by Jo Clayton
The little dancer grinned, shrugged, a ripple of her body that said, what the hell, it’s your business. “I got Tom’perianne to set one of his poems to music, Lightsailor, you know that one?”
“I’ve read everything I could get hold of.” It was the truth, it was a way of getting close to her father without intruding on his life, something she was afraid of doing, afraid of what she’d find, afraid she wouldn’t like him, afraid she would, afraid he wouldn’t like her, she suppressed a shiver as she. contemplated weeks, maybe months in this sealed womb, having to look at him and wonder…
“It made a great dance. I got the Dangles Tour out of it. Why Bolodo snatched him, I can’t imagine. I mean if he ever gets loose and raises a stink, they’ve got more trouble than a swarm of vores up their backsides.” She shivered. “Don’t look good for us, eh?” She shivered again, exaggerating her fear, fighting it that way, a glint of laughter in her eyes as she watched herself perform, then she went back to naming the captives, those close enough to be visible in the pervasive blue gloom.
3
Bolodo Man live in love
gold fine gold
Bolodo Man live in love
pearl and emarald.
Churri’s rich resonant baritone filled the hold; around, beneath, above it, the Omperiannas improvised a driving support (Tom’perianne, lectric harp, Nym’perianne, tronc fiddle, Lam’perianne, the flute).
Tribulation, sufferation
Boring blaggard Bolodo Man
Sing I sing thee sing we
Bloody bane for Bolodo Man
Get cold get old, senility
Cankers chankers dropsy pox
Virus venin worm and tox
Bolodo Man live in love
gold fine gold
Bolodo Man live in love
pearl and emarald.
Kante Xalloor stretched her restraints to the utmost, standing on her cot, dancing with the twanging ties, her body singing a wordless answer to the chanted curse.
Malediction, imprecation,
Jerk his melts, the B’lodo Man,
Mockery, indignity, calumny and ban
Rash and rumor, rancid liver,
Bob Bob B’lodo Man
Rot and rancor, snarl and spoil
Ulcer, abcess, fester, boil,
Epilepsy, apoplexy,
Indigestion, inflammation,
Fecculence and fulmination
Dilapidation, moth and rust
Treachery, atrocity, malignity and lust
Bolodo Man live in love
gold fine gold
Bolodo Man live in love
pearl and emarald.
Jaunniko snapped thumb and forefinger, diving headlong into the music; when Churri paused and looked at him, he began his contribution:
Wa ha wa hunh
Sibasiba Bird
Come out
Come from the river come
Wa ha
The bird come from the river
Wa hunh
Sibasiba
Eat gold
Eat gold
Eat gold
Eat fat greedy soul.
The bird come from the river
Eat those pearl those emarald
Eat you bare, Bolodo Man
Bare ass, Bolodo Man.
Churri laughed, his booming laughter filling the hold, filling that echoing impossible space.
Execration, vituperation
Call your curses, raise them high
Bolodo Man live in love
gold fine gold
Bolodo Man live in love
pearl and emarald
Fulmination, imprecation
Curse him up and
Curse him down
Curse him neck and
Curse him thigh
Curse him heel and
Curse him crown
Bolodo Man live in love
gold fine gold
Bolodo Man live in love
pearl and emarald.
Parnalee stood on his cot, straining his restraints, hunched over, slapping his shovel hands against his massive thighs, his burring basso waking echoes until his words got lost in them.
Thump them, dump them
Down among the dead men
Ekkeri akkari oocar ran
Down among the dead men
Bolo Bolo B’lodo Man
Down among the dead men
Blood and bone, heart and stone
Down among the dead men
Fillary fallary hickery pen
Down among the dead men
Blackery luggary lammarie
Eat the brain, the bod dy
Gut and liver, black kid ney
Rowan rumen mystery
Down among the dead men
The Curse Song went on and on, the transportees taking turns at soloing, their curses growing more extravagant, more surreal as each dipped into his or her culture to surpass the contribution of the last. The rest belted out the refrain until the hold rocked with it. Round and round, Churri playing variations on his verses, the Omperiannas adding flourishes, round and round until, finally, the transportees collapsed in exhaustion and laughter and fell into extravagant speculation about where Bolodo was going to dump them.
4
“Yo, I remember you. May’s Ass.”
“Aslan.”
Abruptly realizing what he’d said, Jaunniko went bright red, so red his ears and the tip of his long nose were nearly purple. “Ah,” he said. “Thing is,” he said, “May sort of went round saying you had the neatest ah um derriere he uh… He turned even redder. “The time we met,” he went on hastily, “it was at a party, you probably don’t remember me, you brought your mother along and that wasn’t being too successful, I talked to her a while, she was bored out of her skull, one icy lady…” He sneaked a look at her. Her expression must have been rather daunting, because he stopped talking altogether.
After she calmed down, she took pity on him and changed the subject. “How’d Bolodo get you?”
