Outcasts

Outcasts

Three Stories

Vonda N. McIntyre

Book View Café Edition
April 10, 2012
ISBN: 978-1-61138-164-1
Copyright © 2012 Vonda N. McIntyre
www.bookviewcafe.com

Hot and wet from the fine, steamy rain, Kylis sat on her
heels at the top of the drilling pit and waited for the second-duty shift to
end. She rubbed at a streak of the thick red mud that had spattered her legs
and her white boots when she walked across the compound. Redsun’s huge
dim star altered colors; white became a sort of pinkish gray. But among the
forest’s black foliage and against the Pit’s clay, white uniforms
stood out and made prisoners easier for the guards to see.

A few other people waited with Kylis at the south end of the
deep slash in the earth. Like them, she crouched unsheltered from the rain,
strands of wet hair plastered to her cheeks, watching for friends she had not
seen in forty days.

Below lay two completed generator domes; above them rose the
immense delicate cooling towers, and the antenna beaming power along the relay
system to North Continent. Fences and guards protected the finished
installations from the prisoners. Kylis and the rest worked only on clearing
the fern forest, extending the Pit, drilling a third steam well — the
dirty, dangerous jobs.

Paralleling the distant wall of volcanoes in the east, the
drill pit extended northward. Its far end was invisible, obscured by the rain
and by clouds of acrid smoke that billowed from the trash piles. The Pit was
being lengthened again to follow the fault line where drilling was most
efficient. Another strip of frond forest had been destroyed, and its huge
primitive ferns now lay in blackened heaps. The stalks never burned completely,
but until the coals died a bank of irritating smoke and sticky ash would hang
over the prison camp. The fine rain sizzled into steam when it fell on glowing
embers.

Kylis started at the long shrill siren that ended the second
shift. For an instant she was afraid the hallucinations had returned, but the
normal sounds of the prison responded to the signal. The faraway roar of
bulldozers ceased; the high whine of the drill slipped down in pitch and
finally stopped. People left their machines, threw down their tools, and
straggled toward the trail. They passed beneath the guards’ towers,
watched and counted by the Lizard’s crew. One by one and in occasional
pairs they started up the steep slope of clay and debris and volcanic ash, picking
their way around gullies and across muddy rivulets. Screwtop seemed very quiet
now, almost peaceful, with no noise but the hum of turbines in the two
geothermal power plants, and the rhythmic clatter of the pumps that kept the
drill pit unflooded.

Kylis could not yet see Jason. She frowned. He and Gryf, who
was on the third shift, had both been all right when she got off duty. She was
sure of that, for news of accidents traveled instantaneously between working
crews. But Kylis had been alone, sleeping much of the time, in the nine hours
since the end of her shift. Anything could happen in nine hours. She tried to
reassure herself about her friends’ safety, because the pattern and
rhythm of the work just ended had been too normal to follow a really bad accident.

She could not put aside her anxiety, and knew she would not
until she had seen and spoken to and touched both Gryf and Jason. She still
found herself surprised that she could care so much about two other human
beings. Her past life had depended on complete independence and
self-sufficiency.

Below, Gryf would be standing in the group of prisoners near
the drilling rig. She tried to make him out, but the only person she could
distinguish at this distance was the guard captain, called by everyone —
when he was out of earshot — the Lizard, for his clean-shaven face and
head gave him a smoothly impervious reptilian appearance. He was standing
alone, facing the prisoners, giving orders. He wore black, as if in defiance of
the heat, as a symbol of his superiority over everyone else in the camp. Even
so, he was conspicuous now only because he was separated from the others. Gryf
was conspicuous in any crowd, but the rig was too far away for Kylis to
identify even Gryf’s astonishing ebony and tan calico-patterned skin. The
first time she had seen him, his first day at Screwtop, she had stared at him
so long that he noticed and laughed at her. It was not a ridiculing laugh, but
an understanding one. Gryf laughed at himself, too, sometimes, and often at the
people who had made him what he was.

Gryf was the first tetraparental Kylis had ever seen or
heard of, and even among tetras Gryf was unusual. Of his four biological
parents, it happened that two of them were dark, and two fair. Gryf had been
planned to be a uniform light brown, only his hair, perhaps, varicolored. Genes
for hair color did not blend like those for skin. But the sets of sperm and ova
had been matched wrong, so the mixture of two embryos forming Gryf made him his
strange paisley pattern. He still had all the selectable intellectual gifts of
his various parents. Those qualities, not his skin, were important.

New tetraparentals were special; the life of each was fully
planned. Gryf was part of a team, and it was inconceivable to the government of
Redsun and to the other tetras that after all the work of making him, after all
the training and preparation, he would refuse his duty. When he did, he was
sent for punishment to Redsun’s strictest prison. If he changed his mind,
he could at a word return to the tetras’ secluded retreat. He had been at
Screwtop half a year and he had not said that word.

Kylis was no Redsun native; she was oblivious to the others’
awe of Gryf. She was curious about him. Neither because of nor in spite of the
pattern of his skin, he was beautiful. Kylis wondered how his hair would feel,
the locks half black and wiry, half blond and fine.

He was assigned to a nearby crew. Kylis saw immediately that
he had been given hard and dirty jobs, not the most dangerous ones but those
most tiring. The guards’ task was not to kill him but to make life so
unpleasant that he would return to the tetras.

