Chasers rode the more limber city-parts to the mouth of the pass and waited. The torchers crossed to the opposite side and set the necessary fires.

"Stop, dig wells, feed the pumping systems!" Reah demanded. The city obeyed but they were still too high; the wells didn't bring up enough water. The fire caught the side ranks and destroyed them. Reah felt their end as a shriveling in her extended awareness.

The city moved around the fire and flowed toward the rock piles. Reah saw Durragon's scheme and brought the city to a halt again.

"I release you from another obligation," she said. "It's necessary to kill human beings now -- not as one steps on ants, but deliberately."

She felt the spark of rage glowing beneath her. At once she was aware of a new city mental space -- a vast, dark realm, crossed by ordered textures of tradition. For a moment she sensed rebellion, but that subsided, and the spark vanished.

Still, it was best to try an alternative first. The city sent part of its mass into the rock-piles to engage the men waiting there. The Chasers attacked and the rest of the city withdrew, leaving expendable parts behind as bait. The Chaser army was divided.

She pushed Resurrection on to the old river bed. The smell of the sea, a dozen miles away, came to her through a thousand sensors. Much fainter, but sharply amplified, was the smell of fresh water. It was deep, and they'd have to dig near Akkabar.

She looked for the village and saw it. A few huts had risen among the ashes, and now she was dragging the invaders back. She would try to circle the town, protect it. She spread the city farther apart, knowing what she was risking. She was tiring, though. Chasers riding rogue parts were capturing and destroying structural members on both sides. Events seemed to swim in her memory. She struggled in the chair. Weakness used her veins as step-ladders to her mind. Then she felt her stomach heave and she lost contact with the city. Far beneath her, the spark grew.

Durragon rode away from the arsonists after ordering them to extinguish their torches. The grass fires burned away from them, carried by winds going north through the pass. That was good; the fires had served their purpose, and already too much of the city had been destroyed.

He told his runners to re-group the army and follow him in a charge on the city. His flank-runners shook their heads.

"Dis we, brayba do we be, do no' t'ink wisdom to dribe away de -- "

"Those are my orders!" Durragon said. The runners continued to look at him darkly, almost insolently. He stared them down. Perja shrugged. "Ob de way, Man," the Chaser said. They jogged off.

Still no fear, but Durragon could feel sweat gathering on his forehead, not born of exertion.

The sky across the river bed was gold, and high above, an insect-wing blue of enchanting depth. In another hour night would be upon them. The city could entrench and they'd never get into it. He had to act now.

He rode toward the front of the flow as fast as the mount could carry him, passing Chasers. Some cheered, others watched silent. There were only a few bands at the very front of the city, and they were tired, smoke-smudged and disgusted. They shouted questions as he passed them.

There was no time for orders or explanations. He had to get to the front, to lead his troop in for the kill. He could feel the blood pumping in his neck and head. Best to lead, to fly into the face of danger even before his men ... that was how he would stop the uprising. It wasn't overt, but he could feel it nonetheless: the lack of respect, the growing confusion in his men. He found an assistant runner trudging through the grass and almost rode his city part over the man, stopping short and kicking up clots of dirt. "Get all the guards down to the front," he ordered. "All the veterans, the advance guides ... I want them all up here with me." _Around me,_ he thought. "I'll wait for them before we move in." He felt for the secure hardness of his pistol.

The city was a mile away, bearing down inexorably. There were no more obvious weaknesses in its lines than there had been at the beginning of the day.

This was the confrontation, the last stand. If he failed at this, the Chasers would lose their near-mystical reverence for him (were losing it already) and they would suspect he didn't really care for them, not even as a God cares for his peon creations. They would suspect he only cared for the opportunities they gave him. He had wondered how long it would take them to realize. _No leader ever cares for the masses,_ he thought. _It's a relationship of opportunity, not love._ His father had once worked him the same way, looking at him after the harvest with dark, suspecting eyes, in the candlelight after the meager dinner, unsure what this child was, but knowing there was work in it, help for his failing strength. And Durragon had felt a similar suspicion for the tired, seamy-faced patriarch, had dreamed at night of killing him, taking the family savings and going far away.

Now he was the father, and the children were restless. He had to get his most trusted men around him, or he could be killed in the charge, just as the map-maker had been killed.

Durragon had been born a Habiru. No Habiru, he thought, could ever really trust or respect a Chaser. They wasted their lives running in the wake of migrating cities, hoping to scavenge and caring for little else, praying to intractable monoliths that hardly knew they existed.

Now he was their leading edge, to split the monoliths and bring back rightful Paradise. But they were too stupid to even know knives must have a cutting edge.

The advance guides, guards and honored veterans were gathering around him in clumps of five or six or ten, and he rode among them, barking orders and arranging their ranks as buffers. He spotted Perja riding a mount like his own, no doubt captured in the raids of the past few hours. Ambition. The man was dangerous. Durragon didn't stop to let him have his opportunity.

The city was almost upon them. Some small bit of tactical judgement told him it was foolish, suicidal, but he shouted the command anyway. "Move in! Wedge your way through!" A hundred yards. His mount carried him smoothly and the wind between his teeth felt exhilarating. Then a giant structural column seemed to materialize, pushing through the smaller city parts, dividing his men. Perja rode beside him.

"Get back to the rear ranks!" Durragon shouted. Perja shook his head. Durragon turned away to see where his mount was running. In the corner of his eye, he saw something fly in, a kicked-up stone, a tuft of dirt and grass. He pulled out his pistol.

He slid off the mount, hitting the ground and knocking all his breath out. He felt a pain, like a pulled muscle in his chest. He rolled over.

Perja stood above him, blocking out the sky. The Chaser put a foot on each of his arms. He couldn't find the gun or organize his thoughts. The Chaser brought out a thin woven wire. Durragon closed his eyes. A shadow passed over. Angel of Death.

He coughed and his eyes flew open. Perja was still there, but something black was above him. The Chaser was cringing, trying to hunker lower, but his head was snagged by an obstruction and he flew away, leaving Durragon on his back. The shadow passed. The wire fell into Durragon's hands.

The city had saved him. The Chaser must have thrown a knife and knocked him down, and now the city, like a jealous lover, wanting his command, had saved him. His chest ached. Where was the knife? The stars were visible. The self-defeating stars ...

Things moved around him, silent as ghosts. Huge things. He could feel their feet tromping the ground. Legs rose into the air like pistons, giant insects, walking ... what? Someone was shouting.

There was wet on his hand, wet dark against the starlit grey *...* what?

_"I'm hurt!"_ He felt his lips with his fingers. They opened and closed in rhythm with the noises. They were his own. He got to his feet and reached out for a dark hulk moving swiftly by. His hand caught an edge and held, yanking him up, and something large and gentle gripped him to keep him from falling under the treads.

In the starlight, Resurrection circled Akkabar and began to rebuild.

By night, the city was dark and lifeless. Its pieces groaned as they settled, a mournful sound that raised the hair on Ezeki's neck. Musa cried aloud to Allah like a child.

For two days and nights the leaderless Chasers surrounded Resurrection and tried to get inside. The barriers, though greatly reduced, held. The Chasers' songs could be heard above the wind and city sounds:

_ "Dis we; purge and puriby, sin ob men_

And dog, and Debbils dribe out ob dark,

Dis we, brayba mans oll..."

"Der wa' an ald God, an' dis me broke de

Pact ob dis awbul ald Shaytan call' Day-o,

And dead, dey all lab, and cry por de pain

_Ob de paders and modders ob me-o..." _

Musa and Ezeki listened as the sun approached zenith on the third day. "I should have known better than to consort with infidels," Musa said, sitting on the back of the stilled transport with Ezeki. "They have weak minds." The vehicle was parked on a much reduced version of the parkway which had once surrounded the city.

"Weakened by history, I think," Ezeki said. "Doesn't part of you want to do what they're doing?"

Musa made a fist and shook it at the sky. "Yes, but I'm not a crazy man. I don't listen to the voice of _Shaytan_ inside of me."

Ezeki gripped the Moslem's arm. "As of this moment, we have no past. We're exiled by our expolises and by Durragon. We should survive together. We share a God, at least in some respects. And what better place to survive than in the city?"

"You're crazier than the dogs outside," Musa said.

"Not at all. Each day, we'll prick our arms and go to the hospital and say, 'Look, we're still injured ... take care of us!'"

Under the bright blue sky they laughed until they had to hold each other up. Then they shook arms, grasping each other at the half of the elbows, and declared themselves brothers by common insanity.

"Where's the woman?" Musa asked, suddenly sober. "Was she killed? Are we alone here?"

Ezeki shook his head. "We can check in the hospital. If she's not there, the city's still too big to find someone who doesn't want to be found."

They spent an hour searching through the changed floor-plan of the city's lower regions. The hospital had been moved closer to the central shaft; pieces of the buttresses springing from its outer walls were singed. Much of the city looked shabby now, but the basic functions were still being performed. Durragon's forces had reduced it, but not subdued it. They entered the hospital and looked at the small cubicles with their empty beds. In the last cubicle, they saw a figure stretched out on a table. It was bathed in green light and surrounded by a web of silvery wires and medical machinery. Three husky coat-rack type workers stood nearby, unmoving. Ezeki stepped into the doorway to get a better look.

"Is it her?" Musa asked.

Ezeki leaned forward, then walked quickly around the table as a worker advanced to stop him. His eyes widened as he was pulled away by a brass and copper-colored arm.

"No," he said "It's _him._"

Durragon, half-awake, with green limbs and silvery wires and stinging drops of fluid weaving above him, had thought he was dead for several days, whenever he thought much at all. He couldn't remember how many times he had been carried from bed to table and back. He thought he was a body, being preserved by funeral directors from the Habiru village, taking their revenge on him day after day ...

Then he heard the voices. He turned his head, or tried to, and found himself held down firmly. He recognized the voices. It was no use trying to talk. If he was dead, then they were dead, too. Even in death, he could have an army...

Reah sat at the top of the highest tower, now barely two hundred meters above the river bed, tapping her fingers impatiently as a mobile medical worker checked her over.

"You are not sick," it said. "That is, you are not diseased or malfunctioning."

"Then why do I throw up? My stomach bloats like I've been eating green fruit."

The worker hummed for a moment. "You are not aware?"

"No. Aware of what?"

"It is the reason you have been allowed to stay in the city."

"What, in the name of Allah?"

"You are pregnant."

Reah laughed. "I'm too _old!"_ she said, her voice sharp.

"Apparently that isn't true."

"It's ridiculous. Who -- I haven't..." She shook her head.

"You have been pregnant since the day you came here, perhaps a few days even before that. We can give you several choices. Most citizens opt for natural childbirth, as that suits our beliefs. You may, however, have your pregnancy conducted outside the womb, with additional maternal conditioning to facilitate acceptance of the child. Also -- "

"Quiet!" She shuddered. "No. I don't believe it."

