Aritch’s people had warned McKie about this as a basic flaw in his cover, the need to conceal the subtle signs of age.
They’d provided him with some geriatric assistance and an answer to give when challenged. He used that answer now.
“It ages you in a hurry out here.”
“It must.”
McKie felt that something in Bahrank’s response eluded him, but dared not pursue this. It was an unproductive exchange. And there was that reference to a “police action.” McKie knew that the Rim Rabble, excluded from Chu, tried periodic raids, most often fruitless. Barbaric!
“What excuse did you use to come out here?” McKie asked.
Bahrank shot a probing glance at him, raised one webbed hand from the controls to indicate a handle in the roof over his head. The handle’s purpose was unknown to McKie, and he feared he had already betrayed too much ignorance. But Bahrank was speaking.
“Officially, I’m scouting this area for any hidden surprises the Rimmers may have stored out here. I often do that. Unofficially, everyone thinks I’ve a secret pond out here full of fertile females.”
A pond … not a Graluz. Again, it was a relatively fruitless exchange with hidden undertones.
McKie stared silently ahead through a slit. Their dusty track made a slow and wide sweep left, abruptly angled down onto a narrow ledge cut from red rock walls. Bahrank put them through a series of swift changes in speed: slow, fast, slow, fast. The red rock walls raced past. McKie peered out and downward on his side. Far below lay jungle verdure and, in the distance, the smoke and spires of Chu—fluted buildings ranked high over dim background cliffs.
The speed changes appeared purposeless to McKie. And the dizzy drop off the cliff on his side filled him with awe. Their narrow ledge hugged the cliff, turning as the cliff turned—now into shadows and now into light. The machine roared and groaned around him. The smell of oil made his stomach heave. And the faraway city seemed little closer than it had from the cliff top, except that it was taller, more mysterious in its smoky obscurity.
“Don’t expect any real trouble until we reach the first ledge,” Bahrank said.
McKie glanced at him. First ledge? Yes, that’d be the first elevation outside the city’s walls. The gorge within which Chu had been raised came down to river level in broad steps, each one numbered. Chu had been anchored to island hills and flats where the river slowed and split into many arms. And the hills which had resisted the river were almost solid iron ore, as were many of the flanking ledges.
“Glad to get off there,” Bahrank said.
Their narrow ledge had turned at right angles away from the cliff onto a broad ramp which descended into grey-green jungle. The growth enclosed them in abrupt green shadows. McKie, looking out to the side, identified hair fronds and broad leaf ficus, giant spikes of barbed red which he had never before seen. Their track, like the jungle floor, was grey mud. McKie looked from side to side; the growth appeared an almost equal mixture of Terran and Tandaloor, interspersed with many strange plants.
Sunlight made him blink as they raced out of the overhanging plants onto a plain of tall grass which had been trampled, blasted, and burned by recent violence. He saw a pile of wrecked vehicles off to the left, twisted shards of metal with, here and there, a section of track or a wheel aimed at the sky. Some of the wrecks looked similar to the machine in which he now rode.
Bahrank skirted a blast hole at an angle which gave McKie a view into the hole’s depths. Torn bodies lay there. Bahrank made no comment, seemed hardly to notice.
Abruptly, McKie saw signs of movement in the jungle, the flitting presence of both Humans and Gowachin. Some carried what appeared to be small weapons—the glint of a metal tube, bandoliers of bulbous white objects around their necks. McKie had not tried to memorize all of Dosadi’s weaponry; it was, after all, primitive, but he reminded himself now that primitive weapons had created these scenes of destruction.
Their track plunged again into overhanging growth, leaving the battlefield behind. Deep green shadows enclosed the lurching, rumbling machine. McKie, shaken from side to side against the restraints, carried an odor memory with him: deep, bloody musks and the beginnings of rot. Their shaded avenue made a sharp right turn, emerged onto another ledge slashed by a plunging cut into which Bahrank took them, turning onto another cliff-hugging ledge.
