Armor (25 page)

Eventually, mercifully, we slept.

In the nick of time.

XIII

“He had no faith’.”

Holly said it like he still couldn’t believe it was true. He looked at me with all the wide-eyed incredulity of a child learning for the first time that “fair” has nothing to do with the real world. Shocked, hurt, more than a little frightened. Angry, too, and morally indignant. Demanding an explanation.

I had none. None, anyway, that would do any good to him right then. So I changed the subject: “I thought you said you couldn’t read the guy’s mind?”

“I couldn’t. Not really. I mean, I couldn’t tell when he was going to move until he moved or what he was going to say until he said it. But I. . . felt it when it happened. It was so close. So intimate.”

“You mean emotions?” I persisted. “You could read those?”

“Not read them,” he replied carefully. “Feel them. Or rather, feel him feeling them.”

I glanced across the bed to Lya for some reaction. No luck.

She sat as she had for the entire hour I had been there: hunched forward in her chair with her elbow propped on a knee, her chin propped in her palm, and her eyes staring dead blank at the floor. The only signs of animation came when she put out one cigarette in order to light another. But she was listening. Her face was drawn so tightly across her cheeks it looked like it should hurt.

I shifted back to Holly, looking skinny and out of place against the vast expanse of linen. Even his bedclothes dwarfed him, ignoring all but his broadest gestures. He was constantly having to drag his huge collar around to match the motions of his neck. And there was a lot of motion there. His eyes darted constantly about the room. From the ceiling to the walls to Lya to me and back again, pausing only when he had trouble choosing the right words. Then he would stare at the palms of both hands held plaintively before his face like twin viewscreens and his eyes would glaze and he would be back there, in the suit. In the War.

It was particularly eerie.

He wasn’t away long this time. He dropped his hands on his lap. “He had no faith!” he said again, the same way as before.

I nodded, exactly as if I had any notion whatsoever. “Well, I’ve got to run,” I lied, standing up. “See you. . . tomorrow, Holly. Lya.”

Something in my uneasiness must have leaked through.

Holly looked up at me, at me this time for the first time.

“No, Jack. Uh. . .” He glanced at Lya. “Tonight. Can you come back tonight?”

I noticed Lya watching me too. I nodded. “Tonight it is,” I said and scooted too quickly out the door.

I hurried through the seals outside where the sun was shining and the sky was Earthblue and lovely, where there were horses and cattle things on the meadows surrounding the western edge of the Dome. The guards on the bridge smiled at me and waved and said something unintelligible but nice. I took all of this in and relished it, filled my lungs with it. Got all the way across the bridge, sat down at the far end of it and got my cigarette lit before I let myself think.

On the other hand, I told myself furiously. Holly could be simply stunned. Instead of the vegetable he appeared to be.

Or, maybe he was just stark raving mad, an improvement over being a carrot anyway.

Shit.

Or maybe it was just my usual guilt funk dripping those pitiful images. I made a command decision. I decided to forget about it. Holly was just tired out and a little disillusioned, that was all, by the reality of war vs. the flag waving. OK? OK. Besides, I was busy with traitor business. I had to see Wice.

I walked across the sewer bridge into the City. It was its usual teeming desperate self. People stomped or strolled or wandered about looking for spots to hide what little bits of their past lives they had dragged through the staggering jolt of getting this far. The maze was dry now, but miserably pockmarked with hundreds of hard and dusty footprintcraters. I limped and tripped alongside everybody else on my way to Wice’s passage. I was about halfway up the gradually ascending length of it in about a tenth of the time it had taken me before in the rain and darkness and despair. It was more than just the physical conditions which made this day different, however. There seemed to be a new touch of something in the air, crisp and clean and. . . hopeful, maybe, the way the people clamored about. Like the rain had washed something away and what was left was good and purposeful and. . . . And so feeling poetic and the like, I got a little careless. A guy came suddenly hopping out of a narrow side tunnel moaning in pain and fluttering his right hand in the air. “Damndamndamndamn. . . damn!” he said to himself and then, apparently seeing that he wasn’t alone, to me. Then he stopped his hopping long enough to hold his left thumb up and examine it critically. It was purple and, I assumed yes, assumed it was swelling.

