"It's not finished, Keryl," Dr. Chala confided to me. "But we're being told that we have to evacuate. Even though we've cracked their communications codes, the Nuum will be sending in fresh personnel soon. I can finish the serum back in Tahana City."
"That's good. Timash told me this morning they've been ferrying computer equipment, supplies, weapons, and bio-sensors out of here for days. We've got to smash anything that can't be moved, then we'll leave the doors open and the jungle can take care of the rest."
She sighed. "I wish we could take Dr. Sinh back to the city with us. He's a zoological research scientist as well as a physician." She looked at me hopefully, even though she knew it wasn't my decision to make, and I told her so. But she had reminded me of an errand I needed to undertake, so I begged her pardon and sought out the doctor myself.
I found him in his quarters; since he was confined there when not working with Dr. Chala in the lab, not finding him would have been cause for great alarm. He looked up as though he had been expecting me, which I suppose he had.
He wore the face of a condemned man. "Is it time?"
I had to smile. "It's not that bad. Dr. Chala and the Librarian have assured me that you won't suffer any ill effects. And you'll hardly be conscious until you reach the village. Considering the roads around here, that's all to the good."
With a sigh he arose and extended a hand. "I guess I didn't believe it was really true until just now."
"I meant what I said. But I need to ask you a question," I confided as I accepted his grip. "Why was Harros in the brig?"
For a moment his eyes dropped away from mine, and he licked his lip as he formed his answer.
"I probably shouldn't say anything, but the truth is, I don't know. All I know is that you should watch him. We tend to give our soldiers a lot of rope. Whatever landed him in prison, it must have been serious."
"Thank you," I said, turning to leave.
"No," he replied. "Thank you. I owe you a debt. You saved my life."
"It's no more than you did for me."
"You're wrong. I did what I did because I'm a doctor. I had to do it. You didn't."
But he was in the wrong. War is about more than deciding who dies. It is also about deciding who lives.
24. I Take Companions
Once the groundwork had been laid, the finishing of the serum to cure my telepathic illness was quickly accomplished. Dr. Chala administered it, sent me to bed, and watched me for twenty-four hours. Before the end of that time, the fuzziness that had filled my brain for so long it seemed natural began to ebb, and the whispers of other minds floated around the fringes of my consciousness. It was as though cotton had been removed from my ears.
"I guess you're just meant to make history, Keryl," she told me the next day. "Your screens are almost normal. Congratulations. You are the first person in recorded history to survive an attack of a telepathic virus."
"I can't believe it's gone. It was almost as though I were growing used to it."
"Best you not think that way. According to your scans, it isn’t gone; there's still a residue, but it's so weak I don't think it will ever pose a threat. Your shields are strong enough to resist; it's almost as if you've built up an immunity."
It was the difference between a reprieve and a pardon. I would take it. I squeezed her as hard as I could, exchanging hearty grins with Timash and Balu, who stood nearby waiting for the results. I told Dr. Chala that she was to be congratulated as well.
"Hmm, well, me and the Librarian and Dr. Sinh. But since I'm the only one around, I guess I'll just take their bows too."
"So what are you going to do now, Keryl?" Balu asked. He said it quietly, as if reluctant to hear my answer.
"You've all been more than kind…" I began, but I needn't have tried to soften the blow. They knew my choice even as I did. "…but my heart is in Dure."
Timash began to shift his weight back and forth, eyes downcast. I smiled gently, thinking that he was trying to think of a way to say good-bye—which only showed that even after all this time, I knew next to nothing about him.
Balu cuffed his nephew gently. "You'd better get to it, boy. It's now or never."
"What?" Chala asked sharply—with a mother's instinct, I fear.
Timash stopped rocking and looked me straight in the eye. "Keryl," he said, not betraying his soul-shaking nervousness (as he confided later), "I'd like to go with you."
My first thought was that he would make quite a sight strolling through the West End. His mother was more to the point.
"It was bad enough that we had to put up with your uncle parading all over the world, son. I am not going to go through that again."
Naturally, those travels by his esteemed ancestor were exactly the spark that had lit Timash's fuse of adventure, so this argument fell short. But Dr. Chala experienced no shortage of impassioned arguments where her only offspring was concerned. She railed. She cried. She gave ultimatums. And she peeled Balu's skin off in strips, up one side and down the other, for giving her baby boy the idea that trekking across unexplored wastes chased by the Nuum and the breen and Lord-knows-what could take the place of a good education and a long life visiting his mother for supper every Sunday. Frankly, by the time she was finished cataloging the probable dangers found just between Tehana City and Dure, I was more than a bit willing to reconsider the entire venture myself.
"He's only known Keryl a few weeks, and they've already fought off the Nuum and almost been eaten by tiger spiders!" (She had a point.) "What's going to happen to them if they go off alone?"
In the end, though, she had no defense against the same age-old argument that Balu's father had probably used against his own mate, many years ago:
"Chala, he's grown. You can't stop him."
