Earthblood (9 page)

"That's all right," Roan said. "As long as you keep your hands off." For the next eight days Roan worked sixteen hours at a stretch among the stacks of supplies, lifting heavier weights than he had ever lifted before, climbing long, wobbly ladders, counting, tallying, arranging boxes and cans and jars in even rows which the issue clerks promptly disarranged. When he left the storeroom to go to the mess hall or to his room, he looked for Stellaraire along the corridors and in the rooms he passed, but he never saw her. She's forgotten all about me, he thought miserably. She fixed up my cuts like you'd try to help a scratched gracyl who was lying on the ground expecting to die. Now she was busy with other things—and other people.

On the ninth day Nugg came to the warehouse, signaled to Roan.

"We're coming into Chlora; planetfall in a few minutes. Plenty to do: tents to set up, midway to lay out, rigging to stretch . . . " Roan followed while Nugg talked in his usual grumbling way.

"I need to know more about what I'm supposed to do, if I'm going to put on a wire-walking act tomorrow," Roan interrupted.

"Tonight," Nugg corrected. "What do you need to know? Does a Flather need someone to tell it how to fly? You're a Terry wire-walker; so walk the wire . . . "

There was a sharp change in the ship's gravitation, and Roan caught at a handrail to keep from falling. His feet were like lead, suddenly, and his breakfast was heavy in his stomach.

"What's the matter?" Nugg called. "Never felt high-G before?"

"N-no," Roan said. He swallowed hard, twice.

"You'll get used to it," Nugg said carelessly.

The gravity pulled and the deck trembled and vibrated. There were noises and sudden tiltings underfoot. A roaring whistle started up, went on and on. There was a final, violent shudder, and the ship was abruptly still. The gravity was worse now, if anything.

"We're down," Nugg said. He stopped at a door, unlocked it with a big electrokey, motioned Roan into a dingy storeroom. He hauled a heavy wooden mallet and a vast bundle of plastic stakes from a shelf, shoved them at Roan.

"Go ashore and help stake-out. There'll be Mag to show you what to do. You do your job and stay out of Ithc's way, see? When you finish, go to tent three, cell 103, and get ready for your stunt." He walked off, and Roan shouldered his load and went looking for the debarkation deck. A stream of circus creatures were pushing into an elevator, each carrying a box or piece of equipment and Roan, caught in the press, went into the elevator with them, and along the long central corridor of the ship and down the ramp, out into the strange smell of another world. He started sweating almost immediately. The heaviness felt worse outside, in the heat, and Roan didn't like not knowing where he was supposed to go and having only a vague idea what he was supposed to do.

He was walking across a landing field. Not an official, well-groomed one, but more like an abandoned launching pad; just a flat, cracked concrete ramp. Beyond, a garbage dump of a neighborhood crawled up a hillside. It reminded Roan depressingly of home.

Beyond the garbage dump neighborhood reared a blue metal city, flashing harshly in the merciless sunshine. A flat, shining sky loomed overhead. The crowd from the circus ship thinned out, everyone hurrying to an appointed task.

Miraculously, the incredible, monstrous tents began to go up. Roan walked toward them. A diminutive red-eyed creature scurried up to him, pulling a heavy cart that bumped over the cracks in the concrete. It stopped in front of Roan and jumped up and down, chattering, waving a stick overhead.

"Mag! Mag!" Its voice was like fingernails on dry wood.

"I guess you're Mag," Roan said. "Where do I go?" Mag started off with the cart again and Roan followed him across the field where the garbage was being cleared off as the tents went up. Mag pointed with his stick to a spot marked with powdered chalk and Roan pounded the first stake in. The hammer felt like a tree trunk and he brought his whole body down with it when he struck.

After the first stake, he wanted to throw the mallet down and sit on the ground and catch his breath, but Mag chattered and waved his stick and danced toward the next chalk mark, and Roan followed. There were other stake drivers at work, big, thick-armed humanoids mostly. They swung their mallets with effortless ease, knocking a stake into the hard soil with two or three easy-looking blows and moving on to the next. Roan struggled with the heavy mallet, raising it and letting it fall. Sometimes he missed the stake completely. After each stake, he promised himself he would rest—but the others never paused, and somehow, he didn't want to be the first to stop work. His aim got worse and worse. He broke one stake with a glancing blow, and Mag jumped up and down and his screeching went up into the supersonic. Roan leaned on his mallet and breathed dust, then started in again.

