The Queen nodded. The things one had to do as a spy were often undignified. So she had been told. Ornice had not liked the idea of his daughter becoming a spy, but Lurilile had been determined on the matter.
“But you’re a woman!” Ornice had cried, unforgivably.
“So is the Queen!” his daughter had replied, with more relevance. Not only that, Lurilile had come to the Queen, begging her intercession in the matter. Lurilile was strong-willed. Her family, an ancient one, was known for its strength of character. “Someone must do something about this Voorstod mess,” she had said. “Why should I hang back, feeling forgiven any effort because I am a woman?”
“It may be unpleasant,” the Queen had told her. “Spies have to do unpleasant and undignified things.”
“I am sure they are no more unpleasant or undignified than dying with one’s guts blown out by some terrorist bomb in Green Hurrah,” Lurilile had answered, and the Queen had had to agree.
Sweet, strong Lurilile. The Queen thought of her often, wishing her well.
“Has she found out anything about the bribes.”
“She has attached herself to one of the Thykerite members of Authority, and through his contacts has found everything but evidence we can submit to Authority.”
The Queen snorted. “However those bastards are being paid, someone is being exceedingly clever about it.” She sighed. “What else isn’t new about Voorstod.”
“Uri, why ask if you already know?”
She nodded, curtly. “Sometimes I have to hear you say it, Ornice. Sometimes I have to hear myself say it, just to realize it is not a pervasive nightmare I have come to believe in.”
“It is not dream,” he bowed. “Further, as I mentioned to you, this morning I have been advised of Voorstod’s newest demand.” He ticked off first and middle fingers once more, holding the remaining ones in reserve.
“What more?” she asked. “What more could there be?”
“The three southern counties, those in which people of Voorstod have intermarried with people of Ahabar, those in which the people have watered down or changed their religion, and become, so say the northerners, a bastard race—those counties, says Voorstod, are to be ravaged and sewn with salt.” Third finger. “After every man, woman, and child within them has been slaughtered.” Little finger. “They give notice that Ahabar is to withdraw the army and is not to interfere while Voorstod takes care of this internal matter for itself.” Thumb, and all five points were made. The hand could rest.
The Queen paled. “You can’t have understood them. The difference in dialects …”
He bowed, one nostril distended to tell her he had understood them all too well. “They speak System as well as we do. They may be intransigent, but they are not stupid. Either they see a threat in the southern counties and want it stopped or this is a feint, to draw our attention while they do something wicked somewhere else. The Gharm escape through the southern counties, Uri. The people of Wander and Skelp and Green Hurrah have become reasonable and peaceful. They have lost the fanaticism of their forefathers. They are, therefore, apostates and heretics, anathema to the prophets of Voorstod. Killing a man of the southern counties is now counted a meritorious act in Voorstod. Killing a child is more meritorious yet, for it chops that many more years of heresy away. Killing a child in the womb, or a woman of childbearing age, or a virgin girl …”
“Don’t say any more,” she cried. “Oh, who would be Queen in a world like this!”
“They don’t get away with it,” he soothed. “Commander Karth keeps the peace.”
You believe the peace is what he keeps!” she cried. “My harried soldiery have prevented the slaughter of some innocents in Green Hurrah. That is true. I went there and presented the medals myself. Karth’s battalions lately stopped a murderous battle in Skelp. Our intelligence network intervened in the planned assassination of the Squire of Wander. All true, and yet we are powerless to prevent the killing which goes on, hour by hour, day by day. You know it. I know it. Commander Karth knows it and says so. Why do we lie to ourselves!”
She turned away from him to look out the window into her gardens, tears threatening to fall. “The killing goes on, old friend. The Voorstod Question is the curse of Ahabar and the woe of her Queen. Voorstod has crawled into a tomb of darkness and pulled the heavy stones down upon it. Oh, yes, Voorstod is far into the habit of death!”
