Years ago, it seemed, he’d been in the room to take out tubs of old message strings and bits of discarded packing foam. Today the walls were blue, like the back wall of the cage.
A very tall woman sat on a cushion on the black tiled floor, one sandalled foot on the desk’s lowest shelf. Her heel had overturned a stack of multicoloured cubes. Some had fallen to the ground.
‘You know that what you’re asking is illegal.’
The woman made a barking sound, becoming a laugh that would have set her lozenges shaking – only for some reason she’d taken off her mask and tossed it on the tile so that the coloured bits lay in a tangle. ‘You think a bitch like me doesn’t know that? Do you think a bitch like me would come here and ask what I’m asking of you if this station were three thousand kilometres closer to the population belt?’ She pulled her foot off the shelf. It dropped to the black, along with three bright cubes. She smiled, as if she knew that behind his plastic bits the man currently in charge smiled back. ‘What kind of bitch do you think I am?’
‘I think –’ The man coughed. ‘Well, really, I don’t know why I’m doing this. It’s irregular –’
‘I only said you should bring them in and let me look them over.’ She drew her heel back to the cushion and put her arms across her knees.
‘And I have.’ The man coughed again. ‘I have. There they are … but I don’t know why I’m doing it. It’s irregular, and it’s illegal, and –’
‘I’ll tell you why you’re doing it.’ The smile softened on her dark face. ‘The economy in over a third of the equatorial geosectors is failing. Neither the political swing towards the extreme Yellow, the insurgent Crazy-Greys, nor the Free-Informationist backlash is going to mean a return to the soft-money economy that will benefit any of the polar projects, north or south. I took a look at the shape your rat cage was in before I came inside. Hot stars and cold magma! You men haven’t been properly staffed in three years, and getting rid of another mouth to feed – even a rat’s – is going to be more help than hindrance. You know it. I know it. And that’s why you’ll do it –’
He didn’t know why she paused, but he expected her to pick up her discarded mask and put it back on now: that’s what the women on the projection screen at Muct had always done after they paused meaningfully. But that had been years ago, somewhere else in the world.
This woman still smiled, face still bare.
The masked man behind the desk took a silent breath. White hair moved on his chest under his shirt’s soiled net. ‘You’re quite a woman.’
‘I’m quite a bitch.’ She threw back her head, and her hair, which was dark and wiry, did not swing. ‘That’s how you’ll say it when I’m gone. Say it to me that way now.’
Behind the swinging fragments, the man coughed again. ‘Well. I guess you are.’ He rose, stepping from behind the desk. ‘A bitch. At any rate. These are the ones I can let you choose from.’
She turned on the cushion, rising to her knees. She had an expression of great concentration now, an expression the women in the projected stories never wore. After seconds she stood. ‘I told you I was interested in males.’ She touched her chin with her fingertips, moving them a little as if scratching some half-felt itch. She was a good head-and-a-half taller than the man in charge.
‘Well, we have more females here.’ The man shrugged. ‘These are the ones we can spare.’
‘Mmmm,’ she said, as though she knew that already. Then she said: ‘Which more or less limits me to this one. Tell me –’ She turned to face him – ‘are you ready to come away with me to strange climes and stranger lands and be my slave for ever, to obey my every command, to fulfil any and every whim and caprice I should articulate, no matter how debased or lascivious?’
He did not know what ‘articulate’ or ‘lascivious’ or some of the other words meant. ‘Yeah …?…?’
The man in charge coughed once more.
The woman chuckled over her shoulder. ‘That was mostly for your benefit. He isn’t exactly what I pictured, I admit.’ She turned back, reached forward, touched his naked cheek, grimacing as if she questioned some terribly important point to which he was oblivious. ‘But you’ll do. You’ll have to, won’t you? It’s cut into your brain now, that you’ll do … do what I say.’ Her hand fell from his face, a finger brushing his collar bone in the fall. ‘How much do you want for him?’ She turned to the man in charge and, stepping over fallen cubes in her scuffed sandals, took out a coil of silver string from her leggings pocket and began to unroll it, silent lips counting the evenly spaced black beads along it to which cubes could be clipped.
The man mentioned a price so far above twenty-eight SI units, he simply decided that they weren’t discussing him after all.
The woman kept wrapping silver around her fist, kept counting. Finally she popped the credit cord, rolled it from her palm with her thumb, and put the SI payment on the desk. ‘You know you’re over-charging me by even more than some black market slaver might in some mildewed equatorial bazaar.’ She still smiled.
