Collected Short Fiction, page 802
“Electricity?” The Regent blinked vacantly. “What’s electricity?”
“A useful force. It creates light, It can give you power.”
The Regent’s head was drooping. She jogged him with her elbow. He farted loudly and glared at me.
“You get heavy rains in the monsoon seasons.” Pepe swung back to her. “Snow on the mountains. From space we saw great rivers and magnificent waterfalls. We can bring you technology for hydroelectric—”
“Hydrowhat?”
“Energy,” Pepe said. “Power to build a greater civilization.” He raised his voice to penetrate the golden mask. “Your technology has stalled. You would have to train engineers and build an infrastructure, but we can bring the science you seem to lack—”
“Liars!” The regent pointed a trembling finger at us. “Scheming Scienteers!”
“Not so, sir.” Pepe grinned in desperation. “Give us a chance. We can prove who we are and help you change your world. Electric power could do a thousand times more than your driven slaves. You can get rid of those hideous bugs—”
“Treason!” She shrieked at the regent, her golden face a mask of hate. “They are Scienteers!”
With a dim smirk at her, the Regent picked up the glass and tossed the black liquid down his throat. Alarm gongs crashed. A heavy wooden wall crashed down in our faces. We were suddenly surrounded with black clones swinging clubs and machetes.
6.
OUR GUARD SQUAD WAS HALF-A-DOZEN BLACK clones under a blind white leader. One of his eyes was a shriveled pit. A dark patch hid the other. The tiny black eyes of the bug on his forehead watched every move we made. lie, or perhaps the bug, drove us with harsh staccato commands: Walk! . . . Quick! . . . Right! . . . Left! . . . Halt!
He marched us back up Moon Boulevard to the Agency of Justice, a modest red-brick building two blocks down a side street Inside the building he left us locked in a long bare cell with a stone bench along one wall and a narrow ditch of reeking sewage across the end.
A thin blade of sunlight from a high window slashed through the shadows to pick out a little man in a dingy gray cloak slumped into a sobbing huddle on the end of the bench. The iron door clanged behind us. Feeling trapped and bewildered, stunned by disaster, I could only stare at Pepe.
“I wish we’d never landed.” He dropped his voice, though the weeping man had paid us no attention. “Or never left Casey alone on the plane. God knows what will happen to him now-.”
Or to us, I thought.
Searching gamely for any way out, he sat down beside our unhappy companion and coaxed him for his story. Between the sobs, he whimpered that he had discovered his best friend in bed with his wife. Out of his head with grief and fury, he picked up a lamp and struck his friend. His wife screamed and grappled him. He struck again. His friend fell and died. His wife’s arm was broken, but. she ran out naked and called the law.
“What will happen to you now?”
“I don’t care.” He rubbed his red eyes. “They can bug me if they want. I should have died with Carlo.”
With no cheer from him, Pepe probed for any hint of hope from other prisoners that came in through the rest, of the day. One was a jittery little man in a dirty white toga, eager to tell his tale. He had been an honest businessman, selling tropic fruit from a stand on Regent Street, Arrested for robbing a silversmith, he was the innocent scapegoat of the actual thief.
“Early this morning I was walking as always to my little stand on the street. The thief dashed past me, a fat cop whistling behind him. He snatched my hat and tossed a handful of stolen silver at my feet. I followed him to recover my hat. He stopped, pointed back at the scattered silver, and swore that he had seen me tossing a brick through the shop window. The cop laughed at the truth and let him walk away with most of the loot still in his pockets.”
The weeping man sat up to give Pepe a sardonic shrug.
“Believe him if want I’d say his bug is talking. It makes a man a fool, even before it grows into his brain, but his lies will never save him. The judge won’t listen and his bug won’t care.”
He wiped at. his swollen eyes with the back of his hand and sank back into dismal silence.
“How many get bugs?” Pepe turned back to the man in the dirty toga. “Don’t some go to prison instead?”
“Prison? What is prison?”
“You’re the Moon men?” He stared as if we had been strange animals while Pepe tried to explain what a prison was. “If such places ever existed, they are not. needed now. The bugs are enough.”
