The warrens seemed unreal to Stead.
Manager Purvis called him into the office and took no pleasure in ripping him to pieces.
“You didn’t have to explain to a supercilious Controller Commander that one of your men had seen a Demon, and been seen in return. Thorburn reported the incident in as lie was bound to do.” Purvis pushed back in his chair and glowered up at Stead standing unhappily before him.
“Thorburn knew that once the Demons sight us they go on a determined all-out effort to kill us all. But you try telling that to a Controller!”
“They don’t believe in Demons.”
“Of course they don’t. They can’t. How could they, stuck in the warrens or the outside immediately surrounding the warrens? The Commander pulled out because we had been betrayed by the Yobs.” Purvis thumped the table. “That’s one of the few times in my life I’ve been glad to see Yobs!”
“But can’t we persuade the Controllers that there are Demons? Can’t we—”
“We can’t. And it isn’t our job to try. Our job is to go out and Forage and return with full sacks. That and nothing more. Controller Wilkins accepted the Yob report; I doubt that the Commander bothered to repeat the story of the’ Demon. Y’know, Stead, you’ve been extremely lucky.”
Stead supposed that he had.
“The Controllers consider themselves a superior form of life, Stead. Oh, I know you’ve been in the inner warrens with them and you speak like a Controller. But you’re a Forager. From the reports I’ve had on you so far, an extremely able one. Until this last fiasco. You’ve got to remember that you are a Forager. You’ll live longer that way.”
Stead nodded slowly, reluctantly. He had to agree with old Purvis, at least in part, but he could never renounce his affinities with the Controllers. They had taught him and they had taught him well, and he must not neglect the fact he tended now more often to overlook—that he was out with the Foragers only for one tour of duty. After that he’d go back to Simon’s laboratory and Delia would enter the final stages of bringing back the memory of his past. He still wanted that to happen, but without the consuming passion the revelation of those hidden days had once held for him.
How she was going to do it he hadn’t the slightest idea. He knew only that she could, and would.
“Right, Stead. Be off with you. You’ve caused me enough trouble with your special guards and surveillance that… ah hmm! Well? What are you waiting for? Rang’s dinner? Be off!”
Stead went.
Special guards? Surveillance?
Well, there was Vance. Was that what Purvis meant? It must be; it had to be.
In the days that followed Stead developed his Forager’s eternal head-swinging habit into something that remained with him even inside the most secure burrow. Everyone he saw wore to his sensitive perceptions the sinister aspect of a spy, someone sent to watch over him and to prevent him from learning.
For that, surely, could be the only reason the Controllers had set watchdogs on him. They might just as well have set watch-Rangs; after a week or so Stead had picked out the men he suspected.
His suspicions crystallized the night of the Forager bac-chanalia.
Ostensibly the celebrations were in honor of the anniversary of the landing on Earth of the immortal being’s garden. Farther in among the Controllers’ warrens, elaborate rituals were being gone through; down in the Captain’s cabin impressive processions wound through the lighted streets, chanting hosts and singing choirs celebrating the auspicious day. Astromen came into their own this day.
Huge replicas of that instrument that hung at Astroman Nav’s waist and had so puzzled Stead would be borne in stately procession, illuminated by spotlights, scented by sweet-burning aromatic woods. An instrument of potent power, it was, said to have guided the garden to its resting place on Earth.
After the solemn rituals would follow the parties.
Sorry as he was to miss all that splendor and color, that pageantry and tradition, Stead did not regret it for an instant. Instead of that, he had the Foragers’ Bacchanalia.
Ostensibly the Foragers and Hunters, too, celebrated the anniversary of the garden’s landing on Earth; in fact, the day had become through long usage and custom in the wilder sections of the warrens a day of license and jollity, when inhibitions were flung aside and wine and laughter and carelessness ruled.
Caught up in the excitement of preparation and then in the fever of participation, Stead allowed himself to be borne along in the center of Thorburn’s group. Even on such a day, a group of Foragers tended to stick together.
Everywhere the electrics burned. Everywhere flushed faces and laughing mouths and bright eyes brought laughter and jollity to the warrens. Many people wore fancy dress. The heaters burned at full power, reckless of the drain on the cables looped through into the world from the world of buildings by the designing hand of the immortal being. This day no one recked the cost.
