Sign of the Labrys

by Margaret St. Clair

  I obeyed the first command, but I could not go to sleep. My mind was too full of questions and uncertainties. At last, after I had lain beside her for a long time, I said in a whisper, “Kyra, are you asleep?”

  “Not yet.”

  “What will you do when you get up to E?”

  “Stay there a few days, until F thaws out again. Then I’ll go back down. I’ve been stationed there.

  “You can stay above ground, Sam. You’ll be all right. I’ve done all I can for you.”

  Once more there was silence. The prospect she had outlined for me filled me with an odd dismay. The future without Kyra—what sort of a future would it be? And now I knew what this small girl meant in my life. She had returned the future to me as an object of speculation, even of hope. She had given my future back to me.

  I rolled toward her and took her in my arms. “Kyra,” I said, “let me go back with you when you go. Let me stay on F with you. If you have to stay there, I’ll stay. We’re close to each other already, darling. Already we’re half in love. We could be happy together, even on F. It’s an unpleasant place, but we’d be lovers, dear.”

  She had not resisted my embrace, but she had not yielded to it. “No,” she said softly. “I’m sorry, Sam.”

  I did not let her go. “Why not?” I said. “Don’t you feel close to me, too?”

  “Oh, yes. But there’s a reason why we can’t be lovers, Sam.”

  “What is it? Some sort of prohibition, like the one that makes you stay on F?”

  “No, not that… I’ll have to tell you. I’m your sister, Sam.”

  I let her go, and she rolled out of my arms. I half sat up, leaning on one elbow, and looked down at her. She looked up at me unwinkingly.

  “My sister? Are you sure? How long have you known?”

  “Yes, I’m sure. I’ve known since you first told me your name.”

  I sat up on the edge of the bunk, my head between my hands. Her tone had brought conviction to me. There would be explanations; she would tell me how this extraordinary thing could be possible.

  I did not doubt she had told me the truth. But now my future opened out blankly ahead of me.

  15

  I parted from Kyra, sadly and a little flatly, two days later on level E. In that interval we had done a lot of talking. She had told me the details of her begetting, as far as she knew them: she was certainly, if not my sister, my half-sister.

  My father—she knew his first name—had been sympathetic to the craft. Kyra’s mother, who had been of high enough rank to wear the ritual bracelet, had met him one May eve, and, as Kyra put it, “taken quite a shine” to him. May eve is one of the eight ritual occasions, and Kyra herself had been the not-unanticipated result.

  I hadn’t known my father was interested in the old worship, but it was perfectly possible; he had been killed in an freeway wreck while I was still a baby, and I had had no opportunity to learn what he was like. I tried to find out from Kyra whether the episode had antedated or postdated my parents’ marriage, but she was vague about the dates. She wasn’t, it seemed, quite certain how old she was. But she had been told her father’s name, and had always called herself Kyra Sewell.

  “Will F be thawed out now?” I asked as we stood at the head of the stairs in our leave-taking.

  “I think so. The disposal people will have cleaned up things by now. Sorensen’s monster ought to have been put out of business, that’s one comfort. But it’s going to be odd down there, with nobody on the level but myself.”

  “Do you have to go back, Kyra?” I asked. I disliked thinking of her, alone and essentially defenceless, in that enormous uncanny place.

  “Yes. I told you, I’ve been stationed here. Besides, I want to see if any of the fungi in my shop are still alive. But”—she gave me a quick smile—“I may not have to stay there much longer.

  “Good-bye.” She leaned forward and kissed me on both cheeks, like a pre-plague French general pinning a medal on somebody. She pressed my left hand. Then she turned and started down the stair to F.

  I watched her dark head descending until she was out of sight. Small, brave Kyra! I was proud to be related to her.

