After a long time I realized that it was light and quiet and cool again in the room. But I stayed where I was. It didn’t matter that what I’d seen wasn’t real-because it had all been real where it happened, and that was where I was going. Damn Siebeling! Damn all of them! Yesterday I was sharing with them and laughing with them, and today I was going to hell and it didn’t even matter to them.
The lights went out again and then I was at the door, beating my hands on it, yelling, “Let me out! You bastards, lemme out of here-“
But there was no one to hear it. And there was nothing else, this time, only the darkness-maybe it was night already. I rested against the cool surface of the wall, and then I went back to my corner and sat down, and said, “I wish I was dead.” But there was no one to hear that, either.
By the next morning I was more than ready to get out of that room. The guard who came for me grinned and said, “You don’t look like you slept too much.” I didn’t answer, and he thought that was funny, too. He kept trying to get a reaction out of me as he led me down one hall and then another, and finally into a big room full of data storage.
“The kid here’s ready for a little vacation.
S-One-three-nine-six.”
The guard flipped a tape bobbin onto the counter.
“Lucky boy.”
“Go to hell, scumsucker,” I said, finally, just to shut him up. He grinned again and twisted my arm.
The narrow-faced woman behind the counter put
a readout
on her screen and said, “Are you sure? It’s not on any direct line from here-it’s hardly cost-efficient.” She looked down her nose at him.
The guard glared. I figured it was my turn to grin.
“But, if you want to press your point-“
I changed my mind.
“-you could send him through, say, Tillit Sector. You can bond him here and they’ll handle the transfers.”
“Tillit Sector?” The guard looked surprised. But he nodded. “Do it.”
The clerk smiled a strange smile, and I wondered. But then she lit the counter top with an image showing a lot of tiny print. “Sign here.” She pointed to a line at the bottom of it. “This is your formal contract, stating your agreement to work. At the end of ten years indenture you get five thousand credits. If you want to buy out your contract before that time, you owe that much to us.”
“Like hell! I ain’t signing that piece of-“
The guard picked a writing stylus up off the counter and stuck it into my fist. “Sign it or I’ll break your hand.”
I signed it.
But only with an X.
The clerk nodded, but then she caught my thumb and pressed it down on the readout. I looked, and saw my thumbprint there in blue.
“Just for insurance.”
Then she fed the assignment tape to a stamper on the counter. She caught my arm and stuck that in, too. I tried to pull back but her grip was like iron. I felt a hot slash of pain, and thought I’d lost my hand for sure, but all I’d lost was my freedom. What I got for it was a bright red bracelet about two fingers wide. I touched it, wiggling my fingers. It was hard and still a little warm; and bonded to the smarting flesh of my wrist. I thought about how this wasn’t the kind of bracelet I’d been expecting to get, up until yesterday. . . . “Thanks for the jewelry.”
“He’s ready. Take him to Processing.”
I got processed. They took away my good clothes and handed me a worn-out jumpsuit. I wondered if somebody else had died in it. Then they asked me whether I was blind or deaf or dead. . . . I said I was, but the examiner said the question was purely rhetorical anyway, whatever that meant. He sent me on again, to more insults, vaccinations, humiliations, until finally I was back in a cell again and this time I didn’t have any trouble sleeping.
The next day, or maybe the one after, I was taken out and sent onto the spaceport field, jammed into a carrier with a load of other dazed human cargo.
I’d never seen the spaceport before, and I didn’t get much chance to see it now. But still a strange kind of excitement tightened inside me at the flashing glimpses I got of energized grids and silhouetted pylons, outbuildings, gantries . . . ships. I tried to shake off the choking mind-cloud of everyone else’s despair and let myself feel the sight: these were ships that went to the stars, that weren’t tied to one place or even one world, that had the freedom to cross hundreds and thousands of light-years from sun to sun. . . . Ships like the gleaming disk with the Centauri Transport insignia on its side, that lay waiting up ahead to take me away from the prison of Oldcity and Quarro and Ardattee-to something a whole lot worse than any of them.
On board I was sedated and strapped into an acceleration sling so I couldn’t move. For hours I lay waiting, not knowing what would happen next. Then at last the ship came alive around me and began to lift. I didn’t know what to expect when it finally happened. Maybe I was lucky, because they didn’t bother to make our free ride easy or soft. I felt my body tense and fight and scream as the ship tore itself out of gravity’s fist, pushing upward and outward into clear vacuum with a will that was stronger than universal law.
I never even saw what it looked like to go up from Ardattee, leaving my life behind, or what my home-world looked like from out in space. But by then it hardly mattered, to me or anyone else, because it was too late anyway, for all of us.
And then there was nothing to do but go on waiting.
I never knew where Tillit Sector was, or even what it stood for. The FTA used Contract Labor to fill its needs for non-tech workers, and it used them all over the Federation. There wasn’t even a planetside Colony in the system where the ship came out of its final hyper-light jump: only an orbiting way station chained by gravity to a lifeless, lonely world. Not that that mattered, either. All that really mattered was what happened when I got there.
For days I waited in a gray stale room, with a bunch of others who lay staring at the ceiling, mainly, because there wasn’t anything else-hope, or even sorrow. One end of the room looked out on the scarred, angry face of the nameless world staring up at us from below. I sat on the floor in front of the port for hours, staring back. My mind was as bleak and empty as the view, and all I could think about was the red bond tag on my wrist; how there was no way to hide it, no hope for me either, now.
Until finally a guard came into the room and picked me out, glanced at my bond ring and said, “Okay, bondie, you’re it. Up.” He pointed with his thumb.
“N-now?”
My voice shook.
He laughed. “What do you think?” He took me out into the hall.
There was another Crow waiting there; but this one looked like an official, and he said, “Your name is Cat?”
