Sten (4 page)

"Fine, fine," the Counselor said. "Let's give them a real good show."

He hurried back around the makeshift ring.

"Dad," Sten managed, "his Xy—it's twice the size of ours. We don't stand a chance."

Amos nodded. "Sure looks that way, don't it? But you remember what I told you, time back, about not handling things the way people expect you to? Well—you take my card. Nip on out to that soystand, and buy all you can hide under your tunic."

Sten grabbed his father's card and wriggled off through the crowd.

The Counselor was too busy bragging to his cronies about what his Xy would do to notice Sten shoving strands of raw soy into the large Xypaca's cage.

After a few moments of haggling, bragging, and bet-placing, the Xy cages were brought into the ring, tipped over, and quickly opened.

The Counselor's thoroughly glutted Xypaca stumbled from his cage, yawned once, and curled up to go to sleep. By the time he was jolted awake, Amos' Xypaca had him half digested.

There was a dead silence around the ring. Amos looked as humble as he knew how. "Yessir. You were right, sir. We showed them we're sure the best sportsmen, didn't we. Sir?"

The Counselor said nothing. Just turned and pushed his way through the crowd.

After that, Amos couldn't get a fight for his Xypaca in any match at any odds. Nobody mourned that much when the Xypaca died—along with all the others—after a month or two.

Lack of necessary trace elements, somebody said.

By that time, Amos was already busy figuring out another scheme to get himself and his family off Vulcan.

He was still scheming when Thoresen dumped the air on The Row.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE BARON'S WORDS rolled and bounced around the high-roofed tube junction. Sten could pick out an occasional phrase:

"Brave souls…Vulcan pioneers…died for the good of the Company…names not to be forgotten…our thirty million citizens will always remember…"

Sten still felt numb.

A citizen, coming off shift, elbowed his way through the crowd of about fifty mourning Migs, scowling. Then he realized what was going on. He pulled what he hoped was a sorrowful look in his face and ducked down a tube opening.

Sten didn't notice.

He was staring up at the roof, at the many-times-magnified picture of the Baron projected on the ceiling. The man stood in his garden, wearing the flowing robes that Execs put on for ceremonial occasions.

The Baron had carefully picked his clothes for the funeral ceremony. He thought the Migs would be impressed and touched by his concern. To Sten he was nothing more than a beefier, more hypocritical version of the Counselor.

Sten had made it through the first week…survived the shock.

Still, his mind kept fingering the loss, like an amputee who can ghost-feel a limb he no longer owns.

Sten had holed up in the apartment for most of the time. At intervals the delivery flap had clicked and every now and then he'd walked over and eaten something from the pneumatiqued trays of food.

Sten had even been duly grateful to the Company for leaving him alone. He didn't realize until years later that the Company was just following the procedure outlined in "Industrial Accidents (Fatal), Treatment of Surviving Relatives of."

From the quickly vidded expressions of sympathy from Amos'

and Freed's supervisors and the children's teachers to the Sympathy Wake Credits good at the nearest rec center, the process of channeling the grief of the bereaved was all very well calculated. Especially the isolation—the last thing the Company wanted was a mourning relative haunting the corridors, reminding people just how thin was the margin between life and death in their artificial, profit-run world.

The Baron's booming words suddenly were nothing but noise to Sten. He turned away. Someone fell in beside him. Sten turned his head, and then froze. It was the Counselor.

"Moving ceremony," the man said. ‘Touching. Quite touching."

He motioned Sten toward a slideway bibshop and into a chair. The Counselor pushed his card into a slot and punched.

The server spat two drinks. The Counselor took a sip of his drink and rolled it around his mouth. Sten just stared at the container before him.

"I realize your sorrow, young Sten," the Counselor said. "But all things grow from ashes."

He took something from his pocket and put it in front of Sten.

It was a placard, with KARL STEN, 03857-coNl9-2-MiG-UNSK

across the top. Sten wondered when they'd snapped the picture of him on the card's face.

"I knew that your great concern was, after the inevitable mourning period, what would happen to you next. After all, you have no job. No credits, no means of support. And so forth."

He paused and sipped his drink.

"We have examined your record and decided that you deserve special treatment." The Counselor smiled and tapped the card with a yellow fingernail.

"We have decided to allow you full worker's citizenship rights with all of the benefits that entails. A man-size monthly credit.

Full access to all recreational facilities. Your own home—the one, in fact, in which you grew up."

The Counselor leaned forward for the final touch. "Beginning tomorrow, Karl Sten, you take your father's place on the proud assembly lines of Vulcan."

Sten sat silent. Possibly the Counselor thought he was grateful. "Of course, that means you will have to serve out the few years left on your father's contract—nineteen, I believe it was. But the Company has waived the time remaining on your mother's obligation."

"That's very generous of the Company," Sten managed.

"Certainly. Certainly. But as Baron Thoresen has so often pointed out to me in our frequent chats—in his garden, I might add—the welfare of our workers must come before all other things. ‘A happy worker is a productive worker,' he often says."

"I'm sure he does."

The Counselor smiled again. He patted Sten's hand and rose.

