"I'm not a Nuum," I said automatically. It took only a second for my brain to reach down and strangle my tongue, but the words were out.
Timash (as I learned to call him) stepped back and looked me over carefully. Then he inched forward again, squinting at my eyebrows.
"Damn," he whispered presently. "You're a yellow, aren't you?"
In for a penny, in for a pound. "What's a yellow?"
"That's a damned good question," he acknowledged, "because I've never heard of one. Which means maybe you're telling the truth. So what's a Thoran doing running around disguised as a Nuum?"
I sighed. "It's a long story. Let's just say it's not something I want spread around—especially to the Nuum." Or the Silver Men, I added silently, but that would take a very long time to explain.
Timash nodded thoughtfully. "All right. You saved my life, I owe you something. But when we get back home they're going to want some answers."
"Home. And where's that?"
He pointed off to our left. "About three hundred yards that way. We've been circling it until I figured out what to do with you."
I opened my mouth to protest but didn't get the chance. There was a terrible pain in my head and I never heard the shot that brought me down.
17. In the City of the Apes
I dreamed that I was lying on a table, naked. A crowd of people had gathered near my head, digging in my skull, removing little bits of my brain with very tiny spoons. Not surprisingly, it being a dream, no one found my nudity the least bit odd—except me. I felt a vague sense of vulnerability from my nakedness, all the more odd as I felt none at all from the removal of my brain.
At last one of the faces glanced down at me and frowned. It said something I couldn't make out and the dream faded away. I slept on for another century.
When I woke up, I was naked under a blanket, on a table, with the unsettling sensation that someone had taken out my brain and stuffed my head with cotton balls. I started to worry immediately. Strangely, the fact that the gorilla looming over me was not Timash was not uppermost in my concerns.
"Good morning," it said prosaically enough. It wore what I was learn passed on an ape for a smile. Whatever evolution had brought them to the point of Man’s speech had not elevated their ability to assume facial expression to the same level. Smaller than Timash, its fur was tinged on the ends with silvery grey.
I smiled back, very weakly. I had to swallow a couple of times before I could get words through my throat.
"Good morning."
"Are you in any pain?" I shook my head, rather surprising myself to learn that I was telling the truth. By its voice, I guessed this to be a she-ape, although it was not a distinction at which I was practiced. "I shouldn't think so," she said, "but your brain is a little different from anything I've encountered before. I wanted to make sure the blocks were working properly. Here, let me help you up."
As she did so, the sheet fell and pooled around my waist. I grabbed automatically to keep it in place, the sudden movement making me dizzy for a moment. The room was comfortably warm on my bare skin, but my head seemed a bit off-center, as if it weren't quite situated correctly on my neck. I shook it to clear my senses, but the fuzzy feeling remained. When I reached up to touch my scalp, I couldn't feel my hand.
"I'm Dr. Chala," my helper informed me, gently moving my head from side to side. I couldn't feel her hands, either. "You've been ill, in a coma, for about two days." She stopped, holding my face directly before hers. "You've contracted a telepathic virus."
She might have been explaining the interior structure of the sun for all I understood her. I reached out for the only anchor I had.
"Where's Timash?"
With a toss of her head toward a door behind her, she said: "He's been waiting. You must have made quite an impression on him. Timash isn't known for hanging around any one place for very long."
"Could I see him?"
She shrugged. "There's nothing else I can do for you. I'll let you get your things. But we'll need to talk before you leave." She left and I looked about for my clothes.
Someone had cleaned and repaired my Nuum uniform while I was unconscious. Even so, as I put it on I resolved to get some new clothing as soon as possible—and to wash the red out of my hair. I was starting to feel like a leper—or a target.
Timash was obviously glad to see me, but he approached me as though I were made of glass. He stood back, afraid to touch me, almost afraid to breathe on me.
"Thanks for bringing me here. I guess we're even now."
Hesitantly, still without speaking, he placed the library on the cot beside me. I realized guiltily I hadn't even noticed it was missing. I picked it up and glanced at its irregular surface, covered with crooked lines and tiny indentations whose function I could not begin to guess.
Timash watched me silently, not moving away, but carefully avoiding me nonetheless. I gave him the distance he seemed to crave and spoke directly to the library.
"Tell me about telepathic viruses."
"I am scanning medical equipment nearby," the library responded obliquely. "If you place my sphere into the indentation on that imaging diagnostician in the corner, I can more easily manifest my visual persona."
I did as instructed, or at least as well as I could make out. The library fit into a cuplike depression in a small, squat machine in the corner. Although there were no obvious catches on either component, an experimental tug proved that it was there to stay. A moment later, the familiar figure of the Librarian materialized before us. Timash jumped a foot in the air.
"Good morning, sir, Mr. Timash," he said with a small bow to each of us. He assumed a pedantic pose. "Telepathic viruses. A self-explanatory term. Although viruses were unknown in your time, you will be familiar with the concept now, after your general course in modern topics." I spared a glance for the gorilla. If he understood the implications of what the Librarian was saying, he wasn't giving it away. Well, the cat was out of the bag now. The Librarian continued: "Telepathic viruses are so small they can be passed literally by thinking about them.
