by Ann Maxwell
“Don’t shout, boy,” she said calmly. “Makes them nervous. If they get too nervous, they’ll forget that a dead Treat isn’t much better than a stone, far as God’s concerned.”
“Your God likes Treats alive?”
“You’re learning,” she said, patting his arm. “An unwilling Treat is fewer points. A lot fewer.”
“Fewer points,” said Daemen helplessly.
Kirtn looked at Rheba and shrugged. If Daemen was going to handle the questioning, they would be a long time learning anything useful. For a graduate of Loo’s slave Pit, The Luck was remarkably innocent. “Fssa, translate without showing yourself.”
The Fssireeme hissed and changed shape within Rheba’s hair. As Kirtn spoke, the snake translated so quickly that it was like speaking and understanding the language yourself. Fssa even duplicated the voice of whoever was speaking at the time.
“Can this Treat slide a few words in?” asked Kirtn.
Daemen stared at the Bre’n who seemed to be speaking flawless Daemenite. With a hurt look, he turned to Rheba. She smiled reassuringly.
The red-haired scout leader waited. Every time she looked at the big Bre’n with the odd copper skin-fur, she smiled possessively. A very big Treat indeed.
“What does your God do with Treats?” asked Kirtn reasonably.
“It loves them. All zoolipts love Treats.”
Kirtn was tempted to ask how a zoolipt—whatever that was—loved its Treats, but he was afraid the woman would have an answer for that, too. “Does being . . . loved . . . by a God-zoolipt hurt?”
“Not if you’re willing.”
“The same could be said of rape,” Rheba observed acidly.
Fssa refrained from translating her comment. He had learned on Loo that a translator had better be a diplomat, too.
“What happens after this love feast?” asked Kirtn, straining to keep his voice down.
“Good eats for everyone,” said the woman enthusiastically. “Fat times and fancy flavors.”
“For everyone? Even the Treats?”
“Willing Treats,” corrected the woman.
“What happens to the willing Treats after the feast?”
“Same as everyone else. We eat, drink and fall in a shaval pile. We keep doing that until God gets bored. Then we have another Hunt.”
“Bored? Your God gets bored?”
The woman took on a long-suffering look. “You said a truth, Treat.”
Kirtn looked at Daemen.
“I don’t know any more about these barbarians than you do,'* said The Luck in Universal. “Not about their personal habits, anyway. Once we get inside their Installation, I’ll find some new technology, then go back to the tunnel and make a mover. Once the Seurs see what I have, they’ll be glad to take us back. Then these creatures can eat themselves into a coma for all I care.”
“Right,” said Kirtn in sarcastic Universal. “You just stroll into the Installation, technology drops into your hands and we’re home free.”
“Right,” said Daemen.
“You’re a stupid, arrogant—”
“Kirtn!” said Rheba, horrified.
The Bre’n shrugged. Calling Daemen names would not help. On the other hand, it would feel good.
“I’m not stupid,” began Daemen hotly, “and I’m not arrogant either! I’m The Luck!”
“Bad luck,” snapped Kirtn.
Daemen stared, too shocked to be angry. “But we survived! For thousands of years Seurs have tried to reach Square One. We walked over their bones—and we survived. Do you call that bad?”
Kirtn looked at his exhausted fire dancer and his own bloody hands. He sighed. “No, that’s not bad. And this,” he continued, staring at the group of Daemenites, “isn’t good. I don’t know about here, but where I came from we ate treats.”
Daemen’s laugh was as beguiling as a Bre’n whistle. “Don’t worry. Good Luck is with you. Whatever happens can’t be bad.”
“What are you yammering about?” demanded the woman, obviously tired of listening to noises she did not understand.*
Kirtn smiled lopsidedly at her. “He was just reminding me that he’s Good Luck.”
“Good for him,” she answered, unimpressed.
“And for his companions—I hope,” muttered the Bre’n. He drew a breath so deep it made his ribs ache. He sighed again. “We’re willing Treats. Now what?”
The Daemenites looked at the Bre’n, then at each other. They broke into cheers and mutual congratulations.