The worker said nothing more. She stood and walked to the wall, looking over the scattered, disordered camps of the Chasers. She frowned. There had been something ... but it wasn't clear. She remembered lying on the dirt, with a youthful, dirty face moving back and forth above her. She felt queasy again, but not from the abomination in her womb. She was sick remembering how, as a child, she had watched a grasshopper mating with another grasshopper which had been cut in half. The live grasshopper was unable to discriminate.

The man -- or men -- or boys -- who raped her had had no more control than the insect. At that time, she had been a half-wit, an ugly and filthy harridan. But the very fact of her femaleness had driven men to mate with her, plant monsters inside her. She felt like screaming.

"I won't carry such a child," she said. "I want it dead."

The words seemed to burn her tongue.

"Removal can be arranged," the worker said. "But we will not terminate the child."

"I don't care. Just take it out of me."

"You must go to an equipped apartment, or to the hospital."

"Are there still men in the hospital?"

"Yes."

"Then take me to the apartment."

Durragon was out of his bed and walking slowly around. A worker attended him, supporting one elbow. Durragon hadn't spoken since coming awake. He had no idea how long he had slept, but he was suspicious now, and he didn't want to give anything away by asking questions, seeming weak.

He was inside the city! The thought both plagued and delighted him. Why had it taken him in? Just because he was injured? Did it matter? He was where he wanted to be. Whatever God or gods controlled his fate had seen fit to bless him with an unequalled opportunity.

He heard a footstep and turned his head to the doorway. Ezeki Iben Tav stood there. Musa Salih was behind him.

"General," Ezeki said, nodding slightly.

"Where is Breetod? The others?" If he had a loyal flank runner, perhaps he could regain control of the Chasers.

"They're dead," Ezeki said. "They were killed when the city tried to move."

"But I was dead, and the city brought me back to life."

"You were not dead," the worker said. "You had a chest wound and a fractured skull. This city cannot resurrect the dead."

"The city no doubt has a different definition of death than we are used to," Ezeki said. "You may have been dead, General, in one way or another." The old man was standing stiff, his fists clenched.

"Whatever, the plan had worked. We're inside."

"Not for long. We'll be thrown out again."

"Tell me everything that's happened," Durragon said. "Brief me."

Ezeki hesitated, then began a disjointed, muddled description. His mind seemed elsewhere. Durragon frowned and tried to draw him out on several points. Musa added details.

"How were you wounded?" Ezeki asked when he was finished.

Durragon shook his head. "That isn't important. Now that we control the city, we'll change everything."

"We don't control the city," Musa said. "A woman does. A madwoman."

"The city manager is not insane," the worker said.

"The city isn't too bright, either," Musa commented, showing his teeth.

"You haven't ... reasoned with her? Days, weeks in the middle of our goal, and you haven't taken advantage of your position?"

"We were waiting for you," Ezeki said softly. "We're not going to stay in the city any longer than it wishes. And I suspect neither will she."

"We'll find ways."

Ezeki sighed and looked away. "You are the General."

Durragon sensed something unpleasant in the old man's tone. "You couldn't hold this city if it was a starving dog and you had a bag of meat! You're a half-lettered pedant. What do you know about command?"

"Nothing," Ezeki said, surprised at the outburst. Good, Durragon thought. If I can surprise them, I can still control them.

"So!" Durragon laughed and straightened, wincing at the stretched skin on his ribs. "We'll have to get along as best we can."

"Yes, General," Musa said.

"I need rest. I must get well soon."

They nodded and left the cubicle. Ezeki looked like he was close to tears. "He'll have me killed when we get outside," he said.

"No, he won't. He's no better than we are now." Musa's eyes narrowed. "He lost the Chasers. Something happened out there; someone tried to kill him -- not the city. He bungled his command!"

An hour earlier, Reah had opened her eyes to the kaleidoscopic flow of the ceiling, moaned, and rolled over in bed. She hadn't changed her position since. She felt like one of the damned. The operation itself hadn't been painful, but she was torn into a multitude of dissenting, condemning parts. Suddenly she jerked up in bed, screaming," Where's the child? What have you done with it?"

There were no workers in the apartment and the louvres on the nearby desk screen didn't open. The panels above the bed which concealed medical equipment hadn't closed all the way, and she heard a faint ticking behind them. She tried to pry them open and broke a fingernail. She rose to her knees on the bed and pounded on the doors.

"Answer me!"

The ticking stopped. She backed away, shuffling across the bedclothes, which were trying to rearrange themselves beneath her knees. "Where is everything?" She felt close to panic. Had she pushed the city too far? Had it finally just given up and died?

The apartment door slid open and a worker entered.

"Do you need help?" it asked, holding up one brassy limb.

She stammered, then closed her mouth and shook her head. "It was a dream," she said. "I dreamed I had a child."

"You did," the worker said.

She nodded slowly, then sat in the desk chair. "What are you going to do with it?"

"It will be brought to term."

"And then?"

"You have renounced all claim to the child."

"Yes," she said. "What would I do with such a thing? A monster. An abomination." Her voice rose. "Why let it live?"

The worker didn't answer. Such a question was beyond its capacity to understand, Reah thought. It could edit out her words when they made no sense, just as it would edit out a burp, or a stammer. "What do I care, anyway?" she asked.

"It's done with." She pointed to the screen. "This apartment isn't complete. Find me something more suitable."

"Of course," the worker said, and went out the door, motioning for her to follow.

It had been a week since the journey. Ezeki had spent the time learning how to use the apartment screens. Though the service was erratic, he was spellbound. He could learn more in one week than he had learned in all his past years. Musa saw very little of him.

Durragon had left the hospital and wandered through the city. The beauty was staggering. He wanted the city very badly. It had always been difficult for him to appreciate something until he knew he owned it completely. Now, with the opportunity to do so many things, he did nothing but walk and take a speculative inventory. His plans grew.

From the rebuilt control center, Reah followed their movement -- watched Musa sitting in a courtyard, sunning himself; watched Ezeki through the receiver in his screen; but most carefully of all, watched Durragon as he paced and explored.

She did not show herself. She stayed in the reduced central tower performing her own inventory, assessing the city's new limitations and damage. How many children could she accommodate now? What did she care? She couldn't accept her own child -- why ask for thousands not her own? All her life she had been compassionate, even when oppressed. Now she found it difficult to care.

But the children would be coming whatever she thought or felt, and having started the project, she couldn't bring herself to give up. With a worker beside her chair, and the equipment waiting at her fingertips, she half-heartedly began to arrange things. Apartments had to be cleaned out, but so many workers had been lost in the move. She felt a flash of anger again. "Why can't you throw him out?" she asked for the tenth time.

"He is not completely healed."

"He's the one who almost destroyed us!"

The voice of the homunculus was flat and expressionless. "The city still has functions to fulfill."

How Reah hated! The tears would not come, however. She wasn't even sure what she hated any more -- was it Durragon, or that terrifying spark she felt whenever she assumed the complete mantle of the city? That spark which in turn, seemed to hate her...

With evening, she took her walk, stiff-legged and slow, around the upper promenade. The worker followed her.

She watched the Chasers.

She thought of Abram Iben Khaldun, ages dead, and of her daughter. What would the new child be like? Where did the city keep it? Slowly, her anger turned away from her insides -- still fertile, like seeds in a dead, dry fruit -- and even away from the thoughtless scum who had raped her.

She could not hate the helpless and defenseless, not even the ignorant and crude. All together, they were common victims. They were products of an evil that went beyond understanding, of a philosophy that had wormed into the brilliance of the city-dwellers and designers. But she could not even hate them. Perhaps they had suffered most of all.

Whom did she hate? She stopped and felt the pressure build behind her face as if she were a pot coming to a boil. She lifted her hands. "Allaaa-a-ah!" she wailed. "Help me! You despise me, you torture me, help me-e-e!"

She was on her knees, lifting her hands. The tears poured down her face. That was weak, very weak; that was giving in to the madness again ... to the insects buzzing, the bells ringing, the filth and scavenging. But she couldn't stop. Her thin body shook. Her colorful robes formed a wrinkled circle around her, the contours changing with her spasms.

She looked up, beseeching. "Allah, all my life I have served you, never cursed you -- not until I became mad and entered this city -- all my life I have been a good Moslem woman, obedient and faithful. Not once did I dream of being more than I was, yet you visited grief upon me time and again until I broke. What are you testing me for?" She had an image of a club of males -- _djinn_ and prophets and men risen to Paradise -- around a shadowy, masculine Allah, with Mohammed at their fore, in a city of jeweled minarets and stone walls and gold walls and gates of pearl ... all looking down on her, mildly amused. They had risen above life, and how the suffering of those still in the material realm seemed like the scuttling of ants to them. She was an object of pitying amusement. She would never attain such heights. She was a woman, barely possessed of a soul, bound to Earth, her tides determined by the motions of a moon so far away it was beyond consideration. Her blood flowed and ebbed, she was unclean, she bore the gate of creation, she was an object of desire and disgust. She was not even most desirable. For children, go to a woman. For pleasure, go to a young boy. For delight, go to a melon! Such had been the dirty rhymes thrown at her when she had been a child, by boys and even other girls, blaspheming as all children will do when not supervised. They hardly knew what the words meant. She had always wondered what men did with a melon, until finally she had learned that merely eating a melon was considered better, more desirable than consorting with a woman. That was the ultimate refinement, in discernment.

And yet in her deepest despair she still turned to Allah. "Allah," she murmured, head buried in her arms, bowing over. "Allah." The insects buzzed.

And ... what was it? She seemed to hear a song. She turned ... and her past fell away, as if she had all her life been falling down a long tunnel, and only now had emerged in sunlight. She felt herself lifted up and fitted to something, not like man to woman but ... she searched through her more recent education -- like a molecule fitting to another molecule. She was very small, but valued, and the thing she fitted against, so well, was huge and beyond knowledge, but loving. She removed her clothes and stood naked, surrounded by the sprawl of fabric. Her breasts were high, her stomach was flat, her hair was smooth and red-gold, and honey hung between her thighs. Then that was gone, too, and she was like a thin leaf of gold, wavering in an electric wind.

"What am I doing here?" she asked, and the larger molecule seemed to quiver with a vast, benevolent laughter.

_You are not quite ready after all_

"No," she said. "I'm not."

And she wafted down, neither sad nor despondent at the sudden release. She found herself fully clothed, walking with purpose and energy down a corridor of trees. She was laughing at each trunk, each spray of leaves. They had been carried by the city and lovingly protected from fire and Chasers, to be planted here, that she might walk among them. They were all parts of the city. And she was a part too, for the city had a soul. Distorted as it was, it lived and desired. Now she had to fulfill those desires and teach it how to survive, as a mother would teach her child.

Durragon stood fifty meters away, hidden by a stand of trees. Musa and Ezeki stood beside him. "That's the madwoman," he said. They nodded. "How does she control the city?"

"We don't know," Ezeki said. "We've only seen her a couple of times."

"She walks like she's drunk. Look how she reaches out and touches the trees. What's inside the tower?"

