Sign of the Labrys

by Margaret St. Clair

  “Sit down there,” she said. She was unsmiling. “There are things I must do before I can help you through.”

  I looked at the chair. Straps and… “Suppose I refuse?” I asked.

  “Then you can hunt the exit yourself.” She laughed. “You’ll never find it. Or any of the others, as far as that goes.”

  “But what are you going to do to me?”

  “If I told you ahead of time,” she said, “it wouldn’t work.” She hesitated. “There isn’t anything else I can do,” she said at last. “Sit down.”

  The atmosphere impressed me as sinister, and yet I felt confidence in her. I seated myself on the hard leather pad of the chair, and she stooped and buckled the straps around my legs.

  “Now your arms.” She fastened the straps there too.

  “I feel pretty helpless,” I said, trying to speak as if it were a joke.

  “You have to be,” she answered.

  I was buckled down. She went over to the enameled table and busied herself with something. At last she turned around.

  What she was holding in her hands surprised me. I don’t know exactly what I had been expecting—a hypodermic needle, perhaps, or a surgical knife. But what she had was something that would have been at home on a woman’s dressing table—an ordinary looking glass. The frame and handle were of chased silver.

  She walked over to me and held it in front of my face. “What do you see?” she asked.

  “My own face.”

  “How does it look?”

  “Lopsided.” This was true. “And I’m sweating more than I thought I was.”

  “Umm.” She put the glass down. She chewed her lip for a moment. Then she got an ampoule from a cabinet in the corner. She broke it under my nose.

  “Breathe in deep,” she said tonelessly, “Hold it in your lungs.”

  I obeyed. The substance in the ampoule was aromatic, like camphor, and spicy, like pine. But it smelled bitter too.

  “How do you feel now?” she asked after I had breathed normally a few times.

  “All right… I wish you’d get further away.”

  “Why?” she asked without moving.

  “I don’t—I don’t want you near me. Please go further away.”

  Deliberately she advanced a step toward me. I gave a kind of grunt and shrank back against the wood of the chair.

  “Go away,” I said between my teeth.

  “How do I make you feel?”

  “I can’t stand you. You—Please get away. If I could, I’d kill you. You’re torturing me.”

  She had come closer. She was standing over me. Her face swam before my eyes.

  I strained against the straps, as if I were trying to get out through the back of the chair. “Go away,” I begged her desperately. “Get further off.”

  “If I were to touch you?”

  “I’d—Don’t. Don’t.”

  She smiled very faintly. Gently she laid her small hand over mine.

  It was as if she had reached through my flesh and plucked directly at my nerves. I could feel the touch running, red-hot and agonizing, through my cringing body. It spared nothing. Wherever the paths of nerve impulses ran, there was pain.

  I think I cried out. I was sobbing and gasping for breath. Then darkness welled up from inside my skull and covered my eyes.

  When I came to, she was unbuckling the last of the straps. It seemed to me that she was paler than she had been, and that her forehead was beaded with sweat.

  “How do you feel now?” she asked.

  “Better. But I still wish you’d go away.”

  She nodded. “The drug I had you inhale,” she said, “intensifies the usual repulsion people have felt toward each other since the plague. Of course it has other properties, too.”

  She fetched the looking glass again. “What do you see this time?” she asked as she held it in front of me.

  “A fog. Now it’s clearing… A naked man pursued by stags.”

  “Where is he?”

  “Behind me. In the mirror. In my head… They aren’t stags, they’re dogs. They’re catching up—”

  “Who is the man?” she broke in. “Do you know him?”

  “I’ve never seen—Yes, yes I do. He’s Sam Sewell. He’s myself.”

  “You’re ready to go through, I think,” she announced. She tossed the mirror over on the padded couch. “Lean on my shoulder,” she said. “You’ll be weaker than you expect.”

  She helped me out of the chair and over to the autoclave. I was as weak as if I were recovering from a long illness, and was no more ashamed to lean on her small shoulder than an invalid would have been. From her dark sleek hair a perfume, of roses and some brisker scent, came to my nose.

  We stood in front of the autoclave. “Your promise,” she said. “Before I put you through.”

  “All right. What must I promise?”

  “You are going to Despoina. When you come back, you must help me up through the levels.”

  “To the surface?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why don’t you just go? There’s nothing stopping you from going up.”

  She gave me an oblique glance. “There is, though. Promise you’ll help.”

  I didn’t see why I shouldn’t promise. “All right, I will.”

  She let her breath out slowly, as if she had been holding it.

  She pressed on a pedal on the floor. The autoclave opened. “In with you,” she said. “In the opening of the autoclave.”

  “In that?”

  “Yes. It’s not hot. Put your arms and shoulders in. I’ll lift your legs.”

  The picture she brought up was so comic that I gave a weak chuckle. I looked at her, and sobered. She was obviously not amused.

  “It’s the only way out of this level that I know,” she said, “and you’d be unlikely to get out that way except that I’ve processed you. What I did was partly physical and partly psychological. If you wait much longer, it will wear off. And then there won’t be anything I can do.”

  “But—it’s just an autoclave. A big one. But it doesn’t go anywhere.”

