Under the Eye of God (20 page)

A squad of Dragon Guards herded them out of the elevators, using their sting-whips liberally. They drove them out onto the barren ground, toward the place where Death Canyon opened out onto the Plain of Sorrows. There the labor camp lay like another discarded tumble of trash.

The prisoners shambled toward it in despair. Sawyer and Finn looked ahead and groaned. The barracks sagged like a dying beast.

“Oh, hell—cheer up. We've had worse accommodations.”

“I can't remember where.”

“Give me time—I'll think of something. We have to have had a worse experience somewhere.”

“Not necessarily,” Finn grunted painfully. Then he added, “But think of it this way, Soy. We can only go up from here.”

Behind them, Kask shook his heavy head. “Nobody escapes from Death Canyon. No one ever has.”

“Well, then,” said Sawyer, “Finn and I will claim the honors of the first. You may come with us, if you wish. Harry? Lee? Will you join us?”

Lee looked skeptically at the tall blond man. “Tracker, your jests have everything but laughter.”

“You have my apology, sir. But I don't share your dismay. I've finally found the place where the sun never shines. Now I can stop wondering.”

Lee just sighed and shook his head. He wandered away from Sawyer and Finn. The two would not last long here. Of that, he had a strong premonition. They didn't take the situation seriously enough. Lee shielded his eyes with a leathery red hand and stared up into the canyon, wondering how far it extended, wondering how far the guards would chase a man before they gave up and turned back.

The piles of pipes and casings, broken engines, wall panels, half-filled trash containers, shattered girders, twisted frameworks of all kinds, gave the landscape a weird, metallic, evil, and surreal quality. Here and there, orange fires smoldered. The smoke rose upward, twisting slowly in the wind, disappearing into the gray haze that hung over everything down here.

Lee squinted and wondered who lived up there, up beyond the towering garbage. Who prowled through its tunnels, haunted its narrow canyons, lurked inside the metal caverns? Who came crawling down out of the night to prey upon the prisoners of the labor camps? If the inmates of the labor camps lived on the bottom rung of Thoska-Roole's ladder, then what kind of horrors lived beneath them, where no rules existed at all?

“You, there!” growled the Dragon Guard. He lashed his stinger-beam across Lee's back. “Don't go too far! We have to put a collar on you first!” Lee fell to the ground, writhing in pain, twisting and turning and trying to get his arm around to touch the band of fire the Dragon had laid across his spine.

“How do you like your Alliance of Life now?” rumbled Kask, as he yanked Lee to his feet and flung him back in the direction of the others.

Lee shook his head in disbelief. A prisoner like all the others, and Kask still identified with his oppressors. Lee staggered to his feet and followed the rest of the prisoners on toward the hut at the center of the camp—where they would have their slave-bands installed.

Following behind, Sawyer and Finn looked as broken as they rest. Finn mumbled as he walked, a steady stream of quiet, inventive curses. Sawyer had long since stopped asking him for explanations of some of the more esoteric terms. He grabbed Finn quickly to keep him from stumbling and asked him softly, “Can you make it?”

Finn grunted. He looked bad. A lot of the color had drained from his face; his body seemed wracked with chills and fever. But he merely nodded and said, “I can handle it. The spells remain bearable.”

“Finn—they keep getting stronger. And closer together. You don't have enough time to recover from the first one before the next one begins.”

“I have six hours between them now. I'll manage.” He shrugged off his brother's grasp. “I'll make it. Or I'll die trying.”

“Yes,” agreed Sawyer. “That's what I fear. If we intend to get out of here, we'd better do it quickly, while you still have the strength.”

“Don't worry about me.”

“I have to. I promised your mother.”

And then the Dragon Guards nudged them forward with their whips. Sawyer and Finn exchanged their last two looks as free men—and then the Dragon pushed the slave-bands down onto their heads.

Thoska-Roole had no indigenous life of its own. Whatever lived here, whatever survived here, had arrived as a stranger. The starships had delivered their cargos of passengers and stowaways. Along with the miners had come the rats and parasites and the diseases.

