Redworld, page 16
25
Inside the Tower
GIL’S ELIXIR was ready. Indeed, it had been ready for several days. It sat in a beaker in my chym locker, waiting. But I delayed. I needed to think. When I drank it, I would be sitting in the Death Hut. And there I would die. If the elixir worked, I would live again. If it didn’t.…
Life was good. Why take the risk?
Life with Josi was very good, and I was thinking light airy wonderful thoughts that afternoon as I walked into the Main Room.
Boogi was sweeping up industriously. Otherwise the place was empty—devastatingly empty. No people. No chairs … no tables … no pots … pans … stove … no food on the shelves … no music box. Nothing.
I didn’t understand. There was something appalling about this. “Boogi … what’s going on?”
“Cleanin’ up, Squire Pol.”
“I can see that. Oh never mind.” Josi had sent me a racing message at home, to drop by the Tower, “but nothing urgent.” By Siris! It was urgent!
I ran up the stairs. “Josi! Josi!”
She came out on the landing. Something about her face astounded me. She was neither smiling nor frowning. It went far beyond that. There was something ecstatic about the eyes, the lift of the chin. And then she smiled at me. “Oh, Pol! Thank you for coming by.” She took me into her room and closed the door.
“Well?” I said.
“I’m closing down the Tower. I’m moving across town.”
I stood there, unbelieving. “Tell me more.”
“I’m letting all the girls go. They’ll find work in other … houses. Vys will move to the new house. Boogi will come with us.”
“Is that all of it, Josi?”
She looked me square in the eyes. “No.” Through her radiance I could see shadows of a sadness so great it could not be put into words.
“What’s wrong, Josi? Let me help you.”
“There’s nothing wrong. Everything is exactly as it should be.”
“You think I lack knowledge and understanding. Perhaps you are right. But I love you. Grant me that.”
“I know you love me, Pol. And I love you.”
“But you are leaving. You are not just moving. You are going to … vanish.”
She gave me a surprised look. But she denied nothing.
I continued. “Thirty years ago your great deadly ship dropped from the skies. You fell out of that door there.” I pointed to the closed hatch in the far wall. “Squire Vys rescued you. Sige Tern nursed your broken mind and body.” I walked over to the Tower shell and banged on it with my knuckles. From somewhere a hollow metallic echo answered. “What strange and marvelous land could build such a ship? You’re not just moving. You are getting ready to leave this world. You’ll get in the Tower, and it will rise up into the clouds, just as Tern said in the poem. And I will never see you again.”
She just looked at me. Had she heard anything I had said?
I took her by the shoulders. “Actually, it’s a good idea to move. Gard has been after the militia to raid the Tower. As long as Kertor was here, you were safe. But now he’s gone, and you’ll be raided. Don’t stay here another night.”
“I have to. There are things I have to do here.”
“In the sky-ship?”
“Yes.”
“May I see inside?”
She hesitated. Then, “Yes.” She walked over to the door in the far wall, opened it, and I followed her into the great mystery.
She watched my face as I looked around in awe. There were strange glass plates, illuminated by weird ever-changing patterns. There were rows and rows of odd white dials, with little black needles dancing on them. And clusters and clusters of buttons, with insignia on each button. Several very wide chairs. And off against the wall, two glasslike coffins, one with the lid up.
“For you, Josi?” I asked.
“Yes.”
I caught a vision of stars and of unimaginable space and time.
“How far, Josi?”
“A very long way.”
“Oh, Josi,” I said sadly, “why did you let them do this to you?” I went back out through the door, and she followed silently, as though her world could not possibly communicate with mine. “What do your people call our sun?”
She replied quietly, “Barnard’s star. It’s a small red star. It’s relatively cool, compared to our sun, which you call Brightstar. All life everywhere—my world, your world—is the product of its local sun. Your sun is red. My sun, Brightstar, is what my people call a yellow star.”
“Yellow? What is yellow?”
