“But he finally broke?” Hop asked, not sure whether he was glad that Jazz had held out so long (the bastard traitor) or sick that he had suffered so much (I like him anyway, dammit).
“Yes. I was near the door. That’s why I’m alive. The moment he named the man, the cockles went off, just like that. Farl didn’t have a chance. Dead on the spot. A few others, too. As if it had been planned.”
“But who was it? Who did Jazz name?”
“Didn’t I tell you? Shimon Rapth.”
Hop didn’t know him, but remembered“Hey, wasn’t he the guy who was helping Baak figure all this stuff out?”
She nodded, and a flash of hatred crossed her face. “Looks like he was just trying to find out who his opposition would be. The guards were all his men, of course. They’ll be rounding up the whole group, there are at least a hundred of us, maybe more”
“You mean Jazz Worthing was working for this Shimon Rapth?”
“Looks like it, doesn’t it?”
“Butthat’s impossible, I never even heard of him before. And why would he let them put Jazz through the probe, drive him insane like that”
She shrugged. “Get rid of a possible future competitor, maybe. I don’t know. I just ran.”
“Why’d you come to me?”
“Farl was dead. I didn’t trust anybody else in the group. I could have come here alone, I guess.”
“I’m glad you didn’t,” Hop said. And then he got upas far as he could, since the floor of the room above kept him from standing straight. He took Arran’s hand. “Hang on. Let’s not get separated in the dark. But if I suddenly fall down a hole, let go.”
“Where are we going?”
“I told you, I don’t know this area. I was born and raisedif you can call it raisingin the bottom levels of the stinkingest borough of Orem district, and we’d go into the crawlspace all the time. The only way we could stay out of the reach of the constables and Mother’s Little Boys.”
“Then there might be criminals here?”
“In this district?” Hop chuckled as they walked gingerly along the catwalk. “In this district all we’ll meet is dust. Every district is absolutely sealed off from every other. Including the crawlspace.”
“Oh,” she said. They came to a ladder. Hop leaned on it, looked up. He could see light abovedim, but light.
“Up,” he said. “You first.”
She started to climb. When they got to the next level up, she stopped.
“What’re you stopping for?” he asked.
“Don’t we get off here?”
“No, of course not. Do you think we’d ditch them by just changing floors? If they’re serious about rounding up everybody from your little group, they’ll seal off this whole district. Check anybody coming and going, and spot you the first time you use your credit card. We’ve got to get out of this district.”
“But you said they were all sealed off”
“Just keep climbing. There’s a way out, and it’s up. This ladder’s part of the exhaust system, and the exhaust system leads to the surface.”
“And what then?”
“Maybe we’ll think of something on the way.”
And so they climbed. Following the exhaust vents meant hours of squeezing through narrow spaces, climbing ladders to dizzying heights before the great vents leveled off again, bellying through inches of dust in foot-high crawlspace. They were filthy and exhausted a few minutes after they started. They stopped three times to rest. Once they stayed long enough to sleep. And then they came to a place where huge steel girders stretched above them, and the vents plunged suddenly upward to a heavily girdered metal ceiling. For the first time, except on the ladders, they could stand up straight.
Arran looked around. The light was still dim, but it was obvious the space around them was hugemuch larger than any hall they had ever been in, and interrupted only by the rising vents and the huge steel shafts that apparently supported the roof.
“It looks very strong,” Arran said.
“You should see it where the ships cradle. Makes this look like foil.”
“What’s outside?”
“We’ll soon see,” Hop said. “Better lie down and rest again. The next part’s going to be hard.”
“As if it had been easy up to now,” Arran said, lying down willingly enough. They lay on a large vent, and the rush of air pouring through it made the surface vibrate. “I heard,” Arran said, after a while, “that you can’t breathe the air out there.”
“A myth,” said Hop. “You can breathe it. You just can’t breathe it for very long.”
“What’ll we do?”