‘You know,’ the man said, ‘the only reason I’m doing this at all is because –’
‘– is because you think you can get away with it.’ She put the remaining credit roll back in her pocket and bent to pick up her mask with a swipe of her arm. ‘That’s why I’m doing it too.’ Lozenges clicked and tinkled on tangled wire. ‘Would you like me to take him out the back? We’ll attract less notice that way.’
‘Yes,’ the man in charge said. Then he said, ‘Just a moment.’ He reached behind the desk, opened a lower file, and pulled out one of the yellow canvas bags with the embossed lizard. ‘He can put his things in this.’ He handed it across the desk.
‘Thanks.’ She took it and slipped the strap over her arm. ‘This way?’
‘Yes,’ the man repeated. He came around to the front of the desk to pick up the cubes she’d knocked from the desk shelf. He knelt. ‘The back way. Yes, that would be best.’
In the narrow hall with the badly tacked up roof repairs shredding above them, she asked: ‘Do you have any things to take with you?’
‘No …’
She looked down at the canvas bag hanging at her hip and shook her head. ‘The condition your cage is in –’ She gave a bitter grin – ‘I’m not surprised.’ She put one hand on his peeling shoulder as they walked out the three-layered hangings at the hall’s end that kept in the cool air.
Over hot sand the sky was a hotter orange.
She walked with him through the heat.
Sand streaked between the evenly spaced bolt heads; the transport’s green metal wall dropped its shadow over them. She opened the door in the side. ‘Get in.’ She followed him up and closed the port.
Tossing the canvas bag into the clutter behind them, she slid under the padded restraining bar and into the seat. She reached forward to rub at a smudge on the transparent sandshield with three fingertips pressed together. ‘Sit down.’
As he sat beside her, she asked, ‘Did you know you have to sit down, in these things here, before I start driving?’
‘Yeah.’
She sucked her teeth in mock disbelief, pulled some lever sharply down, kicked at some pedal under the instrument board. A motor began to rev, then, at another pedal, to rumble. ‘Have you any idea why I bought you from the station, there?’ She heaved the steering bar around. Outside, the world turned slowly, then began to move back. The transport shook across the sand in a direction he’d never walked before.
‘No.’ The seat shook against his back and buttocks.
‘Oh. Well, you will.’ She turned in her plush seat to face him. ‘I think the first thing is to get you washed down. I read that if I got one of you from any but the big industrial complexes up at the equator, that would probably be the first thing I’d have to contend with.’ She frowned. ‘Tell me, do you know how to use a sonic cleaning plate? That’s what I’ve got in the back.’
‘No.’
Outside the plastic window
s long dunes shifted. Her look grew puzzled then, oddly, nervous. She gave a little laugh. ‘You don’t?’ The self-assurance from back in the station office had fallen away somewhere, as if in their short walk across the sand, pieces of it had shed on to the desert. ‘Well, do you at least know how to use a damned squat-john? All I need is to have you pissing and shitting all over this hulk like it was your putrid rat cage –’ Suddenly, with the thrust rod in both hands, she leaned forward, her face between her arms, and began to shake. She took great breaths, and he did not know if she were crying or laughing. ‘What do I think I’m … by the hot stars overhead, by the congealed magma, oh jeeze … ! What do I think I’m – it’s crazy, I … I can’t, I –’ Possibly steered by its automatic mechanism, possibly not, the transport moved on.
‘Yeah.’
She looked up. There were tears on her face, and great confusion under them.
So he told her again: ‘Yeah.’
The grimace again. ‘Yeah, what?’
‘Yeah, I can use the john.’
She held the rod, looked at him, and finally took a long breath.
‘But they didn’t have one at the station. For rats. So they told us to use the cage. Then we slept in it –’
‘Jeeze … !’ she repeated. ‘All right, when you have to,’ she said, with another breath, ‘please do. Use it, I mean. The john in back, there. I … I know I’ve got to tell you everything. And tell you very clearly. For heaven’s sake, I’ve got a whole carton in the rear compartment full of instructions on how to handle rats – and I’ve been afraid to read more than a cube or two of any of them for fear I’ll come across some incontrovertible fact that’ll tell me this whole thing just isn’t going to work! And then –’ She looked away, glanced back, looked away again – ‘I’ve got this machine that’s supposed to make all those instructions unnecessary anyway, or close to it, and –’ She took another breath – ‘and I’m terrified!’ She blinked at him, dark eyes near the surface of a dark face, while he tried to remember which emotion terror was. ‘I mean, if you could only … I mean, could you – If you might just put your arm around me, hold me – firmly, and perhaps even love me just a – love? Oh, what am I talking about! If you just wouldn’t hate me –’
She stopped, amidst her uninteresting (to him) confusion: because he’d moved over on the bench, put his arm around her, and held her firmly.
