The Free Companions, who had been serious, hardworking men operating a warfare machine, became swaggering heroes in the public fancy and many a man sighed for a day he thought he had missed by a period of heartbreaking briefness.
They sang the wailing ballads the Free Companions had carried over, in changed forms, from the pioneer days on Venus, which in turn had derived from the unimaginably different days on Old Earth. But they sang them with a difference now. Synthetic Free Companions in inaccurate costumes performed for swaying audiences that followed their every intonation without guessing how wrong they were.
The emphasis was off, in words and rhythm alike. For the Keeps were stagnant, and stagnant people do not know how to laugh. Their humor is subtle and devious, evoking the snigger rather than the guffaw. Slyness and innuendo was the basis of their oblique humor, not laughter.
For laughter is cruel and open. The hour was on its way when men would sing again the old bloodthirsty ballads as they were meant to be sung, and laugh again with the full-throated heartiness that comes from the need to laugh—at one’s own misfortunes. To laugh because the only alternative is tears—and tears mean defeat. Only pioneers laugh in the primitive fullness of the sense. No one in the Keeps in those days had so much as heard real laughter in its cruelty and courage, except perhaps the very eldest among them, who remembered earlier days.
Sam Reed along with the rest accepted the Free Companions—extinct almost as Old Earth’s dinosaurs, and for much the same reason—as the epitome of glamorous romance. But he understood the reasons behind that emotional acceptance, and could jeer at himself for doing it. It was not Free Companionship but free endeavor which, in the last analysis, enchanted them all.
They didn’t want it, really. It would have terrified and repelled most of these people who so gracefully collapsed into the arms of anyone willing to offer them moral and mental support. But nostalgia is graceful too, and they indulged themselves in it to the full.
Sam read of the pioneer days on Venus with a sort of savage longing. A man could use all of himself against an adversary like the ravening planet the newcomers had fought. He read of Old Earth with a burning nostalgia for the wider horizons it had offered. He hummed the old songs over to himself and tried to imagine what a free sky must have looked like, terrifyingly studded with the visible worlds of space.
His trouble was that his world was a simple place, made intricate only artificially, for the sake of intricate intrigue, so that one couldn’t hurl oneself wholeheartedly into conflict against a barrier—because the barrier was artificial and would collapse. You had to support it with one hand while you battered it with the other.
The only thing that could have offered Sam an opponent worthy of his efforts was time, the long, complex stretch of centuries which he knew he would never live. So he hated men, women, the world, himself. He fought them all indiscriminately and destructively for lack of an opponent he could engage with in a constructive fight.
He fought them for forty years.
One pattern held true through all that time, though he recognized it only dimly and without much interest Blue was a color that could touch him as nothing else could. He rationalized that, in part, by remembering the stories of Old Earth and a sky inconceivably colored blue.
Here water hemmed one in everywhere. The upper air was heavy with moisture, the clouds above it hung gravid with moisture and the gray seas which were a blanket above the Keeps seemed scarcely wetter than clouds and air. So the blueness of that lost sky was one in his mind with the thought of freedom …
But the first girl he took in free-marriage was a little dancer from one of the Way cafes, who had worn a scanty costume of blue feathers when he saw her first. She had blue eyes, not so blue as the feathers or the unforgotten skies of Earth, but blue. Sam rented a little apartment for them on a back street in Montana Keep, and for six months or so they bickered no more than most domestic couples.
One morning he came in from an all-night job with the Sheffield gang and smelled something strange the moment he pushed the door open. A heavy sweetness in the air, and a sharp, thick, already familiar acridness that not many Keep men would recognize these effete days.
The little dancer lay slumped against the far wall, already stiffening in her slump. Where her face had been was a great palely tinted blossom whose petals gripped like a many-fingered hand, plastering the flower tight against her skull. It had been a yellow flower, but the veins in the petals were bright red now, and more red ran down beneath the blossom over the girl’s blue dress.
Beside her on the floor lay the florist’s box, spilling green tissue, in which someone had sent her the flower.
