The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  "Of course," Dr. Chala was saying, "this is all theoretical, and unless you know how to catch a tiger spider, Uncle, it will most likely remain so. There's no way to synthesize the venom here in the lab. We have to have a specimen."

  "And the only time I've ever seen one," Timash chimed in, "we were too busy running to ask for a sample. 'Course, if Keryl hadn't smashed that first one, I wouldn't have been running anywhere."

  The room seemed to move in slow motion, with Dr. Chala and the Librarian and Uncle Balu all swiveling to stare at Timash, then at me, doubt and hope and wonder dawning in their expressions. Timash must have caught their thoughts, because he too turned to look at me until I shrank away from their concentrated attention.

  "Keryl," Balu said softly, "did you really smash a tiger spider?"

  "Yes…"

  "With what?" he asked with disarming gentleness, like a man removing the casing from an unexploded artillery shell.

  "My staff. It's in my… uh, Timash's room."

  Timash was the first to escape from ensuing scramble and disappeared into his room, emerging a moment later with my staff balanced gently in his big hands.

  "Don't touch the part where he smashed the spider!" his mother commanded, and he shook his head, scarcely breathing as he gently laid the staff on an examining bench. The doctor pulled on her gloves, approached the desk, then paused long enough to pull a second pair of gloves on over the first. Even at that, she used long tweezers to pick away bits of the vermin that still stuck there. The Librarian watched intently at her shoulder.

  "Good lord," I whispered to Balu. "Is it still dangerous? That staff has been standing in the corner in Timash's room for weeks."

  "Nobody knows," he whispered back. "She just doesn't want to take a chance."

  "I kept meaning to clean it up, but I never thought to need it again," I said, meaning the staff. "Now I'm glad I didn't."

  "You should be very glad, Keryl, and I'm glad Timash was taught better than to handle other people's possessions," Dr. Chala said tightly from where she bent over her task. She had added a surgical mask to her regimen, and as she spoke she carefully set down her tools and procured a pair of goggles. "These remains should have been contaminated with bacteria by now. They aren't. I've got a feeling they're still capable of killing anything that touches them." She set a control on a console on the examining desk and stepped back again. A faint glow surrounded the desk and the staff. "From now on, nobody touches this thing. And I'm going to need to decontaminate the whole house. I don't think any of us are in any danger, but I'll want to run some tests."

  The tests came back favorably, a great relief to me and especially to Timash, who had spent some hours describing to me the thoroughness with which his mother was wont to conduct her examinations. To me, his horror stories held no fright, compared to twentieth century medicine. I thought about regaling Timash with tales of battlefield first aid, but recanted the notion: Either he wouldn't believe me, or he wouldn't sleep for a week.

  Despite my determination that nothing short of a Hun battalion could keep me from being the first to hear the results of Dr. Chala's tests upon the venom residue itself, my illness, combined with the excitement, laid me low. I lay down on my bed in Timash's room, eyes shifting fearfully to the spot on the wall against which the tip of the staff had rested (now scrubbed so thoroughly the paint had all but disappeared) for a brief moment, and I knew nothing more for nearly eleven hours.

  As always, sleep refreshed me greatly, clearing the grey, hanging cobwebs from my mind, and I was warm and comfortable under the blanket someone had thoughtfully lain across me. Most days I had been wont to lie there for some time sifting through my dreams, but on this occasion I was up almost before my eyes were open. As quickly as I could arrange myself, I was searching the house for someone with news.

  Timash met me immediately, leaping out of his chair like a dog caught on his owner's bed. No need to ask him; through no choice of his own, he had stayed with me rather than accompany his mother to her laboratory. We ran out the door without a word.

  We would as well have walked.

  "It doesn't work." Dr. Chala's dismally bare pronouncement was given without artificial preamble or couched in false hopes. "The venom attacks the virus, but it only bruises the outer protein sheath. I thought it would be strong enough to break through, but I overestimated the size of the virus. To be passed along by mere thought—you cannot imagine how small it is. Lord only knows how the virus lives."

