After looking in all the wrong places, I found a carrier headed in the right direction and climbed painfully onto the partial load only moments before the doors were closed and sealed. This time Joram’s instructions for anchoring were uppermost in my mind, so I tied the arms of my jacket to anchor straps and sealed the jacket around me, arms tight at my sides. I fell asleep and woke much, much later, surprised that I’d slept at all even though Joram had told us it was not only possible but advisable to sleep en route whenever one could.
I was slightly rested, but every bruised place on me had stiffened. Even small movements hurt. The midcoastal transfer station was hectic, with people constantly moving about, and I waited for some time before a lull gave me the chance to clamber out and then up to the top of the carrier. I lay there, numb where I didn’t hurt, hoping Joram had been right about no one ever looking on top of carriers. When night came, the activity slowed; incoming and outgoing loads were less frequent, and I was able to use the toilet, wash up, refill my water bottle, and nose about for a carrier headed to Baja Urb I. The first several were fully loaded, with no room for either a passenger or the air a passenger would need to survive. The next one was only half-loaded, but the time of departure was several hours off. I hid nearby, hoping it would remain half-empty, as it did. When the time of departure was just minutes away, I sneaked in and anchored myself as before, this time staying awake during much of the trip, trying to remember Witt’s face as I imagined furious arguments with him, me saying “See! See!,” while he claimed we couldn’t possibly do anything to withstand his mother.
When the carrier finally slowed and came to rest, my link-timer said it was evening of the third day “on the road,” which was Joram’s phrase. He had a lot of antique words and phrases. On the road. Across the street. In the country. Wedding cake. Witt’s and mine had been an earth-cake, without any real taste. The thought of that tastelessness made me cry. It seemed suddenly typical of our relationship. We really had not savored one another as I had imagined cohabiting people should do.
Crying wasted time, however, so I sucked in my cheeks and bit down while disentangling myself. Carriers sometimes stop on a siding in the vacuum tube, but voices outside mean there’s air, so I waited to hear voices. I finally heard them, too close. I hid in a niche between crates while the doors were opened and the voices went away. Finally, I climbed out, barely able to stand, and hid myself for a while to assess the situation. Things seemed quiet, so I moved gradually toward the loading section where the up-ramp was swarming with people and bots cleaning up after a loaded surface carrier that had been hit by a flit. It was enough of a mess to draw a crowd of down-dwellers and get all the human workers involved. When I went in the opposite direction, I happened on a labeled freight lift to level. As it turned out, I was under Tower 3.
Aunt Hatty lived in Tower 29, seven to nine miles from where I stood, depending upon which side of Tower 3 I would exit from and which side of Tower 29 I would come to first. It was late evening. Since traffic slightly decreased during hours of darkness, the only light at the lower levels was coming from the lighted podways that crisscrossed the urb towers like a giant gridiron. It was actually a good time to travel inconspicuously. Level Patrol officers are supposed to keep an eye on the down-dwellers, but they don’t pay attention to anything short of a full-scale riot. Many of the people around me were wearing robes and masks or veils, which I hadn’t seen before. Others wore ordinary clothes, perhaps not as dirty as those I had on, but dirt wasn’t remarkable at level. Down-dwellers were dirty by definition. Dust had to be cleaned off solar collectors, dirt had to be washed off the sides of towers, which meant it all ended up in the bottoms of the chasms, coating the podways, building up beneath them, even making mud sometimes, when it rained. Once in a great while, the cleaning machines came through and took all of the muck out to the farms. From the looks of it, they hadn’t been in Baja Urb for ages.
According to Joram, some urbs had unlicensed taxis at level, that is taxis without monitors. Perhaps they’d existed when Joram was young, but I didn’t spot even one of them. I was too tired and achy to hurry. Besides, I had to locate all the past-this-point monitors before I passed one without realizing it. Often that meant quite lengthy detours. I didn’t reach Tower 29 until the sky above the urb canyons was growing light. Joram’s rule for covert travel was “Go high or go low,” so I took a freight rampway down into the first sublevel garage section. Since we’d never had a flit, I’d never been in a garage section, but it looked much as Joram had described it, emptier than other places, and, except for cross walls separating the four quads and sixteen sectors, more open. The nearest walls had huge numbers at each entry, dark yellow on a lighter yellow field. Yellow is the uniform code for northeast, so I was in the northeast sector of the northeast quad, one of the twelve outer sectors used for deliveries and parking. The core, the four inner sectors, was where all the machinery that kept the tower running could be found.