Sam never knew who had done it, or why. It might have been some enemy of his, taking revenge for past indignities, it might even have been one of his friends—he suspected the Slider for a while—afraid of the hold the girl was getting over him, to divert him from profitable business in the dark hours. Or it might have been one of the girl’s dancing rivals, for the bitterest sort of struggle went on constantly among people of that profession for the too-few jobs that were open just now in Montana Keep.
Sam made inquiries, found out what he wanted to know, and exacted dispassionate justice from people who may or may not have been guilty. Sam was not very concerned with that. The girl had not been a particularly nice girl in any sense, any more than Sam was a nice man. She had been convenient, and she had blue eyes. It was his own reputation Sam was upholding when he did what he did about her murder.
After that other girls came and went. Sam exchanged the little back-street apartment for a better one in a quieter neighborhood. Then he finished an exceptionally profitable job and forsook girl and apartment for almost elegant quarters high up in a tower looking out over the central Way. He found a pretty blue-eyed singer to share it with him.
By the time our story opens he had three apartments in three Keeps, one quite expensive, one average, and one deliberately chosen down among the port loading streets in the dimmest section of Virginia Keep. The occupants matched the apartments. Sam was an epicure in his own way. By now he could afford to be.
In the expensive apartment he had two rooms sacred to his privacy, stocked with a growing library of books and music, and an elaborate selection of liquors and drugs. This was not known among his business associates. He went here by another name and was generally supposed to be a commercial traveler from some unspecified but distant Keep. It was as close as Sam Reed could come to the life Sam Harker would have led by rights.
The Queen of Air and Darkness
Begins to shrill and cry,
O young man, O my slayer,
Tomorrow you shall die …
On the first day of the annual carnival which ushered in the last year of Sam Reed’s life, he sat across a small, turning table and spoke practically of love and money with a girl in pink velvet. It must have been near noon, for the light filtering down through the Sea of Shallows and the great dome of the Keep fell at its dim maximum upon them. But all clocks were stopped for the three-day Carnival so that no one need worry about time.
To anyone not reared from childhood upon such phenomena as a merry-go-round cafe, the motion of the city around Sam would have been sickening. The whole room turned slowly to slow music within its transparent circular walls. The tables turned each upon its own axis, carrying a perimeter of chairs with it Behind the girl’s soft cloud of hair Sam could see all of the Keep spreading out and out below them and wheeling solemnly in parade past his unheeding vantage point.
A drift of colored perfume floated past them in a long, airy ribbon lifted and dropped by the air currents, Sam felt tiny spatters of scented moisture beading his face as the pink fog drifted past. He dispelled it with an impatient fanning of the hand and narrowed his eyes at the girl across from him.
“Well?” he said.
The girl smiled and bent her head over the tall, narrow, double-horned lyre, streaming with colored ribbons, which she
embraced with one arm as she sat there. Her eyes were gentian blue, shadowed with lashes so heavy she seemed to look up at him through them from black eyes.
“I have another number in a minute,” she said. “I’ll tell you later.”
“You’ll tell me now,” Sam declared, not harshly as he would have spoken to most other women, but firmly. The expensive apartment, high up at the exclusive peak of the Keep residential section, was vacant just now, and if Sam had his way this girl would be the next dweller there. Perhaps a permanent dweller. He was aware of an uneasy stir in his mind whenever he thought of Rosathe. He didn’t like any woman to affect him this deeply.
Rosathe smiled at him. She had a small, soft mouth and a cloud of soft dark hair cut short and haloed all over her head like a dark mist. There was unexpected humor in her face sometimes, a rather disconcerting intelligence behind the gentian eyes, and she sang in a voice like the pink velvet of her gown, a small soft plaintive voice that brushed the nerves with pleasant tremors.
Sam was afraid of her. But being Sam Reed, he was reaching for this particular nettle. He dealt with danger by confronting it, and if there was any way of getting this velvety creature out of his mind, it would be through surfeit, not by trying to forget her. He proposed to surfeit himself, if he could, as soon as possible.
