The Cosmic City

by Brian K. Lowe

  It was Maire who broke the awkward silence. “In that case, we should get you on your way. I would think that the longer you stay here, the more drag you have to contend with.”

  Kyle’s face lit up. “Are you people kidding me? I thought this was new to you. You all seem to know as much about this stuff as I do.”

  I needed no telepathic insight to see that his enthusiasm was rooted in more than pleasure that we had taken so well to his explanation; he was beginning to persuade himself that we knew more of time travel than we were admitting, knowledge that might be used to his benefit. ‘Twere better to pierce that bubble immediately.

  “Honestly, Maire was just guessing. In fact, time travel is a forbidden subject, and aside from whatever cosmic damage your presence may cause, we need to return you because the damage to you if your presence is discovered is not worth contemplating.”

  As I suspected it would, a light went out behind his eyes. Although he hid it well, Zachary Kyle was very frightened that he would not be able to return home. Rather than despise him for cowardice, however, his fear only made me admire him the more.

  “Then that’s all I came to say, I guess.” Kyle stood up and I followed suit. “It was an honor to meet you,” he said, holding out his hand, which I shook warmly.

  “The honor is mine,” I replied. I could have said more, but I was afraid it would sound forced.

  Maire followed my example and shook his hand as well. “Do you want us to accompany you? I could get you past the guards without any trouble.”

  He smiled. “Not a problem. I got in, I can get out.” With a nod to the Librarian, he left.

  Maire and I immediately collapsed into chairs and stared at each other.

  What had we gotten into now?

  Chapter 2

  The Chronologic Institute

  “Six months,” Maire said at last. She spoke it with the air of a woman who had just received a terminal diagnosis from her doctor. “Six months. At most. How are we supposed to find this person in six months? There are millions of square miles of unexplored territory on Thora—it would have taken us six months just to search the abandoned city where we found the klurath. Where are we supposed to start?”

  I took a deep breath, and another. Then I twisted in my chair to look at our companion.

  “Sherlock Holmes, I think.”

  The Librarian nodded. “Under the circumstances, we should appeal directly to the best.”

  Maire’s eyes narrowed. “What are you two talking about?”

  I turned back to her. “Do the Nuum read detective stories?” Maire returned me a blank look.

  “The mystery genre has not been in vogue in several centuries,” the Librarian offered. “Other than the mass-audience entertainments you sampled in Crystalle, there has very little creative endeavor for some generations.”

  “Hm. Maire did say that the Thorans had been slipping into complacency before the invasion. And the Nuum brought nothing cultural with them?”

  “You have seen the Nuum up close, Keryl. What do you think?”

  “Wait, wait, wait!” Maire interrupted, waving her hands. “What do you mean, we have no culture?” I was glad she was directing her ire at the Librarian and not at me.

  He smiled serenely. “I am but a Librarian, my lady. I observe and record, and disseminate when requested. The Nuum have never been overtly interested in cultural exploration, unless the exploitation of the Thorans counts as such.”

  My eyebrows shot upward.

  “Moreover, the two decades I spent with Keryl in the 20th century were a case study in cultural immersion. However primitive they may seem by contemporary standards, the people of Keryl’s native century were culturally vivid and highly expressive.”

  Maire suddenly seemed to realize that her mouth was open, and she shut it with a clack.

  “What has that got to do with what you were talking about a minute ago?”

  I viciously fought down even a small grin. “I was asking the Librarian about a detective from my era who might help us.” The blank stare returned, and it took me a moment to decipher the problem. Explaining what a “detective” was, and the concept of the “mystery novel,” took a few minutes more. I am not sure even in the end Maire grasped the point of the exercise, but she at least understood the terms.

  “Sherlock Holmes was the greatest of the detective heroes. He could take one look at you and tell where you were from, your occupation, and what you had been doing all day.”

  “I can do that, too,” Maire said. “Unless someone has really good mental blocks, there are things that just stand out about you.”

  “Yes, but Sherlock Holmes did it without telepathy.”

  She considered this. Although she knew that I had originally arrived in this time period as ignorant of telepathy as any of my “primitive” contemporaries, I had learned the skill by the time I met her, and the idea of an entire species which lacked it was hard for her to encompass.

  “Are you sure?”

  I nodded. “Quite sure.”

  “So how does that help us?”

  “It helps us because we have Sherlock Holmes right here,” I answered, gesturing at the Librarian.

  On cue, he vanished, and in his place stood a lean, hawk-faced man in an Inverness coat, smoking a well-used pipe. His glittering eyes did give an uncanny impression that the brain behind them could read your thoughts as they flickered over each of us. His accent was English, his inflections of another time. The Librarian I had come to know so well was gone, and in his place stood the world’s greatest consulting detective—the greatest of my time, at any rate, and by default, of this time as well. He gave Maire the kind of overall study that in another man would have seemed indecent, then moved to me. He dismissed me in a moment and returned to Maire, regarding her thoughtfully.

  “I think, madam, that there are things that need to be said, but this is neither the time nor the place. As you have stated, time is of the essence.”

  I opened my mouth to ask a question, but he steamrollered over me.

