by Tanith Lee
* * *
• • •
There were two hours left of the Maram. Casrus walked directly to Aita, through the slink and to the entrance of the mine.
A couple of men kept guard. Sometimes the mines were mechanically guarded. It would not always be necessary to tip, but usually, and this time it was. For a white credit chip each, they let Casrus through to crawl on the slides of fosscoal.
The slides lay downward, though most of the galleries of copper and calvium rose above the Subterior. In a tube of rock, men and women together clawed and picked at the somber slopes. A single electric bar gave light, touching the proceedings to a dismal sheen. The coal came away in little avalanches after much slow prizing. All worked noiselessly, with a noiseless desperation. Only the coals made any sound, rattling free, and the steady mindless chiseling of knives, stones, fingers.
Cloakless and lacking the usual plastomil sack for transporting coal, Casrus bore away his spoils wrapped against him in a fold of the outer long-coat. In the narrow alley, occasional wanderers scraping by took note. Once a thin skeleton of a man came prowling from a doorway, only to be drawn back by the words of an unseen mutterer: “No, leave him alone. He’s too big to tackle.”
Then, at the rough stair leading to his new dwelling, hearing a soft pattering, Casrus turned about and found four women behind him. They were almost identical, melted into one mold of deprivation, long matted hair, loose and uncovered, fire-colored tatters, faces gaunt white as if carved from slender bones. One held a stone in her rag-bound hand, but at his turning all four backed away. She with the stone it was who spoke, lifting her head to stare at him.
“You’ve gathered much warmth there, man. Let me share it with you. I’ll see you enjoy it, too.”
Another of the women punched her on the shoulder.
“Take me,” this woman wheedled. “I’m better than she is. I’ve known fewer men.”
The other two lowered their lids dully, waiting on fate, past outcry.
Casrus went toward them, and again they flinched, but the woman with the stone and the other who had cried kept their fierce eyes on him.
“Do you have a coal sack?” Casrus asked.
The woman with the stone unbelievingly stared on. The other with the voice, more flexible, said at once: “The skirt of my coat will do,” and held it out. Casrus dropped into it immediately two handfuls of fosscoal. Then, as the others slowly followed suit, spreading the coats or the threadbare liners of their clothes, Casrus awarded them each the same measure.
The woman with the stone was ready the last. As the coal fell into her grip, she said, “Do you want all of us, then?”
Casrus ignored the question.
“Have you far to go?” he asked her. “You may be stopped for the coal, now that you have it.”
“Not far. We’ll keep together. And stealing is lawfully punishable, if the offender is caught.”
“So it is,” said Casrus, with the faintest smile, and turned once again to climb the stair.
The nearer of the speechless women whispered, “Look, he has only three or four coals left for himself.”
“He’s a fool,” said the second woman loudly and sniggered.
She with the stone said, “It’s Klarn. Can be no other.”
They hung there, grown quiet, and observed the stupid hated benefactor go up to his hovel, activate the door and enter. Then they ran for home.
Even in the two hours left him, he could not sleep, but lay on the insulated pallet, watching the drawn leaping cat and the pale tired flame he had kindled in the scoop by striking sparks on the coal with his knife. His insomnia did not unduly trouble him. He had long ago learned to sleep little.
Beyond the hovel, vague sounds of Jate commenced instantly with the bell. They were not the sounds of the Residencia by any means, but a clamor of machinery and human discontent. Dogga barked, wheels argued with each other, a woman wept. Presently Casrus rose, and smothered the fire to save the coals.
In a bartering space, in one of the streets below the Slink, a white chip bought him a square of the concentrated gluey food and a plastomil cup of sour processed water tasting of disinfectants.
It was a cold Jate, extra cold, for the temperature here fluctuated, either as certain forms of heating—vaporines, fires—were left quiescent, or as some intensification of the surface temperature far above gradually sank into the bones of the planet. Ear shields had been donned, and the shields for nostrils and mouth. It was not extreme enough this deep into the Subterior for the entire face to be covered.
