Collected short fiction, p.691
Collected Short Fiction, page 691
He remembered fragments of a quarrel. His surgeon’s voice, shrill with anger, protesting that his clan had handed down their secret remedies five thousand years. The worried chief handler, insisting that the new doctors who came through the eye had better medicine than the dagger.
He didn’t know how the quarrel came out. He lacked the life to care. But a pale young stranger in white was bustling around him now. He felt cold metal that stung like the tly, heard the click and hum of unknown devices, relaxed at last beneath a warm red glow. The pain began to drain away. He wanted to thank the pale man, but he was too sleepy to say anything.
He woke again in the dim cool stillness of the dying room, somehow quite alive. Stretching himself, he found no pain. Even his arm felt smooth and sound, where the scratch had been. His body moved well when he sat up, and he felt a pleasant stab of hunger.
His attendants and the pale man were gone, but an old black came shuffling toward the bed. A handler he knew. Although the man had never been a binder, his leathery skin was seamed with accidental scars, his gaunt frame stiff and palsied from accidental stings.
“Lad—lad!” His shrill voice cracked. “I’ve been waiting to beg your forgiveness.” He knelt beside the bed. “It’s all my fault you are not the champion.”
He ducked the boy’s clutching hand.
“There’s a stranger—a gray-skinned other-worlder called Wheeler. One of those rogues who come through the eye to prey on Nggongga. An importer of forbidden drugs. A crafty gambler. He bet on the champion. Arranged for you to lose.”
“You—” The boy slapped the bent bald head, before he could check himself. “What did you do?”
“Mercy, lad!” he whimpered. “I’ll tell you everything. I was the milker. They had come to the arena to look over the tlys. Wheeler and the champion. A whore with them. They whispered together, with their translators set for privacy. Then the champion spoke to me.
“He made me promise to leave poison enough in the sacs to cripple you. In return, he promised that Wheeler would bet five hundred gongs for me and take me along to a richer world beyond the eye when he went on.—Don’t hurt me, lad!” His gnarled hands lifted, twisted and trembling from old stings.
“I did try to put them them off. Believe me, lad! I had always been an honest handler. I like your courage and your style. But I’m an old man, remember. I’ve been stung too many times. When I tried to say no, Wheeler promised that his other-world doctors could stop the pain that twists me. So I did what they wanted.”
“I—I forgive you,” the boy whispered. “But not the Stalker!”
“Now they won’t—won’t pay me!” Bitter tears burst out. “Wheeler says he never saw me. The champion kicked me out of his way, and his whore laughed at me. They say the stings have curdled my brain. That’s why I came back to you.”
“Why tell me?” The boy laughed harshly. “I have no clan, no name, no rights. The entry costs took all I could raise. All except my hat and dagger. What can I do?”
“Kill the Stalker!” the old man gasped. “Kill Wheeler, too!” Trembling suddenly, the boy slid to his feet. He shoved the old man aside, snatched his dagger belt from its hook behind the bed, buckled it around him.
“Why not?” he breated. “What have I to lose?”
“Wait, lad!” The old man whined. “What I’ve told you is only half the story. Both tlys were fixed. Yours unmilked. The other drugged and dying.”
He turned back, staring. “Another handler told me. Wheeler’s girl promised him money—three hundred gongs bet on the champion—to slip the Stalker’s tly a black capsule with its last feed. When the handler pushed it out to meet the Stalker, he says it was already weak and twitching. But now he says the whore won’t pay.”
“So I should kill all three?” The boy chuckled. “Perhaps I will.” He clapped on his black hat—the color of the clanless man. He thumbed the dagger’s edge with a bleak black smile and strode out of the dying room into the clangor of Nggonggamba. Somehow, in spite of the tly’s sting, he felt quite fit. All his pain was gone. Each bounding stride felt good, as if that pale outsider had oiled every joint, restrung every muscle.
