“Up!” Axam ordered. “Up—quickly!”
Yes, what they proposed to do was clear. Wait until he had climbed well out over the lake, then fire one silent power-blast, and—an open mouth in the water below. No trace. No hope.
The blood seemed to be draining away from Kazan’s head, leaving his mind giddy and empty of ideas. He began to climb numbly, his eyes fascinated by the way the black mirror of the water sometimes broke apart in ripples to reveal a hump-backed shape or a whipping tentacle. Someone had mentioned to him—Yarco, perhaps—that these creatures had lived in many places all over this world before the coming of man, and that this had once been the private hunting lake of the royal family.
Glancing back, he thought he saw one of the bullies raising his power-gun. Perhaps it was a flinching in anticipation of the impact that made him slip; perhaps the step on which he had placed his weight a second earlier was failing faster than the rest; the air sagged beneath him and struggled to be more than air and was only air and he was plummeting headlong to the hungry water, thirty feet below.
In the bright, warm room—sealed utterly from the outer world so that no whisper of sound or ray of light might attract a passer-by—Yarco shivered and shivered again. Now and then his teeth escaped his control and chattered aloud.
From his endless succession of consultations with visitors who came through the door with backward glances and scrutinized the prince carefully before making obeisance, as if suspecting deceit, Luth looked up in irritation.
“For the love of life, Yarco!” he snapped. “Will you keep your foolishness to yourself?”
These matters of how strong sentiment is in such a town, what weapons lie in secret armories … Yarco flinched and muttered something which did not carry. Proud beside Luth, Bryda tossed back her dark hair.
“What’s the matter, you dodderer?” she said. “Speak up if you’ve anything to say!”
“I feel you have done something evil and dangerous,” Yarco said. “The young Kazan—”
“Enough!” Bryda cut in. “Have you not heard before from Hego how he fell to his death, manacled and helpless among the beasts of the lake? What are you afraid of?”
“He made steps in the air,” Yarco said.
“And could not make them to save himself,” Bryda retorted. But in her fiery eyes Yarco thought he could detect a lurking, shame-faced fear as great as his own. To cover this, she gestured across the room to where Hego stood, his loose-lipped mouth working a little, his huge hands nervously locking and unlocking with each other.
“I keep thinking of a beak like a giant’s scissors,” Yarco said. “Strong enough to shear through a steel shackle. I keep thinking of a tentacle that could whip a man through the air like a ball batted in a children’s game, to land him bruised and panting in soft mud, but alive. I keep thinking of the hate that a man could bear you for condemning him to such a death. And the power that a black devil could give him to wreak his vengeance.”
“If there was that power,” Prince Luth said, “the devil would have saved him directly, not by this chain of fantasy you’ve pictured.” But his eyes were shadowed. “Go, he said after a pause. “Your mind is wandering.”
Yarco pulled his plump body up from his seat. He gave a formal bow to Luth and started towards the door. On the point of leaving, he turned back.
“It will go badly with this plan,” he said. “I can feel how the wyrds are working.
“Get out!” Luth roared, half-rising. The door slammed. He sank back in his place, adding with a sidewise glance at Hego, “And no nonsense from you, either. Hear? The man is dead, a worthless Dyasthala thief!”
He went back to his business of available vehicles, codes, signals for action and means of assembling troops. It was not until near morning that he needed Yarco to answer a question for him and sent Hego up the stairs.
So it was Hego who found the stout man, lying back on the bed which Kazan had used during his stay in this house, a look of frozen terror on his face and a tiny vial of poison clasped with death’s rigidity in his plump left hand.
VI
Under the gray sky, the gray people stood passively in a line across the expanse of concrete. The line was meant to be straight, but it bowed a little here and there like a resting snake. Or like a parasitic worm, the intellectual lieutenant thought, because the segments of such a worm could separate and start anew when they found something to sink their hooks into, going over to an ecstasy of ovulation. And this wavering line was splitting, dividing at the head, going this way and that into the parallel sets of prefabricated huts erected along the high wire barriers with the one guarded gate—and even sometimes getting through the gate.