McKie stared across Bahrank through the slits. The city was nearer now. Their rocking descent swept his gaze up and down Chu’s towers, which lifted like silvery organ pipes out of the Council Hills. The far cliff was a series of misted steps fading into purple grey. Chu’s Warrens lay smokey and hazed all around the fluted towers. And he could make out part of the city’s enclosing outer wall. Squat forts dotted the wall’s top, offset for enfilading fire. The city within the wall seemed so tall. McKie had not expected it to appear so tall—but that spoke of the population pressures in a way that could not be misunderstood.
Their ledge ended at another battlefield plain strewn with bodies of metal and flesh, the death stink an inescapable vapor. Bahrank spun his vehicle left, right, dodged piles of torn equipment, avoided craters where mounds of flesh lay beneath insect blankets. Ferns and other low growth were beginning to spring upright after the monstrous trampling. Grey and yellow flying creatures sported in the ferntops, uncaring of all that death. Aritch’s aides had warned McKie that Dosadi’s life existed amidst brutal excesses, but the actuality sickened him. He identified both Gowachin and Human forms among the sprawled corpses. The sleek green skin of a young Gowachin female, orange fertility marks prominent along her arms, especially revolted him. McKie turned sharply away, found Bahrank studying him with tawny mockery in the shining Gowachin eyes. Bahrank spoke as he drove.
“There’re informers everywhere, of course, and after this …” His head nodded left and right. “ … you’ll have to move with more caution than you might’ve anticipated.”
A brittle explosion punctuated his words. Something struck the vehicle’s armor on McKie’s side. Again they were a target. And again. The clanging of metal against metal came thickly, striking all around them, even on the glass over the view slits.
McKie suppressed his shock. That thin glass did not shatter. He knew about thick shields of tempered glass, but this put a new dimension on what he’d been told about the Dosadi. Quite resourceful, indeed!
Bahrank drove with apparent unconcern.
More explosive attacks came from directly in front of them, flashes of orange in the jungle beyond the plain.
“They’re testing,” Bahrank said. He pointed to one of the slits. “See? They don’t even leave a mark on that new glass.”
McKie spoke from the depths of his bitterness.
“Sometimes you wonder what all this proves except that our world runs on distrust.”
“Who trusts?”
Bahrank’s words had the sound of a catechism.
McKie said:
“I hope our friends know when to stop testing.”
“They were told we couldn’t take more’n eighty millimeter.”
“Didn’t they agree to pass us through?”
“Even so, they’re expected to try a few shots if just to keep me in good graces with my superiors.”
Once more, Bahrank put them through a series of dazzling speed changes and turns for no apparent reason. McKie lurched against the restraints, felt bruising pain as an elbow hit the side of the cab. An explosion directly behind rocked them up onto the left track. As they bounced, Bahrank spun them left, avoided another blast which would’ve landed directly on them along their previous path. McKie, his ears ringing from the explosions, felt the machine bounce to a stop, reverse as more explosions erupted ahead. Bahrank spun them to the right, then left, once more charged full speed ahead right into an unbroken wall of jungle. With explosions all around, they crashed through greenery, turned to the right along another shadowed muddy track. McKie had lost all sense of direction, but the attack had ceased.
&n
bsp; Bahrank slowed them, took a deep breath through his ventricles.
“I knew they’d try that.”
He sounded both relieved and amused.
McKie, shaken by the brush with death, couldn’t find his voice.
Their shadowy track snaked through the jungle for a space, giving McKie time to recover. By then, he didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t understand Bahrank’s amusement, the lack of enduring concern over such violent threat.
Presently, they emerged onto an untouched, sloping plain as smooth and green as a park lawn. It dipped gently downward into a thin screen of growth through which McKie could see a silver-green tracery of river. What caught and held McKie’s attention, however, was a windowless, pock-walled grey fortress which lifted from the plain in the middle distance. It towered over the growth screening the river. Buttressed arms reached toward them to enclose a black metal barrier.
