She recognized him from those ears. He was a We-ku, one of a batch of look-alikes who had come down from the Birthing Vat at the same time and had clung together ever since. If they had ever had their own names, they had long abandoned them.
She wasn"t about to be deathed by a We-ku. She pressed the heels of her hands into his eyes and shoved.
Her ankles started to slide out of his hands. The harder he gripped, the more his clutching fingers slipped. She pointed her toes and shoved harder.
Then she was free.
She pushed up to the surface and blew out a huge mouthful of dirt. She prepared to take on the We-ku again, elbows and knees ready, fingers clawing for the knife strapped to her thigh.
But he didn"t come for her, not for one heartbeat, two, three. She took the risk of wiping her eyes clear.
The We-ku had already found another victim. He was pressing a body into the dirt with his great fat hands. If he got his victim to the floor, his piston legs would crack the spine or splinter the skull in seconds.
The We-ku was a surging monster of blood and filth. His eyes were rimmed with blackness where she had bruised him.
Something in La-ba rose up.At a time like this, a time of overcrowding, there was a lot of deathing. You could see there were too many babies swarming out of the Birthing Vat, the great pink ball that hovered in the air at the very center of the Observation Post. At rally hours you could look beyond the Vat to the other side of the Post, where the people marched around on the roof with their heads pointing down at you, and you could see that almost every Cadre Square was overfull.
Commissaries would come soon, bringing Memory. They would Cull if they had to. The less the Commissaries had to Cull, the happier they would be. It was the duty of every citizen of every cadre to bring down their numbers.
If you did well you would fly on a Shuttle out of here. You would fly to Earth, where life un-ended. That was worded by the cadre leaders. And if you hid and cowered, even if the amateur deathers didn"t get to you, then the Old Man would. That was worded in the dorms.
La-ba had no reason to un-believe this. She had seen hundreds deathed by others. She had deathed seventeen people herself.
La-ba was tall, her body lithe, supple: good at what she was trained for, deathing and s.e.xing and hard physical work.
La-ba was five years old. Already half her life was gone. She leapt out of the muck and onto the We-ku"s back, her knife in her hand.
The We-ku didn"t know whether to finish the death at his feet or deal with the skinny menace on his back. And he was confused because what La-ba was doing was un-Doctrine. That confusion gave La-ba the seconds she needed.
Still, she almost had to saw his head clean off before he stopped struggling- He sank at last into the dirt, which was now stained with whorls of deep crimson. The head, connected only by bits of gristle and skin, bobbed in the muck"s sticky currents.
The We-ku"s intended victim struggled to his feet. He was about La-ba"s height and age, she guessed, with a taut, well-muscled body. He was naked, but crusted with dirt.
She was aroused. Deathing always aroused her. Glancing down at his crotch, at the stiff member that stuck out of the dirt there, she saw that this other felt the same.
"You crimed," he breathed, and he stared at her with eyes that were bright white against the dirt.
He was right. She should have let the deathing go ahead, and then take out the We-ku. Then there would have been two deaths, instead of one. Un-Doctrine.
She glanced around. n.o.body was close. n.o.body had seen how the We-ku died.
n.o.body but this man, this intended victim.
"Ca-si," he said. "Cadre Fourteen." That was on the other side of the sky.
"La-ba. Cadre Six. Will you report?" If he did she could be summarily executed, deathed before the day was out.
Still he stared at her. The moment stretched.
He said, "We should process the We-ku."
"Yes."
Breathing hard, they hauled the We-ku"s bulky corpse toward a hopper that was alreadyhalf-full-of tangled limbs, purple guts, bits of people. The work brought them close. She could feel the warmth of his body.
They dumped the We-ku into the hopper. La-ba kept back one ugly ear as a trophy.
La-ba and Ca-si s.e.xed, there and then, in the slippery dirt.
Later, at the end of the shift, they got clean, and s.e.xed again.
Later still they joined in a dance, a vast abandoned whirl of a hundred citizens, more. Then they s.e.xed again.
He never did report her crime. By failing to do so, of course, he was criming himself.
Maybe that bonded them.
They kept s.e.xing, whatever the reason.
Hama stood beside his mentor, Arles Thrun, as the citizens of the Observation Post filed before them. The marching drones stared at Hama"s silvered Raoul-technology skin, and they reached respectfully to stroke the gleaming egg-shaped Memory that Arles held in his hand.
