by Tanith Lee
And this bowl was to be cleaned, and was now shutting off certain of its cells, fading from silver into a pearlized opacity.
The men swarmed up the metal stalk, aided by magnetized rungs. At the lip of the bowl, each swung and tipped over like an insect into a dish.
“Here,” the man spoke to Casrus again. “You must take one of these.”
Along the edges of the apparatus, small wands could be pulled loose on lengths of rubberized coil. A dry scouring of particles blasted softly from these wands at the thumbing in of a button, to play over the bowl, cleansing it, though from what, save occasional disturbed dust, was not evident.
Casrus was acquainted by hearsay with both method and occupation. He knew also to activate the wand delicately in order to prevent himself from being rocketed backwards. The men, of course, had watched for just such a display.
One of them said to the others: “He knows his business. How come?”
“Oh, Klarn knows everything there is to know about us.”
Beneath the intensifier bowl the robot machine was glimmering away. As soon as the faint knob-conducted hum of it was gone, another of the men said, “A razor flint would puncture your air suit, Klarn. No Stare-Eyes here.”
“He’s only to touch the red cord to get the air back.”
“Unless we rip the cord. There’re nine of us.”
They went on with this for some while, as the ten of them proceeded minutely over the bowl, cleaning it. The talk was just that. Eventually, the man who had first spoken of a woman’s powder box exclaimed, “Well, what do you say, Casrus Klarn? We kill you and it goes down as an accident.”
“I say,” said Casrus, in a voice that had never changed, during combat, threats or silences, “that you’d better hope no accident of any sort befalls me. The computers who sent me into the Subterior will be waiting for just such an event as my death.”
“You mean they’d welcome it—sentence carried out?”
“I mean that they’d anticipate crimes against me. And whoever was by me in the hour of an accident must be suspect and a scapegoat. Murder is rewarded by death.”
“That’s so,” one of them said. “Sent up here, but without a suit, without any air. Just the stars to watch the lungs bulge out of our mouths. We’d better let this prince live.”
“More than that,” Casrus said. “You’d better be sure I do.”
They went on cleaning the intensifier bowl diligently.
The first speaker spoke again.
“A year ago,” he said, “three hovels collapsed in Ni Slink. This man here brought a machine and cleared the rubble. The wretches there survived because of that.”
“What about Nentta,” said another. “He saved some lives there.”
“Why did you?” yet another demanded.
Casrus failed to answer. There was a pause as they cleaned. Then somebody said, “More important, what were you sent here for, into cold hell? Why?”
Again Casrus did not reply, though he glanced at the man through the milky barriers of their air balloons. The glance was grave but uninformative.
“Someone hated him, why else?” the first man supplied. “Hated him because he came often to the Subterior. Those stinking aristos. That’s it, isn’t it?”
“Is it?” said Casrus.
A couple laughed.
“He can fight, I’ll tell you that,” said the first man. “Rotten-bone Dorte set three gangers on him—one was Hejerdi. And we all know where Hejerdi ended. Klarn slung him in a fire scoop at the drinking shop.” The man took a couple of bounds. He struck Casrus mildly on the arm. “I’m Zuse. I’ll see that you don’t die. We might have some bets on you in the alleys, who can beat you in a brawl.”
“I think not,” said Casrus.
“Live anyway,” said Zuse. The others had stopped working to look. “It’s hard enough, without us making it harder.”
“My thanks,” said Casrus, without a trace of mockery, prince to prince, on the offer of truce.
* * *
• • •
Besides dread, and the frozen dripping of stars, there was on the surface a measure of freedom. The form of travel, in large bounds, an effortless almost-flight, was not unpleasing when understood and in control. Yet they worked throughout the Jate, unrecalled by any bell, told by machines when to attach a tube to the facial area of their air balloons and sip a gruel that gave strength but tasted of diluted plastomil. Even without gravity, the muscles of the spirit began at last to ache. To cleanse the mirror bowls, to haul equipment in the tracks of the machines, to apply force-drills to unspecified vents in the ground. That was the Jate. Repetition and unchanging vistas of black and white. The cold, too, pressed against the air suits, quietly coming in, so that by the end of his stint, each man felt the threat of freezing half an inch away beyond his suit’s skin, leaden mouth breathing at his flesh as if through a window. The false staling air in the bubbles that shrouded them, drugged them with inexorable fatigue.