Casrus, huddled at a low communal fire with others, was distinguishable only by his superb physique, which, bundled as it was in layerings of garments, might be mistaken for the gaunt bulk of the surface worker. His face, however, gave him away. Good looks were not common, or, if they were, were totally submerged by want and anxiety. Besides, the aristocratic caste to the features alone betrayed them.
Word had spread. Three-fifths of the warren had learned by now of the fall of Prince Klarn. Those who had not learned would shortly do so. His crime they had not heard, and so invented crimes, the crimes of the Subterior, often sinisterly apposite to the lie which had condemned him. Other tales were also rife. Casrus had given away the stuffs of life, careless, princely still, and unforgivable.
No one approached him as he sat at the fire, but when he rose to seek the Kaa exit point Dorte had exhorted him to reach by the second hour, in trios and quartets, members of the bartering crowd got up and followed him. At first with stealth, amazed at him and his unprotected advent among them, conscious too of the milky, all-seeing Stare-Eyes on their poles.
The initial vocalization was raw, half wary of itself, but soon enough others joined it. Even the Law would not intervene in an affair of taunts and insults. And there were alleys between here and all other places that might be his destination. The Law had sent him to them. Perhaps the Law welcomed their assumption of its task. And there were many of them now, too many for the blame to fall squarely on any individual or group, if they proceeded well short of murder.
Casrus, knowing most of the main thoroughfares and linkways of the Subterior from five or six years of coming and going in them, knew that to gain the exit point he must presently traverse a part-buried gallery, scanty of light. If he had needed reminding, last night, Dorte and he had trodden there, en route to the tavern.
The mood of the crowd, perhaps now thirty strong, had increased. It was close to attacking him, regardless of the Law, driving itself into a fever of viciousness.
He was a street away from the gallery when he turned and faced the crowd. They had not expected it, or the absence of unease which he displayed—they might reasonably have anticipated his terror.
But Casrus, a fatalist, a cynic even, understood them, and felt neither anger nor alarm. He was that unusual entity, a man assured of self if not of his world and the deeds of that world. Actually, he was unafraid—not from blindness, but from true sight. Fear was superfluous and unhelpful. To erase it was instinctive, an act unfelt by him, or those who gazed at him.
The abuse had slackened. Now a single voice yelled from the midst of the crowd.
“This is the man who gives away fuel and clothes. Give us your coat and top shirt, Casrus Klarn!”
Then other voices took up the howl.
“Give us your boots!”
“Give us your quilted vest!”
“And your gloves.”
“Give us your breeches.”
Spurts of laughter went up, and suddenly a man came running to Casrus. His face, shielded at ears and nostrils but not across the mouth, was a grinning cypher for the entire crowd, as was his advance. His hands were already out to rip and snatch some fragment of Casrus’ gear when Casrus struck him one felling blow across the head. The man whirled and went down, bleeding from the left brow, barely conscio
us, yet his protective facial shields unharmed. The blow had been chosen at the instant it was delivered, to save him that.
Again, the crowd was hushed. The spoon they had used to taste the broth had broken in it. They hovered between the impulse to rush upon Casrus in a body or else to leave him be.
In this interim, Casrus appeared to scan the crowd. His scanning was leisurely and thorough. His eyes came finally to rest on a youth with a crippled shoulder, result of some accident of natural birth or unnatural industry that had gone unhealed—for though the centers would treat the sick, during treatment employment and wages were lost. The young thin fingers, ungloved, had the blueish tinge of bloodless bitter cold.
The crowd was again checked. Casrus, rather than back off, stepped across the felled man and walked forward.
“I am willing,” said Casrus, the first time he had addressed them, his voice clear and steady, “to give up what I myself can spare. Therefore, you take these,” and he drew off the upper and the lower gloves from his hands and extended them to the young man with the frost-nipped fingers.
