The Practice Effect (16 page)

It would be a symbol of status among the rich, of course, never to be seen wearing or using anything that truly
needed
practicing.

Besides food and land, metal and paper, the chief commodity of value here was the human man-hour. Even when exhausted from a hard day’s labor in the fields, a serf’s time was not his own. In relaxing he practiced his master’s chair; in eating, he practiced his mistress’s spare dinnerware. He couldn’t save to buy his freedom, because anything saved away had to be maintained, or face decay!

No wonder there was trouble brewing in the east! The combination of the guilds, the churches, and the aristocracy made sure that change would come hard, if at all.

Fixxel’s Practicorium, at the north end of the plaza, was a tall building that reminded Dennis of home.

For one thing, its walls were in large part brilliantly transparent, as if of the clearest glass, slightly tinted to moderate the afternoon sunlight.

Arth explained that the panes had started out as sewn paper sheets, practiced hard during dry seasons, until they were weatherproof and clear. After many years of this they were probably better than any windows on Earth.

Facing the boulevard were displays of men’s and women’s clothes, tools, pottery, and rugs. “Nothing New! All Old and Used!” a sign stated proudly.

The window displays were constantly changing. Workers removed items and replaced them as Dennis watched.

The furnishings on exhibition were stunning. Realistic mannequins were draped in what looked like exquisite silks and brocades. Some of the gowns would surely have gone for thousands at Neiman-Marcus.

“Come on,” Arth said, nudging Dennis. “Don’t give old Fixxel a free push.”

Dennis blinked. He had been entranced by the beautiful things. Then, all at once, he realized what Arth meant. He laughed out loud in admiration of the scam. By just looking at the merchandise, and appreciating its beauty, he had helped just a little to enhance that beauty! No wonder the mannequins looked so lifelike. They were
practiced
by generations of passersby!

What a racket!

Still, Dennis couldn’t help but wish his camera wasn’t lost with his backpack. The clothing designs alone would be worth a fortune back on Earth.

Under Dennis’s urging, they went around back to peek into the great practice arena at the rear of the building. It was a scene of furious activity.

Teams of men and women poured water into and out of long lines of pitchers, cups, and goblets. Others kept busy digging holes with shovels, and then refilling them, or slicing
great logs into kindling, practicing shiny tools in the process.

There was a large open area in which men muffled in layers of clothes sat on half-finished chairs and threw weapons at targets. The crudest knives were being tossed against near-finished suits of glossy leather armor.

No wonder technology never developed here! It didn’t pay to specialize. Wherever a person could practice three or four items at once, it paid. The niceties of concentration seemed less important than keeping as many things busy as possible all the time.

This was the equivalent of an Earthly factory, but something about it struck Dennis as terribly futile. All this hard work would be for nothing if the constant maintenance stopped for just a few weeks or months. Left alone long enough, each of these products would decay to its original state.

Still, Dennis thought, there were no mountains of garbage here, either—no great landfills heaped with worn-out, unwanted things. Almost anything these people created was ultimately recycled to nature.

On neither world, it seemed, was there any such thing as a free lunch.

Later, in another part of town, Dennis and Arth watched a religious procession pass through one of the main squares. A trio of yellow-robed priests and their followers carried a pillowed platform on which a gleaming sword was carried. At the four corners of the palanquin were set freshly severed human heads.

“Priests of Mlikkin,” Arth identified them. “Bloody panderers. They appeal to th’ more unsavory cit’zens of Zuslik with their murderin’ ways.” He spat.

Dennis made himself watch, though his gorge rose at the grisly sight. From what he had picked up during the past week, he could tell that the priests were engaged in a campaign to inure the people of the town to the idea of death and war.

Sure enough, when the procession stopped at a platform set up at one end of the square, the chief priest held up the sword—obviously a product of generations of daily practice by acolytes of Mlikkin—and harangued the rowdy crowd that had gathered. Dennis could not make out much, but clearly the fellow thought little of the “eastern rabble.” When he
began speaking ill of King Hymiel, some parishioners looked at each other nervously, but nobody cried out in disagreement.

A number of Zuslikers, though, frowning in distaste, hurried off, leaving the square to the celebrants.

