Free The Secret City by Carol Emshwiller Page A

Secret City until now. To them I’m a barbarian. Well, I am. My parents thought so, too. Mollish thought so, but she didn’t care. Why isn’t she here? And Lorpas? I thought they were right behind me.
    Do these people, trying to hide their smiles, even know there’s a dead person lying here? They bow and nod. They wave their hands back and forth in front of their faces as if waving off flies. I don’t know if there are flies here but I think that gesture is about me. I wonder if I smell bad. I know I’m dusty and … well, I haven’t had a good wash-up since it got cold.
    The way they’re dressed and the way their hair is, I can’t tell which are male and which female. But I suppose they can’t tell about me either.
    I take a step forward but a couple of people grab me from behind, turn me around and rush me away, down steep steps and in a doorway. Out of sight fast as if I’m too horrible to be seen by decent people—as if I might do something dangerous or unseemly.
    They put me in a tiny room, a kind of padded cell. There’s not even a window and everything in there is gray. I wish there was a window. What’s the sense of being here on a whole new world and not seeing anything? I was wanting so badly to see all that glitter and I especially wanted to get a better look at the twirling birds … if those are birds. This room might as well be on any old world.
    They make me take a whole batch of pills. I try not to, but they know how to force you. I yell both, “No,” and, that “Aay
yaa”
of my own language. I call out for Lorpas. Why isn’t he here?
    But those pills….
    … AND HERE I AM, COMING-TO .
    I’m alone. They’ve cleaned me up, cut my hair short and put something on it to make it stiff. They’ve taken away my clothes. I wonder if they destroyed them. I made those myself and decorated them with red and green thread which was hard to get up there at the city.
    They’ve dressed me in a kind of smock, greenish, sprinkled randomly with a few red dots of different sizes. There’s writing on the front. I recognize it as writing because it’s the same kind that was carved on the walls of the Secret City. I never got that good at reading it. I’ve no idea what it says. Maybe Watch Out For This Wild Barbarian or maybe Smelly Foreigner, Don’t Breathe.
    There’s no mirror. I’ve no idea what I look like with my hair all cut off. How will Lorpas know who I am?
    There’s a little table that wasn’t here before. On it, a cup of faintly reddish liquid, and beside that, a dish of what must be something to eat, also reddish and with little black specks in it. I sit on the low stool and sip at the red stuff. It tastes so odd I wonder if they’re trying to knock me out again, but I’m so thirsty I drink it anyway. People used to get sick just going from one country to another. What about going from one world to another? I do feel a little queasy. I wonder about all those pills.
    I take about half a bite of the food. It tastes so bad I start to laugh, and then I find tears are rolling down my cheeks. I’ve never been a person who cries much but I cry now. It starts off with the horrible taste and then I think how things would be if Lorpas had come with me. We’d both be laughing at this odd food. I wouldn’t feel so lonely and scared if he were here. I know he didn’t want to leave there, but I thought he’d go wherever I went. If he’d had time to think, he would have come. I suppose he didn’t have time to do anything but act. And then he already got burned once before trying to stay there. I wonder if he’s all right this time. Maybe he’s burned again and needs help. Of course Mollish is there. Or is she burned, too?
    Maybe we’d have come together if we’d been holding hands when they snatched me. We did hold hands now and then. That’s as far as we went. We never even kissed. But there wasn’t room on the ledge for holding hands.
    I wish we hadn’t been so shy. You’d think, at our