Raising The Stones (68 page)

Shan heard this without a quiver. The interesting thing about the Hobbs Land Gods was that they did tell the settlers things and the things were always true. Not commands. Not beliefs. Just things. Like, it’s going to rain. Like, there’s a fire in the chemical stores. Like, that yellow cat just had five kittens, tell her how pleased you are. Like, somebody is hurt out behind the tread repair shop.

Now: the army of Enforcement is coming. Get out fast.

Shan went to help the men who were loading food, wondering only briefly if he had been swallowed yet.

•
On Authority, Lurilile
went on soft feet down endless metal aisles, listening for sounds she did not hear. Soft whish of air, rumble of liquids in pipes, clutter-clutter sound of fans, wink and beep of monitoring devices, dials quivering, light arrays flickering, all normal, all usual. Why no sounds from above?

She almost passed by the main environmental monitoring station. Inside the half-glassed door, banks of stages showed here, there, everywhere, with telltales beside them reading off temperature and humidity and parts per millions of pollutants. Pollutants off the scale. Temperatures above levels where humans could live. Fiery temperatures. Flames dancing on the screen among charred bones.

“Where?” she breathed.

The great library of the Religion Advisory, said the stage.

“A key for the last lock,” she said firmly.

No magic. The flames went on. Wherever the ear she needed to reach was, it was not here.

“Schematic of the supply area,” she commanded.

It swam onto the stage before her.

“Command module for Enforcement,” she ordered.

A quivering as the memory searched and did not find.

“Command override,” she said desperately.

Nothing.

“Find command override and give it this message,” she told Archives. “A key for the last lock. Implement.”

Again that searching quiver. Oh, Archives wanted to please, wanted to find whatever it was she was searching for, but it could not. No one had told it where the thing was. Or, it knew the thing under another name.

What other name?

“Where is the last lock?” she asked.

Nothing.

“Where does the key go?”

“What key?” asked the stage. “Define key.”

Lurilile sat for a moment more, gathering strength. Surely when they ran out of people to kill on the upper levels, they would come down here. Was there anywhere to hide? What were her chances of finding what she sought? Could she in good conscience go home, to Ahabar, to cry on her father’s shoulder?

What would Queen Wilhulmia do, in this situation?

After a time, she left the small room and began her search once more.

EIGHT

•
Shallow under the
soil, the radiating mounds had lain, dormant, as the people from Thyker had said, but they were dormant no longer. Urgent information had come to them and shocked them into burgeoning growth. As they pushed upward, the soil had grown shallower still, cracking above them, falling away from the emerging shapes beneath, revealing hard wooden structures which came straight from the ground like walls, echoing beneath curious knuckles like a knocked door.

Eleven radiating walls were all there were at first, eleven spokes from a central hub. When they had shed the soil from their tops, however, a groove formed and deepened along the top of each, splitting each wall into two, and then into two again. Forty-four radiating walls, a hundred feet long, moved slowly upward and apart, thickening and lengthening as they grew, thrusting upward at their centers, arching high into gigantic wickets, fifty feet high at the center, rising still higher as the ends flattened and joined into a solid outer wall and into a central ringwall, pierced by smaller arches. Here and there the outer wall puckered, dimpled, and opened to make a mansized hole into which children raced, shrieking, only to race out again, stunned at the strangeness of the open-topped, torus-shaped enclosures.

Inside, the floor scooped down and covered itself with an ornamental fiber, almost a mosaic of nappy carpet in colors of gray and cream and green and rose. Into the ringwall arches vinelike tendrils twined and knotted to make ornamental grills, hard, almost metallic barriers between the outer ring and the central space where the tower thrust skyward in visible movement, massive-walled, open-topped, the buttresses of the tough, interconnected arches holding it stiffly erect as it grew.

A flange extruded lengthwise on the top of each arch, grew tall and narrow, split in half lengthwise, spread to the sides like great leaves spreading beneath the sun, widened, overlapped, and then grew together to make a laminated roof, a continuous fabric, which wrinkled and ramified on its upper side, thickening itself with veins, roughening until it resembled thatch.

