by Keith Laumer
“You do not sup! Is your zeal for Honorable Dealing less than complete?”
This time I had to drink. The stuff had a sweet overflavor, but left an aftertaste of iron filings. I forced it down. After that, there was another toast. He watched to be sure I drank it. I tried not to think about what the stuff was doing to my stomach. I fixed my thoughts on a face I had just seen, looking no older than the day I had seen it last, nearly four years before; and the smooth, suntanned skin, and the hideous scar that marred it.
There was a lot of chanting and exchanging of cups, and I chewed another drink. Srat would be showing Milady Raire to a cabin now, and she’d be feeling the softness of a human—style bed, a rug under her bare feet, the tingle of the ion-bath for the first time in four years. . . .
“Another toast!” Hruba called; His command of lingua was slipping; the booze was having a powerful effect on him. It was working on me, too. My head was buzzing and there was a frying-egg feeling in my stomach. My arms felt almost too heavy to lift. The taste of the liquor was cloying in my mouth. When the next cup was passed my way I pushed it aside.
“I’ve had all I can take,” I said, and felt my tongue slur the words. It was hard to push the chair back and stand. Hruba rose, too. He was swaying slightly-or maybe it was just my vision.
“I confess surprise, Man,” he said. “Your zeal in the pledging of honor exceeded even my own. My brain swims in a sea of consecrated wine!” He turned to a servant standing by and accepted a small box from him.
“The control device governing your new acquisition,” he said and handed the box over to me. I took it and my finger touched a hidden latch and the lid valved open. There was a small plastic ovoid inside, bedded in floss.
“Wha’s . . . what’s this?”
“Ah, you are unfamiliar with our Drathian devices!” He plucked the egg from its niche and waved it under my nose.
“This gnurled wheel; on the first setting, it administers sharp reminder; at the second position . . .” he pushed the control until it clicked, “ . . . an attack of angina which doubles the object in torment. And at the third . . . but I must not demonstrate the third setting, eh? Or you will find yourself with a dead slave on your hands, his heart burned to charcoal by a magnesium element buried in the organ itself!” He tossed the control back into the box and sat down heavily. “That pertaining to the female is in the possession of her tender; he will leave it in the hands of your servant. You’ll have no trouble with ’em. . . .” He made a sound that resembled a hiccup. “Best return to zero setting the one I handled; if its subject lacks stamina, he may be dead by now.”
I tilted the box and dumped the ovoid on the ground and stamped on it; it crunched like a blown egg. Hruba came out of his chair in a rush.
“Here-what are you doing!” He stared down at the smashed controller, then at me. “Have you lost your mind, Man?”
“I’m going now,” I said, and went past him toward the passage I had entered by, a long time ago, it seemed. Behind me, Hruba was shouting in the local dialect. A servant jittered in front of me, and I yanked my pistol out and waved it and he jumped aside.
Out in the street, night had fallen, and the wet pavement glimmered under the yellow-green glare of lanterns set on the building fronts. I felt deathly ill. The street seemed to be rising up under my feet. I staggered, stayed on my feet by holding onto the wall. A pain like a knife-thrust stabbed into my stomach. I headed off in the direction of the port, made half a block before I had to lean against the wall and retch. When I straightened there were half a dozen Drathians standing by, watching me with their obscene faces. I yelled something at them, and they scattered back, and I went on. I passed the plaza where I had found the Zeridajhi cloth, recognized the street along which Srat and Eureka and I had come. It seemed to be a steep hill, now. My legs felt like soft tallow. I fell and got up and fell again. I retched until my stomach was a dry knot of pain. It was harder getting to my feet this time. My lungs were on fire. The pain in my head was like a hammer swinging against my temples. My eyes were crossing, and I stumbled along between twinned walls, seeing the two-headed Drathians retreat before me.
Then I saw the port ahead, the translucent, glowing dome rising at the end of the narrow alleyway. Not much farther, now. Srat would be wondering what happened; maybe he would be waiting, just ahead. And at the ship, the Lady Raire. . . .