Daemen listened to the excited babble. He smiled triumphantly at Kirtn. “See? There’s nothing to be afraid of. Apparently willing Treats are very rare, and therefore very prized. They’ll take good care of us.”
“Maybe the unwilling Treats knew something we don’t,” retorted Kirtn.
For a moment Daemen looked uncertain, then his faith in his own Luck reasserted itself. “We survived,” he said, as though that answered all questions.
And, the Bre’n silently admitted to himself, maybe it did.
The Daemenites stopped congratulating themselves long enough to surround the three Treats. The red-haired woman grinned at them. “Call me Super Scuvee. Everyone else will in a few days.”
Rheba’s hair fluffed out as Fssa made a flatulent noise. The snake, however, had the good sense to make it seem that the sound issued from a Daemenite.
Scuvee whirled and glared, but had only protestations of innocence from her followers. With a final cold look around, she led the party away from the cliff face.
They followed a dim trail through an area of gray-blue rocks and drifts of gold that could have been dust. Rheba and Kirtn looked around, memorizing their route. Out of the corner of her eye, she spotted a quick dart of movement.
“What’s that?” she asked.
Instantly, every Daemenite was alert. Then Scuvee laughed. “Just a runner. They’re only worth a few points. Not much of a Treat,” she added. “A flyer, now, is pretty good. Lots of points. A real trick to catch them, too.”
The silver-furred man looked at the point where the runner had disappeared. “You sure we don’t need it?”
“With the Treats we already have?” she retorted, laughing. “We’ll be three days just adding up their points!”
“Yeah,” agreed the man slowly, but he still looked at the gold drift that had swallowed up the runner. “Seems a waste. There’s been more than one Hunt when we’d have been glad to take even a dead runner back.”
“Skinny times are over,” Scuvee said, smacking the man on his shoulder with her fist. “Fat times and fancy flavors!”
“Fat times and fancy flavors!” roared the rest of the Scavengers. Apparently the phrase was a local shibboleth.
“Kirtn,” murmured Rheba in Senyas. “They have animals here. Centrins only had rocks.”
“And Seurs.” Kirtn looked around. “Wonder why animals survived here and not there?”
A gold drift curved across the trail. As Kirtn walked through it, a haunting fragrance filled his nostrils. He bent over and grabbed a handful of the dust. It was cool and silky to the touch, clinging to his skin in golden clouds of fragrance. He had an impulse to lie down and wallow in the drift, covering himself with its incredible, sensual fragrance.
“Smell this,” he said, holding out a handful of gold dust to her.
She inhaled and made a sound of pleasure. Akhenet lines pulsed as she responded to fragrance. It was almost aphrodisiac in its intensity. She looked up at Kirtn, eyes lambent with promises.
Scuvee watched, grinning. “Well, you may be different, but you’re still human. The last time we really pleased God, it gave us shaval,” she said, gesturing toward the golden drifts that curled across low spots in the land. Her grin increased. “I can hardly wait to see what we get this time. Should be enough to make a rock shout.”
“Your God gave you this?” asked Rheba, smiling dreamily. “That would be enough to make me take up religion.”
Daemen dipped his finger in
the dust, sniffed cautiously, then looked thoughtful. “How did you make this?”
“Can’t you hear?” snapped Scuvee. “God gave it to us.”
“How did you get your zoolipt—your God or whatever you call it—to make this for you?”
Scuvee looked at Daemen. Slowly her face settled into the lines of one who is being patient with a particularly backward child. “As I said, boy. We fed it a really good Treat.”
“What was it?” asked Kirtn, curious.
Scuvee sighed. “Wish I knew. It was so long ago even God forgot.”
“If I could find out how to make this,” said Daemen in excited Universal, “the Seurs would have to call me Luck.” He turned back to Scuvee and spoke Daemenite. “Does your God live with you?”
“Where else would it live?”
“Oh, over the mountain, across the sea, in the sky,” said Daemen, remembering just a few of the religions he had encountered on Loo. “On another planet, maybe.”
“What good would it be to have a God that lived somewhere else?” asked Scuvee, perplexed.