Kylis waited to speak to him until she would not risk
discipline for either of them. Without seeming to, the Lizard was watching Gryf
closely, padding by every so often in his stealthy, silent way, his close-set
eyes heavy-lidded, the direction of his gaze impossible to determine. But
eventually his duties took him to another part of the camp, and Kylis left her
own work to tell Gryf the tricks experience had taught her to make the labor a
little easier.

Their first night together was Gryf’s first night at
Screwtop. When the shift ended, it seemed natural to walk back to the prisoners’
shelters together. They were too tired to do much more than sleep, but the
companionship was a comfort and the potential for more existed. They lay facing
each other in the darkness. Starlight shone through a break in the clouds and
glinted from the blond locks of Gryf’s hair.

“I may never be let out of here,” Gryf said. He
was not asking for sympathy, but telling her his future as best he knew it. He
had a pleasant, musical voice. Kylis realized these were the first words she
heard him say. But she remembered his thanking her for her advice — and
recalled that he had thanked her with his smile and a nod and the look in his
eyes.

“I’m in for a long time,” Kylis said. “I
don’t think there’s that much difference between us.”
Screwtop could kill either of them the next day or the day before release.

Kylis reached up and touched Gryf’s hair. It was stiff
and matted with sweat. He took her hand and kissed her grimy palm. From then on
they stayed together, growing closer but never speaking of a future outside the
prison.

Several sets later Jason arrived and changed everything.

Kylis brought herself back to the present. She knew Gryf was
below somewhere, though she could not make him out in the blotch of dirty
white. She had been on the last shift during a previous set and she knew the
schedule. The prisoners still working would not be exposed to much more danger
today. Instead, they would have the dullest and most exhausting job of the
period. During the last shift before the free day, once every forty days, all
the equipment was cleaned and inspected. Anything done wrong was done over; the
shift could drag on long past its normal end. Kylis hoped that would not happen
this time.

At the bottom of the slope, Jason emerged from the bright
cancer of machinery. He was muddy and grease-spattered, gold-flecked with
bleached hair. He was very large and very fair, and even on Redsun where the
light had little ultraviolet he sunburned easily. Though he had been working
from dusk to midmorning his legs were horizontally striped with sunburn,
darkest at the top of his thighs and lightest just below his knees, marking the
different levels to which he had pulled the cuffs of his boots. Right now they
were folded all the way down.

He glanced up and saw Kylis. His carriage changed; he
straightened and waved. His blond beard was bristly and uncombed and his hair
was plastered down with sweat. The waistband of his shorts was red with mud
spattered onto his body and washed down by perspiration and rain. As he came
closer she saw that he was thinner, and that the lines around his eyes had
deepened. They had been lines of thought and laughter; now they were of fatigue
and exposure. He hurried toward her, slipping on the clay, and she realized he,
too, had been worried.

He heard I was in sensory deprivation, she thought, and he
was afraid for me. She stood motionless for a few seconds. She was not quite
used to him yet; his easy acceptance of her and his concern seemed innocent and
admirable compared to the persistent distrust Kylis had felt toward him for so
long. She started forward to meet him.

He stopped and held out his hands.
She touched him, and he came forward, almost trembling, holding himself taut
against exhaustion. His pose collapsed. Bending down, he rested his forehead on
her shoulder. She put her hands on his back, very gently.

“Was it bad?” His voice was naturally low but
now it was rough and hoarse. He had probably been directing his crew, shouting
above the roar of machinery for eighteen hours.

“Bad enough,” Kylis said. “I’ve been
glad of the work since.”

Still leaning against her, he shook his head.

“I’m okay now. I’ve quit hallucinating,”
she said, hoping it was true. “And you? Are you all right?” She
could feel his breath on her damp shoulder.

“Yes. Now. Thanks to Gryf.”

Jason had started this set on first day shift, which began
at midnight and ended in the afternoon. Its members worked through the hottest
part of the day when they were most tired. Halfway through his third work
period Jason had collapsed. He was delirious and dehydrated, sunburned even
through his shirt. The sun drained him. Gryf, just getting off when Jason fell,
had worked through his own sleep period to finish Jason’s shift. For them
to switch shifts, Gryf had worked almost two of Redsun’s days straight.
When Kylis heard about that, she could not see how anyone could do it, even
Gryf.

Gryf had broken the rules; but no one had made Jason go back
to his original shift. The Lizard must never have said anything about it. Kylis
could imagine him standing in shadow, watching, while Gryf waited for a
confrontation that never came. It was something the Lizard would do.

Jason’s shoulders were scarred where blisters had
formed in the sun, but Kylis saw that they had healed cleanly. She put her arm
around Jason’s waist to support him. “Come on. I found a place to
sleep.” They were both sticky with sweat and the heat.

“Okay.” They crossed the barren mud where all
the vegetation had been stripped away so the machines could pass. Before they
turned off the path they drew rations from the mechanical dispenser near the
prisoners’ quarters. The tasteless bars dropped through a slot, two each.
There were times in Kylis’ life when she had not eaten well, but she had
seldom eaten anything as boring as prison rations. Jason put one of his bars
into his belt pouch.