Brass bands marched and counter-marched, stunning the overheated air with music and competing brassily with one another for unheeding ears. Foolish papier mache masks grinned and bumbled along, brilliantly colored, eliciting shrieks of laughter and shudders of revulsion. Tickling feather screechers unrolled as youngsters puffed out their cheeks. Food and wine were dispensed on a lavish scale. The aromas of cooking food, sizzling fat, the sweet heady scent of wine, the flat taste of dust in the heated atmosphere, the myriad perfumes of scented women, all combined with the stink of human sweat into a nasal orgy.
Stead pushed along with his group and was pushed along. Painted women clutched his arm. Screechers unrolled, pecking his face, making him dodge, laughing. Someone blew a huge brass snort in his ear and he jumped and Honey dragged him away from the brass band, laughing.
They ate magnificently from nookside tables piled with the warrens’ profusion. Wine flowed. Stead drank as his companions drank, laughing.
Thorburn boasted for them, “All this wealth, all this food and wine—all of it brought here through the work of the Foragers. The Foragers keep men alive on Earth!”
And no one could gainsay that.
Honey held his arm, laughing up at him. She wore a parti-colored, red and black costume. Her legs—one black, the other red—were encased in shrunken-on tights. Her body, quartered red and black, and her head, hooded in red and black, moved in jig time to different strains of music as band succeeded band. Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks flushed. Stead had not missed the single glance from Julia, at once surprised and then femininely understanding; he had not missed it but he had not comprehended it.
Honey, the reserved, dark, shyly withdrawn Honey, flamed in livid electric brilliance this day.
Stead had contented himself with his old blue shirt and slacks, but among the Foragers that old clothing of his Controller days was itself a fancy dress. He didn’t bother; he smiled and drank wine and let Honey tug him along with the others.
A surging, swaying, singing tide of maskers crossed their path, bursting from a cross-runnel. They trundled barrels of wine on handcarts and took their refreshment with them. Everywhere, Stead could see men and women hugging each other, meeting and parting, dancing on, linking hands in long chains, swinging and breaking free. The resemblance to the stately dances of the Controllers struck him with in-congruousness. Here, men and women danced with an abandon, a verve, a vivacity that would have gonged a harsh note of discord in the more delicate world of the Controllers.
And then, flushed and laughing, reeling just a little, Stead was dragged away from Honey and from his group. He saw Thorburn’s massive head, the mouth open and shouting jovially to Julia, and then the group vanished behind a prancing wall of men and women intoxicated as much by excitement as by wine.
Without a qualm, he joined a jigging line, went bellowing up a lighted runnel. A goblet was thrust into his hand. He drained it on a laugh, danced on.
He had no idea where he was. Each side of the runnel contained the usual rows of wooden doors and glazed windows. Lights blazed, brilliant vegetable growths depended in artfully wrought wreaths and streamers before every door. Gaily embroidered cloths hung down; banners waved in the electric fans’ continuous currents of air. People surged around him bemusingly; noise clanged in his ears incessantly.
Spinning, he staggered from the end of a dancing line as slippery fingers failed to hold him; spinning, he staggered away into a shadowed crevice between cubby holes. He leaned against the wall, whooping, panting for breath, feeling the wine clouding in his brain. This, indeed, was life!
“More wine!” bellowed a fat, paunchy worker, waving his goblet frenziedly. Stead felt the deep sympathy of complete understanding with the fat, sweaty man. If he didn’t have wine immediately, the tragedy would be beyond a mortal’s bearing.
“Wine for my friend!” shouted Stead, looking blearily about, angry that no one should leap forward with ready cup.
A lean, rascally-looking fellow, a silversmith’s apprentice, rolled forward, splashed wine liberally into the fat man’s goblet and over the stone paving. A girl slithered up behind him, thrust her bare arms under the ruby stream, head back, laughing, her red mouth open and shining, her eyes glittering. Then she sucked the glistening drops from the whiteness of her arms.
“More wine!” yelled Stead, lurching forward.
The girl turned with the speed of a Rang, saw him, gurgled deep in her throat. She thrust her hands under the spilling stream of wine, caught a splashing double-handful, swung towards Stead.
“Here! Here is wine for the good of your immortal soul!”