  “It goes to level G. Don’t argue so. Doesn’t your name mean anything? You’re acting like a fool.”

  “But—”

  “The longer you wait, the more dangerous it is. Hurry! I’m not deceiving you.”

  She was plainly sincere. I hesitated a fraction of a second longer and then put my head and shoulders in the opening of the autoclave.

  Behind me I felt her lifting my legs. For such a small girl, she was unexpectedly strong. I couldn’t see anything, but there seemed to be a current of air blowing.

  “Move forward with your arms!” she said. She was shoving me forward, rather as if I were a pencil she was feeding into a sharpening machine.

  I obeyed. There was a tinny crash; my head seemed to have struck against something. It gave, and I felt myself sliding head downward on a steepening plane.

  “Remember your promise!” she called behind me. “Keep your arms over your head and try to relax. My name’s Kyra. Remember me.”

  I tried to make some answer, to call something. But my lungs could get no air. My body accelerated in the narrow dark.

  6

  A bird was singing. I heard the notes—metallic, repetitive, insistent—remotely for a long time before they roused me from my stupor. But at last I raised my head and sat up. I wondered where I was.

  The surface under me was soft; I looked and saw grass. Over my head there was an arching tracery of branches and green leaves. I was sitting between two trees, in a sort of grove. A light, pleasant breeze ruffled my hair.

  My head was aching violently; I was tempted to lie down again. Where was I? Certainly not on the surface; there are no trees there—I haven’t seen a tree, let alone grass, for at least ten years. This must be level G. But how had I got here? I couldn’t remember anything between Kyra’s pushing me into the accelerating darkness and my hearing the song of the bird.

  I turn
ed slightly and looked around me. The motion made my head throb, and I let out a groan. The bird, which had been silent since I sat up, must have been alarmed by this. At any rate, it gave a sort of squawk and flew away. I caught a glimpse of it; it was a small, rusty-looking bird.

  Yes, this must be level G. But what a spacious level, to have room spent on a grove of trees, to have birds in a sort of park! I held my head for a moment longer. Then I struggled to my feet.

  I couldn’t see any sign of how I had got here. The grove seemed to go on and on. The “sky” was well-lighted and blue.

  I walked a few feet and then clutched at one of the trees for support. My headache was coming in waves, each more ferocious than the last. Abruptly I leaned forward and vomited.

  There wasn’t much in my stomach, but when I had finished I felt better. I was still holding onto the tree—some sort of birch—when I saw a girl coming toward me.

  She was wearing a white blouse with ruffled puffed sleeves and a very low neckline—so low that it cleared her nipples by no more than half an inch. The lower part of her costume was a pair of extremely short, extremely tight black velvet shorts. On her feet she was wearing gilded sandals whose straps were laced about her legs halfway to her knees, in the manner of ballet slippers. It was a style of dressing I remembered having seen on the surface some ten years ago, just before the plagues began. But the necklines on the blouses had been higher then.

  Her hair was a glossy black, with a flower like a red hibiscus stuck in it, and her mouth had been painted a brilliant red. There was nothing dull about her coloring, and yet, for all that, she gave an impression of something faded, like a length of cloth whose color has been bleached by time and light. Her figure was bosomy and hippy, but her knees belonged on a skinny woman.

  “Hello,” she said. “You’ve killed the grass. I saw a man do that once before. You must be from topside.” She had a childish, affected way of speaking that was rather attractive and at the same time rather irritating.

  I looked behind me, following the direction of her gaze. It was true, the grass where I had been lying was withered and pale. At once my fears of what I might be carrying revived.

  “Keep away from me,” I told her. “I’m a vector of plague.”

  She gave a giggle. “Don’t worry about that,” she said. “You couldn’t infect me with anything. I’ve been immunized against all possible plague strains. We’re important people down here, you know.”

  “But—I killed the grass.”

  She shrugged. “It’s not very healthy grass anyway. You probably have some yeast spores on your clothes that bothered it. It’ll be fixed. How’s the war?”

  “What war?” I asked blankly.

  “The war that was going on when they sealed this level off, stupid. The war that started when the enemy released the spores of the plagues.”

  This was so different from what had actually happened that I could only stare at her. The plagues had begun near one unfortunate laboratory in Newark, had spread out across the country, killing nine people out of ten, and crossed the oceans via the airliners to Europe and the rest of the world. The “enemy” had had nothing to do with it. The latest news anybody had had of people in other countries was at least five years old, but they had been said to be suffering quite as much as we were. Presumably they had been reduced to the same sort of parasitism and disunion as we had.

  “There isn’t any war,” I said at last.

  “You mean it’s been settled? Nonsense! They’d have come down and told us it was over. Or are you a spy?”

  There was no use arguing with her; I felt desperate.

  “I’m not a spy,” I said. “I’m only trying to get through to the level below this. I’m not interested in what’s going on here.”

  “Why do you want to go on down? It’s nice here. I mean, pretty nice.”

  For answer, I held out Despoina’s ring toward her. She looked at it critically.

  “That’s a funny picture,” she said at last. “It must be an antique.” She giggled again. “I wonder how I’d look in a dress like that.”

