giant set him down in the lowest level of the city. Thinner met him there. Jeshua saw the girl waiting on a platform near the circular design in the shaft.

 

“If it makes any difference to you, we had nothing to do with bringing you back,” Thinner said.

 

“If it makes any difference to you, I had nothing to do with returning. Where will you shut me tonight?”

 

“Nowhere,” Thinner said. “You have the run of the city.”

 

“And the girl?”

 

“What about her?”

 

“What does she expect?”

 

“You don’t make much sense,” Thinner said.

 

“Does she expect me to stay and make the best of things?”

 

“Ask her. We don’t control her, either.”

 

Jeshua walked past the cyborgs and over the circular design, now disordered again. The girl watched him steadily as he approached. He stopped below the platform and looked up at her, hands tightly clenched at his waist.

 

“What do you want from this place?” he asked.

 

“Freedom,” she said. “The choice of what to be, where to live.”

 

“But the city won’t let you leave. You have no choice.”

 

“Yes, the city, I can leave it whenever I want.”

 

Thinner called from across the mall. “As soon as the city is put together, you can leave, too. The inventory is policed only during a move.”

 

Jeshua’s shoulders slumped, and his bristling stance softened. He had nothing to fight against now, not immediately. He kept his fists clenched, even so.

 

“I’m confused,” he said.

 

“Stay for the evening,” she suggested. “Then will you make thought come clear of confusion.”

 

He followed her to his room near the peak of the city. The room hadn’t been changed. Before she left him there, he asked what her name was.

 

“Anata,” she said. “Anata Leucippe.”

 

“Do you get lonely in the evenings?” he asked, stumbling over the question.

 

“Never,” she said. She laughed and turned half-away from him. “An’ now certes am dis em, you no’ trustable!”

 

She left him by the door. “Eat!” she called from the corner of the access hall. “I be back, around mid of the evening.”

 

He smiled and shut his door, then turned to the kitchen to choose what he was going to eat.

 

Being a whole man, he now knew, did not stop the pain of fear and loneliness. The possibility of quenching was, in fact, a final turn of the thumbscrew. He paced like a caged bear, thinking furiously and reaching no conclusions.

 

By midnight he was near an explosion. He waited in the viewing area of the terrace, watching the moonlight bathe God-Does-Battle like milk, gripping the railing with strength that could have crushed wood. He listened to the noise of the city. It was less soothing than he remembered, neither synchronous nor melodic.

 

Anata came for him half an hour after she said she would. Jeshua had gone through so many ups and downs of despair and aloofness that he was exhausted. She took his hand and led him to the central shaft on foot. They found hidden curved stairwells and went down four levels to a broad promenade that circled a widening in the shaft. “The walkway, it doesn’t work yet,” she told him. “My tongue, I’m getting it down. I’m studying.”

 

“There’s no reason you should speak like me,” he said.

 

“It is difficult at times. Dis me—I cannot cure a lifetime ob—of talk.”

 

“Your own language is pretty,” he said, half-lying.

 

“I know. Prettier. Alive-o. But—” She shrugged.

 

Jeshua thought he couldn’t be more than five or six years older than she was, by no means an insurmountable distance. He jerked as the city lights dimmed. All around, the walls lost their bright glow and produced in its stead a pale lunar gleam, like the night outside.

 

“This is what I brough’ you here for,” she said. “To see.”

 

The ghost-moon luminescence made him shiver. The walls and floor passed threads of light between them, and from the threads grew spirits, shimmering first like mirages, then settling into translucent sharpness. They began to move.

 

They came in couples, groups, crowds, and with them were children, animals, birds, and things he couldn’t identify. They filled the promenade and terraces and walked, talking in tunnel-end whispers he couldn’t make out, laughing and looking and being alive, but not in Jeshua’s time.

 

They were not solid, not robots or cyborgs. They were spirits from ten centuries past, and he was rapidly losing all decorum watching them come to form around him.

 

“Sh!” Anata said, taking his arm to steady him. “They don’t hurt anybody. They’re no’ here. They’re dreams.”

 

Jeshua clasped his hands tight and forced himself to be calm.

 

“This is the city, what it desires,” Anata said. “You want to kill the polis, the city, because it keeps out the people, but look—it hurts, too. It wants. What’s a city without its people? Just sick. No’ bad. No’ evil. Can’t kill a sick one, can you?”

 

Each night, she said, the city reenacted a living memory of the past, and each night she came to watch.

