Lantern Road: 8 by Cullen

by John T. Cullen

  Ramy-baba dismounted and threw her robe loosely over her body. She did not want to be found naked—men and non-sisters would be revulsed at her appearance. If the woman-sister was beautiful as a star in her man's eyes, the baba was ungainly like the earth.

  The Ancient Sage had written: “The baba is a soil of unpleasant appearance, but she mothers flowers that rival heaven for beauty."

  Still weak and in shock, Ramy-baba staggered around the table for a last look at her dead sister. Ramy's hands lay limp together. Her legs would never run again. Her eyes stared sightlessly into the sky, whose first tendril of light made her eyes glitter. Her face had a vacant, slightly shocked expression. Her tongue had turned from blue to black and hung fully extended from her red lips like a dark worm on the marble tabletop, where the mattress had slid aside during their love making.

  Ramy-baba arranged the body, which was still warm, but cooling rapidly. First she used a long linen bandage to hold the burst organs in. She worked the body into the wedding dress and laid it on its back. She folded Ramy's hands on her chest and straightened Ramy's legs, and put tiny white slippers on the bare feet. She wept softly all the while.

  Then she sat down and composed herself. She tried to listen to the sound of her heart, but there was too much rushing in her ears. She chose the knife with the two moons because it spelled hope. Still composing herself, she held the knife before her and stared at it in an effort to make it enter her torso more easily. She stared at it long and thoughtfully, weighing her sins and praying to the gods and goddesses who waited for her, most of all Ramy who had just become an ancestor-god.

  The castle was silent as the bottom of a pond.

  They would give her as long as she needed, presumably on order of Lord Ramyon. She was a non-person, half dead already. She sat for a time, testing the knife's heft, balancing it in one hand, then the other. Slowly, she brought the point to her belly.

  * * * *

  The fungal poison had sickened Jory O'Call to the verge of death, not a whit closer. He recognized the dark touch of the babas as he lay vomiting watery soup laced with twirling bits of vegetal matter into a bucket. For a while, he was too sick to care where he was, or even that the place smelled bad like rancid butter. Fire inside and outside tormented him as he brought up what mean gruel or rabbit food was brought to him.

  After what seemed like an eternity, probably a few days, a Fril woman came with a warm, wet towel. She knelt by his bedside and wiped his cheeks, showing him the white fungal deposits that covered the area around his mouth. “You will be feeling better now,” she said in a curious snapping voice. She spoke Human fair enough, but strangely. Jory glimpsed the inside of her mouth as she spoke—toothless mustard-colored gums; a narrow, longish tongue split at the tip; and a round throat hole that he suspected she liked to distend of an evening now and then while she enjoyed a large river rat or two. Indeed, her skin was snake-like—dry, flaking here and there, colored in equal sized patches of white, dull silver, and light yellow. Her nostrils were a pair of slits, her eyes black buttons over which gray nictitating membranes slid horizontally from either corner. Her manner was kind, however, and Jory had lived with worse in the babas. Her hands—same colors, same scaly raspy skin, and an opposing thumb plus three flat-tipped fingers—were gentle in their touch. “You must not give yourself away,” she said in her thick accent, “nor us, or we will all die on Oba Island."

  “Believe me, I don't want that. Am I safe here?"

  “You are as safe as a human can be under these circumstances."

  “But I am in Kusi-O?” His chest constricted at the thought he might not be.

  “You are. This is Kusi-O. My husband and I keep an inn here. We have been paid well to keep you safe."

  “Who pays you?” He must know. Why would anyone want a court poet so badly?

  She chuckled. “You find out soon enough. Now you rest and get better."

  “How did you get me in through the gates?” The thick concrete drum surrounding Kusi-O was actually a five story building with walls so smooth even a lizard could not climb them. The building had no windows at all. It had several gates that, most of the time, acted like airlocks—if the Oba side was open, the Kusi-O side was shut, and vice versa. Goods coming from either side were left in the open corridor between the two worlds. Both gates were again shut. Then the receiving gate opened and a flock of cargo slaves rushed in, supervised by armed warriors—Imperial road police on the Oba side, Fril cops on the Kusi-O side. The system had worked for centuries, bringing wealth in and Shurian goods out, while keeping the status at quo and the wealthy in power.

