The Stolen Future Box Set Page 16

  “You don’t know what his plan is?” There was suddenly an unmistakable tone of suspicion.

  “We thought it best he not know, in case something happened to him while he was setting up this meeting,” I whispered. “We’re just being careful, just as you were when you insisted we meet you out here in the middle of the jungle instead of at your headquarters.”

  The dim figure straightened in indignation. “We have a good reason. We have to be careful if we’re going to keep the Nuum off our backs.”

  “Seems to me if you were a little less…careful,” Balu interjected, “you wouldn’t have to worry about the Nuum at all.”

  “Who’re you?” The guard turned an anxious gaze on Timash. “Who’s he?”

  “This is Keryl Clee, and that’s my Uncle Balu.”

  “Oh,” the stranger said with a knowing nod. “So this is the famous Uncle Balu. Timash talks a lot about you.” Suddenly he held out a long strip of cloth toward me. “He’s got to be blindfolded before he goes any further.”

  “Oh for god’s sake!” Balu exploded. “It’s pitch dark!”

  “I don’t want him memorizing the trail.”

  “Memorizing—!” Balu sputtered. “He can hardly memorize his own name! He—oh, you tell him, Timash!”

  Timash leaned forward and muttered a few words into the man’s ear. Once the fellow’s head jerked up and I saw his eyes glinting in the moonlight as he looked at me.

  “Really?”

  Timash said something else, which apparently ended the dispute, because the guide abruptly turned and disappeared again as silently as the moonlight. My friend followed and Balu ushered me along in their wake. Stumbling again, I had to grin. A blindfold!

  I could have assured the conservationists, when we reached the low mass of darkness that revealed their headquarters, that a blindfold would not have contributed one iota to my inability to retrace my steps at some future date. I could have told them, but I did not. Not only did they not ask, but I felt secure in the supposition that their sense of humor was sadly underdeveloped.

  I was gladdened to note that the members of their council, as they referred to it, were older by some years than the man who had led us here with such poor grace. It gave me some hope that my plan, untested and largely dependent upon faith, might be approved. As I stood in the soft light surveying the four unsmiling faces that awaited my hastily-rehearsed speech, I lowered my estimate of the odds against us from astronomical to merely huge.

  My initial introductions were met with polite nods and little else. Although Timash had been here on more than one occasion—to which was owed the genesis of my idea—any courtesies extended to him in the past plainly did not apply to me, or for that matter, to Balu. Even Timash seemed puzzled, so confused that he had apparently not yet realized that his own welcome had worn discernibly thin.

  The council consisted of one black woman, and three men whose complexions were the reddish tan I had seen on Bantos Han and most people I had met recently. The woman’s aristocratic features and short hair made her an arresting figure, almost Egyptian. Something about the intensity of her gaze caused me to direct the bulk of my remarks to her.

  “Timash has already told you why we’re here, and if you weren’t interested, you would not have invited me to speak tonight. We want the same thing: To be rid of the Nuum. I can help you to do that.”

  “And how do we know you’re not one of them?” one of the male councilors asked.

  Balu retorted before I could. “Are we going to go through this all over again? Keryl’s been a guest of ours for weeks. If he was going to turn anybody over to the Nuum, it would be us in Tahana City, not you living in the bushes!”

  The councilors were on their feet before I could act. It took Timash to restrain first his uncle and then the council—but then, when a bull gorilla demands the floor, you give it to him.

  “Look! Everybody shut up!” He pointed to Balu. “Uncle, control yourself! You taught me better manners. And you—” he fixed the council with a glare “—didn’t need to drag us ten miles through the jungle just to pick a fight. You know I’ve been coming here a long time, and I would never betray you any more than you would me. We’ve pretty much left each other alone all this time, but now Keryl thinks it’s time we changed—right, Keryl?”

  I nodded numbly. That was exactly what I thought—but I hadn’t told Timash. Balu knew what I was about, but he and his mother and Tahana City’s own rulers had judged it too sensitive and dangerous to entrust the information to a lad of Timash’s years. Perhaps we had misjudged him…

  But now was the moment to speak. Timash had calmed the crowd, and bullied them into giving me at least a few seconds’ grace, but that time was quickly draining away. Mentally I threw all of my logs onto the fire.

  “I know some things about the Nuum that you don’t. Never mind how I know them. But I can tell you that they are fractured and disarrayed, and they are vulnerable. The troops they have sent here cannot handle the job they’ve been given; they’re barely holding their own. Properly supplied and organized, we can take them. We can take back what is ours.”

  The black woman leaned over the table. “Are you talking about actually driving them away? About taking over the research station for ourselves?”

  “Oh, no, madam,” I replied. “I’m talking about a revolution.”

  Chapter 22

  I Go Behind the Lines

  My bald statement seemed to stun them, set them back on their heels even more than Timash’s bombast. In that moment of eerie silence, like the eye of a hurricane, I could feel with a rush along my skin the fate of our world teetering out over the edge of the abyss. I teetered with it, as a man who has stopped just short of the precipice does not know if the crumbling rocks will hold him for that timeless, priceless instant before he can regain his balance and save himself.

