The Stolen Future Box Set Page 12

  We couldn’t make it that far; within two hundred yards he was slowing, his breath coming in heaving gasps from his bellows-like chest.

  “When you’re my size,” he wheezed, “you don’t have to run very often.”

  I looked back the way we had come, nervous at even this short rest. With their black and yellow banding, tiger spiders blended well with the sun-dappled branches, and the few, short studies ever done on them had carelessly failed to measure either their speed or their tracking ability. They could be preparing to drop down on us as we spoke.

  “Just another moment,” my companion begged when I said as much to him. “I’m really not used to this kind of exercise.”

  “Well, perhaps they are.” I was literally hopping from one foot to the other in my anxiety. I imagined a horde of huge spiders dropping from the trees onto our heads, covering us with webbing like living mummies—never mind that these spiders didn’t spin webs. As though reading my thoughts, the great ape straightened with a groan and we were off again, if less agilely than before.

  “Is there a clearing anywhere nearby?” The pace we were making now hardly impeded my ability to talk, however taxing it might be to my guide. He raised one arm in what I hoped was a sign and trotted on.

  Then the birds stopped singing.

  Through redoubled efforts we reached the clearing ahead of the spiders. It was smaller than I had hoped, too small to dissuade the tree-dwellers from pursuing us through the tall yellow grass, which I realized belatedly would only allow them to blend in better. On the far side of the clearing one liana-strung tree stood alone, and it was toward that I pushed my comrade-in-peril.

  We stood on its exposed roots, the grass on all sides of us unable to grow within a few feet of the tree itself. Even now the impatient spiders were dropping out of the shade we had just quitted—in their eagerness they could not be bothered to climb down their trees. Their bloated bodies made a soft thud as they hit the ground. The grass began to weave evilly.

  Glancing upward, a slim hope was born. “Up the tree!” I didn’t wait to see if my friend complied; there was no time for noble sentiment and he climbed faster than I anyway. Startled questions died on his lips and he took the only course open to him. Not until we were quite a ways up (and not without his help), did he address them with me.

  “What are we supposed to do now? Those things live in the trees!”

  “So did you, once—or at least your ancestors,” I replied, casting about for what I needed. Had I the time, I would have laughed out loud at the irony of my idea, an irony, had he but known it, more suitable to my companion. If we lived, someday I would have to explain it.

  “What are you talking about?”

  I thrust aside the consideration of how long it must have been since the apes had come down from the trees that they would not even remember their own heritage. I had less doubt that he could accomplish what I intended than that I could; my only consolation was that if I failed, the tiger spiders would cease to be a worry.

  “Take a vine,” I instructed hastily. “One that’s secured to a branch. We’re going to swing on them into those trees over there.”

  “We’re—” words failed him. “If—” he sputtered again. “Are you insane?”

  All the time I was arguing I was trying on vines for a secure hold and length. This was not as easy as I had read. I resolved to have a talk with the author when I got back to my own time.

  “I’ve read about this. You can swing on the vines into those trees. The spiders will have to climb back down and run after us, but we should be able to get away.”

  “Are you crazy? You’ll break your neck! I’d rather stay here with the spiders!”

  “Then have it your own way!” I pointed behind us. The first of the monsters had reached our branch, and I didn’t have to look down to know that the trunk beneath us must be swarming with venomous eight-legged demons. The gorilla screamed and tried to bounce up and down on the branch to dislodge the spider. I myself nearly fell to a merciful death, but it only stood and watched with unconcerned evil certainty. Suddenly my companion whipped about, seized the first vine to come to hand, and launched himself into space. If tiger spiders have breath, I swear that I felt this one’s frustrated exhalation as I recklessly followed suit.

  We both survived our amateur jungle lord experience, and not surprisingly (to me, at least) I was less eager to try it again than my new anthropoid friend. In the face of its unarguable advantage in speed over walking, I did consent to two more airborne voyages, though they were successful more by chance than design. At last determining that our luck was merely finite, we once more descended to terra firma.

  My friend was a new man…er, gorilla.

  “That was incredible!” he repeated over and over again with frequent longing looks skyward. “What was it you said about my ancestors?”

  “It’s a long story,” I said cautiously, “but from what I have read, once long ago, gorillas and apes were tree-dwellers, or at least some of them were.” To be honest, I was about at the end of my zoölogical rope. And despite what we had been through together, almost everyone I had met in this world had treated me as an enemy or a prize. I did not want to show off knowledge that might brand me as an outsider.

  “No kidding,” he breathed, never taking his eyes off the high branches. “That must have been something.”

  Somehow, I had held onto my staff throughout our ordeal. I shouldered it and nudged my new friend. Reluctantly he left off his daydreams and struck a path.

  “The name’s Timash,” he said as we fell into our pace. “Arlen Timash.”

  “Keryl Clee,” I said again. The last time I had offered my hand I had followed it with a swing at his head. As the gesture seemed unfamiliar to him anyway, I restrained myself this time.

