Topman Taiko was a short, stout man, red-faced and squeaky-voiced, without much time for bewildered swabbers. Though he wore a ship-service medal, he had never been anywhere off Kai. Later, Keth came to see him as a troubled, lonely man who loved the school and lived for it, but at first he always seemed angry over nothing.
“I warn you now,” he screeched at the swabber class, “you’ve got a lot to learn. A thousand years of history first, and the great traditions of the ship. You’ll learn the list of Navarchs, from the great Kyrondath Kyrone down to Suan Ko. You’ll learn to lead, but not till after you’ve learned to obey. You’ll begin to learn the skills that can take you into space, maybe even out to Malili. But first you’ll learn to love Greenpeak.”
He stopped to glare down at them and shook his head as if they saddened him.
“You swabbers are a sorry lot, but we’ll have to make you do.” His fat chin jutted at them, and his old voice quavered. “You’re all raw clay, but we’ll make you boatfolk, fit to work the ship. You’ll have to take some grinding and some blending and some shaping and some heat. Some of you won’t like it. Some of you may crack in the kiln. But we’ll make the best of you fit for service in the Zone.”
Scowling down with dull, red eyes, he talked a long time about rules and punishments. They would walk the duty deck two hours for each black slash. Boatfolk with ten black slashes would get no sweets for the rest of the term. Boatfolk with forty black slashes would never make shipclass.
Keth worked hard. So did Chelni Vorn. They often sat together at mess and she told him more about her family. Her great-grandfather had commanded one of the landers that opened the original Zone and his claims had been the richest in thorium. His heirs had made the Vorn Voyagers a great trading fleet. She was planning to train for space, and she hoped one day to command the Vorn station in the Zone.
She didn’t believe in the humanoids.
“Not on Malili, anyhow. My uncle says the Lifecrew makes up horror tales about the planet, about humanoids and killer trees, trying to keep us scared away. We’ve got real troubles enough, he says, with dragon bats and rockrust and bloodrot, without inventing more. But he says we Vorns are going to open up Malili—in spite of everything!”
Sometimes he didn’t like her. She talked too much about the Vorn Voyagers, about her uncle’s summer places at both capitals, about skiing at his winter lodges and swimming in Crater Lake and hunting wild mutoxen on the Darkside ranch. Most of the other swabbers called her conceited and bossy, but she didn’t seem to care. She liked him.
Once she wanted to see him naked. She looked in a head to make sure it was empty, and called him inside. They stripped together. Her body was thin and straight, pale where her uniform had covered it, with no hair anywhere. Frowning at his penis, she said it didn’t look good for much.
Dutymate Luan burst in while they were dressing, screaming at them. She dragged them by the ears to Topman Taiko, who gave them an angry lecture and five black slashes each. He hated Chelni while he was walking the tours, but she gave him a secret smile when they met later in the study cabin, and they stayed friends.
Sometimes they studied together and traded tutor tapes. She told him about her holiday trips away to her uncle’s exciting places, and she was generous with the illegal extra-quota sweets she always brought back. But she always called the humanoids a stupid hoax.
The school museum had three ruby-colored dragon’s eggs in a dusty case, along with a holostat of the ice-caves where they had been found. Looking at them, he felt a pang of old regret for the one his father had taken, and wondered if Chelni still thought they were lucky. He decided not to ask her.
She seldom spoke about her missing father, and no more news came back from the Dragon. Once every moontime, the space transports brought him a voicecard from Malili, but there was never anything about humanoids or those rhodo sources in the jungle. Cyra and his father were busy and well. His father always asked about slash marks and grades, and he always finished: “Remember, Skipper. Learn to fight.”
He wasn’t learning to fight. Contact sports were worse than chess. He felt secretly relieved when Topman Taiko said he wasn’t fit for warball. Once, on the duty deck, when the boxing champ called him yellow, he just walked away. Yet he longed to be ready when the humanoids came.
