فصل 7

Seven

My Master’s Cat

I was fortunate in my Master.

He led me to his carriage, which was in a line of others outside the building, showed me into it, and drove us away. The driving would be one of my duties, he explained. (It was not difficult. They were moved by an invisible power that came from below the ground. There was little to do in the way of steering, and some device in the machine made collisions impossible.) I saw that some of the Masters with newly acquired slaves were already forcing them to learn this skill, but mine did not because he saw that I was tired and distressed. The carriage ran on very many small wheels, set beneath one face of a pyramid, the driver having a seat in the pointed front part for controlling it. My Master drove it to the place where he lived, in toward the center of the City.

On the way I examined my surroundings. It was hard to make sense of the place—buildings and streets and ramps were at the same time very much like one another and confusingly different, their construction either unplanned or following a plan I could not begin to understand. Here and there I saw small areas which I supposed were meant for gardens. They were mostly triangular in shape, and filled with water, out of which grew strange plants of various colors—I saw red, brown, green, blue—but all somber. They all had the same general shape, too: a squatness at the base which tapered with height. Many of the garden pools had mists rising from them, and in some I saw Masters, moving slowly about or standing, like trees themselves, rooted in the water.

My own Master lived in a tall pyramid overlooking a large garden pool. It was five-sided but looked more like one of the triangles of which the Masters seemed to be so fond since three of the sides were shorter than the others and formed almost a straight line. We left the carriage outside the door—I looked back and saw the ground open under it and take it in—and went into the building. At the center we entered a moving room, like the one that had taken us from the Hall of the Tripods. My stomach lurched as it whirred, but this time I understood what was happening—that the room was moving upward and we with it. We came out in a corridor and I trudged along in the Master’s wake to the door which was the entrance to his home.

There was much that I only understood later, of course. The pyramid was divided into homes for the Masters. Inside there was a smaller pyramid, completely enclosed by the outer one, which was used for storerooms, the place where the carriages were kept, the communal place for slaves, and so on. The homes were in the outer section, and one could tell a Master’s importance in the City from the position of his home. Most important was the one right at the top—the pyramid on top of the pyramid. Next came the two triangular homes immediately below, and after that the homes at the corners of the pyramid, in descending order. My Master was only moderately important. His home was on a corner, but nearer the base than the apex.

At first sight of the City, with all these towering peaks, I had thought the number of the Masters must be fantastically great. At closer quarters, I realized that the impression had been to some extent misleading. Everything was on a far bigger scale than the human one to which I was accustomed. The homes, in particular, were spacious, the rooms being large and very high, twenty feet or more.

From the corridor, one came into a passage with several doors. (The doors were circular, and worked on the same principle as the one in the Tripod—a section swung inward and upward when a thing like a button was touched. There were no locks or bolts.) In one direction, the passage turned through a right angle at the end, and eventually issued into the most important part of the home: the triangular room that looked out from the building. Here the Master ate and relaxed. In the center of the floor there was a small circular garden pool, its surface steaming from extra heat provided beneath it, which was his favorite spot.

But I was not shown this right away. The Master took me along the passage in the opposite direction. It ended in a blank wall, but there was a door on the right a little before that. The Master said, “This is your refuge, boy. There is an airlock inside—that is a place where air is changed—and beyond that you can breathe without the mask. You will sleep and eat there, and you may stay there, or in the communal place, at times when I do not require your service. You may rest for a while now. In due course, a bell will ring. Then you must fix your mask on again, go back through the airlock, and come to me. You will find me in the window-room, which is at the end of the passage.” He turned and glided away, light on his stumpy feet, along the broad high passage. I understood that I had been dismissed, and pressed the button on the door in front of me. It opened and I stepped through, and automatically the door closed behind me. There was a hissing, and I felt the pull of the air current on my ankles as the Masters’ air was drawn out and replaced by human. It did not take long, but it seemed like an age before the door on the opposite side opened, and I could step through. My fingers were tearing at the fastener of the belt that secured the mask as I did so.

I did not think that I could have supported the stifling confinement, with my own sweat pooling on my chest, for much longer, but later I found that I had been lucky. Fritz had been kept for several hours, being instructed in his duties, before he was allowed to find relief. My Master’s consideration was apparent in other ways. The room set aside for the servant was small in floor area, but had the same towering height as the rest of the home. In this case the Master had had an intermediate floor constructed, with a ladder leading up to it. My bedroom was up there, whereas usually the bed had to be fitted into the limited living space.

