The Ladder in the Sky (6 page)

X

For Kazan, that was to be born—into this curious self-contained traveling world which was the ship, the thing by definition going somewhere and yet as it vibrated through the dark spaces carrying ignorance within itself, in the skulls of the travelers. The ship was enclosed. It was still, so far as anyone aboard could tell; even the engineers who controlled it never directly perceived its motion, but read dials emotionlessly. To Kazan this was a parable of himself. A journey undertaken in a womb, like a mother bearing her foetus unknowing, beginning at the familiar Berak spaceport and ending soon on Vashti.

A word. A label without an object. A scrap of tacky paper clinging to the fingers against attempts to throw it away.

Here, there had to be the start of an understanding of himself. To accept was not enough if he had to wrestle with the central problem: is Kazan Kazan or is he a black devil? They had said, “He is highly intelligent.” He began now to realize what the word meant, because it applied itself to his worries. It wasn’t the Dyasthala comment: “He’s sharp.” That was a business of assessing risk, of knowing how best to organize a pattern of action centered on a clothman’s store, or a drunken spaceman, so that it ended with safety and anonymity and a handful of cash instead of the impersonal retribution of the law.

In the Dyasthala, Kazan’s world: hunger yesterday, fullness today, randomly. The belly had no chance to build its own clock. Time was different. The wakening into the world of the ship, so arbitrary—like being
inside
a clock, because the passage of time was totally controlled—was another difference to add to others. Emergent, the new Kazan chose this fact for a centerpole of personality, thinking of Yarco and his sighing resignation to the decree of the wyrds. He would still have liked to talk to Yarco about his situation, but not to learn more of Yarco’s way of adapting; now, to try and make him see that it was not universally applicable.

The Kazan of the Dyasthala (curious, that Clary should have seen the same parallel as he, between Yarco’s state of bondage and the invisible bonds tying down inhabitants of the Dyasthala!) had been tempted by Yarco’s philosophy. The Kazan of the ship was not. It was clear to him from looking around that men could organize the events they experienced. What he had to do was make himself
believe
that he was the organizer, and that was difficult.

A creature hatched from an egg, he thought, would be in his condition. In the egg it was certainly—for at least
a
little while—living and aware. It could be heard to move
for
a time before it cracked or tore open the shell or tough integument about it. Already it was in a sense independent, before it came out. He also. Not as a womb-born child.
For
him this would come later, perhaps, after landing on Vashti, with the opening of the ship, which would be soon.

Meantime he had to wrestle in his mind, and fanatical urgency stemming from the shortness of the time till the shell opened on Vashti created for him the exact reverse of the dull apathy he had shown when he came aboard. He had to know. He had to know his past as much as his present.

The Dyasthala: the cracked walls and the tilted flagstones of the streets, the smells and sights and sounds. List them, and they were not pretty. They were smells of rotting garbage, which was not garbage in the Dyasthala so long as anyone could conceive any use at all for it, and of the people who found such uses and descended to them. They were sights of children in gutters and parents in rags. They were sounds of screams, from pain or from hate.

The heritage Kazan carried with him into his new existence was compounded of that, and his need to be himself. He had to work hardest of all at being himself, because he was so frightened of being a black devil instead.

Who was anybody? He took to staring curiously at the other workers, sometimes without their noticing for long minutes together as they attended to some small task or relaxed, eyes closed, wondering: what is in that person which makes him, or her,
not me?
There would be a clue to himself there, perhaps. And again he had to spend time feverishly working over the Dyasthala memories, the memories of the period of parturition, the memories of the new and vivid self, which seemed to be lit from within by a powerful lamp.

Merely to be able to categorize his existence in that way—as a sentient egg-born creature might categorize his into intra-ovular preconscious, intra-ovular conscious, and extra-ovular—led him to views of being which he could not before have found the mental strength to handle.

Still he lacked words for much of what occurred to him; among his fellow workers were some whose education had gone beyond an elementary level and he cornered these and sweated out for them a set of verbal parameters defining the thing he wanted to name and had no word for, while they cowered back and flinched and shot glances from side to side, seeking a way of escape. Often they gave him words; often they could not. He made the best of what they offered. Fixation. Conditioning. Instinctual. Subconscious. Logic. Intellectual. Whether he attached the handles to precisely the right concepts didn’t matter. At least he had something to take hold of in his mind.

