“Elsewhere.”
“Where elsewhere?”
“You would not understand.”
“Are they dead?”
“No.”
“Will they ever come back?”
“They never went away.”
“The hell with you!” To this point the exchange had proceeded with the lifeless quality of a catechism, a rote repetition of questions and answers unvarying and long committed to memory. But now Boone stood, and, hands behind his back, savagely strode to and fro, as if building up his courage. There was a wild light in his eyes. Finally he asked, “Will we see them again in recognizable form—as something roughly human, capable of communicating and interacting with us?”
“By the nature of what happened,” Cicero said, “that cannot be.”
“You see?” Boone turned triumphantly to Hanson. “You see? The City of God—its buildings and parks, its powers and potentials, the land, the sea, everything—is ours. Ours to control, ours to command. It belongs to us!”
Hanson glanced uneasily at Cicero.
Cicero said nothing, waited patiently.
“I dunno,” Hanson said. It didn’t seem right to him, somehow, to make such claims. It didn’t seem safe. In his experience, everything had a price, even things you didn’t get, and that price was always more than any sane man would agree to pay, given the choice. Not that you ever got the choice. The balance was enforced from afar, by powers immaterial and unlocatable, nothing you could even identify, much less get your hands on. “Maybe we oughta just take our time here, not do anything rash.”
“No! I’ve waited too long. Your coming back now is a sign. We have to act immediately, right now, without delay.” With a slash of one hand, Boone made all the scrolls and squares disappear. The room looked monkishly bare without them. Turning to Cicero, he said, “Take us to the Throne of God.”
“The local utility node, you mean?”
“Whatever you want to call it—bring us there.”
Cicero nodded. “As you wish.”
5
THE THRONE WAS LOCATED in a windowless zone like a jet bead atop a slanted glass tower whose stairs took them a terrifying half hour to climb. From a distance, the tower looked like a syringe with a black drop of blood at its tip. Within, the walls and stairs alike were transparent, marked only by gleams of reflected and refracted light, making the ascent a sickeningly vertiginous experience. There was no other way to reach it, Cicero explained, because the powers it controlled were too great to be tapped on a whim, even a post-Utopian’s whim. At the top, within a hideously unstable region of blackness, they confronted the thing itself—an unornamented silver chair with armrests and a high back.
Boone had been here before.
“Control,” Boone said. “Even the City of God needs to be controlled. Especially the City of God.” He paced back and forth before the Throne, talking rapidly and with an unnatural energy. “There are many such towers, each tapping a fraction of the power of the Wall and responsible for the maintenance of a small segment of the lands within. From this chair, one man can control more power than is held by all the mortal nations combined. I have often come here to meditate upon whether to assume responsibility for that power.”
“Don’t!” Hanson said suddenly. He couldn’t explain the wave of apprehension that came over him, the fearful certainty that Boone was about to destroy them both; but he felt it nevertheless, down to the soles of his feet. “Just—don’t do it!”
Boone nodded, not listening. He stopped pacing and struck a pose, hands behind back, legs wide. “Hanson, we stand on the brink of history. It is our duty to humanity—our destiny, even—to tear down the Wall separating the Human Domain from the City of God.” He stared at the Throne without seeming to actually see it, his eyes gleaming and blank with excitement.
“Think of it, Hanson! For ages, we have been made helpless, impoverished by the presence of a City whose accomplishments we could never hope to duplicate, whose very existence made a mockery of all our aspirations. Now… now, we can make the Earth a garden, abolish human misery, free men to follow their better natures. We’ll fill the skies and roads with great vessels again, millions of them! We’ll build cities—human cities!—on the Moon, beneath the seas, at the poles. Can you picture it, Hanson?”
Hanson dumbly shook his head.
Boone laughed, a shallow, brittle laugh. “No. No, of course you can’t. But you’ll see—you’ll see.” He took a step toward the Throne, then convulsively whirled about, and, hugging himself, said, “It is a great responsibility I am assuming here, a terrible burden indeed. You see that, don’t you? By its very nature power must be apportioned, divided, distributed—and withheld. That is natural law. Fanatics and opportunists, the self-serving and corrupt, will be drawn to this point like moths to the flame. We must take steps to ensure that this power does not fall into the wrong hands.”
In all the crawling and uneasy blackness, the silver Throne was an island of calm matter. Not even aware he was doing it, Hanson stretched out a hand to touch it, to reassure himself with the cool feel of its solidity.
“Don’t!” Boone said. “Only I can touch the throne—it’s protected.”
Hanson whipped his hand away. He had been intending, once Boone stopped talking, to urge him one more time not to do this thing. But now, overcome with futility, he knew he would not. What would be the use? A man like Boone, smart as he was, would never listen to somebody like him. And why should he? He was nothing much in the brains department, he knew it—never had been. Look at the mess he’d made of his life, look at how, all the way along the line, it had been someone else—Gossard, Willis, Boone—who had saved him from the consequences of his own stupid, blundering actions. Without them, he never would have made it. Without them, he never would have been standing here in the first place, way up here above the City of God, at the place where all the power of Heaven could be commanded. Without them, he’d be a pile of weathering bones somewhere, already stripped of flesh, already forgotten.
Hanson felt himself flushing with shame, suffused with a dull, ponderous embarrassment that seemed to turn his limbs to lead, congeal him solid where he stood, incapable of speech or action. He was a proud man—pride was what had gotten him into all this in the first place, after all. That is, he was a proud man when he had something to be proud about… but it seemed like he hadn’t had that for a very long time. Certainly there was nothing to be proud about now, even though he was standing where no man had stood for who knew how many thousands of years. He’d gotten here in the first place through sheer blind blundering luck, and by taking advantage of the sharper wits of other men, and now that he was here, he really only half understood the situation, or what Boone was proposing to do, or the risks involved, or the rewards that might be gleaned. Even standing here before the Throne of God, even with all the strange and wondrous things that he’d been through, he hadn’t been changed or elevated or ennobled—he was still just the common working slob he’d always been. Just a dumb ox. So why should he interfere? What right did he have to an opinion?