Planet of the Apes Omnibus 2

by John Jakes

  Thade was still staring at Sandar’s retreating back, a dreamy, terrible expression of anticipation on his face, when Attar approached him at a brisk march. Thade nodded at the gorilla.

  “They’re not within the city walls,” Attar reported. He sounded disappointed, but not surprised.

  Thade grunted. “We underestimate this human,” he said, remembering the beast that had sprawled before him while he searched its gullet for a soul.

  At the time, he hadn’t thought he’d seen anything there but the mute dumbness normal to such animals. But maybe he’d missed something…

  He made up his mind. “I will hunt him down myself!”

  Attar started to salute, but Thade was already turning away, his foot seeking the stirrup of his horse. He threw himself up into the saddle just as another rider approached at a gallop and reined up beside him.

  The newcomer was an old ape wearing dark robes and a worried expression. Thade had known him well since his childhood; he had served as his father’s manservant all of Thade’s life.

  The old ape leaned out of his saddle toward Thade and spoke in low, hurried tones: “Your father has sent me to find you. You must come quickly.”

  Thade involuntarily clutched at his reins, then let them drop, his expression shaken. This could be no surprise. His father had been failing for some time. Once, he’d been the strongest of them all, but even the great ones eventually succumbed to the ceaseless rubbing and wrecking of time.

  Why now? Thade roared silently to himself. Couldn’t he have waited? Damn the Semos-cursed luck! But then, horrified at his own disrespectful thoughts, Thade pushed them away. Of course he would go. He wasn’t some bestial human, to leave his father dying alone in the street, like that barbarian woman had done…

  He gathered himself, turned to Attar, nodded him closer. “Alert the outposts. Make sure the human does not pass.”

  Attar half-saluted. “I understand, sir,” he replied.

  The general stared searchingly at his underling, as if wondering how much he could say to him. He began slowly: “Except for my father, you’re the one I depend on most. We’re not just soldiers, we’re friends.” He paused, then continued: “I’m depending on you…”

  Attar nodded, deeply touched by his general’s confidence. He was a tough fighting ape to his very bones, but he’d been with Thade for a long time, and he understood at least some of what drove his commander. He had no qualms about Thade’s intentions toward the wild human male he’d seen at Senator Sandar’s dinner. After all, Attar was a devout believer, and Semos had placed apes above all other beings. Killing or capturing wild beasts who threatened apes was neither sinful nor criminal, merely duty. And Attar was an ape who knew his duty.

  * * *

  The room was as dark as the bottom of a mine-shaft, and nearly as stuffy. The chamber smelled of sweat, and age, and sickness. The windows were heavily shrouded, as if for a tomb. A single candle flickered uncertainly on the stand next to a simple wooden bed. The thick silence was broken only by the low rasp of heavy, labored breathing.

  On the bed lay an ancient ape, whose thinning, faded gray fur gave him the appearance of a ghost. He looked as if he might vanish entirely at any moment, so wasted and desiccated had he become.

  Thade approached the ape on the bed with a mixture of grief and pity for one who had once been strong, but was now only a short step from his grave. It was painful for Thade to even look at his father, at what his father had become, but he owed him this final duty, and he would carry it out. He always carried out his duty.

  The old ape didn’t know he was there. Thade came to the bed wrapped in his own silent pain, leaned over, and gently smoothed the old ape’s lank, lifeless hair away from his raddled features.

  “Father…” he whispered.

  Slowly, the old ape opened his eyes. Once so sharp and clear, now they were scarred with the pale, milky clusters of cataracts. He recognized his son more by smell, sound, and touch, than by the power of his nearly ruined sight. But he did know, and he smiled.

  “I don’t have much time.” His smile widened slightly. He was amused at stating such an obvious thing. “Tell me about this human who troubles you.”

  Thade didn’t really want to talk about humans. Even the one who worried him seemed a small matter in this room. He made a short gesture, waving the subject away.