Other than that there was a chair, a table (both of the simplest kind), a chest with two drawers, a cupboard for storing food, and a small toilet section. It was bare, and ugly. There was none of the extra heat, which the Master’s rooms had, but no way of cooling, either, nor of freshening. One sweltered, the only alleviation being in the toilet section, where there was a device for spraying water on one’s body. The water was lukewarm, both for that and for drinking, but cooler at least than the surrounding air. I let it play over me for a long time, and washed and changed my clothes. The air made the clean ones damp before I had put them on: no clothes were ever dry inside the City.

In the cupboard, I found food, in packets. It was of two kinds, a sort of biscuit to be eaten dry and some crumbling stuff to be mixed with the warm water from the tap. Neither had much taste, and they never varied. They were made by machines, somewhere in the City. I tried a little of the biscuit, but I found I was not hungry enough yet to eat it. Instead I hauled myself wearily up the ladder, a straining effort in this City of Lead, and dropped onto the bare hard bed that awaited me. There were no windows, of course, to my quarters, but a globe of green light in each, turned on and off by a button. I pressed the button, fell into darkness and oblivion, and dreamed I was back in the White Mountains, telling Julius that the Tripods were made of paper, not metal, and that one could chop their legs off with an axe. But in the middle of telling him, there was a savage clangor in my ears. I awoke with a start, and realized where I was, and that I was being summoned.

• • •

Knowing nothing of conditions in the City, Fritz and I had not been able to make any specific plans for finding each other, though naturally we were anxious to do so as soon as possible. When I contemplated the size and complexity of the place, despondency overcame me; I did not see how we could ever hope to make contact. There were, plainly, thousands of Masters in the City. If every one of these had a servant . . .

In one way it was less difficult than I had thought; in others, more. To start with, each Master did not have a servant. It was a privilege reserved for those of a certain rank, probably less than a thousand in all, and not all availed themselves of the right. There was a movement in opposition to the presence of humans in the City. It was based on a fear, not that the slaves might revolt, because no one doubted their docility, but that the Masters, in accepting the personal service of other creatures, were somehow weakened and degraded. The total of humans, drawn from the Games and from other selection procedures in other places, was probably no more than five or six hundred.

But between this five or six hundred, means of communication were extremely limited. There was, apart from the individual refuges inside one’s Master’s apartment, a communal place for slaves in each of the residential pyramids. There, in a larger, but still windowless room, it was possible to meet and talk, with a number flashing in a box on the wall to tell you when your Master required your return. One could not go to a communal place in other buildings without running the risk of being absent when the call came. And the risk was never taken, not through fear of punishment but because, to the Capped, it was unthinkable that they should fail the Master in any way.

We might meet on the street, sent on errands by our different Masters, but the odds were against that. It soon seemed obvious that the only real chance of discovering each other lay in our Masters both attending the same function, at which (as was true of most) there was a restroom for slaves.

There were a number of such functions, I discovered. The one of which my Master was fondest was one in which they rooted themselves in a pool inside a pyramid, while in the center a group of them used their tentacles to agitate devices which rippled the water and shook the air and at the same time sent out wild sounds, which my Master found pleasurable but which to me seemed hideous. At another, the Masters spoke to each other in their own language, full of whistling and grunting sounds; in a third, Masters on a raised stage hopped and whirled about in what I supposed was meant to be a dance.

To all these, at different times, I accompanied him, and went eagerly to the restroom, to shower and dry myself, and perhaps eat a piece of the monotonous biscuit or, at least, lick one of the salt sticks with which we were provided. And to hunt among the other slaves for Fritz. But again and again I drew a blank, and I began to think it was hopeless. I knew that not all the Masters enjoyed these things, just as there were events to which my Master did not choose to go. It was beginning to seem that we had had the bad luck to be chosen by Masters whose interests were very different.

In fact, this was true. My Master was fondest of things that stemmed from the mind and imagination, Fritz’s of those which exercised and demonstrated the body. Fortunately, though, there was one event which had an almost universal appeal. They called it the Sphere Chase.

