by Джеффри Лорд
Blade looked around the room again, and with a further shock realized something he hadn't clearly noticed before. Every woman and every man in the room had that same quality of unnatural beauty, health, and personal perfection. The more clearly he realized this, the less plausible it seemed.
The android who'd escorted him was standing by the platform. Beyond the platform another corridor opened off the room. Blade could see lighted doorways on either side. He headed off down the corridor, determined to explore further.
He found himself moving through an even stranger world than the big room. All the rooms here were also spotlessly clean and beautifully kept, with a decadent display of cushions and tapestries, jewels and polished metal, weird abstract sculptures, and still more weird and abstract paintings, carved and inlaid furniture.
In the center of every room was an enormous bed. About half of these beds were empty, although some had androids busily at work on them. The others were occupied, always by a single person who was apparently sound asleep.
All of these sleepers wore metal mesh helmets on their heads, with solid, heavy bands around their temples. All wore black masks over their eyes. Otherwise they were completely naked.
Beside the bed of each sleeper stood a large, polished, black metal box mounted on four wheels. Wires led from it to the metal helmets. On top were a control panel and a series of slots. Two androids stood beside each box, apparently keeping a close watch on it and on the sleeper.
Although they seemed to be sound asleep, the people in the beds also seemed to be having some rather interesting dreams. Several were kicking furiously or churning their legs in running movements. Blade saw two men with erections and one woman writhing in the grip of orgasm.
At last Blade felt he'd seen enough on this floor. He led the android back to the platform and motioned toward the shaft. The platform lurched into the air, then dropped through the hole in the floor.
Blade examined eight different floors in the building before deciding there was no point in going on. With minor variations, each floor was the same. A large room at one end, with a corridor leading off it. On each floor sixty to a hundred of the private rooms and sixty to a hundred people. About half the people asleep and wired into the black boxes, the other half in the large room being tended by the androids or (very rarely) talking or making love to each other. Always a small army of blue-clad worker androids-at least two for every human being. Always the languid movements and the blank stares, the apathetic manner, and the inhuman perfection of the human bodies.
Blade realized that he had not only seen enough, he couldn't really stand seeing any more for the moment. The people of this city seemed to grow more weird and incomprehensible the more he learned about them! They were not dead, but they hardly seemed to be doing much he could call living.
He'd walked into a city of the living dead, and his first impulse was to walk right back out of it again. Still, there was too great a mystery here to leave behind, not to mention too much that might be worth bringing back to Home Dimension.
There might even be a chance to help these people-if they weren't past wanting help, or even realizing that they might need it.
Blade didn't realize until he started back down how long he'd taken in his exploration of the building. Through a window he could see dawn creeping across the city. If the woman hadn't been discovered and released by the workers, she might have suffocated. At the very least, she'd be trying to scream her head off. When the android let him off the platform at the bottom of the shaft, Blade practically sprinted down the corridor to the room where he'd left the woman.
She was still there, alive, and quietly asleep rather than unconscious or hysterical. She'd certainly done her best to get free-her wrists were raw from the chafing of the rope. Seeing that she wasn't going to get free though, she'd settled down to regain her strength.
This woman was formidably cool-headed and competent-dangerously so, if she remained an enemy. It wouldn't be enough just to interrogate her. He'd have to win her over, as a friend or an ally. Otherwise he'd have to kill her outright, keep her a prisoner, or spend the rest of his time in the city of the living dead trying to look in all directions at once. Blade didn't like any of these alternatives.
Blade ordered two of the workers to bring him a meal, for two Masters. When the meal came, he set the woman's tray aside and emptied his own. The food and cooking were superb-better than Blade had eaten in most expensive Home Dimension restaurants. There people obviously had settled their priorities a long time ago. Never mind if the gardens ran to wilderness or the soldiers ran amuck-as long as the baths were hot and the steaks were rare, all was right with the world.
Yet how did this explain the woman he'd taken prisoner, so skilled and deadly that it had nearly been the other way around? She certainly had not achieved her skill through a lifetime of sybaritic self-indulgence and being waited on hand and foot by androids!
Blade looked at the woman and realized that she was awake and looking at him. He smiled. «The androids have brought a meal for you. If I untie you so that you can eat, will you promise not to call out?»
Their eyes met, and she nodded slowly. Blade guessed he could trust her, but decided to make sure. He sent the serving androids out into the corridor, then closed the door and dragged the table and several chairs in front of it. That would delay the woman in getting out or the androids in getting in. Only then did he take off the woman's gag and untie her wrists. He left her ankles bound and sat in a chair between the bed and the door with his rifle across his lap while she ate.
When she'd finished, Blade untied the knife he'd been using as a bayonet. With the knife in his belt, he sat down on the foot of the bed. He had no intention of laying a finger on the woman again, except in self-defense. He was not yet ready to let her know this.