  “He’ll be captured soon. And little trouble.”

  His father lifted his head from his pillow, trying to see him better.

  “You’re not telling me everything.” His eyes widened a bit. “You believe he’s not born of this world.”

  Thade gave an involuntary twitch of surprise. How had his father known? He’d been this bad for weeks now, with nobody but his old servants and his son talking to him.

  “Has he come alone?” his father said.

  Thade nodded. “Yes.”

  His father sighed. “More will come looking for him.”

  Thade stared at him. “How can you possibly know?”

  His father stirred restlessly on the bed. He was considering how best to say what he had to say. The words were difficult, but finally he found them.

  “I have something to tell you before I die. Something my father told me, and his father told him. Back across our bloodline to Semos.”

  He began strongly enough, but his voice faded as he went on, and Thade leaned closer until his ear was only a hand’s-breadth away from his father’s lips.

  “In the time before time,” his father said slowly, “we were the slaves and the humans were our masters.”

  Reflexively, Thade jerked back, his mind boiling with the unbelievable implications of that revelation.

  “Impossible,” he roared.

  Slowly, the old ape stretched out one skeletal hand, like some dire phantom warning of doom. He pointed a shaking finger at a sealed urn on a table across the room. From the earliest time that Thade could remember, the urn had been there. His father had never said anything much about it, but everyone understood it was not to be meddled with. Thade had always assumed that the jar played some role in his father’s private religious observances. That had never been confirmed, but now he wondered if he hadn’t been right all along.

  “Break it,” his father said flatly.

  A curious, half-expectant fear electrified Thade’s muscles as he hurried across the room, lifted the urn from the table, and smashed it on the floor.

  His father watched intently as Thade sank to his knees, pushed aside the shattered bits of ceramic, and slowly lifted a corroded metal object into the candlelight.

  Thade stared at this thing, utterly confused. He couldn’t imagine why his father considered it so important. It was nothing more than an oddly shaped hunk of rusty metal. Not even big enough to use as a club.

  He didn’t know what to call it, because even the concept of a gun had never entered his mind. He looked at his father, the question plain on his face.

  “What you are holding in your hand is called a gun. It is proof of their power. Their power of invention. Their power of technology. Against which our strength means nothing.”

  With wonder, and not a little touch of fear, Thade turned the deadly thing back and forth in his hands as he stared at it. Its name was meaningless to him. Nor could he understand his father’s obvious awe and terror of the harmless-looking artifact.

  His father’s voice grew stronger, as if to impart by the sheer force of sound the truth he was trying to speak.

  “It has the force of a thousand spears,” the old man warned.

  But his efforts, and his determination, were agitating him greatly, and causing him pain. He grimaced as he tried to gather himself, fighting against the urge to fall back in exhaustion as the world swam away from him. With nearly super-ape effort, he pulled himself back together, and continued.

  “I warn you, their ingenuity goes hand-in-hand with their cruelty. No creature is as devious or violent. Find this human quickly. Do not let him reach C
alima.”

  Now even more confused, Thade stared at his father in disbelief.

  “The ancient ruins? There’s nothing there but some old cave paintings.”

  But his father shook his head. “Calima holds the secret of our true beginning.” The effort had cost him too much. He let out a low, guttural groan of pain.

  Thade hurried to him. He still didn’t really understand what this great secret was supposed to be, or how the strange wild male was connected to it, but he knew what his father wanted to hear.

  “I will stop him, Father.”

  But Thade’s father barely heard him. He’d exhausted what little of his strength remained, and now he fell back against his pillow. He spoke his last words in a nearly inaudible whisper.

  “This human has already infected the others with his ideas,” he gasped. Death rattled deep in his throat. “Damn them all to hell…”

  His hands went limp. His eyes rolled back in his head. Thade looked down on him, feeling his own eyes well with tears. Gently, he touched his fingertips to his father’s eyelids, and closed his eyes for the last time. Then he straightened, turned to the bedside table, blew out the candle there, and plunged the room into darkness.