An open freightway gave him a heady whiff of musk weed. He breathed deeper and walked faster. The gaudy towers all looked brighter, the rush of the rolling ways sounded louder, the tly pens behind him stank with a sharper fetor, as if his senses had all been renewed. He found himself peering aside into the glittering perfume shops and ahead at the mobs of black-skinned workers and the paler troops of merchants and shoppers and lovers and tourists, as if they had all been new.
The odor-lure of an eating place wet his mouth and stabbed him through with hunger—the quickest, keenest, brightest hunger he remembered. Searching his belt, he found one worn iron five-gong coin and a bright two-gate bit of portal money. Enough for dinner and a tip. He walked inside to eat. Stalker and Wheeler could wait. After all, he felt too good to kill anybody. Perhaps, over good food and drink, he might decide to forget—
“Hold up, boy!” The black doorman stopped him. “See that sign?”
It was the swirling disk of rainbow color that meant clansmen only. Beyond it, he saw old champ hopping nimbly about the tables, waving his crutch at the bowing waiters seating his pale other-worlders.
“They aren’t clansmen.”
“Honorary clansmen,” the doorman snarled. “You get out.”
That turned his hunger into anger. He clutched at his dagger, let it go again. It was not the stupid doorman but the Stalker who had earned it.
In the native market, he shopped for a weapon. Wistfully, he tried the balance of the sleek man-guns, weighed the tapered rockets, peered at the cunning booby-bombs. Each was priced at many hundred gongs. So were the night glasses, the seismic traps, the chemical trackers. He was fingering the lower priced knives and poison darts and lethal baits when a clerk frowned at his black kilt and began asking whom a clanless man had any right to kill. He spent his five gongs for a hunting lantern, and the two-gate bit for glasses to see its light.
The builders of the eye had chosen an arid site on the arid planet. The portal itself stood on a rocky ridge between a dry salt lake and a narrow arm of Nggongga’s single landlocked ocean. The new city ringed it now with enormous looming towers that mixed the styles of a hundred other worlds. Power plants and rolling ways honeycombed the rock beneath. New barge docks lined the ocean inlet, and new air pads dotted the ancient lake.
Only the arena was old. It stood southward on the same ridge, with an awesome view of desert and sea. Once it had been the common ground of a dozen roving clans, with domesticated tlys allowed to burrow in the cliffs around it, but the mirror-domed suburban villas of wealthy other-worlders shone on the slopes below it now.
Storm Stalker was a Ngugong of the Wind clan, and his loyal clansmen had long ago rewarded his prowess with the historic fortress of his clan, which perched like a resting tly on a naked peak above the arena. Though it was two thousand years older than the eye, he had opened it to progress. The new robot keeper at the street door ignored the boy when he asked to see the champion.
Yet the boy was not defeated. Growing up in Nggonggamba without clan or rights or name, he had learned to use the dust traps beneath the rolling ways. He rode a freightway, climbed a disposal shaft into the castle, crept past the Stalker’s sleeping attendants into the tower where he lived.
Nothing stopped him until the flitting ray of his lantern shivered and came back to the long rows of black heads grinning at him from the trophy cases in the hall. For one frozen instant, he felt as if the tly had stung him again. As he tried to breathe, his last qualms faded. The Stalker had also been a hunter of men. He dimmed the lantern and gripped the dagger and moved noislessly on.
The bedroom door was locked, but a roving other-worlder had taught him how to deal with bedroom locks before he was eight years old. Inside, he turned up his hunting light to fill the great stone room. He heard the Stalker’s wheezing breath and found the ancient bed. Thick-pillared, covered with a khamsin canopy, it loomed like a dark inner fortress.
The old floor took all his skill, but he had almost reached the bed without a creak when an odor checked him—the rose-tempered musk that Sapphire wore. Though he tried to tell himself that he should not have been surprised, her scent shook him like an unfair blow.
He stopped where he stood, breathing carefully. When he dared move again, he pushed up the hunting glasses to make sure his light could not be seen and pushed them back to survey the huge room again—the massive old armoire that towered like a second fort beyond the bed, the alternating tly’s eggs and black heads that decorated the high stone mantel, the window slits that looked out across islandlike airpads on the dark sea of desert.
