Her head came up again. “We weren’t rich. My father was a day laborer. My mother had been a dancer once, she taught me a little how to dance.… But my father wanted money, he wanted to sell me to the priests to be used in the temple rites. My brother … my brother was always trying to get me alone, touching me, and making me touch him—he told me what happens in the rites, how all the men can come and use you after … what the priests do, how they mutilate you, so that you can’t even feel any pleasure, because women are not even allowed that—” Her voice rose, and broke; tears poured down her face, blurring it with wetness, reflecting the instrument lights in alien traceries of color.
She was not looking at him, not seeing even the night, blind with tears of rage and betrayal. “And he laughed at my tears, and he pushed me down, calling me a whore, and he tried—tried to rape me. But I took his knife and I stabbed him! And I stole his clothes and I ran away. And I went as a boy after that, just so I could live, so I could work, so I could be human.… I thought someday, somewhere, I would be able to stop, but I can’t stop, because nowhere is safe, and whenever I look at a man and remember that I am a woman I’m always afraid.…” She wiped her face fiercely on her sleeve; a small sound, a sob or a noise of pain, escaped her.
Kedalion shut his eyes. He opened them again, looking over at her. He put out his hand, offering it tentatively, in comfort.
“Don’t,” she whispered, shaking her head. “Don’t touch me. Please, Kedalion.”
He withdrew his hand, sat looking at it for another moment that seemed endless. “When I was a boy, on Samathe, we used to go drafting off the cliffs, with a glidewing—it was like a big kite. You could fly for hours, if you were good, riding the updrafts like a bird. The stilts—the tall ones—from the other villages used to come and try it; but we were the best at it, because we were small. Some of them hated that. It didn’t matter that they could run faster or jump farther or make our lives miserable on the ground … they hated seeing us in the air.”
He looked out at the stars. “One day when I was drafting, a stilt started shooting at me with his pellet gun. The son of a bitch shot holes in my wing; it ripped, and I went down. It scared the hell out of me, I thought I was going to die. But I was lucky, I just landed hard, cuts and bruises, broke a couple of fingers.… But some of my friends saw it, they went after the stilt and they got him. They put my wing on him and pushed him off the cliff. He fell … he broke half the bones in his body. They just left him there. I called the rescue service.… After that day I swore I was getting out of that place, if it was the last thing I ever did.” He shook his head. “One thing that you find out when you leave somewhere is which of your problems belong to where you are, and which of them belong to what you are.…” He sighed, looking back at her at last.
“Why did you call the rescue service?” she said faintly.
He glanced away. “Because I saw my friends’ faces when they pushed him over the edge. And I was afraid the same look was on my face.”
She sat staring at him for a long time, without saying anything. She looked down at her body again, still silent.
“It doesn’t matter,” he said at last. “You do your job. You do it right, and you don’t complain. You can go on doing it, like you always have, if you want to. I don’t care what you do with your private life. It’s none of my business, as far as I can see.”
She lifted her head slowly. “What about Reede?”
He shrugged. “If you do your job, it’s none of his business either.”
She went on staring at him, her eyes clouded, her face clenched.
“Look,” he said, “after all this time, I think I know you. I know I can trust you. Does that mean anything to you? Can you trust me that much, enough to go on working for me now that I know the truth?”
She smiled, in an acknowledgment as uncertain as the offer of his hand had been. And then, slowly, painfully, she offered her hand to him.
BIG BLUE: Syllagong, Men’s Camp #7
“There it is.”
Gundhalinu pressed his face against the narrow window slit in the transport’s vibrating wall, as the guard’s voice announced their destination from somewhere up in front. He saw nothing that he had not seen before, glancing out the window in nervous anticipation every few minutes during their flight: the purple murk of the sky, like a massive bruise filling his limited view—the color never changing, brightening or deepening, because the world they called Big Blue was tidally locked, and the penal colonies they called the Cinder Camps existed in the marginally habitable twilight zone on the perimeter of the night side.
