We walked another minute in silence. Then Oar said, "I know how to stop you being sad. We can find the Tower of Ancestors in this place."
She looked at me expectantly.
"And that would cheer me up?" I asked.
"It feels good inside the Hall of Ancestors."
"Only if you feed off UV and X-rays," I told her. "I'll pass."
"But if we go to the Tower of Ancestors," Oar insisted, "we can find the foolish Prophet those Morlocks follow. Then we will walk up to him and say, 'Pooh!' Just like that: 'Pooh!' Someone should have spoken to him a long time ago. 'Pooh!' "
I smiled. "You have a knack for theological argument. Good thing you didn't try it with the Morlocks themselves."
"The Morlocks are all very foolish," she replied. "It does not make sense to wear skin when it only looks ugly. Ugliness is bad. You know that, Festina. You will never be beautiful, but you are trying to look better. That is wise. That is correct."
"Thank you," I answered drily. "But even if the new skin works, I may not wear it forever. I just put it on for curiosity's sake. An experiment, that's all. No self-respecting woman places much value on mere appearance…"
Such babble. Even Oar knew I was talking for my own benefit. She gazed at me with gentle pity… and perhaps I would have prattled on to greater depths of humiliation if a naked man hadn't materialized two paces in front of us.
The Naked Man
He didn't step from behind a building. He didn't rise out of the ground or appear in a puff of smoke. One moment the space in front of us was empty, and the next it was occupied. As instant as a scream.
The man was short and brown and hairy. His head was thatched with crinkly salt-and-pepper hair, and his mouth surrounded with a bushy silver beard. Graying curls dappled his chest, arms, and genitals. Beneath all that hair was a wiry body marked liberally with scars — wide slashes of whitened tissue, the kind you see on Opters fanatical enough to refuse stitches, no matter how serious the wound. His eyes had a yellow tint to them, but were still bright and alert. He looked straight at me for a moment, then slammed his fists on his stomach and spoke in a melodious language I didn't recognize.
I looked at Oar to see if she knew what he was saying. She returned my gaze in bewilderment.
"Okay," I sighed to the little man. "Greetings, I am a sentient citizen of the League of Peoples, and I beg your Hospitality."
"Why do Explorers always say that?" Oar muttered. "It is very annoying."
"Blame it on boundless optimism," I told her. "Someday I'll say it to someone who doesn't run screaming or try to kill me."
The man did neither. Instead he spoke again, this time guttural words with phlegmy rasps in the throat. It sounded so different from his first speech, I guessed he had changed languages in an attempt to find one I understood. Good luck, I thought to myself. No Explorer bothers with linguistic training; it's taken for granted we'll never understand the native tongues of the beings we meet. If they don't understand our "Greetings" speech, our only recourse is to play charades… very careful charades, trying to avoid gestures that would be misunderstood as hostile.
Accordingly, I lifted my hands, palms out, facing the man. "Hello," I said, more for Oar's benefit than his. "I am unarmed and friendly." To back my words, I smiled, making sure to keep my mouth closed: for many species, baring the teeth means aggression. The man in front of me appeared to be one hundred percent Homo sapiens — the kind with real skin, not glass — but it would still be a mistake to assume too much cultural common ground.
Before the man could respond to my gesture, Oar took her own stab at communicating: a gush of words in her own native language, a flood of syllables that went on for more than half a minute before she paused for breath.
The man blinked once, then turned back to me. His attitude said he didn't understand Oar, and had no interest in trying. He ventured another smattering of syllables, this one a type of singing that reminded me of Gregorian chant. The words, however, weren't Latin — I don't speak the language, but a zoologist knows enough scientific names for animals to recognize Latin when she hears it.
"Listen," I said, keeping my voice soft and friendly, "we aren't going to understand each other this way. Maybe if we…"
I didn't finish my sentence. At that moment, the man flickered in and out of existence like heat lightning.
