The Merlin Conspiracy (20 page)

“This token entitles you to one free meal and one free night's sleep,” he said. “After that you'll have to work for a living like the rest of us do. Take him to the steps, Wright, and send him on his way.”

“Don't I get my money and my key back?” I said.

“No,” he said. “All vagrant property is forfeit to the city. Get going. You've only got an hour before sunset.”

And I love you, too! I thought as the other policeman grabbed my arm and pulled me away to the outer door.

Outside, under the arches, the low sun glared in my eyes quite painfully from just above the opposite cliff. There seemed to be far fewer people around. Those who were around all looked fastidiously away as the policeman hauled me the few yards to the corner, where the massive tower was with the stairs and the lifts in it. The light was dim enough under it for me to be able to focus on the big fancy notices on its walls.
LEVEL ELEVEN
, one said.
HAVE PASSES READY AT ALL TIMES
, said the next. And the rest had arrows pointing to
Lifts, Stairs, Main Shopping Arcade, Cloth Fair
.

“Can I use the lift?” I asked the policeman.

“Lifts cost money,” he said, and pushed me toward
Stairs
. “Get climbing. All the eateries on Fourteen will take your token, but you'll only have time to eat if you hurry. When the sun sets, you'll hear a hooter. If you haven't got to the PW office by then, you'll be liable to arrest.”

A train came in down in the depths while he was talking, with a rush and a rumble and a wave of warm, smelly air. I thought how it must feel to be in a prison cell under those trains. I started climbing.

They were wide, elegant, cleanly cut stone steps, lit by fancy lamps overhead. I went up and up until I was sure that my feet would be out of sight of the policeman—if he bothered to wait and watch, that was—and then I stopped under a light and looked at the token. It was a big white enamel circle with blue enamel lettering on it. On one side it said “Loggia City Public Works,” and when I turned it over, it said “1 standard meal, sleep 1.”

This is all it takes to make you an official vagrant, I thought. I put the disk in my pocket and went on climbing to the next level. Fairly naturally, I expected it to be Level Twelve.

Not a bit of it. The next notice I came to said
LEVEL ELEVEN A
→
Residences 69–10042
, pointing to even grander stairs on the right, and the one farther up after that pointed off to the left, saying ←
LEVEL ELEVEN B
House of Prayer for Holy Jazepta, College of High Prayermaster
. The steps to this bit were brightly whitewashed, while the ordinary steps climbed on, straight ahead. It looked as if the levels were staggered up the cliff, not in straight rows as I'd thought. Level Twelve was quite a long climb farther up and nothing like so exclusive. The stairs had hollows from people climbing them, and the notice there just said ←
Shops
→.

My legs ached by then—you know how they do when you're short on sleep—so I wandered out on Twelve to take a rest. It was all small shops as far as I could see, spilled out like stalls into the arcade, very well lit and cheerful and busy. I could see jewelry and veg, books and clothes, toys and bread. After that the pillars got in the way. It was so cheerful there that I stood staring until I began to shiver. My clothes were still quite damp, and I noticed the chill when I wasn't moving. I thought of dungeons under the railway and went back to the stairs.

I think Twelve A and Twelve B just said
Houses
and numbers, and Thirteen the same, though I was in a blur of climbing by then and didn't pay much attention, except to notice that the steps were much more worn and dirty by then and the lights on the ceiling weaker. But I snapped to attention at Thirteen B. The notices there said ←
Sex
and
Drugs
→.

“That's frank, at least!” I panted. I wanted to stop and take a look, both ways, but I seemed to have been climbing for ages by then, and I was starving hungry. With the luck I'd been having in this place, I knew someone was just going to have served me up my One Standard Meal when the sunset hooter would go and I wouldn't have time to eat it. So I put on speed, up really grotty steps that were cracked and crooked and filthy, with rubbish piled in the corners, and got up to Level Fourteen at last.

