He nodded. "Like Moomoo country? That's dangerous. But he could do it if he's willing."
"So you'll take me to him?"
The big man rose, nodded. "I'll have Toria take you over there. She knows him better than I do, and keeps an eye on odd'uns like you. But you're gonna have to dress like everybody else does off-shift. The Fire don't like secrets, just work. And you better bring him back here alive when you're done, or I'll have to raffle off the privilege of slabbing you."
Geyl followed a young woman down a twisting gravel path in dawnlight. Her guide wore boots, mud-brown trousers, a belt, and the usual Burning Men coating of mud. Geyl wore only the mud, and thin sandals made of transparent plastic.
Toria had stood beside her while Geyl undressed, searching each garment before folding it neatly in a stack atop a stone bench. Toria had then pointed to the mud, and followed Geyl into the waist-deep mire, ensuring that every inch of Geyl was thoroughly coated. Geyl squirmed with closed eyes while Toria's strong fingers performed a cavity search as well. Whatever fearsome thing a "sicaria" was, the Burning Men were taking no chances.
And so it was, naked and caked with mud like some sort of aborigine, that Geyl climbed a run of narrow stone steps up a middling cliff face, and stood before a meter-wide hole in the soft sandstone.
"Filer is here," Toria said, pointing to the hole. "Fire be." She then turned and walked back down the cliff face steps.
The hole faced east, and the pink-yellow sky now cast enough light so that Geyl could see clearly within: The cavity in the cliff was no more than three meters deep and two wide, and a tall, muscular man sat against the far wall, propped on several duffels, eyes closed and hands on his knees. Unlike everyone else she had seen there, he was fully dressed and had not a dab of mud on him. There was a small oil lantern on the cave floor, its flickering flame retreating against the rising dawn.
"Fire be?" Geyl said hesitantly.
He smiled a slight smile just before opening his eyes.
"Good morning, Ma'am. Don't do the fire talk if you're not one of them, which my hunchmaker says you're not. We're both guests here. And I don't recognize your face."
"You can't even see my face!" Geyl objected, laughing. "And I'm freezing. Can I come in?"
He nodded, gesturing. Geyl clambered through the hole. The top of her head brushed the stone, and she realized that there was no way Filer could stand straight in the tiny cavity.
What Geyl had thought were two flattish stones were plastic cushions. Her legs were aching from the trudge up the cliff face and the kilometer's trail from the Big Top. She sat as demurely as she felt she could, and realized that another identity was called for. No matter; she had plenty. "I'm Karen Hittner. I don't work here. They stripped me and dunked me in a mudhole before they'd bring me to you. I'm not used to being naked in company."
Filer stretched his long legs out horizontally. "It's an indistinct kind of nakedness, Ma'am. And around here, nothing special." He had a quiet, precise sort of voice, one that fully pronounced every syllable and seemed to revel in the experience.
"Mmm. People tell me you can help me."
"People exaggerate sometimes. But I'll do what I can."
Geyl grasped her knees and leaned forward. The mud was making her itch in some very bad places. "I need someone to take me somewhere, somewhere a long way from here. I was told..."
"Well, let's go." He turned, extinguished the oil lamp, and began packing it in one of the duffels.
"Let's go? You didn't even let me finish."
Filer shrugged. "I've been here for almost a week. It was time to be off somewhere anyway."
"But you don't even know me!"
"True. And that's good! Ma'am, if I'd already gotten bored with you I would have made excuses. But my hunchmaker tells me you're middling good company, which is in short supply on the ways to far-off places. So let's get you washed and dressed and both of us fed."
"Well, hold on. You haven't asked me where I want to go. It's likely to be dangerous."
Filer finished lacing his last duffel closed. "I only go to dangerous places. And when I need a rest, I come back here. Besides, I can either get you someplace or I can't. And if I can't, nobody else can either. So I might as well try my best."
"And you haven't told me what it'll cost."
"Cost? Jow," Filer Fitzgerald said with a grin, and waved Geyl back out the hole into the newly risen sun.