Sometimes he woke sweating from ugly dreams about hordes of them chasing him through the black and empty tunnels under Greenpeak. Their clutching hands were golden, like Bosun Brong’s. Every one had Nurse Vesh’s frowning face and stringy gray hair, and they all screamed after him in her voice, “We got your mother, and we’ll get you.”
Yet, in spite of everything, he soon felt happier at Greenpeak. He learned not to get black slashes. Topman Taiko sometimes smiled with his salute when they met in the corridors, and the new swabbers seemed a pretty sorry lot.
Wondering whether he was really yellow, he decided to test himself. On the Sunset holiday after the second term, when Chelni had gone back to her uncle’s Northdyke home, and the school was almost empty, he took a lightgun out of the emergency box in the hall and followed a path he had planned out, through the empty gym and across the deserted duty deck to a barrier nobody could see. Heart thumping, he climbed the barrier and stumbled on down the off-limits tunnel into thickening blackness.
He had always been vaguely terrified, but also fascinated, by the dead city that lay far around and reached far beneath the tiny, lighted island of the school. Looking across the barriers into the icy dark of the uncleared tunnels, dreaming about his own forefathers who had lived and fought and died there, he had wanted to walk where they had been. The waiting dangers of rocktalls and floodwaters and deadly gas seemed real enough to test his courage, and he wouldn’t have to hurt anybody else.
Beyond the barrier, he groped his way into a side tunnel before he dared use the lightgun. When he did snap it on, there wasn’t really much to see. Only an endless row of blackmouthed caves opening off the gloomy passage, with nothing to tell him whether they had been shops or homes or something else.
Yet he found himself strangely excited, lifted with an elation he didn’t entirely understand. Here, somehow, he was free. With nobody he had to beat or give up to, with nobody trying to hurt him or master him, he could be himself.
He snapped the lightgun off and sat on a fallen rock in the soundless dark, wondering why this lonely freedom felt so good. Perhaps he had escaped some hurt he couldn’t remember back in the time with his mother on Malili. Perhaps he had been too long with Nurse Vesh and Doc Smart, learning too little about other people. Perhaps he was just a misfit.
Suddenly, feeling the damp chill creeping into him, he stood up to go on. In spite of the cold, he liked being alone in this black stillness, liked it so much that the reason didn’t matter. He knew he had to come back again.
On that first adventure, he found nothing else he cared about. Only a few odd bits of rust-eaten metal and broken glass that he dropped where he found them, because they would have been too hard to explain at room check. But he kept going back when he could, working his way all around the school, mapping the musty caverns in his mind to make sore he wouldn’t get lost.
Pushing farther, he found what must have been the main vertical ways. Burned out, perhaps from the bombing, they were great black pits, choked with broken stone and twisted steel, blocking him out of the lower levels.
On a longer expedition, at the end of the term, he felt cold wind blowing out through a broken grating. A ladder beyond it went down into the dark as far as the light could reach. When he tried the rusting rungs, they seemed strong enough.
Trembling a little, yet elated to be venturing where nobody else had been for many hundreds of years, perhaps since the city had died, he hooked the lightgun to his belt and climbed down the ladder into suffocating silence and the stale reek of wet decay.
The first three levels he reached were as empty as those around the school, the dark caves along the corridors all stripped bare
in the flight from the bombs, or perhaps by later vandals. One ringing sound startled him—a waterdrop crashing into a still, ink-black pool.
On the fourth level, he found the grating still in place. Climbing back for a piece of broken steel, he pried and hammered till it fell. Beyond it, the foul air took his breath and turned him giddy, yet he stayed long enough to see that the people caught here had not escaped.
The water pools were deeper, and the strange little mounds that scattered them were skeletons. Staring into the stifling dark, trying to imagine the terrors of the dying city, he stayed almost too long. He was quivering and gasping when, at last, he dragged himself out of the shaft on the level above, and his head was still throbbing when he got back to his room.
He didn’t go back all the next term Those secret expeditions had begun to seem a dangerous vice. He resolved to spend more time with his tutors and make a fresh effort to know and like his messmates. His grades were already high enough, however, with only Chelni Vorn above him, and he still disliked games. Alone and bored during the break at the end of the term, he decided to risk just one more venture.