When the door clanged again, our next guest was a drunk in a blood-spattered toga and a rag around his head. He staggered to the end of the cell, vomited noisily into the ditch, fell back on the bench, and lay there in a reek of raw alcohol, snoring hoarsely.
The last, to come in was better dressed, with a gold hairband and a gold-fringed garment that looked like silk. A swarthy fellow with a thick black moustache, he seated himself with an air of offended arrogance and ignored Pepe’s first efforts at talk. When Pepe persisted, he exploded into a sudden diatribe.
“They call this the temple of justice, but I’ve been frammed!” The word was new. “Frammed by my partner. We were in construction. Royce & Ryan, a fine old company, loyal to the Regent, our buildings standing all over the city. We were bidding on contracts for the Asian Tower when my first partner died and his son replaced him.
“Mike Ryan, a cocky kid just out of college and full of tarky about civil rights. We’d always used contract labor. Black clones for heavy work, ridden convicts for skills with steel and fine masonry. Of course the freeman unions always fought us when we went to the brokers for their skilled ex-members who had been bugged for strikes and riots. Mike wanted us to hire freemen at twice the price. I told him that would ruin us, but the framhead wouldn’t, listen.
“Instead he schemed to fram me. Accused me of his own crimes. Forged evidence that I was in a big conspiracy to liberate convicts. Killing their riders with the juice of some poison weed smuggled out of Africa and running an underground railway to get them to freedom in America.
“A monstrous plot to get me out of his way and take the company over.” He sighed forlornly. “The stupid Justice Agents raided our office, seized our records, arrested me. Look at me now! A convict myself, sentenced to sweat, out the rest, of my life with a bug in my head.”
The tearful man roused himself again.
“Could be the other way round.” He grinned maliciously at Royce. “Could be you were the thief. Could be your victim turned the tables on you. Could be you frammed yourself.”
THEY SAT GLARING AT EACH OTHER WITH NO MORE TO SAY. THAT THIN blade of sunlight shifted and reddened and dimmed. The guards brought ajar of water for us to pass around, but no food. The stinking ditch was a latrine when we had to use it. The drunk slid off the bench and lay snoring on the floor.
Pepe paced the narrow floor anti came back to whisper at me.
“Think, Dunk! Think! We’re dead if we don’t.”
I tried and thought of nothing.
The light faded. Pepe paced as long as he could see. Stiff from sitting, I felt stiff and cold and hopeless. The dark cell grew silent, except for coughs and snores and the sad man moaning that he loved his wife and never meant to kill Carlo. I slept at last, dreaming that we were back in the plane, on our way to the Moon. The screech of the iron hinges woke me.
The others had been given numbers, by some system I never understood. Guards reading numbers off a slate came to call them out, one by one. The drunk lay snoring till the red-eyed man shook him awake, tried to vomit again, and staggered out after the guard. Pepe and I waited uneasily until at last we were taken clown a gloomy corridor and into a room where sunlight dazzled me.
The wide window framed a walled garden of luxuriant plants with thick purple cactus-like leaves and huge, trumpet-shaped scarlet blooms. The Sun shone across a wide desk of some jet-black hardwood, polished till it mirrored the glare. The air was sharp with the odd scent of tiny golden flowers on a moss-like plant that filled a crystal bowl.
“Gentlemen!”
The rider broker, June Shawn, greeted us genially, smiling across the desk. Dressed in something brighter and more revealing than her toga at the dinner, she looked bright and young and clean, almost as attractive as I remembered Mona and Tanya. She rose. I thought for an instant that she was coming around the desk to shake our hands, but she beckoned briskly at. the chairs in front of the desk. “Please sit down.”
We sat and waited.
Seated again, she eyed us thoughtfully. I felt cold and tired and grimy, stiff from trying to sleep on cold hard stone, hunger aching in my belly. She shook her head at me as if in sympathy for my discomfort and turned to Pepe.
“So you say you’re Agents of the Moon?”
