"I almost knocked the poor fellow right off his feet. He took one look at me, and his eyes got real wide, and I was sure for a second we were gonna get into it, and he says: 'Hey, what are you doing here?'
"Well, I thought maybe I could scare him off, so I said: 'Looking for a job. What's it to you?'
"Quick as a wink, he tells me to follow him, and turns around and goes the other way. So I followed him. Before you know it I'm standing guard at the local governor's house with a brand new uniform tunic and a full stomach to fill it out. He tells me: 'Stand right here. Don't move and don't let anybody in unless I tell you to.'
"Seemed simple enough to me, so I did it. I found out later that the only reason they hired me was because the governor and his daughter were passing through town and they wanted to scare off anybody with a gripe against Nuum. They would've fired me the next morning—if I'd lasted that long.
"A couple of hours of standing there and I was getting pretty bored. Then I heard some noises from around the corner. I wanted to go look, but the Nuum who hired me had told me to stay put. So I did. A few minutes later, this couple came around the corner, all covered up in capes and hats and things. As soon as they saw me, they stopped.
"Now I knew as sure as I was standing there that they were up to something. I just didn't know if it was any of my business. I figured if they tried to come in, it was, and if they didn't, it wasn't. They walked by me kind of fast, and as soon as they went around the corner I heard them start running. But hey, I was doing my job…
"About an hour later the whole place started jumping and the lights came on and there’re people everywhere. Finally one of them runs up to me, asks me if I'd seen anybody, and I told him about the couple that ran around the corner.
"He started screaming at me. 'Why didn't you stop them?'
"'Because I was told not to move. I'm keeping people out.'
"'You idiot! That was the governor's daughter! She's run off with a Thoran!' And the next thing I know they've got those weird guns all over me and I'm shipped off to a sky barge for 'dereliction of duty.'
"You ever seen one of those things?" I had to admit that I had not. Vaguely I had a memory of one from my night in the Library, just enough to know that the ship on which I had flown did not meet the same description. "They're just big open boats in the sky. They've got photonic sails and negative gravity generators, but most of the time they run on photonic oars. They Nuum use them for pleasure ships, mostly—the nobles like to ride around in them because they're slow and you can actually look around. That, and it gives them a place to put prisoners. They use them as slaves. You sit there all day and row back and forth. It's not hard, but it sure is boring."
He stopped to pour us all a new cup of tea, sipping some of his own to soothe his dry throat. "Well, after a while the novelty of the whole thing started to wear off, so I started working a little harder at it. Pretty soon my bench mates couldn't keep up with me, and that threw off the whole side of the boat. Couldn't row in unison, you see, and we kept spinning off to one side. All the time I just kept smiling like an idiot, so they wouldn't see I was doing it on purpose. What they didn't know was that we'd sailed almost all the way back home, and I figured if I was getting off it was now or never. What I didn't know was whether they'd get rid of me at the next stop—or just dump me over the side and be done with it.
"I guess they must've figured that dumping me was more work than letting me go, so they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. They must have thought it was quite a joke; they forced me off at gunpoint like I was being exiled to some foreign land." He pointed through the window. "It was about ten miles from here. I was home for breakfast the next day."
Home. Would the word ever again hold any meaning?
20. I Have Hope
In the weeks subsequent to my first visit to Uncle Balu's home, I became a frequent guest, both with and without Timash. In truth, I believe he found his uncle less spellbinding than I when subjected to his familial duties on such a scale. Somehow, I found that Balu evinced an understanding of my circumstances; more than once in his long wanderings he, too, had known cause to wonder if he would ever see his home again.
On top of that, though, I had Hana to think about. Had Farren’s intentions toward her changed after my abortive attempts at rescue? Was he now holding her hostage against my renewed appearance? Was she even alive? Every day I was forced to remain in seclusion held the potential to drown me in a nightmare of worry; every day I was reluctantly compelled to the conclusion that the only sanctuary for my sanity was to put her dear face from my mind until I could resume the hunt.
In this Balu was a godsend. Twice he prevailed upon me to become an overnight guest, and although there was no danger inherent in walking the streets of Tahana at night, unlike some of the larger cities I had known, I grasped his offer eagerly. His store of treasures was apparently far larger than those on display in his apartment; each time I went there I would find new and different objects in place of those I had seen before. After a while it became a game between us, to see how long it would take me to pick out the new wonders in the museum that was his home.
It occurred to me at last to inquire how he had conveyed all of these fantastic objects from the far corners of the earth here, particularly given the Nuum's strictures against many of them. For that matter, how had he obtained them in the first place?
"I never reveal my sources," he chuckled over a cup of tea. (He seemed to live on it.) "But there are a lot of places in the old cities where you can stash mountains of things if you know where to look. Warehouses, vaults, chemical storage tanks… No one uses any of them any more. There are more abandoned cities between here and the Nuum in the north than you can count on your fingers and toes."
I picked up a cup of my own and sat down, recognizing his expansive mood. Such moods never failed to be informative, or at the very least fascinating. "But what happened to all the people? Did the Nuum destroy them in the invasion?"
