Sanctuary in The Sky (2 page)

III

Keeping Waystation
neutral in this tense situation was a triumph of delicate balance—like trying to land a ship on manual on an airless world. There had to be rules, inflexible rules; likewise, there had to be means of making the rules bend a little when necessary.

Captain Raige had served with the Waystation staff longer than all but a half-dozen other members of the personnel; she had become a past master ait the essential techniques, including the use of unofficial channels of information. As always, she supervised the disembarkation of the passengers from the newly arrived ship; she scrutinized these, however, more carefully than usual. She couldn’t have said why. It was simply because the atmosphere seemed tense, as though a storm were brewing.

Waystation was neutral in every sense—medically as well as politically, for example. Disembarkation, therefore, was not complicated by quarantine inspections, and the customs examinations were perfunctory. It was the fault of the Pags or the Cathrodynes—so the Glaithes reasoned—if illegal merchandise got off or on to one of their worlds; what .happened at Waystation was none of their business.

Within a very short while of the ship’s docking, therefore, the passengers would be free to mingle with the rest of Waystation’s million-odd population—half of it the Glaithe staff, the rest transient. It was Captain Raige’s job to know about all of them.

Down the null-grav funnel from the ship they came one by one, to emerge blinking into the bright light of the main re- ceptior hall, to stare at the ranked doors of the elevator system, the long chains of chairs on the horizontal conveyers, the steel and plastic and mineraloid interior of the most fantastic artificial construction they had ever seen.

They had questions: accommodation, transhipment dates, refreshments, local time, necessities and luxuries. The staff of receptionists—lit
tl
e sloe-eyed Glaithe girls in plain rust colored overalls—equipped them with maps, currency scrip, directions, tickets. Standing aside inconspicuously, Captain Raige watched them with her face composed and her hands folded out of sight in the loose full sleeves of her gown. Only her eyes moved noticeably, but her fingers were also busy, stroking memoranda into the touch-react keys of a tiny recorder covered by her sleeves.

The Lubarrian woman was the first to pass through reception. Raige had received special instructions about her. She was a factor in a complex profit-and-loss account, kept by the Glaithes at Waystation. Currently the Pags were smarting about some trouble that the Glaithes had put them to—a smack on the hand, so to speak, for attempting to interfere in the administration of Waystation. Accordingly, with scrupulous neutrality, the Glaithes had decided to put the Cathro- dynes to similar inconvenience, making them bring this Mrs. Iquida out to Waystation first class on a Cathrodyne ship— almost unheard of, for a member of a subject race!

There would have to be another flea-bite to irritate the Pags again shortly. Raige sighed. One day she would be able to retire, and bring up the children that were waiting for her in the ovum blank on Glai—deposited there when she was first drafted for service in space. But it would be a good few years before that happened.

Meantime, there was a lot in common between bringing up children and keeping the peace between the two irascible “master races” of the Arm.

There was a priest—a Cathrodyne of the Lubarrian church. The name would be Dardaino; Raige didn’t have to see his papers to know that. He was the replacement for the Waystation chaplain, who had died the other month. Someone
w
ould have to go and have a quiet discussion with him before he began throwing his weight around, if he proved to be more Cathrodyne than priest.

Two officers: a Pag returning from a tour with her embassy on Cathrodyne, and a Cathrodyne, formerly on the staff here but whose declared purpose now was to take a furlough, and who was almost certainly a spy. They ostentatiously avoided each other, going to reception desks at opposite ends of the hall.

A Cathrodyne archeologist, who had been here before as a young student. And a stranger, about whom nothing more than his name was known—Lang. With a small pet animal of some species which Raige had never even seen in pictures.

She kept her face stone-still, but she wished intensely that she could let her feelings show. There was nothing obvious to justify her apprehension; indeed, this was a routine kind of cargo, except for this stranger Lang. Yet. . .

Well, maybe Vykor would be able to clarify matters. She shut off her recorder with a determined gesture, and watched the last of the first-class passengers disappear toward their transit accommodation. The stewards would not be free for an hour or more yet, and there were steerage-class passengers also to be discharged here for temporary revivification and feeding up to normal. That too was her job. She moved noiselessly across the hall on sandaled feet toward the revival rooms.

