Flux xs-3

by Stephen Baxter

  At last Hosch seemed to exhaust his anger, and he Waved away to some other part of the hopper line. The laborers who had gathered to relish Farr’s humiliation — men and women alike — gave up their surreptitious surveillance and, with the smugness of spared victims, fixed their attention back on their work.

  Air seethed in Farr’s capillaries and muscles. Upfluxer. He called me upfluxer, again. He watched his fists bunch…

  Bzya’s huge hand enclosed both Farr’s own, and, with an irresistible, gentle force, pulled Farr’s arms down. “Don’t,” Bzya said, his voice a cool rumble from the depths of an immense chest. “He’s not worth it.”

  Farr’s rage seemed to veer between the supervisor and this huge Fisherman who was getting in the way. “He called me…”

  “I heard what he called you,” Bzya said evenly. “And so did everyone else… just as Hosch intended. Listen to me. He wants you to react, to hit him. He’d like nothing better.”

  “He’d be capable of liking nothing after I take off his head for him.”

  Bzya threw his head back and roared laughter. “And as soon as you did the guards would be down on you. After a beating you’d return to work — to Hosch, to a supervisor who really would hate you, and wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to show it — and to an extra five, or ten, years here to pay his compensation.”

  Farr, the remnants of his anger still swirling in him, looked up into Bzya’s broad, battered face. “But I’ve only just started this shift… At the moment I’ll be happy just to get through that.”

  “Good.” With an immense, powerful hand Bzya ruffled Farr’s hair-tubes. “That’s the way to think of it… You don’t have to get through your whole ten years at once, remember; just one shift at a time.”

  Bzya was a huge man with muscles the size of Air-piglets. He was as bulky, powerful and gentle as the supervisor was small and needle-dagger vicious. Bzya’s face was marred by a mask of scar tissue which obliterated one side of his head and turned one eyecup into a ghastly cavern that reached back into the depths of his skull. Farr had come to know him as a simple man who had lived his life in the poverty-stricken Downside, keeping himself alive by turning his giant muscles to the mundane, difficult and dangerous labor which allowed the rest of Parz City to function. He had a wife, Jool, and a daughter, Shar. Somehow, through a life of travail, he had retained a kind and patient nature.

  Now he said to Farr, winking at him with his good eyecup, “You shouldn’t be hard on old Hosch, you know.”

  Farr gaped, trying to suppress a laugh. “Me, hard on him? Why, the old Xeelee-lover has it in for me.”

  Bzya reached to the conveyor and raised a length of tree trunk longer than Farr was tall. With a single blow of his ax he cracked it open to reveal its glowing core. “See it from his point of view. He’s the supervisor of this section.”

  Farr snorted. “Making himself rich out of our work. Bastard.”

  Bzya smiled. “You learn fast, don’t you? Well, maybe. But he’s also responsible. We lost another Bell, last shift. Had you heard? Three more Fishermen dead. Hosch is responsible for that too.”

  Disasters seemed to hit the Harbor with a depressing regularity, Farr thought. Still, he remained impatient with Bzya’s tolerance, and he began to list Hosch’s faults.

  “He’s all of that, and then some you’re too young to understand. Maybe he isn’t up to the responsibility he has.

  “But — I’ll say it again — whether he can cope or not, he’s responsible. And when one of us dies, a little of him must die too. I’ve seen it in his face, Farr, despite all his viciousness. Remember that.”

  Farr frowned. He shoved more glowing wood into the hoppers. It was so complex. If only Logue or Dura were here to help him make sense of it all…

  Or if only he could get out of here and Surf.

  * * *

  The rest of the shift wore away without incident. Afterward Farr filed out with the rest of the laborers to the small, cramped dormitory they shared. The dormitory, home to forty people, was a stained box slung across with sleeping ropes. It stank of shit and food. Farr ate his daily ration — today, a small portion of tough bread — and looked for a stable nest in the web of sleeping-ropes. He wasn’t yet confident enough to challenge the older, powerful-looking Fishermen, men and women both, who monopolized the chamber walls where the Air was slightly less polluted by the grunts and farts of others. He finished up, as usual, close to the center of the dormitory.