  “When one has no facts, conjecture is pointless. Therefore, we must amass more facts. My library, although extensive, has no entries relevant to research into time rips for the past 1400 years. This is hardly surprising, given that such research is highly dangerous, highly resource-intensive, and since the Nuum arrived on Thora, highly illegal.

  “The notion, however, that such research has not taken place is itself suspect. Therefore, we may conclude that the research that is being conducted, is being conducted in secret.”

  “So how does that help us?” I asked. “If the research is secret, how do we see it?”

  “That’s where I come in.” Maire looked more animated than she had since Zachary Kyle disclosed the details of my intended death. “As a member of the Council of Nobles, I have a very high security code. I can access parts of the datasphere most people don’t even know exist.”

  She moved to lie on a nearby sofa. “This is going to take a few minutes. It isn’t like accessing the newsfeed; I don’t even know where to look. I’m going to have to give myself over to the datasphere.”

  “That sounds dangerous.”

  Maire waved away my concern. “Spoken like a true—what did you call it?”

  “Neanderthal,” the Librarian supplied.

  “Yes, that. But it will be easier if you guard the door.”

  I stationed myself in front of it. If my wife wanted that door guarded, it was going to take a herd of breen to break through. I heard her shift on the sofa.

  “I meant you could lock it, sweetheart, so I can relax without being interrupted. I’m not expecting an armed invasion.”

  It wouldn’t be the first time…

  Nearly an hour later, Maire sat up on the sofa and blinked several times. Bringing her a cup of water, I sat down and waited for her to speak. The Librarian, back in his normal guise, stood by with his customary patience.

  “There are three secret temporal resea
rch programs going on right now,” she said softly. “The largest, and the nearest, is the Chronologic Research Institute in Xattaña. It’s a small city about two days from here on The Dark Lady.”

  “Two days…if we take The Dark Lady, we are going to use up a lot of our time in travel.”

  She twisted her mouth ruefully. “I’m not the Regent of Dure any more. I can’t just grab any ship I want and take off. It’s either The Dark Lady or you can try to explain to the Council what’s going on—and how you know about it.”

  I hardly needed Sherlock Holmes to tell me that her logic was unassailable. She was less helpful when it came to my next question, however:

  “What are we going to tell them when we get there?”

  As so often happened, that was to be the least of our problems.

  Chapter 3

  Besieged by Monsters

  “I’m with the Librarian on this one, Keryl. We go in there and we tell them the truth—as much as we can, anyway. They’re the Chronologic Research Institute; researching time is what they do. You think they could just ignore this?” Timash put his hairy paws on the table. “Hell, for all we know they already know about it.”

  Maire had been right. This was not the same brash young ape who had travelled with me cross-country after we attacked the Nuum bio-research station twenty years ago. He was a man now, more measured, if no less seized by the thirst for adventure that ran through his family, as exemplified by his Uncle Balu. He had remained with us even after his enslavement by the klurath when many men would have wanted nothing more to return home, heal their wounds, and woo young ladies with fantastic stories about their outsized heroism fighting the subterranean lizard-men in the buried city of Jhal. And no sooner had I told him about Zachary Kyle and the incredible task we had been given than he demanded to know whither the quest and how soon it would commence.

  Now I turned to my wife with a thoughtful expression. “He may have a point there. If the Institute is worthy of its charter, they have probably already noticed something is going on. The problem with infiltrating a secret project that they are going to be reluctant to talk about their work, even to you, even if you persuade them that you know what they are up to in the first place. But if we show our hand, they will want in on the game.”

  Although only the Librarian actually understood my metaphor, Maire took my meaning clearly enough.

  “All right, you win. It’s just not in my nature to be so honest. Nuum politics are terribly convoluted, probably because it’s the only thing we seem to concentrate on, and being upfront with strangers—especially strangers with something to hide—doesn’t suggest itself easily.”

  “It isn’t as though we are being completely transparent, my lady,” the Librarian reminded her with a nod toward me. “In fact, we will be hiding the thing that they would most like to have. In a way, we will be using the truth to hide the truth.”

  She brightened at the thought. “In that case, make ready for landing. We should be over Xattaña right about now.”

  I hurried to the deck so that I could watch the landing. As often as I had flown now, the excitement of entering a new part of the world—a new city—had never left me. I had always wanted to travel when I was young, and so I had pounced on the chance to study at Oxford before the War, never dreaming that I would continue my wanderings in the trenches of France—let alone 900,000 years down the halls of Time. When I returned to the 20th century, my wanderlust had diminished, along with my zest for life itself, but I had occasionally taken trips—one could hardly have called them “vacations”—striving to lose myself in exotic and sometimes trying experiences. But this, flying across the globe in a an anti-gravity sailship? This was living.

  We were coming in over the mountains which surrounded and supported Xattaña on two sides, facing out over a small alluvial plain leading to a wide river perhaps ten miles distant. I frowned to see it: Virtually the entire city was built in the foothills, the only substantial structures on the plain being a series of a half-dozen equally-situated squat five-sided towers that arced from the mountains on one side of the city to the other. It resembled nothing more than a medieval walled town, but without the wall. And what would it have been protecting them from?

