The Cydonian Pyramid (24 page)

“Dealt with how?” Lia asked.

“They will be taken to the pyramid and executed.”

Lia could hardly believe what she was hearing.

“You do not approve?” Hidalgo regarded her with wry amusement. “How many Pure Girls have
they
killed? Their continued existence would only lead to further disruption, and we do not have the resources to watch over them. Our responsibility is to restore order to Romelas.”

“So the Yars are taking over for the priests?”

“Someone must rule.” Hidalgo’s tired eyes glittered. “Better us than the priests, or the merchants, or the landowners. As for the public executions, the people of Romelas need their bread, yes, but they must also have their circuses. When you have recovered your strength you will join us, of course.”

Lia forced herself to remain expressionless. It seemed to her that Hidalgo and her council were no better than the priests.

“I may wish to leave Romelas,” she said.

“Where would you go?”

“Into the Gate.”

“You would follow the priests?”

“I would search for my friend.”

Hidalgo gave Lia a long measuring look. She said, “Song told me of a boy.”

“He is not just a boy. He is Tucker Feye.”

Hidalgo drew back. “Tuckerfeye? Tuckerfeye is a story from the Book.”

“
This
Tucker Feye is real. Whether he is the Tuckerfeye from the book, I do not know. But he is my friend, and I may have sent him to his death.”

Hidalgo nodded slowly. “I know how you must feel. It is a terrible thing to ask a friend to die. I have done the same, even more recently. But the boy — Tuckerfeye or not — is gone. Your place is here, in Romelas. We cannot resurrect the dead.”

“He died because of me. I may be able to undo what I did.”

“By using the Gate? I think not. You are needed here. We have much work to do.”

“Are you saying that I, too, am a prisoner?”

“You are a prisoner of your destiny. As was the boy. As are we all.”

“Perhaps my destiny lies elsewhere.”

“Impossible to say,” said Hidalgo. “I know only that you are a Yar, and we have need of Yars.”

“I don’t want to kill anyone,” Lia said.

“Really?” Hidalgo smiled. “A pity. You are so good at it.”

After Hidalgo left, Severs entered Lia’s room and stood silently, waiting for Lia to speak.

“Hidalgo says you are her prisoner,” Lia said.

Severs nodded. “I cannot leave.”

“Why did you come here in the first place?”

“I was on the roof of Mayo One when the building was bombed by zealots calling themselves Lambs. The hospital was in flames. The only way I could save myself was to flee through a disko. Fortunately, I was able to bring my tricorder and a few other items with me. I arrived here, on the pyramid, and was taken by the Yars. They told me that this city — Romelas — is in fact Mayo. It is all that is left of our once-great city. If that is true, it is tragic.”

Lia said, “According to
The Book of September,
Romelas was born after the Medicant city was destroyed by Plague and storms.”

“Mayo was destroyed by bombs and religious fanatics. There is no such thing as Plague.”

“No such thing as Plague?” Lia’s head whirled. “How can you say that?”

“I say only what is true. ‘Plague’ was invented by the Lambs to explain behaviors that they chose not to understand.”

“You’re saying they just made it up?”

“In a sense. They accused us of spreading this so-called Plague, and then they destroyed us.”

“How is that possible? When I was in Mayo, the city was enormous and the Lambs were few.”

“The Mayo you visited existed before my time,” Severs said. “Before the Transcendence.”

Artur, the Boggsian, had used that word:
Transcendence.

“Are you talking about the Klaatu?” she asked.

“The Klaatu, yes. By the time the Lambs rose up, the Transcendence had reduced our population drastically. By the time I was born, there were fewer than seven thousand Medicants in Mayo, while the Lambs numbered in the tens of thousands. And now I find myself in the midst of another senseless war. It is all madness. I want no part of this terrible, cruel time.” Severs’s face remained the same bland mask it had been, but her eyes were moist, and Lia realized that the Medicant felt as lost as she did.

“What is stopping you from walking out of here, climbing the pyramid, and stepping through the Gate?”

“I attempted to do so,” Severs said. “The disko is guarded. They threatened me with their weapons and told me to go.”

“But you could walk out of the city if you wanted?”

“Where would I go? I am lost here. Hidalgo says I may one day be allowed to return to my people, but she has given me no cause to believe her. In the meantime, I perform my function. I heal.”

Lia thought back over her conversation with Hidalgo. “It seems I am a prisoner here as well,” she said. “When I am better, I will find a way to leave this city. If you still want to go, I will take you with me.”

T
HE SUBMARINE SHUDDERED AND GROANED
.

“What was
that
?” Tucker asked.

Dr. Arnay got up quickly and left the cabin, closing the door behind him. Tucker tried to remember everything he knew of the USS
Skate.
It wasn’t much. He remembered reading that the submarine had surfaced at the North Pole and that it had returned safely. If that held true, then nothing too terrible was about to happen. But maybe his being here had changed things — he sure didn’t remember anything in his submarine book about the
Skate
finding a teenage boy on the North Pole.

