The Secret City

by Brian K. Lowe

  “Are you out of your mind?” Timash demanded.

  “What am I supposed to do? Go back to the Zilbiri and tell Jazil what a great time I had on vacation?” Sanja in high dudgeon was very nearly Timash’s equal, and that was saying much.

  “I travel ten thousand miles to find some adventure, and now you tell me all you wanted me to do is play chauffeur? You could have sent her a card!”

  That was my interpretation of Timash’s words, but it conveyed his outrage. “I think we may have misconstrued the situation,” I whispered to Maire, who simply closed her eyes and shook her head. To be fair, separating our party had been my idea, not hers. In retrospect, this was one of those times when, in leaping before I looked, I had jumped right over a cliff.

  “All right, all right!” I held up my hands in surrender. “You have made yourselves very clear. But now we have to decide what we are to do next.”

  Sanja drilled me with an appraising look. “What were you going to do next?” I reddened. “Besides that!”

  “I have an airship, The Dark Lady,” Maire stepped in smoothly. “It’s been operating, um, independently ever since Keryl left. In fact, somewhere along the way it’s managed to lose all of its navigational and dataspheric beacons. I’m not sure I even know where it is at the moment.”

  Sanja looked confused, but Timash was smiling. “So I don’t suppose there’s any way you could contact the captain and have it pick us up,” he said.

  Maire twisted her face around in a thoughtful look. “I might be able to. And if I could, we could probably disappear. If anyone wanted to, he could disappear with us. Of course, once he did, I don’t know where he might end up or when he might come back…”

  “That sounds like just what we need,” Sanja said. “But how are you going to find it? And why did you let it get lost in the first place?”

  Timash flicked a look at me. “You said she comes from the middle of nowhere, right?” I nodded innocently. “Huh. I guess I never really thought about it.”

  Sanja’s eyes darted back and forth between the two of us, and finding no help there, looked at Maire. They must have exchanged some sort of silent female code, because suddenly Sanja’s eyes went wide and she slapped Timash hard on the shoulder. She tried to say something, but the words tangled together and all she could emit were inarticulate sounds. She slapped him again and crossed her arms sulkily.

  “It seems to be settled, then,” I said to my wife. I have to admit that the words “my wife” sounded both alien and thrilling in my head, and I was glad that my “primitive” brain prevented even the slightest inkling of my thoughts from being read by even the most advanced telepath of this era.

  Maire went into our room and emerged with a small bracelet which she strapped to her wrist. She proceeded to press points on its surface until it shone a dim green. I watched with the avid interest of a peasant following a magic trick. I had the feeling that my friends were watching me in turn with indulgent pity, but I could not catch them at it.

  “It’s time to come home,” Maire murmured into the bracelet.

  “Not technically,” replied a disembodied voice. “You’re not even in Dure. In fact, you’re a long way from Dure. Is everything all right? We’ve been hearing rumors.”

  I stared at the bracelet. “Is that—?”

  Maire motioned me to silence. “Everything is fine, but I’ve had an argument with my neighbor, and I think a vacation may be in order. And I’ll need quarters for two passengers.”

  “As you say, captain. We can be there in two days.”

  “Excellent!” Maire beamed. “I think my neighbor has calmed down, but you know how he can be. I’d rather not wait around for him to find something else to argue about.” She pressed the bracelet and the glow faded. “Sorry. I didn’t want anyone to hear your voice, even if this is supposed to be private. You never know.”

  “Was that Skull?” I asked. “He’s still on The Dark Lady?”

  “That was another reason,” Maire confessed. “I thought you’d like to surprise him.”

  It would be quite a surprise. Skull had been the unofficial leader of Maire’s slave crew before Timash and I were shanghaied. We had taken over the belowdecks from him, and when I eventually commandeered the vessel on behalf of the slaves after Maire’s crew mutinied, I made him one of my officers. In the short time I had known him, I had come to think of him as a friend.

  “If we’re going to be here another two days, we should move again,” Timash suggested.

  “Before we do that,” I said, “we need to know that Farren will not be able to locate us. There is no point in moving if he can simply try again.”

  “He can’t,” Maire assured us. “I sent a message back to my cousin Lottric and his people did some investigating. It seems someone had broken into my dataspheric account server and placed a trace on my account.”

  Timash’s shaggy eyebrows rose. “He can do that? I’ve never heard of it.”

  Maire shrugged. “Obviously he can. It’s extremely illegal, but then again, so is trying to kill me. Lottric’s looking for evidence that Farren was involved; if he could have him arrested, it would change everything. But I doubt Farren is that stupid.”

  To this we all agreed, and the matter being for all we could tell settled, we made short shrift of our leaving, since we had little to carry. Within the hour, we had ensconced ourselves in yet another hotel, a small establishment with a reputation for utmost discretion. Farren might not be able to track us the same way, but he knew were in Crystalle. In deference to Timash and Sanja’s need to remain indoors, Maire ordered a full entertainment suite delivered to Timash’s room.

  As far as she and I were concerned, we could provide our own entertainment.

