The Stolen Future Box Set

by Brian K. Lowe

  “Where is the doctor?”

  He fetched her without a word. She stopped short at seeing the Librarian, and he bowed as he launched into a new introduction, but I cut him short.

  “Doctor, how long do I have?”

  She looked from the Librarian to me, and back to him, plainly flustered. I had already gathered from Timash’s earlier machinations that strangers were neither usual nor welcome in the apes’ city, and this one had appeared without notice. Eventually she would grasp the hologram’s true nature, but for now I did not care. As it had with the Librarian, my urgency brooked no delay from her.

  “How long?” I snapped.

  Her professional instincts came to the fore in time to save me from giving her what would have been an ill-advised shaking.

  “That depends on you. We have installed nerve blocks throughout almost your entire brain. You may have noticed that you are not telepathically active even now.” Truth to tell, I hadn’t. I wondered if that was why Timash had been so quiet. Although I was to learn that apes used words more than humans, he still wasn’t used to talking completely verbally. “Fortunately, the virus attacks brain functions that you don’t use in everyday situations. But your telepathic abilities are completely blocked out, and some of your higher brain functions with them. That can’t be helped. Still, you can go about your normal tasks as long as you don’t try anything too technical or straining.

  “Your virus was triggered by exposure to an extremely strong telepathic source. We know it wasn’t Timash, and he swears there was no one else around you when you collapsed. But someone nearby awoke the virus, and that someone is an extremely dangerous telepath.” She paused, as if weighing how much to reveal. “We have had search parties out for almost two days with no luck. Do you have any idea who that person could be? Have you been in contact with any powerful telepaths?”

  I returned her anxious stare with my own blank look. “How would I know? By now Timash must have told you everything he knows about me, and you’ve been inside my brain enough to know even more than that. You tell me!”

  “Is this a symptom of the disease?” the Librarian asked with clinical interest.

  “Yes, he’s becoming over-stressed. This is exactly what I told him he needed to avoid.”

  “Maybe if you stopped talking about him like he wasn’t here…!” Timash interrupted, earning my gratitude.

  Dr. Chala flashed him a look of irritation, but then she turned her attention back to me.

  “I’m sorry, but your case is extremely unusual, Clee.” She lowered her voice. “And I was surprised to find --” she jerked a thumb at the Librarian --”him here. Who is he, anyway?”

  “He’s a librarian.” At her puzzled expression I tried to elaborate. The words didn’t come easy. “He’s a—holographic projection. I picked him up from the Nuum.”

  I knew when I said it that I shouldn’t have mentioned the Nuum, but it was only a vague feeling and I couldn’t work up the energy to formulate a reason for it. Dr. Chala’s eyes narrowed, but she examined my skull again as though nothing had changed. I was happy to let her examine me; she smelled warm and sweet. I suddenly realized I was very tired.

  I said as much, and Dr. Chala helped me to lie down again. I asked Timash not to go away, and vaguely heard him promise he would not. The room began to spin but by then my eyes were already closed.

  When I woke up again, my head cleared more quickly than before, and I barely felt the fuzziness that was confined now solely to my forehead and temples. I swung into a sitting position and stepped onto the floor for the first time. It was warm and yielding under my feet, a far cry from the cold that I had expected. I found my boots in the closet and felt ready to leave. Straightening up, I took a deep breath, and with a guilty sigh turned to where I had left the Library.

  It was gone. I checked the cabinets and even the floor, although I knew it could not have fallen from its perch; it had been fastened too tightly to be removed any way other than deliberately. On a sudden inspiration, I tried to open the door.

  It was locked. I was a prisoner.

  Chapter 18

  I Am Given a Vision

  The opening mechanism was a simple knob, just like those I had been used to back home. I thought that perhaps if I broke it off, I might find a way to manipulate the latch. Where I would have gone if I had succeeded, being to my knowledge the only human being in the entire city, I do not know, but as events transpired it never fell to me to decide.

  In casting about for a way to break the knob, my eye fell on the diagnostic machine; it was on wheels and appeared quite heavy. I crossed the room, laid my hands upon it—and stopped dead in my tracks, struck dumb at the simple and obvious ramifications that had escaped my clouded brain until now.

  It was a diagnostic machine. The apes had machines.

  I returned to the cot, sat down, and waited like a good lad until they should come for me.

  By the time the door finally opened, I had poked through every cabinet twice and examined each and every object inside until I almost understood their purpose. The only thing I found was that, for something that I had barely become used to, I missed my telepathic abilities. Time and time again I wished I had them to probe beyond the locked door and solid walls of my medical prison.

  There was a knock at the door, and Dr. Chala came in. Timash was at her heels. He handed over the Library.

  “Your friend told us everything about you,” the doctor said, gesturing to the Library. “Once he had finished speaking to the authorities, they agreed that you should be allowed to stay here. I’m sorry we had to lock you in, but we had no way of knowing who or what you were.” She extended a hand. “Welcome to Tehana City.”

  I took her hand with automatic politeness; it was soft and supple, like a favorite leather glove.

