The thought of Katie—the first one to get away from the slavers—had given Roxanna shudders afresh. What had happened to Katie? Katie had promised to get help, and she had been the type to keep her promises—Roxanna was proud of her ability to read people. Was Katie even alive anymore?
Life at the Malaudin House Brothel had been such, however, that Roxanna had been glad to get away. It was not that she had been overworked; the sexual tastes which she had been bought to satisfy, were not the majority ones among the Exalted of Vultaire, nor among the wealthier of the Ordinary Citizens, who also occasionally frequented the bordellos. Besides, the management had been directing the ones who did like girl-children, especially, if they liked hurting them, to the green girls, more so since they had realized that Ingrid’s presence among them was somehow a life-preserving force. Thus Roxanna had had time on her hands to ponder her situation, and to converse with the lesser of the Vultairian staff—the cleaners, the laundry workers, and such.
“Your kind are well and truly caught,” had said Norris, a maintenance man, during a conversation which Roxanna, he, and a laundress named Janza had had in the brothel kitchen one morning. “The Exalted know that you’d stick out in any Vultairian crowd, should you dare to try to escape. They’d just have to wait and keep their eyes open, and sooner or later they’d spot you, and pick you up again.”
“Indeed,” Roxanna had sighed.
Ingrid, seated beside her, the four green girls clutching her as usual, had kept silent. She, with her size and colouring came closest, of all the off-world slaves, to being able to pass in a pinch, as perhaps an adolescent Vultairian, but with the green girls hanging onto her, she was the most visible alien of them all. Roxanna had realized even then, that the blonde would not jettison the quartet. There was something maternal about Ingrid, a deep caring for others. It made her selfless in a way that Roxanna herself could never imagine being.
The green girls were nodeless, and had to rely on those around them who did have nodes, and had picked up some of their language, for any verbal exchanges. Ingrid had quickly become the leader at that; even the Malaudins had her translate for them. They were too indolent to bother to learn a language if it was not absolutely necessary. That kind of arrogant laziness was one of the Exalted traits that had had Roxanna seething with fury.
“The Exalted are sadistic beasts, the lot of them,” she had snarled to Janza, one day.
She had gone to the laundry during a quiet time to help Janza fill the clothes washers. These were a lot like the ones she remembered from the slave ship. Janza had explained that they were imported technology, and forbidden to the Ordinary Citizens, except while they were working for the Exalted.
“Fortunately, the Malaudins must have spent lots of money on sex slaves. None of us off-worlders, except for the green girls, have to work hard. I suppose slaves are a cheap way to fill a brothel, but I can’t help but die a little every time I hear one of the green girls crying. They’re in pain—and that seems to please the Malaudins, especially since Ingrid keeps them going. Though you’d think that the girls would want to die, considering how they suffer.”
“Until you and Ingrid came, a quartet of green girls would last only a couple of months,” Janza had responded. “They’d die in the night, usually. But a new group of four would arrive within days—why four, I don’t know, but it’s always four.”
“It’s not just the sex work that they’re here for, although that’s a part of it,” Roxanna had added, furrowing her brow. “There’s something else involved.”
Janza had sat down on a low stool to bring her face closer to Roxanna’s.
“There is something else, but I’m not sure what to make of it,” she had said, her voice low. “All the clothing, and linens that those girls use: the sheets, the towels, the wipes for tears and sweat, are handled separately from the rest of the laundry. They’re soaked and thoroughly wrung out, and then they are soaked again, and wrung out again. Not until that’s been done do they go into the common wash. And the water from the wringing, one of the other workers told me, is boiled down while covered with some kind of a mesh, which ensures that nothing but water vapour escapes. A cloudy liquid is left, and it’s taken away, I don’t know where.”
“It sounds like they’re getting something from the girls’ bodily secretions,” Roxanna had said, surprised.
Janza had nodded.
“That’s what we think,” she had agreed. “But we don’t know what. Or where it’s taken. Or what’s done with it.”
“It’s kind of creepy,” Roxanna had muttered with a shudder.