  Chapter 14

  Aboard The Dark Lady

  I had to smile at Skull’s evasiveness, and turned my attention again to the endless roiling sea that spread far and wide below us, taking in and letting go of a deep, contented breath. It was an unwonted feeling that I had, free to let go of loneliness and doubt, unconstrained by justifiable paranoia and the need to keep my eyes peeled for enemies on all sides. For the first time since I had returned to this century I knew I was safe and among friends; for the first time in two decades I knew that the woman I loved—now my wife—was near to my side. Small wonder, then, that my friend’s teasing out of his secrets amused me rather than raised suspicions.

  “You ferry Nuum on hunting trips and tours,” I repeated without a trace of skepticism. “Why don’t they simply use their own ships?”

  “Well, it’s not like when you were here last. You can’t just drop into any abandoned city and start hunting thunder lizards and breen and mutants.” That was a gross misconstruction, and he knew it; he also knew that I knew he knew it, so I let it pass. “The Nuum have taken up hunting with a passion these days, and the thunder lizards don’t breed very quickly, so they’re harder to find. Fortunately, no one has decided to start breeding them again.” He sighed. “At least as far as I know, but it’ll probably occur to somebody sooner or later.”

  I shared his anxiety over such an eventuality. Mankind had, over the millennia, resurrected some of nature’s most horrific killers in the name of sport, not to mention spawning its own original creations, and the results had often been predictably bloody. Some things truly were better left to God.

  “The result is,” he continued, “that you have to go further into unexplored territory to find what you’re looking for, and a lot of crews aren’t equipped to do that. We are.”

  I looked at the sidearm he wore at his side, attached to his leg invisibly by technology beyond my ken. According to Nuum codes, it made him a criminal, subject to summary execution. To be fair, the remainder of the crew were in the same boat, as were Timash and I. Sanja had yet to progress sufficiently in her training to keep one, though as eager a student as she would not be denied for long.

  “And how do they feel about sharing a ship with armed Thorans?”
<
br />   “Better than you’d think. The captain vouches for us, of course, and that goes a long way, but mostly no one says anything. We’re a long way beyond the cities, and any Nuum who’s afraid of us shouldn’t be out there anyway. Besides, I think it gives them a thrill to be part of something illegal. You’d be surprised how much repeat business we get.”

  “Hmm. I would have thought Farren could use that to get at Maire. Arming Thorans, especially after the rebellion, is a serious offense. It would be like Farren to send spies to gather evidence.”

  Skull smiled and shrugged. “Hunting is a dangerous business. Accidents happen.”

  And those “accidents” had happened on Skull’s watch as commander of this vessel while I was at home in the twentieth century. I shook my head. Actually, they were still in the future then, but now they were in the past. Another reason not to dwell too closely on them.

  “And when you’re not ferrying tourists to uncharted lands, how do you occupy your time?”

  “Cargo runs.”

  I thought back on my time in the deserted city where I had met Maire. Many of the buildings had still been sufficiently intact to protect whatever was inside.

  “So you bring your passengers to remote, deserted cities, and while they are hunting, you are—hunting?”

  He nodded. “We’re just hunting different things. They take their trophies home; we sell ours to villages and farms that the Nuum never bother with. And what they don’t know, doesn’t hurt anybody.”

  I thought about that. The Nuum seemed so confident in their absolute authority…but my experience with them had mainly been in the cities. I had once seen them quell a riot by decimating an entire square, hundreds of Thorans reduced to bone and ash in a matter of minutes. Sadly, I had been the unwitting catalyst of that riot, and the ensuing slaughter lay heavily on my conscience. Yet I thought about the Zilbiri, who seemed to live without any significant contact with their overlords, and Timash’s people lived completely unmolested, using advanced technology which would have precipitated a major incursion were its existence known, or even suspected. There was, I reminded myself, an entire world to be considered, and I had seen precious little of it.

  “How many people are there on Earth?” I asked.

  Skull looked at me oddly. I had never let him in on my secret. For all he knew, I was Nuum, albeit likely a criminal since I had been serving as a slave on this very vessel when he met me. Such an elementary question took him by surprise. Seeing his expression, I explained: “I’ve been away, remember? And there was no datasphere access where I was.”

  After a moment more, he said, “About two billion.”

  I was non-plussed: There were two billion people in the world when I left the Twentieth Century. I thought about the resources it would take to contain such a population. The Kaiser had started a war that putatively involved the entire world, but he and his cronies lacked the manpower even to beat the Allies, much less subjugate every Allied country plus all the neutrals. The Nuum had to be basing their authority on their ability to control the major cities, believing that no effective resistance could arise from isolated towns. It had worked for them, after all, for 300 years. But was their control an illusion? I had seen the victory of the conservationist Thorans in the southern jungles in my last visit; how many other small rebellions had taken place—were taking place even as I stood there?

  More than that, I began to realize just what this meant to me, and to Maire. Could we but find such a place which would take us in, we could settle down undisturbed into a new life together. True, Farren had never stopped looking for me for almost twenty years, but with Maire gone from Dure, he had no motive for continuing to search. I needed to talk to her. Was this what she had had in mind all along? A chance to rest, a chance to get to know one another at last, a chance to—

  “—turn into a vegetable? Do I look like a farmer to you?” Though her words were mocking, Maire’s dark eyes were concerned. “Did you really think I simply wanted to go to ground somewhere? There’s an entire planet to explore! Do you have any idea how little the Nuum actually control?” She shook her head. “No, of course you don’t. Why would you?”

