He decided to leave the valley. Cautiously he moved up the slope opposite the spacecraft, irritated that his path had been determined by a mere inanimate object.
He stood for a while when he reached the top, sweeping his surroundings with his alerted senses. He detected nothing new . . . except, just once, somewhere far across the flats, he thought he noticed something moving. Immediately he focused all of his attention in that direction, but by then whatever it was had already disappeared. It did not surprise him that he was being monitored.
He pressed onward then, leaving a long trail of footprints across the faded brown sea of sand, remnants for the wind to scatter and the sliding sand to fill.
He followed the line of the half-buried highway. It did not seem like very long before the spires of the city were towering above his head. The walled city—the mirage he had seen from a distance—was now very real and spread out before him. A collection of yurtlike buildings extended out from the shield wall, and the wall was half covered by a translucent dome that seemed to be half melted, its edge a waterfall of drooping threads and beads of water frozen in place. The yurts spilled out from the walled city in a tangle that showed no order or planning, like intestines from a ruptured stomach. The shield wall above them rose to a height of roughly five hundred meters, he guessed, without a single window or visible seam. It appeared to have been carved from a single piece of some unknown substance nearly ten kilometers in circumference. Above it the spires rose like a tangled forest impossibly high, seven to eight thousand meters above the plain. The spires’ bases were thick enough to form buildings many stories high. Their tips were sharp and narrow, like spears piercing the sky. From their tips and edges bristled antennae and other objects—he guessed them to be radar dishes and laser cannons—in a pattern like some ancient arabesque, their structures seeming to defy the laws of gravity.
He stood and stared.
Though he had not noticed it until now, behind the forest of spires the quarter shell of a translucent dome arced across the sky. And there were other shattered domes beyond it, beyond the city, standing empty upon the sand, some like giant inverted bowls, others with flat mesalike tops. He guessed that the dome had once covered the city in its entirety.
He took in the sight of the great city, storing it in his neural memory web.
At last he moved in for a closer look. The yurts were half buried in sand, making it hard for him to see inside them. On further inspection he found that the buildings were arranged around a long corridor, roughly one hundred meters wide, in which nothing had been built. Both the buildings’ walls and the roads between them seemed to have been made from an incredibly thin, specialized silicon. One part of the yurt closest to him was scorched where some weapon had opened a hole in its side. He approached and looked in, only to find it filled to its ceiling with sand. Then he walked on down the empty corridor, making for the main wall of the city. He guessed that he was walking along an ancient thoroughfare, perhaps the main entrance to the city in the past. If that was true, there was a good chance it would take him to a gate or some other entrance through the wall and into the city.
The forest of spires threw a jumbled shadow across the sand around him. He wondered what had inspired the city’s architects to construct such high towers with such sharp points to scrape against the sky. He wondered if the people who lived here had borne the heavens some great hatred that led them to direct even their buildings upward as weapons, protected though they were by a wall and dome. He belatedly realized that he had been thinking about the city only in the past tense. This was very dangerous. Had he not just entered a derelict spacecraft only to find it functioning perfectly enough to unleash a terrifying attack?
For all he knew, something might be waiting for him in there, buried beneath the rubble and the sand. As long as that was a possibility, there was nothing past tense about this city and the danger it posed.
A giant door opened in the high shield wall. He crouched in its shadow, peering through the gate. The blowing sand had settled in beautiful windblown curves along the edges of the wall. Other than the drifts that gave way beneath his feet, nothing moved in all that space. Through the city’s entry gate a dark tunnel led toward the other, deeper levels. He peered into its darkness, tense. The danger he’d faced inside the spacecraft again came to mind—clearly this was no place to linger. He went through the gate, the sand rising up to his knees.
Though the tunnel way had seemed inky black from the outside, once inside it he saw that it was dimly illuminated, its walls the same gray ash color as the world beyond the wall. He looked for the source of the illumination but was unable to find it. He decided that it must come from the high ceiling or the walls or the floor itself.
The sand stirred like a mist around his feet as he walked. The tunnel was short, opening into a large circular hall with several short radio-tower-like structures at its center, the openings at their tops shaped like the mouths of trumpets. The towers’ circular bases were covered in drifting sand, and though it was apparent these were devices for absorbing radioactivity, it was obvious that they no longer functioned. He imagined the citizens of the city coming in from the outside world, always passing through this hall for decontamination, after which they would enter the city proper through one of several doorways set around the hall. He picked one of them and went through into the ruins of the ancient city.
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He walked among fallen, shattered ceilings, cracked walls and floors, twisted electrical conduits and clogged water pipes, and vast quantities of preserved goods that had been stored for so long they were now nothing but mountains of dust and sand. The destruction Fate had decreed for this place had been so thorough that over the long quiet years, the city had marched to its ruination with an impossibly ponderous certainty.
Again, he sensed the presence of some enemy—closer this time. Perhaps his foe had come behind him and was even now standing at the city gates beneath the towering walls.
For a brief moment he hesitated, casting his senses in all directions, and then he continued his advance. He came across a line of large buildings, each about a hundred meters long. Peering into them through the openings at their sides, he saw that they were crossed with metal pipes like those in a rotary kiln, all red with rust. Many cranes and beltways hung from the ceiling of each chamber, their workings covered with thick layers of dust. A manufacturing sector, perhaps, he thought.
He climbed to the upper levels of one building along a beltway that hung loosely, its belt dangling in places like shredded paper. From there he passed through countless rooms and halls of many sizes, including a communications hub filled with electronics and a manufacturing facility that seemed outfitted to produce large quantities of synthesized foods. Everything was rusting, half buried in sand, enveloped in silence.
What am I supposed to do here?
Fierce doubts churned in his chest. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be looking for, why he was driven to search.
Feeling empty and alone, he stepped into a small room with a floor buried in sand. There was a large window in one wall, and through its empty frame he could look out on the foundations of the towering spires. He stuck his head out through the window and stared up at the gray sky, then let his gaze fall back down to the dune-crowded streets of the ancient metropolis. There were symbols engraved on the foundation of one of the nearest spires—something commemorating the tower’s construction, possibly. He opened his two foremost eyes wide, trying to read the symbols.
Two nine zero . . .
He directed all the energy in his body toward his visual cortex. The circuit breaker that supplied his scorched optic nerves trembled with the load.
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2902 TOKYO