The Ladder in the Sky (4 page)

VI

Under the gray sky, the gray people stood passively in a line across the expanse of concrete. The line was meant to be straight, but it bowed a little here and there like a resting snake. Or like a parasitic worm, the intellectual lieutenant thought, because the segments of such a worm could separate and start anew when they found something to sink their hooks into, going over to an ecstasy of ovulation. And this wavering line was splitting, dividing at the head, going this way and that into the parallel sets of prefabricated huts erected along the high wire barriers with the one guarded gate—and even sometimes getting through the gate.

It was the weather, he thought. Coloring his mind the same dismal gray as the sky.

So backward! He had walked twice the whole length of the sullen line, fascinated against his will by the dirt and the raggedness. Some of them lacking
limbs,
for the love of life, when a five-day graft and a course of cell-stimulant was all it took to replace even a leg. And sores dressed with foul rags. And teeth missing. It was a miracle that any of them were allowed through the gate at all.

Still, for the mines on Vashti … And after all, they were only cargo to him.

He cast a longing glance backward over his shoulder to the ship resting in its cradle like a squat egg, the planetary insignia of his home world glowing luminous on its nearer side. For all the good he was doing here he could be comfortably in his cabin, playing over that tantalizing not-quite-erotic recording by that new anonymous composer, the one for whom they had made such extravagant and justified claims. Was it a man or a woman who had—?

He sighed. Surely the job wouldn’t take long now. But it was a long time since any of the prospective workers had emerged from the examination huts and turned towards the gate. Almost all of them for the last half-hour or so had gone despondently back towards the city, growing smaller like insects as they walked across the concrete with lowered heads.

Eight hundred, they needed. Surely out of all these thousands it wouldn’t take long to find eight hundred—even if they were undernourished miserable wrecks.

“How’s it going, Major?” a voice behind him said. He half-turned, seeing a large, prosperous man in a temperature suit of dull green and black, his fingers heavy with rings. By his accent, an upper class native of the area.

“Lieutenant, not Major,” he corrected. And went on, “Slowly, I’m afraid.”

“So I gather, so I gather,” the large man said. “Name’s Zethel, by the way. Yes, I believe you can only take eight hundred. We’re giving you too many to choose from, isn’t that it?” he chuckled.

Not wanting to be impolite to this man who might be locally important, the intellectual lieutenant feigned an interest in a subject that he didn’t care the fission of a nucleus about.

“There certainly are a lot of applicants,” he agreed. “I wouldn’t have thought you’d allow so many of them to leave the planet. Not that we’re going to complain. Our mines on Vashti won’t be automatized for another ten years or so, and we’ll need plenty of human labor till they are. But I’m puzzled.”

“First time here?” Zethel said. “And only just arrived?”

“Yes to both. All I knew when we touched down was what we were told from home—that there was mercenary labor available in quantity. So we came at once, of course.”

Zethel grunted. “Well, let’s be honest—you’re doing us a favor taking some of ’em off our hands. You aren’t going to have an easy time with some of them, I guess. We had a spot of trouble here recently. Maybe you heard about that?”

The intellectual lieutenant remembered something vague he had caught on a news channel without really paying attention to. He said, frowning, “Some sort of popular revolt?”

“Not so popular,” Zethel said. “The last heir of the old ruling house—this island has been an incredible backwater area clinging with crazy doggedness to out-of-date ideas—anyway, this Prince Luth called a revolt against the government, and caused some small disturbance. Nearly ten thousand people were killed and quite a lot of damage was done. We had to divert space traffic to other continents for a period of about a month. Forlorn hope, of course. He was killed by one of his own followers and the movement fell to pieces. There wasn’t any real support for it—just a vague mystical aura that stuck to the prince’s name. Why should there be? Nobody in his right mind wanted to go back to the days of autocratic monarchy, even here on Berak.”

“And these are the followers of this prince?” the lieutenant hazarded. His voice showed some slight interest at last. It was quite like something out of a historical romance, after all. Hereditary titles—why, even on a backward world like this you’d never have expected it. And the mystical influence of royalty.

“Some of them,” Zethel said, shrugging. “The healthy ones. The rest are out of the Dyasthala—that’s our thieves’ quarter.”