  "What about radiation?" Balu hadn't left the hospital since the virus was transferred. "Couldn't you use a focused stream of charged particles to breach the protein sheath? We know that nuclear radiation will destroy them."

  The doctor was tired, but not too weary to bite back her initial response. She simply shook her head.

  "It won't work. The virus is dispersed throughout his brain. We could never find them all, and even if we could, his brain would look like a honeycomb. It's got to be done biochemically, or not at all."

  As the education bestowed upon me by the Librarian was the first part of my mind to fade out when the virus wore me down, I had been following the technical implications of this discussion only vaguely. Even sleep was insufficient to bring my senses back to what they had been before I fell ill, and protein sheathes and nuclear radiation were fantasy in the world where I had grown up. But then, perhaps that is why Dr. Chala's words should trigger in my wandering thoughts an association that my more learned friends had overlooked.

  "Biochemical?" I uttered vaguely. "Isn't that what you said the Nuum were here for, Balu?"

  "Oh my god," Chala breathed. "Oh my god, he's right! The greatest biochemical library on the continent could be sitting not ten miles away…!" She swept me up in a hug that threatened to finish the job of killing me that the virus had begun. "Keryl, that's brilliant!"

  Amid the renewed celebration, it fell to Timash, with the clarity of youth, to ask the obvious question.

  "Um, Mother, how are you going to get in?"

  The sultry air of the jungle night and the soft susurrations of its insects were in my mind merely gentle invitations to danger whose sinister agenda was only slightly diminished by Timash and Balu's repeated insistence that tiger spiders were solely diurnal. They need not add, and I did not seek to know, that other creatures roamed in their place, creatures far more adapted to nighttime hunting than we were to evading them.

  I had never feared the dark more than any other adult; perhaps it was the telepathic virus's fogging of my mind that caused me to revert to childhood terrors. Whatever the reason, I credit my companions' unyielding vigilance, in bracing me between them as we threaded along barely-worn paths, with keeping me on track to our chosen goal. Without them, I would never have departed from Tahana City, and the most fantastic sights of my long journey—far stranger than any I had yet experienced—would have gone forever unwitnessed.

  The Library I carried in my pocket. We had found that the Librarian, when visually manifested, shone in the dark, and so he must await our destination before participating in our plan. I thought he had submitted to our arguments with a touch of pique.

  Having begun our trek while it was still light, we were now skirting the area Timash recognized as being controlled by the Nuum. Our goal lay partway around the circle of their influence. Along with Timash's knowledge of the terrain I relied upon his assurances that we could pass undetected.

  "You're sure they won't know we're there?" I had asked as he mapped out our route.

  "Absolutely." He spoke with the confidence of one who had not lived long enough to see how life could go wrong. "They can't use infra-red detectors because the jungle's too thick and too crowded. Even if the sensors were on, they couldn't distinguish us from a hundred other animals on their screens at the same time. The only things they can pick out for sure are the thunder lizards—and you don't need a night scope to know they're coming."

  "Thunder lizards?"

  Balu had shaken h
is head gravely. "Don't ask."

  Now, committed to sneaking through the monster-infested dark guarded by two jungle beasts, I thrust my nerves into a back cupboard of my mind and focused on what lay ahead, both literally and figuratively.

  The moon was thankfully just over half-full; any less and we could not have picked our way safely. As it was, I was constantly tripped up by low branches and depressions in the damp ground. Before and behind me, my guides' bare feet made little sound. Again and again hands reached out of the night to catch me before I could trip and break my neck. At last I learned to raise my feet more than was my wont and place them straight down when I stepped. It was uncomfortable, but I fell less often and made less noise. No sooner had I begun to master this new gait than we arrived.

  A nearby shadow detached itself from the bush and greeted us softly.

  "Timash," the man said. "You're lucky you weren't caught. Your friend makes more noise than a three-legged sloth in the dry season."

