Day by Night Read online

  With a toiling heart and a mouth dry as the blown sand she trod, Vel Thaidus went to the arches of the house of labor allocation, and waited there for them to be unsealed and for the voice to commence in the yard.

  All Jate, she waited in the yard.

  People came and went. Sherner was not among them.

  Rain flakes floated down in the twelfth hour, tinted strange colors from the smokes of the city.

  Her mouth became a brazen cup, her throat a cistern of dust. Her belly clenched and unclenched like a fist.

  The voice spat many names into the court, and none of them was hers.

  At the sixteenth hour she got up. Dizzy with fatigue and dehydration, past scruple, she approached a woman and asked her: “Which way to this sector’s J’ara mansions?”

  “Outward, and hespa,” the woman grated. “And may the gods frizzle you before you get there.”

  The smoke of the city seemed to have penetrated Vel Thaidis’ skull, and she staggered through it, and here and there she asked the way. On a narrow street, she asked a man, who struck her casually across the head. She fell back against a wall. Then there was a sound she vaguely recognized. Two copper pillars went by on their jets of air.

  “Pardon me,” the man said. He took her in his arms and stroked her hair and she had no strength to resist. “Don’t tell them I struck you.”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  The man gave her a drink of boiled aqua from a flask on his belt.

  Everything came suddenly clear, focused and exact. So clear, so exact, she almost retreated. Then the man shouted: “Here’s Sherner.”

  “I’ve been chasing after you for three staeds or more,” Sherner grumbled, panting, seizing her arm. “Why didn’t you wait for me? I’d have guided you, you anteline of a girl.”

  She was glad to see him, glad he had followed to enmesh her in Tilaia’s weird promise. The focus of the aqua seeped away.

  When Sherner picked her up in his arms, she was dully surprised at such strength from the stick-like muscles. She did not struggle and her hair brushed the ground.

  I lost home and rank, she thought, kin and kind. All security, all rights to security. My silence I had to give away. Now I have lost even pride, she thought. I am finally one with the Slumopolis.

  But Sherner was carrying her to Mansion Seta. Velday might come, a companion of the Yune Meks, having been told by them: Your sister is here. How many J’aras would pass before Velday came, and clutched her to him, and cursed Ceedres, and vowed she should be vindicated?

  She was feverish and began to be afraid she would say aloud these dreams, and give away beyond doubt her aristocratic origins.

  “Sherner,” she gasped, “how far is it?”

  “We’re there, ” Sherner said.

  Somewhere, time had evaded her on their route. Minutes or more had elapsed, streets and byways with them. A peculiar thing had happened to the sky, to the odor and the noise of the city.

  “Let me stand,” she said.

  “Oh you,” he said. “Always giving orders, like a lady from a palace. Your tech lover learned you such ways, I suppose?”

  But he swung her to her feet, and supported her, amused at her weakness, her reliance on him.

  They were high up again, the Slum a lake of jewel-like mists below, its pollution made, as always, glamorous by distance. And ahead there was another lake, a sheet of true fluid, though not the aqua of the canals, not the green of the wonderful lake at Hirz. This lake was like red wine. It filled a huge basin stretching for two staeds or more, and on all sides there piled extraordinary edifices, built in cones, in cubes, in steps, in craning spikes and needle towers, sheer-walled or overhung by decoration. A hundred stages and balconies stretched out over the crimson liquid, supported by columns and pylons, carved, incredible and festooned with fluorescent lights of rose and tourmaline, purple and iron-blue. In turn, these glows ribboned in the lake, which all the while gently rippled and simmered. The air did not smell of chemicals but of perfumes, and there was a confused guttural of music on it. An ultimate strangeness beyond scent and noise, beyond the appearance of Basin or buildings, overlay the scene. A giant parasol, over a staed in diameter, of polarized flexiteglass tinted with a deep olive tone and mounted on pillars of bronze, roofed in the Basin and all its mansions. The grimace of eternal day was transmuted to a walnut-green blush which thickened the atmosphere, blurred the edges of metal, plastum, wood and stone alike; tinged everything, skin or hair, soothed, disoriented, inebriated.

