“What have you done, my child?” he asked her. Jaila remained silent for a long moment before looking up at him to speak.
“Humans deserve rights as well, Minister,” she said, repeating a litany he had heard far too often from the misguided activists. “We shouldn’t be testing on them. We should—” Her words were drowned out by a loud clatter of birds taking flight from a nearby tree. Zaius sighed. He shook his head and turned away.
Julius emerged from the barn, vying for his attention.
“Should I dispose of it, sir?”
“What?” a disoriented Zaius asked. “It?”
“The dead human,” Julius replied.
“No, no,” Zaius responded. He thought about Taylor and Landon’s other associate, the dark-skinned human named Dodge. That one’s corpse adorned the human display in the natural history museum. “Bring this one to the taxidermist. Have him stuffed and displayed with the humans from last season’s hunt.”
Then he turned. What disturbed those birds?
* * *
Cornelius and Zira watched Consus’s farm from a safe distance. It had taken them far too long to acquire the antibiotics, but it had been for the best. Had they been faster, they would have been among the prisoners.
Landon is dead, Zira thought, peering through a spyglass Milo had given to Cornelius. There’s no indication of violence, though. He must have died sometime during the night. The infection must have already spread too far, she realized.
All she had now were her notes on his behavior.
What was he trying to say? To do?
Cornelius stepped on a stick, and it snapped loudly. They froze. Above them a flock of birds protested loudly and took flight. Across the field, Zaius looked around.
“Hey,” Cornelius urged her. “We better get out of here, and fast.”
An angry Zira growled, but knew her husband was right. Quietly they returned to their horses, mounted, and made haste back toward Ape City.
* * *
Groom Lake, Nevada
Area 51
1963
BOOM!
The sonic blast echoed over the desert.
Flying ANSA’s hypersonic trans-atmospheric X-15B rocket plane, Major George Taylor shot past the speed of sound and accelerated toward the stratosphere.
“You in a hurry to get topside, Starfire 1?” Groom Lake ground control inquired. “You’re climbing pretty fast, over.”
Pushing Mach 5, Taylor was sick of the desert and sick of people. He didn’t give a damn about the tests they wanted to run—he had his own test in mind for this rocket.
“I’m going to see the stars, control.” With a pause and an afterthought, he added, “Over.”
Sixty-two miles up and it’s outer space. He smiled. Time to earn my astronaut wings. The aircraft plowed through the cloud cover. Her angle of ascension steep, Starfire 1 began to wobble.
“This is Groom Lake, Starfire 1. Dr. Stanton suggests you throttle down, over.”
“Tell Stanton this plane’s a piece of junk,” the major growled. “She handles like a ’37 pickup truck with a shot suspension. Over.” Starfire 1 zoomed to the mesosphere. The sky ahead of him began to clear, greeting Major Taylor with a pitch field pinpricked with tiny suns. Taylor was so close to the stars now he could almost touch them. Just a little more altitude and he’d be able to pull them down and put them in his pocket.
Annoyed, Starfire 1 shuddered.
“Back down, Major,” Stanton himself said. “You’re pushing her past her design limit, over.”
Instead, Taylor cranked her to Mach 6. The X-15 quivered. Gravity slammed him in his seat. She could go much higher than she was, but not at the rate of ascension George was forcing her.
“I say we push her, control,” Taylor urged. “Nothing to worry about—I’ve got the new pressure suit and suborbital ejector. Worst case scenario we test those as well, over.”
“Stand by, over,” the radio operator replied. This time it was Colonel Lazenbe who spoke up. “Negative, Starfire 1. The brass say abort and bring her home, over.”
The brass. Taylor knew who that meant.
“What was that, Groom Lake?” Taylor replied. “I didn’t copy, over.”
“George—” Lazenbe started to reply, but a new voice cut him off.
“You damn well did copy, Major,” Admiral Taylor shouted. “Now get your goddamn ass—”
Aboard Starfire 1, Taylor tore the microphone’s spiral cord from his headset. Disconnected. There would be no more nagging from Groom Lake. The admiral would need to find someone else’s ass to ride.