Another of Hell's long hours found them walking side by side along tracks in the Gamma Alpha Sigma freight yard, between endless rows of tank cars stinking of mercaptan and other chemicals. The Burning Men loved their mud but had good soap too, smooth and mild and scented with lemons and clove. The sun was drying her hair, and Filer had found an anti-inflammatory in his pack for her aching legs.
Filer Fitzgerald told her that he had been born Luke Edmund Fitzgerald, in Uriel, the big mining city in the foothills of what people really did seem to call Those Damned Mountains. "Someone told me my father named me after an ore boat that sank," he had said as they packed to leave. "He must have wanted a girl." Filer was 29 but looked older; the sun had put lines in his face and robbed its skin of much of its suppleness. He was a lead prospector, with training in chemistry, metallurgy, and mining.
"Filer" was a nickname, after the musical instrument that he carried lashed to his duffels: A rectangular stringed instrument like a cubistic violin. It was native to Hell and called a "file," "though when I play it I sometimes think they should call it a rasp." He had a quick laugh and a self-deprecating style, and could carry a surprising load on his back.
And so far, he had been happy to let her make the smalltalk, and had asked her virtually no questions at all.
They had walked some time in silence, squeezing under massive pipes and around tangles of red-painted valves. Finally they reached the far end of the freight yard, and Filer paused. "North or south?" he asked.
"South. Way south."
"Got a city?"
Geyl shook her head.
"Got a latitude?"
"Zero."
Filer nodded, grinning. "Hey, easy. I was afraid you wanted to go to the South Pole." He set his pack down in the dust and trotted forward a few dozen meters to where the steam turbine locomotive idled at the head of the consist.
"Yo, Randy!" he shouted. A balding man in striped coveralls stuck his head out the cab window. "Yo, Filer!"
"Jow!" Filer pulled something from his pocket and tossed it to the engineer. The engineer caught it, withdrew, and a moment later returned, to hurl something round at Filer. "Jow!"
Filer caught it. "How far south you going?"
"Sycorax. End of the line. Need a ride?"
"Me and my babe!"
"Well, sit tight. Caboose is empty till Nixon, where I pick up Joe, and he ain't partikuller. We pull in fifteen minutes. I'll go slow and you can jump it when it comes. Honk if you spot a hotbox."
"Roger!"
The train pulled by at two klicks per hour, and Filer hopped effortlessly up the ladder with his enormous pack on his back, Geyl running along behind and laughing. He grasped her hand and hauled her to the caboose's rear deck as though she were weightless, burdened as she was with a backpack full of food.
They climbed up to the cupola and sat on the cracking red leather cushions, while Filer unwrapped the large round object the engineer had tossed him. He took a bite and offered it to Geyl.
"A popcorn ball!"
"Ummph. Light to carry and doesn't get moldy. Good for a mid-day boost."
Geyl giggled and bit a chunk from the opposite side. It was so big she had a hard time getting her teeth into it.
"So what's this 'jow' stuff I keep hearing?" she asked.
Filer pulled a knife from his pocket and carved a few ragged chunks from the ball, which he pushed across the scarred wooden table to Geyl. "It's how poor people get along out here on the fringes. We share and we do favors, figuring when we need something it all comes around."
&nb
sp; "But what does the word mean?"
Filer shrugged. "It's not like it means just one thing. I guess when you say it it means, 'here you go and pay me forward.' Sometimes when you want a big favor you ask it with a little one. I tossed Randy a chunk of salami. He tossed me a popcorn ball. Jow. He knew we needed a ride. I knew he was short a brakeman. Jow."
"Doesn't anybody ever use money?"
Filer shook his head. "Money's an abstraction. The orders pretend it exists so they don't have to barter with each other. But it's not something you can carry in your pocket."
"No, I'm sorry…I said 'money,' but I meant currency."
"Currency." Filer gouged another chunk out of the popcorn ball with his knife and chewed thoughtfully. "Is that an Earth word?"