“Does your God live in the Installation?” Daemen asked hurriedly, not wanting to argue religious niceties with a woman who did not even know the value of Luck.
“What’s the Installation?”
“The building that’s all colors and never needs repairs.”
“Oh, you mean God’s House. Sure, where else would God live?”
Daemen threw a despairing look in the direction of his friends. Kirtn almost felt sorry for him. Scuvee had a death grip on reality that would not be weakened by nuances of any kind.
“Are outsiders allowed to . ah . . . worship in God’s House?” asked Kirtn, guessing the point of Daemen’s interrogation. Any technology to be found would be found in the Installation. If the Installation was sacred, getting into it could be difficult.
“Outsiders? Worship?” Scuvee looked from Kirtn to Daemen and back. “You don’t make any more sense than he does. What do you mean, worship!”
Kirtn tried to think of words she would understand. Fssa spoke for him, in tones that resonated with contempt. “Can we get inside God’s House?”
Scuvee’s face cleared. “Why sure, Treat. Glad to hear you’re so eager. You really told a truth when you said you were willing.” She patted Kirtn’s chest approvingly. “Such a big Treat, too. I can’t wait for the shaval pile.”
Rheba’s hair stirred, crackling with the beginning of anger. “Then you won’t mind if we go in God’s House?” she snapped.
“Mind? Listen, pretty Treat, you can go in God’s House anytime you like, anytime at all. In fact”—she leaned forward, smiling—“I’ll knife anyone who tries to keep you out.” She looked around her group triumphantly. “Willing Treats!” she crowed.
“Fat times and fancy flavors!” they shouted back.
The Daemenites turned eagerly back to the trail. Kirtn and Rheba moved with less alacrity. They were beginning to feel like a meal looking for a place to be eaten. And they were afraid that God’s House was the place.
XXIV
Super Scuvee kept them apart from the other Square One inhabitants. It was not difficult. Like Centrins, Square One had rank upon rank of uninhabited buildings erected in the Cycles that followed the original builders, the Zaarain. Scuvee and her group lived in one of the least ramshackle houses. Its windows were intact and its floors did not slant randomly. Its doors, however, required muscle to open and close.
Despite Scuvee’s assurances that her Treats could get into God’s House at any time, Rheba, Kirtn and The Luck had only seen the Installation from a distance.
“I told you,” said Scuvee, her voice rising, “you have to wait until the Hunt is over.”
Kirtn shifted restlessly. “Yes, you told us. But you haven’t told us when this damned Hunt ends. We’ve been here five hours and all you’ve done is tell us to wait!”
She sighed. “Treat, I’m glad you’re so eager. But I don’t get points for stupidity. If Ghun doesn’t see me put you in God’s House, I won’t get points. And Ghun can’t see you if he isn’t here. So until Ghun gets back, you don’t go into God’s House. Got that, Treat, or do you want me to chew it for you again?”
Kirtn managed not to snarl. “When will Ghun be back?”
Scuvee all but pulled at her bright-red hair. “I told you, when the Hunt is over!”
“But when will the Hunt be over?” put in Rheba quickly, reading anger in Kirtn’s tense body.
“Pretty Treat,” said Scuvee, “I already told you. The Hunt will be over when Ghun gets back.”
“Don’t worry,” soothed Daemen, taking Rheba’s hand. “Everything is all right. Remember, I’m The Luck. Good Luck,” he added quickly over Kirtn’s muttering. “Look at the food Scuvee gave us. Wasn’t it better than anything we had on Loo or in Centrins?”
“It was?” said Scuvee, shock in every line of her face. “Little Treat, your zoolipt must be real bored.”
“What do you mean?”
Scuvee’s voice dripped patience. “Our food is rotten. That’s why we called a Hunt. Now, if you think the swill we’ve been eating is good, it means that the food you ate at the other end of that hole was hundred-proof shit. Right?”
“Right,” said Daemen, pleased that she understood. It was not always easy to get through to Square One barbarians.
“The only way you could eat worse food than here,” continued Scuvee relentlessly, “is if your zoolipt is even more bored than ours. Don’t you ever feed it?”
