While their sergeant—a man with the unlikely name of Barker, usually appropriate enough for a sergeant, although Barker was a quiet man with tired, pouched eyes that had seen too much and knew that they were going to see more—went to arrange tents for them, they sat around in a rest area. Hanson was struck by what a glum and dispirited camp it was, lacking the horseplay and jocular shouted insults that would usually characterize a bunch of off-duty soldiers with nothing to do but wait for the mess hall to open as dusk came on.
Once, when Hanson was a boy, he saw a “gorilla,” although it was more likely to have actually been one of those half-human hybrids that the ramshackle little nations to the west kept trying to use as soldiers. It was in a cage on a wagon in a pathetic little carnival that had passed through town, and all the children had come running out to jeer at it and poke at it with sticks between the bars. The ape had ignored them all, enduring everything, simply sitting and staring at nothing.
That was how the soldiers sat, empty-eyed and uncaring, not looking at anything, nor so far as could be determined thinking anything either. Marshaling their strength for the next battle.
It occurred to Hanson to wonder if York was losing this war. Then it occurred to him to wonder if there even was such a nation as the State of York anymore, or if it had been swallowed by the Stabilities of Portland or some other nation, or reorganized into some other political entity altogether. He had lost touch with the world in the years he’d rotted in prison, and the world hadn’t waited for him. So much had changed. Was there anyplace where he belonged anymore?
That night, alone in his pup tent, the Wall smoldered through Hanson’s dreams, and for the first time in years, he felt the key move within his chest, as though the nearness to the City of God were bringing it back to life.
The next morning, they marched into the City of God, the hair rising on the back of Hanson’s neck as they crossed through the palisade’s gate and into the City itself. The land before them had originally looked like a vast lawn or meadow, freckled with occasional pairs of silver dots—the plates that the Utopians had used to transport themselves instantaneously from place to place—now, however, encased in crude cages of metal bars so that nobody would blunder across them to be transported who-knew-where and, more likely than not, never be seen again. The land gracefully swelled and ebbed, a park essentially, with the occasional copse of flametrees. It should have been beautiful—it had been beautiful once. But it was scarred with pits and trenches hacked into the land and there were black smears where stands of trees had been chopped down and burned, for what purpose Hanson could not guess. To one side, a cluster of graceful buildings or machines or whatever-they-were intruded into the parkland and they looked wrong too, some of them streaked with soot, suggesting that the Army had tried to blast them open with explosives, others ashen and wilting, like dying plants.
Down the center of the meadow was a dirt track that led straight from the camp then suddenly jogged to one side and, after a bit, abruptly to the other before driving straight into another grouping of maybe-buildings. Those earlier soldiers who had come to loot the City of God, it appeared, had undergone their share of unpleasant adventures.
The soldiers were mostly quiet as they walked, even Delgardo seeming a bit overawed by the alien strangeness all around them, although there was some nervous speculation among the men about whether the old Utopians were somewhere inside the buildings—if buildings they were—staring ominously out at them, preparing to strike. Hanson knew better. There were no Utopians here, not in any form he understood or could recognize, anyway. But they had left thousands of their toys behind, still working, and most of them could be deadly if you blundered into them. One of the youngest soldiers, a pock-faced boy named Lopez, one cheek heavily scarred by a radiation burn, was the only one who seemed to be enjoying himself, enthusing about how beautiful and wonderful and strange everything was, until at last Sergeant Barker glumly told him, “Shut up, Lopez. You’re not on fucking vacation.” And Hanson surprised himself by adding, “Ai, it’s pretty, but anything here can kill you in a second, without any Goddamned warning. Don’t touch anything. Don’t go through anything. Don’t go under anything. And keep on the Goddamned path.”
Delgardo glanced back at him, and then gestured for Hanson to take the lead, although Hanson could see it hurt his pride to surrender it. “Silly to bring the only one who’s been here before and then not use him as a guide, eh?” he said, and you could almost hear the unspoken words he shared with the rest of the men: Let him be the first one to die, if something goes wrong.
Hanson walked at the front of the group thereafter. They traveled nearly five miles that day, cautiously but steadily, along ways that had been mapped out as safe by previous incursions into the City. Bringing up the rear of their party was the Stumper, a tremendous pair of metal elephant legs which had been fitted with a wooden wagon, wheels and axles excised, atop what would have been its waist had there been more of it. It looked like a walking basket piled high with food rations, barrels of water, and other supplies and was led by a soldier tugging it along at the end of a rope.
Hanson had laughed involuntarily when he first saw the thing, and of course Delgardo demanded to know why. “Well, just look at it,” Hanson said. The Stumper was made of hundreds of sliding parts that eased in and out of each other so that in motion its gleaming surface seemed to flow like water. The basket-wagon atop it was crudely designed and clumsily built. “Whatever that thing is for, it for sure a’n’t just for humping cargo about. But this is the best your sort can do with it. You’re like a manshogger that’s found a rifle and all he can think to do with it is use it as a club.”
To his surprise, Delgardo laughed, and though there were sneering overtones to it, on the whole the laughter sounded genuine. “You’re one hundred percent right, Hanson, we’re dealing with technology that’s unfathomably beyond our comprehension, and our very best uses of it are nothing but jury-rigged kludges. Yet, for all that, a manshogger with a club has a distinct advantage over a manshogger without one.”
As dusk began to fall, they made camp at the edge of an open area where multicolored tentacles of light rose from a tangle of gently swaying mists, closed ends to form shimmering rings, dwindled as they ascended, and finally disappeared with soft, musical chimes. The spectacle was probably just for looks; nevertheless, Hanson was glad that there was a stream between them and it. The soldiers got to work pitching tents and digging a slit latrine. While they did, Hanson, who had been assigned no duties, stood apart from the rest, looking at the rising loops of prismatic mists. The buildings had closed around them and then opened up again into what he thought of as a park, though God only knew what function it might actually have served. The “park” was probably safe; he’d passed through its like many a time before and never been hurt by one. But there were structures in every direction that hurt his brain if he tried to make sense of their shapes: a twisted disk taller than the Courthouse in Orange, with a square hole punched through the left half of it; a braided noodle of bright red and yellow tubes that unraveled at the top and flopped downward without quite reaching the ground; an inverted pyramid made up of rotating rectangles that Hanson almost couldn’t pry his eyes away from. On the horizon, one structure soared high above the others, a series of intersecting arches with steep spires, like the sharp wings of bats hanging from a cave ceiling only reversed, which seemed to challenge the sky itself. It glowed the same eerie red-pink-gold as did the Wall itself, and that frightened him very much indeed.