Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  “What happened to her?”

  Bzya shrugged, his arms extended before him. “A Bell accident, deep in the underMantle. It was so fast, she can’t even reconstruct it. Anyway, she left half herself down there. After that, of course, she was unemployable. So the Harbor said.” He smiled with unreasonable tolerance, Farr thought. “But she still had her indenture to fulfill. So she came out of the Harbor with one leg, a dodgy husband, and a debt.”

  “But she works now.”

  “Yes.”

  He fell into silence, and Farr watched him work the clothes curiously.

  Bzya became aware of his stare. “What’s the matter?… Oh. You don’t know what I’m doing, do you?”

  Farr hesitated. “To be honest, Bzya, I get tired of asking what’s going on all the time.”

  “Well, I can sympathize with that.” Bzya carried on rubbing the grit through his clothes, impassive.

  After a few heartbeats of silence Farr gave in. “Oh, all right. What are you doing, Bzya?”

  “Washing,” Bzya said. “Keeping my clothes clean. I don’t suppose you do much of that, in the upflux…”

  Farr was irritated. “We keep ourselves clean, even in the upflux. We’re not animals, you know. We have scrapers…”

  Bzya patted the side of his barrel of chips. “This is a better idea. You work your clothes through this mass of chips — bone fragments, bits of wood, and so on. You work the stuff with your hands, you see — like this — get it into the cloth… The chips are crushed, smaller and smaller, and work into the cloth, pushing out the dirt. Much less crude than a scraper.” He hauled a shirt out of the barrel and showed it to Farr. “It’s time-consuming, though. And a bit boring.” He eyed Farr speculatively. “Look, Farr, while you’re in the City you ought to sample the richness of its life to the full. Why don’t you have a go?”

  He moved eagerly away from the barrel, rubbing a layer of bone-dust from his arms.

  Farr, well aware he was being teased again, took another shirt — this one stiff with grime — and shoved it into the barrel. As he’d seen Bzya do, he kneaded the cloth between his fingers. The chips crackled against each other and squirmed around his fingers like live things. When he drew the shirt out again the dust coated his hands, so that his fingers felt strange against each other, as if gloved. But the shirt hardly seemed any cleaner.

  “It does need practice,” Bzya said drily.

  Farr plunged the garment back into the barrel and pressed harder.

  Jool had been fixing food; now she slapped Bzya on the shoulder. “Every time someone comes to see us he gets them washing his smalls,” she said.

  Bzya tilted back his battered face and bellowed laughter.

  Jool led Farr to the center of the little room. A five-spoked Wheel of wood hovered here, with covered bowls jammed into the crevices between its spokes. Hanging in the Air the three of them gathered close around the Wheel-table, enclosing it in a rough sphere of faces and limbs, the light of the wood-lamps playing on their skin. Now Jool lifted the covers from the bowls and let them drift off into the Air. “Belly of Air-piglet, spiced with petals. Almost as good as Bzya can make it. Eggs of Crust-ray… ever tried this, Farr? Stuffed leaves. More beercake…”

  Farr, with Bzya prompting, dug his hands into the bowls and crammed the spicy, flavorsome food into his mouth. As they ate, the conversation dried up, with both Bzya and Jool too intent on feeding. He couldn’t help comparing the little home with the Mixxaxes’, in the upper Midside. There was only one room, in contrast to the Mixxaxes’ five. A waste chute — scrupulously clean — pierced another wall of the room they ate in. And Jool and Bzya were far less tidy than the Mixxaxes. The clump of cleaned clothes had been simply abandoned by Bzya, and now it drifted in the Air, sleeves slowly uncoiling like limp spin-spider legs. But the place was clean. And he spotted a bundle of scrolls, loosely tied together and jammed into one corner. The Wheel symbol was everywhere — carved into the walls, the shape of the table from which they ate, sculpted into the back of the door. There was a much greater feeling of age, of poor construction and shabbiness, than in the Midside… But there was more character here, he decided slowly.

  He looked at the wide, battered, intelligent faces of Bzya and Jool as they worked at their food. The light of the lamps seemed to diffuse around them, so that their faces were evenly illuminated (the apparently random placing of the lamps was actually anything but, he realized). There was a quiet, unpretentious intelligence here, he thought.

