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9
The innkeeper was Girex, his wife Giru. They were quiet, kind people whose only child was severely disabled in a special clinic on their home planet. They welcomed a little gaxba, 'so-so money,' on the side to send home. Each time they did, it meant their child could receive special medicine and be released home a time with a nurse. Jory did not ask—he did not want to pry. What if they sold him back to the Oba road police for a higher price after they finished receiving payments from the unknown parties in Kusi-O? He kept an eye out for treachery, but they must be good actors indeed if they meant to betray him. No, as long as he was in their inn, he could say they harbored him, and they would be delivered to the Obayyo officials in wooden stocks, ready for the chopping block.
He stayed in what once had been a giant chimney. His bed and a few items of furniture were on a sandy floor. The odor of whatever had burned here, kjirs ago, still clung faintly to the walls like a decaying cheese. The walls appeared dry, except for traces of ubiquitous Oba fungi. Jory recognized a dozen kinds amid cracks in the white plaster, on blunt rock surfaces where plaster had fallen off, and in the interstices where heavy structural beams poked through. Where the thick, low wooden door now hung, which Girex and Giru had to bow to walk through, had once been a steel furnace door.
As the fire in his gut healed, Jory became aware of the source of what, in his sickness, he had thought of as fire surrounding him with pain: Light. The light at the bottom of the chimney had a bluish cast. When he peered upward in fascination, the chimney's top disappeared into what looked like a vortex of blue-white light.
"We on Fril enjoy direct sunlight," Girex told Jory one afternoon. Girex was bigger than his wife, and more powerfully built, but just as gentle. Both seemed to have a faint deviousness about them that made Jory wonder if it was an invention of his mind, or a property of persons who looked like snakes. But it was open, not hidden, and maybe it was just their sense of shame and guilt about deceiving the authorities and risking death for a sum of money.
Girex helped Jory climb up within the old chimney. A wide, sturdy ladder stretched some forty feet upward. Jory climbed ahead, while Girex followed, coaxing him on. "Hold on tight," he admonished.
"Ah!" Jory gasped with pain and averted his face. The blue-white light burned his eyes like a searing sun.
"You'll have to go slowly," Girex said, "Your eyes were made to enjoy the beautiful light."
Yes, Jory thought bitterly, not to be enslaved by people who live in perpetual night. There was an expression on Oba: 'Blind as a crx,' a mole. Shurians were just as likely to say "blind as a human."
"You will become accustomed to the beautiful light," Girex said as they climbed back down. "There are spy holes up there where you can look without being seen. They will be your only glimpse of this place before you leave for deep space."
"Deep space," Jory said slowly. "I have heard that ships travel from star to star."
Girex waved his arm contemptuously. "It is a dark age on the other side of the wall. Ships do not travel to stars—they would burn up. They travel to moons, like Shur, or planets, like Fril. You will learn all these things soon enough."
"So who has paid you for me, and what do they want from me?"
Girex raised his hands, empty. "I don't know. I don't care. I think you are different from the other humans. They say you have horns." He gingerly reached for one of Jory's temples. "Are they broken off?"
"I have never had horns," Jory said. "This is something else." The other humans had laughed at him and shied away from him because of them. Now even this snake was acting as if there were something wrong with him. He brushed Girex's hand away.
"It must be something expensive else," Girex said with lewd nerviness.
Jory would soon learn the source of Girex's strange behavior. In the meantime, he ate well. He exercised as best he could to build up his strength—the heavy poison had left him strangely weak for a young man, but he felt his energy rebounding. Every few hours, he practiced climbing up the ladder and tried to accustom himself to the brightness outside.
Girex watched him and laughed. "That's not even real daylight. Wait until you step onto a real planet with two or three suns in a white sky."
The intense light in Kusi-O was caused by an imported power unit that sat in the center of the mile-diameter circle wall. Girex explained that the hydrogen powered helium chewer, as he called it, glowed through a thick, milky wall of glass two palms thick. Still there was enough energy left to pipe light through glass cables, out to the wall on all sides, up the wall, where it shone down from hundreds of spotlights. The substitute sunlight was evenly distributed and could burn for ages.
Jory spent many hours staring from the narrow slits on all sides of the old chimney, which had provided energy centuries ago before Kusi-O had received the benefit of nuclear lighting. He had to keep from sneezing half the time, and often brushed cobwebs from his head. He had to keep an eye out for the silently crawling red and black striped spiders whose sting was venomous; the others were merely annoying. From his vantage point, Jory saw in all directions.
He saw the looming drum wall, its surfaces soiled with long stains of dampness and moss. Several times a day, the great gate closest to him would open on the Obayyo. Sometimes, in the gloom of the inner wall, he could see the gleam of the Imperial police armor and swords while near-naked Fril cops with spidery looking black vap guns stood on this side. Pallet upon pallet of urns and trunks of various sizes arrived from points all over Oba, to be shipped to the worlds serviced by the Raum Transport League.
Toward the center of Kusi-O, Jory made out the dimly glowing milky-glass dome of the light generator. Around that on all sides were the landing pads for antigrav shuttles. The gray, boxy shuttles looked beat-up, and were streaked with chemical and burn marks. Their experienced, bored pilots snapped them through fast take-offs and landings.
Around the ring of pads was a ring of warehouses. Through the warehouses moved tons of material, mostly the thousands of varieties of fungal extracts, but also some fine swords and other cultural oddities.
In a ring around the inside of the Wall, and inside a wide circumferential dirt road, were the houses of Kusi-O's permanent residents. There must be as many as 5,000, Jory thought, and they not only lived in homes but sent their children to schools, and went to parks, and frequented libraries and public-houses like the one where Jory hid.
As Jory's eyes became used to the light, he was amazed that he'd ever tolerated the gloom that seemed to pour in when the gate was open. Once he saw a captured human—a wild man with long hair, dirty skin, and tattered clothes—dragged to the gate in chains by Fril police and handed over to the Imperial police, who immediately placed wooden blocks around the unfortunate's neck. Jory might be next.
Jory saw all sorts of beings from the far reaches of space. He saw things stranger than the Fril—floating orbs that bore sentient life; tall yellow things with dangling appendages, that he'd swear could only live in the sea; four legged and even eight-limbed mammals covered with fur or feathers; a slug-like thing that took all day to move its glistening brown sausage shape along the road from one warehouse to another.
Girex and Giru's behavior became stranger and stranger, and Jory became alarmed. At times the house remained shuttered, with drunken customers pounding on the front door in the middle of the night demanding food and liquor. At other times, the pub seemed to be open long past the customary hour, and carousing customers kept Jory awake all night.
Jory, locked in his chimney around the clock, became jumpy. He'd cling to the door for hours at a time, listening for a certain type of footfall. Even when it was only Giru with his meals, he ran up the ladder like a frantic animal, though he had no hope of fighting a group of Fril police if they came for him.
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