The Companions (8 page)

“And you don't run PPI,” I acknowledged.

“No. PPI is under the Bureau of Order. Originally, Interstellar Planetary Protection was a policing group, under BuOr. Even though PPI's purpose has changed to ecological protection for newly discovered planets, it's still considered an enforcement arm, its members have an enforcement mind-set, by which I mean, tyrannical, and I have no control over them.”

“Which means Dame Cecelia can go on doing it even though she knows I had nothing to do with it?”

“I've known Cecelia Hessing for years,” Shiela said. “I told you she's tenacious. She's charming and generous to
her friends, but she can be wicked to anyone who crosses her. You've told me that she was responsible for sending Witt out there. Now he's gone.”

“She has to blame someone.” Brandt peered into my face, looking for something. Resolution, perhaps. Fury. I couldn't feel anything at that moment, so he found nothing to help him.

Shiela shook her head. “As I thought before, maybe…but maybe that's not it. Jewel, are you by any chance pregnant?”

Then the blood left my face, my head swam, just for a moment, and I was suddenly so angry that everything went red. I put out a hand to balance myself.

Shiela fluttered with consternation. “Forgive me, dear. That's entirely too personal a question for me to have asked. If you were pregnant, however, or if she thought you might be, all this nonsense might be laying the groundwork for a claim to Witt's child on the grounds you're unfit. It's the kind of thing she would do.”

I was so tangled in fury I couldn't respond at all.

“Do you have anywhere else to go?” Brandt asked. “Somewhere remote? The Hessings have a lot of friends and influence here in NW, particularly in Urb 15.”

“Jewel has been sleeping here every now and then. She could just move in,” said Shiela.

Brandt frowned. “You told me they'd searched here. Even with increased security, it would be a strategic mistake to draw Hessing antagonism toward the sanctuary.”

“I need to think,” I said. My reflection in the window opposite was of a tall, slender, very light-colored person with lots of tightly groomed yellow hair who looked icily controlled, which was a lie. Inside I was a boiling pot of lava, popping with magma and threatening havoc. I made myself say, “Just give me a little time.”

“While you're doing that,” said Brandt, “consider getting a vial of STOP to carry with you.”

This broke through, and I cried, “No, why? I mean, that's dreadful…”

Gainor took my hand again. “Dreadful, and expensive, but better than being the victim of harassment turned violent, as it might if she decides to hire some down-dweller to be her agent instead of flunkies at ESC.”

“I'll pay for it,” Shiela offered. “If you decide to carry it, Jewel. Some of our preservationist friends do so. None of us would use it except as a last resort.”

I returned to Witt's place by the same route I had taken to leave it, pausing on the mercantile floor to call Taddeus, asking him to visit me that evening and bring a tota-float.

When he arrived, he heard me out, then asked, “You're really going to do this, Joosie?”

“I don't have a choice, Tad.”

“What do you want me to do?”

“Link Aunt Hatty in Baja to tell her I'm coming. Use a public link, not your own. Go see Shiela Alred tomorrow. See her in person. Tell her you know where I am and you're the only one who knows. Also, please tota-float this stuff home with you and store it. It isn't much. I didn't bring much, and can carry very little with me. I thought I'd sort things out later, only there isn't to be any…”

He put his arms around me. “Any ‘later.' I know. Jewel, I wish I could do something…” Tad was a very Joram sort, kind and interesting and always eager to help.

“If you just do what I've asked, that's all the help I should need.”

The following morning, well before dawn, I was in the disposal tube again, on my way to Hatsebah Lipkin, Matty's sister. Everything of mine from the apartment, except what Tad had removed the night before, was in my pack. Nothing was left in the apartment to show I'd ever been there except an identichip listing made by the door as I had gone out.

