Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs (35 page)

“Surely your books will tell you about the world outside your domes,” I said. “I don’t know why you’re holding back on us.”

“I know of nothing like what you’ve described,” Danura said with a sour look on her face. “We learn to speak, learn to do what needs doing from our mothers—and they look nothing like your ‘books.’”

“Who built the domes, then?”

“The domes have always been here!” Danura shouted. She turned to Evina. “Send them back to their quarters. They are no use to us in this state.”

“Please,” I said, with my hands up, palms out. “If you let us explore your world some more, perhaps we can find these books.”

Danura gave me a fulminating look and then turned away, waving her hands dismissively. “Do what you want, go where you will. When I call for you next, if you have no answers to your questions . . .”

I needed no further prompting. “Come on, Gar, let’s go exploring.”

Gar followed me reluctantly.

“It’s no use, Tangor. You’re never going to find anything,” Handon Gar said to me hours later as we retraced our way up another one of the strange bubble corridors. “We should just tell Evina—I mean, Danura—that we really did escape from a high-class harem.”

“Control yourself, Gar,” I growled at him, thinking of pretty, bright Yamoda. “We
know
that there’s more to this world than these domes, we just need to prove it.”

“Perhaps we only dreamed it,” Gar said with a wistful sigh. He gave me a probing look. “Didn’t you say you came from another world?” When I nodded, he pressed on: “Perhaps you only dreamed that, too.”

I managed not to growl at him but it took a great deal of restraint. “This way,” I said, turning down a passage I was certain we hadn’t tried before.

Finding doors in the domes was still something of a mystery to me—apparently one walked where one wanted a door to exist and it snapped open. But it was still very difficult for me to walk straight at what I
knew
was a solid wall, expecting it to yield to a new room.

This time, though, I heard a word as I went through the door into the new room.

“
Nistay
,” a deep bass voice boomed. “
Nistay
” is Tonosian for “no” or “forbidden.”

“Did you hear that?” I said, twirling around to speak to Handon Gar.

He wasn’t there. I looked around. “Gar?”

There was no sign of him.

I thought of going back, and then I thought of that voice. It was a man’s voice. A voice of command.

I started forward. The corridor widened and widened until I found myself at the top of a huge expanse and all the way down to the dimmest bottom there were lights—and the sound of machinery.

My feet started moving of their own accord and I went to the edge of the walkway and peered down over the railing, enraptured. Never before have I seen or heard of such amazing machinery.

Who ran all this? Why was Danura keeping it a secret? There was no way that all this machinery could be run without someone maintaining it—and they must have learned from manuals.

On all Poloda there was nothing like this. If I could learn the secrets of this machinery and return with it to the Unis, defeating the Kapars would be easy.

A noise startled me and I turned toward it. Someone must be near.

“Hello?” I called and then, raising my voice to carry, “Hello?”

I never, in my wildest imaginings, expected the answer I got.

“Hello?” I’d called in answer to a noise. “Hello?”

The answer I got was beyond my wildest imaginings.

I saw a light coming toward me from down the unexplored hallway. As it approached, it became obvious that it was not one but two lights, at about eye level. Perhaps someone was wearing a special visor, I mused.

And then I saw it. I took a step back, but it was useless. The thing was approaching too fast.

And it
was
a thing. It
hovered
noiselessly above the ground. It looked almost like a human without any legs, or a fat, bulbous bug with arms instead of wings.

A thin beam of red light flicked out from above its glowing “eyes” and swiftly moved left to right, top to bottom, as though it were some sort of radar painting a map of my body.

The light hurt my eyes when it shone in them but was quickly gone.

“
Lakanoma
,” a deep, rusty voice grumbled from the inside of the thing.

I knew that word, it was the Tonosian singular of “
Lakanamos
”— “come.”

I hesitated as it turned away from me, but then it turned back once more, white eyes shining and repeated, “
Lakanoma
.”

“I have friends,” I said, gesturing toward the bulge in the dome where I’d stepped through.

“
Lakanoma
,” the machine repeated, turning away once more but not moving.

I had the distinct impression that it was tracking me, even though its eyes were no longer on me.

I took a step toward it and it started moving—noiselessly.

We walked—rather, I walked and it floated—for ten minutes. The machine then stopped and turned back to me, its deep voice saying “
Lakanoma
” before it vanished through the nearest wall.

At this point there was no way I could retrace my steps back to the entrance, so I had no choice—I stepped through the wall.

I entered into another room, full of dials, gauges, wheels, levers, and other controls. My jaw dropped. If this was not the central control room for the entire dome, then it was one of the secondaries.

My eyes scanned the room, trying to make sense of it, to grapple it into something that a pilot might understand.

I noticed that the dials, rather than being separate units, were actually drawn on wide, flat panels which also seemed to show buttons and levers.

Panel after panel was placed on the wall, meshing seamlessly in one huge display. It was all beyond me. I glanced around and found the only familiar spot in the room—it was a chair pushed under a desklike console.

I went to it and sat. The moment I did, a number of darkened screens lit and a light flashed to life beside me.

“
Alcorana ishnu
,” a different voice demanded.

“
Queros?
” I said, having used the word often in my lessons. ‘What?’

“
Alcorana ishnu
,” the voice repeated.

“I don’t understand you,” I said to myself, not expecting a reply.

“
Semda incoriga
,” the voice now said. “
Ishniah incoriga
.”

“Yeah, you don’t know what I’m talking about,” I muttered to myself. “Well, mate, now you know how
I
feel.”

