The City That Lost Its Way Part 3

Nemqal disappeared after the Qals threatened to punish him. Because the city was sapient, they charged him with kidnapping.

They placed a tracer--a neurotropic, non-pathogenic, radioactive marker--within his brain, so that there was no place he couldn't be found, dead or alive, within the skip coordinates. The Qal hoped he would, thereby, lead them to the city.

The tracer's signal abruptly disappeared. Whatever place Nemqal had gone was outside the paths of the skipstones, and beyond the range, or perhaps the physics, of the monitors.

He'd gone back to his city, for he thought of it as his, the last refuge of a criminal seeking to escape his due. But if he had thought the place to be his redoubt, he was much mistaken and as crazy, in his own way, as the city would become. His welcome was not to his liking.

With a whoosh, a rust-colored vapor began flooding the chamber from ducts that had opened in the ceiling. The gas was lighter than air, so only a few choking whiffs a.s.sailed Mayer and Dierdra before they fell, gasping, to the floor. There they had precious seconds left to gather oxygen into their systems and watch death descending.

Perhaps the method of execution was designed to give its victim that extra incentive to remember the correct sequence of tones and syllables that would open the walls. Maybe the gas was so poisonous to Qals that the first touch killed. On the other hand, no consideration might have been given to the fact that death boiled down from above, displacing life-giving air into unseen vents. Poisoning certainly made fewer cleanup problems than, say, shooting.

Whatever the motive behind the method, it gave City long enough to exhaust all pa.s.swords and to begin telling the two how nice had been their visit and how he was looking forward to entertaining more humans very soon.

Suddenly the English stopped, a final sing-song intonation came forth; and the barriers shot up, the gas stopped pouring out, and a wind blew the ruddy billows away.

"My apologies, I just found the pa.s.sword. Nemqal, my creator, used it. I remember hearing it from him long, long ago. It came out of personal memory, not program memory; therefore it was not so easily obtainable."

Mayer's voice rasped sour displeasure as he looked at the skull.

After he'd kicked it, it had landed again on its top. "I guess we know what happened to this other guy."

"No, not at all." answered City. "He wasn't poisoned. I just pushed him out when his body started to fail."

"Out of where?"

"The control center." City opened a door much farther down the corridor, from which a golden light flowed.

"C'mon, let's go." Mayer was already on his feet, but Dierdra was sitting dazedly and coughing quietly but deeply.

"I'm too tired to go on. That gas..." Her voice faded into a coughing spasm more severe than the previous.

The man forgot his ire in concern for his companion. "What's wrong with her, City?"

"She needs another pneumonia treatment; and she was exhausted when you brought her in. I couldn't do anything about that, other than to give her a stimulant. Since then, she's been running on adrenalin."

"You seem to know an awful lot about cures, when you aren't busy poisoning us."

"That's not fair. I honestly didn't remember those traps, therefore I couldn't pre-a.n.a.lyze their effect on you.

"But as for her, while she was outside my door, I studied her symptoms and compared them to my undigested database of human conditions.

I synthesized improved drugs based on a guess that her malady was bacterial. If it had been viral, Earth's medical knowledge would have been much less help. None-the-less her lungs still have fluid in them, she needs more antibiotic, and she's dead tired and poorly fed. The gas was traumatic."

"You're a regular Albert Schweitzer, aren't you?" Mayer retorted; but he was impressed.

"Albert Schweitzer?"

"He was a famous healer and philanthropist."

"Healer?" City paused. "Bring Dierdra to the control room. Off there is a rest chamber. I can finish curing her there.

Mayer carried the smelly disheveled woman into the golden room, which was small and plushed out with an alien weave of fabric on every furnishing and surface not bared for function. The large chamber was six-sided, containing a flat screen about two feet square on each wall above a vertical board of hundreds of octagonal keys. For each screen, there was a tall, narrow chair. The room was accented in strong metallic blues and gray green pastels--not something Mayer was used to, but not unpleasant.

A side door dropped; and out came a mechanical spider. Mayer let out a cry; but City said, "Don't be alarmed. It's just a fixbot, the kind that first helped her when you pulled her in. Please hand her to it."

In spite of misgivings, Mayer put Dierdra onto the machine's outstretched arms. He saw that the robot held her gently and followed its quiet scrabbling into the rest chamber. In there was a narrow brown bed, into which she was put. A tube came out of the wall toward her mouth; and he suddenly turned away and left.

"You'll take good care of her," he said to City.

"Yes."

One of city's fixbots was already putting standard typewriter letters and symbols onto one of the six vertical panels in the control room. Over the next several hours Mayer familiarized himself with a genuinely intelligent, self-accessing database that made the little three-terminal supermicro at his office seem like nothing at all.

Surprisingly, he caught on pretty well, though after several hours he still couldn't determine the key. He was, however, getting an idea.

He asked about the previous visitor, the skeleton in the hallway.

City did not reply.

