Walk to the End of the World (23 page)

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Authors: Suzy McKee Charnas

BOOK: Walk to the End of the World
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‘If neither of you young men minds, I’ll have your fem fed now.’
Alldera shivered. When he had been speaking of fems in the time of the Wasting, his tone had chilled her. She had begun to feel the absence of her own kind like an added coolness in the air.
A steaming dish was set down in front of her by the Armicor. It did not contain curdcake or even seaweed, but was filled instead with a brown, grainy mass much coarser than hemp-root taydo. A sweetish scent was rising from it. Alldera’s hunger vanished.
‘Eat,’ Maggomas said.
She ate. The food was chewy but yielding, thick on the tongue.
‘What is that?’ Bek asked.
‘The basic sustenance of the new Holdfast, and of the world in times before even the Ancients. It’s a low-energy, high-bulk food, but an old and honorable one. We make it not from leaves like our curd-cheeses, but from the seeds of mature grasses: “grain”, it’s called. We’ve already raised two successful grain crops in the high meadows west of us – without the Board’s knowledge, of course. In time, the whole upper plateau will be given over to grain-growing. That’s our first step, when we take over.’
‘Then where will you grow manna-hemp?’ d Layo said ‘Or is this “grain” good for dreaming?’
‘Dreaming!’ the old man scoffed. ‘Mind melting, you mean! Men with a whole real world to explore won’t have any use for dreaming. There will be no manna in the new Holdfast.’
With a glance at the Armicors, d Layo said, ‘Do all ’Troimen share your opinion?’
‘There hasn’t been a real dreaming in ’Troi for two and a half years,’ Maggomas said, ‘only mummery to satisfy the Board. I told
you, ‘Troimen are realists. To them a foodcrop is obviously more valuable than a drug.’
D Layo sat back, radiating polite incredulity.
‘Come on, young man,’ Maggomas chided, ‘haven’t you any ambition to be more than a DarkDreamer, scrambling through the alleys from one cheesebrained client to another? That’s no life for an able young fellow. I can offer better. You lived to come through the gates of ’Troi because you have a place here — but not as a DarkDreamer. My son will need practical advice.’
D Layo smiled and began some modest disclaimer, but the Armicor officer strode over at that moment and pressed the spyglass into Maggomas’ hand.
‘Look at the docks,’ the Armicor said, pointing. ‘The main body of the City men have come upriver from Oldtown by boat.’
Even without a glass the first of a fleet of barges could be seen butting out of the darkness among the wharves. Citymen leaped out and ran along the palisade, looking for a weak point. A volley of thunder from the ‘Troimen sent them scurrying from the reach of the lights. ’Troimen standing on the palisade walkway waved their fists and weapons in the air. The sound of their cheering rose unevenly on the night breeze.
Maggomas took the Armicor officer by the elbow and walked the length of the terrace with him and back, talking excitedly. The other Armicors brought up a large box through the kitchen hatch and strapped it to the back of one of their number. Cables dangling from the box were attached to places in the parapet. Maggomas wound a crank-handle projecting from the side of the box and talked into a hand-piece (also on a cord) that hitched into a bracket on the other side.
A small, crackling voice replied from the box.
Men’s magic, Alldera thought grimly. Who was it who turned out to be able to speak to others who were not present? Not femmish witches, but the Ancients themselves, from whom Maggomas must have harvested this wonder along with all the others.
When the old man rejoined them, Bek said, ‘You’ve done astonishing things here. How is that the Seniors of ’Troi allowed the development of such advanced machines?’
Maggomas sat down again and leaned back, a picture of comfort and confidence.
‘Good question. Once I accepted the fact that real innovations were doomed, it was easy. I simply presented an idea that seemed designed to reinforce the status-quo. I offered to arm the ’Troi Seniors so effectively that they’d never again have to depend on Rovers for protection or worry about the energy and aggressiveness of young men. You remember that bow-and-arrow scare a decade ago? You can’t let a Rover loose with a distance-weapon, so nobody else can have one either.
‘These ’Troi Seniors trusted me because I was a Senior myself. They gave me a free hand. I used my freedom to make sure that the men who actually made the new weapons also knew how to use them – and who to thank for them. So here I am.’
‘And where are they?’ Bek asked him. ‘The Seniors of ’Troi?’
‘You met one at the watchtower; he, and a few others who were useful, were asked to join us. The rest we killed along with the Rovers and their officers. It gave my men a chance to try the new weapons before any major clash, and we were relieved of a lot of dead weight in our ranks. None of this should bother you; more men have died at your hands in Endpath than at mine here in ’Troi.’