Reah entered a half-circle archway and a wide door closed behind her. Ezeki sighed and held out his hands. "We have only seen this place just now."

"You've been wasting time," Durragon said. "We have to talk to her, reason with her if that's possible. She looks harmless. A crazy old woman. If the city can do without her -- if we can control it the same way she does -- if she does -- " He cocked an eye at the two men -- "then we can do without her, too."

Musa looked down at his feet. He was tired of fighting and killing. The old Habiru must be tired as well, he thought. Yet Durragon was able to lead them around like gullible Chasers.

The children were coming, just a day or two away. She wondered how the parents had felt -- if there had been parents. Had the machines just snatched them away, or taken only those who were sick beyond help, or abandoned? Perhaps the villagers had been asleep and saw nothing, or perhaps they had regarded the machines as appointed angels. She sat in the chair, watching through the city's far-seeing eyes. Her legs ached, and her breasts no longer seemed as high, or her hair as bright and silken -- but that had been a vision. What remained was more important. The purpose, the energy. She closed her eyes to rest them. Outside it would be growing dark. She could return to her apartment, clean herself, lie down and rest, perhaps get up after a few hours and watch the stars, then use the screen, tap the city's memory less directly.

She got out of her chair stiffly. The screens and equipment dimmed and shut down behind her as she walked to the door. There were fewer workers now; none followed her. To feel more secure, she would post one in her apartment.

The air was cool and scented with the fragrance of pine. The sky above was a rich royal blue, streamered with flame-red clouds. Stars were appearing, and a scimitar moon. She looked ahead.

Three men stood in front of her. She stopped, hands by her side, puzzled. Durragon stepped forward and smiled.

"It's time to meet," he said.

"I see."

"We have to talk about what we can do for this city."

"There isn't much time now," she said cautiously, "the children will be coming in a day or two. I have to get things ready for them."

Durragon's smile faded slightly. "Children?" he said, with the merest flex of a question.

"Probably thousands of them."

"I don't see what you mean -- "

"The city is here to take care of all the children it can. The sick ones, those who have no chance outside. I am directing it." She looked at the two others and gauged them by their expressions. _They aren't with him any more,_ she thought. "I can use your help. It'll be difficult doing it by myself."

"There isn't enough space now, or facilities."

"Nonsense." She returned her shrewd gaze to his face. "You're a leader. At least, you were for a time. You can help."

"I -- "

She pushed her verbal advantage home. She was ahead of him; he was weakening. "Or you can leave."

"No," he said, grinning. "I can't do that."

"Then come with me." She walked past him. They stumbled out of her way and Durragon spun around, his face flushed. He was frowning and his fists kept opening and closing. "Come," she repeated, looking back at them. "I'll show you all you need to know." She continued walking. She trusted them -- or Durragon, at least -- about as much as she trusted a scorpion. But even with her back turned, she felt no fear. She was in control.

Durragon held Ezeki and Musa back when they tried to follow. "Later," he called out. "We'll go with you later."

Ezeki gave him a puzzled glance. "Let her go," Durragon growled. "We'll see what's in the tower."

But the door wouldn't open for them.

In the apartment, with the door closed and a worker posted, she rested and felt some of her self-confidence slip away. They had caught her by surprise, had come so _close ..._ And she had behaved like a fool. What had she seen in the expressions of the old man and the Moslem? Had she seen enough to expect them to stand up for her against Durragon? She shook her head and tears started up in her closed eyes. She was so weak, and what she had felt earlier had been a moment of girlish stupidity, weakness ... exaltation. Molecules fitting together! Youth and beauty forever! Bitterness and death, more likely.

She swallowed back a clot of phlegm and tried to feel for the joining again, the ecstasy. It wasn't there now. How could she be sure it had ever been there? Would it protect her from Durragon? If she was wrong, and the old man and the Moslem weren't sympathetic to her, then in time there was nothing on her side. Nothing except a still-huge mass of contradictions, neurosis and fear ... the city. Resurrection.

Could she get the two apart from Durragon, talk to them? It wasn't likely.

"Think of the young ones," she said out loud, but the confusion remained.

While Durragon slept, Musa met Ezeki on a parapet looking over the central shaft, several floors below the Apostate's quarters. They sat and drank their health with the city's wine, which left their heads clear. "I'd like something with more persuasion to it right now," the old man said, lifting his glass and peering through the amber fluid.

"In the Earth days, my people would not drink anything ... ah ... persuasive. Nor would the more orthodox Moslems on God-Does-Battle. So I am chastened by Resurrection."

"What are we going to do?" Ezeki asked.

"He'll kill her soon," Musa said.

"We've been with him for five years. I don't know any other way."

"The city shows us another way."

Ezeki shook his head despondently. "I'd leave him. I really would. But what can we do with a city like this? Get healed, then thrown out?"

"We're healed now."

"Then we'll be thrown out any time. But if he kills her, takes over ... perhaps we can stay. The city let her stay."

"Yes, but why?" Musa asked. Ezeki shook his head. "Perplexing."

"She wants to help children, crippled children. Did you see the way she looked at us? Perhaps we could work for _her,_ instead of him."

"Crippled children! Sick kids! She's a dreamer," Ezeki said. "I was a dreamer, once. Now I'm just an old fool with pretensions to learning. And the city doesn't even leave me my pride. It shows me how ignorant I am."

"We could kill him, now," Musa whispered. "In his sleep. She would reward us."

Ezeki stared steadily at the Moslem. "We're crazy, as crazy as she is."

"Then perhaps it's best the whole forsaken planet should go crazy again. Sanity hasn't been much good for us, has it?"

Ezeki started to get to his feet, then hesitated. Musa rose all the way. "Now?" the old man asked. The Moslem nodded. "If we get thrown outside, the Chasers will probably kill us."

"What will we use?"

Musa pulled out a crudely made folding knife. "I clean my fingernails with it," he said, grinning wickedly.

They went to Durragon's apartment. When they got there he was gone.

The general had come awake and found himself alone, unable to sleep. As the two men searched frantically for him below, he stood by the tower door, deep in thought. He felt good now, almost as if he could will things just by thinking. The woman was strong, but he was stronger. And he had made up his mind. "I will get in there," he said, "and I will control the city, just as she does."

He stared hard at the door, trying half seriously to make his strength manifest. When the door opened, he jumped back, the hair on his neck prickling. The old woman stood there. "Neither of us can sleep," she said. "Can insomniacs ever be enemies?"

"We've both been planning," he said. "Maybe we can plan together." There was something disturbing about her, a placid acceptance he had never seen before. His words might not have even been heard, but for her turning inward and motioning him to follow with a crooked finger. Durragon stared at the control center.

The charts, the throne, the ranked screens and odd machinery ... it was terrifying, and more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. It was powerful. It was the navel of the world.

"Why let cripples into the city?" Durragon asked. "They won't know what to do with themselves. The city should belong to those who can best use it."

Her expression was almost apologetic.

"I have a plan," he continued. "I thought you'd ... like to hear it. We can rebuild the planet, make it like it was. We have to find the place where the city grows new parts -- "

"No," Reah said. "We'll start a new way. Someday, perhaps we won't even need cities. We'll use the fragments of the old world to help lay foundations for the new."

Just like that, her words made him seem like a savage, a child again. She was babbling, he decided. His ears hurt him and he tried not to listen -- but she went on. She took him around the room, showing him things and telling him their names, using words he didn't understand, magic words, powerful words. Her control was daunting, but she was no better and no smarter than he. That was obvious. If she was gone, he could take control as easily as she had. She was mad! A city filled with cripples. It was obscene.

He watched her closely, waiting.

"I've been listening to the city for days now," she said. "For a while, it kept me here because I was -- " The briefest of pauses. "I was ill. But now I'm well, as well as I can hope to be, and it still lets me stay. Perhaps it's made a decision. Perhaps it needs me. And if it needs me, it needs us..."

He came closer. He pulled a wire out of his pocket. He had wrapped the ends in tough bedsheet fabric, rolls of it, and spliced the pieces together to form handles. It would be like the death Perja had planned for him.

She had her back to him. A worker rolled in through the door. Behind the worker, eyes wide, walked Musa and Ezeki.

Durragon stepped forward, wrapped the wire around her neck, applied his knee to her upper neck, pulled back her chin, and felt the snap. He loosed the wire and backed away. The body fell to the floor.

The worker rushed past him. It brought out a net, like strands of hair made from silver, and laid it over the woman's head. No, that wouldn't do -- Durragon kicked at the worker

And almost broke his foot. It seemed rooted to the floor.

Musa stood and stared, slack-jawed, but Ezeki shook his head wildly and grabbed the Moslem's knife from his hands. "Damn YOU!" he screamed. Durragon half-turned.

Reah, vision dimming, felt the net around her and was again in the vast space with the textures of tradition. But this time the spark was a sun, rising under her, and its rage was beyond all measure.

Then there was an enormous time.

It was the middle of the month Sivan, a calm, dry day in the village of Akkabar. The smooth walls of the city's inner circle surrounded the town. Near the main school, a stream of water passed from the wall -- not under it, but through a surface slick as glass -- and meandered out one side of the main gate. There were four gates in the inner wall, but none of them lead into the city. Instead, broad tunnels let the citizens pass to the outside.

Ezeki Iben Tav sat at the front of the main classroom in the school near the river. He had just finished a lesson in history and the students were writing on slate tablets. They were beautiful children, and more of them came every day. The dormitories the villagers had built were now almost full of children, yet still transports delivered the sick and retarded and lame to the outer barricades. The city took them in, healed them, and weeks later, at night released them in Akkabar. They were healthy and bright, just the sort of children bereaved parents might be willing to adopt. The supply of parents was small, but with such children, what matter if each parent adopted a hundred, a thousand? The city provided. Fruit grew along the inner walls, and other foods -- grain, fodder for cattle -- rose out of the ground with little tending now that the water supply was assured.

Musa came to the classroom and clapped his hands. It was time for the pupils' physical training. Musa taught them games and how to fight properly; the Chasers occasionally returned to Resurrection and skirmishes had taken place.

The older boys and girls stayed behind for a few moments to socialize. Ezeki looked out the open front of the classroom at the village then stepped into the sunlight, away from the reed awning, and shaded his eyes. A slender tower rose on the city's northern side.

He had only two regrets. There had been so little time for him to sample the knowledge the city contained. He would always be haunted by the memory, and by knowing he could never return. His second regret was that the children, bright as they were, emerged from the city haunted not only by the beauty they could not have, but by peculiar notions impressed on them. In time they seemed to come around. Ezeki was a good teacher and a good teacher of teachers. For their health and bounty it was a small price to pay.

The children told stories. In the city they had often encountered a figure they called, simply, Spirit-Woman. She came and went, neither smiling nor frowning, and a star glowed in her forehead. She might have led the star or been led by it, no one could tell.