At Mach 7, the supersonic X-plane shook with vehemence. Taylor’s breathing echoed in his flight mask. For a moment he was back over Korea.
Falling up.
“George, level off, goddamn it!” Maddox yelled.
Not today, Donny-O, he decided.
Not today.
* * *
Stanton had been right. His father was right—he’d taken her too far. The controls froze.
The hell with your damn plane, he fumed, and to hell with you, too.
Starfire 1 fell into a hypersonic spin. Alarms swelled in the cockpit. At over 300,000 feet now, the X-plane was a bucking bronco ready to throw Taylor and gore him.
Sixty-two miles, he decided, gritting his teeth. Then he was there. Made it, Ma! Top of the world! Taylor had reached the Kármán line—the edge of space. Now he really was an astronaut.
Cracks spread across the X-plane’s wings and splintered her fuselage.
Her rocket sputtered.
She was tapping out.
That’s it.
Taylor threw his reflective visor down and pushed the button. Explosive bolts blew the canopy up and away from the cockpit. His seat did the same, sprouting fins and catapulting him away from the starfighter as its engine blew like an enraged firecracker. Taylor somersaulted free as his rocket plane disintegrated in the thermosphere.
The force of the blast rocked him, and something glanced off of his helmet, but he didn’t have time to worry about that. He unbuckled his seat harness and assumed the position for a suborbital dive. For a moment, he was weightless.
For a moment, nothing mattered.
The record freefall was 102,000 feet. Taylor had just ejected at nearly three times that height—280,000 feet. Cracking a toothy grin, he gazed again at the stars. His radio inactive and not a single living thing around, he was free. The stars beckoned. Taylor stretched out his hand to pluck one of those lights from the sky.
Then, he began to fall.
Friction embraced him. Atmospheric abrasion excited his experimental pressure suit. Its ablative pads absorbed enough of the energy to keep him alive, but not enough to keep him from feeling the heat. Sweat in his eyes and adrenaline pumping his heart, Taylor laughed as he plummeted to the earth.
That’s when shrapnel smacked him in the face. His reflective visor shattered, Taylor’s faceplate was also cracked by the glancing blow of twisted metal from his exploding X-plane. He was reeling. If his helmet radio had still worked, Groom Lake would be receiving a litany of curses that would make a native New Yorker blush.
At 250,000 feet he plunged through the mesosphere. Any heat from re-entry calmed and turned frigid. Inside his helmet, his sweat began freezing on his brow. Ice formed on the inside of his mask.
At 200,000 feet the damage spiderwebbed his field of vision. His breath screamed in his ears.
At 150,000 feet he was in the stratosphere, but still well above the Armstrong Limit. If his faceplate went, his helmet would depressurize—and at this height, the pressure was too low for the living. Sweat, urine, and saliva would boil.
His blood would evaporate.
At 100,000 feet, if his faceplate went, it would all turn to steam.
At 80,000 feet, splintered veins etched their way across his faceplate.
His mask exploded at 65,000 feet. His respirator in place, oxygen still flowed—but exposed to the atmospheric pressure,
no amount of breathable air would keep him alive for long. He had to get below the Armstrong Limit before his brain seized.
Before he passed out.
He pushed his body into a steeper dive.
His eyes burned.
The water on his tongue sizzled.
His fluids were about to boil.
Crimson crept into his sight.
* * *
Still in freefall, Major George Taylor awoke with a start. The desert spun below him.
He felt like he had a hangover. His joints throbbed, his head pulsed, and his tongue was burnt.
Not dead yet, he mused. Doing some quick calculations, he figured he must’ve passed out for a good five minutes or so. He still had some altitude. There was still time to deploy.
Lucky, lucky, lucky…
At 5,000 feet, Taylor pulled his cord.
Nothing happened.