  One day, he told himself as he closed his eyes and sought sleep. One day.

  At the start of his next shift, with eyecups still crusted with sleep deposits, he filed back to his post at the wood hoppers.

  The Harbor was an irregular compound of large chambers constructed of stained wood and fixed to the base of the City — in the shadow of the Downside, well away from the bright, fashionable sectors of the upper levels. It was just below the huge dynamos which powered the anchor-bands, and the deep, thrumming vibration of the machines above was a constant accompaniment to life for the Fishermen. The Harbor was a dark, hot, filthy place to work, and the contrast of the heat of the stoves, the grinding roar of the pistons and pulleys with the open Air of the upflux, made it all but unbearable for Farr.

  Still, as his shift wore on, Farr relaxed into his work’s heavy, steady rhythms. He hauled the next massive length of tree trunk from the conveyor belt that ran continually behind the row of laborers. He was forced to wrestle with the chunk of wood; its inertia seemed to turn it into a willful, living thing, determined to plow its own path through the Air regardless of Farr’s wishes. The muscles in his arms and back bulged as he braced himself against the floor of the chamber and swung at the section of trunk with his ax of wood, hardened with a tip of Corestuff. The trunk was tough, but split easily enough if he swung the blade along the direction of the grain. When the split was deep enough, Farr forced his hands into the cracked wood and prized the trunk section open, releasing a flood of warmth and green light from the nuclear-burning interior which bathed his face and chest. Then, with the nuclear fire still bright, he dumped the hot fragments into the gaping maw of the hopper before him.

  Cutting the wood was the part of his work Farr enjoyed the most, oddly. There was a certain skill to be applied in finding exactly the right spot for his ax blade, a skill Farr found pleasure in acquiring and applying. And when the wood split open under his coaxing, releasing its energy with a sigh of warmth, it was like revealing some hidden treasure.

  A line of laborers worked alongside Farr, stretching almost out of sight in the gloom of the Harbor; working in shifts, they fed the ravenous maw of the hoppers unceasingly. The work was heavy, but not impossibly so for Farr, thanks to his upfluxer muscles. In fact, he had to take care not to work too fast; exceeding his quota didn’t earn him any popularity with his workmates.

  The heat energy released by the wood’s burning nuclei was contained in great, reinforced vessels — boilers — in another part of the Harbor complex. Superfluid Air, fleeing the heat, was used to drive pistons. These pistons were immense fists of hardened wood twice Farr’s height which plunged into their jackets as steady as a heartbeat.

  The pistons, via huge, splintered rotary arms, turned pulleys; and it was the pulleys which sent Bells full of fearful Fishermen toward the mysterious and deadly depths of the underMantle.

  It was so different from his life with the Human Beings, where there were no devices more complex than a spear, no source of power save the muscles of humans or animals. The Harbor was like an immense machine, with the sole purpose of sending Fishermen down into the underMantle. He felt as if he were a component of that huge machine himself, or as if he were laboring inside the heart of some giant built of wood and rope…

  Bzya apart, the other workers showed no signs of accepting Farr. It was as if their unhappiness with their lot, here in this noisy, stinking inferno, had been turned inward on themselves, and on each other. But still, once each new shift had settled in, the wo
rkers seemed to reach a certain rhythm, and a mood of companionship settled over the line — a mood which, Farr sensed, extended even to him, as long as he kept his mouth shut.

  He missed Dura, and the rest of the Human Beings, and he missed his old life in the upflux. Of course he did. His sentence in this Harbor seemed to stretch off to eternity. But he was able to accept his lot, as long as he kept his mind focused on the task in hand, and took comforts where he could find them. One shift at a time, that was the secret, as Bzya had told him. And…

  “You.”

  There was a hand on his shoulder, grasping at his grubby tunic. He was roughly dragged out of the line.

  Hosch glared at him, his nostrils glowing sickly-white. “Change of assignment,” he growled.

  “What?”

  “A Bell,” Hosch said.

