by Keith Laumer
“We can stand it long enough to smash them.”
“If the controller’s destroyed, you die,” he said flatly. “It’s covered any way you play it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Fsha-fsha.” I told him about crushing the controller the night I had been arrested. “Huvile didn’t die. The Rule-keeper saw him board Jongo II, an hour afterward.”
“Strange-it’s common knowledge among the slaves that if your controller is damaged, it kills you.”
“It’s a useful story for the slave-owners to spread.”
“Maybe that’s why they grabbed you so fast. You might have given the game away. Hell’s ice, if the slaves knew. . . .”
“How about it, Fsha-fsha? Are you with me?”
He stared at me in the gloom of the comer where we’d drifted to talk in private. “You’re a strange, restless creature, Danger,” he said. “For a being as frail as you are, with that soft skin and brittle bones, you’ve got an almighty urge to look for trouble. Why not take a tip from me and make the best of it-”
“I’ll get out of here, Fsha-fsha-and get clear of the planet, too-or die trying. I’d as soon be dead as here, so I’m not risking much.”
Fsha-fsha made the noise that served him as a sigh. “You know, we Rinths see the Universe differently from your Propagators,” he said. “With us, it’s the Great Parent that produces the spores. We workers have the mobility, the intelligence-but no future, except the Parent. We have the instinct to protect the Tree, fertilize it and water it, prune it, insure its survival; but we’ve got no personal stake in the future, the way you have. Your instincts tell you to stay alive and propagate. Your body knows this is a dead end as far as offspring go, so it tells you to get out or die.” He sighed again.
“When I left Rinth, it was hard; for a long time, I had a homesickness that you wouldn’t be able to understand-any more than I can really understand the way you feel now. But I can remember how it was. And if it’s anything like that with you-yes; I can see you’ve got to try.”
“That’s right; I’ve got to try. But not you, Fsha-fsha. If you’re really content here, stay. I’ll make it on my own.”
“You wouldn’t have a chance, Danger. I know the language, the routes around the town. You need me. Not that it’ll do any good in the end. But knowing about the controllers will make a difference.”
“Forget it. You can teach me the language, and tell me all you can about the town. But there’s no point in your getting killed-”
“That’s another advantage a Rinth has,” Fsha-fsha cut me off. “No instinct for self-preservation. Now, let’s get started planning the details.”
The weeks went by. I sorted, slept, took my language lesson, and worked to memorize the map of the city I drew up from Fsha-fsha’s descriptions. About two months after our decision to crash out, Fsha-fsha got a call for an outside detail. He vetoed my suggestion that I volunteer to go along.
“This is a lucky break,” he said. “It will give me a chance to look over the ground again, in the light of our plans. Rest easy. We’ll get our chance.”
“We Propagators aren’t as patient as you Tree—farmers,” I told him. “It may be another six months before an outside detail comes up again.”
“Better to propagate in your old age than not at all, eh?” he reminded me, and I had to bite my teeth and watch him go. I got one quick look at the passage as he left. It was narrow, dim-lit; the Drathians didn’t like a high level of illumination. I wondered if there was a useful tip for me in that. Fsha-fsha came back rippling his gill-flaps in a way that I knew meant he was excited. But it turned out not to be pleased anticipation.
“It’s hopeless, Danger,” he assured me. “The Worm-face in charge of the detail carries the controllers in a special rack, strapped to his chest for quick access. He keeps his distance; ten feet was as close as I could get before he warned me back.”
“What weapons did he carry?” I asked him.
“What weapon does he need? He holds your life in his hand as it is!”
“Too bad,” I said. “We’ll have to get our armaments somewhere else then.”
Fsha-fsha goggled at me. “You’re an amazing creature, Danger. If you were cornered by a Fangmaster, I think you’d complain that his teeth weren’t larger, so as to provide you with a better dagger!”
The routine settled in again then. Every day was like the one before; the glorm-bulbs rushed at me in a stream that never ended, never changed. I ate omelettes, played revo and tikal and a dozen other games, walked my two miles a day, up and down the dark room; and waited. And one day, I made a blunder that ended our plans with total finality.
The work-shift had ended half an hour before. Fsha-fsha and I had settled down in his alcove to play our favorite game of telling each other what we’d do, once we were clear of Drath. A big Drathian slave who’d been assigned to the Sorting crew a few hours earlier came lumbering over, breathing out fumes that reminded me of a package of rot-ten broccoli I’d opened once by mistake.
