‘We look quite the pair of lay people,’ Romero said. ‘Good. Are we going by wiretrain?’
‘No, Sister. I hired an airhopper. The pens are a good long way away, and we want them to think we’re prosperous.’
A long way, indeed - it took the airhopper an hour to fly to the edge of Palace. Romero spent the trip looking out the window at the spread of the city, criss-crossed with its canals and wiretrains. The closer they came to the swamps, the lower the buildings grew, dwindling down to rambling compounds of plastocrete, roofed with peeling pink shingles, or stacked brown housing modules, listing to one side or the other from age and the spongy ground underneath. Rarely she saw a strip of turquoise lawn or a tiny garden. Once, when the airhopper swung around in a turn, they dipped low over a pumping station, a tower of blue-grey metal, quivering from its own machinery, at the junction of three broad canals. Although she’d been hoping for a view of the swamps, they reached the pens while the waterlands still lay at the horizon, a stretch of dirty green shot through with the sparkling silver of ponds and streams. The airhopper abruptly turned and circled, dipping one wing. Romero saw among the shabby buildings an area roofed in black solar panels that stretched a good four square blocks. All around it rose a high fence woven of strands of wire and red cables.
‘Electrified?’ Romero said.
Thiralo nodded and made a note on his tablet.
In the middle of the compound lay a landing pad big enough for half a dozen airhoppers, but this early in the morning the strip stretched empty. Even so, the pilot landed off to one side and taxied close to the edge.
‘Airtrucks land here,’ Thiralo remarked. ‘Full of supplies, I suppose.’
They stepped out into gusts of wind and the hum of huge fans, mounted up on the black roofs of the adjoining buildings. Even so, the smell of saccule lay heavy in the air, a maelstrom of scents and most of them unpleasant. On three sides of the landing pad stood dark brown walls without windows, though Romero did notice a pair of double doors on one structure. On the fourth side was the front of the saccule market proper, a long low building with a glass front shaded by a red and gold striped awning. Flowering shrubs and pole trees grew around the entrance. When they reached the door it slid back to reveal a skinny human man with thick and untidy bright blue hair.
‘Good morning, Se,’ he chirped. ‘Come right in. My name’s Mil, and I’ll be helping you today.’
‘Thank you, but I’m just looking,’ Romero said. ‘I’m weighing getting a pair trained for cleaning against a bot.’
‘Ah, well, cleaning bots have really gone up in price. I’m sure we can find you a good bargain.’
Although Romero had been dreading a cross between a zoo and a jail, the long room stretched curiously empty. At one end stood a low dais in front of a pair of closed doors; at the other, a cluster of desks and chairs. In between stretched bright red carpet and nothing more. Romero noticed here and there lines cut into the carpet, forming big squares, as if it had been ineptly patched.
‘Come sit down,’ Mil said. ‘I’ll show you what we have in stock on the vidscreen. Give you some idea of the prices.’
‘No, I’d like to see the actual saccules,’ Romero said. ‘I know you have a visitors’ area.’
‘Se, normally we’re glad to show our customers around, but it’s early. I don’t think our graduates are looking their best at the moment.’
‘I have no time to wait, and I’m not interested in making another trip back here today. If you’re not ready to do business, you shouldn’t have opened up.’
‘Er, well yes of course. Just come this way.’
The tour behind the scenes did live up to Romero’s fears. Mil led them through double doors to a long dim corridor, lined with open pens. The so-called graduates lived one to a tiny pen, just barely big enough for a saccule to lie down to sleep. In one corner of each stood a pool of dirty water, where most of the neuters were sitting, slumped over and staring at nothing. Every now and then one would slap the water with the flat of its hand and make a booming noise. Others would slap and call out in turn. Despite the roar of evacuation fans, the combined stench of excrement and saccule despair made Romero feel sick to her stomach by the time they reached the end of the row.
‘I’ve seen enough,’ she said. ‘Now, do they come with health certificates?’
‘Oh yes, Se. We guarantee both good health and tractability.’
With Mil in the lead, they began walking back toward the doors, which still stood open. In the shaft of light Romero could see the floor of the corridor more clearly. In the middle lay a square panel that seemed to be a sliding hatch of some sort.
‘What’s that?’ she said, pointing.
‘Oh uh, nothing, nothing.’ Mil threw back his head like a startled animal. ‘Uh, um, a repair to the floor.’