“Feed what?” asked Daemen.
Scuvee made a frustrated sound. “Your zoolipt!” she shouted.
“Centrins doesn’t have a zoolipt. We just have machines.”
“Don’t be more stupid than stone,” she said, her face getting as wild as her hair. “You have a fancy colored building, right?”
“Right.”
“You put garbage in one end and food comes out the other, right?”
“Well, that’s an oversimplification. What actually happens is—”
“Right, Little Treat?” shouted Scuvee.
“Ahh, right.”
“What do you think makes garbage into food?”
“A machine . . . right?”
“Wrong!” Scuvee gulped air. “It’s the God in the machine that makes food. The machinery just shovels in garbage. But if all you ever feed it is garbage, all you get is garbage. Garbage in, garbage out. Right? Right,” she continued relentlessly. “A bored God is unhappy. If it gets too bored, it starts making things.”
Daemen moved as though to protest. Kirtn’s big hand clamped down on the younger man’s shoulder. “Let her talk,” whispered the Bre’n. “She’s finally saying something interesting.”
Scuvee did not hear what Kirtn said. She was too involved in her own words to have attention for anyone else. “If you’re lucky,” she continued, “a bored God just makes bad food. We spend a lot of time running to the shit pits, giving back as bad as we got. The cramps are rough and it ruins a lot of clothes, but that’s not as bad as the headbenders.”
“Headbenders?” said Rheba.
“Right. You never can tell when it’ll hit. You eat and then the world gets all runny around the edges and colors start yammering at you and then the devils come screaming and clawing. It’s bad, real bad, and it stays that way until God gets bored with that, too.”
“Then what happens?” asked Kirtn, liking what he was hearing less and less.
“We shovel in our dead and go on a Hunt. If we’re lucky, the runners have changed a little since the last time, or the flyers. The more they’ve changed, the bigger Treat they are.”
“Changed?” murmured Kirtn.
“Right. A few legs more or less. Fur shorter or gone. They have to eat what God makes, too. If you eat godfood, you change.”
“Do people change, too?” asked Rheba, struggling with an unreasoning fear. A few legs more or less.
“Sure. But God learned to be careful with us. If we cha
nge too much we’ll all die and then God will be more bored than ever. That’s why it made crawlers—crawlers can change a lot and not die. Where do you think the diggers and flyers came from? Crawlers, that’s where.”
Kirtn remembered the startling variation in phenotype among the Seurs. It was even more pronounced at Square One. Apparently there was a mutagen in the food.
“Their machine must be out of phase,” said Daemen in Universal.
“What?” asked Rheba, still envisioning the nightmare Scuvee’s words had conjured.
“Their Installation isn’t tuned. It’s a miracle they’ve survived this long.”
“God is on their side,” Kirtn said sarcastically.
“I’m serious,” Daemen snapped.
“So am I. Look around, Luck. Scuvee’s people are a lot healthier than the Seurs were.”
“Nonsense!”
“Kirtn’s right,” said Rheba. “The Seurs were gaunt. There weren’t many children. You were much stronger and taller by a head than most men. Loo’s slave rations weren’t much, but they were better than what the Seurs eat.”
“Centrins doesn’t make us sick or feed us mindbenders,” Daemen said hotly.
“No. It just starves you and then teases you by announcing dinners that aren’t served.”
“It’s a machine, not a person. It’s out of tune, not bored.”
“That’s your dogma,” said Kirtn. “Scuvee’s is different.”
Daemen looked stubborn. “All civilized Installations are the same.”
“Starving?” suggested the Bre’n. “You may not like it but Scuvee’s dogma works,” continued Kirtn, his voice soft, implacable. “What do the Seurs say to that?”
Daemen still looked stubborn, but there was also uneasiness in his expression. “The Seurs say that people who recycle whole corpses are disgusting barbarians. How can you eat food that once was your uncle?”
“Isn’t that what they sent you here to find out?”
Scuvee cut in impatiently. “Yammer in words I can understand or I’ll beat you bloody before grace even starts.”