“Can you believe it?” he asked. “This is the fourth damn time?”

I smiled, partly because of the way I was feeling and partly because of the way the guy was. Nicelooking man. Big, broad shouldered with long black hair that was maned, squared off around his forehead. He was oriental. Earthorient, that is. He had an easy, powerful voice.

“Seems like a lot,” I agreed pleasantly.

“My dumbass helper,” he added with a shrug in the direction from which he had appeared. “Idiot has no grip whatsoever.” He shook his head and sucked briefly on the purple digit. He grimaced slightly.

I shrugged consolingly, made a step past him.

“Hey!” he said, brightening. “Can you give me a hand? It’ll just take a second. Just help Idiot hold it in place long enough so that I can. ...”

And blah blah blah with me following him around the comer and, sure enough, there was a corner of one of the local throwtogethers exposed with this huge piece of what looked like plassteel heat shielding resting beside it that looked to have been carved out to fit the hole. Up above on the second “story” was this little guy with red hair, the Idiot, no doubt, leaning out of what had once been an escape hatch back during the time when this erector set used to be a star ship. And it looked all right. The redhead was in a good position to bold the piece of plassteel, if he leaned out the hatch, while the oriental on the ground could brad it in tight.

So I nodded and stepped forward and the oriental picked up one side and I reached for the other and the redhead stretched both arms down to get it and then I noticed that it really wasn’t plassteel at all. It was that plastoform crap that was so popular because it was cheap and looked like plassteel and I thought: Well, hell, he oughta be able to just hold this with one hand. . . .

And that’s when the oriental hit me.

He was a big guy and it was a damn good blow, a forearm to the side of my head. I went down flat.

Then rolling away into position for the next shot and then there was red hair flying through the air onto me out that batch and be hit me as hard as the local gravity allowed for his fall which was plenty and before I got a good grip on him or the oriental who loomed over me or anything else, the sun was blotted out by many others crowding in for a piece.

The crowd worked well together, each getting a good grip on me and lifting me up off the ground making me helpless and, worse, making me know it. They hustled me around a owner and then around a couple others, the passage getting narrower and narrower until we stopped in this tight square claustrophobic little area surrounded on three sides by three stories of maze, crooked and ugly and seeming to lean in on us.

They had me. Absolutely goddamn had me. No one broke his concentration or loosened his grip or looked like he was going to. Two on each leg, two on each arm. One held the back of my head against his chest with two huge hands, the thumb of the left one painted purple.

Shit.

Shit because they had me, really had me and I hated, loathed, was repulsed. . . sickened by having hands on me without my consent. And double shit because I had been so utterly fooled and, come to think of it, triple shit.

Because not only did this group know how to handle itself against an enemy, they knew how to handle themselves against me. This wasn’t a shakedown or a robbery or any other sort of thugmugging gang. This was the execution of a plan dreamed up by someone who used well trained, or at least well drilled, disciplined people who knew just how good I was and who weren’t taking any chances.

“Bring him here,” said somebody I couldn’t see. And they did, all eighteen legs of them spiraled around so that I might face the man who had spoken. He stood on a jutting piece of webform a couple of meters over our heads. He looked about fifty, which meant nothing, of course. Still, I had the impression that his appearance was “natural,” non-cosmetic. Which would have made him a couple of decades younger than me.

But I only noticed those details in passing, the way I noticed his well-worn tunic and his beard and the unusually long thin fingers on the hands hanging clasped before him. For beside him, stood Eyes. Clean now and, amongst her folk, safe. Long brown hair tucked into something functional. Loggingthings on the legs of her pants. Simple tunic like her father’s. . . was it her father who stood at her side? I never found out.

She looked strong and capable and lovely and well worth the fighting that had gone on for her sake. Still Eyes, too. Hers shone in the sun.

“You must forgive us,” began their leader, opening his hands in an expression of regret, “for having treated you in this fashion. But your somewhat lethal reputation has preceded you.”