A twilight existence. He looked away again from the desolate, shadow-ridden landscape below him. The land below seemed never to change, like the sky above. Someone pushed against him, trying to look out; pressing him back into his seat.
The Cinder Camps. Gods … For a moment the sense of overwhelming betrayal that had filled him from the day he had learned that he would not even be allowed a trial crushed all his ability for coherent thought. He saw Survey’s hand behind this—the Golden Mean’s hand, the one that he had bitten, as Chief Justice of Tiamat. They had made certain that he would be buried alive—not allowed to serve his life sentence in the kind of humane minimum security institution he had expected, where he might have the opportunity to go on fighting to change his situation. Instead he had been spirited away without warning or explanation, taken halfway across the galaxy to this place—sentenced to the Camps. He did not know whether anyone he mattered to had even been told where he was; he doubted that they had.
He had heard of the Cinder Camps, again and again, while he served in the Police; it was the place they sent the worst dregs of human existence, the ones Hegemonic justice considered unsalvageable or incorrigible. And how many other political prisoners had that included, over the centuries? He had no idea, although he had an idea about how long most of them had lived, after they got here. He was grateful that he had been a Police officer, that he was trained in hand-to-hand combat, at least … as long as no one ever found out where he had gotten the training. He had heard the stories about what they did to ex-Blues, here.
He took a deep breath, as the man next to him leaned away with an inarticulate grunt that might have been disgust. He saw the heavy collar locked around the man’s thick neck; reached up to touch the one around his own: A block, they called it. It made the use of any kind of charged weapon impossible. If he so much as tried to fire a stunner while wearing one, the block would explode and blow his head off. They had taken away his trefoil, and locked this on him, instead. His fingers clung to it, like the fingers of a man dangling from a cliff, as he felt the transport begin to settle toward the landing field.
He pulled on the pack filled with his survival gear—which had suddenly become the sum total of his worldly possessions—as the guard ordered them out. The pack was not very heavy. Like the other prisoners, he wore gray coveralls of some material as thick and stiff as the hide of an animal, and a hooded parka. He went out with the others as the hatch dropped, not waiting for anyone to urge him to it; trying to remain as unobtrusive as possible. The wind was cold, and smelled of sulfur. Ash blew into his eyes.
The guards fanned out in a ring around the craft, which was already heavily armed, ensuring that unwelcome approaches by anyone waiting there would be instantly fatal. Gundhalinu saw the shadowy figures who stood just beyond the boundaries they allowed, gathered in tight claustrophobic groups, watching for a sign. Behind them, like a surreal painted backdrop, he saw the vast arc of the far larger planet this world circled, the gas giant which was the real Big Blue. Its presence in the sky colored the smoky mauve with a swath of violet-blue. The ground shuddered, faintly but perceptibly, under him where he stood.
“Anybody going back?” one of the guards shouted; the words sounded strangely flat and uninflected, as if the desolation swallowed them whole. But a restless whisper of shuffling feet stirred the silent bodies beyond the ring of guards, as one m
an came limping forward, moving as though it took the last of his strength. His face was gaunt, but his eyes shone like the eyes of a man who had seen a vision of his god.
The other convicts let him pass, and then the ring of guards opened to let him through, as if he were a holy man. Gundhalinu saw the green light glowing like a beacon on his collar as he came on toward the transport. “He’s served his time,” the prisoner beside Gundhalinu muttered. “Lucky bastard.” Gundhalinu touched his own collar again, silently.
The guards ordered the new arrivals to begin unloading the supplies that had been crammed into the transport’s belly along with them. The crates and sacks were stamped with the numbers of work gangs. He worked without complaint, silently cursing himself with each strained muscle for not having kept in better shape.
As his vision adjusted to the dim light, he began to make out more detail in the landscape around him. At first he saw only the utter lifelessness of the plain, nothing but an unending undulation of the same ash-gray cinders that crunched under his heavy, chemical-sealed boots. His eyes kept searching for something more, until he noticed that the cinder desert was pockmarked here and there by an odd extrusion—small craters, their puckered mouths smeared with something black and tarry.
