Walk to the End of the World

by Suzy McKee Charnas

  ‘You’ve known d Layo longer than I have, and better than I’d care to. How can I tell you anything about him?’

  ‘Then you have no advice for me?’ Bek prodded. The pleasant effect of their previous conversation was gone, banished by Servan, who wasn’t even here. Bek felt hunger grinding away at his weary body; discomfort made him nasty and obtuse, and he knew it and didn’t care.

  Kelmz said, ‘No advice.’

  ‘My affairs don’t interest you enough for you to have an opinion. Forgive me for asking; I’ve been alone on the Rock too long; I forgot my age-place.’

  He heard Kelmz move to ease stiff limbs and sigh. ‘Is it being so close to the City that turns you into a sniveling, carping boy all of a sudden? If it will make you feel more like a grown man, I do have a question.’ Stung, Bek said nothing. Kelmz cleared his throat and forged ahead. ‘A meeting with Maggomas could come sooner than you think, right here in the City. What do you mean to do when you finally face him?’

  ‘Whatever will settle what’s between us.’

  ‘Have you thought about just walking away from the whole thing?’

  ‘That has occurred to me. It’s unacceptable.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘You agree?’

  ‘Yes. There’s no point pretending not to notice, if there’s something riding your mind all the time. You have to stand up to it eventually. But what happens after you find Maggomas?’

  ‘I don’t know, I don’t see into the future. What sort of career do you think would be open to the ex-official poisoner of the Holdfast?’

  ‘Feeling sorry for yourself?’

  ‘A little.’

  ‘Well, I hope it gratifies you; that’s all it’s good for. Try this instead: suppose you walk up to Maggomas and you lay it out in front of him – all your time, your thinking, your feelings for most of your lifetime – like a sacrifice with his name stamped all over everything. And he says, “What did you say your name was again? I’ve had a lot of things on my mind these past years, and I don’t exactly remember …” ’

  Bek barked out an incredulous laugh. ‘You mean you think I’m a conceited idiot.’

  ‘No. But when you know there’s a skirmish coming up, it’s a good idea to consider all the possibilities you can beforehand.’

  ‘The answer to your supposition,’ Bek said, ‘is that it doesn’t matter. I’m going to get some answers, even if it’s just “I don’t know”.’ The captain’s elbow jostled him; Kelmz was shrugging out of the mantle he had worn on the way from Bayo and folding it up. ‘Captain, there’s a peculiarly valedictory tone to this conversation. Are you working up to leaving?’

  ‘I want to put these Rovers safe out of the way before d Layo gets back.’

  It was a good idea. Rovers were very hard to handle in the alleys, and Kelmz could hardly walk openly in the City with them as Senior Kelmz and his escort. He himself and the affairs of Hemaway Company were too well known here for him to be able to get away with it. The patrolmen would challenge him at once.

  ‘Yes,’ Bek agreed, ‘they’re a hindrance now. Servan’s solution would be to cut their throats and stuff the bodies into the sewer-pipes, or something equally direct.’

  ‘You’ll do fine,’ Kelmz remarked, ‘as long as you keep as free of illusions about your friend as that.’

  ‘I know him well, as you pointed out,’ Bek said, drily. ‘What will you do with these Penneltons?’

  ‘Give them sleep-commands and leave them in the sick bay at Hemaway Compound. The officer who’ll be running things in my place doesn’t make his rounds till late in the morning, if it’s the man I think it is. D Layo knows the outlaw business; by then he’ll have found a good place to lie up if need be.’ Kelmz stood up with a cracking of his knee-joints. ‘I won’t be coming back here, so don’t wait for me. I have some business of my own to tend to.’

  ‘And if you’re needed?’

  ‘Then look for me in the Boyhouse Library.’

  The Boyhouse Library was famous as the setting for assignations across the age-line. Startled, Bek said only, ‘Oh.’

  ‘My soul,’ Kelmz exclaimed, ‘he’s got you thinking as foul as he does! Those shuffle-footed Boyhouse cubs don’t interest me. I had a loving friend once. He was a grown man and knew how to act like one, and he died acting like one. And that’s all.’