  He briefly imagined living with these people. What if he’d grown up here, deep inside Parz, in this strange, old, cramped part of the City?

  It wouldn’t have been so bad, he decided. His mood swung into a feeling of pigletish devotion to these two decent people.

  Surreptitiously he shook his head, wondering if the beercake was affecting his judgment.

  He became aware of Jool and Bzya watching his face curiously.

  He blurted, “Do you have children?”

  Jool smiled over a fistful of food. “Yes. One, a girl. Shar. We don’t see much of her. She works out of the City.”

  “Don’t you miss her?”

  “Of course,” Bzya said simply. “Which is why I haven’t mentioned her before, Farr. What can’t be helped shouldn’t be brooded on.”

  “Why not bring her back?”

  “It would be up to her,” Bzya said gently. “I doubt if she’d want to come. But she’s too far away. She’s a ceiling-farm coolie. Like your sister, from what you say.”

  Farr felt vaguely excited. “I wonder if they’ll meet.”

  Jool laughed. “The hinterland may seem a small place to an upfluxer, Farr, but it contains hundreds of ceiling-farms. Shar’s serving out her indenture. It’s hard for her to get home until that’s through. Then, maybe, she’ll get a more senior job on the farm. She’s working for a decent owner. Equitable.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  Jool frowned. “What? How we can live apart, like this?” She shrugged. “I’d rather have her away from us and safe, than here but in the Harbor. It’s just the way things are for us…”

  “Farr has family,” Bzya said.

  Jool nodded. “A sister. The coolie. Yes? And there’s another with you from the upflux, an old man…”

  “Adda.”

  “And you’re separated from them both. Just like us, with Shar.”

  Farr nodded. “But Dura’s being brought back from her ceiling-farm. Deni Maxx has gone to get her.”

  “Who?”

  “A doctor. From the Hospital of the Common Good… And Adda has been taken to see the Chair of the City. It’s all to do with sorting out the Glitches…”

  “Hm,” Bzya said. “Perhaps. Farr, I don’t believe everything I hear from the Upside, and I’d suggest you grow a little skepticism too. Still, I hope you see your sister soon.”

  Jool was working toward the bottom of the bowl of piglet meat. “So what do you make of our part of the City?”

  Farr finished his mouthful. “It’s different. It’s…” He hesitated.

  “Dark, dirty, threatening. Right?”

  Farr shook his head. “I was going to say cramped. Even more cramped than everywhere else.”

  “Well, this is the heart of the City,” Jool said. “I’m not sentimental about it, but that’s the truth… It’s the oldest part of Parz. The first to be built, around the head of the Harbor, when the Spine was first driven into the underMantle.”

  Farr imagined those ancient days, the bravery of the men and women determined to extract the Corestuff they needed to build their City, and then constructing that immense structure with their bare hands and tools little more advanced, he guessed, than the average Human Being’s today.

  Jool smiled. “I know what you’re thinking, boy from the upflux. Why would anyone build a little box like this around themselves? Why shut out the Air?”

  “Because,” Bzya said, “they were trying to rebuild what they thought they’d lost,
when the Colonists withdrew into the Core.” He looked thoughtful. “So Parz is a representation in wood and Corestuff of an ancient dream…”

  “You’re both very intelligent,” Farr found himself saying.

  Husband and wife together tilted back their heads and opened their throats with laughter. The pair of them made a ludicrous, outsized, merry sight in the room’s cramped Air.

  Jool wiped her eyecups. “You say what you think, don’t you?”

  Bzya patted her arm. “We aren’t fair to laugh, Jool. After all, we know plenty of people — even in the lower Midside, let alone the Upside — who think Downsiders are all subhuman.”

  “And,” Farr said, “with Human Beings — upfluxers — worse than that.”

  “But it’s rubbish,” Bzya said fervently. He grabbed a ray egg from the bowl and waggled it before Farr’s face. “Humans are more or less equal, as far as I can see, no matter where they come from. And I’ll go further.” He bit into the soft egg and spoke around his chewing. “I believe humans throughout this Star are intelligent — I mean, more so than the stock on other human worlds; perhaps more intelligent even than the average Ur-human.”

