Last night I dreamed about wanting to die, and not being able to ... an old, old dream. I woke up and couldn't get back to sleep.
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When I sleep tonight I suppose I'll dream about
ay 37.
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pumps. We reached the refinery today--the last outpost of the Company, and the last sign of
"civilization" we'll see. Armed guards greeted us at the dock when we arrived.
Fortunately Ang knew the password, or whatever it took for them to let us ashore. I never thought I'd be happy to be on Company ground again; but after four days on the river . . .
The sound of pumps is everywhere throughout the complex; there's no escape from it. This station sits-- floats--in a vast, tarry swamp of petroleum ooze.
Not even the jungle wants this stretch of ground. But the Company does. According to Ang they couldn't resist such a cheap source of hydrocarbons, so they built a
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pumping station and an entire bloody refinery on top of it. They thought it would be easier than fighting the jungle; now they fight day and night to keep the whole thing from sinking into the sludge. Why they didn't float the installation on repellers, I can't imagine. Any Kharamoughi could have told at a glance that it was absurd.
I said as much to Ang as he showed me around.
He said, "Any fool could see it! But the Controllers wouldn't come and look for themselves.
Now they've put so much in it they won't let it go. And they'll never build a new plant till they give up on this one. They don't really want to know what it's like here. They don't give a damn."
He waved his hand, grimacing. Then he looked back at me and said, "You Techs like to point out the obvious, don't you?" As if I'd insulted him, even though he agreed with me.
I didn't answer. He frowned; then he shrugged and walked away. All day he'd shown a peculiarly territorial attitude about this place--especially considering that he seemed even more sour than usual upon our arrival here this morning. I watched him start up a conversation with a group of workers who were taking a break in the lifeless yard outside the refinery. Ang had been a geolo
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gist when he worked for the Company, and he knew a lot of the workers here. He'd arranged for us to stop over for a day, so that he could try one last time to locate a grid for the rover.
I wandered off alone across the yard, looking at the megalithic sprawl of the refinery. It occurred to me that
I hadn't seen Spadrin all day; it was like being free of a physical weight. He'd stayed in our quarters, sleeping or drunk or just disinterested--there was nothing worth seeing by most people's standards. Primitive structures and monstrous entanglements of equipment all rusting, rotting, shored up or jury-rigged to keep them functioning. I was drawn to explore them by a kind of horrified fascination--and because I couldn't face going back to the claustrophobic hallways and the stupefyingly ugly rooms of the compound's living quarters.
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But there was no real escape from the ugliness here.
At last I heard Ang shouting at me, and made my way back across the yard. I climbed ladders and catwalks to the place where he stood with three of the workers, the highest point I'd reached yet in my exploration. I gazed at the geometric sprawl of the station silhouetted against the bleary red face of the setting sun; all I could see were towers thrusting black against the gray of the rising fog.
Pale flames hovered at their tips as gases were wantonly burned off, adding to the stench that hung over this place day and night.
Ang said to the others, "This is our mechanic. Tell them what kind of grid you want."
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I looked at the three Company men. One of them was a burly man wearing the orange coveralls of a supervisor.
The others wore plain white--or what must have been white once. It struck me how hopelessly impractical it was to make them wear white in a place like this. To keep the cheap, untreated fabric from staining was im50
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possible . . . and every new stain only reinforced the futility of trying.
The three of them looked at me with dark, disinterested eyes. It was hard to tell their faces apart, and Ang hadn't bothered to mention names. I gave them the specs on the grid I wanted, and the man in orange shrugged.
"Maybe," he said grudgingly, as though he disliked the whole idea. A grid was not a small or inexpensive piece of equipment. "He can come with me and take a look, I suppose." He glanced at the others. "Randet? Fila long?"
One shrugged, the other shook his head. The one who'd shrugged came with us. Ang and the other man stayed where they were, lighting fesh. Smoking is strictly forbidden here. I was glad to get away from them.
I followed the other men along the catwalks, looking out at the blackwater swamp that lay beyond the refinery.
The rotting sentinels of the jungle's edge waded like skeletons in the stagnant lake. "I'm Gedda,"
I said.
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The supervisor glanced at me. When it elicited no further response, I asked, "You have names?"
The supervisor frowned. "Ngeran. This is Randet.
Ang said you're a Kharemoughi." It was merely a classification.
I nodded, and we walked on in silence. The others never bothered to look out, or down; they moved like sleepwalkers. I watched the sun disappear into the fog.
Ngeran led us back down into the maze of buildings, stopping again and again to check on some project. After a while I began to suspect that he was stalling, probably hoping he could force me to lose patience and give up on the grid. But knowing the difference that grid would make in my life gave me the patience of the dead.
Everywhere he stopped, the workers would gather around and stare at me, sullen and uncertain.
I made
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myself talk to them--trying to establish some sort of communication, to turn their hostility into at least marginal cooperation. It was like talking to a herd of animals.
The only thing I could imagine these people relating to was their work, so I tried a few obvious questions about function, or process, or adjustment. They answered in monosyllables.
"You know," I said, studying a readout, "if you opened that line three quarters, and decreased your input by about ten percent, this would actually produce more efficiently."
Something like interest began to show on a few faces.
"That's slower," a man said, shaking his head.
"This class of machinery was designed to handle a maximum rate flow of about twenty-five. You only cause a backlog if you push it harder than that. Try it-- you'll find you only have to recalibrate one time in ten."
"Really?" He stared at me. "How do you know that?"
"He's a Tech," Ngeran said, looking at me as if he saw me for the first time. I smiled.
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