“I’ll take this alcove,” he said to Fsha-fsha. “Get out, animal.”
“Makes himself right at home, doesn’t he?” I pointed across the room to an empty alcove. “Try over there, sport,” I said to the broccoli-breather. “Lots of room-” I got that far when he reached out with a couple of arms like boa constrictors and ripped down the hammock. He yanked again, and tore the other end free. He tossed it aside and swung his own kit down onto the floor. I stood up.
“Wait,” Fsha-fsha said quickly. “The overseer will deal with this one. Don’t-”
The big Drathian took a quick step, threw a punch at me. I ducked, came up with a three-foot length of steel pipe the Rinth had tucked under the hammock for possible future use, and brought it down in a two-handed blow across the Drathian’s shoulder. He gave a bleat like a branded steer and went down bucking and kicking. In his convulsion, he beat his head against the floor, whipped his body against the wall hard enough to give off a dull boom! like a whale slapping the water with his tail. Thick, yellowish blood spattered. Every slave in the barracks came crowding around to see what was going on, but in thirty seconds it was all over. The big Drathian was dead. The Rule-keepers got there a minute or two later and took me away, up the stairs I’d looked forward to seeing for so long. My hearing didn’t amount to much. I explained to Hruba that the dead slave had attacked me, that I didn’t know Drathians kept their brains under their shoulder blades; but it was an open-and-shut case. I’d killed a fellow slave. My Sorting days were over.
“Transportation to the harvesting rafts,” the majordomo intoned in Drathian and repeated it in lingua. “Too bad, Man,” he added in his unofficial voice.
“You were a valuable Sorter-but like your kind, you have a savage streak in you most unbecoming in a chattel.”
They clamped my wrists in a steel ring and hustled me out into a courtyard where a big, tarry-smelling air-barge was waiting. I climbed aboard, and was kicked into a metal-walled broom-closet. They slammed the door on me, and I lay in the dark and felt the barge lift off.
The harvesting rafts were mile-square constructions of metal floats linked by woven-rope mats and carpeted with rotting vegetable husks and the refuse of the canning sheds, which worked night and day processing the marine life hoisted aboard by the seining derricks. A pair of husky Drathians threw me off the side of the barge into foul—odored ankle-deep muck, and another pair grabbed me, knocked me around a little just to keep in practice, and dragged me away to a long lean-to which served to keep the worst of the subtropical rains off any of the workers who were lucky enough to be on off-shift. They took off the wrist-irons and rigged a fine-gauge fiber loop around my neck, not tight enough to choke me, but plenty snug enough to wear the skin raw, until it toughened and formed a half-inch-wide scar that itched and burned day and night. There was a limp bladder attached to the rope, designed to inflate and keep my head above water if I happened to fall overboard; slaves weren’t allowed to evade
their labors by anything as easy as drowning, intentionally or otherwise. I learned all this later; the first night the only orientation I got was what I could deduce from being dragged to a line of workers who were shelling out big crustaceans, and yelled at to get to work. The command was emphasized with a kick, but I had been watching for that; I slid aside from it and smashed my fist into the short ribs of the Drathian and chopped him again as he scrambled back. My reward for this effort was a solid beating, administered by three Drathians, two holding and one swinging a rod as heavy and limber as a golf club. They finished after a while, threw water over me, and someone shoved a sea-lobster at me.
“Better look busy,” the slave on my left tipped me off. He was a medium-sized Drathian with a badly scarred face; that made us pals on two counts. I followed his advice.
There wasn’t anything complicated about the work; you grabbed your chzik, held him by the blunt end, hooked a finger under his carapace, and stripped it off him. Then you captured his four flailing limbs, and with a neat twist of the wrist, removed them. The chziks were active creatures, and they showed their resentment of this treatment by writhing frantically during the operation. When you found yourself tackling a big fellow-weight ten pounds or more-it could sometimes be a little difficult to carry out the job as smoothly as the overseers desired. They usually let you know when this was the case by hitting you across the back with the golf club. At first, my fingers had a tendency to bleed, since the carapaces were razor-sharp and as tough as plexiglass, and the barbs on the legs had a way of lodging in my palms. But the wounds healed cleanly; the microorganisms of Drath were too alien to my metabolism to give rise to infections. And after a while calluses formed.
