The Stolen Future Box Set Page 15

  “And have they?”

  “Apparently not. They were bred for climbing and killing things, not for long trips through empty land. The story goes that they still live there, in the cities, feeding off rats and birds and whatever idiots happen to walk through.” He grinned and tapped himself on the chest. “Like me.”

  I made a properly impressed face. “Have you ever seen one?”

  “Oh, yes,” he nodded emphatically. “And smelled him. The only good thing about a breen is that you can smell him a mile away. Thank god, or I wouldn’t be here.”

  As much as I wanted to hear more about his adventures, with a mind toward their impact on certain future plans of my own, I was doomed to eternal disappointment by the frantic knocking that suddenly rattled my host’s front door!

  As I was the nearer, Balu gestured to me to answer the frantic summons. “It’s just Timash, anyway.”

  And so it was, with his chest heaving like a bellows from his exertions. As I have previously noted, the apes are not heralded for their endurance over distance, but even so I had not seen one so breathless since the day Timash and I met under decidedly extreme circumstances. So it was that I was quite curious to learn the origin of his excitement, an urge I had to quell while the poor boy got air back into his lungs.

  “My mother—” was all he could get out. Balu was on his feet instantly.

  “Has something happened to her?” I cried.

  Timash shook his head, still gulping air. “No, she—thinks she’s found something. She needs you home right away.”

  Behind me I could almost hear Balu relax. “If it’s that important,” he asked, “why didn’t you just call?” All homes in Tahana City were equipped with extremely sophisticated telephone systems.

  “I wanted to tell you in person,” Timash said to me. “She thinks she’s found a cure for your virus!”

  My friend tried to explain to me what he knew on the way back to his house, but I rather rudely broke into a sprint that he could not hope to match and left him behind.

  I found Dr. Chala in her laboratory, the Librarian at her side. The good doctor jumped when I dashed in, panting, my legs buckling from the unaccustomed exercise.

  “What did that boy tell you? Where is he?” she demanded. “No, never mind. What did he tell you?”

  Her cautious look calmed me faster than a bucket of water. The Librarian’s ubiquitous expression of bemused observation imparted nothing.

  “Timash almost broke down Balu’s door to tell me that you had found a cure for the telepathic virus,” I responded. “I’m afraid I left him behind.”

  “Oh,” Dr. Chala moaned. She turned to the Librarian. “You were right,” she said. “I never should have allowed him to be the one to carry the news. But he was so excited…”

  “The Sixth Age philosopher Ochre said: ‘Never is a deed badly done when its genesis is love,’“ he replied.

  “I’ll bet Ochre never had any children.”

  “Oh, she did. Thirteen.”

  “Any boys?” Chala asked.

  The Librarian frowned a moment. “No, all daughters.”

  “Figures.”

  I watched their by-play with bewilderment, and interrupted the Librarian before he could reply with his usual literality. “I thought you were programmed with geographical and cultural information I could use on my trip. Why are you suddenly spouting philosophy?”

  “The main librarian noted that your natural education was heavily weighted toward literature. That includes studies in philosophy, religion, logic, and history. I was supplied with subprograms on all these subjects so that you would have someone to talk to.”

  I shook my head in awe. As much as I had been given to know about computers and artificial intelligences, the knowledge seemed still to be filtering into my awareness. It floated on the surface of my mind, attached to, and yet not part of, my consciousness.

  Dr. Chala cleared her throat gently, followed by Timash’s second breathless arrival in the space of half an hour. The twin events helped me to remember why I was here, and I gave the doctor all of my attention. Timash, after a single wordless glare from his mother, did the same.

  “There is very little in my literature concerning telepathic viruses,” she began, “since there are very few cases of them any more. In the very young and old, they kill quickly, and no one else has contracted a case—well, probably since before the Nuum came.