"Oh, no," Balu shook his head. "These people were gone long before the Nuum. Maybe they died, maybe they left—maybe they became the Nuum. Who knows?"
"And the cities are just deserted? Nothing lives in them?"
"Oh, no," he repeated, with greater emphasis. "I never said that. There are still things living there—not people, of course, let alone apes, but plenty of Things."
I smiled, unable to miss the capitalization. "Well, of course something lives there," I said, backtracking to cover my apparent naiveté. "I don't doubt there are animals, and insects, and a lot of things I wouldn't care to meet—tiger spiders, for example."
"Son," he said with sudden seriousness, "even a tiger spider will back away from some of the things that live in those cities. Have you ever heard of the breen?"
To this day I vow that it could have been nothing less than racial memory that caused the chill that ran down my spine when he said that word—racial memory of the horror of a creature that had not even come to the light of Creation until millennia after I was born. It could not have happened, but it did. In answer to his question I could only shake my head.
Before he spoke again, he rose from the chair he loved so much, moving about the room to touch an object here and there. My apprehension grew; I had never known him to be reticent before about any part of his wanderings or the things he had seen—precisely the opposite. I normally had to preface my departures by at least an hour to allow him time to wind down.
"Nobody knows where they came from. They've only been around for about a couple hundred years, so the most popular theory is that the Nuum brought them. From what I've seen and heard, that's probably the best idea we're going to get.
"Breen stand just a little bigger than a man—about your size, in fact. They're covered with silvery short fur, walk on two legs, and carry claws on their fingers and toes that will cut through metal. They're fast and they're strong. But the most scary thing about them is their tenacity. You know how you never go after a rat in a
hole? Once it's trapped, it's ten times as dangerous because it's got nowhere to go and nothing to lose. Well, the breen are like that all the time. They never back down from a fight, never give up. They're like wolverines—except they're your size. If one ever sees you, you're a dead man. They'll eat anything that moves, and nothing that you can carry can stop them."
"Why would the Nuum bring such creatures to Earth? And why would they let them run free?"
Balu shrugged. "The Nuum aren't exactly talking. But the story goes, in the early days, they used them to flush out pockets of resistance. Sometimes rebels would take refuge in a building that the Nuum didn't just want to bomb out of existence. So they'd pull back, let a pack of breen in, and wait. Problem was getting the breen out again. Pretty soon they learned that they might as well have bombed the building in the first place, for all the good it was doing them. So eventually, they abandoned the project and worked around those areas."
"And there are still districts in these cities where no one lives because of the breen?"
Balu chuckled and poured more tea. "Oh, no. That's where the Nuum outsmarted themselves. Breen are nomadic; they run in packs from place to place, moving whenever they hunt up all the food in their area—which is often. Pretty soon they started coming out of the buildings on their own —hungry. But they were smart too; as soon as they'd fed, they'd run back home. Nuum started moving out real fast, and by the time they figured out what to do about it, they were afraid to bomb the buildings because they didn't have any way of knowing if they'd gotten all the breen. They ended up evacuating a bunch of cities and hoping the breen wouldn't migrate."
"And have they?"
"Apparently not. They were bred for climbing and killing things, not for long trips through empty land. The story goes that they still live there, in the cities, feeding off rats and birds and whatever idiots happen to walk through." He grinned and tapped himself on the chest. "Like me."
I made a properly impressed face. "Have you ever seen one?"
"Oh, yes," he nodded emphatically. "And smelled him. The only good thing about a breen is that you can smell him a mile away. Thank god, or I wouldn't be here."
As much as I wanted to hear more about his adventures, with a mind toward their impact on certain future plans of my own, I was doomed to eternal disappointment by the frantic knocking that suddenly rattled my host's front door!
As I was the nearer, Balu gestured to me to answer the frantic summons. "It's just Timash, anyway."
And so it was, with his chest heaving like a bellows from his exertions. As I have previously noted, the apes are not heralded for their endurance over distance, but even so I had not seen one so breathless since the day Timash and I met under decidedly extreme circumstances. So it was that I was quite curious to learn the origin of his excitement, an urge I had to quell while the poor boy got air back into his lungs.
"My mother—" was all he could get out. Balu was on his feet instantly.
"Has something happened to her?" I cried.
Timash shook his head, still gulping air. "No, she—thinks she's found something. She needs you home right away."
Behind me I could almost hear Balu relax. "If it's that important," he asked, "why didn't you just call?" All homes in Tahana City were equipped with extremely sophisticated telephone systems.
"I wanted to tell you in person," Timash said to me. "She thinks she's found a cure for your virus!"
My friend tried to explain to me what he knew on the way back to his house, but I rather rudely broke into a sprint that he could not hope to match and left him behind.
I found Dr. Chala in her laboratory, the Librarian at her side. The good doctor jumped when I dashed in, panting, my legs buckling from the unaccustomed exercise.
"What did that boy tell you? Where is he?" she demanded. "No, never mind. What did he tell you?"
Her cautious look calmed me faster than a bucket of water. The Librarian's ubiquitous expression of bemused observation imparted nothing.