He stretched out on his cot, crossed his ankles, laced his fingers over his flat stomach. “I’d just got my papers. Junior Master. May found me a commission, he’s good about that, you know, Jeengid in the Blade, the Keex of Jelkim. I was one of about fifty she hired, she liked my part of the piece well enough to give me a little bonus, I was feeling whoooo no pain when this stringman came on to me. Woke up in a Bolodo scout tied down and sick as a… well, sick.”
“Any idea where we’re going?”
“None. Except we aren’t coming back from it.”
“So Xalloor thinks. I expect you’re right.
V
1. Still two+ years till Aslan’s Mama meets Quale/ four months after she woke in the belly of the transport/the voyage is finished.
Lake Golga/Gilisim Gililin/Imperator’s Palace/ afternoon.
The Bolodo transport decanted Aslan and the others on Tairanna four months after it collected them at the Weersyll substation. Smallish dark men with cold eyes supervised their transfer. Others of the same type loaded their gear on carts pulled by stocky stolid beasts with horns like half smiles curving up and away from round twitchy ears.
Aslan stepped onto the ground, braced herself to endure the extra weight and found a moment of quiet while their new guards prodded them into line. They’d been stuffed with the local language and a sketchy outline of local customs so they had no trouble understanding the terse commands. Despite the circumstances she was momentarily happy. There was an infinity of possibility stretching out before her, new worlds always did that to her. She stood docilely where the guards put her, sniffing at the wind that whipped around the base of the transport, sampling the smells it brought to her. Fish and rotting flesh, dung and mud and the sharp green bite of trampled grass, the dank musky odor of the beasts, the subtler odors of cart woods and working metal, over all this the faint burnt-cabbage stink of the men. That wind wailed and whined; the carts rattled; her fellow slaves snapped irritably
when impatient guards shoved at them, barking guttural monosyllabic orders; behind her the drones servicing the ship clanked and hissed; overhead, racy white birds circled in flittering flocks, their eerie cries a most proper accompaniment to the debarking of slaves into the land of their servitude. The extravagance of word and image made her laugh. Xalloor looked a question, flinched from a guard’s goosing prod (an elastic grayish cane a meter long) and in her indignation forgot what she was going to ask. Aslan sighed and started walking as the guards marched them toward the towered city a kilometer or so away. Nothing to laugh about. She had no control over her life; whatever happened to her depended on persons and events she had no way of manipulating, not now, not until she had sufficient grasp of local verities to do some planning. Her first flush of interest and excitement quickly wore off; she was a slave here, not a scholar. She rubbed at her lower back. Though the gravity of this world was uncomfortable rather than unbearable, she was already feeling fatigue and fatigue made her depressed, diminished her ability to deal with her problems.
She risked a look over her shoulder, winced as a guard stung her with his prod. There were other ships down on the pad, three of them. Cargo transports. Insystem ships. Not good. Apparently the only way home was through Bolodo. She clung to a faint hope that her mother would be able to find her because there wasn’t much else to keep her from the black despair that sometimes overcame her; she couldn’t afford that now, it sapped her will worse than any gravity-induced fatigue. Once the Bolodo transport left… she scowled at the rutted track… if she could organize some sort of group… she was enough of a pilot to get them back to busier starlanes… we can’t be the only shipment of slaves to this place, the guards are too casual, we’re nothing special… why not take the ship, security was lax, it was obvious the Bolodo crew weren’t worrying about their cargo turning on them… surprise them… if I can get the right people… weapons… we’ll need weapons of some kind. She strained to get a look at the guard without letting him see what she was doing… the prods… knife in an external bootsheath… some sort of pistol in a leather holster clipped to his belt… what kind? Depends on the technology here; I doubt if Bolodo is supplying weapons… self-interest would say no… I don’t know… What is the level of technology here? Hard to estimate. Nothing from Bolodo on that and what she saw around her was ambiguous. The carts had shock absorbers, bearings in the wheels and pneumatic tires, but they were pulled by beasts and the road itself was little more than ruts and mud, no sophisticated land traffic here despite the landing field and the size of the city ahead of them.
They were led round the edge of the city, past walls about twice manhigh, pierced at intervals by pointed archways where Aslan could look down narrow crooked lanes meant for walkers not wheels, lanes paved in carved and painted stones, the simple repeating design echoing the pattern of bright, glazed tessera set into the cream-colored bricks of the walls. Her steps slowed as she tried to see more, fascinated and frustrated by the tantalizing glimpses she got into the life of this world; one of the guards laid his prod across her shoulders, reminding her once again that she wasn’t here to study-though why she was here…
The guards took them across a narrow section of wasteland where they walked a beaten earth path between shivering silver-green walls of waist high grass, grass that buzzed with hidden insects and rustled gently in a soft erratic wind. Xalloor grimaced and scratched at her thin arms, rubbed at eyes beginning to water and redden; she sniffed and spat, glared at a guard who whapped her with his prod because her spittle had just missed the toe of his boot.