Scarcely knowing what he did, Stead bent, drank the warm sweet wine. The girl’s hands trembled against his mouth. Then they opened and ruby drops cascaded to the ground. She laughed. Looking up at her, still bent over, Stead laughed too.
Her brown, lusterless hair had been powdered with sparkling dust. Her yellow bodice, caught in a deep vee-shape at the neck by large scarlet buttons, had been half torn away. Her black skirt, short and shining, had been even further ripped up its side slit. She swayed there before him, laughing, disheveled, wanton, unknowable and… suddenly, a vivid reminder of Belle.
Her tongue flicked over her lips. She took one deep breath, and flung herself forward on Stead. He felt her arms about him, her hot breath on his face, a warm breathing aliveness that stirred a deep-sleeping demon within him.
“Come on, lover boy! Why so coy! This is bacchanal-come on!”
Vertigo seized Stead. His hands trembled. He bent forward with that hot breath of the girl breathing full on him from her open mouth. He bent forward without knowing why or what to do next.
Rough hands dragged the girl away, thrust her spinning and cursing to fall on one knee. She plunged one hand into her bosom, drew out a slender stiletto, lunged, shrilling curses, to her feet.
Stead sagged back, bemused.
The two men in tight-fitting black, with the square, patient, unemotional faces so much alike, took her by the arms. The stiletto dropped to ring against the flags. They dragged her off bodily. Stead caught a single glimpse of the girl’s contorted and frightened face before high black shoulders cut off that disturbing vision.
What they said to her he could not hear above the uproar cannonading down the runnels. But she cast one horrified look at Stead and then turned, all aquiver, ran as though a Rang trod her heels.
The two men in black regarded Stead for a long, scrutinizing moment, a moment that hung humming isolated from the bacchanalia all about. Then they turned as one, and marched off, keeping perfect step. Stead wiped a hand across his forehead. It dripped sweat.
So they were the Controllers’ watchdogs. Purvis had been right. He was being watched, and more than watched; Delia and Simon intended with utmost severity to prevent him learning anything of that forbidden country of the relationships between men and women.
As a character and a personality, Stead was a very immature being, newly born and still soaking up knowledge and understanding, still hazy about life. He stood swaying for a few indecisive moments. He supposed Simon and Delia had the right to order his life; after all, they had conjured it into being from the empty husk he had been. But something he could not define deep within his core rebelled at their high-handed treatment of him. It smacked of the master-slave relationship and, coming as it did on top of the revelations he had experienced in the outlook of the Foragers, presented him with a crisis of conscience.
These scientists of Archon—these earliest friends—must know what they were doing. Surely?
He felt a blazing impulse to rush out into the runnel, seize the first girl he happened across, bundle her into this dark cranny and there rip off all her clothes and so discover what mystery lay in a woman’s body that all the pictures and all the evasive answers could never give.
How could it be so important? The important things in life were eating and sleeping, drinking and having fun. The important things were going out into the Outside and proudly returning with full sacks. The really important aims of life were the learning of all that science could teach, the probing of the barriers of the unknown. But— But that brought him squarely back to where he had started.
Stead staggered out into the runnel, avoided a miraculously appearing dancing line, lurched away to find his comrades.
It was all too much for him. He would have to go along with Simon and Delia and wait patiently until they explained everything. Anything else, now, was far too difficult.
And as he went he hugged the knowledge of the Demons to himself. That, at any rate, was one area of knowledge where he was superior to them.
Not that it was doing him much good.
Finding his way back to streets and runnels he recognized took time. He passed endless rows of workers’ hovels where the pitiful evidences of their jubilation in bacchanalia, a tawdry reflection of the more robust Forager celebrations, might have filled him with sorrow and a pondering wonder had his mind not been seething with his own problems. These people had little to celebrate. Their lives grayed with daily toil, the fear of sickness, the never-ending search for that extra crust of bread, that extra blanket, that extra heating element.
No wonder, then, at bacchanalia they let their repressions pop.
At least the Foragers and Hunters met the danger and excitement of their lives with a consciousness that they were alive. The workers might as well be dead, most of the time, for all the difference it made to them.
