The Secret City Read Online Free PDF

by the natives. Also so they can wait for rescue together and not be scattered over this whole primitive world
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    The disadvantages of the city are, it’s even more primitive than the natives’ world, and you never see the sun except filtered through the leaves. The advantages are, you never feel the full force of hail or sleet of mountain storms and you’re hidden so well not even a low flying helicopter would guess the city was here
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    ALLUSH
    B ACK WHEN WE WERE CHILDREN, THE WHOLE CITY was our playground. We still know every crook and cranny. We know where to avoid the bears and wild cats, where to hunt for deer…. My favorite spot is where the fox kits play. I sit, not stone still, just normal, moving if I want to, and the kits come right up to me. Mostly from the back. I make sure not to turn around. They don’t like to be looked at. Funny, it’s the runt that comes up and looks at me from the front. She’s the boldest. Or maybe the stupidest. But she’s my favorite. I love how they sound like cats and look like them, too. Odd how a canine can seem so much like a cat.
    But domestic cats don’t last a half hour up here and didn’t even last on the way. We brought some with us when we first came. None of us kids wanted to come so our parents brought along our cats and dogs. By the first week out, coyotes got every single one. We’d brought mine. She was a calico. I found her the very first morning of our trek, with her stomach torn out. Why didn’t our parents know that would happen? They should have known. I know our world is so much better that they didn’t think it was worth while paying attention to this one, but they should have known.
    We all thought we’d be gone back to Betasha, the real world, a long time ago. Most of us hate it up here, especially in the winter. It’s boring and cold, and there’s hardly any of us left anymore. Except I always like playing with animals and climbing trees, but I remember movies and TV and radio and books down there in the Down. Not that we don’t have plenty of books. But I remember store-bought clothes and store-bought food—TV dinners all ready to eat. I was only eight when we left, but I could heat up my own supper.
    When the old ones got up here they didn’t have anything to do—of course they didn’t and neither did we—so they built the city. They said, for us children, to show us the marvels of the homeworld but I think they were homesick. I wonder that they bothered, what with everything phony, and everything fake overgrown so it wouldn’t be discovered.
    Back in the early days here, every now and then they’d go back to the Down to get supplies, but they wouldn’t let us kids come with them. They kept the way secret so we couldn’t ever leave the Secret City without one of them.
    I did try to run away one fall. A long time ago. I tried to get back to the Down before winter came. I was tired of this primitive living. I hiked for three days. I was determined. All I found was more mountains. I had to backtrack on my trail to find my way home.
    But in the summer it was fun. We were free. There was no crime. Nothing to fear but falling out of a tree or mountain lions though mostly they kept away from our city. We made pets of whatever was around. Sometimes garter snakes. Sometimes horned toads. And there’s my foxes.
    Nobody’s gone to the Down for a long time now and there’s only Mollish of the old ones left to show the way. When she dies, nobody will know how to get back. But that’s what the old ones wanted—for us to stay here with the locked-up homing beacons and wait for rescue.
    Before we came here and built the city we lived, more or less, with the natives, always in poverty and always waiting to go home. The Secret City is harder and more primitive even than being poor in the Down, but the old ones kept saying, “Can’t you stand it for a few years? Rescue
will
come. Our own people would never leave us stranded on such a backward