Xeelee: An Omnibus: Raft, Timelike Infinity, Flux, Ring (90 page)

Hork glared at him, raking his fat fingers through his beard. ‘What evidence is there for any of this? It’s all legend and hearsay . . .’

‘That’s true,’ Muub said, ‘but we couldn’t expect any more from such a source, sir ...’

Hork shoved himself out of his sling, his bulk quivering in the Air like a sac of liquid. ‘You’re too damn patient, Physician. Legend and hearsay. The ramblings of a senile old fool.’ He Waved to the captive vortex ring and slammed his fist into the elegant spheres encasing it. The outermost sphere splintered in a star around his fist, and the vortex ring broke up into a chain of smaller rings which rapidly diminished in size, swooping around each other. ‘Am I supposed to gamble the future of the City, of my people, on such gibberish? And what about us, upfluxer? Forget these mythical men on other worlds. Why are the Xeelee interested in us? ... and what am I to do about it?’

Past Hork’s wide, angry face, Adda watched the captive vortex ring struggling to reform.

B
zya invited Farr to visit him at his home, deep in the Downside belly of the City.

The Harbour workers were expected to sleep inside the Harbour itself, in the huge, stinking dormitories. The authorities preferred to have their staff where they could call them out quickly in the event of some disaster - and where they had an outside chance of keeping them fit for work. To get access to the rest of the City, outside the Harbour walls, Bzya and Farr needed to arrange not only coincident off-shifts but also coincident out-passes, and they had to wait some weeks before Hosch - grudgingly and reluctantly - allowed the arrangement.

The Harbour, a huge spherical construction embedded in the base of the City, was enclosed by its own Skin and had its own skeleton of Corestuff, strengthened to withstand the forces exerted by the Bell winches. The Harbour was well designed for its function, Farr had come to realize, but the interior was damned claustrophobic, even by Parz standards. So he felt a mild relief as he emerged from the Harbour’s huge, daunting gates and entered the maze of Parz streets once more.

The streets - narrow, branching, indecipherably complex - twisted away in all directions. Farr looked around, feeling lost already; he knew he’d have little hope of finding his way through this three-dimensional maze.

Bzya rubbed his hands, grinned, and Waved off down one of the streets. He moved rapidly despite his huge, scarred bulk. Farr studied the street. It looked the same to him as a dozen others. Why that one? How had Bzya recognized it? And...

And Bzya was almost out of sight already, round the street’s first bend.

Farr kicked away from the outer Harbour wall and plunged after Bzya.

The area around the Harbour was one of the shabbiest in the City. The streets were cramped, old and twisting. The noise of the dynamo sheds, which were just above this area, was a constant, dull throb. The dwelling-places were dark mouths, most of them with doors or pieces of wall missing; as he hurried after Bzya, Farr was aware of curious, hungry eyecups peering out at him. Here and there people Waved unevenly past - men and women, some of them Harbour workers, and many of them in the strange state called ‘drunkenness’. Nobody spoke, to him or anybody else. Farr shivered, feeling clumsy and conspicuous; this was like being lost in a Crust-forest.

After a short time’s brisk Waving, Bzya began to slow. They must be nearly at his home. Farr looked around curiously. They were still in the deepest Downside, almost on top of the Harbour, and the buildings here had the shrunken meanness of the areas closest to the Harbour itself. But in this area there was a difference, Farr saw slowly. The walls and doors were patched, but mostly intact. And there were no ‘drunks’. It was astonishing to him how in such a short distance the character of Parz could change so completely.

Bzya grinned and pushed open a doorway - a doorway among thousands in these twisting corridors. Once again Farr wondered how Bzya knew how to find his way around with such unerring accuracy.

He climbed after Bzya through the doorway. The interior of the home was a single room - a rough sphere, dimly illuminated by wood-lamps fixed seemingly at random to the walls. He felt his cup-retinae stretch, adjusting to the low level of light.

A globe-bowl of tiny leaves was thrust into his chest.

He stumbled back in the Air. There was a wide, grinning face apparently suspended over the bowl - startlingly like Bzya’s, but half-bald, nose flattened and misshapen, the nostrils dulled. ‘You’re the upfluxer. Bzya’s told me about you. Have a petal.’

Bzya pushed past Farr and into the little home. ‘Let the poor lad in first, woman,’ he grumbled good-naturedly.

‘All right, all right.’

The woman withdrew, clutching her petal-globe and still grinning. Bzya wrapped a huge hand around Farr’s forearm and dragged him into the room, away from the door, then closed the door behind them.

