The Secret City Read online

  “Look,” Sanja said at last. “You’re not Nuum, I know that, at least not like any Nuum I’ve heard of. There’s something about your mental shields—with most people, they’re just there, you see them but you can’t get past them, like someone whispering to a friend so you can’t hear. But yours—it’s like you’re not even there. There are no shields; there’s just…nothing. And then there was when Jazil called to have them take you away, that scared you. The sandclaw didn’t scare you, but the Nuum did. So whatever you are, you’re not one of them.”

  I said nothing. Her reasoning was sound, even if there was no chance that she could deduce the truth. And she had earned my trust, but how much did I need to tell her? When I had been here last, I had lead a Thoran revolt in the city of Dure and earned the enmity of virtually the entire Nuum race. Were they to learn that I had returned, I could only imagine the lengths to which they would go to find me. Were they even to hazard a guess as to who I really was, I would immediately become the most wanted man on the planet. Would it even be fair to burden her with all of that?

  Then again, until I had a chance to consult the Librarian, I didn’t even know when this was. I might well have returned before I was here the last time. Perhaps I was being needlessly paranoid. How did I know the Nuum even knew of me at all?

  I was lost in time and space. My only goal was to find Maire, but I had no idea if she would know me. In the meantime, the only anchor I possessed was this girl who had risked so much for a stranger. I glanced around to make sure the owner of the diner had not dropped back to see to our needs.

  “I am a ghost,” I said softly. “I do not show up on the planetary datasphere.”

  Sanja frowned, her forehead wrinkling. “Not at all? Anywhere?” When I shook my head she went on, “I’ve never heard of that. Are you a spy, or something? Did they wipe you out of the system?”

  “Something like that,” I admitted. “I would rather not go into details.”

  She sat back, her face relaxing. “No, I understand… Maybe I don’t want to know anyway. I like you the way you are. If I found out something I didn’t want to know, I might not like you so much.”

  “No need to worry,” I said hastily. “I am not going to try to hurt you.”

  That elicited an unladylike snort of laughter which must have made the rest of the room mad with curiosity.

  “Oh, you could try, but you wouldn’t succeed.”

  Her response relaxed me in turn. It was not bravado; I had seen Sanja surprised by a stranger in the desert and attacked by a sandclaw, and neither time had she fainted, run away, or shirked from a fight. She had abandoned her old life for me, and her new life would be tumultuous, but now I could rest easy knowing she was equal to the task.

  Chapter 5

  I Form a Plan

  Our food arrived, delivered personally by the owner, still trying to keep his hands from shaking as he set our plates down. One whiff and I forgot my table manners, attacking my food and frightening the poor man half to death. I was ravenous. Oddly enough, although I had never eaten these dishes before, I had an unmistakable sense of déjà vu. This restaurant served exactly what the menu advertised. Some things had actually improved in a million years.

  While I was slaying my worst of my hunger, Sanja was devouring her own breakfast in a more orderly, but just as thorough, progression.

  “Do you have a plan?” I asked in a rare moment when neither of us was chewing.

  “The people we need to see will be available by the time we finish here. Then we’ll go to the bank and deposit the tribe’s share of the take in their account.”

  “The tribe has a bank account?”

  She looked at me as if I had grown a set of antlers. “Of course the tribe has a bank account. We’re nomads, not savages.” She picked up a piece of seed-laden bread and bit into it. “Don’t worry, our share will be enough to cover our needs.”

  “Not to disagree with you, but you have no idea what my needs are. I have a long way to go.”

  Swallowing the last of the bread, she replied: “Not to disagree with you, but believe me, whatever we’re going, we’ll have enough to get us there in style.”

  My forward planning motion hit a brick wall. “We?”

  “Yes, we. You didn’t think I ran away just to set up camp in the nearest one-giva town, did you? Where do you think Jazil’s going to look for me? If there’s anything I do know from looking at you, you’re not planning to stick around here. Like you said, you’ve got a long way to go. If I’m leaving home, I’m leaving. There are parts of this world I’ve never heard of, let alone seen. You’ve been places. You’re going places. That’s what I want to do.”

  Her voice had been rising steadily, and now the other customers, if they had not yet decided to leave for their own safety, must be bursting to know what was going on. I motioned for her to calm down.

  “You have no idea what you are talking about. I told you, the Nuum want me very badly.” A bit of premature conjecture, perhaps, but in a good cause. “And they are not careful about who they hurt in getting what they want. I know you think you can take care of yourself, but this is not like taming a giva or taking down a sandclaw. I have seen the Nuum lay waste to cities. I have been inside their prisons, and I was lucky to get out. I am only alive because I look like one of them. You do not.”

  Her face was getting red, but Sanja was no movie princess. She knew the vital importance of keeping our conversation private, though I could see that it was costing her.

  “And what options do I have? I’m not going back to the tribe, and even if I took all the venom money, it wouldn’t last forever. I have no friends, no job, no skills. This is the only city I’ve ever visited. I know how to survive, but how am I supposed to live?”