I found an unmonitored service link along the wall and spoke Hatty’s code into it.
She answered. “Where are you, dear?”
“In the garage.”
“Which sector, dear?”
“Yellow-yellow.”
“You’re directly down the wall from me. I can’t bring the flit down to you because I’m identichipped for Blue-blue. Can you…?”
“I’ll get there.”
“Do be careful. I’ll meet you in Blue-blue, fifth level down.”
“I’ll be there. It may take me a while.”
I located a convenience unit along the wall and stayed there for a brief rest while I ate my last nutrient bar and washed the exposed parts of my body. The bruises were suspicious enough without the filthy clothes, but I couldn’t do anything about that. Wearily, I resolved to be very, very sneaky.
Blue meant northwest, and the most direct route to Blue-blue was along the outside wall, as Hattie had said, which had the added advantage of keeping me well away from the workers who thronged the service core. I had no idea how I’d get through the sector wall, but blue sector of yellow quad would be straight ahead. I shambled wearily in that direction, taking refuge behind parked flits or stacks of supplies whenever freight carriers rumbled by or flits screamed into parking areas.
About halfway along the wall, I came upon a pile of small cartons someone had been working on with a routing labeler. A robe and veil were hung on the wall behind the pile, left there, perhaps, by someone who wasn’t used to wearing them yet? Or someone who had gone to the toilet and didn’t want to be bothered with them? Thievery is supposed to be impossible, but this was an exception. Without a qualm, I put on the robe and draped the veil over my head, thankful the person they belonged to was about my height. Now, I might be seen by people, but I certainly couldn’t be identified by them.
As I approached the wall between sectors, I saw the yellow doors of an empty lift standing open, and, almost miraculously, another set of doors, blue ones, at the back of the lift. The lifts served both sides! I took time to be sure no one was watching, then limped into the lift, took it down five floors, and went out the other doors into Yellow-blue. If the quad walls were also served by two-sided lifts, the cross-tower trip wouldn’t take as long as I’d feared.
Another quarter-mile journey along the yellow wall under the blue numbers was interrupted only when a long procession of workers, half of them robed and veiled, emerged from a door in the service core and streamed along the quad cross wall toward the lifts, probably the night shift workers going home to their apartments in the tier above. To minimize podway crowding, most people who work in a tower also live in it. I didn’t hide. I just fooled around with the machine next to me until they were gone, then I called down the lift and went through it into blue quad, yellow sector.
The rest of the way along the blue wall was almost totally silent, though I saw a few people leaving or entering the core and half a dozen machine operators noisily inspecting a weird piece of equipment
in a far corner. At the final wall, I called down another lift and stepped through it to the far side.
Someone nearby said “Ahem,” almost tentatively.
The figure was robed. It could have been anyone. I took a deep breath and risked it. “Hatty?”
Hatty lifted her veil. “My dear. Are they wearing robes in NW Urbs?”
“No.” I gasped with relief. “They don’t. I found the stuff near where I came into the tower.”
She sniffed back a tear. “Take that robe off, put it in the lift, and send the lift all the way up, just in case the robe might be identified somehow. Then put this one on. I bought it for you, so you could get to my level without being seen.”
When I took off the robe, she gasped. “My dear, what in the name of serenity has happened to you?”
“I forgot about not getting into an empty carrier.”
“Oh, child, child. You look beaten half to death. Your whole face is bruised, and look at your arms!”
“All of me is bruised, Hatty. Don’t fuss. It’s nothing that won’t heal.”
