The Invisible City

by Brian K. Lowe

  "And we can't set down in a town for the same reason. But we can't let them all out while we're airborne. They'd overrun the ship. Half of them would probably fall overboard—or jump. Even if we got the force fields back up the deck would be jammed full before half of them made it up here."

  "Wait a minute," I said suddenly. "What if we could find a city where the Nuum wouldn't bother us? We could set down without being seen—at least as long as no one flew right overhead…"

  Skull gave me a disbelieving look. "And where would this mythical city, with no Nuum and people who would allow us to set this bunch down there?"

  I told him; he said I was crazy.

  Crazy or not, I was the captain. We set sail immediately.

  The former city of the Vulsteen looked peaceful from the air. The avenues were remarkably free of debris; the buildings that had collapsed seemed to have fallen in on themselves in an admirably tidy fashion, and whatever means the original inhabitants had used to discourage weeds and plant pests had long outlived them. Or perhaps the Vulsteen themselves had appropriated all the loose building materials years ago, and some voracious herbivore kept the streets clean with its early morning feedings. Whatever the case, our two ships sailed loftily and majestically over a scene of such tranquility that even Skull, speaking to me from the control cabin of the Eyrie, allowed that I might have been right after all in choosing this refuge for the beaten and mistreated former rowers.

  And then our shadow crossed the path of a napping thunder lizard and his roar awoke every creature within miles.

  I fancied I could smell its breath from even this height. At my direction, the pilot zoomed in on the beast until we appeared to be but a hundred feet away—near enough for my taste, even in this indirect form.

  "You have to admire it," Maire admitted. "For what it is, it's magnificent."

  "Oh, it's beautiful, all right." The irony in Skull's voice was not lost in the inter-ship communication loop. "And I'm sure it'll return the compliment—right before it eats us."

  "Relax." I had to laugh. We were already drifting out of its sight, and with a final ineffectual snarl it turned away from the two flying irritants in search of something it could catch. "We're going to set down on the other side of town—miles from here. We killed the one that lived there, and there can't be too many—they're too big. So relax."

  "Relax, he says…" Skull's voice disappeared as I waved the connection closed. Maire had covered her mouth as she tried not to laugh out loud at Skull’s irritation, but her giggles were getting the better of her. Evidently she found my leadership methods amusing.

  Although our words were flippant, we spent the better part of a day and a night floating above our intended landing spot, monitoring for life. During the day the streets remained empty but for small, scurrying animals. Daytime had been the haunt of the thunder lizard, and though we saw none, old habits die hard. Beyond the wall and across the river I could see the carcass of the thunder lizard that had pursued us and smashed the groundcar. Its bones had been stripped clean, and broken for their marrow.

  On a whim I borrowed the monitoring apparatus long enough for a close-up. The bones seemed to be flowing back and forth with a rhythmic, liquid motion. On closer inspection, they were covered with millions of tiny, white scavengers, methodically moving back and forth, scouring even the bones clean. Surreptitiously exposing the Library to the view, I asked what they were, but he didn't know. I was suddenly glad that my duties had kept me from making a personal inspection.

  Nighttime was a different story. While we sat fascinated, the drama of life and death unfolded in the dim light of infra-red. Even with computer enhancement, the scenes retained a spooky dimness. Swarms of bats with three-foot wingspans soared gracefully from ancient towers, inverted V-shapes like hideous geese swooping over and around the lower buildings in perfect formation—until one flock blundered into the path of another. Instantly all was chaos, winged devils diving and pouncing on each other like rival packs of sharks. In less than a minute, one flock limped away. The other lay dead on the ground.

  But they lay not peacefully. Smaller shapes were soon skittering among the fallen, feeding on the dead and near-dead. Even between the scavengers there was competition, and battle, and some of the scavengers quickly became the scavenged.

  "I think we were wise to stay inside at night," I noted to Maire, but she wasn't paying attention.