It took place, at regular intervals, in the Sphere Arena. This was a great open space, in the shape, naturally, of a triangle, near the center of the City. It was covered with some reddish substance and there were seven posts, perhaps thirty feet high, each with a basket-like contraption at the top. Three of these were set at the points of the triangle, three midway between the points, and the seventh in the center.

That is as much, really, as I can describe which makes sense. I think what happened in the arena was a kind of game, but if so it was not like any game that men play. Small Tripods, standing not more than twenty feet high, issued out from a place below ground behind one point of the triangle, performed a complicated marching about for a time, and then started chasing each other. After a while, in the course of this chase, one or more golden spheres would appear in the air between the probing point of the Tripods’ tentacles. This was generally greeted by a loud booming noise from the Masters who were watching all around in terraced seats, and the booming would increase as the chase and pursuit continued with the golden ball flashing and tossing between them. At some stage, the sphere would be flung over or around one of the baskets on top of the poles, and eventually would light in the basket when there would be a great coruscating flash, a noise like a clap of thunder, and the booming from the spectators would be punctuated with wails and howls. This was much intensified when it happened to be the center pole’s basket that was hit, both as to flash and thunder, and what I imagine was applause. Then the chase began all over again, and a new ball was created.

The small Tripods, I found, were occupied by one or, at the most, two Masters. It seemed that much skill was involved in the Sphere Chase, and those who were best at it were greatly honored. On that last bit of the trek that Henry and Beanpole and I had made to the White Mountains, when the two Tripods came across us out in the open but took no notice—then, too, there had been the golden ball flashing against the blue sky. I realized that the Masters driving those Tripods must have been Sphere Chasers, practicing for the next Chase and too engrossed to concern themselves with anything else. It represented a weakness in the Masters: trivial, perhaps, but any sign of fallibility was something to rejoice at.

The other good thing was that the Sphere Chase was the means of finding Fritz, after weeks of fruitless searching. I accompanied my Master to his seat in that side of the Triangle reserved for the superior ones, and hurried—which meant a lumbering rather than a dragging walk—down to the restroom beneath. It was larger than any other communal room I had seen, but crowded for all that—there must have been a couple of hundred slaves in it. I pulled off my mask, placed it in one of the lockers along the wall near the entrance, and went looking for him. He was at the far end, in the queue for the salt sticks which we sucked to replace the salt we lost through our continual sweating. He saw me and nodded, and brought two salt sticks over to where I stood, as far removed from the others as possible.

I was shocked by the sight of him. This was a life, I knew, which would drag anyone down, if only by reason of the relentless clammy heat and the constant drag on bone and muscle. Many of the humans I had met were in a pitiful state, old and enfeebled long before their time. I was conscious in myself that, although I was learning to live with the heat and weight, and to husband my energy, gradually my strength was ebbing. But the change in Fritz was far beyond expectation.

We had all lost weight but he, who had been tall and well-built, seemed, in proportion, to have lost much more than I. His ribs showed painfully through the flesh of his chest, and his face was gaunt. He had the stooped posture that one saw in those who had been a year or more in the City. I saw something else, too, with horror: a pattern of angry marks across his back. I knew that some of the Masters beat their human servants, for carelessness or stupidity, using a thing like a fly whisk, which burned the flesh where it touched. But Fritz was not stupid and would not be careless.

Giving me the salt stick, he said in a low voice, “The most important thing is to make arrangements for future meetings. I am at 71 Pyramid 43. It would be better to meet there, if you have an easy Master.” I said, “Where is that? I still can’t find my way about.”

“Near the . . . No. Tell me where you are.”

“19 Pyramid 15.”

“I can find that. Listen. My Master goes to a garden pool almost every day, regularly at two seven. He stays for a period. I think there’s time enough to get to your pyramid. If you can manage to get down to your communal place . . .” “I’ll do that, easily.”

“I’ll say I’m the slave of a visiting Master.”

I nodded. We used Masters’ time in the City, not human. The day was divided into nine periods, and each period was divided into ninths. It was made difficult by the fact that the day started with sunrise, and so changed continually. Two seven was approximately noon. My Master, too, often went to a garden pool around then. Even if he did not, I could keep some small errand until that time.

“Your Master,” I said, “—is he very bad?”

Fritz shrugged. “Bad enough, I think. I have nothing to compare with.”

“Your back . . .”

“He enjoys that.”

“Enjoys!”