  Timash grasped the other's outstretched arm briefly. "You won't care when you hear what he's got to say." He turned to me. "In fact, I can't wait to hear it myself."

  "You don't know what his plan is?" There was suddenly an unmistakable tone of suspicion.

  "We thought it best he not know, in case something happened to him while he was setting up this meeting," I whispered. "We're just being careful, just as you were when you insisted we meet you out here in the middle of the jungle instead of at your headquarters."

  The dim figure straightened in indignation. "We have a good reason. We have to be careful if we're going to keep the Nuum off our backs."

  "Seems to me if you were a little less…careful," Balu interjected, "you wouldn't have to worry about the Nuum at all."

  "Who're you?” The guard turned an anxious gaze on Timash. “Who's he?"

  "This is Keryl Clee, and that's my Uncle Balu."

  "Oh," the stranger said with a knowing nod. "So this is the famous Uncle Balu. Timash talks a lot about you." Suddenly he held out a long strip of cloth toward me. "He's got to be blindfolded before he goes any further."

  "Oh for god's sake!" Balu exploded. "It's pitch dark!"

  "I don't want him memorizing the trail."

  "Memorizing—!" Balu sputtered. "He can hardly memorize his own name! He—oh, you tell him, Timash!"

  Timash leaned forward and muttered a few words into the man's ear. Once the fellow's head jerked up and I saw his eyes glinting in the moonlight as he looked at me.

  "Really?"

  Timash said something else, which apparently ended the dispute, because the guide abruptly turned and disappeared again as silently as the moonlight. My friend followed and Balu ushered me along in their wake. Stumbling again, I had to grin. A blindfold!

  I could have assured the conservationists, when we reached the low mass of darkness that revealed their headquarters, that a blindfold would not have contributed one iota to my inability to retrace my steps at some future date. I could have told them, but I did not. Not only did they not ask, but I felt secure in the supposition that their sense of humor was sadly underdeveloped.

  I was gladdened to note that the members of their council, as they referred to it, were older by some years than the man who had lead us here with such poor grace. It gave me some hope that my plan, untested and largely dependent upon faith, might be approved. As I stood in the soft light surveying the four unsmiling faces that awaited my hastily-rehearsed speech, I lowered my estimate of the odds against us from astronomical to merely huge.

  My initial introductions were met with polite nods and little else. Although Timash had been here on more than one occasion—to which was owed the genesis of my idea—any courtesies extended to him in the past plainly did not apply to me, or for that matter, to Balu. Even Timash seemed puzzled, so confused that he had apparently not yet realized that his own welcome had worn discernibly thin.

  The council consisted of one black woman, and three men whose complexions were the reddish tan I had seen on Bantos Han and most people I had met recently. The woman's aristocratic features and short hair made her an arresting figure, almost Egyptian. Something about the intensity of her gaze caused me to direct the bulk of my remarks to her.

  "Timash has already told you why we're here, and if you weren't interested, you would not have invited me to speak tonight. We want the same thing: To be rid of the Nuum. I can help you to do that."

  "And how do we know you're not one of them?" one of the male councilors asked.

  Balu retorted before I could. "Are we going to go through this all over again? Keryl's been a guest of ours for weeks. If he was going to turn anybody over to the Nuum, it would be us in Tahana City, not you living in the bushes!"

  The councilors were on their feet before I could act. It took Timash to restrain first his uncle and then the council—but then, when a bull gorilla demands the floor, you give it to him.

  "Look! Everybody shut up!" He pointed to Balu. "Uncle, control yourself! You taught me better manners. And you—" he fixed the council with a glare "—didn't need to drag us ten miles through the jungle just to pick a fight. You know I've been coming here a long time, and I would never betray you any more than you would me. We've pretty much left each other alone all this time, but now Keryl thinks it's time we changed—right, Keryl?"