  “What I discovered in talking to the Librarian, though, is that the Nuum themselves have had a little more reason to do research. Apparently one of the rare side effects of space travel is viral mutation, and every once in a while, what they call a ‘telepathic carrier’ is affected. When that happens, the virus can spread, with results that I wouldn’t even wish on the Nuum.”

  “And they’ve discovered a cure?” I asked, trying to control my eagerness.

  “No,” she said flatly. “In fact, they haven’t even stumbled upon the procedure we used on you, even though our Thoran doctors have known about using it for centuries. I guess it never occurred to them that our archives could be good for much?” She directed the last toward the Librarian.

  “Not for medical matters, I’m afraid,” he admitted. “A pity.”

  Dr. Chala allowed that to pass without comment. “In any event, by pooling our information—since the Librarian has learned a lot more from our governors than they have from us—I’ve come up with a theoretical vaccine. The problem has always been that the viruses are so small, they can’t be invaded by most pathogenic agents. The agents are too big. We could slice off pieces with an electron scalpel, but the pieces wouldn’t be sufficiently toxic to do the job. I asked the Librarian to scan my pharmaceutical database to see if there was anything on hand that could be combined with something Nuum to do the job, but he came up empty.”

  “Then Timash had an idea,” the Librarian said. “He suggested we scan the biological databases to see if there was a naturally-occurring agent more virulent than what we could synthesize, and yet near enough to obtain a specimen.”

  “And we found something,” Dr. Chala resumed. The shining pride in her eyes completely eclipsed any annoyance she had felt at Timash’s earlier rash action. “It’s natural, it’s locally available, and there’s little doubt that it is toxic enough to do the job, even in microscopic portions.”

  My excitement threatened to consume me, until it was abruptly overshadowed by a horrible fear that they were not telling me something—something that would negate all of their marvelous findings.

  “So what is it? What did you find?”

  Before she could answer, an entirely new voice said from the doorway:

  “Tiger spider venom.”

  Chapter 21

  The Revolution Begins

  Balu walked into the room on the heels of his announcement confident that his niece would not contradict him, a faith in which he was rewarded. The astonishment in her eyes must have been ambrosia to the weary soul of a man so used to being shunted aside. Even the Librarian appeared impressed.

  “I could have told you that without your computers.” He waved his arm to indicate the world. “We’ve always known that there are things out there that have medicinal use. Even the Nuum have figured it out. Why do you think they built that base on the edge of the jungle in the first place? To keep an eye on us? No! I’ll bet you my Picadorean compass they’re doing biological research. That’s why they don’t just bomb the conservationists off the map. They want to study the plants down here.”

  Dr. Chala digested this news, turned to me. “You were with them. Did they say anything about why they were here?”

  I shook my head. “No, we were brought in expressly to deal with the rebels—the conservationists. All they told us was that the ‘blacks’ couldn’t handle the situation. I was a little confused—I didn’t see any black men among the Nuum—but that would explain why we were given staffs and swords instead of guns. The ray weapons the Nuum use would burn up the entire jung
le.”

  “When the Nuum talk about the ‘blacks,’ Keryl,” Timash informed me, “they’re talking about people with black hair. All the Nuum with you had red hair, right? The reds and the blacks don’t get along.”

  “Black hair?” I repeated. “I thought they were talking about skin.” My voice trailed off as I tried to re-order what I knew of this spacefaring people. In my own life I had had little to do with colored people, and never had any of them given me reason to dislike them, although I knew my opinion was in the minority. But to discriminate because of hair color—? Suddenly I felt the need to sit down somewhere and think for a very long time—a wish not to be granted for many days to come.

  “Of course,” Dr. Chala was saying, “this is all theoretical, and unless you know how to catch a tiger spider, Uncle, it will most likely remain so. There’s no way to synthesize the venom here in the lab. We have to have a specimen.”

  “And the only time I’ve ever seen one,” Timash chimed in, “we were too busy running to ask for a sample. ‘Course, if Keryl hadn’t smashed that first one, I wouldn’t have been running anywhere.”

