Outcasts (4 page)

“Miria, “ she said on impulse, “have you
ever thought of partnering with anybody?”

Miria hesitated so long that Kylis thought she would not
answer. Kylis wondered if she had intruded on Miria’s past again.

“No,” Miria finally said. “Never.”

“Would you?”

“Think about it? Or do it?”

“Both. Partner with me and Gryf and Jason. Not just
here, but when we get out.”

“No,” Miria said. “No, I couldn’t.”
She sounded frightened again.

“Because we want to leave Redsun?”

“Other reasons.”

“Would you just think about it?”

Miria shook her head.

“I know you don’t usually live in groups on
Redsun,” Kylis said. “But where I was born, a lot of people did,
even though my parents were alone. I remember, before I ran away, my friends
were never afraid to go home like I was. Jason spent all his life in a group
family, and he says it’s a lot easier to get along.” She was
skipping over her own occasional doubts that any world could be as pleasant as
the one Jason described. Whatever it was like, it had to be better than her own
former existence of constant hiding and constant uncertainty; it had to be
better than what Gryf told her of Redsun, with its emphasis on loyalty to the
government at the expense of any family structure too big to move instantly at
the whim or order of the rulers.

Miria did not respond.

“Anyway, three people aren’t enough — we
thought we’d find others after we got out. But I think — “

“Gryf doesn’t — “ Miria interrupted
Kylis, then stopped herself and started over. “They don’t know you
were going to ask me?”

“Not exactly, but they both know you,” Kylis
said defensively. She thought Miria might be afraid Kylis’ partners would
refuse her. Kylis knew they would not but could not put how she knew into
proper words.

The rain had blurred away the marks of tears on Miria’s
cheeks, and now she smiled and squeezed Kylis’ hand. “Thank you,
Kylis,” she said. “I wish I could accept. I can’t, but not
for the reasons you think. You’ll find someone better.” She started
up, but Kylis stopped her.

“No, you stay here. This is your place.” Kylis
stood. “If you change your mind, just say. All right?”

“I won’t change my mind.”

“I wish you wouldn’t be so sure.”
Reluctantly, she started away.

“Kylis?”

“Yes?”

“Please don’t tell anyone you asked me this.”

“Not even Gryf and Jason?”

“No one. Please.”

“All right,” Kylis said unwillingly.

Kylis left Miria on the stony hillside. She glanced back
once before entering the forest. Miria was sitting on the stone again, hunched
forward, her forearms on her knees. Now she was looking down at the huge slash
of clay and trash heaps, the complicated delicate cooling towers that condensed
the generators’ steam, the high impervious antenna beaming power north
toward the cities.

When Kylis reached the sleeping place, the sun was high.
Beneath the dead fern trees it was still almost cool. She crept in quietly and
sat down near Jason without waking him. He lay sprawled in dry moss, breathing
deeply, solid and real. As if he could feel her watching him, he half opened
his eyes.

Kylis lay down and drew her hand up his side, feeling bones
that had become more prominent, dry and flaking sunburned skin, and the scabs
of cuts and scratches. He was bruised as though the guards had beaten him,
perhaps because of his occasional amusement at things so odd that his reaction
seemed insolence. But for now, she would not notice his new scars, and he would
not notice hers.

“Are you awake?”

He laughed softly. “I think so.”

“Do you want to go back to sleep?”

He reached out and touched her face. “I’m not
that tired.”

Kylis smiled and leaned over to kiss him. The hairs of his
short beard were soft and stiff against her lips and tongue. For a while she
and Jason could ignore the heat.

Lying beside Jason, not quite touching because the afternoon
was growing hot, Kylis only dozed while Jason again slept soundly. She sat up
and pulled on her shorts and boots, brushed a lock of Jason’s
sun-streaked hair from his damp forehead, and slipped outside. A couple of
hours of Gryf’s work shift remained, so Kylis headed toward the guards’
enclosure and the hovercraft dock.