  "Look!" she pointed, her finger penetrating the holographic cube itself. The technician quickly hid his annoyed expression. But we both followed her lead.

  Peeking out of a doorway was a humanoid head. Even in this light we could see its silvery fur glint. It scampered into the street and another followed.

  "Breen," I agreed. I turned to the technician. "Mark that spot. That's where we want to go."

  I stood before the entrance to what we had firmly established as a breen burrow, bolstered both by the word of Uncle Sam that: "The breen have long memories," and even more so, I admit, by the assurances Maire had given me that not only could the Lady's fire computers stop even a charging breen with one shot, they could also differentiate between hostile and merely cautious movements. I needed the breen not simply to refrain from attacking me, but also to trust me. The memory of the poor, emotionally-scourged soul I had been forced to kill on the arena stage still twinged painfully when I touched it.

  No one accompanied me; I was on this fool's errand all by myself. I shouted a halloo toward the building, squat and dusty, its windows gone. It would be surprising if the breen did not already know I was there, but the trick was going to be letting them know who I was. Far above I could feel the eyes of my crew, and the rest of them, jostling for a look at the monitor cubes or craning as far out over the railings as the force fields would allow. Their breath would be fast and shallow, their hearts beating heavily against their chests… they might as well have been here with me.

  But they were spared the breen-scent that clung to the walls and the bushes and the very ground all about me. I knew it would stick to my boots when I went back—and when its pungency rose suddenly like a musical crescendo, I knew they were here.

  They stood back in the darkness, not from fear, but from having lived their lives underground. Normal breen were not nocturnal, so I was fairly certain I had met the right clan. If I had not, I would soon be meeting my Maker instead.

  "Come in." Sweat trickled down my back. Mangled by bestial mouths, most breen speech was garbled at best, and telepathy among them appeared rudimentary. I strode forward and hoped I had not mistaken "Oh, look, breakfast," for an invitation.

  I could almost hear the screech when Maire realized what I was doing.

  My vision disappeared completely the moment I walked through the door. I could not see a thing. The scent remained the same, my nose having given it all the credence it was warranted. One clawed hand gently—so gently!—encircled my upper arm and I was lead away.

  "All the same, I thought Maire was going to jump ship and go after you when you went inside."

  "What was I supposed to do, Timash? I wanted them—I needed them to trust me, and I needed to know that the men would be safe with them. If they killed me, at least you'd have known not to bring down the rowers."

  "If they had killed you, we would have turned around and left your bones rotting in the sun!" Maire slammed the cabin door behind her. One look at Timash and he beat a hasty retreat. I raised my eyebrows at her and took another sip of my beer with a sigh. Man had lived a million years, but he could never get tired of beer.

  "And what's that to you? I thought you wanted your ship back."

  Now it was her turn to raise eyebrows. "What? You think Skull would just hand it back to me? 'All's forgiven, dear. Forgotten all about that slave-rower nonsense. See you around?'"

  I nodded in beery satisfaction. "So you need me. And judging from that reaction a minute ago, maybe you even like me a little?"

  "Let's stick to 'need' for the moment." She stuck out a
hand. "And speaking of needing…"

  With no little surprise I passed over the mug. At least I did not have to worry about her taking too much; the mug simply made more, until I told it to stop. And it kept the beer cold. Lord, I prayed, if you could just let me go back home with this one little thing, I could stop all wars forever. Amen.

  She gave it back, licking foam from her upper lip. "It tastes like you."

  I stopped short of another sip; thank goodness she hadn't waited another second to say that, or I would have choked on it and made the whole argument moot.

  I thought of the other day right there in that cabin, when I had kissed her.

  I couldn't help myself. "You should know."

  Maire leaned forward, a wicked smile playing at the corners of her mouth. Shadows gathered at the opening of her blouse.

  "If you ever try something like that again, you'll wish the breen hadn't given you back."

  With God as my witness, I could not help myself.