For some reason, Vykor found himself in a frenzy of impatience as he went through the routine of clearing up after docking. Usually he managed to concentrate on what he had to do; this time; it irked him insupportably to have to clear the cabins out, see to the discharge of baggage, report to the purser and have him inspect the cabins, collect his currency scrip. . . .

And at last he was in his own cabin, stripping off his uniform and hurrying into the undress wear of a Majko liner employee. On Waystation, in theory, he was free from the overlordship of the Cathrodynes; in practice, though, any of the easily recognizable curly-black-haired Majkos who tried to assert their privilege found themselves marked down and
repaid for their arrogance when they were back in Cathrodyne jurisdict
i
on.

So he put on the drab shirt and breeches resignedly, finding—as always—that after his fine purple uniform it was depressing to look at himself in the glass.

Then he made haste off the ship, winking at a pretty Glaithe receptionist as she put away her dossiers, waving at a Lubarrian engineer off a sister ship to his own liner, respectfully saluting an officer of the Glaithe staff, and reluctantly making a token bow to a Cathrodyne grand-dame in a cripple-walker—a mechanically-propelled pair of artificial legs designed to restore the tone of muscles long unused. There were many such old women—and men also—who came to Waystation in the vain hope of finding the secret of eternal youth among the vast stores of knowledge in the master memory banks. Charlatans made a good living off such people—but only the Glaithes knew Waystation’s secrets.

Some few, they parted with. At a price.

Vykor had to saunter across the reception hall, judging the moment of his arrival at the elevators. He had to take a particular car, and he had to be alone when he took it. A sudden influx of laughing children—Glaithes, on an educational trip—compelled him to dawdle at a sweetmeat automat, pretending to choose between the charms of crystallized mutches and weerwil steeped in honey.

When he got his chance, he slipped by himself into the car and glanced down the row of level-buttons he could press. These elevators were as complex as a subway system in a city planetside, but of uniform pattern because they followed geodesics of the artificial gravity field. Only sometimes they didn’t—not exactly. This was one of the secrets that the Glaithes had entrusted to a few people, of whom Vykor was one.

It was simple, really. A matter of pressing two of the buttons simultaneously.

Vykor had never been able to make up his mind where the elevator actually took him when he did this. At first, he had assumed that it let him out between two levels, in a concealed space. Then he had gone to the level above and
descended by the ordinary staircase to the one below, and then climbed up again. That had convinced him that there was no room for an extra concealed level between them. The elevator went somewhere else, then.

Some time he would stay at this level after seeing Captain Raige, and make his way out on foot, thus establishing once for all where he was. But not yet. He had too much to gain from the privilege he enjoyed to risk losing it.

The elevator stopped, and the doors slid back to reveal the same rather narrow, dark passage he had seen before, on other trips. It ran twenty paces in either direction, bathed in a dull orange-red glow from neon strip lighting, and then was blocked off by a T-junction. He had never been in either direction along either of the further passages; he was permitted to cross the passage in which he found himself after leaving the elevator car, press the admission button on the door opposite, and report to Raige. That was all.

Lately, he had been more and more tempted to hesitate and turn right or left and at least glance down the passages he had never yet seen. Now he told himself yet once more —with even greater reluctance—Next
time!

And his thumb was on the admission button of the office; the door was purring back in its sliding grooves.

He was always a little bit afraid of Raige. She was a small woman, as all her people were small, and came no higher than Vykor’s elbow. Her face was smooth-skinned and youthful, with large oval dark eyes under neatly braided black hair. But in some way—perhaps it was the absolute calm of her expression—she managed to appear master of all imaginable situations.

She sat in a low, round chair, reading back a pattern of flickering symbols projected by her personal recorder on to the smooth cream-painted bulkhead to the right of the door. Vykor glanced at the symbols and then away again; he knew better than to waste his time trying to read them. That was a code the Glaithes had adapted from the memory bank records of Waystation, and no one else had ever gained access to the key.

“Welcome, Vykor,” said Raige, not taking her sloe-dark eyes from the shifting, flickering pattern on the wall. "I will
only detain you a few moments—therel” She shut off the recorder’s tiny, brilliant projector light, and slipped the whole machine away in the shrouding recess of her sleeve. A halfsmile seemed to light up her whole face.

