The Golden City Page 7

  The three suns were a hand’s width above the horizon. The cooks had finished their jobs and found their seats in the little amphitheater. Michael was cautious about asking too many questions, but he wanted to know what was going on. “How long do we have to wait?” he asked Verga.

  “Soon enough. When the dark sky comes.” The old man jerked his head at the screen. “Just keep watchin’ the visionary.”

  As dusk fell, the sound of a choir singing came from hidden speakers, and then the image of a crystal sphere appeared on the screen. Stars floated on the surface of the sphere, changing position as it rotated in space. The camera passed through the translucent surface to a second sphere that held the triad of suns and a third sphere that held comets and asteroids. At the center of all this was a round disc colored with patches of blue and green. Like an avenging angel, the camera swooped down from the sky, and Michael saw that they were entering a world with grasslands, forests and waterfields. A city was at the center of this world, and now the camera was gliding past brick buildings and streets filled with steam-powered crawlers.

  A group of nine towers dominated the only hill in the city. They were tall, bright spires, composed of translucent glass or plastic that concealed those inside but allowed light to glow from within. Just down the hill from the towers was a white triangular building with an open roof. As the music reached a climax, the camera floated downward to where one man was standing on a stage.

  The guardian was a slender blond man in his thirties with a pallid face. He wore a dark green robe that resembled a priest’s vestments, but had the ingratiating manner of a game show host. “Welcome everyone!” he shouted. “This could be the night the gods smile on you!”

  Music boomed from speakers and beams of light shot across the stage. The camera angle changed and Michael saw that the guardian was facing an immense audience in an amphitheatre. Men and women were sitting in different sections of the room, and quick close-ups revealed that everyone was young and enthusiastic. Most of the audience were faithful servants, but a smaller segment of the crowd wore silver tunics and black trousers. Michael decided that these people were the church militants that acted as both police force and army.

  “This is the moment when two halves become one.” The guardian spread his hands and then slowly brought them together. “This is the moment when the gods create a new unity, a new creation.”

  Again, the lights changed and laser beams moved around the amphitheatre as if searching for someone. Back on stage, a row of lights on a panel began to blink rapidly.

  “And the gods have searched and the gods have chosen ”

  The row of lights froze—expressing a binary number. There was a brief moment of silence and then a woman in the audience screamed and jumped up, waving a slip of paper that showed her number. Her girlfriends hugged and congratulated her as she hurried to the central aisle and climbed a staircase to the stage.

  The young woman had wrapped silk flowers around her red collar, transforming it into a necklace. She seemed awed by the bright lights and the fact that she was now a participant in this event. When one of her friends shouted from the audience, she giggled nervously and waved her hand.

  “And what’s your name?” the guardian asked.

  “Zami.”

  “Welcome, Zami! Did you think this was going to happen to you tonight?”

  “I—I prayed to the gods ”

  “And now we’ll see how they answered!”

  The binary lights began blinking rapidly as Zami clasped her hands together. When the flashing stopped and a number appeared, shouts and laughter came from the men’s section of the auditorium. A broad-shouldered servant emerged from the crowd and ran toward the stage. The moment he reached Zami, his aggressive energy disappeared. He glanced down at his feet and smiled nervously.

  “We—We know each other,” Zami said.

  “Wonderful! Sometimes that happens.” The guardian shook the young man’s hand. “And who am I speaking to?”

  “Malveto.”

  “You look like a happy groom.”

  “Yes, sir. Yes, I am.”

  As the evening continued, more brides were introduced to their grooms. Some of the couples were strangers, while others had known each other since childhood. At certain intervals, the guardian presented wedding gifts: tools, clothes, and simple furniture. No one seemed to find it surprising that that lasers and video screens existed in the same world as wet crawlers and horse carts.

  Finally twelve new couples were led off stage. The lights dimmed and the music became slow and solemn. The harvesters sitting around Michael stopped chattering to each other. They looked tense and expectant. Verga leaned toward the screen.

