Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  He thought he knew what Kelmz had in mind. If successful, it would save Servan trouble. If not, he would do what was called for. He never liked to plan too tightly for the future.

  The Rovers wheeled and marched back the way they had come. A shadow rose from the darkness behind them, and Kelmz fell silently into step at their backs. They stiffened visibly, but didn’t turn or break stride. Kelmz would be matching their tread so exactly that each of them would hear only his own steps amplified by his companion’s in a manner that he had been taught not to fear, so that he could work as a member of a brace or squad.

  Servan would have to tell Kelmz later what an artist he was. His praise would certainly irritate the captain – art was a famishing untrustworthy attribute – and at the same time it would have the virtue of being true. Kelmz had an artist’s luck, too: the Chesters were doing their part well, for no one stepped outside the men’s compound to piss or settle a bet. There was no break in the pounding rhythm of the Penneltons’ dancing.

  Smoothly, the captain moved up and put his hands on the Rovers’ shoulders. He wheeled with them and they came back down the gallery, secured by his authoritative touch. If he had hesitated, they would have turned and cut him down. By the time Servan and Eykar gained the gallery themselves. Kelmz and the Rovers were again at the far end of their patrol, backs turned.

  The doors to the work-buildings were not locked, for no fem would try to get past a Rover-watch. The two men simply walked in, entering a huge room full of hot, sour air.

  The cement floor was cluttered with machines, bins, tables, and chutes. At the far end, layers of stuffed hempen sacks mounted toward the ceiling, presumably containing some of the finished product. Most of the equipment seemed to be idle. A few fems were present, wearing sweat-rags bound around their heads and stained aprons that reached from armpit to knee. Three of them stood nearby, fixing a piece of wire mesh over the opening of a pipe that stuck out of the wall. The pipe and the trough under it seemed to be the prime source of the pervasive sour stink. From this group and others came the murmur of voices; that was surprising. Though normally fems sang at work, the majority of them were held to be incapable of any but the most limited fem-to-master type of speech.

  There were no men about at all. This was the first time Servan had ever seen any number of fems together without at least one pair of Juniors overseeing their activities. It made his hair prickle.

  Some signal must have been given; suddenly every fem in the place acquired a slight stoop or cringe. The faces of the nearest ones went slack and foolish before his eyes. Witchery? He almost laughed. He had seen a dormful of boys change in just such a way when a Teacher walked in on them unexpectedly in the Boyhouse.

  One of the fems tending to the pipe came toward the intruders, her calloused feet rasping on the concrete floor. She knelt to kiss the ground in front of them. There were scars on her lean back. Nobody bothered about pretty appearances in the workrooms of Bayo, it seemed. She had wide shoulders for a fem and a strong neck, and she was almost the size of a fair-grown boy.

  Servan addressed her close-cropped head. ‘Where are your masters?’

  ‘This fem feels that they are all in the men’s compound, please-you-master,’ she whined, slurring her words in the manner of fems. She sat back on her heels, so that now that he had acknowledged her presence, he might see her face if he wished to. ‘Is there something this fem might offer these masters?’

  A trickle of white fluid ran off the lip of the pipe into the trough, setting off a to-do of shouting and wall-rapping from the fems working with the mesh.

  ‘She can offer her full attention,’ Servan snapped to the one before him. She kissed the ground again in apology. ‘Is there some fem here who’s been in Bayo for the past three five-years?’

  ‘This fem can try to take the masters to one such,’ she said, using the proper formula that avoided any suggestion of actual competence on her part. She arose at his gesture to guide them.

  Then the outer door opened and Kelmz walked in. The two Rovers strode ahead of him, heads up and nostrils flaring.

  Every fem in the room froze.

  ‘Christ,’ Servan groaned, ‘and his unfortunate father!’

  Close up, the Rovers were impressive. Their heavy torsos gleamed, and the short capes they wore strained across their shoulders. They stood with their legs bent in an aggressive crouch. Each Rover had a knife in his right hand, and his defensively gloved left hand tensed before his belly, ready to lash out with a metal-studded blow or to turn the slash of an enemy’s weapon.

