“Let’s get him, mate!” The galleyman had turned to look for him, blinking drunkenly. “Let’s take his bloody hide!”
“Here are holostats,” the machine was pealing. “Study them well, and search every tunnel. Let no suspect escape—m case of innocent error, you have my own personal promise of a pardon. I am authorizing a million-point reward, to be paid from my own discretionary funds, for the death of each of the three. I’ll request the Bridge to double that when it meets tomorrow. Admiral Vorn, in addition, is offering another million to the killer of the monster who murdered his niece.
“Shipfolk, the holostats . . .”
The Navarch’s commanding image dissolved into one he had given Chelni the Wintersend before. Head bare and hair windblown, teeth gleaming through a somewhat wistful smile, he thought he looked strangely fresh and young, certainly too diffident to kill.
“The most inhuman monster! See the sneering evil on his features—and watch for him, shipfolk!”
Shrinking toward the tunnel wall and into his hood, trying to hide his face without seeming to, he recalled that the Prime Directive did not require the truth.
26
Bilges Lowest levels of Northdyke and other Kai cities, originally cut for drainage, but inhabited by persons deprived of shipfolk status or unable to achieve it.
The galleyman staggered against him. “Where’s my bottle, mate?”
Keth pointed at it, lying in the reek at their feet.
“You swilled it, mate!” The slurred voice lifted. “My full bottle!”
“I’ve got tokens.” He dug into his pockets. “I’ll pay for it.”
“Tokens, mate?” The galleyman was abruptly amiable, gripping his arm again. “Let’s drink ’em up—to the humanoids!”
“Later.” Nodding at the holo, now blazing with a holostat of Cyra, he spilled tokens into the galleyman’s hand. “I’m on my way to work.”
“Work?” The galleyman bristled indignantly. “That’s for humanoids.”
“They aren’t here yet. We’ve got to fix the spacedecks.”
“Not me.” The galleyman turned to the light at last to count his tokens. “Not till these are gone.”
Muttering with shock and indignation, the watchers were scattering. The galleyman lurched away toward the holorama of a bar. Hunched into his hood, Keth moved after him and veered toward the downway.
Nobody shrieked or pursued.
When Chelni had taken him to tour the capital on that first trip with her, so long ago, their guide had warned them about the people of the bilges.
“Thieving shiprats! Swarming down below the law. No cops or tax collectors. No slideways or sanitation. No reason to go there—not unless you’re looking for a knife in the neck.”
The bilges seemed less dangerous now.
At the bottom of the downway he followed a foot-worn trail into a dark opening beneath a rusting sign: storm drain way —do not obstruct! The trail led him into a narrow, unlit passage, never meant for human use, sloping steeply down.
Oozing water made slippery spots, and the task of getting safely past them in the dark took most of his attention. Still numbed and dazed by those humanoid lies, he had no clear plan of action, no goal except to stay alive and free.
Pausing once to get his breath and feel for bruises, after he had slid and tumbled a dozen paces, he was struck with a sudden rueful admiration for the humanoids. Their falsehoods had become almost creative. Where would their evolution lead?
For a moment he stood shuddering, arrested by a vision of the ultimate humanoid universe, peopled only by implacable intelligent machines, forever overwhelming world after world and galaxy after galaxy in a vain unending search for more of the beings they would be forever driven to serve and guard and obey.
He stumbled on, trying not to think of that, but haunted by a dreadful loneliness. Any shipman who had heard that newscast would surely attack him on recognition. He had nowhere to go, no dependable friend left anywhere.
Somberly, when the light from the bottom began to get a little stronger and the footing better, he wondered what had actually become of the live Chelni Vorn. Lost recollections streamed through his mind. Her firm, high voice and her air of arrogant command, when they had been in the swabber class at Greenpeak. Her hot anger when Topman Taiko made her walk the duty deck. Her short upper lip and her stubborn chin and her drive to lead the class. The time they stripped together—and now that black thing in her room, shedding her nude shape like some dreadful insect metamorphosing. He tried to shrug the ugly image off. The actual Chelni had been too utterly herself to welcome the humanoids. Any happiness they had given her was cruel delusion, and he ached with pity for her.