“We’ll go along here until we find the end of the district. The sealed-off wall. Then we’ll go up the nearest vent and try to get across to a vent on the other side of the barrier. The air isn’t really dangerous. The real danger is the sun.”
Of course Arran knew what the sun was. It was the nearest star, and the source of all of Capitol’s energy. She had never seen it. “Why is the sun dangerous?” she asked.
“You’ll see,” he said. “I can’t describe itjust don’t look at it! And whatever you do, don’t let go of my hand. If the sun isn’t up we’re coming right back. At night we’d probably freeze to death in the winds and get lost to boot. So we’ll wait for sunlight”
Silence for a few moments, and then Arran laughed softly. “Funny. I never think of Capitol as having winds. Just drafts. Just little breezes from the vents. Capitol is a planet after all.”
“The surface is the worst desert you’ll ever find, though. Any interference with our food supply or energy sources, and it’d be a desert down below, too. Sleep.”
They both slept. When Hop woke, Arran wasn’t beside him. He got up quickly, looked into the dimly-lighted distance for her. She wasn’t too far awaysitting at the edge of the huge exhaust duct they had slept on, off toward the ladder they had climbed to reach it. Hop walked toward her. His steps were muffled by dust and the distance of the wallsno echoes here. But she heard him a few steps off, and turned to look at him. Wordlessly she waited until he came to the edge and sat down beside her.
“A long way down,” he said. She nodded. “Ever been this close to the surface?” he asked.
She shook her head. “I woke just now without a toothbrush,” she said. “I couldn’t bathe. I couldn’t go to the wardrobe and choose what I would wear for the day. Nobody’s coming to call.”
“You’ve got problems,” Hop said. “I’ve already missed about fifteen appointments, and Jazz’s latest tape isn’t ready for distribution. It’s costing me about a thousand a minute just to sit here.”
“What will we do, even when we get to another district?”
“You’re asking me?”
“We can’t use our credit cards. They’d track us down in a moment.”
Hop shrugged. “Maybe they aren’t looking for me. Maybe I can use mine.”
“And maybe not.”
Suddenly there was an abrupt change of pitch in the hum of the air passing under them. “What was that?” asked Arran.
“Maybe eight thousand people flushed their toilets all at once in this district. Maybe fifteen thousand people turned down their thermostats. Maybe there’s a fire.”
“I wonder what Capitol looked like before,” Arran mused.
“That’s a strange thing to wonder.”
“Is it? But there must have been a time before men came here. What did the first colonists see?”
Hop laughed. “A virgin world, ready for raping.”
“Or perhaps a home.”
“What is this, a lifeloop? Nobody talks about home in real life,” Hop said.
“Nobody talks about home in lifeloops, Hop,” she said, a little annoyed. “Nobody has used the word in thousands of years. But we keep it in the language. Why?”
Hop shrugged. “Everybody says, ‘I’m going home’.”
“But nobody says, this is my home. Come in.’ We li
ve in flats. We walk through corridors. We travel in tubes. What would it be like to live out under the sky?”
“I hear there are bugs.”
“A huge park.”
“Well,” Hop said, “that’s your solution. Go to a colony. Get on a colony ship, and your troubles are over.”
Arran turned to him, horrified. “And go off somec? Are you crazy? I’d rather die.”
She got up and walked back toward where they had slept, and Hop joined her. They looked around at the two patches where the dust had been largely cleared away by their sleep. “Nobody’s ever going to believe this,” Hop said. “Here I was, alone with Arran Handully for hours on end. We slept together, and not only did I not try to make love, lady, I didn’t even have my loop recorder going.”
“Thank God.”
“Let’s go.”
They went to the opposite end of the duct, where it turned a ninetydegree angle and shot upward to the distant ceiling. A thin, spidery ladder crept up the shaft. They both stood and looked upward for a few moments, and then Arran said, “Me first?”
“Yeah. Try not to fall.”
“Just don’t tickle my feet.”