Near the transport there was a cairn heaped up from slabs of stone; probably the sign marking the landing-place. He saw no structures of any kind; but scattered over the surface of the ground, three or four meters apart for as far as he could see, there were poles—wooden, metal, he couldn’t be sure—the size of felled trees, and always laid out in a direction he guessed was east to west.
When the offloading was finished, the ring of guards moved inward, passing through the dozen men being left there like so much extra baggage among the supplies. The last guard to pass him paused, looking at him with hard, knowing eyes. “Good luck, Commander,” the guard said. “You’re going to need it.”
Gundhalinu froze, stared at him, trying to make the guard’s face into the face of someone he knew, one of the men who had once served under him. But the man was a stranger. A stranger far from home.
The guard grinned, and turned back to the transport. The hatch gaping in its underbelly took him in and sealed. The ship rose into the purple twilight with the heavy throbbing of a heartbeat, and rapidly dwindled in the distance.
Gundhalinu dropped the sack he was somehow still holding, feeling the stares of the small knot of strangers around him penetrate his flesh like needles. He said nothing, not acknowledging them, as he looked toward the men on the perimeter who had been waiting for the transport’s departure as patiently as hungry carnivores.
The work gangs came forward, each one a coherent unit, the solidarity of their members a show of strength, an act of defiance intended to keep the other gangs at bay as they came in to collect their supplies.
The men around Gundhalinu pressed closer together, instinctively, as the gangs approached and began to go through the supplies. They picked out their own shipments until the ground around the new convicts was completely empty. And then one man broke away from each pack, coming in from their territory to study the newcomers. Gundhalinu guessed that they were the gang leaders, coming to choose recruits.
He held his breath, his tension a physical pain in his stomach as he waited for someone to denounce him. But no one around him said anything, all of them suddenly preoccupied with their own fates. He realized what it would mean to be left on your own in this wasteland. At least as part of a work gang there was some chance of survival.
The gang bosses who came to pick and choose among the new arrivals were ragged and bitter; pale-skinned, dark-skinned, and everything in between. He endured, with the other new men, being inspected like an animal or a slave. The three or four biggest, strongest-looking men went first; he began to smell desperation among the ones who remained.
“Show me your hands.” The words were in Trade, the bastard tongue that was probably the only language most of them had in common.
He glanced up into the hard, emotionless stare of one more set of eyes. He held out his hands; the other man’s heavy, callused fingers touched his smooth palms. The man snorted and shook his head. “Bureaucrat.”
“I can fix things,” Gundhalinu said, in Trade. “I’m good at fixing things.”
“Got nothing to fix,” the man said, “and you’re not pretty enough.” He moved on.
Someone else stepped into his place. “You say you can fix things?” Gundhalinu nodded, studying the other man, as he was being studied. The gang boss was about his own height, gaunt and raw-boned, not an imposing figure. His face was dark, layered with grime; his eyes were gray and deep-set. Gundhalinu couldn’t guess his homeworld, but he recognized the measuring intelligence that looked him over, still holding back judgment. “Kharemoughi?” the man said.
Gundhalinu nodded.
“Tech?”
Gundhalinu nodded again, reluctantly; sensing that the other man would know when he was being lied to.
“What was your crime?”
Surprised, he said, “Treason.”
The man grimaced, and shook his head. “I think you’re too smart,” he said. “Politicals aren’t worth the trouble.”
Gundhalinu moved suddenly, as the other man started to turn away; used a Police move to pull him off-balance. The other man went down flat on his back, taken totally off-guard. Gundhalinu stood looking down at him. “I can take care of myself,” he said.
The man got slowly to his feet, his expression a mix of self-disgust and grudging amusement. “Okay,” he said, and shrugged. “I’m Piracy. Come on, Treason.” He turned, starting away.
“But he’s a Blue!”
Piracy spun back as the prisoner still standing unclaimed beside Gundhalinu shouted out the words. There were razors in his stare. “Is that right, Treason?” Piracy asked softly. “Is it?”