The effect of this on the workers was to create dismay. Just when they had shamed themselves into seeing that the object of their superstitious fear was an apathetic and harmless being who hardly offered a word even when spoken to, and never any violent act, he turned to this baffling dynamic person who did not seem able to find time even for sleep, but must always be demanding knowledge of themselves, how they thought, why they thought as they did, what they thought about life and awareness, problems that few of them had ever considered and none of them could discuss.

His whole world had opened out again, like a shell being cracked. It was as it had been when Bryda had him taken to the shore of the sour-water lake, and he had known discomfort because he was out of sight of buildings. His perspectives had broadened in a day—from the Dyasthala to the whole of Berak then, and knowledge that human affairs could transcend such business as he had learned in the Dyasthala; from that hesitant halfway stage now, to a burgeoning concept of the stars. It was painful in a way, but it was necessary and sometimes it was also exciting.

He was intelligent, they had told him. This was what it meant to be intelligent: not to close in the universe around oneself for comfort and reassurance, but to have the itch in the brain which demanded return again and again to insoluble problems. Who? What? Why? How? The archetypal simplicity of basic questions astonished him. It had never struck him before that the simpler a question the more general it is, and hence the more complete the answer it demands. All this from wondering how he could tell whether he was Kazan or a black devil acting in Kazan’s name!

Like firecrackers spitting tiny red sparks in darkness,
a
succession of memories crackled in his head. Bryda, throwing back her dark hair scornfully—she had been very beautiful, no denying—and being afraid of what she had brought about, afraid of the gutter-born thief on whose shoulders she had shifted a burden she dared not carry herself, and who mocked her by displaying a power that could have been hers had she not lacked courage. That was clear at once. She had wished Luth free not for any love she bore him—because gratitude then would have made her repay him, Kazan—but for the hope of regaining some lost power and position in the state. In Kazan she had seen a rival with good cause to hate her. So she had ordered him disposed of. He could almost pity her now.

And back beyond Bryda and everything that she had stabbed into the flesh of his life like a bright dagger were the people of the Dyasthala that he had known, not in friendship—for hunger was the eternal enemy who could split the fondest allies—but objectively, as those parts of his environment who were characterized by the ability to move and communicate. A certain woman with a scrofulous head who had kept a dirty bakery; a youth who, when Kazan was ten or twelve years old, had made himself the joyous subject of all the Dyasthala gossip by getting himself enrolled on someone else’s birth record into the law force, so that by day he was the guardian of the city, and by night plundered it. He had had the first power-gun Kazan ever saw.

He had killed himself with it the day his confidence overreached itself and he was discovered for what he was.

These pawns of circumstance! These people who
must
have shared with his new self the power to ask questons and organize events, but to whom simple material problems were the equal of the bonds holding Yarco! Clary had said that but for the clearing of the Dyasthala and the compulsion to find somewhere else to go, she who had dreamed all her adolescent life of getting out, and had taken the dream seriously enough to sell her body in exchange for being taught to read and count, would never have actually gone.

True. Why?

Once he went to the barrier at the entry to the crew’s quarters, and there hammered till he was answered, and asked to talk with the doctor who had treated him. He was allowed that much, and out of curiosity Lieutenant Balden also came to the doctor’s office, and for the better part of an hour he fumbled through some of the ideas obsessing him.

But Balden grew bored quickly, and gave patronizing answers as to an ape with a rudimentary gift of speech, and after a short while the doctor—who up till then had been much more friendly—decided that he wanted to give Kazan another set of tests, and became so eager that he started to interrupt every few moments.

Eventually Balden left the office, and Kazan sighed and consented to take the tests, the doctor baiting the hook with the offer of advice and help when they were over. He dashed through them all; they were similar to the ones he had taken without interest in the examination hut at the spaceport in Berak. He waited, itching with impatience, while the doctor looked over what he had done, and finally demanded the advice and help he had been promised.

The doctor looked up with a wan smile. Then he rose from his chair and slid back a panel in the wall, revealing shelf upon shelf of tiny oblong boxes not much larger than Kazan’s thumb. He indicated the lowest of the shelves.

“Those are microfilms,” he said. “These boxes—there are a hundred and sixty-five of them—form one single set. I’ve owned them since I was a student, eight years ago, and I guess I’ve actually worked through less than a tenth of the total wordage in them. The title of the set goes like this:
Human Philosophy, Ethics and Religious Beliefs, a Five-Thousand-Year Survey.
The only advice I can possibly give you, Kazan, is this. Teach yourself to read, make yourself a fortune, pay for a century of geriatric treatment—and go and live by yourself out of reach of anyone else till you’ve read that book. If you don’t go away by yourself, someone else will have invented a new philosophy before you’ve more than begun.”

