vi
The Labour Registry was a maze of curving corridors, all white, all the same. Lifts designated sub-basements down to the fifth level; Raen recalled as many as twenty stories above ground, although the lifts in this area only went to the seventh: she recalled the overhang. They passed row on row of halls, a great deal of seemingly pointless walking with ser Itavvy in the lead. There were doors, neat letters: LIBRARY: COMP I: LEVEL I: RED CARDS ONLY.
She made no sense of it, had no idea in fact what she was seeking, save that in this building was what should have been a thriving industry, and in the front of it were empty desks and silent halls.
Itavvy paused at last at a lift and showed them in, took them to third level, into other identical halls, places at least populated. Grey-suited techs stared at the intrusion of such visitors and stopped dead in their tracks, staring. White-suited azi, distinguishable by their tattoos, stepped from their path and then resumed their cleaning and their pushing of carts.
Itavvy led them farther.
“I’m tired of walking aimlessly,” Raen said. “What do you propose to show us on this level? More doors?”
“The available contracts, sera.”
Raen walked along in silence, scanning doors and labels, searching for something of information. Periodically corridors branched of from theirs, always on the right. Inevitably those corridors ended at the same interval, closed off by heavy security doors. RED CARD ONLY, the signs said.
She stopped, gestured toward the latest of them. “What’s there, ser Itavvy?”
“General retention,” Itavvy said, looking uncomfortable. “If sera will, please, there are more comfortable areas—”
“Unlock this one. I’d like to see.”
Itavvy unhappily preceded them down the short corridor, produced his card and unlocked the door.
A second door lay beyond, similarly locked: they three stood within the narrow intervening space as the outer door boomed and sealed with a resounding noise of locks. Then Itavvy used his card on the second, and a wave of tainted air met them, a vastness of glaring lights and grey concrete; a web of catwalks.
The scent was again that of antiseptic, compounded this time with something else. Itavvy would too obviously have been glad to close the door with that brief look, but Raen walked stubbornly ahead, moving Itavvy out before her-no beta would have the chance to slam a door at her back-and looked about her.
Concrete, damp with antiseptic, and the stench of humanity and sewage.
Pits. Brightly lit doorless pits, a bit of matting and one human in each, like larvae bestowed in chambered comb. Five paces by five, if that; no doors, no halls between the cells . . . only the grid of catwalks above, with machinery to move them, with an extended process of ladders which could, only if lowered, afford the occupants exit, and that only a few at a time.
The whole stretched out of view around the curve of the building and far, far, across before them. Their steps echoed fearsomely on the steel grids. Faces looked up at them, only mildly curious.
Raen looked the full sweep of it, sickened, deliberately inhaled the stench.
“Are contracts on these available?”
“For onworld use, sera.”
“No export license.”
“No, sera.”
“I understand that a great number of azi have been confiscated from estates. But the contracts on those azi would be entangled. Where are they housed? Among these?”
“There are facilities in the country.”
“As elaborate as these?”
Itavvy said nothing. Raen calculated for herself what manner of facilities could be constructed in the sparsely populated countryside, in haste, by a pressured corporation-government. These facilities must be luxurious by comparison.
“Yet all of these,” she said, “are warehoused. Is that the right word?”
“Essentially,” Itavvy whispered.
“Are you still producing azi at the same rate?”
“Sera, if only you would inquire with ITAK Central—I’m sure I don’t know the reasons of things.”
“You’re quite satisfactory, ser Itavvy. Answer the question. I assure you of your safety to do so.”
“I don’t know of any authorisation for change. I’m not over Embryonics. That’s another administration, round the other side, 51. Labour doesn’t get them until the sixth year. We haven’t had any less of that age coming in. I don’t think . . . I don’t think there can be any change. The order was to produce.”