For hours in the blinding sun, Roan drove stakes. All around, the magic tents rose, cables arcing to their high peaks, pennants breaking out to flutter against the steely sky. Zoo people came and went carrying props, equipment, tools. Processions of ambling animals with caked dung on their flanks went by, driven by cursing menagerie keepers; a few curious locals wandered along the now dusty paths between the canvas tops, ogling the show people. Once Roan looked up to see Ithc standing twenty yards away, eyeing him, fingering the butt of a nerve gun strapped to his birdlike hip. His injured hand behind him, the tall alien came closer, his gill flaps working nervously.

"I'll—ll be watching—ing tonight when you walk the high wire—ire," he said.

"Maybe—aybe you'll fall—all . . . "

Roan made his face smile. "Some day I'll catch you alone, without a weapon, Ithc," he said, trying not to breathe hard from the stake-pounding.

"Then I'll kill you."

Ithc showed a gristly ridge where teeth should have been and walked away with his queer, gliding walk that reminded Roan of the Veed and the smell of alien hate and cruelty. Ithc wants revenge, Roan thought, watching him go. But he doesn't really know what wanting means.

The stakes were all driven at last, and Mag squeaked and took his cart away, without even looking back.

Roan found tent three, and in room 103 he found two Freaks. Two other Freaks, he thought wryly. One was a transparent post, and it wasn't until it moved that Roan saw it was a creature at all. The other was a thing with a hide like a skinned tree, covered with orange polka dots, and with a double-faced head set on one shoulder. Its modesty section was apparently approximately at the left knee, for it was carefully covering it with a little patch of black plastiflex. As far as Roan could tell, all it was covering was an orange polka dot exactly like all the others.

Roan settled for arranging his tunic into a skirt, pulling it around his belt. A bell rang—they seemed to ring every few minutes—and he followed the first creature out into the dust and heat of the midway. The creature ambled stiffly over to a row of cages, got in one, and reached a flipper around to close the big, fake lock, which was supposed to indicate that the Freaks were dangerous. It motioned Roan to the next cage.

Roan looked curiously at the sign on the bars. PRIMITIVE MAN, it said in Panterran, the fifth legend in a long row, all in different scripts. He climbed in and clanged the door shut and sat on a wooden bench. This part of the job was easy enough. It felt good just to sit and rest.

Roan sat in his cage for two hours. The ponderous creatures of Chlora crowded past, pointing and making noises. One Chloran stood in front of Roan's cage for a long time, making sketches and taking notes in a curious script. Once a child prodded him with a long stick. But they didn't seem to find Roan very spectacular. Most of the Freaks were much larger and more colorful.

Roan hardly noticed the Chlorans filing past because he had fallen to musing about himself again. Some day I'll find out, he thought. I have to know who I really am, who my parents were, where my people are—my home.

Home. Somewhere was home for him, and it wasn't Tambool.

I'll take Stellaraire with me and there's where we'll live. Among our own kind. Surely Stellaraire was near enough human so it wouldn't matter. Another bell rang. Dusk had fallen, Roan noticed. The days were short here on Chlora. The Freak exhibit was now empty of spectators, a garish and lonely place under the polyarcs glaring far above.

Roan got stiffly out of his cage. He'd sat too long and his thigh had stiffened a bit again.

Mag was there waiting for him, the little red eyes catching a glitter from the arc lights; he chattered and hopped on his spidery legs, clutching his stick, and Roan followed him through the huge, billowing tents. It was much cooler now that evening had come. Almost cold when the wind blew, ballooning out the tents and flapping against the poles.

Roan walked through the dizzying flickers of colored lights and blasts of noise from the noisemakers and the twirling of weird creatures. At the base of a vast mast as big around as Roan, Gom Bulj appeared from the crowd, his walking tentacles rippling as he hurried over.

"Ah, there you are, young Terry! You're on! Now, I'm expecting great things of you! See that you perform in a style worthy of the Extravaganzoo!"

"What am I supposed to do?" Roan asked. "I don't know anything about being in a 'zoo. Don't I wear a costume?"