The settlers who had been among the first evacuees watched this process by lantern light, their interest mixed with moderate apprehension. Prudently, they moved a distance away from the emerging temple-shape and those others developing behind it. They asked one another if this resemblance to the stone and thatch temples in the settlements was coincidence or whether one, either one, was a pattern for the other. They cautioned the children, but they, moved by perversity as much as curiosity, ignored prudence and caution to go darting inside, to run shrieking around the central space then plunge out to report on the mosaiclike floors, the woven grills, the whatever-it-was in the middle.

At the bottom of the tower, they said, a mass was forming. A seething shape urgent with power, vibrating with force.

“Is it like in the temples?” they were asked. “Is the thing in the middle a God.”

“Maybe,” they said. “But a different kind. Like a storm cloud in the wind. All rolling around.” Other fliers came from the settlements, discharged their human and cat cargoes and ascended once more. From the air above the westernmost settlements, the soldiers of Enforcement could be seen far to the west, the newcomers said apprehensively, exchanging their apprehensions for wonder, and marveling with those who had come earlier when they saw the growths.

Together the settlers built campfires in the narrowing spaces among the great growths, and the chain of these fires threw fitful glares upward onto the curving walls growing into the night. There were others, cried the irrepressible children, rushing in from explorations. Other ones growing beyond the light, growing up to meet the stars. Others beyond the village. And others still beyond that. “Growing like mushrooms,” they cried. “Growing like asparagus.”

Saturday and Jep Wilm joined hands and went into the nearest of the weird growths, finding their way around the floor to the place the ringwall door would have been in a settlement temple. In this templelike space there was no door. There was a grill, one they could see through, but they could not get their hands through to the convoluted tubes and corrugated shapes that were growing there, could not find the source of the strange, chemical smell that permeated the space. Saturday knelt, craning her neck as she tried to look through the grill upward, to the place the enclosure ended. She could not see the top.

“I think it’s open up there. But it’s not saying anything,” she whispered to Jep.

He shook his head. “Nothing.”

“It’s not really like being in a temple. It’s more like being inside an engine. I feel movement all around. Like something running, very quietly.”

“What’s it doing, do you think?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s something for us, or something against those things.”

“The things from Enforcement?”

“Yes. Them.”

Outside once more, they stood staring at the tower outlined against the stars, faintly orange-flushed along its edges by the light of the circling fires. It might have been a huge smokestack, inclining slightly but unmistakably toward the south, supported around its circumference by the buttresses of the enclosing arches. It was even more like an enormous cannon, but Saturday and Jep had never seen cannon. With de-bonders available, no one needed cannon. Because of the vast difference in scale, they did not think of the launchers the settlers used to distribute trace minerals.

Fliers came and went. People unloaded hastily packed crates of food and bedding, then settled down in the midst of mystery, only to get up and wander nervously about once more, putting their hands on the wooden walls, knocking as though for admittance. Anyone who liked could have gone inside. Only the children did so, daring each other to enter again and again. After a time, even the children stopped their incursions, driven out by the strange, powerful smell.

A group from Settlement One had gathered beneath the trees halfway between the first-discovered mounds and the Departed village. Sal Girat was there, with Africa and China Wilm, and Theor Close, who had brought the word from Sam. Vastly pregnant, China crouched among her friends and kinfolk, weeping over Sam.

“Gone off like that,” she cried. “Sacrificing himself! For what?”

“Nonsense,” said Sal. “That’s not what he’s doing at all. Sacrifice isn’t necessary. You know that.” The words had come out automatically, without thought, but she stopped with her mouth still open, stricken with a moment of total recall, a visionary episode so vivid it was as though she lived it rather than merely remembering it. She was seeking an Old One, one of the Departed, crouched against the wall in a tiny, circular house. Sal was so close she could smell his earthy, slightly acrid smell. A linguist was crouched beside the Old One and had just asked, “Is sacrifice necessary?”

