At his direction, Cicero led him back to the spider-legged houses and into Boone’s bedroom. It was spare and almost empty, with a small rectangular pad in its center, not much different from a working-class man’s futon back in Orange. “Lie here,” Cicero said, “and you will be refreshed.”
With a nod, Hanson lay down on the pad. It was of an almost neutral texture, neither soft nor hard, just yielding enough to avoid discomfort, a trifle cool to the touch at first and then warm. He closed his eyes.
Five minutes later he opened them again.
He was wide awake.
Lying on the pad had refreshed his body, cleansed it of fatigue poisons, and returned it to peak strength and vigor. Physically he was in terrific shape. Mentally, however, he felt the same as before—wasted, blasted, sick to the very pit of his being with the mere fact of existence.
He sat up, alert, unblinking, and knew then with an awful clarity that he was never going to be able to make any kind of life for himself here, that Heaven was simply not for the likes of him. He didn’t know where home was for him anymore—perhaps there was no home for him anymore. But, wherever it was, it wasn’t here.
He stood.
He walked out to the balcony.
He walked back in.
He walked back out.
Finally, there was no help for it. He was beyond evasions now.
Without looking at Cicero, he said, “Take me to the Throne of God.”
No trace of Boone’s violent end remained. Every least particle of blood had been cleaned away in his absence. The room was as sterile and empty as if no one had walked here for a thousand years. Or as if no one ever had walked here, since the first recorded tick of time.
Hanson sat gingerly down on the Throne, his body tensed and aching to leap up and away from its cold electric touch. He felt a surge of icy terror, but fought it down. This was the one moment in his life when he had a chance to actually change things, probably the one moment in the lives of all the hundreds of ancestors who’d striven and fought and toiled to produce him in the first place, who had lived their lives and broken their hearts and died without ever encountering a single moment where anything they did had even the remotest chance of effecting a real change in the world. This was the only chance any of them would ever have, even if he went back to the human world and had a dozen children and they lived a thousand generations more. This was the one chance for all of them, that chain of lives stretching back into the distant past and ahead into the unimaginable future. This one moment, here and now. He had to give it his best shot, and hope that things would work out all right. He didn’t really know what he was doing, or what the consequences of it might be, but he knew he had to try. Perhaps it had been no different for God Himself, in the Beginning, when He’d set out to create the world.
He clutched the Throne’s arms. “Show me where we are.”
Cicero gestured, and the tower, walls and stairs and ceiling alike, became transparent.
Hanson stared over the City to the Wall, and over it as well, as if from a height even greater than the tower’s: stared upon a landscape rendered toylike by distance, like a cunningly crafted panorama or three-dimensional map, but one in which things moved and changed position, as in the image cast by a camera obscura (one of which he’d seen in the Courthouse in Orange, as a boy) so that you could see horses and transports moving on the roads, and people working in the fields, and cows wandering as they grazed, and trees swaying in the wind. Through some post-Utopian magic, it seemed like he could see everything at once, see it all clearly and distinctly, no matter how far away it was, his whole old world laid out at his feet. First there were the Utopian ruins overgrown in calamity weed and scrub oak; somewhere down there was the clearing in which he’d met Boone. Then the road up which the transport had come so very long ago, leading back to the ancient highway that stretched back to the south, past the SI garrisons and gypsy camps, the tiny crossroads towns, the vast glinting silver snake of the river, the high iron bridge over the Hudson, and on to the patchwork of hardscrabble farms beyond, which clung precariously to a series of gently rolling hills like the folds of a carelessly thrown quilt. Then, finally, by the horizon, a low gray smear of buildings where Orange was. Leaning forward, looking closer, he could make out the fetid streets of the Bog, rising up into Blackstone (he almost thought he could see the window of his old apartment, where he had lived with Becky for so many bittersweet years), and then up into the Swank, tidy tree-lined squares surrounded by fine old brick-and-iron buildings. He could see the rusty-orange Courthouse dome, one of the few specks of color in a sea of brown wood and gray brick, and imagined that if he could somehow see within the dome itself he would see himself as a small child staring fascinated at the table where the image from the camera obscura shifted and glittered, as if the Utopian optics through which he was looking could somehow let him see back through time as well as off through space (as who knew if they could not?)… And then, raising his eyes, up the slopes of Industry Hill to the highest point in Orange, he saw at last the massive ugly bulk of the State Factory, where he had slaved away the best days of his life, where he had poured out his youth like water onto thirsty ground. If he leaned forward a bit more, he could see the lip of the Pit itself, and tiny figures moving on it, shoveling, turning away to dump their coal onto the pile, turning back to shovel again, bending and straightening, their tiny matchstick arms and legs scissoring, and perhaps one of them was Gossard, or the New Man, or—recalling his fancy of a moment before—perhaps even Hanson himself, staring at the Wall of the City of God as he shoveled, thinking all the while about God staring back at him with a huge watery eye, tall as the sky.
Something caught in Hanson’s throat, and he blinked back sudden tears. No one knew better than he not to romanticize the world stretched out there below, no one knew better than he the miseries and brutalities it contained, the sickness and the poverty and the filth, the tyranny and murder. From up here, you couldn’t see the crooked politics and institutionalized cruelties that were housed beneath the Courthouse dome that looked so picturesque and attractive. From up here, you saw only the pastoral beauty of the fields and the patchwork farms; you didn’t see the grotesquely mutated animals and the cows with cancerous running sores and the “sour spots” in the fields, places too thoroughly drenched in ancient chemical poisons for anything to ever grow there again for millennia to come. Hanson knew all that, none knew it better.
And yet, even so, he was homesick.
He wanted to go home, wherever home was. Maybe not back to Orange, necessarily, but home. Back to the human world. Back where he belonged. Back to where children went fishing in the summertime and women leaned out of windows to catch a breath of air at evening, back to where cows grazed and people drank beer and laughed, back to where folks fell in love and had babies and grew old and died. Away from the inhuman, unchanging, cruel and incomprehensible alien splendor of this place.