Demons' World

Chapter Eleven

The day after the Forager’s Bacchanalia Manager Purvis called Thorburn, Blane and Rogers into his office. The three leaders left their groups speculating on what lay in store for them. Other group leaders had already been briefed; more would be given their instructions later in the day.

“It’s another big one, you see,” said Julia confidently.

Old Chronic cackled wheezingly. “Must take all we can mine afore the Demons step on us, eh, Stead?”

The oldster shot a malevolently arch look at Stead.

He’d sighted his first Demon on his last Forage and he’d had to stand drinks all around his group, but they still liked to dig slyly at him. That was one of the tricks of the trade, a morale booster, one of the hazards of life that set these men and women apart from their warren-dwelling fellows.

Stead didn’t mind that. Not now. His values had been brutally altered since he’d joined the ranks of the Foragers and Hunters.

He felt their pride. A twisted force of… circumstances, pride, maybe. But it uplifted them and gave them courage in the bright places of the Outside.

He gladly shared in it. He was a comrade, now.

The extent of that comradeship, its real meaning, was highlighted for him in a few gruff words from Cardon.

Vance had lounged across in the Hunters’ anteroom, grim and seamed, the essence of toughness, the veteran Forager, and bent down to Cardon. Stead caught the swift, low words.

“That bald-headed pal of yours never knew how near he was to his come-uppance. Lucky for him you stopped him killing Stead.”

“You saw?”

“My job, inside as well as out. The womanising angle doesn’t concern me, only his life. His two watchdogs look after that.”

“I see.” Cardon’s black eyebrows drew together as he glanced covertly at Stead. Stead’s face, with its assumed air of negligence, apparently satisfied him. “Stead’s a Forager comrade and in my own group. That bald-headed fellow is a fine man, born organizer, marvelous orator, but he’s a worker. I couldn’t let Stead be killed, could I?”

Should he let Cardon know he knew what had happened? The problem bothered Stead as they sat there waiting for the orders that would send them Outside to face the horrors lurking there, the Scunners and the Yobs, the Rangs… and the Demons.

Cardon settled the problem.

Vance leaned back and Cardon said across the gap, low and yet in that Forager’s penetrating whisper that would carry in the reaches of Outside without disturbing the life that festered there, “Stead, forget it all, understand? You’ll be all right.”

So Stead could only say, as a Forager must, “Thank you Cardon. I assure you I followed you because I thought you were going back to the group. You’re—”

“Just forget it, Stead. That’s all.”

Sitting back on the hard seat Stead felt the resentment coursing through his mind again. Forget it. Why, sure, that must be easy for him. He was a man without a memory. He was just a child, learning in a man’s world; what difference could he make to the great designs these men plotted in their nooks and crannies? He wanted to learn, to know, to understand. Simon and Delia had helped and taught him, but their teaching he found every day fell short of what his eyes and brain told him was true. Was all of life then a fraud? Were there always truths behind truths, one opening out of the next? Did men say one thing and do another, and was that expected of them?

Just when Honey came in and sat beside him he wasn’t sure; but slowly he turned his head to look at her, the cloud in his eyes a sure sign to her that his thoughts were lar away from what now mattered to her, increasingly and with more poignant force every day. Stead, for his part, knew obscurely that Honey looked more troubled and sad each day, but what the trouble was he didn’t know. And, naturally, no one would tell him.

They talked desultorily as they waited for Thorbum.

“More and more wavelength changes,” said Honey, steadfastly adhering to her radio-talk. “Something’s really messing up the air.”

“You should worry,” Julia chipped in, her blonde hair glinting, her fresh face flushed. “Lorna—she’s Rogers’ ra-darop—says that they met a nine-inch beam last trip. Nine inches above the ground! Think of it!”

“You’d never squeeze through that,” Old Chronic cackled. “Not with your figure.”

“Keep quiet, you old Scunner-bait!” snapped Julia. But Stead saw that she put both hands to her waist and pressed them down and in, smoothing. “I’ll be sliding through beam gaps when they feed you to the river.”

“River?” said Stead, politely.

“That’s where they drop corpses,” Cardon said, and jerked his thumb down. “Plunk ’em through the burial gaps into the river. Read a nice service over ’em and pipe an eyeful and then, forget them.”