  Then the moment was gone and the voices crashed over me once more.

  Had I resisted, the power in that room would have swept me away. I only stood fast; before long they would see their words flooding over and past me without leaving a mark, and they would cease of their own accord. Then and only then would they be mine.

  It came as no surprise that the black woman emerged first from the din. She stopped in mid-sentence, abandoning her argument with the man next to her, and simply looked at me. She looked at me as though she had not seen me before, as though I had appeared in a puff of smoke, like Merlin. When I would have grinned fatuously at her, I restrained myself: I held Merlin captive in my pocket. I was becoming drunk with unaccustomed authority, and had she not waved her fellows on the council into order, I might have laughed in sheer delight. All that they had put me through to come here, and I held secrets far greater than they could imagine. Power is a dangerous thing, and arrogance is far worse. A few more moments of chaos and I might have destroyed everything.

  “You have our attention, that much is obvious,” the councilwoman said dryly. She let her words hang on the air, an invitation.

  “If I had your names, I might do more,” I countered. To be truthful, I only wanted to know hers. Plainly the power behind the council’s democratic facade, she fascinated me personally as well. As a colored woman, I could not bring myself to admit any attraction, but as a human being her force of personality was undeniable. In my own time, for a woman to exude such authority was unusual; in this downtrodden age of Man I thought it remarkable.

  She acknowledged my riposte with a nod of her head. “I am Shene. My fellow council members are Trell, Ribaud, and Jonn.” We briefly nodded to each other in turn. They had not spoken directly to me since I entered the chamber, and seemed content to allow Shene to continue. I was equally content to address myself almost solely to her.

  I am unaccustomed to public speaking; my last experience was in giving orders, not in persuading unbelievers. I cast myself back in time (in my mind only, alas) to my university days and the unsmiling professors on whom I had bestowed my theses of Robin
Hood and Arthur and the role of the women who loved them. I spread my hands in implied gratitude for my audience and assumed my most ingratiating smile.

  “Thank you, members of the council. Before we go forward, you have expressed questions as to my reasons for coming here. You have lived a long time under the heel of an oppressor. You have the right to ask.

  “Some of you know that I am ill. My doctor tells me I have contracted a virus, a virus that has no cure in Thoran medicine.” It would be too time-consuming to explain how I contracted a telepathic virus, so I did not try. The crowd began to shrink away, but I stopped them with a wave of my hand. “It is not contagious. No one here is in the slightest danger. But my doctor believes the Nuum may have a cure. I need to get into their laboratories and find out.”

  “Then what do you need us for?” Councilman Trell snapped. “Why don’t you just go back to them?” He fell to muttering to himself. There was little doubt how he felt about my story, or about me.

  “Because despite my appearance, I am not one of them.” I projected my words directly toward him now. I could afford no doubters. “I come from a land very, very far away. I was known by a different name there, but one thing was the same: They too suffered under an invading tyrant. When I first came here, I was glad for the peace and quiet afforded me. I did not know of the Nuum, but it was not long before I found out. My first experience with them showed me a cruel, selfish people who delighted in abusing their own power. I thought perhaps I was only seeing them at their worst, that with time I would come to understand their point of view. But I was mistaken—I had not seen them at anything approaching their worst.

  “Because of circumstances beyond my control, they took me to be one of their own. Even then they were cold and aloof. But I was caught up in their war. I was one and they were many, so I did what they wanted until I could escape.

  “Now I have friends, friends who stood by me when I needed them. Now we are many. I’m tired of running and hiding. And I’m not going to do it anymore.”

  Somewhere behind me a foot scraped the floor. Someone coughed. The council watched me intently. I hadn’t said a damned thing, and they were still listening. The Lord had evidently not yet tired of protecting fools. I cast all my dice on my next throw.

  “You can live the rest of your lives in these tunnels, or you can fight the Nuum and live as free men. I can show you how to make weapons that will kill at a hundred yards without a sound.” Jonn, or perhaps it was Ribaud, stared down at his hands. The others simply shook their heads sadly. I challenged them to speak their minds.

  Shene spoke for them all. “Do you think we haven’t thought of this all before, Keryl Clee? We know these trees better than anyone. There hasn’t been a Nuum who could walk safely alone outside in years. Even their tractor-probes fall into our traps. But it doesn’t do any good. They just send more men, and more robots. We can keep them from doing what they came here for, but we can never stop them. We don’t have the technology.”

  I fingered the Library and pulled it from my pocket.

  “And if I could give you that technology?”

  Her eyes narrowed. Even Jonn looked up.

  “What do you mean?”

  I activated the Librarian. Before I left that room, I had an army.

  As with, I suspect, all medieval scholars, I had at one time carried on a romance with the bow and arrow. Unfortunately, I had abandoned it some time ago in the face of more pressing concerns, but I was delighted to find that while not so simple as riding a bicycle, it was yet a skill that had not utterly devolved over time. Nor was I forced to realize my other fear, that of not being able to reproduce my weapon of choice. I had never been a bowyer nor a fletcher, and had envisioned an extended period of trial and error in creating both a bow of sufficient power, and more importantly, an arrow that would fly in something approximating a straight line. I need not have worried, for the marvelous engineers in Tahana City quickly picked up on my crude design ideas and machined both bow and arrows in a single night.

