The City of Gods

It was one of the cities where no one ever died. It was a city defined by yellow and brown, dirty yellow; sunlight and dead grass and bare earth and the uncured, rough-cut human leather hanging in flaps and in skeins of empty fingers from the sun-kilned flesh of those who were whole. Or mostly whole, for the purposes of that particular moment, at least.

A newcomer walked among them, among the howling barbarians that were the grandchildren of high civilization. Though the cannibal savages danced mad dances around him, shouting and stamping and lashing with their fists in foreplay for an orgy of violence, they did not touch him. They accepted him readily, and did not visit the violence on him that they readily visited on one another, breaking out into meaningless brawls on all sides of him, tumbling into fights at his feet. The ones with unregenerate limbs sought each other out, clasping the gaps in their flesh stump to stump, jabbing bone against bone and knotting shreds of flesh together, wrestling as screaming cripples.

He took a place on one of the worn grey-wooden benches, shaded by an overhanging canvas that snapped in the wind. He folded his hands in front of him. He was, distinctly, Chinese-American. The people around him were too sunburned and interbred to be much of anything.

Black specks like flies that were in fact human ash skittered in the wind around the tables. There were no actual flies, for the ashes had eaten them. Flecks of ash would land on the Chinese-American man’s clothes and exposed skin (only at his face and the backs of his hands) and stick, shooting out small tendrils as soon as they landed and start to bloat like ticks with the intake of organic mass. He brushed them away when he could, when he could feel them, but there were too many, and any effort to repel them was only temporary, as was the effort to sleep away the hunger by means of immolation. But they knew that, and they burned themselves anyway, just as the Chinese-American man knew it was pointless to pick at the ashes, but he did it anyway.

Gobbets of tendriled human flesh scampered or oozed beneath the stamping feet of the table, seeking scraps. People crushed them when they saw them, stomping on a potential brother’s shinbone or perhaps the tip of their own mother’s brown nipple. This too, was pointless. This too, was necessary.

A vendor approached the Chinese-American man who, in clothes of rough-spun cotton rather than skin, seemed like someone with something to trade. The vendor
Opened up the cold chest that hung around his neck to show his wares. “Shaved brains?” he asked, paring away at one of the grey-white lumps in the cold chest and putting the shavings into a conical paper cup before applying a spot of redolent barbecue sauce to the cone that suffused the cold shaved brains with a rich red-brown color. The vendor kicked away a half-human mass that crawled up at him, moaning with hunger.

“No thanks,” said the Chinese-American man. “I’m a naturalist. I had my brains shaved a long time ago.” The vendor moved on.

The Chinese-American man, the naturalist, returned his attention to his hands folded on the table. He began to watch—as they all began to watch, somehow—a woman. She was moving through a field somewhere at the edge of the city, for all that it seemed as though the city consumed the whole of the world. Buildings were visible only in the background behind her. She moved through a swatch of dead grass that the ash-flies and flesh-rats, for all their trillions, had not yet found. She approached the grass and produced a woven basket from behind her back. She gathered up a handful of the dried yellow stalks and began to rattle them out over the basket. Slivers of yellow seed fell into the basket.

The noise and motion drew attention. One of the starving rose up from behind the thin screen of grass. Crumbs of dirt fell from his mouth. He had been eating earth in hopes of straining out some scrap of worm-flesh. Seeing and smelling the lush flesh of the woman he charged at her, his hands outstretched. She dropped the basket, the seeds lost to the wind, and shifted her body into a spring. When the starving man screamed and lunged she put a kick into his throat. He staggered back, choking. She pulled a long knife from her belt and slashed out at his neck. Blood bloomed. He fell, she continued to cut, sawing away at the tough nerves connecting the vertebrae until she had severed the head completely, killing him temporarily. She wiped the knife and its complement of starving blood on his skin and holstered it again.

Already his hungry blood was seeping out, seeking, a red amoeba. The machines that made his blood hungry, the machines small as atoms, would not let him die. They would never let anybody die anymore. And for the first five years, among those elites who could afford them, that had been a blessing. But when the nanomachines began to transmit from person to person like a virus until all in the world were made deathless, and all the appetites for energy and organified matter that had already been straining the planet to its breaking point only amplified with time, people began to recognize that it was a curse in disguise.

She picked up her basket. She moved among the plants and collected the seeds of grass. She collected the seeds of amaranth, here called pigweed, when it was called anything at all and not eaten whole and raw.

She searched for a cure to hunger. Or she searched for a cure to life, the Pure Poison.

The naturalist leaned back his head, exposing his throat. She had been a colleague. He closed his eyes. He blew his breath out through fixed teeth. The savages screamed around him.