  I looked about me. Was I going to set up housekeeping again on one of the upper levels, or should I look about for a place to live outside? There would be plenty of vacancies above ground—the housing shortage has been solved in a way that Karl Marx, writing away in London on tracts and working for the revolution, would never have dreamed of. But it is rare to find a house or apartment where the water runs; and electric power, except near the FBY’s offices, has been off for years. Nobody keeps the generators running, you see.

  It would be more comfortable, certainly, to find another pad somewhere in the upper levels, but I decided I didn’t want any part of it. I was sick of the artificial, microcosmic world of the caves. It would be worth putting up with inconveniencies to have sunlight and air.

  I took the escalators up to the surface. It was a bright day, and I blinked like a mole as the light hit my eyes. The levels are well lighted, but the light isn’t the same as up above. Then I set out on my househunting.

  I found an apartment easily, on the second floor of a building that had been new when the plagues began. I thought the second floor would be a good choice because, if the roof leaked, there would be a couple of stories between me and the rain. I believe somebody was living on the ground floor, even though most of the windows were broken.

  My new domain was roomy, and far enough from where the bodies are being buried to be fairly quiet. But it was unspeakably dirty. The caves are clean, partly because the air supply is filtered and partly because of the robot cleaners. But here there was a ten-years’ accumulation of dust. It was so heavy and thick that it blurred the outlines of chairs and tables. It was like the furry scum that veils rocks at the bottom of a lake. But I was glad to be above ground again.

  I went to the supply closet to look for a duster. There was a vacuum cleaner there, and on impulse I plugged it in and pressed the switch. To my intense surprise, the machine began to hum obediently.

  The power was on. Somebody must be tending the generators again. But why? And who?

  There were a few cans in the cupboard, and I dined on chow mein and applesauce. I was used to better catering. Tomorrow or the next day I would visit the stockpiles and bring back some food,

  I went to bed early. Somehow, even though the power was on again, I was unwilling to turn on the lights and make known my presence.

  Next morning I walked over to where the bulldozers were working and climbed up to my seat on my old machine. Nobody seemed to have noticed my absence at all.

  At noon I asked Jim, the one fellow worker whose name I knew, whether he thought a man could have been put in a plastic disposal bag before he was dead and then have escaped from it. He answered that it was possible, but he thought it was mighty god-damned unlikely. When they were dead, they were dead.

  It was odd to observe how, while we were talking, he kept backing away from me, when I moved toward him. I could approach him without discomfort, but he wanted to get away from me. I don’t know whether he noticed it or not.

  The day went on, with me in the peaceful frame of mind I had experienced before when bulldozing. About mid-afternoon two FBY men went by, conspicuous in their neat plum-colored uniforms. They were walking side by side, closer than most people would have done. I had seen a lot of FBY men today—one by himself as I walked to work; three going past the bulldozers in the morning; and now these two going in the other direction. Usually they kept off the streets.

  On my way home from work, I made a detour to one of the stockpiles and picked up a couple of shopping bags full of delicatessen food. I knew the locations of at least eight stockpiles. Two of them were not in the levels system at all. The contents of the various stockpiles are quite individual—some run to one type of foodstuff and some to another—and the smallest of them would feel the city’s present population for more
than a hundred years.

  I ate my evening meal and went to bed early again. Before I fell asleep I felt an acute throb of longing for Kyra. Was she safe? F was an uncanny place. I wished we had agreed on some way to communicate with each other. But she had said she might not have to stay there much longer.

  My life began to settle into a routine. Daytimes I worked with the bulldozer (Jim tried to impress me into the night squad, but I turned him down), and in the evenings I read until it got dark and then went to bed. I still felt reluctant to turn on the lights in my apartment, and this forced an early bedtime. I thought of Kyra a good deal at first, and then less and less frequently. The future had ceased to occupy my mind at all.

  On the surface, it seemed that nothing had changed from what it had been before I had gone down so deep, hunting Despoina. And yet I was aware that much in myself was changing, and had changed. It was a time of preparation and silent growth.

