Star Bridge (14 page)

As if he were carrying out a grim mission, Horn moved from strip to strip, his face set and determined. Men and women glanced at him and looked away, and in that flicker Horn read distaste and uneasiness and a touch of fear.

What is it you sense?
Horn thought.
An assassin? Or is it only the vague knowledge that I could kill you so easily, I the barbarian, unsophisticated, savage, and powerful? Or is it your own society you fear and the security measures necessary to sustain it?

The slideways moved through the eternal tunnels of plastic and metal, past the near-hypnotic displays of shopping centers, the tantalizing odors of restaurants, the garish beckonings of amusement districts. Urging, luring, demanding. The slideway was a living snake weaving to the changing tunes of a skillful charmer. People got off and people got on, but it was always the same snake. Helplessly, Horn moved with it, watching the strips that split off into other corridors or turned downward, thinking dazedly how a man could stand in one spot and go entirely around this world, how he could keep traveling all his life and never pass the same spot twice, how this went on endlessly, this headless snake swallowing its tail.…

Horn shook his head vigorously. Danger could be anywhere and was probably everywhere, but he had to decide where to go. He couldn't just stand and wait for the decision to come to him. But it was hard to think while the snake twisted mindlessly to the compulsive rhythms of music and the pleas and commands to buy this! buy that! do this! do that! use this! use that!… Horn tried to close his mind to it, but words forced their way into his consciousness:

“All guards not now in their assigned barracks will report there immediately. All guards—repeat—all guards will report to their assigned barracks. No excuses. No exceptions. Guards on post will wait until relieved. All unreported guards will be shot on sight.…”

The snake turned to look at Horn. He walked quickly to the right-hand strip and stepped onto the first strip heading down. As it carried him away from the brilliance, he heard the voice saying:

“A meeting of Directors has been called for some unspecified time within the next twenty-four hours. Presumably the most urgent business will be the election of a new General Manager to replace.…”

Down. That was the right way. Down toward the barracks. Down in obedience to the general command, which could only mean that Duchane knew he was inside Eron dressed as a guard. The Guard would be inspected, a monumental task but one guaranteed to unmask an assassin hiding behind a gray uniform and a yellow identity disk his description did not match.

And if he didn't report, the manhunt would begin in Eron. Any solitary guard would be captured or shot.

Idly, Horn noticed the level number glowing on the wall as he stepped around a corner to take the next strip down:
111.
He had been on the top level then; there were one hundred and twelve numbered levels to Eron. It was an odd fact that occurred to him suddenly, and he felt an odd satisfaction in the reflection that he had been where few barbarians had ever been.

The hunt was about to begin again. Horn felt a familiar flutter of something between panic and excitement. His hands got cold; he suppressed a shiver. He breathed deep for calmness, turned a corner, stepped onto another moving ramp. Down. Down, seeking his level, seeking the level of rats and vermin and other hunted things.

Down past flickering lights and darkness, intermixed: residence levels, schools, middle-class shopping centers, restaurants, amusement areas, music, babble, people.… They blurred together; they became a kaleidoscope, bright, colorful, flickering, fantastic, meaningless.

As he was carried lower, men in uniform began to join him, guards answering the order to report. They became a stream fed by countless tributaries as it dropped lower down the smooth, sloping channel; inevitably the stream became a river.

The lights brightened. The slideway leveled out into a wide, low-roofed area where guards waited with drawn pistols. Between them the river flowed, Horn carried with it. Horn glanced at the faces bobbing in the river around him; they were blank and careless. But the men with the guns were watchful.

Ahead of them would be the long, narrow barracks with the stacked bunks against the walls and the eating benches between. Horn remembered them well. Once there his last chance would be gone. His eyes searched the walls ahead, searching for an opening; he kept his gun hidden beneath his arm. There were slideways leading down from here. Most calls for the guards came from below.

When the break in the walls appeared, Horn was ready. He saw the slideway when he was fifty meters away. He sneaked his pistol into his hand and edged toward the right side of the gray river. When the slideway was ten meters away, his gun was on his hip, slanting upward toward the low metal ceiling.