Hattie started to hug me, then thought better of it since there was no nonlivid part of me to grasp. I struggled into the new robe, as she said, “I didn’t bring the flit because I thought people might be looking for you in the flit or pod lobbies, so we’re going to take the passenger lift to the sorting lobby on the fiftieth floor. There’s a fixed monitor to the right of the lift door as we go out. I’ll move out and put my large self right against it while you walk past me and get at least twenty feet away. It will yammer at me, ‘Do not loiter, move on,’ but you pay no attention, just move quickly past, so I can move and shut the thing up. We’ll do the same thing at each monitor until we get home. I’ve been scouting for two days. We can avoid all but five, but I know where all the beastly things are!”
According to Joram, all four of the Lipkin sisters had been a bit wild. Seeing Hatty in action, I could believe it. She blocked the monitors all the way to her apartment, including her own door monitor, until I was safely inside. Only after we were inside did she tear up again, dabbing at her wet eyes with her sleeve as she helped me out of the robe.
“Do you really think they’re looking for you this soon, dear?”
I thought about it for a moment. “No. Not yet. Since I sometimes spend several days at the sanctuary, they’ll assume I’m there, or with Paul and Tad. When I don’t show up for six or seven days, that’s when they’ll start querying the past-this-point recorders.”
She shook her head, angrily. “Tad and I had a long talk, on a public link just in case they had his link or mine diverted. He told me about everything. I’m so furious at that dreadful woman! Tad has decided that since you’ve come down to stay with me, he’d like to come, too. He says he’s only stayed this long because of you, and it seems Luth Fannett would love nothing better than to have the liaison contract terminated. Tad says Paul is impossible to please, which doesn’t surprise me. Matty despaired of him when he was only a child. Tad is family, however, just as you are, and I’m listed in Matty and Joram’s original liaison as an appropriate guardian until he’s eighteen. So long as I serve as coparent, there’ll be no problem.”
“I didn’t realize that Luth was eager to…”
“According to Tad, she badly wants out. Paul sounds most unpleasant!”
I shook my head. “It’s probably not Paul as much as it is Paul and his concs. He and I share a father, so he tolerates me so long as I let him manage me. He doesn’t share anything with Taddeus, so he doesn’t spend any of his limited supply of congeniality on Tad.”
She drew herself up, eyes flashing. “And does he manage you?”
“I let him think so. It makes him feel as though he’s in charge, and when he’s being in charge, he’s reasonably pleasant and sometimes interesting. I admit that Tad and Luth are much happier when Paul’s away, which means I am, too. Tad’s a lot like Mother, and we’re fond of one another.”
Hattie shook her head at me. “Well then, it’s for the best. Fortuitously, there’s available space adjacent to this apartment, and I’ve already spoken for an allotment for Tad. It will be enough for you to have a little room of your own, Jewel dear, even if no one is to know you’re here. How long do you think you’ll need to hide?”
She saw from my blank expression that I wasn’t up to making predictions, so she hugged me very gently, and we stopped talking about it. In fact, I stayed in Hattie’s apartment for months. My little room was hardly more than a closet, but I only used it to sleep in, or to hide when Hatty had visitors. When I needed a doctor, as I did soon after arrival, one of Hattie’s medical friends paid a call. When my few bits of clothing wore out, Hattie bought a new supply. So far as Dame Cecelia was concerned, I was dead, though Tad stayed in touch with my arkist friends in the Northwest, who knew differently.
Tad brought word from Shiela Alred that Dame Cecelia was in a rage at my disappearance. No one except the lowliest down-dweller could vanish, but I had done so. Record checks of past-this-point monitors showed nothing. I had not returned to Witt’s apartment or to Paul’s. I was not at the sanctuary. I hadn’t taken space anywhere else. After Taddeus moved to Baja, BuOr spent some time watching his comings and goings, but he didn’t lead them anywhere but back and forth to school.
When the better part of a year had gone by, Gainor Brandt met Botrin Prime at a meeting of upper-level bureaucrats, where Boaty confided that Dame Cecelia had stopped looking for me.
When Gainor asked why she had been so determined, Prime said, “She’s been watching the birth registry, trying to learn if Jewel had a child by her son.”