It was the weather, he thought. Coloring his mind the same dismal gray as the sky.
So backward! He had walked twice the whole length of the sullen line, fascinated against his will by the dirt and the raggedness. Some of them lacking limbs, for the love of life, when a five-day graft and a course of cell-stimulant was all it took to replace even a leg. And sores dressed with foul rags. And teeth missing. It was a miracle that any of them were allowed through the gate at all.
Still, for the mines on Vashti … And after all, they were only cargo to him.
He cast a longing glance backward over his shoulder to the ship resting in its cradle like a squat egg, the planetary insignia of his home world glowing luminous on its nearer side. For all the good he was doing here he could be comfortably in his cabin, playing over that tantalizing not-quite-erotic recording by that new anonymous composer, the one for whom they had made such extravagant and justified claims. Was it a man or a woman who had—?
He sighed. Surely the job wouldn’t take long now. But it was a long time since any of the prospective workers had emerged from the examination huts and turned towards the gate. Almost all of them for the last half-hour or so had gone despondently back towards the city, growing smaller like insects as they walked across the concrete with lowered heads.
Eight hundred, they needed. Surely out of all these thousands it wouldn’t take long to find eight hundred—even if they were undernourished miserable wrecks.
“How’s it going, Major?” a voice behind him said. He half-turned, seeing a large, prosperous man in a temperature suit of dull green and black, his fingers heavy with rings. By his accent, an upper class native of the area.
“Lieutenant, not Major,” he corrected. And went on, “Slowly, I’m afraid.”
“So I gather, so I gather,” the large man said. “Name’s Zethel, by the way. Yes, I believe you can only take eight hundred. We’re giving you too many to choose from, isn’t that it?” he chuckled.
Not wanting to be impolite to this man who might be locally important, the intellectual lieutenant feigned an interest in a subject that he didn’t care the fission of a nucleus about.
“There certainly are a lot of applicants,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d allow so many of them to leave the planet. Not that we’re going to complain. Our mines on Vashti won’t be automatized for another ten years or so, and we’ll need plenty of human labor till they are. But I’m puzzled.”
“First time here?” Zethel said. “And only just arrived?”
“Yes to both. All I knew when we touched down was what we were told from home—that there was mercenary labor available in quantity. So we came at once, of course.”
Zethel grunted. “Well, let’s be honest—you’re doing us a favor taking some of ’em off our hands. You aren’t going to have an easy time with some of them, I guess. We had a spot of trouble here recently. Maybe you heard about that?”
The intellectual lieutenant remembered something vague he had caught on a news channel without really paying attention to. He said, frowning, “Some sort of popular revolt?”
“Not so popular,” Zethel said. “The last heir of the old ruling house—this island has been an incredible backwater area clinging with crazy doggedness to out-of-date ideas—anyway, this Prince
Luth called a revolt against the government, and caused some small disturbance. Nearly ten thousand people were killed and quite a lot of damage was done. We had to divert space traffic to other continents for a period of about a month. Forlorn hope, of course. He was killed by one of his own followers and the movement fell to pieces. There wasn’t any real support for it—just a vague mystical aura that stuck to the prince’s name. Why should there be? Nobody in his right mind wanted to go back to the days of autocratic monarchy, even here on Berak.”
“And these are the followers of this prince?” the lieutenant hazarded. His voice showed some slight interest at last. It was quite like something out of a historical romance, after all. Hereditary titles—why, even on a backward world like this you’d never have expected it. And the mystical influence of royalty.
“Some of them,” Zethel said, shrugging. “The healthy ones. The rest are out of the Dyasthala—that’s our thieves’ quarter.”