  I nodded numbly. That was exactly what I thought—but I hadn't told Timash. Balu knew what I was about, but he and his mother and Tahana City's own rulers had judged it too sensitive and dangerous to entrust the information to a lad of Timash's years. Perhaps we had misjudged him…

  But now was the moment to speak. Timash had calmed the crowd, and bullied them into giving me at least a few seconds' grace, but that time was quickly draining away. Mentally I threw all of my logs onto the fire.

  "I know some things about the Nuum that you don't. Never mind how I know them. But I can tell you that they are fractured and disarrayed, and they are vulnerable. The troops they have sent here cannot handle the job they've been given; they're barely holding their own. Properly supplied and organized, we can take them. We can take back what is ours."

  The black woman leaned over the table. "Are you talking about actually driving them away? About taking over the research station for ourselves?"

  "Oh, no, madam," I replied. "I'm talking about a revolution."

  22. I Go Behind the Lines

  My bald statement seemed to stun them, set them back on their heels even more than Timash's bombast. In that moment of eerie silence, like the eye of a hurricane, I could feel with a rush along my skin the fate of our world teetering out over the edge of the abyss. I teetered with it, as a man who has stopped just short of the precipice does not know if the crumbling rocks will hold him for that timeless, priceless instant before he can regain his balance and save himself.

  Then the moment was gone and the voices crashed over me once more.

  Had I resisted, the power in that room would have swept me away. I only stood fast; before long they would see their words flooding over and past me without leaving a mark, and they would cease of their own accord. Then and only then would they be mine.

  It came as no surprise that the black woman emerged first from the din. She stopped in mid-sentence, abandoning her argument with the man next to her, and simply looked at me. She looked at me as though she had not seen me before, as though I had appeared in a puff of smoke, like Merlin. When I would have grinned fatuously at her, I restrained myself: I held Merlin captive in my pocket. I was becoming drunk with unaccustomed authority, and had she not waved her fellows on the council into order, I might have laughed in sheer delight. All that they had put me through to come here, and I held secrets far greater than they could imagine. Power is a dangerous thing, and arrogance is far worse. A few more moments of chaos and I might have destroyed everything.

  "You have our attention, that much is obvious," the councilwoman said dryly. She let her words hang on the air, an invitation.

  "If
I had your names, I might do more," I countered. To be truthful, I only wanted to know hers. Plainly the power behind the council's democratic facade, she fascinated me personally as well. As a colored woman, I could not bring myself to admit any attraction, but as a human being her force of personality was undeniable. In my own time, for a woman to exude such authority was unusual; in this downtrodden age of Man I thought it remarkable.

  She acknowledged my riposte with a nod of her head. "I am Shene. My fellow council members are Trell, Ribaud, and Jonn." We briefly nodded to each other in turn. They had not spoken directly to me since I entered the chamber, and seemed content to allow Shene to continue. I was equally content to address myself almost solely to her.

  I am unaccustomed to public speaking; my last experience was in giving orders, not in persuading unbelievers. I cast myself back in time (in my mind only, alas) to my university days and the unsmiling professors on whom I had bestowed my theses of Robin Hood and Arthur and the role of the women who loved them. I spread my hands in implied gratitude for my audience and assumed my most ingratiating smile.

  "Thank you, members of the council. Before we go forward, you have expressed questions as to my reasons for coming here. You have lived a long time under the heel of an oppressor. You have the right to ask.

  "Some of you know that I am ill. My doctor tells me I have contracted a virus, a virus that has no cure in Thoran medicine." It would be too time-consuming to explain how I contracted a telepathic virus, so I did not try. The crowd began to shrink away, but I stopped them with a wave of my hand. "It is not contagious. No one here is in the slightest danger. But my doctor believes the Nuum may have a cure. I need to get into their laboratories and find out."

  "Then what do you need us for?" Councilman Trell snapped. "Why don't you just go back to them?" He fell to muttering to himself. There was little doubt how he felt about my story, or about me.