Downbelow Station

logic. Most of them simply expected to die. There was a desperate atmosphere in all of green, while those who had finally reconciled themselves to capture voluntarily moved into white. Green and white grew stranger and stranger, with walls graffiti’d with bizarre slogans, some obscene, some religious, some pathetic. We lived here, one said. That was all.

All but a very few lights in the corridors had been broken out, so that everything was twilight, and station no longer dimmed lights for mainday/alterday shifts; it would have become dangerously dark. There were some side corridors where all the lights were out, and no one went into those lairs unless he belonged there — or was dragged screaming into them. There were gangs, who fought each other for power. The weaker souls clung to them, paid them all their resources, not to be harmed, and perhaps to have the chance to harm others. Some of the gangs had started in Q. Some were Pell gangs which formed in defense and undertook other business ventures. He feared them indiscriminately, feared their unreasoning violence most of all. He had let his beard grow, let his hair grow, walked with a slouch and acquired as much dirt as possible, changed his face subtly with cosmetic… that commodity sold high on the market too. If there was any comedy in this grim place it was that most of these folk hereabouts were doing exactly the same thing, that the section was full of men and women who desperately did not want to be recognized, and who avoided each others’ eyes in a perpetual flinching as they walked the halls… some who swaggered and tried to threaten, unless troops were at hand… more who flitted like downcast ghosts, scurrying along in evident hope no one would set a hue and cry after them.

Perhaps he had changed so much in appearance that no one did recognize him. No one had yet pointed a finger at him or at Damon in public. There was some loyalty left on Pell, perhaps — or their involvement with the market protected them, or others who knew them were just too frightened to start something. Some of the gangs were linked into the market.

Occasional troopers walked in the halls, some back in nine two, no less common than Downers about their business. Green dock was still open as far as the end of white dock; and Africa and occasionally Atlantic or Pacific occupied the first two berths of green, while the other ships berthed in blue dock, and troops came and went freely through the personnel access beside the section seals on that end of green. Troops entered green and white on liberty or on duty, mingling with the condemned… and the condemned knowing that all they had to do to escape was to go up to those troops or to the cleared-area access doors and turn themselves in. Some did not believe that the Mazianni would decompress the section, simply because of that close and almost friendly association. Troopers shed their armor on liberty, walked about laughing and human, hung out in the bars… staked out a couple of establishments for themselves, it was true… but mingled in other bars, turned an occasional benevolent smile on the market.

So much the easier to handle the victims until it came, Josh reckoned. They still had choices left, played the game with the troops, dodged and struggled… but all it took was a button pushed somewhere in central, no personal contact, no watching faces as they died. All clinical and distant.

He and Damon planned, wild and futile schemes. Damon’s brother was rumored to be alive. They talked of stowing away on one of the shuttles, taking one over, getting to Downbelow and into the bush. They had as likely a chance of stealing a shuttle from armed troops as they did of walking to Downbelow, but the planning occupied their minds and gave them hope.

And more realistic… they could try to pass the seals into the cleared sections, and chance the alarm-rigged access doors, regimented security, checkpoints at every corner and card use at every move… that was the way of life over there. Mallory’s doing. They had been checking it out. Too many men-with- guns, was Bluetooth’s warning. Cold they eyes.

Cold indeed.

And meanwhile there was the market and there was Ngo’s.

He approached the bar along green nine, not by the tunnel ways which led to the corridor outside Ngo’s back door, for that was for emergencies and Ngo had no love for anyone using the back way without cause… wanted no one seen in the main room who had not come in by the front door and wanted no access alarms going off in comp. Ngo’s was a place where the market flourished, and as such it tried to be cleaner than most, one of almost a score of bars and entertainment concessions along green dock and the niner access which had once thrived in the traffic of merchanters… a line of sleepovers and vid theaters and lounges and restaurants and one anomalous chapel completing the row. Most of the bars were open; the theaters and the chapel and some of the sleepovers were burned out shells, but the bars functioned, most like Ngo’s, as restaurants as well, the channels through which station still fed the population, arid black-market food augmented what the station was willing to supply.

He cast cautious glances one way and the other as he approached the front and ever-wide door of Ngo’s, not obvious looks around, but a rhythm of walking and looking as a man might who was simply making up his mind which bar he wanted.

A face caught his eye, abruptly, heart-stoppingly. He delayed a half a beat and looked toward Mascari’s, across the corridor at the emptying of nine onto the docks. A tall man who had been standing there suddenly moved and darted within Mascari’s.

Dark obscured his vision, a flash of memory so vivid he staggered and forgot all his pattern. He was vulnerable for that instant, panicked… turned for Ngo’s doorway blindly and went inside, into the dim light and pounding music and the smells of alcohol and food and the unwashed clientele.

