Strength of Stones (13 page)

"What village are you from?" she asked in English.

"From the _Medain,_ the cities north of here. You speak the old tongue?"

Reah didn't answer. "I want you all out of here. The city will bind your wounds, then it will put you on the perimeter and you can join your soldiers outside."

"We are suppliants," Musah Salih said, smiling toothily at her. "You cannot refuse us." He was still speaking the old tongue. At one time, she thought, he must have been a scholar.

"I don't refuse you. I treat you and release you like the wild animals you are."

"Nor can you refuse us food, drink, information. That is the code of our people."

"You consort with _Nasrany_ and _Yudah_ and ask me about the code of our people?"

"They are human like you and I," Musa said, finally using English. "Were we not all exiled long ago, faithful and _kafir_ alike? We all lacked something."

"Whatever we lacked, the cities can't help us find it. My word is final. Belshezar, show them the hospital rooms. The city watches closely. No miserable soldiers can -- " She stopped herself and shook her head, then addressed the coat-rack. "You'll watch them and report to me when they're gone."

Belshezar started to walk toward her, but felt faint and faltered. "You're lying," he said. "You're still crazy. The city can't fix you."

"Makes no matter to me what you think," Reah said. She smiled grimly at the others. "Be wary. This city is full of ghosts. The sooner you leave it, the better for you." To the Chasers she said, "Dis polis chocka sperrit, compree?"

Then she turned and walked toward the heat shaft.

She didn't want them in the city at all. They could spoil her plans -- the city wouldn't force them out until they were well, and they could perform much mischief before then. The confrontation had merely been postponed; until they were gone they were like vipers hidden in her bedclothes.

She returned to the top of the city and the control center. She commanded a map of the surrounding area to be projected on a wall screen. The area of Akkabar was shown covered by a broad river. "Architect," she said. The homunculus appeared on its plate. "This map is wrong. Prepare to make corrections."

"The architect has put all city memory on read-only status," the figure said. "No information can be altered except in an emergency."

She sighed. "This is an emergency, obviously. The city is dying. It needs much more water than it gets here. It's tapping the water table for miles around and the flow is weakening daily. But where two rivers meet, even in drought, water must exist a few dozen meters beneath the sand. There's enough for a dozen cities, if the geology you taught me is correct."

"Are you proposing the city should move?"

"I am."

"To what end?"

"To ensure long life and health for its components." She noticed the homunculus had changed color. She was now addressing the religious coordinator, dressed in blue.

"Why? Is it not time for an empty city to die?"

"No." She shivered with emotion. The city actually _wanted_ to die.

"There is no purpose in going on."

"Yes, there is. I'm going to send city transports to all the villages for hundreds of kilometers around and have them bring back the sick children. This city can heal them."

"Children are exiled as much as adults."

"Are children filled with sin?"

"Yes. This city's creed is Baptist. Those -- "

"Stop that! You're repeating the very contradiction that makes you sick. I am the leader. You will send out city parts to retrieve the sick children."

The homunculus suddenly fuzzed and wavered. Reah, with her fingers in the sockets, could feel something changing. Far below, in one of the hundreds of control drums, something died. She wondered what it was.

The architect's colors returned. "Yes?"

She sucked in her breath and mumbled a prayer to Allah. "Here is how you will do it."

And the city did not object.

Belshezar watched as the medical machines repaired his wounds. "I'd live here forever if I could," he said.

Ezeki, already bandaged, ate from a plate held by the worker the woman had left to watch over them. "They'll throw you out just like they did before."

"Why haven't they thrown her out?"

"As you say, maybe she's still crazy. But it seems to me there's method in her madness."

Musa Salih grumbled deep in his throat. "She's a woman. Women can't enter a man's tent when they are impure, much less a blessed city. This woman has the manners of one highborn, the wife of an important man. They get haughty when their men rank high."

"Perhaps the city made her that way," Ezeki said.

"She was ignorant when she came here," Belshezar said. "We taught her how to learn from the city. Now she shows her gratitude."

