This Fortress World (13 page)

My hand started toward my waist and stopped. "Yes," I said. I looked down at the note.

George Falescu:

Please help this man get passage.

It is important to—

Laurie

That was all. The handwriting was clean and flowing without any affectations. The signature was firm and readable. Instead of a dot of the 'i' she had put a small circle.

Laurie was giving me instructions. '"on't go directly to the port. Take a circular route, loiter, make certain that nobody is following you. And don't march up to the first person you see at the port and ask for George. Wait around the Peddlers' repair shop until someone asks you what you want. Show him the note." She sighed. "After that it's out of our hands."

I got up from the table and stood looking down at Laurie. It seemed a long way down to her face. "There's nothing I can say to express my gratitude. I never knew there were people like you in the world. You've made me think better of it. Good-by, Laurie. Good-by, for the last time."

I walked to the door, not looking back, not daring to.

"Will!" Laurie was at my side, turning me to face her. "Don't thank me until you're safe. Be careful! Don't take any chances! And—and—"

As if to say what she couldn't frame into words, she pit her hand behind my head and drew it, effortlessly, down to hers. Standing on tiptoe, she pressed her lips to mine.

Her lips were warm and soft and sweet. And then they were gone and she was gone and I walked out into the sunlight and down the steps into the black-and-white city.

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Imperial City.

I saw it as an alien would have seen it walking through its streets in the white glare of the morning sun. It was a city pitilessly exposed, a city washed free of color, naked to the eye in stark whites and black shadows.

It was a city of decay. The rot of time was everywhere.

I walked through the city slowly, my eyes watchful. I walked through miles of warrens: ramshackle stone buildings that had been repaired endlessly with crumbling mortar; plastic hovels, cracked, patched, and leaky; dirty warehouses, stained by smoke, weather, and seepage.

I saw its inhabitants: serfs returning to their fields from the market; freedmen scurrying on errands; a skilled laborer or two, his craft badge proudly displayed on his jacket for deference. And if his badge was white, the deference was close to fear. White is for the worker in radioactives. His companion is death.

But they all stepped aside for me. Their eyes spoke to me before they were hastily averted. They said, "I am poor and miserable and insignificant. You can kill me, but you wouldn't want to waste your efforts on someone as small and worthless as I am. I know nothing, I have nothing, I am nothing." And sometimes, "If we were alone, if I found you in an alley some night, asleep or wounded…"

They passed, falling silent as they approached. Fragments of conversation reached me, cut short—

—
best to live directly under the Emperor. Then there is only one lord to appease
—

—the Baron summoned my eldest. She returned in tears, but tears are soon dried, and the Baron has promised—

—the crop is poor, and my lord demands more, always more. There is nothing to eat. My second youngest died today—

—only one died today of the dust—

—tonight they give "The Noble Serf." It is my favorite—

—no, no "The Freedman's Daughter."

Laughter, quickly stilled.

Passing, passing, eternally passing, lives, precious lives, each with its dream without words to express it, each with its struggle without knowledge by which to judge it. Lives, lives, millions of futile lives. Add them, multiply them by the countless inhabited worlds: the leaden total of misery should shift the stars from their infinite rounds.

I felt a little sick.

—my poor daughter. She was always my pet, but we had no money, and she does what she must
—

—we were saving for a shop of our own, and then—a special assessment—

—I petitioned the Baron, and after him the Emperor—our blessed Emperor—

—were it not for his constant vigilance, we would soon be conquered and ravaged—

—ten children, my friend, all dead—all dead—

Gradually the surroundings changed. Here, there was a public theater, there, a shop with meager wares. The serfs and freedmen began to thin out. A few mercenaries appeared, most of them idling, always in groups, but I saw no Agents. The shops slowly grew more prosperous, the theaters more ornate.

I had never seen a Peddler before, but I recognized them now. They blazed with fancy clothes that had a foreign cut to them; they spangled with strange ornaments. A sprinkling of them and their women eyed the shops or passed in sleek, slim cars. Once a helicopter settled on a low roof nearby. Nobles got out, men and women. They were dressed simply but in fine cloth. They stood on the roof for a moment, gazing down into the street before descending into the store.