  The room seemed to move in slow motion, with Dr. Chala and the Librarian and Uncle Balu all swiveling to stare at Timash, then at me, doubt and hope and wonder dawning in their expressions. Timash must have caught their thoughts, because he too turned to look at me until I shrank away from their concentrated attention.

  “Keryl,” Balu said softly, “did you really smash a tiger spider?”

  “Yes…”

  “With what?” he asked with disarming gentleness, like a man removing the casing from an unexploded artillery shell.

  “My staff. It’s in my…uh, Timash’s room.”

  Timash was the first to escape from ensuing scramble and disappeared into his room, emerging a moment later with my staff balanced gently in his big hands.

  “Don’t touch the part where he smashed the spider!” his mother commanded, and he shook his head, scarcely breathing as he gently laid the staff on an examining bench. The doctor pulled on her gloves, approached the desk, then paused long enough to pull a second pair of gloves on over the first. Even at that, she used long tweezers to pick away bits of the vermin that still stuck there. The Librarian watched intently at her shoulder.

  “Good lord,” I whispered to Balu. “Is it still dangerous? That staff has been standing in the corner in Timash’s room for weeks.”

  “Nobody knows,” he whispered back. “She just doesn’t want to take a chance.”

  “I kept meaning to clean it up, but I never thought to need it again,” I said, meaning the staff. “Now I’m glad I didn’t.”

  “You should be very glad, Keryl, and I’m glad Timash was taught better than to handle other people’s possessions,” Dr. Chala said tightly from where she bent over her task. She had added a surgical mask to her regimen, and as she spoke she carefully set down her tools and procured a pair of goggles. “These remains should have been contaminated with bacteria by now. They aren’t. I’ve got a feeling they’re still capable of killing anything that touches them.” She set a control on a console on the examining desk and stepped back again. A faint glow surrounded the desk and the staff. “From now on, nobody touches this thing. And I’m going to need to decontaminate the whole house. I don’t think any of us are in any danger, but I’ll want to run some tests.”

  The tests came back favorably, a great relief to me and especially to Timash, who had spent some hours describing to me the thoroughness with which his mother was wont to conduct her examinations. To me, his horror stories held no fright, compared to twentieth-century medicine. I thought about regaling Timash with tales of battlefield first aid, but recanted the notion: Either he wouldn’t believe me, or he wouldn’t sleep for a week.

  Despite my determination that nothing short of a Hun battalion could keep me from being the first to hear the results of Dr. Chala’s tests upon the venom residue itself, my illness, combined with the excitement, laid me low. I lay down on my bed in Timash’s room, eyes shifting fearfully to the spot on the wall against which the tip of the staff had rested (now scrubbed so thoroughly the paint had all but disappeared) for a brief moment, and I knew nothing more for nearly eleven hours.

  As always, sleep refreshed me greatly, clearing the grey, hanging cobwebs from my mind, and I was warm and comfortable under the blanket someone had thoughtfully lain across me. Most days I had been wont to lie there for some time sifting through my dreams, but on this occasion I was up almost before my eyes were open. As quickly as I could arrange myself, I was searching the house for someone with news.

  Timash met me immediately, leaping out of his chair like a dog caught on his owner’s bed. No need to ask him; through no choice of his own, he had stayed with me rather than accompany his mother to her laboratory. We ran out the door without a word.

  We would as well have walked.

  “It doesn’t work.” Dr. Chala’s dismally bare pronouncement was given without artificial preamble or couched in false hopes. “The venom attacks the virus, but it only bruises the outer protein sheath. I thought it would be strong enough to break through, but I overestimated the size of the virus. To be passed along by mere thought—you cannot imagine how small it is. Lord only knows how the virus lives.”

  “What about radiation?” Balu hadn’t left the hospital since the virus was transferred. “Couldn’t you use a focused stream of charged particles to breach the protein sheath? We know that nuclear radiation will destroy them.”

