The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  These were not the same animals with whom we had lived the past several days. In the last moment before my hopes were dashed and terror descended upon us, I stole a look at the grandstand, and there I saw men clustered about a gray metal contraption of patchwork tubes and circuits. It could only be their emotion machine, not pointed at us, but at the breen, and I knew then that the Vulsteen had lied. It took more than a return to their wild environment to turn these creatures into killers—the Vulsteen left nothing to chance.

  My newfound knowledge, however, gave no comfort when the first of the breen saw us, and giving a high-pitched cry, hurled himself across the arena!

  Naturally, my first thought was to run headlong to meet him.

  30. I Conceive a Plan

  For all that my rush implied a desire for swift suicide, the Bard himself would have approved the method to my madness. In the instant after the breen had charged and before I dashed ahead to meet him, I had caught Marella's eye, and an instant understanding passed between us. As I ran, so did she, flanking the breen. Separated from its pack, under assault from two directions at once, the poor beast's head whipped back and forth as it tried to decide how to deal with this unprecedented problem: other creatures ran away from breen, not at them.

  By the time it faltered in its charge and turned on Marella, I was close behind. Clumsy in the sand, it swiped at her with its claws and missed; I did not. My sword entered its body below the shoulder and plunged straight into its heart.

  I pulled the sword free even before my victim hit the sand, dead, and I backpedaled furiously. The wondrous material of which the Nuum made their weapons allowed for no sticking in the body; it slid in and out as if the target were water. Blood itself hardly clung.

  The remaining breen stood bewildered in their tracks. As Marella and I retreated, Harros moved to join us. I could hear Timash cheering us on in the background.

  The breen suddenly surged forward—and halted again. Even the subsonic buzz of Vulsteen telepathic "shouting" stopped. Some subtle but palpable alteration tugged at the edge of my consciousness, like a background noise suddenly silenced. I whirled, turning my back on the most dangerous creatures in the world, and saw my thoughts confirmed: Where before the Vulsteen technicians had surrounded their device, now they swarmed over it like ants. The undercurrent that had signified the operating of their machinery was gone.

  I fell to my knees as though exhausted, dropping my chin in an attitude of despair. Whatever the cause of the instrument's failure, its creators must not suspect that I had divined even a part of the truth. Let them think that I believed in heavenly deliverance, but if they were unable to remedy the problem, we would live to fight another day—unless they simply decided to execute us.

  And then the hand of inspiration reached out and touched my pitiful brow. Throwing my arms out, I pitched full-length onto the sand. It was as dismally histrionic a performance as was ever hissed off the London stage, but I gambled that these passionless monsters would lack the experience to see through me. Against the sand, the whip-like sword was nearly invisible to me, let alone any watchers in the gallery. One-handed, I retracted the blade.

  "Come help me," I muttered to my friends, and when they moved in close I threw a handful of sand in Harros' face. As he clawed at his eyes, I staggered to my feet, palming my club and sliding it down my sleeve.

  Open-mouthed with shock, Marella nonetheless followed me back to the cage where Timash waited. My heart was thumping wildly; if the breen were to rouse themselves now, Harros would die blinded and alone. But (so my reasoning went) if the breen came alive again, we were all dead in any event.

  "What did you do that for?" Marella demanded as we reached the wall. "What's going on?"

  By this time Harros had cleared his vision and was stumbling in our direction. I needed no telepathy to see that if the Vulsteen had gotten their connivance operating at that moment, they could have picked up from him alone enough emotion to power their society for a year.

  Harros came to a stop a few feet in front of me, blinking angrily, club hefted but held in abeyance out of respect for the sword I had carried. He had had no time to note its apparent disappearance.

  "It was a trick," I hissed before he could speak. "I had to distract them." I dared say no more for fear of being overheard, and the many eyes still upon us prevented my showing my prize, but he must have read the truth on my face, because he dropped the club and net. Marella dropped her sword as well, and with their voluntary disarmament the bars rose behind us. It took a great deal of composure not to shout out loud. Safe!

  For now.

  A Vulsteen was awaiting us; whether it was the same as before or another I could not tell, since their gaunt features and monotone skin gave little individuality to any of them. Even the voice was the same.

  "You." He meant me. "You did not leave your weapon outside?"

  "I dropped it on the field. Didn't you see me?" Thousands of years of telepathic communication and generations of suppressed humanity had erased any facility the Vulsteen possessed for lying, or for perceiving it in others. He lowered the outside bars again and left us there.

  "Boy," Timash marvelled when we were alone. "I don't know what you guys did, but it sure made them crazy!"

  "What do you mean?" Marella asked.

  "Well, I was up against the bars, trying to bend one or something, and they must have been right above me because I could hear them talking the whole time." He snorted. "Not that they were whispering. They're a pretty rude bunch."

  In telepathic communication, as I had learned early on, your "voice" can carry much further than in mere speech—and through walls, to boot. Evidently the Vulsteen had tossed the baby of manners out with the bath water of emotion.

