Until that morning… That morning, the city discovers a neighborhood unknown to it, a slum, an impossible place, the city feels, impossible the city knows, but the city sees it nonetheless, does the city. The city investigates, grows sensors, stirs into every corner, does the city, every corner of this new place, unheard of place, stirs and stirs, does the city, finds rooms unfit for habitation, ugly rooms, not rooms of beauty, finds the city. The city finds streets that twist unnecessarily, grow too wide here, too narrow there, here with too high a ceiling, there with a ceiling too low… All this finds the city, sees the city, mourns the city, fears the city, and even more than this, even more… The city finds rooms where the walls are not smooth and pleasant, but knotted, gnarled, pimpled, pocked and mottled, finds the city all of this, and even more, even more.
The visual images that corresponded to the narrative were quite unsettling: ugly, misshapen rooms with queer things growing from the walls; in several instances, decomposing corpses and skeletons of human beings tangled up in the thick black branches and caved-in sacs of puslike material.
The city finds the dead, its people, all its dead people, killed in and by its rooms, its bad rooms, ugly rooms, rooms it never made or does not remember making, even though the city remembers, always remembers, knows and holds dear every memory of every generation of its peoples, loving peoples.
Days pass, and the city finds two more neighborhoods, places of decay, finds the city, sees the city, evil places, unknown places, dead or dying places, and the city panics, feels fear does the city, begins an inspection of its body, does the city, searching, fearful, finding trouble, does the city.
The city is equipped to dissect, to analyze, and the city does, cuts open its own sores, does the city, worried city, seeking answers, finding answers, terrified of predestined ends, is the city. Cancer grows in the city, explodes in random cells, in the city, sick city, rotting city, city all alone on a world it never made, wishing for the old world, its home world, city wishes, wish and wish, does the city, unable to fight the creeping sickness, city wishing, slowly dies.
Dies within it, all its peoples, cancer spreading like a fire, only days until its fingers lie hidden in every neighborhood. Cancer growing, faster, faster, sealing windows, closing doors, crushing rooms and smashing corridors, shifting, changing, eating the city, vomiting death to all its peoples, faster and faster, like a fire…
The visual impressions that flooded over the espers were vivid enough to make the narrative many times more terrifying than it might otherwise have been. The five seated on the rocking deck of the Hadaspuri Maiden not only saw the holocaust, but seemed abruptly thrust into the very middle of it, as if they stood amid the crumbling walls, shrinking corridors and hideous cancerous explosion of growth…
The city dying, sees its peoples dying, knows they trusted it, loved and lived and trusted it, knows it cannot let them perish as generations passed before. The city dying, knows these people, city's people every one, are the last that it will nourish, knows that if it loses these, it will be alone forever, past the ends of endless time and then some, without love and no more to cherish, lonely, lonely, aching city, city aching, wishing doom.
The city's brain is unaffected, unreined to its failing flesh, brain of city, all detachable, immortal even with no home. The city schemes to save some peoples, not their bodies, but their minds, schemes and thinks and sees to do, how to do it, save them all. In its brain, cells go unused, once the center of regulation, but no more body to control, could be used, the city figures, could be used to house other souls, souls of peoples, minds no longer fettered by the earthly flesh. Holding fast to its rotted body, the city brain seeks out its peoples, seeks their auras, mental nimbus, seeks, secures and saves them all, holds and cherishes, contains them, all its lovely, loving children, given new homes in its brain…
Then, in moments, the deed is done, city and peoples all are one, all flesh gone but minds remain, in the city's living brain. But a strange, unsettling feeling, courses through the city's brain, beats and pounds, calls out in anguish, like a beast refusing chains. Panic is the rush of souls, meeting hence from different poles, born of different worlds and finding, love and living not withstanding, that they have no common ground, city and peoples all fall down, all fall down, all fall down, down, down, down and down, city and peoples all fall down…
The last image of the invisible creature's projections was of a huge, convoluted brain, lying in a dark cavern, nestled in gossamer webs, pulsing with life but lacking any body to encase it.
The image flickered.
Was gone.
Slowly the five espers regained awareness of the real world…
Then the creature that has been plaguing us, Chaney said, is the living city itself — or at least the brain of the city that survived the body's death.
More than that, Melopina expanded. It's also the consciousness of a goodly portion of the millions of people who died in the city's collapse.
All of them mad, Tedesco 'pathed.
But why did they go insane? Kiera asked. I didn't fully understand that part of it.
The city made the mistake of thinking that since it had lived with people, contained them for centuries, it fully understood them. But it was apparently from another world — perhaps brought to Earth as a seed by our early space travelers — and it could not hope to understand the human mind. When it meshed with them, it drove them mad and pushed itself over the brink.
Melopina added to Tedesco's explanation. And since the brain is evidently immortal, it has trapped them in that state forever.
Kiera shuddered. Perhaps we should return to the craters, find the thing and destroy it.
Tedesco: I don't think so. I don't believe it wants to die.
Kiera: But what does it have to live for?
Tedesco: It has its compulsion.
Come again?
Tedesco: The city's behavior pattern reminds me of an ancient poem that survived the Last War. It was called “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner'' and concerned an old sailor who spent his life repeating the story of a disaster at sea, compelled to repeat it as a form of penitence for his own complicity in that disaster. The city is a modern mariner.
I believe you're right, Jask 'pathed. I don't sense its presence any longer. I believe we're free of our unseen companion.
It's interesting to think about the power of its esp projections, Melopina said. It managed to follow us, psychically, for hundreds of kilometers, apparently without strain.
I'm glad we encountered it, Tedesco 'pathed.
Glad to lose all that sleep? — Chaney.
The living city taught us a valuable lesson, Tedesco 'pathed.
Then I'm a poor student — Chaney.
Tedesco: It taught us that it is fine to mesh minds as closely as the five of us have — as long as the parts of a gestalt are all of the same species. Such close contact between beings evolved on other worlds, under other circumstances, can bring madness. When and if we meet the Black Presence, we must be careful to hold our telepathic probing to minimal levels.
Then, leaving the Maiden at rest in the middle of the Hadaspuri Sea, they all slept soundly for the first time in days.
29
The Maiden crossed the Hadaspuri Sea without need of sails and put to shore twenty kilometers west of the isolated town of Langorra, which lay in the shadow of the Jinyi Fortress. The five espers hiked west and north, into the great pine forests, until they came to the village of Hoskins' Watch. Here they bartered for winter clothes to outfit Jask and Melopina against the rigors of snow and ice, which they would soon have to endure; Tedesco, Chaney and Kiera were comfortable enough in their own skins. They also obtained five sets of snowshoes for use in the high country, and spent a few minutes admiring the great statue of Hoskins, which stood at the edge of the town, peering down the rugged Lancerian Valley, an inscrutable expression on the stone face. They left town without incident, following the rising land, the leaden sky, and the sentinel pines that sheltered them from the worst of the north wind.