King of the Beggars, yet. That was an ancient phrase which had once stuck in the lieutenant’s mind. His interest brightened still further. He said, “I guess the mystic aura you mentioned would be strong among people like that.”

“No, you’d be wrong,” Zethel corrected him. “That’s what was so curious. It had always been believed that people in the Dyasthala didn’t give a damn about who was at the top of the heap, because they were invariably at the bottom. Nonetheless there was a rumor, far too strong to be ignored, that the prince’s escape from the place he was held captive—which is a story in itself, I may say; it’s acquired overtones of pure legend in a shorter time than you’d think possible—but as I was saying, there were these rumors that his escape had been masterminded by someone from the Dyasthala. Not unreasonable, I suppose. A really skilled professional thief might well be able to steal away a man for once, instead of goods.

“So to teach them a lesson we had the Dyasthala cleared. It was an appalling slum, anyway, and a sink of disease and moral corruption of all kinds. Quite a number of people we managed to hang criminal charges on—theft, mainly, or receiving stolen goods, or debauching children under the age of discretion. Those we put to use ourselves. The rest are out there, mainly. Now that we’ve cleared the area they used to live in, they haven’t anywhere to go, and we’re anxious to stop them from sleeping in the streets.”

“And did you catch this mysterious personage who—what did you call it?—masterminded the prince’s escape?”

“Him? Oh, I doubt whether he really existed,” Zethel said. “We had the same more-or-less garbled story from several of the prince’s sympathizers, though. Rather puzzling. He’s said to have sold himself to an evil being in return for the power to walk on air up to the window of the prince’s prison and bring him down again. Then the demon, or devil, or whatever claimed him by throwing him into the lake below. It’s colorful, at any rate, isn’t it?”

The lieutenant nodded. He was just going to put another question—after all, this would make a story to tell on the trip to Vashti, and when he’d polished the native crudities off it, perhaps even at home during his next furlough—when an orderly came out of the nearest of the examination huts.

“Sergeant presents his compliments, sir,” the man said. “Wants a decision from you on a borderline case.”

The lieutenant sighed and excused himself. Zethel gave
a
mechanical smile and moved away.

A tall, lean young man, quite good-looking except for his wolfish expression and lackluster eyes, was standing passive in front of the last table in the examination hut, the one at which the results of all the tests were collated into a whole and the subject accepted or rejected. The lieutenant glanced at him before turning to the sergeant behind the table with his stacks of documents and computing equipment before him.

“What’s the problem?” he said.

“Literacy, sir,” the sergeant answered. “He passed the physical—here’s the assessment: slight traces of deficiency diseases, but nothing serious, and a patch on the lung which can be cured with a day’s chemotherapy. Passed the nonverbal section of the intelligence test and checked out at just under the limit. Passed the manual skills tests, the reflex tests and the speed-of-learning tests all within the permitted margins. The tester says he’d show up even better if he’d been fed first. But he can’t even write his own name.”

“Give me the speed-of-learning results,” the lieutenant said. Waiting for them to be handed up, he took another look at the subject. Dirty, of course; his hair probably wasn’t that tarnished color when it was clean, if it ever had been clean. But well set up. On the other hand, he must be past his teens. It was hard to judge his age, because of the prematurely ancient dullness in his eyes. Provided he wasn’t word-blind, though, he sounded like a good prospect for training.

He riffled through the pages of the speed-of-learning test. There was one test used for illiterates which involved the recognition of quasi-letter shapes. If he’d checked out well on that one—yes, here it was, and he had—then he was acceptable.

“Yes, check him through,” he told the sergeant. “Thumbprint his contract on the signature block, and that’ll do.”

Kazan, not caring in the least what happened to him because he ought by rights to be dead and could not find in himself the desire to live, mechanically obeyed the orders given to him. He had come here in the first place because that was where most of the people from the Dyasthala happened to be going; they had heard of a chance to leave the planet, and because the Dyasthala was a heap of smoking ruins and they had to sleep on the streets they were assembling at the spaceport. He had gone through the tests because they were put to him and he was given orders. His existence was not up to Kazan any longer. Kazan was dead.

This was a body operated in his name. Nothing else could account for the fact that he was still—apparently—alive.