  “Each of us is a strand of thread woven tightly into a piece of cloth. The faithful servants are strong. The militants are brave. We guardians are thoughtful. But all of us serve the gods,” the Guardian said. “Unfortunately there are a few heretics who attempt to destroy the sacred unity that binds us together.”

  Militants waiting in an off-stage area rolled out three men strapped to heavy wooden chairs. The prisoners had shaven heads, and bandages covered their necks. They wore only flimsy white robes that reminded Michael of hospital gowns.

  The guardian approached the oldest prisoner. “This enemy of the gods was once a faithful servant.”

  The prisoner was trembling. His mouth and tongue moved, but only a gurgling sound came out. Now the reason for the bandages came clear—someone had removed the man’s vocal cords.

  “But he was a servant who committed a vicious crime!”

  The visionary screen showed the prisoner chasing a young woman through a warehouse filled with storage bins. As the woman fumbled with a door latch, the man grabbed her from behind, threw her to the ground and began to rape her. The surveillance cameras photographed the scene from a variety of angles, but no one called for help.

  The auditorium reappeared on the screen and a camera moved into a close-up of the man strapped to the second chair. This prisoner was younger than the rapist. His face was slack and his eyes rolled upward as if he had been drugged.

  “And now we have a church militant who became a traitor and murderer,” the guardian said. “He was taught to be brave and faithful, but he violated his oath and killed a superior.”

  The screen switched to surveillance footage of the prisoner standing in what appeared to be a military barracks. He was arguing with an older man and suddenly began beating him with a length of pipe. As the attack escalated, the harvesters stood up and shouted at the screen. When the militant finished, he turned and ran between two rows of cots. It seemed like he was coming toward the harvesters, trying to attack them.

  “And now a true sacrilege,” the guardian said. “This wretch is a fellow guardian. A man I once called brother.”

  The visionary showed a guardian using a hammer to destroy an altar in one of the crystal towers. The harvesters watching the screen began shouting. “Kill him! Kill them all!” Fists were raised and faces were distorted with rage. Michael could hear babies crying, terrified by their mothers’ anger.

  “There’s no doubt of these crimes,” the blond guardian said. “No doubt of the punishment.”

  Militants readjusted the hinged parts of the chairs so that they became wooden racks with the prisoners still fastened to the frames. While the prisoners’ gowns were ripped away, another group of militants appeared, pulling large hooks fastened to steel cables. The cables were attached to struts that extended over the stage.

  A choir began singing as men with hammers pounded the hooks into the prisoners. When the cables were pulled tight, the rapist was pulled up into the air. Naked and bleeding from his wounds, he trembled and fought to break free. Then the murderer was raised up, followed by the guardian who had defiled the sanctuary. Each man twisted on three pairs of hooks that were buried in their shoulder blades, torso and legs.

  The cables holding up the servant tightened and then strained. First his legs were pulled away, then both arms. The two remaining cables pulled even ha
rder until there was an explosion of blood and his torso was ripped in two. The chunks of flesh and bone still attached to the hooks swung back and forth like bloody pendulums as the other two prisoners were executed in the same manner. When it was over, the cables were released and everything dropped to the floor at the rear of the stage. A spotlight focused on the Guardian. With a solemn look on his face, he clasped his hands together and murmured the phrase Verga had said earlier that day.

  “All is just when each does his part.”

  The music changed, after a moment the twelve brides and twelve grooms returned to the stage. All the young women had been dressed in dark red gowns and the men in black uniforms. A blaze of stage light made them look as if they were floating in darkness, but Michael could see the blood-splattered floor behind them. There was a crescendo of music and singing as the walls behind the stage opened like two immense doors. In the distance, the nine towers glowed with such power that they illuminated the city below. A final blast of music came, and then the visionary went dark.