The light brightening ahead, he came back to his own bleak predicament. Kai promised no aid or refuge for him. Malili, he thought, was his only hope—one thinner than a thread. Even if ships were, in fact, still departing for the Zone, the spacedeck would surely be teeming with men and humanoids alert to kill him. Evading them, he would have to stow away three times, on the shuttle, on the spacecraft, and on yet another shuttle. A vanishing chance, but he saw no other.
He paused in the shelter of the drain, a little above the exit, lost for a moment in a longing dream of Malili. The tangled jungle and open savanna, orange and yellow and red. The darker rockrust on the hills, blue and green and black. The crimson titan trees, solitary and enormous.
The Leleyo haunted his imagination. Golden people, beautiful and nude, as innocent as infants but wiser than the humanoids, at home, somehow, with their dragon bats, and immune to bloodrot, living in a more perfect state than the imitation Navarch had promised the people of Kai, needing no machines or laws or leaders, free of everything.
The magnificent Leleyo—and Nera Nyin! She came alive in his mind: her gold-green eyes and gold-brown hair, her enigmatic loveliness. The image hurt as cruelly as his recollection of that sharp black line dividing Chelni’s face and torso, because she was gone forever.
In a different world, if he had somehow become a fit leader for the fleet, he and Chelni might have made a happy marriage. He and Nera Nyin? Malili was in fact a different world, a vision unattainable, forever forbidden. The most he could hope, with unlikely luck and daring, would be to reach some brief sanctuary in the narrow little prison of the Zone.
Even that seemed a crazy dream. He shrugged it off and pushed out of that dark chimney into the bilges. Cut as drains and never sealed, the tunnels here still dripped icy water. Broken stone floored them, debris from the dwellings the shiprats had blasted into the walls. The lights were far apart, and the air carried a fetid reek.
Yet he smiled a little, tramping out into the middle of the tunnel. Here, beyond the slidewalks and the news holos, he might move with relative safety. Since the bilges drained the whole region, perhaps he could follow them to a point from which he could climb to the spacedeck.
Though the guides had spoken of many thousand outcasts living in the bilges, the tunnel looked almost empty. A whitehaired man staggered past him, reeling under a huge brown bale of something that stank like ripe garbage. A crippled woman dipped water from a rusty tub that caught a drip from the tunnel roof and limped with it toward her cave. Half a dozen ragged children pelted rocks at a nearly naked smaller child, who fled around the corner, shrieking.
“Welcome, Shipman!” The high young voice startled him. “May I aid you, sir?”
He whirled with apprehension, because the voice had sounded too much like a humanoid’s, and found a hungry-looking boy behind him. Aged perhaps ten, skin blue with cold beneath muddy rags, eyes big and brown and trustful.
“Hello.” He tried his invented story. “I’m looking for a friend.”
“If you wish a woman,” the boy said, “my cousin is young and clean and very skillful. If you prefer a virgin, sir, she has a little sister. If you prefer boys—”
“My friend is a man who came here because of trouble with the shipwatch.”
The boy nodd
ed wisely. “Many here have been in trouble with the law.”
“My friend ran too soon. We’ve paid his fines and got the other charges dropped. I’ve come to find him and bring him home.”
“You’re a kind man, sir.” The boy smiled politely. “Please allow me to aid you. I know many people. What does your friend call himself?”
“Who knows?” He shrugged. “He has been seen in the tunnels under the spacedeck. I want to look for him there.”
“May I guide you, sir? I know the bilges well.”
He showed a handful of quota tokens, and they reached a bargain. The boy would guide him to the spacedeck bilges for thirty ten-point pieces. They set off at once. Sometimes the boy took unexpected turns, explaining that the drainways ahead were obstructed with rockfalls or floodwater.
“Upper-deck shipfolk often come here.” He was sagely talkative. “The law seldom overtakes them. There are many places too low or too narrow for patrol vehicles, and even the shipwatch don’t like walking here.”