  ‘Kelmz, you’re moon-mad to bring them in here!’ Servan said.

  ‘I can hold them,’ said the captain.

  Eykar said sharply, ‘Will they be missed?’

  Kelmz shook his head. ‘They’re fresh, probably just on duty an hour or so. Nobody will check them for a while. I think they’re worth the risk to us. You want to keep these bitches shivering when you have to go among them.’

  His hands rested lightly on the Rovers’ shoulders; he stroked them a little, calming them. But he had an odd, abstracted air, as if he touched them from a great distance.

  7

  In his time Kelmz had done enough guard duty among workgangs of fems to be unfazed by them now. He attended to the Rovers, who padded warily along rolling their eyes and quivering under their scarred hides. To them, fems were drug-distorted demons.

  Servan watched Eykar as they all proceeded through the fems’ quarters. Eykar’s eyes, that Servan knew to be remarkably keen and untiring, missed nothing; but his face remained austerely uncommunicative. Probably he was holding in his disgust. What he had been taught about fems in the Boyhouse (as Servan knew, having had the same lessons and having had opportunities since to prove them against reality) was not enough and not even particularly accurate. It was one thing to be told that fems were smelly, misshapen and alien-minded. It was another to be surrounded by them.

  No fems ever went to Endpath. They had no souls, only inner cores of animating darkness shaped from the void beyond the stars. Their deaths had no significance. Some men believed that the same shadows returned again and again in successive fem-bodies in order to contest for the world with the souls of men, which came from light.

  It was hard to connect these crude mud walls and their stunted inhabitants with the great witch-fems who had overthrown the Ancients’ mighty civilization. The Chants Historical told the tale: at the peak of their power, the men of Ancient times had been so fascinated with their own technical prowess that they had neglected the supervision of their treacherous fems. Technics had seemed to offer the promise of overcoming the sullen chaos of the void itself by the extension of manly will from the face of the earth out among the stars. The Ancients had concentrated first on attacking the moon, through which the forces of the void were focussed on the world.

  The Moonwitch had not been destroyed by the missiles the Ancients had hurled; she had fought back through her minions, the fems. With her magic the fems had inspired the natural inferiors of the Ancients to join in a coalition to overthrow the rule of order and manly reason. There was some question as to the exact apportionment of blame for the rebellion of the Wasting among the various kinds of lesser beings (collectively known as the unmen). Each kind had a proper place, after all, under the authority of men: the beasts of all elements furnished men with raw materials; labor could be forced from the lazy, savage Dirties; even the fems had certain minor skills to offer their masters in addition to giving them sons.

  To the logical mind, however, the answer was obvious: there had been beast-fems, and fems among the Dirties, and the sons of men had turned Freak under the tutelage of their dams. The common denominator of corruption and rebellion among all the unmen had been fems.

  Even at the time, there had been names for fems indicating some understanding of the danger they represented. One Ancient book used in the Boyhouse mentioned fems as ‘bra-burners.’ Since ‘bra’ was a word in an old language mea
ning ‘weapon,’ clearly ‘bra-burner’ meant a fem who stole and destroyed the weapons of her masters.

  The weapon of the fems was witchery, and that could only be destroyed by burning the witches themselves. The Ancients had begun by burning other kinds of rebellious unmen, out of a reluctance to recognize the power that the fems had accumulated. By the time the fems’ primary responsibility for the wars of the Wasting had been openly acknowledged by the Ancients, the world had already begun to slip from the grasp of men.

  Yet it never fell into the hands of their enemies. The fems’ witchery was by nature irrational, utilizing epidemics, uprisings of crazed Dirties, destructive storms (to which the Ancients properly gave fem-type names), and poisons released into air, earth and water. These weapons were so virulent and undiscriminating that they also killed the unmen themselves. That anyone survived at all was due to the foresight and tough-mindedness of a handful of ruling men.

