“All that you can see, from here to the Wall,” Cicero said, “is subject to your manipulation.”
“How do I turn off the Wall?” Hanson asked gruffly.
“A twenty-mile section of it is under your control.” Cicero waved a hand, indicating an arc reaching from horizon to horizon. “It can only be turned off by depriving this entire segment of the City of all higher functions. I do not advise it. If, however, that is what you wish to do, I will guide you through the protocol.”
Hanson took a deep breath. “A’right,” he said. “Let’s do it.”
He seized the chair’s grips. The needles converged upon his skull.
To his surprise, it did not hurt. A glowing sensation radiated from the base of his spine, a pervasive warmth like the sun on a summer’s afternoon. Lucid calm flooded his brain and he became aware of a thousand distant structures and devices, not as any kind of detailed knowledge but in much the same way he was aware of parts of his own body, ignorant of their inner workings but, with the slightest concentration, in control.
“What do I do now?”
“Make yourself aware of the Wall.”
“A’right.” He felt it now, within him, a glowing length of immaterial and impervious substance, reaching down three times farther into the bedrock than it extended above the ground. A thin, thin line reached even farther down, impossibly far, toward the core of the Earth, tapping energies incomprehensively greater than any he’d ever imagined. No phantom guardian appeared. No one challenged him. He did not ascend, descend, vibrate, scream. “What now?”
“Imagine a blue triangle. Within it, imagine a yellow circle. Now imagine that circle turning red.”
He did.
Twenty miles of the Wall ceased to be.
It took Hanson three weeks to make his way out of Heaven to the mortal realm of York. He could still summon a cyclone by stepping on a silver pad, but he could not make it take him where he wanted to go. His first attempt carried him so far from the Wall that he was not tempted to try a second time, lest he lose himself so thoroughly he might never find his way out again.
Without Cicero, the City of God was unspeakably dangerous, capricious in unforeseeable ways. There was, so far as he could tell, no malice to it, but he was like a child lost in a steel mill; power was everywhere and he did not understand its purposes. The post-Utopians hadn’t turned off any of their machines before they had gone away to wherever it was they had gone. And Cicero, who understood its workings, was gone too, canceled out along with the twenty miles of Wall, never mentioning that he was one of the “higher functions” that Hanson’s command would send to oblivion. Hanson found he missed Cicero more than he did Boone, though the one was only a function and the other a real human being.
It was an awful thing to have to admit to himself.
He lived off rain water and what vermin he could catch, and he was often sick. It was a hellish time for him. But he kept going, determined that if he were going to die, he would at least make it to the Human Domain first. He would die on his own side of the Wall.
When finally, starving, Hanson crossed over into the borderlands of York, he was taken prisoner by a troop of State soldiers. They were out in force, establishing a string of camps where the Wall had been, digging ditches and earthwork ramparts, re-creating a crude parody of the Wall in order to control access to the City of God and its many presumed treasures. They were all of them badly spooked by this turn of events, fearful and uncertain of what the future would bring. An unquestioned chock of their reality had crumbled without warning, and if that could happen, then who was to say what else might or might not?
“Hands up!” the soldier shouted. He held his rifle too tensely. He was ungodly young, a child really. When Hanson obeyed, he eased hardly at all, remaining as taut as an overwound spring. “You’re in bad trouble, mister.”
“A’right,” Hanson said. His head swam dizzily; he had to fight down a suicidal urge to caper and dance. But even in his weak and giddy state, he was particularly anxious not to be shot, not at this late date. “Y’caught me. You’re the boss. I’ll do whatever you say.”
“Where’d you come from, anyway? How’d you get past the line?”
Line? “I came from the east.” He gestured with his head, keeping his hands up as steady as he could. “Beyond where the Wall used to be.”
The boy’s eyes widened.
Two more soldiers came out of the woods. They both looked tough, but one looked mean as well.
“What you got?” one asked.
“This’n says he come from over the Wall.”
“Yeah, right.”
“So what do we do with him?”
The soldiers glanced one at another. There was an uneasy moment of balance when Hanson’s fate could have gone any which way. The mean-looking soldier cocked up his mouth to one side, and, unslinging his rifle, said, “Too much fucking trouble to walk him back, if you ask me…”
The boyish soldier gaped at him, too horrified to interfere.
Talking quickly, saying any fool thing that came into his head, Hanson said, “Hey, any of you boys come from Orange? That’s where I’m from, that’s my neck of the woods. Maybe you got family back there? What are their names? Might be I know them.” Crazy, nonsensical stuff he was saying, but it didn’t matter—anything to establish contact.
The third soldier stared hard at him. Then—
“Fuck it,” he said, and pushed the rifle barrel out of line, away from Hanson. The mean-looking one gave him an angry look, then turned his head to the side, spat, and re-slung his rifle.
The soldier who’d just saved Hanson’s life looked tired. “We’ll take him to camp. He can answer questions there.”
They tied his hands behind his back and started down the road. Hanson went quietly. He knew his answers would not please their superior officers. Their questions would be all wrong. It didn’t matter, though. He had done his part.
He had opened the City of God for them.
It might be some good would come of it. Anything was possible. He didn’t intend to dwell on it, though. What they did with it was their concern, not his.
They walked on in silence for a while. Hanson felt weak and dizzy. After a mile or so, one of the soldiers struck a narc on his thigh, took a long drag to get it started, and stuck it in Hanson’s mouth.
He mumbled his thanks. They wouldn’t untie his hands, but after he’d sucked in, the young soldier who’d captured him took the narc out again so he could exhale.
The two older soldiers tended to keep a cautious distance from him, but the younger one hung at his side, not frightened any longer but curious, intrigued, obviously thinking over what Hanson had said earlier. Finally, he couldn’t keep his questions in any longer. “You really been”—he made a gesture with his head—“back there?”
Hanson nodded wordlessly.
“Inside the City, I mean.”
“Ai. S’pose I have.”
“You ever seen… you know?”
The kid asked it in a hushed kind of way, the religious feelings of his childhood apparently not entirely dead yet, for the blasphemy of a ragged drifter like Hanson claiming to have come from the City of God was clearly thrilling and alarming to him. His buddies, skeptical, intrigued, moved a little closer to hear Hanson’s answer.
“You mean God?” Hanson began to laugh. He couldn’t help it. Stumbling to a halt, he managed to control himself, to still the painful laughter for just long enough to look into the boy’s anxious face and say, “Fool! D’you mean to say you ain’t heard yet? God is dead!”