Nest of Worlds (22 page)

Jaspers detested the morning exercises, done in the barracks courtyard—or, during the winter, on the cold parquet floor of the unheated gym, stinking of their sweat. Each man brought his mat, woven by himself out of hemp strings, which scratched their backs painfully through the thin cloth of their pajamas.

This early in the morning, the disk of the sun barely showed above the horizon. The thaw was recent, and the ground gave off a damp chill.

They finished their standing exercises, and now Jaspers had to lie on his back and move his legs like an idiot in time to the guard’s commands.

At one, you put your legs together, straightened them, and raised them fifteen centimeters; at two, the legs were lowered; at three, you sat up; at four, you lay back down.

“One, two, three, four . . . ,” the guard counted. “Hm, hm, hm, eight . . .” The guard was tired of counting.

I too am tired of this, Jaspers thought.

“And! . . . And . . . twelve.” Lasaille was in charge of the exercises today.

Jaspers panted from exertion.

“Sixteen . . . twenty . . .” Lasaille gave up supplying consecutive numbers. He estimated the intervals instead.

“Twenty-six . . . thirty-one . . .”

He’s screwed up, Jaspers thought, and stood.

“What is it, Jaspers?”

“Mister Guard, sir. You made a mistake, sir.”

“
What?
”

“Twenty-six is not divisible by four, sir. Nor is thirty-one.”

Lasaille said nothing, tapping his palm with his stick.

An ugly gloat appeared on the face of Crooks, faded, and reappeared. He didn’t follow what Jaspers had said, but it was clear that Jaspers had just put his head in a noose. Meanwhile Lepko, red as a beet, gasped like a fish out of water. For him the exercises were a kind of mortal struggle, and this pause allowed his wildly pounding heart to slow down.

“Worker Jaspers,” Lasaille said through his teeth, and Jaspers snapped to attention.

“Yes, sir, Mister Guard,” he shouted.

“You will report, after exercises, to the bureau.”

The evil grin of satisfaction didn’t leave Crooks’s hideous face.

It was late when Jaspers returned from the barracks where the bureau of guards was located. All day long he had been given complicated mathematical tests and logic puzzles to solve. He was tired but happy. A cold March wind blew. Bent over from the cold, he pressed his wrapped treasure to his chest: a real book.

“Here, take this. It’s yours,” Lasaille had said. Jaspers could still hear those words. His promotion to Secretary of the barracks filled him with pride. It also meant that he would get two extra hours of sleep in the morning and have two less hours of work in the evening.

The lights were still on. Crooks was sitting on his bunk and soaking his hand in a pot of water. At the sight of Jaspers, he gave a twisted smile.

“Broke my hand,” he complained. “On a piece of shit, can you believe that?” He took his hand out and examined it with solicitude.

At the sink by the window, Trub stood and held Lepko, who was bent over and splashing water on his face. The water was pink. Lepko’s pajamas were wet, because he had also tried to wash the brown stains off them. He blew a black clot from his nose.

Hiccuping with sobs, he spoke in whispers with Trub. He had made it through the evening’s beating. It was a regular thing, but the victim varied. Every break brought with it the fear that today would be your turn to experience the iron fists of Crooks.

Ordinarily Jaspers would not have reacted. He would even have taken comfort in the fact that he wasn’t the one pounded. But this was an exceptional day, and in addition he felt sorry for the new man.

He stood on spread legs before Crooks and bellowed like a guard: “Older Worker Crooks! Attention! Make your report!”

Crooks started, some water spilling from the pot.

“You . . . I’ll, I’ll,” he boomed, glaring hatred at his next victim. Not taking his eyes off Jaspers, he put the pot aside. More water spilled.

“Watch who you’re talking to!” Jaspers roared, matching Crooks glare for glare. “Get off that bed now, you stupid sack of meat!”

The silence in the hall was deafening. In the three months since Jaspers arrived, no one had spoken to Crooks in such a tone. Even the guards treated him with a certain deference.

“I . . . I kill you,” Crooks finally rasped.

“Stand at attention! I am talking to you! From now on you address me as Mister Secretary Sir!” Jaspers continued to roar, aware that Crooks might get a no-food and twelve whacks but not before he beat Jaspers to a pulp. Jaspers waved his sleeve with the three sewn badges that indicated the Secretary function in front of the man’s nose.

“Wha . . . ?” It began to sink in. “Secretary?” The energy drained from Crooks like the air from a punctured balloon. Clumsily he raised and straightened his bear’s body.

“Now you listen, shitface Crooks!” said Jaspers. This was the next command. He wanted to crush his opponent. “Where do you sleep? You sleep on the bottom bunk, by the night lamp . . . But the night lamp is for reading, for the mental work of the Secretary.”

Crooks didn’t interrupt. Silent, he blinked and looked at Jaspers from under his lashes. Again he was gathering himself.

