“Marrying them, or the sons of them. The wives don’t prosper,” said Aufors. “Not according to what I find. Few of them live to be old, and they mostly the childless ones.”
“Seemingly that is true,” she murmured. “I wish I knew what all this was about.”
“Has your mother told you nothing about old, old men? And why she feared your marrying?”
She sighed and laid the babe in its box near the fire. “My sister and I were born in a village, daughters of a commoner father. Mother read us stories out of books, and she told us myths and tales of ancient times on Old Earth, but she said nothing of nobility on Haven. After father was dead, we came to live in the city, and then we met our grandmother for the first time. She took us, my sister and me, for a long walk one day, and she asked us if my mother, her daughter, had taught us anything about . . . certain things.”
“What certain things?” he demanded, rather angrily. “I’ve really had enough of this mystification!”
“Well, so had I,” she said. “For I knew nothing about anything she was speaking of. Something about the song of the world, and harbingers, and the swimmers in the stars. I remembered star swimmers, for mother had read us a story about it when we were little, and that’s all it meant to me, a story. Then Grandma asked us if we ever had what she called waking dreams, and I said I did, and my sister said she did not. And that was the end of that. Grandma said our mother had been unfitted for the learning, and I was too old to be taught. She sighed, and wept and said perhaps it didn’t matter. But I went on having waking dreams just the same, though they have misled me as often as not.”
She looked down at her child, tears in her eyes, and Aufors shook his head, angry at himself for upsetting her. Perhaps when he next saw Alicia, or Genevieve, they might enlighten him. He suspected very strongly that both of them knew more than they had ever told him.
* * *
In the tunnels under High Haven, Jeorfy Bottoms drove one of the smallest freight carts slowly down a lengthy, narrow aisle between two stacks of crates. The dust on the floor before him was deep as velvet, untouched and opulent. As he drove under overhanging surfaces, he could look up at labels where the dust had not settled: medical supplies on his left, machine parts on his right. Neither stack had been disturbed for over a hundred years, according to the universal dates on the boxes, and the thick gray layers attested to that fact. According to the expiration dates on those same labels, most of these materials should have been dumped into the chasm long ago. Obviously, no one had bothered to do so, up to and including Zeb.
Around the next corner lay a great pile of cartons beneath a lizard rookery, the whole now a petrified heap of guano that must have taken at least a century to accumulate. Most of the stacks in this area were equally fouled or dilapidated, and Jeorfy had seen few if any newer stacks, which could only mean that Zebulon, and possibly the people before him, had been taking the newly arrived stuff directly from the elevators to the fire chasm. There were file entries up to about ten years ago, but none since then. Lately, Zeb hadn’t bothered with any of it.
Jeorfy could imagine what Zeb would say to him if he asked. Zeb had already said it, more than once:
“My reward is the same whether I do the work or not. I get the same pay: too little. I live under the same conditions, not good. I ask for a little consideration, and they tell me men are begging for work, men without wives or hope of family, thousands of us, they say. So, why sweat?”
At which point Jeorfy had mentioned that a modicum of sweat could buy them a sweet life. There were bound to be valuables among the stacks. They could take those valuables out through the ducts, sell them outside, and make a fortune.