“Is that supposed to be an apology?” I snarled.

“It is.”

“That the best you can do?”

He stiffened. So, in fact, did a couple of the ones holding me. Eyes, I noticed, showed no reaction at all. She was still waiting.

“I assume,” be began again, “that your statement implies release.” He paused, wiped his brow clear of a lock of sandy gray hair with one of those long fingers. “Quite understandable, of course,” he resumed. “Even reasonable, under normal circumstances.” Those hands clasped together again and he peered forcefully into my eyes. “You, sir, are hardly normal circumstances, even for us. If I were to have you set free, how many of your captors would be killed or maimed or otherwise handicapped before they could get free?” I grinned, shrugged. “Three.”

He nodded. “At least three, Mr. Crow. At least.” His hands separated again, palms upward. “So you see how my hands are tied.”

I laughed. I had to. So, apparently, did everyone else. At the absurdity of the situation. And at our own, each and everyone of us. So bizarre. . . So often. ‘ Eyes, sparkling, laughed herself beautiful. I forced my thoughts and my feelings and. . . and me, away from the idea of that.

The leader had resumed. “. . . do hope you won’t be too uncomfortable while I say what little I have to say. In any case, 1. . . .”

“Get on with it,” I snapped, hating buddy buddy while being held.

That cooled ‘em off instantly. We all got a lot more tense.

The muscles on the hands that held me grew more taut.

Good. This was not fun, dammit.

“Very well, Mr. Crow,” said the leader stiffly. “I shall indeed get on with it. First let me tell you a little bit about who we are.” He spread his hands wide to indicate, not just the immediate throng, but the City itself.

And then be gave a speech. It was a pretty good one. And he didn’t ease up much, either. He really did tell me who they were. And what.

They were crewmen and women from the starships or couples with girls and boys of draft age or merchants fleeing the growing restrictions of wartime. They were Societies Against the Loss of Something or Other. They were people who had pushed off into the unknown one step ahead of Fleet expansion or two steps ahead of prison. They fled the loss of freedom, the courts, their wives or husbands, their past.

Most simply fled the Antwar. Quite a few were deserters.

Each had, or had been, deserted.

So they crashed their shuttlecraft in the gorge or entire ships along the flatlands under the shale bluffs. Sometimes they left their empty ships in orbit. Sometimes the same orbit. The rare nightflashes of colliding bulkheads were the sources of much amusement as well as a small monthly lottery. Many, many died.

Many had lived though, and those folk hung together. Raw and bleeding and desperate, they tacked the tortured metal together and hammered at the bulkheads and welded and strained and fought and lived. Outer hulls became outer walls. Airlocks became doors. First one battered ship became two battered ships. And then three and then four. Beside it another equally ugly configuration began to grow the same way. And then another and another. The first clearing opened into another outer one and so on until there was formed the maze, the Maze! The Maze, of dirty heat blasted metal and plassteel through which trod an ever-growing horde. The streets were almost always muddy. So, usually, were the people.

Primitive hydroponics kept them alive. Then came other things. And though they were never fully organized in any formal sense, bosses had appeared to make the attempt. The tough guys didn’t last long. They rose up and seized control for awhile until stabbed or blazed or beaten to death by onetime clerical assistants or pharmacists or third-class drivetechs who had come a long way to be rid of such men and would damn well not accept them now.

There were major setbacks and major villains, but each and all were vanquished, trod into the mud of the maze by a deeper, mightier vitality that came from desperation and the will to live. Soon it was just a naked force bigger than the sum of its parts. Bigger and stronger and, somehow, more mature. Ready, at last, to evolve into something else: a City. “And then,” I said, interrupting, “came Wice.”

The leader broke off his rhetoric and eyed me’ narrowly. After a moment he nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Wice. And his band of animals. And now the whole process has begun all over again.”

I snorted. “The people seemed behind him on the bridge a few weeks back. Against the Project Director, no less.”

“The people don’t understand him. They don’t know what he is. They don’t see. . . .”