Страница 66 из 90
It might be possible to repay all that by some form of indenture ranging from apprenticeship to slavery, depending on the employer/owner. And then you'd have to start all over to save the money for passage back to Earth.
No, that wasn't even a possibility. She had known that from the start. Her exile was final.
If she were going to survive, better not regard it as exile, but as a new life. How would she manage?
A glance about the bay showed her fellow exiles in a new light. The strong ones-casual labor. The other politicals-maybe they could be used as clerks. The wives and daughters arrested with their men? Women's work, the answer occurred to Wyn immediately. In a low-tech society, cooking and cleaning would doubtless be handed right back to them. Even the children: she recollected that even in the Plymouth Colony that had become her home state, indentures started young.
It looked as if she was about to suffer from her own ancestors' management tactics. She wondered if she were up to it; she'd lived off Baker wealth, Baker fame, Baker co
So now you get the chance to prove yourself, Wyn. Just what is it you think you can do? An interesting question, wasn't it? What kind of trade could a displaced aristocrat with a talent for languages take up in middle age?
Anyone on Haven need a butler? A na
She feared she would soon learn.
A few more Jumps and gravity shifts, and the intervening weeks and months passed. Atrocious as their rations had been, they became shorter. They began to sleep more, waking to eat and invent new versions of old curses on the purser, who pocketed the cost of their food. They shed the unhealthy bloat that comes of eating too much starch, became thin, then gaunt as they stinted themselves still further to make sure that the children, at least, had enough.
Haven would be too rough a world for children stunted by malnutrition, she had told one woman, the mother of three, and the word had spread.
One last Jump. One last interval of sitting in a daze. The variable gravity wobbled sickeningly, then steadied at a level that made her ache in every joint. To Wyn's surprise, gossip helped her identify this as mercy.
Then, one ship's "night," while the prisoners were groggy and disoriented, crew and CD Marines burst into the bay and ordered them out. Now. On the double, if not faster.
"My God, just smell them! Like pigs, these convicts," muttered one Marine. The ensign overseeing the transfer didn't silence him.
Wyn scarcely had time to grab her precious bag before she and the rest were herded to shuttles. She staggered a little in the unaccustomed G, then sucked in her breath as if someone had kneed her in the belly as the shuttle broke away from the ship in which she had spent more than a year of her life and whatever illusions she had brought on board. Zero-G brought her empty stomach flip-flopping perilously close to her mouth, and then Haven's own gravitation and the shuttles braking rockets took hold: she was heavy, heavier than she had ever been; and her vision reddened. It wasn't fair; she was going to burst, and she hadn't survived the trip just to explode in reentry because the pilot poured on the G's. There were no hatches; she wouldn't even see the sky in which she would die.
From the shuttle's cockpit came a steady drone of affirmatives and static. "Begi
My God, were they going to land in water? Wyn forced herself not to scream, to unstrap herself and claw at the nearest bulkhead: not to be trapped, not to sink in this steel trap, plunging further and further till it burst asunder, and her lungs . . .
She wanted to scream a protest, but "uuuhhhhh!" was all that came out, more breath than pain.
And then they were down.
In the water.
On whatever Haven this world might be.
The stench of steam and overheated metal rose about the port. Clutching a bag that felt heavier than any suitcase she had ever packed in her life, Wyn tottered toward the port. A blackened metal ladder led down from it to boats that bobbed in the black water far too much below. Even as the ship floated, she could feel Haven's gravity, heavier than the ship's. It felt heavier than that of lost Earth, though she knew otherwise.
Her feet trembled on the rungs of the ladder; the boat's crew steadied her as if they hated touching anyone as filthy as she was. Could they smell it through the steam and the traces of this new world?
It took forever for the launch to fill. The thin crying of hungry children rose in the alien air.
"Where are we going?" she asked.
To her surprise, she was answered. "Splash Island," replied a man with a twisted arm. He gri
"There's Splash Island. Pro-ces-sing . . ." he sounded the long word out. "Over there . . ." a sweep of his arm . . . "you got Docktown. And beyond it, The City. Castell City."
A combustion engine roared into fetid life, then backfired so loudly that at least two people screamed and the launch jolted dangerously. The ferryman laughed, exposing broken teeth.
"You don' wa
I haven't a coin for the ferryman, Wyn thought. In the next instant, she realized she was wrong. The coin shone in the night sky, dominating it, more crimson than copper, baleful as the eye of a cat. Another shone upward, reflected in the dark, dark water.
Ship's rumor called Haven's bloated primary the Cat's Eye. Fu
Haven's gravity took her as she climbed out of the launch, and she stumbled to her knees. Her hands scrabbled, then filled with mud. Dear Earth, I do salute thee with my hands, the mournful pentameter from Richard II rang in her thoughts. Wrong again. Haven's ground was dirt, soil: it never would be earth.
"Why are we so heavy?" wailed a child. Its cries were quickly hushed as if it knew Haven were no planet for weeping.
And yet, with the Eye above and the reflection below and the lights of Docktown and Castell City shimmering over the water, it was beautiful.
Moving like invalids their first day out of bed, the convicts shuffled toward the Processing Center.
"God, I am too damn old for this," Ellie moaned. "Feel like I got lead boots on. All over me. Or maybe that's just crud."
"Men on one side . . . women on the other . . . all right, move!" came the order. "Kids with the women."
Men and women clutched each other, dismayed. They had all been together for so long that separation came as a threat. Down long, shabby corridors they were herded. Wyn noticed that the women guards hustling her and her friends along were unarmed. The corridors opened into a room that smelled, blessedly, of clean steam and water, dripping from nozzles set into the ceiling.
"All right, everyone strip. And scrub good!"
The soap they found in squeeze bottles nearly took off their outer layer of skin, and Wyn had never felt anything as good. Steam billowed about them, mercifully hiding their bodies. But at that moment, she wouldn't have minded if they hadn't separated the men and the women.