• Since Emun Theckles had seen the temple of Bondru Dharm falling apart, the old man had become distracted and depressed, uncommunicative, and obsessed by old times. He stared at walls and did not answer his brother Mard’s attempts at conversation. After a few days of putting up with grunts and silences, Mard decided Emun needed to be jostled. Mard did the jostling by inviting Sam Girat to breakfast, a meal which the aged brothers often took on their porch so they could watch what went on in Settlement One. As an elder settler, Mard could get away with insisting Sam wander by at an appropriate time and sort of drop in. Sam was also instructed to ask Emun about his former life.
“Maybe he’d rather not talk about it,” Sam had suggested to Mard.
“Talking about it’s the only way he’s going to get himself back on track,” said Mard. “You be there, Sam.”
So Sam dropped in for breakfast, and after a few general words about the weather asked, “What was it like, up there?”
Mard set a sharp elbow into Emun’s ribs to wake him up.
“Up where?” asked Emun, coming to himself with an effort.
Mard jabbed him again. “You know what he’s asking about, Emun. Up there.” Mard pointed generally upward, though Phansure was in quite another direction, with all its moons. “Answer the Topman.”
“On Enforcement?”
“Of course on Enforcement, where else have you been!”
“It was … it was gloomy.”
Mard shook his head in exasperation. “How d’ya mean, gloomy? Sam wants to know!” He raised his eyebrows at Sam, who said, yes, indeed, he did want to know.
Emun, who was accustomed to obeying those in authority, turned his full attention to the question and thought about it. When he had thought for a time about what he had meant, in fact, when he said it was gloomy, he told them.
The maintenance quarters were above ground, he said, liberally fenestrated so the workers could see the stars and the wheeling, clouded orb of Phansure above them. The gravity was light. The quarters were luxurious. “Real nice,” said Emun. The food was delicious, just as it was on Authority. The chefs were trained on Authority, after all; none of them had to stay very long; and they received hardship pay plus bonuses if they kept the staff happy. Emun could recall nothing really unsatisfactory on Enforcement. There had even been a properly maintained brothel, for both sexes.
Sam nodded. “But you said ‘gloomy,’ Emun.”
Emun allowed it was more a matter of perception than reality. One rose in that place to the quiet whisper of air, the stroking of banal music—” Without any umph to it,” Emun said—the flurry of water as one cleaned oneself of one’s own dirt. There was no other dirt, no extraneous filth, no foreign organic or inorganic impurity from which the morning body needed deliverance. It was only sleep dirt, sleep sweat, the flake of no-longer-living skin, the fall of no-longer-living hair, to be cleansed away before submitting oneself to the dustless rooms, the sterile walls, the endless, empty ducts down which men moved in their white garb like ghosts on felt-padded feet. Ghost-servitors. Ghost-prowlers, along the edges and down the aisles of static madness. Perhaps that was what had been gloomy.
Or maybe it had been the cars, like coffins, with their padded, almost reclining seats, their airtight lids, their number pads greenly glowing in the shadows of the tube. One found the proper tube, one got in, one shut the lid, one entered the destination number. BB5601. An almost silent whoosh and a feeling of heaviness. A screaming above the level at which one could hear and the heaviness again. Then the lid opened of its own accord to let one out in green-lit Vestibule BB5601 with the
closed door and the green light washing all the walls. Green meant as usual. Green meant no worse than yesterday. Green meant boring, uninteresting, but vastly preferable to yellow, or red. Certainly it was preferable to purple which meant it was already too late.
“Ah,” murmured Sam, sensing interesting danger.
But Emun didn’t talk about that. He went on to something else that had always disturbed him: the sound the doors made. The doors clanged. No matter what one did to them, or how carefully they were shut, they clanged—a deep, clamorous sound like an ill-tuned bell, a tocsin pealing danger. Clang, and then the whisper of feet as one went through. Clang, again. Inside, the cobweb aisles stretched ahead and back to infinity, vanishing in gloom, in distance. Gray light, there in the aisles. Coming from nowhere. Throwing no shadows. A long walk down the main aisle from Vestibule BB5601 before one saw Aisle BB5617 to the left. Past it would be Aisle BB5618 and Aisle BB5619 to the left again. “Those three were mine,” he said, almost with pride. “Those three were all mine.” Emun’s province, his kingdom, where the unlit eyes looked only to him, where the unspeaking throats quivered, almost ready to utter, only to him. Between him and Vestibule BB5601 were five other men, each with three aisles. Beyond him were five more, each with three aisles, and then Vestibule BB5635.
