A burst of gunfire tore the cellar door into thousands of charred pieces that rained down from the top of the stairs.
That made up his mind for him.
He followed the telepathic mutant, the double outcast, into the stinking depths of the public tunnel, wondering how long and in what condition he would survive…
3
The General held the broken manacle in the light of the hand torch. He could see where the iron had cracked like plastic before the chain links had been able to separate. Whatever had broken free was not a thing to be taken lightly. He dropped the iron, brushed his hands together briskly.
“Lieutenant!” he commanded.
A Pure, robed in blue-white, hurried to him, carrying a small case from which wound a flexible steel cord that terminated in a ring of brassy metal. He activated the device for his superior. The air hummed with the resonances set up inside the compact machine.
The General passed his hands through the brass circle, withdrew them, effectively sterilizing the flesh that had touched non-Pure artifacts.
The lieutenant switched off the machine and retreated to stand at a respectful distance. His own lineage could be traced back a dozen or more generations to a straggler named Bomark, who had come to the fortress on the white cliff and was given shelter after the proper testing of his genes. Perhaps one of his descendants, two or three centuries from now, could hope to become the General of the enclave.
“What was it like?” the General asked Belmondo.
The innkeeper said, “A great, bearlike man, Your Excellency.” He used the word “man” to irritate, though he knew the General's tolerance could swiftly give way to anger — and that anger could be deadly. “A child of the Wombs, if you ask me.”
“But you were not asked.” The General's tone made Belmondo cringe and realize, suddenly, that he could not afford any more rebellion, no matter how low-keyed it might be. “You were asked only for a description,” the General said, “not for your uneducated suppositions.”
Belmondo nodded penitently.
The General was pleased with the tainted man's reaction. Now that he had been elected to the highest position in his enclave, a post that carried with it a lifetime term, he did not care especially to impress the living. What he wanted most, now, was to impress future generations, to become a moment of history far above those others who had served as the enclave's General before him. It was not altogether vanity that made this his motivation. If human history judged him favorably and named him as a great General, he could be almost certain that his descendants would supply at least one or two future Generals and that his family line would always know plenty and respect. Belmondo's obeisance was a sign that this entire affair would shortly be stabilized and finished with and that his own reputation would thereby be increased.
He crossed to the storm drain and stared into the inkiness, aware that danger might very well lay only inches away, in those impenetrable shadows — but equally aware that bravery was expected of him. “This?” he asked Belmondo, indicating the drain.
“For the rain waters,” the innkeeper explained. “When there is a storm, or when the river rises, the cellars gather water; they are imperfectly made. The sewer bleeds off the excess.”
The General smiled and clasped both hands behind his back, pausing to deliver a few theological observations. “A human town, a Pure enclave, fashioned by the hands of untainted men, is never plagued by such problems.”
Belmondo said nothing.
“We see here,” the General added, turning to his soldiers and sweeping them with his forceful gaze, “another indication of the supremacy of the Pure strain. From a distance this village appears clean and quite efficient. Closer, one sees it is filthy and somewhat deteriorated, though one still feels it offers adequate shelter for the animals who built and live in it. Inside, at the core, however, one discovers that it is painfully flawed, as flawed as were the hands and minds and genes of the tainted creatures who constructed it.” The General was a wise man with complicated philosophy in every sphere but religion. Religiously, he was terribly naive. But then so were all his kind.
Belmondo said, partly in defense of his people, partly because he felt he was expected to play the devil's advocate, “But the village is very old, and all things fall apart in time.”
“Not all things,” the General said. “The enclave is countless centuries older than this place. It dates back to a time just after the Last War, perhaps twenty-five thousand years. Yet it is in as excellent a condition as the day it was finished.”
“But,” Belmondo said, “it was constructed with forgotten machines, with the tools of the prewar men.”
“Exactly,” the General said, pleased with himself. “That is just my point, you see. It was built by Pures, built to last.”
“Yet,” Belmondo said, rolling his huge eyes, his black tongue flicking nervously at his lips, “the machines that built the enclave, and the others like it, have all decayed and been lost. If they survived, our own village could have been built with them, could have been made to last. I'd say it is not so much the fact that we were tainted that led to our constructing an imperfect town — but that we simply lacked the knowledge that man once had, the same knowledge even you, Your Excellency, now have no access to.”
The General stared at him for a long moment, his eyes hard as bits of ice, his lips parted to show the sharp edges of perfect, white teeth. When he spoke, the good-natured, philosophic tone had vanished, and his voice was gruff and mean again. “You begin to bore me and to insult,” he said. “I expect the former, from a tainted creature, but never the latter.”
Belmondo was quiet, though he longed to speak.
The General returned his gaze to the open drain. “The sewer continues beneath the entire town?”
“Yes,” Belmondo said.
“And where does it empty?”
“That is not known, Your Excellency.”
The big Pure turned and stared hard at the tainted, his fierce eyes the brightest points in that dank chamber.
Soldiers shifted, waiting for the worst.
Belmondo said, hastily, fearfully, “That is the truth!”
“I find it difficult to believe. Convince me.”
Belmondo said, “The town was built some thousand years ago. Many generations have passed through it, lived and died in it. And the public records were burned during one of the Pirate sweeps through these parts — a hundred or more years ago. Since then, the knowledge of the subterranean system has been lost. We know the drains work, and that is all we wish to know, for we suspect that beasts of various sorts live in them.”
The General reluctantly accepted that. Pures held the tainted in such low regard that they always underestimated the mutated folk. This misjudgment was the sole reason the tainted had survived at all. If the Pures could have seen through a true perspective instead of through the colored prism of religion and theocratic distortion, they would have hastily exterminated all who carried impure genes. This time, however, Belmondo told the truth. Rebellion still flared in him, but he was intelligent enough to understand that he would not survive the morning if he allowed it to surface once more in the General's august presence. A devil's advocate was appreciated only when his arguments could easily be cast in doubt and swiftly discredited altogether.
“If there are beasts below this floor, in the sewers, then they have little chance of escaping, anyway,” the General said.
“Except for their — power,” Belmondo said.
The General grunted, thought on it a moment more, then dispatched four armed men into the storm drain, two teams to cover either direction the fugitives might have gone. The other soldiers went outside at his heels, prepared to take up other positions throughout the village in order instantly to apprehend the espers, wherever they
