The Cosmic City

by Brian K. Lowe

  I had to admit, it was a fine plan. I realized my revenge against Farren, the Thorans took back their planet, and Maire and I would have the opportunity to enjoy the kind of marital happiness it had been our misfortune so far to miss. I would have congratulated him—if I believed a word of what he said.

  Tofan Res might be a genius, and Vanu’A might be the greatest telepath ever to grace the world, but neither of them could gain the slightest glimpse of what was going on in my mind, and so they had no way to tell that I had been throwing every iota of mental energy at my command at Tofan Res’ shields the entire time we had been sitting there. And while I was no closer to reading his thoughts than when I started, I had chipped away at his defenses far enough to know that the good doctor was lying through his teeth.

  The problem was, I had not the slightest idea what he was lying about. Was it his plan to assassinate Farren? His promise to give us a place to live unmolested afterward? The story of the Nuum invasion?

  “I will have to think about,” I said out loud. “But at first look—I like it.”

  “You’re not seriously considering his offer.”

  “On the contrary, I am considering it very seriously.”

  Apparently Tofan Res believed me even when my wife did not, for we had been escorted after our dinner to much more salubrious quarters: a real suite of rooms, with nary a dungeon motif in sight. I had no illusions, however, that we were not still being monitored. Maire was even more aware of it than I was, and she was openly questioning me only because it was what our captors expected. Our real conversation would come later, in much more confidential circumstances.

  “He’s talking about another revolution, Keryl. We just stopped the klurath from going to war with our people. Now you’re going to help him do the same thing?”

  “We stopped the klurath because they wanted to conquer the Nuum and the Thorans alike. Tofan Res wants to restore the Thorans to where they used to be—where they should be. You know what your people have become—look at Wilner. Look at Milorner. Look at Farren! Would Tofan Res be any worse?”

  “If the system’s broken, you fix it! You don’t just shoot everyone who disagrees with you!”

  “The Nuum do…”

  The doors in our suite were not made to slam, but the message was clear.

  Chapter 26

  A Painful Lesson

  Given how Maire had closed her door on me with such finality, I was surprised to see her standing in my own doorway the next morning, fully dressed—in fact, she gave the distinct impression of never having taken her clothes off the night before.

  “I can’t stop thinking about what Tofan Res said. I need to know if it’s true.”

  And then she told me how she could find out.

  If Tofan Res was surprised by our request to go outside, he hid it well enough that I felt justified in believing that he was having our conversations monitored. I had to wonder just how much Vanu’A could pick out of Maire’s thoughts.

  Surrounded by armed Thorans, who by now had at least ceased to point their weapons straight at us, and stepping out of our enforced quarters for the first time, we emerged onto a large plaza with a scattering of pedestrians who appeared to pay no attention to the armed contingent in their midst. It was an overcast, gloomy day, a change from the relentless, cloudless sun arranged by the Nuum weather-controllers, who preferred that their rain, when necessary, fall at night. There was something else missing, some ethereal element to which I had become accustomed but which the Thorans lacked, and the windless day seemed a bit stale by comparison.

  The Library was located directly across the square. It looked very much like the first Library I had visited, soon after I first arrived in Maire’s time, and I was taken there by Bantos Han and his family. We ascended the moving stairs and proceeded inside. Maire drew a sharp breath, and I understood why.

  I had only ever been inside one Library, but I had been told they were considered almost sacred, even by the Nuum. As a result, they were well-kept. Thoran labor had maintained them; Thorans were even allowed to work as librarians, in an exception to the ban on their association with higher technology. Perhaps for some reason Thorans were more suited to such work, having lived with the Library and its holographic Librarians for 600,000 years. (I realized with a start that Tofan Res would have used the Library in his own native time. I was even more stunned to think that the Library had been nearly 300,000 years old then.)

  The truth is, however, that by the time I arrived, the Library was not what it had once been, a fact that I had never appreciated until now. Although I guessed from our having been given our evening meal that the hour was tending late, the Library was in full use. People passed by us on their way in or out, but I could feel that even had they been curious about our appearance (and our guards) it would have been blunted by the fact that this was the Library. Here, decorum and courtesy overrode all other considerations.

  The concept of such universal respect for the storage and acquisition of knowledge! It made Oxford feel like a flea market on Saturday. I was in heaven.

  And I doubtless looked like a complete lout, a barbarian, as the Nuum sometimes referred to me. I was staring at the throngs of Thorans purposefully going about the business of accessing thousands of records, a total breach of the very protocol they were demonstrating by not staring back. Maire was no better, if for different reasons; not only had she never seen a Library in such demand, she had never seen so many Thorans with such purpose.

  After a few moments our guards chivvied us along as though they, too, were uncomfortable with our frank rudeness. They lead us further into the building where private chambers awaited, study cubes where deep research could be performed. I had visited one such the last time I was in a Library; my studies had not only required my interacting with a Librarian, which would have been distracting for others, but also took several hours of sleep-learning.

  “You can choose any of the chambers,” Dr. Res murmured. “Ask anything you like; the Librarian will be happy to help you.”