“The guard called him ‘Commander.’ ‘Good luck, Commander,’ he said, ‘you’re going to need it.’…”
“Oh, yeah?” The gang boss who had rejected Gundhalinu first pushed toward him again. At the perimeters of his vision, Gundhalinu saw heads turning, the sudden ripple of bodies starting into motion, starting inexorably in his direction, as if he had suddenly developed a magnetic field. The big man shoved him, hitting him hard in the center of his chest, so that he staggered back into the waiting arms of half a dozen other men behind him. He struggled free, kicking and elbowing, as their hands tried to get a hold on him.
He stood in the center of the small open space that was suddenly all that was left to him; ringed in now by a wall of convicts. “I’m a sibyl!” he said, hearing his voice break. “Keep away from me—!” He lifted a hand to his throat, to bare the tattoo that was also a warning sign, that meant biohazard to anyone who saw it. His fingers brushed the cold metal of the block; he remembered suddenly that the collar completely covered his tattoo.
“Where’s your proof?” somebody called.
“He’s got no proof. He’s lying.”
“Come any closer, and I’ll prove it on you!” Gundhalinu shouted.
“You want to bite me, Blue?” Someone else laughed. “You can bite my big one, you Kharemoughi cocksucker.”
“I never believed that ‘death to kill a sibyl’ shit, anyhow—”
Gundhalinu heard the catcalls starting, the muttered threats and curses in half a dozen languages—the hungry sounds of a mob starved for entertainment, for release, for a victim. He turned, slowly, balancing on the balls of his feet as the trap of human flesh closed on him.
They came at him first in ones and twos, and he held them off, sent them back into the mob again, crippled, or laid them out on the cinder field. At first his mind barely registered the blows his own body took; he had not fought, even in practice, for a long time, but the adrenaline rush of his fear honed his reflexes and deadened his pain.
And then they began to come at him in twos and threes, threes and fours, pinioning his arms, tripping him, falling on top
of his struggling limbs and body. Someone’s hands were at his neck, crushing the metal collar into his throat, choking him into submission. He twisted his head, opening his mouth, and used the only weapon left to him. He sank his teeth into the man’s wrist. The strangler bellowed; the pressure on his throat eased, and then came back doubled, sent the universe of stars reeling across his sight.
And then, as suddenly, the crushing pressure was gone again; the weight slid from his chest. He lifted his head, as his vision came back, to see the convict who had been trying to strangle him sprawled on the ground beside him, twitching and white-eyed, as if he were having a seizure. And then the maddened eyes closed, and the body beside his own lay still.
Gundhalinu pushed himself up onto his elbows, gasping, every breath like acid going down his ruined throat. He heard the shouts and laughter fade away into murmurs of disbelief, questions, angry demands: “What happened?” “What did he do to him—?”
“I’m a sibyl.” He spat the words out, with the taste of a stranger’s blood. “I warned you.”
For a long moment there was near-silence. He got to his feet somehow, stood swaying. He saw Piracy, at the edge of the crowd, shaking his head. “Too much trouble,” Piracy mouthed silently. No one moved around him.
The ground shuddered suddenly; Gundhalinu lost his balance and fell. And then the inner wall closed in on him in a rush, like one creature with a dozen heads, half a hundred arms and legs, a thousand hands, knees, feet and fists. They stuffed his mouth with ash and gagged him with a strip of cloth, bound his hands and feet. He was pulled up, beaten, kicked, and dragged; passed from hand to hand, buried alive inside a moving mass of bodies until at last he came down hard on the blackened rim of a crater he had glimpsed from the landing field. He only had time to realize what he saw before he was forced, face down, into it. Black, reeking ooze covered his head, filled his eyes, his nostrils, his ears. He held his breath, praying to all the gods of his ancestors and the Eight Worlds as he felt himself sink deeper, as they did not pull him up and did not let him breathe and did not stop and did nothing at all but let him die.…
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