“Listen!” Boone cried. “Those issues that divided your kind and mine are long dead. Yes, we were separated—let now the two streams reunite! It’s time we were reconciled.”
A short, angry slash of the head. “No!” The phantom’s face was dark as thunder. “Too late, too late!”
“It’s never too late!”
“It was always too late for you.” Now the flames blazed hotter, so that the apparition became almost painfully bright, dazzling and terrible. “Look—see the price we paid for perfection!”
Briefly, Hanson saw the raw and bleeding wound where the man’s genitals had been. He turned his head away, sickened.
“I tore off those parts with my own teeth and, oh, how I savored the pain of it! Could you have done as much?”
Boone could not speak.
The phantom smiled disdainfully as the flames burned low again. “I thought not. You came here seeking power and knowledge. Very well. Drink deep of both. Learn what we learned!”
Boone screamed.
It hurt the eye to look at him. He seemed to be vibrating; a kind of still motion possessed him, as if he were simultaneously shooting rapidly upward in the air and descending with equal speed into the ground. And yet he went nowhere. Boone’s body had taken on the blurriness of extreme speed, a sort of translucence with nothing visible behind it. His face tensed, stretched, lengthened like cold taffy relentlessly pulled. His mouth stayed open, stretched to its extreme.
He screamed.
He screamed, and the scream went on and on, independent of the air in his lungs, endless, eternal, a condition of existence, a cry of pain and fear that stretched from the beginning of time to its end, like the shrill note of a violin string endlessly stroked, always on the verge of snapping and yet continuing, impossibly continuing. It simply was.
Hanson seized Cicero by the shoulders and shook him. “We’ll leave!” he cried. “Tell him,” pointing to the phantom, “to let Boone go, and we’ll leave. Tell him!”
“He cannot be reasoned with. Despite his appearance, despite his words, he is not a citizen. He is only a security function.”
Hanson spun away, reaching for Boone, but Cicero stopped his hand. Slight though he was, Cicero was impossibly strong; Hanson, for all his muscle and bulk, could not free himself from his grip. “It would be extremely dangerous to touch him. It might kill you.”
“You!” Hanson shouted to the phantom. “You can stop this!”
The phantom turned his sightless frown upon Hanson, but said nothing.
Now the air about Boone was streaking, congealing into vertical strings of shattered light, greenish, as if the vibrations from the Throne were threatening the structure and nature of space about it. Boone hung agonized at the very center of this twisting chaos. His eyes were wide with pain, but sane. Unbearably sane.
His scream went on and on, unendurable.
“Cicero!” Hanson cried again. “He’s dying!”
“No. He is suffering, but he will not die. He will not be allowed to die. He will wait here as a warning to all who would aspire beyond their state. The years will pass, and then the decades, and then the centuries. To him, the agony will be eternal.”
“Get him off, damn you!”
“He is beyond rescue. The security function is implacable and absolute. A Renunciate has sat upon the Throne—he must be punished.”
As if in a dream, Hanson felt his hands go to his belt. His gun was still there—the gun he had retained simply because it was the only thing besides Boone that he had brought with him to the City of God, the only thing he possessed that was undeniably his own.
He pulled it out.
This was not him acting; it was his body, obeying no conscious impulse of his own, but only the implacable logic of Boone’s unending scream. Hanson watched, horrified, from a place behind his eyes as the gun swam into view. He expected Cicero to step forward to stop him. He expected the guardian function to confront him.
Neither did.
Awkwardly he slid the safety to off. He cocked back the heavy hammer. He raised the muzzle toward the blind-eyed guardian brooding over Boone’s suffering. But when he did, the guardian turned upon him so unconcerned and disdainful an expression that Hanson knew without being told that it was useless, that mere bullets could not stop so powerful a being.
Stepping close to the Throne he raised the gun in both hands, so that it pointed right at the center of Boone’s face, at a spot directly between the man’s eyes. The agonized eyes that did not look at the gun but right through it, as if it hardly existed and certainly didn’t matter, boring into Boone’s eyes and pleading as clearly as words ever did:
Kill me.
I can’t, he thought, even as his finger clenched around the trigger, squeezing it tight, fighting the balky mechanism of its action, a simple movement that was taking forever it seemed, impossible that it could go on so long, as if time had frozen to a gelid flurry, slowed, solidified, and then—finally—stopped.
The gun fired, with an appalling explosion of sound so loud it seemed to shatter Hanson’s ears.
All in an instant, Hanson’s hands went flying up and back, the recoil spinning the revolver itself through the air and sending it clattering across the floor. Boone’s head slammed back into the Throne and bounced forward again. Flecks of blood and gore were everywhere, tiny droplets landing on Hanson’s knuckles, his shirt front, his face. Boone’s body pitched forward and fell heavily to the floor, facedown, as limp as a sack of laundry.
Silence.
The guardian turned to Hanson.
“You may assume control of the node now, if you wish.”
Hanson raised his head, heavy with guilt, wordless with disbelief.
“It’s true,” Cicero said. “There’s no danger to you. I know you believe yourself to be a Renunciate, but by testimony of the key you carry within yourself, you are not. You are a citizen. All functions must respect you. The security function would never offer you harm, not even to save the City itself.”
Hanson shook his head bullishly, a rejection not so much of any specific words or actions as of everything: Boone’s death, the raid on the brigand camp, his flight from Orange, the Pit, his childhood, his birth, everything.
With a respectful nod, the security function stepped backward, dissolving into blackness.
“Shall I clear this away?” Cicero indicated Boone’s body.
Appalled, Hanson opened his mouth to say who knew what, and then caught control of himself and closed it again. Cicero didn’t know any better—he was only a function. He wasn’t real. Hanson slumped, closing his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes. Take it away, bury it.”
“And this?”
Cicero held up the gun.
“Bury it along with him.”
Then, because Boone had after all been a man of the cloth, he added, “Raise a stone or a sun-cross or something over it. Something appropriate.” It was a hell of a thing for a man to die so far from home. A hell of a thing to pass unnoticed and unremarked by anyone you ever knew.
He stood waiting while Cicero picked up the body in his arms, stepped into darkness, and returned unencumbered. Then he said, “Let’s get out of here.”
Cicero led him to the stairwell. When he looked down it, he threw up.
What Hanson needed now, more than anything, was sleep. He was still standing, and that was all. Months might have gone by for Boone and Cicero, but for him, Hanson, by the clock of his heart, it had only been three days since he’d had his shoveling contest with the New Man back in the Pit in Orange. In fact, this was still the third evening, as far as he was concerned, although enough had happened in those three days to make it seem like a lifetime had passed, and in all that time he’d only had a fitful nap here and there, not really a decent night’s sleep since leaving Orange. He was tired enough to make him believe that he had been awake and on his feet for every second of those eight months that Boone claimed had passed. Every cell in his body yearned for nothingness, darkness, oblivion.