Nora Londi followed the monster through the blackness of the rocky tunnel until it widened into a massive, dimly lit cavern. Her first impression was that she was overlooking a city at night. Below there were orderly legions of yellow and red lights in precise patterns. Neighborhoods and thoroughfares more expansive, even, than New Chicago’s.
As her eyes grew accustomed to the illumination, she saw that the lights were not so distant. This was a cavern the size of twenty tobacco barns, and its floor was filled with rows of blocky cabinets, machines dotted with innumerable bulbs and gauges, some of the little lights winking on and off as their functions were called into play.
The dreadful beast stood in the center of the “city,” near a horseshoe-shaped desk laden with control panels and keyboards—an assemblage that gave Londi a sickening apprehension. The large bull-faced man was waving her on, beckoning and mumbling unintelligibly under the whir of machinery. His muscular mounds of skin glistened in the odd light—perhaps a little greasy from too many cannibalistic meals, Londi told herself. She descended the stony slope until she hit the polished stone flooring and looked back: The llama Diego and little Loo had emerged from the black tunnel and were following.
“…and stand right here in the center of the universe,” the hunched man was saying when she came within hearing range. “I don’t expect you to understand all of this, Nora. But these are thinking machines. They collect information, store it, assimilate and analyze. The way … just the way a brain does.”
“You thought there was a real Government? Well, not in New Chicago, no.” There was a wet hiss as he breathed deeply. He motioned grandly around the dark room. “There is a town of note takers and taxers, builders, Badgers, Inspectors. Bureaucracy. Mmm, to carry out my orders, but most of those groundlings have no idea I really exist. Or, at least, where I exist and in what form.”
“From here, one man—with assistance from little Loo—can control every population center on the continent. We monitor, regulate, all use of teletype, telephone, wireless. You won’t believe this, because you can’t see them, but there are actually ancient flying machines high above us. So high up that there is no air there. My flying machines. I found ‘em, figured them to be. One even has a meanly powerful camera. There is not much my machines don’t see or hear.”
Londi leaned against the rounded desk, feigning nonchalance. She poked at the nearest keyboard. It was made of worn plastic and carried the sheen of a well-used knife handle.
“These thinking machines,” Londi said, “that’s Old Age talk. They had the thinker boxes and the flying machines. There’s none of that now.”
The big man laughed. “There’s none of that, maybe, except mine! The computers have been here for centuries, perfectly preserved in the cool and dry of these caves. I had to build the turbine to power them. Then took another ten years to gully the machines themselves.”
Diego clopped up beside Londi and sniffed at the keyboard. Loo pulled him away by his neck.
Irritated, Diego asked, “Fly, hooma, machine? No … ooom, not legal.”
The monster’s bovine face brightened with pride. “I made that illegal!”
“So you would have the only ones?” asked Londi.
“Oh, don’t say it so sour. We must have some control! Technology, the reading and the writing.” He shuddered. “These things are for me. For the Government. That way the Government embodies all good, all progress. It cannot fail.
“But those flying machines, not even I actually have one to ride in, as the ancients used to. Mine are all in the sky. To bring them down would destroy them.”
Diego murmured pensively, “Hoooorma.”
“And what’s this little stick woman got to do with running the Government?” Londi asked gesturing at Loo.
“She talks to the computers so well that it saves me weeks of time, weeks of typing out the thinker box talk. It all has to do with that language she developed once she, uh, misplaced her tongue.” The man smiled, his thick lips twisting grotesquely, and pulled the cover off of a microphone on the counter. “She speaks into this instrument with that ooonga-oooonga talk—you’ve heard how she speaks? It’s a language based on tone levels and changes in pitch. Think of it as a language that climbs up and down stairways, while ours remains on the ground. Vertical, as opposed to horizontal.”
Londi stared blankly, but he continued, “Loo’s language is much more suited to binary logic, which is how these machines think. When I command the thinker boxes, the computers, it takes me twenty times the effort.”
Londi shook her head, understanding little of the explanation. “I suppose there’s a reason you’ve shown us?”
“Oh, you killed one of my Transport men, and while doing that blundered into the center of Government. You are bright and strong, and you are either an asset to me or a danger. Mmm, now. You owe me a body.” He scratched at his belly. “You will either work with me and, humph, join the gene pool, or you will die. Either way, you will never leave our community. You see that, don’t you? That you owe me a body—one way or another?”
“Not much of a choice.”
“Then in the spirit of cooperation, you will tell me about your friends.”
“I don’t have any friends.”
“The friends you spoke of earlier. Knights, you called them, using chess terminology. Yes, I was aware of them. But they can’t know you are here, can they? They must think you are at Blue Hole. They will be captured there—easily. It’s not only my largest prison camp, but also a training ground for Security. I like to have them refine their, uh, interviewing techniques on the prisoners.”
Londi was at a loss. She had mentioned companions as a bluff, and now she was told that someone actually seemed to be on the follow. But then she had a wry thought: There was one bastard’s name she didn’t mind giving.
“It’s probably Anton Takk.”
Loo groaned, disappointed. Londi turned and saw that the little woman had her razorlike flier’s knife in hand.
“She’s buggered,” said the large man. “We already knew the answer. And if you lied, I had promised Loo she could have a little nick of your tongue. Let’s hope you continue to cooperate. Or you might have to learn Loo’s language.
“You see, we take visitors from the outside quite seriously. No one must know where we are. If the location of this canyon became known all across Merqua, we would have to move immediately. And I hate moving—every forty or fifty years is often enough.” He sighed. “And now I’ve got the thinker boxes—a whole cavern full of thinker boxes, which would not be a simple thing to transport surreptitiously.”
The Monitor’s jaw muscles bulged nervously. “If I had to move now because of your friends, I would get quite upset,” he said sternly.
Londi felt queasy, and as her vision began to blur, she heard Diego’s hoofs clatter nervously. She put a hand on the desk for support. Anton Takk. That Northland rube—out here? Oh, bugger. “Yeah I’ll, uh, cooperate. Course I will.”
“Yes,” he responded, suddenly cheerful. “And now shall we entertain ourselves with a real game of chess? Did you know that even the ancients considered it an ancient game—it’s that old? They say that there are two things that not even the firebombs can eradicate: Mankind and chess. We do like to keep killing each other, don’t we?”