 

Jeshua saw the pseudolife, the half-silent existence of a billion recorded memories, and his anger slowly faded. His hands loosened their grip on each other. He could never sustain hatred for long. Now, with understanding just out of reach, but obviously coming, he could only resign himself to more confusion for the moment.

 

“It’ll take me a long, long time to forgive what happened,” he said.

 

“This me, too.” She sighed. “When I was married, I found I could not have children. This my husband could not understand. All the others of the women in the group could have children. So I left in shame and came to the city we had always worshiped. I thought it would be, the city, the only one to cure. But now I don’t know. I do not want another husband, I want to wait for this to go away. It is too beautiful to leave while it is still here.”

 

“Go away?”

 

“The cities, they get old and they wander,” she said. “Not all things work good here now. Pieces are dying. Soon it will all die. Even such as Thinner, they die. The room is full of them. And no more are being made. The city is too old to grow new. So I wait until the beauty is gone.”

 

Jeshua looked at her more closely. There was a whitish cast in her left eye. It had not been there a few hours ago.

 

“It is time to go to sleep,” she said. “Very late.”

 

He took her gently by the hand and led her through the phantoms, up the empty but crowded staircases, asking her where she lived.

 

“I don’t have any one room,” she said. “Sleep in all of them at some time or another. But we can’t go back dere.” She stopped. “There. Dere. Can’t go back.” She looked up at him. “Dis me, canno’ spek mucky ob—” She held her hand to her mouth. “I forget. I learned bu’ now—I don’t know...”

 

He felt a slow horror grind in his stomach.

 

“Something is going wrong,” she said. Her voice became deeper, like Thinner’s, and she opened her mouth to scream but could not. She tore away from him and backed up. “I’m doing something wrong.”

 

“Take off your shirt,” Jeshua said.

 

“No.” She looked offended.

 

“It’s all a lie, isn’t it?” he asked.

 

“No.”

 

“Then take off your shirt.”

 

She began to remove it. Her hands hesitated.

 

“Now.”

 

She peeled it over her head and stood naked, with her small breasts outthrust, narrow hips square and bonily dimpled, genitals flossed in feathery brown. A pattern of scars on her chest and breasts formed a circle. Bits of black remained like cinders, like the cinders on his own chest—from a campfire that had never been. Once, both of them had been marked like Thinner, stamped with the seal of Mandala.

 

She turned away from him on the staircase, phantoms drifting past her and through her. He reached out to stop her but wasn’t quick enough. Her foot spasmed and she fell, garnering into a twisted ball, down the staircase, up against the railings, to the bottom.

 

He stood near the top and saw her pale blue fluid and red skinblood and green tissue leaking from a torn leg. He felt he might go insane.

 

“Thinner!” he screamed. He kept calling the name. The lunar glow brightened, and the phantoms disappeared. The halls and vaults echoed with his braying cry.

 

The cyborg appeared at the bottom of the staircase and knelt down to examine the girl.

 

“Both of us,” Jeshua said. “Both lies.”

 

“We don’t have the parts to fix her,” Thinner said.

 

“Why did you bring us back? Why not let us stay? And why not just tell us what we are?”

 

“Until a few years ago there was still hope,” Thinner said. “The city was still trying to correct the programs, still trying to get back its citizens. Sixty years ago it gave the architect more freedom to try to find out what went wrong. We built ourselves—you, her, me others—to go among the humans and see what they were like now, how the cities could accommodate. And if we had told you this, would you have believed? As humans, you were so convincing you couldn’t even go into cities except your own. Then the aging began, and the sickness. The attempt finally died.”

 

Jeshua felt the scars on his chest and shut his eyes, wishing, hoping it was all a nightmare.

 

“David the smith purged the mark from you when you were a young cyborg, that you might pass for human. Then he stunted your development that you might someday be forced to come back.”

 

“My father was like me.”

 

“Yes. He carried the scar, too.”

 

Jeshua nodded. “How long do we have?”

 

“I don’t know. The city is running out of memories to repeat. Soon it will have to give up... less then a century. It will move like the others and strand itself someplace.”

 

Jeshua walked away from Thinner and the girl’s body and wandered down an access hall to the terraces on the outer wall of the city. He shaded his eyes against the rising sun in the east and looked toward Arat. There, he saw the city that had once occupied Mesa Canaan. It had disassembled and was trying to cross the mountains.

 

“Kisa,” he said.