I was lucky in timing my arrival near the end of a shift; I was able to look busy enough to keep the overseer away, and make it under my own power to the shed. There were no bunks, no assigned spaces. You just crowded in as far as possible from the weather side and dropped. There was no insomnia on the rafts. The scarred Drathian-the same one who had given me some good advice the first night-helped me out again the next shift, by showing me how to nip off a chunk of raw chzik and suck it for the water content. The meat itself was spongy and inedible as far as I was concerned; but the slop dipped up to us at the regular feeding time was specially designed to be assimilable by a wide variety of species. When an off-brand worker showed up who couldn’t live on the stuff, he soon starved, thus solving the problem.
Instead of the regular cycle of alternating work-and rest—shifts, we harvesters worked two shifts out of three, which effectively prevented any chance of boredom. For six hours at a stretch, we manned our places by the chute with the squirming heaps of chziks arriving just a little faster than we could shell them out. The slippery mat under foot rose and fell in its never-ending rhythm, and beyond its edge, the steel-gray sea stretched to the horizon. Sometimes the sun beat down in a dead calm, and the unbelievable stink rose around us like a foul tide. At night floodlights glared from high on the derricks, and the insects swarmed in to fly into our mouths and eyes and be trampled underfoot to add to the carpet. Sometimes rain came, hot and torrential, but the line never slowed. And later, when gray sleet coated the rigging and decks with soft ice, and the wind cut at us like sabers, we worked on, those of us who could stand the cold; the others settled into the muck and were hauled away and put over the side. And some of us who were still alive envied them. I remembered reading, years before, back on old Earth, of concentration camp prisoners, and I wondered what it was that kept men going under conditions that made life a torture that never ended. Now I knew; it wasn’t a high-minded determination to endure, or a dauntless will to take a blood-curdling revenge. It was an instinct older than thought, older than hate, that said: “Survive!”
And I survived. My hands toughened, my muscles strengthened, my skin hardened against the cold and the rain. I learned to sleep in icy slush, without protection, with horny feet stumbling over me in the dark; to swallow the watery gruel and hold out the cup for more; to take the routine club-blows of the overseers without hitting back; in the end, without really noticing. There were no friendships on the rafts, no recreations. There was no time or energy for anything not directly related to staying alive for one more day. The Drathian who had helped me on the first day died one wet night, and another took his place; I had never even learned his name. During my years in space, I had developed an instinctive time-sense that told me when a week, or a month, Earth-style, had passed. I had been almost five years away, now. Sometimes I wondered what had happened during those years, back on that small planet. But it was so far away that it seemed more like a dream than a reality.
For hours at a stretch, sometimes for a whole double shift, my mind would wander far away from the pelagic rafts of Drath. My memories seemed to become more vivid with time, until they were almost realer than the meaningless life around me.
And then one night, the routine broke. A morose-looking Drathian boss-overseer caught me as I went toward the chzik chute, shoved me toward the boat wharf.
“You’re assigned as a net-handler,” he told me. Except for the heavy leather coat he was wearing, he looked as cold and filthy and miserable as the slaves. I climbed down into the twenty-foot, double-prowed dory that was pitching in the choppy water at the foot of the loading ladder, and we shoved off. In five minutes the high-sided raft was out of sight in the ragged fog.
I sat in the stern and stared at the oily gray surface of the water. It was the first new sight I’d seen in many months. The wake was a swirl of foam that drifted aft, forming a pattern like an ugly face that leered up at me through the murky water. The face grew clearer, and then it broke water, a devil-mask of rippling black leaves edged with feathery red gills. An arm swept up, dripping water; I saw the flash of a knife blade as it swept down toward me-and felt the rope fall from my neck. A wide hand clamped on my arm, tumbled me over the stern, and before I could draw a breath, had dragged me down into the cold and the dark.
I woke up lying on my back in a warm, dry place. From the motion and the sound, I could tell I was on a boat. The air that moved over my face carried the sweet, clean smell of the sea. Fsha-fsha was standing beside the bunk; in the soft glow from the deck lamp, his face looked almost benign.
“It’s a good thing I recognized you,” I said, and was surprised at the weakness of my voice. “I might have spoiled things by putting a thumb in your eye.”
