Barrington Bayley - The Zen Gun

“No,” she said slowly, “our battle didn’t have anything to do with your moon. It was out among the stars.”

“Then I wonder what is happening? Well, shall we have breakfast, lady?”

She accompanied him back to the fire, where Lacey gave her a piece of meat from the quadruped (which he called a rabbit). The flavour was novel to her; discovering she was ravenously hungry, she gulped it down and wished for more.

Pout himself then scattered the fire, stamping on flame and ember with his bare feet, and ordering the group to begin the day’s march. In single file, Pout in the lead,: they set out to the west.

Hesper glanced behind her. The kosho who had not shared the breakfast, and to whom no one had spoken, rose from the ground, picking up a small mat which had protected his buttocks from the ground and tucking it away somewhere on his person. He walked well to the rear of the rest of the line, and shortly was joined by Sinbiane.

Pout proved to be an indefatigable pace-setter. The sun rose high in the sky and became hot, until Hesper, perspiring and fatigued, began to strip off, unfastening the one-piece sheen suit they had adopted as uniform aboard the Shark , quickly following that by pulling off her undervest. Her boots she put back on and strode along in those and her underpants, carrying her other clothing in one hand.

Pout, glancing back, saw her so disrobed and reminded himself of his plans. A hitch suddenly occurred to him. The boy Sinbiane had assured him they were only a day’s journey from the great level plain where the moving cities were. If they found a city before he had set his seal on her, there would be nothing to hold her to the group…

True, there would be plenty of women in the cities, and perhaps female apes and man-ape chimeras too. Still, the snag tussled in Pout’s mind with his impatience to reach the plain.

The little band he had around him satisfied one aspect of Pout’s nature: his desire to revenge himself on the world by dominating those around him. But he found his vagrant life of the past few months insufficient. Getting food was too difficult. And it became boring, day after day in the wilderness. His lust for life demanded closer, more colourful horizons.

He was able to resolve the difficulty when, near the end of the day, the land sloped down to meet the expected plain. They all stopped to stare when they had a good view of it, for it was just like a grass sea, completely flat as far as the eye could perceive, the more hilly terrain they had crossed curving round it in coves and headlands.

“Is it natural? ” Hesper asked of no one in particular.

“It was a sea bottom once,” the eldest of the sneakthief brothers told her. “But it was levelled off a bit, too.”

Sinbiane had joined them. “Earth’s is an ancient culture, lady, and has peculiarities perhaps not found elsewhere. One of these is the culture of the moving cities. For centuries they have roamed this plain.”

“They really move? But why?”

“Come!” ordered Pout. “Down onto the plain!”

They descended. But instead of setting out immediately over the ocean of waving tall grass, as Hesper had expected, Pout stopped and turned to her. From the bib-like garment he wore he drew, not her scangun, but a different-looking gun she had not seen before.

“Time you joined our little gang properly,” he told her in a thick voice, curling back his protruding lips. “We have an initiation rite.”

Hesper looked blankly at the gun.

Lacey was showing signs of distress, a pained look coming over his face. “Aw, boss, not to the lady. It ain’t right to a lady. She’ll be a good girl, won’tcha, lady? She’ll do what she’s told.”

As he said this he reached out his arm to Hesper. She drew away. Pout waved him back. His gaze was fixed on Hesper’s breast.

The muzzle of the zen gun was barely a yard from her as he pointed it at her left nipple.

“Look!” cried Sinbiane.

He was pointing to something that had appeared on the horizon: a hulking yellow shape that heaved itself up, like a rising sun or moon, but which seemed almost too big to be coming over the horizon. It was as if it were only on the other side of a table.

Spellbound, they watched until it came fully into view, even though the process took several minutes. It was like a mobile castle supporting clusters of round, moulded towers, and it gleamed like gold as the sun caught it.

Suddenly, a fear of the unknown entered Pout’s brain. He stabbed at the buttons of his gun, returning it to kill mode. Then he returned it to his bib, and beckoned.

“Come.”

The moving city appeared to be making for the north of the plain; its progress would take it round a long promontory, though at the rate it went it probably would not get there for a day or two. The grass of the plain was taller than on the higher ground; it came to their mid-thighs (in Pout’s and Sinbiane’s case, to their hips) and they waded through it as they half-ran towards the gorgeous vision.

How do they know we’ll be allowed in? Hesper thought.

But no such doubt seemed to have entered the others’ minds. They stopped running after ten minutes, panting, with the city seeming no nearer.

After that they walked, for about three miles, while the structure grew and grew. Hesper could not keep her eyes off it. One did not normally think of a city as a thing—it was a place. But this was a thing, and at the same time, it was undeniably a city.

Or rather, it was like the centre of a city translocated, its skyscrapers torn away from its suburbs to live a freelance life of their own. Hesper found it almost incredible that such a massive object could be mobile, at least on the ground (in space was a different matter). Perhaps, she thought, it had to keep moving to stop itself from sinking into the Earth! As they approached she could see that it was surrounded by a skirt of casings which presumably covered whatever it rode on, and from this emanated a low quivering, rumbling sound.

She estimated the city’s speed at about half a mile per hour. At length they found themselves below the outer wall, peering up at towers, balustrades and walkways. Pout scampered to and fro, desperately searching for an entrance.

It was one of the sneakthief brothers who eventually let out a penetrating whistle and guided them to a ramp which sloped down over the tread casings (gigantic treads, Hesper decided probably were the most economical method of locomotion), gliding over the grassland like the front end of a lawnmower.

The slope was gentle, but quite long. It ended in a portico fifty feet wide, the way barred by a silver grille. This withdrew; they entered, found their way barred by yet a second grille, while the first fell back into place behind them. The area between was capacious. From the floor, a table emerged, bearing flagons, cups, and a large platter of fruit and breads.

There was a gentle tone, followed by a pleasant female voice.

“To our visitors, greetings! You stand at the entrance to Mo City, one of twenty mobile cities that inhabit this flat veldt known as Flatland on the maps. The levelness of the terrain is of assistance, not to the mobility of the cities which are able to negotiate inclines, but so that the human inhabitants may not find their floors and other surfaces tilting. Before entering Mo, it is as well that you should know something of the reason for the existence of the moving cities. They were originally the brainchild of the social scientist and historian Otto Klemperer, whose thesis was that there is a particular form of political constellation which has been especially fruitful for civilisation. This is where a number of independent city states exist within the same geographical area, sharing a common language and a common culture to some extent, but rivals in every other sense. Cases of particular note are the city states of ancient Greece, the city states of the central plain of China of the same period, and the city states of Italy at the time of the Renaissance. In each case, the ideational foundations were laid, within a comparatively short space of time, for the subsequent development of entire civilisations.