  Obviously Despoina’s passport was meaningless to her. “Do you know how to get out of this level to the next lower one?” I asked.

  “No; why would I? There’s nothing interesting down there,” she said with a pout. She pressed her thigh and shoulder against me. “I like you,” she said with artificial childishness. “You’re young and fresh. Different. New. I get so tired of the same old men and boys.”

  “Thanks… Doesn’t anybody on this level know how to get through to the one below?”

  “I don’t think so. A technician might. But there aren’t any technicians down here. They aren’t important people—I mean, not like us.”

  We had been walking along while we talked, and I found myself still somewhat shaky and uncertain. Now we came to the edge of the grove of trees. A low, large building was in front of us.

  It was a handsome structure, set on a slight elevation, with broad flights of steps approaching it. It was crowned by a flattish dome. People were going up and down the steps, the women dressed in variations of the costume my guide was wearing, the men in swim trunks or bermuda shorts.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  “The casino. Would you like to go there first?”

  “A casino? Do you have gambling here?”

  “Oh, yes. Roulette, chemin de fer, chuckaluck. But it gets tiresome playing for money,” she confided. “There’s nothing to buy with it. So sometimes we girls play for ourselves. We stake ourselves for a month, or a week, or something like that.”

  “What happens if you lose?”

  “Then the house disposes of us for that length of tune. We have to do whatever they tell us to. It’s fun.”

  The social activities of level G seemed to be a cloak for something not far from prostitution. Still, it wasn’t any of my business. What I wanted was to get through to the level below.

  “Let’s skip the casino,” I said.

  “Well—we could go to the beach. It’s a nice beach,”

  “A beach? Here? This far underground?”

  “Oh, yes. With salt water and sand to sunbathe on. We even have tides. We’re important people here, you know.”

  She took my hand and tugged me along childishly. She seemed to have forgotten all about her worry that I might be a spy. Her palm was warm and moist, and a little sticky.

  “What’s your name?” I asked as we went along a graveled path.

  “Cindy Ann. Don’t you think it’s a pretty name? What’s yours?”

  “Uh-huh. Mine’s Sam.”

  “Sam.” She pronounced it with a faint lisp, so that it came out a little like Th-ham. “That’s a pretty name, Th-ham.”

  The sand began abruptly, about ten feet ahead. We plowed across it and down to the water. As Cindy Ann had said, it was indubitably a beach, though its whole extent was no more than a hundred and fifty feet. It had a slight inward curve, and at both ends it faded into clumps of shrubbery.

  “How far out does it go?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. It’s fixed so it looks as if there were miles of water. But nobody swims out more than fifty or sixty feet.”

  The sand was starred with sunbathers. Their costumes were the skimpiest I have ever seen—the men wore smallish plastic fig leaves, and the women made the old joke about “two Band-Aids and a cork” seem a reasonable description. They were all nicely tanned, but somehow, like Cindy Ann, they had a faded look. As I watched them I was struck by something odd in the scene, and suddenly I realized what it was. The sunbathers lay close to each other; the people on the steps of the casino had passed near each other without apparent distaste. In short, the inhabitants of level G seemed to have an old-fashioned ability to endure each other’s company.

  “Cindy Ann,” I said, “do you people here ever mind being near each other? Up on the surface, it bothers us to be with other people for more than a few minutes.”

  “I
could stand being with you for quite a long time,” she said. “Anyhow, all night.”

  Her amorous gestures were getting embarrassing. “Yeah. But doesn’t it ever bother you?”

  “Sometimes,” she said more soberly. “Sometimes we have to lock ourselves in our houses away from the others for days. But usually we take a euph pill, and then we like each other again.”

  “A euph pill? Like a tranquillizer?”

  “Oh, lots better. When you take a euph pill, you feel fine. Happy and relaxed. You like everybody, all the important people down here.”

  She had been holding my hand all this time. Now she turned it over and deliberately tickled my palm with her forefinger. She looked up at me inquiringly.

  “What’s the matter?” she asked after a moment. “Don’t you feel well?”

  “As a matter of fact, I don’t,” I answered. “My head aches, and my stomach is upset. Also, I want to get out of here.”

  “You need a euph pill,” she said. She fumbled in the waistband of her shorts and produced an infinitesimal pillbox. She opened it and took out a tiny pink pill, which she handed to me. “Take it,” she said, “and I’ll have one too. You’ll be surprised how good it’ll make you feel.”

  I looked at it dubiously. But I was feeling increasingly miserable physically; the pill might help me—and I was curious. I put the pill on my tongue and washed it down with a draught of the sulphurous-smelling water from my flask.

  She watched me interestedly. “We just swallow them dry,” she said, “they’re so small.” She opened her mouth and dropped one of the tiny pills down her throat. She smiled at me. “Let’s go sit in the bushes,” she said.

  She led me along the beach to where it faded into grass and shrubs. We walked inward until there was a wall of brush between us and the people on the beach. “Let’s sit down,” she said. “We can talk.” She giggled and rolled her eyes at me.

  I seated myself beside her. The euph pill must have been taking effect, for I was feeling much better. Cindy Ann seemed quite attractive—full of girlish, coltish charm.