Delgardo, meanwhile, had his head tilted back and was gawking up at the spires that glittered and gleamed in the morning sunshine. He turned away from the Cathedral, saw Hanson, and they exchanged a glance. Believe me now? Hanson thought, knowing that his onetime torturer and now open enemy would be able to read it on his face. Delgardo gave him a short, sharp nod, and then turned to the sergeant. “Lay off those men! This has nothing to do with them. Send somebody to my tent to fetch the folding chair and my portable writing desk.”
Then, sitting with the writing desk on his lap, Delgardo delicately filled his pen from a bottle of ink and wrote out a letter, which he read aloud at the end of each sentence loudly enough for all to hear, explaining that the troop was returning to base without him by his express command, and concluding: We have made great discoveries and I confidently expect to make many more. He signed the document with a flourish, blew on the ink to help it dry, then folded it and sealed it with wax and his signet ring.
Delgardo handed the letter to Sergeant Barker, saying, “You have your orders. Break camp and make for base. Be sure to bring along all my effects. If this goes as I believe it will, they’ll be sacred relics one day and kept in a museum for all to admire.”
“Sir. Yes, sir.” The relief on Sergeant Barker’s face was almost painful to look upon.
Soon thereafter, Hanson and Delgardo were alone. “I’ve kept my end of the bargain,” Delgardo said. “Now it’s time you keep yours.”
The Cathedral rose steep and sheer in front of them, pinks and roses and corals blending into one another so that its surface seemed to shimmer. As they grew closer, Hanson could feel the heat it radiated, fierce and stinging; nevertheless, he forced himself to walk steadily toward it. Delgardo walked by his side. When Hanson glanced his way, he looked confident and unafraid, two traits that Hanson himself decidedly did not share. He kept walking anyway. He did not see that there was any other choice, the Cathedral wanted him to do this and it clearly had the power to enforce its wishes. Also, if Delgardo was going to make a grab for power, Hanson wanted to be there to make certain he didn’t get it.
When he came to the windowless, featureless side of the Cathedral, there was a searing blast of heat and a flare of agony. Then he was alone, in a moving bubble that kept pace with him as he walked, just as had happened when he had walked through the Wall itself. There was an opalescent light in here, although nothing to see by it, and the air was getting hotter with every step. A buzzing sound rose up, like millions of angry bees. As he pushed forward, the buzzing grew louder and louder, filling his head, making his teeth ache. By God, it was hot! The heat, too, kept increasing, until he was sure that his skin must be burning and blackening. Pain was a constant, impossible for him to ignore. The buzzing filled the whole world now, and he stumbled and nearly fell, but he kept pushing forward. Keep going, keep going—
Then, suddenly, he was in a room filled with cool gray light.
Delgardo stepped out of the wall and looked about with interest. “What now?” he asked.
“I… I don’t…”
“What is it?” Delgardo asked in an irritable voice. “What is it you don’t?”
“… feel so good.”
Then Hanson screamed as the key, which had lain quiescent within him for so long, came bursting out of his chest, sending him falling backward, uncoiling itself from within his guts, unfolding in a series of jointed cylinders, then twisting together again, melding, softening, changing color, becoming something else—and all the while, causing so much pain that Hanson had just reached the conclusion that he was about to die when, without warning, everything went dark.
When Hanson came to, he was lying on the floor of the featureless gray room. Nearby, Delgardo sat cross-legged, chatting with a woman similarly seated. Hearing him stir, Delgardo looked over his shoulder and amiably said, “So this is the secret you’ve been hiding, Hanson. Any other man would have told me everything about the key back in prison. But I see now that all my efforts were in vain. I could have keep torturing you until doomsday and you still wouldn’t have blabbed.” He applauded lightly. “Kudos to you, Hanson. Kudos!”
But Hanson wasn’t listening to Delgardo’s words. Instead, he stared, transfixed, at the woman sitting across the room from him.
“Becky?” he said.
He felt dazed, poleaxed. It was his wife, his dead wife, only somehow, miraculously, restored to the dewy flush of youth that had been hers when they first met—before the hard years, before the shortages, the food riots, the recurrent plagues. Before the stillbirths, the formal declaration that an unsympathetic doctor had so baldly made that she would never be able to produce a living child, before the…
Before the hemorrhagic infection that had carried her off.
Becky smiled that warm, loving smile that Hanson had missed so achingly for so many terrible years. “Hello, Carl.” She reached out and took his hand.
Hanson and Becky were strolling hand in hand together through the City of God. A light breeze, perfumed with cinnamon and sandalwood, ruffled her hair, and though they were surrounded by Utopian devices and dwellings, for the first time since passing through the Wall, Hanson felt not the least fear of the City, for he understood everything here, both what it did and why, from the glass clouds floating overhead to the halls of shadow and the soft burrowers underfoot. Hanson did not know how such knowledge was possible. He knew only that he was very, very happy and that it was all a Goddamned lie. To his horror, he began to cry.
Becky turned a face toward him that was all sweet, loving concern. “You mustn’t reject this, Carl. It can all, myself included, be yours.”
“You’re not Becky,” Hanson said. It was not so much a statement as a fervent plea that she somehow prove him wrong. Everything within him wanted this woman to be his wife, his one love, his Rebekah. Only his reason insisted that she wasn’t.
She hugged his arm. “I am not and yet I could be.” A gardener moved gracefully past them, scattering little turquoise lizards in its wake. “You’ve probably guessed that I’m the key. But you have no idea what that is, do you?” Hanson shook his head and she sighed. “Link arms with me. I may not be your wife, but I’ve lived with you more intimately than even she did, and I’ve learned more about you than ever she could.” He did as she bade him, and she led him onward. “Do you see that menhir at the top of the hill before us?”
“The big stone, you mean?”
“Yes. Come with me there. I want you to meet my mother.”
The stone, when they came to it, was gray and weathered. It stood up on end and was twice as tall as either of them. Letting go of Hanson, Becky bowed deeply before it. “Mother, awaken!” The surface of the stone shimmered and flowed. A blast of heat went out from it and it changed color, brightening into fluid reds, pinks, corals, peaches. It was the same color as the Cathedral and Hanson got the distinct impression that they were somehow connected, that between them was a vast subterranean body of which the Cathedral was an outthrust knee, perhaps, and this stone but the tip of a raised pointer finger.
Though it terrified him, Hanson stood his ground. “What is…? You say this is your mother?”
Out of nowhere, a voice both female and infinitely sad, spoke. “I am the City… and I am so very, very lonely.”