King of the Beggars, yet. That was an ancient phrase which had once stuck in the lieutenant’s mind. His interest brightened still further. He said, “I guess the mystic aura you mentioned would be strong among people like that.”
“No, you’d be wrong,” Zethel corrected him. “That’s what was so curious. It had always been believed that people in the Dyasthala didn’t give a damn about who was at the top of the heap, because they were invariably at the bottom. Nonetheless there was a rumor, far too strong to be ignored, that the prince’s escape from the place he was held captive—which is a story in itself, I may say; it’s acquired overtones of pure legend in a shorter time than you’d think possible—but as I was saying, there were these rumors that his escape had been masterminded by someone from the Dyasthala. Not unreasonable, I suppose. A really skilled professional thief might well be able to steal away a man for once, instead of goods.
“So to teach them a lesson we had the Dyasthala cleared. It was an appalling slum, anyway, and a sink of disease and moral corruption of all kinds. Quite a number of people we managed to hang criminal charges on—theft, mainly, or receiving stolen goods, or debauching children under the age of discretion. Those we put to use ourselves. The rest are out there, mainly. Now that we’ve cleared the area they used to live in, they haven’t anywhere to go, and we’re anxious to stop them from sleeping in the streets.”
“And did you catch this mysterious personage who—what did you call it?—masterminded the prince’s escape?”
“Him? Oh, I doubt whether he really existed,” Zethel said. “We had the same more-or-less garbled story from several of the prince’s sympathizers, though. Rather puzzling. He’s said to have sold himself to an evil being in return for the power to walk on air up to the window of the prince’s prison and bring him down again. Then the demon, or devil, or whatever claimed him by throwing him into the lake below. It’s colorful, at any rate, isn’t it?”
The lieutenant nodded. He was just going to put another question—after all, this would make a story to tell on the trip to Vashti, and when he’d polished the native crudities off it, perhaps even at home during his next furlough—when an orderly came out of the nearest of the examination huts.
“Sergeant presents his compliments, sir,” the man said. “Wants a decision from you on a borderline case.”
The lieutenant sighed and excused himself. Zethel gave a mechanical smile and moved away.
A tall, lean young man, quite good-looking except for his wolfish expression and lackluster eyes, was standing passive in front of the last table in the examination hut, the one at which the results of all the tests were collated into a whole and the subject accepted or rejected. The lieutenant glanced at him before turning to the sergeant behind the table with his stacks of documents and computing equipment before him.
“What’s the problem?” he said.
“Literacy, sir,” the sergeant answered. “He passed the physical—here’s the assessment: slight traces of deficiency diseases, but nothing serious, and a patch on the lung which can be cured with a day’s chemotherapy. Passed the nonverbal section of the intelligence test and checked out at just under the limit. Passed the manual skills tests, the reflex tests and the speed-of-learning tests all within the permitted margins. The tester says he’d show up even better if he’d been fed first. But he can’t even write his own name.”
“Give me the speed-of-learning results,” the lieutenant said. Waiting for them to be handed up, he took another look at the subject. Dirty, of course; his hair probably wasn’t that tarnished color when it was clean, if it ever had been clean. But well set up. On the other hand, he must be past his teens. It was hard to judge his age, because of the prematurely ancient dullness in his eyes. Provided he wasn’t word-blind, though, he sounded like a good prospect for training.
He riffled through the pages of the speed-of-learning test. There was one test used for illiterates which involved the recognition of quasi-letter shapes. If he’d checked out well on that one—yes, here it was, and he had—then he was acceptable.
“Yes, check him through,” he told the sergeant. “Thumbprint his contract on the signature block, and that’ll do.”
Kazan, not caring in the least what happened to him because he ought by rights to be dead and could not find in himself the desire to live, mechanically obeyed the orders given to him. He had come here in the first place because that was where most of the people from the Dyasthala happened to be going; they had heard of a chance to leave the planet, and because the Dyasthala was a heap of smoking ruins and they had to sleep on the streets they were assembling at the spaceport. He had gone through the tests because they were put to him and he was given orders. His existence was not up to Kazan any longer. Kazan was dead.