They had occasionally seen another child, alive and not a ghost, but segregated from them, never allowed to play. The city had told the children, in the rare times it spoke, that the young one was Christ reborn, waiting to cleanse their sins in due time. That disturbed Ezeki. He could imagine the city cradling a stray infant but why was it allowed to stay?

Of all the mysteries and memories, one haunted him most. The city's final screams, the day he and Musa and Durragon's corpse had been thrown out into Akkabar ... the entire sky, burned with flaming brands, could not have screamed so heart-rendingly. After all, it had been betrayal stacked upon betrayal -- the attack on the woman, then the murder of Durragon. No holy city could stand such a thing. They were lucky it had carried out the woman's plan.

Was she still in the city, or her spirit, controlling it? The questions piled up and he smiled as he always did, then shook his head. Where was she now?

_Between the textured spaces, Reah felt her children enter and leave. There was one child who stayed, but she was never allowed to see him clearly. This disturbed her. She was constrained by the glowing spark, now reflected all around like a million bright searchlights in the fog. She was not alive, and she was not dead. While she sensed the presence of the huge molecule, she could not fit into it. Somehow, lacking everything, she was content. Long ago, her mother had told her that Paradise was not for women._

But while she did not command, neither did she serve. She wandered, thought when it was possible and appropriate, but usually just waited.

It was all a game, lapses of indefinite time between the fittings of huge molecules. Soon enough, others would do what she had done, or the cities would die and wither away like ants under a spyglass beam. Either way she would be freer than she had ever been before.

Still, she swam in a kind of pride. She had made important moves in the game. When she felt the pride, the molecular connection loomed up, seemed to query, Not ready yet, eh?

No, not yet...

The cities became fewer and fewer. Strength of will failed, environments changed; where they weakened, often enough Expolitans and Chasers moved in to finish them off. Centuries of bewilderment and self-accusation had hardened into anger and hatred.

As the numbers of cities dwindled, some reached out to the others, using communications links long abandoned. Dialogues were exchanged, shy, halting at first, then more extensive. Information passed from city to city, and queer stories were told, for in some cities marvelous things had happened.

The cities continued to die. Finally, as if tired of the pain of links suddenly silent, or the worse pain of links growing more feeble every day, the city talk stopped.

_The few still alive were silent, like stars in a dying universe, waiting for dust and defilement._

--------

*BOOK THREE*

3562 A.D.

_The Revenant_

WHATEVER else they took away from him, they could not touch the fact that he was a fine architect. He had created enough monuments that long after the petty disputes and clashes of personality were forgotten, his name would still --

For the merest moment, he was amazed that such a trivial line of thought could have been preserved in the simulacrum. Then he had a dizzying spiral of recursive wonders -- that he could be thinking about the miracle of such trivialities, and _thinking_ about thinking.

Best to concentrate on the last memory -- Danice, long black hair, hugging him before the process, saying good-bye forever to a man she would see the next day, after the block had memorized him; very strange for her --

In a rush, he spilled from the block, arms flying, legs tangling in each other. With a sigh, the block delivered a neatly folded stack of clothes and then paled, crusted over, and died.

Robert Kahn blinked. He lay naked in a heap of dirt and debris. Sticks and leaves clung to his moist skin. He smelled mustiness and decay. Nobody had come to meet him. The expected hum of the living city of Fraternity was an empty, echoing wind.

The great architect, come to inspect his work after two centuries and offer advice, suggest revisions if necessary, was alone.

He stood and brushed the dirt and leaves off, then looked at the clothes beside him. He should have arrived dressed. Instead, as if trying its best, the block had tossed out his apparel separately. His vision blurred and he rubbed his eyes. He was a little weak. He shouldn't have been. The block should have re-created him fresh and strong.

He wasn't frightened yet. He felt blunted, as if coming out of a drug haze. But fear wasn't far away. Like the wings on a new butterfly, his emotions were spreading out, stiffening.

The block -- cornerstone of the great Aquinas Gate archway -- was a wreck. How it had produced him at all was a wonder. The walls around it were grey and cracked, dry-looking. The pipes lacing back and forth through the arch, integrated into the overall floral design, were empty of fluid.

Outside the Aquinas gate was a broad plaza covered with mounds of dirt and pitted with holes as if people had been digging for buried treasure. Evidence of fire was clear in scorched walls, piles of blackened ash. He glanced up at the ceiling within the city, beyond the arch. The vault was still there, great upside-down beehive-like shafts of basalt hollowing to form the dome a hundred meters above the floor. But everything was grey, not vibrant green and sky blue and violet.

A huge part of the city -- perhaps all of it -- was dead. As far as he could see down the walkway to the main heat shaft, a kilometer away, the walls and buttresses and pipes were lackluster.

He walked out onto the plaza, avoiding the pits, until he reached a spreading field filled with large chunks of broken silicate. He stepped out of the city's shadow and looked back. The sun was brighter than he remembered -- brighter and hotter. Around the city there was nothing but a plain of dry grass, isolated scrub trees, and a crude dirt road.

He squinted at the city's towers. The lines had changed. It was obviously the city of Fraternity, and from this direction he could make out -- with some difficulty -- the abstracted portrait of Saint Thomas Aquinas in the central tower, but --

Like a sand castle in the rain, the outline had eroded. Up and down the heights, marks of burning and decay and vandalism vied with collapsed supports and walls for first place in the game of destruction.

The whole city was dead.

He was still naked. He had to return to the city for the clothes -- and to retrieve the record. His work on the one hundred and fifty-three cities of God-Does-Battle had at times been so frustrating and arduous that he had decided to leave a secret network of city recorders, in case something should go wrong and he be blamed. But he had never considered anything like this ...

How long had it been? More than two centuries -- perhaps much more. He stepped back into the shadow and re-entered the corpse of Fraternity.

Arthur Sam Daniel wasn't surprised to see the oddly dressed stranger traveling the road past his small farm. Just the day before, a large, dark man carrying a talking head under his arm had gone in the same direction. Arthur's grandmother had often told him about "trods," or spirit roads. It was common knowledge that God-Does-Battle was a haunted world; times were changing, and apparently the trods were shifting. Arthur sat on the wooden bench under the mulcet tree, ten meters from the road and the stranger and twenty or so from the house, wondering if he had time to run back before it got him.

It stopped by the fencepost. Arthur could see that it wasn't sweating, despite the heat. It spoke a few words. Though the stranger's language sounded familiar, he couldn't quite understand. After another attempt, the stranger shook its head.

"Are you human?" Arthur asked loudly, poised to leave the bench and run if need be. "Or maybe a spirit?"

Of course, it could also be a city part. New Canaan had been plagued with mimics for almost a generation.

The stranger looked puzzled, then smiled. It said something in what Arthur recognized as Hebrew, but the Daniel families hadn't spoken Hebrew since leaving Bethel-Japhet during the break Wars. The Daniels had been Catholic then, but had learned Hebrew in the Expolis Ibreem to be neighborly.

It was truly hot -- the hottest summer in Arthur's forty-five years. Even if the stranger didn't sweat, it might be thirsty. Arthur brushed off his pants legs nervously and stood to face it. "Well, whatever you are, the least I can do is offer a drink of water. Come on in." He gestured for the stranger to follow him between the withered thorn bushes to the house. Hospitality was one of the few pleasures left to Arthur these days. The stranger shaded his eyes to look, then complied.

"Nan!" Arthur called to his daughter from the front porch. He looked over his shoulder; the stranger was a few steps behind. "We have a guest."

"Who's that?" A woman's voice inquired from inside.

"I don't know," Arthur said. "I've decided you're human," he said to the stranger, opening the door. "But my decisions don't mean much around here. I wasn't sure because of those clothes, you know." The stranger wore a fancier outfit than any that the Canaan Founders could produce, that was for sure. Arthur especially admired the boots that seemed to flow right down from the pants, and the way there were no buttons or zippers visible. "You spoke a bit of Hebrew there, but I've forgotten mine since I was a kid." Nan met them in the front room, rubbing her hands on black coveralls.

"Who is he?" she asked suspiciously.

"Doesn't speak like us," Arthur said.

"Why did you invite him in? What if he's a city part or something? He could be dangerous."

The stranger glanced around the front room, a worried look on his face. The structure of the house was primitive but sound -- a strong wood frame with glazed brick walls -- but litter and filth speckled the front room and adjoining kitchen. The fireplace was almost choked with ashes, and the pot hanging over it on black east-iron rods was caked with remains of old meals. The floor, except for well-worn trails, was centimeters deep in dust. Arthur and his daughter had not cleaned since the dust storms three months before.

"Haven't been keeping it as well as we should," Nan said guiltily. She was thirty years old, at least, going premature grey, with a thin face weighed down by lines of worry. Arthur was balding, with long fringes of hair around his crown. He wore coveralls much like Nan's.

"No need, just ourselves alone here," he said.

"I see," Kahn said, and Arthur understood him. The accent wasn't quite right, but at least they could talk. Arthur smiled.

"You been away a long time?"

"I'm not actually back yet," Kahn said. "Sorry, I'm certainly not here to speak in riddles. By the way, do you understand me?"

"Pretty well now. Just forgot for a minute there?"

Nan clearly didn't like the stranger in her house. She backed away and held her hands clasped in front of her.

"I'm a quick study at languages. Yours is a bit like English, with a touch of evolution clocked in. There's a machine in my head which lets me extrapolate rapidly, memorize, compute." At least, there was something in the simulacrum which imitated the original machine he had had implanted decades ago. Strictly speaking, he was all machine now.

"In your head?" Nan asked. "How? You from the polises?"

The stranger didn't answer. The woman's tone was distinctly unfriendly. "What happened here?" he asked, holding out his arms.

"Dust mined the crops two years running," Arthur said. My wife left with my other daughter to find work with the Canaan Founders, didn't come back."

"No, I mean, why aren't you living in the cities -- the polises?"

That stumped Arthur for a moment. Then he looked the stranger's clothes over more closely, seeing how truly unique they were. "Maybe you should tell us where you're from, first. Then I'll tell you what I know. Who are you?"

"My name is Kahn," the stranger said. "Robert Kahn."

"That's a peculiar name -- not peculiar, not like no one could have it," Arthur said, "but more like nobody wants to have it."

"Why?"

Arthur and Nan exchanged glances. "Go get us some water," he told her. "That's the name of the man who built the polises. You don't look that ignorant. You should know about him."

"I did build the cities," the stranger said.

Arthur smiled tolerantly. He had the man pegged now. He had met someone like him when he was conscripted twenty-four years ago -- a fellow who had tried to get out of service by acting crazy. "Don't tell the Canaan Founders that. They have a bone to pick with you." He chuckled. "You got us in this mess, long time ago. Just watch your tongue around them. Us, we haven't got anything against you -- we're tolerant enough."

"I take it something went wrong."

"You're not playing the fool for me, are you?"

"Not at all," the stranger said, face perfectly serious. "I'm here to look over my work, check up on things. Looks like a great many things have gone wrong, and I've returned a lot later than I should have. Does anyone live in the cities -- the polises?"