I was lying on my face, and the sky was spinning slowly over me, a pitch-black canopy with the great dim blur of Center sprawled across it, and the faint avenue that was the Bar reaching out to trail off into the dwindling spiral curve of the Eastern Arm. I found the pavement under me, and pushed against it, and got to my knees, then to my feet. I could see the ship across the ramp, tall and rakish, her high polish dimned by the years of hard use, her station lights glaring amber from high on her slim prow. I steadied myself and started across toward her, and as I did the rectangle of light that was the open port narrowed and winked out. The amber lights flicked out and the red and green pattern of her running lights sprang up. I stopped dead and felt a drumming start up, vibrating through the pavement under my feet.
I started to run then, and my legs were broken straws that collapsed and my head hit and the blow cleared it for a moment. I got my chin up off the pavement; and Jongo II lifted, standing up away from the surface on a tenuous pillar of blue flame that lengthened as she rose. Then she was climbing swiftly into the night, tilting away, dwindling above the licking tongue of pale fire that shrank, became a tiny point of twinkling yellow, and was gone.
They were all around me in a tight circle. I stared at their horny shins, their sandaled feet, as alien as an alligator’s, and felt the icy sweat clammy on my face. Deathly sickness rose inside me in a wave that knotted my stomach and left me quivering like a beached jellyfish. The legs around me stirred and gave way to a tall Drathian in the white serape of a Rule-keeper. Hard hands clamped on me, dragged me to my feet. A light glared in my face.
“Man, the Rule-keeper demands you produce the two slaves given as a gift to you by His least Greatness!”
“Gone,” I gargled the words. “Trusted Srat. Filthy midget . . .”
“Man, you are guilty of a crime of the first category! Illegal manumission of slaves! To redress these crimes, the Rule-keeper demands a fine of twice the value of the slaves, plus triple bribes for himself and his attendants!”
“You’re out of luck,” I said. “No money . . . no ship . . . all gone. . . .”
I felt myself blacking out then. I was dimly aware of being carried, of lights glaring on me, later of a pain that seemed to tear me open, like a rotten fruit; but it was all remote, far away, happening to someone else. . . .
I came to myself lying on a hard pallet on a stone floor, still sick, but clear-headed now. For a while, I looked at the lone glare-bulb in the ceiling and tried to remember what had happened, but it was all a confused fog. I sat up and a red-hot hook grabbed at my side. I pulled back the short, coarse-weave jacket I was wearing, and saw a livid, six-inch cut under my ribs, neatly stitched with tough thread. It was the kind of wound that would heal in a few weeks and leave a welted scar; a scar like I’d seen recently, in the sides of Huvile and the Lady Raire. A scar that meant I was a slave.
CHAPTER NINE
The controller made a small lump under the skin. It wasn’t painful-not unless you got too close to your overseer. At ten feet, it began to feel like a slight case of indigestion. At five, it was a stone knife being twisted in your chest. Once, in an experimental mood, I pushed in to four feet from him before he noticed and waved me back. It was like a fire in my chest. That was just the mild form of its action, of course. If he had pushed the little lever on the egg-shape strapped to his arm-or died, while the thing was tuned to his body inductance-the fire in my chest would be real. Once, months later, I saw three slaves whose keeper had been accidentally killed; the holes burned in their chests from the inside were as big as dinner plates.
As a rul
e, though, the Lesser Triarch believed in treating his slaves well, as valuable property deserved. Hruba dropped by twice a day for the first few days to be sure that my alien flesh was healing properly. I spent my time lying on the bed or hobbling up and down the small, windowless room, talking to myself:
“You’re a smart boy, Billy Danger. You learned a lot, these last four years. Enough to get yourself a ship of your own, and bring it here, against all the odds there are, to find her. And then you handed her and the ship to the midget on a silver platter-for the second time. He must have had a good laugh. For a year he followed you like a sick pup, and wagged his tail every time you looked his way. But he was waiting. And you made it easy. While you sat there poisoning yourself, he strolled back to the ship, told Huvile you weren’t coming, and lifted off. The Lady Raire might have interfered, but she never knew; she didn’t see you. And now Srat has her right back where she started. . . .”