Flicker
The effect only lasted a second: his image breaking into a moire pattern of optical interference, then righting itself again into a seemingly solid man. It didn't matter how brief the disruption was — it told me two things.
First, the man was a hologram: a good hologram, since it's extremely difficult for projections to fool the eye at a range of three paces. Nevertheless, I knew he was just a constructed image… something I half-expected already, since corporeal men don't appear out of nowhere. (Some members of the League are rumored to have perfected teleportation, but no one with that technology has ever contacted humans.)
The second thing I knew was that Melaquin had started to live on borrowed time. The flicker in this image could only mean some machine somewhere had acquired a fault. It might only be a small malfunction in a nonessential system — the hardware for projecting pictures of naked men was unlikely to be crucial for survival — but even a tiny glitch meant things had begun to break down. No one, not even the League of Peoples, could build equipment that lasts forever; all the automated repair systems in the universe can't hold back the patient creep of entropy. If four thousand years was the lifetime for the systems here on Melaquin…
…the lifetime of the people wouldn't last significantly longer.
Fluent Osco-Umbrian
The man in front of me behaved as if nothing unusual had happened. He launched into another speech in another language — no language I knew, no language I cared about. I bided my time till he finished, then held up my hand to stop him from trying again.
"Don't bother," I said. "Whatever message you want to convey, it's four thousand years too late. You're a simulation, right? Probably the interface projection for an artificial intelligence that oversees this town. Computer-controlled and designed to relate to the first people who came here. To them, you must have looked like a wise old man… someone they'd naturally respect. But to me, you're evidence of the AI's imminent breakdown. Trying to reach me with languages four millennia old; you can't understand Oar, so you haven't kept up as the people here changed. Anyway, I've never liked talking to AIs — they're always smarmy and unctuous."
The man said nothing. He stared intently, as if sheer force of will could make my words intelligible.
"Oar," I said, "you'd better fetch Tobit. He might know how to deal with our friend. If Tobit has lived long enough in this town, maybe he's learned Osco-Umbrian."
"Tobit…" the naked man whispered.
"Ah," I said, "a name he recognizes."
"Tobit," the man repeated.
"You're friends with Tobit, right?" I said. "Maybe you two get lit up together."
"Tobit," the man answered. "Tobit. Toe… bit… toe… bee… or not to be, that is the question. Whether 'tis nobler in the mind, to suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune—"
"Shit," I said. "Or rather, Zounds."
Speaking Trippingly From the Tongue
"Hail and well-met!" the man said with a flourish of his hand. "I have in timely manner found your tongue within my mind."
An ugly anatomical image, I thought. Aloud, I replied, "You've finally identified my language in your data banks."
The man nodded. "This blessed talk, these words, this speech, this English."
"What is wrong with him?" Oar asked in a whisper. "Is he simply foolish, or is there something chemically wrong with his brain?"
I shook my head. "The League of Peoples obviously drops in now and then to update the local language databases. The good news is that the records are recent enough to include English; the bad news is—"
"It is a foolish kind o
f English," Oar finished.
"Let me not to the intercourse of true minds admit impediments," the man replied. "My tongue may be rough and my condition not smooth—"
"Enough," I interrupted. It annoyed me he understood my contemporary English but continued speaking his Elizabethan version. That's an AI for you: probably trying to "uplift" me by setting an example of "correct" speech. "Let's keep this to yes-or-no questions," I said. "Are you a machine-created projection?"
"Yea, verily."
"So I'm essentially talking to an artificial intelligence?"
"Aye, milady." The little man displayed a smile of delight — the indulgent smile a pet-owner wears when the family dog rolls over. As I said, AIs are all smarmy.
"And there's some good reason you've approached me?" I asked.
"E'en so."
"What reason?"
"To lay this thy kingdom at thy feet. To bid you take up the scepter. To hail you as lord, and queen hereafter."
And he knelt before me, lowering his head to the pavement in respectful submission.
The First of My Kind
I had never been offered the title of queen. I did not want it now.
"Do you say this to everyone who comes by?" I asked.