Which may have won the argument, but I doubt to this day that she has ever forgiven him for saying it. Unfortunately, Balu had not the answers to all of my problems.
The conservationists had accepted the two Nuum as their temporary responsibility with poor grace, but they were in my debt and I was forced to hold them to it. I could not and would not bring them to Tehana City; I myself had only been accepted there under extraordinary circumstances, and to attempt to secure similar courtesies for Harros would have been an abuse of hospitality.
But they had been no happier with the arrangement than they keepers; Harros, especially, as he had already been imprisoned once, albeit by the Nuum. He were cared for by the conservationists, and if the conservationists treated them with less than the greatest respect, they could ask for no more.
Days later, they were a little the worse for wear, but they did not seem to have suffered any permanent damage. I forbore to make an issue of it.
"Get up," I said. "We're going." Neither needed a second invitation.
The Nuum guard, whose name I had never inquired after nor cared to know, accepted our plan to return him to civilization with all the grace that was to be expected, once Dr. Sinh had assured him we were telling the truth about the drugs to be administered. Harros did not.
“I need to speak to you privately,” he said in an urgent undertone, and more out of curiosity than necessity I acquiesced.
“I don’t want to go back with them.”
Inwardly I groaned. Little enough of this episode had pleased me, albeit I had emerged much the richer for it, but now that it was almost over I had begun to breathe a sigh of relief. Almost over, I reminded myself now, but not quite.
“You have no choice. You can’t stay here.”
“Why can’t I go with you?”
Were I a more nimble-witted man, I would simply have averred that I was going nowhere, that I was remaining with the conservationists, and thus put an immediate end to his request and this ridiculous conversation. But then, a thoughtful man would not have ended up in my place at all.
“Because I’m not going back to Vardan. I have other business.”
Harros looked off into the distance for a moment. “All right,” h
e said. “You should take me with you because we have something in common.” I arched my eyebrows at him, expecting him to launch into a tirade against the Nuum and their oppression of the Thorans, but he surprised me. “I’m a ghost, too.”
I blinked, but before I could deny knowledge of this topic, he went on. “You can ask the doctor to check the ‘sphere. He’ll tell you I’m not lying. But if I go back with the others, the first thing the authorities will do is check my records—and I don’t have any.”
I asked Harros why he was not present in the datasphere; he replied he had not asked me my business, and I was forced to let it lie. Nor would he divulge how he knew I was not listed there either.
He was not pleased to find that Timash was also included in our party, but to his credit, Harros kept his feelings to himself, nor did he query me as regarded my plans, despite the fact that they now perforce included him. I was not, under the present circumstances, planning to divulge to him my own destination or my origin: He was still a Nuum, and might buy his way back into their good graces with my scalp. On the other hand, we were bound together at least until we reached some spot of civilization where he might be released with some chance to remain anonymous. After that, his fugitive life was his own. I explained that to him the first night as we made camp, parking our stolen Nuum groundcar beneath a spreading forest giant.
He had gathered wood for a fire, almost apologetically eager to pull his weight.
"I wouldn't mind sticking with you for a while. The Nuum have a long reach and a longer memory."
We had passed out of the jungle an hour ago. I stared out at the endless grasses of the great plain for a long time, more to keep Harros off-guard than to formulate my answer, which I already knew. The sun-painted sky glowed a deep vermilion more intense than the sunsets I remembered. The Library had told me the atmosphere had changed in almost a million years; it scattered light in a different way. It was very beautiful.
"Timash and I have a lot to see. We'll make sure you're all right before we leave you anywhere."
That was the plan.
* * *
I am not by natural inclination a talkative man, which served me well on the long days that followed, one from another onto the horizon. Timash was not happy that I had allowed another to join us, and a Nuum at that. I could hardly blame him for his taciturnity under the circumstances. Harros tried to bridge the gap, but he was rebuffed with silence. To have taken sides would have been divisive, so I kept my counsel. Either they would learn to get along, or not, and in any event we were not planning to remain a trio for long.
At first we had hoped to appropriate a Nuum flyer that could have covered the distance to distant Dure in a day—even if we detoured long enough to drop Harros in another town. This idea was stillborn: The flyer was available, but none of us could pilot the thing. Such practical but exotic information was outside the Librarian's programming and unavailable from the research station's database.
Ground transportation was our other option, offering more choices and controls that any one of us could have mastered with ease. One of our first tasks was removing as many identifying marks as possible.
I call it a groundcar, because that was how Harros referred to it, but in fact it was a marvelous invention that traveled through the air—albeit only two feet off the ground. In the trees, we had actually used retractable treads, but in the open we glided along with no more noise than a strong breeze. The controls were in the front; behind was a space somewhat larger than a Conestoga wagon, in which the three of us could sleep, if somewhat uncomfortably.