“A color. You don’t have it here, on your world. Even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to see it as yellow, because your vision is essentially”—she searched for a word—“monochromatic. You see everything in shades of red, edging very slightly into orange—ocher, that is.”
“But Josi! We have d-douzaine colors!”
“And so you have. But they’re all shades of red, some with a touch of ocher. In fact, you have about two douzaine names for various hues of red: crimson … scarlet … cardinal … vermilion … ruby … flame … cerise … carnelian, and so on. As red darkens, you have a whole gamut for that: maroon … rust … russet. And as it lightens you have pink, cerise, rose. As red goes into ocher you get what I call marigold … saffron … copper … titian. These are not your names. I’m not sure what you call these colors here. Your sun is simply not hot enough to radiate the colors we know as yellow, or green, or blue, or violet. Your skies are reddish-ocher because your ammonia atmosphere passes the longer wavelengths of sunlight and scatters the shorter wavelengths. On my world, which we call Earth, our skies are blue, because oxien in our atmosphere scatters radiation in what we call the four-fifty millimicron range. Since you cannot see blue, to you our skies would seem gray.”
We truly lived in different worlds. Everything about us was different. Even the way we looked at things. And at each other. “Your eyes,” I said, “what color are they, really?”
“Blue. They probably look gray to you.”
“Yes. And your hair?”
“On my world it is yellow. But since it absorbs all colors radiated by your sun, it would appear black to you. Is it not so?”
“Yes, black. Except when the sun is behind it, there are glints of pure red.”
“That’s because the strands are translucent; some of them may actually transmit sunlight, after filtering out the ocher wavelengths.”
I had asked, “Who are you?” And she had tried to answer, and I still did not know. The closer I approached, the more remote she became.
But some sort of motion had caught my eye. Something remarkable was happening on one of the glass plates. At first it showed a strange curved thing, like a fat scimitar dagger. The thing glowed and glistened, and grew bigger and bigger until it overflowed the plate. “What is that?” I whispered.
She answered quietly. “We call it the moon. It is a great ball that circles our world, which is an even bigger ball, and which orbits Brightstar.”
Enlargement continued, and now I would make out structures, some sort of buildings on a wild stone-strewn landscape. And then there was additional movement: a glittering thing, shaped like a spear head, zipping away from the building complex, and vanishing into blackness.
“A ship?” I hazarded. “Like this one?”
“Similar. It launched from the American Lunar Center.” Her voice held a quiet pride.
“These Americans—your people?”
“My people.”
“That man in the picture, that used to hang on your wall. The big fellow. One of your people?”
“Yes.”
“Your husband?”
She inhaled sharply. “He was. He is dead now.”
“I’m sorry.”
She lifted a shoulder.
I said. “He did not really look much like you. He was much, much heavier in body build.”
“He was not structurally modified for life here.”
Structurally modified …? So that’s what they had done to her. I had to wait a bit for it to sink in.
“Was Jehanne-Mar one of your party?”
“There were only two of us. She was the other.”
“But she was not structurally modified, as you call it?”
“No, except for the lung converter. Aside from that she wanted to age normally, in mind and body. It didn’t matter. She had a different objective.”
“Which was?”
“She was our geneticist.”
“ ‘Gen—.’ What does that mean?”
“Jean Morrow selected certain lines for me to mate with. But she finally went insane, and she was caught and killed.”
“You knew she pointed at me?”
“Yes. She developed your chart. You were the primary selection.”
Of course. Of course. It was now all falling into place. “The day Gard killed her, that was the day I first saw you, when you came out on your porch. I think now, looking back, you had been crying. You were grieving for your friend Jehanne-Mar.”
Josi nodded. “They put her ashes in a cheap clay jar and they buried it in the Criminals Crossroads. I dug it out, and I shall return it to Earth for a proper ceremony. She was a very great woman, and she gave all that she had.”