  “There’s beauty,” Sherner remarked, indicating the parasol.

  “Is it aqua in the Basin?” Vel Thaidis inquired. Her awareness had crazily centered on this. Its very unnaturalness seemed to mark a period, a gateway. As if for sure, beyond this point, her fate could be changed.

  “Not aqua. Plasta, kept blood-heat by a furnace beneath to prevent its solidifying.” Ego burnished by his wisdom, Sherner added: “There is nothing better in hespa-Ia, I’d guess? Those J’ara mansions there had nothing like these.”

  Vel Thaidis did not know if this were so or not.

  The winy plasta lake, the tiny suns of the lights, all in the soup of the parasol shade, set her eyes swimming. Then the roar of the Slum clocks, hoarse and pitiless, drowned the music and invaded her trance. The seventeenth hour: Maram.

  Tilaia’s words: “At the stroke . . . or else don’t trouble.”

  In sudden alarm, Vel Thaidis cried: “I shall be too late!”

  “Not quite. We’re at the door.”

  Part Two

  Casrus Klarn entered the Subterior of the Klave by means of a slow-flying transport. The entranceway, a smooth and unpretentious hole, led into a tunnel and thence upward. For the Subterior was lower than the princely palaces in personality alone. In location it lay mostly above the Residencia’s thick sky-ceiling of rock, and thereby closer to the frozen surface of the planet. Only at its edges, far beyond those of the Residencia, did the Subterine complex fold down into abysms of the world, to the deepest mines, the most obscure shafts, pipes and channels of itself.

  Traveling, there was at first no light. The transport glided through a bath of ink. But this was hardly novel to Casrus. He had come so many times, and by so many similar routes, into this place. Nevertheless, the symbol of the dark was not entirely lost on him. When he had come here before, he had had the option of returning.

  Presently, lights tore down the black, mechanized yet uncosmetic. (The makeshift fires the Subterines themselves were forced to ignite, lacking mechanical illumination or heat through great stretches of their warren, offered a strange byproduct of color and flamboyance—perhaps resembling the gaudy dyes they daubed upon their walls.) The transport halted and its side pleated open. Clearly, Casrus was to leave, having arrived at his destination.

  The bitter cold struck him like a series of well-aimed blows. But again, he was prepared, had anticipated nothing else.

  Before him lowered a gray, featureless mass of building, part freely contrived, part hewn from the rock at its back. The savage lights hovered forty feet up in the air in front of it. As Casrus started to walk forward, a section of the wall hissed back. It was a center of mechanized management, in his case, of induction. Here he would be given clothing suitable to his new life, instructions, warnings, also suitable. Within the door, he found he had stepped straight onto a moving ramp which bore him farther inward. The atmosphere was warmer, and smelled of certain of the ubiquitous Subterine smells: disinfected oxygen, electricity, darkness, freezing, and insulating materials of all types. Also of despair? Maybe not, for Casrus had not yet despaired.

  Not that his attitude was based on any sort of blind optimism. That a future appeal to the computers might be available was a slight chance, and he did not depend on it. Nor did he expect miracles, gods leaping forth from the machinery to save him. Rather, he was dependent upon h
imself. As ever. And, as ever, he did not feel he would necessarily fail himself. Indeed, he trusted himself to do as well here as he might, given the impoverished means at his disposal.

  Altogether the mood of dread that had assailed him at Klarn, when he had gone to set in order the affairs of his house, had passed. First into swift shock, not softened by preknowledge, then into black anger, a desire to rail against the shortcomings of so-called justice—equally swift and passing, and of course, not put into practice. He had been, as usual, calm when he went from Klarn, though a different calm, obviously, devoid of most of its grounding. Then, a new structure had arisen in his mind to support him.

  Almost all was lost to him, but not everything. While he lived, he could strive. Now on his hands and knees, where before it had been a sweeping act, entailing robots and technology, but still there would be things for him to do. It was pointless to bemoan past wealth, and easier for him than for most not to bemoan it, since he had only thought of it in terms of its use to others. Now he must be used instead, must give himself, since he was all he had to give. Not from altruism, for it had never been that, but from the awareness that the Klave was a balance out of true, and a disturbance in him at the sight of human adversity, those things he invested together with the name: my guilt.

