Two rails ahead and below, running in a long gentle curve off into nowhere, more dry dead earth. I couldn't look just ahead at where they dissappeared under us without feeling dizzy again. There definitely were hills now, distant and low and all around the horizon. The ones directly ahead, where the rails ran, were sort of flat-looking, and odd in the light, but I saw nothing more. I asked Shimmy what I was looking for, and he said to wait. The hills in the distance began to change in their oddness, and then I saw long lines of light runnign up and down between them. And I realized that it was City.
City is a word that everyone knows, I think. Cities are what people used to be, where they used to live and run the world from. Cities ran the world, Cities were important and big, they ate from the land around them and did not have to give back, because they were where all the people were. And Cities were gone now, only their great bodies were left, places of fear and danger, where treasure hunters went and did not return.
Even if I hadn't known what City meant, I could have figured it from thinking about Our Town and just making it bigger in my mind. But figuring a thing without seeing it, and seeing it in front of you, are two different things. This City was big, and it was getting bigger every second.
The thing I remember most are the walls. Enormous, staggering heaviness of rock and eyes and lines of metal, stretching up and up and up into the sky as if they were actually hanging down from it. We moved like creepers in the shady valleys between the the un-knowably high walls. And everywhere, above and ahead and to either side, were the enormous wide flat glasses of eyes.
No wonder the people of the Cities had all fallen apart long ago, with that many eyes to see them all the time. Who could stand up under all that weight? Our Town would have fit, all of it, into just the shadow of one of these smooth-walled monsters. I wished oddly that the Revs would find out about this place, they would get lost in this maze like a clot of rot in the Trashlands and never be seen again. Then I thought about who might already be living in these buildings, out of sight, and I thought about asking to close the two doors again.
I wasn't looking forward when we went into the mouth of the earth, but suddenly all was black and the day was gone and I gave a little shriek and fell down again. My head was getting sore, maybe from everything trying to fit its way inside it, maybe from hitting the ground so many times. Shimmy told me it was alright, that it was a tunnel. He went back to the engine, and soon I felt the house stop moving, there in all the dark. It was overwhelmingly terrifying. I stayed on the floor. I could not move.
I was wishing, suddenly and desperately, that I hadn't followed Shimmy that morning. The worms were still in my pocket, they were probably nearly spoiled now. The nestlings would be hungry. I had found the nest in the corner of a busted house a few weeks before; I watched for a day and a night, but the mother bird had never come back, and the little ones were being noisy. I knew it was only a matter of time before someone found them and ate them,
Now that I'm older, I know that very few people have had days like I had that day, packed full of wonders from one side to the other. I don't expect to have another while I live, the the wide world is weird, and I won't say never. Anyway, of all the things I'd seen that day that I'd never seen before, what happened next is what I seem to remember most, and what I love to remember.
Out of the dark, darker than any night I could remember, there was suddenly a light, and it was in Shimmy's hand. He was holding, he must have had it in those baggy clothes of his, something that burned bright enough to almost sharp my eyes if I looked right at it, but not like a campfire, steady and clean and white, powerful. Shimmy held it, and he helped me up, and he said it would be alright, and that I should follow him. It's no real mystery why I remember that so well.
We walked through the dark, and Shimmy got me to understand, after many times telling me, that we were inside and under one of the enormous stone walls, and that there was a way to climb up to the top and get back out into day. I didn't really believe him, but I followed him. We walked through long, wide, echoing hallways, with no light but the one Shimmy carried. I kept close by him, imagining horrors behind every door we passed and listening as hard as I could. After what seemed a long time we turned aside, found a narrow room, and started walking up steps.
Never again will I walk up so many steps. I won't say that I'll never come across that many, because the world is weird and anything can happen, but I ever do find them, I will never walk up them. I had never thought so many could be piled together in one place, having never seen more than a handful in one place at one time in Our Town. The space we walked through was full of strange echoes, and the light only went as far as the next turn of the wall. We'd walk up, turn, walk up, turn. There were doors at every other turning, but Shimmy would look at them in the light and keep walking. It seemed like it would never end.
It was only after hours of this, when my legs were cramped and burning and my throat raw, that it occurred to me that these steps weren't just piled along side each other, but that they were stacked together, all in a straight line from the ground to the sky. I was walking up the same ground again and again and again, getting higher and higher all the time.
I groaned and almost stopped, then decided to put it out of my head. I said it was impossible, and in my mind's eye I went back to walking up the stairs that were piled together, like a great spiral or a strange heap. It was easier to remember there would be a top that way. I kept my eyes on Shimmy's bent legs ahead of me in the dark. Maybe these stairs were why he'd started shimmying at all; walking in a straight line along the ground seemed impossibly easy now.
At last, after too many doors to have imagined counting, and many stops to rest, we came to a door, and Shimmy's light went over it, and he did not keep walking. He paused, we rested again, and then he opened it and went through. I froze in the soft light from the other side, then followed when I saw the door was closing on its own and I'd be shut alone in the room of steps. It was a heavy door, I hauled it open and stepped through, and it closed with a bang.
