Ebert stared at the planet below him, shaking his head. The great shapes of white that had once covered every continent had now diminished to a patchwork. In some places—in the Southern continents particularly—it was gone entirely. Only in Europe was the City still dominant, but there, too, it was split—a great jagged line, like a crack in the surface of a frozen pond, running from west to east.
"I didn't realize," Ebert said. "There has been war, neh?"
"War was the least of it," Tuan Ti Fo answered, placing images on the screen before them. "War is but the prelude to disaster. After War there is Pestilence and Starvation, and always, always there's the darkness."
"The darkness?" It was Aluko Echewa who spoke. All about him the young Osu murmured, their discomfort evident. They had never been off Mars until three months back. Now they were to start a new life on the planet below, alone, cut off from their loved ones, preparing the way for others of their kind.
"The darkness within," Tuan answered. "Hatred and fear and evil." Dogo, the strongest and biggest of the young Osu, laughed. "Father Aluko thought you meant us, Master Tuan. With us the darkness is visible, no?"
There was general laughter at that. Eight dark faces grinned, showing pearled teeth like polished stones. But Ebert seemed distracted.
"What is it, Efulefu?" Echewa asked, laying a dark hand on his shoulder. "Why the long face?"
"What happened here"—he looked up at them, real pain in his eyes—"I was much to blame for it. The things I did . . ."
He turned, looking back at the scenes of horror that continued to fill the screen.
"Where should we go, Master Tuan?" he asked. "What does your friend the Machine suggest?"
"We shall go south," Tuan answered. "We shall—"
There was a sharp buzz of noise and then a rapid clicking. |
"What is it?" Echewa asked, leaning forward, suddenly anxious.
"I don't know, I—"
"Leave the cabin," Tuan Ti Fo said faintly, his voice barely audible above the static. "Now, before—"
Ebert was facing the screen as it lit up. The others were more fortunate: they had turned away, making to obey Tuan's voice.
The light from the screen was fierce, like the light from the heart of a sun. It flooded the cabin, seeming to scour every pore, every cell, of their bodies. The Osu were screaming, the pain in their heads—in their eyes—like nothing they'd ever experienced. But their blindness would prove temporary. For Ebert it was different. Ebert had taken the full force of the light. He sat there in the chair, groaning, his face blistered and steaming, his eyes burned from their sockets.
The light faded, the clicking stopped. Echewa, on his knees in the doorway, turned blindly.
"Efulefu? Are you all right?"
Ebert groaned again.
"What . . . what happened?" Echewa asked, beating down his fear.
"What was that?"
"It was a light mine," Tuan Ti Fo answered. "Our presence in its air space seems to have triggered it."
"But I thought ..."
Echewa fell silent. He had thought Tuan's "Machine" would have anticipated such a danger and dealt with it. He'd thought . . .
He swallowed bitterly. "Efulefu?"
"It's okay," Ebert said weakly. Then, strangely, he laughed.
"Efulefu? Are you all right?"
"I'm blind," Ebert said, then laughed again. "I'm . . . blind."
Echewa struggled to his feet, then turned, trying to see, but his eyes were still too painful. All was a blur; a blur of pain and confusion.
"But Efulefu . . . why are you laughing?"
"Blind . . . the Walker in the Darkness, blind. . . ." Again he laughed. Then, just as unexpectedly, he moaned. "Gods . . ." he said quietly. "All those things I did. All those people I hurt. All that darkness . . ."
"Is past now," Tuan Ti Fo said, his voice warm and reassuring in the air surrounding them. "Now sit quietly, Tsou Tsai Hei. The Machine will see you down."
PART 2 SPRING 2218
The King under the City
Here not even the stars can spy us, Not even the moths can alight On our mystery; nought can descry us Nor put us to flight.
Put trust then now in the black-boughed tree, Lie down, and open to me The inner dark of the mystery, Be, penetrate, like the tree.
—D. H. lawrence, The Yew Tree on the Downs
I go new ways, a new speech has come to me; like all creators, I have grown weary of the old tongues.
—FRIEDRICH NIETZSCHE, "The Child with the Mirror," from Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1883
CHAPTER TWELVE
Clay
SEEN FROM AFAR the City was a glacier, its featureless white cliffs thrusting out into the sea, following the contours of the coast. Thorn stood at the prow, one hand shielding his eyes, the other gripping the roof of the steering hut as the boat rose and fell. There was the steady slap and slosh of water against the wooden sides of the boat; a regular vibration in the wood beneath his hand as the engine chugged noisily.
Thorn looked to his side, studying the boatman. He was a squat, broad-shouldered man in his middle years, his neck and arms well muscled. He stared ahead, his rough hands gripping the wheel tightly. His wind-carved, ruddy face was handsome in a primitive way, typical of the men who worked this coast. His hair was short and tightly curled, sea bleached almost to whiteness. Like most of his kind he was reticent with strangers. He had uttered barely a dozen words to Thorn since they had set out from St. Mary's earlier that morning.
Thorn looked away, enjoying the bite of the wind against his face. Ahead the land seemed to grow by the moment, the vast walls of pearled whiteness soaring into the cloudless blue. A rock slid by to his left, like the dark back of an animal. He turned to see it swallowed by the swell.
Slowly the boat came around, its rolling motion exaggerated as it began to run parallel to the coastline. For a while they maintained this course, then the boatman swung the wheel sharply to the right, turning the boat inland once more.
Ahead an arm of rock jutted from beneath the massive walls, dwarfed by them but still huge. The port lay to the far side of the rock, in the bay beyond. A hundred ch'i ahead the sunlit surface of the sea ended in a sharply defined line. Beyond was darkness. Slowly they approached that line. Fifty ch'i. Twenty. Then, suddenly, they were beneath the City's walls, in a still, cavernous place of intense shadow. The wind dropped. The sound of their engine came back to them across the dark water. Thorn turned and saw the boatman glance up at the overtowering walls, then look away with a shudder.
He looked down—the water a glaucous black, like the swollen pupil of a giant eye—and had a sudden sense of its depth beneath the hull.
Up ahead, waves were breaking against the stone, then washing against the shore beneath the wall, all force spent. Closer and closer they came, the sunlight up ahead. Great slabs of rock thrust up out of the sea, jagged and irregular. They passed within a boat's width of them, rounding the headland, then came out into the sunlight again, but it was no warmer. If anything, the wind blew fiercer here, churning the water into spray and making the boat rock steeply, its prow smacking into each wave as its engine revved, fighting the current, drawing closer to the land.
THE HARBOR WAS CALM in the brief afternoon sunlight. Five small craft were secured against the far wall. Once there would have been more. Many more. The cobbles of the jetty were loose, several missing. Empty fishing baskets were stacked against a low wall next to coils of old bleached ropes. Thorn looked about him, noticing how the paintwork on the boats was worn, likewise the tires that were hung as buffers over their sides. Relics, he thought. From a simpler age.
He looked up. Steep streets of old stone houses ended in the blind, unfeatured whiteness of the City. What remained of the tiny fishing port rested in an angle between two of the vast external walls which rose two li into the air on either side of the harbor. Only for these brief afternoon hours was the village free of its oppressive shadow.