  Jool shook her head. “Listen to him, the ruler of a hundred Stars.”

  “But there’s logic to what I say. Think about it,” Bzya went on. “We’re descended from a selected stock — of engineers, placed in the Star to modify it; to build a civilization in the Mantle. The Ur-humans wouldn’t include fools in that stock, any more than they would have made us too weak, or too ill-adapted.”

  “The analogous anatomists have worked out much of what we know about the Ur-humans” project from our ill-adaptation,” Jool said, her wide face lively and interested. “From our inappropriate form, based on the Ur-human prototype. And…”

  Their conversation, illuminating and informed, washed around Farr; he listened, mellow and relaxed, chewing surreptitiously on a little more beercake.

  Jool turned to Farr. “Of course, we weren’t so clever as to avoid setting up a rigid, stratified society to control each other with.”

  “Here in Parz, anyway,” Farr said.

  “Here in Parz,” she conceded. “You Human Beings are evidently much too smart to put up with it all.”

  “We were,” Farr said mildly. “That’s why we left.”

  “And now you’ve come back,” Bzya said. “To the lowest strata, at the bottom of the City… Upside, Downside, bottom, top; all those up-and-down concepts are relics of Ur-human thinking — did you know that?… here in the Downside we’re regarded as less intelligent, less aware, than the rest. In the past people here have reacted to that.” His large, battered, thoughtful face looked sad. “Badly. If you treat people as less than human, often they behave like it. A couple of generations ago this part of the Downside was a slum. A jungle.”

  “Parts of it still are,” Jool said.

  “But we’ve pulled ourselves out of it.” Bzya smiled. “Self-help. Education. Oral histories, numeracy, literacy where we’ve the materials.” He bit into a slice of beercake. “The Committee does damn all for this part of the City. The Harbor does less, even though most of us are Harbor employees. But we can help ourselves.”

  Farr listened to all this with a certain wonder. These people were like exiles in their own City, he thought. Like Human Beings, lost in this forest of wood and Corestuff. He told them of lessons and learning among the Human Beings — histories of the tribe and of the greater mankind beyond the Star, told by elders to little huddles of children suspended between the vortex lines. Bzya and Jool listened thoughtfully.

  When the food was finished, they rested for a while. Then Bzya and Jool moved a little closer to each other, apparently unconsciously. Their huge heads dipped, so that their brows were almost touching. They reached forward and placed wide, strong fingers on the rim of the Wheel. Quietly they began to speak — in unison, a slow, solemn litany of names, none of them familiar to Farr. He watched them in silence.

  When they finished, after perhaps a hundred names, Bzya opened his eyecups wide and smiled at Farr. “A little oral history in action, my friend.”

  Jool’s face had resumed the sly, playful expression of earlier. She reached across the Wheel-table and touched Farr’s sleeve. “Have you figured out what my job is yet?”

  “Oh, stop teasing the boy,” Bzya said loudly. “I’ll tell you. She gathers petals from the Upside gardens, and delivers them to the pig-farms — the small in-City ones scattered around Parz, where the pigs for the Air-cars that run within the City are kept.”

  “Think about it,” Jool said. “The streets of the City are hot and cramped. Enclosed. All those cars. All those pigs…”

  “The petals are ground up and added to the pigs’ feed,” Bzya said.

  Farr frowned. “Why?”

  “To make them easier to live with.” Solemnly, Jool bent forward, tilted her stump of leg, grabbed her wide buttocks through her coverall and separated them, and farted explosively.

  Bzya laughed.

  Farr looked from one to the other, uncertainly.

  Then the smell hit him. Her fart was petal-perfumed.

  Bzya shook his head, sighing. “Oh, don’t pay her any attention; it will only encourage her. More beercake?”

  16

  The driver of the car from Parz City was Deni Maxx, the junior doctor who had treated Adda. Dura wanted to rush to her, to demand news of Farr and Adda.

  The Human Beings — all twenty of them, including the five children — emerged from their shelter in the forest and trailed after Dura. Deni Maxx peered out of the open hatch at her, staring indifferently past her at the ring of skinny Human Beings. “I’m glad I’ve found you.”

