by John Brunner
Vykor had often reflected that Waystation was like a living organism—in a dozen different ways. For one thing, it was virtually self-running, self-repairing, self-programming. It had attended to all its own wants for no one knew how many thousands of years before the first tentative explorers from Glai had come out here in slow ion-drive ships, before they developed faster-than-light drive. It was largely chance that had given the Glaithes their precedence here. They had been within a mere half light-year of Waystation when they achieved space flight, and although the Pags and Cathrodynes had both launched their first man-carrying ships at about the same time, they had had to wait for hyperdrive before they could come this far along the Arm.
Waystation resembled a living creature in another respect: It had a kind of metabolism, in which the part of corpuscles was played by human beings. Sometimes an injection from outside—a new Carthrodyne general with aggressive tendencies, a new loud-mouthed Pag—threatened to upset the delicate balance, and a kind of fever resulted. Then the Glaithes, the white corpuscles of the system, had to iron out the imbalance.
Something about the way Raige had acted made Vykor feel that this was one of those times.
And Lang looked as though he was going to be the foreign organism.
Usually Vykor was glad to get away after reporting to Raige, to enjoy the company of the free Majkos in the Majko section of the station for a few precious days before he had to report back for duty at the ship. And he always begrudged the occasions—once every four trips—when he had to stand watch between docking and blast-off.
Today, however, was altogether different. He felt no urge to go in among his Majko friends—those odd people of a halfworld, owing allegiance to Majkosi as their home, but forever confined to Waystation because they had revolted against Cathrodyne rule and would never be able to go home until Majkosi was set free. Here they were under Glaithe protection, though even that sometimes failed. Elsewhere, they were doomed.
They were always half ashamed and half eager to seek the company of a Majko from outside—a member of a ship’s complement, a servant attached to the Cathrodyne staff, or, very rarely, a popular entertainer whose talent had lent him temporary immunity from Cathrodyne decrees and who was brought to Waystation to amuse his masters. They were eager because they were all permanently homesick, no matter how much they strove to conceal the fact under a superficial garb of flippancy; they were ashamed because they had achieved security for themselves at the cost of losing their chance to help in the struggle against the overlords at home. It was the same in the Lubarrian section, and in the Alchmid section; between them there was a sort of kinship, the fellowship of the condemned.
But Vykor knew that they tried to make up for their selfishness when they could; in fact, it was through Waystation’s colonies of free members of the subject races that the revolutionary movements on Lubarria and Majko were co-ordinated.
There were other couriers besides himself; there was no urgent task for him to do now until Raige gave him the answer to the dispatches he had delivered. He could go and relax with his friends, in comfort. And yet he lingered, when Raige and Indie let him go.
Pangs of hunger finally drove him to the Majko section’s restaurant, where the synthesizers—they too had been running since Waystation was abandoned by its builders—had been adjusted to their clients’ particular taste. He had chosen well as regards time; it was late evening on the local clocks, and there was no one present that he knew.
He took his order from the dispensers, presented his currency scrip for punching, and went across the hall to a table in an alcove where he would not be noticed. The low blue ceiling of the hall seemed somehow oppressive; the shiny white tables looked cold and impersonal; the squat chairs and stools were untidily arranged and irritated him in an indefinable way. He was in no mood for company; he realized that.
He was halfway through his meal when he raised his eyes from his plate to find a young man—in nondescript Majko leisure wear of drab cloth—sitting opposite him and staring at him fixedly. He held a mug of liquor in one hand, and his eyes were bright under bushy brows.
He was a stranger to Vykor, who therefore pointedly ignored him.
But the other wasn’t having any. After a period of silence he glanced around to make sure there was no one within earshot, and coughed mysteriously. “You’re Vykor, aren’t you?” he said.
“That’s right. And I came over to this comer to be alone.”
The other scowled. “Be alone later, if you like. Right now I have questions for you, and I want them answered.”