The wine fumes coiled less chokingly about him now and his steps grew steadier. By the time he caught a glimpse of Cardon’s black-browed face, with Sims and Wallas with arms draped across each other’s shoulders, Stead was back to his usual self, or, rather, the self he had become out here with the Foragers. He hailed his comrades through the noise.
They were genuinely glad to see him.
“Hey, Thorbum! Here’s Stead!” and, “Hullo, Stead. Vance has been worried.” Cardon just eyed him and took a long throat-jerking swig at his goblet.
They were standing pushed back against the comer of a pastryshop where already the shelves had been covered by sheets of white paper, eloquent proof of their sold and eaten wares’ popularity. In this little eddy in the human stream Stead paused, regaining his breath, looking about for Honey and the others. He turned back, dodging a man wearing a papier mache mask six feet tall, leering and grinning and blowing an immense trumpet, and saw Cardon striding off, pushing his way through with the purpose of a man who would not be denied passage.
Chuckling at Cardon’s black-browed intentness, his brooding seriousness even in the midst of Bacchanalia, Stead followed.
What was it that Thorbum had said, off-handedly, without really thinking what he was saying? “Cardon is a man cherishing a secret sin.” Sins were acts and thoughts against the sublimity of the immortal being. That was what he’d learned with the Controllers, but among the Foragers, as Astroman Nav had direfully predicted, spiritual matters and the deeper genuflections to the immortal one were mere surface posturings, habits without conviction. That had shocked him. But he’d wit enough to see that Cardon wouldn’t cherish a secret sin against the immortal being. At least, Stead, with his new-found knowledge of his latter-day comrades, didn’t think so.
Sims and Wallas had vanished and Stead, pushing along in a roseate cloud of wine fumes and heady thoughts and the blackness of the deeper frustrations within him, supposed that Cardon was trying to catch up with the rest of the group.
Only when Cardon turned off quickly into a narrow crevice under the curving flight of stairs leading up to another level and, with a searching backward glance into the throng that missed Stead, was a hazy idea of another destination borne in on Stead. What was Cardon up to? The man slithered swiftly down a ramp of beaten earth; his cape swirled around the lightless corner and the way lay open and empty. Still with a betraying tremble in his legs, Stead started on down.
A hoarse shout, a blow, stunningly heavy across his neck, and then the greasy taste of earth in his mouth. A man’s foot, thick and clumsy in ill-fitting sandal, an inch from his face. The pressing feel of hands lifting, turning, bringing his face up into the light of an electric torch. The blinding brilliance of that light struck through in red whorls of agony past his closed eyelids.
“Who is he?”
“A dirty Controller spy. Dispose of him—quick!” A rough horny hand under his chin, jerking his head up cruelly. Sparks darting before his closed eyes. “Wait!”
The voice… the voice had to be Cardon’s. “I know him. The stranger. He knows nothing.” Another voice, thick and syrupy and laden with hate. “You’re right. He will know nothing when I’ve finished with him.”
“No, you fool! He has powerful connections.” Two soft yet firm pressures beside his eyes. “A thumb in his eye will stop him spying.”
“Don’t do it! You’ll precipitate—”
Stead heaved mightily, once. Then he was flat again on his back and a man’s foot pressed down without mercy on his chest.
“The people will not tolerate Controller spies!”
“He isn’t—at least, I don’t think so. But he’s followed everywhere by Controller watchdogs.”
“Them! Men who betray their own class.”
The slither of metal on stone. Something hard jabbed excruciatingly into his side. He tried to move, to roll over, to curl away from that relentless light. A voice called, faintly, some distance away.
“More! Two of ’em!”
“They’ll be his watchdogs; come on, man! Run!”
“I’m not leaving him.”
The sound of a scuffle, hard breathing, a curse, the slide and slither of feet on stone. Then, “All right, Cardon, but you’ll be sorry for this!”
The diminishing patter of feet. The darkness swamped back, blessed, cool, concealing darkness.
When his two watchdogs reached him, Stead was just staggering up, a hand to his head, swaying, staring blearily about. He wanted to be sick.
They didn’t speak to him. They waited, hovering, their hands under their black short-capes resting on gunbutts, watching. They hovered and waited and watched as Stead lurched unsteadily back into the lighted runnels and, filled with a horror he could not put name to, found his miserable way back to his group.
Truly, there was much to learn in this wicked world.