"Do? Costume?" Gom Bulj popped his huge eyes at Roan and drummed on his wide torso with his thick fingers. "You're the first Freak I've had who wanted freaking lessons. You have expensive ideas, young Terry!" He plucked a cigar from the flowered weskit that stretched across his chest, stuck it in his mouth.

"Later on, we'll see; for the present, you're on probation. Oh, it's a gamble, taking on new talent! Never know how the public will receive 'em." He drew a tremendous breath that made the cigar burn bright yellow, letting the ash fall with the insouciance of those who never have to clean up after themselves.

"It wasn't my idea for you to kidnap me," Roan said.

"Tush, tush! I'm going to forget you said that, young Terry." Gom Bulj flung his red-lined cloak about him and rippled his legs. "Good luck—and if you should fall, do it nicely, as though it were part of the act." He loosed a vast cloud of smoke from his air-discharge orifice and hurried off. Mag pointed with his stick to the rungs set in the pole. Roan looked up. He couldn't see it, but somewhere up there, in the backwash of the cacophony of circus sounds and colored lights, there was a tightrope . . . Ithc strolled up, tall and alien, his gills moving in and out, his greenish face shadowed sharply black in the harsh light. He was still wearing the nerve gun.

"Go—oh up—up," he said. "All—ll the way—ay up—up."

"I'll go up," Roan said. "You couldn't do it, but I can. I'm a Terran." A short life and a glorious one, he thought, looking up the swaying pole. Stellaraire would be here somewhere; maybe she'd be watching him. He'd have to throw off the tiredness now, and forget the stiffness in his leg. He wanted to do his act smoothly, just as though he'd been with a 'zoo all his life. He wanted her to be proud of him.

He stopped to rest halfway up. He didn't want to be tired or breathless. It was going to be hard, walking the rope with that gravity pulling at him. And he already felt hot and dizzy and his leg ached.

Roan looked down. Ithc was still there at the bottom of the ladder, a toy Ithc, far off, looking up. If he shot Roan with the nerve gun, everyone would assume Roan had merely fallen.

Roan climbed slowly now. He was safer on the high wire. Ithc's gun couldn't reach him that high up. But he felt eyes on him and looked back again. A bright spotlight was on him and so were a million eyes. A voice was booming over the loudspeaker, in Chloran, and Roan knew it was announcing him. He heard the word "Terran."

There was noise for him, loud and insistent.

He forgot the eyes and the noise and kept climbing. The metal of the ladder was cold, from the wind blowing on it, and slippery in his sweaty hands.

He reached the platform at the top. A few feet above him the top of the tent billowed and flapped. The noise of drums rose to him, commanding him on, and the spotlight felt like a ray of heat. Everything seemed to spin slowly, and he held onto the flimsy rail for support.

There was nothing to catch him if he fell.

Roan put a foot on the wire and inadvertently looked down. The world fell away endlessly at his feet. He pulled his foot back and felt his stomach sweating coldly inside, and the fear reaching to hold his body rigid. He held on to the bars around the edge of the platform and shook. He was afraid even to stand there on the little platform. I'm a coward, he thought with horror. But he couldn't do anything about it. All he could do was hold on for dear life and wonder how he was going to get down—and knew that Ithc was waiting below with the nerve gun in case he tried to back down, hoping he'd fall . . .

Roan wanted to die—but not by falling. Just to die now, without effort.

"Roan!" a voice called, faint and clear from the middle of the air. Roan looked. Stellaraire was on the platform at the distant, other end of the tightrope. She was dressed in gold skintights now, from head to toe, and she called, "If you don't come here, Terry, I'm going to come there." Roan held on and looked at her. He remembered how she had shuddered when he told her what his specialty was. But she had climbed up here to the crow's nest to watch him. She had known he might need her. He let go of the rail. Falling wasn't anything. He would just die—like Dad. But to fail, and have to go on being alive . . .

He went to the taut, black cable, stepped out on it, stood balanced on the wire that swooped down and up again to the blob of light and the golden figure. Then he was laughing aloud, with relief that he wasn't a coward, and with love for his woman, with the deep joy of life.

He walked right across the tightrope, stopping in the middle to wave to the invisible faces below; he was master of the crowd now, tuned to the strong noise of the drums.

Then he was at the other end and Stellaraire caught his hand and pulled him close, looking up at him, and there were tiny flecks of gold dust in her hair.