The first thing I saw there was a red-and-white enamel notice over the stairs to the next level.
CAUTION
, it said,
HIGH LEVELS OF RADIATION BEYOND THIS POINT
.

“Oh,
fun
!” I said, and I was glad I didn't have to go up there. The notices pointing each way along Level Fourteen said a whole list of factories, and the one pointing to the right added at the bottom,
PUBLIC WORKS OFFICE,
O
PEN
S
UNRISE
–S
UNSET
. “Right,” I said, and went that way. I could smell food along there, too.

The arcade there was much lower and narrower, and it was held up by big square pillars that I could see were just meant to support radioactive Level Fifteen and the rest and nothing to do with being pretty. The floor was black and sort of tarry. But the first thing I came to was a whole row of little caffs, crammed in together under the pillars, and those were all I could attend to by then. It was
hours
since those scarmbled eggs. I went along the row, looking.

That policeman had lied to me. Some of the caffs had menus in the windows saying
FRESH SCOPPINS
, 3
TOKES
or 5
BINDALS
, 4
TOKES
and several had stacks of colored stickers showing you which factory they took tokens from, but only one had a notice saying
PW TOKES TAKEN HERE
. So I had to go into that one.

It was a really depressing greasy spoon, one of those places where the windows are running with sweat from the cooking and lighted with raw greenish strips that don't give any light. People were queueing for food at a glassed-in counter at the far end, where a dreary, fat woman in an apron was slapping food on plates and calling out things like “You need another toke for bindals,” and “Peslow's run out now.” When they'd got their plates, the people sat wearily down at worn plastic tables to eat it. The only thing that seemed to be free was the drink people kept fetching from a spigot in the wall. It looked yellowish and a little fizzy.

I stood for a moment to get the hang of things. Everyone wore embroidery here, too, only it was all shabby, with threads hanging out or pieces from other patterns darned in. Even the fat woman's apron was old embroidery.

She glared at me and jerked her chin. I held out my token. “This gets you nipling and colly or klaptico. That's all,” she said, tapping the food troughs with her big wooden spatula. “Which is it? Hurry up.”

Klaptico looked swimmy and greasy and gray. Nipling was white and had a sort of look of mashed potatoes. It looked filling, so I chose that. She poured orange colly over it and then snatched my token away and stamped it with a huge black stamp.

“So don't think you can use it twice,” she snapped, sticking the token into the nipling like an ice-cream wafer. She handed me the plate, token and all. “Spear and spoon on the tray at the end.”

The eating implements were a sort of spike and a minishovel. I picked up one of each and took my plate to a free table. All the other people sort of bent away from me as I went. Then they bent away again when I went to get myself a drink. Yes, I thought, working the spigot, I'm a vagrant. You don't know where I've been!

I was really puzzled by the drink. It tasted rusty and sweetish. “What is this stuff?” I asked the woman at the nearest table, as politely as I could.

She looked at me as if I was mad. “Water,” she said.

“Oh,” I said.

I turned back to my plate and took a look to see how other people were using their spike and shovel. They were spiking and shoveling, so I did that, too. And after one shovelful I was wishing I'd had klaptico instead. Nipling was hot, like horseradish, and colly was another kind of hot, like salty chili. I had to keep going for more of the weird water, wondering each time if it was poisoning me, but I was so hungry that I ate every scrap. I swear I could taste nipling for the next twenty-four hours.

I put my plate and my glass in the bins near the counter and left, thankfully. Then, feeling a good deal better but a bit fiery around the middle, I went along the black, blocky arcade until I came to a long brown building with hardly any windows and a large door covered with blue-and-white enamel notices.
PUBLIC WORKS OFFICE. OPENING HOURS
08.00–16.00.
DO NOT DISTURB NIGHT SHIFT UNLESS AN EMERGENCY. NO LOITERING. NO MONEY EXCHANGED FOR TOKENS
, and scads of others. I stared at them all for a while until I saw one notice all by itself in the doorjamb.
INSERT PW TOKEN TO OPEN DOOR
, it said, and underneath it was a slit like a letterbox.