The three of them hovered in a rough circle. The woman dropped the petal-globe in the Air and thrust out a hand. ‘I’m Jool. Bzya’s my husband. You are welcome here.’

Farr took her hand. It was almost the size of Bzya’s, and as strong. ‘Bzya told me about you, too.’

Bzya kissed Jool. Then, sighing and stretching, he drifted away to the dim rear of the little home, leaving Farr with his wife.

Jool’s body was square, a compact - if misshapen - mass of muscles. She wore what looked like the all-purpose coverall of the Harbour, much patched. One side of her body was quite damaged - her hair was missing down one side of her scalp in wide swathes, and her arm on that side was twisted, atrophied. Her leg was missing, below the knee.

He was staring at the stump of the leg, the tied-off trouser leg below the knee. Suddenly unbearably self-conscious, he lifted his eyes to Jool’s face.

She clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Not much point looking for that leg; you’ll never find it.’ She smiled kindly. ‘Here. Have a petal. I meant it.’

He dug his hand into the globe, pulled out a fistful of the little leaves, and jammed them into his mouth. They were insubstantial, like all leaf-matter, and strongly flavoured - so strong that his head seemed to fill up with their sweet aroma. He coughed, spluttering leaf fragments all over his hostess.

Jool tilted back her head and laughed. ‘Your upfluxer friend hasn’t got very sophisticated tastes, Bzya.’

Bzya had gone to work in one corner of the cramped little room, beneath two crumpled sleeping-cocoons; his arms were immersed in a large globe-barrel full of fragments - chips of some substance - which crunched and ground against each other as he closed his fists around pieces of cloth. ‘Neither have we, Jool, so stop teasing the boy.’

Farr picked up a petal. ‘Is it a leaf?’

‘Yes.’ Jool popped one in her mouth and chewed noisily. ‘Yes, and no. It’s from a flower ... a small, ornamental plant. They’ve been bred, here in Parz. You don’t get them in the wild, do you?’

‘They grow in the Palace, don’t they? In their Garden. Is that where you work?’ He studied her. From the way Cris had described the Committee Palace to him, Jool seemed a little rough to be acceptable there.

‘No, not the Palace. There are other parts of the Skin, a little further Downside, where flowers, and bonsai trees, are cultivated. But not really for show, like in the Garden.’

‘Why, then?’

She crunched on another leaf. ‘For food. And not for humans. For pigs. I wait on Air-pigs, young Farr.’ Her eyes were bright and amused.

Farr was puzzled. ‘But these leaves - petals - can’t be very nutritious.’

‘They don’t make the pigs as strong as they could be, no,’ she said. ‘But they have other advantages.’

‘Oh, stop teasing the lad,’ Bzya called again. ‘You know, she used to work in the Harbour.’

‘We met there. I was his supervisor, before that cretin Hosch was promoted. At the expense of this huge dolt Bzya, I’m afraid. Farr, do you want some beercake?’

‘No. Yes. I mean, no thank you. I don’t think I’d better.’

‘Oh, try a little.’ Jool turned to a cupboard set in the wall and opened its door. The door was ill-fitting, but the food store within was well stocked and clean ‘I’ll bet you’ve never tried it. Well, see what it’s like. What the hell. We won’t let you get drunk, don’t worry.’ She withdrew a slab of thick, sticky-looking cake wrapped in thin cloth; she broke off a handful and passed it to Farr.

Bzya called, ‘Cake is fine as long as you chew it slowly, and know when to stop.’

Farr bit into the cake cautiously. After the pungency of the petals it tasted sour, thick, almost indigestible. He chewed it carefully - the taste didn’t improve - and swallowed.

Nothing happened.

Jool hung in the Air before him, huge arms folded. ‘Just wait,’ she said.

‘Funny thing,’ Bzya called, still working at his globe of crunching chips. ‘Beercake is an invention of the deep Downside. I guess we evolved it to stave off boredom, lack of variety, lack of stimulation. The poor man’s flower garden, eh, Jool?’

‘But now it’s a delicacy,’ Jool said. ‘They take it in the Palace, from globes of clearwood. Can you believe it?’

Warmth exploded in the pit of Farr’s stomach. It spread out like an opening hand, suffusing his torso and racing along his limbs like currents induced by some new Magfield; his fingers and toes tingled, and he felt his pores ache deliciously as they opened.

‘Wow,’ he said.

‘Well put.’ Jool reached out and took the beercake from his numb fingers. ‘I think that’s enough for now.’ She wrapped the cake in a fragment of cloth and stowed it away in its cupboard.

