XII

 

 

Not a jail …

This was such a transparently obvious fact that Kazan could not understand why so many of the people working here felt otherwise. There were about six thousand personnel altogether: a couple of hundred forming a permanent administrative core, mostly career government servants from the parent world of Marduk, the rest labor recruited on a contract basis from a number of planets, ranging from highly skilled metallurgists and personnel experts to the least educated, least skilled of the workers who had come in with Ogric’s ship. Merely to come into contact with people from so many different backgrounds was fascinating to Kazan, but there was something infinitely more significant still.

Not a jail, for him, in any least sense of the word. An incredible liberation.

He could see a very pale reflection of his own feelings in some of the other workers from Berak, especially among the people of the Dyasthala. It didn’t apply so much to those who had come to Vashti because they had supported Luth’s abortive revolt and wanted to escape the consequences. As nearly as he could put it into words, it was release from the naked problem of staying alive, warm and fed.

Most of the people of the Dyasthala had never worked regularly or been fed and clothed without having to beg or steal. Those who had been passed by the selectors at the Berak spaceport were those who innately disliked such an existence. It would obviously have been foolish to choose recruits who had a real psychological need for theft and violence.

Now they found themselves at a complete loss. Once, living had been a clock-round business for them, extending not only to the question of where the next meal was coming from, but as often as not to the question of where they could safely sleep the night. Free from the perennial preoccupations which had faced them, they were now fed, clothed, housed and entertained in return for undemanding work. It was said that in ten years’ time the Vashti mines would be fully automatized and would require only a token corps of engineers and surveyors to run them. Already the process had gone so far that the crying need was for labor to undertake the simple tasks which machines would take over completely in the first stage of automation. That was why Ogric had gone to Berak; unskilled labor was growing steadily rarer.

Not a jail, for the love of life!

Already aboard ship Kazan had begun to realize how much of his thinking had formerly been wasted on problems of survival. Already he had cast around for other things to apply himself to, and had fetched up with a crash against the blank wall of the ultimate simplicities which the greatest human thinkers of many worlds had tackled, and failed to answer. But new horizons were opening before him all the time, and it did not really seem to matter what he concerned himself with because so many things were offered.

First there was the work he was assigned to, doing repair and maintenance under the supervision of a tubby, pleasant man with a shiny bald head named Rureth. His life in the Dyasthala had brought him no nearer to contact with machinery in general than an occasional theft of a vehicle for a job. And that was an incidental, an accessory, which did not involve his interest.

Confronted with the machines they worked with here, he was jerked again into a new view of the universe in which he existed. They assigned a large number of illiterates and slow readers to the repair shops, because the tough, reliable equipment seldom needed more than cleaning, servicing and changing of parts which could be done by following colored diagrams. Most of the other workers were content with that. Kazan could not stop there. He wanted to know more; he had to discover the system behind the effects. This was an excavator which shifted and piled overburden at the rate of a ton a minute. What went on in the magnet-cased fusion chamber to produce so much power? This was a separator, which sorted streams of finely ground mineral dust according to its composition, into forty vertical storage tubes. How could it tell one kind of dust from another?

At first Rureth was irritated by Kazan’s insistent questioning. Then he began to understand the reason behind it, and to think that he ought not to try and stop Kazan from improving himself. He sent him to the library.

The library, with its stock of microfilms and recordings, was a revelation to Kazan. When he had been spending almost every free moment there for a month, Rureth decided that something ought to be done about this young man so hungry for knowledge.

 

Not a jail, Clary thought dully. That was a joke, if you liked. It was all very well not to have to worry any more about where the next meal was coming from, where you were going to sleep tonight, but with that much taken out of her pattern of existence, what could she put in its place? She felt empty, and bored, and frustrated.

And as for Kazan, who seemed not to be worried, she was disgusted with him.

Her work was of no particular interest to her. It was simple clerking and maintenance of records. She could already read and write fairly well; she was taught to use a keyboard computer input, to select the appropriate program from the limited range required to administer the small settlement, and to interpret results. Mostly she had to handle dietary and leisure-time programming. The department was also responsible for accommodation, but that was a subject she would rather not think about now.