Vykor jerked his head upright and swallowed a mouthful of food. “You—” he began, and interrupted himself. The intruder had composed his hands into a casual-looking but meaningful pattern, leaving his mug standing aside on the table.
“My name’s Larwik,” said the stranger conversationally when he saw that Vykor recognized the symbol he had made. “You and I haven’t run into each other before because we’re in different ends of the movement. But we happen to need some information and advice, and you can give it to us and you happen by a stroke of luck to be involved with the movement already.”
“What is it you want to know?” said Vykor. He had been dimly aware that there was more to the revolutionary movement in the Cathrodyne empire than the limited area he had covered; he had, though, not the least idea what the responsibility of other branches might be.
“That’s all right,” said Larwik, picking up his mug again and waving it toward Vykor’s plate. “Eat your meal. I should prefer to talk alone with you, afterwards.”
He didn’t speak again, merely watched with his sharp, bright gaze as Vykor ate.
At length. Vykor found he could not force anything more into his reluctant belly; he shoved the plate aside and made to get up. “I’m ready,” he said.
"Fine,” murmured Larwik, and swigged, the last of his liquor before also getting up. “Over to the elevators, please.”
Vykor half suspected the kind of place to which he might be being taken even before he got into the car with Larwik and saw him press buttons on the selector—contriving to shield the exact combination with his body. So there were many other elevators, besides the one he took to Raige’s office from the reception hall, which went to peculiar places if one pressed the right combination of buttons. Where would this trip take him?
As it proved, not far—certainly within the confine of the Majko sector, if the car had obeyed normal physical laws during its trip. They spent only a moment waiting for the door to open, and they stepped out into a room with no other exit, a room as absolutely square as a box. Its walls were lined from floor to nearly ceiling level with rough-finished crates, and the floor was covered with tiny bits of dark brown, crisp stuff, like fallen leaves.
A slight stinging puzzled Vykor as he stepped out into the room; then he placed what it was: a static curtain, to keep dust from entering the elevator car.
Larwik waited until the car had been called to an errand on some other level, and then turned briskly to face Vykor. “Sit down,” he said, and hitched himself up on the only furniture available—a stack of the crate^.
Vykor copied him, sniffing. There was a pungent aroma in the air, which he couldn’t identify, but which seemed individual.
“Recognize it?” Larwik demanded after a pause. Vykor shook his head, and Larwik shrugged. “Well, tell you later, then—I suppose I’ll have to. Right now, I want that information you can give me.
“Who or what is this man Lang?”
Lang againl If the entire retinue of the Suprema of Pagr, every member of which was habitually able to wear out three Pag males before finally giving in and letting herself be ravished by a fourth, had descended on Waystation, it would hardly have caused more impact than the coming of this one man. Vykor counter-questioned.
“I’I1 tell you what I know—which isn’t much—but first, please tell me: what’s special about him? My Glaithe contact wants to know about him; everyone seems to be inte
rested.” Larwik bit his lower lip thoughtfully. “Is that so, now?” he said. “News has already been round the station about him—but we put it down to the fact that he’s out of eye- range, and was therefore a distinguished visitor. At least, we hoped that that was all it was due to. It could have been due to something rather disastrous.”
“Such as what?”
Larwik hesitated. “All right,” he said at last. “I’ll have to tell you anyway, I guess.” He bent to one side and slipped the lid off one of the crates. Underneath was a mass of short brown twigs, with little needle-leaves on them, packed tightly together. At once the smell grew stronger.
Larwik pulled out one of the twigs with extreme care and handed it over for Vykor to inspect. “Don’t know what it is, huh?” he said.
Vykor shook his head.
“It’s dream weed,” said Larwik succinctly. “Our stock in trade.”
“Now see here!” said Vykor, getting up with his face white. “I don’t know what the hell you’re playing at, but if there’s dreamweed mixed up in it I want out—and quickly!” Larwik waited, unmoved. “What do you know about dreamweed, anyway?” he said. “You didn’t recognize it.”
