Demons' World

Chapter Four

Stead could not be sure of his impressions in that chaotic moment. Something incredibly hard and horny lashed him across the back and he fell. A monstrous bloated shadow reared above him. From the corner of his eye he glimpsed Delia reeling, a long hairy something wrapped around her waist. The blue dress ripped upwards. A vast and sudden booming concussion hit him, the sound of a great explosion.

Struggling to rise, he saw the hairy thing around Delia slacken, then lopped and writhed away spouting a blasphemous ichor. A sword, gleaming in parts not covered by a glistening thick syrup, slashed again.

Delia toppled free. Stead reached for her, and Cargill’s hand raked down, took the girl by her back, hefted her, and carried her away.

Numbly, Stead crawled after them.

Cargill dropped Delia, turned, and grabbed Stead by the hand, dragging him free. Something soft and warm and furry had enveloped Stead’s legs. The touch of that abhorrently caressing softness brought a sickness again into his stomach, made his jaws ache with a revulsion of reaction.

“If you want to vomit, vomit,” Cargill said.

The soldier turned at once to Delia, propped her head against a knee, his hands very gentle, and felt her pulse. Her eyes flickered open.

“Thank you, Cargill! You saved—”

“Forget that,” he said, quite normally. “That’s my job. I’m good at that.”

“Is Stead all right?”

“Yes. He looks green, but hell recover.”

“What,” said Stead weakly, “was that?”

Cargill stood up, helping Delia to her feet, holding her hand. Fleetingly Stead wondered why, if the soldier wanted to put his hands on Delia’s body, he hadn’t done so then. There was a lot more to the soldier than appeared. “We call those beasts Scunners. No brains. Pretty fierce with those sixteen legs. You saw how the brute used ’em on Delia. But a gun will usually see ’em off, unlike the Rangs.”

Stead did not particularly look forward to meeting a Rang.

Delia had regained her composure and, not without a shuddery glance back at the ghastly thing that lay in its own blood, the three set off for the warrens. Now Stead understood more clearly the reason for Cargill’s alertness. If things like that Scunner infested the outer darkness, then a man’s total attention and courage was needed to leave the warren.

“There are many animals inhabiting the world,” Delia told him as they passed the barrier beneath its blue light and re-entered once more the warm brightness of home. “As you can see, physiologically we have no relationship with the Scunner, nor with any other animal of the country.”

They had entered a different control point from the one they had left and their way led past a series of cubicles lining the main street. In each cubicle a man or youth, a woman or girl, sat engrossed before a whirring, glinting machine.

“Who are they?” asked Stead. “What are they doing?”

“They are workers,” Delia told him. “This is the street of the tailors and they are making clothes for us to wear. Each street has its own trade, all under the direct supervision of a street Controller, and each contributes something to the wealth of Archon.”

But Stead found it difficult to concentrate on the economic system of Archon. He saw workers laboring to produce all the things needed, saw electric and dog-drawn carts distributing the products, saw the great markets with their blazing never quenched electric lights, heard the bustle and hum of commerce, smelt the scents of the factories where foraged food was brought to be processed. But his imagination darted restlessly outside the warrens.

The revelation of the animals to be found outside, the Scunner he had seen, excited him with the wonder and awe of it all. He wanted to go out and explore, to know, to learn more and more of this world in which he had been flung with the careless inconsequence of a workman rejecting a scrap of unwanted material.

Over it all, like the haze he had been told enveloped the Outside, the blurred longings for revelations of self wilted and died. He had long since given up trying to cudgel his reluctant brain into yielding up the secret of his personality, his memories, his hidden lore.

Now all that lay in the past, in another world into which he had no desire to return. He had not been a man of Archon but the immortal being had been kind and had given him a second chance, a second birth, and he was now privileged to be one of Archon. And the humble gratitude he felt sustained him at the fading thoughts of any losses he might have suffered.

No other race could be so well-favored as the people of Archon. He believed that implicitly.

His schooling proceeded apace. Not without a smile, Delia had decreed he should work completely through a standard school course normally occupying an Archon child for six years. Stead completed the whole in the course of a quarter, one hundred and nineteen days.

“And now you can begin to learn about life.”

“Learn about life… or about Life?” said Stead, who had begun to find his feet in this new world.

“All in due time. Don’t forget the Scunner.”

“I’m not likely to. I must say, Cargill acted his part well.”

“It’s his job,” Delia said offhandedly. But Stead had not failed to notice the warmth with which she greeted the soldier these latter days, the unquestioning acceptance of his presence on every walk they took together. “He’s just doing a job, looking after you.”

On the one hundred and twentieth day after his discovery, Stead was summoned to the Captain’s presence.

Despite his growing confidence, he could not repress a quick appreciative shiver of alarm. After all, the Captain was as much above mere mortal men as the Controllers were above the workers. Delia had patiently explained that the Captain, and his Crew were mortal, but to Stead the notion that in some way they survived the normal decay of the human body could not be dismissed in simple rational belief. Death, he now understood, was a nastily permanent thing, except for those of the people of Archon who acted blamelessly in the support of Archon and the Captain.