And so are you, Josi, I thought. It was growing more incredible with every breath. My knees began to wobble. I very much regretted I had asked her anything. “I have to sit down,” I said faintly.
“Yes, of course.”
I sat on the bed. “You must think us quite primitive.”
“No. I would not be here if we thought that.”
“I assume you possess very sophisticated weapons. Why didn’t you save Jehanne-Mar?”
“We brought no weapons on the ship. Besides, I had not yet met you. We came on a mission of profoundest peace.”
I mused aloud. “You were the patroness who paid my Guild fee. You wanted me up here on Vys Street. When the job with the militia opened, it was you, not Kertor, who arranged the auction. You stood on the landing, waiting.” I looked up at her. “If I hadn’t come to you, freely, how much would you have bid?”
“All that I had.”
I got up to go. But I couldn’t take my eyes from her. Oh, Josi, Josi. How lovely you are! The cirurgeons back on your world really knew their business. It was almost as though they were talking to me with the things they did to your body. But I also knew that you now have what you wanted from me and that we will never make love again. Already I ache for you.
“Don’t stay here tonight,” I said. “Gard is on the prowl.”
But she didn’t reply.
26
The Raid
AS I WALKED on to the City Building I was thinking of several things. With Josi leaving my life, there was no longer any reason to delay drinking Gil’s elixir. But that wasn’t the most immediate problem. With Kertor gone, Dean Gard was going to force a reluctant Coronel Dite to raid the Tower. That was bad. And it would be a lot worse if Day printed Josi. Only five fingers. And other things. Another execution in the public square? Was it really that bad? Indeed it was. Ah, Josi! If you won’t leave, at least have the foresight to get yourself arrested on my shift, in the middle of the night, at the hori when babies are born, the hori when your Brightstar is brightest.
And so thinking, I entered the militia office.
Day was leaning back in his chair with his fingers laced behind his head. On his desk in front of him were two or three fingerprint cards, a haphazard newssheet and a nearly empty cup of brew. He looked up at me quizzically.
“Seems pretty quiet,” I said.
He yawned, took his hands down from his head, and began some slow complicated maneuvers that finally brought him to his feet. “Yup,” he said. He picked up the cup and took a sip.
“What’s going on, Day?”
“The Tower gets busted tonight.” He finished up the brew with a grimace. “And it’s all yours. Good night, Pol.” He walked out.
I began to perspire.
I walked across the hall to the arrest desk and got the guest sheet. Keep busy. Set type for the arrest cards. Everything must look normal. “Hello,” I said to Kumbo.
He grunted. I walked away.
“Pol,” he said wearily.
I turned back. “Yeah?”
“The sheet?”
I returned and got it. The shift was not starting well.
I put the arrest sheet in the carrier and began to set type for the day’s cards.
It is now just a question of waiting.
I visualize. Gard is dressed in gleaming angelic robes. His neatly trimmed hair reflects light from a glowing halo. He lifts the glittering trumpet to his sacred lips and blasts away. Ta da! Ta da! All men and women of low repute, evildoers from all walks of life, come forth! Ta da, ta da! The wages of sin is death. Into the wagons, you scum! Off to the station, and may you rot forever in the evil bosom of siriS! Ta da!
I continued the night’s work in a stupor.
I had just finished the last card when Dama Lane, the matron, came around the corner of the files, behind Josi.
Josi looked at me once, then no more. She showed no surprise, no fear. Her face was drawn into a pale mask under a light make-up. Her black curls framed her cheeks limply.
Dama Lane brought her around to the typesetting desk and handed me the arrest slip. It read, “Jocelyn Case.” Interesting. I suspected that was her real name, back on her own faraway Earth.
I sighed, put the fingerprint card in the printing machine, and filled in her name and address. Age, 30+. Eyes, gray. Hair, black. Arrest on suspicion.
I took the card over to the print holder and slid it in. I looked for a moment at the twelve blank squares. Out of the corner of my eye I noted that Dama Lane was sitting at the end of the room on a file stool. Pretty much out of earshot.