Sam imagined it and shivered.
On the first day of shift, one got the cart out of its garage, stocked it, led it down the main aisle, then turned left into BB5617 and began the slow trip down the side aisle, looking at telltales, tapping at dials, peering at signal lights, reading tapes, refilling tape registers, replacing telltale lights, running test patterns, the soft-tired little cart buzzing along behind like an obedient pet. There was a toilet on the cart, and a little kitchen, which would open at quarter-shift to give him drinks and snacks. By mid-shift one would have got a tenth of the way down the first aisle, and the cart would offer a comfortable seat and a built-in little table, where it would serve him a hot meal.
“That sounds well-managed,” Sam said, approving.
Oh, yes, that was well-managed enough. One would eat while listening to music or watching a recreation on the little information stage on the cart, and then the afternoon would go by, doing the same things. Replace. Repair. Check. Monitor. Sometimes something would actually be wrong! Then one could take out the tools, do a dismantle and repair, something different, something unusual. At quitting time one rode the cart back to its garage on the main aisle to be there, waiting, when the services scooter came ding-ding-dinging down behind him, with five other men already aboard, being taken back to Vestibule BB5601. They knew you were tired by then. They didn’t make you walk.
Every fifteen or twenty days, the route would be completed. Then there was time off to do what one pleased: to drink or dance or play games of chance, or simply to sleep or read or go to the brothel or to religious services. And then Aisle BB5617 once more, Aisle BB5618, Aisle BB5619.
“A little boring, perhaps,” suggested Sam, feeling goosebumps.
Oh well, yes, but not always. Once in a great while, a true malfunction. The monitors quivered in excitement, something wrong. Pseudoflesh is rotting, pseudobrain is not functioning, something awry, dangerous.
“And then all of a sudden you knew how dangerous it was,” said Emun. “Then you didn’t need no telltale to tell you anything. You didn’t need no monitors. You’d feel it, all the way down the aisle you’d feel it, like something reaching at you, like some great animal creature, evil and hating you every minute and not wanting you to get away.”
A brute malevolence, he went on saying, though not in those words. Sam supplied the words. A killing horror, barely withheld.
“You pick up that communicator so scared you can’t hardly breathe,” said Emun. “And at the same time your old heart’s poundin’ away like you was runnin’ a race from the excitement. And you say, Technician Theckles, reporting possible malfunction.’
“And he says, ‘What is it Technician Theckles?’ ”
“Who was he?” asked Sam.
“Oh, that there was Faros, we called him Chilly Faros. Never no more emotion to him than to a circuit scanner. Except when he talked of his wife, then he got all soft. Old Chilly Faros, he was only a subaltern then.”
“So what did you say?” asked Sam.
“Oh, I’d say, ‘Brain malfunction, Subaltern Faros. I recommend power shutdown at once.’
“And he’d say, ‘Do so, Technician.’
“An’ you’d go to pull the plug. Disconnect the power source for the whole section. An’ you’d pray the whole time the things would let you do it.”
There had been cases of soldiers that didn’t want to be unplugged, he said. Cases where men had been found, what was left of them, like a splash of mush on the floor, red jelly.
Then young Lieutenant Halibar Ornil would come zipping up on a scooter, full of rumbling amusement. “Got a rogue, have we?” he would ask, as though it didn’t matter. “Got a rogue?”
A rogue, said Emun. A devil. A killer designed to be unstoppable, unappeaseable. A thing the height of three tall men, on clawed treads that could climb a fifty-percent grade, with disruptor circuits and de-bonder guns and no feelings. A thing that would blow up a schoolyard full of children without blinking. A thing, so thought Emun occasionally, like a Voorstoder, only bigger.