*****
The questions this had raised had not been answered by the time Janza had come by and whispered into Roxanna’s ear that someone she knew had offered to take away “the dark-skinned girl” and her blond friend, if they wanted to escape the brothel.
“They only have room for two, since you’ll have to travel hidden,” Janza had explained. “But, it’s the Rebels, and they have a safe place where you can keep away from the Exalted. They want you for your brains; in my talks with them, I’ve mentioned how sharp and inquisitive you are. They won’t hurt you, and certainly you won’t have to work as a prostitute!”
It had been an offer too good—and flattering—for Roxanna to refuse, and she had immediately agreed to go. But when she had asked Ingrid about coming, she had done as Roxanna had thought she would, and placed the interests of the green girls above her own. After months spent together, the two teens from Earth had separated; Roxanna feeling guilty, and bereft.
“If only there was some way to help her and the green girls,” Roxanna muttered as she stared at the sheets of figures that the Base Coordinator, Jorun, had asked her to study.
The numbers were some kind of import-export statistics, involving something called the Klensers. Jorun had obtained raw data from a mole in the Government bureaucracy, and had asked Roxanna, as the person with the best math skills on the Base, to see what she could make of them. Roxanna had been rather shocked to find out that there was no such thing as a computer, or even a calculator, on hand, but had bit her tongue; clearly the Exalted were keeping a lot of technological advantages from the regular folks. How they had succeeded in creating and maintaining such a two-tiered society she did not quite understand, but there it was. The Exalted flitted about in flying machines that were way more advanced than anything that Roxanna had known on Earth, while the Ordinary Citizens travelled using runnerbeast carts and their feet. The Exalted had translation nodes while other folk had to do without.
“The government rents these Klensers out, right?” she asked Jorun after reading the scant information accompanying the figures. She knew better than to call it “your government” in Jorun’s hearing. “They don’t actually sell them?”
Jorun looked down at her from the other side of the table with a queer smile on his face.
“You have no idea what the Klensers are, do you?” he queried.
“No, I don’t,” Roxanna admitted.
She did not mind revealing her ignorance. She was ignorant; she was on a world that was strange to her. Her only experiences of it so far had been the brothel, and the road to the Base, and both had been very limited environments. Now she was at the Rebel Base where she was free, but not to go out into the wider world.
“Would you like to see?” Jorun asked.
“Of course,” she replied, surprised.
Jorun rose, heading out from the office, gesturing for her to follow. She did so, wondering if the Klensers were machines of some kind, designed to clean something or other. Soap would have had to be sold outright to be of any use. Jorun still had the odd smile on his face as he waited for her to catch up; he then shortened his long stride to accommodate her.
He led Roxanna across the vast open cave that made up most of the Base, and which was living space for the people who were, more or less, permanent residents of the place. Roxanna had been assigned a pallet, and floor space, for her nights, in
that very hall. In the evenings she simply hauled out the pallet, and a blanket, from storage, and settled down approximately in her assigned spot to sleep. The set-up did not include privacy, but, fortunately, Vultairians were not snorers. She had wondered what the married couples did for sex, but had decided not to ask, partly because her recent experiences had made her skittish on the subject. The Vultairians on the Base had showed no sexual interest in her, which was a blessing; like Jorun, they treated her as a very precocious child, not an object for lust. She found it a wonderful change from the pedophilia in the brothel.
At the other side of the hall, Jorun hailed a young woman carrying a basket filled with folded towels and sheets.
“Sira, how’s the waste water situation?” he asked her. “Roxanna here has no idea as to what the Klensers are. I thought that we could give her a demonstration.”
Sira smiled at Roxanna. She obviously recognized her, which made sense since the off-worlder was rather conspicuous on the Base.
“Ah, you must be from a planet that has never used the services of the Klensers,” she said. “This ought to be quite interesting for you.
“There’s enough waste water in the storage container for a demonstration,” she added to Jorun. “Although, it’s not nearly full yet. Cathe is with the Klensers. She’ll tell you which one of them has gone the longest without working.”