  "All of a sudden," he went on, "they really started yelling and carrying on and like that! Something about how the meter was only showing a third as much input as they expected, and it wasn't balancing the output, and all kinds of other technical garbage that I couldn't make heads or tails of, and somebody said something about throwing the switch and the next thing you know the breen are all standing around like statues and the whole place got real quiet. For a minute I could hear them up above…it sounded like they were working on some kind of computer or controls for something…and they didn't sound happy. Then they stopped and you guys came back."

  I nodded, comparing what Timash had told us with what I myself had seen. Something had gone wrong with the Vulsteen's plans; their infernal emotion-sapping machine had not functioned as planned, and I suspected I knew why. From what the first Vulsteen said, it had been calibrated for Nuum emotions, Nuum minds. My variant brain chemistry had proven resistant in the same way it proved resistant to certain forms of telepathy. I chuckled dryly to myself. Let them try to figure out what had gone wrong! They'd be at it for a million years…

  Harros stared at me, eyes narrowed. "What's so funny?"

  "Just wait," I assured my companions mysteriously. "It's all going according to plan."

  For the subterranean dwellers of a dead city, there is no night or day, and for the emotionally parched Vulsteen there was no sense of increased tension or alarm following our visit to the arena, so awaiting a propitious moment at which to begin our escape would have been an exercise in procrastination. We were hustled back to the pit soon enough, when someone could be bothered to remember us. Once there I sought out Uncle Sam without delay. I found him at the funeral.

  The breen were gathered at the spot where their dead friend had lived, crowding quietly into that little space while some spoke softly in turns. I came upon them suddenly, unaware of their intent. When I realized what was going on, I backed away and listened from a distance—I was, after all, the deceased's killer.

  If I had foreseen ill will, I was correct, but it was not aimed toward me. Rather the Vulsteen took the blame for the death, and in the breens' words I heard an echo of my earlier sentiments: that these our slavers were cowards, living through the deaths of o
thers the lives that they could no longer feel for themselves. I heard the words of these man-made predators, and looking at their claws and teeth I wondered if my plan was so very clever after all. My sympathies were hardly with the Vulsteen—I have always despised those who force their will upon others—but with Timash, and Marella and Harros: If I unleashed this force of nature and used it to topple our captors, would we be pulled down as well?

  The ceremony was short, befitting a people who had never been meant to know humanity, let alone been allowed to experience it freely. When it was over, I went to Uncle Sam and told him what I had planned: Several breen would form a pyramid against the wall of the pit. The others could climb over them out of the pit. There were no guards; I was astonished that no one had thought of it before.

  He turned me down.

  "It will not work," he mumbled, turning away from me. I looked to the others around him for help, but none would meet my gaze.

  "There's nothing above for us," one said morosely. "At least here we are alive."

  "And as far as they were concerned, that was the end of it."

  "They weren't even willing to try?" Timash's youthful world view could conceive of no more bewildering possibility.

  "Maybe we could do it ourselves?" Harros suggested. "The walls are about twenty feet high; between the four of us we could get that high."

  "I don't know." I hesitated. "None of us has ever done this before, and if we don't get it right the first time, somebody could get hurt."

  "Hurt?" Harros echoed. "As opposed to what?"

  His point was well taken. "All right. Timash, you're on the bottom, then Harros, then me. Marella, how are you at climbing?"

  "Terrible." Marella had listened intently throughout, but now she slumped down and turned her face to the wall. "Uncle Sam's right. It'll never work." She picked at the dirt with her finger. "And even if we get to the top and get out of here, the bloodbats'll be on us before we get two blocks—if the thunder lizards don't eat us first."

  A chill ran through me. In prison, despair passes from person to person like a disease: If it could infect Marella, how long did the rest of us have?

  I took her face in my hands as I would a child. She did not resist my touch.

  "Marella," I said. "Remember how we found you. You were alone, fighting for your life in a room full of Vulsteen. You weren't afraid, you were angry. What has changed? This is our chance! You aren't alone any more."

  There was no response, not even an angry shrug or a declaration of her right to be left alone. My words washed over her and fell away like waves from a rock.

  "Let me try," Harros suggested. "We've been—spending a lot of time together." He hunched down next to the girl, speaking in whispers. After several moments he stood again with a deep sigh. "That's not the same woman we met a few days ago," he stated with certainty. "That's not even the same woman who went into the arena with us."

  "What do you mean?" Timash demanded.

  "He means the Vulsteen have been using their ray on us," I guessed.

  Harros nodded. "That's why the breen have never tried to break out before. It's on all the time. It keeps them in line, except when they're in the arena. Then the effects are reversed for the show."

  "So why aren't we affected?"

  "Marella is a woman," I pointed out. "Their emotions are more easily manipulated than ours."

  Harros stared at me. "What century are you from? But the question is, can we get out of here without her help? If we can find a rope, we could come back and rescue her whether she likes it or not."

  "That's not good enough," I said. "We can't leave the breen here to be enslaved—and the next poor devil who wanders in here will be thrown to the same fate."

  Harros stared at me in astonishment. "We're not even out of the pit and you want to overthrow the Vulsteen and free the slaves? Let's get ourselves free and get out of here."

  My face was getting hot and I was on the verge of doing something which might have jeopardized all our chances for freedom when Timash placed a leathery hand on my shoulder.