Just as there are no past-this-point monitors in disposal or freight tubes, so there are none inside cross-country freight carriers and only a few in high-security sections of tunnels. Joram had crossed continents and oceans in freight carriers, as Tad and I knew from playing transport pirate throughout
long, childhood afternoons. Every carrier has display panels that list the contents, the routing, and the times of departure from and arrival in freight terminals. Only these display panels are picked up by monitors. I slipped inside the first empty carrier with a routing code southward, so eager to get away from the urb that I forgot Joram's warning about avoiding empty carriers. I remembered it with shock when the acceleration slammed me against the locked doors. When the carrier stopped abruptly, I slid the other way, the full length of the carrier, crashing into the other end. The floor was smooth and featureless except for key-shaped holes for the anchor straps. I wrapped my clothes around me for as much protection as possible, but by the time the carrier arrived at the urban hub, I was turning black and green and several other colors over most of my body.

When the carrier was shunted from the track into a loading zone, I waited for the voices outside to go away before struggling painfully to my feet and cracking the airtight door. Across the shunt track I found an empty cubby space behind a tool rack, where I crouched in silent misery, trying to observe the pattern of movement in the cargo bay. All the work was being done by robots; the few supervisory staff members seemed more interested in their gambling game in the small office than in what was going on with the cargo. The supervisors' toilet was nearby, and I used it between shifts, getting a look at the livid splotches blooming on my face and arms. No point grieving over the injuries. They'd heal. Meantime, I had to find the shunt where Mid Coast Urb carriers were being loaded.

After looking in all the wrong places, I found a carrier headed in the right direction and climbed painfully onto the partial load only moments before the doors were closed and sealed. This time Joram's instructions for anchoring were uppermost in my mind, so I tied the arms of my jacket to anchor straps and sealed the jacket around me, arms tight at my sides. I fell asleep and woke much, much later, surprised that
I'd slept at all even though Joram had told us it was not only possible but advisable to sleep en route whenever one could.

I was slightly rested, but every bruised place on me had stiffened. Even small movements hurt. The midcoastal transfer station was hectic, with people constantly moving about, and I waited for some time before a lull gave me the chance to clamber out and then up to the top of the carrier. I lay there, numb where I didn't hurt, hoping Joram had been right about no one ever looking on top of carriers. When night came, the activity slowed; incoming and outgoing loads were less frequent, and I was able to use the toilet, wash up, refill my water bottle, and nose about for a carrier headed to Baja Urb I. The first several were fully loaded, with no room for either a passenger or the air a passenger would need to survive. The next one was only half-loaded, but the time of departure was several hours off. I hid nearby, hoping it would remain half-empty, as it did. When the time of departure was just minutes away, I sneaked in and anchored myself as before, this time staying awake during much of the trip, trying to remember Witt's face as I imagined furious arguments with him, me saying “See! See!,” while he claimed we couldn't possibly do anything to withstand his mother.

When the carrier finally slowed and came to rest, my link-timer said it was evening of the third day “on the road,” which was Joram's phrase. He had a lot of antique words and phrases. On the road. Across the street. In the country. Wedding cake. Witt's and mine had been an earth-cake, without any real taste. The thought of that tastelessness made me cry. It seemed suddenly typical of our relationship. We really had not savored one another as I had imagined cohabiting people should do.

Crying wasted time, however, so I sucked in my cheeks and bit down while disentangling myself. Carriers sometimes stop on a siding in the vacuum tube, but voices outside mean there's air, so I waited to hear voices. I finally heard
them, too close. I hid in a niche between crates while the doors were opened and the voices went away. Finally, I climbed out, barely able to stand, and hid myself for a while to assess the situation. Things seemed quiet, so I moved gradually toward the loading section where the up-ramp was swarming with people and bots cleaning up after a loaded surface carrier that had been hit by a flit. It was enough of a mess to draw a crowd of down-dwellers and get all the human workers involved. When I went in the opposite direction, I happened on a labeled freight lift to level. As it turned out, I was under Tower 3.