"Telepathic viruses were invented in the Fifth Age, when telepathy was finally grasped as a learned behavior. Before that, it was the province of mutations and the occasional religious mystic, but when it began to be available to the normal human population… well, someone always finds a way to make a weapon out of any example of progress. And so it was here.
"Fortunately, it was never used in actual warfare; as soon as its existence became known, it was outlawed. There was no cure for it, and no escaping it without giving up this new ability that Man had sought for so many generations and now had within his grasp. Not that the development of telepathy itself was so smooth or easy—not at all. For a generation the asylums were filled to capacity with the untrained and the poorly-trained, not to mention the victims of early forms of telepathic dueling. Often as not both duelists ended their days drooling in their porridge behind padded walls on a robot-tended asteroid. No one could—" He trailed off at the look on my face. "Oh, sorry. I am a librarian, you know. Once I get onto a subject, I can simply beat it to death."
"You were telling us about viruses," I prompted.
"Although they were outlawed, some specimens were saved for research, naturally. A laboratory was established on the dark side of the Moon. There were many who lobbied for the virus' total destruction—they protested that something so small could never be completely contained, and unfortunately, they were right. A mutated form of the virus infected one of the researchers, driving him mad before it killed him. But by the time the symptoms manifested themselves, he had journeyed back to Earth. He lived on a small Pacific island. They say it was beautiful.
"At first they thought they were simply seeing a return to the early madness, but soon the virus had mutated again—it can mutate simply by its host's thinking about it—and entire households began to die on a daily basis. Ironically, it was the originally-infected scientist, the Patient Zero of this particu
lar plague, who realized the danger. Before he died, he called for an air strike that destroyed the entire island and everyone on it."
"Easy enough for him to decide, since he was dying anyway," Timash commented.
"The island's entire population was descended from a single couple," the Librarian replied quietly. "He signed the death warrant for his entire family."
Timash retreated, abashed, but I put aside the millennia-old tragedy to focus on my own.
"How did the virus survive?"
"The virus apparently had spread so quickly only because of the genetic similarities between the people infected; they thought they had engineered out all of their recessive weaknesses, but Nature proved herself more ingenious. By the end, however, the virus had mutated in such a narrow fashion that it was far less contagious than anyone would have believed, and since the island was declared off-limits and remained radioactive for centuries, it could only lie dormant until eventually it found a new host.
"That took many years, and by then humanity had developed its telepathic abilities to an extent that the normal, routine barriers that everyone erected to preserve the privacy of thoughts were sufficient to ward off infection by the virus. In fact, for many years scientists thought the virus had died on the island. Nowadays, attacks are very rare, usually occurring only in the very young, the extremely old, or victims of certain types of brain injuries." Suddenly he stopped, smiling, awaiting my next question.
I wanted to hit him, but it wouldn't have helped. "And —?" I challenged.
"And that's all. I would judge, based on what I know of your own history, that you compare with the very young in terms of telepathic ability. You must have been infected before you learned to raise the proper barriers."
I fought down the cold lump in my stomach. I knew that if I allowed this latest horror to fight its way up my throat to manifest it in a single sign of fear it would overwhelm me, but of all the terrors of this horrific tomorrow, this was the most personal. I was a victim of my own mind.
"Is there a cure?"
"I don't know. My databases are strong on geography, language, anthropology, and zoology—subjects that the main library foresaw as necessary to you on your journey. My medical database is not equipped for complicated diagnoses and treatment."
The horror lurked at the base of my throat. My breathing came harder and faster and I fought it down. Think, I told myself, think! There had to be a way out, a cure... I swung to face Timash.
"Where is the doctor?"
He fetched her without a word. She stopped short at seeing the Librarian, and he bowed as he launched into a new introduction, but I cut him short.
"Doctor, how long do I have?"
She looked from the Librarian to me, and back to him, plainly flustered. I had already gathered from Timash's earlier machinations that strangers were neither usual nor welcome in the apes' city, and this one had appeared without notice. Eventually she would grasp the hologram's true nature, but for now I did not care. As it had with the Librarian, my urgency brooked no delay from her.
"How long?" I snapped.
Her professional instincts came to the fore in time to save me from giving her what would have been an ill-advised shaking.
"That depends on you. We have installed nerve blocks throughout almost your entire brain. You may have noticed that you are not telepathically active even now." Truth to tell, I hadn't. I wondered if that was why Timash had been so quiet. Although I was to learn that apes used words more than humans, he still wasn't used to talking completely verbally. "Fortunately, the virus attacks brain functions that you don't use in everyday situations. But your telepathic abilities are completely blocked out, and some of your higher brain functions with them. That can't be helped. Still, you can go about your normal tasks as long as you don't try anything too technical or straining.