  He acknowledged my introduction with a distracted grunt, not seeming inclined to take the conversation any further. The silence stretched on painfully; unlike the companionable quiet of a long hike, there felt here as if there were an obstacle between us, something unsaid but floating in the air. It was the silence of tension. Something was wrong.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  It took him a moment to answer. “For what?”

  “For not leaving me behind. You were better at swinging through the trees than I was; you could have left me behind and gone on your way.”

  That stopped him, and he turned to me. He had been walking slightly ahead, but now he waited until I had come abreast. He stood, hands on hips, and leaned into me.

  “Are you ever going to make sense?”

  I opened my mouth but he cut me off.

  “Every time you want to talk about something, you just jump right into the middle of it. Now that’s fine when we’ve got tiger spiders on our butts, but now we’ve got nothing to do but walk and you don’t have time to start a conversation at the beginning. What’s your hurry, anyway?”

  If you have never been berated by a gorilla with a chip on his shoulder, take it from me, you are blessed.

  “Are you listening to me? Hello? Is anyone home?” He shook his head. “You are the strangest Nuum I have ever met.”

  “I’m not a Nuum,” I said automatically. It took only a second for my brain to reach down and strangle my tongue, but the words were out.

  Timash (as I learned to call him) stepped back and looked me over carefully. Then he inched forward again, squinting at my eyebrows.

  “Damn,” he whispered presently. “You’re a yellow, aren’t you?”

  In for a penny, in for a pound. “What’s a yellow?”

  “That’s a damned good question,” he acknowledged, “because I’ve never heard of one. Which means maybe you’re telling the truth. So what’s a Thoran doing running around disguised as a Nuum?”

  I sighed. “It’s a long story. Let’s just say it’s not something I want spread around—especially to the Nuum.” Or the Silver Men, I added silently, but that would take a very long time to explain.

/>   Timash nodded thoughtfully. “All right. You saved my life; I owe you something. But when we get back home they’re going to want some answers.”

  “Home. And where’s that?”

  He pointed off to our left. “About three hundred yards that way. We’ve been circling it until I figured out what to do with you.”

  I opened my mouth to protest but didn’t get the chance. There was a terrible pain in my head and I never heard the shot that brought me down.

  Chapter 17

  In the City of the Apes

  I dreamed that I was lying on a table, naked. A crowd of people had gathered near my head, digging in my skull, removing little bits of my brain with very tiny spoons. Not surprisingly, it being a dream, no one found my nudity the least bit odd—except me. I felt a vague sense of vulnerability from my nakedness, all the more odd as I felt none at all from the removal of my brain.

  At last one of the faces glanced down at me and frowned. It said something I couldn’t make out and the dream faded away. I slept on for another century.

  When I woke up, I was naked under a blanket, on a table, with the unsettling sensation that someone had taken out my brain and stuffed my head with cotton balls. I started to worry immediately. Strangely, the fact that the gorilla looming over me was not Timash was not uppermost in my concerns.

  “Good morning,” it said prosaically enough. It wore what I was learn passed on an ape for a smile. Whatever evolution had brought them to the point of Man’s speech had not elevated their ability to assume facial expression to the same level. Smaller than Timash, its fur was tinged on the ends with silvery grey.

  I smiled back, very weakly. I had to swallow a couple of times before I could get words through my throat.

  “Good morning.”

  “Are you in any pain?” I shook my head, rather surprising myself to learn that I was telling the truth. By its voice, I guessed this to be a she-ape, although it was not a distinction at which I was practiced. “I shouldn’t think so,” she said, “but your brain is a little different from anything I’ve encountered before. I wanted to make sure the blocks were working properly. Here, let me help you up.”

  As she did so, the sheet fell and pooled around my waist. I grabbed automatically to keep it in place, the sudden movement making me dizzy for a moment. The room was comfortably warm on my bare skin, but my head seemed a bit off-center, as if it weren’t quite situated correctly on my neck. I shook it to clear my senses, but the fuzzy feeling remained. When I reached up to touch my scalp, I couldn’t feel my hand.

  “I’m Dr. Chala,” my helper informed me, gently moving my head from side to side. I couldn’t feel her hands, either. “You’ve been ill, in a coma, for about two days.” She stopped, holding my face directly before hers. “You’ve contracted a telepathic virus.”

  She might have been explaining the interior structure of the sun for all I understood her. I reached out for the only anchor I had.

  “Where’s Timash?”

  With a toss of her head toward a door behind her, she said: “He’s been waiting. You must have made quite an impression on him. Timash isn’t known for hanging around any one place for very long.”

  “Could I see him?”

  She shrugged. “There’s nothing else I can do for you. I’ll let you get your things. But we’ll need to talk before you leave.” She left and I looked about for my clothes.

  Someone had cleaned and repaired my Nuum uniform while I was unconscious. Even so, as I put it on I resolved to get some new clothing as soon as possible—and to wash the red out of my hair. I was starting to feel like a leper—or a target.

  Timash was obviously glad to see me, but he approached me as though I were made of glass. He stood back, afraid to touch me, almost afraid to breathe on me.

  “Thanks for bringing me here. I guess we’re even now.”