"Only you," the man replied. "You are the first of your kind to walk here since the dawn of this era."
"He means you have occluded skin," Oar said helpfully.
"A diplomatic turn of phrase," I told her. Turning back to the man, I said, "I'm not the first of my kind to come. What about Tobit? Or the other Explorers who've visited this town?"
"Pretenders have been legion," the man admitted. "Many a child," he gestured toward Oar, "has tried to usurp the throne, clad in borrowed rags." I realized he meant glass people wearing artificial skin. "Another who dwells in this place appears to have the proper bloodline, yet has knitted himself to unliving metal and is therefore discounted." That had to be Tobit, "knitted" to his prosthetic arm; the League disapproved of cyborging, and had obviously programmed the AI to disqualify anyone equipped with any augmentation.
"Some too," the man continued, "have arrived with unverifiable claims, hidden as they were behind impenetrable armors."
"Ahh!" The other Explorers to pass this way had all been wearing tightsuits. The suits must be sufficiently shielded that the AI couldn't tell whether the wearers were fully human. I, on the other hand, in my knee-high skirt…
"Why are you laughing, Festina?" Oar asked.
I answered, "How many women ever became queen because of their legs?"
Probably a lot, I reflected. Especially if kings had anything to do with it.
The Powers of the Queen
"What does being queen entail?" I asked the little man.
"All this realm's resources lie at your command," he replied.
"Which realm? This dome? Or the entire planet?"
"All that lies beneath this most excellent canopy, look you, this brave o'erhanging firmament, this majestical roof—"
"The dome," Oar explained.
"I got that," I nodded. "Not much of a kingdom," I told the man-image. "And not much of a distinction either. What can a queen do that a commoner can't? Anyone can work the synthesizers to get food, artificial skin, you name it. What else is there?"
"Only one thing more. Follow me, your majesty."
I shrugged. "Lay on, Macduff."
The man rose gracefully from his knees and after a courtly bow, led us forward, keeping to the circumference of the dome. Although his legs were half the length of mine, he had no trouble walking at our pace, since his image could skim over ground as quickly as necessary.
As we walked, I passed the time scanning the area for the projectors creating the man's image; but I soon realized my search was pointless. Whether the machines were mounted on the dome, on a tower, or shining straight through the walls of nearby buildings, it didn't make a real difference. He was here. He was projected. Everything else was a technicality.
After another minute of walking, the man turned to the outside wall of the dome and threw up his arms, shouting, "Behold, O Queen!" A moment later, a section of dome wall thirty meters wide and twenty high popped backward with a soft hiss. I tensed, fearing a deluge of water might suddenly pour through the breach. No such flood occurred; and as we watched, the wall dropped back four more paces, then slid sideways on guide tracks, revealing a large, well-lit chamber.
Or more accurately, a large, well-lit aircraft hangar.
Daggers Before Me, Handles Toward My Hand
Five fliers stood in a perfect line before me, each fashioned to look like a chiseled glass bird. The closest was a goose, wings and tail outspread, head stretched straight forward; it ran twenty meters long, with space for two riders, side by side in the middle of the bird's body. The next plane was an eagle, then a jay, then an owl, and lastly a generic songbird which the little man said was a lark. All were stylized, their feathers mere suggestions, their shapes trimmed and streamlined for better aerodynamics… but then, the same was true of Oar. Like her, these craft were Art Deco versions of living creatures.
Yet they were also working airplanes: jets, by the look of them, though the tiny engines were artfully incorporated into the wing structures to look like fluffed regions of feathers. I counted four such engines on each wing, plus two more on the tail. Each was small, but their combined power must pack a kick if you really needed propulsion.
Only one thing spoiled the planes' sleek, birdlike appearance: each had four charcoal-gray cylinders mounted on their bellies. Fuel tanks? I wondered. No — they were impractically long and slender. Rockets for extra boost in emergencies? Sensor arrays?