  “That is a secret,” the snake woman said. “Rest. It will be days before you are able to walk without getting dizzy. Oba grannies’ poison is very potent but works well.” She emitted what passed for a giggle and fled toward the wooden door. The Fril wore little in the way of clothing. She wore only a loincloth and had small breasts. He wondered if she carried her eggs inside until they hatched. Frankly, he did not care. As long as he was still alive ... then he thought of Ramy, and burst into tears.

  * * * *

  The innkeeper was Girex, his wife Giru. They were quiet, kind people whose only child was severely disabled in a special clinic on their home planet. They welcomed a little gaxba, ‘so-so money,’ on the side to send home. Each time they did, it meant their child could receive special medicine and be released home a time with a nurse. Jory did not ask—he did not want to pry. What if they sold him back to the Oba road police for a higher price after they finished receiving payments from the unknown parties in Kusi-O? He kept an eye out for treachery, but they must be good actors indeed if they meant to betray him. No, as long as he was in their inn, he could say they harbored him, and they would be delivered to the Obayyo officials in wooden stocks, ready for the chopping block.

  He stayed in what once had been a giant chimney. His bed and a few items of furniture were on a sandy floor. The odor of whatever had burned here, kjirs ago, still clung faintly to the walls like a decaying cheese. The walls appeared dry, except for traces of ubiquitous Oba fungi. Jory recognized a dozen kinds amid cracks in the white plaster, on blunt rock surfaces where plaster had fallen off, and in the interstices where heavy structural beams poked through. Where the thick, low wooden door now hung, which Girex and Giru had to bow to walk through, had once been a steel furnace door.

  As the fire in his gut healed, Jory became aware of the source of what, in his sickness, he had thought of as fire surrounding him with pain: Light. The light at the bottom of the chimney had a bluish cast. When he peered upward in fascination, the chimney's top disappeared into what looked like a vortex of blue-white light.

  “We on Fril enjoy direct sunlight,” Girex told Jory one afternoon. Girex was bigger than his wife, and more powerfully built, but just as gentle. Both seemed to have a faint deviousness about them that made Jory wonder if it was an invention of his mind, or a property of persons who looked like snakes. But it was open, not hidden, and maybe it was just their sense of shame and guilt about deceiving the authorities and risking death for a sum of money.

  Girex helped Jory climb up within the old chimney. A wide, sturdy ladder stretched some forty feet upward. Jory climbed ahead, while Girex followed, coaxing him on. “Hold on tight,” he admonished.

  “Ah!” Jory gasped with pain and averted his face. The blue-white light burned his eyes like a searing sun.

  “You'll have to go slowly,” Girex said, “Your eyes were made to enjoy the beautiful light."

  Yes, Jory thought bitterly, not to be enslaved by people who live in perpetual night. There was an expression on Oba: ‘Blind as a crx,’ a mole. Shurians were just as likely to say “blind as a human."

  “You will become accustomed to the beautiful light,” Girex said as they climbed back down. “There are spy holes up there where you can look without being seen. They will be your only glimpse of this place before you leave for deep space."

  “Deep space,�
�� Jory said slowly. “I have heard that ships travel from star to star."

  Girex waved his arm contemptuously. “It is a dark age on the other side of the wall. Ships do not travel to stars—they would burn up. They travel to moons, like Shur, or planets, like Fril. You will learn all these things soon enough."

  “So who has paid you for me, and what do they want from me?"

  Girex raised his hands, empty. “I don't know. I don't care. I think you are different from the other humans. They say you have horns.” He gingerly reached for one of Jory's temples. “Are they broken off?"

  “I have never had horns,” Jory said. “This is something else.” The other humans had laughed at him and shied away from him because of them. Now even this snake was acting as if there were something wrong with him. He brushed Girex's hand away.

  “It must be something expensive else,” Girex said with lewd nerviness.