Kazan looked first blank, then angry. The doctor shrugged.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “The simple fact is that there are that many answers to the kind of questions you’re asking, and none of them is definitive.”

When he left the office Kazan was fuming. By the time he was back in the workers’ quarters, though, he had realized how sensible the doctor’s suggestion was. He slid back the door of his cabin and found Clary there alone. She was often there alone now—not because she was a person to shun company, but because by imperceptible stages she had come to see what was happening to Kazan and had been fascinated by it. There had obviously been instructions to the crew to treat Kazan as a special case and allow him to do what he liked so long as he did not interfere with the other workers, and no attempt was made to force him or Clary to the daily classes or the entertainments. Far from objecting to this special treatment, the others seemed to find it a relief that they could be away from Kazan for most of the day.

At his slamming entrance Clary looked up, startled. She said, “Kazan, you look angry! What is it?” She put aside a book she had been leafing through. Kazan seized it and thrust it towards her again.

“Can you teach me to read?” he demanded.

A hint of a smile came to her mouth, and she cocked one eyebrow at him. “I’ve been wondering when you were going to ask that,” she said composedly. “I’ll try, if you like. Sit down.”

Instead of obeying immediately, Kazan hesitated. He said after a pause, “How did you know?”

“I’ve been watching you,” she answered. “Sit down!”

He obyed slowly, not taking his eyes off her. Suddenly he burst out laughing. Then, still laughing, he threw his arms round her.

XI

There was nothing much on Vashti except the mining settlement, a city of oblong apartment blocks faced with the dusty reddish color of the iron-rich rocks so common in the equatorial zone and so pregnant with metal that the saving in refinement time more than outweighed the expense of shipping bulk cargoes off a planetary surface. The native vegetation had been cleared off about eighteen thousand square miles of rolling land—some of it was poisonous to human beings—and over the area it had occupied the mining machinery and the processing equipment had spread like another kind of plant, like vigorous weeds driving out competitors. As well as iron there was rutile; there were brine-beds left from a vanished sea which were an economic source of magnesium; there was some tungsten, a lot of antimony, there was gallium in such quantity that the eventual plans included factories for semiconductors and solid-state circuitry on the spot.

But that was about it, and Ogric sometimes had the feeling that the bleakness of the environment had left its stamp on Snutch, the general manager of the entire mining complex.

He was a much bigger man than Ogric, but he had the same kind of explosive manner, suggestive in his case of overcompensation for some real or imagined inferiority. He was a superb organizer, that was known; he could hold every last detail of the program for his mines in his head, and under his management production had expanded eight-fold in six years. But Ogric found him the kind of person about whom it was reassuring to tell oneself, “Well, you don’t
have
to like him.”

He came out to the ship directly after it landed, to take formal charge of his new employees, and sat in the captain’s office sending snapping glances all around him.

Hoping to get his business over quickly, Ogric went straight to the point.

“Eight hundred for you this trip,” he said. “Usual contracts—five-year, wide range of work listed, twenty thousand cash payment at end of term, and home world repatriation if required or another thousand in lieu.”

“Gutter-sweepings,” Snutch grunted. “I checked up on the place where you were getting ’em from. Have any trouble on the way?”

Ogric frowned. He’d hoped Snutch might forget to ask—but still, there it was. He bent sideways in his chair so that his voice would be caught by the hear-this microphone and called for the doctor who had attended Kazan. While waiting for him to arrive, he ran over the bald facts of the affair.

Snutch stared at him. When he had heard the story to its end, he threw up his hands.

“Not just gutter-sweepings!” he said. “But lunatics! How do I account to the government for production lost when they start worshiping the big excavators, or refuse to work a night shift because of the ghosts?”

“It’s not like that at all,” Ogric said stiffly. “After the first day or so we had no trouble. The only two you’ll have to watch out for are this man Hego, who’s as strong as they come and passed very high on the manual skills tests—he’ll probably make an excavator driver—but who’s not very bright, and Kazan himself. Ah, doctor; come in. We were just talking about the Kazan problem.”

The doctor nodded to Snutch and took a chair. He laid a file of documents on his knees. He said, “It seems to be working itself out satisfactorily. You know I gave him a course of treatment for this hysterical state he was in?”

Ogric nodded. Snutch looked coldly attentive.

“I have the results of another set of tests I gave him afterwards,” the doctor said. He took a sheet of paper from his file and handed it to Ogric. “Just glance down that. And note the times marked against the individual results.”

