Donovan could not resist the lure. He could not come all this distance and fail to climb those last few steps.
He found the stairs behind the dais that went to the highest seat, the presider; and there he eased himself onto the hard quasi-marble chair and gazed over the assembled amphitheater. His first thought was not some grand remembrance of the Commonwealth, not some thrill of ancient spectacle. His first thought was that these hard stone seats must have once had cushions.
Only then did he pick up an imaginary gavel and strike the desktop. Will the Assembly of the Suns please to be coming to order. He imagined a cacophony of voices slowly diminishing and the—what had they called them? Grand Senators? Delegates? Representatives?—drifting toward their seats.
What had this assembly done? he wondered. In those days, when communication had been only as swift as the fastest packet ship, disparate stars tended toward self-government. If this assembly passed a law, it would be weeks or even months before other worlds would hear of it. Perhaps it had adjudicated disputes, settled trade agreements, orchestrated the exploration and terraformation of new worlds, directed the struggle against the prehumans.
He remembered what Peacharoo, that fortuitously surviving automaton on the old terraforming Ark, had said: Tau Ceti is a valued and important member of the Commonwealth. They stand shoulder to shoulder with our comrades against the People of Sand and Iron.
Symbolism, he decided. This gathering had been mostly symbolic. The rituals of unity mattered. Hence, the array of statues and very likely other more perishable regalia. Banners, medallions, standards, ballads, all now forgotten, all of it geared to say: We Are One. A hundred worlds or more, from the old home-planet to the newest hardscrabble colony, were one in mind and resolve and brothers and sisters each to the other.
Patriotism meant love of a place, of the patria, and this of a place no larger than one could embrace as whole. But in the new world of the Commonwealth, men had gone from world to world, weakening ties, forging new fortunes, forming a new allegiance to a broader empire, while the stay-at-homes would have preserved their own particularities and celebrated their own festivals. And this would have been most true on the longest-settled worlds, and in particular on Terra herself. Was that why the Exiles, scattered to the Periphery, had so diligently re-created lost particularities?
He looked again at the worlds arrayed before him. Most of them with one seat—one vote? A few—more populous?—with two. The Old Home-Stars with three and Terra alone with five. Had that been in rough proportion to population? Or had the Home-Stars been loathe to dilute their power? He recalled also that Peacharoo had sounded slightly condescending: This dormitory is reserved for Terrans. Colonists from the Lesser Worlds are housed elsewhere.
So as Terra cooled and dried and its population grew sparser, Dao Chetty must have asked why Terra retained five votes when her now-more-populous colonies held but three.
The breeze outside the colonnade freshened and a ball of tumbleweed rolled through the amphitheater, caught on one of the seats, broke loose, and rolled out the other side.
Maybe Gidula was right, Donovan thought. Maybe at the end a desperate Terra had tried to use the Commonwealth to sustain itself, tithing the wealth of the colonies to replace what she could no longer produce, even while her own sons and daughters fled for more prosperous worlds. What had been the blackmail? You owe it to your Mother World? But one day a generation arose who knew no such debt of sentiment, who did not keep St. Patrick’s Day or Cinco de Mayo, Navratri or Lunar New Year, and for whom Terra was just another planet.
Donovan stood and made his way down the dais and when he left the Hall of Suns he did not look back.
Quite by instinct, he took a different route back to where he had left the hopper, but the geometry of the ruins forced him through the same intersection where he had earlier stopped for lunch. The sun was lower in the sky and the mysterious crackling had subsided a little, though he could still hear it distantly from across the entire city.
But Inner Child was constantly alert to alterations in his environment and the Brute was keen to all his senses, and between the two of them they brought the scarred man to a halt by the block upon which they had earlier sat.
«The crack is gone.»
The Brute remembered that the crack had made the block uncomfortable to sit on. Donovan went to his knees and the Sleuth studied the stone closely. He ran their fingers across it.
I can feel where it was. Like a scar.
“It’s been spackled,” said the Fudir.
«Someone is in the city with us!»
He turned suddenly and looked down the empty avenue behind him. The freshening evening wind stirred the grasses.
“Who?” scoffed Donovan. “A stealthy stonemason who creeps through the ruins patching up the cracks?”
The wind drove pebbles and grit before it, stinging Donovan’s cheek. They rolled across the surface of the foundation block like a miniature barchan. A grain found the slight groove where the crack had been and nestled within it.
There’s your answer. Windblown grit has simply filled in the crack. He reached out to dislodge the grain—to free it, as he thought—and found that it was fused with the stone. When he put pressure on it, he experienced a sudden wave of foreboding, as if the entire city would tumble itself upon him and bury him.
He pulled his hand away, stood, withdrew a pace from the wall.
Certain materials of the Commonwealth, called metamaterials, were said to be self-repairing. Like the self-sealing hulls and pressure suits we have.
“But,” said Donovan, “self-repairing stone?”
It is not true stone, said the Pedant, but some sort of Commonwealth material.
Donovan looked out over the ruins. The Capital of All the Worlds has been rebuilding itself all these centuries, the Sleuth decided. Listen to that sound, that unending rustle.
The young man in the chlamys thought it sounded like the rustle of leaves on the ground of autumn, and thought how lonely the stones must have been over the ages.
“And after all this time,” the Fudir said, “this is as far as it’s gotten?”
After all this time, the Sleuth agreed. One pebble at a time. Starting from rubble. You remarked how well preserved the city is. Imagine what it looked like after the Dao Chettians had finished with it! Do you imagine for a moment that they left the Hall of Suns so nearly intact? No, the whole complex is rebuilding itself, but the Hall came first.
And when it is finished, said the Silky Voice, when it stands once more the Capital of All the Worlds, then will the Ulakaratcakan appear.
“No, Silky,” said Donovan buigh. “Then will the fleets of Dao Chetty appear, and flatten the place once more.”
“If they know this is happening,” said the Fudir. “Terra is a backwater now, and even the Terran natives avoid this place. How much might this place change in the span of a life? If the grandchildren see a city less ruined than their grandparents saw, would they realize it?”
The city will rebuild itself, said the young woman in the chiton, but there will be no one to come live in it.
For Pollyanna, of all of the Donovans, to say a thing like that filled them all with deep sorrow.