Singer From the Sea

by Sheri S. Tepper

  “Enough. One more and I’m leaving you here alone!” shouted Zebulon, his face red with fury.

  Jeorfy mimed apology, bowing, wringing his hands in pretend-distress, then turned to say cheerfully to Genevieve, “The Colonel was far better at dissimulation than I. When I tried it, they caught me at it. I’m down here as punishment.”

  Keeping a blank face, she asked, “How did you know I was up there?”

  Jeorfy said, “Zebulon was just showing me around and we happened to be there. That grille is the back gate to this cavern, so to speak …”

  “Among others,” muttered Zeb.

  Jeorfy paid no attention to the interruption. “Of course, the current powers that be, up there, don’t know there’s any way out except the locked gate they put me through. They think we’re cut off from the world down here, incommunicado. Which is why I’m here. I know too much. Or they think I do.”

  Zeb mused, as though talking to himself, “I like that particular way out. There’s lots of travelers come by there. I can come out at night and listen to them. I hear all kinds of interesting things.”

  Genevieve rubbed her forehead wearily, trying to decide whether she should insist they let her go or simply go along for a while longer. Jeorfy accurately read her expression.

  “Don’t worry, girl,” said Jeorfy. “Your so-called papa isn’t up there anymore. He’s been escorted to the border. You agreed to meet in Midling Wells, and that’s where we’ll take you. We can, can’t we, Zeb?”

  “Near to there,” said the other, reluctantly.

  Jeorfy nodded. “Your so-called papa isn’t fool enough to wander around in the wilderness just hoping you’ll show up, and with the number of men on the roads, he won’t have a chance to come back here.”

  “Is this where you live?” she asked, looking around the small room with something like dismay. She didn’t want to stay for a long time, and it would be very crowded with all three of them in it.

  “This is just a rest stop,” Zebulon said. “I fixed me up a bunch of them, here and there, like plums in a pudding. So I can stop and be comfortable whenever I want.”

  “How do you live? What do you eat?”

  Zebulon sniggered, grasped her by the arm and dragged her back onto the cart. This time she sat on the seat next to Jeorfy while Zebulon drove them down dark chasms between huge, dusty piles of merchandise, other shadowed aisles squirming away on either side like wormtracks. Near the bottom of one stack a crate had been opened, and Jeorfy leapt from the machine long enough to pull a container from the open crate and place it on their wagon.

  “Zybod ham,” crooned Zebulon. “From the planet Kuflyk. This ham, it’s in perpetual preservation. You’d think it’d taste like dust, but it’s good, oh, very good. It’s why I stay, I think. The food. This ham with goat cheese and fresh bread—well, bread that tastes fresh—is remarkable. Quite remarkable.”

  The look he gave her was a hungry one, and he licked his lips in a lecherous way. Genevieve kept her face turned resolutely away from his as they went on. They circumnavigated a continent of carved furniture, beneath tottery mountains of marquetry, past veins of veneer, lodes of inlay, eroded towers of tapestry and trapunto over sheer cliffs of stacked cabinetry, bronze fittings, and mirrored surfaces, all scaled and corrupted by time. They slid beneath a leaning tower of paintings, gilt frames jutting like angled crystals, stretched canvases slit and tattered into dust-stiffened stalactites. They passed cataracts of chandeliers, tumbling gold and prismed glass, shining here and there as a vagrant beam reflected through the gray film. They eased along the bottom of a chasm, crowded on either side by great broken cartons full of crystal and porcelain and lizard nests, the packing material sodden with the excrement of the generations of babies who had hatched there.

  Speaking of nesting gave Jeorfy an idea. “We should get this girl a bed,” he announced.

  “Next left,” said Zeb, and they swerved around a corner to stop at a topless pile of mattresses, the bottom ones squashed flat as paper beneath the enormous weight of all those vanishing into the gloom above. Zebulon scrambled high onto a plateau, dust billowing around him as he kicked several mattresses from the dusty layers. The first ones plummeted and burst on impact, but the last few, with surfaces almost clean, landed more or less in one piece.