  Hesitantly, still without speaking, he placed the library on the cot beside me. I realized guiltily I hadn’t even noticed it was missing. I picked it up and glanced at its irregular surface, covered with crooked lines and tiny indentations whose function I could not begin to guess.

  Timash watched me silently, not moving away, but carefully avoiding me nonetheless. I gave him the distance he seemed to crave and spoke directly to the library.

  “Tell me about telepathic viruses.”

  “I am scanning medical equipment nearby,” the library responded obliquely. “If you place my sphere into the indentation on that imaging diagnostician in the corner, I can more easily manifest my visual persona.”

  I did as instructed, or at least as well as I could make out. The library fit into a cuplike depression in a small, squat machine in the corner. Although there were no obvious catches on either component, an experimental tug proved that it was there to stay. A moment later, the familiar figure of the Librarian materialized before us. Timash jumped a foot in the air.

  “Good morning, sir, Mr. Timash,” he said with a small bow to each of us. He assumed a pedantic pose. “Telepathic viruses. A self-explanatory term. Although viruses were unknown in your time, you will be familiar with the concept now, after your general course in modern topics.” I spared a glance for the gorilla. If he understood the implications of what the Librarian was saying, he wasn’t giving it away. Well, the cat was out of the bag now. The Librarian continued: “Telepathic viruses are so small they can be passed literally by thinking about them.

  “Telepathic viruses were invented in the Fifth Age, when telepathy was finally grasped as a learned behavior. Before that, it was the province of mutations and the occasional religious mystic, but when it began to be available to the normal human population…well, someone always finds a way to make a weapon out of any example of progress. And so it was here.

  “Fortunately, it was never used in actual warfare; as soon as its existence became known, it was outlawed. There was no cure for it, and no escaping it without giving up this new ability that Man had sought for so many generations and now had within his grasp. Not that the development of telepathy itself was so smooth or easy—not at all. For a generation the asylums were filled to capacity with the untrained and the poorly-trained, not to mention the victims of early forms of telepathic dueling. Often as not both duelists ended their days drooling in their porridge behind padded walls on a robot-tended asteroid. No one could—” He trailed off at the look on my face. “Oh, sorry. I am a librarian, you know. Once I get onto a subject, I can simply beat it to death.”

  “You were telling us about viruses,” I prompted.

  “Although they were outlawed, some specimens were saved for research, naturally. A laboratory was established on the dark side of the Moon. There were many who lobbied for the virus’ total destruction—they protested that something so small could never be completely contained, and unfortunately, they were right. A mutated form of the virus infected one of the researchers, driving him mad before it killed him. But by the time the symptoms manifested themselves, he had journeyed back to Earth. He lived on a small Pacific island. They say it was beautiful.

  “At first they thought they were simply seeing a return to the early madness, but soon the virus had mutated again—it can mutate simply by its host’s thinking about it—and entire households began to die on a daily basis. Ironically, it was the originally-infected scientist, the Patient Zero of this particular plague, who realized the danger. Before he died, he called for an air strike that destroyed the entire island and everyone on it.”

  “Easy enough for him to decide, since he was dying anyway,” Timash commented.

  “The island’s entire population was descended from a single couple,” the Librarian replied quietly. “He signed the death warrant for his entire family.”

  Timash retreated, abashed, but I put aside the millennia-old tragedy to focus on my own.

  “How did the virus survive?”

  “The virus apparently had spread so quickly only because of the genetic similarities between the people infected; they
thought they had engineered out all of their recessive weaknesses, but Nature proved herself more ingenious. By the end, however, the virus had mutated in such a narrow fashion that it was far less contagious than anyone would have believed, and since the island was declared off-limits and remained radioactive for centuries, it could only lie dormant until eventually it found a new host.

  “That took many years, and by then humanity had developed its telepathic abilities to an extent that the normal, routine barriers that everyone erected to preserve the privacy of thoughts were sufficient to ward off infection by the virus. In fact, for many years scientists thought the virus had died on the island. Nowadays, attacks are very rare, usually occurring only in the very young, the extremely old, or victims of certain types of brain injuries.” Suddenly he stopped, smiling, awaiting my next question.

  I wanted to hit him, but it wouldn’t have helped. “And —?” I challenged.

  “And that’s all. I would judge, based on what I know of your own history, that you compare with the very young in terms of telepathic ability. You must have been infected before you learned to raise the proper barriers.”

  I fought down the cold lump in my stomach. I knew that if I allowed this latest horror to fight its way up my throat to manifest it in a single sign of fear it would overwhelm me, but of all the terrors of this horrific tomorrow, this was the most personal. I was a victim of my own mind.

  “Is there a cure?”

  “I don’t know. My databases are strong on geography, language, anthropology, and zoology—subjects that the main library foresaw as necessary to you on your journey. My medical database is not equipped for complicated diagnoses and treatment.”

  The horror lurked at the base of my throat. My breathing came harder and faster and I fought it down. Think, I told myself, think! There had to be a way out, a cure… I swung to face Timash.