Day by Night Page 14
After two hundred staeds, the transport shot on to a road which angled to the hest, where the land began climbing steeply. In minutes, a building appeared on the ridge above. Matt steel glinted dully, a group of block-like structures and several rod-thin towers, naked on a brown rock where nothing grew, against a white-green tension of exhausted sky. The Instation of First Hour hest-Uma.
As the transport approached, slowing as it came with a thick sizzling of depression, a sphincter pulled open the steel wall nearest to the road. Vehicle and escort dove through. The aperture squeezed itself tight.
The unalterable landscape lay once again heat-blasted in stasis, framing the empty road.
* * *
• • •
The door section of the transport had slid aside.
Beyond, an iron hall, windowless, lit by an inner sunlight, similar to that which permeated the temples, but harsh, cruel as the light of the solar disc on the plain.
Vel Thaidis saw her own hands bathed in this artificial glare. Her skin seemed hard, its metallic quality intensified into a new substance—the gleaming covering of a robot. The air itself had a brittle glow. Each movement and gesture seemed to separate and groove it, like motions made through liquid.
She got to her feet and waited for some order to be given her by her escort of Lawguards. Now once more vertical, they stretched from the transport along the hall, a colonnade. But no unbreathing voice uttered. Then Vel Thaidis saw a figure, walking toward her along this copper fence.
This was the first denizen of the Slumopolis Vel Thaidis had confronted. Confront was the applicable word. A female, she glanced in no direction but one; her gaze fixed on Vel Thaidis. The features were overlaid by a strange enamel, a plaster of pallid make-up, even on the mouth. A scarlet cloth concealed hair and much of the head. The gray tunic was draped, a haphazard and ungraceful drapery, and bordered with untranslatable scientific symbols, red on a white ground. In the dry fluid of the light, blank-faced and immutable, the woman looked too much a robot to be one.
About three yards away, she came to a standstill. The white lips unseamed. The dark eyes never shifted.
“You are called Vel Thaidis, formerly Yune Hirz. Don’t answer. I’m stating a fact for our records, not questioning you. Now come out, and follow me.”
Vel Thaidis complied. What else?
Near the end of the hall was an escalator on which the woman stepped, and Vel Thaidis after her. The stair spilled itself down, through a tunnel of floury white, reminiscent of the woman’s coated face. The woman did not turn to see what Vel Thaidis did, or if she had obeyed. Presumably obedience was inevitable.
Vel Thaidis, numbed and wrung of all prayers and all hope, felt the ache of humiliation and horror yawn again in her vitals. Her pride had disintegrated. She could no longer brick herself up in protective silence. She longed suddenly for any hint of comfort, at an hour and in a place where comfort was not to be had.
“I—” Vel Thaidis said. And fresh humiliation deluged her at her weakness, her compulsion to speak.
“You may talk if you wish,” the woman said, not turning. “Expect no reply.”
Vel Thaidis sank against the rail of the moving stair, weary almost beyond endurance, and effectively gagged.
At the escalator’s foot, a succession of cubicles opened one from another. The woman went through, Vel Thaidis a few feet behind. She noticed gleams igniting and going out along a variety of panels, and heard the faint humming and muttering of hidden mechanisms. Eventually, the cubicles gave on a round pale room, awash with the awful light.
The woman indicated a bench.
“Sit.”
Vel Thaidis sat. The woman went to a panel and read from it. Presently she also seated herself, in a broad plastum chair. The chair had an air of studied authority about it, as did the woman’s clothing and manner. She resumed her stare into Vel Thaidis’ face.
“You aristos,” she said at last. Something had amused her slightly, though her mouth did not reveal it. “Even in such an extremity of loss, you look at me as if at a tiny beetle that has crawled onto your plate of candies. Such unwinking hauteur, little girl. But your hands betray you, and your stiff spine. Well. The machines report you have attained your twenty-first year and have faultless health. But then usually, you know, you aristos are healthy. A life of mild solarism, nutritious food, relaxation and unforced exercise makes for strong specimens. But I forget. No longer an aristo. For a crime unstated, you’ve been relieved of your title and your rights to service. Now you’re a plain Zenena of the Slumopolis. Welcome!”