  Shelters had been prepared earlier against the aggressiveness of the most powerful of the Dirties: Reds and Chings across the ocean and Blacks at home. Seeing at last that the light of manly reason was doomed to be overwhelmed by the forces of chaos, the wisest leaders of men withdrew to these shelters, taking a handful of fems with them for breeding purposes.

  Outside of this Refuge, as the area of the shelters was called, men and unmen fell to the plagues and disasters that wasted the world. In helpless horror the men in the Refuge watched (by means of wonderful distance-instruments) the ruin of the civilization they had once commanded but were powerless to save. Some of the refugees went mad, but the strongest among them (many were military men) organized an interim life of discipline and sturdy optimism. They had faith that someday the surface of the earth would be habitable again. Meanwhile, at least the vermin responsible for earth’s ruin were dying along with their victims.

  The descendants of the refugees (and the properly tamed fems) emerged eventually to reclaim and make usable the territory now known as the Holdfast. It was the first step in the Reconquest of the whole world in the name of light, reason, and order. The descendants of the surviving fems, however, would never again be allowed to become an active danger to the hegemony of their masters. The only type of unmen to have been saved from the Wasting, fems were now closely controlled; modern men were taught never to forget that these beings were by their nature the hereditary and implacable enemies of everything manly, bright and clean.

  Servan was disappointed to find no signs of witch-power here in the recesses of Bayo. On occasion he had sensed something secret about certain fems, a holding-back that had challenged him. He had never been able to extract anything from them other than a song or two, and often the fem who sang only half-comprehended the words, which were merely lamentations over hard work and the vagaries of the masters’ desires. Though he had considered dosing a fem with manna as an aid to interrogation, when it came down to it he never could bring himself to waste good stuff on them.

  In the Holdfast, fems accused of exercising powers inherited from the terrible fems of Ancient times were burned as witches. Here in the dull yellow light of the wall lamps of Bayo, the existence of such powers seemed preposterous. Servan congratulated himself for his own scepticism.

  Yet, moving among so many of these bent, dull-eyed figures, he wasn’t sorry to have the Rovers along.

  Their guide stopped and indicated with a cringing gesture that their goal lay through the doorway to the right. The room beyond was sparsely furnished with clay tables and sitting-blocks. One old fem sat eating curdcake from a chipped bowl. She arose at once and hurried toward them, wiping her mouth and fingers on the hem of her smock so that they wouldn’t have to smell fem-food about her. She knelt in front of Servan. So far, all was in order.

  ‘Fossa presents herself, please-you-masters, with important news.’

  Servan was no kind of fanatic about fems and their proper place, but by addressing them first this old bitch (who should have known better) had committed a serious breach. Kelmz looked ready to break her skinny neck. It was not out of anger but to maintain propriety that Servan slapped her, hard.

  She rocked back from the blow, but went right on with the same astonishing forwardness: ‘Word came from Lammintown. The Pennelton masters watch for you masters. They seldom come to these quarters after sunset. Tonight, they have come twice.’

  The men looked at each other; Senior Bajerman must have heard about their encounter with the ’Wares and guessed something of their intent and their destination.

  Servan said, ‘Is there a place where the men never come?’

  ‘There is a place where they have never come before, please-you,’ replied the crone. She was even using hard-edged, manly speech, instead of the slurred softspeech of fems, so that there would be no misunderstanding.

  ‘Take us there,’ Servan said.

  Fossa was leathery from weather and work; teeth were missing from one side of her mouth so that her cheek had sunk in and her jaw was crooked. She scuttled ahead of them, bowed with age and humility. Yet something in the bearing of other fems towards her as they passed seemed to indicate respect. Servan was intrigued.

  They entered a series of low-ceilinged, dimly lit dormitories. Fems slept or reclined in slit-eyed torpor in the beds. Some had small, blanketed bundles lying next to them. Servan was reminded of the brief trip that all boys made to the Hospital adjoining the Boyhouse, to be instructed about the grossly swollen fems due to drop cubs. The lights had been brighter in the Hospital, but the somnolent atmosphere had been much the same.

