“It’s not a bad life,” he said. “Plenty of food, a place to sleep, and the work’s not arduous, after you’ve learned the routine.”
The routine, he went on to explain, was Sorting. “It’s a high-level job,” Fsha-fsha assured me. “Only the top-category workers get this slot. And let me tell you, friend, it’s better than duty in the mines, or on the pelagic harvesting rafts!”
He explained the work; it consisted of watching an endless line of glowing spheres as they came toward us along a conveyor belt, and sorting them into one of eight categories. He told me what the types were, and demonstrated; all the while he talked, the bulbs kept coming, and his big hands flicked the keys in front of him, shunting them their separate ways. But as far as I could tell, all the bulbs were exactly alike.
“You’ll learn,” he said blandly, and flipped a switch that stopped the line. He fetched a lightweight assembly of straps from a wall locker.
“Training harness,” he explained. “It helps you catch on in a hurry.” He fitted it to me with the straps and wires crisscrossing my back and chest, along my arms, cinched up tight on each finger. When he finished, he climbed back on his stool, and switched on the line.
“Watch,” he said. The glowing bulbs came toward him and his fingers played over the keys.
“Now you follow through on your console,” he said. I put my hands on the buttons and he reached across to attach a snap that held them there. A bulb came toward me and a sensation like a hot needle stabbed the middle finger on my right hand. I punched the key under it and the pain stopped, but there was another bulb coming, and the needle stabbed my little finger this time, and I jabbed with it, and there was another bulb coming. . . .
“It’s a surefire teaching system,” Fsha-fsha said in his cheery, sub-cellar voice. “Your hands learn to sort without even bringing the forebrain into it. You can’t beat pain-association for fast results.”
For the rest of the shift, I watched glorm-bulbs sail at me, trying to second-guess the pain circuits that were activated by Fsha-fsha’s selections. All I had to do was recognize a left-forefinger or right ring-finger bulb before he did, and punch the key first. By the end of the first hour my hands ached like unlanced boils. By the second hour, my arms were numb to the elbow. At the end of three hours I was throbbing all over.
“You did fine,” Fsha-fsha told me when the gong rang that meant the shift was ended. “Old Hruba knew what he was doing when he assigned you here. You’re a quick study. You were coding ten percent above random the last few minutes.”
He took me along a damp-looking tunnel to a gloomy barracks where he and twenty-six other slaves lived. He showed me an empty alcove, got me a hammock and helped me sling it, then took me along to the mess. The cook was a warty creature with a ferocious set of ivory tusks, but he turned out to be a good-natured fellow. He cooked me up a sort of omelette that he assured me the other Man-slaves had liked. It wasn’t a gourmet’s delight, but it was better than the gruel I’d had in the hospital cell.
I slept then, until my new tutor shook me awake and led me back to the Sorting line.
The training sessions got worse for the next three shifts; then I started to catch on—or my eye and fingers did; I still couldn’t consciously tell one glorm-bulb from another. By the time I’d been at it for six weeks, I was as good as Fsha-fsha. I was promoted to a bulb-line of my own, and the harness went back in the locker.
The Sorting training, as it turned out, didn’t only apply to glorm-bulbs. One day the line appeared with what looked like tangles of colored spaghetti riding on it.
“Watch,” Fsha-fsha said, and I followed through as he sorted them into six categories. Then I tried it, without much luck.
“You have to key-in your response patterns,” he said. “Tie this one . . .” he flipped his sorting key, ” . . . to one of your learned circuits. And this one . . .” he coded another gob of wires, ” . . . to another. . . .”
I didn’t really understand all that, but I tried making analogies to my subliminal distinctions among apparently identical glorm-bulbs—and it worked. After that, I sorted all kinds of things, and found that after a single run-through, I could pick them out unerringly.
“You’ve trained a new section of your brain,” Fsha-fsha said. “And it isn’t just a Sorting line where this works; you can use it on any kind of categorical analysis.”
During the off-shifts, we slaves were free to relax, talk, gamble with homemade cards and dice, commune with ourselves, or sleep. There was a small, walled court we could crowd into when the sun shone, to soak up a little vitamin D, and a cold, sulfury-smelling cave with a pool for swimming. Some of the slaves from watery worlds spent a lot of time there. I developed a habit of taking long walks—fifty laps up and down the barrack-room—with Fsha-fsha stumping along beside me, talking. He was a great storyteller. He’d spent a hundred and thirty years in space before he’d been marooned here; he’d seen things that took the curl out of my hair to listen to.
The weeks passed and I sorted, watched, and listened. The place I was in was an underground factory, located, according to Fsha-fsha, in the heart of the city. There was only one exit, along a tunnel and up a flight of stairs barred by a steel gate that was guarded day and night.
“How do they bring in supplies?” I asked my sidekick. “How do they ship the finished products out? They can’t run everything up and down one little stairway.”
Fsha-fsha gave me what I had learned to interpret as a shrug. “I don’t know, Danger. I’ve seen the stairs, because I’ve been out that way quite a few times—”
I stopped him and asked for a little more detail on that point.
“Now and then it happens a slave is needed for labors above-ground,” he explained. “As for me, I prefer the peacefulness of my familiar routine; still, so long as the finger of the Triarch rests here—” he tapped a welted purple scar along his side— “I follow all orders with no argument.”
“Listen, Fsha-fsha,” I said. “Tell me everything you remember about your trips out: the route you took, the number of guards. How long were you out? How close did they watch you? What kind of weapons did they carry? Any chains or handcuffs? Many people around? Was it day or night? Did you work inside or outside—”
“No, Danger!” Fsha-fsha waved a square purple-palmed hand at me. “I see the way your mind’s working; but forget the idea! Escape is impossible—and if you did break away from a work detail, you’d still be alone in the middle of Drath, an alien, not knowing the language, with every Rule-keeper in the city ready to pounce on you—”
“I know all that. But if you think I’m going to settle down here for the rest of my life, you’re dead wrong. Now start telling me: How many guards escorted you?”
“Just one. As long as he has my controller in his pocket, one is all that’s needed, even if I were the most intractable slave in the pens.”
“How can I get picked for an outside detail?”
“When you’re needed, you’ll be called.”
“Meanwhile, I’ll be getting ready. Now give.”
Fsha-fsha’s memory was good. I was surprised to hear that for as much as an hour at a time, he had worked unsupervised.
“It’s no use creeping off and hiding out under an overturned cart or in an unused root-cellar,” he said. “One touch of the controller, and you’re mewling aloud for your keeper.”
“That means we’ll have to get our hands on the control devices before we break.”
“They’ve thought of that; the thing is tuned to your neuronic carrier frequency. If you get within three feet of it, it’s triggered automatically. If the holder dies, it’s triggered. And if it’s taken off of the overseer’s body, the same thing.”
“We can stand it long enough to smash them.”
“If the controller’s destroyed, you die,” he said flatly. “It’s covered any way you play it.”
“That’s where you’re wrong, Fsha-fsha.” I told him about crushing the controller the night I had been arrested. “Huvile didn’t die. The Rule-keeper saw him board Jongo II, an hour afterward.”
“Strange—it’s common knowledge among the slaves that if your controller is damaged, it kills you.”
“It’s a useful story for the slave-owners to spread.”