This was a body operated in his name. Nothing else could account for the fact that he was still—apparently—alive.
The machinelike efficiency with which the applicants were processed suited his frame of mind, moreover. It was good to be organized, directed, measured, weighed, tested, moved from here to there by someone else’s decision. He had not had to wonder what to do for several hours, since he joined the line waiting to be examined.
Half a dozen other acceptees were sent out with him to the ship. The processing continued: bathing and delousing; medication; physical measurements; a meal, taken standing in a large cargo hold where every footstep or word spoken above a whisper brought booming metallic echoes; the issue of a kit in exchange for the rags he was wearing, which had once been splendid but which were crusted with mud and blood.
Finally he was being led by a uniformed sergeant down a long corridor into the bowels of the ship. The sergeant had a list in his hand; one by one he allotted members of the group which included Kazan to certain doors off the corridor. Each time a door was opened Kazan had a glimpse of racked bunks beyond, separated head from foot by lockers and side from side by narrow walkways. Each room seemed to have about a dozen bunks.
He was the last to be ordered through a door. The sergeant opened it for him and closed it behind him when he had sidled through with his new kit. Suddenly at a loss because he had no longer any guidance, Kazan looked around him dully. There were four or five others already here—women as well as men—and one of the men was rising slowly to his feet from the bunk on which he had been sitting.
It seemed to Kazan that he remembered this man out of a distant past. Out of a previous life, perhaps. He did not remember the look of sick terror which was now distorting the man’s features.
“Kazan!” the man moaned. Kazan gave him a further incurious glance. He nodded and looked for an empty bunk on which to set his gear.
The man seemed to gulp an enormous mouthful of air. As if compelled by something outside himself, he took three rapid paces to close the gap between them and put his big hard hand briefly on Kazan’s chest.
“But you can’t be here,” he said. His voice broke like a child’s, and the words were followed, by a whimper. Then he spun to face the others present, who were sta
ring puzzled at his extraordinary actions.
“He’s dead!” he choked out. “It’s his devil that’s brought him! He’s dead and eaten in the lake by the fortress, and his devil has brought him back! Don’t you understand me? That’s Kazan, the man Bryda sold to the power of darkness, the man who walked on the air to rescue Prince Luth! He’s a dead man walking, I tell you! Get out of here!”
He was barely in time to lead the rush from the door.
VII
Captain Ogric halted abruptly in his tracks. From somewhere in the belly of the ship was coming such a clashing and banging one would have thought a herd of wild animals was coming aboard instead of a collection of raggedy, underfed migrant workers. He had been on his way to dine with the port commandant, a traditional act of courtesy the last night before a ship lifted for space.
But at the racket which he heard, he turned aside and began to stride down a corridor in the direction from which the cries and crashes came.
Rounding a corner, he went full tilt into his master-at-arms, who jumped back with a cry of dismay and threw up a smart salute. Captain Ogric, who was known as White Dwarf to his crew because of his small size and illimitable energy, fixed him with a glare.
“For the love of life, what’s going on?” he demanded.
“Beginning of a riot in the workers’ quarters, sir,” the master-at-arms said. “We’re penning it up as much as we can, but there seems to be some superstitious reason at the bottom of it which they’re more scared of than they are of my men. A small group of them turned out of the cabin allotted because they said they wouldn’t share it with another man who was just sent aboard. Claim he’s a zombie, or something—say he’s a dead man walking. Some local cult, I guess.
“We took out the man who started the trouble, a big bully called Hego—white as a sheet, practically wetting himself with raw terror. You never saw anything like it, sir! I thought I’d avoid further trouble by transferring the so-called ‘dead man’ to another cabin, but the word got around, and half of them are saying they won’t fly in the same ship as him. Want to break out of the ship and go back to the city.”