Then he hesitated, inserted his card in the slot again and punched buttons. Another drink appeared from the slot. "Have another, Citizen Sten. On me. And let me be the first to offer my congratulations."

He patted Sten again, then turned and walked down the street. Sten stared after him. He picked up the drinks, and slowly poured them on the deck.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE ON-SHIFT WARNING shrilled and Sten sourly sat up.

He'd already been awake for nearly two hours. Waiting.

Even after four cycles the three-room apartment was empty.

But Sten had learned that the dead must mourn for themselves.

That part had been walled off, though sometimes he'd slip, and some of the grief would show itself.

But mostly he was successful at turning himself into the quiet, obedient Mig the Company wanted. Or at least at faking it.

The wallslot clicked, and a tray slid out with the usual quick-shot energy drink, various hangover remedies, and antidepressants.

Sten took a handful at random and dumped them down the waste tube. He didn't want or need any, but he knew better than to ignore the tray.

After a few hours, it would retract and self-inventory. Then some computer would report up the line on Sten's lack of consumption. Which would rate a reprimand from the Counselor.

Sten sighed. There was a quota on everything.

Far up at the head of the line a worker touched his card to the medclock. The machine blinked and the man shoved his arm into its maw. It bleeped his vital signs, noted he was free of alcohol or drugs that might be left over from last off-shift's routine brawl, and clocked him in.

The man disappeared into the factory and the line moved two steps forward.

Sten moved forward with the rest, gossip buzzing around him.

"Considerin' Fran was the loosest man with a quota on the bench, I think it was clottin' fine of the Company—so he lost an arm; only thing he ever did with it is pinch joy-girls. They gave him a month's credits, didn't they?…"

"You know me, not a man on Vulcan can match me drink for drink—and next shift I'm rarin' for the line—I'm a quota fool!

Bring 'em on, I says, and look out down the line…"

It was Sten's turn. He slotted his card, stared at the machine dully as it inspected and approved him, and then walked reluctantly into the factory.

The assembly building was enormous, honeycombed from floor to ceiling with belts, tracks, giant gears, and machines. The Migs had to inch along narrow catwalks to keep from falling or being jerked into the innards of some machine and pounded, pressed, and rolled into some nameless device that would eventually be rejected at the end of the line because it contained odd impurities.

After nearly two months in the factory, Sten had learned to hate his partner almost as much as the job. The robot was a squat gray ovoid with a huge array of sensors bunched into a large insect eye that moved on a combination of wheels and leg stalks that it let down for stairs. Only the eye cluster and the waggling tentacles seemed alive.

Most of all, he hated its high-pitched and nagging voice. Like an old microlibrarian that Sten remembered from his Basic Creche.

"Hurry," it fussed, "we're running behind quota. A good worker never runs behind quota. Last cycle, in the third sector, one Myal Thorkenson actually doubled his quota. Now, isn't
that
an ideal worth emulating?"

Sten looked at the machine and thought about kicking it. Last time he'd tried that, he'd limped for two days.

Sten's robot prodded him with its voice.

"Hurry now. Another chair."

He picked up another seat from the pile in front of the long silver tube. Then he carried it back to where the robot squatted, waiting.

Sten and his robot were at the tail end of a long assembly line of movers, the capsules used in the pneumatic transit systems common to most industrial worlds.

The robot was the technician. Sten was the dot-and-carry man. His job was to pick up a seat from the pile, lug it inside the tube to the properly marked slot, and then position it while the robot heat-sealed the seat to the frame. It was a mind-numbing job that he never seemed to do quite right for his mechanical straw boss.

"Not there," the robot said. "You always do it wrong. The position is clearly marked. Slide it up now. Slide it up."

The robot's heatgun flashed.

"Quickly, now. Another."

Sten lumbered back down the aisle, where he was met by a worker whose name he couldn't remember. "Hey. You hear? I just got promoted!"

"Congratulations."

The man was beaming. "Thanks. I'm throwing a big bash after shift. Everyone's invited. All on me."

Sten looked up at the fellow. "Uh, won't that set you back—I mean, put you even with the promotion?"

The man shrugged.

"So I card it. It'll only add another six months or so to my contract."

Sten considered asking him why it was so important to rush right out and spend every credit—and then some—of his raise.

How he could throw away another six months of his life on…He already knew the answer. So he didn't bother.

"That's right," he sighed. "You can card it." The Mig rushed on.

Leta was about the only bright spot in Sten's life those days.

In many ways, she was the typical joygirl. Hired on the same kind of backwater planet Sten's parents had come from, Leta just knew that when her contract ran out and she immigrated to one of the Empire's leisure worlds, she'd meet and sign a life-contract with a member of the royal family. Or at least a merchant prince.

Even though Sten knew better than to believe in the whore with the heart of gold, he felt that she got real pleasure from their talk and sex.

Sten lay silently on the far side of the bed.

The girl slid over to him and stroked his body slowly with her fingertips.

Sten rolled over and looked up at her.

Leta's face was gentle, her pupils wide with pleasure drugs.

"Ssswrong," she muttered.

"Contracts. Contracts and quotas and Migs."

She giggled.

"Nothin" wrong with you. An' you're a Mig."

Sten sat up.