Ahead of them was a massive wall more than thirty meters high, a wall that rambled over the grassy hummocks and dipped into the water that spread out to the horizon on three sides. Aslan decided it was a lake because the smell told her the water was fresh, not salt. The lead guard thumped with his prod on an ogeed gate; it swung open in heavy, well-oiled silence.
The line of slaves marched through arcades and colonnades and formal gardens manicured to an order and an artificiality that seemed to deny the ordinary processes of change and decay. Jaunniko was just ahead of Aslan; she could hear him muttering under his breath as he looked around, his shoulders were pulled in and his fingers were twitching. She thought she knew what he was feeling because this dead place grated on her too. Figures appeared in the promenades, posed in the arches, showing a flicker of interest in the newcomers that faded almost as it was born. They were uniformly taller and fairer than the guards, with a high degree of physical beauty; male or female, it made no difference, in their own way they were as unalive as the garden, mobile ornaments as clipped and trained as the hedges were. Never, she told herself, I’ll die first, make them kill me outright before they drain the soul out of me. She shivered and knew the words were whistling in the wind, if Luck wasn’t with her… a few steps on, she smiled, amused at her vanity. She wasn’t young enough or pretty enough to qualify as an ornament, whoever bought her wasn’t apt to want her body. There was a hint of comfort in the thought, her usefulness and therefore her value wouldn’t depend on how soon her owner tired of her. She made a face at the taste of that word, owner.
A tower grew out of springing arches like a tree rising from its roots. The guards herded them through one of the arches and stopped them in a paved courtyard, dusty and barren, a pen for two-legged beasts. Xalloor edged closer to her.
“’minds me of a casting call.”
“I don’t think I like the roles we’re up for.”
“Or the audience.” Xalloor flashed a defiant grin at one of the guards who slapped his prod against his leg but showed no sign of coming to shut them up. She turned her shoulder to him, shivered and rubbed at arms roughened with horripilation. “Fools. They should’ve told us we were going to freeze our assets.”
Aslan looked up at the tower with its ranks of narrow windows glittering in the light of the lowering sun. “At least they’ve got glass in them. I wonder if we’re going in there? Hmm. Far as I’m concerned, they can take their time. No joy for any of us in that place.”
“I want to know now.” The dancer moved restlessly, fighting against gravity, working the muscles of her shoulders, arching her feet inside her boots, tightening and loosening her leg muscles. “You’ve led a sheltered life. Working the tran-circuit isn’t all that different from this. Once I know the terms, I can root round and finagle a way to live with them.”
“You dance, the Omperiannas are musicians, Parnalee designs large-scale events, Yad Matra’s a machinist, Churri’s a poet, Appel, Jaunniko, Naaien, go down the list, you’re all techs or artists or both, but me? There’s nothing I can do that has any meaning outside of University or a place like that, nothing I like to think about. What can they want with a xenoethnologist? It’s ridiculous.”
“Mebbe so.” Xalloor laced her hands behind her head, bent cautiously backward, straightened with an effort visible in the tendons of her neck. “I loathe these heavy worlds, move wrong and you tear up your legs.”
There was a loud clapping sound of wood on wood. They turned. A man had come through a door in the side of the tower; he stood at the top of the steps that led up to it, a clipboard in one hand, its bottom braced on the ledge of a hard round belly. “I am the Imperator’s Madoor,” he said. “When I call your name, come here, stand at the base of the stairs. You will be taken to your posts. There will be no argument, no protests, no threats, no struggling. Awake or drugged, you will go. We have no preference as to the manner of your going, but consider well, how you begin is how you will go on. You have no voice in your destination or what happens to you there. I want that very clear. You are not beasts, you are less than beasts. You are worth only what services or instruments you can provide. If you choose not to provide them, you will be beaten or otherwise persuaded to change your mind. If you still refuse, we will get what value out of you that we can. You will serve as bait for our fishermen or food for our hunting cats. Do not think to escape and hide yourself among Huvved
or Hordar; you cannot, you do not look like us, you do not sound like us no matter how well you have got our language, you do not know custom or rite, you have no family here. No one will help you. Cooperate or suffer the consequences.” He looked down at the clipboard. “Kante Xalloor. Tom’perianne. Nym’perianne. Lam’perianne. Jaunniko.” He named five others, all performers of one sort or another, then waited while two guards and an escort of exquisitely robed and tonsured males sorted them into a proper line and took them off. They went without creating fuss, they went with prowling steps and narrowed eyes, plotting as they moved, too cool, too controlled, too experienced in the exigencies of surviving to waste their energies in a futile rebellion. Aslan watched them go and saw her vague notion of assembling a group to take one of Bolodo’s transports go with them, the vision fading like a memory of a dream. As she passed through the arch, Xalloor risked a wave and a grin and got away with both. Aslan waved back, then waited her turn, feeling bereft and lonelier than she had in years.