‘There is no comparison —’ Bek began savagely, but checked himself. ‘I won’t argue that point. I have only one question that matters. Didn’t it ever occur to you, while you were making your — preparations, that I might decline to succeed you?’
The old man began to frown, and Alldera thought, he is going to make the wrong answer.
Now she knew why she had spoken so freely to Bek in the camper, more freely than she had ever intended. Bek knew how to pay attention, however imperfectly and intermittently. It was to this offer of ultimate respect that Alldera had responded. But the idea of looking straight at a thing – or a person – to see what it was, rather than what use it might be to him, was alien to Maggomas. Schooled by years of examining the past for whatever he could turn to his own purposes, he had no conception of disinterested regard. Utility, bald and degrading, was his reality. His answer must be disastrous.
Looking from the blind old man to the desperate son, she felt a shiver of sweet dread.
Impatiently, Maggomas said, ‘You don’t understand. You’ve passed every test: the Boyhouse, Endpath, even the timing of your arrival here. Your presence is my vindication, not that I ever had
serious doubts. I set up the course, and you’ve run it, and the rest is all arranged. I had everything worked out before I ever marked your dam’s neck.’
‘Thank you,’ said Bek scathingly, ‘for putting my life into its proper perspective. But if you’ve done all this for me, then you’ve done it for nothing. I accept nothing from you: not your name, not your place, not your future!’
Now, thought Bek, be calm for this battle.
Maggomas scowled. ‘I see we’re further apart than I’d thought. Maybe I was wrong about the maturing influence of Endpath. You would have no future if I hadn’t risked my soul to plant yours in the black pit of a fem’s belly; if I hadn’t used my influence to keep certain Seniors from having you killed at once in the Boyhouse; and if I hadn’t saved you from the consequences of your own foolish behavior later on.’
‘By having me sent to Endpath.’
‘Yes,’ the old man barked, ‘and not without cost to myself. You owe me, boy.’
‘There are more unpaid debts than I think you know. Do you remember Karz Kambl at all?’
‘Of course,’ Maggomas said sharply. ‘A good friend, but an incompetent engineer. I never meant to bring him upriver. In return for posting you to Endpath, the Board insisted that I leave the City immediately — and there was no one else I could call on for help at the time. That Karz ended up back in the City in spite of having blown himself up with my boat’s engine simply justified my original judgment that he was the wrong man for the job.’
‘You knew he was alive afterward,’ Bek said. ‘Yes, I guessed it. Why didn’t you get in touch with him? He died in your defense, as he imagined it, not two weeks ago.’
‘Ah. Poor Karz.’ Maggomas brooded over his plate. ‘I’ve thought of him often. He would have been miserable up here. He was too
idealistic, impressionable, literal-minded in an innocent and vulnerable sort of way. I doubt he would have understood one single thing I’ve had to do here in ’Troi — any more than you do, I suspect. Now look here, boy; this is no game where we outpoint each other for standings. I am the first real and true genius in generations to be born into this ass-end scrapheap of a world and to grow up with his brains unscrambled. The most has got to be made of my talents. That’s the reason for your existence, which is more reason than most men have for theirs. You’re needed here, and I’m treating you accordingly. You come as my enemy, as you’ve been taught; but have I had you drugged or chained, for my own safety?’
He shoved aside his plate, planted his elbows on the table, and leaned closer, intently. ‘Your pride is smarting; you’re drowning in a puddle of self-pity over nothing! I’ve been a misfit and an outsider from my birth, with capacities that no one understood. I’ve had a few followers, fewer friends, and none who could keep up with me. I’ve spent my time in every dirty corner of the Holdfast and beyond, sniffing out fragments of the past that other men couldn’t see the use of but made me pay for anyway. After one Scrapper burnt a book in front of me because I wouldn’t meet his price — a book he couldn’t read, let alone comprehend — I paid what was asked and let them laugh.’
Bek broke in fiercely: ‘How could you mark me for an outsider’s life, knowing yourself what it was like?’
‘What are you talking about?’ Maggomas demanded. ‘There’s no comparison between what we’ve been through! You were born to be shaped to your capacity; I was born to shape myself. You’ve lost nothing by the help I’ve given you. No one could help me. In another age, I’d have been a rich man among rich men, a leader among leaders; I’d have had an empire to bequeath to you instead of a hidey-hole and a plan for taking a big step backward without breaking a leg!’
‘What I don’t understand is what a man like Karz Kambl saw in you to love.’