  I’ve hurt his feelings, Bek thought, taken aback that an older man would care enough what a younger one thought of him to be hurt – unless they were lovers. What was there for Kelmz in the Boyhouse Library, then, other than boys? Books, of course. Books and pictures concerning the Ancients’ times.

  ‘It’s the beasts you’re after,’ Bek said.

  ‘That’s right.’ The captain waited, making plenty of room for a burst of scorn or disgust or even good advice.

  ‘A man’s entitled to his obsessions,’ Bek said, aridly mocking them both. ‘We’ll meet you there.’

  ‘Only if you can get in without a lot of stupid risk. If not, you let me find you. I know my way around well enough, even without d Layo’s wide experience of City low-life. Meantime, keep an eye on your friend – I think he’ll sell you on a bet and be sorry later. The other eye you can keep on the fern, there. Now that I’ve given you some advice after all, I guess I can leave you in good conscience.’

  Bek restrained an impulse to say something – anything – that would hold the captain back. Servan was more slippery than wet clay and could make his way out of any situation, but Kelmz was the sort of capable and steady man who caught the trouble that Servan’s kind avoided. Bek was afraid he would never see the captain alive again.

  With a crisp word of command, Kelmz brought the Rovers to their feet. He set them side by side in brace-position, patted them down to check their gear and started them off toward the City before they could get restless.

  Kelmz captured by patrolmen, Kelmz brought before the Board for treachery, complicity with a renegade Endtendant and a notorious DarkDreamer – Bek looked up and realized that he must have been dozing. The sky was brightening. He stirred. He was uncomfortable. His body, which he thought of disparagingly as a sort of bestial enemy, had stiffened with hard traveling after the days of inactivity on the ferry. He identified the separate naggings of hunger in his belly, a stitch in his side, and a blistered heel. Every time the fem sniffled or moved so that the pack-basket scraped the causeway stones, the blood jumped in his veins.

  He concentrated on watching the City solidify with the predawn light. From what he could see, nothing important had changed. The backs of the outer buildings were haughtily turned on the stinking southern approach, which was dominated by the sewers that fed the laver-ponds. The City stood high on the compacted ruins of previous flood-broken settlements, so that the causeway simply joined the streets without any change in elevation. North and west, the City’s thoroughfares sloped down toward the river, which swept past on its way down from ’Troi to Lammintown and Bayo on the coast. Tall levees rose neatly alongside the river. From causeway-height, Bek could see a string of flatboats heading downriver, awnings flapping in the early breeze.

  The wind changed, bringing the sound of the City’s bells loud and clear over the laver-ponds. There was the flat-noted call of the Blues, the tinkling scale of the Angelists, the rough tocsin of the Quarterbacks with the cracked end-note, and the others in their turns. None of that had changed either.

  Someone whistled. Bek squinted and picked out a figure in one of the dim openings between the warehouse walls. It was Servan, in blanks, waiting for him.

  Patrolmen should have been watching the cleared perimeter under the outer walls, but they didn’t like the smell of the south side and neglected it. Bek could hear the fem’s steps at his back as he crossed, a hasty, fearful pattering. No challenge rang down from the rooftops.

  The bundle Servan carried was a second suit of blanks, more patches than cloth, two sizes too large and very dusty. At least he’d brought a face-mask and a voice-filter in the
old style of truly anonymous dress, so that Bek wouldn’t have to risk showing his face openly in the street. While the fem went off at Servan’s command to dispose of the pack-basket down a side alley, Bek changed his clothes.

  Servan watched, oddly restless and uneasy. ‘Where’s the captain and his brutes?’ he asked.

  Succinctly, Bek told him, wondering if perhaps Servan had sold him out after all.

  ‘And you didn’t try to keep him with you?’ Servan demanded. ‘Did you consider the possibility that he might go straight to Bajerman or to the Board?’

  Ah, the two of them – Bek was fed up with their suspicions and grudges. ‘He won’t.’

  ‘You forget, my friend: you’re on one side of the age-line with me, little as you may like the idea – and he’s on the other side, with Bajerman.’

  Distastefully, Bek fingered the frayed inside of the mask. ‘I notice that you brought no blanks for Kelmz to wear. What did you have in mind for him, Servan? I think he was wise to go off on his own. I only wish I’d thought to ask if he knew people we could approach for information about this man Kambl.’

