Karrel Goza finished filling the cart, wishing as he’d wished so many times before that the slave techs would finally come up with a machine capable of that noxious work; the fibers were tough, slippery, treacherous and finer than a woman’s hair; every mechanical forker they’d tried jammed after an hour or two. It took a man’s dexterity to manage the transfer. He kicked the gong to let the handler know and the cart purred off, a new one clanking into its place. Around him other forkers were working with steady minimal swings; another gong clanged, and a third after a silence so short that it seemed more like an echo than a sound in itself.
He coughed, felt a burning in his throat and lungs. The fumes from the vat were beginning to get to him. He looked around. The overseer was out of the room. That figured. The lazy bastard spent most of the day in his office, a glass-walled room raised fifty meters off the floor. He could sit in comfort and watch the forkers sweat. Karrel coughed again, cursed under his breath and climbed off the platform. There was a naked faucet waist-high on the wall near the only door. He turned the faucet on full so the water beat into the catch basin. Holding his breath, he slipped the mask off and slid the filterpack from its slot. He looked at the discolorations on both surfaces, swore again; he held the pack in the stream of water until some of the overload was soaked out of it. That only took care of the grosser particles, the absorption of the wad was a joke; he shook it, wondering what he was putting into his lungs. He swished it back and forth in the water, shook it again and clicked it home. The wetting was weakening it, he could see pulls and a small rip. He’d been asking for a replacement for three weeks now. Oversoul alone knew when he’d get it. Likely he’d have to buy a pack on the black market. If he could find one. Elli might be able to do it for him, get a filter from her Family. He splashed water on his face, coughed again, felt like he was trying to rip the lining from his throat. He pulled the mask back on; as bad as it was, breathing that miasma over the vats without any protection at all was a thousand times worse. He went back to work. Not much longer, he told himself. Hang on, Kar; twenty days. Twenty days and Elli will get her chance at Herk. Ah, to see him dangling head down in that vat.
2
“What?” Karrel Goza set his cup down, blinked wearily at his Ommar.
The Parlor was small and by intention intimate; the wallposts, the ceiling and its beams were carved and painted in jewel colors, small angular flower patterns on an angular emerald ground; a fire crackled cheerfully behind a semi-transparent shell guard; ancient tapestries hung from ceiling to floor, colors muted by time, still dark and rich. The Ommar sat in a plump chair, its ancient leather dyed a deep scarlet and mottled by decades of saddlesoap and elbowgrease, its arms and ornaments and swooping clawfooted legs carved from a brown wood age-darkened to almost-black. She was a small woman with a halo of fine white hair about a face dominated by huge black eyes, ageless eyes. She wore a simple white blouse, an old black skirt smoothed neatly about her short legs, legs too large for her size. She’d been a diver before she married into the Goza family, not one of the premiere Dallisses though she shared their arrogance; even now he could see the merm marks on the backs of her hands. She sniffed impatiently, repeated what she’d said.
“Youngers and middlers from Goza House have been running with the inklins. Gensi, Kivin, Kaynas, it’s an isya, I think, one just forming with Gensi as the Pole. Zaraiz, Bulun and half a dozen boys, they call themselves…” her weary wrinkled face lifted suddenly, lighted by the grin that made him and everyone else adore her when they weren’t afraid of her, “the Green Slimes, or something like that. They were in that hoohaw last night, dropping sludge bombs on the guard barracks. At least it wasn’t fire, they haven’t gone that far, both sets, it’s mischief still, but the inklins they’re mixing with aren’t playing, Kar. Nor are the bitbits. Streetgangs, tchah! what nonsense. You weren’t like that, much more sensible.”
Karrel Goza thought about a few of his exploits when he was a younger (which he fervently hoped she’d never find out about) and didn’t think he’d been all that sensible. He wasn’t too old to remember the feeling that he and his agemates were alone against a stodgy disapproving world, how they built up a powerful secret world of their own that no adult had access to. He couldn’t see this crop of pre-adults welcoming interference, but the world was infinitely more dangerous these days and the Ommar was right. Something had to be done. “Yizzies? Homemade or borrowed or what?”
“Gensi boasted she made her own; I suppose they all did, which means they’ve been stealing, there’s no other way they could have got the materials, you know very well no adult in this family has coin to throw away on idiocy like that.”
“Where are they keeping them?”
“Not in the House. I’d have the obscenities smashed if I could lay my hands on them.”
“The boys, do you know which is the leader?”
“Zaraiz Memeli, as much as any. That clutch of shoks, it’s not even an imitation isya and as for being a gang, tchah!” She leaned forward, urgent and more upset than he could remember seeing her, her tangled white brows squeezing against the deep cleft between them. “I am afraid of them, Kar. I know their faces, but not what they’re thinking, if they’re thinking at all; I look into those shallow animal eyes and I wonder if there’s anything but animal behind them.” She straightened her back. “In any case, they have to be stopped. Bad enough to have those street-sweepings making trouble. Tchah! Do you know what Herkken Daz will do to us if Sech Gorak finds one of our boys dead on the street or shoots one of them out of the sky? Goza House will be translated to Tassalga brick by brick. What’s left of it. I’m talking to you, do you know why? Because everyone here knows what you’re doing and I have this faint hope the boys will listen to you. If they don’t, I don’t know what to do. The girls…” she brushed a hand across her eyes, “the girls, ahh! Kar, they look at me… animal eyes, nothing there. I thought I knew girls, I don’t know these. Talk to them, Kar. If you think it would help, can you get that Indiz Dalliss to see them? You know who I mean.”
He sipped at the tea to cover his hesitation. After a minute, he said, “That might be difficult. The Huvved put a price on her head and the Jerk has doubled it.”
“Try.” Her voice was iron, her eyes pinned him.
“This is not a good time,” he said, “she won’t come.”
“What use are you Kar, if you can’t do this small thing for your Family? What do I say to your mother? We have protected him and lied for him, covered his shivery ass, and when we ask a small, a minute thing for us, his Family, what does he say? I can’t, he says.
“Let it lay, Ommar. Please.” His hand shook, tea splashed onto his knees.
“Why should I? What is more important that the moral discipline of your sisters, your nieces, your cousins?”
“I can’t tell you that. Please. I can’t.”
She relaxed, her back curving into the cushions. “I see. How long will you need cover this time?”
“I don’t know, maybe four, five days.”
“When?”
“When I’m called. I can’t say more.”
“Hmm. It will be better if we prepare for this.” She smiled, no glow to her this time, just a tight bitter twist of the lips. “You’ve been doing too much, Kar. You look like a walking ghost; no one will be surprised if you go down seriously sick. If I pull in some markers, I can set your cousin Tamshan in your place, so we don’t lose the earnings.”