One in three of the drones who pa.s.sed was a.s.signed, by Arles"s ancient, wordless gesture, to the Cull. Perhaps half of those a.s.signed would survive. Each drone so touched shrank away from Arles"s gleaming finger.
When Hama looked to the up-curving horizon he saw that the line of patiently queuing drones stretched a quarter of the way around the Post"s internal equator.
This Observation Post was a sphere of Woven s.p.a.ce, so small he could have walked around its interior in a day. The folded-over sky was crowded with Cadre Squares, dormitory blocks and training and indoctrination centers, and the great sprawls of the Post"s more biological functions, the Cesspits and the Cyclers and the Gardens, green and brown and glistening blue. Every surface was covered with instructive images, symbols and pictures of man"s long battle against the Xeelee, ten thousand years out of date. Drones walked all over the inner surface of the sphere, stuck there by manipulated gravity. The great Birthing Vat itself hung directly over his head, pink and fecund, an obscene sun. The air was thick with the stink of growing things, of dirt and sweat.
To Hama, it was like being trapped within the belly of some vast living thing.
It didn"t help his mood to reflect that beyond the Woven s.p.a.ce floor beneath his feet, no more than a few Planck"s-lengths away, the host planet"s atmosphere raged: a perpetual hydrogen storm, laced with high-frequency radiation and charged particles.
Absently he reached into his drab monastic robe and touched his chest, stroked the cool, silvered Planck-zero epidermis, sensed the softly gurgling fluid within, where alien fish swam languidly. Here in this dismal swamp, immersed in the primeval, he could barely sense the mood even of Arles, who stood right next to him. He longed for the cool inter-galactic gulf, the endless open where the merged thoughts of Commissaries sounded across a trillion stars. . . .
"Hama, pay attention," Arles Thrun snapped.
Hama focused reluctantly on the soft round faces of the drones, and saw they betrayed agitation and confusion at his behavior.
"Remember, this is a great day," Arles murmured dryly. "The first Commission visit in ten thousand years-and it is happening in the brief lifetime of this creature," and his silvered hand patted indulgently at the bare head of the drone before him. "How lucky they are, even if we will have to order the deaths of a sixth of them. There is so little in theirlives-little more than the wall images that never change, the meaningless battle for position in the cadre hierarchies ..."
And the dance, Hama thought reluctantly, their wild illegal dance.
"They disgust me," he hissed, surprising himself. Yet it was true.
Arles glanced at him. "You"re fortunate they do not understand."
"They disgust me because their language has devolved into jabber," Hama said. "They disgust me because they have bred themselves into overpopulation."
Arles murmured, "Hama, when you accepted the Burden of Longevity you chose a proud name. I sometimes wonder whether you have the n.o.bility to match that name. These creatures"
names were chosen for them by a random combination of syllables-"
"They spend their lives on make-work. They eat and screw and die, crawling around in their own filth. What need a candle-flame of a name?"
Arles was frowning now, sapphire eyes flickering in the silver mask of his face. "Have you forgotten the core tenet of the Doctrine? A brief life burns brightly, Hama. These creatures and their forebears have maintained their lonely vigil, here between the galaxies-monitoring the progress of the war across a million fronts-for sixty thousand years. These drones are the essence of humanity. And we Commissaries- doomed to knowledge, doomed to life-we are their servants."
"Perhaps. But this essence of humanity is motivated by lies. Already we understand their jabber well enough to know that. These absurd legends-"
Arles raised a hand, silencing him quickly. "Belief systems drift, just as languages do. The flame of the Doctrine still burns here, if not as brightly as we would wish."
Now two of the drones came before Hama, hand in hand, male and female, nude like the rest. This pair leaned close to each other, showing an easy physical familiarity.
They had made love, he saw immediately. Not once, but many times. Perhaps even recently.
On a thong around her neck the female wore what looked hideously like a dried human ear.
The fish in his chest squirmed.
He snapped: "What are your names?"
They didn"t understand his words, but comprehended the sense. They pointed to their chests.
"La-ba."
"Ca-si."
Arles smiled, amused, contemptuous. "We have the perspective of G.o.ds. They have only their moment of light, and the warmth of each other"s body. . . . What is it, Hama? Feeling a little attraction, despite your disgust? A little envyl"
With an angry gesture, Hama sentenced both the drones to the Cull. The drones, obviously shocked, clung to each other.