“Please be seated. It is good to see you again.”

“And I am delighted to see you, Captain Raige.” Vykor put enthusiasm into his voice—rather, could not keep it out. To him, Raige was an altogether amazing and wonderful person; he would say the same of almost any Glaithe, and had in fact said so to Lang before disembarking, but in his mind Raige was very special indeed.

A flicker of something crossed Raige’s smooth, unwrinkled face. “You have the dispatches?” she said after a short pause, and Vykor nodded. A tiny roll of microfilm was hard in his left shoe; he raised his foot and took the roll out and passed it to Raige.

“Thank you. I will see you again before you leave; there may well be an answer.”

“I ... I have a further message which the group asked me to deliver personally,” Vykor ventured, and Raige nodded, waiting. “It is to say—to say how much the oppressed multitudes of Majkosi value the aid they receive from Glaithe sources, how heartening it is to know that the people of Glai sympathize, and how much we admire the achievement of your people in remaining independent of either Pag or Cathrodyne rule.”

His hands were clenched a little, and his fingers ached in tension. He had not been asked to deliver any message verbally; the clandestine group whom he served as courier never transmitted anything except in code—and if the Cathrodynes learned that the Glaithes were helping subject races surreptitiously under cover of their famous neutrality, perhaps not even the greedy desire they felt for Waystation would hold them back from war.

But, he told himself rebelliously, that was what the group felt. Or ought to feel.

Anyway, it was certainly what he felt himself.

And this was the only way he could convey it to Raige. He had to say it, somehow, because he wanted to so badly, and he couldn’t step out of his role as an impersonal courier. He
waited for her answer in agonized suspense, and sighed with relief when she inclined her head gracefully, smiling.

“Thank you, Vykor,” she said. “It is nice to hear that.”

Then she briskened. “And now, if you please—about your passengers?”

IV

The tall
Pag officer had shouted one final, ringing insult across the reception hall after disembarkation procedure, and had turned with a swirl of her short dress cloak to climb on a conveyer chair. For her part, the quicker she got back among her own kind, the better.

Ferenc, absently waving aside offers from the Glaithe reception clerks of maps, currency scrip and other necessaries, watched her go, eyes narrowed. He was picturing the Pag officer’s man. He would be a yard taller than Ferenc, muscled like two ordinary men, smooth of scalp and cheek, with long white teeth that he bared meaninglessly or sometimes in a smile every few moments. He would wear, if anything, a wove-metal smock that even he could not rip to pieces. It would probably be fouled around the lower edges. He would speak
little
; they seldom bothered to teach male children to talk properly on Pagr.

Depicting this to himself, Ferenc felt the rankling sore in his mind diminish. The Pag officer was probably quite right to say that neither he nor any other Cathrodyne male could force her to submit. But who would want to make her submit, when her idea of love-making was to strip and climb into a cage with the male of the species, and be throt
tl
ed half to death beforehand?

And yet he would dearly have liked to shove her remark —well—down her throat. . . .

He swung on his heel and reached out a long arm—long
by Cathrodyne standards; Pig standards were another thing entirely. His hand fell on the shoulder of Ligmer, the archeologist, who was immersed in the Glaithe-prepared maps he had been handed.

“Listen, young man
!
” he said harshly. “I didn’t like the attitude you were taking, back there aboard ship. You’d do well to keep your scientific detachment in a separate compartment when there are Pags around to hear you. I don’t know how much it’s already spread around, but if there’s a lot of this half-heartedness among your kind, it’ll do our prestige a lot of harm.”

Ligmer blinked at him, a little owlishly, and stopped and withdrew half a pace so that his shoulder was free of Ferenc’s grasp. He said with dignity, "Officer Ferenc, national pride has to be based on truth, on hard fact. Would you have us descend to the level of the Pags, and bluster inflated nonsense about the ‘vaulting Cathrodyne spirit? Surely not
!
”

Ferenc hesitated, suddenly at a loss. Seizing his advantage, Ligmer hurried on, “No, of course not
!
Let them make their empty claims—it impresses no one except themselves. You may be sure that we, and I, will do nothing so foolish.”