“Yes. At first I thought it was because I was doing things wrong, but it is not so. He finds reasons. I howl and shriek a lot, which pleases him. I have learned to howl louder, and it does not go on so long. What about your Master? I see that your back is unmarked.” “I think he is a good one.”

I told Fritz something of my life, of the small signs of consideration I was given. He listened, and nodded.

“A very good one, I would say.”

He related a few other things about his own life, from which it was plain that the whippings were far from being the only respect in which he suffered worse than I. In every way possible, his Master humiliated and persecuted and heaped impossible burdens on him. I was almost ashamed to have been so lucky. He did not dwell on this, though, but said, “Anyway, all that is not important. It is what we find out about the City that matters. We must exchange information with each other, so that what one learns the other knows. You tell me first what you have discovered.” “Very little so far. Practically nothing.” I searched my brain for snippets, and retailed them to him. They were a meager collection. “That’s all, I think.” Fritz had listened gravely. He said, “It all helps. I have found where the great machine is from which they get heat and light, and the means for making the carriages go. For making the City so heavy as well, probably. Ramp 914 leads off Street 11. It goes through a place with garden pools on either side, and then dips down into the earth. The machine is down there somewhere. I have not been able to go down yet—I am not sure if humans can go there—but I will try further.

“Also, I have found the place where water comes into the City. It is in Wall Sector 23. A river comes in below ground and passes through another machine which makes the water suitable for the Masters. I have been there, and will go again. It is a huge place and I cannot understand much about it yet. Then there is the Place of Happy Release.” “Of Happy Release?”

I had heard this phrase spoken once or twice by other slaves, but had no clue as to its meaning. Fritz said, “That is not far from here, along Street 4. It is the place where the slaves go when they know they are no longer strong enough to serve the Masters. I followed one, and saw it happen. There is a place where the slave stands, beneath a dome of metal. There is a flashing light, and he drops to the floor, dead. Then the floor on which his body is lying moves. It goes along, and a door opens, and there is a white-hot furnace inside, which burns the body away to nothing.” He went on to tell me what he had discovered about the other slaves in the City. They did not only come from the Games; in other countries they were selected in different ways, but always for youth and strength. The life in the City, even where the Masters, like mine, were tolerant, possibly kind, was one which killed them, slowly but surely. Some crumpled up and died almost at once; others lasted a year, two years. Fritz had met a slave who had been more than five years in the City, but he was exceptional. When the slave knew that death was on him, he went, of his own volition, to the Place of Happy Release, and died in the glad assurance that he had served the Masters to the utmost of his ability and the last atom of energy.

I listened carefully to all this. Now I was really ashamed. I had been thinking my life was hard, and had been treating this as an excuse for not doing anything much—in effect, I had been marking time, hoping to get in touch with Fritz and then think of what to do. He, with so much worse to suffer, had nevertheless been getting on with the task which we shared, and on which man’s future might depend.

I asked him, “How did you manage to find all these things, if you can only get away during the two hours he spends at the garden pool? You could not get to them all in that time, surely.” “There is another Master with whom he has twice spent a day. He is one of those who disapprove of slaves, and my Master leaves me behind. So I got out, and explored.” “If he had returned unexpectedly, or called you . . .”

There was a means in each home by which a Master could call his slave to come to him. Fritz said:

“I had thought of an excuse. He would beat me, of course, but I am used to it.”

There had been an occasion when I had been left behind. I had spent the day resting, talking in the communal center; once I had gone out, but the confusion of streets and ramps and pyramids had depressed me, and I had come back. I felt myself flushing.

We had been talking apart from the others, but more and more slaves had been arriving from the arena above us, and the room was beginning to be crowded. Fritz said, “Enough now. 19 Pyramid 15. The communal place at about two nine. Good-bye, Will.” “Good-bye, Fritz.”

Watching him lose himself in the throng of slowly moving slaves, I made a resolve—to go about my task more keenly, and with less self-pity.

• • •

The duties I had to perform for my Master were not in themselves particularly onerous. I had to tidy the home, prepare and serve his food, see to his bath, make his bed—that sort of thing. As far as food was concerned, preparation was easy enough, for it consisted of mixtures of differing texture and color (and flavor, too, I imagine), which came in transparent bags. Some needed to be mixed with water, but many of them were eaten just as they were. Serving was a different matter. Portions of the foods were put on a triangular dish and eaten in a certain order, and the placing and the ways in which they were laid out were important. I became good at this quite quickly, and was commended for it. It was a little more difficult than it seems, because there were dozens of patterns, not just one, which had to be learned.