"I’ve seen enough of its effects not to like it,” said Vykor harshly. “Those poor devils you get over in the Alchmid section sometimes—who’ve run away from their Pag slave- masters under the influence, and who die by inches because their supply has been withdrawn.”
“Not any more,” said Larwik levelly. “We keep them supplied, out of charity. They got us the stuff in the first place, you see—risked their lives to snitch seed-pods and smuggle them in.”
“But . . . but what the hell for?” exploded Vykor. “What do you want to soil your hands with it for?”
“The Pags use it to keep the Alchmids tamed,” said Larwik. “It’s the most powerful hallucinant and intoxicant we know. It’s habit-forming as hell; addicts will pay everything they have in the galaxy for a shot when they’re really strung out.” He paused. “The Cathrodynes are really getting worried about the number of addicts they’re getting these days. It’s a very profitable business, Vykor—and it puts Cathrodyne money in our pockets.”
Slowly Vykor relaxed. “I don’t like it,” he said grudgingly. “But . . . okay, it’s a logical idea. I’d rather see the Alchmids giving it back to the Pags, because bad as they are the Cathrodynes never did anything like that to us.”
“They did to the Lubarrians,” said Larwik. “Seen that fat slob of a chaplain that’s been dumped on them this time? To infect them with that phoney creed was near as bad as dreamweed.”
“I’ll give you that,” said Vykor reluctantly. “Okay— you wanted to know about this man Lang.”
He couldn’t add anything to what he had told Raige; he did not even have a new theory to account for Lang’s presence in Glaithe-reserved territory. And the whole affair mystified Larwik.
“Maybe he’s genuine, then,” Larwik said thoughtfully. “Or —no, he can’t be, because he knows his way around the station too well, on your showing. Or . . . You see, I was afraid he might be a Cathrodyne plant—a real stranger, bought for the occasion, or a ringer near-perfectly disguised, whose job was to make like a susceptible tourist eager to try all the sights and entertainments and splashing money around everywhere. If such a character really did come here, we might be tempted to offer him a shot of dreamweed and milk him till his purse was dry. Shove him on an outgoing ship and who’s the wiser when his withdrawal symptoms kill him? That’s the way Cathrodynes work, anyway . . . This Ferenc who came in with you is a spy for sure, but he’s mixed up in Cathrodyne-Pag high politics, and not in anything as incidental as tracing a source of drug addiction.”
“Do the Glaithes know about this?” queried Vykor.
“Know?” said Larwik in tones of high amusement, getting off his stacked crates and stretching uncomfortably. “Where do you think we grow the stuff? They gave us a whole bank of hydroponic tubes to play with. Of course they know! They practically pushed us into it.”
“Oh. If they objected, Lang might have been a plant from them, but since they don’t . . Vykor frowned. “Who the—?”
VIII
There was a long pause. Finally Larwik went over to the elevator door again and pushed the call button. “I should dearly like to introduce Dardaino to dreamweed,” he said in a meditative tone as he waited for the car to arrive. “But I don’t think I can risk it. If the Cathrodynes discovered that the source of their trouble was here at Waystation I expect the Glaithes would have to disown us and pretend they never knew a thing about it. Maybe we could rig it indirectly, by having him invited to the Alchmid section; no one would be surprised to find dreamweed there, because half of the poor devils are only kept alive by what they can get of it . . .”
He interrupted himself as the car stopped at their level. “You realize, of course, that all this is under the usual precautions of secrecy?”
Stiffly, Vykor said, “I’ve done thirty-odd trips as a courier, and haven’t fallen down yet.”
“All right, all right,” said Larwik good-humoredly. “No offense—just a reminder.” He ushered his companion into the elevator car and slid the door shut.
“By the way,” he added, as they began to rise, “whatever you find out about Lang—we want to know, as well as Raige.”
“I’ll do what I can,” Promised Vykor. But even as he said the words, he knew that he was going to find it difficult even to fulfil that half-hearted undertaking.