  I understood more than she thought, of course, and every word she said was solidifying my understanding, but I kept my counsel. Letting her explain would be faster than my having to parse out information from a series of questions.

  “Three hundred years ago,” she began, “we landed on Earth. I could say we returned to Earth, since this is where our ancestors had lived. Somehow, we were cut off from our homeworld. For some reason, no one seems to know how or why anymore. I tried to find out once—every child tries at some point—but I couldn’t. There just wasn’t anything in the datasphere. For years I was convinced that it was some kind of conspiracy, and I was sure that I, the daughter of the duke, would be able to uncover the truth when no one else could, but of course I couldn’t. Maybe I could’ve once I assumed the throne, but I never had the time. And it’s not likely now…

  “Anyway, the Thorans had become lazy and unfocused. There was very little other interstellar travel, and none of it was theirs. It would have been harder for us not to take over than it was to take over. We banned personal technology, and that was pretty much all we had to do. If the Thorans had any weapons they didn’t try to use them. I think they were almost happy we showed up, to tell them what to do. They were really just going in circles.”

  I had to wonder how much of this was true and how much was Nuum revisionism. I also wondered if, when I asked him, the Librarian would be able to give me a more unbiased view of history, or whether the Nuum had rewritten contemporary records to suit their fancy.

  “But there were only a few of us at that time,” Maire continued, “compared to the Thorans. If they had wanted to make trouble they could have; that’s why we banned technology. It was fortunate for us they had so little, and anything they had that might have posed a problem for us they couldn’t remember how to use. On the other hand, we knew how outnumbered we were, so we tried to do the best we could with what we had. We started in a few cities, pacified them, and expanded later. The actual conquest of Earth, if you will, took many years—in some ways, it’s still going on. We control all of the major cities, but really, that’s not so much. You’ve seen the abandoned cities everywhere. Our timing was good. A thousand years ago the Thorans would have shrugged us aside like raindrops.”

  I stared at my wife, only now beginning to realize that however much I had been in love with her for these past two decades, I did not know her at all. I was aware Maire had been born of a Thoran mother; I had fought beside her as her Nuum crew mutinied and tried to kill her at Lord Farren’s order, helped her take back the throne of Dure for her father, and seen her lead a small army of Thorans into the Council of Nobles itself against her own kind. And yet now she spoke of Thorans as though they were children who had merely needed the discipline of a higher race to become productive citizens! How much had Maire changed in the nineteen years since I was returned to the twentieth century? How much had her “accommodation” of Farren’s co-rule affected her thinking about the relationship between the two races of Earth—the two races she herself embodied? When I met her, this ship had been crewed by Nuum, but belowdecks were dozens of Thoran criminals sentenced to slavery. I had been sentenced to such slavery under her command. Now her crew was Thoran—but how did she perceive them? As allies, as underlings, or as slaves still?

  Her eyes searched my face. “What is it? You know I can’t get anything of your thoughts. Usually I can tell what someone’s feeling even past his shields, but not you. It’s very frustrating. Is something wrong?”

  Embarrassing as it was, she was right. I could sense, even past her mind’s shields, that she was afraid she had offended me. I could also feel her love. Even though men and women have always struggled with questions of love and fidelity, believing in another’s love sometimes right up until the moment of betrayal, I had the gift of knowing that
my wife loved me, but that this certainty had been plucked from her own thoughts felt indecent, and made it difficult to accept. Given that, I suppose that I was on a par with every other man who had ever loved a woman, after all.

  Chapter 15

  Wilderness Warfare

  For a man to appreciate the immensity of the world, he must be able to see great distances. Place a man on a seashore and let him gaze out over the Pacific Ocean. Pluck him down on a hilltop where he may set his eye on every acre in a fifty-mile radius. Or raise him up on an airship eight thousand feet above the Earth where he might imagine he can see the curvature of the planet itself.

  Sanja had never been airborne until she met me, and until now, not for any extended length of time. Timash and I had traveled in The Dark Lady before, of course, but we still found the endless passing vista a source of continuing awe and delight. I had thought that Maire would treat the terrestrial panorama with more sanguinity, but she seemed to find every opportunity to appreciate even now. Perhaps she saw it through my eyes, and perhaps that was how I wanted it.

  Yet the even the passing tapestry of the world was inadequate to consume all of our time, nor would it have been a constructive use thereof. We had been through a great deal in a short period, much of it dangerous, and should our voyage unfurl as I hoped, our trove of excitement was not exhausted. With this in mind, we were practicing.

  When I had met the Librarian, almost two decades ago, he had instilled in my brain a catalog of knowledge and skills that he anticipated would be useful in my quest to find what we believed to be the last working time machine. Facts about the world and its customs and peoples had lain uppermost in my brain, and necessary usage had confirmed and cemented them to the point where I could comport myself as a native of the modern age with sufficient facility that no one had guessed my true origin.