“If you’d died, my mother would’ve killed me.”
“Nonsense!” huffed the other gorilla in a gravelly voice. He slapped both hands on his knees and stood up. “I taught your mother more medicine than she can remember.”
“More than she wants to remember, you mean,” Timash retorted.
“That’s enough of that, son. I also taught her to respect her elders.” He regarded me, still prostrate with the memory of pain. “You can lie there all day if you want, but the tea’s in the other room.” And with that he turned and left Timash and me to our own devices. I queried my friend with raised eyebrows.
“That’s my Uncle Balu,” Timash whispered. “Well, actually he’s my mother’s uncle—I think. Anyway, his house was the closest place of I knew to take you, so…”
“A good thing, it feels like to me,” I said, rubbing my scalp. I swung my legs over the side of the bed.
“Oh, yeah, Uncle Balu knows a lot of stuff like that. He wasn’t kidding when he said he taught my mother a lot about medicine. He’s been everywhere.”
I began to understand the origin of Timash’s wandering ways. However, my manners, impressed upon me almost a million years ago by my own family, suddenly snapped me back to the present and commanded me to join my host in the other room, preventing me from interrogating his nephew any further.
Uncle Balu sat in a straight chair before a window overlooking the city. His apartment was on the third floor, judging from the building across the way, which surprised me, for in a city of very close horizons, lodgings with anything approximating a commanding view were highly prized and notoriously difficult to obtain. Although directly across the road was another apartment building, I was to find that from his chosen seat, Balu could see obliquely one of the small but beautiful parks of Tahana.
On a small table beside the chair sat what I least expected to see: a dainty flowered tea set, with three cups set out on saucers. Not until I was quite close could I see that the flowers were not the English roses with which I was familiar, but flowering plants whose genus had probably not existed when I was born. But they were lovely nonetheless, and I was almost overwhelmed with an attack of homesickness.
Balu gestured for us to sit down, and as he poured the tea (which I was delighted to find tasted equally as delicious as those I was accustomed to), I took in the wonderful tiny museum that he called home.
In only four rooms, he had stuffed the memorabilia of a lifetime. The walls were covered with paintings and carvings of all sorts, although placed with such a masterful appreciation of each piece’s uniqueness that they complemented each other perfectly without blending into a homogenous blur. I was pleased to see that none resembled the abstract art with which Hana had decorated her room, and I began to feel an affinity for this creature so unlike me. Hana’s face arose in my memory, chiding me for my inaction. I shook my head to clear her away along with my guilt.
Where there were no paintings there were curio cabinets and shelves lined with objects of glass, metal, wood, plastic, and shell. Not cheap souvenirs from some backwater midway, these virtually shouted out to be noticed, absorbed, and their stories told. On one shelf I saw a long, hollow metal tube, ringed about the middle with semiprecious stones. Both ends were blackened and pitted. I could guess that it was a weapon, and very old, but how it might work I could not fathom—nor was I sure I would want to. A small glass globe held a replica of the Earth so finely detailed I could almost see myself on its surface, but the continents were subtly changed, and an unknown archipelago stretched almost the width of the Atlantic.
“Your tea will be getting cold,” a gentle voice chided me, and I turned to see Balu and Timash watching me from their chairs. So lost in fascination had I become that I had arisen to walk about the room without ever noticing my own movements.
To proffer my apologies would have been insulting. I groped for words as I retook my seat, but anything I could think to say seemed inadequate.
“Timash told me you’d been everywhere,” I managed at last. “I’ll never doubt him again.”
To my great surprise, he laughed, a roaring jungle-cry of a laugh, until he could hardly put his teacup down, and then he slapped both knees with his hands and laughed some more. I looked at Timash, but he was nearly as mystified as I, communicating without words his feeling that: “He’s an old man, you just have to take him as he comes.”
When Balu finally calmed down he took a moment to wipe a tear from his eye.
“Oh, Clee, I haven’t laughed like that in years. I’ve been everywhere? What about you?”
I smiled self-consciously. I have never been comfortable as the center of attention; until the War, books had formed my shelter from the scrutiny of my fellow man.
“Most of my travels have been through books—or because of them. Even in the War, I went only so far as France and England.”
Balu stroked his chin in an attitude of wisdom, and then said: “I have no idea what you’re talking about. How far is it from England to France?”
Again, I smiled, but this time in response to the unintentional irony of his question.
“That depends. In distance, only a few miles. In culture, philosophy, outlook…the Moon is closer.”
Balu nodded. “Then you have traveled far indeed. Cultures can learn from each other, even in war. I myself have learned a great deal in my travels, but nobody wants to hear about it anymore.” He glanced at his nephew. “Except Timash, of course, and even he doesn’t believe me.”
“Hey, hold on—!”
“Quiet, boy. If you’d rather listen to your mother, who’s never been outside this mountain, than to me, well that’s your business.” He sipped his tea, giving me a wink over the lip of his cup. Timash missed the wink and sank into a staring contest with the bottom of his cup. The conversation lagged.
“I did make quite a trip getting here,” I ventured, trying to relieve the silence. “But I spent most of it inside a Nuum airship, so there wasn’t much to see.”