  “What’s it all for?” cried Genevieve, when they had loaded the best one aboard the platform. “The Lord Paramount couldn’t use all this in a million years.”

  “Not likely,” snarled Zebulon, returning to his lever, “besides which, we’ve got perfectly good mattress-makers in Haven. And chandelier-makers. And furniture-makers.”

  “I think I’ve figured it out,” said Jeorfy. “The Lord Paramount has little enough to amuse himself, so he sees something in the off-world catalogs that catches his eye, and he orders it, that’s all. All the planets send their catalogs to the Lord Paramount. I’ve seen ‘em, because when he was finished with ‘em, they brought ‘em to be filed in the archives. Catalogs for food, fabric, machines. Weapons. Gadgets. Even pets! Zeb says there’s a whole aisle of pets in stasis down here. Animals you’ve never seen!”

  Genevieve heard this with a feeling of certainty. Jeorfy was right. She herself had seen the catalogs stacked around the Lord Paramount’s high seat. “What does he trade for all this?” she asked wonderingly. “This is a poor world.”

  “Now that’s what I’d like to know,” murmured Zeb, with a leer in her direction. “I suppose Jeorfy’d like to know that, too.”

  “I’ve heard it said it’s pearls,” she offered, pretending not to notice the leer.

  “No,” said Jeorfy, shaking his head. “I’ve heard that, but it’s not pearls. When I saw all this down here, I wanted to know what we traded, oh, yes, so I looked it up in the archives. Archives was mute, didn’t give a toot.”

  Zeb snarled, “Trade goods is something ordinary folk aren’t allowed to know about. Just the nobles know about trade goods.”

  “How could that be?” Genevieve asked. “I mean, I’m a noble, and I don’t know anything about anything. And it’s not as if I can do anything that ordinary people don’t know about. I mean, my maid knows when I take a deep breath! She knows more about what’s going on than I do. Nobles are surrounded all the time by ordinary folk.”

  “I can tell you one bunch, one place they’re not surrounded by commoners,” remarked Jeorfy, with a significant nod. “And that’s the Tribunal.”

  “The Covenanters? I didn’t know that.”

  “It’s true,” remarked Jeorfy. “I was surprised when I read about it, but that’s how it is. Whoever installed the inventory system down here connected it to the archive machines upstairs. Zebulon didn’t even know that until I came. The nobles, the Lord Paramount, and the Prince and all, even they don’t know that! So, I’ve been digging around, and I came across some Tribunal edicts forbidding common people from going anywhere near the Tribunal.”

  “What do you mean, the systems are connected?” Genevieve asked.

  “It means from down here we can read anything that’s in the archive machines except what they’ve locked up since they caught me looking. They find out I can still get into those machines, they’d disconnect us in a minute, or kill us.”

  Zebulon made a sharp right turn and headed off in the new direction at top speed. They had come to a section of the cavern where the crates stacked on either side were huge, each one towering three and four men high. Genevieve cocked her head to read the lettering on them as they went past, BIOSTASIS, they read, followed by a code number.

  “What’s Biostasis?” she asked.

  Zeb answered. “That’s what we told you. Pets. Animals. I think the Lord Paramount wanted to have a zoo, so he bought all kinds of animals, but never set the zoo up. The animals are in stasis. You open the box, the insides go to work, and out it comes, alive. I’ll show you.”

  He stopped the wagon, and beckoned her to follow him as he wriggled his way into the enormous stack. He
stopped before a fogged window and rubbed it clear. “See!”

  She looked in, seeing forms, fur, perhaps the edge of a wing? Maybe. Another window showed an unmistakable ander, huge. There were a dozen cases of that particular code number, all from the same shipper. From one case an eye looked at her, unmistakably.

  “It’s looking at me,” she murmured to Jeorfy.

  “Can’t,” he said. “It’s asleep.”

  She felt the look. The thing might be asleep, and in that case it was dreaming her, but it definitely perceived her, one way or the other!

  She leaned closer, looking deep. She saw an ear, trembling. Perhaps she did not see it tremble, perhaps she only felt it, the fragile tympanum responding to a sound so deep she could not hear it. “Something’s talking to it,” she said firmly.

