by Clay Gilbert
“Greetings, Paladin,” said the man at the console. “It was difficult, but I managed to clear the chamber for you. You didn’t say what you wanted it for, though.”
Paladin nodded. “Controller, I’m afraid I couldn’t at the time. You know my son, Brain, and these are his friends Eternity and Shadow. Eternity was a friend of Ace’s. He wants to survey our Net records.”
“What for?” asked the Controller, who looked about thirty years old, with auburn hair and greenish-gold eyes. He wore dark blue pants and a collared white shirt. The Controller’s eyes widened with surprise at Paladin’s response.
“He wants information about the chamber.” The emphasis on the last two words made it impossible to mistake the subject of the statement.
“Haven’t you told him?” the Controller asked.
Paladin nodded.
The Controller fixed stern eyes on Eternity. “There’s nothing more to know. The chamber is sealed.” “Yes, but the Net’s not. I haven’t been able to find anything on the neuronet, but your machines are older. Your records probably are, too.”
The Controller said nothing.
“What are you afraid of?” asked Eternity.
“I’m not afraid,” the Controller said. “Look all you like.”
Eternity clicked a button on the ancient terminal, and the red light on the processor told him it was accessing a part of the Net older than the Black City’s neuroconnections.
A part of it the Providers don’t want people knowing even exists. He wondered what caused these terminals to become obsolete. Had it just been a shift in technology, or was there another story? And were there any connections to the bodies that had been found all those years ago? There was only one way to find out.
* * * *
The skycar soared over the City.
Isaaclooked out at the City’s lights, winkingon likeartificial stars rising in the waning afternoon sunlight. Isaac imagined they were the eyes of the Providers themselves.
They’ll light my way to the refuge of the infidels. Then I’ll burn it down. He fingered the lasgun at his side and smiled. Where would he look first? Not among the faithful in Central Sector, he decided. They wouldn’t dare hide there. Then inspiration came to him: East, to Busisec. Among its distractions, such infidels might find a place where they could crawl into shadows and hide, unseen. But not for long.
* * * *
There must be something else, Eternity thought.
So far, his search through the Net had been like trying to piece together a lost language with no clue to the syntax. The sectors he’d scanned contained obscure references to the discovery of the chamber and its doomed inhabitants, but no images or details, and certainly no clue as to who the deceased had been or what the chamber had been built for. “Extended sector search,” he directed. A moment later, the monitor went dark, then lit up with the image and voice of a phantom from another time:
“Witnesses wereshocked todayas excavation began on what will be the new power station.” Unlike the Black City’s newspeople, who delivered their ever-cheerful missives from behind a desk set against a sterile white backdrop, the youngman reportingthis storystood in the heart of Oldtimer Town in front of what Eternityrecognized as the place where the stone pillar now marked the entrance to the Underground. The monitor no longer showed the newsperson, though his voice could still be heard. The screenwas filled with asingle, frozen image of the unearthed chamber. Slowly,the camera panned downinto the chamber, where several twisted and broken, but still recognizably human figures could be seen buried beneath dust and rubble. Eternity shuddered at the sight, almost overcome. He could only guess at the effect these images had had on those who discovered it those many years before.
Is this what they’re afraid of remembering? Or is there still more?
On the monitor, the newsperson continued speaking. “Speculation continues as to the cause of death. Most conjecture centers on the possible involvement of the Providers, but if anyone really knows what happened here, they’renot talking. Aservicein memoryof the deceased will be held this week, and work on the Power Project is expected to continue undeterred.”
Eternity sighed. Were the Providers’ unseen faces behind every atrocity in the entire City? Why had these people had to die? Curse of the Providers. That’s what Paladin said, but now Eternity wondered if even here, he—indeed, all of them—might still be within theirgrip. Helooked again at the image of the twisted, broken bodies in their chamber. He already knew the answer. It doesn’t matter if the Providers killed these people or not. If finding something like this can make us doubt ourselves, then we are, all of us, still prisoners.