Farr, still tingling, drifted across the room to join Bzya. The big Fisherman’s arms were still buried in the barrel of chips, and his broad hands were working at a garment - an outsize tunic - inside the chips, rubbing surfaces together and scraping the cloth through the chips. Bzya hauled the tunic out of the globe and added it to a rough sphere of clothes, wadded together, which orbited close to his wide back. Bzya grinned at Farr, rubbed his hands, and plunged a pair of trousers into the chips. ‘Jool has been looking forward to meeting you.’

‘What happened to her?’

Bzya shrugged, his arms extended before him. ‘A Bell accident, deep in the underMantle. It was so fast, she can’t even reconstruct it. Anyway, she left half herself down there. After that, of course, she was unemployable. So the Harbour said.’ He smiled with unreasonable tolerance, Farr thought. ‘But she still had her indenture to fulfil. So she came out of the Harbour with one leg, a dodgy husband, and a debt.’

‘But she works now.’

‘Yes.’

He fell into silence, and Farr watched him work the clothes curiously.

Bzya became aware of his stare. ‘What’s the matter? ... Oh. You don’t know what I’m doing, do you?’

Farr hesitated. ‘To be honest, Bzya, I get tired of asking what’s going on all the time.’

‘Well, I can sympathize with that.’ Bzya carried on rubbing the grit through his clothes, impassive.

After a few heartbeats of silence Farr gave in. ‘Oh, all right. What are you doing, Bzya?’

‘Washing,’ Bzya said. ‘Keeping my clothes clean. I don’t suppose you do much of that, in the upflux ...’

Farr was irritated. ‘We keep ourselves clean, even in the upflux. We’re not animals, you know. We have scrapers ...’

Bzya patted the side of his barrel of chips. ‘This is a better idea. You work your clothes through this mass of chips - bone fragments, bits of wood, and so on. You work the stuff with your hands, you see - like this - get it into the cloth ... The chips are crushed, smaller and smaller, and work into the cloth, pushing out the dirt. Much less crude than a scraper.’ He hauled a shirt out of the barrel and showed it to Farr. ‘It’s time-consuming, though. And a bit boring.’ He eyed Farr speculatively. ‘Look, Farr, while you’re in the City you ought to sample the richness of its life to the full. Why don’t you have a go?’

He moved eagerly away from the barrel, rubbing a layer of bone-dust from his arms.

Farr, well aware he was being teased again, took another shirt - this one stiff with grime - and shoved it into the barrel. As he’d seen Bzya do, he kneaded the cloth between his fingers. The chips crackled against each other and squirmed around his fingers like live things. When he drew the shirt out again the dust coated his hands, so that his fingers felt strange against each other, as if gloved. But the shirt hardly seemed any cleaner.

‘It does need practice,’ Bzya said dryly.

Farr plunged the garment back into the barrel and pressed harder.

Jool had been fixing food; now she slapped Bzya on the shoulder. ‘Every time someone comes to see us he gets them washing his smalls,’ she said.

Bzya tilted back his battered face and bellowed laughter.

Jool led Farr to the centre of the little room. A five-spoked Wheel of wood hovered here, with covered bowls jammed into the crevices between its spokes. Hanging in the Air the three of them gathered close around the Wheel-table, enclosing it in a rough sphere of faces and limbs, the light of the wood-lamps playing on their skin. Now Jool lifted the covers from the bowls and let them drift off into the Air. ‘Belly of Air-piglet, spiced with petals. Almost as good as Bzya can make it. Eggs of Crust-ray . . . ever tried this, Farr? Stuffed leaves. More beercake ...’

Farr, with Bzya prompting, dug his hands into the bowls and crammed the spicy, flavoursome food into his mouth. As they ate, the conversation dried up, with both Bzya and Jool too intent on feeding. He couldn’t help comparing the little home with the Mixxaxes’, in the upper Midside. There was only one room, in contrast to the Mixxaxes’ five. A waste chute - scrupulously clean - pierced another wall of the room they ate in. And Jool and Bzya were far less tidy than the Mixxaxes. The clump of cleaned clothes had been simply abandoned by Bzya, and now it drifted in the Air, sleeves slowly uncoiling like limp spin-spider legs. But the place was clean. And he spotted a bundle of scrolls, loosely tied together and jammed into one corner. The Wheel symbol was everywhere - carved into the walls, the shape of the table from which they ate, sculpted into the back of the door. There was a much greater feeling of age, of poor construction and shabbiness, than in the Midside ... But there was more
character
here, he decided slowly.