Jorun thanked Sira, and led Roxanna to one of the smaller rooms at the edge of the main cave. The room was occupied, not by some kind of animals as Roxanna had half-expected, but by a half-a-dozen people lying on pallets, either asleep or comatose, and a woman seated in a chair by the wall, knitting. When Jorun and Roxanna entered, the woman set her handiwork aside, rising to meet them.
“Hello, Cathe,” Jorun greeted her. “Can we borrow one of your charges? Roxanna here has no knowledge whatsoever of Klensers so I thought it would be a good idea to show her.”
“Are you saying that these people are the Klensers?” Roxanna asked, staring at the blanketed forms on the pallets.
One of the forms had the shape of a heavily pregnant woman; there was another woman as well, and four men of varying ages.
“Yes, indeed,” Jorun answered. “They are, indeed, human beings. Vultairians, like Cathe and myself, but of course, not really like us. Mutated Vultairians, is the way it has been explained to me. The mutation is carried as a recessive gene in the population, which means that it shows up among the normal ones, every so often, but can also be bred for by mating the Klensers among themselves.”
“However, since the Klensers spend a lot of their time sleeping or in an entranced state,” Cathe continued, “they need the help of the rest of us to stay alive. They could probably manage on their own in some Garden of Ease and Delight where fruit and vegetables were available all year around, but since most of this planet needs to be farmed to produce food, we have to look after them.”
“So when that woman there has her baby,” Roxanna queried, nodding towards the pregnant sleeper, “the child will be a Klenser?”
“Possibly,” Cathe replied. “We won’t know for sure until he or she reaches adolescence. The trait doesn’t show up until then, and since we don’t know who impregnated Kaya, we don’t know how her baby will turn out. If the father is another Klenser, the child will certainly be a Klenser, but if, and this is more likely, the father is one of the Exalted who like to play idiotic sex games, then there’s a good chance that he or she won’t be.”
“Idiotic sex games is a kind way to put it,” Roxanna muttered, thinking of the screams of the green girls that still rang in her ears, her troubled eyes on the mother-to-be. “I happen to be in a position to know that much.”
Jorun patted her shoulder gently, and Cathe smiled at her.
“You and Kaya are two lucky ones,” she said. “You’re both out of it, now.”
Roxanna drew a deep breath, and nodded.
“So how do the Klensers do what it is they do?” she asked.
“Which one of them may we take?” Jorun inquired of Cathe, his eyes flitting over the sleeping bodies. “Not Kaya, of course. She needs her strength for the birth.”
“Any of the others are fine,” Cathe replied. “We don’t have much for them to do around here, so we never come close to wearing them out. But take Jebo over there.” She pointed to a sleeper with a middle-aged face at the edge of the group. “He hasn’t had to do anything for at least three weeks. It’ll do him good to exercise his talents.”
Jorun walked over to Jebo, and leaned down to shake his shoulder.
“Get up, Jebo,” he said in a quiet but insistent tone. “We need you.”
He pushed back the blanket to reveal a muscular Vultairian male, dressed in a simple one-piece suit of soft cloth. To Roxanna it looked a lot like a baby’s sleeper which left the feet bare. The front apparently could be opened all the way to the crotch, but at the moment it was done up to the throat. The man struggled to his knees, looking dazed.
“We need you to demonstrate your abilities for us,” Jorun said to him. “See, Jebo, our friend Roxanna here comes from a world where the people have never heard of the Klensers.”
He gestured at Roxanna, and, to the girl’s surprise, the kneeling man’s gaze settled on her. She had assumed that he was not alert enough to register her presence, but obviously that was not so. The eyes that looked at her were of an odd blue-green colour that she was certain that she had never seen before, even among the Vultairians who seemed, almost always, to have light-coloured eyes.
Jebo nodded, climbed onto his feet, and turned to look at Jorun questioningly.
“We’re just doing some waste water,” Jorun told him. “Sira tells us that there’s enough of it for a demonstration, but that’s hardly enough to test your strength.”
