“Maybe that’s why they grabbed you so fast. You might have given the game away. Hell’s ice, if the slaves knew. . . .”
“How about it, Fsha-fsha? Are you with me?”
He stared at me in the gloom of the comer where we’d drifted to talk in private. “You’re a strange, restless creature, Danger,” he said. “For a being as frail as you are, with that soft skin and brittle bones, you’ve got an almighty urge to look for trouble. Why not take a tip from me and make the best of it—”
“I’ll get out of here, Fsha-fsha—and get clear of the planet, too—or die trying. I’d as soon be dead as here, so I’m not risking much.”
Fsha-fsha made the noise that served him as a sigh. “You know, we Rinths see the Universe differently from your Propagators,” he said. “With us, it’s the Great Parent that produces the spores. We workers have the mobility, the intelligence—but no future, except the Parent. We have the instinct to protect the Tree, fertilize it and water it, prune it, insure its survival; but we’ve got no personal stake in the future, the way you have. Your instincts tell you to stay alive and propagate. Your body knows this is a dead end as far as offspring go, so it tells you to get out or die.” He sighed again. “When I left Rinth, it was hard; for a long time, I had a homesickness that you wouldn’t be able to understand—any more than I can really understand the way you feel now. But I can remember how it was. And if it’s anything like that with you—yes; I can see you’ve got to try.”
“That’s right; I’ve got to try. But not you, Fsha-fsha. If you’re really content here, stay. I’ll make it on my own.”
“You wouldn’t have a chance, Danger. I know the language, the routes around the town. You need me. Not that it’ll do any good in the end. But knowing about the controllers will make a difference.”
“Forget it. You can teach me the language, and tell me all you can about the town. But there’s no point in your getting killed—”
“That’s another advantage a Rinth has,” Fsha-fsha cut me off. “No instinct for self-preservation. Now, let’s get started planning the details.”
2
The weeks went by. I sorted, slept, took my language lesson, and worked to memorize the map of the city I drew up from Fsha-fsha’s descriptions. About two months after our decision to crash out, Fsha-fsha got a call for an outside detail. He vetoed my suggestion that I volunteer to go along.
“This is a lucky break,” he said. “It will give me a chance to look over the ground again, in the light of our plans. Rest easy. We’ll get our chance.”
“We Propagators aren’t as patient as you Tree-farmers,” I told him. “It may be another six months before an outside detail comes up again.”
“Better to propagate in your old age than not at all, eh?” he reminded me, and I had to bite my teeth and watch him go. I got one quick look at the passage as he left. It was narrow, dim-lit; the Drathians didn’t like a high level of illumination. I wondered if there was a useful tip for me in that.
Fsha-fsha came back rippling his gill-flaps in a way that I knew meant he was excited. But it turned out not to be pleased anticipation.
“It’s hopeless, Danger,” he assured me. “The Wormface in charge of the detail carries the controllers in a special rack, strapped to his chest for quick access. He keeps his distance; ten feet was as close as I could get before he warned me back.”
“What weapons did he carry?” I asked him.
“What weapon does he need? He holds your life in his hand as it is!”
“Too bad,” I said. “We’ll have to get our armaments somewhere else then.”
Fsha-fsha goggled at me. “You’re an amazing creature, Danger. If you were cornered by a Fangmaster, I think you’d complain that his teeth weren’t larger, so as to provide you with a better dagger!”
The routine settled in again then. Every day was like the one before; the glorm-bulbs rushed at me in a stream that never ended, never changed. I ate omelettes, played revo and tikal and a dozen other games, walked my two miles a day, up and down the dark room; and waited. And one day, I made a blunder that ended our plans with total finality.
3
The work-shift had ended half an hour before. Fsha-fsha and I had settled down in his alcove to play our favorite game of telling each other what we’d do, once we were clear of Drath. A big Drathian slave who’d been assigned to the Sorting crew a few hours earlier came lumbering over, breathing out fumes that reminded me of a package of rotten broccoli I’d opened once by mistake.
“I’ll take this alcove,” he said to Fsha-fsha. “Get out, animal.”
“Makes himself right at home, doesn’t he?” I pointed across the room to an empty alcove. “Try over there, sport,” I said to the broccoli-breather. “Lots of room—” I got that far when he reached out with a couple of arms like boa constrictors and ripped down the hammock. He yanked again, and tore the other end free. He tossed it aside and swung his own kit down onto the floor. I stood up.
“Wait,” Fsha-fsha said quickly. “The overseer will deal with this one. Don’t—”
The big Drathian took a quick step, threw a punch at me. I ducked, came up with a three-foot length of steel pipe the Rinth had tucked under the hammock for possible future use, and brought it down in a two-handed blow across the Drathian’s shoulder. He gave a bleat like a branded steer and went down bucking and kicking. In his convulsion, he beat his head against the floor, whipped his body against the wall hard enough to give off a dull boom! like a whale slapping the water with his tail. Thick, yellowish blood spattered. Every slave in the barracks came crowding around to see what was going on, but in thirty seconds it was all over. The big Drathian was dead. The Rule-keepers got there a minute or two later and took me away, up the stairs I’d looked forward to seeing for so long.
My hearing didn’t amount to much. I explained to Hruba that the dead slave had attacked me, that I didn’t know Drathians kept their brains under their shoulder blades; but it was an open-and-shut case. I’d killed a fellow slave. My Sorting days were over.
“Transportation to the harvesting rafts,” the majordomo intoned in Drathian and repeated it in lingua. “Too bad, Man,” he added in his unofficial voice. “You were a valuable Sorter—but like your kind, you have a savage streak in you most unbecoming in a chattel.”
They clamped my wrists in a steel ring and hustled me out into a courtyard where a big, tarry-smelling air-barge was waiting. I climbed aboard, and was kicked into a metal-walled broom-closet. They slammed the door on me, and I lay in the dark and felt the barge lift off.
4
The harvesting rafts were mile-square constructions of metal floats linked by woven-rope mats and carpeted with rotting vegetable husks and the refuse of the canning sheds, which worked night and day processing the marine life hoisted aboard by the seining derricks. A pair of husky Drathians threw me off the side of the barge into foul-odored ankle-deep muck, and another pair grabbed me, knocked me around a little just to keep in practice, and dragged me away to a long lean-to which served to keep the worst of the subtropical rains off any of the workers who were lucky enough to be on off-shift. They took off the wrist-irons and rigged a fine-gauge fiber loop around my neck, not tight enough to choke me, but plenty snug enough to wear the skin raw, until it toughened and formed a half-inch-wide scar that itched and burned day and night. There was a limp bladder attached to the rope, designed to inflate and keep my head above water if I happened to fall overboard; slaves weren’t allowed to evade their labors by anything as easy as drowning, intentionally or otherwise. I learned all this later; the first night the only orientation I got was what I could deduce from being dragged to a line of workers who were shelling out big crustaceans, and yelled at to get to work. The command was emphasized with a kick, but I had been watching for that; I slid aside from it and smashed my fist into the short ribs of the Drathian and chopped him again as he scrambled back. My reward for this effort was a solid beating, administered by three Drathians, two holding and one swinging a rod as heavy and limber as a golf club. They finished after a while, threw water over me, and someone shoved a sea-lobster at me.