  As I carried the Library with me at all times, the Librarian naturally stood at my side.

  “What is all this?” I asked him. “Why don’t they build on the plain where it’s flat? And what are those towers?”

  “Xattaña—like its predecessors—has been known for centuries as a quiet, small city suitable for artists and scientists, and anyone who wants privacy to think and create. Whatever cultural advancements, however slight they are, that come from the Nuum are born right here. It has a temperate climate due to the mountains and the river, and it will never grow too large, so the scenic panoramas promote serenity, with a view that is considered by many the most beautiful on this continent.”

  It was breathtaking, I had to admit, if a bit stark for my tastes, but since my understanding was that Thora had entered a dry phase of its existence over the previous centuries, I could concede the point.

  “But why won’t it grow? And what are those towers?”

  The Librarian leaned against the side of the ship and took a deep breath, neither of which he needed to do in the slightest, but were a sign that he was about to embark on his greatest pleasure: lecturing me.

  “About 12,000 years ago, when Thoran civilization had reached a much higher standard than exists today, before even the Nuum had gone out to colonize their world, it became suddenly fashionable to study the past—the very distant past, what you would call pre-history. Given that for them, you would have been considered pre-historic, this was a far cast, if you will, particularly since so much of those eras—the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and so forth—had already been excavated by your time. By the period of which I speak, finding fossil remains of the dinosaurs was nearly impossible; they had been dug up and picked over and lost again by half-a-dozen prior civilizations, starting with your own. For that reason, most archeology was limited to excavation of human history, and once the Library had been established, the need for that had decreased dramatically. Between the 20th century and when the Library came on line was less than 300,000 years, and enough records from the latter centuries had survived to be assimilated into my files to remove most of the mystery therefrom.

  “So, as I say, when this new mania took hold, it was all the more popular because it was so very hard to practice. A few took the idea off-world, and began to excavate other pre-histories, but that never appealed to most—for one thing, space travel was itself a daunting prospect, expensive and time-consuming, with little hope of success—so the bulk of the interest remained on Thora.

  “And it would have died out as quickly as these fads tend to do, since there was so little to be gained from it, until a group of enterprising scientists came up with an idea for expanding the available pool of fossils—by growing their own.”

  I groaned. Timash and I had met one of those “fossils” in the abandoned city where we found Maire, not to mention the emotion-stealing mutants called the Vulsteen. Of course, that had been no collection of ancient bones, but a living, roaring Tyrannosaurus Rex. I had a bad feeling about where the Librarian’s story was going.

  “According to my contemporary records, which are rather sparse because they fall outside of this branch’s datafiles, they planned to clone the beasts from genetic material they scavenged from museums, kill them, and salt various sites with bones, for which they would charge ‘fossil hunters’ outrageous fees to ‘find’ and excavate them.”

  “Let me guess. Someone got a ‘better idea.’“

  “You were always an apt student, if prone to interrupting. Someone did indeed come up with a ‘better idea:’ Once the animals were cloned, instead of having to harvest the monsters themselves, why not charge for that opportunity as well? The hunter could either leave the bones, which the company could then use to salt their fo
ssil sites, or take them as his own personal trophy—for an additional fee, of course.

  “Human ingenuity being boundless, however, even more new uses were soon proposed. There was no monopoly on the materials needed for cloning, as much as the museums tried to protect their collections. Soon beasts of all stripes were being recreated in laboratories all over the world, limited only by the samples still extant and the funds to promote the work. One country tried to create a dinosaur army, with predictable results. Other experiments spawned equally spectacular failures. Eventually, the entire world decided to act before the Age of Dinosaurs reasserted itself, and the experiments were outlawed. With force.”

  I held up a questioning finger. “But I fought one of those things the first time I was here, and that was only twenty years ago.”

  “An apt student, but closer attention to details would benefit your studies. I said the experiments were halted. The dinosaurs were largely killed, but there were many by this point, and it is a large planet, and hunting them was by no means safe. In their own habitats, they actually flourished for several thousand years. More recently, however, with the drying out of the planet and the appetite of Nuum hunters, their numbers have dwindled.”

  “So the towers down there are an artifact of the old days?”

  “Oh, no. They protect the city from the river monsters. If you were out on the plain after dark, your chances of survival would be extremely poor.”

  “But why don’t the Nuum hunt them down? If they all come out on the plain it should be easy. Then they could expand the city and live by the river.”

  The Librarian shook his head. “Keryl, Keryl, Keryl. If they did that, they would have to give up their beautiful view.”

  Chapter 4

  A Skillful Interrogation

  The Chronologic Institute occupied a long, low building at the far end of the crescent-shaped city. According to Maire’s research, it was ostensibly a think tank devoted to the Nuum space program, which for reasons that had never been clear to me, had been abandoned some time after they arrived on Earth and had never been revived. With space at a premium, many of the larger buildings in Xattaña had docking facilities on the roof, and the Institute was not an exception, although its docks were empty. Skull set The Dark Lady down without a jar, and Maire, Timash, and I used a cargo sled to descend. An older Nuum in a blue lab coat—some things never change—was awaiting us.