‘Shit …’ she whispered. After a few moments she asked: ‘You don’t hate me for making you do… this?’
‘No.’
Outside the windows, near dunes moved quickly before distant ones. On the instrument board, red and yellow needles quivered on blue and black dials.
She put her head against his shoulder, took another long breath, then raised her head again. ‘Then I guess anything’s possible in this man’s universe, right?’
He didn’t answer because, again, he didn’t know. But she didn’t hit him or yell at him as had often happened back at the station and sometimes even at Muct when people got upset around him.
What she said finally was: ‘Well, I guess there’s nothing to do but get on with it.’ Apparently that meant, for the next five hours, driving over the bevelled sands. Ten minutes into them, she said, gently: ‘Take your arm away now and sit back where you were, please.’ So he did.
An hour after that she said:
‘You know, even with two families in Kingston and three very fine jobs that took me back and forth over almost half this world, from Ferawan to Gilster – do you know, I was miserable? Miserable! I thought about suicide. I thought about becoming a rat myself. I went to the Institute once, sat there for a whole day, watching one pathetic creature after another push in through that black leather curtain and not come out. I must have put my own number back and taken a new one from the end of the list over a dozen times, before it hit me: I don’t have to become a rat to solve my problem. I could get a rat. For myself. I mean, that would have to be better. For me, for what I wanted. So you see …’ and was quiet, then, for more than an hour.
Then she said: ‘Look at the way the light glitters on the grains caught at the edge of the sandshield.’ She nodded at a corner of the window. ‘And there, at the horizon, sometimes you get that same, vaguely prismatic effect, a kind of coloured glitter in the basic tan – like you do when the grains are up close. That’s because human beings are the basic height we are – if we were less than one metre tall or more than three metres tall, it wouldn’t happen – and because this world is the diameter it is, so that the horizon is the distance away it is from people who happen to be about as tall as we are, and because the average sand crystal here is as big as it is and because the atmosphere filters out the particular frequencies it does. One of the two great poets who came in the second colonial ship to this world noted the phenomenon, worked out its parameters on an early computer, and said, in a beautiful poem, that this effect would define the lives of humans here as long as we stayed. I suppose he didn’t realize how fast there would be sandless cities all around the equator. You know, I learned the poem by heart when I was ten, but I never saw the actual thing itself until three months ago, when I took this transport and struck off from the population belt here towards the south pole. And now, though I remember the poem and the story about it, I can’t remember either the poet’s name or the poem’s title. Do you know –? But no, you wouldn’t know things like that. Not on this world. Still, it’s a beautiful thing to watch and realize that someone else, two hundred fifty years ago, watched it too; and thought it was beautiful.’
And hours later she said:
‘This is crazy. This is more than crazy. It’s stupid! If they catch us, I don’t want to think about what’ll happen. What I want, you’re just not supposed to have, here. I never thought of our world, with its endless deserts and orange sky and multilayered equatorial cities and great canyons and underground waterways, as coy. But it is! It makes slaves, then says that individuals can’t own them, only institutions – because somehow institutions make slavery more humane! Well, I want a slave, my own slave, to do exactly what I want, the way I want it done, without question or complaint – a slave to do what I want to make me happy. The Yellows are going to win this coming election. I know it – everyone knows it! Well, we’re heading for Grey territory. We’ll hole up there for two weeks. After the election, during the resultant confusion in the Grey sectors, records will vanish, order will disappear, and who knows what moments of freedom might occur in the chaos or for how long they’ll hold stable. Happiness! Yours?’ She grinned at him. ‘Mine? No, not yours I guess. But if I could, I’d make you free – before I made you serve me! I really would. Only I can’t. So the only thing left is for you to make me free.’ She snorted. ‘Or happy. Is it the same thing? Is happiness slavery? That’s what they tell you at the Institute, isn’t it? Slavery is happiness. Accepting slavery, becoming a rat, is happiness. Well, I don’t believe it! I don’t believe it at all! And even though you’re a slave, I hope you learn that! Learn that from me. I swear, if I thought I could teach you that, I’d turn you loose this instant and be on my way. There are some things more important – than I am, to me. Nobody else believes me when I say it. But it’s true. Do you believe me –? No, don’t answer. I don’t want you to say anything now.’