  “Nonsense,” said Jeorfy, coming to thrust his face in beside hers and peer into the case. “Who could be talking to it?”

  “I don’t know,” she murmured. Still, she was sure the thing in the crate knew she was here, and knew something was talking to it, and was fully aware, though perhaps only in dream, of what was going on. She backed off to estimate the size of the crate. Very, very large. The size of an elephant, perhaps, one of the old, now-departed animals of Old Earth.

  “Come on,” said Jeorfy, uncomfortably. “It’s the same with the war machines. The Lord Paramount has a lot of them down here, too, and they’re sort of alive. They take up a lot of space.”

  “What are war machines for?”

  “They’ve been here since the year one. Inventory has ‘em listed as protection against invasion. Like from off-world.”

  “Does my … ah, that is, do the armies know about them?”

  “Nobody knows about them. The weapons they know about are simple by comparison, and cheaper. They’re all stored up from here, on the first level under Havenor, where they’re easier to get to.”

  She cried, “We’re not a rich world! Why would anyone invade us? And who buys such things?”

  Jeorfy shrugged. “The Lord Paramount or the Prince would be my guess. Or some oldie duke.”

  “What do you mean exactly, when you say Oldie’?” asked Genevieve.

  “Someone a hundred fifty, two hundred years old,” snarled Zeb. “Like the Prince and the Lord Paramount and all the Dukes, living off the rest of us, like a vampire.” He made another swift turn and brought the vehicle to a halt at the end of a long line of vehicles, some large, some small.

  She turned, eyes wide. “My … ah father’s a Count. He’s nowhere near that old.”

  “Maybe he’s not old enough yet.” Jeorfy made a face. “According to the archives, they turn into oldies later.”

  “How old do they get?”

  “Oh, two or three hundred. Maybe more.”

  Genevieve stood to one side, lost in wonderment, while the men removed the cargo from the carrier and carried it into a nearby room, one much like the previous chamber except that this one had been professionally built with stout masonry walls and a pitched, tiled roof. From the large combined office-cum-parlor a short corridor extended past a kitchen, a toilet, a bathroom, two bedrooms, and a number of empty living spaces, all of them brightly lighted and well ceiled against the dust. In one of the empty rooms Jeorfy placed the mattress they had salvaged and put Genevieve’s belongings upon it.

  They returned to the largest chamber. “Our official post,” said Jeorfy, gesturing at the wall, which was lined with screens and panels. “Those are the inventory machines.”

  Zeb said, “Everything the Lord Paramount ever bought’s supposed to be listed there.” He sniggered, unpleasantly, as seemed to be his habit as a kind of punctuation to his private thoughts.

  “What are you supposed to be doing here?” she asked curiously, dropping into a chair.

  “It’s just ordinary maintenance,” Jeorfy answered, with a slightly worried sidelong glance at his companion. “Every little while there’s something new that comes down on the elevators, and we’re supposed to put it in new stacks, and number the stacks and enter the numbers in the machines. And the machines keep track of how long stuff has been here, and lists off the things that have to be destroyed because they’re no good anymore …”

  “Or dangerous,” said Zeb.

  “Right, so when the machine tells us something has run out of time, we’re supposed to take a suitable lifter and load whatever expired and move it through one of the tunnels to a fire chasm, where we push it over.”

  “And what do you get for all that?” she wondered.

  Zeb twisted his mouth into a particularly nasty smile. “Nothing that makes it worthwhile. I tell you, I dream of getting out of here!” He said it angrily, with another of those leering, hungry glances at Genevieve. She looked away.

  Jeorfy caught this and said quickly, “Well there is another good thing they don’t know about.”

  “And that is?” sneered Zeb.

  “The tunnels. They go everywhere. We could go to Merdune, underground. Hell, we could probably go to Sealand, underground, under Havenpool, the whole way.”

  “Except you’d starve,” said Zeb. “The vehicles won’t go that far without refueling, and the only power source is right here. You’d have to walk, and it’d be a damn long walk.”

  “So you can take me underground to a place near Midling Wells?” asked Genevieve.

  “Somewhere near there,” said Zeb, turning away to busy himself at the kitchen cabinets.