Blade suspected the woman was of the Authority-the government or police of this city. He also suspected that it had been a long time since even the Authority had come face to face with a civilized person from outside the city. Blade was the unknown, and the unknown always had the ability to sow terror or at least uncertainty in the toughest and best-trained people.
«My name is Richard Blade,» be began. «I come from England. I have traveled far and entered this city of yours in peace. I have not found-«
The woman frowned and held up a hand. It was a long-fingered, graceful hand, in spite of the distinctive calluses from many years of unarmed-combat training. «England. What was it called, when it was a City of Peace?»
«I do not know that our land has ever been called anything but England,» said Blade. «Certainly there are no records that give another name.»
«You do not even remember that you were a City of Peace?»
«As I said, we have nothing left that tells us so.» Blade pretended to frown in concentration. «Some say there was once a mighty city called Rome, which ruled all the world and then disappeared. But most among the people of England consider this a tale to amuse children, no more.»
The woman shook her head, and her voice held a note of sadness, «It has been a long time since the Cities of Peace ceased to talk to one another. Perhaps it has been long enough even for what you say to have happened. Certainly you are the first to enter Mak'loh from another City in the lifetime of anyone in the Authority, and some of us are no longer young.»
«That is not impossible,» said Blade. «Certainly it is only quite recently that England has been sending out explorers such as myself to enter the other Cities of Peace. Mak'loh is the first one I have entered, and I had a long journey to reach it.» Apparently she assumed that any civilized man in this Dimension had to be from another «City of Peace.» Perhaps she was unable to conceive of any alternative. This was certainly a weakness, but it was a weakness very much to Blade's advantage for the moment.
«You came across the Warlands?» the woman said. She pointed at Blade's sword and knife as she spoke. Blade assumed she meant the lands outside the Wall.
«I did. That is why I brought those weapons you see. They are not as powerful as those of a City's Authority, but they do not attract so much attention from the Warlanders. And they are powerful enough, if one knows how to use them.»
He put down the knife so that he was between it and the woman. Then he made his expression as severe as he could and spoke in a clipped, hard voice.
«You call this a City of Peace. Yet I crossed the Warlands without shedding a drop of my blood. Only when I entered Mak'loh was I in real danger.» In brisk sentences Blade told the tale of his adventures in this Dimension. He left out nothing, including Twana and the encounters with the Shoba's men. He merely implied that all of these things had happened after he'd reached Mak'loh with an exploring party.
As he talked, Blade noticed the woman's face turning pale and her breath coming more quickly. As he told of his encounter with the androids on the city wall, she shivered. When he told her of how he'd walked freely through this House of Peace and seen all that went on there, she put her hands over her face.
«I could have slain every man and woman in this building between sunset and dawn,» Blade finished. «I did not, because I call them my brothers and sisters. Would the men of the Shoba be so kind, if they passed the Wall?»
The woman's voice came out muffled by her hands. «Blade-are you of the Authority, in England?»
«No. I am sent out by the Authority, as are the other explorers.» To increase the pressure on the woman, he added, «I am no more than a common fighting man of England. It was a great honor for me to be chosen by the Authority, for there are many thousands of fighting men and women as skilled as I am.»
«Th-th-thousands, like you?» the woman said, her voice starting to break. Blade nodded. «I'm surprised that you c-c-call us brothers and sisters. We-«and at that point her voice failed her completely. She turned over, buried her head in the pillows, and wept.
Blade said nothing but quietly moved closer to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She didn't seem to notice it. Finally she wiped her eyes and rolled over, her hands clasped behind her head. Blade carefully kept his eyes off the slim white throat and the firm breasts thrusting up beneath the black coverall.
«I see Mak'loh has few secrets left from England,» she said wearily. «The only way we could change the situation would be to kill you. You did not kill us, when you could have easily done so and perhaps thought we deserved it.» There was a note of bleak despair in her voice. «So we will not kill you.»
«Thank you,» said Blade. He would have said it sarcastically, except for the genuine emotion in the woman's voice. Something about the situation of her city moved her deeply.
«Yet in England you seem to have forgotten where you came from,» she went on. «So you will not understand Mak'loh until I tell you how the Cities of Peace came to be. Then perhaps we can understand each other better.»
Blade smiled. «By all means, tell me.» He'd be more than happy to sit and listen while the woman revealed all the secrets of Mak'loh, this city of the living dead.
Chapter 14
The woman's name was Sela, and she was one of the Council of the Authority of Mak'loh. The Authority consisted of several hundred selected and trained men and women. They were the only people in Mak'loh who led anything that might be called a normal life by Home Dimension standards. They were responsible for everything that might be needed to keep the city running and had to be done by human beings rather than by robots or androids.
They were a few hundred men and women. The total human population of Mak'loh was somewhere around a hundred thousand.
When Blade learned that, he felt he knew half the answer to why the city was slowly falling apart. He still needed to know how Mak'loh had ended up in this situation.
After listening to Sela for about five hours, Blade felt he knew.