  For a moment my heart jumped at the thought that my old friend might be waiting for me, but only for a moment. I would not meet that Librarian for another 300 years. I enjoined myself to concentrate on the task at hand. Tofan Res had brought us here for a reason—a very specific reason that did not include Dr. Wilner or anyone else. Until we discovered that reason, we could not hope to upset his plans and force him to return us home.

  At least if we were trying to thwart his plans now, we did not have to worry that the universe was about to tear itself apart. That deadline was three centuries away.

  Tofan Res accompanied us into a study room, where we found ourselves in our own apartments in Crystalle. I was not surprised, since they were where we had spent the majority of our married life. Every time we thought we would soon to be free to settle in Dure, something new had come up in the Council that had demanded Maire’s immediate and full attention. A paranoid man would have suspected that these crises were being manufactured so that I must remain where I could be more easily monitored. Fortunately, I was not a paranoid man: I knew they were being manufactured. So did Maire. There was just nothing we could do about it, until a larger emergency finally reared its fearsome head.

  “Good evening, sir, madam, Dr. Res. Please sit down,” a cultured voice invited us, and my heart sank to hear it. The Librarian—my Librarian—stood before us with that gentle, ever-so-slightly-condescending smile that I knew so well. But the twinkle in his eye was absent; there was no friendship here, only pre-ordered solicitude.

  “This image was chosen for you,” the hologram continued. “It will be the same every time you enter, unless you change it.”

  “Thank you,” I said automatically. If the Librarian noticed the ironic note in my politeness, he did not say.

  Tofan Res had not accepted the invitation to be seated. “I won’t be staying; I just wanted to help you get started. Then I’ll leave you to talk to the Librarian and ask him what
ever questions you have. Librarian? You recognize me?”

  “Of course, Dr. Res. You come into the Library almost every day.”

  Res nodded. “Yes, I do. I could hardly do my work without it. Librarian, how much time have I spent here?”

  “Six years, 141 days.”

  “Really? It seems longer. What year was it when we first met?”

  “It was the year 199,991 of the current Thoran calendar.”

  The doctor nodded again. “Indeed it was. Well, Keryl, Maire…that should answer your first question. It is the year 19,997, and the Nuum will arrive in three years.” He smiled. “My men will wait for you outside. Please take all the time you need to satisfy your curiosity.”

  I waited until he was gone before I turned to Maire for confirmation of what he had said. Her tone was grim.

  “Our people arrived in the year 20,000 of the Thoran calendar. I was taught that the fact that we came back on a millennial anniversary was part of why the Thorans took so easily to our guidance; they thought it was some kind of sign.” But behind her words I could feel the doubt; what we had seen indicated a healthy people with a vital society, not the feeble, decadent race her ancestors had supposedly saved. The historical foundations of her own society were crumbling under her feet. “Tofan Res is telling the truth.”

  How far Dr. Res was to be believed was a matter of debate, but the Library was another matter. The Library—and by extension the Librarian—was incapable of lying. Like it or not, we were trapped in the past, and without Dr. Res’s cooperation we would remain here. But that cooperation bore a very high price tag…

  “Keryl, are you all right?”

  I found a glass of water on a tabouret next to my chair and I drank it all, without thinking. In response to Maire’s question, I shook my head. I was not all right. Not nearly.

  But for all of her telepathic skill, my mind was the one Maire could not read, so my whirling confusion escaped her. She sat down on her own chair, her eyes seeing scenes far beyond these walls.

  “If we took this planet from these people, we’re the barbarians…” she breathed. “We’ve treated them like children for three hundred years. Like slaves.” When she looked at me, tears were coursing down her face. “What kind of people are we?”

  I had no answer. Coming on the situation as I had, without knowledge of its history—whether that history was accurate or not—I had naturally gravitated toward the Thorans. They had taken me in, taught me how to communicate and to survive, and in the case of Hana Wen, given much more. The Nuum had demonstrated nothing but wanton, impudent cruelty. I had seen them murder hundreds in the streets, seen Lord Farren drag Hana Wen from her home simply because he fancied her. While I could understand Maire’s shock, I had been aware of her kinsmen’s true nature from the moment I met them. To pile this crime atop all of their others seemed almost superfluous in light of what I already knew.

  It might seem insensitive, but this might be the only opportunity Tofan Res allowed us to have access to a Librarian. I wracked my brain for pertinent questions. If I were interrogating the Librarian back in my office in 1935, what would I be asking him?

  “What is the nature of Tofan Res’s research?” I remembered the original Librarian telling me that the identities of researchers was private, but their results were not.

  “Tofan Res has been pursuing two main areas of research. The first involved various theories of time travel. Three years ago, he began concentrating on historical research.”

  “Historical research? What kind, specifically?”

  “Dr. Res has been investigating the great wars. He spends much of his time poring over lists of combatants listed as missing in action after large-scale battles.”