Arthur didn't answer. He pulled up a chair for the stranger and shouted at Nan to hurry up with the water. She came into the room hauling a full bucket, with two dirty tin cups in one hand.

"How long has it been?" the stranger asked.

"You think I'm so ignorant I don't know what year it is?" Arthur shot back, getting angry now. "I'm no fool, and you're no spook, you can't get away with baiting me that way!"

"Father's a very intelligent man," Nan said quietly, putting the bucket on the table and handing out the glasses.

"We've been through rough times. We're not tidy here, but we're not simple."

"I'm not teasing or baiting you or anything, sir. I honestly don't know how long it's been since you lived in the polises."

"I didn't ever live there. Nobody for fifty generations has lived there. It's been nearly eleven hundred years."

"What's the date -- the Christian date?"

"No such thing now. I don't know."

"Apollo year?"

"Don't know that either."

Kahn ignored the dirt on the cup and swallowed a cold draught of water. It was a nervous gesture more than anything else -- the simulacrum needed a minimum of water and no other kind of sustenance.

"Inside pumps don't work, so we raise water from the well," Arthur said, tapping his bony fingers on the wood table top.

"The water's fine," Kahn said. Eleven hundred years!

"It's hot today, no denying it." Nan wiped sweat from her forehead and poured more water into their cups.

Jeshua Tubal Iben Daod put down Thinner's head in the shade of a withered mulcet tree. "Just plant me here somewhere and I'll replace this poor bush," the head said, grimacing. "A headfruit tree."

Jeshua had carried Thinner for three weeks, covering at least eight hundred kilometers. The head kept him company. "Your jokes are getting worse," Jeshua said, sitting down against a rock.

"It's the heat."

Jeshua lay back in the grass and rubbed his back in it. His clothes were covered with dirt and grass stains, but none of the dirt was his own. For over a century he had known how to shut off the artificial sweat and excretory systems in his body, making him cleaner than either a real human or a pure machine. Getting used to not being human had taken him some time.

"Come on," Thinner said. "Don't sulk. What would we be doing right now in the city, anyway -- "

"I don't sulk," Jeshua said darkly. "And if we were in Mandala, I'd be studying _kaballah,_ meditating, fixing whatever could be fixed."

"Which wasn't much, the past few years. I'm amazed it lasted as long as it did."

"We tried," Jeshua admitted. They had had this conversation at least two dozen times already. It was like making the first four or five moves in a game of chess, each opponent knowing the exact piece and square the other would use, so familiar the board could be set up that way, and the real game begun. For Jeshua and Thinner, the real game was figuring out where they were going, and what they were going to do when they got there.

"So we did everything we could. It was a lost cause," Thinner said.

"Not according to my studies."

The head made a sound like a sigh. "'The vessel of the Holy One Blessed Be He has broken and scattered its drops of worthy oil into the nether reaches ... One part in Mandala, another in each city, and now the parts must gather themselves together again.'"

"You're memorizing me," Jeshua said, smiling.

"It's about the only thing I _can_ memorize any more."

"I feel it inside," Jeshua said, looking across the grey-brown grassland and the waves of heat. "Don't you?"

"Some of the words strike home," Thinner said. "But wishes don't bring rain." The head rolled over. "Prop me up again," he said stoically. "I just find it ridiculous that two city parts would sit around discussing human religion."

"We go where we must."

"I'd much prefer Resurrection."

"If we go to Resurrection, our cause will be lost there, too. All the cities are dead or dying."

"Not Resurrection, not yet," Thinner said. "That's _my_ faith."

"The regathering will occur at the Bifrost. If we go there first, we don't waste time, take chances."

"We don't even know what the Bifrost is. Or how to get there, exactly. Communications haven't been the best for some time ... we don't even know if it still exists!"

"It must. And I think the signals came from Throne."

"Fine, but do we know where Throne has moved? No. In Resurrection, there could be information -- a library. You could study in the library, pin down your prophesies more precisely."

"And you could find spare parts -- perhaps another body," Jeshua said.

"That has occurred to me once or twice, I'm not sure I can last long enough to get to the Bifrost. Or you. Look at your skin."

Jeshua pulled a flap of skin together on his arm and fastened it. It was getting worse now, opening and showing the green capillaries and silver-white bones whenever he wasn't vigilant.

"I admit I'd like to have some means of walking around without being carried. I wouldn't even mind being a remote again. I'm tired of being a cripple."

Jeshua held his fingers in an inverted pyramid, elbows on his knees. "It is the suffering of the -- "

"Birth pangs of the age of the messiah," Thinner said. Jeshua looked at him mournfully.

"The texts are very clear."

"I've never found them so. You've been at them for fifty years -- Rab City Part Jeshua, combing out hidden secrets from the books like fleas from a beggar!"

"We're machines," Jeshua said, his expression showing he was about to return bait for bait. "Machines don't suffer."

"Tube waste," Thinner said. "We mimic. We were made to play the roles. Let _them_ decide if we're faking it." By _them_ he meant humans. "We're as real as they are." The pair had been avoiding humans since leaving Mandala. In Mandala, of course, there had been no humans at all. They had grown used to living alone, and life in the city had inevitably rubbed in an aversion to humans. Even Jeshua, who had grown from a small child believing he was human and living with them, felt vaguely misanthropic.

He had been alive for more years than he cared to remember now, never aging, learning how to use his body all over again. He could still eat human food if he wished, and be sustained that way. Thinner could not. Jeshua had to periodically peel off the tip of a finger (which was getting worn, too, and dropping away at awkward moments) to give Thinner some of the nourishment his body had processed. Above the metal and colloid, blue and green chemicals, cables and valves and sensors, was the sandy flush of skin and the dark, thick hair. Despite the years, the image of Jeshua's exterior still haunted him with humanity, and in that way he would always be human, not a city part.

Thinner's body surrogates had never quite taken. With the breakdown of the last -- a wheeled water-sprinkler which had tended the city's gardens -- Thinner had resigned himself to being bodiless. Jeshua didn't mind carrying the head around. He had long since come to regard Thinner as his only friend, and, like him, one of the last living parts of Mandala.

He stood up and brushed off his clothes. Thinking of Mandala was depressing. He reached down with his broad, rugged hands, but Thinner objected.

"Just a moment. We don't talk as much when we walk, and I'd like to get this settled now."

Jeshua shrugged. "All right. But we're just bickering to give us an excuse to keep moving. I don't think either of us wants to decide. We don't know where Resurrection is now, and what if one is gone, or the other, and we make the wrong _choice?_ We might find out how things really are."

Thinner's jaw moved as if he were swallowing. "We're very naive out here. Sooner or later, if we keep moving, as ignorant as we are, we're going to be caught, killed, put on display -- whatever. We're freaks. I am an obvious freak, but you're no less one. If we got to Resurrection, not only might we get the information we need, but we might be able to ride a transport part to the Bifrost."

Jeshua considered. There was nothing in the texts forbidding such a sidetrip -- just the risk of encountering humans. If they find out what we are -- "

"Don't," Thinner said. Wherever they had been, even the dead cities had been scourged -- burned, used for the dumping of trash, destroyed when possible. With the death of Mandala through its own madness and decay, they had had to face a sobering fact.

Most of the cities -- dying for lack of the citizens they had once exiled -- were no longer able to defend themselves.

The time for humanity's vindication was at hand.

Kahn finished his explanation. Arthur stared at the opposite wall, the cords in his throat working.

"If you really are from a polis -- "

"From Fraternity," Kahn repeated.

" -- Then I'm not sure you should stay in this house."

Arthur got up from his chair and stood by the table. "We're supposed to report rogue parts."

"I'm not a part."

"You're a ghost," Nan said. "Someone who should be dead by now."

"Whether or not I'm dead, somewhere else, has no bearing on my existence here," Kahn said. "I'm not a ghost." He reached out and gripped Nan's arm, making her jump in her seat. "Feel. I'm as solid as you are."

"You claim you're like a picture, then," Nan said, slowly pulling her arm from his fingers. "Except ... round."

"More than that, even. I think and act and feel just like the original. To myself, I am Kahn. But my time here is short. I only have about thirty days." He looked between Arthur and Nan. "Certainly not enough time to try to convince everyone."

Arthur stacked the cups and carded them into the kitchen, dropping them into a dry washtub. "Crazy people say they're Robert Kahn."

Kahn looked up.

"They say it all the time. Especially if they are crazy for being beat up. That sort of thing." He refused to face Kahn. "You don't sweat in the heat -- maybe you're sick. Where you get clothes like that, I don't know, but I don't travel much, either. Maybe you're crazy and from a place I've never been."

"I don't do magic tricks," Kahn said. "I'm not claiming to be a god, or a ghost."

"I'd believe a ghost," Nan said.

"When I was stored in the block's memory, there was a universal program in the cities. They have to let me inside. Take me to a city that's still alive -- "

"There aren't any here," Arthur said. "They're dead and the Chasers and Founders tried to burn them. We fought city parts." He pointed to a heavy-bore rifle sitting alone in a gun-rack next to the fireplace. "I was conscripted. Twenty-four years ago, they gave me that, and took six years out of my life because they were afraid of polises taking all of us over. Then I came home to my family, got back to farming -- that's been eighteen years." He paced across the creaking floor. "Back then, the Founders were just soldiers and hotheads. Now they're bankers, merchants, farmers, engineers."

"You mentioned Chasers. What are they?"

"Hunh!" Nan said, incredulous.

"They used to worship polises, chase after them. Didn't respect them -- peculiar type of worship. They'd just as soon burn a polis down if they could, and when the polises got weak, they burned them, sure enough. Now the Founders hire Chasers as soldiers, police."

Kahn shook his head. "It'll take years just to catch up on the history."

"History! History is dead people and crooked Founders and no laws any more -- "

"Founders have laws, Father," Nan said patiently. "They're a government like any other."

"A touch more harsh," Arthur said sharply. "They're expolitans like all the rest of us, but they don't like that word now. No more talk of exiling, of polises. The old government just accepted the fact we weren't worthy, lived with it, made good laws. Then the Synedrium converted itself into the Syndine to handle bigger problems, more land and people, and the Syndine couldn't keep people from getting angry. You can't sit around thinking you're weak and sinful all the time. A thousand years is enough. So the Founders said we weren't weak, we're better than the polises! Tear them down, wipe out their memory, start over?"

Kahn nodded. "Why did the cities kick everybody out?"

"Because we're sinners," Arthur said. "Some of us still believe that. Founders can't kick it out of us. So now they make their own guilt. I fought side by side with them, watched them die, and I still don't like them. Arrogance. Mine, theirs." Arthur was growing more and more agitated. "They take whatever they want, now. No guilt. That's where my wife and daughter are -- other daughter. I told you about them." Arthur's face was dark and deeply lined with sun, hard work, worry.

"Why aren't you one of them, if you fought for them?" Kahn asked.

"I'm an independent sort. They want complete cooperation. Bunch of young, skinny men and women run things now, chase the old out -- more guilt in the old." He made a wry face. "Not my sort at all. If you join and don't cooperate, you're in even worse trouble than if you just mind your own business."