“You will move to my bunk. You will take your own bedding. Exchange the mattresses too, because I’m not putting my ass in your spilled filthy water . . . And you had better lie there quietly. I want no straw trickling down on my book. For damaging a possession of the firm, you’ll get a no-food. Is that clear?”

Crooks lowered his head. The Secretary function was important: the Secretary recorded their day’s output, which meant he could write it down as lower, and severe punishment would follow.

“Now do it.”

“Yes, sir, Mister Secretary Sir.”

The hall was silent.

Crooks, out of breath and scrambling, moved his bedding to Jaspers’s bunk and took Jaspers’s bedding down.

“I’ll make the bed myself,” Jaspers told him. No point in tightening the wire more: Crooks might snap.

Jaspers prepared herbal tea, because while Crooks was making his bed, bits of straw fell and got in Jaspers’s nose.

Then Jaspers tightened his sheet per regulations and slipped under the cold blanket. Sipping his tea, he looked at the book in the light of the small lamp. The cover had notches in imitation of a mosaic, and the title was made of little golden flecks:
Nest of Worlds: Version 3
. The paper was thin, pliable, cream-colored. He opened the book, not at the beginning but after some fifty pages.

* * *

The wind kicked up clouds of fine, gray-white dust. Through them it was hard to see the ribbon of asphalt road, which had not been repaired in years. The shortest route lay through a group of boulders that resembled a dead city or a labyrinth in a hostile waste. The way through the steppe was longer.

This part of Schhian was named Fnorrah, which meant “sounds,” “voices,” “places that played.” The dust of Fnorrah was feared by every living thing. The homes of old residents had been razed to the ground so that no one would stay here long. It even happened sometimes that drivers and passengers passing through died, but these were invariably people whose Significant Name ended either in Int or Myz.

Many travelers heard voices that seemed to come from inside their heads: a babble, an incoherent chorus of whispers, as if several hundred were speaking at once. Yet some people could make out words. They heard exhortations, or recitations, or voices remembered from childhood. At night and during dust storms, the voices of Fnorrah threatened; drivers lost their way, plowed into dunes.

Ozza drove a truck, her eyes watering from staring constantly at the road. Old eyes. Her vision, once sharp and precise, was now good only for distances. Even so, she saw better than Hobeth, who had been myopic her whole life and was now losing her distance vision as well. She dozed now, rocking on her bed in time to the bumps in the asphalt.

Their house truck had been adapted from an old hauler. Instead of a trailer they carried a kiosk converted into a one-room dwelling that included a shower stall and a kitchen recess. A large cylinder containing water had been affixed over the driver’s cabin.

They bought the vehicle together, so they could keep traveling despite their age. Every five years and 219 days a person moved to a different Land, but the governments did not look with favor upon itinerants and tried to limit their number. It was because of the “rootless” that houses stood empty, apartment owners went bankrupt, people didn’t invest in real estate, and buildings became ruins. Construction of new housing complexes had fallen almost to zero. Itinerants were considered poor workers, even when they stayed on the job for some time.

In Schhian, where the two women had arrived this spring, the itinerant lifestyle was barely tolerated. The stout, red-faced border guard inspected the interior of their room and their driver’s cabin.

“Nice babes in these pix!” he shouted to the guard hut, where his colleague was warming himself. “You’ll bring the brochures, Gerd? My heart beats too hard today.”

Ozza attempted to smile, though smiling embarrassed her, and even offered the guard some medicine drops. The other guard emerged reluctantly from the hut. His eyes were cold with contempt. He shoved the legal brochure into their hands and, after the detailed inspection of the vehicle was finished, read them the usual statement.

“In every town you must report immediately to the police,” he finished. On his way back to the hut, after performing this duty, he said to the other, “Blast you for that trick, Appe! Bothering me for two poor old rootless women, one dry as a broom, the other stooped and half blind.”

“The pix, man, the pix,” came the answer from the hut, with a hoarse laugh. Gerd lifted the border barrier for them. Had Ozza been younger, her cheeks would have burned with shame; now they only turned a little pink.

Maybe he had not given them all the leaflets, to be mean. Would the information in their crumpled little notebook be enough? Only a few days and already dog-eared. The brochure with the laws of Schhian had been stuck in a holder on one of the doors in the cabin. Ozza looked in its direction.

If Schhian is setting new restrictions, she thought, that must mean the itinerant life is spreading. More and more people have caught on to our idea.

During the constant traveling that separated a person’s life into equal segments, one kept parting with and meeting the same people, as if the same crew was moving as a group to one ship after another. The new laws indicated that those who preceded them in the constant journey were trying to cope with new conditions.

Ozza knew that she would never know most of these people, but it was possible to convey information to them: those who left a Land a few days after you arrived knew people you would never meet, people who had left days or months before you. In the same way, those arriving a few days before you left knew people who were following you in life’s journey. Information could travel only by a chain and only in one direction. It was not possible to synchronize time between the Lands.