Sam blinked, setting that aside.
And the eyes, staring over his head blindly, but picking up reflections of the red telltales, as though the eyes themselves were glittering.
“Gloomy,” repeated old retired Emun Theckles to Sam Girat at the end of his tale, wishing he could forget it entirely since he had come to this better place. “Oh, Topman, it was gloomy there.”
• That night, in Settlement One, Topman Samasnier Girat tapped his gavel impatiently and, when this had not the desired effect, bellowed at the small clot of people arguing in the doorway of the settlement hall. “Can we get this meeting started, people!”
Quiet came reluctantly. Outside in the dusk, children shouted at one another. On one window sill an orange cat groomed herself in the pink light of sunset, while her gray colleague sniffed along the base of the walls followed by a staggering line of half-weaned kittens. All three hundred seats were filled, with room at the back for any young person who decided to take an interest in community government.
“All right,” Sam said. “Short meeting tonight. We all know of the recent crop shortfalls. I’ve made a complete report to Central Management, and they’ve asked me to come in for a meeting in a few days. They’re also sending some people to run tests, so they say, though what tests they can run we haven’t already run I don’t know. You all know that even after the shortfalls our production is still within the parameters set by the project, so the settlement is in no danger. Our production balance is going to suffer quite a bit, but that’s all.” Production over and above ninety percent of the reasonable quotas set by CM was converted into land credits for the settlers. Settlement One had long had an enviable production balance.
“Now, the reason for this meeting tonight is to discuss the conflicts we’ve been having among the production teams… .”
There were groans of resentment and voices raised at once, each blaming some other team or individual for whatever had happened. Sam demanded order, and got it, only to have the discussion degenerate again. It was like a grass fire, he thought. You stamped it out in one place, and then the wind took it running off somewhere else. The arguments generated heat but not light; the meeting threatened to degenerate into a brawl; finally Sam shut them up, talked them into relative peace, and adjourned the meeting before they got started again.
Africa Wilm, who had been standing by the door, keeping herself quiet with some difficulty, slipped out into the night. China went after her. Quick as she was, Sam managed to intercept her at the door.
“G’night, Sam,” she said hurriedly, increasing her pace, even as he reached out a hand to detain her.
By th
e time Sam got outside, the children seemed to have gone elsewhere. There were no shouts in the dusk, no squeals or cries of outrage. Sam stood in the quiet, snarling to himself. Everyone was behaving … behaving like something or other. Not like themselves. Now China. Well. Always China.
Rebuffed, Sam stalked north of the settlement, toward the temples, stopping only briefly at his brotherhouse to pick up his sword belt and helmet. Theseus didn’t like it when he showed up without them.
“It means you’re not serious,” Theseus had explained. “You haven’t the proper attitude.”
“I do have the proper attitude,” Sam had growled. “I’m tired of waiting, that’s all.” He said the same thing again tonight as he settled on the hillside near the old temple.
“You’re agitated,” accused Theseus.
“We’re all agitated. There’s lots of anger floating around. We’re not used to that.”
“What are you angry about?”
“Me?” Sam thought about it. What was he angry about? “I don’t know. Nothing specific.”
“Something in your past, maybe?”
“I guess I’ve always been angry that my father let me leave that way. He didn’t try to stop Mam from taking me. He just let me go.”
“That’s a very old anger.”
“Old ones are the worst. New ones you can yell about and get over. When you grow up, you learn that. Yell about it, then forget it. But when you’re a kid, you’re afraid to yell. Somebody might punish you for it, for the way you feel, so you put the anger away, deep, store it, and it festers. I imagine old angers are like abcesses, deep ones, full of nasty pus and sickness. You can feel them boiling inside you.”
“So you hate him because he didn’t keep you?”
“I hate him because he didn’t even try.”
“I hated mine, too. He could have sent someone to Troezan to learn how I was, whether I was growing up strong and healthy. He never did. He didn’t even know he’d had a son until I showed up in Athens.”
“So if you hated him, why did you go?”