He had a bath several times a day, in addition to visits to one of the garden pools and wallowings in the smaller pool in the window-room: all the Masters soaked themselves in water as often as they could. His private bath was next to the room in which he slept. Steps led up to it, and the bath itself was a hole in which he could put his body to be wholly submerged. The water was specially hot for this; it welled up from the bottom, boiling. I had to put in powders and oils which colored and scented the water, and lay out a number of strange brush-like devices with which he scrubbed himself.

The bed was upright, too, and of much the same shape as the bath, but instead of the approach being by steps, it was up a spiral ramp—a fairly steep one, which it made me pant to climb. Inside was placed a sort of damp moss, and each day I had to remove the old and replace it with fresh from the bed cupboard. Although the moss looked light, it weighed heavy. I suppose this was the hardest of my tasks, as far as labor was concerned.

But apart from these, and other similar duties, there was another function which I found myself fulfilling: that of companionship. Except for the occasions on which they joined together to watch the Sphere Chase, or other forms of entertainment, the Masters led strangely solitary lives. They visited one another, but not often, and spent a good deal of their time in their homes alone. (Even in the garden pools, I noticed, they did not talk to each other much.) To some, though, this isolation came less easily than to others—to my own Master I suspected it did. A human slave to him was not merely someone to do various menial chores around the home, not merely a sign that he was of the rank that qualified him to own such a one, but someone who could listen to him talk. In my village at home, old Mrs. Ash had six cats and spent most of her day talking to one or the other of them. I was my Master’s cat.

With the advantage, of course, of being a cat who could talk back. He not only spoke to me of the things that happened to him (I could rarely make any sense out of them, and I never began to understand what work he did), but asked questions as well. He was curious about me, and about my life before winning at the Games and coming to the City. At first I was suspicious of his interest, but I quickly realized that it was innocent. So I told him all about the way I had lived as the son of a small dairy farmer in the Tirol—how I had driven the cows up to pasture in the high meadows at the beginning of the day and stayed with them until it was time to bring them back for milking in the evening. I invented brothers and sisters, cousins and uncles and aunts, a whole pattern of life which he accepted and seemed to take an interest in. When I was off-duty, I used to lie on my bed in my refuge and think of more lies to tell him: it was a way of passing the time.

Or had been until I realized how little I had been doing compared with Fritz. But when I said something about it to Fritz the following day when we met again in the communal place of my pyramid, he took a different view. He said, “You have been very lucky with that one. I had no idea any of the Masters spoke to us slaves, except to give orders. Mine does not, certainly. He beat me again this morning, but he did it in silence: I was the one who made a noise. Perhaps you can learn more from this than from exploring the City.” “If I asked questions, he would certainly be suspicious. The Capped do not pry into the wonders of the Masters.”

“Not questions, as such. But perhaps you can lead him on. You say he talks about his own life, as well as asking you about life outside?”

“Sometimes. But it makes no sense. He has to use their words when he talks about his work because there are no human words for the things he is telling me about. A few days ago he was saying that he was feeling unhappy because during the zootleboot a tsutsutsu went into spiwis, and therefore it was not possible to izdool the shuchutu. At least, it sounded something like that. I saw no point in even trying to understand what it meant.” “If you keep on listening, it may make sense in time.”

“I don’t see how it can.”

“It may, though. You must persevere, Will. Encourage him to talk. Does he use the gas bubbles?”

These were small rubbery spheres which could be stuck to the Master’s skin, below the nose opening. When they were pressed by one of the Master’s tentacles, a reddish-brown mist came out and rose slowly upward, encircling the Master’s head.

I said, “He has one a day, sometimes two, when he is in the pool in the window-room.”

“I think it does to them what strong drink does to men. Mine beats me harder after he has sniffed a gas bubble. Maybe yours will talk more. Take him another while he is in the pool.” I said doubtfully, “I doubt if it will work.”

“Try, anyway.”

He looked ill and exhausted. The welts on his back were bleeding slightly.

I said, “I’ll try tomorrow.”

And I did, but the Master waved me away. He asked me how many calves cows bore, and then mentioned that the pooshlu had stroolglooped. I did not seem to be getting very far.