Though he asked no questions, his glance was sometimes so keen that Keth felt a stab of terror.
“You shouldn’t worry, sir,” he murmured once. “Though there are outlaws at large here, I know how to avoid them. In fact, sir, it may comfort you to know that the law of the ship does reach here. Though you may see no lawmen, many ship-rats are paid informers. Some take pay for lies about their friends. Evil men, sir.” He spat on a rock. “Worse than any outlaw!”
They were following a smooth-trodden path that wound among heaps of rubble from the dwelling caves, among mounds of odorous refuse and piles of rusting junk metal. He paused at a tunnel comer to look brightly back.
“Your friend is no doubt safe and well, sir. The bilges offer us many ways to keep ourselves alive. There are the Bridge dole posts, where one can stand in line to swap ferticloset shitbricks for quota tokens. There are the fleet salvage dumps, which sell half-spoilt food and damaged goods of all kinds very cheap. There are charity stations, where one can often pick up used garments and tapes for nothing at all. I myself have gone to a charity school.”
“You must have been an excellent student.”
“Thank you, sir. I taught myself to read from an incomplete set of flatprint classics I found in a trashbin. I once hoped to qualify for shipman. That was possible for one who could read, if he had also points enough for the fees and gratuities to the examiners.”
“Was?” Keth frowned. “Not now?”
“There will be no shipfolk now,” the boy informed him gravely. “No upper-deck classes or working classes or shiprats, since the humanoids have arrived to serve all alike.”
Keth decided not to comment.
Though the boy seemed to know his way, the trip took longer than he had expected. They stopped several times, twice for bottled melonade sold by haggard women who smiled very fondly at the boy and eyed Keth somewhat strangely, once to buy a handful of sunplums that were only slightly overripe. Again for bowls of what its greasy-aproncd maker called mutox stew, though it had the bitter taste of the ox-pea soup back at Greenpeak on days when the cook had burnt it.
“Shouldn’t we be there?” he asked at last. “I’ve been counting intersections, and we’ve come far enough.”
“Not yet, sir!” The boy looked hurt. “I would never mislead you, sir. I can see that you are much fatigued, and you seem confused about the distance. The spacedeck is still several kilometers ahead. We must find a place for you to sleep.”
The place they found was Beg’s Beds. The name was crudely splashed in luminous paint along the rough tunnel wall above a row of rough-cut caves. Beg himself was a massive, legless blackboard in a sort of hammock that moved on pulleys along a rusty cable stretched outside the caves.
“You’ll sleep well here, sir,” the boy promised him. “Beg is my friend, and I myself will lie on guard at the entrance.” Though he wanted to argue that he was not confused about the distance, he felt suddenly too tired to go on. Ten tokens seemed far too much to pay for the evil-odored hole in the rock, but the boy declared it fair. Uneasily, he crawled inside. The bedding smelled like moldy hay, but he felt no insects. Perhaps he shouldn’t suspect the boy—
“Wake up, Shipman!” Beg was bawling from his hammock. “Everybody out!”
Sitting up, he bruised his forehead painfully on the low rock roof. His limbs were stiff, his dry mouth bitter with the taste of that stew. When he fumbled at his pockets, they felt flat. Chilled with panic, he dug desperately.
His quota card, the tokens from Vara Vorn, the rhodo weapon—gone!
“I’ve been robbed!” He crawled out of the cave. “Where’s that boy?”
“Outside! A warning from the Navarch!” Hauling himself along the cable, Beg kept bellowing. “Humanoids landing on the spacedeck above us. Weight of their transport may damage tunnels. Everybody out!”
27
Underhill A dealer in primitive robot appliances whose small business was ruined when the townsfolk welcomed the wonderful new humanoids.
The lights flickered twice and went out.
He stood lost for an instant in suffocating blackness. Sudden thunder broke the breathless hush. Beneath his feet, the granite itself pitched and moaned. Falling rock crashed. Bitter dust choked him.
“Humanoids!” Far shrieks came faintly through the roaring dark. “Humanoids, coming!”
