When she'd finished, Blade untied the knife he'd been using as a bayonet. With the knife in his belt, he sat down on the foot of the bed. He had no intention of laying a finger on the woman again, except in self-defense. He was not yet ready to let her know this.
Blade suspected the woman was of the Authority-the government or police of this city. He also suspected that it had been a long time since even the Authority had come face to face with a civilized person from outside the city. Blade was the unknown, and the unknown always had the ability to sow terror or at least uncertainty in the toughest and best-trained people.
«My name is Richard Blade,» be began. «I come from England. I have traveled far and entered this city of yours in peace. I have not found-«
The woman frowned and held up a hand. It was a long-fingered, graceful hand, in spite of the distinctive calluses from many years of unarmed-combat training. «England. What was it called, when it was a City of Peace?»
«I do not know that our land has ever been called anything but England,» said Blade. «Certainly there are no records that give another name.»
«You do not even remember that you were a City of Peace?»
«As I said, we have nothing left that tells us so.» Blade pretended to frown in concentration. «Some say there was once a mighty city called Rome, which ruled all the world and then disappeared. But most among the people of England consider this a tale to amuse children, no more.»
The woman shook her head, and her voice held a note of sadness, «It has been a long time since the Cities of Peace ceased to talk to one another. Perhaps it has been long enough even for what you say to have happened. Certainly you are the first to enter Mak'loh from another City in the lifetime of anyone in the Authority, and some of us are no longer young.»
«That is not impossible,» said Blade. «Certainly it is only quite recently that England has been sending out explorers such as myself to enter the other Cities of Peace. Mak'loh is the first one I have entered, and I had a long journey to reach it.» Apparently she assumed that any civilized man in this Dimension had to be from another «City of Peace.» Perhaps she was unable to conceive of any alternative. This was certainly a weakness, but it was a weakness very much to Blade's advantage for the moment.
«You came across the Warlands?» the woman said. She pointed at Blade's sword and knife as she spoke. Blade assumed she meant the lands outside the Wall.
«I did. That is why I brought those weapons you see. They are not as powerful as those of a City's Authority, but they do not attract so much attention from the Warlanders. And they are powerful enough, if one knows how to use them.»
He put down the knife so that he was between it and the woman. Then he made his expression as severe as he could and spoke in a clipped, hard voice.
«You call this a City of Peace. Yet I crossed the Warlands without shedding a drop of my blood. Only when I entered Mak'loh was I in real danger.» In brisk sentences Blade told the tale of his adventures in this Dimension. He left out nothing, including Twana and the encounters with the Shoba's men. He merely implied that all of these things had happened after he'd reached Mak'loh with an exploring party.
As he talked, Blade noticed the woman's face turning pale and her breath coming more quickly. As he told of his encounter with the androids on the city wall, she shivered. When he told her of how he'd walked freely through this House of Peace and seen all that went on there, she put her hands over her face.
«I could have slain every man and woman in this building between sunset and dawn,» Blade finished. «I did not, because I call them my brothers and sisters. Would the men of the Shoba be so kind, if they passed the Wall?»
The woman's voice came out muffled by her hands. «Blade-are you of the Authority, in England?»
«No. I am sent out by the Authority, as are the other explorers.» To increase the pressure on the woman, he added, «I am no more than a common fighting man of England. It was a great honor for me to be chosen by the Authority, for there are many thousands of fighting men and women as skilled as I am.»
«Th-th-thousands, like you?» the woman said, her voice starting to break. Blade nodded. «I'm surprised that you c-c-call us brothers and sisters. We-«and at that point her voice failed her completely. She turned over, buried her head in the pillows, and wept.
Blade said nothing but quietly moved closer to her and laid a hand on her shoulder. She didn't seem to notice it. Finally she wiped her eyes and rolled over, her hands clasped behind her head. Blade carefully kept his eyes off the slim white throat and the firm breasts thrusting up beneath the black coverall.
«I see Mak'loh has few secrets left from England,» she said wearily. «The only way we could change the situation would be to kill you. You did not kill us, when you could have easily done so and perhaps thought we deserved it.» There was a note of bleak despair in her voice. «So we will not kill you.»
«Thank you,» said Blade. He would have said it sarcastically, except for the genuine emotion in the woman's voice. Something about the situation of her city moved her deeply.
«Yet in England you seem to have forgotten where you came from,» she went on. «So you will not understand Mak'loh until I tell you how the Cities of Peace came to be. Then perhaps we can understand each other better.»
Blade smiled. «By all means, tell me.» He'd be more than happy to sit and listen while the woman revealed all the secrets of Mak'loh, this city of the living dead.
Chapter 14
The woman's name was Sela, and she was one of the Council of the Authority of Mak'loh. The Authority consisted of several hundred selected and trained men and women. They were the only people in Mak'loh who led anything that might be called a normal life by Home Dimension standards. They were responsible for everything that might be needed to keep the city running and had to be done by human beings rather than by robots or androids.
They were a few hundred men and women. The total human population of Mak'loh was somewhere around a hundred thousand.
When Blade learned that, he felt he knew half the answer to why the city was slowly falling apart. He still needed to know how Mak'loh had ended up in this situation.
After listening to Sela for about five hours, Blade felt he knew.
A long time in the past-at least several thousand years ago-there had been a war in this Dimension. It had been an immensely destructive war, fought with nuclear weapons, bacteria, gas, and all the other resources of a highly technological civilization. A large part of that civilization had simply vanished in the war.
Part of it had somehow managed to survive, in spite of the destruction. There were comparatively few people left, but a large part of the Dimension's technological skills and resources still existed. This included the robots, the early models of android, and the very earliest models of the Inward Eye.
The Inward Eye was a method of directly stimulating the human brain to give all the sensations of an actual experience while the individual slept. An enormous variety of incredibly vivid experiences could be recorded on tapes and reproduced with total fidelity, every sensation intact down to the last and smallest detail. All one needed to make one's sleeping hours more exciting than one's waking hours was an Inward Eye machine and a sufficiently large variety of tapes.
The black boxes with the wired helmets Blade had seen in the rooms above were Inward Eye machines. The early ones had been used both as a high-society hobby and a method of therapy in mental hospitals. Both high society and mental hospitals vanished during the war. The survivors were much too busy putting things back together to have any time for socializing or developing mental illnesses.