‘I see. Just curious.’
Thiralo made a small note. As they walked out into the light and air of the showroom, Romero heard a loud whining sound that grew, turned piercing, then swelled to a mechanical roar.
‘Airtruck!’ Mil yelled. ‘It’ll land soon.’
With the two men following, Romero headed toward the bank of windows. Hovering on huge rotors the black truck plunged straight down, caught itself with a whine of engines, then settled to the pad. The noise stopped, leaving Romero’s ears ringing.
‘Well, Se, come sit down.’ Mil hurried to her side. ‘Right over here, and we’ll look over the price schedules. Just this way.’
Romero said nothing, merely watched as a door hatch swung up on the airtruck’s side. A long ramp slid out, and a pair of humans wearing black coveralls trotted down to secure it to the pad.
‘Se, please.’ Mil was whining with anxiety. ‘Do come sit down. Can we get you something to drink, perhaps? We have a nice vidscreen presentation of the graduates to show you.’
On the far side of the landing pad the double doors into the brown building were sliding open to reveal two more men in black, carrying electric prods. One of the men on the pad was frowning a little as he fussed with the settings on a long control wand of some sort.
‘Se, please.’ Mil laid a hand on her elbow.
When Romero swung her head around and glared at him, he took his hand away and fast. Back at the landing pad, the herder had activated his wand. Glittering walls of yellow barrier ran from the truck to the open doors. Even through the plate glass Romero could hear the whimpering and squealing as saccules poured out of the truck and rushed down the ramp. Several hundred, she estimated, and they were pushing each other, stumbling with bare webbed feet on the unfamiliar footing of first the ramp, then the pad. Now and then a saccule would lumber into the barriers and recoil, screaming in agony, as the force-field snapped out sparks.
Romero found her hand on the door. Before Mil could stop her, she pushed it open and stepped out. A stench like raw vomit made her gag, but she held her ground and watched as the saccules lurched and staggered into the building beyond. She could hear human voices shouting from inside the truck, herding out the last of the new stock. One undersized grey creature tripped on the ramp and went down. She could hear it skirl in terror as the press of its fellows behind poured over it, kicking and trampling.
‘Se!’ Blue-haired Mil was standing right behind her. ‘Please come in!’
Romero took another couple of steps closer. As the last saccule trotted into the building, with a hiss and flash the barriers went down. The saccule who’d fallen lay moaning and bloody on the ramp. With a wave at Thiralo to follow, Romero hurried over just as the two men in coveralls grabbed it, feet and head, and tossed it onto the concrete pad. It fell with the crack of breaking bones.
‘May the wrath of God chill your lungs,’ Romero hissed.
Startled, they looked up, then turned to call out to Mil.
‘Who the hell’s this?’
Mil made a fluttering sort of motion with his hands but kept quiet. Romero knelt on the concrete and laid a hand on the saccule’s pouchy face, half-covered in oozing orange blood. It turned dull grey eyes her way and died, spasming once, then falling still with a scent alarmingly like roses in full bloom.
‘May the light of God guide you.’ Romero put thumbs and forefingers together in the sign of the Eye. ‘May you find peace in His heavens.’
Mil and the two workers were staring in something like disbelief. Romero got up and pointed at the nearer of the men in coveralls. ‘Why did you kill it?’
‘Well, hey, lady, it was all banged up, probably gonna die anyway. They’re not worth the vet bills until they’re trained.’
‘I see.’ Romero glanced at the salesman. ‘Is that standard practice around here?’
‘None of your business,’ Mil snarled. ‘Just who are you?’
‘My name is Sister Romero, anil this is my factor, Thiralo. Perhaps you’ve seen me on the vidscreens?’
She had never seen a man look as frightened as Mil did then. Dead-white and open-mouthed, he stepped back out of her reach.
‘The Papal Itinerant?’ the man with the control wand said.
‘What are you doing here?’
‘You’ll find out in the fullness of God’s time,’ Romero said. ‘Thiralo, let’s go. I’ve seen as much as I need to.’
She marched off with Thiralo hurrying to catch up. Once they’d climbed back into the airhopper, the factor slammed the hatch shut and sank into a seat. Romero sat opposite him and buckled on her safety belt. Up in his tiny cabin the pilot started the engine with a roar.
‘Blessings to the Holy Eye,’ Thiralo called over the noise. ‘I was afraid they weren’t going to let us leave.’