"Why do they leave you alone?"

"They don't, not entirely. I don't have much they want, though, now they have two of my family. Nan is the only one who stayed with me. The land here isn't worth much, but they'll come and take that when they please."

"When did the farm start to go bad?"

"Four years ago. Weather heated up, not as bad as now, but enough to wither the corn. Founders offered seed for other crops, tents to cover them during the heat, if you became a Founder and handed over your land, tenant farmer sort of thing. I didn't go along. Jorissa -- that's my wife -- she said I was a fool. I suppose I was. Everything burned off. Couldn't get the seed or tents yourself unless you joined."

"Is that when the sun started getting brighter?"

"That's when it started getting noticeable. But this is all talk about us, and we haven't settled anything about you, yet."

Nan nodded her agreement.

"I can't convince you," Kahn said. "My clothes are some evidence. Feel the fabric." He removed his coat and offered it to the woman. She looked it over carefully, then passed it to Arthur. "Father does as much knitting here as I do," she said dourly. "Some things the Founders did weren't too bad. Women are better off in some places."

"Syndine did that during the Reform," Arthur said. He turned a sleeve inside out. "No seams. Fabric stretches two ways. Doesn't feel like fabric. So you could be from someplace far away -- or from a polis. They had clothes like this in the polises."

"Yes, but I'm not a city part."

"We're no judges," Nan said. "We're not that educated, we don't know what to make of you. You have to go to the Founders."

"I wouldn't recommend that, daughter," Arthur said. "They'll think he's a city part for sure."

"If the Founders know more, I'll have to go to them. Have you heard any people talking about the star being a variable?"

"Star?" Arthur asked.

"The sun, he means, Father," Nan said.

"Not that I know."

"Do you know what a variable is?"

Arthur hesitated, then shook his head, looking levelly at Kahn.

"A variable is a star that gets brighter or dimmer periodically. If it's a long-term variable, it's hard to determine the period, or even to tell if the star is stable over millennia. If it truly is hotter now than it was just four years ago -- or in my time -- " He stopped, If the star was a long-term variable, his problem was far worse -- and it was already monumental. "Are there any cities still alive?"

"Yes," Arthur said slowly. "Resurrection, it's called."

"Can I get there?"

"It isn't too far, maybe a hundred kilometers. Across the border. The Founders don't touch Expolis Ibreem proper, it has its own government -- last of the Syndine states. Too powerful. So the polis stands."

"If I could go there -- "

Arthur struck an attitude of listening, then shook his head firmly. "No, dammit!"

Nan went to the window and peered out.

"I hear them goddamn scooters again," Arthur said. He stood behind her and pulled aside a ragged blind. Kahn could hear voices and a weak putt-putting.

"Who is it?"

"Founders, six of them, a tail, curly-haired spindly fellow in the lead. I know his type. I know his goddamn type. You stay in here; whether you're crazy or what you say you are, you shouldn't mess with them. And if they get in, say you're visiting from Ibreem, hiking on a sabbat march. And your name isn't Kahn -- it's Cohen, Azrael Iben Cohen, something like that. They have treaties with Ibreem, can't mess with religious people."

"Be quiet!" Nan warned, opening the door for her father and shutting it behind him.

Arthur stood on the porch, hands buried in his torn pockets, expression grim.

The tall leader dismounted his gas engine tricycle and strolled up to the steps, looking down at a pad of paper. "Arthur Sam Daniel, son of Julius Sam Daniel, son of Giorgio Sam Daniel?"

"You know all that," Arthur said. "Wife tells you all that, all you want to know."

"We're here to account for your crops, take census, that's all. No trouble, now friend."

"No crops, just me and my daughter. Easy enough." Three of the six were women, wearing the grey and black that Founders wore almost without exception, smiling and talking with each other as the leader looked mildly at Arthur. "The Canaan Founders just have your best interests in mind. You living alone now?"

"I told you, just my daughter and I. You don't need more facts than that."

"We've been told a stranger came to your house earlier today. I thought he'd like to meet us and be welcomed to New Canaan West."

"He'd rather not," Arthur said, throat bobbing.

"Now," the leader began, his voice rising faintly, "don't you think it's more polite to let your guest answer for himself?"

Kahn stood, but Nan vigorously gestured for him to stay put and resumed peering through the curtains.

"We like to keep track of visitors, give them information that will help them get around New Canaan West. Mind telling us where your friend is from?"

"I don't see any need -- "

The tall man walked up the steps and put his hand firmly on Arthur's shoulder. "You're making me very suspicious, neighbor." He smiled, showing snaggled teeth and a gold crown. "We need to see your visitor."

Kahn stood again and ignored Nan's gestures. He opened the front door. "Can I ease your day?" he asked, hoping his language was up to the confrontation.

"Perhaps," the leader said. "I'm Frederik Bani Hassan. We need to know your origin, destination and intentions."

"No trouble at all. I'm hiking from Ibreem."

"Long hike. Your family and name?"

"Azrael Iben Cohen."

"Lots of Cohens in Ibreem," the leader said. "But you weren't born there. Where were you born?"

Kahn blinked, then said casually, "Here, originally. In New Canaan."

"No, I don't think so," the leader said. "They don't have clothes like that in Ibreem -- or here, for that matter. I think you'd better come with us."

Kahn nodded and followed the leader to his motorbike. Arthur said nothing, but his fists were clenched tightly.

The bike sputtered off. Arthur stayed on the porch for several minutes, watching the trail of dust. Then he walked back into the house and stood in the filthy kitchen, looking around, his lips trembling. "We've been living here like dust in a snail shell. They aren't going to let us stay much longer. They want the land. They want everything we have."

"Now, Father -- "

"They do," he said quietly. "Poor, crazy man."

Jeshua's footsteps echoed in the empty halls. They had spent more than a week in the dead city, exploring, trying to find something useful to them. All they found was decay and defilement.

"They destroyed it," Thinner said as he was lifted around to see the crumbling walls of the third level gardens. "It let its guard down and they destroyed it."

"It was probably dead when they came in," Jeshua said.

"I went through Fraternity once, before I met you. It was a quiet place. They'd built it for seminarians and it was less fancy than some of the polises. It had a huge collection of books -- real books."

"I hope they didn't burn the books, too," Jeshua said.

The silence settled over them. Thinner made a noise like a sigh. "You looked around the upper levels?"

"Yes," Jeshua said, frowning. "I took you with me."

"I'm growing forgetful," Thinner said. "No spare parts?"

"Nothing."

"No, of course not. Then we move on."

As they left Fraternity, an early evening drizzle settled on them. They turned west.

Thinner talked of the days in Mandala before Jeshua's return. Jeshua had heard it many times before, but the sound of the head's voice was soothing, rising above the hiss of rain on the hot, dry dirt and grass. A thin ground-fog crept around his legs and he walked between thin, skeletal trees, tall and shadowed, the head clutched in his arm.

Four men on horseback saw him that way. The horses reared in terror and the men, quite agreeing, gave them their reins, hanging on as they galloped into the foothills.

It was late evening and two moons were up above the mountains behind them when Jeshua stopped. The land was cooling now and a thick, moist breeze was falling out of the hills. The rain had stopped and the ground was dry again.

They spent the night in a copse of withered mulcet trees. Jeshua laid Thinner delicately on a prepared bed of dry grass and leaves, making sure his mouth was pointing up. Then he sat with his back against a trunk, thinking. Thinner was getting more and more forgetful each day. Jeshua wondered if his nutrients weren't enough for the head -- if Thinner needed something only the internal working of a full body could produce. He hoped they would make it to Resurrection before the head gave out completely. Jeshua didn't have much in the world to lose, little more in fact than his existence -- which he wasn't too concerned with -- and his companion.

He wished he could sleep. Thinner lay with his eyes open, in a kind of stupor, but Jeshua had long since abandoned the human habit.

He was quite aware, then, when a crowd of men on horseback surrounded the copse and began to close in.

* * * *

Kahn tried to shout above the noise of the motor tricycles, leaning forward toward the ear of the thin curly-haired man. "I need to talk to people in your city..."

The Founder shook his head.

"It's very important," Kahn said. "I need to talk with meteorologists -- with weather men, with astronomers -- with land managers."

"You're not talking to anybody," the Founder shouted back over his shoulder.

Kahn wriggled his wrists reflexively to loosen the bonds fled to the rear cushion of the trike.

The town of New Canaan was busy, prosperous-looking, and -- to Kahn -- painfully primitive. He was removed to a two-story stone and concrete building, square and ugly, and taken into custody by a burly officer in a loose-fitting black uniform.

"We have reason to believe you're a mimic," the officer said, walking around Kahn and tapping him lightly with a thin wooden dowel. "We've had problems with mimics in the past. We still find them now and then. You know how we tell if you're a mimic?"

Kahn shook his head.

"We cut you open."

The room was small. Through a tiny barred window, Kahn could hear the grind of internal combustion engines and the hiss of steam vehicles.

"I'm not a city part," Kahn said. "I have to speak to -- "

"You don't know anything about us, do you? Like most mimics. Ignorant. Locked up in cities, never bothering about us, here in the dirt and flies."

"I come from Fraternity, but I'm not a city part."

The officer pursed his lips and raised his eyebrows. "You came from a city. That's good enough for us." He leaned forward and lowered his voice. "Whatever you are, we don't need you. We have laws here, and I think you should be glad. If I had my way, we'd dismantle you right now. Find out what you work. Not that you'd care, I suppose. Mimics don't feel pain, don't eat, don't sleep." The constable shook his head. "But then, you're probably lying. You probably came from Ibreem, crept out of the city there. Hide your tracks. Well, we're a democracy. We have treaties with Ibreem, we can't just go in and clean them out. The borders aren't nearly as tight as they should be." He motioned with his hand.

Kahn was taken by two guards to a concrete pit. He walked down a flight of wooden steps into the cell and iron bars were lowered over. He barely had room to squat. "If you shit, maybe we let you loose," one guard said. "Maybe not. Mimics can shit, too, they say."

He settled in to make himself as comfortable as possible. After a few minutes, he pinched himself on the inside of his left arm, then tried to indent the skin with his fingernail. What would they find if they cut him? His knowledge of simulacra was slight, ironically. Except for the brain, he had heard, the interior structure was pretty amorphous. Not at all like a city-part.

Could they disable him? He wasn't sure.

No one had considered the possibility a simulacrum would have to face such circumstances.

He didn't think he could sleep, though he could close his eyes. He certainly couldn't shit. There was no way he could convince his captors he was human.

After an hour, he shut his eyes and began running numbers and architectural images across the darkness. Soon he had a Romanesque cathedral mapped out. Then he began to change the types of stone, working out strength of materials problems and redesigning accordingly.

To his surprise, something like sleep came along shortly after -- dreamless, dark, not very comfortable, but much better than useless thought.