With one exception. Dennis noticed that an old woman knelt in a far corner of the plaza, before a niche in which was set a dusty statue. With age-wracked hands, she cleared away layers of debris and replaced flowers in the twisting, helical pedestal.

Something about the shape of the shrine made Dennis’s neck tingle. He started forward, with Arth trailing along nervously, complaining that this was not a healthy place for them to be.

“What is it?” Dennis asked his companion about the shrine.

“It’s a place of th’ Old Belief. Some say it was here b’fore even Zuslik was founded. The churches tried to have it pulled down, but it’s been practiced so long it’s impossible to scratch. So they dump offal on it an’ have gangs of toughs push around people who try to pray there.”

No wonder the old woman glanced up and around nervously as she went through her devotions. “But why should they care—”

Dennis stopped, still twenty yards away. He recognized the figure at the top of the pedestal. It was a
dragon
. He had seen its likeness on the haft of the native knife he had found by the zievatron.

In the dragon’s grinning mouth was a malevolent, demoniacal figure—a “blecker,” as Arth identified it. Covered with layers of filth and graffiti, the dragon nevertheless gave a frozen wink to passersby. Its open eye shone with gemstone brilliance.

But it was the pedestal beneath the mythical beast that seized Dennis’s attention. The fluted column was a delicate double helical coil, held together by delicately knotted rails, like the rungs of a twisted ladder.

It was a chain of DNA, or Dennis was the pixolet’s blood uncle!

Dennis felt a return of that nervous feeling of unreality that had plagued him since his arrival on this world. He approached the shrine slowly, wondering how these people ever could have learned about genes lacking the tools or mental disciplines required.

“Hssst!” Arth nudged Dennis. “Soldiers!” He nodded toward
the main street, where a troop was strolling in their direction.

Dennis glanced longingly back at the statue, but then nodded and hastily followed Arth into an alley. They watched from the shadows as a patrol passed by. The squad marched along haughtily, their “thenners” raised port high. The big sergeant, Gilm, paced alongside, heaping verbal abuse on civilians not quick enough to get out of the way.

From the way the townsfolk scattered, Dennis presumed Kremer’s northern clansmen still didn’t think of themselves as Zuslikans, though the town had been the Baron’s capital for a generation.

When Dennis next looked back at the little niche-shrine, the old woman had departed, no doubt scared away. Gone also was his best chance to find out more about the Old Belief.

The troop of soldiers was followed by nearly a score of young civilians, downcast and tethered to one another at the wrist.

“Press gang!” Arth whispered harshly. “Kremer’s buildin’ up th’ militia. War can’t be far off now!”

It reminded Dennis that he was still a hunted man. He looked up and saw, high in the sky, a set of broad black wings sailing in an updraft. A pair of small human figures sat in a light wicker framework beneath the glider, steering it lazily toward a thermal south of town. The underside was painted to resemble leathery wings, to take advantage of the traditional dragon reverence that filled most Coylian fairy tales.

Fortunately, these people had never developed telescopes. Those scouts would not be likely to pick them out in Zuslik’s crowded streets. He and Arth only had to worry about foot patrols.

When they made their break in the balloon, however, it would be a different story. Those gliders might present a problem.

Discretion seemed well advised. He let Arth lead him away from the busy square, resolving though to return to study the statue in more detail later.

The Hall of the Guild of Chairmakers was overrun with children.

The chairmakers’ guild was the poorest of the maker castes. Unlike that of the stonechoppers, the hinge and door builders, and the papermakers, it had no secrets to protect. Anyone could make a chair or table “starter” with twine and sticks. Only the law kept the guild in its monopoly.

Youngsters ran all over the place. The floor was a litter of string and shredded bark. Arth explained that open guilds like the chairmakers’ hired mostly children and old people—unsuited for the high-volume practicing that took place at salons like Fixxel’s.

Under the supervision of a few master chairmakers, boys and girls assembled furniture starters to go into the homes of the needy. After a year or so of using these tables and chairs, the poor would sell the practiced models to somewhat better-off folk and buy another set of crude starters with part of the proceeds. The furniture would slowly work its way along the socioeconomic ladder as it grew older and better—upward mobility for things, if not people.

