Hapexamendios was everywhere in this metropolis. This was the City of God; and God was the city.
Twice in his life he'd had presentiments of this revelation. The first time when he'd entered Yzordderrex, which had been commonly called a city—god itself and had been, he now understood, his brother's unwitting attempt to recreate his Father's masterwork. The second when he'd undertaken the business of similitudes and had realized, as the net of his ambition encompassed London, that there was no part of it, from sewer to dome, that was not somehow analogous to his anatomy.
Here was that theory proved. The knowledge didn't strengthen him but, instead, fueled the dread he felt, thinking of his Father's immensity. He'd crossed a continent and more to get here, and there'd been no part of it that was not made as these streets were made, his Father's substance replicated in unimaginable quantities to become the raw materials for the masons and carpenters and hod carriers of His will. And yet, for all its magnitude, what was His city? A trap of corporeality, and its architect its prisoner.
"Oh, Father," he said, and perhaps because the formality had gone from his voice, and there was sorrow in it, he was finally granted a reply.
"You've done well for me," the voice said.
Gentle remembered its monotony well. Here was the same barely discernible modulation he'd first heard as he'd stood in the shadow of the Pivot.
"You 've succeeded where all the others failed," Hapexa- mendios said. "They went astray or let themselves be crucified. But you, Reconciler, you held to your course. "
"For your sake, Father."
"And that service has earned you a place here," the God said. "In my city. In my heart."
"Thank you," Gentle replied, fearful that this gift was going to mark the end of the exchange.
If so, he'd have failed as his mother's agent. Tell Him you want to see His face, she'd said. Distract Him. Flatter Him. Ah, yes, flattery!
"I want to learn from You now, Father," he said. "I want to be able to carry Your wisdom back into the Fifth with me."
"You've done all you need to do, Reconciler," Hapexamendios said. "You won't need to go back into the Fifth, for your sake or mine. You 'II stay with me and watch my work."
"What work is that?"
"You know what work," came the God's reply. "I heard you speak with the Nullianac, Why are you pretending ignorance?"
The inflexions in His voice were too subtle to be interpreted. Was there genuine inquiry in the question, or a fury at His son's deceit?
"I didn't wish to presume, Father," Gentle said, cursing himself for this gaffe. "I thought You'd want to tell me
Yourself."
''Why would I tell you what you already know?" the God said, unwilling to be persuaded from this argument until He had a convincing answer. "You already have every knowledge you need—"
"Not every one," Gentle said, seeing now how he might . divert the flow.
"What do you lack? " Hapexamendios said. "I'll tell you everything."
"Your face, Father."
"My face? What about my face?"
"That's what I lack. The sight of Your face."
"You've seen my city," the Unbeheld replied. "That's my face."—"There's no other? Really, Father? None?"
"Aren't you content with that?" Hapexamendios said. "Isn't it perfect enough? Doesn't it shine?"
"Too much, Father. It's too glorious."
"How can a thing be too glorious?"
"Part of me's human, Father, and that part's weak. I look at this city, and I'm agog. It's a masterwork—"
"Yes, it is."
"Genius."
"Yes, it is.";
"But Father, grant me a simpler sight. Show a glimpse of the face that made my face, so that I can know the part of me that's You."
He heard something very like a sigh in the air around him.
"It may seem ridiculous to you," Gentle said, "but I've followed this course because I wanted to see one face. One loving face." There was enough truth in this to lend his words real passion. There was indeed a face he'd hoped to find at the end of his journey. "Is it too much to ask?" he said.
There was a flutter of movement in the dingy arena ahead, and Gentle stared into the murk, in the expectation of some colossal door opening. But instead Hapexamendios said, "Turn your back, Reconciler."
"You want me to leave?"
"No. Only avert your eyes."
Here was a paradox: to be told to look away when sight was requested. But there was something other than an unveiling afoot. For the first time since entering the Dominion, he heard sounds other than a voice: a delicate rustling, a muted patter, creaks and whirrings stealing on his ear. And all around him, tiny motions in the solid street, as the monoliths softened and inclined towards the mystery he'd turned his back upon. A step gaped and oozed marrow. A wall opened where stone met stone, and a scarlet deeper than any he'd seen, a scarlet turned almost black, ran in rills as the slabs yielded up their geometry, lending themselves to the Unbeheld's purpose. Teeth came down from an unknitted balcony above, and loops of gut unraveled from the sills, dragging down curtains of tissue as they came.
As the deconstruction escalated, he dared the look he'd been forbidden, glancing back to see the entire street in ross or petty motion: forms fracturing, forms congealing, forms drooping and rising. There was nothing recognizable in the turmoil, and Gentle was about to turn away when one of the pliant walls tumbled in the flux and for a heartbeat, no more, he glimpsed a figure behind it. The moment was long enough to know the face he saw and have it in his mind's eye when he looked away. There was no face its equal in the Imajica. For all the sorrow on it, for all its wounds, it was exquisite.
Pie was alive and waiting there, in his Father's midst, a prisoner of the prisoner. It was all Gentle could do not to turn there and then and pitch his spirit into the tumult, demanding that his Father give the mystif up. This was his teacher, he'd say, his renewer, his perfect friend. But he fought the desire, knowing such an attempt would end in calamity, and instead turned away again, doting on the glimpse he'd had while the street behind him continued to convulse. Though the mystif s body had been marked by the hurts it had suffered, it was more whole than Gentle had dared hope. Perhaps it had drawn strength from the land on which Hapexamendios' city was built, the Dominion its people had worked their feits upon, before God had come to raise this metropolis.
But how should he persuade his Father to give the mystif up? With pleas? With further flattery? As he chewed on the problem, the ructions around him began to subside, and he heard Hapexamendios speak behind him.
"Reconciler? "
"Yes, Father?"
"You wanted to see my face."
"Yes, Father?"
"Turn and look."
He did so. The street in front of him had not lost all semblance of a thoroughfare. The buildings still stood, their doors and windows visible. But their architect had claimed from their substance sufficient pieces of the body he'd once owned to recreate it for Gentle's edification. The Father was human, of course, and had perhaps been no larger than His son in His first incarnation. But He'd remade Himself three times Gentle's height and more, a teetering giant that was as much borne up by the street He'd racked for matter as of it.
For all His scale, however, His form was ineptly made, as if He'd forgotten what it was like to be whole. His head was enormous, the shards of a thousand skulls claimed from the buildings to construct it, but so mismatched that the mindit was meant to shield was visible between the pieces, pulsing and flickering. One of His arms was vast, yet ended in a hand scarcely larger than Gentle's, while the other was wizened, but finished with fingers that had three dozen joints. His torso was another mass of misalliances, His innards cavorting in a cage of half a thousand ribs, His huge heart beating against a breastbone too weak, to contain it and already fractured. And below, at His groin, the strangest deformation: a sex He'd failed to conjure into a single organ, but which hung in rags, raw and useless. "Now," the God said. "Do you see?" The impassivity had gone from His voice, its monotony replaced by an assembly of voices, as many larynxes, none of them whole, labored to produce each word.