Calm again, he framed his plan. He turned the black lantern high, its whole globe glowing, and placed it gently on the floor. He drew back into the shadow of the bed, lest the Stalker have hunting glasses of his own.
“Stalker!” His hand settled on the dagger. “Wake up, Stalker.”
Sapphire screamed. Stalker’s last snore became a grunt. His fat-jowled head thrust through the heavy curtains, darted back. The girl gasped something about “the stung man.”
“You pitiful kid.” The hoarse startled voice had a rasp of seeming sympathy. “A bad break you got.” Behind the curtains, there was motion. “What are you doing here?”
“Asking—asking questions, Stalker.” He had thought he was calm enough, but his voice tried to stick. “Why was I stung? What killed your tly? If I like the answers, I’ll let you live.”
“Fool kid!” That croaking shout failed to cover a click of metal and a scrambling in the bed. “You’ve been listening to some brain-stung handler—”
White light blazed. Feet thudded beyond the bed. The kicked lantern clattered across the floor. The Stalker loomed where it had been, crouching and blinking, swinging a heavy man-gun. The boy slung his black glasses away, threw his poised dagger, dived aside.
The rifle crashed once, rattled on the floor. With a soft, childlike cry, the Stalker toppled backward. Inside the canopy, Sapphire choked back another scream. The boy scooped up his lantern and the gun, got his dagger back. When he stood up, he found Sapphire trembling beside the bed, clad only in her long red hair.
“No Name—” Huskily, she breathed the half-mocking term she had found for him the night after he first saw her in a tourist group old champ was leading through the arena. “No Name, you know I always—always wanted you to win.”
“Once I thought you did.” Half afraid to look at her, he bent to wipe the dagger on Stalker’s naked belly. “But we’re done with your game. If you still want to play, we’ll play mine.”
“With you, No Name—”
He felt her flowing motion toward him, and her rose-tempered scent turned him giddy. For a moment all he could hear was his own blood pounding.
“I’ll play any game with you.”
“I won’t kill you, Sapphire.” He pushed her back with the muzzle of the man-gun. “I’ll even play fair. Show me his winnings, and you can keep half.”
“You hurt me, No Name.” She cringed backward. “There’s forty—forty thousand gongs. There in his safe under the hearth. I said I’d play your game.” She tried to smile, swaying toward him. “Just tell me, No Name.”
“I’m sliding through the eye.”
He heard pounding boots and shouting in the hall.
“Your part is to get me out alive,” he whispered. “If these seed eaters know you’re here, convince them the Stalker isn’t hurt. Maybe he shot at something in a dream. Dig up the loot. Find me a cooler-cloak to cover the gun. If you try one trick—”
“Trust me, No Name!” Her white arms opened. “Take me—take me with you.”
“Not yet!” Grinning at her, he waved the man-gun toward the door, where the Stalker’s people had begun to hammer. “First we’ve got my game to play.”
3.
Old Champ was guiding a group of native black Nggonggans around the terminal complex. Members of the Sand clan, in brown hats and kilts, they were rare-earth miners and musk-weed cutters and crawler drivers from the equatorial uplands half around the planet. Rollways and towers and the eye itself had humbled them with awe, and he was snappish with them, suspecting that they disapproved the other-worlder custom of the tip.
“See that dome?” He waved the yellow crutch. “It covers the transflection portal.”
They marveled at the dome, which was wide enough to cover the largest village in their desert highlands. They stared again at his agility, as he hopped up a rolling ramp and led them along the high gallery that belted the dome above the terminal doors. They gasped when he turned a section of the inner wall transparent, to let them look down into the dome.
“The portal,” he bugled, in their own tonal dialect. “The eye itself.”
The floor was a vast circular plain. Rollways entered it from hundreds of terminal entrances three levels deep, spaced all around the rim of the dome. They flowed together into six broad trunks, all at the same level, that converged into the actual eye.
“Monstrous!” A hulking miner shivered. “Forty yards wide—and looking straight at me.”