“We are from Tycho Station,” he told her, “but here only to look and report what we find. We claim no authority to meddle with anybody.” He bent toward her desperately. “All we want, is to get back on our plane and back to the Moon.”
“Sorry.” I thought I had seen a momentary flash of pity, but her smile was gone. “The Regent permits no appeals. Our problem now is your future here. Your cellmates were easy enough to place, but you—” She paused to frown searchingly. “Do you have manual skills that, might be useful here?”
In a moment of hope, I nodded at Pepe. “He’s a space pilot.”
She looked at him.
“A skill you may not need.” He shrugged and added quickly. “Better than that, we can bring you knowledge. At the station, we have a library and museum filled with the art and history and science of the old Earth. Treasures of the old world that could transform yours.” She was shaking her head.
“We’ve seen the Regent,” he hastened desperately on. “Perhaps he doesn’t want any major transformation, but we aren’t here to threaten anybody. There must be bits of technological know-how that you could use.”
“Perhaps somebody can use them.” She glanced through the open door and nodded thoughtfully. “I’ll inquire.” She studied us again and asked abruptly, “Have you eaten?”
“Not lately,” Pepe said.
She clapped her hands. A black Casey clone came in with a huge silver tray stacked with glasses, a pitcher, a bowl of ice, mid a dish of little cakes that filled the air with a fragrance that wet my mouth. We watched avidly while the silent done scooped ice into the glasses and filled them with a pale pink liquid.
“Glacier ice.” Beaming expansively, she let the clone hand her the first glass. “A new luxury. The Agent of Trade has just opened a new road through the mountains all the way up to the glaciers. Clone runners are now able to get the ice to us before it melts.”
The drink was the juice of an American fruit, she said. She had brought seedings back from her visit there, mid established them on her own plantation. Famished as I felt, its tangy sweetness was a delight. We drained the glasses and the clone offered the cakes. She watched with mi evident amusement at our appetites till he was gone with the tray.
Ignoring Pepe’s thanks, she picked up a slate, frowned at it, and shook her head.
“The Regent sees no good in this electricity, whatever it is, or any of your magic off the Moon.” Erasing something on the slate, she peered at Pepe. “Can’t you do some useful work that might interest a buyer?”
“Don’t you believe us?” he begged her desperately. “Don’t you believe we’re really from the Moon?”
“Who knows?” She shrugged. “I’ve seen your flying machine. We might do better if I knew more about you. Tell me about this city on the Moon. How does anybody live there, with no air to breathe?” She listened with apparent interest while he tried to describe the station.
“Get us back to our machine,” he told her, “mid we can fly you there.” A flash of interest lit her face, mid he hurried on. “We could freeze a tissue sample, if you like. You could be cloned to live again on future worlds. A kind of immortality—”
“Clone me?” She was offended. “I’ve seen clones enough. My problem is a place for you.”
“A bug, you mean?” Pepe bent toward her, hoarse with dread. “You want to drill holes in our skulls? Plant those hideous little monsters in our heads, to ride us and torture us the rest of our lives?”
“Nothing you’ll enjoy.” She gave him a philosophic nod. “Life is seldom perfect. But your have already admit ted that you are only clones, endowed with your own peculiar immortality. Whatever happens in one life, you can always look forward to another.”
“Clones are people.” He spread his hands, pleading. “Clones can hurt.”
She marked something on the slate mid rang a bell to call the guard. “Miss Teller, please!” Desperately he raised his voice. “You look human. Have you no human feelings?”
She stiffened and flushed in anger, but then sank slowly back into her chair. The guard appeared in the doorway, glanced at her, and vanished. She sat a long time staring blankly at us. When at last she spoke, her voice was nearly too low to hear; as if she were speaking to herself.
“Of course I feel.” Her lip was quivering. “I remember a friend, a man I cared for, condemned for a mere political blunder. I appealed, but he had enemies. Once I saw him pulling a wagon on the street. I called his name. He couldn’t turn or speak, but his bug looked at me. I know he heard. I know what he felt.”
Turned pale, she slammed her hand on the shining desk and slumped down over it as if about; to cry. In a moment, however, she was on her feet.