  “Don’t worry, pretty girl,” said Jeorfy, with a troubled glance at his companion. “We’re not monsters, not sex maniacs, not dreadful anything but dreadful bored, probably.”

  Zebulon made no comment, merely continued putting together a meál while Jeorfy asked Genevieve questions about everything under the sun. By the time dinner was ready, he had elicited more than she had intended to tell about her schooling, her reading, and her life in general.

  Genevieve, she cautioned herself. You’re tired and you’re spouting. You’re chatting. You’re doing everything wrong! The self-caution came too late. She had already mentioned her feelings of loathing regarding Prince Delganor, an indiscretion that stopped Zebulon’s activities momentarily while he stared at her with his leering smile.

  When they were seated around the table, Jeorfy asked. “These off-world publications you read at school? They weren’t catalogs?”

  “No, no. They were accounts of current happenings.”

  “Did you notice, were any of them from Ares? Or Verben’s World? Or Chamis?”

  “There was a story about Chamis,” she said, her forehead furrowed. “About the world becoming … depopulated. I mean, it’s going downhill. Why?”

  Jeorfy shook his head, puzzled. “I’ve been looking back over the records that were kept, oh, say three or four hundred years ago. Before Marwell was elevated, it was Lord Paramount Gorbagger. He bought little stuff from about a dozen different worlds. And so did Marwell, but he bought a lot. Then as time went on, Marwell kept right on buying more and more, but from fewer and fewer planets. Now he gets most of his stuff from Ares. Including his bodyguards.”

  “Some settlement worlds don’t make it,” Genevieve acknowledged. “Actually, Haven is one of the older settled worlds that are still going. Ares is one that’s having a hard time, like Chamis. People can’t figure why some worlds make it and some don’t. It’s as though some worlds lack something people need in order to live, but no one knows what it is.”

  “Now that’s interesting.” Jeorfy frowned. “I’m going to use the machines to look that up. I’m going to order some of those publications, too.”

  “You don’t have a purchase order,” snarled Zeb.

  “I can make one up,” said Jeorfy. “You think anybody’s keeping track? That’s a laugh. I can fake a number and then take the staff out of the shipment when it arrives.”

  Genevieve put down her fork. “How does staff get ordered and come here for storage? Where is it brought? Who handles it?”

 
; Jeorfy said, “Stuff gets ordered from the palace. I used to do it myself. Then it gets paid for somehow, before it comes or at the same time as. The smaller stuff is delivered down at Bliggen and sent up here on barges and wagons. That gets sent down the chutes. But Zeb says huge stuff is always landed right here in High Haven. After dark, by some kind of beam or other that sets it right down on the elevators.”

  “Hasn’t been any huge stuff for decades,” mumbled Zeb. “Those big animals was the end of it.”

  Genevieve put her hand to her mouth, only half-hiding a yawn. “It’s very interesting Mr. Coffin, but I’m so … I’m so tired. I only had about an hour last night, and all that running and hiding and riding …”

  “Surely, surely,” said Zebulon. “You go ahead. Jeorfy and me, we need some sleep, too. Been a long day.”

  She nodded her thanks, finished the food on her plate, then excused herself. Within moments, she was lying on top of the bed they had brought for her, her bedding pulled over her, soundly asleep.

  Outside, in the other room, Jeorfy asked again, in a worried tone, “We will take her where she’s going, won’t we?”

  “Oh, you can say that, yes,” Zeb answered, not meeting his eyes. “We’ll definitely take her where she’s going.”

  On that same high vantage point where Aufors Leys had once stood to contemplate his relationship with the Marshal’s daughter, Ogberd Ygdaleson, Captain of the Lord Paramount’s Aresian mercenaries, Sometime-General of the Aresian army, leaned upon the railing in off-duty laxity, surreptitiously wiping his eyes. He did not see his brother ascending the steep flights behind him; he did not hear him until Lokdren was within a pace of him.

  “Brother? Og?” Lokdren murmured, unsure of his ground under these unusual circumstances. Ogberd was not an emotional man. His men had never seen a tear in his eye. “What’s happened? Have we had news from home?”