Sanctuary in The Sky (6 page)

“True enough,” said Usri dispassionately. “You have a sharp mind, fellow.”

“Too sharp, I’d say,” Ligmer snapped. “A Majko has a very good reason to put about such theories;- these would imply that all men ought to be on equal footing, and that Majkosi and Lubarria are oppressed unjusdy.”

There was a sudden tension in the air; Usri was aware of it, Lang was aware of it, even the little animal which Lang called Sunny raised its head inquiringly and snuffed. And Vykor grew aware of it also. But too late. Because by then he could hear the fatal words ringing in his memory. He had said—had actually said to the face of a Cathrodyne in the presence of a Pag—had said:

“And they are! Monstrously oppressed, and without a shred of justice for it!”

There was a long, frozen silence. Or rather, a period when none of them said anything; there was noise from everywhere, music from the dancing floor, talk from beyond the bushes that ringed the clearing, even very faint thunder from the storm still raging in the Mountains.

Outcast! Outcast!
The word hammered at Vykor’s imagination. He looked at Usri’s frozen face, at Ligmer’s which was purpling with indignation, at Lang’s which wore a quizzical half-smile. Suddenly he felt unreasonably angry with Lang. He had never dreamed he could do such a stupid thing! He had thrown away his life, his freedom to come and go between Waystation and home, his value as a courier for the revolutionary movement on Majkosi, through a moment’s loss of control over his tongue. And somehow Lang was responsible. He felt it in his bones, he
knew
it—and at the same time knew that nothing Lang had said or done could explain his idiotic lapse.

He got to his feet with unsteady dignity, set down his half-full glass of wine with a hurt look at Lang, and walked away among the bushes.

“Well!” said Usri after a further pause.. “I’m surprised you let him get away with that. If an Alchmid had said such a thing to me, I’d have broken his teeth in and sent him to be food for the males.”

“Oh, he won’t get away with it, don’t worry,” said Ligmer through clenched teeth. “There’s not much anyone can do to him here on Waystation; he’ll just hide among his fellow Majkos here and the Glaithes will prevent us from dragging him out. But he won’t be able to leave the station again unless he has it in mind to commit suicide. I’ll have instructions given to the purser of his ship, just in case he tries to brazen it out and pretend nothing happened.”

He turned to Lang and half rose to give a sort of bow. “I must thank you, distinguished sir,” he said. “I did not see what you were driving at when you pressed him for his opinion; I see now that you were cunningly provoking him into voicing subversive views. It is a service we Cathrodynes will appreciate.”

“You have nothing to thank me for,” said Lang, and his gaze was dispassionate and hard. “I am neutral. As it were, I am a citizen of Waystation, and your national disputes are none of my concern.”

He raised his glass and emptied it. When he set it down again, his manner had-changed completely.

“I have been wandering through what I gather you call the tourist circuit,” he said. “It is impressive.”

“And damnably difficult to find your way around,” said Usri shortly. “Forever changing places with itself. Yesterday I came down Chute Number Radium to the City; today I had to come right through the Caves to get here, and cross a bit of the Ocean. That I don’t mind so much—the weird juice they have in it instead of water dries like magic once you come ashore again. But going through the Caves was a nuisance.”

“Why?” said Lang, raising an eyebrow. “I haven’t seen them.”

“You will, if you’re normal.” Usri gave a sound halfway between a grunt and a laugh. “Even if you’re not. By non- Pag standards, that is. Other people seem to think we’re pretty peculiar because we won’t give in to any male until he’s proven he’s worth it by beating us in single combat— but it’s all a matter of attitude. So we don’t go there for fun, the way most people do.”

“It’s a—shall we say—place of exotic amusements?”

“More of them than anything else. One thing that does tend to support our historico-geneticists when they say that the people of other planets are degenerate culls of a primal Pagr stock is that we like our matings to be straight—Pag to Pag. In the Caves over yonder most visitors from other planets seem to go for a stock different from their own. You get Cathrodynes wanting Glaithes, Alchmids mucking around with Lubarrians—ugh!” She made a disgusted face. “Degenerate!”

