As he stared from his window, the world gradually changed, and not just with the changing of the seasons.
On a cold, cloudless night, clinging to the window bars, it was sometimes possible to watch the Bear or the Scorpion or other constellations rising over the edge of the Earth. He was watching, one night, when there arose an actinic purple glow on the northern horizon that sponged away the stars. From then on, the fizzing purple glow was always there, dimly visible even in the daylight if you shaded your eyes to look.
A few days later, a ragged wave of refugees came south down the road, grim, silent men and women carrying bindles and dragging sledges piled with household goods, herding both straggling children and straggling pigs and sheep along before them. For most of a day they streamed past, looking down or inward, not speaking, and then they were gone, around the bend in the road and out of sight.
Sometime later, there was a brief firefight down there at the bend of the road, small groups of men in unfamiliar uniforms blazing away at each other, some with guns, some with weird-looking implements that emitted flashes of light. Hanson clutched the bars of his window tight, reveling in the sudden flurry of action and drama, not stopping to worry that a stray bullet might hit him. Would it even kill him if it did? After a while, the firefight moved off into the woods, leaving bodies sprawled lifelessly across the road until someone from the prison with a mule and wagon came out and hauled them away. In retrospect, it occurred to Hanson to be ashamed that the killing down there had been nothing but a welcome diversion to him, a break in the numbing routine; they were men who had died down there, after all, spilling their blood and giving their lives to inadvertently provide his vicarious entertainment. Prison was changing him, wearing him thin, making him less human.
At night now, when the prison itself was quiet, he could hear strange booming noises off in the distance, ponderous and slow and very far away, like the footsteps of some unimaginably huge beast, and occasionally there were strange wailings and unearthly shriekings that put the hairs up on the back of his neck. Lights flared on the horizon, dimmed, flared again, pulsed rhythmically.
One moonless night, peering from his window, Hanson had seen a huge indistinct shape like an immense metal spider go by, momentarily occulting the stars as it passed, padding soundlessly up the road.
There were strange things abroad in the world now.
The world was changing, becoming an unfamiliar place, leaving him behind. He’d felt trapped, buried, in the State Factory in Orange, his life crushed beneath its smothering weight, compelled to recognize that his whole existence had been for nothing, that it had no point or reason at all. Once he had had dreams and a wife. Both were long dead. Even after he’d been forced to flee Orange and miraculously found his way through the Wall surrounding the City of God, possibly the first man ever to do so, how much credit could he take for that? The only extraordinary thing he’d ever done in his life—and that mostly against his will, from necessity, being driven by forces beyond his control and by the will of other, better men—had been to enter the City of God, and decline an opportunity to assume godlike power… and, almost as an afterthought as he left, to shut off one section of the Wall. Was all this strangeness his fault, for having let men into the City of God, where they were not supposed to go?
If so, then the one moment of significance in his futile, meaningless life, for better or worse, was behind him now. From here on, it would make no difference that he’d ever been born.
It was clear that he’d never get out of here. It was clear that he’d die here, and be absorbed tracelessly into the dark river of anonymous and forgotten dead who stretched back to the very beginnings of humanity, most of them having lived and died without leaving so much as a mark on the slick, impervious surface of the world, nor any indication that they’d ever been there at all.
One morning in late winter or early spring, there were horses waiting impatiently in the forecourt, eight or ten of them, blowing steam from their noses and scraping with their hooves at the glittering hoarfrost that coated the cobblestones. Hanson could just see them from here, if he pressed his face out as far as it would go between the cold metal of the bars. Of the riders, there was no sign; they must have entered the prison. For no particular reason, he felt a thrill of unease—someone important must be visiting.
An hour or so later, he heard footsteps approach his cell door and stop in front of it, then the rattling of the lock as someone fumbled with it. He sat up on his cot, feeling an odd surge of mingled anxiety and anticipation.
The door swung open. The whistling guard stood there, accompanied by two of his fellows, all wearing truncheons at their belts. “On your feet, freak,” the guard said.
They hustled him down the familiar corridor to Overton’s office, but Overton wasn’t there. Instead, a tall, almost painfully thin man sat behind Overton’s desk, and unfolded himself to get to his feet as Hanson entered. He was expensively, almost foppishly, dressed, with lace at his sleeves and ruffles on his silk blouse, and wore thigh-high riding boots of gleaming black leather.
“Ah, Hanson,” he said, his face breaking into what seemed to be a broad, genuinely good-spirited grin. “I’m very glad to meet you at last.” It sounded like he really was. “I’m Salvatore Delgardo,” he said. Then, without changing expression or taking his eyes off Hanson, he said to the guards standing close behind, “Hold him.”
Two guards seized Hanson from either side, holding him fast.
Then, before Hanson had a chance to struggle or even react, Delgardo came forward around the desk, picked up a broad-bladed knife, and, with one swift motion, cut Hanson’s throat.
Hanson tried to scream, but could only make a strangling noise. The world did a slow somersault. He didn’t realize that he had fallen to the floor until he saw Delgardo standing over him. Delgardo had taken a cup from the desk, and now leaned close over Hanson and filled it with the blood that pumped from Hanson’s throat, being fastidiously careful not to splash any blood on his shirt. As Hanson watched in horror and amazement, his eyes already dimming, Delgardo raised the cup of blood to him in salute, and then drank it down in a single gulp.
The last thing Hanson heard was Delgardo’s cheerful voice saying, “Hanson, we’re going to be the greatest of friends!”
Hanson awoke that night in his cell, and instinctively clutched at his throat, but the wound was gone. He lay motionless in the darkness for a long time, listening to voices rise and fall somewhere off in the depths of the prison, too far away to make out the words. A door slammed somewhere with iron finality. The full moon looked in between the bars of the window like a fat bone-white face.
In the morning, they came for him again. He was taken to a part of the prison he’d never seen before, what must be the guards’ quarters, given water and coarse potash soap to wash with and new clothes, plain but sturdy, and had his hair cut short by a scowling, sour-smelling old woman—the first woman Hanson had seen, he realized, in however many years he had wasted away in his cell. Then they took him back out through the corridors to Overton’s office—or he supposed it was Delgardo’s office now. Overton seemed to be gone.