“Lethe,” said Honey, with a little shiver. “That’s what the river’s called.”

Stead was about to ask where it went when Thorbum and the other leaders reappeared. At once the casualness went out of the talk; the atmosphere in the room grew taut with the knowledge that at last they would know where they were going on this trip. It might all too easily end in a death far away from the cleansing waters of the Lethe.

“A big one,” Thorburn told his group as they gathered around him at one of the briefing tables. Old Chronic shuffled his maps out, sniffing and clicking his dentures. Vance sat relaxed, lounging, but his fierce eyes glittered on Thorbum with a vigilance that chilled. Sims and Wallas sat together, erect, watching Thorburn’s face, taking all they wanted from there. Cardon crouched a little in his seat, his hand fingering the worn handle of his machete, his brows a black bar tufting over his eyes. Julia and Honey spread out their logs ready to record wave-lengths and radarop notices of beam positions. Their slender hands moved surely and with purpose, yet they contrasted strongly with the square brown hands of the men.

They were a team, this group. Vance and Stead were now full members, and each individual fitted in like the sliding mechanism of a clock, each party devoted to its task and all depending on the efficiency of each single member.

It was, Stead decided, listening to Thorburn, a good feeling.

Thorburn spoke crisply and yet matter-of-factly, not overly stressing any one particular aspect of the Forage, yet at every word that good feeling leached out of Stead as though his strength of purpose had become a sponge to absorb and let go at the slightest pressure. Appalled, he looked forward to a return to the nightmare world of Outside. His fear uncoiled in him with a physical pain in the pit of his stomach, soggy, dull, shaming. In the level words of Thorbum, the leader, the man who would take them out again from the warrens into the outer runnels, Stead could find no comfort but only the final sentence of a death he could not face.

Out there were Scunners. Out there were Yobs. Out there were Rangs and all the human enemies of the Empire of Archon.

And… there were Demons.

No. He couldn’t go out again. He couldn’t. That was all there was to it.

He made his mind up in a single chaotic moment of confusion and fear and pain. He put a trembling hand down onto the seat of his chair to press himself up. He would rise and tell them he wasn’t going out again… not again. Not any more.

He’d get Simon and Delia to intervene. They’d understand. They’d fix it. He must have done his full tour as a Forager now; he must have done. His arm straightened to push himself up, and—

And Honey lightly tapped the inside of his elbow, his arm bent, and he remained sitting down, feeling foolish, casting a sideways glance at her, his face burning, a roaring in his ears and the shakes flowing all across his thighs. Honey put her small cool hand on his knees. She pressed hard; she dug her fingernails in. She dug as though her shapely hand had become on a sudden the rending fangs of a Scunner.

Her face, raised to his from her wave-length logs, held a long, aloof look of complete understanding and compassion, and of absolute withdrawnness and disinterest. Stead met that look; he matched it. He drew in a dragging lungful of air, coughed, wiped his mouth with a hand that did not quite tremble, and then put his own hand on Honey’s fingers clamping into his knee.

“Thanks, Honey.”

“It happens to all of us,” she said, softly, allowing the intimacy between them to flower as a precious bloom apart I mm thfe others of the group. “I know. Thorburn knows, too. We all do.” She lifted her hand from his knee and, for a queer split-second instant her hand trembled against his. Then, with ii quick pat, she had withdrawn, was turning back to her logs. “You’ll be all right, now, Stead.”

“Diane and Rogers and D’Arcy and a number of other groups are co-operating. There will be a large military escort and as many trucks as we need.” Thorburn cracked a gritty smile. “Not so much marching this time. You’ll be glad of that, for one, Old Chronic.”

“That I will,” huffed and puffed Old Chronic, putting on the act, pretending to be the old hasbeen he very nearly was, in all truth.

“We’re going in and establishing the usual forward depot. We’re likely to be Out for a month or more. Depends on mining progress with the main party.”

“Main party?” That was Cardon, sharp and edgy.

Thorburn leaned back, tossing down the pencil he had been using. “Main party. The other day Boris marched in with full sacks, and with only three men left of his group.”

He quietened the astonished, shocked exclamations.

