The rope's rise up toward the city, and by connection my own, was quite fast considering the fact that Noriandara Remontar had just climbed six hundred feet hand over hand. As I neared the end of my upward journey, I saw that the rope had been hanging from a ledge suspended below the belly of the flying city, but now it was being pulled up, but not by the Princess. It was being hauled up by a metallic creature with four arms and three glowing eyes in its face.
Chapter Twenty Four: Among the Clouds
I stepped onto the ledge which looked as though it must have been a landing pad for some type of small air-going vessel. It was about sixty five feet square, and hung down about one hundred feet below the rest of the city. Standing at the edge were the metallic being who was now helping me onto the level surface of the deck, and Noriandara Remontar who was watching warily.
"I started to pull you up," she explained, "but this thing took the rope from me and did it for me."
"It looks like an automaton," I said, using the closest word in the Amatharian vocabulary to robot. The creature stacked the rope neatly near the precipice, and began rolling around on wheeled feet, picking up debris here and there which had blown on to the deck. "It looks like a maintenance man."
"That is not a man,” she sneered. "It is grotesque."
"I thought Amatharians were more tolerant of other species. It is probably designed to look something like the Meznarks."
"Oh it is," she said. "The Meznarks had three eyes and four arms, just as this thing does. They have legs though and not wheels. It is not the Meznarks that I find so grotesque. It is this artificial representation of them."
"They probably made their machines look as much like them as possible so that they could feel more comfortable around them." I suggested.
"They should not be comfortable around them," replied the Princess. "It is one thing to have a machine as a tool, to enhance one's abilities. It is another thing entirely to have a machine as a replacement for a person, whether that replaced person is a companion, a coworker, a slave, or a master. It disgusts me." I nodded. I had known people who chose to make machines their masters, and it was disgusting, whether the machine was a robot, a computer terminal, or a time clock.
"Perhaps," I changed the subject, "if there are machines still working here, then there may well be living Meznarks as well."
"Hmm," she said, still irked about the robot.
I began looking around for a way to the upper levels from the deck, and was rewarded with a platform on the side opposite where I had been lifted up. This platform was open on all sides but had a small raised control panel in the center of it, and another just beside the platform on the main deck.
"Looks like a down-going room," I said, using the Amatharian term for elevator.
"Down-going room," muttered the Princess.
"Shall we go on up?" I asked.
"Why don't you push this control and see if it works first." I pressed a button on the control panel beside me, and without any warning, the elevator platform dropped from the deck in a free fall. We looked over the edge as the device plummeted far down into the canyon below, finally crashing to the ground."
"Down-going room,” muttered the Princess.
We looked around some more, and finally located a rung ladder on the outside of one of the struts that held the landing platform by its corners to the main part of the city. We climbed up about sixty five feet to a hatch which opened with a large lever. The ladder continued on and after about two hundred more feet, a second hatch similar to the first led to the main city deck. We stepped out onto a broad avenue between tall buildings.
The temperature was somewhat lower than it had been on the ground, but it was beautifully sunny. We were near the center of the city, and had we not known that we were floating high in the air, we probably would not have been able to guess. There was still an eerie feeling pervading the place, though. The buildings were not in ruins, though they were in disrepair and in disarray. It was very quiet.
"How long do you suppose this thing has been deserted?" I asked.
"I don't know, but it doesn't seem to have been that long," replied Noriandara Remontar. "Perhaps the Oindrag didn't attack this city. Perhaps they were killed by disease."
"Maybe we should reserve our judgment until we see one of the Meznarks." The Princess nodded and started toward the nearest building, a large edifice with a series of steps leading up to the entrance. I followed her, and we both entered through a large square door way. The interior of the building was a huge open atrium and in the center was a metal sculpture of what on Earth might be called modern art.
"What is that thing?" asked Noriandara Remontar.
"It's an art object,” I replied. "It's an abstract."
"I don't understand," she said, and I recalled that all the statuary that I had seen in Amathar was of very realistic people.
"My people create art of a similar type. It represents some intangible thing--possibly courage or love or beauty, or it is meant to invoke the feeling of looking at the ocean or of feeling the breeze in your face."
"I still don't understand," she said. "Wouldn't it be better to create a statue of a person who was courageous, or a person who was loving, or a person who was beautiful? And if one lived in a flying city, and one wanted to look at the ocean, couldn't one just fly to the nearest ocean. And if one wants to feel the breeze in his face, he has only to step outside this building."
"Yes, I suppose that is true," I conceded.
We looked around the atrium. There seemed to be no other objects of any importance there. There was no furniture, nor was there any clue to the function of the building. In the rear of the chamber were two open elevator shafts. Considering the incident earlier, we both felt inclined to avoid using them. We walked back outside and looked around.
