Citizen of the Galaxy (2 page)

“Nothing, nothing.” The Syndonian flourished his kerchief in dismissal.

From the Plaza of Liberty to the hole where Baslim lived was less than a li, no more than a half mile, but it took them longer than such distance implies. The hopping progress the old man could manage using the boy as one leg was even slower than his speed on two hands and one knee, and it was interrupted frequently by rests for business--not that business ceased while they shuffled along, as the old man required the boy to thrust the bowl under the nose of every pedestrian.

Baslim accomplished this without words. He had tried Interlingua, Space Dutch, Sargonese, half a dozen forms of patois, thieves' kitchen, cant, slave lingo, and trade talk--even System English--without result, although he suspected that the boy had understood him more than once. Then he dropped the attempt and made his wishes known by sign language and a cuff or two. If the boy and he had no words in common, he would teach him--all in good time, all in good time. Baslim was in no hurry. Baslim was never in a hurry; he took the long view.

Baslim's home lay under the old amphitheater. When Sargon Augustus of imperial memory decreed a larger circus only part of the old one was demolished; the work was interrupted by the Second Cetan War and never resumed. Baslim led the boy into these, ruins. The going was rough and it was necessary for the old man to resume crawling. But he never let go his grip. Once he had the boy only by breechclout; the boy almost wriggled out of his one bit of clothing before the beggar snatched a wrist. After that they went more slowly.

They went down a hole at the dark end of a ruined passage, the boy being forced to go first. They crawled over shards and rubble and came into a night-black but smooth corridor. Down again . . . and they were in the performers' barracks of the old amphitheater, under the old arena.

They came in the dark to a well-carpentered door. Baslim shoved the boy through, followed him and closed it, pressed his thumb to a personal lock, touched a switch; light came on. “Well, lad, we're home.”

The boy stared. Long ago he had given up having expectations of any sort. But what he saw was not anything he could have expected. It was a modest decent small living room, tight, neat, and clean. Ceiling panels gave pleasant glareless light. Furniture was sparse but adequate. The boy looked around in awe; poor as it was, it was better than anything he remembered having lived in.

The beggar let go his shoulder, hopped to a stack of shelves, put down his bowl, and took up a complicated something. It was not until the beggar shucked his clout and strapped the thing in place that the boy figured out what it was: an artificial leg, so well articulated that it rivaled the efficiency of flesh and blood. The man stood up, took trousers from a chest, drew them on, and hardly seemed crippled. “Come here,” he said, in Interlingua.

The boy did not move. Baslim repeated it in other languages, shrugged, took the boy by an arm, led him into a room beyond. It was small, both kitchen and wash room; Baslim filled a pan, handed the boy a bit of soap and said, “Take a bath.” He pantomimed what he wanted.

The boy stood in mute stubbornness. The man sighed, picked up a brush suitable for floors and started as if to scrub the boy. He stopped with stiff bristles touching skin and repeated, “Take a bath. Wash yourself,” saying it in Interlingua and System English.

The boy hesitated, took off his clout and started slowly to lather himself.

Baslim said, “That's better,” picked up the filthy breech clout, dropped it in a waste can, laid out a towel, and, turning to the kitchen side, started preparing a meal.

A few minutes later he turned and the boy was gone.

Unhurriedly he walked into the living room, found the boy naked and wet and trying very hard to open the door. The boy saw him but redoubled his futile efforts. Baslim tapped him on the shoulder, hooked a thumb toward the smaller room. “Finish your bath.”

He turned away. The boy slunk after him.

When the boy was washed and dry, Baslim put the stew he had been freshening back on the burner, turned the switch to “simmer” and opened a cupboard, from which he removed a bottle and daubs of vegetable flock. Clean, the boy was a pattern of scars and bruises, unhealed sores and cuts and abrasions, old and new. “Hold still.”

The stuff stung; the boy started to wiggle. “Hold still!” Baslim repeated in a pleasant firm tone and slapped him. The boy relaxed, tensing only as the medicine touched him. The man looked carefully at an old ulcer on the boy's knee, then, humming softly, went again to the cupboard, came back and injected the boy in one buttock--first acting out the idea that he would slap his head off his shoulders if he failed to take it quietly. That done, he found an old cloth, motioned the boy to wrap himself a clout, turned back to his cooking.

Presently Baslim placed big bowls of stew on the table in the living room, first moving chair and table so that the boy might sit on the chest while eating. He added a handful of fresh green lentils and a couple of generous chunks of country bread, blade and hard. “Soup's on, lad. Come and get it.”

The boy sat down on the edge of the chest but remained poised for flight and did not eat.

Baslim stopped eating. “What's the matter?” He saw the boy's eyes flick toward the door, then drop. “Oh, so that's it.” He got up, steadying himself to get his false leg under him, went to the door, pressed his thumb in the lock. He faced the boy. “The door is unlocked,” he announced. “Either eat your dinner, or leave.” He repeated it several ways and was pleased when he thought that he detected understanding on using the language he surmised might be the slave's native tongue.

But he let the matter rest, went back to the table, got carefully into his chair and picked up his spoon.

The boy reached for his own, then suddenly was off the chest and out the door. Baslim went on eating. The door remained ajar, light streaming into the labyrinth.

Later, when Baslim had finished a leisurely dinner, he became aware that the boy was watching him from the shadows. He avoided looking, lounged back, and started picking his teeth. Without turning, he said in the language he had decided might be the boy's own, “Will you come eat your dinner? Or shall I throw it away?”

The boy did not answer. “All right,” Baslim went on, “if you won't, I'll have to close the door. I can't risk leaving it open with the light on.” He slowly got up, went to the door, and started to close it. “Last call,” he announced. “Closing up for the night.”

As the door was almost closed the boy squealed, “Wait!” in the language Baslim expected, and scurried inside.