Beyond the drill-pit clearing, the forest extended for a
short distance westward. The ground continued to fall, growing wetter and
wetter, changing perceptibly into marsh. The enclosure, a hemispherical
electrified fence completely covering the guards’ residence domes, was
built at the juncture of relatively solid land and shallow, standing water. It
protected the hovercraft ramp, and it was invulnerable. She had tried to get
through it. She had even tried to dig beneath it. Digging under a fence or
cutting through one was something no spaceport rat would do, short of
desperation. After her first few days at Screwtop, Kylis had been desperate.
She had not believed she could survive her sentence in the prison. So, late
that night, she crept over to the electrified fence and began to dig. At dawn
she had not reached the bottom of the fence supports, and the ground was wet
enough to start carrying electricity to her in small warning tingles.

Her shift would begin soon; guards would be coming in and
going out, and she would be caught if she did not stop. She planned to cover
over the hole she had dug and hope it was not discovered.

She was lying flat on the ground, digging a narrow deep hole
with a flat rock and both hands, smeared all over with the red clay, her
fingernails ripped past the quick. She reached down for one last handful of
dirt, and grabbed a trap wire.

The current swept through her, contracting every muscle in
her body. It lasted only an instant. She lay quivering, almost insensible,
conscious enough to be glad the wire had been set to stun, not kill. She tried
to get up and run, but she could not move properly. She began to shudder again.
Her muscles were overstimulated, incapable of distinguishing a real signal. She
ached all over, so badly that she could not even guess if the sudden clench of
muscles had broken any bones.

A light shone toward her. She heard footsteps as the guard
approached to investigate the alarm the trap wire had set off. The sound
thundered through her ears, as though the electric current had heightened all
her senses, toward pain. The footsteps stopped; the light beam blinded her,
then left her face. Her dazzled vision blurred the figure standing over her,
but she knew it was the Lizard. It occurred to her, in a vague, slow-motion
thought, that she did not know his real name. (She learned later that no one
else did either.) He dragged Kylis to her feet and held her upright, glaring at
her, his face taut with anger and his eyes narrow.

“Now you know we’re not as easy to cheat as
starship owners,” he said. His voice was low and raspy, softly hoarse. He
let her go and she collapsed again. “You’re on probation. Don’t
make any more mistakes. And don’t be late for duty.”

The other guards followed him away. They did not even bother
to fill in the hole she had dug.

Kylis had staggered through that workday; she survived it,
and the next, and the next, until she knew that the work itself would not kill
her. She did not try to dig beneath the fence again, but she still watched the
hovercraft when it arrived.

By the time she reached her place of concealment on the bank
above the fence, the hovercraft had already climbed the ramp and settled. The
gate was locked behind it. Kylis watched the new prisoners being unloaded. The
cargo bay door swung Open. The people staggered out on deck and down the
gangway, disoriented by the long journey in heat and darkness. One of the
prisoners stumbled and fell to his knees, retching.

Kylis remembered how she had felt after so many hours in the
pitch-dark hold. Even talking was impossible, for the engines were on the other
side of the hold’s interior bulkhead and the fans were immediately below.
She was too keyed up to go into a trance, and a trance would be dangerous while
she was crowded in with so many people.

The noise was what Kylis remembered most about coming to
Screwtop — incessant, penetrating noise, the high whine of the engines
and the roar of the fans. She had been half deaf for days afterward. The
compartment was small. Despite the heat the prisoners could not avoid sitting
and leaning against each other, and as soon as the engines started the
temperature began to rise. By the time the hovercraft reached the prison, the
hold was thick with the stench of human misery. Kylis hardly noticed when the
craft’s sickening swaying ceased. When the hatch opened and red light
spilled in, faintly dissipating the blackness, Kylis looked up with all the
others, and, like all the others, blinked like a frightened animal.

The guards had no sympathy for cramped muscles or nausea.
Their shouted commands faded like faraway echoes through Kylis’ abused
hearing. She pushed herself up, using the wall as support. Her legs and feet
were asleep. They began regaining sensation, and she felt as if she were
walking on tiny knives. She hobbled out, but at the bottom of the gangway she,
too, had stumbled. A guard’s curse and the prod of his club brought her
to her feet in a fury, fists clenched, but she quelled her violent temper
instantly. The guard watched with a smile, waiting. But Kylis had been to
Earth, where one of the few animals left outside the game preserves and zoos
was the possum. She had learned its lesson well.