The machinelike efficiency with which the applicants were processed suited his frame of mind, moreover. It was good to be organized, directed, measured, weighed, tested, moved from here to there by someone else’s decision. He had not had to wonder what to do for several hours, since he joined the line waiting to be examined.

Half a dozen other acceptees were sent out with him to the ship. The processing continued: bathing and delousing; medication; physical measurements; a meal, taken standing in a large cargo hold where every footstep or word spoken above a whisper brought booming metallic echoes; the issue of a kit in exchange for the rags he was wearing, which had once been splendid but which were crusted with mud and blood.

Finally he was being led by a uniformed sergeant down a long corridor into the bowels of the ship. The sergeant had a list in his hand; one by one he allotted members of the group which included Kazan to certain doors off the corridor. Each time a door was opened Kazan had a glimpse of racked bunks beyond, separated head from foot by lockers and side from side by narrow walkways. Each room seemed to have about a dozen bunks.

He was the last to be ordered through a door. The sergeant opened it for him and closed it behind him when he had sidled through with his new kit. Suddenly at a loss because he had no longer any guidance, Kazan looked around him dully. There were four or five others already here—women as well as men—and one of the men was rising slowly to his feet from the bunk on which he had been sitting.

It seemed to Kazan that he remembered this man out of a distant past. Out of a previous life, perhaps. He did not remember the look of sick terror which was now distorting the man’s features.

“Kazan!” the man moaned. Kazan gave him a further incurious glance. He nodded and looked for an empty bunk on which to set his gear.

The man seemed to gulp an enormous mouthful of air. As if compelled by something outside himself, he took three rapid paces to close the gap between them and put his big hard hand briefly on Kazan’s chest.

“But you can’t be here,” he said. His voice broke like a child’s, and the words were followed, by a whimper. Then he spun to face the others present, who were staring puzzled at his extraordinary actions.

“He’s dead!” he choked out. “It’s his devil that’s brought him! He’s dead and eaten in the lake by the fortress, and his devil has brought him back! Don’t you understand me? That’s Kazan, the man Bryda sold to the power of darkness, the man who walked on the air to rescue Prince Luth! He’s a dead man walking, I tell you! Get out of here!”

He was barely in time to lead the rush from the door.

VII

Captain Ogric halted abruptly in his tracks. From somewhere in the belly of the ship was coming such a clashing and banging one would have thought a herd of wild animals was coming aboard instead of a collection of raggedy, underfed migrant workers. He had been on his way to dine with the port commandant, a traditional act of courtesy the last night before a ship lifted for space.

But at the racket which he heard, he turned aside and began to stride down a corridor in the direction from which the cries and crashes came.

Rounding a corner, he went full tilt into his master-at-arms, who jumped back with a cry of dismay and threw up a smart salute. Captain Ogric, who was known as White Dwarf to his crew because of his small size and illimitable energy, fixed him with a glare.

“For the love of life, what’s going on?” he demanded.

“Beginning of a riot in the workers’ quarters, sir,” the master-at-arms said. “We’re penning it up as much as we can, but there seems to be some superstitious reason at the bottom of it which they’re more scared of than they are of my men. A small group of them turned out of the cabin allotted because they said they wouldn’t share it with another man who was just sent aboard. Claim he’s a zombie, or something—say he’s a dead man walking. Some local cult, I guess.

“We took out the man who started the trouble, a big bully called Hego—white as a sheet, practically wetting himself with raw terror. You never saw anything like it, sir! I thought I’d avoid further trouble by transferring the so-called ‘dead man’ to another cabin, but the word got around, and half of them are saying they won’t fly in the same ship as him. Want to break out of the ship and go back to the city.”

“Ugly?” the captain rapped.

“Quiet at the moment. But rumbling. Like a volcano.” The master-at-arms wiped sweat off his forehead. “I was just going to send down to the examination huts for Lieutenant Balden.”

Ogric kept his face from showing his feelings, but he made a mental note to remind Lieutenant Balden privately that when he was put in charge of getting a batch of workers aboard, that didn’t mean lounging at the barrier gate and eyeing the women among them. But he wasted only a moment on that. In the forefront of his mind was what the port commandant had told him when he first landed and went to present his compliments.