The old man snarled, ‘What do you care? All I want from you is respect, nothing else.’
‘You have that; how could I fail to respect your brilliant handling of my life, so that you’ve had only to wait for me to come here’ - Bek’s voice cracked out of control into an anguished cry — ‘and be a
monster like you!’
Maggomas retorted, ‘You make me sound like some kind of criminal! Control yourself! You’re distracting my men from their duty with this display — shaming yourself in front of your friend.’
For a moment Bek longed to plead with the old man to think again, to put his hand in the fire of his son’s rage and say, yes, it’s a dreadful conflagration I’ve created in my ignorance … But the feeling was smothered under the invasion of a vast and chilling grief for something irreversibly lost; a grief colder than the void. When Bek spoke he said calmly,
‘How soon … are you expecting to die?’
The old man shrank away from him. ‘I’ve struggled along with bad health for years,’ he said defiantly. ‘I can last a while longer.’
‘You stuff yourself like a gluttonous boy and have a Junior’s energy,’ Bek observed coldly. ‘There’s at least another decade in you. You don’t need me yet. But I would like to know what you have arranged to keep me occupied meanwhile. Something to toughen me up some more? Perhaps imprisonment in a cage hung from your terrace?’
Gruffly, Maggomas said, ‘I’ve loaded you with too much at once. I apologize. It’s just that I’ve wanted to talk with you for so long —’
‘Of course, you could hardly have dropped in for a chat at Endpath; you might have been taken for a pilgrim and not come out again. But don’t worry, you’ve said it all. I only hope you have someone to put in my place — or rather, someone else to put in your place. What about your Armicor officer there? He undoubtedly believes in your plans and ideas more than I ever could anyway.’
The officer, who was speaking into the talk-box, gave no sign of having heard.
‘I don’t understand you!’ Maggomas cried, slapping the table so that the dishes rattled. ‘Would it be so terrible to be the instrument that saved mankind?’
‘Mankind,’ Bek replied, with chilly precision, ‘has nothing to do with this. You want to save yourself from extinction. You want me to be your dead hand, crushing the future into your design for you. You’re transparent, old man. Don’t you think the Endtendant of Endpath recognizes the dread of death when he sees it?’
Watching the painful wincing blink of Maggomas’ wrinkled eyelids, Bek felt an ache of wintry pleasure.
‘I have a point, perhaps,’ interjected another voice, Servan’s of course, ‘at which you two could possibly come together over your differences.’
How relaxed Servan looked. He exuded friendly concern, sitting there with his beer mug in his hands and smiling so winningly at them both. We’re no more than dreamers for him to manipulate, Bek thought wearily, drunk on emotion instead of manna, that’s the only difference.
‘It seems to me,’ Servan went on smoothly, ‘that Eykar is perfectly well suited to the exercise of power that you offer, sir, but he doesn’t yet see any personal interest of his own in it to attract him. I think Eykar might be amenable to overseeing your new Holdfast for you if he could have a free hand in, say, formulating the place of fems in that design. During our travels he’s appropriated my own fem to himself, and he sometimes even shows concern for her welfare. I imagine that he has a whole book of notions in his head about her correct treatment. Am I right, Eykar?’
Oh, helpful Servan, to offer bait for Maggomas’ trap! Beautiful Servan, eager for power he wouldn’t know what to do with; clever, treacherous, beloved, blind Servan.
Bek kept silent, refusing to be drawn.
‘The whole matter of the fems,’ Maggomas said, ‘is one of the few things that hasn’t gone too well in the preliminary stages.’ He rushed into a history of the problem, plainly relieved to bring the conversation back to some sort of technical level.
‘When we began slaughtering fems in preparation for the long siege, a couple of them actually turned and attacked my men. It was an incredible affair, and my people reacted as you might expect. By the time I got control again there wasn’t a fem left alive in the town. Even my lab population had been shot down in their cages, and all the mining-fems were destroyed. Not that it’s a disaster. When the City men realize their situation, they’ll be happy to trade anything they have for a packet of lammins, including their fems.
‘It was my fault, in a way, though. The attention some of our ’Troi fems were getting in my experiments must have given the whole lot of them an inflated notion of their worth. I was working along several lines at once with the ones in my laboratories, not just on diet experiments.’
He began to take up and devour, absent-mindedly and voraciously,
morsels of food from Bek’s plate, speaking rapidly as he ate.