We were in a quiet hallway. It was cool and very clean, like everything else had been since we'd left the Trashlands and Our Town far behind. It was about as long at the metal house had been, and it ended in a wooden door, very smooth and very clean. The light was coming from discs set in the ceiling, and was warmer than the light Shimmy had carried, if not as warm as a fire woudl have been. The air was cool and without any smell, which I immediately mistrusted. The floor was covered in an even, skin-colored cloth matting that hugged my floppers as I stood.
Shimmy didn't look good. He was still panting from the climb, and seemed stooped and worn out. His legs were shaking a little.
"You alright?" I asked.
"Give me some water," he said flatly.
I stared. If he had pulled out his knife and tried to stab me right there, I would have been less surprised.
It is difficult to make this plain now, but in those days you didn't, ever, ask another man for water from your fours. You carried your own, and you made due.
In a very short time that day I had come to see Shimmy as a very different kind of person from the others in Our Town. Diggers, Weeders, Revs, kids, everyone; no one knew what Shimmy knew, no one had been where we had been. If anyone else knew the secret, it was buried at least as deep inside them as Shimmy had buried it.
But even so, looking at him as I did with awe and wonder, I have to admit now that it changed the way I saw him even more to hear him ask for water. It makes me unhappy. I saw him as a taker, as someone who couldn't be trusted as well as I'd trusted him a moment earlier.
I don't know how to make the feeling come through now, things have changed. Back then, someone who would ask for water was someone you couldn't trust. I like Shimmy, and I was in awe of his powers after everything that had happened, but I realized I did not trust him.
I gave him the water.
The funny thing is, if someone asks for water, you have to give it to them if you've got it. He drank.
"I'm sorry to ask," he said, handing it back to me.
I felt unhappy. Here I was, somewhere in the middle air of a great stone prison of walls, and I had no idea what we were doing or why we were there. It was as if a spell had fallen away; while we were traveling I had not asked where we were going or why, because I had been caught following Shimmy in the first place, and hadn't felt like asking questions just to be told to be quiet again.
But now I couldn't help it. Those little nestlings had gotten into my head again somehow, squeaking for food. The worms were still and drying in my pocket. I took the water back from him. When I spoke, it didn't sound like me.
"What is all this?" I said. "What are we doing here?"
Shimmy looked unhappy also, and very tired. He drew himself up, his eyes just a little higher than mine.
"We are here," he said, "to see a very old man, and a very important one, and to see what he wants. Unless you are spoken to, do not speak. Follow me."
He walked down the hallway. After a moment I followed him. I dreaded that door for some reason, all the dark, sharp things that had hidden from me in the shadowy building below us seemed to be welling up behind it. We reached it after a moment. All was still. Shimmy opened the door without knocking.
The second I saw inside, I shrieked again and almost slid to the floor. The room beyond had no walls.
The sun was setting. I knew this because from the floor to the ceiling was nothing but horrible, staring eyes, big, tall, with bars between but open all the same. Any second the floor was going to push sideways and tilt me out, a gust of wind would lift me out, I would fall out. The city outside was sleeping in the setting sun, and it was a very beautiful death coming to get me right now. I did slide to the floor. I could go no further.
"Calm down," said Shimmy tiredly. "They are all closed tight, you can't get out that way."
He tried to pull me up. How did I know they weren't about to open? There was a wild sound in my ears, I was terrified, I could not move. Slowly, inch by inch, Shimmy pulled me up from the floor. I pressed myself against the wall for support.
On the wall there was a small metal bulge with a screen glowing on it. I hadn't gotten a good look before I'd seen into the room, and I wasn't going to look away from that false wall to look now. It was buzzing and frizzing like a large creeper. I nearly put my hand on it as I moved along the wall.
"Don't touch that," said Shimmy, startling me.
"Will it bite me?" I asked, almost in delierum.
"You'll break it," he hissed. He moved my hand away with his and pulled me past it. We edged through the doorway into the room. I stayed pressed against the wall.
There was a short narrow space on the other side of the door; I hugged the wall as we edged along down it. When we got out into the room, I began taking darting glances around the space I was in, but kept returning to those huge, staring, treacherous eyes where the wall should have been. They were certainly shut very tight, there was no breeze, but I knew that eyes are made to be opened, and I did not trust them. We edged along.
We turned a corner, and the wall behind me changed. I did not look, but I felt under my a row of flat objects, very smooth, some feeling almost like cool dry skin, others like cloth. I halted, felt very carefully for a moment, pulled one of the objects free and stared at it. It was flat, square, and very smooth. I folded it at one side like Dad had, God rest. Inside were many pieces of paper, flat and cut in squares and very clean, but covered with those neat little rows of creepers. I realized I was blinking back tears. Shimmy touched my arm and I dropped the book, we moved on.