“All right!” growled Ferenc. “But bear in mind what I said, remember.”

“Of course. They’re not all as bad as that one we shipped with, fortunately; some of them are quite levelheaded. I’m going to be working with a woman from an archeological institute on Pagr who’s something of a subversive movement so far as this kind of subject is concerned, and refuses to have any part of their nationalist boasting.”

“It sounds unlikely,” said Ferenc curtly. "Don’t let them fool you into thinking they’re reasonable beings—they aren’t capable of it.”

Ligmer flushed and turned away, and Ferenc, after one last hard glare at the other’s back, finally allowed a receptionist to allot him the papers for his stay.

He saw out of the corner of his eye that the stranger, Lang, had approached Ligmer a few moments later, and was driven by curiosity to pass within earshot of their talk when he was walking toward the elevator cars. Lang was speaking.

“
. . compliment you on your attitude,” he said. Ligmer smiled in self-deprecation.

"Oh, I mean it,” Lang was insisting. “I’ve traveled a good deal, as you know, and I always appreciate it when I find someone who doesn’t let prejudice rule his thinking.”

Ferenc frowned, and passed on toward his elevator. He made a mental note to investigate Lang while he was here; he didn’t think Ligmer’s stability was adequate for him to be sent out here to come under Pag influence, and Lang’s remark—coming as it did from someone out of eye-range and therefore automatically regarded as a man of distinction— was apt to make the situation still worse.

And there was another matter he ought to drop some hints about, too. That priest, Dardaino: where was the man? He glanced along the row of elevators and saw the plump figure waiting at another door for the car to arrive. He walked across and spoke authoritatively.

“Dardaino!”

The priest blinked a little and fingered a ceremonial symbol on his robe. Ferenc ignored the gesture; Dardaino’s creed had lost its hold on its home planet some time back.

“Yes, my son?”

“Officer Ferenc, if you please. Dardaino, I oughtn’t to have to say this to you, but I’d better if no one else did already. Don’t you know that this Iquida woman—the Lubarrian who came with us—represents a deliberate snub to the Cathrodynes? Haven’t you heard about the reason for her being sent here?”

A little nervously, the priest nodded. “Yes, it struck me as odd to find her traveling with us, so I made inquiries.”

“Yet you engaged her in conversation, and—one might almost say—attempted to make up to her. I suppose one can’t expect any better taste on your part, since you live and work among Lubarrians all the time. But one might have expected more restraint from -one whose first allegiance is to Cathrodyne.”

Dardaino gulped. “I ... I was restrained in my behavior, I thought. She is of my own faith, after all, and it is my duty to foster the faith where I can. But I did not attempt to exercise my rights over her, in view of the circumstances. I
had to express my disapproval in some way, and that was the —the most obvious.”

“Rights over her?”

“Why, yes—I did not bid her to my cabin, or visit hers.”

“But isn’t she coming out here to her husband . . .?” Bells rang in Ferenc’s memory, and he checked himself. Of course. This faith of Dardaino’s incorporated some strange practices, the abusi of which had been a major factor in destroying its hold on Cathrodyne itself. Marriage, for example, was forbidden between the parents of children; all families were out- cros
s
ed, and it was considered anti-social to have more than one child by the same partner. It was, however, requisite to have a permanent partner as regards financial support and the maintenance of a home. A peculiar reversal of the system common to the other worlds of the Arm—and, so it appeared, of worlds further in-galaxy.

“Oh yes,” said Ferenc.
“Oh
yes. I’d forgotten. Well, I wouldn’t have expected more self-restraint from one of your persuasion, anyway. All right.”

He turned away, catching sight of Mrs. Iquida as he did so. Under the smiling supervision of a pretty Glaithe girl, she was climbing aboard a conveyer-chair, her eyes bright with excitement.

Behind Ferenc, the priest was sighing loudly with relief. Ferenc spat, deliberately and conspicuously, to symbolize his cumulative disgust: with the Glaithes at the way they had made the Cathrodynes eat dust in the Iquida case, with Dardaino and his sensual, self-indulging religion, with Ligmer for his lack of proper patriotism, and lastly with himself for failing to make the Pag officer respect him.