‘In the hospital I saw throwbacks killed as soon as they were born — cubs marred by oddities of feature, skin-color, hair type, all the peculiarities left over from the Dirties. A foolish waste; there’s no reason why, with careful selective breeding over time, we shouldn’t be able to obtain some very useful throwback strains. I foresee, for instance, a breed large enough and strong enough to bear a mounted man at a good pace – but too stupid to be dangerous. I had one very promising line started in the laboratory: two cubs with strong, hairy hides that might have been bred back to true fur-bearing form, given a few generations.
‘The real problem is time. We have to work on ways of speeding up the maturing process. Breeding them younger helps, even if you lose the dam – after all, it’s the cub’s properties you want for the next generation.’
‘You sound as if you mean to resurrect the unmen!’ Servan exclaimed. He was enthralled with all this, excited as a boy.
The fem sat composed and motionless, her head tensely lowered so that Bek couldn’t see her expression. He studied the top of her head, willing her to look up at him. She must see that he repudiated all this. She must. His eyes burned with the effort to stare her into obedience to his mental urgency, as if he suddenly believed in witchery.
‘Not exactly unmen,’ Maggomas was saying, thoughtfully, ‘but yes, they’ll have to be called something, some word to clearly differentiate the males, in particular, from you and me. Fortunately you’ll only need a very small population of throwback males for breeding purposes.’ He wiped his fingers on his apron bib and reached for another fragment of lammin. ‘When you get into this deeper, you may want to do some reading in my library to turn up a good label for them. And possibly I was too hasty in dismissing manna entirely just now. We should research the potential use of drugs for keeping throwbacks quiet and tractable. Later on, when you’ve separated the breeding lines you want, you may decide to release the hardier strains into the Wild to forage for themselves.’
With a wrench, Bek thought of Kelmz, who would have gone into the Wild to search out non-human creatures had he been given time. For all of his brilliance, how small Maggomas stood next to the memory of the dead Rover officer!
Servan, still fascinated, asked what Maggomas would do with a fem like Alldera.
‘She’s cut out for breeding your sons and Eykar’s, if she’s smart enough to have intelligent offspring — as I assume she is, since she’s in private service. Individual ownership of fems will be ended, of course; it’s inefficient. Plans will be made for them on impersonal, rational grounds. Now, the smarter she is, the more careful you have to be that she stays out of mischief. You can’t keep her pregnant all the time; it lowers the quality of the cubs. But between her gestation periods you can put her in charge of the working throwbacks.’
‘But didn’t you say that you wanted the throwbacks drugged to keep them quiet?’ Servan said. ‘How could they work, then?’
Patiently, the old man explained. ‘It’s only your more dangerous types, the less controllable and less capable ones – near to beast level, you could say – that you’ll want to sedate. The fems at higher stages will be a multipurpose resource. They won’t be fit to breed men from, of course, only to mate and produce more of their own kind — like the Dirties, in fact. Well directed by your intelligent breeding-fems, these intermediate Dirty-types can replace most machines as we run short of metal for repairs. We’ll have to feed them more grain so they can do heavy work, but they’ll get exercise on the job, so it balances out: activity keeps up the muscle-tone, restricts the build-up of fat and improves the flavor at the same time.’
‘Flavor?’ echoed Servan.
‘Flavor, flavor,’ repeated Maggomas, impatiently, ‘of their meat. Haven’t you been listening? I’m talking economy, total utilization of the few resources that are going to be left to us. You can’t run a Reconquest on a bulk-food like grain, so you use throwback fems as meat, a food that young men can pack in quantity on long expeditions. We’re going to rationalize society into a small group of superior men subsisting primarily on the meat, skins and muscle power of a mass of down-bred fems.’
He jumped to his feet, leaning toward their stricken faces. ‘Why else would I have had the ’Troi fems killed, if not for their meat? You didn’t think I could pack ‘Troi with enough lammins and lavers to feed my men for long – we would need a dozen ’Trois to hold that much seaweed!’ In a conciliatory tone, he added, ‘Eating femflesh
seems bizarre to you now, but believe me, you’ll get used to it. You have no choice; you’ve already started.
‘Ask your own fem, here, about it; she’s a cannibal herself. What do you think is in that curdcake that they eat?’
At last, Alldera looked up, straight into Bek’s eyes. She was smiling a fierce, wild smile.
Servan surged from his seat, stumbling backward a step so that his chair crashed over on the tiles.
‘You don’t think,’ Maggomas protested, ‘that we’ve been so crude as to feed you your own carry-fems! We recognize that there are claims, familiarities that men must be educated out of. In a way, though, it’s too bad. You would feel differently if you’d begun your flesh-eating at its best – in fresh steaks, instead of the dried chips that were cooked up in your stew.’

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