  The first open change, though, came in the world about me. I had been above ground for a little more than two weeks when, going to my favorite stockpile for food on my way home from work, I found an armed man standing guard there. The shelves had been closed off by a metal gate.

  The fluors lit up his face. He wore a purple uniform, of a cut identical to those worn by the FBY men, but several shades darker in color, and his face was not an FBY face. It lacked the easy affability that was almost their trademark. And yet there was a thoroughly FBY look to him. As Kyra would have said, “It stuck out all over the place.”

  “Stop where you are,” he said sharply when he saw me. He had a rather high voice. “What do you want?”

  “I came for some food,” I answered. I indicated my brace of shopping bags.

  “Go register at the post office. They’ll give you a food card.” He grinned at me unpleasantly. “From now on you lazy bums are going to have to work.”

  I was silent for a moment. Should I tell him I was working? Certainly my exertions with the bulldozer could be considered work. But I didn’t think it was any of his business. Besides, I only worked for diversion and to keep from having to think.

  “What are we to work at?” I asked finally. “Nobody needs to work at making things. There’s enough in the piles to last for generations. And how can we work at regular jobs, when we can’t stand getting near each other?”

  “We’ll fix that,” he answered. “You’ll stand it when you get hungry enough.”

  He had spoken with great decision. But he involuntarily gave ground when I advanced a step toward him.

  “Who told you to stand guard there?” I asked him.

  “The government.”

  “What government?”

  “The new government.”

  Once more I moved toward him, and once more he backed away.

  “Get back,” he said sharply. I took another step toward him. The bullet hit the ground at my feet.

  “That’s a warning,” he said viciously. “Get on over to the post office. I’ll shoot higher next time.”

  I turned with what dignity I could muster and walked away with my empty shopping bags.

  As I plodded along I was thoughtful. The “new government” could only be the FBY, which had for a long time been the nearest thing to a government we had. Now it seemed to be reaching for overt power.

  Our society had ceased to exist because the ancient whip, hunger, could not be plied in the presence of abundance, and the ancient cement, love, could no longer operate. But if an artificial scarcity could be produced, hunger might drive us to endure each other again. We might loathe, and yet tolerate. And then we should once more live in a society.

  The FBY’s motives, of course, were thoroughly impure. They were not aiming at our benefit, but at their own dominance. And, since power is an appetite that grows with eating, they would soon want more.

  Well, it might not be too bad. It would probably take a considerable time, four or five years, before they began to arrogate the privileges of an elite to themselves openly. And they might never become overtly cruel.

  Certainly I disliked the idea. There was something painfully anti-climactic in reflecting that all the sufferings of the plague years, the deaths of nine-tenths of the population, our frozen isolation from each other—that all these miseries had served merely to put a watered-down version of a police state in power. But there wasn’t much I could do about it. They had the guns.

  I had been walking along slowly, while my shopping bags flapped windily around my knees. Now I realized that I was still hungry. My interview with the guard hadn’t filled my belly. What should I do, go to the post office to register?

  No, I wasn’t hungry enough for that yet. It would be a long time before I was. I’d try at another stockpile.

  The one I decided to try was really a stockpile of clerical supplies, with the foodstuffs added more or less as an afterthought, and for that very reason I thought the “new government” might have neglected to post a guard there. Cans of multi-purpose food, no matter how abundant, are not attractive except to a really hungry man.

  This pile was in a big warehouse, not far from the one where I had once moved boxes. It was a tedious walk. But when I got there and went inside an armed man was standing guard.

  He had the same high voice, the same tight face (did the FBY turn them out of a mold?), and the same purple uniform. And I had the same humiliating conversation with him I had had with the other guard.

  I had turned away and was about to leave, angry but impotent, when the outer warehouse door opened and a man came waddling in.

  His face was streaked with red and yellow paint, and he hopped like a duck. He wore a tattered crimson shirt and faded ocher trousers. In one hand he held a large stoppered Ehrenmeyer flask.