The old man himself was tending bar. Josh went to the counter and leaned there, asked for a bottle. Ngo gave it to him, no asking for his card. That all came later, in the back room. But his hand shook in taking the bottle, and Ngo’s quick hand caught his wrist. “Trouble?”

“Close one,” he lied… and perhaps not a lie. “I got clear. Gang trouble. Don’t worry. No one tracked me. Nothing official.”

“You better be sure.”

“No problem. Nerves. It’s nerves.” He clutched the bottle and walked away toward the back, stopped a moment against the back doorway that led into the kitchen and waited to be sure his exit was not observed.

One of the Mazianni, maybe. His heart still pounded from the encounter. Someone with Ngo’s under surveillance. No. His imagination. The Mazianni did not to need to be so subtle. He unstopped the bottle and drank from it, Downer wine, cheap tranquilizer. He took a second long drink and began to feel better. He experienced such flashes… not often. They were always bad. Anything could trigger it, usually some small and silly thing, a smell, a sound, a momentary wrong way of looking at a familiar thing or ordinary person… That it should have happened in public — that most disturbed him. It could have attracted notice. Maybe it had. He resolved not to go out again today. Was not sure about tomorrow. He took a third drink and a last look over the patrons at the dozen tables, then slipped back into the kitchen, where Ngo’s wife and son were cooking up the orders. He paid them a casual glance, received sullen stares in return, and walked on through to the storeroom.

He pushed the door open on manual. “Damon,” he said, and the curtain at the rear of the cabinets opened. Damon came out and sat down among the canisters they used for furniture, in the light of the batteried lamp they used to escape comp’s watchful economy and infallible memory. He came and sank down wearily, gave Damon the bottle and Damon took a drink. Unshaven, both of them, with the look of the unwashed, depressed crowds which collected down here.

“You’re late,” Damon said. “You trying to give me ulcers?”

He fished the cards out of his pocket, arranged them by memory, made quick notes with a grease pencil before he should forget. Damon gave him paper and he wrote the details for each one, and Damon did not talk to him the while.

Then it was done, his memory spilled, and he laid the batch on top of the next canister and reached for the wine bottle. He drank and set it down. “Met Bluetooth. Said your mother’s fine. Give you this.” He drew the brooch from his pocket and watched as Damon took it into his hands with that melancholy look that told him it might have some meaning beyond the gold itself. Damon nodded glumly and pocketed it; he did not much speak of his family, living or dead, not in reminiscence.

“She knows,” Damon said, “she knows what it’s coming to. She can see it from her vid screens, hear it from the Downers… Did Bluetooth say anything specific?”

“Only that your mother thought we needed it.”

“No word of my brother?”

“It didn’t come up. We weren’t in a place we could talk, the Downer and I.”

Damon nodded, drew a deep breath and leaned his elbows on his knees, head bowed. Damon lived for such news. When it failed him his spirits fell, and it hurt. Hurt both of them. He felt as if he had dealt the wound.

“It’s getting tight out there,” Josh said. “Lots of anxiety. I delayed a little along the way, listening, but no news; everyone’s scared but no one knows anything.”

Damon lifted his head, took the bottle, drank down half the remaining wine, hardly a swallow. “Whatever we’re going to do, we’ve got to do soon. Either go into the secured sections… or try for the shuttle. We can’t go on here.”

“Or make ourselves a bubble in the tunnels,” he said. In his reckoning, it was the only realistic idea. Most humans were pathologically frightened of the tunnels. What few humans who would try them… maybe they could fight them off. They had the guns. Might be able to live there. But they were about out of time… for any choices. It was not an existence to look forward to. And maybe we’ll be lucky, he thought miserably, looking at Damon, who looked at the floor, lost in his own thoughts. Maybe they’ll just blow the area.

The storeroom door opened. Ngo came in on them, walked up and gathered up the cards, read through the notations, pursed his wrinkled mouth and frowned. “You’re sure?”

“No mistakes.”

Ngo muttered unhappily at the quality of the merchandise, as if they were at fault, started to leave.

“Ngo,” Damon said, “heard a rumor the market’s going for the new paper. That so?”

“Where did you hear that?”

Damon shrugged. “Two men talking in front. That true, Ngo?”

“They’re dreaming. You see a way to get your hands into the new system, you tell me.”

“I’m thinking on it.”

Ngo muttered to himself and left

“That so?” Josh asked.

Damon shook his head. “Thought I might jar something loose. Ngo won’t shake or there’s no way anyone knows.”

“I’d bet on the latter.”

“So would I.” Damon set his hands on his knees, sighed, looked up. “Why don’t we go out and get something to eat? No one out there who’s trouble, is there?”

The memory which had left him came back with dark force. He opened his mouth to say something, and of a sudden came a rumbling which shook the floor, a boom and crash which overrode screams from outside.