“An optical effect,” old Champ said. “The same from every direction. The blue iris is a circular image of all the other portals—some of them ten thousand light-years off in ordinary space. The black pupil—the engineers call it a circle of inversion—reflects the darkness of all the unknown spaces collapsed between the open eyes.”
He waved the crutch at the unending streams of traffic—piled freight containers and crowded passenger floats—flowing into the eye on one side and out on the other.
“Ring-fields around the iris push the traffic through—”
“A forbidden thing!” A stooped weed cutter shrank fearfully back.
“People and things go into that eye and come out—different! Bales of weed turn to big black boxes.”
“It only looks that way.” Old Champ rapped the deck impatiently. “What goes in is scattered through other eyes to destinations on many thousand planets. What comes out here has been gathered from those same far eyes. A ticket through costs more than you have, but it does save travel time. A thousand gongs can save you a thousand years in a starship—if you could live so long.”
He paused to let them gape. “The operators and the inner guards are stationed on those six islands.” He pointed at the triangular platforms that stood between the converging rollways. “They sort and watch the traffic. But what you see is less than half the eye. The computers and the power installations fill nine more levels, under the floor.”
“Sir!” A curious crawler driver stopped chewing the sweet-seed that colored his mouth vividly orange. “Can we go down there? I want to see—”
“Not without your ticket.” Old Champ snorted. “Not without your exit visa. Not without being screened for weapons and contraband and bad ideas.”
“Why?” The driver looked for a place to spit and gulped uncomfortably. “I don’t see why—”
“Eyejackers!” snapped the guide. “A lot of con men and bigger thieves do get through the eye with loot collected on Nggongga—but they’re the slick ones. The eyejackers are the fools. They rob somebody and turn up here with a gun or a bomb for a ticket. Every one gets caught, but more keep coming.”
“How do they catch them?” The miner squinted through the crystal wall. “I don’t see any guns.”
“You won’t see—”
The wall turned suddenly opaque, now the color of polished steel.
“Trouble inside—but we won’t see it.” Old Champ rapped with the crutch and hopped toward the ramp. “They’ve cut us off. We’ll have to move along. Your good luck. Our next stop is a perfume factory, and now we’ll have time enough to shop. The manager is my clan-kin. Highly reliable. If you decide to purchase anything, I can get you wholesale rates.”
The boy had never been inside the portal dome, but he had begun cleaning boots and sometimes picking pockets on that sight-seer’s gallery before he was seven. Tourists had told him of other worlds where all people had rights and a name was not too hard to earn. Never expecting to have the money or the right to buy legal passage, he had brightened many an hour of hunger and despair with schemes for illegal transit to some kinder place. That converging web of rollways was mapped in his mind, and off-duty workers had told him how the eye was run.
Now, with twenty thousand gongs in his belt, he might have paid his legal way, but he could not expect the dead Stalker’s fans to leave him time enough to comply with legal regulations. He rode a low-level freightway into the dome, crouching between piled bales of cured musk-weed.
When it slowed to pass an inspection station, he dropped off the rollway behind the bales and slipped into a washroom. He waited there for an inspector, took the man’s uniform and eye-badge, climbed a ramp to the main level, sprang boldly on a passenger float.
The man-gun slung across his back as if it had been official equipment, he moved briskly between the files of standing passengers, asking to see their departure papers. With a hard-won deftness, he extracted transit coupons from one folder, the visaed passport from another, gathered a medical clearance and a credit disk and a universal translator, working his way along the float until it was entering the slot between two control islands, within moments of the portal.
“Documents,” he was rasping. “Departure doc—”
When he glanced up toward the eye, his voice caught. Already overhead, the brilliant blue flicker of the iris was many yards across. The black stare of that vast solitary pupil struck him with a terror as keen as his breathless hope. All around the iris was a haze of colorless nothingness—already swallowing the front of the float. In a few heartbeats, he would see a new world—
The roll way stopped.
“Get off!” That amplified command thundered from somewhere above, and blinding searchlights blazed down on him from the island wall. “Get off that float!” Plunging into a knot of startled tourists, he unslung the man-gun.