“What will happen now?” Vel Thaidis said. She was not sure why she asked.
The woman nodded and said flatly, “Let us have this straight. I’m here to tell you things, but not to answer questions. We have no leisure for such niceties. Time only for orders related and orders carried out. Dawdling could entail the failure of crops, the lowering of production—the means of existence, in other words, dashed from our hands. Here we survive by bone-tearing labor, and by luck. Your luck’s run out, lady. You’d better decide on labor.”
The woman paused. Vel Thaidis said nothing. The woman nodded complacently. She said, “I am Dina Sirrid. I am, you might say, the matrix mother of what you’re about to become, what in Law already you have become. Zenena Thaidis. Unremember title, frills of cognomen and rank. In the Slum, you’ll be free to take whatever work is available to one of your sex, physique, health and aptitude. No slum work is attractive or particularly inspiring. The criteria are simple: Will this put food in my belly? Of course, it will be doubly difficult for an aristo. Not only because you are so far good for nothing, but because it will be impossible for you to conceal what you are. Your looks, your attitude, defy camouflage. Some advice. Your safest employment would be that of a prostitute. Why? Because you’ll need to know little at the start. Your customers will derive their prime delight in sleeping with a woman of the estates, a princess. They’ll exhaust their antagonism toward you during the pleasure act, exulting in the disgrace you will obviously experience. You may subsequently grow adept, or discover a protector with access to tech-credits. Tech-credits are, patently, the most precious commodity of the Slums. The luxury of robot service you received as your due in a palace. Ours is restricted and mostly unavailable. Only tech-credits can procure robot service or mechanical aid of any personal sort. If you have ever been slumming for enjoyment, you’ll know about all that. If not, well, you’ll learn, girl. The Instations are the stopover points to which vagrants are brought, or, in your case, exiles. That’s tradition. The Instation’s function is to direct and to place. But who listens? The Zenens who visit us want new employment in another portion of the Slum, or to exchange the urban hell for the farm hell on the outland, or they require medical attention perhaps, or have broken the Law and fear apprehension. Even they don’t accept much of the advice offered them. While an aristo—” The woman made a yapping sound. It was not really a laugh, more a coda to her scorn. It was also deliberate and false. She too was deriving her pleasure from the downfall of a princess.
Vel Thaidis met her stare, burned in it, suffered it. She wondered how much longer she must control her wounded writhing, and how much longer she could. Would there be any privacy for wounds in such a spot?
“But,” the woman, Dina Sirrid, remarked, “I had better mention something at this juncture. You see, dear lady, your special plight, your—fallen—condition, is very unusual. The last aristo cast into the Slum—that was many tens of years ago. And before him, a few men, but not many. I speak of those who were exiled, owing to a crime of some sort. Now and then, a prince has joined us, because the technology of his estate has failed—but of these, not one for many years. You have, you see, no kindred here. Probably you knew all this. Your education in all things, I’m sure, is complete. The ignorance which prevails in the Slums is deplorable, but you will have had your robot-tutor and
your instruction machines. . . . But I wonder if you know of the single consolation the Slumopolis is able to offer to those of your kind?”
Dina Sirrid pressed the arm of the plastum chair, which opened a partition. Within the hollow thus revealed lay a black metal tube attached to a bulb of black flexite.
“All weapons are technically illegal in the Slumopolis,” Dina Sirrid said. “But a certain number are ethically necessary, and the Law permits them. This, for example. A gasgun. Very easy to operate, children could use it—and have done so. Do you wish to look at it more closely?”
“Now, I am to speak?” Vel Thaidis asked.
“Oh, I think you might. Do you wish to inspect the gun?”
“Why?”
Dina Sirrid took the weapon from its recess and held it offensively, daintily, in her large hands. Her nails, long but squarely cut across their tops, were possibly also a mark of her authority. Vitamin deficiency in the Slums would reduce the strength of bones, hair, teeth and nails. In this handmade world, weak nails would snap. The nails of Dina Sirrid explained that her position provided better food, and that her fingers were not familiar with mechanical tools, acids, excess of aqua or farm implements. Even here, a hierarchy persisted.