“Welcome,” Baslim said quietly. “I'll leave it unlocked, in case you change your mind.” He sighed. “If I had my way, no one would ever be locked in.”

The boy did not answer but sat down, huddled himself over the food and began wolfing it as if afraid it might be snatched away. His eyes flicked from right to left. Baslim sat down and watched.

The extreme pace slowed but chewing and gulping never ceased until the last bit of stew had been chased with the last honk of bread, the last lentil crunched and swallowed. The final bites appeared to go down by sheer will power, but swallow them he did, sat up, looked Baslim in the eye and smiled shyly. Baslim smiled back.

The boy's smile vanished. He turned white, then a light green. A rope of drool came willy-nilly from a corner of his mouth--and he was disastrously sick.

Baslim moved to avoid the explosion. “Stars in heaven, I'm an idiot!” he exclaimed, in his native language. He went into the kitchen, returned with rags and pail, wiped the boy's face and told him sharply to quiet down, then cleaned the stone floor.

After a bit he returned with a much smaller ration, only broth and a small piece of bread. “Soak the bread and eat it.”

“I better not.”

“Eat it. You won't be sick again. I should have known better, seeing your belly against your backbone, than to give you a man-sized meal. But eat slowly.”

The boy looked up and his chin quivered. Then he took a small spoonful. Baslim watched while he finished the broth and most of the bread.

“Good,” Baslim said at last. “Well, I'm for bed, lad. By the way, what's your name?”

The boy hesitated. “Thorby.”

“ 'Thorby'--a good name. You can call me 'Pop.' Good night.” He unstrapped his leg, hopped to the shelf and put it away, hopped to his bed. It was a peasant bed, a hard mattress in a corner. He scrunched close to the wall to leave room for the boy and said, “Put out the light before you come to bed.” Then he closed his eyes and waited.

There was long silence. He heard the boy go to the door; the light went out Baslim waited, listening for noise of the door opening. It did not come; instead he felt the mattress give as the boy crawled in. “Good night,” he repeated.

“G'night.”

He had almost dozed when he realized that the boy was trembling violently. He reached behind him, felt skinny ribs, patted them; the boy broke into sobs.

He turned over, eased his stump into a comfortable position, put an arm around the boy's shaking shoulders and pulled his face against his own chest “It's all right, Thorby,” he said gently, “it's all right It's over now. It'll never happen again.”

Thorby's wounds healed, those outside quickly, those inside slowly. The old beggar acquired another mattress and stuck it in the other corner. But Baslim would sometimes wake to find a small warm bundle snuggled against his spine and know thereby that the boy had had another nightmare. Baslim was a light sleeper and hated sharing a bed. But he never forced Thorby to go back to his own bed when this happened.

Sometimes the boy would cry out his distress without waking. Once Baslim was jerked awake by hearing Thorby wail, “Mama, Mama!” Without making a light he crawled quickly to the boy's pallet and bent over him. “There, there, son, it's all right”

“Papa?”

“Go back to sleep, son. You'll wake Mama.” He added, “I'll stay with you -- you're safe. Now be quiet. We don't want to wake Mama . . . do we?”

“All right, Papa.”

The old man waited, almost without breathing, until he was stiff and cold and his stump ached. When he was satisfied that the boy was asleep he crawled to his own bed.

That incident caused the old man to try hypnosis. A long time earlier, when Baslim had had two eyes, two legs, and no reason to beg, he had learned the art. But he had never liked hypnosis, even for therapy; he had an almost religious concept of the dignity of the individual; hypnotizing another person did not fit his basic evaluation.

But this was an emergency.

He was sure that Thorby had been taken from his parents so young that he had no conscious memory of them. The boy's notion of life was a jumbled recollection of masters, some bad, some worse, all of whom had tried to break the spirit of a “bad” boy. Thorby had explicit memories of some of these masters and described them in gutter speech vivid and violent. But he was never sure of time or place -- “place” was some estate, or household, or factor's compound, never a particular planet or sun (his notions of astronomy were mostly wrong and he was innocent of galactography) and “time” was simply “before” or “after,” “short” or “long.” While each planet has its day, its year, its own method of dating, while they are reconciled for science in terms of the standard second as defined by radioactive decay, the standard year of the birthplace of mankind, and a standard reference date, the first jump from that planet. Sol III, to its satellite, it was impossible for an illiterate boy to date anything that way. Earth was a myth to Thorby and a “day” was the time between two sleeps.

Baslim could not guess the lad's age. The boy looked like unmutated Earth stock and was pre-adolescent, but any guess would be based on unproved assumption. Vandorians and Italo-Glyphs look like the original stock, but Vandorians take three times as long to mature -- Baslim recalled the odd tale about the consular agent's daughter whose second husband was the great grandson of her first and she had outlived them both. Mutations do not necessarily show up in appearance.

It was conceivable that this boy was “older” in standard seconds than Baslim himself; space is deep and mankind adapted itself in many ways to many conditions. Never mind! -- he was a youngster and he needed help.

Thorby was not afraid of hypnosis; the word meant nothing to him, nor did Baslim explain. After supper one evening the old man simply said, “Thorby, I want you to do something.”

“Sure, Pop. What?”

“Lie down on your bed. Then I'm going to make you sleepy and we'll talk.”

“Huh? You mean the other way around, don't you?”

“No. This is a different sort of sleep. You'll be able to talk.”

Thorby was dubious but willing. The old man lighted a candle, switched off the glow plates. Using the flame to focus attention he started the ancient routines of monotonous suggestion, of relaxation, drowsiness . . . sleep.

“Thorby, you are asleep but you can hear me. You can answer.”

“Yes, Pop.”

“You will stay asleep until I tell you to wake. But you will be able to answer any question I ask.”