The unlucky pilot began to somersault. Whirling out of control, he discovered the issue—the experimental cord mechanism strapped to his abdomen had also been grazed by shrapnel. Dented, it had then iced up. He looked for a “Made in China” label. There was none.
Good old American-made, he thought with a grimace, vowing to find out who in R&D had designed it and punch them in the face. Hopefully it was Stanton, he mused. He could use a good knuckle sandwich.
Then Taylor’s mood darkened. If I even make it back.
With no scientist in sight, Major Taylor instead punched himself in the stomach. Twice.
Metal bent.
Ice cracked.
He pulled the cord again. This time his heart yanked up into his throat, as at 3,000 feet his pilot chute deployed. Designed to pull the main chute’s canopy from its sleeve, it did just that—just a little too hard. As his descent slowed, above him something tore. Lines twisted.
In freefall again, he ripped at the release tab. The useless chute fell away. Taylor reached for his emergency cord. He was at 2,000 feet, and had one more shot before he became roadkill.
Come on, you sonofabitch, Taylor urged. Come on!
At 1,000 feet the cord yanked. The reserve chute deployed. Falling too fast, he pulled the directional vanes hard in an attempt to cushion the fall.
Ground Zero.
Still spinning, Taylor slammed into the desert.
* * *
A gorilla sat on his chest. At least it felt that way. Something was pressing down on him. Something packed and firm.
No! He opened his eyes only to be met with stinging pebbles of sand. Then he remembered. He was in the Forbidden Zone.
Sandstorm.
Buried alive.
Suffocation.
Taylor erupted from the dune, more or less intact. Free of the grit, he gulped at the dry desert air. It was approaching dusk, and the sun lay low in the sky, just beyond the nearest craggy ridge. Shaking the sand out of his loincloth, hair, and ears, Taylor surveyed his surroundings. To his far left he could make out the storm, still traveling away from him, a dusty cloud on the horizon. The sky around him was clear, light blue giving way to violet hues peppered by orange clouds.
There were strange shapes cast on the ground around him. They were regular, angular shadows, not like the organic rocky cliffs that infested this part of the Forbidden Zone. He followed the shapes back toward the setting sun, and soon came to the edge of a deep gorge.
It was a city—but not like the ruins of New York. This was a monolithic construct of mirrors, its every surface gleaming in the setting sun, sending rays scattering in every direction. The chromed surfaces shone in oranges and purples. It was dazzling, it was new, and it had been built with a technology that not only outpaced that of the apes, but of twentieth-century man, as well.
It was a city of the future—and Taylor could only assume it was built by man. Future man, though given his circumstances, man from the past.
But how far past?
It was built on a behemoth slab base, one surely large enough to support half of Manhattan itself. That foundation rose some thirty stories high, then transformed into ascending spires of triangles and rectangles, each ranging from fifty to two hundred additional stories taller. Massive antennae perched atop the tallest of the peaks.
Those antennae were blinking.
Lights. Power, Taylor realized, then he dared, Life?
As the gorge was cast in deeper purples and blues, pinpoints of warm light hummed into being. There was a ragged path winding down the cliff face toward the city below, illuminated by white-hot running lights. They followed the treacherous trail to a high floor, where it connected with a red-lanterned bridge that led to a massive door.
“That’s a trail of breadcrumbs if I ever saw one.” Even without Nova here, he still spoke aloud. The sound of his own voice grounded him, but the thought of her alone out there made his stomach sink. He considered going back for her, but after that sandstorm Taylor didn’t have any idea where he was.
If she had understood him, by now she would be halfway to Zira in Ape City. So he decided to plow ahead. Whoever lived here might help him get her back. Or, if there was nobody home, there was likely to be some sort of technology here he could use to give himself an advantage over Zaius and his baboons.
“Well, here goes everything.”
Taylor began the arduous descent toward the mirrored city’s bridge.
CHAPTER 12
OF COUNCIL AND CLERGY
“When I became your army commander, what I saw broke my heart,” Ursus said to a congregation in the Ape City amphitheater. “Our country, imprisoned on one side by the sea, surrounded on three sides by naked desert. And within our boundaries, we were infected by the pestilence we call humans.”
