Princess of Amathar (24 page)

"This seems to be an untraveled area," remarked the beautiful woman, "which may be all the better for us. I think we should wait here until we are sure that we have thrown off the trail of the Zoasians. Then we can start on our way home to Amathar. It seems as though I have not seen it in a long, long time." I too, am anxious to return to Amathar," I said. "I was just beginning to make myself feel at home there."

"Tell me what your world is like," said the Princess of Amathar. I told her as much as I could think of about Earth, the United States, and my old home town. I told her of my childhood, my education, my life in the army. I answered her numerous questions just as I had done for Malagor, Norar Remontar, Vena Remontar, and the interrogation team at the Temple of Amath. It was really very therapeutic. I then asked Noriandara Remontar to reciprocate by telling me of the adventures she had faced she was captured by the Zoasians.

"There is really not to much to tell," she began. "I was knocked unconscious in the battle against the Zoasians. When I woke up, I was a prisoner on their ship. There were one hundred one of us, a tiny fraction of our crew aboard Sun Cruiser 9. We were all tossed unceremoniously into an empty cargo hold, with our hands and feet manacled. They kept us that way the entire trip back to their home city-chained up and in the dark."

"It must have been awful," I commented.

"Well, it certainly wasn't good for my physical condition," she replied, "but it could have been much worse, especially from the Zoasians. We had not been in Zonamis very long before the attack came. Though I didn’t know at the time what was happening, I knew that something was going on. The guards forced us onto the transport. I don’t know where they were planning to take us." We sat thinking in silence for a while. At last I felt compelled to break the quiet with a question.

"How long should we stay here?"

"Long enough to get some of our strength back. I am certainly not up to my best, and I can tell that you are not. That arm must be very painful."

"Actually," I replied. "I had forgotten about it until you reminded me." We stayed in the small cave in the desert for what must have been about four days. We rested up, hunted and cooked small game, and harvested and ate a variety of strange but tasty seeds and roots. As it always did in Ecos, time passed strangely. In some ways it seemed as though we had been living together for months, and in other ways it seemed as though we had known each other but a moment. After we had slept one last time in our rock chamber, we set out once again across the desert. During our stay, the sandy landscape had remained cool and dry, though several large clouds occasionally crossed the sky. Great square rocks were piled here and there as though they had been left behind by some cyclopean preschooler. A few large trees clung to life in the beds of dry rivers. The only other vegetation was an abundance of small shrubs which carpeted the land. Here and there, one could see large dunes of billowing red sand. It was quite a rugged country, but it was also very beautiful, and it reminded me somewhat of my childhood home in the American southwest. Noriandara Remontar looked even better than when we had first met. The stopover at the cave had been a chance for her to recover from past ordeals. Fewer troubles now seemed to wrinkle her brow. I probably looked better myself, having benefited for the rest.

We had not walked too many miles when Noriandara Remontar called to me. As I looked up, she pointed to a large object in the sky. I thought at first that the object was an Amatharian or Zoasian battleship, since it was about the same size. It was not one of the air vessels. It was instead a floating city. While the bottom was far from smooth, with openings, windows, and protrusions, the top was a jagged skyline of tall buildings shooting up toward the noon day sun.

"Have you ever seen a floating city like that?" Noriandara Remontar asked.

"No," I replied. "You?"

"I have heard of them. They were built long ago by the Meznarks, contemporaries of the Orlons. They built hundreds of floating cities and sailed all over Ecos, until they angered a race of beings far away known as the Oindrag who hunted the Meznarks down and destroyed them. There are numerous artifacts from a fallen Meznark city at the Tree Clan Museum in Amathar, but I don't think anyone has ever come across a city still in flight."

"Are the Oindrag still around?"

"I believe they are also extinct."

"How far away to you suppose that thing is?"

"It is at least twenty kentads," she replied, indicating a distance of about fifteen miles, "but is seems to be moving toward us."

"Do you think there is anyone there steering it?"

"Our archaeologists believe that these cities were designed to float around at random." We continued on our way, watching the floating city moving in our general direction, though not altering our own course because of it. There seemed to be no purpose in moving toward the city as there was no obvious way for us to ascend to its height. Likewise there seemed to be nothing to fear in letting it cross our path. The closer it came, the more abandoned and broken down it appeared. We were less than a mile away from the city in the sky, when we simultaneously noticed several hundred long cables and ropes hanging from the artifact, some dragging along the ground below.

"If we could climb up there," I suggested, "perhaps we could find some sort of steering mechanism, and use this as transportation back to Amathar."

"My feelings exactly."

We increased our pace to a slow jog, but it soon became apparent that the ancient city was not heading directly toward us, but would instead cross our path somewhat ahead of us. We changed our course to correct the discrepancy, and increased our pace yet again. It was very difficult to run over the uneven desert landscape, at one moment sliding in soft sand and in the next hopping over mounds of stones. If I had not had the benefit of gravity enhanced strength, I would not have been able to keep up with the Princess of Amathar.

At last we reached the shadow of the hovering metropolis, or rather we and the metropolis crossed paths, since we had intercepted it. The cables were just ahead of us. But there was a problem. We were running out of land. The object of our chase was heading toward a huge canyon--not as large as the Grand Canyon of Arizona perhaps--but pretty big. If the city, which I estimated to be moving at about one to one and a half miles per hour, were to reach the canyon before we could climb aboard, we would lose it.

With an extra burst of speed, Noriandara Remontar and I reached the closest cable. It was long enough to drag along the ground. I grabbed the rope, which seemed to be made of a plastic like fiber, and the Princess started to climb up. I followed her, but could only climb a few feet from the ground with great difficulty. I realized that I would probably never be able to climb up the rope to the city with my splinted, broken arm.

My beautiful companion looked down and saw my predicament and dropped from her hand hold to the ground below me. She gathered up the slack rope below me and tied it around my waist, then climbed up beside me, just as we passed over the edge of the great canyon. It was almost a mile to the bottom, and it looked to me to be ten times that.

"I'll climb up and maybe I can pull you,” suggested the Princess. I looked up to the bottom of the flying behemoth above us. It seemed to me to be about six or seven hundred feet up. There was no guarantee that there was even a suitable entrance there, let alone a place from which the Princess could draw me up.

"I don't know about that," I replied. "Maybe we should wait until we are on the other side of the canyon and let it go."

"Don't be silly," she replied.

She started quickly up the rope, hand over hand. Climbing a rope had been one of the many fun activities I had gone through in Army boot camp. While I was there, I saw a great many men and a quite few women who could get to the top of a fifty foot tower at a pretty good clip, however none of them could match the climbing ability of the average Amatharian picked off the city street. I knew that Amatharians were on the whole, incredibly fit physically. I also knew that the huge amount of time spent wielding swords had to be a great enhancement to the arm muscles of warriors, swordsmen, and knights. Still, I was amazed at how fast Noriandara Remontar climbed up that cord. I watched the Princess as she climbed, though I stopped periodically to look around at the canyon below, and to make sure that I was securely tied. By the time she reached the top; between the distance involved, the movement of the rope, and the size of the floating city, it was difficult even to see her. But moments later, the rope began to be pulled up, and me with it. It started up slowly, then stopped, dropped a bit, and started up again more quickly.

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."