The GoldenCity

He was standing in an empty room with white walls and bars on the windows. The bars created little boxes of hazy light on the floor. A second door was set in the wall left of the entrance. Gabriel pushed it open and found himself in an identical room.

So where were the gods? As he glanced out the window at the courtyard, he heard the door shut behind him. Moving slowly, he passed through a row of empty rooms until he reached the other side of the building. The silence was starting to bother him. He had never been in a space that felt so empty.

A staircase led him upward into an identical room with another doorway.

“Hello!” he shouted. “Anyone here?” When no one answered, he lost his temper and marched forward, slamming each door behind him. Floor after floor, he climbed upward, but there were no room numbers to announce how far he had gone. At a certain point, he entered a room and found a white cube supporting a model of a palm tree made out of bits of colored metal.

The next few floors displayed more artificial plants. Gabriel found daisies and oak trees and sea kelp, but there were also plants he had never seen before. Had the gods created these objects? Was he supposed to offer prayers, or was this building simply an enormous museum? A few floors higher, the plants vanished and models of animals appeared. Fish. Birds. Lizards. And then the mammals. There was a room devoted to foxes and another filled with cats. Finally, a spiral staircase led him out of the building, and he stood among the gold towers.

Perhaps the gods were watching him, testing him in some way. Gabriel crossed the terrace and entered the second building. The rooms were exactly the same, but there were models of tools and machinery. He inspected one room full of hammers and another that displayed lamps. There was a room dedicated to different kinds of steam engines next to one filled with antique radios. Gabriel was getting tired, but there was no quick way out. He climbed staircase after staircase until he reached the second terrace.

From the outside, the third and final building resembled the previous two structures. But when he pulled open the entrance door, he found five staircases that led off in different directions. Gabriel took the middle staircase and immediately got lost in a succession of intersecting hallways. There were no models of the natural or mechanical world in this structure-only a great many mirrors. He saw his bewildered faced in convex mirrors, pocket-seized mirrors and tarnished mirrors held in antique frames.

The sun was directly above the mountains when he finally emerged from this maze and stepped out onto the third terrace. Wandering through the towers, he found shards of broken mirrors and then a spot between two towers where someone had used mirrors to build something that resembled a solar oven. Would gods make something like this? Gabriel assumed they could just wave their hands and objects would appear.

Cautiously, he passed between the towers to an open section of the terrace. Fifty yards away from him, a man was sitting cross-legged on a bench. Like a stone idol, the figure waited for Gabriel to approach him. He looked smaller than Gabriel had remembered and his hair was much longer-almost touching his shoulders.

“Father?”

Matthew Corrigan stood up and smiled. “Hello, Gabriel. I’ve been waiting for you.”

“That could have been a long wait. I almost died a few hours ago.”

“Hope grows from faith. I always believed that you and Michael would find your way here.”

His father’s certainty, his calmness, was infuriating. “Is that why you disappeared?” Gabriel asked. “So you could live in this empty place?”

“After those men burned down our house, I hid among the trees near the top of the hill. When the three of you came out of the cellar, I made the decision to leave. I knew you would be safer without me around.”

“Mom was never the same after the fire. It destroyed her life.”

“When I married your mother, I didn’t know that I was a Traveler. All that came later. The Tabula found out and put me on their death list.”

“So where did you go after the fire? Were you hiding out in this world while we wandered around like bunch of homeless people?”

“I was teaching others. I tried to show them a different way.”

“Yeah, I know all about that. Remember the New Harmony group in Arizona? The Tabula executed everyone living there. They destroyed the entire community-the men, women and children you ‘inspired’ to change their lives.”

Matthew bent slightly forward as if taking the pain and sadness into his body. “What a terrible crime. I’ll pray for all of them.”

“Prayers can’t change what happened. Those people are dead because of your ideas. And you want to know something else? Michael became a Traveler, but he went over to the other side. Now he’s running the Evergreen Foundation.”