There were a dozen incidental problems that could make life complicated aboard Waystation. Time, for instance. The Glaithe staff operated an arbitrary “day” which was in fact tolerable for members of all races here, and divided it into neither “night” nor “morning” nor “evening.” They had to work the clock round, by shifts.
With fine disregard of everyone else’s convenience, the Pag staff insisted on using their own Planetary Mean Time— which coincided with the Glaithe Station Time about once in three hundred days. And somehow (no one had ever been able to see why) the three subject races—Majkos, Lubarrians and Alchmids—each seemed to have chosen a different shift of the arbitrary day to serve as “night.”
Now it was nearly midnight here in the Majko section. In the Alchmid section bleary-eyed drug victims would be reaching out with shaking hands for the dreamweed extract which alone permitted them to face a new day. And in the Lubarrian quarters “dusk” was just setting in.
To complete the chaos, the Cathrodynes mostly possessed a talent for cat-napping, and made do with a mere three hours’ sleep per “day”, catching up the rest at odd moments. As for the tourists rich enough to holiday here, they cared nothing for time and rioted on until they dropped with exhaustion.
Neutrality and tolerance, Vykor said to himself in a fit of sudden weariness, had their points. But sometimes they bred confusion.
Not being Cathrodyne, he needed regular sleep, and here in the Majko section it was getting dark—literally; the wall and ceiling illuminations were dimming everywhere, and would remain dim until eight hours hence. Vykor found himself yawning reflexively as he parted from Larwik and made his slow way to his quarters, head bowed in deep thought.
Lang . . . Larwik had said that news about the arrival of someone from out of eye-range had gone round the station. One would normally expect a curiosity like this to be taken up by tourists in the recreation areas, feted, wined and dined and in general lionized. Vykor, though, didn’t think Lang would enjoy that sort of treatment. And he didn’t doubt the man’s ability to avoid it without seeming impolite.
Nonetheless, he would have to look along the tourist circuit in the “morning.” As a stranger to Waystation (or was he?), Lang would certainly want to see that, at least. And moreover, that was the truly neutral part of the station; no one had any authority there, not even the Glaithes. It was to them a bottomless pool of money—Pag money, Cathrodyne money, and even Glaithe money.
Nearest the hull: machinery. Inc
redible devices that turned incident radiation into energy in usable form—including matter. And, of course, dock facilities, reception halls, and the rest.
Next: quarters, living facilities, offices assigned to the various staffs, service areas of all conceivable kinds.
And in the center—or rather, surrounding the center, like a shell of vacancy—the tourist area.
Vykor dropped down Chute Number Gold nervously. Today Chute Number Platinum was nearer the Majko section, but no Majko could afford to enter that chute, let alone Number Radium. Vykor wore his ordinary drab leisure clothes as a hint to concessionaires that he was not by intention a customer.
A hundred iridescent yellow bubbles soared up the chute to burst around his feet. What had the builders set aside this area for? Purely as a recreation center for the vessel’s original passengers? In that case, their journey must have been an incredibly long one—or they were incredibly hard to keep amused.
Music swelled around him. One note that was struck seemed to make the very bone of his cranium resonate; it filled his brain with confusion and his eyes with tears. He caught at the side of the chute for an instant, to recover, and a boy and girl in their teens dived past him, yelling and laughing as they plunged head first toward the end of the chute. They were Glaithes, both of them; they had been to the station at least twice before, because every Glaithe child had to know about Waystation, had to think, dream, live Waystation in all its aspects so that the iron grip of Glai should not loosen.
No; correction: Not an iron grip. A grip like gravity, permitting certain movements, forbidding escape.
The chute widened, and the drop came to its end with a mist of purple perfume and a chiming of bronze gongs. Vykor felt his sandals sink a few inches into a firm but yielding floor, steadied himself by stretching out his arms like a tightrope walker, and looked around.
Today, Chute Number Gold led to the Plains, it seemed. A rolling expanse ahead of him seemed endless: blue-green under an arched blue ceiling like an open sky. This was the calmest area of the tourist circuit.