Geyl lay on her back on the caboose's tin roof, and gazed at the stars in the north. She was trying to relate the angle of Aldebaran—which lay less than half a degree from Hell's north celestial pole—to the latitude indicated by the picopower XGPN geocompass buzzing its codes silently within the marrow chamber of her right fifth rib. Its operation required electrical circuitry, but theoretically, the MGIDs would not penetrate living bone to reach it.
Theoretically.
The caboose had a low balustrade, barely knee high. At best it would keep her from rolling off, and there was but one narrow cot down below. Filer had given her the cot and taken the floor the first night, but however polite Filer was, the man snored like a zerospike rocket engine. Then they'd stopped at Nixon to swap a dozen empty flatcars for several boxcars of machinery and a long line of liquid petroleum gas tankers. Paunchy, bottle-swigging Joe McBurris joined them there, with his own nocturnal rocket engine. Though some modicum of floor remained, the roof had been her idea and her choice. Blinking with amusement, Filer had hauled a cushion up to the roof for her, tossing in a pair of blankets and woolen socks so she wouldn't have to sleep in her boots.
The low, droning wheeze of the locomotive's turbine was restful, and the coal smoke blew reliably inland and rarely bothered her through her sparkling clear nights on the roof. Geyl had spent the long days watching Joe and Filer play a peculiar card game that involved making a geometrical pattern on the table with peppermint disks that Joe had put up to join the game. After Filer had cleaned him out of mints twice, Joe spent a lot of time riding with Randy up in the locomotive.
The days crept by, punctuated by short stops at fueling and watering stations, and occasional overnight stays in towns so small they had barely a dozen buildings. Geyl bathed in frigid rivers near the track with Filer seated on a rock, his back to her, rifle at ready. She stayed out of sight in the caboose, and Filer brought her things he thought she might like (including spare woolen socks, some fish hooks, a pocket compass, and a sheath knife) that tracked her desires with eerie precision.
From Moloch to the equator was a little over six thousand kilometers, and the Burning Men's gas field was almost a thousand kilometers south of Moloch. The train would take them most of the way to Hell's southernmost city, though the path was longer on the inland angle. On Filer's map the railroad distance to Sycorax was given as fifty eight hundred klicks, and it was only three fourths of the way there.
Finally Sycorax was only six hours off, and they would arrive just after dawn. As the route had gone south, it had turned westward, away from the trackless rain forests along the ocean, and in toward the towering mountain range that ran like a spine down the eastern side of Hell's single titanic continent. By Nixon they were at fifteen hundred meters altitude, and the nights began growing cold. Sycorax perched at twenty-one hundred meters, and Geyl was very glad of her blankets and woolen socks.
Reaching the pickup point would require that she work her way back to the coast, which at the equator involved a six hundred kilometer float down a river through a trackless jungle. She kept expecting Filer to ask her precisely where she was going, and when he failed to ask, could only wonder if he were simply waiting for them to get completely beyond civilization for him to force himself upon her and then kill her.
He didn't seem the type, but then, she had to remind herself that this was Hell, and the old rules didn't apply. Long days pumping Filer for information as the caboose jarred its way down the rails had made her picture of Hell much clearer, and grimmer in ways she had not expected. Filer's services were much prized, as lead was a substance in demand. All the orderhouses in the cities embedded lead plates in their roofs, against the radiation a Hilbert drive would release from orbit directly above them. The Ralpha Dogs, being among the richest of all the orders, had five centimeters of lead in the roof of their masterhouse. Most lesser orders had to be content with one or two. It would take more than a zigship materializing square over Moloch to take out the Ralpha Dogs.
The cruelty of the order system became clear in its economics. Money was a banking abstraction, confined to the orders' ledgers. There was no coin, no currency, no system for the interchange of value among individuals. Only orders could own property and engage in economic transactions through the banking system. Scabs were reduced to bartering for food and shelter and depending on one another's luck and generosity. Against such a bckground the odd notion of jow took on a poignant importance. Only the insane or the desperate would dare leave an order before their contracts allowed.
In a very real sense, Hell was still as much of a prison as it had originally been designed to be.
A single sharp sound violated the predictable staccato clatter of the rails, and the great steam turbine's rhythmic breathing from the opposite end of the consist. Geyl's eyes snapped open in the still air. Hell's gray moon was approaching full, and an icy light showed her breath hanging before her lips.