A red-robed priest moved among the children, accompanied by two master chairmakers, blessing the finished starters. Dennis couldn’t remember which deity the red gown represented, but something about the color seemed almost to remind him of something.

“Another patrol, Dennzz.” Arth pointed out a troop of guards passing by, one street over. “Maybe we better be getting’ back.”

Dennis nodded reluctantly. “All right,” he told Arth, “let’s go.” It would be at least a week before the escape attempt, and there would be other chances to explore the town.

They ducked down a side alley and emerged on the Avenue of Sweetmeats. Arth bought pastries, and Dennis tried to make sense out of the chaotic but apparently efficient sled-rail traffic pattern as they walked.

Still, he couldn’t shake the image of the red-robed priest from his mind. Somehow it made him feel simultaneously angry and frustrated.

Arth grabbed Dennis’s arm as they were approaching the little thief’s neighborhood. He looked up and down the street suspiciously. “Let’s take a shortcut,” he said, and led Dennis between a pair of stalls into another alley.

“What’s the matter?”

Arth shook his head. “Maybe I’m just nervous. But if you sniff a trap five times, and you’re wrong four of ’em, you’re still ahead if you avoid th’ smell.”

Dennis decided to take Arth’s word as the expert. He saw a stack of crates against the wall of one of the wedding cake buildings. “Come on,” he said, “I’ve got a tool that’s super at detecting traps. We can use it up on the roof.”

They climbed to the first parapet, then up a garden trellis to another level. Dennis reached under the robe Arth had lent him and pulled the little camp-watch alarm out of one of his overall pockets.

Arth stared at the flashing lights, entranced. He appeared totally confident in the Earthman’s wizardry, sure that Dennis would be able to tell, from this magic, whether it was safe to go out onto the streets.

Dennis twiddled with the tiny dials. But the screen remained a chaos of unreadable garbage. The alarm, over a week out of practice, kept trying to go off regardless of what he did.

Dennis sighed and reached into another pocket. The slim, collapsible monocular had been in the packet Linnora had thrown him. Fortunately, it had only been scratched in Kermer’s futile attempts to open it.

Dennis used it to scan the streets below.

There were crowds up and down the main boulevard—farmers come to town to market their produce and purchase starters, aristocrats with their clonelike entourages, an occasional guard or churchman. Dennis looked for suspicious clumps of activity.

He focused on a group of men at the far end of the street. They idled about in front of a pub, apparently lounging.

But the spyglass told a different story. The men were armed, and they glanced intently at passersby. They had the high cheekbones of Kremer’s northmen.

Dennis adjusted the focus. A tall, armed man with the look of an aristocrat emerged from a building behind the toughs. He was followed by a short, stooped fellow with a patch over one eye. They were conversing in an agitated manner. The one-eyed man kept pointing in the direction of the waterfront. The aristocrat just as insistently seemed to indicate that they would wait right where they were.

“Uh, Arth”—Dennis’s mouth felt dry—“I think you’d better look at this.”

“At what, that little box? Are you lookin’
through
it, or at somethin’ inside it?”

“Through it. It’s like a sort of magic tube that makes things far away look bigger. It may take you a minute to get used to it, but when you do, I want you to use it to look at that tavern at the end of the street.”

Arth squatted forward and took the monocular. Dennis had to show him how to hold it. Arth grew excited.

“Hey! This is great! I can see like th’ proverbial eagle of Crydee!… I can count th’ steins on th’ table over at … 
Great Palmi
! That’s
Perth
! An’ he’s talkin’ to Lord Hern himself!”

Dennis nodded. He felt a hollowness within his chest, as if fragile hope had suddenly turned into something heavy and hard.

“That scum!” Arth cursed. “He’s turnin’ us in! His dad even served with mine under th’ old Duke! I’ll have his intestines an’ practice ’em into hawsers! I’ll …”

Dennis slumped back against the wall behind them. He was fresh out of ideas. There didn’t seem to be any way to warn his friends back at Arth’s apartment, or in the waterfront warehouse, where construction of the escape balloon had just begun.