  45. I Become a Ghost

  To my knowledge, it was the first and only time Maire ever lied to me: Kissing her did not make me wish the breen had filleted me for lunch. It was, in fact, an uncommonly good kiss, for all that my experience in such matters was limited. Still, it is a uniquely subjective judgment in any case.

  Only afterward did I feel horrible.

  "Great," Maire murmured. "Now I really am the captain's woman." She opened her eyes. "What's the matter?" We had just broken off our kiss—or rather, I had done so—and I inhaled her breath when I spoke.

  "I can't do this—!" I pushed away from her as though to push away the past few moments with her.

  But neither she nor the past would let me go. "What? What's the matter?"

  I inhaled deeply, grabbing the arms of my chair and looking anywhere but at her.

  "I can't do this. I'm in love with Hana Wen. She's the entire reason I've come out here; I can't just abandon her."

  A mask fell over Maire's face, instantly erasing all traces of the concern and—lust? affection? love?—that had previously suffused her face, as only a woman can do. Now it was she who pushed away, and rising from her chair, made to leave. I thought I had mortally offended her—and with good reason!—but as usual I had misjudged the fairer sex.

  "I'm sorry," she said to the wall. "I thought you just needed a little encouragement." Abruptly she faced me again, a brave smile playing her delicious lips. "If we could just forget all about this, I'd appreciate it."

  I hesitated; I had never known a woman to apologize for being forward to a man. But she stood frozen in a stasis of embarrassment until I should release her, so I mumbled a few meaningless words of pardon and allowed her to retreat with what dignity she could muster.

  At that moment, had another of Farren's ships suddenly appeared on the horizon, I would gladly have boarded her alone.

  Perhaps it is just another evidence of the cruel and ironic humor of Fate that the first person I met upon making the deck was Bantos Han. That he was the man I was seeking made me feel no less a cad. It was his sister that I had traversed half the planet looking for, sweeping up innocent lives in my wake and ending more than my fair share of them. Yet not five minutes ago I had kissed another woman.

  The greatest shame came from recalling how much I had enjoyed it.

  He and I had not been given an opportunity ere now to greet each other properly, and I returned his warm bear hug with equal sincerity. I asked after Hori; he said she had been well the last time he saw her.

  "After the riots, things were never the same. The people were restless. All at once all of the malcontents and troublemakers seemed to find each other. Before we'd been afraid, but once we saw what the Nuum could do—what they would do, given the chance—we knew they'd taken their best shot. Even the threat of violence is less frightening once you've seen it actually carried out. Suddenly we thought, 'Sure, they're tough on a common mob, but with a little planning…'"

  "'We'?" I interrupted.

  He grinned. "Uh-huh. I still had the gun you left. And we're not quite as cut off from machinery as the Nuum think we are."

  "What do you mean?"

  "We have access. The Nuum still need us to do their labor, like Hori works in the library. That means we use machines during the day. When you've had as long as we have to work it out, it's not hard to get around the alarms that guard them at night. We've been making copies of your gun for weeks, and hiding them around the city. When we have enough, the Nuum are going to be in for a surprise."

  A sick fear roiled in my stomach, the fear of untutored men with unfamiliar and very real firearms. Bantos Han must have read my thoughts in my face because he moved quickly to reassure me.

  "Don't worry! We made very sure we knew how your gun worked before we even started making copies. Nobody touches one without plenty of supervised practice."

  "But where do you practice? Those guns make a lot of noise."

  "Oh, computer simulations. And we've made some improvements: range, accuracy, noise." He winked. "They're really pretty crude, you know."

  "But they make a hell of a mess, even so. I can guarantee that," I said. "But what happened to you? How did you end up on a sky barge?"