Rosathe plucked one string of the lyre with a thoughtful forefinger. She said, “I heard something interesting on the grapevine this morning. Jim Sheffield doesn’t like you any more. Is it true, Sam?”
Sam said without heat, “I asked you a question.”
“I asked you one.”
“All right, it’s true. I’ll leave you a year’s income in my will if Jim gets me first—is that what you’re after?”
She flushed and twanged the string so that it disappeared in violent vibration. “I could slap you, Sam Reed. You know I can earn my own money.”
He sighed. She could, which made it rather more difficult to argue with her. Rosathe was a more than popular singer. If she came to him it wouldn’t be for the money. That was another thing that made her dangerous to his peace of mind.
The slow music which had been matching the room’s slow turns paused. Then a stronger beat rang through the air, making all the perfume drifts shiver. Rosathe stood up, hoisting the tall, narrow lyre against her hip.
“That’s me,” she said. “I’ll think it over, Sam. Give me a few days. I might be very bad for you.”
“I know you’ll be bad for me. Go sing your song. I’ll see you after Carnival, but not for an answer. I know the answer. You’ll come.”
She laughed and walked away from him, sweeping her hand across the strings and humming her song as she went. Sam sat there watching, seeing heads turn and faces light up in anticipation.
But before her song was finished, he got up and went out of the turning room, hearing behind him the velvety little voice diminishing in plaintive lament for a fabled Genevieve. Every note was delicately true as she slid up and down the difficult flats which gave the old, old song its minor wailing.
“Oh Genevieve, sweet Genevieve, the days may come, the days may go …” wailed Rosathe, watching Sam’s broad red-velvet back out of the room. When she had finished the song she went quickly to her dressing room and flipped the switch of the communicator, giving Sheffield’s call-signal.
“Listen, Jim,” she said rapidly when his dark, scowling face swam into the screen. “I was just talking to Sam, and …”
If Sam could have listened, he probably would have killed her then, instead of much later. But, of course, he didn’t hear. At the moment the conversation began, he was walking into an important coincidence which was a turning point in his life.
The coincidence was another woman in blue. Sauntering down the moving Way, she lifted an arm and threw the corner of her filmy blue robe over her hair like a veil. The motion and the color caught Sam’s eye, and he stopped so suddenly that men on both sides jolted into him, and one turned with a growl, ready to make a quarrel out of it. Then he got a better glimpse of the granite face, long-jawed, with lines of strain etched from nose to mouth, and for no clear reason turned away, giving up the idea.
Because the image of Rosathe was still vivid in his mind, Sam looked at the woman with less enthusiasm than he might have shown a few days earlier. But deep in his mind buried memories stirred and he stood motionless, staring. The breeze of the sliding Way rippled the veil above her face so that shadows moved in her eyes, blue shadows from the blue veil in the heavily shadowed blue of her eyes. She was very beautiful.
Sam brushed aside a haze of pink carnival perfume, hesitated—which was not normal to him—and then hitched his gilded belt with a gesture of decision and went forward with the long motion of a stride, but his feet falling softly, as was his habit. He didn’t know why the woman’s face and her violet-blue robe disturbed him. He had forgotten a great deal since the long-ago Carnival when he saw her last.
At Carnival there are no social barriers—in theory. Sam would have spoken anyhow. He came up below her on the sliding street and looked unsmilingly into her face. On a level she would have been taller than he. She was very slender, very elegant, with a look of graceful weariness much cultivated in the Keep. Sam could not know that she had set the style, or that with her weariness and grace were native, not assumed.
The blue robe was wrapped tight over a tighter sheath of flexible gold that gleamed through the filmy blue. Her hair was an extravagant cascade of blue-black ringlets drawn back from her lovely, narrow face and gathered through a broad gold ring at the crown of her head, so that they fell free from the band in a rich cascade to her waist.
