“Marella?” I frowned. “What has she to do with me?”
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. See, it’s getting really dull down here, and if truth be told we might not be leaving on our own two feet, if you know what I mean. So I was wondering how you’d feel if I tried to…make a move. On Marella.”
Truth to tell, I was not sure for a moment how I felt. Harros must have caught a flash of my thoughts, or perhaps they were reflected on my face, because he retreated half a step, but then I shook my head and caught his shoulder.
“No, it’s all right. You’re a gentleman for asking, but I already have someone else.” Yes, my moral sense scolded me, you do. Marella was a beautiful woman under all the dirt and danger, but I had embarked on this journey to rescue Hana Wen, and to turn my heart away from her now would be unconscionable, notwithstanding whether or not I continued on to Dure. “For a minute there, I was jealous, but it wasn’t because of you. We’ve been through a lot together, and if you want to try to find some comfort with Marella, then God speed you.”
For perhaps the first time, I saw Harros’ face broaden into a full, genuine grin, and clapping me on the shoulder, he was off, searching, I assumed, for Marella. I stood alone, as I had wanted to be, and hollow.
My solitude was soon ended for a second time. Feeling a presence at my elbow, I turned to find Uncle Sam standing there. I was hardly an expert on breen emotional states, even after studying them at close range for a few days, but even I could see that he was nervous, agitated more than I had seen before. Come to think of it, he and the others so far had resembled the Vulsteen in some respects, as if their masters’ wooden equanimity had rubbed off upon them. Up until then I had never questioned exactly why these breen were the way they were: The sheer relief of finding our lives spared by some of the most feared carnivores on earth had chased away concern for the reasons. Now I sensed that my unasked questions were to be answered. I doubted I would like it.
“It’s going to be soon,” he began cryptically. “We can tell the signs. The Vulsteen are going to come for us soon. You need to gather your friends and stay out of the way. That’s the only way to keep from being hurt.”
“Hurt?” I seized his shoulder but immediately let go. The muscles under his fur were tight, rolling with nervous energy. “What’s going on? What do the Vulsteen want?”
“Listen carefully. The Vulsteen have kept us here for generations. The only time they let us out is when they take us to the arena. They have some sort of object there. They point it at us, and we go wild. Something takes hold of us and it’s just like we were outside again.” He glanced up at the far ceiling, but he was seeing the sky. “There’s fighting, and killing. Not all of us come back. That’s what’s going on; everyone’s scared because they know the Vulsteen are coming to put us in the arena. If you don’t stay out of the way, you could get hurt before they even pull you out.”
“Pull us out? Why?”
He paused a breath before he told me. “So they can put you in the arena with us.”
Uncle Sam looked up again, and stepped back quickly. An instant later a loop of tough cord yanked closed around my upper arms and I was hoisted into the air!
Chapter 29
In the Arena of the Mind-Mutants
The rope bit into my triceps; my heels kicked the side of the pit while they pulled me up, heedless of my pain or shock. It was all over in a few moments and the rope was removed, but I was surrounded by armed men. Angry as I was, that would not have stopped me, but the small remaining portion of my mind that could still claim rationality told me that I stood too close to the precipice and less than a shove would be more than enough to end any impromptu rebellion.
Thus restrained, but in no way calmed, I allowed them to bring up my companions, whom Uncle Sam had fetched. At least they were not taken by surprise, so their ascent was easier than mine. Even as Harros, the last man out, cleared the lip, I could see that Uncle Sam had done the right thing; the breen were milling about, growling and bumping each other. The smallest had already fled to the comparative safety of the rear chambers, and those who remained appeared, if anything, eager to work themselves into an ever greater frenzy. And Uncle Sam had told me they did not go truly wild until they entered the arena!
Our hosts, meantime, spared no time marching us away toward our fate. Through more halls we were led, alternating between dust and rock, fine finished stone, and the occasional lunatic mural, but this tour was shorter than our first. We were herded into a small chamber through a heavily barred door, which was quickly shut behind us. Ahead another door, also barred, led to a lighted area. I could feel a cold breeze through the bars. That door led to the surface!
Closer inspection revealed that we were not in a chamber at all, but a cage, not unlike a large prison cell. Outside our jailors stood for a moment staring at us, then they all but one filed away. For the first time, we heard a Vulsteen speak.
“You are going to die,” he said in a voice dry as a hacking cough. I could almost hear his leathery jaw muscles creaking in protest at the unwonted exercise. “We find it heightens the experience if you know why.”
All reasons to the contrary aside, I was fascinated by his narration. To hear a Vulsteen speak of “heightened experience”—notwithstanding the novelty of hearing one speak at all—drew me like a moth to flame. Perhaps this would explain the psychotic art splashed across random walls! At the very least it would explain why we had been kidnapped, and why the Vulsteen had gone to such lengths not to kill us (although I admit it was a near brush with death by fright when we were thrown in with the breen). After all we had suffered, they owed us this much.
“Years ago,” he continued in the same distracted tone, “we lived on the surface, as other men. But the land changed, and the thunder lizards and the breen and the bats came and we were chased beneath the earth, where they could not reach us. We were safe, but the confinement drove many mad. Our scientists perfected a method of draining out all volatile emotions. This allowed us to live underground without sun, without air, and without madness.