I leaned against the front of a shop to orient myself. There were more mercenaries here, swaggering, boasting, laughing coarsely, carrying their weapons on their hips. Once I thought I caught a glimpse of black cloth disappearing around a corner, but it could have been a spaceman.

The shop I leaned against specialized in imported clothing. Across the street was a tavern, like the one I had entered last night. Beyond, as I lifted my eyes, was the tall, splendid dome of the Imperial palace, miles away but shimmering in the morning sunlight with shifting jewel tones. It dominated the city easily, a symbol of magnificence in a shabby world.

I squared my shoulders. I had the uneasy feeling that I was being watched. Casually I swung my head to the left and then to the right. Everyone seemed innocuous. They walked by, chattering, and disappeared. Brilliant, magnificent, and hollow. I relaxed.

The port was beyond the palace, at the edge of the city—

Beside me someone coughed. I looked around. A little man in shopkeeper's clothes stood there, trying to make himself look smaller than he was. His little eyes were shifty and frightened.

"Sir," he said hesitantly, "noble sir, would you—would you like to come in?"

I shook my head.

"Select anything," the man went on desperately, "anything in the shop. It would be our pleasure. If only you would not continue to stand here. You are frightening our customers. The ones who are outside are afraid to come in; the ones inside are afraid to come out—"

I stared at him. He seemed to shrivel, to shrink away. I turned to watch him go back into the store and looked into the building's mirror front. A stranger stared back at me. For the first time since I had left the monastery, I saw myself with unveiled eyes.

My hair, which had been cropped close to my scalp in the monastery, had sprouted into a rough, dark, bristly thatch. The face, with its broad forehead, prominent cheekbones, and blunt chin, had darkened into swarthiness from the flash gun burn—except for a strange, pale band across my eyes. The eyebrows were short; the eyelashes stubby. The eyes were still brown, but they seemed to be an oddly darker brown, with a curious look to them. No longer were they calm and trustful and open; they seemed hard and restless.

In a way, I was pleased. I would be difficult to recognize.

The whole face, leaner and harder, scarcely seemed even the same shape. It looked like the face of a survivor, one who has survived, who will survive. And yet—around the eyes was it entirely the paleness from which they gazed?—I thought I saw an expression of insecurity, of something close to fear. And the mouth, mobile and full, gave me an impression of weakness.

I realized, suddenly, that my palms were sweating. I wiped them quickly on the thighs of my pants, turned, and started toward the palace.

I hugged the shadows of the close-ranked trees in the park, looking up at the ceaseless, shifting beauty of the tall, domed buildings. I watched the nobles come and go in ground cars and helicopters, casual, purposeless, courtly, glittering. They walked in the fountain-jetting gardens—men and women—tall, slim, graceful, and useless. They bowed, they talked lazily, they laughed, and they did nothing. It was a jewel of unreal beauty in a poor, tarnished ring. It was all wrong. Who could blame the people, who had nothing, if someday they should storm the palace and tear it down and trample it flat under their feet? It wouldn't be very difficult.

And then I noticed the palace guards. Their casual alertness was so unobtrusive that it was only when I began to count them that I realized how many there were. And I saw the concealed snouts of giant guns pointing out from the gardens and the palace walls.

I shifted uneasily.

Long, low steps rose gradually to the huge palace doors. There were hundreds of steps, unmarred, glistening whitely in the morning sun. They led the eyes up, up, up to the ultimate authority, the palace that was never the same color twice, the source of all blessings. On either side of the tall doorway, a round, black eye peered down the steps. They could sweep the white steps with flame.

As I looked, I had a fantasy. I saw myself climbing the long steps, climbing toward the massive doors, watched by the two black eyes.