  ‘I know the man to talk to,’ Servan said, jaunty again, ‘a client of mine. We’ll go right to him. But don’t blame me if on the way we bump into Kelmz with Bajerman and a bunch of Hemaway Rovers.’

  Often during their shared youth Servan had led forays from the Boyhouse during hot summer noons, when the Teachers napped, or in blue-shadowed winter dawns. With him, Eykar had spied on Senior residences, prowled the Market Arc for carelessly fastened shutters and doors, tracked fems on the streets and furtive denizens though the alleys. The familiar landmarks were still there - a patch of broken paving near the brick-yard, a wall that had become a palimpsest of rude inter-company insults, the profiles of certain corners – but an odd, expectant quiet lay over everything.

  At the Market Arc, a paved mall under a roof of weathered grass mats, all the stalls were closed. The Arc divided the smoke and noise of the factories from the core of living-quarters on the other side. This morning no streams of work-bound Juniors poured across. Only one group of gaunt-faced young men of the Squires Company was swinging along, and they had the look of all-night carousers on the way home.

  The far side of the mall was bounded by the blind, spike-topped walls of the company compounds. The gates, with the company symbols painted brightly on them, were shut.

  Beyond the compounds, there lay spacious individual residences to which wealthy Seniors might repair when they had one or two friends with whom they wished to lead private lives. The alleys here were neatly kept footpaths serving the back entries to these homes. The scented air seemed to mute even the chiming of company bells. Low voices and occasional laughter drifted from balconies and sheltered garden corners. Crockery chinked as Seniors took the morning meal in the dignified leisure to which their mature spirits were entitled.

  Bek was not as impressed as he had been in his youth. Since then he had seen venerable men shamble into Endpath, weeping into the wide sleeves of their pilgrim robes.

  Turning in at a grillwork gate, Servan had a low-toned altercation with the Quarterback who guarded it. This suave young man insisted on scoring him off with insults and disdain before deigning to deal seriously with him. The Quarterback finally took Servan’s bracelet to show to the master of the house as identification of the three callers. He returned shortly and dropped it back into Servan’s hand as he sulkily motioned them inside. His scowl was a good sign; it meant that he had been rebuked for making a welcome visitor wait. They crossed the rock garden behind the wall and walked under an archway built through the body of the house, to be faced with a curious tableau in the inner courtyard.

  Nine fems were ranked silently in rows across the polished flagstones. They wore long hair, indicating that their owner was rich enough to scorn selling their scalps to the fur-weavers. And they were covered with markings that could not be tattoos: stripes, spots, even fine striations like the hair of beast-pelts, as if they were beasts instead of fems. Here was a decadent use of the tattooing craft, the proper purpose of which was to imprint rank-signs on the shoulders of men, not designs on the skins of fems.

  Among these creatures moved a stubby man who pulled at his lip and squinted anxiously into the fems’ decorated faces. He wore a plain mantle that had been pulled on right over his night shirt, and his brindle hair stood up in sleep-set tufts. He turned toward the visitors, calling,

  ‘Servan, what a pleasure! You’ve come in time to lend me your good taste. I need to pick the fem that would make the best gift to the dreaming-hosts this afternoon.’

  Servan’s luck was serving them well. With the whole City deep in manna-sleep they could look for Kambl without being observed or interfered with, and the captain would run little risk of being discovered in the Boyhouse Library.

  ‘Not to show up,’ the Quarterback Senior was saying, ‘is unthinkable, of course. But to show up empty-handed, for a man of any standing, would be even worse …’ The man rattled along like a wheel rolling downhill. Bek glanced back; Alldera, framed in the archway, was balancing on one foot and picking something out of the sole of the other one. The young Quarterback had gone back to the gate. Bek unhitched the mask from his collar and took it off. The Senior, still in full spate, gave him a curious glance but did not pause. ‘ … undervalued because they’re obvious pets, and those have uncertain reputations as you know, when ownership changes. But I’ve invested a lot of time and paid a lot of fine trainers to develop the loyalty, the responsiveness of this group. They’re a creation I’m very proud of. The trouble is, breaking up a fem-hold by giving one fem away is a risk in itself, since you never know beforehand how the others will react to the loss of any one of their number.’ He sighed, and smiled almost apologetically. ‘But you haven’t introduced me to your companion, Servan.’