“Why?” repeated Dina Sirrid, playing with the gun in a mimicry of aristocratic refinement. “I’ll tell you why. The idea of the gun is that some Jate you might wish to end your life with it. This is allowed. Not many of your class can face what lies ahead of them at this stage. Most accept the gun instantly. I wonder if you will.”
Vel Thaidis recoiled. She was young, and though she had counted herself as dead, her youth told her otherwise. Her reaction was animal, however, virtually abstract, when she answered: “I will not.”
“Won’t you? The procedure is minimal. Put the tube between your lips and compress the bulb. I’ve seen men die from less efficient application; still very swift. And, I’m assured, painless.”
Less abstract now, stronger: “I will not.”
“You say that this Jate. Next Jate you may think otherwise. But come back at any time. The gun is always here, ready for you. It’s a kindness, you understand. Our sensitivity to your grief, your inability to bear the ways we’re bred to, what we come out of the matrix wombs anticipating. Our only ways. Dirt, toil, tedium and unloveliness. We die young. A hundred, a hundred and ten, these are celebrated ages here. Not everyone reaches those. It depends how long you can keep working, once symptoms of aging set in, around the seventieth year. Yes, you’ll note old age in the Slum. Skins puckering and hair dropping out. The sun dries us and nothing restores what the sun steals.”
“There’s always a position like yours,” Vel Thaidis said, shocking herself.
“Mine?” Dina Sirrid yapped twice. “It’s better than some, I grant you. But you won’t get where I am. There’ll be too many wanting to witness your dust. What crime, by the way, did you commit to put yourself among us?”
“Am I obliged by Law to answer?”
“No. Besides, all you aristos, you always claim, according to the records, that you’re innocent.”
“Then I’m innocent.”
Dina Sirrid widened her mouth, and yapped silently on this occasion. The white make-up sun protection—Vel Thaidis would come to see a lot of it—made the woman’s teeth into dark yellow fangs, the cavity of her mouth much redder than her scarf.
“Little girl,” said Dina Sirrid, “I like you. I will look forward to the hour you disintegrate. I will take vast interest in considering you, wondering when it will happen. And at the end, when you come to me to ask for the gun, I’ll treat you with courtesy and gentleness, out of thanks for all the entertainment your agony will have given me.”
* * *
• • •
At an Instation, one meal was awarded, without charge of credit or labor. One meal, and, at Maram, a pallet in a Maram-dormitory. Like the meal, the dormitory had no pretensions. The light was dimmed to a murky monochrome. No music murmured, there were no sleep-inducing sighs. In the Slum, tiredness replaced ritual aids. The pallets were ranked close together. A communal aqua-closet, with sketchy partitions, ran along the wall. The dormitory was deserted. The aristocrat had her privacy, and could not use it.
Hunger coupled with despair had tangled the sour salad of plants, the spongy bread, in Vel Thaidis’ stomach. Needles darted through her skull and behind her eyes. She lay on the pallet and slept and woke and slept and woke. She dreamed of Ceedres Yune Thar, his failed estate lost to him, Slumopolis the only alternative, placing the gas-gun economically between his white teeth.
In the twenty-first hour, the fifth of Maram, she rose. In the washing stall of the closet, only a trickle of aqua would come. Aqua, like everything, was dispensed meanly in the Slum, for there was not enough to go around.
Later, she went to the door of the dormitory, which would not open. A round eye pulsed in the door. A voice said: “It is not yet Jate return to your pallet at the first hour there will be an alarm.”
Vel Thaidis returned to her pallet. She lay in the muddy dark, wishing she could shed tears, but no tears flowed. She feared she would weep instead in the presence of her enemies, the water, somehow held back as if behind a door, bursting from her irresistibly at some unforeseen moment. Then she found herself reciting snatches of songs and rhymes from her childhood, shaping the obscure mannerisms of a guessing game she had played with Velday when she was eight and he seven. Then she began to doze and wake, doze and wake once more. She dreamed she had married Ceedres; in the formal tradition of the princely houses, he was carrying her in his arms into the nuptial chamber. The dream was very real. His strength, his human warmth, the great attraction which she felt for him, were all faithfully represented. Even the scent of flowers and wine, the texture of his skin against her own. Then a terrible shouting broke out.