I rolled out a film of ink on the glass plate.
“Josi,” I said very quietly, “come around here, please. And do exactly as I tell you.”
I took her gloved right hand. She stiffened, then relaxed. I shifted my grasp to her wrist. “Let your hand hang limp. Don’t try to help me.”
“Shouldn’t I remove my gloves?”
“Absolutely not!”
She shrugged very faintly.
I rolled my right hand thumb on the inked glass, then printed it in the place for the left hand thumb. And so on, finger after finger. Everything came out exactly backwards. I cleaned up with paper towel and solvent.
The matron looked up. I nodded to her, and she led Josi out.
A moment later Borch Ballein brought Squire Vys in.
I was relieved that Borch was turnkey for the night. For Borch took no notice of anything that went on, except that the cell block was kept properly locked. He had no interest in dactylography. He gave me the arrest ticket, grunted, yawned mightily, then sat down on the filing stool at the far end of the room to read the newssheet.
I smiled at the squire. “Hi.”
“And hi back at you. How do you like it here?”
“Fine, except for fingerprinting my friends.”
“Sorry about that. Has Josi been in here yet?”
“Yes, sir. I guess you just missed her.”
His voice dropped. “She has only five fingers. That could mean trouble.”
“I took care of that. No problem.”
He seemed both surprised and relieved. “Good. Now what?”
“Both you and Josi will be released within the hori. There are a couple of cabs out front. You shouldn’t have any trouble getting back to the Tower. Do you have money?”
“Yeah, we’re fine.”
I studied the arrest card. “Let’s see what we have here. Ah, Roe Noman.” I set the name in type.
The squire grinned his crooked grin, but did not defend the use of the alias. “You think she’s all right? They won’t”—he looked around carefully—“find out?”
“They won’t find out. They don’t make a body search for a simple serail raid.”
He sighed.
I put the card in the brass holder. “Can you come over here now, Master Noman. And relax your hands. Let them go limp. Just so.” I stole a peek back at Borch. The big officer was still engrossed in the newssheet. I proceeded to print the squire’s left hand where the right should be, and vice-versa.
He caught it instantly. He looked up at me, then down the room at Ballein, who had his big back turned to us. “Josi, too?” he said quietly.
“Something similar.”
“Son of Siris.”
The sound of singing floated in to us from the depths of the gaol.
“What’s that?” asked the squire.
“That,” I said, “is the temple choir, led by Dean Gard, bringing the message of Siris’s love to our current guests.”
“Poor devils,” muttered the squire.
“The choir isn’t really that bad,” I said. “At least in temple. Down here they are a little shaky. Not used to the stony acoustics. Lot of reverberation.”
“And of course Gard knows Josi and I are still here.”
“He knows,” I said. “He planned the entire raid, incidentally, with a little help from the coronel. I think we’re done now. Here, we can get the ink off with a little solvent. And there are some paper towels.”
The squire scrubbed at his hands. “Gard is an absolute busht. He had the militia put their beam-lights on our front door. We barely had time to dress. When Josi stumbled out into all that glare, do you know what he did?”
“What did he do?”
“He called out on a big megaphone, ‘Witness the great harlot, corrupter of youth.’ I had to hold Boogi by the belt. He tried to go back inside for his chop-knife. I’m glad we are moving. I don’t want a murder, not even Gard’s.”
The invisible choir was now starting a new hymn. As I had feared, it was “Sheep May Safely Graze.” I said nothing. I did not even look at the squire. A theme song from a distant sun, by an incomparably great composer named Bach. I had no idea what he looked like. Nor, for that matter, what sheep (strange plural!) looked like.
Squire Vys began to hum, then broke out into a vigorous “dah dah de dah.” He carried the bass very well. I took over the straight melody. Corporal Ballein looked up at us, startled. “You guys crazy?”