“I wish you joy of them,” the port commandant had said. “But I’ll tell you what your advertising is going to bring in—the dirtiest bunch of thieves and cutthroats who ever disgraced this continent. They’ll come out of the Dyasthala, the thieves’ slum in the city which they cleared the other day about half a century after the job fell due. I guess your only advantage is that none of them will trust any of the others out of sight, so you won’t have the danger of them organizing mutiny. But you’d best make the trip a fast one to Vashti—or I wouldn’t put it past them to conceive the idea of taking over your ship and setting up as pirates.”

Was it starting before they’d lifted for space?

Ogric wished profoundly that he could simply turn the lot of them back on the ground and go somewhere else for his workers. But he was in government service, and under orders to supply willing labor for the Vashti mines, so he’d have to make the best of it.

“All right!” he said, making up his mind. “Hold the rest of the intake in the hold where they’re being fed. Close off all the corridors leading out of the workers’ quarters. Get Lieutenant Balden to sort out the zombie, the man who started it, and anyone else he thinks, or you think, might put us in the picture, and have them up in my cabin in half an hour. And get the workers calmed down. And send a man to the port commandant with my compliments and tell him I’ll be late for dinner. Got that?”

“Aye, sir,” the master-at-arms said, and doubled away.

“He’s a what?” the intellectual lieutenant said, sounding rather bored, when the master-at-arms came panting with the message.

“Sold to a devil, they say. And they’re so scared of him they’d rather go back to starvation than ship to Vashti with him even with their contracts worth twenty thousand.”

A horrifying memory clicked in the lieutenant’s mind. He straightened up as though he had been kicked at the base of the spine and stared wildly around for Zethel. But there was no sign of the big man.

Sold to a devil? And supposed to be dead? It couldn’t really be the original of the story. But if even the government authorities of Berak had taken the notion seriously enough to clear out the thieves’ quarter and thus risk spreading some thousands of the criminal class all over their city, then who could say what the illiterate superstitious might not make of it? He had to swallow hard before he could trust his voice; then he barked at the master-at-arms to come with him back to the ship and show him where the trouble was.

The corridors in the workers’ quarters were lined with anxious faces peering out of the doors. Some of the bolder ones had emerged despite the threat of men armed with gas-guns at every intersection, and were warily eying each other as though none of them was sure who the “dead man” really was.

Lieutenant Balden halted nervously, looking down the corridor where the trouble had begun. In a low voice he spoke to the master-at-arms.

“Tell them I’m coming to put this thing right,” he said. “Promise them there’ll be no trouble.”

The master-at-arms shouted the message ringingly down the corridor. It had no visible effect, except that some of the men and women in the passage drew back into nearby rooms. A dry feeling in his throat, the lieutenant allowed the master-at-arms to lead him forward.

Before the last door in the corridor they pasued. “I think he’s still in here,” the master-at-arms said, leaning on the panel and sliding it aside. “Yes. That’s him.”

“Him?” the lieutenant echoed in surprise. He stepped forward involuntarily. Yes, it was definitely the pale-haired, old-young man he had seen at the examination hut. And come to think of it, there had been a dead look in his eyes.

He choked the idea off firmly. Glancing around the cabin, he saw gear belonging to about four or five other people scattered on the bunks. And one other person besides the pale-haired young man—a girl, about the same age, with plain untidy brown hair cut irregularly short, her freshly scrubbed face rather attractive and heavily freckled across the nose and cheekbones, her mouth full and almost pouting. She was taking garments out of the bag in which they had been issued to her and stowing them in a locker, as calm as could be.

The pale-haired young man, on the other hand, was doing nothing at all but staring into space.

“You!” Balden said. “Are you the cause of all this trouble? Are you the man that everyone’s saying is possessed of a devil?”

The lackluster eyes turned to look at him. The head gave a forward dip that might have been a stillborn nod.

“The name’s Kazan,” the master-at-arms supplied. “Anonymous orphan; that’s his whole name.”

“Kazan!” Balden said. “What’s it all about? What started this nonsense about you being back from the dead?”

“I am,” Kazan said in a rustling voice, and went on staring into space.

Helpless, Balden hesitated a moment and then switched his attention to the girl. “You there!” he said. “What’s your name?”

“Clary,” she answered. “That’s my whole name, too.”

“Were you here when this began?”

“Yes.”

