He picked his way through the rubble, the rasa at his side like a flickering crimson shadow. Every few minutes the ground beneath them shuddered, and once where Nasrani’s foot had been a moment before a fissure tore the earth apart with a noise like rending cloth. Nasrani shouted and nearly fell; but the rasa caught him, and then he was running the last few yards to collapse within the ruined doorway.
“My keys—I forgot the keys,” he gasped after a moment. The stone and metalwork felt wet beneath his fingers. His trousers were soaked. Warm water streamed from a crack above his head, spilling onto the ground and running off into the rift spreading slowly across the earth. Tast’annin stood above him and shook his head.
“We won’t need them. This is the entrance?”
At Nasrani’s nod he raised his arms and took hold of the broken edges of a lintel. The door crashed inward. Silence, broken only by the gurgle of water.
“Where is she?” The Aviator’s harsh voice hung in the empty air. Nasrani got to his feet and followed him into the room, shaking his head in disbelief.
At one end of the room the ceiling had caved in. Beneath twisted spars of steel and piles of plaster he saw Maximillian Ur’s cabinet, smashed into a heap of wood and glass. A few feet away the replicant’s bladed arm twitched rhythmically, its fingers curling and uncurling around a shard of metal.
“No,” Nasrani whispered. “My children—no—”
Slowly he circled the room, the ruined cabinets and crumpled banners adrift in pools of black water. In one corner the shattered body of the Anodyne Physician sat upright, her head askew, one side of her torso crushed so that her ruined circuitry glittered coldly, a frozen explosion of glass and wire. “No known remedy,” her clear voice repeated over and over. “No known remedy, no known remedy…”
Weeping, Nasrani stooped over her, yanked a golden filament. The Physician’s head rolled into her lap and she was silent.
“All my children?” he murmured, and turned to where a girder had fallen and covered Moghrebi’s gilded case. His voice rose to a shriek. “ All? ”
In the middle of the room a pile of wreckage hid where the Titanium Children had slept, where Apulieus had laughed and the Mechanical Baboon chattered with her brazen cubs. There was nothing left. Only, pinned beneath a corroded metal beam, something stirred and moaned piteously.
“Yes?” Nasrani cried, hurrying to kneel beside it, but then drew back. “Aaah—the miserable thing!” he spat.
It was a rasa, or had been—its arm had been sheared from its body and lay beside its shoulder. There was no blood, only a watery ammoniac fluid. The creature murmured to itself. It could not lift its pale head, only twist to gaze at Nasrani with one bleary eye. The man grimaced and turned away. The other eye bulged from its socket, black and swollen as a grape. It stank of ammonia.
“Mother,” it whispered. “Mother, please—”
Nasrani looked back down. “Mother? The nemosyne—is she here? Did she escape?”
The rasa moved its head feebly. “Mother is gone—the once-born took her, gone, gone. Please…”
Nasrani stood and wiped his hands in disgust. The thing mewled, trying to move. The rasa crossed the room, pushing Nasrani away, and knelt beside it.
“Which way?” he asked. His voice was almost gentle.
The rasa stared at him, then whispered, “There is another door—a tunnel—”
Tast’annin glanced over his shoulder, turned back to the creature silent now, twisting feebly beneath the weight of the twisted beam. He stretched out his metal hand until it covered the rasa’s face, then with a quick motion snapped its head back, severing the spine. The rasa twitched and was still. Nasrani made a hoarse sound and looked away. The Aviator stood, gazing down at the wretched corpse.
“It said she escaped. It said she went into the tunnel,” he said at last.
Nasrani stared at him dumbly, shaking his head. His face was streaked with tears. “All of them,” he said again.
“No.” The rasa shook his shoulder and pointed. “There is an opening. A tunnel, it said.”
“But she couldn’t—how could she? She has never moved, she never woke for me—”
Tast’annin pulled him through the wreckage.
“Then she has awakened for someone else,” he said, and ducking beneath a broken column he entered the passage.
It happened almost before Hobi realized it. His ears popped; one of the rasas swiveled its head to stare at the ceiling. Nefertity continued to recite in her clear child’s voice the story she had begun many hours before—
“ ‘… Were you ever happy, when you were a man, since you left the womb, unless you were trying to get back into it?’ and she gave me a virgin’s look of disdain.
“ ‘Will I be happy now I am a woman?’ I demanded.
“ ‘Oh, no!’ she said and laughed. ‘Of course not! Not until we all live in a happy world!’ ”
Hobi yawned, as much because his ears ached as because of boredom. The nemosyne had been reciting from her memory ’files, stories and poems she chose seemingly at random. This was how she had enthralled the fallen rasas, those poor creatures starved for any kind of companionship, even the chilly voice of a nemosyne chanting oddments of useless data.
At first he had thought he could listen to Nefertity speak forever. Now he knew that even wonderful things—maybe especially wonderful things—are best enjoyed in small doses. All around him the rasas sat in perfect silence, unmoving, their glowing eyes fixed on the shining figure in front of them. Hobi scratched his nose, thinking that perhaps he might take a walk, just across the room of course. He had just started to his feet, his legs prickling from having been still for so long, when suddenly the floor tilted beneath him.
“Wha—” the boy cried, and was knocked to his knees. There was a horrible crashing noise, hollow hooting cries from the rasas. The candles went flying; burning wax spattered his face and then it was dark, except for Nefertity’s cool blue glow.
“Mother—” someone whispered, and said no more.
“Perhaps I will continue this later,” Nefertity pronounced softly. But Hobi could no longer see her. Something heavy struck his head, knocking him to the floor. For a moment he thought he had been blinded.
“Nefertity,” he choked. His arm hurt when he raised it, but he could raise it, and now when he moved his head he could see, too.
The ceiling had fallen in upon the room. The replicants in their cabinets, the rasas who had been listening to Nefertity: all were buried beneath twisted beams and plasterboard and heaps of rubbish that seemed to smoke, but that was just the dust and plaster. A few feet away he saw the rasa that had brought him here, pinned beneath a girder. Across the room the Anodyne Physician’s case had been shattered and she was speaking solemnly to herself.
“Oh, my god,” Hobi whispered. He stumbled to his feet, biting his lip against the pain, and tried to get his balance without touching anything. He was afraid that if he breathed too deeply the whole room would disintegrate around him. The ceiling was completely gone. Where it had been were only the exposed guts of the ancient building, a horrible mass of wires and steel beams and metal joists, writhing and rippling as though made of windblown silk. “He did it, he really did it….”
“Who did it?”
Hobi turned to see Nefertity, standing calmly amid the ruins like a shining beacon of glass. On the floor beside her two rasas lay side by side, faces white as plaster save where greenish fluid trickled from one’s mouth, giving her a grotesque harlequin’s smile.