  * * *

  As Dura approached — with twenty other new coolies in a huge car drawn by a dozen stout Air-pigs — Frenk’s ceiling-farm seemed tiny at first, a child’s palmprint against the immensity of the Crust itself. The other coolies seemed more interested in another farm, still more distant and harder to make out than Frenk’s. This belonged to Hork IV, Chair of Parz City, Dura was told. The absent-minded Chair escaped his civic responsibilities — leaving Parz in the scheming hands of his son — by indulging in elaborate agricultural experiments, here at the Crust. On Hork’s ceiling-farm there were said to be spears of wheat taller than a man, and Crust-trees no longer than a man’s arm and bound up with lengths of Corestuff-wire…

  Dura was barely able to keep her attention focused on this prattle. The thought of being marooned at the Crust, with only these dullards for company, made her heart sink.

  At last Frenk’s ceiling-farm filled the clearwood windows. The car settled to rest at the center of a group of crude wooden buildings, and the doors opened.

  Dura scrambled out and Waved away from the others. She took a deep breath of clean, empty Air, relishing the sensation in her lungs and capillaries. The Air stretched away all around her, an immense, unbroken layer stretching right around the Star; it was like being inside the lungs of the Star itself. Well, the company might leave a bit to be desired, but at least here she could breathe Air which didn’t taste like it had been through the lungs of a dozen people already.

  Qos Frenk himself was there to greet them. He picked out Dura, smiling with apparent kindness at her, and while the other coolies dispersed among the buildings, he offered to show Dura around his farm.

  Frenk — dapper, round and sleek, his pink hair flowing over an elaborate cloak — Waved confidently beside her. “The work is straightforward enough, but it needs concentration and care… qualities, sadly, which not all coolies nowadays share. I’m sure you’ll do a fine job, my dear.”

  Dura was wearing a coverall woven of some crude vegetable-fiber cloth, given to her as a parting gift by Ito. As she Waved it grated against her skin constantly, as if chafing her all over, and she longed to tear it off. On her back she carried a round pod of wood — an Air-tank, like the one she’d seen Toba wear, with a small mask she was supposed to fit over her face to help her breathe the rarefied Air of the upperMantle. The bulky, unnatural thing impeded her movement even more than the City-made clothes, but Frenk insisted she carry it. “Health ordinances, you see,” he had said with a philosophical shrug, his ornate cloak bunching around his thin shoulders.

  Under the coverall, she still wore her length of rope and her small knife.

  The farm had largely been cleared of tree trunks; the exposed forest root-ceiling was seeded with neat rows of green-gold wheat, of altered grass. Here, hovering just a few mansheights below the wafting, swollen tips of mutant grass, she could no longer see the boundaries of the farm. It was as if the Crust’s natural wildness had been banished, overrun by this claustrophobic orderliness.

  Of course the orderliness covered only two dimensions. The third dimension led down to the clean, free Air of the Mantle which hung below her, huge and empty. The Parz folk had not yet succeeded in fencing off the Air itself… All she needed to do was to throw this Air-tank into the round, delicate face of Qos Frenk, and Wave away into infinity. These soft City-boms — even the coolies — could never catch her.

  But she could never quit this place, abandon her obligations, until Adda’s fees were paid off. Ties of obligation and duty would imprison her here as surely as any cage.

  Qos Frenk blinked, studying her. “I know this must be a strange situation for you. I want you to know you’ve nothing to fear but hard work. I own the ceiling-farm, and I own your labor, in that sense. But I don’t make the mistake of imagining I own your soul.

  “I’m not a cruel man, Dura. I believe in treating my coolies as well as I can afford. And…”

  “Why?” Dura found herself snarling. “Because you’re such a noble person?”

  He smiled. “No. Because it’s economically more efficient for me to have a happy and healthy workforce.” He laughed, and he looked a little more human to Dura. “That should reassure you if nothing else does. I’m sure you’ll be fine here, Dura. Why, as soon as you learn the trade I don’t see why we shouldn’t be thinking of you as a future supervisor, or skills specialist.”

  She forced herself to smile back. “All right. Thank you. I understand you’re doing your best for me. What will I have to do?”

