But first I had to get myself free of this hideous place where I was trapped.
4.
ONE DAY THEY BROUGHT VABRIKANT BACK BADLY wounded from the tunnels. He had gone out a couple of days before with a novice, a long-legged boy from Darma Barma-that was what they mostly used Vabrikant for, the training of novices-and this time he had been imprudent or too slow or he had simply not cared; and when he opened the cyst the insect was alive and waiting. It sprang out already fighting and laid him open from side to side with a single swipe of its beak.
I give the boy from Darma Barma credit: he struggled with the thing and killed it, and staggered back all the way to the dormitory with Vabrikant in his arms although he had been seriously cut and gouged himself. A couple of the overmasters came out to see what had happened. Vabrikant was a horrifying sight and he seemed close to death. He was unconscious, breathing slowly and hoarsely, his mouth slack. His eyes were open, but they looked like little slits of glass. The overmasters studied him a moment, shrugged, walked away.
The merciful thing would probably have been to help him die as quickly as possible, but I was too young to understand that. I went running after the overmasters, shouting, "Hey! Are you just going to leave him lying there?"
One of them didn't even look back. The other turned and peered at me in disbelief. Nobody spoke to overmasters here unless they spoke to you first.
"You said something?"
"He's still alive. He's in pain. For God's sake, aren't you going to do anything for him?"
"Why is that your problem?"
"That's
Vabrikant
there. He's the best man in this whole godforsaken place."
The overmaster stared at me as if I had gone insane and made a quick offhand gesture with his thumb, telling me to get back where I belonged. I wasn't having that. I came up close to him, practically nose to nose, and pointed angrily at Vabrikant. "He doesn't have to die! Get him into surgery, will you? At least give him a pain-killer." A chilly stare was the only response I got. "God damn it, aren't you human? A man's lying there on the ground with his guts hanging out and you won't even do anything?"
The overmaster had his truncheon in one hand and his sensory whip in the other. I saw the blaze of irritation and fury in his eyes and I knew that if I didn't back off in another moment he was going to jab me. But I didn't care. I went on pointing and shouting and then, when that seemed to do no good, I grabbed him by the arm and swung him around.
He didn't give me the truncheon. He gave me the sensory whip.
I wasn't prepared for that. Not that you could ever be; but the sensory whip was a weapon that ordinarily was used only in extreme jeopardy. It could kill. I thought it had killed me. I had never known such pain as that in my life. I felt as if I had been speared in the skull with a mining pick. My head rolled until it almost fell off my shoulders and my heart stopped beating and my feet went out from under me and I fell down, choking and gagging, biting at the spongy flooring.
When I came back to consciousness the walls seemed to be spinning. The roof of the dormitory was gone and the hundreds of kilometers of sponge-stuff above us had blown away and I saw the open sky, and it was all bright yellow swirls of lightning dancing up and down. Gradually my vision cleared and I saw the overmaster against the blare of yellow light. He was standing over me, waiting to see what I would do next.
The sensible move would have been to get myself away from him fast. To forget all about Vabrikant and creep or crawl or drag myself back into some dark quiet corner of the dormitory, if indeed I had enough strength left in me to do anything like that, and lick my wounds, if I could remember where my tongue was. Otherwise, if I made any sort of further trouble at all, the overmaster was going to lash me with the sensory whip a second time, and the second time would almost certainly kill me. I was young and I was very strong, but I had just taken a tremendous jolt of force through my entire nervous system. A second hit of that magnitude and I was done for.
Any sensible person would have known that. And I was a sensible person. Usually.
But I also knew that Vabrikant was going to die very soon if I didn't do something. And that I was probably going to die before long too, for I had grabbed an overmaster's arm in anger, and that marked me as extremely dangerous. Slaves were not supposed to tell overmasters what to do. They certainly weren't supposed to lay hands on them. The next time I got out of line the overmasters would finish me off.