“Boris had had to go into the Outside and ran into trouble. Rangs. But he brought back sacks of berries.”

“Berries!”

Thorburn looked calmly on their excitement, their flushed faces, fists banging the tables, curses and ejaculations. Everyone—everyone except Stead—seemed filled with a violent storm of emotion and excitement… and dread.

“You know the value of a sackful of berries.” Thorburn glanced at Stead. “No? Well, after the celebrations in the Controllers’ quarters, the stock of berries will have been drastically reduced. I’ve heard that the Captain and his Crew are particularly partial to berries, particularly so.”

They all laughed, all except Stead. He stared about, patiently, waiting for them to tell him and yet annoyed and angry and ashamed, now, that he did not know the most elementary things of the world, things that everyone else knew and took for granted. It all made him very insignificant.

Then Julia leaned across and whispered to Thorburn. The leader’s massive head nodded briefly. He looked back at Stead. “What you have to know about berries, Stead, is that they are among the most valuable commodities Foragers can bring in. Automatically they are the personal property of the Captain. For us… well, for us they represent an extra hazard in collecting them.”

“We do the dirty work and collect them,” Cardon spoke savagely and almost incoherently. “And the blasted Captain takes them all for his own pleasure.” He paused, and then said, “Well, nearly all.” Then he laughed. Thorburn fixed him with an eye and Cardon slumped in his seat, his hand caressing that wickedly-sharp machete.

“Don’t say anything you’ll be sorry for, Cardon.” He turned to Stead. “Berries grow on things called trees that the immortal being sometimes creates on the Outside. But this means we have to venture right out where the Demons can see us.” He stopped, looking levelly at Stead. “You know, now, what that means.”

“Yes,” said Stead, on a breath. “Yes, I know.”

A Forager rolled across to their table, cursing furiously and beating at his camouflage cape that nearly had him on his nose twice. “Get back down, you pesky Rang-disease-ridden-Scunner-bait! Get down there where you belong!” Bang! He hit the cape a great flat-handed blow, knocked it away from where a licking flap crept around his ankle to trip him. “I’ll show you who’s the master around here!”

“Hullo, Boris,” called Thorburn. “Glad to have you along.”

In Boris, Stead saw elements of Thorburn and Vance and Old Chronic. Boris, like Thorburn, was a leader and held himself with a leader’s authority. Like Vance, he brooded grim and frightening in his uniform and weapons and armor, grim, seamed, and a veteran. But, like Old Chronic, he was ageing and growing slow, losing some of essential flashing mobility of the expert Forager.

“You mean Boris is coming along, too?” demanded Julia.

Thorburn nodded. “He knows where the berries are growing. He’ll take us.”

Old Chronic snuffled his maps forward. “Mark it on here. I can take you out.”

Boris said, “Delia—she was my navigator—didn’t come out from under a Rang’s claws. I’ll take you.”

After that there was no further dissent. Manager Purvis and the Controller Commander were going on the forage and as Stead mounted into Thorburn’s group’s truck, he saw the size and extent of the convoy. There must have been over a hundred trucks. As each one pulled out past the blue light and the barrier rose swishing the gas curtain away, the sentries turned out the guard and gave a ceremonial send-off.

No doubt they were happy to do so, being thankful they weren’t going Outside with the Foragers.

The soldiers cleared a good path and the trucks rumbled through long echoing runnels. They made good time and pulled at last into a flat, open expanse with the roof safely ten feet above their tops. Water, gas and electricity supplies were tapped, with a suitable “thank you” to the immortal one’s prescience in placing them here. The camp grew, pickets were posted and duty rotas issued. So far everything had gone with a reasuring familiarity. Stead’s fears, alive within him, slept.

Boris’s three survivors from his last disastrous forage had joined Thorburn’s group as a sub-group with Boris as subgroup leader. All told, there were thirteen men and women marching out in the darkness of the world of runnels beneath the world of buildings searching for a wealth of berries. Thirteen.

The three latecomers, veterans all, were Jan and Moke, taciturn, rubbery little men, and Sylvi, with brown hair and bright eyes and a body as tough as a man’s. They fitted in quietly and inconspicuously.