“That was then.” Her voice hard and sharp. “This is now. I do have feelings, Agent Navarro, but they are no concern of yours.”
She rang again for the guard.
7.
THE IRON DOOR OF OUR CELL CLANGED AGAIN, AND we were left there alone in the stifling reek of the sewer ditch. I walked the narrow floor while Pepe hunched miserably down on the hard stone bench.
“Que cabron!” He swayed back to his feet. “Damn the Regent! Damn the bugs! Damn the whole stinking system! They’ll find Casey mid put the bug back on him.” His fists knotted, relaxed, mid clenched again. “If he knew Mona was free mid in America, he could take the plane mid look for her.” Hopelessly, he slumped down again. “There’s nothing he could do for us.”
That thin blade of sunlight reddened mid climbed the wall. I was still dismally wondering what sort of buyer June Shawn might find for us when we heard the tramp of boots outside. The door screeched open. Two tight-faced guards in blue ordered us curtly out of the cell.
Sturdy white males, they wore no bugs. I saw Pepe stiffen as if to make a break, but they wore weapon-clipped belts mid kept a wary distance. They marched us down a long corridor to the back of the building, unlocked a heavy door, mid let us out into a narrow cul-de-sac where two empty rickshaws stood waiting.
With a signal for silence, they beckoned us into them. Stripping off their uniforms, they stuck black beads on their foreheads, picked up the shafts, ran with us through a maze of alleys back to Moon Boulevard. Pepe grinned at me and raised two fingers in a gesture of elation. I sank back in the cushions, rejoicing in the fresh air mid sunshine but hardly daring to hope for freedom.
Sirens were suddenly howling. The boom of a cannon echoed off the buildings mound us. Our rescuers never looked back. As stolid and wordless as actual slaves of the bugs, they threaded a way through the rickshaws and cycles and lumbering wagons, back to the arena. Guards at the gate glanced at a note one man showed him and waved us on toward the spaceplane. We jumped off the rickshaws, and the sweating men were gone before we could thank them.
“All OK?” I heard Laura Grail calling from the top of the stairs, smiling widely to greet us. Dressed in green-trimmed white and a green hairband, she was an unbelievable dream. “Let’s go!”
We ran up the steps.
“Who are they?” Pepe gestured after the rickshaws.
“Friends.” She beckoned us into the plane. “Or call them heroes of liberation.”
“OK!” Casey shouted from the pilot’s seat. “Adios to the Regent!”
The engines coughed and thundered. At the window, I watched the jet steam roaring out to hide the walls around us. The ship quivered and lifted. Slowly at first, but faster, faster, the arena and the red-tiled roofs of the city fell away below. When Casey turned from the instruments, I saw that he looked almost himself again. A glassy patch of sealant still gleamed over the little wound on his forehead where the bug had been, but no blood was seeping through.
“Where to?” Pepe whispered. “Back to the Moon?”
“America,” he said. “Back to where I found Mona when we were here before.”
His voice slowed when he spoke her name. I saw the shine of tears and thought I shared what he was feeling. Age after age, as we lived and died and lived again, the robots and our holo parents had given us a sense of immortality that left us very mortal. Cloned and brought up to be the selves we had been, we were never entirely identical, yet those past lives lay vivid in my mind.
We had slept four centimes since our escape from those vampirish black parasites in the red thorn jungle in Africa, yet the flight seemed as real as yesterday. Our great circle course had taken us north to the glaciers and then back south along the edge of the North American icecap until flat, brown tundra gave way to an exotic bluish green and we came over the strangely varicolored forests of what had been Chihuahua.
I had read the old records and listened to the holos until the haunting songs of the trees and the winged being that. Casey called Mona were memories of my own. I recalled the young tree he named Leonardo and loved like their son. I asked Casey now if he meant to look for the Leo tree.
“After all that time—” He shrugged with misgivings, but old emotion glowed on his dark Asian face. “I don’t know about the tree, Laura thinks my own Mona may be out there, fighting with the rebels to end the rider slavery. We’ll find her if we can.”