  And he need feel no guilt at last. He could work in liberation. He had become one with the Subterior.

  The moving ramp ran into a brightly lit room, saline white as the lights outside. Machinery in the walls ticked and whined, investigating him, finding him sound; the physique of the athlete, the tutored intellect and skilled brain of a prince.

  No human being inhabited the building or at least, none appeared.

  From a chute, clothing jumped out into the chamber, the dress of the Subterior, but not yet dyed, nor ragged as a Subterine’s clothes invariably became, cold rotting the fibers of cloth, rough edges, fights, knives tearing it, live fires scorching. A thousand severe types of labor, the mines, the installations, adding their damages. Replacement clothes meant saving credit chips or suitable barter. Rags were the mode.

  Casrus dressed himself. Undergarments of insulated weave, several layers of shirts and breeches, bundle of top garments, linings, a long coat with wide sleeves to be tied close at the wrists, insulated thin gloves, thicker top-mittens. Footgear of plastomil, soles three inches thick, wadded with insulated foam. An outer shawled half-cloak, equipped with head wrapping. Shields for the ears hanging ready from a pin, shields for nostrils and mouth, curved visor to cover and protect the face. There was also a knife, for cutting the wedge-shaped blocks of compressed food, for slashing down icicles, for defense, and for attack, too, though this was against the Law. No gun was carried in the Subterior. (Nor, for that matter, in the Residencia, where guns were the property of the arenas and stadiums, for sport only, shooting at targets, or clockwork animals fashioned from the computerized memory banks.) The color of the new clothes was umber, patchily diluted to white along the insulated areas. Subterines would dye their clothes, even their rags. The alleys abounded with raddled scarlet, yellow and green figures, as they abounded with spitting crimson fires, and leaning hovels and apertures in rock streaked and bannered in a score of shades. He knew it well. It was his second home. Except that, in the past, he had not needed such clothes, such weapons, such fires or such a hovel, as now he would need them. Before, plain velvet, equipped with its own heating apparatus as small as a chip. Before, another world to go back to, to rest in.

  Yet of everything, in that moment, he regretted only those he had rescued, now condemned to flounder, those Subterines who had shared his house. He understood he had the strength to persevere. But had they, having been taken from this pit, the strength to return? What of Temal?

  A panel buzzed. It fed into his palm the polished iron tab he recognized as the key to, and proof of ownership of an apartment, or such apartments as the Subterior afforded. The panel spoke.

  “Casrus, formerly prince of Klarn. You know the way things are done here. You are fortunate in that. Your accommodation is off main thoroughfare Aita, near to the entry to the Aita mine, the passage termed Aita Slink. Go there, and someone will come to inform you of employment. You are, of course, known in the Subterior. You should be wary. Respond.”

  “I’ll be wary,” Casrus said. “And I have the tab.”

  “You have transgressed the Law,” said the machine. “But, despite that, the Law here will take your part if you are wronged. You recall the Stare-Eyes? Respond.”

  “I recall them.”

  “Go then. The door will open now.”

  * * *

  • • •

  The Aita mine lay over and around deposits of copper, calvium and fosscoal, which latter the Subterines grubbed for their own furnaces. Other minerals, fuels and gases went to power the life-supporting mechanisms of the Residencia. Near to Aita, across the main thoroughfare, a vaporine funnel arose, sheer black steel, ending in a conducting box against the overhang of rock above. Icicles formed at intervals on the edge of the box, during periods of inertia, when the gas rose sluggishly from the vents beneath. Then, when the process quickened and heat came from the box, the icicles snapped off and clattered dangerously on the street, or such street as it was. The heat, however, was approved of, and Aita was a popular byway, and crammed with cells of living, some of piled rocks, some of mine sludge hardened by cold, some scarcely bigger than each individual occupant. On intermittent tall poles of white metal, trellised with ice, the Stare-Eyes duly stared, as they did in most quarters of the Subterior. Each a milky sphere, three or four inches in diameter, motionless, all-seeing, only aggression committed off the street escaped them, and then not always. Aita Street itself was a strip of smoother stone between tumbles of rough stone, where the accommodations huddled like groups of atrocious warts, lit in pockets by fires. Aita Slink was one of those indigenous alleys, mostly unlit, prolonged and twisting, hemmed in by grotesque walls or by rock face, around two feet in width. Now and then, advancement was limited to the sideways motion.