I walked steadily, my eyes fixed unwavering on the doors, my back straight, my head held high. Other eyes were watching, human eyes but just as deadly. I ignored them. Guards moved toward me. They formed a semicircle that left me only one direction to go, up to the palace doors. There was no sound, and in the silence I climbed and the people followed, wondering. I neared the doors. They swung open before me, the palace opened a giant mouth to me, dark and cavernous.

Now one of the guards darted forward, his gun in his hand. "What do you want?" he said. "Why are you here?"

I looked at him coldly. "The crystal pebble," I said.

His eyes were awed. He drew aside. I started forward again but someone was standing in the doorway, barring the way. It was Sabatini, smiling. His hand was stretched out to me, palm up.…

I shifted again, nervously. Was someone watching? Nobody was near, but the feeling continued. I wiggled my shoulders, but it didn't help. There was a spot of irritation between my shoulder blades. I slipped cautiously through the trees, skirting the palace. It was a mile behind before I stopped looking back over my shoulder.

I was in the slums again. I could not escape them. I walked slowly, stopping in alleys to watch the people who passed. None of them hesitated; none of them loitered behind to stare in a shop window or to refasten a shoe. None of them was dressed in black.

In another place I stopped in front of a dismal food store and studied the reflections in the glass window. I looked into a different world, a flat, dusty world, where people slipped in and wavered across it, flat, and disappeared from it, and it was filled up with flat unrealities again, and in that world the air began to whine.…

It was not in the flat world but in my world. Before I could turn around the flat world brightened intolerably. An instant later something struck me a vicious blow on the back, and the flat world disintegrated in front of my eyes. I caught myself just before I stumbled through the shop window after the shattered glass.

I spun around. Far off over the rooftops, smoke and flame spouted into the air. Near me flattened pedestrians picked themselves up and turned with the rest, their faces lifted, to stare at the mushrooming cloud. They began to run toward it. I ran, too. We ran, and we didn't know why we ran, except that somewhere something had happened, was happening, something different, something that involved us all.

We never got to the smoke and the flames and the cloud. Before we got close, helicopters dropped from the sky. Uniformed mercenaries poured out of them, gun drawn and ready. They formed a line across the street, damming the human tide. Beyond them the buildings were flaming where they had not been flattened or disintegrated. A huge hole had been scooped out of the city as if by a giant flame hand from the sky.

To the crackling of fire and the roar of falling houses, a new note was added. It was a wailing, human note made up of screams of pain and cries for help and the sobbing of children. Survivors stumbled through the cordon, bleeding, maimed, mindless. Some of them collapsed in the street. Others were led off by friends in the crowd.

Standing there, helpless, we moaned together, a vast, pitying, sorrowful sigh. It had happened to us, the people.

Helicopters circled above us. They spoke to us.

"Do not be alarmed. This is not an attack. The explosion was only a defective rocket. In the name of the Emperor, disperse! This was merely a defective rocket. Go to your homes or to your work. Do not block the streets. The Emperor is watching over you. He commands you to return home or to work. In the name of the Emperor, disperse…!"

Only. Merely.
The flames roared, the injured screamed and moaned, the children wailed. Motionless and stolid, the crowd stood watching. This was their drama; they must play it out.

But tonight,
I thought,
the cathedrals will be busy.

I withdrew from the crowd slowly, looking at everyone I passed. I had been careless; they might have caught me here. But there were no Agents in the crowd, and the mercenaries in their orange-and-blue uniforms were all on the other side. No one noticed me. For the first time, people did not draw aside as I passed them.

I had to go a long way to avoid the giant hole in the city. A mile or so beyond it, I reached the outskirts. Houses dwindled away. Far off to the right, against the horizon, was a massive black pile, like a squat sentinel over the tilled fields surrounding it. Closer, but still miles away, and straight ahead was the port with its tall ships reaching, a half dozen of them gleaming in the sun, outlined by a nimbus against the blue sky. They were poised bullets awaiting the impulse which would send them battering against the heavens to shatter the blueness like colored glass and leave only the endless night in its place. There was something male and potent about them that sent the blood tingling through my body to the ends of my fingers and the soles of my feet.