“Not much work here,” Jebo said with a voice rusty from lack of use.
“Yeah, we try to keep it that way,” Jorun agreed with a laugh. “That way, if something disastrous does happen, you fellows will be at full strength to go and meet it. Unlike the Exalted, we’re not interested in making profits off Klenser backs.”
Jebo headed for the door, with Jorun and Roxanna following him. Cathe returned to her chair, telling Jebo that it would be time to eat when he came back. Jebo nodded to her, and led the other two out the room at a clip. Apparently he knew well where they were headed, but stopped, every now and then, in his steady progress, to wait for the others to catch up with him, hindered as they were by Roxanna’s short stride.
A door, marked Waste Water Containment, took them into a room which was in the extension to the cave, and inside it, a swimming-pool-sized hole had been dug into the ground, lined with some impermeable material, and surrounded by low walls. The bottom of the pool was covered in filthy water, a mixture, Roxanna deduced, of used washing water and sewage. It reeked, and Roxanna crinkled her nose. Jebo walked directly to where a ladder attached to the wall of the pool gave access to the bottom.
While Roxanna and Jorun watched, Jebo removed his suit, revealing an athletic physique and rippling muscles. Completely at ease in the nude, he climbed down the ladder into the pool, a look of concentration on his face. When he reached the bottom, he slipped into the dirty water without the slightest hesitation, while Roxanna shuddered to see it.
“Watch him,” Jorun said, his own eyes on Jebo’s form which was only partially visible in the dirt.
Roxanna did so, her stomach protesting. Jebo’s face, even, was under water, and she could not understand how he expected not to drown. And then, suddenly, as she stared at him, she realized that the water around him was clearing, becoming transparent. As that happened he moved away from the clean water and into more of the dirty liquid, and that too, began to clear up.
“How does he do it?” she gasped.
Jorun shook his head.
“I can’t say that I understand the biology of it, but I’ve been told that he takes the dirty water into his body, and his body purifies it. This waste water’s ea
sy for him, because it involves only molecular transformation. The Klensers can work at atomic level, too, turning dangerous elements into ones that don’t harm humans or animals, but that takes longer and requires more energy. When this container is full, we usually get a couple of the Klensers to cleanse, but if it was filled with industrial pollutants, we’d need all five of the available Klensers to work on it, and even then it would take a few hours.
“Some of the theories about how this works are as strange as the fact that it actually happens. I’ve heard speculation to the effect that our distant ancestors genetically engineered the Klensers to use the elementary energies of the universe to transform matter. But the truth is that no-one knows much about it, and as long as it keeps working the Oligarchs won’t spend any resources on study.”
“So those figures I’ve been working on were about human beings being sent off to clean messes up on other worlds, is that what you’re saying?” Roxanna asked, her eyes following Jebo’s progress in the water.
“The Exalted keep large numbers of them penned up in barns near the Capital City, and they rent them out to planets that want to clean up big messes quickly, and have the means to pay.”
“I don’t like the sound of those words: ‘penned up in barns’,” Roxanna stated.
“You shouldn’t,” Jorun said with a humourless laugh. “The Exalted consider the Klensers to be animals—when it suits them. When it suits them to notice the beautiful bodies the Klensers all have, then they look upon them as sex objects—that’s how we think that Kaya was impregnated. The Exalted also breed the Klensers when they want more of them, although, under normal conditions, the Klensers don’t have much of a sex-drive. They have to be persuaded to have sex, usually through the administration of pheromones, or hormones, or both.
“But the reason why I’m having you go thorough those figures, is that we’ve received reports of a lot of extra spending on foreign goods by the Oligarchs. I’d like to know if the Klenser rentals are bringing in more money than they used to, or should I be looking for some other economic activity? Some of the Four Hundred Families have been buying lots of off-world chattels and technology lately. Slaves like you, equipment used to spy on, and harass, the Ordinary Citizens, and the expertise to use the equipment, have become very commonplace. I want to find out where the money comes from.”
On Assignment to the Planet of the Exalted Page 25