Then the explanation came to me — an archaic concept dating back to the earliest days of aviation. The cylinders were missiles. Weapons. Designed to be shot at other planes or ground targets where they would explode on impact.
"Bloody hell," I murmured. "Where did those come from?"
"Fashioned at behest of the first generations," the AI-man answered cheerfully.
"That's hard to believe," I snapped. "The first generations must have been primitive hunter-gatherers. They didn't wake up one morning, saying 'We'd like some war-planes, please.' "
"You have the right of that," the man conceded. "But the League took in hand the education of those who came to this place. One generation followed hard on another; and within a handful of centuries, they advanced to devices like these."
He waved proudly at the killer birds.
"You actually built them weapons on demand? Of course, you did," I went on without letting him answer. "The synthesizers made that axe for Oar. As long as no one took weapons off-planet, the League didn't care."
"They cared, O queen," the man replied. "All violence cuts them to the very quick. Yet they grant each species the right to choose its course, within the containment of its proper sphere."
"So you helped this town build… wait a second. I thought you only followed instructions from people with skin. After the first generation, wasn't everyone made of glass?"
"By no means," he answered. "Though many firstcomers chose to be so altered that their children gleamed with health, others held to the frailty of flesh. That path was hard; what mother can watch her child ravaged by fever without vowing her nextborn shall not suffer? What father can bear the bitter spectacle of his children continually bested by those swifter of mind and foot? Pricked by such thorns, more chose the way of glass with each passing year; yet not all. Not all. And those who walked with hollow-eyed Death bedogging their steps like a shadow, those stubborn folk of deliberately mortal flesh… why, they saw devils in every dust mote and knives in every open hand. What wonder that they demanded fearsome engines of war? Death was the currency of their lives: the only coin they had to spend, the only coin they could demand of their enemies. And so it continued until the last such purse was emptied."
I stared at him. "You mean the people of flesh warred themselves into extinction?"
&
nbsp; "That overstates the matter," he replied. "They fought but little, for their numbers were small. Yet they forged their arsenals with the diligence of fear; and fear, more than all, became their undoing. Frighted people yearn to protect their families. What better protection could they find than immortality? Wherefore, as voices of war grew clamorous, more among their number claimed the gift of alteration… until there came a day when every child was glass, and no new flesh was born. The drums of anger fell into silence; and if the crystal children wished to continue their parents' hates, I stopped mine ears to their cries. I and my kind do not serve them — they need no such service. But you, milady… you shall I serve and right gladly."
My mouth was open, ready to snap back a retort — as if I wanted an AI to put killer jets at my disposal! — but I stopped myself from hastiness. With a flier, Oar and I could reach the southern mountains in short order: no long days carrying packs, no frigid river fords, no confrontations with wolves.
And (my stomach fluttered) I might be face to face with Jelca before nightfall.
"Which plane can I take?" I asked.
The AI-man beamed. "The lark, milady; the herald of the morn."
The First Farewell
Short minutes later, I stole past the dirt-worn banners of Tobit's home, hoping I could sneak in and back without being noticed. Through the glass wall ahead, I could see our equipment: my pack and the food synthesizer. I could also see the four Morlocks and Tobit, sprawled in comatose luxuriousness, passed out from drinking. It was just the way I wanted to leave them.
Not that I expected them to stop us from getting away — they'd let the other Explorers go — but I didn't want them to know how we went. The AI had kept the hangar secret because its planes were only intended for flesh-and-blood human use. But Tobit was as much flesh-and-blood as I was; if he detached his prosthetic arm, he could command the AI like a despot. Melaquin had enough troubles without a souse in charge of a fighter squadron.
My pack was close to the door of the room; also close to a Morlock woman with a slosh of booze in her stomach. Tendrils of brown extended threadlike through her abdomen, the alcohol slowly becoming part of her, diffusing into the background transparency. The zoologist in me felt fascinated, curious to stay and watch the complete process of digestion — but the prospect made me queasy. How could these people watch such a thing happen to themselves?
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