  Timash was fairly bouncing on the balls of his feet in the background, as does a child who has news that he will be allowed to tell, but only when his mother allows. It was distracting, and I was already distracted from the whirling thoughts and ideas that were bubbling near the surface of my disease-hobbled mind. Quite frankly, I was having trouble keeping them there. I shook my head to clear it.

  “Timash, would you please stop doing that? It’s making me dizzy.”

  He settled to a stable position, but not before Dr. Chala had turned to bestow upon him what could only have been a forceful look.

  “I just want to talk to him,” Timash muttered.

  The doctor turned back to me. “You’ll have to excuse him. You’re the most unusual thing that’s happened around here since the Nuum came.”

  The fog was starting to descend again, but I fought it back.

  “So you know—I’m not one of them…” I said. She nodded. “I suppose if I had been, you wouldn’t be so friendly to me. Those machines…”

  She glanced at the console where I had attached the Library. “Yes, exactly. If the Nuum were to find us, it would be very bad.”

  I tried to speak, to carry on with my questions, but the effort was overwhelming me. The edges of my vision were darkening and I couldn’t keep my eyes focused. Dr. Chala motioned to Timash.

  “Son, help me with him. He needs rest, and this is not the best place for him to get it.”

  The gorillas each put a hand under my arms and lifted me off the table, hefting me like a child. When we were out of the room, Dr. Chala left me with Timash while she fetched a wheelchair. Whatever she had told him, he took it to heart, propping me up without any repeat of the excitement he had exhibited earlier. With my carriage secured we set out of the hospital.

  I had no preconceived notion of how the apes lived, having seen nothing of their city outside of my examining room, and having had no time to formulate opinions from the meager clues provided by Dr. Chala. Despite this lack, and despite my enervated condition, when the full uniqueness of Tehana City presented itself to my eyes, I forgot my fatigue and surrendered wholly to my supposedly jaded sense of wonder.

&
nbsp; Tehana City was contained entirely inside of a mountain.

  To call it a “city” was perhaps an exaggeration. It was more of a small town, encompassing at most ten thousand souls. But although I lacked any pretension to engineering, I could see at a glance that the construction of this hamlet had required more skill and more technical knowledge than the greatest metropolis of my Earth. I stared skyward, or where I had assumed the sky to be, and the only word that finally came to convey the majesty of this achievement was “cathedral.”

  The builders of Tehana had not sought to make the inside of their mountain resemble the outside world; that would have been too obvious, and too cruel. Their genius had suggested a far more elegant solution, one that incorporated, rather than denied, the uniqueness of their setting. Through some exotic process, they had altered the very composition of the mountain itself so that parts of it, in a dazzling pattern that drew the eye ever onward until it curved in on itself, actually admitted the light of day.

  Dr. Chala explained to me that the mountain itself was solid rock, and that the process of admitting light, called “photonic integration,” was a gift from the original architects, gone to dust a thousand years ago, their knowledge lost with them. From outside the mountain appeared to be, and was, entirely normal. But inside the golden light shone as through clear glass, diffusing until the city suffered not at all from its subterranean milieu.

  All this I absorbed in the first breathless moments that I stared, transfixed, as I exited the hospital. Later I asked the Librarian what he knew of photonic integration, but it was outside of his programming. I was disappointed, having hoped to repay the apes in some way for their assistance. But that disappointment soon melted in the warmth of their genuine friendship.

  Dr. Chala took me to her home, which was, I was surprised to learn, Timash’s as well. They were mother and son. No sooner did we arrive than she informed him that I would be using his room and he would be banished to guest quarters. Like any son, he averted his eyes, muttered under his breath, and obeyed.

  Timash’s bed seemed large enough for my entire family, built as it was to support his greater bulk. When I crawled out into the middle of it and spread-eagled, I could not touch any of the edges. The first night I took advantage of this fact to wrap the huge but thin blankets tightly around me, but I soon learned that Tehana City’s stable temperature rendered most night coverings unnecessary and I slept quite comfortably indeed.

  I soon had reason to be glad of my comforts, for Dr. Chala’s residence suddenly became a social watering hole, as civic leaders, scientists, friends, relatives, and curiosity seekers began beating a path to her door. She had been granted a leave of absence from the hospital, with the understanding that she would use her home office to keep up with some of her patients, but the endless parade of visitors quickly made that impractical. In self-defense, she began to encourage Timash to take me on tours of the city.

  Following the contours of the mountain itself, Tehana’s buildings became taller the closer one came to its center. It made for a pleasing symmetry, even if the tallest of them rose only four stories. The pattern of light from above, diffused by distance, created a warm glow about the city that complemented the quiet way the apes went about their lives. Quiet, indeed—with the mountain all around them loud noises would forever be echoed back upon them. Londoners and New Yorkers could never have survived!

  The city streets were narrow, but the apes had no vehicles to speak of, and in a deliberate contrast to the rocky precipices that formed their horizon, they had lined their avenues with trees and their buildings with color. Along these we strolled through crowds of gorillas, nor did I ever see another human being.