Now she crouched on the bank and watched the new prisoners
realize, as she had, that the end of the trip did not end the terrible heat.
Screwtop was almost on the equator of Redsun, and the heat and humidity never
lessened. Even the rain was lukewarm.

The guards prodded the captives into a compact group and
turned hoses on them, spraying off filth and sweat. Afterward the new people
plodded through the mud to the processing dome. Kylis watched each one pass
through the doorway. She had never defined what she looked for when she watched
the new arrivals, but whatever it was, she did not find it today. Even more of
them were terribly young, and they all had the look of hopelessness that would
make them nothing more than fresh meat, new bodies for the work to use up.
Screwtop would grind them down and throw them away. They would die of disease
or exhaustion or carelessness. Kylis did not see in one of them the spark of
defiance that might get them through their sentences intact in body or spirit.
But sometimes the spark only came out later, exposed by the real adversity of
the work.

The hatch swung shut and the hovercraft’s engines
roared to full power. No one at all had been taken on board for release on
North Continent.

The boat quivered on its skirts and floated back down the
ramp, through the entrance, onto the glassy gray surface of the water. The gate
sparked shut. Kylis was vaguely disappointed, for the landing was no different
from any she had seen since she was brought to Screwtop herself. There was no
way to get on board the boat. The familiar admission still annoyed her. For a
spaceport rat, admitting defeat to the safeguards of an earthbound vehicle was
humiliating. She could not even think of a way to get herself out of Screwtop,
much less herself and Gryf and Jason. She was afraid that if she did not find
some chance of escape, Jason might really try to flee through the swamp.

She ran her fingers through her short black hair and shook
her head, flinging out the misty rain that gathered in huge drops and slipped
down her face and neck and back. The heat and the rain — she hated both.

In an hour or two the evening rain would fall in solid
sheets, washing the mist away. But an hour after that the faint infuriating
droplets would begin again. They seemed never to fall, but to hang in the air
and collect on skin, on hair, beneath trees, inside shelters.

Kylis grabbed an overhanging plant and stripped off a few of
its red-black fronds, flinging them to the ground in anger.

She stood up, but suddenly crouched down in hiding again.
Below, Miria walked up to the fence, placed her hand against the palm lock, and
waited, glancing over her shoulder as if making certain she was alone. As the
gate swung open and Miria, a prisoner, walked alone and free into the guards’
enclosure, Kylis felt her knees grow weak. Miria stopped at a dome, and the
door opened for her. Kylis thought she could see the Lizard in the dimness
beyond.

Almost the only thing this could mean was that Miria was a
spy. Kylis began to tremble in fear and anger, fear of what Miria could tell
the Lizard that would help him increase the pressure on Gryf, anger at herself
for trusting Miria. She had made another mistake in judgment like the one that
had imprisoned her, and this time the consequences could be much worse.

She sat in the mud and the rain trying to think, until she
realized that Gryf would be off work in only a few minutes. She did not even
have time to wake Jason.

When Kylis turned her back on the guards’ domes, Miria
had not yet come out.

Kylis was a few minutes late reaching the drill pit. The
third shift had already ended; all the prisoners were out and drifting away.
Gryf was nowhere around, and he was nothing if not conspicuous. She began to
worry, because Gryf was frequently first out, never last — he did not
seem to tire. Certainly he would wait for her.

She stood indecisively, worried. Maybe he wanted something
in the shelter, she thought.

She did not believe that for a moment. She glanced back
toward the bottom of the Pit.

Everything happened at once. She
forgot about Miria, Lizard, the prison. She cried out for Jason, knowing her
voice would not carry that far. She ran downhill, fighting the clay that sucked
at her feet. Two people she knew slightly trudged up the hill — Troi,
skeletal, sharp-featured, sardonic, and Chuzo, squarely built and withdrawn.
Both were very young; both were aging quickly here.