By Jate’s end, Casrus, with the rest, knew exhaustion. But they were worn to the shape of their fate, and he, indifferent to it as he might be, not yet worn. The rigors and the soullessness of this time jarred on him, body and mind, on those parts unworn, unshaped. That the next ten Jates would be all the same was no consolation.
The ovoid transport took them down to their cheerless home. Dorte had come to see how the prince had fared. All were too enervated to pay much heed. Sneering, Dorte walked Casrus to his hovel in Aita Slink. For a while, Dorte stood in the alley, joking, pointing out to those who went that way by Maram the royal residence of Klarn. At length, a woman came and Dorte rolled off with her.
Later, a woman came also to Casrus’ sealed metal door, begging for coal. Word had apparently spread fast. Casrus gave her one piece, all he could spare. Then, like the dead, insomnia and all else vanquished, he slept.
The Jate bell woke him, as it was intended to wake the sleepers of the Subterior. Those who overslept would lose their work, and maybe starve, or maybe worse than starve.
To work the surface was hard but profitable labor. The computers had been just in selecting it for Casrus. If he retained his stamina, in a few years he might become an Upperling like Dorte, finding others for the work, taking dues from them, living as well as he could, given living’s low shape in the Subterior.
Casrus warmed a cube of concentrated food in a small pot of water rations he had been mechanically awarded as he left the surface, along with the other men. The light of the two coals had become greenish, for they were low. About to quench them, Casrus heard a stone rattled along the metal mesh of his locked door.
He turned. Hejerdi leaned there, peering in through the net of iron.
“I lost my cave,” he said at once. “Someone took it while I was at the center. I tried to scrap with him for it, but with my burned back I couldn’t.” Hejerdi’s face was greenish in the coal light, dark gray beneath the eyes. “Dorte put me up to beat you,” said Hejerdi, “but you treated me fairly. Will you shelter me, now?”
“Yes,” Casrus said.
He unlocked the door with the tab, and let Hejerdi crawl inside. Plainly, his illness was not theater; fresh blood had trickled, despite the cold, through the liners, mottling his coat and cloak where they were worn enough to be absorbent.
Casrus indicated the pallet.
“Lie there, and sleep.”
Hejerdi flopped down with an agonized grunt.
Casrus drank from the mixture of food and water, then took the container to the sick man. Hejerdi drank greedily, breathing in gasps.
Then he lay on his side, staring, as Casrus prepared to leave the room.
“You’re a madman,” said Hejerdi. “When I’m better, I might steal from you. There’s the Law, but I might evade the Law.”
“I doubt it.”
“You doubt it,
Klarn, because you wouldn’t, and you a prince.”
As Casrus reached the door, Hejerdi said: “Quench the coals. Don’t leave them for me, they’re almost gone.”
“I’ll bring more at Maram.”
“Yes, and give them to half Aita. I’ve heard. And not even taking traditional payment from the women. Do you want to ruin the social structure of the Subterior?” Hejerdi grinned. “You,” said Hejerdi, “why are you helping me?”
“Why did you come to me for help?”
“Because you’re mad. I knew you would. You’ve been groaning for our trouble since you were a boy.”
Casrus had paused in the doorway.
“I must lock you in,” he said. “For your protection and my own, I keep the tab till I return.”
“Agreed.” Casrus was locking the door when Hejerdi said, “Those others, Subterines from your household in the fine city. Will they be coming to you here?”
“Not if they’re wise,” said Casrus.
“Not even your woman? Oh, I heard about the woman—Temal, the girl you saved from the Law. Not even her?” The door was secure. Casrus had gone down the stair into the Slink. “You mudskull!” Hejerdi yelled after him in an excess of gaunt passion. He went on shouting this, and other epithets, until the pain in him forced him to be quiet. He sank back on the insulated pallet, and into much the same deadly slumber as that of the man who had lain there before him.