  He advanced toward us, singing. “Pillicock sat on pillicock hill, Halloo, halloo, loo, loo!” He stopped and licked his lips. “This cold night will turn us all to fools and madmen,” he said confidentially. He picked his nose.

  Both the guard and I had backed away from him, in our minds the same thought—that this Shakespearean lunatic was a Sower, and the flask in his hand held the seeds of plague.

  The guard said, “Go away, go to the post office,” in a trembling voice. He half-raised his gun, and then put it down again. He knew that if he shot the man, the flask in his hand might break.

  “Avaunt, you curs!” said the man in the crimson shirt. “I do not like the fashion of your garments.” He grinned wolfishly and shook the flask at us.

  I was frightened; in this moment I hardly remembered that I might be immune to plague. But the guard was terrified. As the man moved forward, singing something about pelican daughters, he stood for a moment trembling, and then turned and ran. His gun fell unheeded on the warehouse floor.

  He got to the door, fumbled with the knob, and threw the door open. I heard the receding thud of his feet.

  “Hey the doxy over the dale,” said the painted man in a normal voice. He pulled a handkerchief from his hip pocket and started wiping his face. The red and yellow streaks came off easily, like grease paint. Now that he had straightened up, I saw that he was considerably taller than I had first thought.

  “That’s one way of getting rid of them,” he said, nodding toward the open door. “The FBY people are all scared to death of Sowers and wild yeasts. Unfortunately, it isn’t permanent. He’ll be back in a couple of days, immunized up to the hilt and wearing a plague-proof suit. You’d better fill your bags while you have the chance.”

  I obeyed. When I came back from the shelves, my bags bulging with their insipid contents, he was still there. “Thanks a lot,” I said. “How did you happen to show up just then?”

  “Oh… Don’t you know me?”

  I looked at him carefully. I didn’t think I had ever seen him before. “No,” I said at last.

  “Ah,” he answered. He turned and walked toward the open door. “Don’t be too long about it,” he said over his shoulder. “There’s not much more time.”

>   “Too long about what?” I asked. But he was already outside, and didn’t turn back.

  Well, I had plenty of food. When I got back to my pad I opened a can of the stuff. There were still a few cans with tastier contents, but I thought I had better get used to this. After I had finished eating, I read for a while and then went to bed.

  I passed a restless night. I kept dreaming of Kyra, confused and disturbed dreams that were not quite nightmares. Somebody else was in the dreams, but I did not know who it was.

  On the job next morning, I kept wondering about the grease-painted man. Perhaps he was right, and I did know him. Where had I seen him before?

  Abruptly, about ten-thirty, when the blade of the bulldozer was pushing up a great wave of dirt, I realized what he had been talking about. I had seen him before, but he had been masked then. No wonder I hadn’t recognized him.

  He was the man with the horns who had scourged me on level H.

  I jumped down from the bulldozer seat. With this bit of knowledge, another, even more valuable, had come: I knew who she was and where she had been waiting for me so long. And I was impatient now.

  It didn’t take me long to get to the warehouse where I had worked for so many months, moving stacks of boxes around. The middle-aged woman in the office looked up as I came in.

  Our eyes met. There was no possible doubt.

  I walked toward her. Her lips had begun to curve in a smile. “Why did you make me go so deep to look for you, Despoina?” I said.

  16

  She pushed the desk chair aside and came toward me. She was smiling, the faint, mysterious smile of archaic art. She put her right hand on my shoulder. “Blessed be,” she said, and kissed me on the lips. “You had to find me as you did to be of use to me. Even the black-hilted sword must be forged.”

  I looked at her. Now that the confusion was gone from my eyes, I wondered that I could, even for a moment, have thought her middle-aged. It was partly a matter of make-up and partly a matter of acting. Despoina was an excellent actress, but there must have been a liberal dash of fith-fath for the illusion to be so complete. In actual fact she was, as I found out later, just two months younger than I myself.