Tucker looked at his hands, at the new, pink skin. The Medicants had made him stronger and faster and, apparently, able to heal from frostbite. Maybe if he were frozen solid, he could be thawed out. He could freeze himself for fifty years or so and wake up when global warming melted the Arctic. Not an experiment he wanted to try. But if these submarine guys decided he was some sort of enemy agent, they might lock him away in a military prison. Even if they let him go, by the time he got back to his own era, he’d be almost seventy years old.

His only way out was through the same disko that had brought him here.

Dr. Arnay returned. “It’s just the ice shifting against the hull,” he said.

“Oh. That’s what I thought.”

Arnay half smiled. “You being an expert on nuclear subs and all.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

Arnay sat down in his chair and crossed his legs. “You were telling me you were on the roof of your parents’ house, and you think this girl, Lahlia, followed you into the . . . um . . . disko? And then the next time you saw her she was different?”

“Yeah . . .” Tucker wasn’t sure what parts of his story to tell. He had left out the World Trade Center, and he figured he’d better leave out the part about the crucifixion, too. “Um, a whole bunch of stuff happened, and I ended up back in the future hospital, and they sent me through another disko, and, well, I finally got back home, to Hopewell. Except everything was different. There was this new church, and the guy in charge was . . . this old guy called Father September. And another guy was there, the priest who tried to kill me on the pyramid. And they decided to kill me all over again. Anyway, that was when Lahlia showed up, and like I said, she had changed.”

“Changed how?”

“She seemed older, and she had a scar on her face. Not a fresh scar. A scar that had completely healed.”

“And it had been how long since you’d seen her?”

“It’s kind of hard to say. It
seemed
like just a few weeks, but I’d gotten older, too, because the Medicants made me work in one of their factories for a couple years. But I don’t remember much about that.”

“Medicants . . . These are the futuristic doctors?”

“Yeah. They were really weird. They wore these strange headsets and talked mostly in numbers. Like they were half machine and half human.”

Dr. Arnay grunted. “Not so far-fetched. A lot of younger doctors I know are focused on test results and percentages. They forget that their patients are people.”

“That’s what my dad thought. Anyway, I think they made me so I heal faster.”

They both looked at his hands. The pinkness was subsiding. His hands looked almost normal.

Dr. Arnay asked, “How are they feeling?”

“Fine.” Tucker flexed his fingers.

Arnay shook his head. “A few hours ago, I was sure you’d end up with stumps. You say these people from the future gave you this remarkable healing ability?”

The way the doctor was looking at him made Tucker wish he’d never mentioned the Medicants. He might end up in some government laboratory for the rest of his life while they tried to figure out how he healed so quickly.

“I’ve always healed pretty fast.” Tucker grinned, trying for a boyish, disarming look.

Arnay didn’t go for it. “Nobody heals that fast.”

“What’s it like outside?” Tucker asked, to change the subject.

“Cold.”

“Did you go out?”

“I poked my head out. It’s rather nice right now. The sun is out, and the wind has died down. Still, it’s twenty below.”

“Any chance I could go out? Just for a minute?”

“No.”

“Don’t you get kind of claustrophobic in here? I mean, how long were you under the ice?”

The doctor frowned. “That’s classified information.”

“Who am I going to tell?”

“I have no idea. You know, you still haven’t told me exactly how you got here.”

“Oh, okay. Like I said before, I got swallowed by a maggot — that portable disko thing I was telling you about. But it wasn’t the first time I went into a maggot. The first time was when Lahlia saved me from getting killed by the same guy who tried to kill me before on the pyramid. They had this maggot strung up on a metal frame, and they were going to kill me and then throw me into the maggot’s disko. But then Lahlia — the older version of Lahlia — showed up. There was a fight, and I shot this guy’s leg off —”

“You
what
?”

“I
had
to. Anyway, the priest made Lahlia go into the maggot, and then I jumped in after her, and —”

“Stop!” Arnay said, holding up one hand and clamping the other to his forehead. “You’re making my head spin.”

“Sorry.” Tucker’s heart was pounding from the memory.

Arnay lowered his hands. “All right, assuming for the moment that what you’re telling me is true — which I very much doubt — why would you jump into one of these diskos when every time you do, you almost get killed? Are you suicidal?”

The question surprised Tucker. He’d never thought about suicide at all.

“Most of the time, if I’d stayed where I was, I’d have gotten killed anyway. But this time I’m telling you about, I was going after Lahlia. In case she needed help on the other side. I figured since she’d gone into the disko just a minute before, we’d end up in the same place. . . .” Tucker paused, thinking back to that moment.

“And?” Dr. Arnay said.

“It didn’t exactly work that way. . . .”