Authors: Jeffrey Thomas
"There will be things I need to buy. For the house."
"For the house?"
"Yes – there's a task that needs to be seen to," Judith told him. "I'll be staying."
The Servitors
Skrey
had chosen this as his day of emancipation.
He gave not the slightest indication of his plans, nor even of the discontent that had spawned them. He functioned as he had every day for the past four thousand years.
Skrey was an assistant feeder at the Twelfth Orifice. Kreve was crane operator and head feeder of this opening. At present, Kreve had had to shut down the feed crane in order to reset the great ring of black metal which held the circular wound open. As the wound attempted to heal, the ring was sometimes forced to contract. Kreve would adjust a huge crank to expand the ring and reclaim lost ground. First, however, he used a bladed pike, of the same black metal as the ring and the idle crane, to slice at the flesh which had begun to actually grow over the ring’s rim. The severed fragments either stuck to Kreve’s four multi-jointed grey arms, splatted at his bony cloven feet, or tumbled away into the great yawning crater of the orifice.
Standing almost on the opposite side of the vast wound, Skrey shoveled feed manually over the edge, digging a black metal spade into a black metal tub filled with a translucent sebaceous
matter, yellow with coarse black hairs sprouting out of it. He heard the feed thump
against the raw red throat of
the wound occasionally but had never heard it strike bottom.
Pausing from his labors, all four arms aching, he watched Kreve pick at the unwanted collar of flesh in his usual crude, sloppy manner. He left ragged strands dangling, wouldn’t sweep the debris over the lip into the volcano-like maw. Skrey would have to clip those untidy shreds, clean up the rubble. When he excised the flesh he always did it neatly. When he, rarely, got to operate the crane he never splashed feed accidentally all over the lip. Skrey kept the crane oiled, scraped off rust and blood – where Kreve would let the machine become clogged almost to a halt, on his own. But who was still head feeder, after four thousand years? Who was the favorite of the Supervisor, and could do no wrong?
Yes,
Skrey thought,
I
could be a favorite also...if I treated the Supervisor like he was God.
But the Supervisor wasn’t God; just another servitor, like the rest of them. A tiny, crawling nothing, scraping out his tiny existence on the planet-huge body of the Dreaming One. The One Who Slumbers. The Phantast. Now,
He
was God.
Kreve, the bastard. He had also been at fault for the death of Skrey’s mate, four thousand years ago, when the drillers had first bored the Twelfth Orifice. Poor Mrek had been on the drill team. It had been the responsibility of both drill leader and Kreve, in setting up his crane, to ensure they had chosen a sound site to bore. But their check for parasites had been cursory. Just below the epidermis, the drill hit a great nest of plump writhing larvae, which in feasting had tunneled the immediate sub-layers profoundly. The drill lost its support and toppled into the fresh wound. Skrey remembered it now; the drill platform screeching metallically, vanishing in the thick mist of blood which geysered up out of the wound. And the operators, trapped on the drill, screeching in horror. One of those voices had been Mrek’s...
Kreve had only received light punishment; his four arms and two legs cut off and prevented from regenerating for forty years. Unbelievable. Skrey’s only consolation had been that brief respite, working without Kreve, while the bastard lay in a dark corner somewhere, counting dust motes.
Mrek had never pulled herself up out of that maw, as two other drillers had. They’d caught hold of the sides, which still offered ragged hand-holds, not yet fully bored smooth. Shaken, covered in blood and mucus, but alive. Mrek must have hit that far-away bottom. An ocean of bile, lost in the darkness beyond sight.
As he shoveled feed anew, Skrey imagined what it was like to die. The servitors had been created all but immortal. He had survived countless atrocious on-job accidents (most of them Kreve’s fault). He was sure he had spawned a few fresh servitors that way. Vaguely he was aware that he himself had started life as an arm jerked off a worker in a cleaning team when a wild hose got wrapped around it. Was that worker like himself? Dissatisfied? Unhappy? Angry? And ever angrier, for being so unhappy?