The others, of course—all the peoples of other empires and federations—were doomed from the moment of their birth. Only the people of Archon could be saved, but saved for what, even Delia was not sure. “A greater world with greater^ buildings and without the necessity to forage and work. That is what is believed by the lower classes.”

“And you? The Controllers?”

She pouted prettily. “Some Controllers, in these sinful days—Simon for one—do not believe anything any longer. When you are dead, you’re dead, they say.”

“And a perfectly reasonable and hygienic belief it is, too,” said Simon, bustling in, his wrinkled face beaming with news. “We call it Scientific Rationalism. It will sweep away the mystical beliefs of our forefathers, and it will not make us one whit the less good or noble men!”

“We-ell, I don’t know,” said Delia. Her parents had been strict about the ritual observance of the niceties, the proper rendition of praise and thanks to the immortal one, the strict keeping of the Dates. “There must be some rhyme and reason behind the world we know.”

“Well, if there is it must wait,” said Simon briskly. “Stead, dress yourself most carefully, shave meticulously, a slight touch of perfume, clean fingernails. You’re still a grubby-necked schoolboy in many ways. The Captain has summoned you for this afternoon!”

Preparations passed in a whirl. He had no premonitions of what to expect, or of what was expected of him. All his attempts to draw out Delia or Simon were met with a silence, an amused, tolerant silence imposed by their scientific training. He even tried to pump Cargill and was met with a silence that was more rigid, more military, less amused.

A brightly painted electric car, adorned with the personal insignia of the Captain—an upright wedge with two smaller wedges depending at forty-five degree angles below—took them silently and with despatch through the streets of the warren, down descending man-made spiral ramps, deep below and out into a spacious expanse where moss grew greenly under the flood of almost unbearably bright illumination from massed electric lights.

“Down here we are in the lowest, most important and luxurious part of the warren,” Simon said. Even his imperturbable scientific detachment sparked visibly at the majesty of the surroundings. The walls rose sheer for a hundred feet and almost—almost but not quite, so Cargill said-induced that panicky feeling of rooflessness that could reduce the strongest of men to babbling idiocy. “Only Foragers seem able to throw it off for a time, and even they cannot stand too many trips Outside.”

Stead had read about the disease called rooflessness in the medical books and had no wish to experience it at first hand, if at all.

They alighted and walked between splashing fountains toward an oval archway through which electric lights blazed orange and blue. The masonry here showed all the art and beauty and aspiration of the human race at its most magnificent flowering. The buttresses and pillars, the supporting arches and columned majesty of the building spoke eloquently of years of painstaking labor, of an infinitude of small devotions. Here one could feel and see the man-made structure crouching, upholding on broad scientific and architecturally grand designs all the weight and pressure the world could bring to bear. Here there would never be a cave-in. Here the ceiling could never collapse. Here man had built himself the safest, snuggest, most magnificent and daring retreat in the world.

“My spirit glows within me whenever I see the Captain’s Cabin,” said Simon, his face, too, glowing with more than the reflected electric radiances.

They walked through that oval door.

Here luxury reigned. Swiftly and yet with a decent decorum they were led through many chambers, softly carpeted, glowing with myriad lights, adorned with paintings and murals and frescoes that dazzled the eye and, at the end, almost wearying the senses, satiating one in un-plumbed depths of pleasure.

Before them doors of solid bronze clanged back like twin strokes of a gong.

Beyond, they had time for one chaotic glimpse of light, of a mass of faces turned to them, of clothes rioting in color, of jewels and feathers and the glint of weapons; the scent of a great throng of Controllers with its thousand different nuances rose up before them; the sound of the discreet murmur of a thousand throats dinned mellowly in their ears, and then they were walking down the unreeling length of purple carpet towards the Control Chair set on its dais beneath the regal splendor of lights above. Emotion caught at Stead’s throat.

Stewards dressed all in white brought tiny gilt chairs, placed them three in a row.

“You may sit down,” said the presence in the Control Chair.

Sitting obediently, Stead glanced upward. The aura of light blazing in refulgent lightnings around the presence rendered detailed observation difficult, and his own emotion clouded his view. But he saw that the Captain was an old man, white haired, white bearded, fierce of face, leaning forward slightly and with his two penetrating blue eyes fixed unswervingly upon them.

Stead lowered his own gaze, feeling blasphemous.

“Repeat your log,” said the Captain.

Obediently, Simon began his recitation of the work they had done with Stead. As the old voice droned on nothing of importance or significance was overlooked, and not one whit of tension and grandeur in the scene was lost. Two thousand ears listened in the great hall. Stead remained with his eyes fixed on the carpet beneath his feet. These matters were grave and vast beyond his comprehension. And the light blinded him.

At last Simon reached the present. “After this report, sir, Stead should go, as your Crew recommends, to some practical work that may—”

“Yes,” said the Captain, and Simon fell silent. “We have decided he will become a Forager.”