7
Deliverance Rhodomagnetic starship in which refugees from the humanoids reached the Cat. Designed and commanded by Captain Lance Mansfield, grandson of the unfortunate Warren Mansfield, who invented the humanoids.
Carrying a little holocamera, a birthday gift from Chelni, he climbed back down to the lowest level where he could breathe. Splashing through the icy puddles m another tunnel, he found a recent-looking rockfall in his way. Scrambling over it, he slipped and nearly fell into a pit he hadn’t seen. A rock from under his hand rolled into it and seemed to drop forever, crashing into something, hollow echoes rolling.
He lay half over it a long time, chilled with sweat and trembling, wondering how brave he really was. When his nerve came back, he slung the holocam around his neck and climbed down that old air shaft till he came to a rust-rotten grating. His light found a long, rock-vaulted room beyond. Though the sour stench took his breath, he battered at the latches till the grating dropped.
He climbed inside and almost fell on a round pebble that rolled in the mud under his boot. Oddly round, when his light picked it up. Another lay near. A dozen were scattered beyond, all perfect spheres, all the same size.
Dragon’s eggs!
The vault, he guessed, must have been a museum. Now, most of its contents were melted down into the black mud ridges along the walls. There was only one skeleton, lying against a heavy metal door that looked as if it was frozen shut with rust. A brown mound covered one outflung hand.
Already giddy and ill, he knew he should get out while he could. Yet he stood there, chilled and gasping, wondering again what sort of beings had made those odd stone balls and trying to imagine what had happened here.
There must have been some warning. The man in the room had tried to get out. Trying, maybe, to carry some special treasure. Keth kicked at the little mound and saw a smooth curve like the smooth curve of another egg.
When he kicked again, a little globe rolled out of the mud. Not quite so large as the others, it wasn’t stone, but some white metal. It bounced off his boot, seeming strangely light. The clots of mud fell off, and it floated upward.
Or had the bad air already crazed him?
He swayed away from it, knowing he must go. But it came so close end looked so real that he reached out and caught it. Blinking at it, he shook his head. Nothing ever fell up. Yet it felt real enough, damp and cold, twice the size of the ball of his thumb. Heavy in its own strange way, it kept pulling upward.
Afterward, that moment seemed like a fading dream. The next thing he really remembered was waking up on that rockfall above. Pain was pounding in his head, his belly ached from Vorniting, and his hands were tom and swollen.
When he could sit up, he found the little sphere tied safe in a pocket of his tom and muddy coverall. He took it out and wiped it clean and sat a long time wondering. A different sort of dragon’s egg, it had made them all seem more exciting and mysterious than ever, and it was already priceless to him.
It proved the courage he had questioned and rewarded all his risks. Its silvery wonder seemed somehow to match the obscure urge that had led him to it. Not knowing quite why he searched, he didn’t have to know what he had found.
He supposed people would want it to show in some museum, but it was too precious to be given away. When he could walk, he carried it back to the school and kept it hidden in his study desk at the bottom of a box weighted down with old tutor tapes.
Now and then he took it out to feast his imagination on it, wondering what it really was, and whether its ancient makers had really come from the worlds of the Dragon. But he never went back into those dead tunnels, or wanted to, not even to look for the holocam when he found that it was gone.
Somehow, just having it made him a better boatman. Though he still avoided contact sports, he discovered so much delight in skiing in the winter moontimes that he led the class team. Suddenly, his studies took a new direction. He never showed the sphere to anybody, because he didn’t want it taken away, but he meant to learn more about it. He searched for tapes about prehistoric Kai and wrote a term paper on the Black Centuries. He made secret experiments with the sphere. When his physics tutors came to lecture on the laws of motion, he measured its upward acceleration: .9 meters per second per second. Once in the lab he asked the instructor what could cause negative gravity.
“Boatman, are you an idiot?” The whitebearded instructor scowled. “Negative gravity has no place in science. Any fool knows that.”