  Servan said urbanely, ‘Senior Kendizen, it’s a pleasure to introduce one of my friends to another, always. This is Eykar Bek.’

  For an instant the Senior’s smile stiffened. Almost at once, however, his expression warmed back into what looked like genuine hospitality, and he responded courteously, ‘You both looked tired and in need of refreshment. Come inside, and let some of these pretty fems of mine prove to you that they’re useful as well as decorative.’

  In the bathing room Kendizen bravely kept up his end of the gossipy conversation that Servan lazily indulged in. He seemed a decent sort of man for a Senior, the more so because of his undisguised embarrassment at Servan’s outrageous comments, all liberally laced with innuendo and sarcasm at the expense of others whose names were for the most part unknown to Bek or else only vaguely familiar. Servan jibed at the growing tensions across the age-line, incidents of friction and violence that contributed to it, the tendency of Senior men to see rebellion and witchery everywhere, certain scandalous Senior-Junior liaisons in Lammintown, and so on.

  Kendizen made one effort to change the subject, following Servan’s remark about the monopolization of good-looking fems by men too old to sire cubs on them. The Senior pointed at Alldera, who was washing her hair discreetly in a corner of the bathing room as she had been ordered to do.

  ‘Would you consider a trade for that sturdy little runner you have with you? I know several people who would be interested. Looks are so much easier to come by these days than real skills among fems.’

  This remark set Servan off on a detailed exposition of certain common abuses of fem-trainer status, which brought color to Kendizen’s cheeks; it was not so long since the Quarterbacks had worked at Bayo. This teasing was intended to highlight, for Bek’s benefit, the familiarity of Servan’s relationship with the Senior. Bek turned his attention to the trays of food Kendizen’s fems brought around.

  When they all had reached a small sun-court outside the bathing room, Bek finally broke in. ‘Senior Kendizen, have you any idea of our purpose here?’

  The Senior turned toward him. ‘I can’t imagine any purpose,’ he said, in a tone of
reproof, ‘that would take the Endtendant from Endpath.’

  ‘I am looking for my father.’

  ‘So are a number of people,’ Kendizen replied. ‘His name is rumored to have come up recently at a Board meeting, not once but several times. You can hardly expect me to be of any help to you in your own inquiries. Senior Maggomas is a man of my years or more, and you yourself are both a young man and reputedly his son. You can’t mean him any good, and I can’t assist you in doing harm to any peer of mine or Senior of yours.’

  These older men who mixed a certain moral firmness with their vices Bek found hardest to deal with. He did not dislike Kendizen nearly as much as he should have, so he spoke as brutally as he could, in memory of Seniors he had known who were anything but decent.

  ‘Servan, this man is a client of yours. Can that be proven to the Board through some informant, if necessary?’

  The Senior opened his mouth as if to shout for assistance; instead, he ordered the fems, who were still hovering about with pitchers and plates, to leave. Then he turned to Servan, saying in a whisper, ‘Servan, you know it wouldn’t be the first time; if I were exposed again – ’

  Putting his arm through the Senior’s in a friendly manner, Servan drew him into a slow, unwilling stroll around the fountain.

  ‘No one expects you to simply divulge Maggomas’ whereabouts, even if you knew, which you plainly don’t, or you would have volunteered the information to the Board long ago, as a responsible citizen. What we hope is that you’ll put us in touch with someone who does know where to find Raff Maggomas, leaving it up to that person to decide whether or not to tell us anything. As it happens, we know of a likely informant, a man named Karz Kambl. We’ve heard that he’s living in the City somewhere, and all we ask is that you use your considerable influence to arrange a meeting with him for us.’

  Senior Kendizen began to sweat. ‘You’re asking me to risk more than you know,’ he muttered. ‘Servan, there must be others you can go to. I’ve broken too many rules for you and your friends already. I’ve let you use my fems, spoken for offenders, helped certain young men to escape being sent to Endpath – ’ He shot a look at Bek, coughed nervously and added, ‘I’ve been a friend to younger men; you know how I feel about certain injustices between the generations …’