She woke, and the door of the Maram dormitory was shouting at her, standing open, letting in knives of incendiary sunlight.
She had been crying in her sleep. She had just the space to rinse her mouth and her cheeks before Dina Sirrid came for her.
* * *
• • •
Over the ridge where the Instation stood, the land folded down toward the Zenith. A sparse plantation of iron ferns straddled for a staed or so below, brown claws throwing a litter of shade from the sun. The metal road passed through the ferns, and on downhill into the urban development of the city.
The view, seen initially, was startling.
In width, the ring of the Slum fluctuated between five hundred to one hundred staeds. Here, under the Station of First Hour hest-Uma, the stretch of the city was broad, and seemed to go on forever into the blazing rim of the horizon. In color it was rainbow, but a rainbow that decayed. Where distance added its tinge of atmosphere, the buildings blended into a kind of emerald stew, out of which threads of smoke and vapor constantly filtered. There was indeed a haze over the whole vista. Chemical smoke from the giant chimneys of manufacts, char and steam from sectors where automation had sunk to its lowest ebb and power generated from the cores of furnaces or hydrobanks, or ultimately the action of blindfold dogga harnessed to wheel and pulley.
This was the aspect of the city. It also made a noise. A growling, gushing, pushing noise, sometimes underlined by vague hummings, distant thuds, whistles, engines, alarms. At each hour the hour-clocks struck with a monotonous roaring of notes. Generally, the cacophony was subdued, choked almost, as if some huge animal were slowly and eternally strangling in a pit of colored fumes.
Progress from the Instation to the urban belt took an hour.
They traveled at a jogging unreliable pace. The expedition was made on an iron-plated high-tired sled, boxed by a rail, backless, frontless and without sides, and with a wooden slat fixed over as a canopy. The contraption was drawn by six dogga, shackled two by two. Hard-muscled yet otherwise thin to the skeleton, each sandy do
g loped, pointed muzzle down and jaws slack, the hackle crest of bare leathery skin purposelessly erected. Across the lean backs whipscars were carved in a white intaglio on the beige pelt. This Jate, Dina Sirrid carried the whip, looped idly on the knee as she drove the sled. Dogga had been known to run wild or turn and rip out the throats of teammates. The whip, with its drugsacs ready-strung against the steel prongs, provided a savage but efficient sedative.
Vel Thaidis was seated beside the woman driver. To the rear, uncommunicative and subtly menacing, glided a solitary Lawguard, vertical, restricting its speed to accommodate that of sled and team.
In this fashion, they moved down the metal road and into the smoke and smell and mood of the city.
Buildings formed up behind each other on either side of the way, some on one or two levels, some in piles of eight or nine stories. Here and there a chimney, a funnel or a tower poked forth, as if attempting escape into the sky. The smogs gathered, violet, cream, rust, umber and lime. Metal streets radiated in all directions. Bridges arched overhead, rattling and thrumming with unlikely improvised vehicles. There were people and beasts. A thousand momentary glances hit the sled. Vel Thaidis felt them like the fangs of dogga, the pangs of the whip, and flinched at them. Her hair had been stripped of its aristo tinting. A heavy silk of fine fair brown, it was not like the hair of the women on the streets. Their hair was frequently concealed beneath scarves against the bite of the sun. Where it showed, it seemed shriveled, like burnt grass. And their bodies, scrawny, flesh like the leather crests of the dogga. There, one leaning and crippled. There—another, and another. The men who slouched or trotted along the streets were similarly seared and knotted. A crowd of men perched on a low wall, resting from some enterprise. Their bare torsos were horrible, the spines bent, the chests narrow, their shoulders blistered and scarred. Vel Thaidis could scarcely bring herself to look at them. Pity and revulsion sickened her. But they looked at her. She imagined they guessed it all. She, an exile from the great estates, tossed into their midst. A bit of meat thrown to starving felines, like those she had seen three turnings back, fighting together in a porch while the humans bellowed and laid odds on which would win. They would maul and rend her. She was a victim they must have prayed for, if ever they prayed in this place. Despite the Law and its edicts against violence, she could never be safe.