"Timash almost broke down Balu's door to tell me that you had found a cure for the telepathic virus," I responded. "I'm afraid I left him behind."
"Oh," Dr. Chala moaned. She turned to the Librarian. "You were right," she said. "I never should have allowed him to be the one to carry the news. But he was so excited…"
"The Sixth Age philosopher Ochre said: 'Never is a deed badly done when its genesis is love,'" he replied.
"I'll bet Ochre never had any children."
"Oh, she did. Thirteen."
"Any boys?" Chala asked.
The Librarian frowned a moment. "No, all daughters."
"Figures."
I watched their by-play with bewilderment, and interrupted the Librarian before he could reply with his usual literality. "I thought you were programmed with geographical and cultural information I could use on my trip. Why are you suddenly spouting philosophy?"
"The main librarian noted that your natural education was heavily weighted toward literature. That includes studies in philosophy, religion, logic, and history. I was supplied with subprograms on all these subjects so that you would have someone to talk to."
I shook my head in awe. As much as I had been given to know about computers and artificial intelligences, the knowledge seemed still to be filtering into my awareness. It floated on the surface of my mind, attached to, and yet not part of, my consciousness.
Dr. Chala cleared her throat gently, followed by Timash's second breathless arrival in the space of half an hour. The twin events helped me to remember why I was here, and I gave the doctor all of my attention. Timash, after a single wordless glare from his mother, did the same.
"There is very little in my literature concerning telepathic viruses," she began, "since there are very few cases of them any more. In the very young and old, they kill quickly, and no one else has contracted a case—well, probably since before the Nuum came.
"What I discovered in talking to the Librarian, though, is that the Nuum themselves have had a little more reason to do research. Apparently one of the rare side effects of space travel is viral mutation, and every once in a while, what they call a 'telepathic carrier' is affected. When that happens, the virus can spread, with results that I wouldn't even wish on the Nuum."
"And they've discovered a cure?" I asked, trying to control my eagerness.
"No," she said flatly. "In fact, they haven't even stumbled upon the procedure we used on you, even though our Thoran doctors have known about using it for centuries. I guess it never occurred to them that our archives could be good for much?" She directed the last toward the Librarian.
"Not for medical matters, I'm afraid," he admitted. "A pity."
Dr. Chala allowed that to pass without comment. "In any event, by pooling our information—since the Librarian has learned a lot more from our governors than they have from us—I've come up with a theoretical vaccine. The problem has always been that the viruses are so small, they can't be invaded by most pathogenic agents. The agents are too big. We could slice off pieces with an electron scalpel, but the pieces wouldn't be sufficiently toxic to do the job. I asked the Librarian to scan my pharmaceutical database to see if there was anything on hand that could be combined with something Nuum to do the job, but he came up empty."
"Then Timash had an idea," the Librarian said. "He suggested we scan the biological databases to see if there was a naturally-occurring agent more virulent than what we could synthesize, and yet near enough to obtain a specimen."
"And we found something," Dr. Chala resumed. The shining pride in her eyes completely eclipsed any annoyance she had felt at Timash's earlier rash action. "It's natural, it's locally available, and there's little doubt that it is toxic enough to do the job, even in microscopic portions."
My excitement threatened to consume me, until it was abruptly overshadowed by a horrible fear that they were not telling me something —something that would negate all of their marvelous findings.
"So what is it? What
did you find?"
Before she could answer, an entirely new voice said from the doorway:
"Tiger spider venom."
21. The Revolution Begins
Balu walked into the room on the heels of his announcement confident that his niece would not contradict him, a faith in which he was rewarded. The astonishment in her eyes must have been ambrosia to the weary soul of a man so used to being shunted aside. Even the Librarian appeared impressed.
"I could have told you that without your computers." He waved his arm to indicate the world. "We've always known that there are things out there that have medicinal use. Even the Nuum have figured it out. Why do you think they built that base on the edge of the jungle in the first place? To keep an eye on us? No! I'll bet you my Picadorean compass they're doing biological research. That's why they don't just bomb the conservationists off the map. They want to study the plants down here."
Dr. Chala digested this news, turned to me. "You were with them. Did they say anything about why they were here?"
I shook my head. "No, we were brought in expressly to deal with the rebels—the conservationists. All they told us was that the 'blacks' couldn't handle the situation. I was a little confused—I didn't see any black men among the Nuum—but that would explain why we were given staffs and swords instead of guns. The ray weapons the Nuum use would burn up the entire jungle."
"When the Nuum talk about the 'blacks,' Keryl," Timash informed me, "they're talking about people with black hair. All the Nuum with you had red hair, right? The reds and the blacks don't get along."
"Black hair?" I repeated. "I thought they were talking about skin." My voice trailed off as I tried to re-order what I knew of this spacefaring people. In my own life I had had little to do with colored people, and never had any of them given me reason to dislike them, although I knew my opinion was in the minority. But to discriminate because of hair color—? Suddenly I felt the need to sit down somewhere and think for a very long time—a wish not to be granted for many days to come.
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