Feebly, numbly, I got to my feet. I was shaking like a man with the palsy. My arms dangled as though they had no bones. I was a thousand years old. The overmaster watched me smugly. He held the sensory whip cocked and ready, but he knew I was going to shuffle away in defeat. A man who has been hit like that doesn't come back for more. It's only common sense. So when I took a couple of shambling steps in his direction he understood that I was simply disoriented. I must have meant to go the other way. Yellow lightning was still crackling through my brain and I could barely focus my eyes. A moment went by before he realized that I had no common sense at all and that I was about to do a very foolish thing; and by then it was too late for him. He raised the whip and started to squeeze off the fatal hit, but I came in smoothly underneath his arm, moving much more rapidly than I had any right to, surprising us both. And I took the whip away from him and told him what I was going to do to him; and then I turned the whip's force down to its lowest level and I lashed him with it.
I didn't want to kill him. I didn't even want to make him lose consciousness. I just wanted to hurt him, again and again, until he groveled, until he begged, until he screamed. I wanted to give him as much torment in five minutes as I had absorbed in two years on this world. So I lashed him at the lowest setting and I lashed him again, and then again. His sphincter control went on the third hit. He fell down and scrabbled about, sobbing, moaning, biting the ground, slapping his hands and feet against the floor in desperate pain. Begging me to stop. I enjoyed not stopping.
Other overmasters came running, of course. With one foot on the fallen one's back I faced them down. "Keep back or I'll whip him again. I won't kill him right away. I'll just go on whipping him."
They looked at each other, bewildered. Maybe they didn't even give a damn what I did to him. But no one was going to take responsibility for it.
"Call out the med-robot," I said. "Take Vabrikant inside and have him sewn up."
"He's dead," one of the overmasters said.
"Take him in anyway. Try to resuscitate him. Do whatever you can." I waggled the sensory whip menacingly in their direction. "Go on. Do it!"
Nobody moved. I gave the overmaster on the ground another jolt.
"Do it," he screamed. "Do it!"
"Vabrikant is dead."
"Do it anyway!"
They sent for the med-robot. It gathered Vabrikant up, holding him like a doll that was losing its stuffing, and went clanking away.
Now what? Keeping the overmaster as a hostage wouldn't protect me for long. He might die any minute from the effects of the lashings, even at the lowest setting, and then I'd have no leverage at all over the rest of them. Or else the others would decide not to worry about him and they'd simply rush me from every side. By now they must be thinking that if they didn't get me under control fast they could have a full-scale slave rebellion on their hands. They had sensory whips, sure, but there were a lot of us and not very many of them.
I had to get out of there.
"Get up," I said to the overmaster at my feet.
"I can't."
"Get up or I'll kill you."
Somehow he managed to do it. He was trembling and whimpering. I could smell his fear. He was the prisoner of a crazy Rom and he expected me to do almost anything now. He was right.
"Start backing out of here," I said.
"Where are you taking me?"
"Just get moving. One step at a time, very carefully. The sensory whip is just behind your neck. If you do anything wrong I'll scramble you up so much that you won't be able to remember to take it out of your pants before you pee. We're going out into the tunnels."
"Please-"
"Come on."
"I'm afraid. I hate it out there. What are you going to do to me?"
"You'll find out when you find out."
I edged him out into one of the eastern tunnels, keeping him between me and the other overmasters. They followed us a little way, but they had no rules to cover this situation and they hung back uncertainly. In ten minutes we reached a place where seven or eight tunnels intersected. I had had two years now of roaming these tunnels and I had a pretty good idea of how they ran; the overmasters didn't. Entering the intersection, I grabbed my shivering shit-stinking hostage and shoved him with all my might back down the corridor toward the dormitory. The last I saw of him he was hurtling toward the other overmasters like a boulder tumbling down a mountainside. I turned and disappeared into the maze of tunnels.