  No words came. Hers had stabbed me through. How naïve to think that I could abandon her here, strand her, blithely believing that she could make her own way? A warrior she might be, self-sufficient in her world, but she was still only a child. In my time she would have been considered a tomboy in her high school. I was old enough to be her father, and a fine parent I was at that.

  “All right,” I said. “You would not be in this situation except for me, and it would wrong for me to abandon you now. But you promise me one thing: If the Nuum show up looking for me, you run. You melt into the crowd and you do not look back.”

  The refusal in her eyes was unmistakable. This was not a girl used to running. She had grown up in the most unforgiving environment possible, where human survival was only possible through cooperation and unrelenting effort toward the common good. Even now, estranged from her people and on the run, she had no thought of our keeping the cash from our venom sale, but only her share, the rest to be put in trust for the tribe—where like as not Jazil would lay claim to it.

  But I could be uncompromising as well. I had said nothing about the Nuum that was not the absolute truth, and I would not put it beyond them to visit their vengeance on the Zilbiri if they thought it would help them to get something out of me. Sanja’s gaze possessed the molten heat of youthful rebellion, but mine was ice—and I had the advantage that some small echo of her feelings was palpable behind her mental shields, while to her, my thoughts were utterly opaque.

  “I promise,” she said almost too low to hear.

  “Good.” I looked down to see both of our plates had vanished, probably the moment we finished our food. “Give me some money. I am going to pay the bill.”

  “I can do that.” Her rebellion had found a spark. “I’m not a child. Besides, a Nuum would make me do it.”

  “A Nuum would not pay at all.” I held out my hand, and she reluctantly put some coins there. Nuum didn’t use cash, but the prohibition against technology extended to any automated payment systems. To me this tableau felt completely normal, but I steeled myself to play my part.

  The proprietor bobbed his head as I approached. He was like to tear his towel in half in his anxiety. I seized his hand roughly and pressed
the coins into his flesh.

  “We were never here,” I hissed, and strode away without a backward glance, as if it would never cross my mind that he would disobey, or that Sanja would not meekly follow. As I left, I managed to make eye contact with each of the other patrons, each of them understanding my wishes without my having to say a word.

  Sanja accomplished the venom sale quickly and with a minimum of bargaining, although I think my presence might have hastened negotiations and secured us more than a fair price. When we reached the bank, I let her go alone. “Banks have too many eyes,” I explained, and found myself a bench in a nearby park. I had the bench, and soon the entire area, to myself.

  “So what have you found out?” I inquired of the empty air, and a moment later the Librarian shared my bench. I smiled to see him; he was only a hologram, a manifestation of the branch library in the image of my of my old professors, but he had been my closest friend for twenty years.

  He smiled as well, and I fancied it was not simply a reflection of my own.

  “The good news first, since I know that’s what you want to hear. I have been performing passive scans since we came to town, and I can say with 99% accuracy that we have arrived 19 years and forty-four days after we left.”

  The blood pounded in my ears, cutting off all other sound. Nineteen years! Maire was here! She would still be alive! I fought to bring my emotions under control.

  “Do you have word of her?”

  He shook his head. “Unless for some reason she was figuring in the world-wide datacasts, I wouldn’t. I’d have to inquire, and I can’t do that. If the main Library were to detect my presence, I would be forced to download my research, and that could trigger alarms.”

  By “research,” he meant everything that he had learned since he met me. When the Library had provided him, it had been fulfilling the wishes of some unknown Thoran insurgent programmer—the same programming that had kept the Library from betraying me as a time traveler. It was a loophole in the system; everything the Library told the Nuum was true—it simply did not divulge everything it knew. Still, if the Thoran modifications had been discovered in the past 19 years, they might have been corrected. We could not take that chance.

  “Then the question is, how do we get to Dure?” I thought for a moment. “Is there anything about the Invisible City on the datacasts? Anything political?”

  “Again, nothing. What I need to access a stand-alone databank, or at least one not currently connected to the datasphere. It would not provide real-time information, but I would be able to make direct inquiries without alerting the main Library. And before you ask, I have found nothing pertaining to you.”

  “Then there is nothing to find. If the Nuum knew I was back, that news would be all over the place.” I started tapping my foot. Now that I knew Maire was out there, I could not stand another minute of waiting. “How do you suggest we get to Dure?”

  The Librarian actually hesitated long enough for me to notice.

  “I can give you a list of cities in order of distance that could provide transport, assuming Sanja is correct in that you will have the appropriate credits to your account, but you might need identification. I do not know how procedures have changed since we were here last; you did tend to cause disruptions wherever you went. Lady Maire was planning to institute drastic social changes in Dure, changes that would not be reflected elsewhere; if they have been maintained, then anyone travelling to Dure may be subject to particular attention, which could prove problematic.

  “In addition, the last time you travelled you were on a military transport, after which you adopted, in a word, non-traditional travel plans. To reach Dure on a commercial route, you would need to use Nuum credits, of which you own none, via Nuum payment methods, of which you have none.”