By the time they all set off down the lead-off runnel where engineers had strung lights, Boris had his cape tamed. “Wasn’t due for a new one for another three years. But that eternally-damned Rang ripped my old one up, very painful—and I inherited this little blighter.”

Thorburn directed Sims and Wallas into the lead. Car-don acted as rear marker. Between these two extremes the others marched as they wished, for now.

A disagreeable lump had formed a hard knotty little ball * and lodged in the center of Stead’s chest, just below his breastbone. Although the lump snuggled in his chest it had sprouted a smaller twin brother that clogged in his throat. He kept on swallowing, but both lumps stayed there. He supposed that he was too afraid to feel fear; he’d gone beyond that tenuous dividing line.

At every step he expected the ghastly form of a Scunner to rattle out on him, seeking, clutching, rending. But, in a way he could not explain and hadn’t the courage to pry into, he knew for certain that he mustn’t own to his fear, mustn’t turn tail and run, when Honey marched at his side.

The swollen party reached a wooden wall, very dusty, with discarded Flang skins crackling like broken glass beneath their feet. When Thorburn ordered the lights doused that eerie, pallid, blue-white illumination crept out again from the world of buildings beyond the wooden wall. Out there lay—Outside.

And yet… and yet Stead knew with a stark dread that he would have to go out there. It had been carefully explained to him. The immortal being created these strange objects called trees and placed them in the world of buildings. To reach them and their precious crop of berries men must grope out into the full sight and range of the Demons. There was no other way.

Jan and Moke, Boris’s men, passed forward, each carrying a sack, full, brilliantly banded in red paint, the word poison prominent in white and black.

Sylvi said, “We’ll be only too happy to do this. Delia was my sister.”

Forager engineers had cut an exploratory hole the previous night. Julia stepped back from the round inhibitingly inviting orifice, said, “All clear. No beams.”

“They’re not on to us yet, then.” Thorburn hitched at his weapons belt, looked back slowly along the line of expectant faces, then with a swift decisive movement ducked his head and vanished through the hole.

In his turn, tremblingly but firmly, Stead squeezed through the hole into the Outside.

At once he looked up. But the dimness precluded any sight of the ceiling; the whole vast space before lay shrouded in shadow. He felt the first faint prickings of relief. At least, rooflessness had not attacked him.

Vance stayed closed up to Stead.

The line of men stepped forward across a coarse tufty surface of knee-high stems. They marched through bands of different colored stems and with each change, however dimly perceived in the faint ghostly lighting, their camouflage capes changed to conform.

Thorbum beckoned, a single swift overarm that, in the drilled and rehearsed sign-language of Foragers, meant, “Close up. Flankers out.”

They clustered at the foot of a square wooden tower that soared into the dimness above them. Thorburn checked batteries. Then the antigravs were switched on and the men rose into the air. Up and up they ascended with the smooth wooden tower flowing downward past them. Boris, who had taken over the lead, halted them with a single wrist-flick. Jan and Moke had vanished before the ascent had begun, going off with their poison sacks.

The silence, the dimness, the rustling furtiveness of every movement, came home to Stead in a strange and chilling miasma of fear and shame-bolstered courage.

This was a Special Forage, with a vengeance.

Then they had scrambled over the edge of a vast wooden plateau that stretched away before them into the dimness. Walking across it was a strange experience; the wood had been covered with some tacky substance only partially rubbed smooth. Boris halted, pointed upwards. Stead craned his head back and stared.

So that was a tree.

There had been a Tree in the garden that had brought the Captain and his Crew to Earth, he recalled, and wondered if that Old Tree had looked like this. It grew up out of a solid glass-like object fully eighteen feet high, soaring up and away and spreading gnarled branches out above them, its top lost in the dimness. Brown were those branches and each branch was covered with pallid yellow and green leaves each the size of a dining room table cloth. But they did not take Stead’s attention. He looked up and he saw myriad shining scarlet berries, round and juicy and glistening, hanging in great clusters from every nodule of those branches.

Setting to work with the others, climbing up on antigrav and plucking the berries, carefully, as he had been told, putting them with caution into his sack, he was struck by the plump juiciness of the berry, the feel of sweet goodness within. He wondered what they tasted like.