  Casrus’ new home lay about two-thirds of the way along the alley, close to the mine, and so received some of the light from the lamps above the mine entrances. A stone stair, rough and much trodden, led to a terrace that overhung the passage below, and supported two or three bulges with rents in them—dwellings. Thus far, Casrus had gone unchallenged, for it was Maram, and not many persons were abroad. Nor did anyone approach now.

  In the way of mechanically allotted tenure, the third hovel was ludicrously barred by an iron mesh, only to be penetrated with the suitable tab. Casrus operated the tab, the mesh drew itself aside, and Casrus entered.

  The room balanced atop the Slink was about seven feet by five, with a variable ceiling, in spots a few inches from Casrus’ skull. The walls, thickly plastered with insulating material, were daubed vermilion and pale amber, apparent even in the dark, and on one there was a crude drawing of a catlike animal pouncing, presumably remembered from a Fabulism, for books of any kind were unknown outside the Residencia. An insulated pallet rested upright in the wall, with a stash of coverings, mainly in tatters. There was a scoop in the floor for making fire; black from previous coals. Beyond the door screen of thin plastomil, a roofless latrine let down into the usual hygienic, naturally available sink of ice. Ice fringed the walls of the latrine also, and pointed in spikes from the roofless opening.

  Casrus had seen many such apartments. He had tried to restore and to replenish them. But there was little to be done, for what a robot would install, want could barter or let fall into decay.

  There were, of course, no coals left. Despite his garments, Casrus had remained keenly aware of the cold. Not a cold which necessarily killed, but which produced physical torpor and mental depression, a cold to be resisted. After a glance, unsurprised, at the room, Casrus turned to leave. Aita had deposits of fosscoal, theoretically free to all who could dislodge them.
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br />   But before he reached the open door, another figure darkened and filled it, coming in.

  With the gray twilight of the mine lamps behind him, the figure was momentarily indiscernible, revealing itself only as male and tall, as Casrus which, for the undernourished Subterines was stature indeed. Then he moved a fraction and was minimally described. An Upperling, not in rags, nor affecting the raucous colors of the unprivileged; instead, unrefined nuggets of copper and silver fringed his shawl-cloak. One ear was pierced, and from it depended a bright yellow credit chip on a ring of stainless steel, the message obvious: I am well-off and can spare this chip for ornament which the rest of you would need for clothing, food, and drink. The face itself was thickly bearded, for warmth rather than for fashion, and amid and above this sable forest, a mean mouth and narrow teeth, a bony flattened nose, broken and healed long ago, eyes of a pale brown like mud mixed with water. Upperlings were not loved, by reason of their success, yet some earned their unlove more thoroughly than others. This was a man Casrus had not come on before in his excursions to the Subterior, yet the type he knew—the needlessly callous chip earring, the smell of something that feeds on its own kind. A smell strangely missing from the Residencia, which should have reeked of it, as if, disclaiming the Subterines as their own kind, they had made it so.

  “Welcome, mighty prince,” said the Upperling. “Welcome, heir of Klarn, famous Casrus, aristo and master.”

  It was the sort of greeting Casrus looked for from any of them. He said nothing, merely waited.

  The Upperling bowed, hands over face, arcane worship for a god, learned from some machine of memory.

  “Let me introduce my humble groveling self,” said the Upperling. “I am Dorte. I have charge of three gangs of men, strong men, who can work planet-surface. You must be strong for that. I know. I did it, five years. Then I was blessed by the clever machineries. They let me pick men suitable for the work. The ration of food is better for surface workers. I was able to get recompense from the ones who begged to be chosen. Now I’m where I am. But you, you’re where you are. Think you’re strong enough to work surface, your elegance?”