  Bantos Han shook his head in disgust. "Bad luck. That's all there was to it. The Nuum have started running patrols around town, picking up anyone out after curfew—there's a curfew now—and they found me walking home after a meeting. They didn't even know who I was. They didn't even ask what I was doing. They just picked me up, dumped on a transport, and next thing I now I was on the Eyrie." He shuddered. "Keryl, you don't know how bad it was. I got lucky and managed to stay near the front because I was new and I still had some strength. I've only been on board about a month; if it had been much longer I could've been lost in the hold and never come out."

  "I saw it," I said quietly. "But you're out of there now. You're part of my crew. The Eyrie is going to stay here with the rowers while they regain their strength before they go home—" I fixed him with my gaze—"and we're going to Dure to find Hana."

  Joyful tears filled his unbelieving eyes and he pulled to him once more. Why didn't I feel the same?

  Seeking to change the subject as much as anything, I lead Bantos Han to the railing where we could speak privately.

  "What was all that excitement when I first boarded the Eyrie, right before I saw you? All of a sudden the rowers started acting very oddly, and some of them were yelling something…?"

  Bantos Han stared at me quizzically. "You don't know? You haven't heard? I would have thought that with all this—" he indicated my boat— "you'd have access to the datasphere."

  I snorted without much humor. "My access to the datasphere is a touchy subject. And I don't think," I added after a moment's reflection, "that it's going to become any less touchy any time soon."

  "Oh…" Bantos Han was evidently taking more than a moment to assimilate this new information. For the life of me I could not understand why. At last he blurted out: "Then you don't know anything!"

  I blinked. The last time I'd heard that was in one of my first-year seminars, uttered by the same don who, four years later, proudly hung upon me my scholarship medal. I wondered what had ever happened to it.

  "Keryl," my friend prattled on excitedly, "you're a ghost!"

  "I've come close more times than I care to think about," I agreed.

  "No, no." His hands fluttered in frustration. "I mean, you're a ghost. A—a non-entity. Someone who doesn't show up in the datasphere!"

  My blank look was all the response I could muster.

  Bantos Han took a deep breath. "This isn't easy. The datasphere is like the sun—it's always been there. Nobody ever has to be told what it is."

  "I know what it is," I said testily. "The Librarian told me; he just didn't think I was ever going to have a chance to use it."

  "The Librarian? You mean Hori?"

  "Never mind. What's a ghost in the datasphere, and why did it create such a sensation?"r />
  "A ghost… Like I said, it's somebody who doesn't show up in the datasphere. It happens sometimes; everyone knows someone who knows someone who heard about somebody in town dropping out of sight—I've heard there are places in the East where whole cities have dropped datasphere connections, but I don't know if it's true or not. The point is, when the Coremaire research station was ransacked, you missed a camera. Apparently it was in the infirmary; I don't know why, maybe it was to record surgical procedures. After you left the Nuum found it, ran the disk, and saw you. So they ran the data through the 'sphere for ID, and you didn't register. You couldn't—because you aren't in the 'sphere in the first place."

  "So now the Nuum know what I look like?"

  "Well, yes… but they haven't got the faintest idea who you are. Some of our people managed to tap the 'sphere and picked up some of the messages about you—and boy, are they going crazy!"

  The import of this information left me a bit less elated than it seemed to leave my companion. Heretofore I had considered myself a phantom member of society, unknown and unlooked-for. Now that I had been formally designated a "ghost," I found myself photographed, catalogued, and no doubt highly sought after. At least in evading the Silver Men we had both been playing on an equally strange field!

  "Can anyone access this information?"

  "Oh, no," Bantos Han assured me. I relaxed. "Only the Nuum."

  This brought less than the full joy of total security and comfort.

  "I meant, can any Nuum access this information?"

  He bit his lip in concentration.

  "We don't know. The Nuum have secure areas that not even their own people can peek into, but we don't know how badly they want to find you. Theoretically, by now they could have dumped your picture into the mailbox of every Nuum on Thora. On the other hand, if they haven't, only certain people would have access. The Nuum have been acting very strangely the last few years—even for them. And if they suspect we can tap into the 'sphere, they might not want this information getting around."