Gainor repeated this to Shiela, who told Tad, who told me.
Shiela had been right all along about the Dame. Hatty arrived home to find me in tears, though whether of anger, grief, or relief, I couldn’t say.
“What happened?”
I told her what I’d heard.
Hatty sniffed. “I imagine you’re feeling an ambiguous amalgamation of vengefulness and exhaustion.”
“I don’t know what to feel,” I confessed. “Not about her, or me, or even Witt.”
She sniffed. “If Matty had lived, you would never have liaised with Witt.”
That stung. “Matty wouldn’t have stopped my loving him,” I cried. Which was crazy, because that word wasn’t one we’d used, not ever, not even when we were in bed together, but recently I’d been preferring to believe I loved him. Everything seemed so pointless, otherwise.
“Not if you really did, Jewel, but you didn’t really pick him as a mate, you know. You wanted to get away from Paul. You were at loose ends regarding your own future. It was a way out, and you liked Witt well enough…”
Her assessment was entirely too close to my own valuation of the real situation. “I’m very fond of Witt…”
“How would you know? Paul has been manipulating your feelings since you were a child, so you’ve learned to repress them, all of them, not only loud, vehement emotions but the subtle ones you need for day-to-day guidance…”
I had no idea what she meant, and said so, angrily.
She looked over my shoulder, her face grim. “We all have little feelings that tell us something isn’t quite right, that there’s danger lurking, that trouble brews, that a person whom we otherwise like quite well disturbs us in unpleasant ways. When the subtle warnings are stifled, we’re handicapped.”
“I don’t think I ever had any,” I said, still miffed.
“All the Lipkin women have them! If Matty had lived, she’d have taught you to pay attention to them. If you’d been more aware, your own sensibilities would have warned you about Witt.”
It was true that I was angry about Witt and at him, but that didn’t mean I didn’t grieve over his loss. He hadn’t deserved his fate, whatever it had been! No matter how impossibly he’d behaved during the last day we’d been together, he had not deserved that. Besides, I told myself I had many nice memories of him. I told myself I must have loved
him, or I wouldn’t remember him so often. I did not, then, analyze the memories for actual content, though I did so eventually, with considerable chagrin.
That was the only time Hatty was anything but loving and supportive, and I simply forgot her analysis, or at least set it aside. I went out into the world again, and we went on with our reasonably comfortable lives in the weeks and months that followed until, on my twentieth birthday, I received a link from Paul.
In a surprisingly affable tone, he said: “Taddeus told me where to reach you because I have something that might interest you…”
“Interest me, Paul?”
“If you’re interested in seeing some nonterrestrial animals, or visiting some other world. You used to talk about going off planet a good deal. I have a contract on Quondangala to study Quondan linguistics as part of an analysis of Human-Quondan legal terminology for Earth Bureau of Trade.”
“I’m not a linguist, Paul.”
“Of course you’re not, Jewel. But you’re a woman, and the Quondan are bisexual, with rather rigid societal expectations. The contract is dependent on my being part of a ‘couple.’ They tell me a female relative will do.”
So I would “do.” Though his all-too-typical approach made me seethe, the prospect of off-planet travel was exciting! Something new. Something that didn’t remind me constantly of Witt.
The Quondan people are often described as faceless. In truth, their sensory apparatus is merely concealed. They have ears hidden behind smooth webbing, mouths under a flap of skin, eyes that peer from behind a fringe of tendrils. They do not betray their feelings through facial expression, obviously, though one can pick up a good deal from their tone of voice.
In late afternoon the females, the Quondana, entertain one another at “Anglazhee,” or “sound-viewing of the trees.” On Quondangala, trees unfold at dawn and fold up toward evening with a melodic wooden clucking. Groves are planted that fold themselves harmonically. On one such occasion, when I remarked that I was fond of animals, a particular Quondana invited me to visit a farm, which I did. I had thought that unfamiliar animals would be interesting, but the several varieties I saw were sluggish and unintelligent, which surprised me.
The Companions Page 8