Aunt Hatty lived in Tower 29, seven to nine miles from where I stood, depending upon which side of Tower 3 I would exit from and which side of Tower 29 I would come to first. It was late evening. Since traffic slightly decreased during hours of darkness, the only light at the lower levels was coming from the lighted podways that crisscrossed the urb towers like a giant gridiron. It was actually a good time to travel inconspicuously. Level Patrol officers are supposed to keep an eye on the down-dwellers, but they don't pay attention to anything short of a full-scale riot. Many of the people around me were wearing robes and masks or veils, which I hadn't seen before. Others wore ordinary clothes, perhaps not as dirty as those I had on, but dirt wasn't remarkable at level. Down-dwellers were dirty by definition. Dust had to be cleaned off solar collectors, dirt had to be washed off the sides of towers, which meant it all ended up in the bottoms of the chasms, coating the podways, building up beneath them, even making mud sometimes, when it rained. Once in a great while, the cleaning machines came through and took all of the muck out to the farms. From the looks of it, they hadn't been in Baja Urb for ages.

According to Joram, some urbs had unlicensed taxis at level, that is taxis without monitors. Perhaps they'd existed when Joram was young, but I didn't spot even one of them. I was too tired and achy to hurry. Besides, I had to locate all the past-this-point monitors before I passed one without re
alizing it. Often that meant quite lengthy detours. I didn't reach Tower 29 until the sky above the urb canyons was growing light. Joram's rule for covert travel was “Go high or go low,” so I took a freight rampway down into the first sublevel garage section. Since we'd never had a flit, I'd never been in a garage section, but it looked much as Joram had described it, emptier than other places, and, except for cross walls separating the four quads and sixteen sectors, more open. The nearest walls had huge numbers at each entry, dark yellow on a lighter yellow field. Yellow is the uniform code for northeast, so I was in the northeast sector of the northeast quad, one of the twelve outer sectors used for deliveries and parking. The core, the four inner sectors, was where all the machinery that kept the tower running could be found.

I found an unmonitored service link along the wall and spoke Hatty's code into it.

She answered. “Where are you, dear?”

“In the garage.”

“Which sector, dear?”

“Yellow-yellow.”

“You're directly down the wall from me. I can't bring the flit down to you because I'm identichipped for Blue-blue. Can you…?”

“I'll get there.”

“Do be careful. I'll meet you in Blue-blue, fifth level down.”

“I'll be there. It may take me a while.”

I located a convenience unit along the wall and stayed there for a brief rest while I ate my last nutrient bar and washed the exposed parts of my body. The bruises were suspicious enough without the filthy clothes, but I couldn't do anything about that. Wearily, I resolved to be very, very sneaky.

Blue meant northwest, and the most direct route to Blue-blue was along the outside wall, as Hattie had said, which had the added advantage of keeping me well away from the
workers who thronged the service core. I had no idea how I'd get through the sector wall, but blue sector of yellow quad would be straight ahead. I shambled wearily in that direction, taking refuge behind parked flits or stacks of supplies whenever freight carriers rumbled by or flits screamed into parking areas.

About halfway along the wall, I came upon a pile of small cartons someone had been working on with a routing labeler. A robe and veil were hung on the wall behind the pile, left there, perhaps, by someone who wasn't used to wearing them yet? Or someone who had gone to the toilet and didn't want to be bothered with them? Thievery is supposed to be impossible, but this was an exception. Without a qualm, I put on the robe and draped the veil over my head, thankful the person they belonged to was about my height. Now, I might be seen by people, but I certainly couldn't be identified by them.

As I approached the wall between sectors, I saw the yellow doors of an empty lift standing open, and, almost miraculously, another set of doors, blue ones, at the back of the lift. The lifts served both sides! I took time to be sure no one was watching, then limped into the lift, took it down five floors, and went out the other doors into Yellow-blue. If the quad walls were also served by two-sided lifts, the cross-tower trip wouldn't take as long as I'd feared.

Another quarter-mile journey along the yellow wall under the blue numbers was interrupted only when a long procession of workers, half of them robed and veiled, emerged from a door in the service core and streamed along the quad cross wall toward the lifts, probably the night shift workers going home to their apartments in the tier above. To minimize podway crowding, most people who work in a tower also live in it. I didn't hide. I just fooled around with the machine next to me until they were gone, then I called down the lift and went through it into blue quad, yellow sector.