  One of the bundles began kicking, and it raised a thin cry. The fem next to it hiked up on her elbow, eyes still shut, and put her hand over the source of the sound. The kicking continued, but the wailing diminished to small grasping sounds that were succeeded by quiet. The fem rolled on her side and went back to sleep.

  Fossa gave Servan the cringing, ingratiating smile of a fem imparting information, so that he should be reassured that she claimed no credit for knowing something that he did not. ‘We teach fem-cubs to be quiet. It’s a good first lesson in obedience.’

  A number of fems were without cubs. Servan pointed to one of them and asked why she wasn’t back at work, having dropped her young and apparently lost it.

  Apologetically, the old fem said, ‘There are ways to continue the flow of milk even when there is no suckling cub. If a dam’s capacity is high, she stays here in the milkery. Some stay all their lives, for fems have a great need of this milk now, in their well deserved deprivation.’ She was referring to the drastic reduction of the seaweed ration allotted to the fems, which dated back several five-years. At that time, successive failures of the laver harvest had earned a rather freehanded rage from the men, resulting in fewer fems (and the deaths of the witches responsible for the blight, since the crops had stabilized again, though at lower levels). Now the fem population was built back up in number, but their food supply had not been expanded. Apparently they were finding their own sources of sustenance, as Fossa explained.

  ‘The masters entered through the curding room, where the milk from these fems is made into the curdcake which fems eat.’

  Kelmz said grimly, ‘If I’d known so many of them could talk I’d have been more careful working around them. But this old bitch can’t even describe what we saw with our own eyes without lying: that stuff they eat is brown and gelid, not white.’

  The old fem responded, after a pause, ‘Other things are added, to give fems strength for the tasks set them by the masters.’

  An alcove at the far end of the dormitory complex served as an office. Strings of tally-beads hung from pegs in the walls, presumably to keep track of the workings of the milkery. Here they stopped. Servan drew up a worn sitting-block, turning so that he could look back the way they had come. The place fascinated him. It was a DarkDreamer’s dream, with its sleep-heavy air, its quiet, the lumpish figures large and small under their coarse, gray covers, the dull light from basket-shaded lamps.

 
; Kelmz used the pause to get better control of the Pennelton Rovers, rubbing them down carefully with his hands as their officer would do, to check for injuries that their inflamed minds would never notice. He kept them facing away from the milkery.

  ‘“The moon’s unpredictable daughters”,’ Servan quoted softly. ‘That’s from the fems’ own songs. And here they are, in full mystery. Eykar, turn your back; you’re just a boy where these creatures are concerned; you have no defenses. They might witch you right out of your high purpose.’

  Eykar stopped pacing and turned his pale gaze on Servan. ‘In pursuit of which, do you think you might bring yourself to find out what we came to find out?’

  Doing so turned out to be simple. Servan asked Fossa about Raff Maggomas, and she told them. He had come; he had stayed with the Quarterback Company assigned here at the time (a hard time, marked by laver failures); he had returned to the City with the Quarterbacks when the five-year was over.

  Years later, word had gotten about that Maggomas’ son was in trouble in the Boyhouse. The son had been sent to become Endtendant, and Maggomas had vanished. At once, a new scandal had broken. Maggomas had apparently had a lover across the age-line, a Junior Quarterback who was moreover much sought after (however covertly) by an Angelist Company Senior superior to Maggomas; a Boardman, some said. The young man, whose name was Karz Kambl, had also disappeared, presumably to join Maggomas in hiding. Enraged by this turn of events, the Board had passed a resolution barring Maggomas from returning to any company of the City in any capacity.

  So far as was known, he had never tried to return and had not been seen or heard of since by any reliable witness. And that had been six years ago. The younger man, now a Senior, was said to be living more or less in hiding in the City.

  Aside from one or two breaks (profusely apologized for) when Fossa was called to confer with some fem in the dormitory, the report was a model of concise information, clearly delivered. Servan complimented the old fem on the effectiveness of her intelligence network. She was remarkably well informed. These rumors of an affair had never come to Servan’s notice, possibly because he was too closely involved through his connection with Eykar.