  "I've got a solution. It's going to take all of us to climb out of the pit. After that, each man is on his own. I'm sticking with Keryl. If you want to take Marella out and try to fight your way past the thunder lizards alone, be my guest. But if we can help the breen, then I'm willing to bet they'll help us. And if it doesn't work, we're no worse off than we are right now."

  There is something about a reasonable compromise, which, when suggested by a full-grown gorilla, is well-nigh irresistible.

  As our escape was problematical if we could not first leave the pit, we resolved to find out just how difficult that would prove. To this end, Timash stationed himself next to the wall. With our help, Harros hoisted himself onto Timash's broad shoulders. That part was easily enough accomplished, but the next was not.

  We soon discovered that climbing a ladder composed entirely of other men is even less simple than anticipated. Merely gaining Timash's shoulders required a helping hand, and once there I had precious little to hold onto, never mind finding placement for my feet: Timash made no secret of his preference that I not use his head for a stepping stone. After I shed my boots and tried climbing in my bare feet (at his suggestion), I found purchase more readily, but had we not chosen a spot in the marshy, debris-cluttered end of the pit for our trials, they would have ended far sooner with much less happy results. Timash might have been the one holding up the weight, but it was I who took the tumbles.

  Finally Harros suggested that Timash stand a bit away from the wall, allowing the two of them to lean in, partly resting their weight on the wall and giving me a more gradual climb. What we lost in height we gained in stability, and it was not long before I was relatively steady atop Harros' shoulders.

  I was also a good three feet short of the top.

  I reported my situation, and heard Timash groan.

  "Come down then. You guys are gonna break me."

  I started to obey, glancing down to check my landing, when something caught my eye. Just about waist level there was a crack in the wall. Crouching, I bade my companions hold on a bit longer.

  "If I can get my baton in there, I can use it as a step. From there I should be able to reach the top." It was slow going, every moment stretched by the knowledge of what Harros and Timash were going through, holding me up. The blunt end of the rod made a poor pick, so I extended the sword. It was even more clumsy, but at least it boasted a point.

  "Can we stop for a while?" Timash pleaded. "You guys are crushing me."

  "Almost there," I hissed, and I was not lying. Digging frantically I cleared a narrow space that I thought would serve. Retracting the sword I jabbed the baton home, holding on with both hands while I tested its hold.

  That hold was all that saved me when my living ladder suddenly vanished and I found myself dangling fifteen feet above the floor!

  31. Battle in the Control Room

  I sensed more than heard the Vulsteen stop short of the edge of the pit only inches above my head. The strain of sudden weight tore at my shoulders, but I bit back my hiss at the burning pain and concentrated on keeping my body pressed against the wall. If he saw me, there would be nothing I could do to prevent his summoning aid and confiscating my baton by force. His foot scraped the ground as he stepped closer.

  Suddenly he cried out and backed away. I couldn't see what had startled him; I could only presume he had spied me hanging there and was calling for help—but after his initial outcry, nothing. After a few moments, I felt Harros rising up beneath me, his shoulders finding their way under my feet and relieving the awful strain.

  "What happened?"

  "He was about to see you. Timash threw a handful of garbage in his face."

  "And it was sticky garbage, too," floated up a comment from far below. Timash sounded a bit put out by the sacrifices demanded by his own quick-thinking action. I had a feeling that I had not heard the last of this.

  Taking the path of Is
aac Newton, I was able to reach the lip of the pit by standing on the shoulders of giants (and my baton). I stretched out on the edge and reached down for it. Harros was trying to hoist himself up to use it as I had.

  "It won't work," I warned him urgently. "There's nothing else for you to hang on to."

  "I can do it," he panted. "I know I can."

  "It won't work," I repeated. "Timash might do it, but you can't lift him. Give it to me—that Vulsteen might return at any moment!"

  "Give him the baton!" Timash growled, and caught between a rock and a hard place, Harros pulled the baton out of the wall and stretched until it touched my outstretched fingers. I grasped it and climbed to my feet.

  The corridor was deserted for the moment; as soon as I was far enough from the pit I reached into my pocket and withdrew the Library.

  "It is good to see you again, sir," the Librarian said as he materialized beside me.

  "You, too," I answered, and as I said it I realized it was more than simply an automatic response. The Librarian had been programmed to resemble men I had known, and I could not help but like him.

  "You realize, of course, that if you deactivate the emotional sequencer, the breen may revert back to their natural state. In that case, Timash, Harros, and Marella will have no chance."

  "I know. But if they were going to revert without help, the Vulsteen wouldn't have wasted the energy preparing them to fight in the arena."

  The Librarian nodded. "Still, they are a fractious species, and the wrong word could set them off. Even if you are correct, it would be a mistake to leave the others in a confined space with them for long."

  "Exactly. So—do you know where the control room is for the machine in the slave pit?"

  "No, I do not. But I noticed when they brought you back from the arena, they used a different route than when they took you there. And each time the path was unnecessarily torturous. I have extrapolated a more direct route that lies between the two you took. It may be that only one control room directs both the arena and the slave pit emotion projectors…"