“Why didn’t you run with the rest of them, then?”

She raised burning eyes to him. They were a little sunken in her face, as though she had been undernourished for a long time. She said with a touch of scorn, “The man who started it was a lumbering fool called Hego, with much more muscle than brain and less guts. I’m from the Dyasthala. I don’t believe in devils. And anyone with an eye in his head could see that
he
isn’t any more dead than I am. Feel him—he’s warm. He’s got a pulse. Hego must be insane.”

The master-at-arms said puzzledly, “If he is crazy, sir, how come he got through the examinations?”

It crossed Balden’s mind wildly that a parallel question might be, “If Kazan is dead, how did
he
get past?” But he pulled himself together before he voiced the words. He said, “All right, both of you. Come with me. We’ll take you up to the captain and get it straightened out.”

His impatience mounting visibly, like a needle on a dial ascending towards the red danger mark, Ogric listened to Hego, then to Balden’s gloss on the story, quoted from Zethel, then to the master-at-arms, Clary, and four other workers who said they also knew the story, chosen from at least a hundred.

Halfway through the fourth confirmatory recitation, Ogric slammed his open palm on the arm of his chair with a sound like a firecracker and bounced to his feet.

“Enough!” he barked. “I never heard anything like it! A walking corpse! Devils! Miracles! Lunacy, all of it—half comet-dust and half nightmares! You there sitting like a booby in the corner—what’s your name, Kazan! You’ve listened to this garbage about your coming back from the dead. What have you got to say about it?”

Kazan shrugged. He didn’t seem very interested. He said, “You heard what Hego said. It’s quite true. They threw me in the lake with my hands manacled.”

“Then how by the blaze of Sirius did you get out alive?” Ogric demanded.

A curious look crossed Kazan’s face. He said, “I—I think something bit through the manacles. And something took hold of me, and another creature attacked it, and I found myself in the mud on the beach.”

From Hego, standing by the door with his face sheet-white, a groan like a dying man’s. He could not tear his fascinated gaze from Kazan, not even to blink.

“Quiet, you!” Ogric ordered. He drove fist into palm. “Well, the answer’s simple enough. We’ll put him back on the ground, since most of these idiots won’t ship with him, and we can better afford to lose one man than hundreds.”

“Did he sign the same contract I signed?” Clary said. Her small face seemed to have set like stone, and her eyes burned more fiercely than ever.

“What?” Ogric snapped.

“I can read,” Clary said. “The contract I signed was solid as rock. Bound you, as well as me. I have my eye on cash at the time when I think about marrying. Did you ask
him
whether he wants to dissolve the contract? Or do I go back down with the rest of the workers and tell them the contracts they’ve signed are so much wrapping paper?”

Ogric lowered himself into his chair again, staring at her. He said, “What’s your interest in this, young woman?”

“None, specially.” She shrugged. “Except I don’t like fools”—she shot a contemptuous glance at Hego—“and I don’t like seeing people made fools of.”

Balden cleared his throat. He said, “If I could make a suggestion, Captain—”

Ogric spun his chair to face the lieutenant. In a frosty voice suggesting he didn’t think the suggestion would be worth hearing, he said, “Yes?”

“I saw this man’s test results. He’d be worth keeping anyway as valuable material to train for a responsible job. We’ve got one worker here—this girl Clary—who scoffs at the superstitious nature of the others. We can probably find enough to fill, or partly fill, one of the cabins. Then we can persuade the rest by playing on their greed or by shaming them that they’re being foolish. The Vashti pull isn’t too long from here.”

“Any pull with this situation stewing aboard the ship would be too long,” Ogric growled. “But the proposal seems sensible enough. Come to think of it, if anyone might well be put on the ground again, it’s this shivering idiot Hego. But no doubt you, young woman”—he gave an ironical half-bow to Clary—“would have something to say about that as well.”

Clary returned his gaze evenly. “You wouldn’t be making a fool of him,” she said. “He’s been one since birth, looks like.”

Ogric couldn’t help it. He chuckled. “You’ve a head on your shoulders,” he said approvingly. “Let’s see if there’s something in it. You’re going to see if you can find ten more like yourself among these silly workers, who’ll have the sense you’ve shown—and if you do it, there’s a bonus for you on top of your contract pay.”