Utter silence.

Then Delia lifted her head. “A Forager, sir? But—” She could not go on.

“When he has completed a first tour of duty with the Foragers, we will see him again. Only then will the artifacts known to you be shown him. That is all. You may return to your stations.”

At the ritual words ending an audience, Simon and Delia stood up and, as he had been told, Stead stood up too. His mind was in turmoil. Being a Forager meant that much of the painstaking work of Simon and Delia became, at one stroke, meaningless. Of what need algebra, the theory of Recurring Buildings, the Evolutionary Theory and its inapplicability to Man The Unique? A Forager needed a quick eye and hand, the ability to run faster than a Scunner and then to freeze into the stillness of inert matter, an expertise with weapons and the knack of filling a sack with forage.

“By all the Demons of Outside!” Simon was muttering and mumbling to himself, rubbing his chin with a shaking hand. “I never dreamed of this outcome! It is almost—”

“Think, Simon!” said Delia, her face white under the lights.

They passed out of the Captain’s Cabin, retraced their steps through the grandiloquent chambers, were taken by the electric car back to Simon’s laboratory in the higher levels of the warren. All the journey was passed in silence.

Then Simon, the free-thinking scientist, could contain himself no longer.

“I have never questioned the edicts of the Captain,” he said, throwing himself into a chair, his hair tousled. “And I never shall. But this—this almost gives me grounds for agreeing with the dissidents. My father would have put away his wife had the Captain ordered it. I would not, because I firmly believe the Captain could never give such an order. Times have changed and we set less store by the old ideas and regimens. But this!”

“Suppose we think what best to do,” said Delia. Her manner had grown brittle and irritable since the audience of the Captain. She tapped her slender fingers on the arm of her chair in a rhythm that annoyed Stead.

“What can we do but prepare Stead in the best way we can to be a Forager?”

Slowly, Stead said, “The Captain said that this was for one trip. That he would see me after that. Perhaps—”

“Of course!” Simon sat up, again eager and alert. “To succeed in our task you must experience every part of modern life. But the shock has been—is still—an emotional upheaval. To me, at least.”

In Archon the day, divided into three equal periods of eight hours each, was demarcated by a one-second flickering of the lights. Then the workers changed watches, the sleepers awoke, the pleasure seekers retired to bed, the guards changed, the whole breathing life of the warrens turned over in a smooth and organized turmoil.

But for the scientists trying to bring the empty husk that had been the stranger, Stead, into the living, breathing, thinking adult that he so obviously was, time meant nothing. There was so much to learn.

“Our society of Archon, we now know,” Simon told him, “is not perfect. Only a few years ago such a statement could not have been made.”

“You mean society was perfect then?” asked Stead.

Simon smiled indulgently. That would follow from my remark. But, no. I meant that although society was no better than it is today, it had no one to impel it to change. Men thought they lived in a perfect society. Only recently have we begun to question the basic foundations of our way of life, largely impelled by a great thinker and writer, called B. G. Wills. He explained that as the animals of the world evolved—always excepting Man—so society was evolving. If only we could change society we would improve man himself.”

“And what does the B. G. mean?” asked Stead. It had sounded odd.

“They were his off-watch names. We all have more than one name, although sometimes I tend to forget that. I am Simon Bonaventura and Delia is Delia Hope. But we use our ofl-watch names nearly all the time. Wills, for some odd reason, simply used the abbreviated form, an affectation. But don’t mistake me. He was a great man.”

“So if we all changed the society in which we live, then we, ourselves, would be changed.” Stead thought about that. Then he said, “Yes. That sounds reasonable.”

“I’m glad,” Simon said with a flashing ripple of sarcasm softened by his eager old smile, “that you agree with our greatest minds.”

“Oh, do come on,” said Delia. “The party’s due to begin in an hour and both of you look as though you’ve been wrestling with a Scunner.”

“By all the Demons, woman!” thundered Simon. “A party has no significance next to trying to teach Stead.”

“And that, my dear Simon, is where you are wrong. A party will show Stead in half an hour more about human nature than these books are likely to tell him in a year.”

“Impractical flibbertigibbet,” Simon rumbled away to himself. But he went off to his suite of rooms to change and make himself presentable.

Stead had been using a small suite, bedroom, anteroom, lounge and study, a very modest establishment compared with some Controllers’ cubicles. He went off to change, chuckling at Simon’s antics.

Everyone, it seemed, had turned out for Stead’s going away party.

“In reality,” Simon told him as they entered the packed and stifling hall, aswim with movement and color and scent, “they are doing you an immense favor, doing you honor. You see, Controllers normally have no social intercourse with Foragers. But you have been educated as a Controller. Up until today you were one of us and, I hope, after your probationary period as a Forager, you will be one of us again.”

“I hope so, too,” said Stead vehemently. “I feel dishonor, a horrible sense of dirt, at leaving the society of Controllers for that of the Foragers.”