"I don't know where to look for a control center," said the Princess. "If this were an Amatharian ship, I would head for the tallest structure, but one can never tell with the Meznarks."
"I'm starting to feel hungry," I reported. "Perhaps we could have a bite to eat before we searched for the control center."
Noriandara Remontar agreed, and we found a nearby building with a large covered entrance, sat down upon the front step, and ate the last of the nuts I had gathered in the desert. One thing which I had not thought about previously was our inability to gather food or hunt while flying around on a floating city. True, if we located a control mechanism, we might possibly be able to lower the city to the ground so that we could do so, but it seemed unlikely that we would even find the control room, let alone find it in working order.
As I was mulling this unhappy thought over in my mind, a high-pitched scream echoed throughout the ruined buildings. Noriandara and I jumped to our feet and looked around. Not seeing anything, we waited where we were until the sound repeated. The Princess pointed in a likely direction for the source of the noise, and the two of us set off at a jog. We crossed one pavement covered street and rounded the corner of another building before hearing the sound for the third time. This gave us an even better bearing on its location. One more turn and we were at its point of origin. In the street ahead of us was an on-going battle. A wave of revulsion swept over me as I recognized six Kartags, the same creatures that had attacked Norar Remontar, Malagor, and me when we had traveled in the underground world of the Orlons. In full daylight, they were even more disgusting, if that is possible and resembled nothing so much as upright, human-sized rodents. These six Kartags were attacking four winged creatures. Each of the winged beings was about four feet tall, only slightly shorter than the Kartags, but were much more lightly built. Each was covered with feathers, two of bright green and yellow, and the other two of a rather plain brown variety. I noticed a fifth flyer, one of the colorful ones, dead on the street. The winged fellows each carried a sword made of wood, lined with tiny stone blades. The Kartags were armed with crude spears and nets.
As I have noted before, I am not well-known for pl
anning out my actions, though I must say, that on the whole my intuitions have been proven right again and again. I will also admit that I held a prejudicial dislike toward Kartags both because of my previous dealings with them, and my strong distaste for their appearance. I didn't know who had started this fight, but I had a good idea who it was that was going to finish it. I whipped my sword from its sheath and rushed forward.
Just before I reached the combatants, one of the Kartags snared a flyer in his net. Two of the other Kartags immediately fell upon the trapped creature and began to kick him and poke at him with their spears. It was toward these fellows that I headed, and as I did so, my sword began to glow brightly with the power of the soul within.
The first Kartag was two Kartag halves before he knew what had hit him. The other two turned their spears to face me, allowing the flyer in the net time to disentangled himself and get away. The Kartags were no match for me, and I gather in general they are not much in the way of fighters, preferring to sneak up on their enemies and ambush them. In a brief moment, my two remaining foes had been dispatched. I turned to see that the Princess had overcome the other three just as quickly. The beings that we had saved were no longer to be seen, but their dead companion was lying upon the pavement. I bent down to examine him. His bright yellow and green plumage was not as lustrous as it had appeared upon the live examples of his species. Red blood and a yellowish substance trickled from his crushed skull. He was of very light build, and I estimate he weighed only fifty or sixty pounds, even though he was about four feet tall, or rather four feet long, since he was no longer vertical.
"What kind of being is this?" I wondered aloud.
"I'm afraid that I cannot say," Noriandara Remontar replied to the mostly rhetorical question. "I have never seen one of these creatures before. Take a picture of it." The Princess was quite the fan of photography. I complied.
"Well, that solves the food problem," she said.
"How so?"
"I don't know about these flying creatures, but I am familiar with the Kartags. They are scavengers of the worst sort. If they can exist on this flying city, there has to be some ready source of food."
"Then on the other hand," I countered, "maybe the only food they could find were these feathered fellows."
"Hmm," she murmured, as if hesitant to accept any opinion but her own. "Still, we should find a location as high as possible and survey the area."
As luck would have it, a very tall building was just down the block from us. It was almost three times as tall as the building which we had previously entered, and it was one of the taller buildings, if not the tallest, in the city. It had a large entry, which though the buildings themselves were of a variety of shapes and sizes, seemed to be rather uniform.
Again we found two elevator shafts, and again we felt some natural anxiety about using them. Upon examining the walls of the room for several minutes, I was rewarded by finding a sliding panel, which once I had noticed it, seemed very obvious. Within was a stairway leading up. The stairs were narrower and steeper than I would have made them, but considering that they were the product of an alien culture, they were not all that unwieldy. Noriandara Remontar and I began climbing, and continued until I was forced to stop and rest. All in all, we stopped and rested about ten times on the way up, and I would estimate that we climbed two hundred flights of stairs. At last though, we were at the top. On the highest level of the building, we exited a panel door exactly like the one we had entered at the base of the stairs. It was clear that the stairs were intended to be used only in an emergency, and that the elevator was the primary means of transportation between levels.