As each consignment of full sacks was stacked below, a transport party formed up and carried them back to the hole in the wooden wall. Soon Stead found himself transferred to this duty. He made six trips. On the seventh, with a returning group of Jan and Moke, their poison sacks laid aside for full sacks, and Honey and Vance, he was halfway from the tree to the drop when Julia’s voice shrilled, faint and attenuated by distance from the hole. “Alarm!”

He heard no more. The ground beneath his feet trembled. A breath of air blasted across the surface, dragging at hiS camouflage cape. Honey gasped a single short cry, chopped off by rigorous Forager training.

Every ear strained, every sense jumped alert. A monstrous creaking noise blasted at them from the far distance away from the hole.

“Dark glasses ready!” snapped Vance, taking over the lead at this moment of crisis. “There will be light soon. Now, run!”

Shambling, they ran for the edge of the wooden plateau and the drop beyond.

The light, when it came, crashed with actinic violence across his eyes. He fumbled his dark glasses on in haste, nearly dropping them, blinded by sweat and shaking with fear.

When he could see again Jan and Moke were about to drop over the edge some hundred yards away. Vance was tugging at him and Honey had slung her own sack onto her back and had grabbed his.

“Come on, man. Run!” Vance looked back and up.

Stead could not do so, but he ran. He knew at what Vance looked back… and up.

Through the air above his head whistled and roared a frightful force, a blast of air, a sensation of wind buffeting around him. The wooden plateau shook under his feet. And ahead… ahead— A great white roll swooped down out of the air, lay full length in a crushing blow across Jan and Moke, caught them and bent them and flung them to the floor.

The long roll rose slowly into the air, hovered above their heads. He saw with the numbness of complete fear that the end of the roll was grasped in the hand of a Demon. The arm reached back out of his vision and he could not swing his head to look.

“Up!” gasped Vance. “Up! It’s our only chance!”

Stead remembered the chilling swish of that knife wielded by a blood-crazed Demon thirsting for his life, and he triggered his antigrav and rose between Vance and Honey, shaking.

The blasphemous roll of white blasted through the air, flattened in rolling waves of sound against the wooden plateau. Torrents of displaced air shook him, whirled him over and over, broke Vance’s grip on his arm. Honey tumbled headlong away and still she gripped her full sack. The noise rolled around his head like the sound of splutter-guns fired in a constricting cavern—booming, hideous.

“Honey!” he called despairingly.

She checked herself somehow, twisted her legs, began again to rise on antigrav. He couldn’t see Vance. Then he, too, was rising with Honey and the white roll went swish! crack! past below.

“There must be a roof we can shelter against up there!” he shouted to Honey, forgetting the sibilant Forager whisper in the terror of the moment.

The roof swooped down on them, white and flaky, with wide areas loose and ready to fall in powder. He bumped against it thankfully, regaining his breath, feeling his limbs once more coming under his control. Honey pressed close to him, her eyes behind the dark glasses wide and fearful. He took a deep breath and wiped the sweat away from his forehead. That first Demon he had seen had been unable to reach him flattened out against the ceiling. That gave him hope.

He remembered that he was a Man. He looked about him; he looked about, and he saw.

The Demon was very like a Yob, but for its size and its four uplifted front limbs and four limbs for locomotion. It was dressed in shapeless glittery clothes, much slit and pouched for pockets, the material straining now with the violence of the Demon’s movements. He could see the Demon’s uplifted crest, erect and fleshy, a dark glistening green, saw the streaky colors around the face, colors that could well be cosmetics. The thing’s flat tureen-like head sat squatly on its thick neck around which brilliant jewels flamed in a string of splendor. The four eyes were not symmetrical; two were opaque and atrophied, horn-covered, not used. And all the time the Demon snorted and gasped, breathing with a heavy rasping hiss and bubbling like a giant pot of stew.

Stead saw. He saw that the Demon was a real live being, a beast living in this room, in which he could now understand that the wooden plateau across which they had run was a table, that there were chairs in the room, and sideboards, carpets on the’floor, windows to the room, curtained now and dark, a room not unlike the rooms he had seen in the warrens. And he was an insignificant figure bumping against the ceiling like a fly.