The dust storm thickened.

They could have used a new air filter for the engine, whose intake rose in a long silver stack above the water tank. Though, true, a new filter would soon become clogged and need to be replaced.

It’s blowing up, she thought.

You could hear the roar of the wind, the flapping of the forgotten rags hanging out of the portable home, the hiss of the sand hitting the sides and windows of the truck.

It will knock down our house or blow some kind of poison inside, she thought. She drove off the road, parked the truck in the shade of a solitary boulder. Nothing threatens us here, she told herself.

A dune began to form under the wheels.

Ozza fought her way from the cabin to the house. Hobeth was sleeping under a gray blanket. On the shelf stood all eight existing versions of
Nest of Worlds
. The books had all their pages, and some still had their jackets. Both women adored books that made life happen. They liked to tell each other what had taken place; it was the same book, yet Ozza related things that only Ozza had seen, and Hobeth did also. For the two solitary old women, entering a new world was a far greater adventure than passing through the industry-polluted Lands of their own. Of their personal lives only photographs remained, taped to the walls of their portable home.

Ozza boiled water on the gas range and made two coffees. She didn’t particularly like coffee, but Hobeth was crazy for it, and its smell would bewitch her out of any slumber. The two quarreled incessantly. But for a good quarrel Hobeth had to be fully awake; from a sleeping person you could get no satisfactory reaction to a remark about the border of Schhian.

When the familiar aroma filled the room, Hobeth sniffed and opened her eyes. Her silver-gray hair was braided in a plait and tied in a bun. A pathetic plait, not what she had when she was young. But Ozza’s hair was even thinner.

Hobeth muttered something, propped herself on an elbow, and sat up on the bed.

“Why aren’t we moving?” she asked instead of taking pleasure in the anticipation of her favorite drink.

That irritated Ozza. “Lost your nose, you gray abortion?” she said.

“Why aren’t we moving?”

Until Hobeth got an answer to her question, she would be interested in nothing else. Thoughts mastered her like a fixation. Ozza said nothing, on purpose. She mixed and stirred the coffee slowly, so that the coarsely ground pieces would sink to the bottom of the faience mug.

“Blowing, is it?” asked Hobeth, not letting go.

“Where’s your nose, old witch? Is it lying under the table? Work your ugly beak.”

“Calm down, Ozza. Don’t think you can say anything!”

“Don’t forget . . .” Ozza wagged a dry finger. “He’s watching you,” she said, pointing at a photograph.

“He’s watching you too.”

Ozza cast a quick look herself at it. “Let him watch,” she said with a shrug.

The difference in age between the sisters was 304 days, which ruled out their traveling together, but during one of the moves, Ozza made up exactly that difference, on a road that happened to take 306 days—counted, of course, as time in the next Land—while Hobeth’s journey lasted only two, and so the number of days remaining for both of them to spend there was the same. They took advantage of this opportunity and had not parted since.

That trip from Lalz to Tahl almost cost Ozza her life. Ordinarily people were given rations for three hundred days only. Ozza reached Tahl after a six-day fast, drinking the water she had used to wash herself. She became phobic about thirst from that experience. Her truck carried a water tank that would see a person through four hundred days.

Making herself comfortable on the sofa, she opened the book. Hobeth was inspecting her teeth in the mirror and picking at them with a needle. Practically all her teeth were her own; maybe she had kept them thanks to such exaggerated care. Ozza found the bent page where she had stopped reading yesterday. The paper was yellowed and the pages were all creased, their formerly pointed corners worn to rounded ones by repeated readings. She had been reading this book since her youth, but she still hadn’t got past the first fifty pages. The scenes and the action developed on their own. The facts, the events, how the descriptions took on color—all that depended on your grasp of the meaning.

A wonderful world exists inside my book, she thought with pride. Her pedantic nature didn’t allow her to leaf through the text quickly. That was why the people of this book world led such intense, eventful lives. She endowed every nested world with the same methodical attention, reading the eight volumes in a cycle. She didn’t lose track of one thread, of one character; the people were, after all, her handiwork, and more than children to her.

Hobeth read more superficially, impatient to see what the next scene would bring, yet she did not get much farther in the book.

Nothing could tear Ozza from her favorite reading.

Hobeth went to the truck’s cabin. She herself hated to have her reading interrupted, knowing that simply setting down the book put a halt to the lives of the heroes, to the life of a world.

The truck, after several false starts, its engine grinding, finally pulled out of the dune that had grown around it. Parking the truck in the middle of a dust storm ran the risk of burial. Ozza, usually organized and systematic, could sometimes be surprisingly irresponsible.

Hobeth wanted to reach Zatr before dark. The truck had already made it through the mountain town of Fnorrah. She wasn’t feeling well. She wished Ozza could sit with her in the cabin, but then she would have to listen to her complaining. Both women were complainers. Perhaps that was why they had chosen not to live alone.