They hunted me for days. But they came close only once, when I was slithering along the flank of some fat worm and I thought I heard the sounds of pursuit from both directions. There was jade-light just ahead and I went for it. With my bare hands I tunneled into the worm's flesh at the glowing place until I reached the shining stony cyst within. It was a new one; I could see the furious giant insect glaring at me through the still transparent walls. I slipped down underneath the cyst with that terrible beak only a finger's breadth from my belly on the other side of the thin jade wall, and there I huddled, smothering and nauseated, for what felt like a hundred years. It was crazy, taking refuge right inside a worm. I might have been encysted myself, if I stayed in there very long. But I stayed as long as I dared; and when I could stand it no longer, I burrowed my way out. There was no sign of overmasters at either end of the tunnel. For days more I wandered in that hellish maze until by some miracle I came to one of the passages that led to the surface. When I reached the upper level, the vine-level, I found myself at the relay-sweep station where the jade was shipped out. A little persuasion with the sensory whip and I had myself shipped out instead. It was a crazy escape from beginning to end. But if I'd relied upon prudence and sober judgment, I might still be slicing open jade-worms in the tunnels of Alta Hannalanna. Or dead a long time by now.
5.
THEY DIDN'T EXACTLY HAVE PARADES AND pyrotechnikons waiting for me when Chorian and I landed on Galgala. But there is no question that I was the center of everybody's attention. This was a situation that had no parallel in all our thousands of years of history. A former king of the Rom was coming to visit the Rom capital world. Who ever heard of such a thing, a
former
king of the Rom? And the former king's own sinister and dangerous son was on the throne. That was a new concept too, a second-generation king. It was all brand new. Everyone was waiting to see what I was going to do. And what Shandor would.
We took the starship
Jewel of the Imperium
from Xamur to Galgala. It was one of the new ones, the so-called Supernova-class starships. I thought
Jewel of the Imperium
was a dumb name for a ship, flat and obvious and clunking, and I didn't think a lot of that Supernova-class label either. In my day starships had the names of people-
Mara Kalugra, Claude Varna, Cristoforo Colombo
-and we didn't need to call the models Comets or Supernovas or Black Holes. But I will say this for these new ships: they certainly are elegant. It had been a decade or so since I had last been on an actual starship, though I had done plenty of running around the galaxy by relay-sweep in that time. Maybe it's a mark of the decadence of our era, the luxury of modern-day starships. The
Jewel of the Imperium
was like the finest hotel you could imagine: immense, palatial, pink polished marble everywhere, huge and fantastically costly statuettes in Alta Hannalanna jade looking down at you from a million recessed niches, plasma lighting that changed color according to your mood, six passenger levels with a gravity-well dining room on every one, and so on and so on. The captain was a very slick young Gaje named Therione, a Fenixi, probably one of Sunteil's proteges. I was invited to dine at his table, naturally. The pilot, a fat grizzled old Tchurari Rom from Zimbalou named Petsha le Stevo, sat there too, though I could tell that Therione wasn't happy about that. With a Rom ex-king on board, the captain could hardly snub his own pilot. But Petsha le Stevo had table manners of the old school. He was a snorter, a guzzler, a belcher. He gloried in it. And each time he patted his belly and let a good one fly I could see Therione cringe. He was a dapper one, that Therione, absolutely up to the mark. Pink skin glowing, his nails gleaming, his little mustache trimmed every day. After every belch Petsha le Stevo would look across the table at me and wink and grin, as if to say, Ah there, you Yakoub, wasn't that something! Compared with him I felt positively fastidious, myself. I wondered what a primordial fossil like that was doing aboard a starship of the Supernova class. But in fact he was right on top of his skills, a totally state-of-the-art pilot. I found that out when I paid a ceremonial visit to the jump-room.
I couldn't make any sense out of it. Everything sleek, metal and tile, like a lavatory. An empty-looking room, some little nozzles here, some shining metal plates there, not much else. You have to understand that I am no stranger to starship jump-rooms. I put in fifty or sixty years behind the handles myself, you know. But here was neither rhyme nor reason. Where was the star-tank? Where was the wink-wall? Where in the name of two-headed Melalo were the handles themselves?
Petsha le Stevo beamed like a proud father as I stared around in bewilderment.