It was clear now: She heard feet softly chuffing up an iron ladder, from the opposite end of the caboose. Filer would have taken the ladder near the end where she was, forward, in the short space between the front of the caboose and the cupola.
Her boots were in the caboose below, tucked in her pack. Never leave things lying around on a mission, Barbara Del Caso had said. Be ready to grab and run at any time. She reached down and peeled Filer's socks from her feet. The iron roof was painfully cold, but flesh would give traction where wool would not.
Had pudgy, middle-aged Joe McBurris deluded or drunk himself into thinking he would be attractive to her?
Then she saw a slender figure clothed completely in black step onto the roof of the caboose, black woolen mask over its face. She remembered the Burning Man's odd suspicion: You planning on killing him?
Was this a sicaria? And what was Filer Fitzgerald, anyway?
The masked figure carefully took several items from his back and laid them without sound on the roof. One was a large rifle. Another was a black rectangular block with several spherical objects in it. All had handles. Grenades?
Geyl silently threw off her blanket and wriggled to one side to get a better view around the cupola. She assumed he would return down the ladder and enter the caboose. Instead, he scooped up the rifle and headed forward, toward the cupola.
She froze when he saw her. Slowly, catlike, rifle raised, he edged around the cupola and stood at her feet. Geyl's heart began to pound. If this was some sort of assassin or terrorist, her chances were poor—and if the mission had to end here, it would. But this was Hell, and women were uncommon. She recalled Jeroen's clumsy eagerness to give her whatever she wanted at the bat of an eyelash.
Her initial look of terror was good. But she looked her confronter up and down, forced a smile of admiration to her face, and half-lidded her eyes.
"Hi," she said in a throaty whisper. "Cold up here..."
Geyl wriggled her hips a little, reached down and shoved her pants down to her knees. She arched her hips in his direction, saw him take another step forward, eyes fixed on her naked pubis.
"Come on!" she coaxed, and pointed at her pants. He looked over his shoulder, hesitated, then carefully set his rifle on the sheet iron roof and went down to his knees. He pulled her pants fr
ee of her legs, tossed them aside, and reached up to undo his belt. His own pants were tight, and he pushed them down only to his thighs.
Violence makes men ready in a heartbeat, Geyl thought, watching him lean forward as she lay squirming on the cold iron roof. Let him think tension was passion. Just a moment more…
A gunshot echoed from below. The assassin stiffened, began to scramble to his knees again. Geyl struck hard with both hands to the side of his head. He fell to one side, instinctively trying for his feet, falling due to the tangle of cloth binding his thighs together.
Another shot, and shouts below. Geyl heard the twing! of a bullet puncturing the caboose's sheet metal roof a meter to her left. She rose to a crouch, spun around, and landed a furious kick to his shoulder, spinning once again and with her other foot striking the side of his neck below his jaw. She felt something crack within. The force of her blow sent him staggering against the balustrade and over the side, grasping in a panic at the caboose instead of kicking free. He fell straight down the side of the caboose, then screamed briefly as the wheels took him.
More shots from below, and the cacophony of windows breaking. Geyl heard Joe McBurris howl in pain. The forward windows of the cupola shattered with two gunshots from within, and Geyl leapt around behind the cupola. A dark figure leapt nimbly through the broken pane, sidearm at ready. He looked ahead, then behind…
…to see Geyl leveling the large rifle at his chest. Heedless, he turned and took a huge kicking leap from the roof of the caboose to the roof of the boxcar ahead of the caboose. Leaning forward, he ran with great leaps like a cat, silently, velvet black against dark brown robbed of its color by the darkness.
Geyl squinted in the moonlight, trying to draw a bead through the sight of the heavy weapon amidst the constant swaying of the caboose. She heard Filer grunting below, and heard the sound of several soft objects bouncing briefly on the tracks.
The assassin leapt from the roof of the first boxcar to the next, and ducked from side to side. Geyl cursed, swung the rifle to follow him, closed her finger on the trigger.
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