"When we go, we'll take her with us," Musa said. "She can tell us what she knows about the city."

"If we're forced to leave," Ezeki said. "If she can stay, why can't we?"

"Something's moving on the outside," Breetod said, looking through a window across the broad pavement surrounding the city. "Big machines are leaving!"

Durragon was roused from his tent by the new left-flank runner. "Sir! Dis we fight beas' fro' inna polis!"

He wrapped his sword belt around his waist and left his tent. The camp was in confusion. At regular intervals around the barrier, spines had dropped to form gates. Huge machines were pouring out. Most were transports -- tractors with human-like torsos but no heads, spider-leg carriers and wheeled trucks with long, flexible carriages and suspensions. They maneuvered carefully through the camp, obviously intent not on destruction but on merely leaving. The spines erected behind them and the Chasers looked in dismay at the trails which had been gouged through the camp.

"Has anyone communicated with the men inside?" Durragon asked. The runner shook his head and shrugged. "Then try, damn it! Try to shout to them. Damned Chasers." The runner smiled and went to gather a chorus of men.

Durragon didn't get much sleep until morning. The Chasers marched from one side of the camp to the other, staying a respectable distance from the spines, shouting at the top of their lungs. When dawn was well along and they hadn't received any answer, the runner woke Durragon up and he groggily began to make other plans.

Ezeki lay on his back in a tub of healing fluid, half-dreaming about his home village. A network of green and chrome manipulators hung in wait over his body. Earlier they had massaged and applied unguents; in a few days the wounds would be healed.

And paradise would end. One way or another, the city -- or the woman -- would throw them out. Something had to be done before then.

The fracas with the disbanded Tomoye had taught Ezeki several things about organic cities. Diffuse and huge as they might seem from the outside, they were controlled by a small number of tank-like brains. The one they had captured had not been very cooperative. He opened his eyes and sighed.

"Bring Breetod to me, please," he told the worker. It rolled out of the room. A few minutes later the flank runner came in, sniffing at his hand and arm.

"They cleaned me up," he said. "I've never smelled this good before."

"How do you like it?" Ezeki asked.

The runner wrinkled his nose. "The smell is unfamiliar, and I can't tell as much about my health as I could before -- " he sniffed his arm-pit and shook his head -- "but I don't itch much, either. It's acceptable."

"This expolitan, Belshezar -- has he told you much about the city yet?"

"He's more your kind than mine. He hasn't said a thing since he was bandaged. Musa would like to strangle the bitch."

"She looks like she can take care of herself. You might warn him. Besides, I think she's telling the truth. She runs the city now."

"Why do you believe her?"

"Does this city act like other cities?"

"No."

"There it is. Something's made it change."

"But she's just an old expolitan -- "

"Not so old, maybe forty. Hard life. But she's smart now, for whatever reason, and I think she has most of the city under control, but not all; otherwise why would it let us in? She was right -- we were faking. She obviously doesn't like having us here."

"So?"

"We'll meet today, before we get so perfumed and softened up we forget why we're here. Bring everyone to Belshezar's room -- even the Chasers -- and make sure the worker is _not_ in attendance."

"Yes, but here the walls have ears for a fact."

"Then we'll speak Habiru dialect. Whether she hears and understands or not, we'll have a meeting."

"One other thing," Breetod said before leaving. "I went to a higher balcony and watched the machines that broke out last night. They scattered in all directions."

Ezeki settled back into the warm fluid again and waved his hand. "Go get the others."

When the despair came, Reah feared that the past was returning again. She sat quietly in the control center, trying to find a way out of the darkness. It all seemed hopeless. Where was the dividing line between the possible and the absurd?

She was furious. She clenched the soft edge of the seat and stared straight into the screen. She had been re-running the city's history, trying to understand. The idiocy of God-Does-Battle's first colonists was a hard stone in her throat. Understanding was no easier than forgiveness.