This floor of the building was one great room. If I had found it in a building on Earth, or Amathar for that matter, I would have taken it for a ballroom, but here on this alien floating city, there was just no way to know what its original use might have been. Three walls of the building were entirely composed of large windows, which provided a striking view in three directions of the city far below and beyond that, of the landscape slowly floating by. Noriandara Remontar and I walked to the closest window and looked out. From here we could see the tops of many other buildings.
Like most buildings on my home planet, the tops of the Meznark cities were flat. Most of these buildings were covered on the tops with lush fields of green growing things. Even in the distance, we could see that these miniature fields were being cultivated by the small flying creatures that we had seen in combat against the Kartags.
"We can climb up to the top of one of those other buildings and ask the flyers for some food," said the Princess.
"Maybe there is a garden just above us on this building."
"Did you not notice," said the Princess, "that this building is topped by one of those things you call an abstract."
"I didn't notice," I admitted.
"We shall go to that building," Noriandara Remontar said, pointing to a close, but not the closest, building."
"Why did you choose that building?" I asked.
"That one is large, with several different types of vegetation, therefore we have more of a chance to find something appropriate for our needs," she replied. "In addition, the area around the base of the building is shielded from view above, and we can approach without being seen."
"Maybe we could sneak up and take some of the food," I suggested. The Princess gave me a withering look. "We are not going to start acting like Kartags. We will attempt to negotiate with these beings. Perhaps they will give us some food. If not, we will find something to trade."
"Of course," I replied.
We descended from our vantage point and made our way to the other building. Just as the Princess had described, most of the walk to the other location was protected from viewers above by overhanging balconies and walkways. We reached the other building and we found it just as empty and generally uninteresting as we had found the other buildings. This building had a hidden panel just like the one I had previously located which, since I now knew what to look for, was really not hidden at all. We climbed up the stairs, and though the building was about one third shorter than our lookout point, still required several rest stops during the ascent.
At last we reached the very top of the stairway and exited through a wide, rather short door. This time, instead of finding ourselves on the top story of the interior, the door opened right onto the roof from a small semi-floor annex. The landscape of this particular building top, which is not a word that is inappropriate, since it was indeed well-landscaped and quite lush, was covered with growing plants, each in a raised bed created from stone blocks around its edge. Shade was provided by a half-dozen large potted trees. All in all, the scene was quite reminiscent of a city park on a warm summer day. I didn't have too long to reflect upon this fact, for almost as soon as we stepped out of the portal, we were approached by seven or eight of the flyers, all bright-hued males, and all carrying the stone-lined swords which I had seen in use against the Kartags on the street below. They crouched low, spread their wings out wide, and gave a hideous squawk, as they prepared to dice us into bird food. Chapter Twenty Five: Among the Flyers
I wasn't really in the mood to draw my weapon against the beautiful creatures that faced us with such threatening determination. For one thing, anyone who was an enemy of the Kartags was pretty much an ally of mine. If that sounds prejudiced to you, I advise you to wait until you are post-judice by having to fight them for your very lives in the bowels of some underground landscape, in the dark. Secondly, they were so colorful and lovely that it seemed a real crime to defile their persons with any sort of physical violence. And finally of course, they were only defending their home as all creatures are prone to do. I would fight to the death to protect Amathar from invaders, as I considered it already to be my home, though I had as yet spent a relatively short time there.
Just when it looked as though we would have no choice but to fight, another flyer came swooping through the air toward our adversaries and ourselv
es, squawking loudly. The avians facing us stepped back. The newcomer landed just in front of the Princess and myself and stepped boldly forward toward us. It stopped its squawking and began to coo in a very calming, soothing way.
"I guess he wants to be friends," I said.
"He was one of the flyers that we helped, by fighting the Kartags," replied the Princess.
"Now, how can you possibly tell them apart?"
"I recognize that patch of feathers he is missing on his shoulder." I looked at the avians shoulder, and there was indeed a patch of feathers missing there. He had several patches of bare skin, and I wondered if it might be an indication of age. The flyer advanced slowly and cautiously, cooing softly the entire time, as if he expected us to bolt in fright or attack. The Princess responded by stepping slowly forward to meet him. They both extended their upper extremities--she her arm, and he his wing --until they touched. I let out the breath that I had been unconsciously holding. Throughout my many adventures and close calls, I seldom feared for myself, but I was much more concerned when it came to the life of Noriandara Remontar. As soon as fingers met feathers, the other flyers smoothed down their own feathers and relaxed, and then they slowly moved forward to join their leader.
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