The walls, I saw, or at least the one I walked along, were lines with books, top to bottom. What treasures, all asleep and unused. There were tables with papers on them, and strange engines glowing and clacking in the corners. It was a very high, very wide room, and there were the warm false light discs in the ceiliing and false torches on the wall. I noticed another door on the far side of the room, but it was part open and seemed to lead to a smaller room, no escape there.
At last, Shimmy guiding me by the arm at first, we parted from the book wall and walked out into the space. In the middle of the cloth-covered floor was a circle of buzzing engines, with thick cords like snakes runnign from the walls on all sides. There was a water bottle on a coat stand in the middle. Below the coat stand I could see a bed. Every heartbeat that passed without the world falling over and me flying out the false wall made me feel stronger, but more suspicious that some other terrible thing would happen. Nothing did. We walked to the bed.
On the bed lay a very small, very wrinkled white-haired man. He had no beard. He had false eyes over his real ones, as I'd seen a tradesman once wear when I was little. The eyes behind the false ones were closed.
"You took your time," said the old man suddenly, clearly. I had thought him asleep.
"I took the stairs," said Shimmy without ceremony. "Hello, Boss."
"Good evening," said the old man. "Why not take the lift? I powered it for you."
Shimmy chuckled in an ugly way. "I didn't enjoy getting stuck last time," was all he said to that.
There was a pause. The old man seemed sick, but did not cough or wease or suffer at all. The humming engines all around him were doing the coughing and suffering for him. I wondered a little blankly if he were going to die.
"Who have you brought with you?" asked the old man. He spoke slowly but firmly. "You know I don't approve of guests."
"One of your children," said Shimmy.
"Eh?" asked the old man warily, his eyes opening and I felt myself gasp. There were no eyes in the sockets, just startling red wells that I couldn't look away from. But even without eyes to see, I felt his look fall on me. I felt instantly that this was a man worse than the worst Revs, I might fall out of the world after all. "Is your mind finally gone?" he asked at last, and the wells shut themselves again. "I have no children."
"One of the children of your world," said Shimmy flatly. "He lives through what you made, he is him because you are you."
"You bring me this filth," the old man muttered. "I can smell him from here."
"He smells like the world," said Shimmy. "You want to shut me out with him?"
"Enough of this," said the old man. "You received my message."
"Yes," said Shimmy.
"Then you know what you have to do," said the old man.
Shimmy seemed to hesitate. "Where are the lifters?" he asked.
"Gone," said the old man.
"Gone," said Shimmy. "Gone where?"
"I told them all to fly away, to leave me in peace," he said. "They're somewhere over the ocean by now, or under it."
"You disabled the safe return," said Shimmy, as if to himself.
"I told them to cross the sea," said the old man. "With full charges they would never have made it. None of them had full charges."
"After I kept them running," said Shimmy. "All those years."
"They were no longer needed," said the old man flatly.
"How long ago was this?" asked Shimmy.
"Three days," said the old man. "I thought that would be enough for these things to wear out, but here we are."
"Yes," said Shimmy. "Here we are." He examined the water hanging on the coat rack. I wondered if there was any more around the old man wouldn't miss; it's wrong to ask for water, but there's no problem with stealing it if you can. "Plenty of saline, I see," he said, staring at the bottles there. "But no more morphine. I see why it's so urgent, eh?" He smiled.
"I said in my message," said the old man, his voice rising somewhat, "that I was weary. How long will you make me wait?" He shifted in position somewhat, seemed to settle again. He said flatly, "You've got a job, now do it."
"Oh, I never said I would do the job," said Shimmy, just as flatly.
"Why are you here, then?" demanded the old man. "Why do you bring in this filth?"
"He's my guest," Shimmy said.
"Oh," said the old man. "Brought him along on a sight-seeing tour, eh? Come to see the old man in the tower?"
I didn't realize he was talking to me.
"Speak up boy," said the old man. "Have I got that certain look you wanted to see?" He used a word I don't remember when he said a certain look. I don't know for sure, but now I think it was prelapsarian or some other word no one actaully knows anymore.
"You look old," I said intelligently.
The old man cackled.
"Behold the inheiretors of the earth," he said to on one. "So much for the meek, but maybe they meant the intellectually meek. Tell me boy can you read? Read one word to me and I'll give you any book from that wall."
"Exit," I said, pointing to a glowing sign near the ceiling. It was a word I knew without reading, you saw those signs everywhere in the trash heaps.
"Very good," said the old man, and I wanted to hit him even though he was frail. "You may take your prize. Is this why you brought this filth here, Shingler? To do little tricks for me?"
"I brought him here," Shimmy said softly, "to do the job for me."
The old man made a strange croaking sound that I suddenly realized was a laugh.
"Very good," he said. "I always knew you were cruel but a coward. Can he do more than gauge out people's eyes when they're not looking?"
"He's killed men before," said Shimmy. "He can do it again."
"He's a boy," said the old man dismissively. "He's not a killer."
"I am not a killer," said Shimmy. "But the boy is."
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