I nodded. They know about it here? I wondered if they went to this much trouble to make everyone suffer who’d ever slugged a recruiter.
“All right.
We’ve got a special request on you, bondie.”
I touched the bond tag, feeling insects crawl across my mind; seeing something yellow and slimy drop out of a tree. . . .
He cleared his throat. “I understand you can drive a snow vehicle?”
“What?” I stared at him.
“We have a priority request for a snow vehicle driver, from one of our agents. Our records show that you’re qualified-?” (Somebody had paid him to ask me this. He expected me to answer yes.)
I didn’t disappoint him.
“Been driving them all my life.
Sure.” Sure that he could feel the lie seeping out around the edges of my thoughts, like water through a sieve. But why should he care?
“You’re already assigned, though.” He looked at the bond ring, surprised or confused; that wasn’t in the plan. I held my breath. “I’ll put through a transfer.”
I started to breathe again. We were walking. Orders on me: Who had the contacts to bribe the FTA and fix its records . . . and knew about me? Siebeling-maybe he’d changed his mind? But Siebeling wouldn’t go to that kind of trouble; he wouldn’t need to. I tried to pick the official’s thoughts, but he didn’t know anything about why he’d been sent here to collect me-only that somebody up the line had made it worth his while.
And the one who was waiting for us was nobody I’d ever seen before. His name was
Kielhosa,
he was an agent for Federation Mining-which meant nothing to me. I looked him in the eye but there was no sign, no sort of recognition-and none lying secretly on the surface of his mind, either. He was as real as the tag on my wrist. I wondered if it could be some sort of crazy mistake after all. I wondered where the other bondie was whose name was Cat. And I hoped they didn’t send the poor slad to S1396 instead of me.
Kielhosa had a jaw like a steel trap and hair as gray as an Oldcity morning. And he thought I looked like a street rat; he didn’t believe I could drive a snow track. He threw a couple of questions at me about how they worked; the Crow started to look uneasy. But I read the answers that lay waiting in his mind and gave them back to him perfectly. For once, I was glad to be a telepath. I tried to find out where I was going, then-but his mind was choked with schedules and delays, deadlines to meet, and the scum of Earth that he was stuck with picking over.
Finally he nodded and signaled to the guard. “I guess this one will have to do. Get him ready.”
The guard led me away. I wished I’d had time to find a clear answer; but in Oldcity they always said, “Asking questions is asking for trouble.” Wherever I was going, it couldn’t be any worse than S1396. So I kept my mouth shut and let it happen.
There were stars everywhere. I’d been lost in the stars as long as I could
remember,
beautiful stars and night. I moved in the cold darkness-and cracked my fingers on something slick.
The ceiling, about half a meter above my face.
My eyes blurred, and when they cleared again, I could see that the stars were only a projection on the wall across the room. And I remembered that I was on a ship again, and where we were going. I felt in the dark for the restamped bond tag; and tried to smile but my face was numb.
They’d given me some kind of drug that had knocked me out back at the way station; getting me ready for a long trip this time, turning me into freight. I didn’t remember coming onto this ship and I didn’t figure I was supposed to be awake now; none of the others were, lying below me in tiers of bunks like bodies in a morgue. But I’d been awake before. I remembered watching the stars for hours, unchanging, while the ship sat in space and the crew computed the next hyperlight jump. Somewhere back in another life, Dere Cortelyou had told me how the length of a jump depended on knowing the shape of space-and if you got the wrong solution, it was anyone’s guess where you’d come out on the other side. One time I saw us take the jump, saw the stars go blank and come back changed before you could hold your breath. I wondered if we’d made the right one; and then I remembered that any jump we made only meant that I was more light-years away from home and everything I knew.
I wondered how far we were going, and how long it had been. One of my arms was strapped down, and something was dripping into a vein. I never felt hungry, or even thirsty; I didn’t feel much of anything. I just lay in a bunk in a long dark room and looked at the stars-or their image on the ship’s hull: my mind was never clear enough to wonder why they were there. I could hear the crew sometimes, and once one of them came through to check up on us. As he passed my bunk, I let my free arm slip off and hit him in the face. He nearly leaped through the wall.
But most of the time I lay alone in the quiet night counting stars, until I lost track of my fingers.
I was starting to count again, when all at once the stars blinked out and changed. And this time I was looking at a world; a new world. But I stared at the image on the wall for a long time before I understood what I was seeing. Inhabitable worlds were always in blues, like Earth on the Federation Seal. I’d seen Ardattee in pictures-soft-edged, smooth, blue and white-and the way station world’s sterile reds and browns from orbit. But this was different from either one, and somehow I knew it was all wrong. There was no blue at all. And it was . . . lumpy. Between swirls of pale cloud the mountains rose up too far, like the skin of a shriveled piece of fruit. We were far enough out to see the planet’s curve, but over the mountains I looked down into deep valleys of twisting golden green. The atmosphere shivered and glowed with light, and between the mountains the plains were silver, catching fire on the day side, as if the whole world was a piece of gem; until I wondered whether I was really seeing any of this. And I wondered what they needed me for. . . .
When it was over, they couldn’t wake me up. I didn’t remember a thing about the landing, or how I got to the bed I woke up in, in what turned out to be the tiny port hospital. It was an improvement over the ship’s floating morgue, but I wasn’t awake enough of the time to appreciate it. The hospital med techs claimed that my internal organs were peculiar, that the drug didn’t react predictably but that it would probably wear off in time.
They were right. There comes a time when you can’t even sleep any more, and when I woke up for good, Kielhosa was still waiting. I opened my eyes, and the first thing I saw was his face: I remembered then why I’d wanted to sleep forever; I’d come to the end of my journey and my choices, and now I was stuck with the consequences.