“That’s our gate,” Bahrank said.
Bahrank turned them left, lined up with the center of the buttressed arms. “Gate Nine and we’re home through the tube,” he said.
McKie nodded. Walls, tubes, and gates: those were the keys to Chu’s defenses. They had “barrier and fortress minds” on Dosadi. This tube would run beneath the river. He tried to place it on the map which Aritch’s people had planted in his mind. He was supposed to know the geography of this place, its geology, religions, social patterns, the intimate layout of each island’s walled defenses, but he found it hard to locate himself now on that mental map. He leaned forward to the slit, peered upward as the machine began to gather speed, saw the great central spire with its horizontal clock. All the hours of map briefing snicked into place.
“Yes, Gate Nine.”
Bahrank, too busy driving, did not reply.
McKie dropped his gaze to the fortress, stifled a gasp.
The rumbling machine was plunging downslope at a frightening pace, aimed directly toward that black metal barrier. At the last instant, when it seemed they would crash into it, the barrier leaped upward. They shot through into a dimly illuminated tube. The gate thundered closed behind them. Their machine made a racketing sound on metal grating beneath the tracks.
Bahrank slowed them, shifted a lever beside him. The machine lifted onto wheels with an abrupt reduction in noise which made McKie feel that he’d been deafened. The feeling was heightened by the realization that Bahrank had said the same thing to him several times.
“Jedrik says you come from beyond the far mountains. Is that true?”
“Jedrik says it.” He tried to make it sound wry, but it came out almost questioning.
Bahrank was concentrating on a line of thought, however, as he drove them straight down the grating floor of the dim tube.
“There’s a rumor that you Rimmers have started a secret settlement back there, that you’re trying to build your own city.”
“An interesting rumor.”
“Isn’t it, though?”
The single line of overhead lights in the tube left the cab’s interior darker than it’d been outside, illuminated by only the faint reflections from instruments and dials. But McKie had the odd sensation that Bahrank saw him clearly, was studying every expression. Despite the impossibility of this, the thought persisted. What was behind Bahrank’s probing?
Why do I feel that he sees right through me?
These disquieting conjectures ended as they emerged from the tube onto a Warren street. Bahrank spun them to the right along a narrow alleyway in deep grey shadows.
Although he’d seen many representations of these streets the actuality deepened McKie’s feelings of misgiving. So dirty … oppressive … so many people. They were everywhere!
Bahrank drove slowly now on the silent wheels, the tracks raised off the paving. The big machine eased its way through narrow little streets, some paved with stone, some with great slabs of gleaming black. All the streets were shaded by overhanging upper stories whose height McKie could not judge through the slits. He saw shops barred and guarded. An occasional stairway, also guarded, led up or down into repellent darkness. Only Humans occupied these streets, and no casual, pedestrian expressions on any of them. Jaws were set on grim mouths. Hard, questioning eyes peered at the passing vehicle. Both men and women wore the universal dark, one-piece clothing of the Labor Pool.
Noting McKie’s interest, Bahrank spoke.
“This is a Human enclave and you have a Gowachin driver.”
“Can they see us in here?”
“They know. And there’s trouble coming.”
“Trouble?”
“Gowachin against Human.”
This appalled McKie, and he wondered if this were the source of those forebodings which Aritch and aides would not explain: destruction of Dosadi from within. But Bahrank continued:
“There’s a growing separation between Humans and Gowachin, worse than it’s ever been. You may be the last Human to ride with me.”
Aritch and company had prepared McKie for Dosadi’s violence, hunger, and distrust, but they’d said nothing about species against species … only that someone they refused to name could destroy the place from within. What was Bahrank trying to say? McKie dared not expose his ignorance by probing, and this inability dismayed him.
Bahrank, meanwhile, nosed their machine out of a narrow passage onto a wider street which was crowded by carts, each piled with greenery. The carts moved aside slowly as the armored vehicle approached, hatred plain in the eyes of the Humans who moved with the carts. The press of people astonished McKie: for every cart (and he lost count of them within a block) there were at least a hundred people crowding around, lifting arms high, shouting at the ring of people who stood shoulder to shoulder around each cart, their backs to the piled contents and obviously guarding those contents.