He was stirred out of the darkness by the squeal of the bars being raised. "Inside, hunker down," said a guard. It was dark and the guard carried a dim electric lantern. A large shadow descended into the pit with him, brushed up against his legs -- he curled them tighter -- and settled into silence.

The guard's light pointed down into the pit and Kahn saw it briefly touch on his companion's chest. The light moved a few centimeters, then stopped. The guard took a deep breath, flicked the light off and locked the bars.

Whoever his companion was, it carried a head under its arm, and the head had blinked at him.

Kahn didn't sleep or meditate for the rest of the night. Dawn threw a vague orange glow into the cell, outlining the figure.

It was human-like, and it did indeed carry a head, but the head's eyes were closed. As the glow brightened, coming through a skylight above the cell, Kahn saw that the large figure was a man, terribly wounded. Shafts of arrows stuck out all over him, most broken off. There were bullet holes in his ragged shirt, and brown and green stains around the holes. His free arm appeared to have been sliced open.

Beneath the flap of skin was not muscle, but glassy green tubes and a purple, foam-like filler. Beneath the filler was metallic bone. The figure was not human -- he was a city part, a mimic.

No wonder he had been suspected, Kahn thought. The mimics must be everywhere.

"Hello," Kahn said. The mimic opened his eyes. "Hello."

"From which city?"

The mimic didn't answer for a long moment. "Mandala," he said finally. The voice was deep, quite convincingly human.

"I come from Fraternity," Kahn said. The mimic nodded and looked at Kahn's clothes, and finally at the shoes. The shoes had been undone in a search for weapons and no longer sealed against the pant legs.

"Fraternity made you?"

"No," Kahn said. "I'm not a city part."

"Then you're human."

"Not exactly." It was difficult treating the mimic as something other than a human; the cities had never specifically been instructed to make humans. For some of Kahn's clients, that ability would have been blasphemous. But Kahn suspected that city programming still operated in the mimic. "I am the builder," he said. "My word is _qellipoth._ It is a practical word, not a theoretical word."

The mimic jerked as if kicked. "I am Jeshua. This is Thinner." He held up the head. "Builder ... I am..."

"Be quiet," Kahn said softly. "I have questions."

"Builder, I am shocked ... doubly shocked. I feel the power of your words ... but I have been studying _kaballah,_ too. For a long time, a century, Builder." Jeshua's eyes filled with tears. He reached out to touch Kahn's foot. "Are you here to rescue the sparks?" he asked. "Is it time for the regathering?"

The mimic's humanity ran deep. His independence was surprising. A normal city part would have come completely under his control upon hearing that sequence of words. And it knew _kaballah_! Kahn had only briefly studied the mystical teachings under the spotty tutelage of George Pearson, God-Does-Battle's financial minister. Kahn had considered it his duty to know more about his heritage, for in past centuries his family had been Jewish.

"I don't know about the regathering," he said. "I'm not a messiah, I'm not a kabbalist. I'm the builder."

Jeshua sagged and his eyelids lowered as if in fatigue. "I feel the compulsion," he said again. "Only the builder would know those words. But I don't know how I know ... I am very confused."

"I programmed a code and command into all city parts long before you were made," Kahn said.

"You were human. How could you live so long?"

"I have questions, too," Kahn said. "I hope you can answer my questions, and I'll try to answer yours. But first, we have to get out of here. I don't think I'm going to see any higher authority."

"Why are you in jail?"

"They think I'm a city part."

Jeshua moved the head into his lap. "They destroy cities, city parts," he said. "They're human."

"There's a place where humans are more tolerant, Expolis Ibreem. If we can find our way there..."

Jeshua reached up with a hand at least half again as wide as Kahn's and tested the bars overhead. "They're too strong for me to bend them. Besides, I'm damaged." He looked down at Thinner, who still had his eyes closed.

"Is the head alive?" Kahn asked. He felt like an artist who had once painted a simple picture, and come back years later to find it growing more and more bizarre.

"I think so," Jeshua said. "Thinner. Wake up. Open your eyes." The head opened his eyes. "We're with the Builder."

"I heard," the head said hoarsely. "Now I know why you study _kaballah._ He planted the seed. Let me see him." Jeshua turned the head and lifted it. "Welcome, Builder. Your coming is a mystery to us."

"Then we're even. You're a mystery to me."

"Jeshua, the walls are concrete and the bolts holding the bars are set maybe only a few centimeters deep. You can't break out in your condition, but maybe you can spread a little pouch fluid on the concrete."

Jeshua considered that for a moment, then set the head down gently on the dirty floor. "_Peah,_" Thinner said. "Smells like a sewer in here."

Kahn's eyes widened as Jeshua pulled up his dirty white tunic. The mimic was fully equipped with genitals, body hair, anal opening. Jeshua touched several spots on his belly and pulled aside a flap of skin.

"Think you're hungry," Thinner said.

Jeshua pulled out a milky pouch from his abdomen. "I'll have to cut it, there's no opening here."

"Let me bite it," Thinner offered. Jeshua held the head to the pouch. Despite his own lack of viscera, Kahn felt strange and looked away.

"Now I won't be able to eat," Jeshua said. "We'll have to reach Resurrection soon, get a city-fed meal, get fixed." Almost sorrowfully, he said, "I'm a real wreck now, aren't I?"

"You're still better off than I am," Thinner said, his task finished. "Wipe my mouth. I don't want to blister."

"You can eat human food and city fluids, too?" Kahn asked.

"The builder didn't provide for our construction?" Thinner asked. Jeshua cupped his hands and clear, steaming fluid poured into them. He dabbed the fluid on the concrete around the bolts, then dipped his hands in the water bucket in one corner. The concrete sizzled and became a greyish mud. The bars groaned and settled a centimeter or so.

"I didn't know cities could make parts like you," Kahn admitted. "My creations exceed my expectations."

"Builder is a proud father," Thinner said, his voice muffled. He had fallen over again. Jeshua was re-sealing his belly skin. Kahn reached over and righted the head.

"Not so proud," Kahn said. "What will that acid do to your insides?"

Jeshua smiled. "Not much leaks. I just have to remember not to get hungry. Shouldn't be too hard -- I've only started eating human-type food again in the last few weeks."

"Can we get out now?" Thinner asked.

"I think I can wrench up this end," Jeshua said.

"And after that?"

"We should probably wait for guards," Kahn said. "When they come to get us -- surprise them."

"I'll stand between their guns and you, Builder," Jeshua said. "I'm already injured -- a few more bullets won't hurt."

"You're amazing," Kahn said. "I would never have guessed city parts could take so much abuse."

"That's why the Holy One, blessed be He, put us here -- using your master plan," Jeshua said. "We are to absorb the pain of the messianic age."

"My friend has gone a bit deep into that stuff." Thinner said. "From what I've heard, he has only you to blame."

Kahn grinned at the rebuke. "I don't think my code is wholly responsible. You both seem to be true individuals. If I didn't know, I'd say you were human."

"No," Jeshua said. "We are not that."

"Well, technically speaking, neither am I, and I think I can take a few bullets as well as you." He wasn't positive about that -- especially not where his head was concerned -- but he felt it was time to assert himself, show a little courage. He felt almost ashamed in the face of his latter-day creations.

A guard opened the door at the end of the cell corridor. Kahn held his finger to his lips. Three pairs of boots clacked on the pavement and he looked up to see men leaning over the pit, shadows against the dim blue skylight.

"All city parts?"

"We think so. Haven't cut them open yet -- but one is hurt, and he isn't human. The other's just a head, no body, and one is dressed in clothes like he came out of a polis."

"Open up, then."

The guard bent down and inserted a key into the lock. The hinges slipped in their corroded seats, making the bars fall against the outer frame with a clang. The guard inserted his lever to pry the bars up, but they had jammed.

Jeshua braced his feet on the floor of the pit and reached up with both hands. Heaving suddenly, he pushed the bars away from the frame. The guard was knocked backward and Jeshua stood, using the bars to pin the other two against the corridor wall. Kahn grabbed the head and climbed out of the pit. Jeshua plucked the keys out of the bars and they ran to the opposite end. With the second door open, they found themselves in an exercise yard adjacent to the old Synedrium judgement chambers. Jeshua kicked a flimsy panel door open and they came to a flight of stairs opening onto a street. They were in the delivery alley in back of the jail. The alarm hadn't gone off yet; the Founder police weren't as efficient as Kahn expected.

They were in Canaantown proper, running through the early scooter and foot traffic, when the jail bells rang.

Arthur sat on the front porch of the house waiting for the first cool winds of evening, chin in his hands and knees braced against a broken board. The stars were twinkling furiously as the land gave up its warmth. To the west, heat lightning flashed silently between clouds pushed high during the late afternoon. The tall anvil-head billows looked like faces in the brief purple and green illuminations.

The house was empty. His daughter was in Canaantown, visiting Jorissa. Nan's visits with her mother grew longer each time. This visit, he suspected, would be the longest of all. He doubted she would return.

He didn't want to feel betrayed. There was nothing here for Nan, after all; little enough for himself. The farm was a memory and a deed to a tract of dead land, soon to be appropriated by the Founders. He was an old man withering under the sun, doing nothing, promising nothing. It was best she leave.

But the betrayal was real and it hurt him nonetheless. It was a hard time, pushing people to do hard things. Soon, he suspected, he would either die or he would leave, and at age fifty-five, he doubted it was time for him to die.

For the moment, however, he felt like doing nothing more than sitting on the porch, wondering how long it would take for God-Does-Battle to bake and blow away.

The lightning was coming closer. Some of the flashes were almost directly overhead, still silent, but bright enough to pick out the trees, front fence and road like full double moonlight. In a vivid purple flash that left an image swimming in his eyes, he saw two figures standing by the fence.

They were on the trod, both of them this time. The one who called himself Kahn and the big fellow with the head in his arms. Arthur was too tired to care.

"So come on up," he shouted into the hot dark. "I feel half crazy, half a ghost myself. Come on!" He waved them to approach.

The dim lantern light coming through the front window picked them out about five meters in front of the porch. The big fellow was frightening, sure enough, more like a giant corpse than a man, and carrying a head just like Arthur had seen him before. Except for dirt, Kahn was no different from two days before.

"We need your help," Kahn said, coming closer. "Where's your daughter?"

"In town."

"We need to know the way to Resurrection. This is Jeshua." He pointed and the giant nodded at Arthur.

"Aren't you going to introduce me to the head?"

"My name is Thinner," the head said. Arthur tensed and moved up one step.

"If I can get to Resurrection, I can at least begin to put things right," Kahn said. "With the problems you've faced, you must understand how urgent this is."

"My problems are my problems. They've been with me for a long time, and I don't think you can do anything about them. Did they take you to jail?"

Kahn nodded. "I met Jeshua and Thinner there."

"City parts, aren't they?"

"Yes."

"And you aren't."

"He is the builder," Jeshua said.

"So I've heard. You have to go to Ibreem to find the polis. That's across the border west of here, maybe fifty, sixty kilometers. Just go west."

