The Earth Quarter
Damon Knight
The Niori permitted refugees from Earth to
live in their cramped little ghetto conditionally:
that they do so peacefully. But there will always
be patriotic fanatics, like Harkway and Rack,
who must disturb the peace....
The sun had set half an hour before. Now, from the window of Laszlo Cudyk's garret, he could see how the alien city shone frost-blue against the black sky; the tall hive-shapes that no man would have built, glowing with their own light.
Nearer, the slender drunken shafts of lamp posts marched toward him down the street, each with its prosaic yellow globe. Between them and all around, the darkness had gathered; darkness in angular shapes, the geometry of squalor.
Cudyk liked this view, for at night the blackness of the Earth Quarter seemed to merge with the black sky, as if one were a minor extension of the other—a fist of space held down to the surface of the planet. He could feel, then, that he was not alone, not isolated and forgotten; that some connection still existed across all the light-years of the galaxy between him and what he had lost.
And, again, the view depressed him; for at night the City seemed to press in upon the Quarter like the walls of a prison. The Quarter: sixteen square blocks, about the size of those of an Earth city, two thousand three hundred human beings of three races, four religions, eighteen nationalities; the only remnant of the human race nearer than Capella.
Cudyk felt the night breeze freshening. He glanced upward once at the frosty blaze of stars, then pulled his head back inside the window. He closed the shutters, turning to the lamp-lit table with its hopeless clutter of books, pipes and dusty miscellany.
Cudyk was a man of middle height, heavy in the shoulders and chest, blunt-featured, with a shock of greying black hair. He was fifty-five years old; he remembered Earth.
A drunk stumbled by in the street below, cursing monotonously to himself, paused to spit explosively into the gutter, and faded into the night.
Cudyk heard him without attention. He stood with his back to the window, looking at nothing, his square fingers fumbling automatically for pipe and tobacco. Why do I torture myself with that look out the window every night? he asked himself. It's a juvenile sentimentalism.
But he knew he would go on doing it.
Other noises drifted up to his window, faint with distance. They grew louder. Cudyk cocked his head suddenly, turned and threw open the shutters again. That had been a scream.
He could see nothing down the street; the trouble must be farther over, he thought, on Kwang-Chow-fu or Washington. The noise swelled as he listened: the unintelligible wailing of a mob.
Footsteps clicked hurriedly up the stairs. Cudyk went to the door, made sure it was latched, and waited. There was a light tapping on the door.
"Who is it?" he said.
"Lee Far."
He unlatched the door and opened it. The little Chinese blinked at him, his upper lip drawn up over incisors like a rodent's. "Mr. Seu say please, you come." Without waiting for an answer, he turned and rapped his way down into darkness.
Cudyk picked up a jacket from a wall hook, and paused for a moment to glance at the locked drawer in which he kept an ancient .32 automatic and two full clips. He shook his head impatiently and went out.
Lee was waiting for him downstairs. When he saw Cudyk open the outer door, he set off down the street at a dog-trot.
Cudyk caught up with him at the corner of Athenai and Brasil. They turned right for two blocks to Washington, then left again. A block away, at Rossiya and Washington, there was a small crowd of men struggling in the middle of the street. They didn't seem to be very active; as Cudyk and Lee approached, they saw that only a few were still fighting, and those without a great deal of spirit. The rest were moving aimlessly, some wiping their eyes, others bent almost double in paroxysms of sneezing. A few were motionless on the pavement.
Three slender Chinese were moving through the crowd. Each had a white surgeon's mask tied over his nose and mouth, and carried a plastic bag full of some dark substance, from which he took handfuls and flung them with a motion like a sower's. Cudyk could see now that the air around them was heavy with floating particles. As he watched, the last two fighters in the crowd each took a halfhearted swing at the other and then, coughing and sneezing, moved away in separate directions.
Lee took his sleeve for a moment. "Here, Mr. Cudyk."
Seu was standing in the doorway of Town Hall, his round-bellied bulk almost filling it. He saluted Cudyk with a lazy, humorous gesture of one fat hand.
"Hello, Min," Cudyk said. "You're efficient, as always. Pepper again?"
"Yes," said Mayor Seu Min. "I hate to waste it, but I don't think the water buckets would have been enough this time. This could have been a bad one."
"How did it start?"
"A couple of Russkies caught Jim Loong sneaking into Madame May's," the fat man said laconically. His shrewd eyes twinkled. "I'm glad you came down, Laszlo. I want you to meet an important visitor who arrived on the Kt-I'ith ship this afternoon." He turned slightly, and Cudyk saw that there was a man behind him in the doorway. "Mr. Harkway, may I present Mr. Laszlo Cudyk, one of our leading citizens? Mr. Cudyk, James Harkway, who is here on a mission from the Minority People's League."
Cudyk shook hands with the man, who had a pale, scholarly face, not bad-looking, with dark intense eyes. He was young, about thirty. Cudyk automatically classified him as second generation.
"Perhaps," said Seu, as if the notion had just occurred to him, "you would not mind taking over my duties as host for a short time, Laszlo? If Mr. Harkway would not object? This regrettable occurrence—"
"Of course," Cudyk said. Harkway nodded and smiled.
"Excellent." Seu edged past Cudyk, then turned and put a hand on his friend's arm, drawing him closer. "Take care of this fool," he said under his breath, "and for God's sake keep him away from the saloons. Rack is in town, too. I've got to make sure they don't meet." He smiled cheerfully at both of them and walked away. Lee Far, appearing from somewhere, trailed after him.
A young Chinese, with blood streaming brightly from a gash in his cheek, was stumbling past. Cudyk stepped away from the doorway, turned him around and pointed him down the street, to where Seu's young men were laying out the victims on the sidewalk and administering first aid.
Cudyk went back to Harkway. "I suppose Seu has found you a place to stay," he said.
"Yes," said Harkway. "He's putting me up in his home. Perhaps I'd better go there now—I don't want to be in the way."
"You won't be in the way," Cudyk told him. "What would you like to do?"
"Well, I'd like to meet a few people, if it isn't too late. Perhaps we could have a drink somewhere, where people meet—?" He glanced interrogatively down the street to an illuminated sign that announced in English and Russian: "THE LITTLE BEAR. Wines and Liquors."
"Not there," said Cudyk. "That's Russky headquarters, and I'm afraid they may be a little short-tempered right now. The best place would be Chong Yin's tea room, I think. That's just two blocks up, near Washington and Ceskoslovensko."
"All right," said Harkway. He was still looking down the street. "Who is that girl?" he asked abruptly.
Cudyk glanced that way. The two M. D.'s, Moskowitz and Estrada, were on the scene, sorting out the most serious cases to be carted off to hospital, and so was a slender, dark-haired girl in nurse's uniform.
"That's Kathy Burgess," he said. "I'd introduce you, but now isn't the time. You'll probably meet her tomorrow."