The gesture was imperious, but not offensive. As a surface-worker, Casrus would receive sufficient credit to obtain other gloves. The youth balked only for a second. Then he reached out and grabbed. And from his lips, unbidden, absurd, yet quite audible, came that phrase least often heard hereabouts, the fumbling sentence in which he made his thanks.
At the same moment, another in the crowd laid hold of Casrus’ coat, and moving like a piece of oiled machinery, Casrus spun about and struck this one also across the head, sending him crashing down. (All violence having been self-defending, the Stare-Eyes would ignore it.)
Casrus walked away.
The crowd, defused and irresolute, hovered murmuring.
Only two men pursued Casrus into the gallery, risking the Stare-Eyes that marked them go. Their imaginations did not stretch to the idea that Casrus could have looked for something of the sort, and waited for them. As they jumped down into the gloom, he seized the foremost in two gloveless yet immaculate iron hands, and rammed him first into the rock and next into his companion.
Alone, Casrus proceeded to the Kaa exit point.
* * *
• • •
A flying craft, similar to that which had brought Casrus to the Subterior (a plain sphere of white metal, equipped with windows and elevating motors) took the gang of ten men to the surface.
Dorte the Upperling rode with them, lounging on a padded chair with a drape of crimson and (aristocratic) blue cloth.
“Ah, so they did not eat you yet,” Dorte had remarked on seeing the prince. By that title he introduced Casrus to this, his second gang. “His elegance takes the place of Hejerdi, whom he put into a center for medical attention.”
The nine men did not speak. Where they were going there would be ample opportunity for murder, but only by endangering themselves. If they reckoned on a score to settle with a deposed aristo, it was doubtful they would try to settle it on the planet’s surface, under the eyes of the machines, and under the awesome eyes of space itself.
Dorte, gang-master, would not be going out. His Jates for that were done since he had achieved position. Others took chances, while he lolled in the cabin of the flyer, or returned below to whatever pastimes he affected. Dorte was hated, too, but in the way a man would hate a blemish on his own skin.
The vehicle traveled the intestines of the planet. Through the windows unlikely glints and chasms of darkness manifested and vanished and thrummed. Old mine-shafts gaped, and fresh, deep random openings, like mouths into the night itself. Casrus had a few times entered this region before, as far as the mine workings extended. He had also picked up the crude mythology of the Subterines in respect of the uncharted ducts which poured themselves away beyond the mapping of men or machines. Some, the rumor propounded, pushed directly through the planet to that farther side, uninhabitable and airless as this, yet held in the glare of an unslumbering sun. Untenable, a desert harsher than the harsh and freezing rock of the night side, the sun side was an unthinkable phantasm, dressed in ridiculous surmise. The sun itself fired off flaming missiles into the earth. Inconceivable monsters swirled in the airlessness, dueling with each other. Recently, there had come to be an additional myth—that another race lived under the sun, with complexions of yellow metal and customs which crazily echoed those of the Klave. Casrus had not yet heard this latest legend, a half-dream left over, unrecalled, from the hypnotizing Fabulism of Vitra Klovez.
Casrus, as his fellow princes, had learned in childhood of the desert face of the planet and the eternal sun which hammered on it. He comprehended that life of any sort was impossible there. The beginnings of his own species were baffling, and indecipherable, despite the accumulations of computerized wisdom regarding other times and other worlds. Concerned with his own time and world, Casrus had set aside contemplation of origin, as his peers set it aside from lightness.
Ultimately, the flying craft came to a chamber of rock insulated with plastomil, and with a series of pressurized doors which gave on the nightmare—the naked landscape of the dark side surface.
“Into suits and out,” Dorte declared with the jollity of the nonparticipant.