It wasn’t a line of thought that made me feel better, but it served the purpose of keeping me on my feet, pacing. With those ideas chewing at me, I wasn’t in a mood for long, restful naps.
When the wound had stitched up, a Drathian overseer took me out of my private cell and herded me along to a big room that looked like a nineteenth century sweatshop. There were other slaves there, forty or fifty of them, all shapes, all sizes, even a few Drathians who’d run foul of the Rule-keepers. I was assigned to a stool beside a big, broad-backed animal with a face like a Halloween mask snipped out of an old inner tube and fringed with feathery red gills. The overseer talked to him in the local buzz-buzz, and went away. He looked at me with big yellow eyes like a twin-yolked egg, and said, “Welcome to the club, friend,” in perfect, unaccented lingua, in a voice that seemed to come from under a tin washtub.
He told me that his name was Fsha-fsha, that he had been left behind seventeen years before when the freighter he was shipping on had been condemned here on Drath after her linings went out, and that he had been a slave since his money ran out, three months after that.
“It’s not a bad life,” he said. “Plenty of food, a place to sleep, and the work’s not arduous, after you’ve learned the routine.”
The routine, he went on to explain, was Sorting. “It’s a high-level job,”
Fsha-fsha assured me. “Only the top-category workers get this slot. And let me tell you, friend, it’s better than duty in the mines, or on the pelagic harvesting rafts!”
He explained the work; it consisted of watching an endless line of glowing spheres as they came toward us along a conveyor belt, and sorting them into one of eight categories. He told me what the types were, and demonstrated; all the while he talked, the bulbs kept coming, and his big hands flicked the keys in front of him, shunting them their separate ways. But as far as I could tell, all the bulbs were exactly alike.
“You’ll learn,” he said blandly, and flipped a switch that stopped the line. He fetched a lightweight assembly of straps from a wall locker.
“Training harness,” he explained. “It helps you catch on in a hurry.” He fitted it to me with the straps and wires crisscrossing my back and chest, along my arms, cinched up tight on each finger. When he finished, he climbed back on his stool, and switched on the line.
“Watch,” he said. The glowing bulbs came toward him and his fingers played over the keys.
“Now you follow through on your console,” he said. I put my hands on the buttons and he reached across to attach a snap that held them there. A bulb came toward me and a sensation like a hot needle stabbed the middle finger on my right hand. I punched the key under it and the pain stopped, but there was another bulb coming, and the needle stabbed my little finger this time, and I jabbed with it, and there was another bulb coming. . . .
“It’s a surefire teaching system,” Fsha-fsha said in his cheery, sub-cellar voice. “Your hands learn to sort without even bringing the forebrain into it. You can’t beat pain—association for fast results.”
For the rest of the shift, I watched glorm-bulbs sail at me, trying to second-guess the pain circuits that were activated by Fsha-fsha’s selections. All I had to do was recognize a left-forefinger or right ring-finger bulb before he did, and punch the key first. By the end of the first hour my hands ached like unlanced boils. By the second hour, my arms were numb to the elbow. At the end of three hours I was throbbing all over.
“You did fine,” Fsha-fsha told me when the gong rang that meant the shift was ended. “Old Hruba knew what he was doing when he assigned you here. You’re a quick study. You were coding ten percent above random the last few minutes.”
He took me along a damp-looking tunnel to a gloomy barracks where he and twenty-six other slaves lived. He showed me an empty alcove, got me a hammock and helped me sling it, then took me along to the mess. The cook was a warty creature with a ferocious set of ivory tusks, but he turned out to be a good-natured fellow. He cooked me up a sort of omelette that he assured me the other Man-slaves had liked. It wasn’t a gourmet’s delight, but it was better than the gruel I’d had in the hospital cell. I slept then, until my new tutor shook me awake and led me back to the Sorting line.
