“You could escape with me,” he said, chiefly to test her reaction.
It was as he had hoped: “I don’t care what happens to all these stupid people, but I won’t be a party to murdering them!”
“I understand all that,” he said hastily. “We’ve been over this ground often enough. But can’t you see, Luang, I was only talking in general terms. I didn’t mean anything as crude as an open breakaway. I’m sure I can find a way to slip off without Biocontrol suspecting a thing. Smuggle myself aboard a Betelgeusean ship, for instance.”
“I’ve known Guards, some of whom have been on spaceport duty. They told me how carefully the Red Star folk are watched.”
“Are you sure Biocontrol will pull the switch?”
“Sure enough. They can take a final dose of medicine and flee in the other ships.”
“If those were sabotaged, though—?”
“Oh, not every man of them would ruin the world for sheer spite. Perhaps not even most. Especially if it meant their own deaths. But they all stand watches at the vats… and Dominic, all it needs is one fanatic, and there is more than one. No!” Luang discarded her cigaret and took his arm again, digging sharp nails into his flesh. “If ever I find you scheming any such lunacy, I will tell Kemul to break your neck. Now I am starving, and this is also the day when I should get my pill.”
Flandry sighed.
He let her go first down the ladder to the trail. They walked precariously, unused to such steepness, and entered the crowds at lower levels. An engineer, in gaily embroidered tunic and the arrogance of a well-paid position, had a way cleared for him by two brawny miners. A yellow-robed priest walked slowly, counting his beads and droning a charm; from a cave mouth several meters above the path, a wrinkled wizard in astrological cloak made faces at him. A vendor cried his wares of fruit and rice, carried up from the valley at the ends of a yoke. A mother screamed and snatched her child from the unfenced edge of a precipice. Another woman squatted in a tunnel entrance and cooked over a tiny brazier. A third stood outside a jabbering joy cave and propositioned a gaping yokel from some jungle village. A smith sang invocations as he thrust a knife blade into the tempering solenoid. A rug seller sat in a booth and called his bargains to every passerby. High overhead, a bird of prey soared among the last ragged mists. Sunlight struck its wings and made them gold.
From a vantage point Flandry could see how the city came to an end and the raw mountain slope stretched northward: cinders, pinnacles, and congealed lava flows. Across a few kilometers of wasteland he spied a concrete dyke, banking the magma channel. Smoke hazed it, as the liquid rock oozed downward and froze. Above all tiers of city and all naked scaurs lifted the volcanic cone. The wind was blowing its vapors away, which was one thing to thank the lean cold wind for.
“Oh. This is the dispensary. I may as well get my medicine now.”
Flandry stopped under the Biocontrol insigne. Actually, he knew, Luang had a couple of days’ grace yet, but the law permitted that much overlap. He also knew she had illicit pills and didn’t really need to buy her ration-but only a dead man could fail to do so without drawing the instant notice of the authorities. He accompanied her through the rock-hewn entrance.
The office beyond was small, luxuriously furnished in the low-legged cushions-and-matting style of Unan Besar. A door led to the living quarters which went along with this job; another door was built like a treasury vault’s. Behind a desk sat a middle-aged man. He wore a white robe with an open hand pictured on the breast, and his pate was shaven; but the golden brand was not on his brow, for employees like him were not ordained members of Biocontrol.
“Ah.” He smiled at Luang. Most men did. “Good day. I have not seen you before, gracious lady.”
“My friend and I are newly arrived.” With her to look at, Flandry didn’t think the dispenser would notice him much. She counted ten silvers, the standard price, down on the table. The dispenser didn’t check them for genuineness, as anyone else would have. If you passed bad money to Biocontrol, you’d be in trouble enough the next time! He activated a small electronic machine. Luang put her hands flat on a plate. The machine blinked and hummed, scanning them.
Flandry could imagine the system for himself. Her print pattern was flashed by radio to a central electronic file in Kompong Timur. In seconds the file identified her, confirmed that she was indeed ready for her ration, established that she was not wanted by the Guards, made the appropriate addition to her tape, and sent back its okay. As the machine buzzed, Luang removed her hands from it. The dispenser took her money and went to the vault, which scanned his own fingers and opened for him. He came back without the coins, the door closed again, he gave Luang a blue capsule.
“One moment, my dear, one moment. Allow me.” He bustled over to fill a beaker with water. “There, now it will go down easier. Eh-h-h?” Flandry doubted if he was as attentive to the average citizen. At least, not judging from the way he used the opportunity to do a little pinching.
“Where are you staying in our city, gracious lady?” he beamed.
“For now, noble sir, at the Inn of the Nine Serpents.” Luang was plainly unhappy at having to linger-but, equally plainly, you were never impolite to a dispenser. In law he had no rights over you. In practice, it was not unknown for a dispenser to block the signaler, so that GHQ never recorded a given visit, and then hand his personal enemy a capsule without contents.
“Ah, so. Not the best. Not the best. Not suitable at all for a damsel like yourself. I must think about recommending a better place for you. Perhaps we could talk it over sometime?”
Luang fluttered her lashes. “You honor me, sir. Alas, business compels me to hurry off. But… perhaps, indeed, later—?” She left while he was still catching his breath.
Once outdoors, she spat. “Ugh! I’ll want some arrack in my tea, to get the taste out!”
“I should think you would be used to that sort of thing,” said Flandry.
He meant it in all thoughtless innocence, but she hissed like an angry snake and jerked free of him. “What the blue deuce?” he exclaimed. She slipped into the crowd. In half a minute, he had lost sight of her.
IX
He checked his stride. Chattering brown people thronged by, forcing him off the trailstreet and onto a detritus slope. After some while, he realized he was staring past the stone wall which kept these rocks off terraces below, downward to an ore processing plant. Its stack drooled yellow smoke, as if ambitious to be a volcano too. Nothing about it merited Flandry’s unbroken attention.
Well, he thought in a dull and remote fashion, I still haven’t had my breakfast.
He began trudging over the scree, paralleling the trail but in no mood to go back and jostle his way along it. The downslope on the other side of the low wall became steeper as he went, until it was a cliff dropping fifty meters to the next level of dwellings. Stones scrunched underfoot. The mountain filled half his world with black massiveness, the other half was sky.
His first dismay-and, yes, he might as well admit it, his shock of pity for Luang and loneliness for himself-had receded enough for him to start calculating. Trouble was, he lacked data. If the girl had simply blown a gasket when he touched some unsuspected nerve, that was one thing. He might even use the reconciliation to advance his argument again, about escaping from Unan Besar. But if she had dropped him for good and all, he was in a bad situation. He couldn’t guess if she had or not. A man thought he understood women, more or less, and then somebody like Luang showed up.