“They think you can kill the Zug. They are terribly worried about it.”
“Then that part was true?”
“About the Zug? Oh, yes. This is total-access clothing, did you know that?” She touched the curved and ornamented plaques that clung to her body one after another. Each one winked briefly out of existence, revealing an arm, a breast with a rather startling violet nipple, a hip, a thigh.
Naismith felt an intense, momentary interest in that tender-looking flesh, but he put it aside. “Which faction is ascendant in the Circle now?” he demanded.
The girl frowned. “What a dull thing you are! You Shefthi, actually…” She yawned once more and stretched back against the curved blue-mist wall. “I think I shall take a little rest,” Her eyes closed.
Naismith gazed at her in annoyance, but before he could speak, something new in the sky caught his attention. It was a mass of spectral blue globes, hanging motionless at eye leveclass="underline" it had not been there a moment ago.
“What is that?” Naismith demanded.
The girl opened her eyes briefly. “The City,” she said.
At first her words seemed irrelevant. Then a shock went through Naismith’s body. “Do you mean that is the City?” he demanded.
She sat up, eyes wide open. “What’s wrong with you?”
Naismith did not reply. His pseudo-memories of the City were all of gigantic rooms, corridors, floating shapes, crowds of people.
Now that he looked for it, the knowledge was there: but it had never once occurred to him that the City was not on Earth.
His inner agitation increased. Here was the danger, not in Liss-Yani’s petulant threats.
His knowledge of essential things was incomplete, badly organized, not readily available. What other blunders might he not make at some crucial moment?… And how much longer did he have to prepare himself?
Outside, the huge, complex shape ponderously revolved as they drew nearer. A bull’s-eye pattern rolled into view, centered itself in the mass, grew steadily larger. The inner circle yawned and swallowed them. They were inside.
Chapter Thirteen
Through the walls of the time vehicle, Naismith found himself looking into a huge globular room—a hollow, pale-green sphere, with regular markings at intervals on its surface, in which floated a confusing array of objects.
Liss-Yani smiled at him sidelong, her hand on the control box. “Are you ready?”
He stared back at her, said nothing.
Smiling, she did something to the controls. The time vehicle winked out of being.
At the same instant, something dark and incredibly swift flapped toward them, enclosing them. Naismith flung up his arms in instinctive defense, then relaxed. Somewhere a bell was ringing.
“What is this?”
“A precaution,” she said, enjoying his reaction. “What if we had been Uglies?”
Through the dark transparency around them, Naismith could dimly perceive motion in the great globe. Angular machines drifted nearer, lenses glowing sullen red, like coals in the heart of a fire. A little above them, another shape was moving: Naismith realized suddenly that it was a man. Something was wrong with the legs, but he could make out pipe-stem arms, a head, the glint of eyes staring.
Abruptly the bell stopped; the darkness winked out. They were floating in the middle of the green sphere, surrounded by machines in whose lenses the red glow was dying. Nearer, the man Naismith had seen before was floating towards them, body at an angle to theirs, hands gripping his forearms, like a Mandarin. He was dressed in a fantastic, puffed and ruffled garment of yellow and white stripes, the top a short-sleeved singlet, the lower part a tube covering both legs and closed at the bottom with a yellow bow. His face was lean and gnomish, at once anguished and ironic. His eyes glittered; his wide mouth twitched. “You got him, I see,” he said.
“Yes, here he is, Prell.”
“Is he dangerous?”
The girl turned slowly in mid-air and gazed at Naismith.
“I’m not sure,” she said thoughtfully.
“We’d better keep the automatics on him, for the time being.
Later they’ll give him a collar.” Prell turned in the air, spoke a single, harsh word.
Out of the clutter of objects hanging in the vast space, one drifted nearer: it was a miniature sarcophagus, with a design painted on it in blue and yellow. The drawing was a crude sketch of a young girl with yellow hair, eyes closed, lips demurely smiling. Her hands were crossed over her breast.
“Tell the Highborn,” said Prell, “the attempt was successful.
We have the Shefth.”
The sarcophagus clicked, hummed, drifted away again.
“Probably it will take a while to get her attention,” said Prell. “Do you want to look at the work, in the meantime?”
“Yes, all right,” said the girl indifferently. The two of them turned, drifted rapidly away from Naismith. After a moment, already tiny in the distance, they paused and looked back, with comical expressions of surprise on their faces.
“I forgot,” said Prell’s distant voice; “he doesn’t have a director. Wait a moment.” He spoke the harsh word again; another machine drifted toward him. This one was box-shaped, ornamented with red and green arabesques on a black ground.
“A director for that man,” said Prell, pointing.
The box dipped slightly, turned, and came rocketing down at Naismith. At the last moment it slowed, came to a halt facing him a yard away.
“For my information, sir,” said a musical voice from the box, “what is that man’s name?”
“Naismith,” said Naismith, looking at it curiously.
“Excuse me, sir, but that is not a catalogued name,” said the box politely.
The voices of Prell and the girl murmured together a moment; then Prell said, “We’ll get him a name presently. For now, just call him ‘that man.’”
“Thank you, sir,” said the box. A hopper in its center slowly opened; out floated a narrow, flexible band of some cream-colored substance.
“Put it on your wrist,” called the girl. Naismith did so, and the stuff curled around his wrist as if half-alive, clung to itself and seemed to melt together; the seam disappeared.
“Now point in the direction you want to go and just tense your wrist slightly,” her voice went on.
Naismith did as he was told, and found the vast green sphere rotating slowly around him, while certain distant clumps of machines drifted nearer. When Prell and the girl came into view again, he pointed toward them, and this time managed to keep them centered. He lowered his arm, came to rest a few feet away.
“You’ll get used to it,” said Liss-Yani. “Come on!”
She and Prell moved off again, but came to a halt almost immediately. Naismith jockeyed up beside them. Prell was moving some small glittering object across the vacant air before him: suddenly there was a shimmer, a crackle, and a great round sheet of silvery reflection came into being.
Prell touched it again; the disk turned transparent, and they were looking into another room, darker and even more enormous than the one they were in. In the vast space myriads of tiny shapes were moving: some were human, some were the symmetrical forms of machines—boxes, sarcophagi, vase shapes. As Naismith’s vision adjusted to the scene, he began to make out serried ranks of dark objects, not visibly connected to one another, among which the human and robot forms came and went.
Prell reached out again, and the scene appeared to drift nearer. They were looking down upon one of the thousands of ranked machines, over which a gnomish young man in a dress like Prell’s was hovering.
“This is the Barrier control network,” the girl’s voice explained. “They’ve been working on it for five years. It’s almost finished.”
“Is this an actual entranceway into that room,” Naismith asked, fumbling for words, “or a—a viewscreen?”