  I was so impressed I considered moving straight on to crossbows, as they require less effort and deliver more power. I left off the idea for a simple reason: An archer can string and loose much faster than a crossbowman. If my men couldn’t hit their targets, they could at least shoot a lot of arrows.

  This is not to say that none of them were proficient. Given enough hours of practice, anyone, man or ape, can learn to hit a target at twenty or thirty yards. I tutored the men while Balu, my best ape student, assisted his own kind. There was no derogation intended; the gorillas simply handled heavier bows. Safety demanded we practice in different areas.

  I should have been far better than any of them; I was simply reviving an old skill while they were still learning it afresh, but the virus interfered with my concentration and aim. Perhaps it was not so bad, then, that my plan called for me not to take place in the attack.

  Two weeks were allowed for training. It would have taken far longer for the men to become truly proficient, but we only needed to win one battle, wherein if I did my part we would hold the advantages of surprise, numbers, and terrain. If I didn’t do my part, our plan failed no matter how well we imitated Robin and the Merry Men.

  The sky was still grey and the ground wet when I stumbled into the clearing around the bio-research station. My clothes were realistically torn and muddy from having walked several miles through the jungle at night without my guides assisting me. I was thin from several days’ near-fasting, and the hunted look in my eyes was no play-acting: I was jumping from the monster-infested trees to the monster-infested buildings. I was not terribly brave, only terribly desperate. I simply let my true feelings show through.

  I ran to the nearest door, pounding hysterically. No one knew what security measures the Nuum followed, except that they could monitor their own clearing. We were fairly sure that their sensors failed within the first few yards past the tree line, but since none of the conservationists had tested the defenses in some time and the Nuum ventured out so seldom, we could not be sure of that any more than we had been sure that they would not shoot me the moment I came into view.

  Barely had my fist hit the door than it flew open and I fell forward. Several hands grabbed me, unceremoniously pulling me through, and the door slammed shut again. It was so close I felt the rush of air.

  My rescuers pulled me up with a jerk among a babble of voices. I was surrounded by strangers’ faces, their eyes wide, their mouths gaping.

  “It is him! It’s Clee!”

  “That’s incredible!”

  “How did he do it?”

  A more controlled voice took command, from beyond the crowd that limited my vision. “Let’s get him to the infirmary.” That was a voice I was happy to listen to.

  I was half-escorted, half-carried to the infirmary with a solicitude well outstripping anything I had been previously afforded. From the whispered exchanges of my handlers, I gathered that I was a brand of local celebrity: Apparently my disappearance had gained me a notoriety I could have done without. It also granted the Nuum a humanity I was loath to recognize. With an effort I divorced that concept from my thinking.

  The doctor was easier to deal with, even withal that I spent more time with him, for his manner was professionally distant. Comparing him in my mind with the equally competent but more accessible Dr. Chala, allowed him to remain a facade, a figure of authority and learning rather than a person.

  Even in wartime, people are never as easy to kill as figures of authority.

  Suddenly the doctor paused in his examination, straightened, and stared quizzically at his instruments. Then he bent over me, pulling up one eyelid, and frowned at his instruments again. I tensed.

  He looked as though he were about to speak, thought better of it, and turned away. I half-rose from the hard pallet that served as examining table and diagnostic tool. Everything depended on my ability to pose again as a Nuum until I could reach my pre-arranged post. If the doctor had detected
some anomaly that marked my true birth… I glanced around quickly; if I couldn’t find a surgical tool, I would have to use my bare hands.

  My breath came shallowly. If he moved toward the door, I would assume the worst. But he didn’t; he turned again to me—a gas syringe in his hand.

  “Take it easy,” he said, gently pushing me back. “You’ll not be sharing your adventures with the mess hall gangs just yet.” The syringe was pressed gently against my neck and released its contents with a hiss I felt more than heard. “You’re sicker than you think. I don’t know how or why, but something you ran into out there caused serious cellular damage. You weren’t living in an abandoned building, were you? Some of those old wrecks still have active power piles, and the radiation leakage is something you don’t want to think about.” He pulled back my lower lip, then the upper. “You don’t appear to have been exposed, but something sure was playing havoc with your immune system.”

  “I have been having headaches,” I ventured tentatively, thinking he might be referring to my virus.

  He snorted. “And a lot of other things, I imagine. Maybe it was a poison. Were you bitten by anything?”

  I thought wryly of the vaccinations and warnings we had received before I left the Nuum ship. Apparently this doctor thought no more of them than I did. I shook my head. Better, I thought, not to go into my close escape from the tiger spiders.

  “Well, something got into you. I’ll want to do a tox screen, but first I need to get some cellular rejuvenators into you. You seem to have stabilized, but whatever it was, it was causing your cells to age at an accelerated rate. I don’t think you’d have lived to see 80.”

  I could not help staring.

  “Oh, don’t worry about it,” he said, busying himself again with dials and lights. “Just stay out of the jungle and you’ll be telling this story to your great-great-grandchildren.”