Chilled with a sweat of panic, he controlled a wild desire to run. Kilometers underground, trapped in the blinding dark, the humanoids swarming above, he had nowhere to go. All he could do was try to keep his feet.
Something struck him.
Thrust off balance, he staggered across the shuddering stone. It struck again. Groping, he caught it—the cable that carried Beg’s hammock, whipping to and fro from the force of the quake. He clung to it.
“Demon machines!”
Nurse Vesh’s death-pale face leered at him out of the dusty dark, her thin old witch-voice hissing at him from his oldest nightmare.
“They’ll get you, Keth! The way they got your poor mother.”
Chelni’s naked image mocked him again, smiling slyly as it split to show the sleek humanoid inside. The Navarch’s outraged shape jeered again in his reeling mind, trumpeting the monstrous lie that he had killed her.
He clung to the swaying cable as if it had been a lifeline to sanity. Helpless, a little ill from the motion of the planet’s crust, he knew nothing else to do. At last the lights flickered on, pale yellow moons in the smothering dust. Beg came racing down the cable, gripping the sides of his pitching hammock with both gnarly hands, grinning through his tangled beard. Alt along the tunnel behind him, tattered shiprats were scrambling out of their dens, coughing in the dust, screaming that the humanoids were here.
What he heard at first was frantic panic. What he felt was a mindless urge to join that senseless-seeming flight. But there was still nowhere to go—and Beg’s gap-toothed grin perplexed him, until suddenly he understood. Here in the bilges, the humanoids were incredible good news.
“New legs!” Beg was yelling. “Shipman, they’ll make me new legs!”
Pushing and hauling at the cable, he helped Beg bring it back to rest. Cautious again, he pulled the hood back over his face. Peering back along Beg’s row of beds and out again into the haze, he still saw nothing of his brown-eyed guide.
“That boy,” he shouted at Beg, “robbed me! Cleaned out my pockets.”
“Took you, did he?” Chuckling with evident admiration, the legless man mopped his greasy features with a bad-odored rag. “Clever little devil! I had a hunch he was up to something.”
“And you let him get away?” Quivering with anger that was half terror, Keth shook the cable till Beg swayed again in his hammock. “I want my property!”
“Lay off, Shipman!” Still half genial, his voice was edged with iron. “Recall where we are. This isn’t the ship. We’ve ways of our own, here in the bilges. We have to live however we can—or had to, before this great day.”
“Never catch him now.” Beg gestured at the mobs in the drifting dust. “Not in all this celebration.” His bloodshot eyes peered into the hood. “Just what did he relieve you of, Shipman, that unnerves you so?”
“My—my quota card.” He hoped not to see the card again, because the J. Vesh name could kill him now. What really mattered was the rhodo weapon, but he hardly dared think of that. “All my tokens.”
“Quota tokens?” Beg dug into the grimy sack that hung below his beard and flung a scornful shower of them at Keth’s feet. “Take what you want. They’re nothing, now, don’t you see? The humanoids will give us everything.”
“I don’t want—”
Beg’s narrowed stare stopped his retort. The crippled shiprat liked the humanoids too well and might too soon be briefing them on the stranger who hadn’t seemed to welcome their arrival.
“Thanks,” he muttered. “I guess they will take care of everybody, but I’ll need food till they get here.”
He scrabbled in the rubble for the tokens and stumbled out among the shouting shiprats. They were hailing one another, asking who had seen a humanoid, wondering when to leave the bilges.
Rumors grew. The humanoids had pledged to serve the bilgefolk first, making up for old injustice. All the hoarded wealth of the fleetfolk would be seized and shared among them. If a shiprat saw a woman he wanted, even a Bridgeman’s daughter, the humanoids would give her to him. Their Prime Directive would compel them to obey.
Wary of questions, but listening as he walked, he put together bits of what he thought must be fact. Shipwatch patrols had warned people out of the bilges beneath the spacedeck before the tachyonic transport landed. It was down now, and all secure, with only a few unlucky strays caught in the rockfalls. The humanoids were still aboard, waiting for the Navarch’s official welcome before they disembarked.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 43