* * * * Eternityscoured the Net records for the rest of the afternoon. Beyond the photos of the bodies, there were no further signs that the incident had ever taken place. He was in the process of shutting down the terminal when he heard footsteps behind him. He turned around to see Paladin and Brain standing in the hallway. Both of them had grave looks on their faces. Eternity thought Brain looked as if he’d been crying.
“What did you find?” Paladin asked.
“Nothing,” Eternity said.
“There’s nothing more to find,” Paladin said. “I made sure of it.”
Eternity stared at Paladin, his eyes filled with disbelief. Brain turned away. “You what?” Paladin’s face still bore its grave expression, but he did not turn awayto avoid Eternity’s accusing gaze. “Imade sure no one would know who those bodies belonged to, and I made sure everyone would know they’d been there.”
“Why would you do something like that?” Eternity’s question seethed with barely-restrained anger. “To keep us safe—myself, myson everyone in the Forgotten City—and to do what I could to preserve the peace. I was afraid They found out where we were. The night the Power Project broke ground, there was only a skeleton crew of us there. It was late before we even started the excavation—we wanted to start late because we thought it might lessen our chances of being discovered. That’s the irony of it. We were discovered anyway.
“There were four of them, and they were riding hovercycles. Not too smart on their part. We could hear the generators a mile away. We were ready for them when they got here. Theyweren’t kids, so don’t start thinkingwewere some kind of monsters for what we did. I was twenty at the time, and each of them looked to be about ten years older than that.”
Paladin paused, looking to Eternity for some sense of the effect his story was having.
Eternity’s face was vacant, his eyes staring into space. Finally he lowered his head into his hands. “Finish it.” “There was a bit of a fight when theyfirst came on the scene. They had a lasgun each, and we had only one between the lot of us. But we had the numbers. Like I said, we weren’t monsters. We might even have let them go until they shot two of us. After that, it was all over. We caught them and killed them, as quickly and as cleanly as we could. One of us had a vidcam, and after we lowered the bodies—six of them in all, our two men and their four—into the chamber, he shot footage of it. We gave the footage to the newspeople the next day, along with our cover story that we found the bodies when we broke ground. We figured it’d keep any more domes from coming after us, since we knew word would get back to the Black City somehow, and we thought it’d keep our own people from trying to get revenge.
“The next day, we told the real story to the others on the Power Project, and until now, they remained the only other ones who knew the truth. We buried the bodies, and we tried to discourage anyone from going into the chamber ever again. Not because there was any way we could be found out, but because we were ashamed, I think, of what we’d done. What we felt we had to do. Eternity, you should know that even Brain never knew about all this before today.”
Eternity said nothing for a moment. “You still don’t know how the domes found you?” he asked finally. “No,” Paladin replied. “It madeus think forthe first time that there might be some way the neural implants the City uses for Net interface might
be traced out here even though we’d always thought theywere onlyeffective in a limited distance from the City itself.”
“No. There’s no way they can trace the signal out here.” Eternity said. “I’d have been dead too many times already if they could.”
“A lot of us would be.” Paladin laughed, a choked, nervous staccato that echoed against the chamber’s metal walls. “That’s when Ace went to work on a way to disable the implants, and once he perfected it, it got to be standard procedure for new people in the Forgotten City. First, we taught the mental techniques you learned from Ace, and later, we used surgery. It’s a simple operation, but it’s really just a failsafe. The masking techniques are enough, long as someone can use them properly.”
Eternity felt as though something were crawling at the base of his skull. I never had mine taken out. He thought again about the possibility they might enable him to be traced. I can mask the signal, though. Ace taught me how. It works. It has to work.
“I hope you’re right, Paladin. I’m beginning to think there’s nothing we can count on for certain.”