“Necessary?” scratched the Old One with horny tentacles. “Necessary to what? Is life necessary? No, sacrifice is not necessary. It is a way. A convenience. A kindness.”

Sal shut her mouth, which was suddenly dry. “Sam wouldn’t do anything foolish,” she said. “He isn’t a foolish man.”

China stared at the firelit towers and asked herself if that were true. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t he a foolish man? Wanting that one perfect thing, whatever it was. The absolute. The marvelous. Playing about in helmet and sandals. Pretending to be all those ancient warriors. What was he doing now? What was he questing for?

She put her face into her hands and went on weeping, feeling the first stirring of birth, the first uncontrollable surges of her own body taking charge of things. “The baby’s coming,” she gasped to Africa. “Sam’s baby. Right now.”

Africa frowned at her choice of words. The baby could not be called Sam’s baby, not in any well-managed society, but Africa did not take time to argue. Instead, she moved swiftly and efficiently to attend to matters, sending someone in search of a medical tech while she herself considered what she might use for a tent to make a private space around them.

Sal held China’s hand, wondering bleakly if this birth might be a trade-off, a life for a life.

•
On the plains
below, some distance to the west, Sam walked toward the line of soldiers, where the prophets were, where his father would be found.

“Phaed,” Sam sang, not melodiously, rather a keening hum, a way of keeping his goal in the forefront of his mind. “Phaed,” whom he was being allowed to meet once more, in order that all things should be resolved between them. Phaed: wife-murderer, woman-killer, culprit of the Cause, one of the Faithful, faithful indeed, to the most ancient and bloody of all religions. Me-worship. My sex-worship. My tribe-worship. My kind-worship. Vowing rage and destruction against all else.

“Phaed.” Dream-dad, fable-father, king and hero, lost somewhere in Sam’s childhood and never found again. Was it a voice he remembered, from before he was six, a whispering voice telling tales before the fire while ochre light gleamed on the eyeballs to show that sly knowingness, that virile intelligence, which meant a more-than-human creature hunched beside the fire, lord-fox, king-wolf, great-bear. Prowler in the dark. Inhabiter of dreams. Troll-papa.

Did he come with a mask, father-player, full of false jollity, mirth made manifest, mockery falling from his lips like apples into Sam’s lap? Tell me, Dad. Tell me the story of when you murdered Maechy. Tell me about those times you worshipped your god with blood, those times you killed, mutilated, raped, tore.

“Phaed.”

Was it a face he remembered? Was there a face there, anywhere? Eyes with a certain look of pride at a son’s first words, first steps, a son’s finger on the trigger of his first weapon. Was it weapons he remembered? Only in play, the finger pointing, stick pointing, noise of rat-a-tat, immemorial childplay at killing. Maybe it was that sound he thought of, Phaed’s sound, in the night, rat-a-tat, killing something.

Was it a smell he longed for? The smell of semen and smoke, the smell of whiskey and sweat, the sour, oldsoapless smell of men who spent too much time together in closed rooms, socks and shoes full of that smell, trousers stiff with it, so old it wasn’t merely smell anymore but more a miasma, rising ectoplasmic, a living presence, melting on the tongue like a thick syrup of old cheese.

Was it that licked-up smell? Sickening and yet strong, strong as stones.

Was it a touch? Could he even remember a touch? A stroke, a pat, a hug. Blows aplenty, shoves, a closed fist knocking his thin, boy’s shoulder, a hard hand aimed in a butt-swat, a knuckle knocking the skull door open, boring into a cheek like an auger, painful as truth.

None of the above. Not smell, sight, sound, taste, touch. What, then? What memory of him pervaded, haunted, kept Sam wondering after all this time?

“Phaed?”

Sam had to know. Sam had to know him again, ask him, perhaps, look at him with these new eyes to see beyond the old veils. Only when he had finished with this could he go on, on—to whatever. To a future if there was a future. To an end if there was to be an end.

Before either, Sam had to find him, there, somewhere, behind the clanking, monstrousness of the soldiers, filing endlessly past.

“What are the acceptable names of God?”

“Almighty, All Knowing, All Wise.”