Ogric obeyed, frowning. After reading the page carefully twice he passed it to Snutch and stared at the doctor.

“What have you got there?” he said. “A freak of nature?”

“It looks like it, doesn’t it?” the doctor said with a smile. “I’d dearly like to take him home with us and run a full-scale investigation of him. His genetic make-up ought to be something out of the galaxy.”

Snutch snapped one finger against the paper he was holding, making a noise like a rubber band breaking. He said, “These results must be faked.”

“I promise you they aren’t,” the doctor said. “I gave him the tests personally. You can check up for yourself, if you like. When we lifted, he couldn’t read—except very haltingly, and about three or four words at a time. Names of streets and stores—that was his limit. And he couldn’t sign his name. About halfway through the trip I advised him to learn. He got himself some lessons from a girl who’d taken an interest in him. She reads slowly, with a lot of subvocalization, but fairly well. He took two days to memorize the letters and a basic syllabary by the shape-technique. I checked him out of curiosity just before we broached atmosphere. Know what his reading speed is?”

“Whatever it is, he was faking before,” Snutch snapped.

“It’s eleven hundred and sixty a minute,” the doctor said imperturbably. “I’ve been reading since I was five years old, and my speed has never topped nine hundred. And his retention is nearly eidetic. I’d dearly like to buy him out of his contract, I must say, and see where he’s going to go from here.”

Snutch’s eyes narrowed barely perceptibly. He said, with an effort to hide his reluctance, “Well, I guess I’ll have to take your word. According to what you’re telling me, he’s a magnitude one genius, is that right?”

“And going up,” the doctor said, nodding.

“Well, we can do with some intelligence around here,” Snutch said after a pause. He got to his feet. “I’ll go and take my first look at what you’ve lumbered me with.”

When he had gone, Ogric exchanged a wry glance with the doctor. He said, “You
didn’t
fake those results, I suppose?”

“For the love of life, no!” The doctor stared at him. “Why do you think for a moment that I did?”

“Because I never saw anything like them before,” Ogric growled. He tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. “Let me see them again.” He reached for the sheet of paper.

“And you’re not likely to again,” the doctor said with unusual solemnity. “If he hadn’t spent his life in the slums of Berak, if he’d had a proper education, that boy would be famous by now. I didn’t mention it to Snutch, because I felt he might think I was overdoing it, but at the same time as I ran the reading test I gave him the literacy section of the intelligence tests, which I couldn’t do previously, of course.”

“And?” Ogric said, as though not eager for the answer.

“How do you measure the man who goes through the highest grade of test you have in four minutes under the theoretical limit?” said the doctor. On the last phrase his voice shook.

There was a pause. “Vocabulary?” Ogric said in a tone to suggest clutching at straws.

“I think he was getting at the words he didn’t know by sheer logic—deducing the sense from the context or from resemblance to other words. When he came aboard I’d say his vocabulary was what you might expect—six to seven thousand. It’s well over twenty now and probably rising continually.” He hesitated. “You know something, Captain?” he said at last.

Ogric cocked an eyebrow.

“Next time we pass Vashti—maybe not until the time when we pick up the repatriates five years from now, but probably a lot sooner—I think you’re going to find Kazan either running this place instead of Snutch, or dead.”

“If you mean what I think you mean,” Ogric began. The doctor cut the sentence short.

“Then you’d better not take me seriously,” he said.

When he lined up to come aboard, nothing had suited Kazan’s mood better than the mechanical business of processing the applicants. Now, during the disembarkation, he chafed and fretted. They were being handled by roomgroups; consequently he and Clary moved up the line together.

“This is stupidly inefficient,” he muttered to her when they had been out of the ship for twenty minutes. “What would it have cost them to signal ahead full details of everyone aboard? If they’d done it yesterday, people could have been ready now to split us up, jobs allotted.” His voice trailed away as he frowned at the officious supervisors attending to the third or fourth group of workers. Trucks stood waiting on the edge of the landing-ground; there were ore tubs in the background, ugly squat ships whose only permanent feature was a drive-unit, the rest of the hull being manufactured crudely on the spot out of Vashti metal and broken up on arrival.

In five more minutes, under Clary’s gaze—which when it was turned on him was becoming by marked degrees more adoring and worshipful every time—he had worked out in his mind a foolproof system for getting any number of new workers off a ship and into their jobs within fifteen minutes of landing. Since the idea had no practical application at the moment, he was about to dismiss it as a mere mental exercise.