And they began to climb. Their muscles were still cold from sleep; at first they climbed awkwardly, slowly, carefully. After a short while, though, they settled into a rather quick rhythm, hand-foot-hand-foot, the motion carrying them endlessly upward. Once Arran spoke, saying, “How many kilometers to go?” The speech broke her rhythm, and she missed a step, and for a mad moment she felt herself fall. But her hands never left the side shafts of the ladder, and her foot caught on the next rung down. From then on neither of them spoke.
At last the rhythm slowed down again. There are only so many rungs of a ladder that untrained, weary bodies can climb. “Stop,” Hop said. Arran took a few more steps and came to a halt.
“Tired?” Hop asked.
“Are you?”
“I think maybe yes;”
“Can we rest?”
“Sure. Just lean back and doze off.”
“Laugh laugh. I’m too tired to be amused.”
“Keep on going.”
It was not long after that, though, that they reached their destination. It was a small platform built onto the side of the duct. The ladder kept going up, but Hop told Arran to climb up only a little way and stop. She did, and Hop stepped onto the ledge. There was only one handhold, beside a door that was too short to use comfortably. It was latched shut, and a wheel had closed the seal.
Arran climbed back down until she was even with the ledge. “How do we know we can get out of the vent?”
“We don’t. But I’m betting that Capitol’s surface arrangement is the same everywhere. And even though I was raised on the other side of the world, I’m betting that I can get through the screens the way I used to.”
“And what if there isn’t a vent down to the other district?”
“They channel all the exhaust vents from the same prefecture into the same general area, so that other areas can be kept relatively clear of smoke. I say relatively, of course, because it gets pretty smoky. Now on the other side of the door the air is pure poison. All that comes out here is the absolute crap that the filters couldn’t clean and recirculate. Poison means don’t breathe.”
“How long?”
“Till you get out of the duct. So take a good big breath before you go in here. And don’t look down in the shaft. If you think it’s bad here in the dim worklights, you ought to see how it looks with all the fires of hell sending smoke up a sunlit shift.”
“What if the sun isn’t up?”
“Then we go back down and wait.”
Arran cursed. “I hope the sun is up,” she said.
“All right, count to ten after I go through. Then hold your breath and come through. There’ll be a ladder on the other side of this door. Stay on the ledge on the other side just long enough to close the door. We don’t want to set off any alarms.”
“Got it. Now let’s hurry.” she said.
“Let me have time to psych myself up, all right? Do a chicken middle-aged man a favor.” Hop stood and counted to fifty, wondering why the hell he was counting. Then he took hold of the wheel and spun it until the seal was opened. A thin trail of smoke came in around the edges of the door. Hop flipped the two latches. The door slowly swung open, inward, and the smoke jumbled through the opening, falling mysteriously down toward the deep darkness they had climbed from. Through the door, sunlight made the smoke brightly gray, with black wisps here and there. Arran was immediately aware of a revolting stench. She looked at Hop with a disgusted expression, and Hop grinned back, took a deep breath, and swung through. She could hear the faint sound of his feet on the ladder.
Carefully, she stepped onto the ledge, took a deep breath, and then ducked into the smoke and passed through the door. She reached over and swung the door shut fastening only one latch (good enough for what we need, she decided) and then began to climb. She could hardly keep her eyes openthe smoke stung terribly, and tears flowed. I’m not even acting, she said in her mind. Tears without acting; pain without pretense. What an education in theater I’ve been getting these last few days.
(I want to breathe, she felt her lungs demanding air.)
She scrambled on up the ladder, and suddenly bumped into something with her head. It was Noyock, and she wondered what the hell he had stopped for. But a moment later, she heard a clanking sound, and Noyock was up and out of the way.
As she came out, almost totally blind from the smoke, she felt Noyock’s hands on her shoulder, helping guide her. A moment later she was standing on the surface.
“Breathe now, but stay low,” Hop ordered, and Arran breathed, then coughed. They were not in the thick smoke of the vent, but the atmosphere itself was thick as shower fog, and smelled hideous. She could open her eyes a little more now, however, and she watched as Hop swung the screen back down and latched it.