"I think we need more specific directions. Which roads -- landmarks -- "

"I've never been there," Arthur said. "I've just heard stories. Oh, I've been to the border. Take any road west. How did you get away from them?"

"With Jeshua's help," Kahn said. "Just west, then?" He pointed.

"No, more that way," Arthur said, correcting him. "The wind blows from there mostly, nowadays. Used to blow from the east."

"Thank you for your hospitality, and for trying to help me," Kahn said. "I won't forget your decency."

Arthur looked away. "Great deal of good it's done me. But I appreciate your saying so."

The giant city part had been looking at him steadily, brow knit as if in thought. As Kahn turned to leave, Jeshua said, "Is your name Daniel?"

"It is. Arthur Sam Daniel."

Jeshua smiled. "I knew your -- great grandfather, great -- great grandfather? A man named Sam Daniel the Catholic."

"I've heard of him," Arthur said. "He was supposed to be the great man in our family. But that was maybe a hundred years ago."

"The age of wonders is at hand," Jeshua said. "Your ancestor was an honorable man, and someday I would like to know what happened to him."

They walked off into the dark, until only the vague starlight outlined them. Arthur was shaking on the porch as if he were cold, but the air was still tepid.

He stood, brushed off his pants, and cupped his hands over his mouth. "Wait a moment!" Under his breath, he muttered "Crazy bastards, crazy stupid asses," and he ran into the house. "Just a moment!"

He came out with a canvas bag filled with all the canned food and clothes he thought worth taking. If Nan returned, he had scratched a note on the kitchen table top. There was enough left to make it worthwhile for her to come back, but if she didn't ... then she would never know.

He felt like a child running away from home, but the feeling exhilarated him. He had never done anything this crazy before.

"I'd like to come with you," he said as he met them next to the road.

They traveled by night -- not as safe as it might seem, since most travelers moved by night and spent at least the heat of day under shelter if possible. Still, they were careful, and they did not encounter more Canaan Founders.

Neither Kahn nor Jeshua tired as they walked, but for Arthur's sake they paused every few hours. Their first stop was within sight of Fraternity, and they sat on a fallen log while the heat mist washed around their legs.

"If there's anything you people or parts or whatever you are can do that I don't know about -- fly, disappear, fight like demons, anything like that -- don't wait to tell me," Arthur said. "Let me know so I can figure a way to take advantage of it."

Kahn smiled. "Nothing magical. The food is for you alone, since I don't need to eat and Jeshua can't just now. The water we can share, but you'll need much more than we do. When you get tired, tell us."

"I'll have to slow down now and then," Jeshua said. "I'm a little worried about Thinner." The head was silent most of the time, eyes closed as if asleep. "I can't feed him much now."

"My grandfather used to tell me about capturing city parts and using them like horses or cars. But they're mostly gone now. I was just wondering how much like a city part you are." Arthur looked at Kahn.

"Not very much, actually. The technology of the block was more advanced than the technology I had to use in the cities. I didn't really have much to do with the block, so I can't say I know how I work ... not clearly, anyway."

Arthur's eyes narrowed. "Makes sense, I suppose. I don't know much about how I run, either. Be a bit perverse if we did, like looking in a mirror too hard."

"I'm quite aware of how I work," Jeshua said. "But then, I've had many years to learn such things, and excellent libraries."

Arthur nodded as if he were engaging in a perfectly normal conversation. "I still don't believe all this, you know," he said matter-of-factly.

"About the only way you'll be convinced is to see us in action," Kahn said. He stood.

"That could do it," Arthur said.

A single moon illuminated the misty path as they walked around one quarter of Fraternity. On the outskirts of the city. Kahn bent down to pick up a shard of silicate. "I've been wondering what these were for. I remember installing a minor city defense like this, but not so extensive."

"Used to be cities would bristle all around to keep people out," Arthur said.

"I put in the defense by request," Kahn said, dropping the fragment. "They asked for it. Wanted it in case the world was invaded by pagans."

They crossed part of the perimeter on solid paving. The city walls were dry and grey-white where the moonlight hit them, like translucent bones.

"I designed Fraternity for contemplation," Kahn said. "A cross of two intersecting cylinders, topped by a Hofstadter figure -- the central tower, there." He pointed. The moon was just passing behind the tower. The upper promenades and portions of the crossed cylinders had collapsed, leaving the tower in prominent relief. "Did all the cities die like this, in one piece?"

"Not that I heard about," Kahn said.

"Most broke apart and moved," Jeshua said. "They died that way, scattered. Only a few cities die in one piece. Mandala did. The city just quit functioning, sections at a time, and finally all of it ... except for Thinner and I."

"They were only supposed to move parts around when the cities were being remodeled. That was a novelty -- walls that could walk by themselves. We could do it, so we did." He laughed sharply.

"You said something about a Hof -- Hofshtad figure?" Arthur frowned. "I know what a cylinder is, that's like a well is a cylinder's hole, but -- "

"The tower was designed to represent three portraits when viewed from three different angles. Fraternity's tower carried portraits of Christ, Aquinas and George Pearson."

"Who was Pearson ... and Aquinas?" Arthur asked. "Aquinas was a philosopher on old Earth. Pearson was the man who negotiated for the purchase of God-Does-Battle." Kahn remembered the monumental arguments they had had. Pearson had appointed himself shepherd to all the Jews, Christians and Moslems on God-Does-Battle; at the time of Kahn's memorization in the block, Pearson had become a recluse living in the Asian Jewish city of Thule.

"Who can we see from this angle?" Arthur asked. Kahn turned and followed his gaze.

"That's Pearson," he said. "He's as responsible for this as I am, in his way."

Arthur felt briefly dizzy. It was more than just walking while craning his neck -- it was as if, for a second, he had indeed looked into a mirror too closely -- the mirror of God-Does-Battle's history, with a crumbled, monumental face staring back, eyes filled with moonlight, smiling benevolently.

They were less than a kilometer from the border, staying close to the road but not traveling on it, when they stumbled onto a camp. A man in brown canvas shorts and sleeveless shirt, wearing a broad-brimmed round hat, was giving instructions in a melodic tenor voice. Four others -- a woman about the same age, two adolescent boys -- and a young girl -- were loading the truck and taking down a large tent.

Arthur, Jeshua and Kahn watched from the cover of some brittle bushes.

"They're from Ibreem," Arthur whispered. "Sounds like their visitor's pass is running out, so they're going to cross the border tonight."

The man was talking about Resurrection.

"They act as if they live there," Arthur said. "I've heard about an enclave surrounded by the city. Maybe that's what he means."

"He sounds like he's a teacher," Jeshua said. "I recognize that tone."

"Wife and students?" Kahn asked.

"One's his son, I think," Arthur said. "Ibreemites have different ideas about polises than Founders. They try to live with them -- not interfere. They're a Syndine state."

"So?" Kahn asked.

"Maybe we can get a ride with them. Jeshua should hide the head -- we don't want to be too shocking. We could certainly fit on the back of the truck."

Kahn agreed. They stepped forward into the lantern light. The girl was startled and dropped her burden of metal tent poles with a clatter.

"Don't tell them everything all at once," Arthur said. "I still have my doubts about you -- so give it slowly, or not at all. We're just travelers, pilgrims."

The man stood between them and the camp, holding out his hands in a gesture that could have been welcome but for his wide eyes and flaring nostrils.

"We need a ride, if you have room," Arthur said. "My friends and I are going to Resurrection."

"What's your business?" the man asked.

"We're pilgrims," Arthur said. "We need to visit Resurrection. I've never been there."

The man looked at Kahn's clothes and Jeshua's wounds, some of which had started healing over. "It looks like you've had a rough journey so far."

"That we have," Arthur said.

"Excuse us for bothering you," Kahn said, stepping forward. "We're from New Canaan West. I desperately need to get to Resurrection."

"You're fugitives," the man said cautiously. The four others had grouped themselves near the truck.

"He isn't," Kahn said, indicating Arthur. "We are. But not for crimes."

"The big fellow -- what is he?"

Kahn motioned for Jeshua to step closer to the lantern light. "If I'm guessing right, he can get into the city -- the polis. He can be repaired there."

"City doesn't take in sick people any more. That stopped a long time ago. There are hospitals in the enclave..."

"He's a city-part," Arthur said. "A mimic. They're trying to kill him here."

"What has he done?"

"Nothing," Kahn said. "He was trying to get to Resurrection and he had to cross New Canaan West."

"Names?" the man asked.

"Mine is Arthur Sam Daniel, my family used to live in Ibreem. This is Jeshua, and this is Azrael Iben Cohen."

"My name is Hale Ascoria. I'm a teacher. My wife, Lod, and son David. My students, Sanisha and Coort. Your country gave us a four-day pass, and now we're going home." He glanced over his shoulder at the group, then took off his hat and fanned his face slowly. "New Canaan isn't known for thieves, not now, anyway. You say you're pilgrims ... how can I be sure you're not police?"

"Jeshua, show him your arm," Kahn said. The mimic stepped forward a few paces and peeled back his skin. Ascoria squinted to see more detail in the dim light.

"Mandala," Jeshua said. "Originally I came from Ibreem, too, when I thought I was a human being. I grew up there as a child."

"How old are you?"

"About a hundred and forty years."

"We have an obligation to deliver city-parts to Resurrection. This is our pact. But I've never seen a mimic as old as you say you are. Most are from Fraternity." He looked at Kahn. "We came here to study Fraternity. We're from Expolis Geshom originally, but we moved to the Resurrection enclave ten years ago." He took a deep breath. "If I'm taking a chance, God help your immortal souls. Join us, pilgrims."

The truck was gas-powered, smelly and noisy but rugged enough to travel the rutted roads. The students rode in the front seat with Ascoria; his wife and son sat behind the truck bed panel, and Kahn, Jeshua and Arthur squatted near the tailgate. Tent and provisions separated the groups. Jeshua kept Thinner in the bag, looking into it now and then. The big mimic's face was impassive, but Kahn could sense that the head wasn't doing very well.

The border was sparsely patrolled these days, Ascoria explained. Friction between Ibreem and New Canaan was slight, and with the heat, patrols were kept to a minimum. They passed through a wire gate with an empty sentry booth and were in Ibreem.

They had started out in the early morning. Within an hour, they were driving across the old alluvial plain. Resurrection gleamed in the post-dawn light. The sun was already as bright as an electric torch.

A few kilometers out on the plain, the dirt path turned into an oiled road. The truck bounced less vigorously, and Kahn was able to concentrate on the city ahead. It was much smaller than he remembered, as if great chunks had been removed and the walls had closed up after them. There was no central tower, but a circle of smaller towers, with one larger than the rest on the north side. It looked for all the world like an overgrown sports amphitheater.

The oiled road circled the city about thirty meters from the outer wails. The walls rose smooth and silver-green at least a hundred meters above the plain, topped by translucent spikes like the bristles around Fraternity, but fresh and formidable-looking. Except for the obvious reduction and redesign, the city looked healthy.