“Sorry about the rough treatment,” he said. “It was the best we could work out. The tender-master wasn’t in on it; just the boss-overseer.”
“It worked,” I said, and stopped to cough, and tasted the alien saltwater of Drath. “That’s all that counts.”
“We’re not clear yet, but the trickiest part went all right. Maybe the rest will work out, too.”
“Where are we headed?”
“There’s an abandoned harbor not far from here; about four hours’ run. A filer will meet us there.” I started to ask another question, but my eye was too heavy to hold open. I closed it and the warm blanket of darkness folded in on me.
Voices woke me. For a moment, I was back aboard Lord Desroy’s yacht, lying on a heap of uncured Nith-hides, and the illusion was so strong that I felt a ghostly pang from the arm, broken and mended so long ago. Then Fsha-fsha’s voice cut through the dream.
“ . . . up now, Danger, have to walk a little way. How do you feel?”
I sat up and put my legs over the side of the cot and stood. “Like a drowned sailor,” I said. “Let’s go.”
Up on the deck of the little surface cutter, I could see lights across the water. Fsha-fsha had put a heavy mackinaw across my shoulders. For the first time in a year, I felt cold. The engines idled back and we swung in beside a jetty. A small, furtive-looking Drathian was waiting beside a battered cargo-car. We climbed up into the box and settled down under some stiff tarpaulins, and a moment later the truck started up and pulled out in a whine of worn turbos.
I slept aga
in. The habit of almost a year on the rafts, to sleep whenever I wasn’t on the line, was too strong to break in an hour; and breathing the salt seas of Drath isn’t the best treatment for human lungs. When I woke up this time, the car had stopped. Fsha-fsha put a hand on my arm and I lay quiet. Then he tapped me and we crawled out and slid down the tailgate, and I saw we were parked at the edge of the spaceport at Drath City. The big dome loomed up under the black sky across the ramp, as faded and patched as ever; and between us and it, the clumsy bulk of an ancient cargo-carrier squatted on battered parking jacks. Something moved in the shadows and a curiously shaped creature swathed in a long cloak came up to us. He flipped back the hood and I saw the leathery face of a Rishian.
“You’re late,” he said unhurriedly. “A couple of local gendarmes nosing about. Best we waste no time.” He turned and moved off toward the freighter. Fsha-fsha and I followed. We had covered half the distance when an actinic-green floodlight speared out to etch us in light, and a rusty-hinge voice shouted the Drathian equivalent of “Halt or I’ll shoot!”
I ran for it. The Rishian, ten feet in the lead, spun, planted himself, brought up his arm and a vivid orange light winked. The spotlight flared and died, and I was past him, sprinting for the open cargo-port, still a hundred yards away across open pavement. A gun stuttered from off to the right, where the searchlight had been, and in the crisp yellow flashes I saw Drathian Rule-keepers bounding out to intercept us. I altered course and charged the nearest Rule-keeper, hit him fair and square. As he fell, my fingers, which had learned to strip the carapace from a twelve-pound chzik with one stroke, found his throat and cartilage crumpled and popped and he went limp and I was back on my feet in time to see the other Drathian lunge for Fsha-fsha. I took him from behind, broke his neck with my forearm, lifted him and threw him ten feet from me. And we were running again.
The open port was just ahead, a brilliant rectangle against the dark swell of the hulk. Something gleamed red there, and Fsha-fsha threw himself sideways and a ravening spout of green fire lanced out and I went flat and rolled and saw a giant Drathian, his white serape thrown back across his shoulder, swinging a flare-muzzled gun around to cover me. I came to my feet and dove straight at him, but I knew I wouldn’t make it Something small and dark plunged from the open port, leaped to the Drathian’s back. He twisted, struck down with the butt of the gun, and I heard it thud on flesh. He struck again, and bone crunched, and the small, dark thing fell away, twisting on the pavement; and then I was on the Rule-keeper. I caught the gun muzzle, ripped it out of his hands, threw it away into the dark. His face was coming around to me, and I swung with all the power that the months of mule-labor had given my arm, and felt the horny mask collapse, saw the ochre blood spatter; he went down and I stepped over him and the small, dark creature that had attacked him moved and the light from the entry fell across it and showed me the mangled body of a H’eeaq.