‘They wouldn’t have dared harm us.’ Romero suddenly smiled. ‘But why don’t you just tell the pilot to get us into the air?’
Before Thiralo could relay the order, the airhopper shuddered and leapt from the pad, rising straight up, then spinning around and heading out fast. Apparently the pilot shared Thiralo’s opinion of the danger. Romero looked down at her borrowed pants, stained a crusting orange and filthy at the knees, and sent up a silent prayer to God, that He might inspire her to see the best path toward justice for His creatures in those pens.
* * *
Just at noon Kata and Elen reached the island that held the old pumping station. As they nosed the hydrofloat into shore, Kata could see that ten-yard-wide slabs of concrete had been piled to form the island’s skeleton, as it were, and that time and the shifting of wind and tide had deposited soil. Years of rooting plants had done the rest, compacting the mass into something as stable as anything could be, out in the swamps. In the middle of the island stood frond-trees, rustling in the wind, and what looked like a stack of house-high metal cylinders. Pipes stuck out at odd angles only to end in mid-air.
‘They must have taken the machinery when they abandoned this place,’ Kata said. ‘Why did they, anyway?’
‘It probably wasn’t worth the fuel it took to run the pumps any more,’ Elen said. ‘Sometimes the swamps win one, you know. They hit springs when they’re blasting out channels, and the water just keeps rising, no matter how hard you pump it.’
In his gear Kata had brought a telescoping metal rod designed to keep swamp explorers out of quicksand pockets. As they walked he tested the ground ahead of them for every step.
‘No-one’s been out here for years,’ Kata said. ‘I hope the stuff is still good. Riva didn’t bother to tell me how she knew it was here, and I hope she wasn’t reading some out of date database or something like that’
‘Well, those sheets don’t decompose or anything.’
‘Yeah? I hope not.’
The ruins of the pumping station sat on a solid bedding of concrete that must have been anchored with pilings, Kata supposed, to stay so stable over the years. Up close he could see rust eating through the empty metal housings - no, not rust. A fine textured life-form covered the silvery metal like velvet.
‘I’ve never seen that before,’ Elen remarked. ‘Let’s not touch it.’
‘Don’t worry about that.’ Kata unrolled the map again. ‘Now then. The explosives are supposed to be in the old foreman’s shed, according to this. That must be that concrete bunker kind of thing, over there.’
Inside, the doorless bunker sloped down to a pool of slimy water. When Kata ran his metal pole through the slime, half-seen things rose to the surface and snapped. Kata backed out fast.
‘Anything left in there fell to pieces long ago.’
‘Probably so.’ Elen was frowning at the map. ‘Wait a minute. Look over there - that square of plastocrete floOring? That looks more like the shape of a shed. I’ll bet the walls fell in or something.’
In a collection of muck and fungi they did find decaying slabs of corrugated panelling. Since the boat came equipped with a shovel for digging out small sand bars and the like, Elen went back to fetch it while Kata squatted down and considered the fleshy tangle of life, plant and parasite both, that had taken over this attempt on the part of sapients to extend solid ground. Small silvery tubes with legs crawled through red pulpy strands; sulphurous yellow globes puffed up, ready to stink, when he reached out a tentative claw. He moved away fast, squatted again, and saw, sticking out of something black and decayed, part of a big plastic ring.
‘There it is,’ he said aloud. ‘It makes sense, that they’d store explosives underground.’
Sure enough, when Elen returned with the shovel, they scraped away the thick layer of life to expose a trapdoor made of plastocrete. When Kata tried prying up the edge, it crumbled, falling away to reveal a trench some four feet deep and three on a side. At the bottom, wrapped in long strands of mildews and moulds, lay a cubical shape.
‘I think I can bring it up with the shovel,’ Kata said. ‘Get ready to grab it if it starts to fall back in.’
‘If Riva’s right, there’s enough plastique in that box to blow us and this island to hell and back.’
‘That’s why you shouldn’t let it fall.’ Kata lifted his crest. ‘Get ready.’
Swearing under his breath, Elen followed orders. Kata slid the shovel under the cube and spooned it out like the inside of an egg, raised it just high enough for Elen to grab it and haul it to solid ground. The white beard of mildew fell and scattered in the wind. Torn, stained steelweave wrap covered what seemed to be a box. Although the lettering was half eaten away, they could make out the red interplanetary sign for danger.