“But as time passed, violence began to break out. Men murdered without warning, without reason. We found that emotion could not be drained, only suppressed, and that when it built up, like fluid in the brain, it must be allowed to escape or it would explode in violence.
“It became a conundrum: that we must express emotion to survive, but quash it to live. We discovered, at last, that we could draw emotion from others and rebroadcast it toward ourselves. With this catalyst, we could experience our own emotions in a powerful but harmless burst of energy. For a few hours we are gripped by strong passions, but they can be channeled, and then we return to the serenity and calm order of our lives.
“For our emotional subjects, we chose the breen: bestial savages but with manlike emotions that could be drained and reused. They have served us for generations, even though left to their own devices they would do naught but kill each other, and soon we would have none left. But the breen prefer killing outsiders to fighting with their own kind. So when we find travelers, we bring them here, and we loose them in the arena, where they fight for their lives. It takes only exposure to the outer air to whip the beasts into a frenzy, and you Nuum, when you are threatened, are particularly vicious. We will absorb your energy and use it. If you live, you go free—but you will not.”
Three us stood stunned at this matter-of-fact lecture on the rationale of our execution, but Timash was having none of it. Throwing himself against the bars, he reached one sinewy arm as far as it would go, clutching air inches from the Vulsteen who, I am certain, had chosen exactly that distance from the bars for precisely that reason.
“You see?” he rasped. “It works.” He pointed to the far set of bars, which slid upward as at his signal. “Go.” He pointed at Timash. “You are the largest. You go last.”
Unwilling to march to our own horrible deaths, none of us moved. But the Vulsteen must have seen it all many times
.
“That door will remain open whether you leave here or not. The breen will find you regardless.”
There is not a man worth his mother’s pain who would not rather die in the open than in a cage. I led Harros and Marella onto the sand of the arena, and whirled when we heard the bars crash down behind us, a second ahead of Timash’s anguished roar. Again his arms plunged through the bars; his hands grasped them in a futile attempt to move the door, but it was adamant. I took his hairy paw in my own.
“Courage!” I hissed at him. “This is all planned. Find out why they left you there and use that knowledge to help you to escape!”
Several soft thumps sounded behind me and I turned to find that our weapons had been thrown into the arena with us. Even as I seized mine I had to admire the Vulsteen’s ruthless consideration for the conservation of their resources. Armed, we would survive a few moments longer, providing a few more precious drops of passion for their dead husks of souls.
I twisted the handle of my staff until the sword leaped out, ready to do battle as was Marella’s, while Harros stood bravely with a club and net. But even as I hefted it, I saw myself pushing the point between the ribs of the breen I knew as Uncle Sam, and my rage grew at these arrogant ghouls who threw friend against friend in a battle to the death only because they lacked the courage to make their own way in the world.
I raised my head to shout my defiance at the crowd—and stopped, speechless at the sight of hundreds of pale-skinned living skeletons perched on their stone benches, burning eyes pinned on me in rapt anticipation of their upcoming feast upon my soul.
Sucking in my breath, I resolutely turned my back, forcing my emotions deep down in my breast and taking the last calm moment that my life might ever know. Across the way, I saw a barred door lift away and the breen emerge into the light. Pushing and snarling, they broke onto the sand singly and in fractious pairs, raising a small hope that perhaps they would, after all, break into a riot before they even saw us.
These were not the same animals with whom we had lived the past several days. In the last moment before my hopes were dashed and terror descended upon us, I stole a look at the grandstand, and there I saw men clustered about a gray metal contraption of patchwork tubes and circuits. It could only be their emotion machine, not pointed at us, but at the breen, and I knew then that the Vulsteen had lied. It took more than a return to their wild environment to turn these creatures into killers—the Vulsteen left nothing to chance.
My newfound knowledge, however, gave no comfort when the first of the breen saw us, and giving a high-pitched cry, hurled himself across the arena!
Naturally, my first thought was to run headlong to meet him.
Chapter 30
I Conceive a Plan
For all that my rush implied a desire for swift suicide, the Bard himself would have approved the method to my madness. In the instant after the breen had charged and before I dashed ahead to meet him, I had caught Marella’s eye, and an instant understanding passed between us. As I ran, so did she, flanking the breen. Separated from its pack, under assault from two directions at once, the poor beast’s head whipped back and forth as it tried to decide how to deal with this unprecedented problem: other creatures ran away from breen, not at them.
By the time it faltered in its charge and turned on Marella, I was close behind. Clumsy in the sand, it swiped at her with its claws and missed; I did not. My sword entered its body below the shoulder and plunged straight into its heart.
I pulled the sword free even before my victim hit the sand, dead, and I backpedaled furiously. The wondrous material of which the Nuum made their weapons allowed for no sticking in the body; it slid in and out as if the target were water. Blood itself hardly clung.
The remaining breen stood bewildered in their tracks. As Marella and I retreated, Harros moved to join us. I could hear Timash cheering us on in the background.