  For a few seconds, the crowd of faithful servants sat quiet and motionless. Then children began moving and the parents were pulled from their trance. Oil lamps were lit and the orange flames showed contented faces. They were tired—yes, it had been a long day—but somehow the visionary’s presentation of hope and happiness and cruelty transformed them all. Life was good. Time to go to sleep.

  Michael felt like he’d been thrown off a building and somehow survived. He kept staring at the visionary as if a face would suddenly appear to explain everything he had just seen. Opposing ideas pushed through his mind and he was startled when someone touched his shoulder.

  It was only Verga, holding an oil lamp. “Follow me, Tolmo. You sleep with us in the Sire House.”

  Entering the three-sided building, Michael discovered that the mound of straw was being used for bedding. Men would take three or four armfuls of straw, pile it against the wall, and burrow into their little nests. It took him an extra amount of time make his own nest comfortable. One-by-one, the lamps were extinguished—leaving a faint buttery scent. Michael felt tired but wary. He removed the knife from its sheath and kept it close to his right hand.

  Come to us, he thought. From what he had seen, this could be the advanced civilization that had sent that message. Come to us and then what? Would they bring him up on stage and tear him apart for pretending to be a guardian? Michael sat up and tried to figure out what to do. He definitely couldn’t stay here. It was too dangerous. When everyone was asleep, he would follow the railroad track back to the handcart, then wait for sunrise. With a little bit of light, he could find the passageway.

  Deciding on a plan made him feel detached from what he had seen on the visionary. Mrs. Brewster and the board members of the Evergreen Foundation thought they were tough-minded, but they were children in comparison to the leaders who ran this world. The acts of torture displayed on the visionary were about as subtle as a Mayan priest cutting open a prisoner’s rib cage and pulling out a still-beating heart. And then they put the couples together and married them. He puzzled out the connection between these two events, and then it came to him. We have the power to kill you or bless you—that was what the guardians were telling their audience.

  Grunts and snores came from the darkness. The only light in the cavernous building came from a single oil lamp burning near the concrete trough. Michael’s arms and legs felt heavy, and he decided to nap for an hour or so before he ran away.

  He snuggled deeper into the straw and went to sleep. At some moment during the night he woke up hearing the hiss and squeak of a steam-driven crawler entering the courtyard. Men spoke to each other in soft voices, and then boots moved across the bricks. Suddenly, Michael’s body was hit with a surge of pain that came from the red collar. The pain spread though his body—a sensation so powerful that he stopped breathing.

  The collar lock had been broken when Verga took it off the dead harvester and Michael was able to rip it from his neck. Men were screaming and thrashing in the straw as men with hand lights searched the room.

  Clutching his knife, Michael jumped up and ran for the doorway. Get out, he thought. Hide in the darkness. They’re going to kill you.

  8

  T ravelers could break free of their bodies and cross over to another world. The rest of humanity needed an access point, one of several portals known in ancient times. Since Maya hadn’t returned, Gabriel would have to find another way to bring her back. Simon spent several weeks in the British Library studying Greek and Latin texts that mentioned sites of prophecy and transformation. Most of these possibilities were in the Egypt so he asked Linden to arrange a trip to Cairo.

  Jugger and Roland were given the passport Gabriel had used to enter Great Britain and hair that would match the DNA samples the Tabula had obtained from Gabriel’s house in Los Angeles. The two Free Runners took the ferry to Calais and then traveled by bus and train across France. Using cyber cafes and mobile telephones, they created the impression that Gabriel was on his way to Eastern Europe.

  While the Free Runners were leaving a false trail in various hostels and hotels, Linden prepared cloned passports for Gabriel and Simon. When governments inserted RFID chips into passport covers, forgers quickly learned how to use a machine called a skimmer to read the information. If the skimmer was hidden in a doorway or an elevator it could read the passport carried in someone’s pocket or handbag. Linden didn’t waste time with skimmers and simply bribed a hotel clerk to scan tourist passports with a legally obtained inspection reader.