He pulled the trigger. The bullet screamed against the ceiling and ricocheted off a wall.

“There he is!” Horn shouted.

Guards turned to look. The river began flowing more swiftly. Men broke into a run. Horn lowered his shoulder and broke through the line of armed guards at the wall, dodged through the opening onto the slideway, and he ran down the moving strip in long strides, weaving from side to side.

The bullets that followed him were late. The feet that ran behind him were slow. In a few minutes, he lost them. He went down.

After innumerable turns and innumerable descents, the strips stopped moving. They looked as if they hadn't moved for a long time. The long inclines were darker, narrower, dirtier. Horn moved out into a roadway, his nostrils flaring to a general odor of decay.

Here the people were pasty-faced instead of golden; their clothes were drab and ragged; they had the blind look of moles. They trudged along the unmoving strips, their eyes down with their feet in the half-darkness, to no music except the shuffle of shoes on plastic.

The shops were dirty and poor. The plastic facings were cracked; large pieces had broken free. The goods on display matched the appearance of the stores they were sold in.

Horn walked with the ragged men and women, feeling a certain kinship with them. Like them, he was hungry; like them he had known that life was sorrow, and sorrow was eternal.

They walked among the factories where the sound of machinery shook the air, beat it with hammer blows, shattered it with explosions, and the air retaliated against the people who moved through it, swaying. They passed the open doors and the long, dirty benches of communal kitchens, where the odor of rancid, rotten food drifted out to them, and many turned aside and entered.

Horn hesitated, feeling his hunger like a living thing inside, but it was folly. He fished a final pellet out of his pocket and let the crowd carry him along. As they entered another stretch of miserable shops, Horn noticed that the people shuffling near him had begun to inspect him warily out of the corners of their eyes. Even here, he had no place.

It was the uniform. If he wanted to hide, he had to get rid of it. He swung into a half-lit doorway. It was a clothing store. Cheap overalls and sleazy wrappers were stacked in the window. The door had a handle. He twisted it and pushed it open and went in.

A bell tinkled somewhere in the back; it had a cracked, hollow sound. As Horn's eyes adjusted to the darkness, something white moved, came close. It was a claylike face above a crooked body.

“Yeah?” It was a throaty whisper.

“Clothes,” Horn said harshly, annoyed by a feeling of revulsion.

The face shook from side to side, laughing with a cracked, hollow sound like the bell. “Nah! The butcher'll nah get me. No clothes for gray guns. It is the law.”

“Clothes,” Horn repeated savagely. “I'll pay for them.”

The doughy face shook. It had lines of dirt in the wrinkles. After a moment Horn realized that the gnome was laughing again. “Nah! Gray guns nah make so much.”

“Ten kellon,” Horn said.

The gnome stopped laughing and hesitated before he shook his head. “Nah, nah.”

“Fifteen.”

They settled on twenty-five. The gnome handed Horn a thin pair of coveralls, reputedly white, and motioned for him to change in the back room. Someone might see.

Horn shrugged, opened the grimy door, and walked into a room stale with old odors of food and sweat. It was even darker than the shop. Quickly he opened his tunic and started to pull it off.

Strong hands yanked the tunic down over his arms, pinning them back. Something whispered through the air. Horn threw himself forward, going down on his knees, rolling. Something grazed his head as he went, but the man who had been holding his tunic sailed over his shoulder and hit against a wall with a thud and an explosion of air.

The tunic had ripped. Horn's arms were free. He was on his feet, turning to meet the expected charge. Something black flickered toward him. Horn threw up his arm and lunged with the other. The blow was numbing; his right arm was useless. But his left fist connected. As the second man staggered, Horn hit him again with a chopping blow that dropped him to the floor, moaning.

The first thug was rising dazedly. Horn turned, bringing up his knee sharply. The dark shape slammed against the wall again and slithered down it limply. The second one, on his hands and knees, was shaking his head like a sleepy bear. Horn chopped the edge of his hand against the back of the man's neck. He pitched forward.