Some of the more foolhardy—those who couldn't find a reason to leave—believed that Thoska-Roole might someday bloom. They knew that all life depends on six inches of dirt. If they could manufacture that six inches, they could turn the deserts into forests. They believed that they could make a paradise here.

So, they created hell. They turned it on, and let it run—and conveniently forgot that hell cannot exist without the damned. Here, huge infernal machines clatter and bang, clunk and churned. They grind the rocks into powder, then mix them with garbage, sewage, and tailored bacteria to make a viscous “rock soup.” Then the resulting mess sits for a while in great stinking heaps. It ferments, it simmers and stews and generally gives nature a very bad name—but eventually, it turns into topsoil. The natives say that you can tell the ripeness of the soil by how bad it smells. Indeed, the smell alone constitutes cruel and unusual punishment.

Here, at the bottom of Death Canyon, where it opens up onto the Plain of Sorrows, lay the topsoil factory for the sprawling farms of New South MesaPort. The labor camps provided the arms and the legs and the backs. MesaPort provided the garbage, the waste, and the prisoners to replace the ones who died.

The condemned men lived and breathed rock soup. It clung to their skins, it filled up their lungs, it grayed their hair, and it dulled their senses until everything smelled and tasted and looked the same. They worked until they died, and then their bodies became part of the soup.

The prisoners shoveled and wheeled and carried all the sewage and the manure without complaint. They couldn't complain. On the day they arrived, they had their slave-bands installed, unremovable prisons wrapped around their foreheads, binding them and steering them. Whether they wanted to or not, the slave-bands would make them work. They retained just enough consciousness to know how much they hurt.

All the races—all except Vampires, of course—had fair representation among the damned; but humans, of course, had the majority share. The Vampires hated them the most—perhaps because the humans represented the
true
species from which all others descended, if not in fact, then certainly in spirit.

Only a single Dragon labored here among the lesser races, a deliberate insult to him and the family whose crest he wore, but an insult deemed appropriate to the crime he had committed. Sullenly, Kask bore his burden, terribly shamed by his dishonor; but he resented even more the dishonor of those who had sent him here.

High up on the slopes of trash and refuse, a tiny creature gasped in recognition. He knew this Dragon. This monster had brought him and his siblings across the light-years to this terrible place. He growled deep in his throat—an embarrassingly, high-pitched sound—but then, as he saw the stinging whips come slashing down, he began to realize that this Dragon, and all the other poor creatures accompanying it, had come here as unwilling slaves, his growl became a whimper of dismay. His tail drooped pitifully.

Little Ibaka couldn't even stand to see a Dragon in pain.

The pack of orphans; all ages, all sizes, ragged and dirty, some human, most not, all scrawny; prowled hungrily through the garbage of Death Canyon. Today, they had ventured dangerously close to the edges of the Labor Camp.

A new child had begun running with the pack of pitiful children—Ibaka, the dog boy. Smaller than the rest, he had to learn fast how to survive in this metallic wilderness. One of the older children, a gender-female human boy
³⁵
named Slash, had taken a fancy to him. She took him under her protection, not entirely for unselfish reasons. She had already figured out that she would rather cuddle up around a warm furry pup on a cold night, than shiver alone under a thin blanket. Slash had no illusions that Ibaka could provide her any protection against the occasional rapist, but Slash had already worked out her own defenses for that possibility.

“Listen to me,” she explained, pointing down the steep slope of trash and slag. They studied the labor camp with impugnity. “I know it looks dangerous to get too close to the labor camp, but if you take care, you should try to stay as close to the camp as you can—at least at first, until you learn how to survive higher up the canyon. The prisoners can't hurt you, not while they wear those silver bands on their heads. See, look—if they haven't finished eating when their break ends, they have to leave their food rations behind. We can sneak down and get them.”

They watched for a while. Slash knew that even if someone below spotted them, they could hide in the endless tunnels undermining the trash before anyone could even aim a scatterbeam. She pointed out landmarks in the camp and explained the actions of the guards and the prisoners.