The remark stung Paladin. “We have to be able to count on each other, Eternity.” “Then everyone has to know about what happened here,” Eternity said. “Yeah, we have to trust each other, but trust can’t be blind.”
Paladin looked to Brain, who nodded his agreement. Eternity’s expression softened. “I understand what you did, man. I know that you were trying to keep the peace. But we can’t start lying to each other. That’s how all of this got started. In the City, I mean.”
“Easy for you to say,” Brain replied. “I know you’re right, though I’ll tell them.”
“I’ll tell them, son,” Paladin said. “This may be a city of youth in manyways, but without us Oldtimers, you wouldn’t be here. This is for me to explain.”
* * * * The Busisec, Isaac thought with contempt, is a place for people too impure to live in the shadow of the Towers. People who were afraid the Providers, who saw everything, would find out their fears, would see their sins. And yet, these same weak ones could presume to stain the words of the Providers by speaking them in their own imperfect voices on reports shown all over the City? Maybe that’s how unworthy ones atone for their failings while higher purposes await the faithful.
Isaac had always been faithful, and he knew he would be rewarded. The Busisec was the Black City’s primary center of commerce. Its Government-sanctioned agencies provided all the goods its inhabitants needed, but the sector’s core was Studio Block, a complex that housed the technological gestalt that was the City’s news media. Often called simply “the Studio” or “the Block”, this was the axis around which all of Busisec revolved.
The black glass obelisks of the Block gleamed in the last light of the sun like miniature replicas of the Towers themselves—a source of endless annoyance for Isaac. This would be a perfect place to search for the traitors, and even if it yielded no answers, it would still be a perfect place to begin the holy work of revenge.
Burn them all. He laughed, his eyes gleaming like black glass in the sunset.
* * * * The young girl with gleaming brown eyes and Regulationlength hair the same color stared at the multiple images of herself from the three-waymirror in her dressing room at the Block. As she stared, she thought how ironic it was even to have a dressing room, dressed as she was in Regulation grey with next to no hair (although she had to admit, the men had it worse). She caught herself. The voices in her head—the voices of the Net—were silent for now, but she knew once the cameras were on her, that would no longer be the case.
Do I want to be a window They can just look into? She thought of the girl she’d replaced, the green-eyed redhead who’d just disappeared. She’d heard things about that. She hadn’t known the girl, but she’d heard that that girl hadn’t been careful with what she thought orsaid, with how she said things, or the way she acted. They found out. And now that other girl was gone.
She looked at the clock on the wall. Almost time. She took a deep breath, and willed away all expression and conscious thought. A moment later, when the studio lights found her and she began to echo the voices she heard inside her mind, there were no secrets there to be hidden.
* * * *
Isaac hid in the shadows of the darkened dressing room and listened to the footsteps as they came closer. Getting in here was so easy. It’d be a perfect place for those traitors to hide. He’d walked in. There were no guards posted at the Block, even with the unrest in Govsec. I guess they don’t think this place is important enough to guard. So much the better. Isaac crouched in a corner, flatting himself against the wall as the footsteps approached his hiding place.
* * * * The dark-eyed girl shivered, grateful for the silence inside her mind. Speakingthe words the voices had given her, she’d imagined the cameras trained on her were eyes—eyes that belonged to Them. She’d tried to push back her feelings, to keep her thoughts neutral and her face expressionless, but her heart pounded against her ribs, and her stomach twisted with tension even now. She was afraid that no matter how hard she tried, they had still been able to hear the fear in her thoughts—her fear of them, the fear that they might make her disappear as they had the red-haired girl.