At the mention of the extraterrestrials, both generations perked up. Balu was the first to speak.
“The Nuum… What an odd bunch. Did I ever tell you about the time I worked on one of their sky barges, Timash?”
Timash started to speak, then thought better of it. I was getting pretty good at reading the apes’ faces: his took on an expression of concentration, then puzzlement, and finally dawning surprise. I knew his answer before he spoke, and it required no telepathy.
“No, actually…I don’t think you ever did.” He put his teacup down and assumed an expression of real interest for the first time since we had begun talking.
For his part, I believe Balu was no less surprised than Timash to find that he’d never told that particular tale, but he concealed it more artfully. He set aside his own cup and rubbed his hands in preparation; I could tell that when he let go, his entire body would leap headfirst into the telling, his arms and legs windmilling and gesticulating. I quietly backed my chair to a safer range.
“Years ago, when I was about your age, Clee, the Nuum hadn’t gotten on this crusade about apes that they have now, and it was pretty safe to travel around the countryside. Well, it was safe from the Nuum anyway, the tiger spiders and the breen and maybe some of the humans were a different story. But hey, if there’s nothing out there you can’t see from your front window, why go out at all?
“So there I was, minding my own business, somewhere up by Cantrenes, which is maybe five hundred miles north of here, and a pretty lively town at the time. About thirty years ago it got wiped out by the red weed, but that’s a different story and I wasn’t there then anyway. So I wandered into town one night, keeping to the shadows, ‘cause some of the Nuum even then were a little nervous about a gorilla walking around after dark.” He winked again. “I guess they were even more nervous before I got through. I wasn’t lookin’ to start any trouble; fact is, I was really looking to find some work—I was hungry—but who should I run into—and I mean tha
t—but a Nuum.
“I almost knocked the poor fellow right off his feet. He took one look at me, and his eyes got real wide, and I was sure for a second we were gonna get into it, and he says: ‘Hey, what are you doing here?’
“Well, I thought maybe I could scare him off, so I said: ‘Looking for a job. What’s it to you?’
“Quick as a wink, he tells me to follow him, and turns around and goes the other way. So I followed him. Before you know it I’m standing guard at the local governor’s house with a brand new uniform tunic and a full stomach to fill it out. He tells me: ‘Stand right here. Don’t move and don’t let anybody in unless I tell you to.’
“Seemed simple enough to me, so I did it. I found out later that the only reason they hired me was because the governor and his daughter were passing through town and they wanted to scare off anybody with a gripe against Nuum. They would’ve fired me the next morning—if I’d lasted that long.
“A couple of hours of standing there and I was getting pretty bored. Then I heard some noises from around the corner. I wanted to go look, but the Nuum who hired me had told me to stay put. So I did. A few minutes later, this couple came around the corner, all covered up in capes and hats and things. As soon as they saw me, they stopped.
“Now I knew as sure as I was standing there that they were up to something. I just didn’t know if it was any of my business. I figured if they tried to come in, it was, and if they didn’t, it wasn’t. They walked by me kind of fast, and as soon as they went around the corner I heard them start running. But hey, I was doing my job…
“About an hour later the whole place started jumping and the lights came on and there’re people everywhere. Finally one of them runs up to me, asks me if I’d seen anybody, and I told him about the couple that ran around the corner.
“He started screaming at me. ‘Why didn’t you stop them?’
“‘Because I was told not to move. I’m keeping people out.’
“‘You idiot! That was the governor’s daughter! She’s run off with a Thoran!’ And the next thing I know they’ve got those weird guns all over me and I’m shipped off to a sky barge for ‘dereliction of duty.’
“You ever seen one of those things?” I had to admit that I had not. Vaguely I had a memory of one from my night in the Library, just enough to know that the ship on which I had flown did not meet the same description. “They’re just big open boats in the sky. They’ve got photonic sails and negative gravity generators, but most of the time they run on photonic oars. They Nuum use them for pleasure ships, mostly—the nobles like to ride around in them because they’re slow and you can actually look around. That, and it gives them a place to put prisoners. They use them as slaves. You sit there all day and row back and forth. It’s not hard, but it sure is boring.”
He stopped to pour us all a new cup of tea, sipping some of his own to soothe his dry throat. “Well, after a while the novelty of the whole thing started to wear off, so I started working a little harder at it. Pretty soon my bench mates couldn’t keep up with me, and that threw off the whole side of the boat. Couldn’t row in unison, you see, and we kept spinning off to one side. All the time I just kept smiling like an idiot, so they wouldn’t see I was doing it on purpose. What they didn’t know was that we’d sailed almost all the way back home, and I figured if I was getting off it was now or never. What I didn’t know was whether they’d get rid of me at the next stop—or just dump me over the side and be done with it.
“I guess they must’ve figured that dumping me was more work than letting me go, so they dropped me off in the middle of nowhere. They must have thought it was quite a joke; they forced me off at gunpoint like I was being exiled to some foreign land.” He pointed through the window. “It was about ten miles from here. I was home for breakfast the next day.”