Ironically, and yet fortunately, the low vibration of the groundcar had an unaccountable and almost irresistible somnolent effect upon Timash. Try as he might, and fascinated by each passing mile as he might be, within a couple of hours of setting forth for the day he was dozing in his chair. (And perhaps each passing mile became less fascinating when it resembled nothing so much as the hundred miles behind and all those visible ahead.) Throughout the day he would doze fitfully, waking at unpredictable intervals and falling asleep again. The poor youth was highly embarrassed, but nearly helpless to resist. As penance, he took the night watches, leaving Harros and me with the sleeping space. (We had decided it was too dangerous to move at night; the catalog of nocturnal beasts was too long and too hideous to be repeated here.) At the time I thought this quirk of lower primate biology convenient and not a little humorous; had I only known then how much depended upon it!
In all of my civilized life I had never traversed such wilderness. Although the groundcar carried us several dozen miles each day (any faster and it blew up so much dust as to be undriveable), at dawn on the fourth day we still had seen no evidence of human habitation other than a few stray abandoned dwellings. Built around ancient watering places, these had all fallen victim to weather and wandering animals, crumbling until in truth I could not say for certain that the builders had been human after all. In this world of wonders, I was slowly learning to put my preconceptions behind me.
Thanks to the Nuums' unintentional generosity, we did not lack for supplies, although their rations looked and tasted as though they might have come straight from my own time. Again I was struck by how little the passage of nearly a million years had changed the basic materials and devices with which Man sought to better his place in the universe. Unconscious of the irony, my companions nonetheless swiftly grew as tired of our unvarying fare as I, and desired greatly to sample the wild game we passed on our way. These animals showed little fear of us, and supplementing our diet would have proven simple had not the conservationists forbidden our taking any of the ray weapons with us. Limited as we were to a couple of Nuum staffs, the beasts had little reason to run.
Little reason to run from us, at any rate.
Harros was poring over the computerized charts while I steered our course; Timash was enjoying one of his frequent naps.
"We should be coming up on an old river delta very soon. If we follow the river south, we may find a town."
I nodded. "The land seems to drop away just ahead." I snuck a peek at what Harros was viewing. "Looks like an old sea bottom gone dry."
We reached the lip of the basin a few minutes later, and I slowed to a crawl. As I inched out into thin air, the soft earth gave way and we tilted forward at a dangerous angle. Harros and I were thrown into the controls, and the sleeping Timash tipped out of his chair, crashing heavily into my own. We slid forward several yards onto level ground again before the car could brake itself. A muffled whine came from below us that had not been there before.
Throwing the gears into neutral, I turned to see if Timash was all right, but one look was enough to tell me it was best not to ask. He was levering himself off the floor using the back of my chair, which groaned alarmingly, his teeth bared in anger.
"If that was somebody's idea of a joke, it wasn't funny."
I exchanged glances with Harros and spoke very carefully.
"It wasn't on purpose; we were going down a hill and something gave way. And I think something may be wrong with the car."
Harros seized the opportunity to volunteer to go outside, inching his way past Timash. I followed his example, and Timash, once he had calmed down, followed me.
The car had settled down onto the ground—mud really, from the embankment all the way across to a line of trees some yards before us. A river or stream, then, and one that had recently flooded. Water seeped up between the car and the mud.
"It looks like mud has gotten caught up in the fans underneath the car," Harros said.
"What do we do?" Timash asked him. There were few motorized vehicles where he came from. I was in no better position. Harros sighed.
"I'm no mechanic, but it seems to me the best thing to do is float the car and let it dry out. But I don't think we want to try to drive over this mud until the fans are clear; we'll just muck everything up worse."
Unable to offer a more sensible suggestion, Timash and I agreed. Harros clambered bac
k into the car to start the engines again, explaining that the process might take some little time, so perhaps we would be more comfortable outside. Given my gorilla friend's recent burst of temper, I made no argument. We stepped away from the car as it geared up.
Laboring with a noise I had not heard before, the car rose to half my height, spitting out such quantities of mud from its underside that we had to retreat hurriedly, lest we be covered with sludge. Harros experimented with moving forward, but quickly gave it up as a lost cause. Waving to us, he sat back to wait.
We headed for the distant line of trees, by virtue of there being nothing else of even remote interest upon the horizon. Looking back, boredom would have been a welcome alternative…
The trees were set in a line too straight to have been natural, almost as though they had been intended as a windbreak. They had been there a long time; they towered above us and their boles were crowded about with lesser shrubs and piled brush, but through it all I thought I saw a glint of faraway metal. I moved faster, urging Timash along. Breasting the bushes, I saw much more clearly.
Across a narrow river sat a settlement, grayish metal walls surrounding squat buildings, some surmounted with flat-topped towers. Sunlight glanced off odd points on the walls, as if they had once been bright and shining, but now only bits of the original coating remained. My heart sank with the fear that this was nothing more than one of the many ruined cities of the south, then rose again with apprehension at what such a city might hold. In this new world, flyers more hostile than bats inhabited the high towers, and crawlers more deadly than spiders wove their cobwebs in the cellars of the long-deserted.
Timash, naturally, was all for going exploring.
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