  He indicated the rows of ripening wheat dangling from the forest ceiling above them. “In a few weeks we’ll be ready for the harvest, and that’s when the real work begins. But for now your job is to ensure that the growth of the wheat is unimpeded. Look for the obvious, like boars crushing the stems. Or trespassers.” He looked saddened. “We get a lot of that nowadays… scavengers, I mean. A lot of poverty in the City, you see. Watch out for blight. Any kind of discoloration, or growth abnormalities… If we get any diseases we isolate the area and sterilize it fast, before the infection spreads.

  “Look for wild grass, any plants growing among the roots, damaging the wheat. We don’t want anything else absorbing the lovely Crust isotopes which were meant for our crop… And that includes young trees. You’d be surprised how fast they grow.” He spread his hands wide. His enthusiasm was almost endearing, Dura thought. “You wouldn’t think it but this part of the Crust was all native forest, once.”

  “Remarkable,” Dura cut in drily, remembering the broad, unspoiled forests of her home area in the far upflux.

  Frenk looked at her uncertainly.

  They met another worker, a woman who drifted with her head lost in the green-gold crop and her legs dangling down into the Air. The woman was hauling small saplings down from between the green stems of the wheat and shoving the weeds into a sack bound to her waist.

  “Ah,” Frenk said with a smile. “One of my best workers. Rauc, meet Dura. Just arrived here. Perhaps you’d be good enough to show her around…”

  The woman drifted slowly down from the dangling crop. Over her head, Rauc was wearing her Air-helmet, a veil of soft, semitransparent gauze which covered a broad-brimmed hat. The curtain bulged out a little, showing that it was being fed by Air from the woman’s tank.

  Frenk Waved fussily away.

  Rauc was slim and wore a simple smock of grubby leather, though her arms were bare. After Frenk’s departure she regarded Dura somberly for a few moments without speaking. Then she untied her veil and lifted it. Her face was thin and tired, her eyecups dark; she looked about Dura’s own age. “So you’re the upfluxer,” she said, her voice containing the flat whine of the City-born.

  “Yes.”

  “We heard you were coming. We were glad. Do you know why?”

  Dura shrugged, uncaring.

  “Because you upfluxers are strong… You’ll work hard, help us meet our quotas.” She sniffed. “As long as you don’t show us up, you’ll be popular enough.”

  “I understand.” This woman was trying to warn her, she realized. “Thanks, Rauc.”

  Rauc led her beneath the golden ceiling-fields back toward t
he cluster of structures at the heart of the farm, where Dura had been dropped on first arrival. There was no sign of Qos Frenk’s car; Dura imagined him returning to his cozy, stuffy home inside the City. Now, in mid-shift, the little huts seemed deserted: they were small, boxy buildings of wood, dangling by lengths of rope from the truncated stems of Crust-trees. There was a small, unkempt herd of pigs. Rauc said the herd was kept — not for commercial purposes — but to provide meat for the coolies, leather for smocks and hats. Rauc showed her small stores of clothing, Air-sacks and tools. There was a bakery, its inner walls blackened by heat; the coolies’ staple food, bread, was made for them here. A large, overweight man labored in the gloom of the bakery; he scowled at Dura and Rauc as they peered in at him. Rauc pulled a face. “Well, the bread’s fresh,” she said. “But that’s all you can say for it… The lowest-quality wheat ends up here, that and any gleanings we can find, while the best stuff is shipped off to Parz.”

  There was a dormitory building, a small, cramped box packed with rows of cocoons. About half the cocoons were occupied. A woman’s sleepy face lifted to stare at them before flopping back into sleep, mouth open and hair dangling. Rauc pointed out a vacant cocoon Dura would be able to claim for herself. But Dura couldn’t imagine sleeping in here, breathing in the snores and farts of others, while the fresh Air of the Mantle swept away all around her. It made her realize, jarringly, that she was going to be as out of place here as in Parz itself. Most of the coolies were, after all, City-born — and mostly from the Downside where conditions were even more cramped than the average. So off-shift coolies shoveled themselves into this stinking box, listening to each other breathe and pretending that they weren’t stranded out here in the Mantle, but were tucked away inside the cozy confines of Parz.