“Hold my hand,” Hop said, taking her and starting to pull her along. “And stay low.”
She noticed her feet were hot. “My feet are hot,” she said.
“Be glad you’re wearing shoes,” Hop answered.
There was a constant breeze coming from the right. Abruptly the breeze turned into a tremendous gust that for a moment lifted them both off their feet. Hop landed standing; Arran did not. She skidded along the surface of the metal, knees and one hand holding her up, and Noyock hung onto the other hand and tried to keep her from sliding. The gust abated as quickly as it had come, and Noyock yanked Arran to her feet. She was gasping from the heat of the metal on her hand and knees, the scraping the metal seams had given her.
Just behind the gust, the air cleared noticeably. Suddenly the bright gray sky turned white, and the metal dazzled in sunlight. It completely blinded Arran. She closed her eyes, and tried to keep her balance as Noyock dragged her along. The heat of the sun on her head was intense; and then, just as quickly as the air had cleared, the smoke closed over them again, and Arran could open her eyes. She touched her hand to her hairit was scalding hot.
And then they were at another exhaust vent, the smoke pouring up darkly. Noyock took Arran’s hand and made her hold onto the mesh of the vent. “Hang on and don’t put your head in the smoke,” he shouted, and just then the wind came up, blowing the smoke mostly away from them, but almost tearing Arran’s hand away from the screen. Noyock hung on with one hand, while with the other he fiddled with the latch. Just as the gust died, he tossed the door open.
“Count to ten, take a breath, and follow me!” he shouted, and Arran nodded. Then Noyock disappeared down into the smoke.
I’m too tired, Arran thought. Her feet were burning hot from the metal; her eyes were in agony from the smoke of the atmosphere; her knees and hand hurt terribly; and her side, where the ribs hadn’t had a chance to heal properly, ached deeply. Worst of all was the exhaustion, and she wondered why she was trying.
Can’t think that way, she told herself,
as she swung over the edge and began to climb down the ladder. But as she descended she thought of how restful it would be just to lean back into the smoke, falling out of sight into soft oblivion. She began to speed up her descent, stepping every other rung, her hands only skimming the sideshafts of the ladder.
“Arran!” somebody called from above her. “Arran, you passed me! Come back up!”
Air, she thought. I need air very badly.
“Arran, just five meters up. Climb up.”
Have I stopped? I stopped. I must have stopped when he called me.
“Move, before you have to breathe! Move!”
I’m moving, aren’t I? Aren’t I still climbing?
“Can’t you hear me? I’ve got the door open here! Just a few meters up.”
Dammit, I’m climbing. I need air.
“Lift your right foot and put it on the next rung.”
Foot. Yes.
“Come on, now the left foot! That’s it, keep coming.” And slowly Arran climbed up to where a strong hand grabbed her arm, pulled her slowly to the right. She couldn’t see in the smoke. Who was it? She brought her face close to him. Noyock. Ah, yes. She opened her mouth to speak to him, took a deep breath, and then began to cough violently. Someonemust be Noyockpulled her through a door, forced her hands to hold a thin handrail. Couldn’t hold the handrail, she decided. Had to cover her mouth as she coughed. Impolite not to cover your mouth when you cough.
Inhale again? Clean. She sighed. Her lungs still stung, and her head ached painfully. She was flat against a metal wall, covering her mouth with her hands. Behind her she could feel Noyock’s body, and arms around her on both sides, holding the handrail, keeping her from falling backward. She opened her eyes. They still smarted, but she could see. Beside them, an open door still let smoke pour into the dimly-lighted interior of the space under the ceiling.
“I won’t go in there,” she said.
“You don’t have to. You just came out.”
“I did?” Oh, yes, I did. “Am I safe?”
“You are if you’ll only take hold of the handrail. I’ve got to close the door before the smoke alarms go off. Do you have it?”
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