Abruptly, she ordered him to hide. “Get down!” Slash whispered, pulling him down out of sight. Duck-waddling, she crept along the gully of trash. Ibaka started to follow, but his curiosity made him hesitate. He held back just long enough to take a quick peek over the edge.

Down below, a new group of prisoners came marching briskly out of the camp; they headed diagonally across the bottom of the slope toward the place the other children called the stink-farm. All the prisoners wore silvery bands around their heads. Ibaka wondered what the pretty headbands meant. The people who wore them all seemed so busy. For a while, he wished he could wear a headband too. His brothers and sisters would all envy him so much—

And then he remembered. And realized. He would probably never see any of them again. And not his mother either.

He began to whimper. He sat there whimpering for a long time, until Slash came back and pulled him down into the dark corridors of slime and sewage where they both could find a pretense of safety and security. Slash had a hidden lair. They could go there. They could hold each other close and pretend they did it only for warmth.

She didn't ask him why he cried. She didn't need to. She simply held him in her lap and petted him gently. After a while, as a way of distracting himself, he asked her about the headbands on the prisoners.

She answered carefully, explaining to the best of her knowledge what she believed the headbands did. “See,” said Slash. “The headband has little needles that drill into your head and take over the working of your body. Then, anybody who has the controller unit can run you like a robot. Your poor body will have to do whatever the controller tells it to do, no matter what you want; no matter what you think or feel or choose.”

At first, Ibaka didn't believe her; then, when he did, he began to cry again—this time in even greater distress. He had never heard of anything so frightening. He hadn't dreamt such horrors existed.

“But can't they take the headbands off?” he asked when his whimpers finally began to subside.

“If they try, they die.”

“But—” Ibaka pawed at his muzzle in confusion. He understood less and less every day. He had to find a way to rescue his brothers and sisters. He had to find a way for them to all go home. But nobody wanted to help him. Everybody only explained to him why nothing would work. “—don't they ever get to go home?”

Slash smiled sadly. How could she explain to this poor naive little waif? He had no concepts for this. She shook her head and patted Ibaka gently, smoothing his fur and pulling him to her. “Listen to me, sweet one,” she said. “You must never let yourself get caught by the guards, or they'll put a headband on you too. They don't care. All criminals look the same in the stink-farm. And they get paid by the amount of topsoil they produce. So, they'll work you and kill you and throw you in the rock soup with everything else. You must take great care. Promise me?”

“I promise.” Ibaka looked to Slash as a surrogate mother. She gave him warmth and reassurance and helped him find food. In Ibaka's eyes, Slash glowed like a radiant creature; her long stringy hair took on a heavenly glow. Her pinched features and squinting eyes became beacons of kindness. Her thin arms and legs had the strength of a warrior. Her voice, when she sang to him, soared like an angel's.

Ibaka had surprisingly little pretense about his situation. He could not imagine himself safe here or anywhere, not ever again; but when he cuddled himself comfortably into Slash's protecting arms, at least he didn't hurt quite so much as he did before.

Star-Captain Neena Linn-Campbell did not find satisfaction at the Thoska-Roole offices of the IOG.
³⁶
The meeting had not begun well. From there, it went downhill. The local Vice Applicator-Adjutant refused to hear Captain Campbell's claim against the Thoska-Roole Regents' misappropriation of her First Officer, a LIX class bioform named Ota.

“You have my sympathies,” the Vice Applicator-Adjutant said, putting on his sincerest expression. “But unfortunately, the Guild lacks authority in this kind of matter.”

Neena Linn-Campbell wasn't fooled. This pompous preening popinjay had a perfumed pompadour piled high upon his head. He stood on his podium, wearing pink ruffled silks and a dark blue velvet jacket. He seemed about as sympathetic as a candied vulture.

Captain Campbell glanced quickly to Robin and Gito; she made a surreptitious
keep still
gesture.
I'll handle this
. She turned back to the Vice Applicator-Adjutant.

“You refuse to provide assistance to a member of the Guild?”