With deliberate barbarism her ears had been pierced, and she wore a hooped gold bell through each lobe. It was part of the current fad that aped the vitality of barbarism. Next season might see a gold ring through the nose, and this woman would wear one with the same air of elegant disdain she turned now upon Sam Reed.
He ignored it. He said in a voice of flat command, “You can come with me now,” and he held out his crooked arm shoulder-high before him, in invitation.
She tilted her head back slightly and looked at him down her narrow nose. She may have been smiling. It was impossible to tell, because she had the same full, delicately curved mouth so many Egyptian portrait heads once had, with the smile implicit in the contour of the lips. If she did smile, it was in disdain. The heavy waterfall of her ringlets seemed to pull her head farther back on the delicate slender neck, so that she look down on Sam partly in weariness, partly in scorn, partly in sheer contempt for him as he was.
She stood for a prolonged moment, looking at him down her nose, so still the bells in her pierced ears did not jingle.
For Sam, at first glance merely a squat plebeian like the rest of the lower classes, at second glance offered many contrasts to the discerning eye. He had lived nearly forty years now with his all-devouring anger; if he had come to terms with it, it consumed him inwardly all the same. The marks of that violence were on his face, so that even in repose he looked like a man straining against heavy odds. It gave a thrust and drive to his features which went far toward redeeming their heaviness.
The fact that he had no hair was another curious thing. Baldness was ordinary enough, but this man was so completely hairless that he did not seem bald at all. His bare skull had a classical quality, and hair would look anachronistic now upon the well-shaped curve of his head. Much harm had been done the infant of forty years past but in some haste and with some carelessness, because of the Happy-Cloak, so that things remained like the well-shaped ears set close against a well-shaped skull, and the good lines of the jaw and neck, which were Harker lines in essence, though well disguised.
The thick neck was no Harker neck, vanishing into a gaudy crimson shirt. No Harker would have dressed even for Carnival in crimson velvet from head to foot, with a gilded belt supporting a gilded holster. And yet, if a Harker had put this costume on—somehow, subtly, this is the way a Harker w
ould have looked in it.
Thick-bodied, barrel-chested, rolling a little with a wide stride when he walked, nevertheless there was in Sam Reed a full tide of Harker blood that showed in subtle ways about him. No one could have said why or how, but he wore his clothes with an air and moved with an assurance that was almost elegance in spite of the squat-ness which the upper classes so scorned.
The velvet sleeve fell back from his proffered arm. He stood there steady, holding the crooked forearm out, looking up over it at the woman with his eyes narrowed, steel-color in his ruddy face.
After a moment, moved by no impulse she could name, the woman let her lips tuck in at the corners in an acknowledged smile, disdainful, condescending. She moved one shoulder to shrug her robe aside and stretched out a slender arm and a very slender, small-boned hand with plain, thick gold bands pushed down well at the base of every finger. Very delicately she laid the hand on Sam Reed’s arm and stepped down beside him. On that thick forearm, hazed with red hair, the muscles interlacing in a hard column toward the wrist, her hand looked waxen and unreal. She felt the muscles tighten beneath her touch, and her smile grew even more condescending.
Sam said, “Your hair wasn’t black the last time I saw you at Carnival.”
She gave him an aloof glance down her delicate thin nose. She did not yet trouble herself to speak. Sam looked at her unsmilingly, inspecting her feature by feature as if this were some portrait and not a breathing, disdainful woman who was here beside him only by a precarious whim.
“It was yellow,” he said finally, with decision. The memory was clear now, wrenched out of the past in almost complete detail, so that he realized how vividly it must have impressed him at the time. “That was—thirty years ago. You wore blue on that day, too. I remember it very well.”
The woman said disinterestedly, her head turned aside so that she seemed to be addressing someone at her other shoulder, “That was my daughter’s daughter, I expect.”
It jolted Sam. He was well aware of the long-lived aristocracy, of course. But he had never spoken directly to one before. To a man who counts in decades his own life and those of all his friends, the sudden impact of a life that spans centuries unimpaired must strike a disconcerting blow.
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