The training sessions got worse for the next three shifts; then I started to catch on-or my eye and fingers did; I still couldn’t consciously tell one glorm-bulb from another. By the time I’d been at it for six weeks, I was as good as Fsha—fsha. I was promoted to a bulb-line of my own, and the harness went back in the locker.
The Sorting training, as it turned out, didn’t only apply to glorm-bulbs. One day the line appeared with what looked like tangles of colored spaghetti riding on it.
“Watch,” Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck.
“You have to key-in your response patterns,” he said. “Tie this one . . .” he flipped his sorting key, “ . . . to one of your learned circuits. And this one . .
.” he coded another gob of wires, “ . . . to another. . . .”
I didn’t really understand all that, but I tried making analogies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs-and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly.
“You’ve trained a new section of your brain,” Fsha-fsha said. “And it isn’t just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical analysis.”
During the off-shifts, we slaves were free to relax, talk, gamble with homemade cards and dice, commune with ourselves, or sleep. There was a small, walled court we could crowd into when the sun shone, to soak up a little vitamin D, and a cold, sulfury-smelling cave with a pool for swimming. Some of the slaves from watery worlds spent a lot of time there. I developed a habit of taking long walks-fifty laps up and down the barrack-room-with Fsha-fsha stumping along beside me, talking. He was a great storyteller. He’d spent a hundred and thirty years in space before he’d been marooned here; he’d seen things that took the curl out of my hair to listen to.
The weeks passed and I sorted, watched, and listened. The place I was in was an underground factory, located, ac-cording to Fsha-fsha, in the heart of the city. There was only one exit, along a tunnel and up a flight of stairs barred by a steel gate that was guarded day and night.
“How do they bring in supplies?” I asked my sidekick. “How do they ship the finished products out? They can’t run everything up and down one little stairway.”
Fsha-fsha gave me what I had learned to interpret as a shrug. “I don’t know, Danger. I’ve seen the stairs, because I’ve been out that way quite a few times-”
I stopped him and asked for a little more detail on that point.
“Now and then it happens a slave is needed for labors above-ground,” he explained. “As for me, I prefer the peacefulness of my familiar routine; still, so long as the finger of the Triarch rests here-” he tapped a welted purple scar along his side-“I follow all orders with no argument.”
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“Listen, Fsha-fsha,” I said. “Tell me everything you remember about your trips out: the route you took, the number of guards. How long were you out? How close did they watch you? What kind of weapons did they carry?
Any chains or handcuffs? Many people around? Was it day or night? Did you work inside or outside-”
“No, Danger!” Fsha-fsha waved a square purple-palmed hand at me. “I see the way your mind’s working; but forget the idea! Escape is impossible-and if you did break away from a work detail, you’d still be alone in the middle of Drath, an alien, not knowing the language, with every Rule-keeper in the city ready to pounce on you-”
“I know all that. But if you think I’m going to settle down here for the rest of my life, you’re dead wrong. Now start telling me: How many guards escorted you?”
“Just one. As long as he has my controller in his pocket, one is all that’s needed, even if I were the most intractable slave in the pens.”
“How can I get picked for an outside detail?”
“When you’re needed, you’ll be called.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll be getting ready. Now give.”
Fsha-fsha’s memory was good. I was surprised to hear that for as much as an hour at a time, he had worked unsupervised.
“It’s no use creeping off and hiding out under an overturned cart or in an unused root-cellar,” he said. “One touch of the controller, and you’re mewling aloud for your keeper.”
“That means we’ll have to get our hands on the control devices before we break.”
“They’ve thought of that; the thing is tuned to your neuronic carrier frequency. If you get within three feet of it, it’s triggered automatically. If the holder dies, it’s triggered. And if it’s taken off of the overseer’s body, the same thing.”