  Now that was no mystery. If Tofan Res was planning a war, studying the tactics of ancient generals made a great deal of sense—particularly since the Library’s records did not extend back to my war, a tactical nightmare that would serve only as a primer on how not to conduct a campaign.

  “He has been generous in offering his own insights to augment my academic records,” the Librarian rambled on. “His firsthand observations have allowed for resolution of a few conflicting histories. He has on occasion even allowed some of the—”

  I waved him to silence. I realized that Maire had not only become uncommonly quiet, she was paying no attention whatsoever to my conversation with the Librarian. She sat like a statue, her eyes focused on a point years away.

  “Thank you,” I said to the Librarian, although he hardly needed my gratitude. “We have no more questions.”

  Maire had walked alongside me like a zombi since we left the Library and returned to our rooms, quiescent and responding to my touch, but hardly making a sound. The enormity of her people’s crime had fallen upon her spirit and crushed it. Whether I could rescue her from her guilt was a question only time could resolve.

  Time, it seemed, was both our problem and our answer. But how much did I have?

  Chapter 27

  The Invisible Enemy

  Oh, no, not again! The last time Jhal went to war, they were fighting the Nuum while we were all slaves, and if Keryl hadn’t managed to bring reinforcements and rescue me from having to act as inlama, we all would have been executed. But they’d made peace with the Nuum, and the former inlama was in prison, right? Had he escaped? Who else could they be at war with? There was nobody else to go to war with!

  “The problem is,” Gaz Bronn said, “that we don’t know who we’re at war with.”

  Oh, well, that made everything clear.

  “For the past few weeks, we’ve been having problems we haven’t had in centuries,” he went on. “We’ve had cave spiders in the streets—and not just little ones. The big ones, the ones we hunt down in the lower caves. We’ve had people disappearing—klurath and human alike. And the strangest thing—we’ve been having reports of humans inciting revolt, like they were still slaves. But every time we track to them the down, there is no one to be found, and on can tell us who the agitators were. So we have people disappearing, and other people appearing out of nowhere…I finally had to close the borders just so we could try to figure out who was who, and who belonged here.”

  “Yeah, we saw that,” Skull said.

  Gaz Bronn briefly held a claw to his own throat. I’d never seen the gesture before, but its meaning was pretty clear.

  “I apologize for that, but my orders were very specific. No one was to be allowed in—I hadn’t thought to make exceptions. I didn’t know you were going to come back. I was thinking about trying to contact Keryl to see if he could persuade the Nuum to help us, once we were able to stabilize our situation, but… It turns out no one ever bothered to conduct a census of the slaves, so we have no way of knowing who they are or even how many. We asked all of the outsiders to evacuate voluntarily, but this is still a big cave.”

  “Do you have any idea who might be trying to cause trouble?” Sanja asked. I studied her for a moment; she was trying to be helpful, but if I knew Sanja, what she really wanted to ask was: “What kind of cave spiders? How big are they? Where can I find some?” I, on the other hand, was in no hurry to answer any of those questions. I was suddenly very glad Gaz Bronn had sent a cart to fetch us.

  “We don’t,” Gaz Bronn replied, “but we think we know where they’re coming from. That’s why I sent Praja Waluu on patrol to the lower cavern entrances. He pointed at his aide. “Tell them what you told me.”

  Praja Waluu’s tail twisted and straightened in a nervous manner I had seldom seen.

  “Since you’ve probably never been to the lower caverns, let me tell you what it’s like. The entrances start almost at the other end of this main cavern, past the crevice and the airfield. You must have noticed that security at the air base has been tightened up; it’s not just that we’re trying to keep people out of Jhal. If something happened to the air base, we would be almost completely cut off from the outside.

  “The tunnels that lead down to the lower cav
erns—it isn’t like there are a couple of them that you can follow until they come out somewhere else. There are hundreds of them spread over wide area. They run from too small for an adult to pass through to almost large enough for a scout ship. When we first came down here three thousand years ago and found them, there was some talk about using them to get further away from the surface; we didn’t know if the humans were going to come after us, or bomb us… So they sent search parties down every one that looked large enough to lead somewhere. The ones that reported back said that their tunnels dead-ended. The others—we don’t know.

  “Ever since then, most people have avoided them. Some—” he glanced at Gaz Bronn—”like to go hunting down there, but even they don’t go very far.”

  “And some of the tunnels are forbidden even for hunters,” the inlama finished. “The ones that no one has ever come back from. As Praja Waluu says, I’ve been down there. As a matter of fact, I even invited Keryl to go with me, but we never got the chance. All of the lower caverns are dangerous, and none is nearly as big as this one, so there is no reason for us to go down there except for hunting. We know that the cave spiders still live down there, cave spiders and other things. The problem is that the ‘other things’ are coming up to our level—and now they’re hunting us.”

  “Wait a second!” I’d been hanging back, trying to let Gaz Bronn and Praja Waluu do the talking, but I had to say something. Apparently, from the way they all turned to look at me, I’d said it a little louder than I intended. “Uh, I don’t want to sound scared or anything, but…what are these ‘other things,’ and what do you mean, they’re ‘hunting us’?”