Horn stood still, breathing deeply, listening. The room was silent now. He stooped and found the pistol that had been torn off in the struggle. He turned slowly, making a complete revolution. Nothing. Quickly, then, he stripped off the gray trousers and the remnants of the tunic and slipped into the loose coveralls. He pushed the pistol into one of the deep pockets and shook his right arm. The numbness had left it; there was a sore spot on the forearm, but it worked out as Horn clenched and unclenched his fist.

His eyes had adjusted themselves to the darkness. He paused at the door to glance back at the men on the floor. They were big, heavy brutes, but their features were puffy, doughy. They looked soft and degenerate. Horn shook his head and went back into the shop. His hand was holding the pistol in the deep pocket, but the look of shock and helpless fear on the face of the crooked man brought his hand away.

He had been lurking near the door. Horn turned to him, his mouth twisting. “A cap,” he said.

The second one he tried on fit well enough. He pulled the misshapen bill down low over his forehead. He stepped close to the shivering, silent shopkeeper, his hand held out. The man drew back fearfully.

“Here,” Horn said. He dropped the coins into the man's grimy hand. “I'm paying for the clothes. You'd find a way to betray me if I didn't. I'd advise you not to try. The Guard or Duchane's agents would find the money. They'd take it away and you, too. They'll never believe you didn't help me. Forget you ever saw me.”

The man nodded, his eyes rolling.

“Give me an identity disk for a warehouse laborer,” Horn said.

Clutching the coins, the gnome bent beneath a table piled high with cheap cloth. In a moment he came up with a yellow disk hyphenated with numbers.

“Get rid of that uniform,” Horn said, as he pinned the disk on his cap. “Fast. And you'd better take care of your boys. They're going to be unhappy with you.”

Horn walked quickly to the front door. He stood there for a moment, studying the twilight street. Even the slaves were ready to rob him, kill him. He hadn't found his level yet. He would have to go lower still, down to the lowest levels, the warehouse levels.

Or perhaps
, he thought,
an assassin has no natural allies.

He saw a guard burst through the shuffling mass of slaves and speed past and disappear again. Horn's eyes narrowed. The workers milled. A rising murmur reached Horn's ears, became shouts and curses. A squad of guards fought its way through the barriers of obstructing flesh, clubbing their pistols right and left to clear a path. Sullenly, the slaves parted.

When the tumult and shouting had passed on into the distance, Horn slipped through the door and joined the roiled stream. He let it carry him along for minutes, trying to see whether any faces followed him for long. There were so many of them, and they seemed so alike that he gave up. He turned aside at the first wide ramp leading down. The air, which had been fresh, although warm, at the top levels, was stale and hot here. It became worse as he passed through huge, dark caverns cluttered with stacked crates, boxes, barrels, bales. There were occasional working parties, but Horn kept well clear of them. Twice he saw thick, squat freighters in their wells, being loaded or unloaded. They were distant and well-lighted. Horn kept to the deepest shadows as he made his way deeper into Eron.

Downward, fleeing, where the rats scurried away from his footsteps and flying things brushed, flapping, past his face. The passages grew narrower, dustier, hotter. Sometimes there were holes in the ramps. The dark caverns, dotted frequently with thick, N-iron beams, were deserted. They had been given up to rot and decay centuries ago. The air was stifling.

Horn tried not to think about the overpowering weight piled above him, supported by these long-forgotten beams. The mass of human flesh alone was a shuddering thought.

Horn stopped. He was in a dark, narrow corridor. The floor was rough underfoot, and the walls were chiseled rock, warm to the touch. Dust was thick in the air; cobwebs clung to his face. He swept them away with a coarse sleeve.

He was below the lowest level. He was down into the ancient catacombs in the heart of Eron's rocky crust. He tried to take a deep breath and walked forward wearily.

The corridor eventually turned right and widened. The light took Horn by surprise. Hours in the hewn passageway had covered him with cobwebs and dirt. Horn blinked. After a moment he saw that the light was only a dim reflection. He went on, turned left, and stopped at the edge of a vaulted chamber cut out of the rock.