True enough, she wasn’t deliberately kept away from Kazan. Although the mining area sprawled over large distances, the accommodations were concentrated for convenience together with the canteens, the leisure facilities and such ancillary establishments as the hospital and library. There was not even a need for internal transport in the dwelling area—everywhere was in easy walking distance, and helibuses were only necessary to transport workers to their jobs.

But she was separated from Kazan in another way, and a far more effective one.

They had allotted him to a room in the block where repair and maintenance staff lived, her to a room in the administrative staff’s block. Remembering what the supervisor had said when they arrived, she inquired and found it was permissible to apply for shared accommodation; a lot of the staff formed more or less permanent arrangements together, because they were mostly here on two- or five-year contracts. Provided you showed up in time for the transport to work, she was told, no one would mind.

But her carefully worded application came back vetoed by Snutch.

In charge of records and programming, and therefore of her department, was a middle-aged woman called Lecia. She was well liked by her subordinates, though she was merciless with their shortcomings. Clary demanded of her why the application had been turned down. There was vacant accommodation available, she knew from the department’s charts.

But Lecia merely said that she could not override a decision by Manager Snutch, and gave no further explanation.

According to the results of her examination on Berak, and the brief training course she had been through, Clary should have been a good and reliable worker. Her attention seemed to move somewhere away from her work after that. Lecia tried half a dozen times to shake her out of her apathy, but after a month she decided something was going to have to be done about the root problem.

This was not the separation which divided Clary from Kazan, though. It was worse than physical. It was as though since coming to Vashti Kazan had become another person as different again from what he had been on arrival as he then had been from the way he was when he left Berak.

“Why did you let him hit you like that?” she demanded of him, thinking of Snutch’s suddenly reddened face and unreasoning violence.

Kazan frowned. “I felt sorry for him,” he said after a pause.

“What?”

“Yes, sorry for him. Don’t you see that the only reason he could have for doing such a thing would be because he’s not completely responsible? I’ve asked some people who’ve been here for a long time, and they tell me they think he’s bitter about having come from Marduk to run things here. He feels that if he had stayed at home he might have got further ahead in life; he thinks he’s traded his chance of fulfilling his main ambitions for a second-best job where he can rise no further.”

“That’s his fault, then!” Clary snapped. “I suppose he’s vetoed the application for shared accommodation for the same reason!”

Kazan shrugged. He said, “I guess so.”

“Don’t you care?” Clary pleaded. “Don’t you want to do something, even if it’s only to complain about it? There isn’t any regulation or anything to stop us being together—only Snutch’s decision. And—and—wouldn’t you like us to be together, Kazan?”

“But we can be,” Kazan said, and she realized with a sinking heart that he had missed her point. “And you know as well as I do that if Snutch vetoed the application for some emotional reason he won’t change his mind. Also I think he knows he made himself look foolish in front of his staff when he hit me for no good cause, and the way a twisted mind like that works, it seems to him that it was my fault he looked foolish. It’s inconceivable that he would change his mind simply because I asked him to.”

“You know a hell of a lot about what goes on in Snutch’s mind,” Clary said sharply. “But you don’t know a thing about what does on in mine, do you? Or do you just not care?”

She left him there before he could answer, hoping against hope that he would come after her. But he did not, and the next time they met it was like meeting a stranger, who could seemingly talk only about stellar processes and numbers and facts of the physical universe. But of these he talked with the excitement of a man who has made a miraculous discovery.

By instinct rather than conscious understanding, she saw then that Kazan as he had been for so short a time was lost to her. It was not his fault, and for all her reflex bitterness she could not make herself think that it was. She knew too well that he was being driven now by his own nature, and until the impetus was exhausted she could not hope to follow him. She could only wait until he was over the violence of this new enthusiasm for pure knowledge, and then—perhaps—he would remember that he had been grateful to her and had even liked her very much.

But the waiting was going to be intolerable, and there was no certainty that it was worthwhile.