  Jory would soon learn the source of Girex's strange behavior. In the meantime, he ate well. He exercised as best he could to build up his strength—the heavy poison had left him strangely weak for a young man, but he felt his energy rebounding. Every few hours, he practiced climbing up the ladder and tried to accustom himself to the brightness outside.

  Girex watched him and laughed. “That's not even real daylight. Wait until you step onto a real planet with two or three suns in a white sky."

  The intense light in Kusi-O was caused by an imported power unit that sat in the center of the mile-diameter circle wall. Girex explained that the hydrogen powered helium chewer, as he called it, glowed through a thick, milky wall of glass two palms thick. Still there was enough energy left to pipe light through glass cables, out to the wall on all sides, up the wall, where it shone down from hundreds of spotlights. The substitute sunlight was evenly distributed and could burn for ages.

  Jory spent many hours staring from the narrow slits on all sides of the old chimney, which had provided energy centuries ago before Kusi-O had received the benefit of nuclear lighting. He had to keep from sneezing half the time, and often brushed cobwebs from his head. He had to keep an eye out for the silently crawling red and black striped spiders whose sting was venomous; the others were merely annoying. From his vantage point, Jory saw in all directions.

  He saw the looming drum wall, its surfaces soiled with long stains of dampness and moss. Several times a day, the great gate closest to him would open on the Obayyo. Sometimes, in the gloom of the inner wall, he could see the gleam of the Imperial police armor and swords while near-naked Fril cops with spidery looking black vap guns stood on this side. Pallet upon pallet of urns and trunks of various sizes arrived from points all over Oba, to be shipped to the worlds serviced by the Raum Transport League.

  Toward the center of Kusi-O, Jory made out the dimly glowing milky-glass dome of the light generator. Around that on all sides were the landing pads for antigrav shuttles. The gray, boxy shuttles looked beat-up, and were streaked with chemical and burn marks. Their experienced, bored pilots snapped them through fast take-offs and landings.

  Around the ring of pads was a ring of warehouses. Through the warehouses moved tons of material, mostly the thousands of varieties of fungal extracts, but also some fine swords and other cultural oddities.

  In a ring around the inside of the Wall, and inside a wide circumferential dirt road, were the houses of Kusi-O's permanent residents. There must be as many as 5,000, Jory thought, and they not only lived in homes but sent their children to schools, and went to parks, and frequented libraries and public-houses like the one where Jory hid.

  As Jory's eyes became used to the light, he was amazed that he'd ever tolerated the gloom that seemed to pour in when the gate was open. Once he saw a captured human—a wild man with long hair, dirty skin, and tattered clothes—dragged to the gate in chains by Fril police and handed over to the Imperial police, who immediately placed wooden blocks around the unfortunate's neck. Jory might be next.

  Jory saw all sorts of beings from the far reaches of space. He saw things stranger than the Fril—floating orbs that bore sentient life; tall yellow things with dangling appendages, that he'd swear could only live in the sea; four legged and even eight-limbed mammals covered with fur or feathers; a slug-like thing that took all day to move its glistening brown sausage shape along the road from one warehouse to another.

  Girex and Giru's behavior became stranger and stranger, and Jory became alarmed. At times the house remained shuttered, with drunken customers pounding on the front door in the middle of the night demanding food and liquor. At other times, the pub seemed to be open long past the customary hour, and carousing customers kept Jory awake all night.

  Jory, locked in his chimney around the clock, became jumpy. He'd cling to the door for hours at a time, listening for a certain type of footfall. Even when it was only Giru with his meals, he ran up the ladder like a frantic animal, though he had no hope of fighting a group of Fril police if they came for him.

  * * * *

  Then, one night, Jory's fears seemed to come true. He heard heavy leather boots tread in the corridor. He heard the murmur of men's voices, none too pleasant, and the clink of metal objects—keys? He jumped up from his cot and, in the faint moonlight-like glow of the generator outside, ran to the ladder and up several steps, thinking maybe he could jump down on them.