Then he checked himself, There was something new about it for him. And yet something familiar. He sought about in his memory as an animal might snuff for the source of a tantalizing odor, and was startled to realize what he was reminded of: the early part of the day when he rescued Prince Luth, the time he had spent giving instructions as to how to dispose the forces available. At the time he hadn’t given it a second thought—it was not so far removed from planning a gang raid on a store, which was part of his life in the Dyasthala.

Now it felt different. It had a different texture. Call it the idea of organizing people. Or events. Systematization. It would probably be easier with machines than people, naturally.

It was something he could do that he hadn’t known about. That was the crucial point.

It gave him food for thought right up till the moment when the group to which he and Clary belonged was called down to the line of trucks, almost half of which had now filled up and moved off. There were men and women with lists here, most of them wearing drab, serviceable uniforms of a reddish-brown which matched the general tone of the landscape, noting and ticking off the individual workers and sending them to various trucks, presumably to different areas of the settlement near their allotted jobs.

As the first names were being called and checked, Clary suddenly squeezed his hand. She said, “What are we going to do if they split us up?”

“Argue,” Kazan said shortly. His eyes were on the one man in the cluster of supervisors who was not dressed in the red-brown uniform, but in a black temperature suit. He was big, and carried himself well, but showed a definite nervousness in his expression and his restless hands.

“Clary, no other name, female,” the bored voice of the checkman said. “Truck six, administrative and supervisory. Kazan, no other name, male, illiterate—”

“Literate,” growled the big man in black. He looked Kazan up and down. “So you’re the phenomenon!” he went on. “They tell me, that is.”

Clary hesitated. For a moment the checkman was distracted by the big man’s words and did not hurry her along. He said, “Uh—Manager Snutch!”

“What are we going to do with you?” the big man contined, ignoring the interruption. “From all acounts, you’re too good for any jobs we have here. That right?”

As though the man’s thoughts had been laid bare for him by some psychic scalpel, Kazan found he could see why Snutch was so heavily sarcastic, and why he was afraid. He had no wish to touch a raw spot in him. The checkman had called him manager, and he was clearly in authority, but it was plain that his personality was as sensitive as a broody bird’s breast.

He said, “I’ll do what I’m set to do, Manager.”

Snutch seemed to turn the reply over as though looking for a cause of offence in it. Failing, he grunted something which sounded like, “I hope so!” He made to turn away.

“Manager Snutch!” the checkman said again. “He’s down as illiterate—allotted to repair and maintenance training, truck twenty. Did you say that was wrong?”

There was a mutter of dismay from Clary. She moved back to Kazan’s side and took his hand again. Snutch watched the movement, scowling, and then studied her from head to foot.

He said, “Where’s the woman down for?”

The checkman told him.

“I see,” Snutch said heavily. “
I
see.” And was going to turn away again, but paused.

“He’s down for repair and maintenance,” he said. “He goes to repair and maintenance, and we sort him out later if we have to.”

Clary’s fingers pressed Kazan’s sharply. He cleared his throat. “Uh—Manager! I can read now, you know. I—”

“You just said you’d do what you were set to do,” Snutch broke in. “Get to it.”

“This isn’t a jail, you know,” one of the supervisors added reassuringly. “Okay, move it along there! Move it along!”

“Right!” Snutch said. “But it isn’t paradise either, and it isn’t a vacation resort. It’s a place for getting things done. Move it along. You heard the order!”

Huddled together against the lonely strangeness of this wide-open world and its arching roof of sky, the other workers waiting to be allotted to their jobs listened and grew restive.

“We want to be together,” Clary said obstinately. The supervisor who had spoken before, sighed and exchanged a glance with the checkman.

“Look!” he said. “This is what there is on Vashti—what you can see and damned little else!” He waved at the landscape around them. “Tomorrow you file an application with the accommodation bureau and we’ll fix you up, right? Now you move and stop being in other people’s way.”

Kazan hesitated. He too shared Clary’s automatic, Dyasthala-bred distrust of people in authority. But he could sense that this was a different kind of authority from that which he had known before. He said, “Go on, Clary. We’d better do as they say.”

Snutch took a huge stride forward and confronted Kazan less than an arm’s length distant. He said, “Better do as we say? Better than what? Now you get this through your head at once! You do what you’re told or you break your contract and you go back in the gutter you came from, understood?”

Kazan gave him a level stare and said nothing. After a moment in which Snutch’s face grew redder and redder a jolting fist came up and took him under the jaw. He reeled back, recovered his balance, and still said nothing. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the checkman had caught Clary’s arm to prevent her from going for Snutch.