  His list of objections was crushing, but his manner of delivery was so calm and controlled that I could not find it within myself to take strenuous objection, not that it would have profited me.

  “Assuming Sanja can provide us both with sufficient cash, how do Nuum pay for things?”

  “Typically, a subcutaneous telepathic data transceiver. One has it placed under the skin and all transactions are handled telepathically. You have never seen a Nuum pay for anything because there is nothing to see.”

  I did not like the “subcutaneous” part very well, but it probably could not be helped. At least I would not have to worry about forgetting my wallet.

  “I assume these transceivers are easy to obtain?”

  “Oh, extremely simple, and their implantation takes only seconds. A banker might wonder why you were only receiving yours now, at such an advanced age, but I don’t doubt you could explain yourself sufficiently. The problem, as I see it, is that such a device would lend itself to remote monitoring. If you should take the implant, and the Nuum discover your identity, they could locate you instantly.”

  My hopes fell again. It had been bad enough to learn that it would take a banker to give me the transceiver, after the effort I had expended to avoid entering Sanja’s bank, but if they came with some kind of tracking system, the whole idea would have to be scrapped. It would be hard enough avoiding the Nuum if they found out I was here without a tiny piece of metal under my skin shouting, “Here I am! Here I am!”

  “And you would have to go into a Nuum bank. A Thoran bank would not have the technology, obviously.”

  I groaned. How could an “extremely simple” operation be so complicated?

  “The alternative,” the Librarian went on as if unaware of the effect his words had had on me, “would be to download the software into my systems. I could deactivate the tracking subroutine, but I would be available to transact for you at any time you would wish.”

  “Really? You could do that?”

  He gave me a look that strongly implied that he would not have offered the idea otherwise.

  It certainly did seem to resolve my dilemma. I was never without the Library, and with his short-range sensors, he would realize my needs as soon as they appeared, so that it would seem to any casual observer that I was activating my own implanted system. Still, the same obstacle remained:

  “How am I going obtain the program without going into a bank?”

  Chapter 6

  My Life of Crime

  Sanja was wary of approaching when she saw me deep in conversation with a stranger, but I waved her over. She was going to make a spectacle of herself if she kept skulking around the park as if she were planning to assassinate me. I introduced the Librarian, and since she still believed that I was, if not Nuum, some offshoot thereof, she was not shocked by my possession of personal technology. Or perhaps she thought that if I were already “outside the sphere,” as the Librarian would have it, nothing else I could do could render me in more danger.

  “I deposited the tribe’s money into its account and opened a new one under your name for our money. I didn’t have any way to open an account under a fake name for myself, but as soon as they heard you were a Nuum, they fell all over themselves to help me.”

  For a moment, horror gripped me. “You did not give them my name, did you?”

  Sanja gave me a “grown-ups think kids are stupid” look that had not changed in a thousand millennia.

  “Of course not! I told them you didn’t want your name on the account. I made it sound like you were doing something underhanded, and that it’d be best if none of us lowly Thorans asked too many questions. They gave me a code and made me promise to tell you that no one would ever know who you were.”

  I let out a relieved breath. “Good. Now the only problem is how to get to the money.” I explained that I lacked a financial transceiver, which merited a raised eyebrow. “I do not exist, remember? Which means I can’t walk into a bank and get a new one. The Librarian has an idea about how we can steal the software, but we still have to get hold of one.”

  The three of us spent the next several minutes tossing out ideas without hatching a single workable scheme. At last o
ur extended stop began to make the space between my shoulder blades itch, and I suggested we move along. It felt odd to walk with the Librarian, but as Sanja pointed out, if anyone was searching for us, he would be looking for two people together, not three.

  As we wandered, we encountered more people, Thorans, a smattering of more lizard-men, even a few Nuum, notable for their size, proud posture, and colorful garments. Although too aloof to speak to a stranger, even a fellow overlord, I could feel their gazes rest on me for more than a passing moment, and it was with a mental wail of despair—fortunately unheard by any of them—that I recalled Sanja and I were still wearing our Zilbiri robes! Even the Librarian had adopted them for consistency. I stopped and gathered my friends, calling their attention to our appalling oversight.

  “It is my fault, of course. Stealing some new clothes should have been our first priority.”

  “It’s Jazil’s fault,” Sanja insisted. “If he hadn’t starved you, your mind wouldn’t have been on food.”

  “Regardless,” the Librarian said, “it only emphasizes the need for you to find some way to access your funds. Now that we have been seen walking about in desert attire, if clothing begins disappearing, someone may remember you.”

  “I suppose we could just walk into a shop and take what we want,” I said, shaking my head, “the way the diner owner thought we were going to do. But I would dislike doing it.”

  “It would not work in any event,” the Librarian said. “The diner was a Thoran establishment. The kinds of shops that cater to Nuum on a regular basis are actually owned by Nuum themselves, even if the staff are Thoran. They will expect payment.”

  We watched another Nuum stroll by, his hair gently swirling and his red cape fluttering even though there was no hint of a breeze where we stood.