* * *
• • •
Temal, clad in a brown robe—brown, the seldom affected color of Subterine lament—stood at one end of the gold-lit salon of the Klarn palace. Vitra Klovez in black and silver, with ear clasps of calvium-sapphire, stood at the other.
“We’re to have an auction,” said Vitra daintily, twisting one of the aristos’ fiddle-toys, matching sapphire, between her long fingers. “An auction of Casrus’ human slaves.”
“They are not slaves,” said Temal.
“What, are you daring to talk to me?” Pale and haughty, Vitra added surprise to her repertoire of looks.
“Excuse me,” said Temal, “I merely sought to enlighten you. The small tasks Casrus allotted to his household were only a pretense to ease their pride. They were here to learn and to better themselves.”
“You’re mistaken. No Subterine has any pride. Except, possibly, you. But then, your status was different, was it not?” Temal said nothing. Vitra smiled and inhaled a mild perfumed drug from a little filigree lozenge. Vyen’s idea was to give away Casrus’ pet Subterines to interested friends, who would pay Klovez token barter—some ornament of racing dogga in recompense. Vitra had noisily applauded the notion, but she was not quite herself, not quite as Vyen had anticipated. Edgily, catching her mood, he had asked of her: “Did you destroy the Fabulism tapes as I told you?” “Of course! Do you take me for such a lunatic? How dare you question me this way. Nor do you issue me with orders. If I had not erased the tapes of Ceedres’ plot, that would be my affair.” “But you did erase them?” “I did.” But, of course, her vehemence sprang from defensiveness. Strangely, she had been unable to do as Vyen suggested. Incriminatingly whole, the tapes of her Fabulism remained—indeed, had been added to. A weird picture of a slum, as bad as, yet different from the squalid Subterior, had begun to haunt her reverie in the chamber of the dome, thrusting through her brain onto the screens. . . .
And now Temal, Casrus’s woman. A slut—defying her.
Vyen had suggested that Temal should be the last and most celebrated item on the agenda of their amusing auction.
“Now Casrus has gone,” said Vitra to Temal.
“Now you have made sure he has gone.”
Vitra stared in disbelief.
“What did you say to me?”
Again, reticence.
Vitra flung the empty lozenge against a wall.
“You insolent nonentity. You should be on your knees to me. What do you suppose you can do with yourself now? Be an actress, perhaps. Flaunt your shamelessness in some entertainment. But you’re not pretty enough, not striking. The princes wouldn’t be interested in you. What’s left to you but to beg aid from Klovez now that Klarn’s sunk in the slime.”
“I can go to my lord,” said Temal.
Vitra gave an actual shriek of mirth, overdone, silly, yet quite corrosive.
“Go to your lord? You mean to the Subterior, where he’s been sent?”
“I mean that. I was matrixed there, and grew up there. It won’t kill me to return.”
“Return, and do what? He can’t keep you there. Casrus won’t welcome another mouth to feed, another human body to support there.” Temal stared at her. Maybe she had not considered this implication before, that Casrus would feel bound to support her, and could not. That she, meaning to assist, would be merely a burden. To follow him could have been her single beacon in a darkening landscape. Her eyes showed her thought. Doubtless accustomed long ago to gazing on desolation, they revealed that once again desolation was all they saw. “Casrus will be hard put to it enough to support himself,” Vitra continued, ruthless and unnecessary. Also, oddly and invisibly, slightly afraid. She could not have said why, as she could not have said why she had not wiped the tapes of the creatures of her imagination, or why these creatures obsessed her. Long before she confronted Temal, aware she must confront her, Vitra had been uneasy. The only liking Casrus had ever awarded a woman had come to Temal, and not to herself.
“Everything you say,” said Temal, “is wise. Will you permit me to leave you?”
“Do as you wish. Possibly it will be the last time you can indulge your whims. My brother wishes you all assembled by the fourteenth hour. See that you’re there. Wear your best garments, not that brown vileness. And put on your jewels, if he gave you any.”
