Гарднер Дозуа - City Under the Stars

He blinked, and the pillar was gone.

Everything around him had changed. He was standing before a grove of orange-roofed mansions—palaces, almost—all raised high above the ground on impossibly thin stilts. For a giddy instant he thought they were floating, and then, when he realized the truth, feared the stilts would snap and send these massive structures smashing down upon him.

A great sphere of water hung over the stilted buildings, dwarfing them. What light came through it was wan and diminished, bathing the buildings in a wavering shadowy cool, as if they were under the sea.

“There.” Cicero pointed to a balcony, high above them. “A typical dwelling, selected, as you requested, to be as like those you are familiar with as possible. This one is in the Italianate style.” After a brief hesitation, Boone nodded. The silver-gray cyclone leaped up and slammed down upon them again, and they were standing on the balcony.

Hanson craned his head and stared up into the water. From here, the sphere was obviously not solid, but a bubble with walls mere yards deep, wrapped around a core of nothing. A shark swam by overhead, twisting its head from side to side, mouth opening and closing in little gasps.

A salt breeze wafted down from the bubble. Multicolored ribbons twisted and curled in the air between buildings and were gone. Staring out at a hundred other balconies, all empty, Hanson felt a sourceless, aching loneliness growing within him, the sort of emptiness one might feel in an abandoned city, an animal certainty that he was surrounded by nothing but vacancy and isolation.

“Where is everybody?” he asked.

Cicero looked regretful. “Gone.”

“Gone where?”

“Elsewhere.”

“I don’t understand.”

“They have followed… certain trends to their inevitable conclusion,” Cicero said. “Would you like to go inside now?”

Boone hesitated, irresolute. “Well, as long as we’re here, we might as well take a look.”

Cicero walked forward, and the wall parted for him. Boone ducked after.

Hanson had no choice but to follow.

He found himself in a clean, light-filled space. The ceiling was high, the pillars thin, and the leaded-glass windows opalescent. It was a fairy-tale structure, sculpted of moonlight and mist, of soft evening shadows and ice. Even standing within it he couldn’t quite bring himself to believe in its existence. It was too fine, too delicate. Hanson could not think back to a time when he’d been young enough to believe in such a place. Yet—here it was. It made him feel gross and crude by contrast, hairy and smelly as a troll, unworthy.

While he was gawking, Boone had been asking questions. Cicero was explaining to him how the cyclones worked. “—rotating you thirty-seven degrees in time, which is why it feels instantaneous; in actuality your rest-motion is only a few thousand kilometers per hour.” Boone nodded, frowning with concentration and understanding. “Similarly, this doorway is distributed in probability along a curve of thirty-nine thousand miles, so that…”

He led them into a room with enormous windows.

Entering, Hanson seemed to grow lighter, his movements unnaturally slow, like those of a man underwater, his head giddy with uncertainty, so that it seemed almost as if he had to push his foot down to bring it to the floor at the end of each step. Otherwise, it would’ve simply floated up and up, leaving him treading air.

“Where are—” Hanson began, and, somehow placing his feet badly, went tumbling over backward, his balance all wrong damnit, falling with impossible slowness and thrashing awkwardly as the floor came floating up toward him.

Cicero reached over to catch and steady him. “I could increase the local gravity gradient, if you wish,” he said, but whatever his offer might entail, it meant nothing at all to Hanson. Boone hid an amused smile.

Flushing, Hanson looked away, through the windows.

Glorious and terrifying views! A bright gray-and-white wasteland of rocks and sand, and, in the distance, a range of humped and rounded mountains. Long black shadows stretching toward forever under the blackest of skies.

The bleached skeleton of a giraffe lay on the barren soil just outside the window.

Low over the mountains hung… something. Something round and blue and streaked with white, as distant as the Moon, but far larger than the Moon ever was.

It was the Earth. Hanson recognized it from the faded Utopian pictures that were preserved in the Courthouse back in Orange, and which a disbelieving bailiff apathetically pointed out to disbelieving visitors as proof that human beings had once, long ago, left the surface of the Earth. This looked just like those pictures, only far more vivid. The colors were unimaginably brighter, the oceans the wildest blue, the clouds dazzling!

It was unbearable.

Hanson twisted wildly away, went tumbling, and more by luck than not, grabbed the doorway with one rough hand. All in a single surge of panic, he pulled himself through and back into the first room. For a long moment, he knelt there, eyes clenched tight. Madness! How could Boone stand it? After a minute or two he gathered himself together and spoke to the backs of the other two:

“I’m going outside. Just for a minute.”

They were lost in talk. Neither of them responded.

He went outside, and it was afternoon. Only a minute before, when he had entered the room, it had been morning. But there was no mistaking it—the sun, wan and silvery through the water-bubble, had risen higher, the stilted shadows of the buildings had grown longer. He had lost hours, somehow.

Weakly, Hanson leaned against the balustrade, staring not up at the marine animals or out at the bizarrely contoured horizon, but into empty space, at nothing. A tangle of colored ribbons floated in the air, twisting between buildings, a whimsical carnival brightness, and when part of it drifted by him, he reached up impulsively to touch it. One ribbon playfully wrapped itself about his wrist like a tendril, and he found himself standing on a balcony on the building opposite staring into his own startled eyes. He was in both places simultaneously, and then in a third on an entirely different building, staring out into the fields of Heaven where something like a shark’s fin—triangular, dark, immense—lifted up from the grass and slowly subsided. All three Hansons were aware of the others’ thoughts, but their thoughts were not identical but divergent, different in the qualities of their fear and dismay.

The ribbon released his wrist, and he was one and alone again.

He lurched back from the balustrade and across one of the silver plates. A cyclone slammed down on him.

Then off.

When Hanson stumbled from the plate, he found himself in a windblown hall. Down its center, unsupported, hung a line of vast stone bells. They were as gray and rough-looking as granite, but when he wonderingly reached up a finger to touch one, it boomed as if struck by a maul, a deep and despairing vibration that shook his body like the sound of God sobbing.

“Naw.” He stepped back from the bell, shaking his head, profoundly disturbed by something he could not put a name to. “Not like that. Naw, not like—that.”

At the far end of the hall was another pair of circles—more cyclone plates. He hurried toward them, shamblingly at first, then faster. The all but imperceptible breeze of his passage brushing against the bells set up an echoing clamor, a turbulent ocean of sound that surged and swelled about him, filling him with primal dread, driving him to greater speed, so that when he reached the plate he was practically running. His feet touched one circle. A metal pillar rose from the other and slammed down upon him.