Most listened in rapt attention.
The gorilla general sneered. “By parasites that devoured the fruits we had planted in a land rightly ours. That fattened themselves on the fields we had made green with crops. That polluted the pure and precious water of our lakes and rivers with their animal excrement, and that continued to breed in our very midst like maggots in a once-healthy body.
“What should we do?” he asked. “How should we act?”
Ursus let the question sink into the crowd.
“I know what every soldier knows.” He called upon the preachings of Kananaios for effect. “The only thing that counts in the end is strength.” Ursus clenched his fist. “Naked, merciless force!”
* * *
The speech fell on human ears, as well. The woman had led Brent to the edge of the outdoor auditorium, where they crouched out of sight in some foliage. Nearby there were humans—mute like his companion, chained as if on display.
“My God,” he hissed, “a city of apes.”
Below, Ursus continued.
“Today, the bestial human herds have at last been systematically flushed from their feeding grounds. No human has escaped our net,” he said. “They are dead, or if not yet dead, they are in our cages—condemned to die.”
He scanned the crowd. No one spoke.
“Their eyes are animal, their smell rancid. Had they been allowed to live and breed unchecked, they would have overwhelmed us. The concept of ape authority would become meaningless. Our high and splendid culture would waste away, our civilization ended.”
Sanity began to pull away from Brent.
Why had the beautiful savage brought him here? Taylor was nowhere to be seen.
An ape, he told himself again. A gorilla—in a uniform. Not only were they talking apes, but they spoke English. Thousands of light years from Earth. How is that possible?
“I know what happened,” he muttered to himself, careful not to be heard. “Re-entry at 20,000 miles an hour. A force of 15G.” He was grasping at straws. “Made Skipper blind and muddled my brains. Everything here is a delusion.”
Brent turned to the woman. “Even you.”
He looked her over again. “Which is too bad,” he conceded.
She might not have understood what Brent was saying, but she did understand
that he needed to stop saying it. She clamped a hand over his mouth and pointed. He returned his attention to the amphitheater.
* * *
“Members of the Citizens’ Council,” Ursus offered, “I am a simple soldier—and as a soldier, I… see things simply. I do not say that all humans are evil,” he declared, “simply because their skin is white.”
Ursus paused.
“No!” he exclaimed. “But our Lawgiver tells us that never will they have the ape’s divine faculty for distinguishing between evil…” He paused again. “…and good.” His voice rose to a fever pitch. That fever was contagious. “The only good human is a dead human!”
As the gorillas roared their approval, Ursus made his play for the orangutans. He backed away from the center of the theater, positioning himself between the seats of High Patriarch Sabian and Minister Zaius.
“Yet those humans fortunate enough to remain alive will have the privilege of being used by our Minister of Science, the good Dr. Zaius.” Looking uncomfortable, Zaius nonetheless stood. The orangutan and chimpanzee contingents joined him and clapped politely. As the wave of green and tan sat once again, one chimpanzee didn’t.
Her, Ursus thought fiercely.
It was the female apostate—Zira. Fortunately for the chimpanzee, her husband stepped in, and put her in line. They argued briefly, she sat, and remained silent.
Good.
Ursus began again. “The Forbidden Zone has been closed for centuries, and rightly so,” he said. “However, we now have evidence that that vast barren area is inhabited. By what or by whom we don’t know, but if they live—and live they do—then they must eat.” He paused to let that sink in. “Now we must replenish the lands that were ravaged by the humans with new, improved feeding grounds—and these grounds we can obtain in the once-Forbidden Zone.”
He had evoked emotion, then followed up with science and logic. Now, he would tie it together with religion.
“It is our holy duty to enter it, to put the marks of our guns, wheels, and flags upon it!” The gorillas were already cheering. “To expand the boundaries of our ineluctable power,” he bellowed, “and to invade!”
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