Temal bowed. Her subservience was now faultless; and, peculiarly, also her dignity.
Alone, Vitra seethed. Almost instantly, the balsam for her nervous fury presented itself. The Fabulism—
She knew what came next. It exhilarated her. She could not help it. Though she could never again see Casrus in the flesh, yet she could conjure him on the screen in the person of Ceedres Yune Thar. She could maneuver all of them, and work out her neurotic impulses on them—even on Vyen. Even on Temal.
And perhaps also, on her guilty self.
Vel Thaidis, the innocent. Vitra, the serpent. Interchangeable.
As Temal, with a soft footfall, climbed the stairways of the Klarn palace, Vitra vacated the house, and dashed, in her vehicle of bells and ribbons, toward the dome of Rise Iu.
CHAPTER FIVE
Part One
Mansion Thirty-Seven (Seta), the Black and Gold, was a four-stepped pyramid, of ebony columns and sable brick, which framed a façade of two hundred and seven windows of saffron glaze. The entire structure was built out along a pier and towered, a shining mountain, on the surface of the wine lake.
Undeniably, Seta had the look of a palace. Which intimated that once, maybe, it had been one, a princely house raised close to the Zenith perimeter, before the borders of Slum and estate were established. Probably these ancestral undertones had given the place its extra fillip of arrogance, and chosen its first danger color of black.
A girl in transparent black satins thick with gold, stood on the outer stair. The stair was non-moving, also the girl. Neither was she Tilaia. She waited for Vel Thaidis to approach, having beckoned to her desultorily. Sherner, she waved away. At her back, the door, veiled only by clear glass, blazed forth its yellow light. Indeed, all the windows and lamps of the J’ara Basin blazed under the thick green olive shade of the parasol. It was an uncanny phenomenon, unlike any other.
Vel Thaidis, having found the strength, went up the stair.
Sherner, left behind, bared his awful teeth moodily.
The girl was comely, yet not so arresting as Tilaia, nor so over-polished. Her hardness had a brit
tle quality that matched the brassy hair.
“The princess,” the girl announced, “sent me to bring you in.”
Vel Thaidis’ heart hammered from the short exertion of the climb and her eyes blurred at each beat.
“Princess?”
“Tilaia, who but? She has techs, didn’t you notice?”
“She spoke to me of kitchen work and service to the tables,” Vel Thaidis said hoarsely.
The girl paid no heed. She climbed the last two stairs and pressed one finger to a black marker on the glass door. The door lifted away in petal sections, into lintel, sides, floor. It seemed the J’ara quarter, like the Instations, had certain benefits of technology at hand.
In a golden foyer black flowers trailed from a lattice on the ceiling. A living cactus squatted on a pedestal—an incs. Vel Thaidis recalled, with a pang of retrospective premonition, the cage of incs at the plateau market. A thin red metal chain secured the creature, but it appeared docile, basking witlessly under the effete artificial sun of bright lights, perhaps fantasizing to itself that it was at home in the Zenith desert. Apart from the door, no absolute technology was in evidence. Where there were no windows, the lights were the fire-and-fuel sort, ignited behind yellow panels. There was, however, a lift. The J’ara girl led the way inside and held depressed a lever. The lift rose with the heavy lilt of hydraulic pressure.
“At another time,” said the girl, “you’ll take a more modest entrance. You were admitted frontward since no patrons are due for another hour.”
“May I drink?” Vel Thaidis said.
“Possibly.”
“I mean, aqua.”
“The girls of the house may take one bucket or two jars a day from the cistern on the roof. There’s also a bath. Even for the kitchen sluts.”
“I mean, I must drink now.”
“How long since you drank?”
“A sip on the street. Before that . . . last Maram; ale not aqua.”
Floors had glided by. They were now at the fifth. The J’ara girl let the handle slide upward and the elevator flowed to a halt. They were in another kind of foyer, hung with gauze curtains and tinsel ornaments. The smoke of music audible outside also haunted Seta, but was at its slightest here. Passages threaded from the foyer, and women occasionally came and went along them, clad in the somber gilded garments of the mansion.