  The doctor was tired, but not too weary to bite back her initial response. She simply shook her head.

  “It won’t work. The virus is dispersed throughout his brain. We could never find them all, and even if we could, his brain would look like a honeycomb. It’s got to be done biochemically, or not at all.”

  As the education bestowed upon me by the Librarian was the first part of my mind to fade out when the virus wore me down, I had been following the technical implications of this discussion only vaguely. Even sleep was insufficient to bring my senses back to what they had been before I fell ill, and protein sheathes and nuclear radiation were fantasy in the world where I had grown up. But then, perhaps that is why Dr. Chala’s words should trigger in my wandering thoughts an association that my more learned friends had overlooked.

  “Biochemical?” I uttered vaguely. “Isn’t that what you said the Nuum were here for, Balu?”

  “Oh my god,” Chala breathed. “Oh my god, he’s right! The greatest biochemical library on the continent could be sitting not ten miles away…!” She swept me up in a hug that threatened to finish the job of killing me that the virus had begun. “Keryl, that’s brilliant!”

  Amid the renewed celebration, it fell to Timash, with the clarity of youth, to ask the obvious question.

  “Um, Mother, how are you going to get in?”

  The sultry air of the jungle night and the soft susurrations of its insects were in my mind merely gentle invitations to danger whose sinister agenda was only slightly diminished by Timash and Balu’s repeated insistence that tiger spiders were solely diurnal. They need not add, and I did not seek to know, that other creatures roamed in their place, creatures far more adapted to nighttime hunting than we were to evading them.

  I had never feared the dark more than any other adult; perhaps it was the telepathic virus’s fogging of my mind that caused me to revert to childhood terrors. Whatever the reason, I credit my companions’ unyielding vigilance, in bracing me between them as we threaded along barely-worn paths, with keeping me on track to our chosen goal. Without them, I would never have departed from Tahana City, and the most fantastic sights of my long journey—far stranger than any I had yet experienced—would have gone forever unwitnessed.

  The Library I carried in my pocket. We had found that the Librarian, when visually manifested, shone in the dark, and so he must await our destination before participating in our plan. I thought he had submitted to our arguments with a touch of piqu
e.

  Having begun our trek while it was still light, we were now skirting the area Timash recognized as being controlled by the Nuum. Our goal lay partway around the circle of their influence. Along with Timash’s knowledge of the terrain I relied upon his assurances that we could pass undetected.

  “You’re sure they won’t know we’re there?” I had asked as he mapped out our route.

  “Absolutely.” He spoke with the confidence of one who had not lived long enough to see how life could go wrong. “They can’t use infra-red detectors because the jungle’s too thick and too crowded. Even if the sensors were on, they couldn’t distinguish us from a hundred other animals on their screens at the same time. The only things they can pick out for sure are the thunder lizards—and you don’t need a night scope to know they’re coming.”

  “Thunder lizards?”

  Balu had shaken his head gravely. “Don’t ask.”

  Now, committed to sneaking through the monster-infested dark guarded by two jungle beasts, I thrust my nerves into a back cupboard of my mind and focused on what lay ahead, both literally and figuratively.

  The moon was thankfully just over half-full; any less and we could not have picked our way safely. As it was, I was constantly tripped up by low branches and depressions in the damp ground. Before and behind me, my guides’ bare feet made little sound. Again and again hands reached out of the night to catch me before I could trip and break my neck. At last I learned to raise my feet more than was my wont and place them straight down when I stepped. It was uncomfortable, but I fell less often and made less noise. No sooner had I begun to master this new gait than we arrived.

  A nearby shadow detached itself from the bush and greeted us softly.

  “Timash,” the man said. “You’re lucky you weren’t caught. Your friend makes more noise than a three-legged sloth in the dry season.”

  Timash grasped the other’s outstretched arm briefly. “You won’t care when you hear what he’s got to say.” He turned to me. “In fact, I can’t wait to hear it myself.”