"Your virus was triggered by exposure to an extremely strong telepathic source. We know it wasn't Timash, and he swears there was no one else around you when you collapsed. But someone nearby awoke the virus, and that someone is an extremely dangerous telepath." She paused, as if weighing how much to reveal. "We have had search parties out for almost two days with no luck. Do you have any idea who that person could be? Have you been in contact with any powerful telepaths?"
I returned her anxious stare with my own blank look. "How would I know? By now Timash must have told you everything he knows about me, and you've been inside my brain enough to know even more than that. You tell me!"
"Is this a symptom of the disease?" the Librarian asked with clinical interest.
"Yes, he's becoming over-stressed. This is exactly what I told him he needed to avoid."
"Maybe if you stopped talking about him like he wasn't here…!" Timash interrupted, earning my gratitude.
Dr. Chala flashed him a look of irritation, but then she turned her attention back to me.
"I'm sorry, but your case is extremely unusual, Clee." She lowered her voice. "And I was surprised to find --" she jerked a thumb at the Librarian --"him here. Who is he, anyway?"
"He's a librarian." At her puzzled expression I tried to elaborate. The words didn't come easy. "He's a—holographic projection. I picked him up from the Nuum."
I knew when I said it that I shouldn't have mentioned the Nuum, but it was only a vague feeling and I couldn't work up the energy to formulate a reason for it. Dr. Chala's eyes narrowed, but she examined my skull again as though nothing had changed. I was happy to let her examine me; she smelled warm and sweet. I suddenly realized I was very tired.
I said as much, and Dr. Chala helped me to lie down again. I asked Timash not to go away, and vaguely heard him promise he would not. The room began to spin but by then my eyes were already closed.
When I woke up again, my head cleared more quickly than before, and I barely felt the fuzziness that was confined now solely to my forehead and temples. I swung into a sitting position and stepped onto the floor for the first time. It was warm and yielding under my feet, a far cry from the cold that I had expected. I found my boots in the closet and felt ready to leave. Straightening up, I took a deep breath, and with a guilty sigh turned to where I had left the Library.
It was gone. I checked the cabinets and even the floor, although I knew it could not have fallen from its perch; it had been fastened too tightly to be removed any way other than deliberately. On a sudden inspiration, I tried to open the door.
It was locked. I was a prisoner.
18. I Am Given a Vision
The opening mechanism was a simple knob, just like those I had been used to back home. I thought that perhaps if I broke it off, I might find a way to manipulate the latch. Where I would have gone if I had succeeded, being to my knowledge the only human being in the entire city, I do not know, but as events transpired it never fell to me to decide.
In casting about for a way to break the knob, my eye fell on the diagnostic machine; it was on wheels and appeared quite heavy. I crossed the room, laid my hands upon it—and stopped dead in my tracks, struck dumb at the simple and obvious ramifications that had escaped my clouded brain until now.
It was a diagnostic machine. The apes had machines.
I returned to the cot, sat down, and waited like a good lad until they should come for me.
By the time the door finally opened, I had poked through every cabinet twice and examined each and every object inside until I almost understood their purpose. The only thing I found was that, for something that I had barely become used to, I missed my telepathic abilities. Time and time again I wished I had them to probe beyond the locked door and solid walls of my medical prison.
There was a knock at the door, and Dr. Chala came in. Timash was at her heels. He handed over the Library.
"Your friend told us everything about you," the doctor said, gesturing to the Library. "Once he had finished speaking to the authorities, they agreed that you should be allowed to stay here. I'm sorry we had to lock you in, but we had no way of knowing who
or what you were." She extended a hand. "Welcome to Tahana City."
I took her hand with automatic politeness; it was soft and supple, like a favorite leather glove.
Timash was fairly bouncing on the balls of his feet in the background, as does a child who has news that he will be allowed to tell, but only when his mother allows. It was distracting, and I was already distracted from the whirling thoughts and ideas that were bubbling near the surface of my disease-hobbled mind. Quite frankly, I was having trouble keeping them there. I shook my head to clear it.
"Timash, would you please stop doing that? It's making me dizzy."
He settled to a stable position, but not before Dr. Chala had turned to bestow upon him what could only have been a forceful look.
"I just want to talk to him," Timash muttered.
The doctor turned back to me. "You'll have to excuse him. You're the most unusual thing that's happened around here since the Nuum came."
The fog was starting to descend again, but I fought it back.
"So you know—I'm not one of them…" I said. She nodded. "I suppose if I had been, you wouldn't be so friendly to me. Those machines…"
She glanced at the console where I had attached the Library. "Yes, exactly. If the Nuum were to find us, it would be very bad."
I tried to speak, to carry on with my questions, but the effort was overwhelming me. The edges of my vision were darkening and I couldn't keep my eyes focused. Dr. Chala motioned to Timash.
"Son, help me with him. He needs rest, and this is not the best place for him to get it."
The gorillas each put a hand under my arms and lifted me off the table, hefting me like a child. When we were out of the room, Dr. Chala left me with Timash while she fetched a wheelchair. Whatever she had told him, he took it to heart, propping me up without any repeat of the excitement he had exhibited earlier. With my carriage secured we set out of the hospital.
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