  The citizens themselves tended to be shy and non-confrontational, with the exception of those who would make themselves at home with Dr. Chala, hoping to catch me for a few minutes’ conversation. But even the scientists and politicians (who had not changed in a mere 900,000 years!) were easily dissuaded should I choose to excuse myself. The centuries of close living had given them a respect for privacy not unlike the Japanese, and I feel sure that many social gaffes on my part went unremarked.

  I learned more about the apes by watching Timash than through conversation with him. He reminded me of my own friends of my adolescent days: everything interested him at once, and nothing for very long—unless it swayed and winked at him in the street, at which time he was wont to forget me completely in fascinated observation of what, in the apes, I found difficult to think of as “the gentler sex.” (Although they likely could not have crushed my skull like an eggshell with a single blow of their massive fists, as could their forebears, I did not doubt that one could lift me over her head and dash me to the ground with little effort and much the same result.)

  When it came to the world outside, Timash was much more informative, for he had lived there. Not all of the Tehanans lived in the mountain; some preferred the outdoors even with its unpredictable weather, animals, and occasional human interlopers.

  “Most of them still think we’re savages,” he muttered one day as we strolled along a quiet, park-like lane. He had recently spied a girl of his fancy, and her dismissal of his advances had pushed his mood distinctly toward the morose. Apparently my company suited him. “Except for the conservationists; they think we should simply move into abandoned villages instead of building them ourselves.”

  “The conservationists? Who are they?”

  His head raised a bit and he almost smiled. “They’re the ones fighting with the Nuum.”

  I waited until my patience was out, and then I prodded him. “And…?”

  “Hey! That hurt.”

  “Tell me about the conservationists,” I said quickly. I had seen Timash aroused to anger and was not keen to repeat the experience. “I was shanghaied by the Nuum to fight someone. In fact, I had to escape them through the middle of a battle. Were those the conservationists?”

  Timash turned to stare at me, a new light sparkling in his close-set eyes. “Really? A battle?” Only when I pantomimed seizing him by the throat did he collect himself. “Well, the conservationists are humans who’ve lived here a long time. Maybe as long as we have. They respect the trees and the jungle, the way the Nuum don’t know how to do. The Nuum have been trying to move into the jungle and harvest trees and animals, and the conservationists are trying to stop them.”

  “Really…” I said, half to myself. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Not long.” Timash made a face, something the apes seemed to enjoy just for the exercise. “Maybe a year or two. I used to go up to their camp and see them, but Mother won’t let me anymore.”

  “I thought you were old enough that you didn’t have to listen to your mother.”

  He only grunted.

  “It seems the conservationists are giving the Nuum all they can handle down here. That’s why they brought us from up north. They said the black Nuum could not take care of their responsibilities, so it was up to the red Nuum to do it for them.”

  This time his eyebrows shot up. “Really? But the blacks and the reds hate each other!”

  “That’s what they said…”

  “Shene must be massacring them!”

  “Who is Shene?”

  “Shene’s the leader of the conservationists. I knew she was going to resist, but this is great!”

  It was my turn to put on a face. “I thought your mother didn’t let you go to see them anymore.” He averted his eyes. “That’s where you were going when we met, wasn’t it? And when you saw me, you were hoping to take me prisoner!”

  “Yeah, but the tiger spiders got in the way, and then we had to run, and things got all fouled up. It would have been great, but I guess it worked out all right.”

  His friendly compliment flew past me without recognition. What a world of possibility this opened! Until now I had been wandering, tossed to and fro involuntarily and without purpose. This was the first moment that the resentment of the Nuum that had bu
bbled inside me since the deadly riots had found vent to the outer world. Here, a hemisphere removed from where I had first witnessed their ruthless carnage, I had discovered a way in which I might strike back!

  But no sooner had my mind embraced this great purpose than the clouds began to rise around my brain. Though I seemed to act the same from my viewpoint, I saw the alarm spread on Timash’s face as far away I heard a madman’s rising babble, and I realized faintly that the madman was me…

  Strong arms gathered me up like a babe. As my conscious mind began to succumb, I heard the sounds of a gathering crowd of apes. Suddenly the rumblings of concern grew into a mighty roar, and for an instant my vision cleared. As in a dream, I saw myself standing on a great hill, while all around me thousands—humans, apes, and others at which I could not guess—cheered and shouted my name over and over until the ground shook under my feet. I raised one arm in triumphant salute --

  -- as the last of my awareness sank into the mire and I was carried off to what destination I knew not.

  Chapter 19

  I Meet a Visionary

  If losing consciousness and being rescued by hairy anthropoids was becoming a habit, waking easily and without discomfort was not. At first I thought Timash had taken me back to his mother, or to the hospital, for I lay on one of the apes’ hard beds, but where I was and how long I had been there were mere tangential details compared to the pulsing, aching mass that was my head. I didn’t dare try to open my eyes, but a moan escaped my lips. Leathery fingers cradled my skull with utmost tenderness. A warm, sour smell wafted in under my nose and a cup was placed against my lips. Hoping against hope that it was a swift poison, I sipped.

  The warmth slipped down my throat like fine brandy while the vapors rose through my sinuses in a rush, and where they touched, the aching eased away. I opened my eyes to a softly-lit room and Timash watching me over the shoulder of a stranger. As he saw me come around, my friend sighed heavily with relief.