They had put the planet in a shadow from which it had never escaped. Reah thought she knew one of the reasons. The religions of her ancestors had been masculine religions, with masculine gods and prohibitions against the ways of women. Women were unclean, little better than livestock. Nature was a conspiracy of the unclean female against the hardpressed male.

Yet she had loved her husband once, and faithfully followed the codes of Islam. Her daughter's future, she had known, would not be as bright as a son's --

She was tense again. She looked at the screens and tried to unlock her neck muscles. Son or daughter, husband or tyrant, they were all equal now. "Better I had no memory," she murmured. The insect on her shoulder buzzed and she tapped its head.

"The men are holding a meeting," it said, relaying the coat-rack's voice. "This unit is not allowed to attend. I believe they are well enough that the city might consider putting them out soon."

"Keep watching," she said. They weren't going to foul her plans. Now that she controlled a city, albeit a disarranged one, it was time to correct the masculine blunders and set God-Does-Battle aright. And where else to begin, except with children?

But first the city had to be relocated.

She summoned the homunculus, now permanently dressed in the red of the architect.

"The city can move as soon as it's ready," she said.

"One transport has returned with information from the old alluvial plain," the figure said.

"I didn't send any transport there."

"This unit found it appropriate to check conditions before moving."

She smiled. The city was thinking for itself, at least occasionally. "What did it find?"

"Conditions are good. There is a deep flow of water and the soil is conducive to city maintenance."

"Now that the suppliants are well, isn't it time to put them out?"

"Tomorrow they will be escorted from the city," the architect said. "Not before."

Reah nodded. She knew her limits better now. There was no use arguing.

Durragon called the captured cylinder before him and stood in front of it -- if it had a front -- holding a finger to his lip and sucking on its tip. "You acknowledge my control over you?"

"This unit has been lifted from any established chain of command. Since it is this unit's duty to serve in a hierarchy, your orders will not be ignored."

The cylinder's voice was scratchy and haggard, as if from long disuse or internal wear. Durragon didn't like the cylinder's answer. There was something defiant about it, no matter how faint the tinge.

"No more riddles. Speak clearly. If I control you, then I control all the captured parts of Tomoye?"

"Yes."

"Do I control you?"

A pause, then, "Yes."

"Good." He wished Ezeki was there. The Habiru could split verbal hairs far better than he. "Do you know how other cities are put together? Where their nerve centers are?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"That was not my function."

"Could you point them out to us if we took you inside?"

"Yes."

"Do they look like you?"

Silence. He repeated the question.

"There is much variety, depending on the city. Some do."

"De polis!" a Chaser shouted. Durragon turned and looked up. The higher reaches of the city were disassembling. It was preparing to move. He put his hand on the cylinder's smooth surface. "You'll help us infiltrate the city, won't you?" He wanted to sound more masterful, but the change had caught him by surprise.

The cylinder didn't answer.

* * * *

Reah watched the huge, spider-legged transports as they waited in the larger corridors and received rows of structural pieces. At other times, many of the transports served as bulkheads themselves, or as portions of buttresses and awesome support beams which crossed the entire city. Now the city was coming apart layer by layer, following a plan first put to use when they were erected a thousand years ago. Every part carried its own memory. Ancillary control units coordinated the motions. And throughout the city, the architect watched over everything.

She had played her part. In a few more hours the city would pour across the plain and through the hills, heading toward the old river bed and Akkabar.

She watched from a balcony overlooking one of the largest enclosed spaces within the city. A kilometer above the ground, the assembly hall spanned the central tower. Its floor was six hundred meters across. Light poured down from transepts windows where hall and tower joined. Stained transparencies shifted designs continually, automatically, turning the floor into a gigantic kaleidoscope, a garden of light-flowers which, by night, became a ghostly promenade for images from times long past. Reah had never found the nerve to walk across the assembly hall at night, for it was there that the city concentrated its dreams and recollections, resurrecting visions of men and women in simple, wonderful clothes, children running naked except for armbands and tiaras, strange animals conjured from the experiments of the city-builders.