The breen suddenly surged forward—and halted again. Even the subsonic buzz of Vulsteen telepathic “shouting” stopped. Some subtle but palpable alteration tugged at the edge of my consciousness, like a background noise suddenly silenced. I whirled, turning my back on the most dangerous creatures in the world, and saw my thoughts confirmed: Where before the Vulsteen technicians had surrounded their device, now they swarmed over it like ants. The undercurrent that had signified the operating of their machinery was gone.
I fell to my knees as though exhausted, dropping my chin in an attitude of despair. Whatever the cause of the instrument’s failure, its creators must not suspect that I had divined even a part of the truth. Let them think that I believed in heavenly deliverance, but if they were unable to remedy the problem, we would live to fight another day—unless they simply decided to execute us.
And then the hand of inspiration reached out and touched my pitiful brow. Throwing my arms out, I pitched full-length onto the sand. It was as dismally histrionic a performance as was ever hissed off the London stage, but I gambled that these passionless monsters would lack the experience to see through me. Against the sand, the whip-like sword was nearly invisible to me, let alone any watchers in the gallery. One-handed, I retracted the blade.
“Come help me,” I muttered to my friends, and when they moved in close I threw a handful of sand in Harros’ face. As he clawed at his eyes, I staggered to my feet, palming my club and sliding it down my sleeve.
Open-mouthed with shock, Marella nonetheless followed me back to the cage where Timash waited. My heart was thumping wildly; if the breen were to rouse themselves now, Harros would die blinded and alone. But (so my reasoning went) if the breen came alive again, we were all dead in any event.
“What did you do that for?” Marella demanded as we reached the wall. “What’s going on?”
By this time Harros had cleared his vision and was stumbling in our direction. I needed no telepathy to see that if the Vulsteen had gotten their connivance operating at that moment, they could have picked up from him alone enough emotion to power their society for a year.
Harros came to a stop a few feet in front of me, blinking angrily, club hefted but held in abeyance out of respect for the sword I had carried. He had had no time to note its apparent disappearance.
“It was a trick,” I hissed before he could speak. “I had to distract them.” I dared say no more for fear of being overheard, and the many eyes still upon us prevented my showing my prize, but he must have read the truth on my face, because he dropped the club and net. Marella dropped her sword as well, and with their voluntary disarmament the bars rose behind us. It took a great deal of composure not to shout out loud. Safe!
For now.
A Vulsteen was awaiting us; whether it was the same as before or another I could not tell, since their gaunt features and monotone skin gave little individuality to any of them. Even the voice was the same.
“You.” He meant me. “You did not leave your weapon outside?”
“I dropped it on the field. Didn’t you see me?” Thousands of years of telepathic communication and generations of suppressed humanity had erased any facility the Vulsteen possessed for lying, or for perceiving it in others. He lowered the outside bars again and left us there.
“Boy,” Timash marveled when we were alone. “I don’t know what you guys did, but it sure made them crazy!”
“What do you mean?” Marella asked.
“Well, I was up against the bars, trying to bend one or something, and they must have been right above me because I could hear them talking the whole time.” He snorted. “Not that they were whispering. They’re a pretty rude bunch.”
In telepathic communication, as I had learned early on, your “voice” can carry much further than in mere speech—and through walls, to boot. Evidently the Vulsteen had tossed the baby of manners out with the bathwater of emotion.
“All of a sudden,” he went on, “they really started yelling and carrying on and like that! Something about how the meter was only showing a third as much input as they ex
pected, and it wasn’t balancing the output, and all kinds of other technical garbage that I couldn’t make heads or tails of, and somebody said something about throwing the switch and the next thing you know the breen are all standing around like statues and the whole place got real quiet. For a minute I could hear them up above…it sounded like they were working on some kind of computer or controls for something…and they didn’t sound happy. Then they stopped and you guys came back.”
I nodded, comparing what Timash had told us with what I myself had seen. Something had gone wrong with the Vulsteen’s plans; their infernal emotion-sapping machine had not functioned as planned, and I suspected I knew why. From what the first Vulsteen said, it had been calibrated for Nuum emotions, Nuum minds. My variant brain chemistry had proven resistant in the same way it proved resistant to certain forms of telepathy. I chuckled dryly to myself. Let them try to figure out what had gone wrong! They’d be at it for a million years…
Harros stared at me, eyes narrowed. “What’s so funny?”
“Just wait,” I assured my companions mysteriously. “It’s all going according to plan.”
For the subterranean dwellers of a dead city, there is no night or day, and for the emotionally parched Vulsteen there was no sense of increased tension or alarm following our visit to the arena, so awaiting a propitious moment at which to begin our escape would have been an exercise in procrastination. We were hustled back to the pit soon enough, when someone could be bothered to remember us. Once there I sought out Uncle Sam without delay. I found him at the funeral.
The breen were gathered at the spot where their dead friend had lived, crowding quietly into that little space while some spoke softly in turns. I came upon them suddenly, unaware of their intent. When I realized what was going on, I backed away and listened from a distance—I was, after all, the deceased’s killer.
The Stolen Future Box Set Page 21