Time went by. No invading humanoids came across from the Dragon. The holo newsmen forgot the loss of Captain Vorn’s Kyrone. Ship officials no longer talked about a rescue expedition. Instead, they announced plans to enlarge the Zone and relieve Kai’s power famine with thorium from new mines on Malili.
With no more nightmares about the humanoids, Keth began to feel that Brong’s whole story must have been fantastic falsehood. He got his lessons and went skiing when he could. Not so often now, he pulled out the bottom drawer of his desk to make sure the white metal ball had not lost whatever tugged it upward. He never spoke about it, even to Chelni, because its wonder had always been so private, and because the way he had found it would have been too awkward to explain.
She was still his friend, growing taller now than he, her black hair longer and her lean body ripening, and he didn’t mind that she always stood at the top of the class, just ahead of him. Scholastic honors did matter to her.
The day he was fourteen, the monthly voicecard came from his father and Cyra on Malili. They were busy and well, and they wished him another happy year. Chelni’s birthday was only three days later. She asked him to come with her to the Admiral’s for her party.
With the Bridge in session, the Admiral was at Vara Vorn, his Northdyke residence. Though that was half around Kai, near the other pole, the distance didn’t matter. Chelni had priority for a special pod that shot them there through the new deep tube in only three hours, from a winter moontime to a bright midsummer suntime.
Half of all Kai’s water was locked in the great north polar ice cap, a thousand kilometers wide, filling the planet’s greatest crater. Vara Vorn sat perched on its long ringwall at Meteor Gap, where the grazing impact of some enormous body had tom a forty-kilometer spillway.
The Admiral’s dwelling overwhelmed him. There were tall bronze winter gates, massive as the doors of a bank-vault with a man in red-and-silver livery to work them. The summer gates inside were almost as heavy, cast in silver and studded with great golden medallions that recorded the greatness of the Vorns.
A fat woman in red and silver ran the swift elevator that dropped them into the high-arched caverns of the winter levels or lifted them to the summer towers, with their grand views north across the endless ice desert or south and down across the farms and villas along Wind River, kilometers below and bright green now in the long polar summer.
They stayed almost a week. His first day was miserable. The servants were stiffly correct and quietly hateful—maybe because he didn’t belong. Chelni herself laughed when she saw him in the suit they had found for him to wear at her birthday banquet, though she tried to apologize when she saw how hurt he was.
“It’s that suit.” Merriment still danced in her eyes. “Borrowed from my Cousin Zelyk—Aunt Thara’s son. A stupid lout, years older than we are. Coddled by his mother and taught by live tutors. Gobby fat, and always stuffed into things too tight for him. If people think you look funny, they should have seen him sweating in it.”
Live footmen in silver braid and scarlet served the dinner in a long summer hall with huge windows overlooking the icefall and the glacier. Chelni sat proudly at the Admiral’s right hand, suddenly a stunning stranger in something red and sheer that left her half nude. He was next to her, unhappy in Zelyk’s suit.
The Admiral looked younger and bigger and stronger than he had seemed on the holo, and friendlier than Keth had expected, His ice-blue eyes were piercing, but they held a glint of good humor. Chelni said he had been a fine athlete at school, and he still moved with power and a gliding grace. His broad, pink face beamed with pride when he made the company stand for a toast.
“An arrogant old bastard,” she had called him. “But he adores me—his wife’s an adulterous bitch and they have no children of their own. He loves me and I like him.”
She had introduced him to the other diners, most of them Vorns or officials in the family fleet. Two or three were Bridgemen. The Navarch had sent a sleek, black-haired, coldly elegant woman from his own staff. Keth recognized Zelyk Zoor before they met—a puffy, small-eyed youth, pale and perspiring in a black jacket too tight for him, grinning stupidly at Chelni. His clammy hand felt soft and lifeless.
The Admiral’s wife was thin and tall, even more naked than Chelni in her clinging green, glittering with rings and bracelets, a great, white star-shaped gem hanging on a golden chain between her gold-dusted breasts. Absorbed in her talk with a young Bridgeman, she frowned impatiently when Chelni broke in to introduce him.
The Humanoids- The Complete Tetralogy Page 32