“Yet your own males will take Alchmid women, as you admitted a little while ago,” said Lang curtly. “So your males are of a degenerate stock and your females aren’t?” Before Usri could muster an answer to that, he had leaned forward on the table to look again at the picture of the ship embalmed on Pagr in solidified lava.

“How many ships are known to have been preserved on Pagr?” he said. Usri hesitated, as though she had been going to say something totally different, and a small frown creased her red-brown forehead. But so completely had Lang the attitude of one who has forgotten the previous subject that she let it pass and answered his new question instead.

“We’ve found fifteen—possibly. All in strata laid down about the same time, at approximately the spot from whereas ordinary archeological studies suggest—our people spread across the planet.”

“Fifteen.” Lang felt in a pouch at his waist and took out a Glaithe-prepared map which he had been given in the reception hall on arriving. “There are a total of sixteen ship- locks on Waystation,” he said. “Not counting four small ones with only a third of the capacity of the main locks. That’s a fairly close match, Scholar Usri. You are welcome to the data and any conclusions you care to draw from them.”

He lifted his pet onto his shoulder again, stood up, and nodded to each of them before walking off among the bushes. "Who is he?” said Usri in astonishment when he had gone. Ligmer shook his head. “An extraordinarily wealthy tourist —officially,” he said. “Traveling to see the galaxy. Heard rumors of Waystation, came to see if it was real, will go away again afterwards.”

“Gas-clouds,” Usri said positively. “That’s a dangerous man,

Ligmer. He gives me the impression that without having been on Waystation before in his life he knows more about it —and us—than you or I could lea
rn
in a century’s work.” Amazingly, uncharacteristically, she shuddered, and huge ripples moved down her sleek flanks under her black blouse.

“I don’t like him
!
” she said fiercely. “I don’t like him at al
l!”

XI

Carrying
his mask, Vykor walked with head downcast for what seemed to be ages. Echoes of his words rang in his head, beat at the edges of his consciousness like waves eroding a rocky shore. His brain throbbed to the crazy pounding of his heart; his breath came arid went in racking gasps.

His lips moved in a senseless repetition of a self-condemning sentence:
you must have been out of your mind, you must have been out of your mind, you must have been out of your mind . . .

At length he sat down on a rocky slope among the foothills of the Mountains and stared back across an inlet of the Ocean towards the City. But it was an unseeing stare. Behind his eyes there were pictures of other things—of his world, Majkosi, of its people, of the past which should also have been his future and which he had thrown away in a fit of anger.

There was nothing he could do about it. He could not go to the Cathrodyne authorities and plead for forgiveness— the stem-faced Cathrodynes did not forgive such behavior. He would suffer, first, and then die. And dying did not seem to be worth it.

Somehow, he would cling to life. But his life would be here, at Waystation.

Maybe—he caught at a fugitive gleam of hope—maybe he could still be of some use. Maybe he could become like
Larwik, agent of a disease gnawing at Cathrodyne supremacy, although the foul nature of Larwik’s work had revolted him.

He remembered Majkosi in an agony of sorrow—remembered the dull industrial town where he had been born and grown up; remembered the people who wore drab clothing and had to step aside into the gutter when arrogant Cathrodyne officials came down the sidewalk, and who still managed to preserve a spark of independence; remembered the face of his father and the pride it had shown when he learned that his son was acting as a courier for the revolutionary movement in which he had himself for years taken part. . .

Majkosi, he found himself thinking, was a grey world— not of its nature, but because Cathrodyne domination cast a shadow over even the brightest day.

He would not see it again.

The chill finality of what had happened finally froze the pain in his mind to a mere ache. He debated with himself what he should do. Was it worth the risk to go back to his ship and get his belongings? He thought not; Ligmer had been so angry he had probably already notified the Cathrodyne authorities, and if he stepped outside Glaithe protection even for a moment he would be seized and jailed.