I’m alone now, though, she thought, unaware of the eyes watching her from the shadows. There were two faces in the mirror now, the dark-eyed girl thought, looking with horror into a pair of unfamiliar eyes as dark as her own. Dark like hers, but stern and unsmiling black diamonds wrapped in steel. She opened her mouth to scream, and a rough, musky-smelling hand clamped it shut. She tried to bite the boy’s hand, but it did no good. He only clutched hertighter, wrappinghis other arm aroundher neck. She felt somethingblunt and cold—it has to be a lasgun, she realized with a shock—and then saw the boy’s face behind her in the mirror, and the gun’s muzzle pointed against the back of her neck, coming into view as if she were watching a screencast with herself as the star. Tears welled and squeezed from the corners of her eyes, falling in silence down her cheeks.
“I’m going to take my hand away from your mouth now,” the boy whispered against her ear. “If you scream, I’ll kill you. If you tell me where they’re hiding, you’ll live. If you don’t, you’ll die.”
“I don’t know anything about them!” the girl sobbed. “Tell me where they are,” the boy said again, his voice sounding even more deadlyfor the fact that it had grown still softer.
If I lie, I can save my life, she thought. But what can I say? And what if I’m right, somehow? How many people will die? If he figures out I’m lying, he’ll kill me anyway.
“I don’t know,” she said again through her tears. The light that rose to end her world was as bright and silent as the sun.
* * * * Shadow’s cycle sped through Busisec. He had business in the Black City, and it took something serious to sway him from his usual habit of staying as far from the domes as he could. There were rumors of resumed unrest, rumors that the Providers themselves had spoken, and their words had set the domes ablaze like gasoline to a fire.
I don’t know, man, Shadow thought. I don’t know if I believe in them or not. Whatever they are, they’re not gods. But the City’s different, somehow—feels like a storm’s coming. Ace isn’t here to ride it for us, so who’s it gonna be this time?
Shadow saw the Block up ahead. Floodlight beams illuminated the black obelisks, revealing the silhouetted form of a boyrunning. As his cycle drew closer to the Block, Shadow was able to make out the figure more clearly. It was a dome about Shadow’s own age. But why was he running? Domes didn’t have to hide in the City. And why was he carrying a lasgun?
Don’t get involved, man, he told himself. Whatever happened, whatever the kid had done, he was just a dome, and whoever he did it to was likely just a dome, too. Just domes, man. Leave it alone.
His mind flashed back to his first years on his own in the City. What if Ace had thought he was ‘just a dome’? He wouldn’t, more than likely, have ever found the Forgotten
City, and just as likely, he’d be dead.
Just a dome. But that could have been me. He left the cycle in hover-mode, letting it depend on its suspensors so as not to run down the generator.
The automatic doors at the entrance to the Block slid open. There was no shieldlock or any other security measure on them. This, Shadow knew, was uncommon in the City. In fact, the Block was unique in this respect. Shieldlock or no, Shadow knew that if anyone saw him, he would be reported and likely hunted down.
Someone may have died in there, he reminded himself, thinking of the figure with the gun, and not knowing on whose behalf he acted—the dome running away in the darkness, or the dome inside who might have been his victim. Either way, it could have been me. A life for a life.
The Block seemed to be empty. It was dark inside the complex, but Shadow managed to find two panels on the wall. He touched them, and the whole place was illuminated.
“Hello?” he called. “Anybody home?” Stupid. He was nervous, though. The place was too quiet. He made his way through the various rooms, progressing through the main studios one at a time. Nothing. He was about to turn and leave when he noticed a light on in one of the dressing rooms. He crept inside with a stealth and secrecy taught by years alone on the City’s streets.
The body of a dark-haired girl lay slumped in a corner of the room. Her neck bore the telltale red mark of a lasgun wound. Her face was frozen in a sob, her eyes a silent plea for life that had been ignored. Behind her, burned into the wall by the weapon that had killed her—were two words: Rebels die. Shadow shuddered. There was nothing he could do. Then, catchingsight ofthe securitycameraset to record everything in the room, he smiled to himself. Maybe there was something after all. There was a control panel on the wall, with an assortmentofmulticolored wires twisting within like veins. In a slot beside the panel, he saw a small black chip he recognized as a micro-drive for information storage.