  Somehow it seemed fitting.

  * * *

  After the enervating heat of the jungle-like lowlands, and the swamps and bogs that clutched at their every step with soft, muddy sucking sounds, Davidson and the rest of the party—the humans more so than the gorillas—found the transition to the foothills of the mountains a welcome relief. But they’d been running for a long time, without much food or rest, and everybody, even mighty Krull, was exhausted. More dispiriting, after the initial relief of not having to fight for every foot through impenetrable underbrush or across treacherous quagmires, was the discovery that the mountains, even the foothills, were hostile to both humans and apes, and placed their own unique obstacles in their path.

  It grew cooler the higher they went, but there was little or no cover from the burning suns. Tender, exposed skin, used to the soft, green-tinged light of the forest, baked and burned beneath the harsh, pitiless light that scoured the stones on which they climbed.

  Worse was the way their journey kept traveling across steeper and steeper ground until, for all intents and purposes, they were climbing instead of hiking. The apes were better at this than the humans, because they had four appendages capable of grasping the treacherous stones. However, nature had designed the apes’ skills for trees; Krull especially had trouble hauling his massive weight up dizzying escarpments, where his hand- or foothold might give way at any moment.

  The chimps, with their small size and extreme strength relative to that size, had it easiest, though Limbo, the slave master, had some trouble with his shackles, and spent most of his time complaining bitterly. The humans tended to straggle along, scratching and clawing their way up the rocks, though Birn, smaller than the others and with the agility and endurance of youth, did better than everybody but Ari and Limbo.

  It was getting on toward the high heat of noonday, with no place to hide from the heat that turned the sky into a white furnace, when Davidson, sweat burning in his reddened eyes, called a halt on a narrow stretch of relatively level ground.

  As everybody sat or squatted, glad for a moment of respite in which to catch their breath and rest their aching muscles, Krull and Tival hurried to their mistress and offered her a cup of water from the sack Krull carried on his back.

  Ari took the water with a nod of thanks, but didn’t drink. Instead, she bounded over to Davidson and handed the cup to him, a look of—of what! Davidson wondered. Something more than friendship, and that is just plain weird… in her eyes.

  That look unsettled him. If Ari had been a human woman, he would have understood it, known how to deal with it. But she was an ape, and to him, no matter how smart or literate or compassionate, that meant she was an animal. And humans just didn’t have that kind of relationship with beasts…

  Reluctantly, he accepted the cup from her, took a single sip, then handed it back. Ari looked disappointed, as if she’d expected something more, but Davidson couldn’t imagine what that might be.

  Surely she doesn’t expect me to…?

  But his mind couldn’t quite wrap itself around that notion, either. To what?

  Then he saw Daena silently glowering at him and Ari a few paces distant. Ari saw her, too, and carried the water to her. Daena looked down at the female chimp as if she were offering something filthy, pushed the cup aside, and quickly stomped away.

  Great, Davidson thought. Maybe I should just let them kill each other.

  He knew why Daena hated the apes. Hell, who wouldn’t? She’d just seen her father die horribly on the cold pavement of the ape city, murdered by brutal ape soldiers. But her attitude toward Ari seemed to go even beyond the usual, and the suspicion was growing on Davidson that it was all tied up with him, somehow. But even thinking about it gave him a headache and made his stomach twist queasily. Women!

  Not that Daena was acting like a woman in love or anything. Mostly she looked at him as if she’d enjoy smacking him upside the skull almost as much as she’d enjoy doing the same to the apes. If he thought he’d have to spend any length of time trapped with the two females, he would probably have to do something about them. But once they found the place where the signal was coming from, he’d be out of here, big-time. No sense in making mountains out of what were, for him, only molehills. He could put up with it for a while, though thank God a while was all that was required.