"You have twelve hours left," came a message. How time flies when life is ticking away.

"If you do not wish to tell me about the skeleton, what of Nemqal?

Tell me more about him."

City answered, "The skeleton is Nemqal."

"So. Now we're getting somewhere. You know things you don't want to tell, don't you."

"I'm afraid this is all very painful."

"If you want out of this hole you're in, you'd better fess up. You're under the same time limit as I."

"You see, Nemqal came back to hide from the qalmasters. They would not negotiate."

"How did he get back and forth? Some sort of vehicle?"

"No."

Could Mayer really sense agitation in his host? "You know more about the key than you're telling, don't you?"

"I'll cut off your air and light!" Pay dirt.

"Let's just talk about Nemqal for a while."

"Yes."

"If he didn't use some sort of machine to travel, how did he get around?"

"He used his head."

"He used his head. You mean he found this place with his mind; and used only his mental ability to travel here?"

"Not exactly. There are skipstones all throughout me. He left qaldom from a skipstone that was within the skip coordinates and came here."

"How does a skipstone work?"

"I'll show you one."

On the screen above Mayer's keyboard--the one he hadn't used much because he found it easier to talk than to punch those awkward vertical b.u.t.tons--an image appeared of a plain black square on an empty, sparkling, green and blue street. Mayer wondered if the sun had gone down, for it was obviously night, again, or if the picture were recorded. It didn't matter.

On the side of the black square facing Mayer, a thin turquoise post ended in a black globe.

"A traveler stands on the square, stares into the ball on top of the pole; and when a local node of the computer has identified him, he states his destination. An arch appears behind him; and he walks through it."

Indeed, part of the scene beyond was replaced by the image of a second black square, ID post facing away, in a golden meadow beneath a rainbow-striped sky. Gray, almost two-dimensional tripeds dipped their rectangular heads and came up with cotton-candy chaws of gold in their tandem mouths. Behind was a solitary barn, red and wooden, that might have come from any small farm in America. That anomalously familiar object made the image the more pointedly alien.

Mayer shivered.

Then the view shifted to the skipstone in the meadow, looking through an arch into City. The screen went blank.

"Thank you," said Mayer. "The destinations, then, are communicated to a computer, which controls the travel."

"Yes."

"But Nemqal found a place outside what was known to the computer."

"Yes."

"How?"

"I told you. He used his head."

"I don't understand."

"He found a way to make the computer send him where it couldn't."

"That's a self-contradictory statement."

"Don't push me."

"All right. May I paraphrase what you said for my own understanding?"

Silence.

"OK. Nemqal discovered a way to instruct the computer to do something no one else had thought of before. It was not impossible, not beyond the machine's capabilities. Perhaps he used a new kind of math to visualize new coordinates within the skipstone's possibilities. Or maybe it wasn't math. Maybe it was intuition. What do you think?"

City was still silent.

"I am trying to help, you know. Memories are often painful; but we sometimes have to face them to help ourselves."

"I know. I don't have to like it."

"No, you don't. But how did he move you with him?"

"The skipstones, themselves, don't have any power. They are merely contact points, like your telephone booths. You get in touch with the travel net through them. The computer then sets up the travel fields and makes the transfer."

"And Nemqal told the computer something it didn't know and had it send you and him here."

"Yes."

"And you lost touch with everything."

Silence. Then reluctantly, "Yes."

"Then how did he get back from you to qaldom?"

"The travel computer is distributed throughout qaldom. It is a single huge computer formed of a network of smaller computers. Whatever equipment is online becomes part of the whole. It is one, and it is many."

"Like G.o.d, perhaps?"

"Some think that computer nets help them to understand what G.o.d may be. Not that he is a computer; but that he is in many places and has many streams of consciousness."

Good, thought Mayer. I've got him talking. "Then part of the skipstone computer net is within you."

"Yes, and it is fully capable, as any separated segment would be, except much slower to construct a travel path. But it is out of contact with the rest of the computer and doesn't know what its coordinates are."

"Can't you develop a new set of coordinates or use the old ones and experiment?"

"It doesn't work that way. It's very complex to explain. The skipstones are called such because they can't access every point in the universe, just bits of territory widely scattered over millions of galaxies. The Qals occupy portions of less than ten thousand galaxies.

"The mathematical framework behind skipstones was set up after billions of observations over one hundred twenty generations. I can make no observations of the sky because of the cloud which surrounds me. If I could, it would take me millions of years. To make a blind jump? I couldn't stand the cold of interstellar s.p.a.ce long enough to make another."

"I'll accept that. Then when Nemqal moved you, he issued instructions to the travel net that the travel computer doesn't remember, neither the part here nor there. Did he create the cloud surrounding you, do you think?"

"I'd say so."

"Is the travel computer a part of your mind?"

"No. But I communicate with it. It has no mind as I do. There is nothing unusual stored within it. I'm sure it was instructed to forget what he said.