Arles laughed. "Don"t worry, Hama. You are yet young. You will grow-distant." Arles pa.s.sed him the Memory. "Carry on alone. Perhaps it will be a useful discipline for you. One in three for the Cull. And remember-love them.""
s.p.a.ce tore and knit up, and Arles Thrun was gone.
Hama weighed the Memory; it was surprisingly heavy. The contents of the Memory would be downloaded into the Post"s fabric and transcribed on its walls, in images timeless enough to withstand further linguistic drift. Nothing else could be written or drawn on the surfaces of thePost-certainly nothing made by the inhabitants of this place. What had they to write or draw?
What did they need to read, save the glorious progress of mankind?
The drone couple had moved on. More ugly shaven heads moved past him, all alike, meaningless.
Later that night, when the Post"s sourceless light dimmed, Hama watched the drones dance their wild untutored tangos, sensual and beautiful. He clung to the thought of how he had doomed the lovers: their shocked expressions, the way they had grabbed each others" arms, their distress.
After another sleep, La-ba and Ca-si were thrust out of the Observation Post.
To La-ba, stiff in her hardsuit, it was a strange and unwelcome experience to pa.s.s through the Woven s.p.a.ce sh.e.l.l of the Post, to feel gravity shift and change, to feel up become down.
And then she had to make sense of a floor that curved away beneath her, to understand that the horizon now hid what lay beyond rather than revealed it.
Only one of them, La-ba or Ca-si, would come back-one, or neither.
This was the Cull.
Crimson fog glowed around La-ba.
The air was racked by huge storms. Far below she saw the smooth glint of this world"s core, a hard plain of metallic hydrogen, unimaginably strange. Above her huge black clouds jostled, squirming like We-kus in the mud. Lightning crackled between and beyond the clouds.
Rain slammed down around her, a hail of pebbles that glowed red-hot. They clattered against the smooth skin of the Post, and her hard-suit. The clouds were a vapor of silicates.
The rain was molten rock laced with pure iron.
The Post was a featureless ball that floated in this ferocious sky, a world drifting within a world. A great cable ran up from the floor before her, up into the crowded sky above her, up-it was said-to the cool emptiness of s.p.a.ce beyond. La-ba had never seen s.p.a.ce, though she believed it existed.
La-ba, used to enclosure, wanted to cringe, to fall against the floor, as, it was said, some infants hugged the smooth warm walls of the Birthing Vat. But she stood tall.
A fist slammed into the back of her head.
She fell forward, her hardsuited limbs clattering against the Woven s.p.a.ce floor.
There was a weight on her back and legs, pressing her down. She felt a scrabbling at her neck. Fingers probed at the joint between her helmet and the rest of the suit. If the suit was breached she would death at once. She did not resist.
She felt the fingers pull away from her neck.
With brisk roughness she was flipped on her back. Her a.s.sailant sat on her legs, heavy in his hardsuit. Rock rain pattered on his shoulders, red-gleaming pebbles that stuck for a second before dropping away, cooling to gray.
It was, of course, Ca-si.
"You un-hunted me," he said, and his words crackled in her ears. "And now you un-resist me." She felt his hands on her shoulders, and she remembered how his skin had touched hers, but there was no feeling through the hardsuits. He said, "You crime if you un-death me. You crime if you let me death you."
"It is true." So it was. According to the Doctrine that shaped their lives, it was the duty ofthe strong to destroy the weak.
Ca-si sat back. "I will death you." But he ran his gloved hands over her body, over her b.r.e.a.s.t.s, to her belly.
And he found the bulge there, exposed by the contoured hardsuit. His eyes widened.
"Now you know," she screamed at him.
His face twisted behind the thick plate. "I must death you even so."
"Yes! Death me! Get it over!"
".. . No. There is another way."
There was a hand on Ca-si"s shoulder. He twisted, startled. Another stood over them, occluding the raging rock clouds. This other was wearing an ancient, scuffed hardsuit. Through a scratched and starred faceplate, La-ba made out one eye, one dark socket, a mesh of wrinkles.
It was the Old Man: the monster of whom infants whispered to each other even before they had left the Birthing Vat.
Ca-si fell away from her. He was screaming and screaming. La-ba lay there, stunned, unable to speak.
The Old Man reached down and hauled La-ba to her feet. "Come." He pulled her toward the cable that connected the Post to s.p.a.ce.