Had the Supervisor allowed Kreve’s six severed limbs to clone themselves into full servitors? Dormant One – he hoped
not! Six more of the bastard...
Six more for Skrey to kill.
The servitors could die...if their bodies were fully and quickly dissolved. Or digested – as in the unseen corrosive sea at the bottom of the giant well Skrey labored at every day.
Jean’s eyes felt full and hard with the pain of heir headache, like billiard balls in her skull. They were the only part of her that showed, ninja-like, in her white costume, and she even wore goggles to complete her disguise.
Through these aching lenses she watched the carousel turn, the jiggling glass cartridges filling with a clear local anesthetic to be administered via hypodermic by dentists. Thousands of tiny tubes of pain-numbing elixir, none of it any good for the pain she felt now. They were a taunt. She imagined the deep stabbing of those thousands of needles.
Jean watched for crimps or dents in the little metal caps which her huge machine then sealed the cartridges with. A dent could make an air bubble. Dangerous. She plucked these and broken cartridges out with rubber-sheathed fingers. The carousel fed into a tray, the cartridges squeezing their multitudes into it like people swarming out of a carnival ride. When it was full she paused the filler, removed the tray and inserted it through a hole in the wall to a person on the other side, whom she could see but not speak with. This was a woman who always seemed to have a look of amused scorn on her face, and who seemed to make comments about Jean to the others out there. They could watch her all night through the glass, like a creature in an aquarium.
Jean couldn’t go get some aspirin. Not for two more hours, her next break. And she shouldn’t have had two coffees at supper; she would have to wait two more hours to relieve herself. Eight times a day she changed her clothes at work. Every time there was a break, all the outer garments of the sterile department – hood, mask, jumpsuit, booties, gloves -- would be discarded ... then, after break, a fresh outfit would be donned over her standard white uniform. All of it a blinding, eye-stabbing white. A termite white. Jean felt a rebellious urge to wear black or red underwear under all that sterile white, but was afraid that it would show through.
No conversation in sterile was audible over the roar of machinery, no lips could be seen to be read. There was no piped-in music, no portable tape or CD players allowed. There were no posters, no tacked up photos of children. Color, it seemed, had been forbidden. Just eyes...and though these were said to be the windows of the soul, the eyes Jean had contact with during the nights were dusty, showed no lights on inside, or seemed to have their shades drawn. She was sure that hers looked the same.
George, her immediate boss, came in and greeted her by motioning impatiently at the tank into which the great bags of metal caps were poured to keep them replenished. It was nearly empty. Jean knew this; she’d been keeping a peripheral eye on it. Hadn’t she worked this job for five years now? But with huffy movements, George ripped open and dumped a fresh bag himself.
The tray was full; too full, as Jean had taken her eyes from it to look at George. It happened sometimes, but shouldn’t while George was around. She paused the filler, slid the tray out, and, despite her attempts not to jar them, two dozen cartridges lingering on the walkway between carousel and tray toppled off the precipice like a horde of lemmings, crashing to a floor already crunchy with glass, wet with pain-killer.
At the end of the shift she would suck up the glass with a vacuum, hose down the floor, while the last dregs of the tank were drained. She could not go home, or even leave the room, until this was accomplished. She had complained once. “Overtime!” George had exclaimed. “How can you complain about making time and a half?” But the nights were so long, and life so short...
George disgustedly caught up a mop and pushed the bulk of the mess away from her feet, against the wall until later. The mop bumped her feet roughly as he did so. Jean thought, then, that anyone who could not at least understand why a worker would slaughter supervisors and co-workers had never worked blue collar.
Sometimes, as now, when Skrey concentrated hard or allowed a meditative calm to come over him, he could feel her. He turned his face of bony chitin up toward the roof of the cavern the Dreaming One reposed in, so distant and dark that it seemed the infinity of space itself. Beyond the infinity, he sensed her. She was her own being, and yet a version of himself, interpreted differently by the dimension she lived in, the plane she dwelt on. They were apart, yet connected. Did she ever sense his life?