Later she said:
‘I have this machine – have you ever heard of GI? General Information? Tell me: have you?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I’m not surprised. It doesn’t really exist on this world. It does up on others, though. They’ve even got it on our larger moon. But they’ve legislated against it here, planetside. Oh, there’re other worlds where it’s common. Can you imagine? Living on a world where, if you want to know something – anything, anything at all! – all you have to do is think about it, and the answer pops into your head? That’s supposed to be how it works. Even our Free-Informationists are scared to go that far. They think we’d slide over into Cultural Fugue in a minute! Well, we just might
anyway, the way this world rolls. But you see, I have something that does almost the same thing. It’s even more illegal than stealing you – they’ll call it theft, you know, if we’re ever found out. I had to come near killing three times to get it. And worlds with as many ways of killing the mind as this one has don’t take kindly to killing the body. Anyway, around the population belt there’re lots of computer-generated data broadcasts all over the place. Some of the sorting and decoding is a little difficult, but with some of the standard encyclopedic programs and … it’s for you, you see? Do you understand why?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I suppose I don’t, either, really. But some people think that the only thing you lose at the RAT Institute is information – not just facts and figures, but information on how to process the information you have, how to deal with the new information that comes in. And if you can replace or supplement …’
She stopped again.
She looked at him a while.
Then, without talking, she drove some more, like someone who’d been telling a very complicated story about themselves only to find, in the middle, they did not believe it either.
Hours later, she said:
‘When I was a kid, my family co-op broke up, and I got shipped off to a platechtonic study group in the north – because none of the adults really wanted to take all those seven- and eight-year-olds with them. I’ve read that most worlds where humans live today are basically deserts, of one sort or another, like ours. Wet worlds are rare, and us human beings are supposed to have come from a world that was largely water. That’s why – at least I used to think so when I was nine – it seemed the most colossal waste to live in the middle of a huge industrial Tinkertoy where every day I offered my minuscule help to the basic project which was pumping millions and millions of gallons down into the fault lines in order to hydraulically relieve the pressures that built up and caused those catastrophic monthly earthquakes the northern mountains were so famous for back in the days of the first colonists. I mean, though we’d just about stopped the earthquakes, nobody lived there. Anyway, at night I used to ride out on a sand-scooter from the compound into the desert – a very different kind of desert from here, with purplish rocks all over it, and little scratches on them that for a while made the geologists believe there might have been life on this world before we humans got here. In the north, sometimes you get breaks in the second-layer cloud level; and when it happens at night, you can look up and actually see stars – other suns, where you know, with some of them, other worlds are circling, where other humans, and maybe even aliens, are living in entirely different ways, in entirely different cultures. I would park my scooter in the dark, climb up in the headlight glare on to some slanted rock, lie down on my back, and gaze at a star. Even with the platechtonics station relieving the pressure by pumping all that water, you still got little rumbles and quivers every few hours or so. Sometimes, I’d feel one underneath me while I lay there in the night, and I would think: suppose the platechtonics station just broke down, and there was a pressure build-up along some major fault line, and suddenly we had one of those giant earthquakes we used to scare each other with, telling stories about when I was a child at the equator – an incredible earthquake, where the whole skin of the northern desert was cracked up and hurled into the sky, and me, lying on my rock, I’d be hurled up with it. And suppose I was thrown so hard I went up into the night, all the way to one of those stars, one of those other, better, different worlds …At nine, I thought they all must be better than this one. I really used to want it to happen, in some kind of vague and awful way. And I also used to wonder, lying there, searching for holes in the night-time clouds, if there was anything that I, nine years old and alone in all that desert, could think or do that, without an earthquake, would actually reach one of those other worlds and change it, affect it in some way so that everyone on it would look up and realize that a world away something as important as a great poem had been written or a new technological infrasystem had been solved … poems and infrasystems, that’s what we studied at the platechtonics station when we weren’t pumping water. At nine, I didn’t even know that more than half the people in the population belt of this world probably didn’t know what a poem or an infrasystem was! Today, I wonder what all that childish night yearning did for me. Gave me grandiose ambitions, I guess.’ She laughed.‘Only not so grandiose any more. I don’t want to make another world sit up and take notice – or even this one. I just want a little pleasure and satisfaction in my own … world? Should that be the word for it? I don’t think so. Maybe if I hadn’t wanted so much as a child, I wouldn’t have wanted … well, you. Today. This way.’