  “I’m surprised you managed it. The upflux is a big place.”

  Deni shrugged. She seemed irritated, impatient. “It wasn’t so hard. Toba Mixxax gave me precise directions from his ceiling-farm to the place he first found you. All I had to do was scout around until you responded to my call.”

  Philas crowded close to Dura. The widow pressed her mouth close to Dura’s ear; Dura was aware, uncomfortably, of the sweet, thin stink of leaves and bark on Philas’s breath. “Who is she? What does she want?”

  Dura pulled her head away. She was aware of Deni’s appraising gaze. She felt a swirl of contradictory emotions: irritation at Deni’s high-handed manner, and yet a certain embarrassment at the awkward, childlike behavior of the Human Beings. Had she been such a primitive on her first encounter with Toba Mixxax?

  “Get in the car,” Deni said. “We’ve a long journey back to Parz, and I was told to hurry…”

  “Who by? Why am I being recalled? Is it something to do with my indenture? Surely you saw Qos Frenk’s ceiling-farm — or what was left of it; it’s no longer functioning. Qos released us, and…”

  “It’s nothing to do with your indenture. I’ll explain on the way.” Deni drummed her fingers on the frame of the car’s door.

  Dura was aware of the staring eyes of the rest of the tribe, as they waited mutely for her to make a decision. She felt a brief, selfish stab of impatience with them; they were dependent, like children. She wanted to go back to Parz. She could surely — she told herself — find out more about the situation of Farr and Adda there than if she stayed with the Human Beings as just another simple refugee upfluxer. And, in the long run — she justified to herself — she could maybe do more to help all the Human Beings by returning than by staying here. Something important must be required of her, for the City to send someone like Deni Maxx to fetch her. Perhaps in some odd way she would have influence over events…

  Philas tugged at her arm, like a child, demanding attention. Dura pulled her arm away angrily — and instantly regretted the impulse.

  The truth was, she admitted to herself, she was relieved that she had an excuse, and the means, to get away from the suffocating company of the Human Beings. But she felt such guilt about it.

  She came to a quick decision. “I’ll come with y
ou,” she told Deni. “But not alone.”

  Deni frowned. “What?”

  “I’ll take the children.” She widened her arms to indicate the five children — the youngest was Mur’s infant, Jai, the oldest an adolescent girl.

  Deni Maxx launched into a volley of complaints.

  Dura turned her back and confronted the Human Beings. They pulled their children to themselves in baffled silence, their eyes huge and fixed on her. She ran a hand through her hair, exasperated. Slowly, patiently, she described what awaited the children at Parz City. Food. Shelter. Safety. Surely she could prevail on Toba Mixxax to find temporary homes for the children. They were all young enough to seem cute to the City folk, she calculated, surprising herself with her own cynicism. And in a few short years they’d be able to turn their upfluxer muscles to gainful employment.

  She was consigning the children to lives in the Downside, she realized. But it was better than starving here, or sharing their parents’ epic trek across the devastated hinterland of Parz. And eventually, she insisted to the bewildered parents, they would reach Parz themselves and be reunited with their offspring.

  The adults were baffled and frightened, struggling to deal with concepts they could barely envisage. But they trusted her, Dura realized slowly, with a mixture of relief and shame — and so, one by one, the children were delivered to Dura.

  Deni Maxx glared as the grimy bodies of the children were passed into her car, and Dura wondered if Deni was even now going to raise some cruel objection. But when the doctor watched Dura settle little Jai — frightened and crying for his mother — in the arms of the oldest girl at the back of the car, Deni’s irritation visibly softened.

  At last it was done. Dura gathered the bereft adults in a huddle and gave them strict instructions on how to get to the Pole. They listened to her solemnly. Then Dura embraced them all, and climbed into the car.

  As Deni flicked the team of Air-pigs into motion, Dura stared back through the huge, expansive windows at the Human Beings. Shorn of their children, they looked lost, bewildered, futile. Dia and Mur clung to each other. I’ve taken away their future, Dura realized. Their reason for living.