She was a female of her kind, he knew that much. It didn’t trouble him. What intrigued him was the softness of her flesh, and especially the brightness of her world. Every day she garbed herself in white, ritualistically, and entered a white place. Perhaps she was a priestess...
Skrey knew of her plane not only from this connection he had to it, but from what he’d heard from the caste of servitors called the explorers, who ventured into other dimensions to inspire cults of worship for the Phantast, and to destroy enemies. What a place of wonders they told of! Open skies of color, and – at night -- stars.
Kreve came toward Skrey, carrying his pike. His mandibles chattered to admonish Skrey. “Dreaming again, friend? Leave dreaming for the Master and shovel that feed! If the Master grumbles hungry in His sleep you’ll wish you had been sent to work in the waste holes, when the Supervisor is done with you.”
Skrey dug his shovel into the tub, swiveled his head to glance over his shoulder. He saw no other workers from here. “Do you ever dream of freedom, Kreve?” he asked.
“There is no such thing as freedom. It is an abstraction. Even the Master is not free. He is trapped in His dreams.”
“Death is freedom, though, is it not? Freedom from slavery? Freedom from pain?”
“Yes, fool, I suppose it is.”
“Then I give you a gift, fellow slave.” Skrey shoveled a blob of feed up into Kreve’s face.
Kreve sputtered, stumbled back, blindly tried to raise his pike, but too late. The shovel blade swung sideways against his skull like an ax.
Kreve plummeted over the lip. No hand-holds now. Slick mucus walls. Skrey did not hear him hit the sea of bile...just a screeching cry fading to nothingness.
“Be free,” Skrey said.
The bottle of maximum strength aspirin sat on the top shelf of her locker. Also on the shelf, inside a paper lunch bag, was her boyfriend's cherished SIG- Sauer P-225 semiautomatic. Boy, would he kill her if he knew she’d smuggled it out of the house...not just tonight, but every night of the week thus far. But she had never taken it out of the bag, had returned it to its drawer each night when she got home. Lightly, she reached into the bag and touched the pebbled handle, the black metal. It had been a rebellious act, bringing this black blot into this white place. Like the panties she wanted to wear...
Roy, a plumber, owned his own house at twenty-six. Now he wanted to get married. He wanted children. Two and a half children, Jean thought. She did not want children.
“Why?” Roy had said. “Jesus! What kind of woman doesn’t want children?”
She couldn’t answer that. There might be many answers. A woman who simply did not care for those particular responsibilities? Who did not want to give away her life to others when she
could be living it herself? A woman who did not see why she had to propagate a species whose worthiness of continuation was questionable?
W
ell, Roy had gone on, in essence, what
do
you want to do? What else is life for? To produce and reproduce. Like a good sheep. But Jean had once dreamed of traveling, of exploring, of being everything she could be, like they told you in school. Only, she had found in her twenties that you couldn’t be all you could be. You couldn’t
really,
ultimately, be what you wanted. There were limits. Walls. Society was bigger and stronger and had its own agenda. Oh, it sounded like a cop-out, even to herself...but it was true, wasn’t it?
The pain was so great in her head, in the agonized orbs she stared through, she doubted the aspirin could help her now. Maybe if she took the whole bottle, it could he
lp her. Cure her. Maybe then...
Instead, she removed the heavy paper bag from the locker. She slipped the chunky gun into the waistband of her pants, pulled her shirt down over it. No, its blackness didn’t show through. Good. She felt better. She would smuggle some personality back into the sterile department. A shard of identity, a piece of self, compacted like a collapsed star into a heavy black core of anger.
Skrey rode a feed conveyer belt most of the way to the First Orifice, jumped off before the crew there could spot him. The absence of the feeders at the Twelfth Orifice would have been noticed by now, but the Supervisor would not guess Skrey’s destination...