Well, he had business to attend to—in the intervals of pretending that he was on furlough. He found that the elevator car he wanted was waiting, and stepped into it. His last look back across the reception hall showed him that Lang, still in conversation with Ligmer, and stroking his pet animal, had his eyes on him.

“Your—uh—compatriot didn’t seem to approve of your remarks,” Lang suggested. Ligmer shook his head.

“Ferenc is an example of something we Cathrodynes would
do better to rid ourselves of,” he said. “I’m afraid his type is all too common—although,” he added with virtuous planetary loyalty, “we’re far better off than they are on Pagr. I suppose people like Ferenc had their place when Cathrodyne was expanding; it was his kind who got us our empire on Majkosi and Lubarria. But their automatic contempt for everything that isn’t Cathrodyne is out of date, I think.”

He gestured with a hand full of papers, to indicate the severe but impressive hall in which , they stood. “It became out of date when Waystation was discovered, you might say. When it became perfectly obvious that things Cathrodyne were
not
superior to anything else, because Waystation is so incredibly far in advance of everything else we know.”

“It is very remarkable,” Lang agreed, glancing around.

“On Pagr, of course, they reacted quite characteristically. They said—as you heard from that officer we shipped with— that since everything Pag, in their view, is superior to all the rest, Waystation was built by Pags. Perfect logic! It’s their official propaganda, but luckily some few of them are intelligent enough to be able to shake themselves free of such rubbish.”

“You’ve been here before, I take it?” Lang asked. "You know Waystation well?”

“Nobody knows Waystation well except the Glaithes themselves,” Ligmer said with a rueful expression. “Oh, they’re very reasonable and co-operative in most respects; their only stipulation is that archeologists like myself and other investigators must not pry too closely into technical matters. Mark you, that’s a handicap in itself, because so much of Way- station’s hidden history must be bound up with technical questions—like the master memory banks, for instance. There’s knowledge in the banks that the Glaithes can’t use themselves and which they daren’t, simply daren’t, let loose indiscriminately. I suppose one can’t blame them; they know that given a free hand both we Cathrodynes and the Pags would try to seize Waystation for themselves.”

"Yes, I already gathered that.” Lang frowned, and lifted his little pet on to his shoulder.

“What is that thing of yours?” Ligmer inquired. “I never saw one before.”

“Oh, it’s a creature that’s popular as a pet on some planets further in-galaxy, beyond the Arm.” Lang
r
ubbed his head against the pet’s with a grin. “I call him Sunny. He’s company for me.”

Ligmer was aching to ask the all-important question— where Lang actually hailed from—but somehow he hadn’t quite summoned the necessary words before Lang was speaking again.

“How do they organize Waystation—the Glaithes, I mean?” “Well, there are about half a million Glaithes here, on the staff. It’s practically a planetary industry with them, running it. They supervise luxury-goods trading between the rival empires, who otherwise would never get a chance to trade peaceably; they act as mediators in cases like that of Iquida, whose wife came out here with us; they help keep diplomatic relations below boiling point; they provide—and this isn’t the least of their services—they provide a holiday resort for people who want a trip into space. And they run a very fine hospital with techniques they found out either for themselves or from records here.”

“They occupy the whole station?” Lang blinked.

“Not exac
tl
y. They lease sections—under supervision—to us and the Pags, to do more or less what we like with. It annoys some people that they also insist on leasing sections to the subject races, who are in their view only subject by right of conquest, and won’t forever remain inferior peoples. But naturally, because their home planets and all the shipping lines are under other jurisdiction the Majkos, Lubarrians, and Alchmids don’t get much chance to enjoy their theoretical advantage. I suppose the Glaithes do it because only their occupation of Waystation has kept them from falling into the hands of one or other of the empires of the Arm.” Lang was staring across toward the elevators; Ferenc was just descending. A smile played around Lang’s mouth.

“You know,” he said, “I rather like what I hear of these
Glaithes
. Well, thank you for your time. I hope we shall meet again during our stay.”

“Of course. And anything you want to know about Waystation—get in touch with me,” Ligmer invited. “I can’t guarantee to answer your questions, but I’ll try.”