A group of Cathrodyne youths emerged from the Ocean within a short distance of him, laughing and spluttering, and began to play tag up the slopes of the foothills. Their gaiety mocked him, and by contrast his misery seemed that much more insupportable. He wished he could shout to them, tell them what he was suffering—but even if he did, they would not understand; they would don their Cathrodyne sneers and say that it served him right, if they condescended to answer a member of a subject race at all.

There was, though, somebody he could tell, who he was sure would understand—and whom he ought to tell, soon. He got up and plodded, head bowed more than ever under his burden of regret, toward a chute out of the tourist circuit.

He found his way as though in a dream to the familiar redlit corridor on the level at which the elevator car never ordinarily stopped; he pressed the admission button on the door of the little office, and went in.

He was thinking:
of course, she may not be here just now; she may be out at work in the reception halls or somewhere
—when he belatedly understood what he was seeing and began to stammer apologies.

The strange red soft plastic material which usually had the form of two chairs, and which seemed to be the sole furniture of the cabin, was flat on the floor like a kind of thick mattress. The featureless bulkheads had changed; there on his left a hidden cupboard door had been slid back to show a row of clothing hanging up and some shoes and sandals in a rack, while opposite it a similar door was open to disclose a collection of printed and taped books. There were other similar changes.

They had not at first registered on his mind because the cabin was as dim as the corridor outside, the usual lighting turned down to a pale twilight glow. And in that glow Raige was starting awake, sleepy-eyed, under a shiny silk coverlet, lying on the thick soft plastic that served her as a bed.

She collected herself in a moment, and cut short his babble of excuses. “No matter, Vykor—you must have a reason, and you look so miserable! What is wrong?”

She sat up, contriving to wrap the coverlet around her so that Vykor caught no more than a glimpse of bare shoulder and a tantalizing curve of breast, and switched on the lights. She looked as tiny and fragile as a porcelain ornament with her bare toes peeping out from under the coverlet. Vykor licked his lips.

“I’ve been a fool,” he said. “I don’t think it was all my fault, but—”

She indicated that he should squat down on the- plastic mat, and he did so awkwardly, trying not to look at her too directly. In abrupt, staccato phrases he recounted what had happened and why he was no longer going to be a free man. Raige listened in utter stillness, her small head tilted a little to one side.

“And that’s it,” said Vykor bitterly at the end. “I’ve
been driven into throwing away my whole life on a stupid burst of annoyance!”

“Poor Vykor,” said Raige, and laid a soft little hand on his his arm. The touch was like a trigger; he bent his head down and felt his belly-muscles tighten in the first of many racking sobs.

He was only vaguely aware of Raige rising lithely to her feet behind him and moving at the edge of his tear-blurred vision. There was a hushing sound as the coverlet fell in a silken pile beside him. When he could raise his head and see clearly again, Raige was standing before him knotting the girdle of a plain white floor-length gown, her face more full of emotion than he could ever remember seeing it before.

“Come now,” she said quietly, and gentled him to his feet with a brush of her hand. She bent down to the soft plastic mat and did something he could not quite follow, and it split in two. From each part she deftly formed one of the familiar chairs he had seen on his other visits, and made him sit down in the nearer.

“This will help,” she said, turning to open another hidden door in the bulkheads and taking from a compartment beyond a small, beautifully shaped jug and two little mugs.

She poured for him and for herself and handed him one of the mugs. Convulsively, he sucked at the liquor and found it bland in the mouth, fiery in the belly, with a sudden comforting glow spreading through his body after a few moments.

Meanwhile, Raige settled into the other chair facing him, crossed her legs with delicate precision and tucked the front of the white gown between her knees. “You’re very young, Vykor—aren’t you?” she said.

He nodded apathetically. “I’m nearly twenty,” he said in hesitant tones.

“And what has been your life up till now?”

He shrugged. “Ordinary enough. I did well in school, and when I was fifteen I was selected for local administrative training; then more or less by accident I was allotted to the spaceport staff near my home, and from there I moved on to purser’s apprentice and finally got to be a steward on liners. And it turned out that people had been watching me. I was

asked to bring some dispatches out here when the regular courier was taken sick; during the trip after that I was assigned to be your contact.”