McKie, staring at the carts, realized with a shocked sense of recognition that he was staring at carts piled with garbage. The crowds of people were buying garbage.
Again, Bahrank acted the part of tour guide.
“This is called the Street of the Hungry. That’s very select garbage, the best.”
McKie recalled one of Aritch’s aides saying there were restaurants in Chu which specialized in garbage from particular areas of the city, that no poison-free food was wasted.
The passing scene compelled McKie’s attention: hard faces, furtive movements, the hate and thinly suppressed violence, all of this immersed in a normal commercial operation based on garbage. And the numbers of these people! They were everywhere around: in doorways, guarding and pushing the carts, skipping out of Bahrank’s path. New smells assaulted McKie’s nostrils, a fetid acridity, a stink such as he had never. before experienced. Another thing surprised him: the appearance of antiquity in this Warren. He wondered if all city populations crowded by threats from outside took on this ancient appearance. By ConSentient standards, the population of Chu had lived here only a few generations, but the city looked older than any he’d ever seen.
With an abrupt rocking motion, Bahrank turned their machine down a narrow street, brought them to a stop. McKie, looking out the slit on his right, saw an arched entry in a grimy building, a stairway leading downward into gloom.
“Down there’s where you meet Jedrik,” Bahrank said. “Down those stairs, second door on your left. It’s a restaurant.”
“How’ll I know her?”
“Didn’t they tell you?”
“I …” McKie broke off. He’d seen pictures of Jedrik during the Tandaloor briefings, realized now that he was trying to delay leaving Bahrank’s armored cocoon.
Bahrank appeared to sense this.
“Have no fear, McKie. Jedrik will know you. And McKie …”
McKie turned to face the Gowachin.
“ … go directly to the restaurant, take a seat, wait for Jedrik. You’ll not survive long here without her protection. Your skin’s dark and some Humans prefer even the green to the dark in this quarter. They remember Pylash Gate here. Fifteen years isn’t long e
nough to erase that from their minds.”
Nothing about a Pylash Gate had been included in McKie’s briefings and now he dared not ask.
Bahrank moved the switch which opened McKie’s door. Immediately, the stink of the street was amplified to almost overpowering proportions. Bahrank, seeing him hesitate, spoke sharply.
“Go quickly!”
McKie descended in a kind of olfactory daze, found himself standing on the side of the street, the object of suspicious stares from all around. The sight of Bahrank driving away was the cutting of his last link to the ConSentiency and all the familiar things which might protect him. Never in his long life had McKie felt this much alone.
No legal system can maintain justice unless every participant—magisters, prosecutors, Legums, defendants, witnesses, all—risks life itself. in whatever dispute comes before the bar. Everything must be risked in the Courtarena. If any element remains outside the contest and without personal risk, justice inevitably fails.
—Gowachin Law
Near sunset there was a fine rain which lasted well into darkness, then departed on the gorge wind which cleared Dosadi’s skies. It left the air crystalline, cornices dripping puddles in the streets. Even the omnipresent Warren stink was diluted and Chu’s inhabitants showed a predatory lightness as they moved along the streets.
Returning to headquarters in an armored troop carrier which carried only his most trusted Gowachin, Broey noted the clear air even while he wondered at the reports which had brought him racing from the Council Hills. When he entered the conference room, Broey saw that Gar already was there standing with his back to the dark window which looked out on the eastern cliffs. Broey wondered how long Gar had been there. No sign of recognition passed between Gowachin and Human, but this only emphasized the growing separation of the species. They’d both seen the reports which contained that most disturbing datum: the killing of a Human double agent under circumstances which pointed at Broey himself.
Broey crossed to the head of the conference table, flipped the toggle which activated his communicator, addressed the screen which only he could see.