He took Hanson’s arm, led him across the room.
Wobbly, Hanson allowed himself to be led. “How did you find me?” he asked. “How did you know I—?” He stopped, unable to finish the sentence.
“I am a function.”
“Oh.” The cat-women paced him, musky-smelling and avid-faced. Growling their lust. Ignoring them as best he could, Hanson asked, “Why? Why would anybody want—” He swept out an arm to encompass them all. “—this?”
“You have been a long time away indeed,” Cicero said, “to have forgotten the need for such entertainments.”
They stepped on the plate—
—a grove of slim buildings so tall that the rivers of water falling from their fluted tops dissolved into rainbows and mist long before they could reach the ground.
—a stone cathedral floating within a sad brown sunset, which stared at him with a hundred human eyes.
—a twilight plane where armies of metal giants fought with axes and clubs, while small and tireless servitor machines retrieved the scrap and climbed their sides to rebuild the damaged parts.
—a small room smelling of chickens and new-mown hay, where blue flames flickered over revolving bowls of mercury.
—a tangle of snakes that raised agonized heads as large as houses against a steel-plate sky.
—an incandescent mushroom cloud, strangely still and unchanging, like a snapshot of some catastrophic explosion, a frozen instant of horrified time.
The light and heat from this last were excruciating. Hanson threw a hand over his watering eyes, his stinging face, and cried, “Where are we going?”
“Why, wherever you want,” Cicero said. “We have been traveling at random, while I awaited your directions.”
“Then take me home.”
Cicero smiled encouragingly. “And where is that?”
It was as if one of the cat-women had arisen out of nowhere to present him with a riddle encompassing the purpose and end of human life. Hanson’s mind was blank; for a long moment he could think of no possible destination to offer in response. Then, “Boone,” he said finally. “Take me back to Boone.”
There was a light dusting of yellow pollen on the balcony, and a springlike coolness to the air. Cicero gestured Hanson through a doorway and into an unfamiliar room. The walls were lined with dark wood paneling and shelves of leather-bound books. Squares and scrolls hung unsupported in the air, a dozen or more, some bright with moving images, others filled with cryptic text. Boone looked up from a writing desk, and, with a wild cry, stood. Papers scattered from him like birds. He ran through the squares and scrolls as if they did not exist, and hugged Hanson with all his strength.
“Aw, now,” Hanson muttered in confusion. “C’mon, now.” Embarrassed, he patted the man’s back once, twice, feather-light and reluctant touches.
Boone stepped back, smiling through his tears. “Where the hell have you been? I stayed here, made this my camp, hoping against hope that you’d—well, that hardly matters. You’re back now, that’s all that matters. Only—where have you been?”
“I was—” Hanson spread his hands and looked down into them helplessly as if they might contain an answer that was nowhere else to be found. He did not know where he had been. “I think I found some post-Utopians.” Boone started and shot him an odd look. “They were… strange. Like cats.”
“Those were not citizens,” Cicero corrected gently. “They were a function. Like me.”
“Oh, shut up.” Boone wiped away his tears and put his hands on his hips. He glared up at Hanson, who, abruptly and with an odd sense of dislocation, realized that he had somehow acquired a mustache and a trim little goatee. “I suppose you think that was funny? I suppose you think you can just follow whatever damn-fool notion enters your head? Well, I have news for you. From this moment on, you’re not going anywhere without my express permission. You got that? I don’t want you going to the shithouse to jerk off without telling me first.”
Hanson flushed. His muscles bunched and knotted under the lash of Boone’s words. He felt that all-too-familiar burning sensation at the back of his throat, the bitter fire of resentment forcibly suppressed. He could crush the little man in his bare hands, if he wanted to, and you’d think that Boone would by God respect that, would at least grant him the elementary caution one gave a manshogger or factory machine with a known history of mangling its operators. It griped him that he did not.
But he needed Boone, and they both knew it. The City of God was comprehensible to Boone in ways it was not to Hanson; he needed the little man’s direction and guidance. Ducking his head, he felt the old habits of submission, of obedience, of silence, the reflexive knuckling under to the loudest voice, come over him like an old, heavy, and detested coat. “It was only a little while.”
“A little while! Eight months you were gone, and you call it—” Boone’s voice rose sarcastically “—a little while?”
Hanson lifted his hands, palms up, baffled. “Eight months? But—” Boone silenced him with a look. And though he was trying to hide it, there was less anger than fear in that look: fear and loneliness. Eight months Boone had spent by himself, without human company, enduring an isolation that would be a burden for even the strongest man, and would break or even kill the weak; the gods alone knew what he’d been through, or how he had withstood it.
For long minutes, Boone simply stared at him, as if afraid he was about to turn away and stalk off once more. Then, stooping, he began to gather up his papers. “These are my notes,” he said. “Oh, nothing formal, you understand. Just jottings, really. I spent the winter researching the City’s records. If you want to call them that. There’s enough information available here to drown in, but none of it’s organized at all usefully, nothing is presented in any kind of—well, never mind.” He passed a hand over his eyes, wiping them clean of tears.
“You’ve moved,” Hanson said.
“Eh? What? Nothing of the sort!”
“The room I saw before had pillars. And windows…”
Boone made a dismissive gesture. “Bah! It takes nothing to reconfigure a room. You have no idea the kind of wealth that’s fallen into our hands. And power—power unimaginable in our old lives!” Papers gathered, he stood behind his desk, tamping them into a neat stack, and, with that simple gesture, regained all of his lost authority. “But this must be bewildering to you. How to explain? Where to begin?”
He thought for a moment.
“I was wrong,” Boone said. “Remember when I told you the post-Utopians were people like you and I? I was wrong. I’ve opened windows into their lives and… they were different. Different in ways that made them not even remotely human. I think they destroyed themselves, but I’m not sure.”
“Destroyed themselves? You mean, like—suicide?”
“Possible—barely. Burned themselves out, more likely. Transfigured themselves, perhaps. Indications go both ways. Let me replay for you a conversation you have doubtless long forgotten.” With a wave of his hand, Boone swept the squares and scrolls to either side, leaving one, bright as a window, hanging in the center of the room. Through it, Hanson saw the balcony outside and, upon it, Cicero talking to a hulking brute of a man.
“Where is everybody?” the big man asked.
(Startled, Hanson realized it was himself.)
“Gone.”
“Gone where?”
“Elsewhere.”
“I don’t understand.”
“They have followed… certain trends to their inevitable consequences.”
Boone gestured brusquely, waving the scroll out of existence. “Such things I have discovered. You cannot imagine. Fantastic, incredible things! I’ve tasted in surrogate the ineffable pleasures the post-Utopians discovered for themselves, glimpsed darkly, as if through a scrim, their activities and preoccupations. Oh, I am not a scholar for nothing! But where have the post-Utopians gone? What became of them? In this one crucial respect, I am as ignorant as you.” He turned to Cicero: “Let me ask you again: Where have they gone?”