“And that’s all? No, of course not. There are your parents waiting, and your friends—and a girl, perhaps?”

Vykor shook his head. Of course there wasn’t a girl! He hesitated on the point of saying why not, and remembered that Raige after all was twice his age, and decided that he did not dare.

But he could hint at it, as it were. He said awkwardly, “It would have had to be a girl I could—could work with and admire as well as . . . well, you know. That’s the only consolation I can think of about what’s happened.”

Raige took the tiniest sip of the liquor in her mug and nodded thoughtfully. “Yet life at Waystation need not be so bad, Vykor. I have spent nearly half my life here, except for leave at home once a year. You know that to us from Glai Waystation is far more than a possession, as Majkosi is to Cathrodyne or Alchmida to Pagr. It represents hope to us, and a shield against—against alien domination. But it also means work: night-long, day-long, life-long, without errors of judgment or lapses of attention.

“At first it was such an incredible strain I didn’t think I could stand it. Then an affair which I had organized—a little individual part of a greater scheme—passed off successfully, and I began to see what I was here for, what I was doing and what it meant to other people. You probably feel the same about the work you’ve been doing for the Majko revolutionaries, don’t you? The first sense of achievement in real life?”

Vykor nodded. That was exactly what he felt.

“Some day soon,” continued Raige meditatively, putting out one hand and stroking the luxuriously curved side of the jug she had brought from the cupboard, “which is to say in another five or six years, I shall have to build a new life, too. I shall go home to Glai, and choose my husband, and bear the children who are waiting for me—they’ve been waiting since I was first assigned to duty here.”

She looked down thoughtfully at the front of her slender
body, as though picturing it in imagination as it would be when she began her family.

“One way, I shall be luckier than you. I shall have some few certainties on which to build my new life. And one way you are now luckier than I shall be. I shall have no surprises —I shall never again have that very wonderful experience when certain disaster turns into rewarding success . . .” Her voice trailed into pensive silence.

“But you, Vykor,” she said after a pause, “can hope, and rafher more than hope. I have watched and studied you since you became my courier. You haven’t become a Waystation resident as most Majkos have done before—through what one must call selfishness, or inadequacy. From the purely material point of view you will have a far better life on Waystation than you could hope for at home. But that doesn’t count with you, does it?”

“I’d rather be stranded at home, never to see Waystation or the inside of a spaceship again,” said Vykor forcefully, “and be able to go on working for what I believe in.”

“You’ll be able to do that,” said Raige. “What sort of life do you see for yourself here, now?”

“I haven’t had time to give it much thought,” said Vykor. “I suppose I could”—he hesitated, then remembered Larwik’s assurance that the Glaithes knew about this—“I could help in the dreamweed traffic to Cathrodyne. Or just take a concession in the tourist circuit and spend my life fooling with the rich holidaymakers . ..”

“Or you could become an associate member of the staff— perhaps even go to Glai some time, if you’d like to.”

Vykor could hardly believe his ears. “I . . . that would be wonderful!” he stammered. “I always wanted to go to Glai. I admire your people so much for all they’ve done for us—”

“I thought you did,” said Raige, and gave a little smile. "That message of gratitude you delivered, for instance, had a personal ring about it. Oh, we’re not angels, Vykor
!
Not by a long, long way. This dreamweed traffic, for example: you musn’t think we support it and help it along because it’s a tool to free your world from Cathrodyne rule. We do so because it’s in our interest to weaken both Cathrodyne and Pagr.

Similarly, we take every chance we get to humiliate one or the other of them, to remind them that Glai accepts orders from no one. Sometimes we are forced to adopt cruel tactics, which make us ashamed, simply to preserve our freedom.” She spread her hands. “But one day, Vykor, one day
!
We have our ambitions for the future, too, as you hope for Majkosi to be independent, and as Pagr and Cathrodyne each hopes to seize Waystation. I’m prejudiced, probably, but I believe what we hope for is better than what anyone else in the Arm wants. Maybe you’ll become convinced of that, too, and if you do, you’ll be able to be happy again.”