He turned back, looking at the girl, answering her.
"When it all fell apart, shortly before City Earth was built, there was an age of great excess—of individual expression unmatched in the history of our species. The architects of City Earth—Tsao Ch'un, his Ministers, and their servants— identified the symptom as the cause. They saw the excesses and the extravagance, the beauty and the expression as cultural viruses and sought to destroy them. But there was too much to destroy. They would have found it easier to destroy the species. It was too deeply ingrained. Instead, they tried to mask it—to bury it beneath new forms. City Earth was to be a place where no one wanted for anything. Where everything the physical self could need would be provided for. It was to be Utopia—the world beyond Peach Blossom River."
She frowned at him, not recognizing the term, but he seemed almost unaware of her now. Slowly he led her on through the labyrinth of streets, the doubled lights, like sun and moon, reflected in the ceiling high above.
"But the City was a cage. It catered only to the grounded, physical being. It did not cater to the higher soul—the winged soul that wants to fly."
She laughed, surprised by him. But of course one caged birds. Who had ever heard of a bird flying free?
The walls closed about them on either side. They were walking now through a narrow back alley, the guide only paces in front of them, his lamp filling the darkness with its strong white light. For a moment it almost seemed they were walking in the City.
Unless you looked up. Unless you stopped and listened to the silence; sensing the darkness all around.
Ben had been silent, looking away. Now he turned, looking back at her.
"It was to be a landscape devoid of all meaning. A landscape of unrelated form."
He had paused and she had been obliged to stop with him. But all she wanted now was to get out, for all the strange beauty of this place. She felt uncomfortable here. Afraid, and vulnerable.
"We are creatures of the earth, Catherine," he said, his eyes sharing something of the darkness beyond the lamp's fierce circle. "Creatures of the earth and yet. . ." he hesitated, as if in pain, "and yet we want to fly. Don't you find that strange?"
She looked past him, at the old brickwork, itself a geometric pattern. "I don't know," she said. "Perhaps we were always looking to create something like the City. Perhaps it's only the perfection of something we always had in us."
He looked at her fiercely, shaking his head in denial. "No! It's death, that's what it is! Death!"
He shuddered. She felt it through her hand. A shudder of revulsion. She hadn't understood before, but now she saw. Why he had isolated himself. Why he always seemed so hostile.
"You talk as if you're not from the City," she said. "As if. . ." But she left her question unasked. He would tell her if he wanted to.
"We keep the names," he said, "but they mean nothing anymore. They're cut off. Like most of us, they're cut off."
"But not you," she said after a moment.
He laughed but said nothing. It irritated her for once, that enigmatic side of him. She freed her hand from his and walked on. He followed, the light from his lamp throwing faint shadows off to one side.
She was angry. Hurt that he made no concessions to her. As if she meant nothing to him.
She stopped, then turned to face him.
He stood there, the lamp held high, the light throwing his face into strange lines, the shadows making it seem wrong—a face half in brightness, half in dark.
"Shall we go on?" he asked. But she could make out no expression on his face. His features were a rigid mask of shadow and light.
"I hate it here."
He turned, looking about him once again, the light wavering with the movement, throwing ghostly shards of brilliance against the windows of the buildings to either side. Dead, black eyes of glass, reflecting nothing.
She reached out and touched his arm. "Let's go back, Ben. Please. Back to Oxford."
He smiled bitterly, then nodded. Back to Oxford then. The name meant nothing to her, after all. But it was where they had been these last two hours. A place, unlike the bright unreality that had been built over it. A real place. For all its darkness.
IN HER DREAM she saw herself, walking beside him, the lamp held up above their heads, the shadowed, ancient town surrounding them, the floor of the City lost in the darkness overhead.
She saw the labyrinth again, saw its dark and secret rivers, the Isis and the Cherwell, flow silently, like blood in the veins of the earth. His words. His image for them. In her dream she stood there with him on the old stone bridge, her flesh connected to his at the palm. And when he lifted his lamp the water shone. Wine red, it shone; the water black as ink beneath the surface.
She woke, feeling hot, feverish, and switched on the bedside lamp. It was four in the morning. She sat up, rubbing her palms together, looking at them in amazement and relief. It had been so real. She had felt where her flesh sank into his and shared a pulse, seen the wine-dark flow where it passed beneath the stone arch of the bridge . . .
So real that waking seemed a step down.
For a while she sat there, shivering, not from cold but from a surreal sense of her other self. Of her sleeping, dreaming self who, like the figure in the dream, walked on in darkness, understanding nothing.
She closed her eyes, trying to recapture it, but the image was fading fast, the feeling of it slipping from her. Then the pulse of it faltered, died.
She got up, and went across to the canvas, then sat on the stool in front of it, the seat cold against her naked buttocks, her toes curled about the rounded bar. Her body was curved, lithe, like a cat's, while her fine, flamelike hair fell straight, fanning halfway down her back, her flesh like ivory between its livid strands.
She stared at the painting, studying it minutely.
It was dark. Reds and greens dominated the visual textures, sharply contrasted, framed in shapes of black that bled from the edge of the painting. Harsh, angular shapes, the paint laid thick on the canvas, ridged and shadowed like a landscape.
His face stared out at her, flecks of red and green like broken glass forming his flesh, the green of his eyes so intense it seemed to flare and set all else in darkness.
She had shown him seated in her chair, his shoulders slightly forward, his arms tensed, as if he were in the act of rising. His long, spatulate fingers gripped the arms firmly, almost lovingly.
There was a hard-edged abstract quality to the composition that none of her friends would have recognized as hers, yet something softer showed through, a secondary presence that began to dominate once that first strong sense of angularity and darkness diminished.
The painting lived. She smiled, knowing that in this she had transcended herself. It was a breakthrough. A new kind of art. Not the mimicry she had long accepted as her art, but a new thing, different in kind from anything she had ever done before.
Behind the firmness of the forms there was an aura. A light behind the darkness. A tenderness behind those harsh, sharp-sculpted shapes. His dark, fragmented face grew softer the more she looked, the eyes less fierce, more gentle.
She reached out with one hand to touch the bottom surface, her fingers following the line of whiteness where the figure faded into darkness. Below that line what at first seemed merely dark took on new forms, new textures—subtle variations of gray and black.
Buildings. Strange, architectural forms. Ghost images she had seen as real. All crowded there; trapped, pressed down beneath the thinnest line of white. Like a scar on the dark flesh of the canvas.
She tilted her head, squinting at the figure. It was stiff, almost lifeless in the chair, and yet there was the suggestion of pure force, of an intense, almost frightening vitality. A doubleness, there in everything: something she had not been aware of until he had shown it to her.