The Demon slowly climbed from chair to table and that creaking sounded hollow and ghostly to Stead. The Demon lifted a long wooden pole, tipped with what Stead could now perceive to be a broomhead. The bristles, twelve feet long, scraped across the ceiling, dislodging much white plaster, creating a cloud, rustling and clacking past them.

“We can’t stay here.” Honey grasped his arm. “There’s a hole. Come on!”

Together they wriggled across the ceiling, away from the horrific giant broom, squirmed through a hole into a dark world they understood.

Here dust and plaster and dirt festooned everywhere. Their lights threw up wooden walls, rough floors, crevices littered with flang skins and with the red reflected glare from faceted watching eyes.

“Trigons,” Honey said, drawing her splutter-gun forward. “Nasty brutes. Spin webs. Got a filthy bite.” She stared around, cool now and calculating, back in the world she knew. “Thank the immortal being Scunners can’t get in here. But we can’t stay.”

A clinging strand of some sticky, soft substance brushed across Stead’s face and he jerked back, repelled. He brushed a hand to one side, saw in the radiance of his headlamp the white slithery strands trailing away like thrown ribbons at Bacchanalia. They caressed his hands and arms, stuck, clung, would not be stripped free.

“They’re shooting their webs at us. We’ll have to get out of here, fast.”

“Well, we can’t go back down the hole.” Stead said that with complete conviction. He couldn’t face the Demon again.

“We’ll go on up,” Honey said firmly. “Work our way through the runnels and rejoin the group.” She moved purposefully forward up a sloping mound of crumbling rubble leading to a wooden wall. “I hope Thorburn and the others got in all right.”

On hands and knees up the tricky slope, unwilling to drain their antigrav batteries, they scrambled along. The wooden wall had been split in the long ago and through the crack they could just edge carefully. Watching Honey’s slim figure determinedly pushing forward, Stead suddenly realized he no longer held his sack. He made a decision, then, that was another milestone along his path to independence.

“We’re in a tough situation, Honey. I think it would be best for you to drop your sack.”

“But,” said Honey. “But… full sacks?”

“I know. But our lives depend on quick movement. Drop it here. Now.”

She obeyed him without further protest. But a strange glow crept into her face. Stead thrust that aside, concentrated on bashing his machete through the flimsy last strands of wood and webs opposing him. A couple of Trigons stirred and spat. Honey ducked and the rustling webs stranded away above her head. Stead, flowing into action, triggered a quick burst. The splutter-gun in that confined space made nearly as much noise as a Demon.

Light, a bright but yellow light, spilled through the hole he had made. Cautiously, wearing his dark glasses, he put his head through.

Directly before him a bright blue wall towered away and up and curved over in a multitude of small folds, some fifty feet above. Behind him extended a highly polished, reddish, wooden wall. The yellow light lit everything softly through the dark glasses, and the floor, bare and shining, could not conceal danger.

“I’m going up,” Stead said. Confidence flowed back. He was going to fight his way out of this and rejoin the group, and that would show his comrades that he was a real Forager, full sacks or no blasted full sacks.

“Hurry. The Trigons are stirring.”

Stead put his hand down on the edge of the hole and pushed himself up. The bright blue wall lapped down over the floor and he trod on it, regaining his balance. It felt soft through his Hunting boots. He turned to reach out to help Honey. Her head showed through the hole, her face, white but resolute, staring at him.

The blue wall moved.

The ground trembled. The blue on which he stood jerked, throwing him on his face. Automatically, he hung on, digging his hands into the material. The blue wall (lowed. Above him it shifted aside, revealing a sudden disastrous vision of immense distances, a high white vastness raking away to a ceiling impossibly far away.

The blue material shifted beneath him. He felt its upward movement through every pore in his body. Sweat sprang, wet and dripping, upon his face. He hung on, looking down, seeing the floor sweep away, drop and dwindle. That reddish wall flowed downward too, appeared as a sudden white expanse extended away into the distance.

And still he was jerked up, hanging on, wondering, gripping the blue material.

Comprehension hit him with the subtlety of a gunbutt across the neck.

He was clinging to a Demon’s clothing.

He was being dragged up and onto the back of a Demon.

The yellow light blossomed into unbearable brilliance.

Far below—far, far below—he caught a last frenzied glimpse of Honey, staring up at him out of her hole in the floor.