  When they finally got moving again, Ari seemed to gravitate naturally to Davidson’s side. Their little break had put some spring back into his stride, though not nearly as much as Ari’s.

  She seemed excited, bursting with energy, and chattered nonstop as they climbed.

  “I have so many questions I want to ask,” she said. Davidson glanced down at her and shrugged. “Get in line,” he replied.

  Ari ignored the implicit rebuff as if he hadn’t spoken. “What are these zoos you speak of? This word is unfamiliar.”

  Right, Davidson thought. In your world, you call them slave pens…

  And maybe it was the memory of his brief, painful experience in those pens that flavored the venom in his answer to her.

  “Zoos are where you’ll find our last few apes,” he said.

  Krull was, as usual, right behind Ari, and when he heard what Davidson said, he uttered an involuntary growl. Ari blinked.

  Krull pushed closer and glared at Davidson— everybody glares at me, Davidson thought—as if to make sure he’d heard what he thought he had.

  “What happened to the rest of them?” the gorilla rumbled ominously.

  Davidson sighed. “Gone. After we cut down their forests. The ones that survived we locked in cages for our amusement… or use in scientific experiments.”

  So put that banana in your bowl and swallow it…

  Ari recoiled, her shocked anger making her stiff with revulsion. “How horrible!”

  Davidson glanced at her. No sense in starting another brawl. After all, she hadn’t tried to harm him. Not intentionally, at least.

  “We do worse to our own kind,” he told her.

  It took a moment for that to sink in, and when it did, Davidson could see it confused and upset her even further.

  “I don’t understand,” she said slowly. “You seem to possess such great intelligence…” Her voice trailed off.

  Davidson could understand. It puzzled him sometimes, too.

  “Yeah, we’re pretty smart. And the smarter we get, the more dangerous our world becomes.”

  Odd. He’d never thought about it quite that way before. Nothing like a little travel to open a man’s eyes.

  But Ari seemed almost willfully determined to put the best possible spin on anything he might say.

  “You’re sensitive. I knew it. It is an uncommon quality in a male.”

  Davidson thought about Thade and Attar, and even the treacherous,
coldhearted Limbo. Not to mention the gorilla breathing heavily over his right shoulder. Or even his former commander, the captain of the Oberon, that pig-headed, stubborn man. Hell, with evidence like that, there might even be something to what she was saying.

  Krull didn’t think so. He just couldn’t quite get it. A world like the one Davidson described was so foreign, so alien, that it remained a few steps around the corner of his understanding.

  “Why don’t your apes object to the way you treat them?” he asked harshly.

  If you only knew, Davidson thought. “Our apes can’t talk,” he replied.

  Ari didn’t really get it, either. “Maybe they choose not to, given the way you treat them,” she said earnestly.

  Limbo had pulled up next to them, clanking his shackles like Marley’s ghost. He’d overheard the last part of the conversation, and not only did he not get the notion of a world where apes weren’t in charge, he obviously didn’t give a damn whether he got it or not. He snorted, his disbelief in Davidson’s fantasy obvious.

  “Apes in cages,” he muttered sardonically. “Right…”

  Daena certainly could imagine such a thing, even if she didn’t yet quite believe it could be possible.

  “Sounds like paradise to me,” she chimed in.

  Birn, as usual grinning silently, was close by, watching Davidson with that worshipful gleam in his eye. Davidson noticed, and smiled at the kid. What the hell. Birn’s hero fixation might be a little embarrassing, but at least the boy didn’t spend half his time trying to make a man miserable.

  Surprised at the unexpected response, Birn blushed, ducked his head, then scooted quickly on ahead of the rest of the party, as if any acknowledgment from Davidson was more than he could cope with in public.

  The terrain, dangerously steep and rocky for quite some time, now turned downright treacherous as they reached an area that was, for all intents and purposes, a nearly vertical cliff wall.

  Davidson raised one hand to halt the rest of them, and watched to see how Birn would do with the sudden obstacle.