A long time in the past-at least several thousand years ago-there had been a war in this Dimension. It had been an immensely destructive war, fought with nuclear weapons, bacteria, gas, and all the other resources of a highly technological civilization. A large part of that civilization had simply vanished in the war.
Part of it had somehow managed to survive, in spite of the destruction. There were comparatively few people left, but a large part of the Dimension's technological skills and resources still existed. This included the robots, the early models of android, and the very earliest models of the Inward Eye.
The Inward Eye was a method of directly stimulating the human brain to give all the sensations of an actual experience while the individual slept. An enormous variety of incredibly vivid experiences could be recorded on tapes and reproduced with total fidelity, every sensation intact down to the last and smallest detail. All one needed to make one's sleeping hours more exciting than one's waking hours was an Inward Eye machine and a sufficiently large variety of tapes.
The black boxes with the wired helmets Blade had seen in the rooms above were Inward Eye machines. The early ones had been used both as a high-society hobby and a method of therapy in mental hospitals. Both high society and mental hospitals vanished during the war. The survivors were much too busy putting things back together to have any time for socializing or developing mental illnesses.
No matter how hard the human survivors worked, there still weren't enough of them. So the robots and androids became more and more essential. They became so essential that the manufacture and programming of robots and androids was one of the first industries to be revived. By the time civilization had recovered, the robots and androids outnumbered the people at least three to one.
It was then that a psychologist and scientist named Hudvom had a brilliant idea. At least it had seemed brilliant at the time, although Sela admitted she now very much doubted this. Blade was certain Hudvom's idea was the worst disaster to happen to this Dimension, except the Great War itself.
Hudvom counted the robots and androids. He observed that Inward Eye boxes and Inward Eye tapes were once again being made and used. He concluded that together they were the solution to the greatest problem facing his people.
That problem was preventing another war. War was the result of aggression. Aggression was the inevitable result of the amount and kind of physical activity that people performed. If they would limit themselves to the physical activity necessary to get work done, the problem wouldn't be so serious. But people were always in search of excitement, new sensations, pleasure, and variety. That search too often led them over the edge into a pattern of increasingly aggressive behavior.
Now there was at last a chance to break this deadly pattern. Much work was already being done by the robots and androids. More could be done. Meanwhile, people who wanted to could seek out a variety of sensations through new Inward Eye tapes. By this combination, the danger of people developing aggressive patterns of behavior would be greatly reduced. The danger of another war would be practically eliminated.
Hudvom was a brilliant and persuasive arguer, and people were already more than half ready to listen to him. There had already been small wars between some of the revived city-states. There were thousands of armed androids on hand. Many of the weapons that had made the Great War so terrible had already been rediscovered. Another major war seemed near, and this one would leave nothing alive in all the world.
So Hudvom was heard by thoroughly frightened people, and they thought him a great and wise man. The work began, to put Hudvom's ideas into effect.
The work was done slowly, over several centuries. Gradually the cities came to be inhabited by those who followed Hudvom's theories, who rejected the Physical, sought their sensations from the Inward Eye, and left everything else to the robots and the androids. Gradually those who thought Hudvom's theories were dangerous nonsense, or who simply couldn't adjust to the new way of life, left the cities. Some of them were forcibly expelled. All who left soon sank back to barbarism, as the cities kept a rigid control of all advanced science and technology.
In spite of their primitive weapon
s, the barbarians were numerous enough to be a danger to the cities. So the Cities of Peace slowly drew into themselves, building their walls and setting up force fields and robot sentinels to guard those walls. The building Blade had stayed in by the Wall had been built to house the human garrison of the Wall, in those distant centuries when such a garrison was needed. It had been abandoned by everyone except robots for more than a thousand years.
Gradually the cities became invulnerable to the attacks of the barbarians. Within five hundred years their life had settled down to a routine. Or at least the life of Mak'loh settled down to a routine. Sela knew practically nothing about what might have happened in the other Cities of Peace. Only three of them had ever sent visitors to Mak'loh, and none of these had come in Sela's lifetime. That lifetime, incidentally, had already lasted some four hundred years, and would probably last another five hundred.
In Mak'loh the routine became simple. The hundred thousand human beings in the city spent two-thirds of their time using the Inner Eye. There were millions of different tapes, and they could be mixed and varied by the computers. The other third of the time, they spent going languidly through various mild Physical activities that still helped to maintain a person's good health and good looks. Sometimes they even made love, although not often enough to produce very many children. At the moment there were in all of Mak'loh only seven nurseries and no more than three hundred children in all seven put together.
Meanwhile, computers, robots, and androids did everything else. The computers controlled the power supply, the protective force fields, the synthetic food factories. They programmed the robots and trained the androids.
The robots mounted guard on the outer Wall and took care of all the heavy maintenance. The androids in the red coveralls were soldiers, pure and simple, produced and trained to be nothing else. They lived in underground caves, connected with tunnels that ran under the whole city and up into the towers along the city wall.