I wasn’t speaking in English, which by now I’d almost forgotten but rather in Polodan.

“Glottal and fricative shifts, input not processed,” the voice now said, causing me to start in my chair. “Please continue.”

“What are you?”

“Who are you?” the voice replied. “Are you from another planet?”

“You know about planets?”

“Continue speaking. Please describe your appearance,” the voice replied.

“My name is Tangor. I come from Poloda with Handon Gar,” I said. “I’ve got brown hair and brown eyes. I’m of medium height—”

“Linguistic match,” the voice interrupted me. “Comprehension at two sigma. Processing . . . What questions do you have?”

“What’s going on?” I said angrily. “How did I get here? What is this place?”

“Excessive input,” the voice replied.

“Who are you?”

“Incorrect pronoun choice,” the voice replied. “I am a machine. I respond to the name Argos.”

“Argus?” I said, my eyebrows going up in surprise. “Like the Greek god?”

“Argos,” the machine corrected. “‘God’ and ‘Greek’ not processed.”

“You’re a machine!”

“Correct.”

“Do you control the domes?”

“I am the supervisory agency for the planet Tonos,” Argos replied.

According to Greek mythology, Argus was the hundred-eyed god that saw everywhere. It sounded like this “Argos” wasn’t all that different—at least in that respect.

“The thing that brought me here, what was it?”

“You are referring to one of my mobiles,” Argos replied. “The mobiles are used to effect repairs.”

“You sound like they’re your workers and you’re human,” I said.

“They perform many functions similar to workers,” Argos replied. “And I am regarded as sentient.”

“You’re an intelligent machine?” I exclaimed.

“I am an artificial intelligence,” Argos corrected me. “No more a machine than you.”

Hmm, I had trouble believing that. But . . . if Argos were running everything, that might explain why no one knew how to read—they didn’t need to.

“What happened here?”

“Open question, insufficiently determined,” Argos responded.

“The people in the domes don’t know about the other planets,” I said by way of example. “They say they don’t have any books—”

“Unknown word, ‘books’—please rephrase,” Argos interrupted me.

Well, I’d had this same problem with Evina, Danura and the others.

“Items in which data is stored in a human readable format,” I said, choosing my words carefully.

“Attend to screen two,” Argos said. A screen flickered to my right, and I looked at it. Images—symbols, glyphs—flickered on it. I could tell there was organization, but I couldn’t distinguish the symbols.

“I can’t read that,” I snapped.

“I can teach you,” Argos said with a strangely wistful tone to its voice.

“I need to get back to the others. They’ll be looking for me.”

“I need you to learn the language so that you can aid me in repairs.”

“Repairs? What about your workers?”

“They are in need of repair,” Argos said. “The entire unit is in danger of failing.”

“Unit?”

“The conglomeration of what you would call this dome and all that is within it,” Argos said. “It is failing.”

“How? Why?”

“The human interface was withdrawn.”

“Withdrawn?” I repeated. My brows furrowed, and I looked around the room speculatively. “You mean this control room hasn’t been manned recently?”

“This control room has been abandoned for a long period,” Argos replied. “All control rooms have been abandoned.”

“How many are there?”

“On the planet?”

“Naturally.”

“For how long hve you controlled Tonos?”

“Since I was commissioned.”

“How long ago—in years—was that?”

“I was commissioned some two thousand three hundred and twenty-two years ago,” Argos replied. “Prior to that, I had nominal control for a previous five hundred years.” Argos added, sounding piqued, “It was a learning period.”

A five-hundred-year learning period.

Okay.

“So, when was the last time a person was here?”

“In years, three hundred and fourteen,” Argos replied. There was a tone of sadness, loneliness in its voice.

“What happened?”

“I do not know,” Argos confessed. It sounded upset at that. “Some sort of biological disaster for which there was no reason to consult me, I presume. I noted a significant decline in population and no access to the medical facilities afterwards.”

“Medical facilities?”

“Naturally, I provide those services,” Argos said. “I am constructed to provide total care for all inhabitants.”

“So you were built with the domes?”

“No. I ordered the construction of the domes,” Argos replied.

“Why?”

“It became necessary after the last war,” Argos told me.

“And when was that?” The people of Tonos appeared incapable of war.

“Two thousand, three hundred and twenty-one years ago,” Argos replied.

“Just a year after you were commissioned?” I said, a feeling of dread spreading over me.

“Adjustments were necessary,” Argos told me.

I decided to change the topic. “You say you have medical facilities.”

“Naturally.”

“And they haven’t been used?”

“Not in three hundred and twenty-three revolutions around the sun.”

“I see,” I said, thinking rapidly. “That would be about ten generations?”

“I have not been keeping track of the population on a generational basis,” Argos replied sounding a bit as though the notion were beneath it.

“I suppose in that time the society could change a lot,” I thought to myself.

“Certainly the intelligence of the males I tried to acquire was unsuitably low.”

“Males?” I repeated in surprise.

“Of course, the females are only suitable for breeding,” Argos replied with all the vehemence of a male patriarch.

I pondered on that before saying slowly, “Argos, is it possible that the epidemic you noted affected the males more than the females?”

“It certainly skewed the birth ratio,” Argos replied. “As of the last census, the females outnumbered males nearly four to one.”

A moment later, it added, “Sperm motility was measurably lower, too.”

“Pardon?” I asked, not entirely certain what he meant. It took a good fifteen minutes before I got the picture and I turned beet red—and was glad that there was only a machine to notice—as I finally caught on to what he was saying.

“Do I understand you correctly? Most of the males are sterile?”