Home. Would the word ever again hold any meaning?
Chapter 20
I Have Hope
In the weeks subsequent to my first visit to Uncle Balu’s home, I became a frequent guest, both with and without Timash. In truth, I believe he found his uncle less spellbinding than I when subjected to his familial duties on such a scale. Somehow, I found that Balu evinced an understanding of my circumstances; more than once in his long wanderings he, too, had known cause to wonder if he would ever see his home again.
On top of that, though, I had Hana to think about. Had Farren’s intentions toward her changed after my abortive attempts at rescue? Was he now holding her hostage against my renewed appearance? Was she even alive? Every day I was forced to remain in seclusion held the potential to drown me in a nightmare of worry; every day I was reluctantly compelled to the conclusion that the only sanctuary for my sanity was to put her dear face from my mind until I could resume the hunt.
In this Balu was a godsend. Twice he prevailed upon me to become an overnight guest, and although there was no danger inherent in walking the streets of Tahana at night, unlike some of the larger cities I had known, I grasped his offer eagerly. His store of treasures was apparently far larger than those on display in his apartment; each time I went there I would find new and different objects in place of those I had seen before. After a while it became a game between us, to see how long it would take me to pick out the new wonders in the museum that was his home.
It occurred to me at last to inquire how he had conveyed all of these fantastic objects from the far corners of the earth here, particularly given the Nuum’s strictures against many of them. For that matter, how had he obtained them in the first place?
“I never reveal my sources,” he chuckled over a cup of tea. (He seemed to live on it.) “But there are a lot of places in the old cities where you can stash mountains of things if you know where to look. Warehouses, vaults, chemical storage tanks… No one uses any of them anymore. There are more abandoned cities between here and the Nuum in the north than you can count on your fingers and toes.”
I picked up a cup of my own and sat down, recognizing his expansive mood. Such moods never failed to be informative, or at the very least fascinating. “But what happened to all the people? Did the Nuum destroy them in the invasion?”
“Oh, no,” Balu shook his head. “These people were gone long before the Nuum. Maybe they died, maybe they left—maybe they became the Nuum. Who knows?”
“And the cities are just deserted? Nothing lives in them?”
“Oh, no,” he repeated, with greater emphasis. “I never said that. There are still things living there—not people, of course, let alone apes, but plenty of Things.”
I smiled, unable to miss the capitalization. “Well, of course something lives there,” I said, backtracking to cover my apparent naiveté. “I don’t doubt there are animals, and insects, and a lot of things I wouldn’t care to meet—tiger spiders, for example.”
“Son,” he said with sudden seriousness, “even a tiger spider will back away from some of the things that live in those cities. Have you ever heard of the breen?”
To this day I vow that it could have been nothing less than racial memory that caused the chill that ran down my spine when he said that word—racial memory of the horror of a creature that had not even come to the light of Creation until millennia after I was born. It could not have happened, but it did. In answer to his question I could only shake my head.
Before he spoke again, he rose from the chair he loved so much, moving about the room to touch an object here and there. My apprehension grew; I had never known him to be reticent before about any part of his wanderings or the things he had seen—precisely the opposite. I normally had to preface my departures by at least an hour to allow him time to wind down.
“Nobody knows where they came from. They’ve only been around for about a couple hundred years, so the most popular theory is that the Nuum brought them. From what I’ve seen and heard, that’s probably the best idea we’re going to get.
“Breen stand just a little bigger than a man—about your size, in fact. They’re covered with silve
ry short fur, walk on two legs, and carry claws on their fingers and toes that will cut through metal. They’re fast and they’re strong. But the most scary thing about them is their tenacity. You know how you never go after a rat in a hole? Once it’s trapped, it’s ten times as dangerous because it’s got nowhere to go and nothing to lose. Well, the breen are like that all the time. They never back down from a fight, never give up. They’re like wolverines—except they’re your size. If one ever sees you, you’re a dead man. They’ll eat anything that moves, and nothing that you can carry can stop them.”
“Why would the Nuum bring such creatures to Earth? And why would they let them run free?”
Balu shrugged. “The Nuum aren’t exactly talking. But the story goes, in the early days, they used them to flush out pockets of resistance. Sometimes rebels would take refuge in a building that the Nuum didn’t just want to bomb out of existence. So they’d pull back, let a pack of breen in, and wait. Problem was getting the breen out again. Pretty soon they learned that they might as well have bombed the building in the first place, for all the good it was doing them. So eventually, they abandoned the project and worked around those areas.”
“And there are still districts in these cities where no one lives because of the breen?”
Balu chuckled and poured more tea. “Oh, no. That’s where the Nuum outsmarted themselves. Breen are nomadic; they run in packs from place to place, moving whenever they hunt up all the food in their area—which is often. Pretty soon they started coming out of the buildings on their own —hungry. But they were smart too; as soon as they’d fed, they’d run back home. Nuum started moving out real fast, and by the time they figured out what to do about it, they were afraid to bomb the buildings because they didn’t have any way of knowing if they’d gotten all the breen. They ended up evacuating a bunch of cities and hoping the breen wouldn’t migrate.”
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 14