I thought, I don't want to do this. But I thought that Important was bound to have phoned up to this place and told them I was on my way. I thought of the prison under the trains. And I got out my nipling-coated token and posted it into the slit.

It went down with an almighty clanging crash. It made me jump.

It made me jump so hard that I realized that I'd been half asleep until then. I'd been doing what I was told like a zombie. Now I was wide awake all of a sudden and quivering. And
angry
. Why should I be sent to work in a cloth factory like a slave when all I'd done was mistake someone for Romanov? And I still hadn't found Romanov. I was supposed to help two more people before I could find him, and after that I'd promised to help that girl. Roddy. It dawned on me that I'd have to
mean
to help her or she wouldn't count as one of the people I'd helped. Instead I was letting myself be stuck in this awful place. And that was stupid. Pathetic, really.

I turned away from the notice-studded door and ran back along the arcade, past the caffs, until I came to the stairs. I knew they'd look for me going down them. So I dived up the next flight, under the notice that warned about
RADIATION
.

My plan was quite simple. I was going to sit on those stairs, just high enough to be out of sight, until I heard the police come up. Then, when they went back down looking for me, I was going to follow them and be behind them when they thought I was in front.

It didn't work out that way. That set of steps turned out to be quite short. There were no lights in the roof, and the stairs were made of cracked and slippery white tiles. Unlike all the other flights, they curved, and as soon as I had climbed round the curve and was feeling pleased that I was out of sight already, I saw sunset light up ahead. I realized I must have come to the very top of the cliff.

After that I was too interested to stop. I wanted to see what was causing the dangerous radiation. I went on up.

The first thing I saw, before I was really at the top, was a tall wire fence quite a long way overhead and another of those enamel notices fixed to it, beautifully lit by the flaring sun.
AIRFIELD KEEP OUT
. As I climbed slowly and cautiously up the last steps, I could see that the fence was actually on top of rows of small houses that backed onto the last piece of the cliff. The houses were all different and all sort of cottage-sized. After the buildings on the lower levels, they struck me as more like doll's houses or dog kennels, and the paint on them was blistered and peeling.

This must be where the poor people live, I thought. I went up the last few steps and saw the poor people.

There were crowds of them, all sitting out on the flat rock in front of the little houses. Every one of the grownups was working away at embroidery, so that the place sort of heaved and flashed as far as I could see both ways, with arms moving and needles catching the light. Kids were darting about, bringing things. Every so often someone would say, “We need more number nine red,” or, “Bring me the one-two-five flower pattern,” and a child would dart off to get it. There wasn't room to walk among the busy people and the spread-out cloths they were sewing at, so the kids mostly had to run along the very edge of the cliff. There were no pillars here and no wall. It looked terrifying.

I stood where I was or I would have trodden on someone, or put my big, dirty shoe in the middle of a bright flower pattern on one side or a wreathing green-gold embroidery on the other. And I had hardly stood for a second when a plane of some kind took off from the airfield with a huge tinny whirring. I could tell it flew by quite different methods from the ones I knew. It zoomed right over our heads and I nearly fell back down the steps, trying to duck. A boy standing with his toes curled round the edge of the cliff never even swayed. He gave me a jeering look.

I pretended not to see him and watched the plane go whirring away across the flat and sandy tops of all the cliffs. It looked almost like unbroken desert from up here, with just a few dark, wriggly cracks to show where the city canyons were. In the distance, where it seemed to turn into solid desert, I could see something shining orange in the sunlight. The plane seemed to be making for this shining thing.

“Do you mind if I ask you a question?” I said to the man beside my right leg. He was old, and I didn't really like to look at him, because he had a growth of some kind down one side of his face. It blocked one of his eyes and went on down to mix with his straggly beard.