  The door opened, and several men stepped inside. “There he is,” said a Fril holding a black gun, pointing with his free hand. There were five, two of them naked Fril, the other three wearing voluminous dark cloaks that just about reached the floor. These swept back baggy hoods to reveal Fril-like heads. All five wore the tokens of immunity—flat name tags suspended against the chest by a thin chain that ran around the neck—promising freedom from Imperial Oba search or detention as long as they stayed within the port and did not wander out somehow into dark Oba.

  Jory was paralyzed with fear. He could almost feel the Obayyo cops’ heavy wooden tablets around his neck, with the legend “Runaway—Sentence Is Death” carved on them.

  “Are you Jory O'Call?” asked one of the three in cloaks.

  Jory climbed up another rung and did not answer.

  “We won't hurt you,” said another. “You are the reason we are here."

  “We?” Jory asked. “Where's Girex? Giru?"

  “Look, friend, we don't have time...” The leader swept off his imitation Fril hood, revealing a human, a young adult with short brown hair and pale skin. The other two cloaked men pulled their disguises off. One was dark and had short, kinky black hair—Jory had seen a few like him around other villages, not his own. The third was of medium color, with slanted eyes and short black hair cut in such a fashion that it stood straight up. They looked strong and well-fed—no slaves, these, ever, from their self-confident demeanor. “I'm Jerzy.” Jerzy introduced the black one as Hans, and the hair-up as Don.

  Jerzy said: “Come on down; we've got to get you out of here."

  At the sight of his fellow humans, Jory bounded down and shook their hands. They whisked a cloak and a Fril mask over him, threw the hood over his head, and hurried him into the dark halls. Guns drawn and shielding him on three sides, they moved in a mass.

  “Where are Girex and Giru?” Jory asked.

  “Ah, those scum...” Don said.

  “Look briefly,” Jerzy said, pointing into a room from which yellow light fell.

  Hans said: “They were well-paid, all right. A little too well."

  Jory looked inside, heart beating in horror, and saw his hosts. Girex was sprawled in one corner, white powder strewn over his head and brightening his hands. Giru lay on her back, sprawled and staring emptily at the ceiling. She too had streaks of powder all over. “Are they—?"

  “Dead. Yes,” Jerzy said. “They were drug addicts. That's how the local goons paid them to take care of you. Paid them with so much of that stuff that they overdosed until their hearts stopped. They must have been crawling on the floor throwing it in the air in their last moments."<
br />
  Jory could think of at least twelve drugs it could be, all made in Oba by the babas, capable of addicting half a galaxy.

  “Maybe someone wanted them out of the way,” Don ventured.

  “Naw,” said one of the Fril, “too valuable. Must be suicide. Too much overdose. Kill. Stupid ones. Find other, but these trustworthy."

  Jerzy pushed on. “We weren't planning to pull you out so soon, but the Dora Mora is in orbit, and several of her boats have set down. With these two gone, it's only a matter of hours before the cops start poking around. They are required to file a report with the other side. Come along, the ship's master is eager to pick you up."

  * * * *

  The five figures spirited Jory away in a car that smelled of fish or snakes or something. One of the real Fril drove. It was trip of a few minutes. The noisy clatter of the space port grew louder and enveloped them as the car turned down short streets. When the car halted, there was a furtive payment, an exchange of sharp, thin light beams full of official seals, and the humans hustled Jory out by his elbows. The Fril took off with the car. Jory stood before a sea of lights in whose center rested the grav-assist boat that would take him to space.

  Jory was amazed at the bustle of the cargo boat that was ten or more stories tall. He entered with his companions and stood on a dirty steel floor in a low-ceilinged corner crammed with bio-electronic devices and displays. Jory stared in fascination at all this wonderful machinery that had been locked out of Oba for centuries.

  Jory saw that the cargo bay occupied most of the boat's interior. Broad bulkheads were open, and Fril and other alien laborers worked around the clock loading the boat for its trip into orbit to join the Dora Mora. The noise of generators, voices, and loaders was deafening. The interior bay was 200 arm spans long, 100 arm spans wide, and 40 arm spans high. The ceiling was slightly curved outward and reinforced on the inside with steel beams that had circles cut out for lightness. Bright biolume strips streaked the ceiling and the walls with a light so bright in some places that it was bluish.