  Once Linden had the information, he created a cloned passport with a duplicate chip. The information could be altered so that the person carrying the clone matched the embedded photograph and biometric data. In developing countries, the match didn’t have to be perfect; ignoring their own instincts, emigration officials tended to wave a passenger through if a machine announced that everything was correct.

  “So who I am supposed to be?” Gabriel asked Linden.

  “A young man named Brian Nelson who lives in Denver.”

  “And what about me?” Simon Lumbroso asked.

  “You’re Dr. Mario Festa—a psychologist from Rome.”

  Simon grinned and leaned back in his chair. “Good. I’m enjoying this. And, of course, Dr. Festa thinks his government is protecting him.”

  * * *

  A few days later, Gabriel, Linden and Simon flew to the West African country of Senegal. At the Dakar airport, Linden paid a bribe that inserted their new passport numbers into the global monitoring system. They quickly transferred to a different airline and took an overnight flight to Egypt. In the morning, they arrived and took a taxi from the airport into Cairo. Their cab moved through the crowded streets of Cairo like a boat floating in a labyrinth of muddy canals. Drivers kept honking their car horns while the traffic police stood listlessly on the sidewalk. But the Cairo jaywalkers displayed grace and confidence: old people, street sellers and pregnant women glided through the traffic as if they had given their souls to Allah before stepping off the curb.

  Simon told the taxi driver to take them to the City of the Dead on the east side of the Nile. Qarafa cemetery had once been the site of the Roman fortress of Babylon; and the brick and stone ruins had been transformed into a burial ground by the Mamluk rulers in the fifteenth century. Over hundreds of years, squatters had built huts among the tombs, and these improvised dwellings evolved into four-story tenements built with a grayish-brown concrete that resembled dried clay.

  The cab passed through a square where men were selling canaries and parakeets, the little birds calling to each other as they fluttered back and forth in their cages. Men approached their car offering melons, shoes, and lottery tickets pinned to a cardboard sign. Veiled women walked arm-in-arm through the crowd while a recorded voice wailed from the speakers mounted on each mosque.

  The driver got lost a few times, but eventually they reached the tomb of Iman al Shafi-i, a Muslim holy man. A mosque with four minarets had been built aro
und the gravesite, and an elderly caretaker gave them a tour of the complex—stone walls and a faded green carpet, swallows darting around the interior of the copula. When they had seen enough of the mosque to provide a reason for their presence in the neighborhood, they walked across the dirt street to a storefront café. Each customer sat at his own little table as the pudgy café owner bustled back and forth with glasses of hot tea that had sprigs of mint floating on the surface.

  Simon Lumbroso could speak basic Arabic and had business contacts in Cairo, but as an Orthodox Jew he felt self-conscious about his appearance in a Muslim country. At the hotel, he slipped on a djellaba— a long cotton robe that covered his shabby black suit and the fringe from his tallit katan, the ritual Orthodox garment.

  Linden and Gabriel were wearing cotton trousers and sports jackets without ties. Gabriel didn’t mind looking like a businessman, but he wondered if Linden could truly disguise himself. The big Frenchman moved with an aggressive confidence and constantly surveyed the space around him as if he were preparing for an attack. Beggars and stray dogs sensed the danger and stayed away from him.

  Simon lowered his mobile phone and wrote a number down in his memo book. “I just talked to the priest’s wife. She thinks he’s at his uncle’s house.”

  “But he was supposed to meet us here.”

  “This is typical for Cairo. What is expected never occurs. And what occurs is never expected.” Lumbroso started dialing a new number. “Don’t worry. We’ll find him.”

  “While we wait for the priest, order some coffee,” Linden said. “This tea tastes like dishwater.”

  Simon spoke to the café owner and then began dialing a new number. Gabriel looked up at the hazy sky above them. The soot and dirt particles in the air softened the light and changed the color of the sun. In the morning, the sun was a yellowish-white, but now it looked like an old bronze coin nailed to the ceiling.