The men obeyed immediately, Casrus going with them to the ready-opened lockers. Each selected an overgarment of slick resistant material, equipped to inflate a bulging transparent skin, that became a great drop of contained atmosphere, forming up to cover the whole of the body and the head but leaving arms and legs outside and therefore mobile. Into the garments the men stepped, drew upon the scarlet cords, and became strange balloon creatures. Only the extremist of pressure changes or the snag of the sharpest object could puncture these air-vortexes. Should such a thing occur, another tug on the red cord would repair the self-reconstituting material.
Casrus knew of such suits, though he had never used one. In the vehicle, he had bound his uncovered hands with strips of lining from his top shirt. The suit adjusted itself to his body. A black knob upon his left shoulder brought him the breathing sounds of the nine men, and would bring the orders of the machines and robots outside.
The door of the flyer was already folding aside. The men plodded clumsily out on the weighted soles of their overgarments, jumped down in the cavern and went toward the series of pressurized doors.
There were three in all, and beyond the third lay the land of everlasting night.
Dreamlike, yet only beautiful in abstraction, the scene flowed across their eyes.
Slender pointed rocks rose all about, and away in colonnaded lines. Far distant, an upcombed tier of mountains, curiously tall, with crests crystalline and thin to the brink of translucence. There was a sense of glitter, specks of brilliance cloned in the dry wet-shining ground, in the pinnacles and shatterings of the rocks, and all across the sheer black membrane of the sky.
It was a sight absolutely of terror. Underground, all vistas were limited, and this, seemingly limitless. It was an alien country to which those who came frequently never grew accustomed, before which the stranger had been known to throw himself, as much as his suiting would allow, face downward. But Casrus, prepared by education if not by familiarity, took in the prospect, and put it from him. Its grandeur and its ominous message of danger he recognized, but his preoccupation was with the internal scenery of men. The scenery of the planet touched but did not subdue him, never would.
Robot machines moved slow and gliding, colorless beetles on the colorless climbing, glowing plain that ran between the nearer rocks. The purpose of their comings and goings was ill-defined, as was that of other gangs of men, all clad alike and moving, unlike the robots, with a weightless, graceless lolloping, restrained only by their conditioned soles.
Now a robot approached. It came to Dorte’s ten men, paused, and said by means of the microphone knob: “Follow.”
They followed it, out onto the wild plain.
> On the surface there were many types of employment. The heads of subsurface mines to be maintained, crevices to be sealed, and new crevices capable of yielding ores to be opened and driven inward. There were also units which fed upon the outer nothing, isolating from it vital elements. Even in airlessness protoforms were obtainable, flecks of gases, moistures and other ingredients available only with machinery. Yet these machines needed in turn to be served and constantly restored. Meteors crashed from tails of luminescence against the unprotected waste—bringing new riches, and sometimes damaging equipment. Among all the gadgets, globes and little towers which freckled the surface, there stood on the high places the barren vents of ancient volcanoes and the satiated, paved cliffs, the mirror bowls of the intensifying lamps. These sucked at the pulses of light the stars wept on the planet. From millions of miles away, the tears were falling, from sources grown old, or cold now, or dead. Yet the mirror bowls licked up the ghosts of the tears, and concentrated them downward into the clear, still radiance that lit the undercity of the Klave.
Dorte’s second gang of ten were first to visit the far cliff line and there work on some of these bowls.
The journey was of nine or ten miles, but accomplished in less than half an hour in the great leaps common to surface travel.
A ditch of light dust lay under the cliffs, produced by a long ago grinding away of their skin, now caged in the vacuum. The dust smoked up whitely as the men and the machine went through it. Suddenly one of the men spoke to Casrus, “Like walking through your mistress’s powder box, eh, Klarn?”
Then they were scaling the stem-like knotting of the cliff, arriving in a depression about a mile in diameter. On a stalk of white metal, the flower cup of an intensifier bowl reared, wide open to space. Gradually, throughout each Jate, each Maram, the bowl would turn itself in pursuit of the brightest stars as they wandered down the sky. Yet the turning was infinitesimal as the star-movement itself.