a practical woman.”
As they turned another corner, the boy’s green eyes jumped at the blue-hazed towers of the palace, distant behind the wealthy roofs of merchants’ mansions, themselves behind the hive houses and the spreading ruin of tenements. He tried to memorize the twisting street they followed. He couldn’t.
There were two general, contradictory impressions in his mind: first, of being enclosed in these tiny alleys, some so small that two could not pass through them with arms held out; the second, of the spreading, immense endlessness of the city. He tried to tell Alter what he felt, but after a minute of broken sentences, she smiled at him and shook her head. “No, I don’t understand. What do you mean?”
And a sudden picture of the seaside leapt into his head. The yellow length of the beach lashed across his mind so that it stung. He could see the salt-and-pepper rocks, shoaling away and knobbed with periwinkle shells. He could see the brown and green fingers of seaweed clutching the sand when the waves went out. He blinked the gray city back into his eyes. Tears washed the broken curb, the cracked walls, washed the rusted metal window jamb sharp and clean again.
“He means he’s homesick,” Rara interpreted. “No, boy,” she said. “It’ll never go away. But it’ll get less.”
The street turned sharply twice, then widened.
“Well,” said Alter. “Here we are.”
A red, circular plaque hung over the door of the only stone building on the block. It was two stories, twice the height of the other structures. They entered.
Beams of real wood were set into the low ceiling. By one wall was a counter. There was a large table in the middle, and coming down into the room in a large V was a stairway.
Of the men and women sitting around the room, one caught Tel’s eye immediately. He was perhaps seven feet and a handful of inches tall, and was sitting, spraddle-legged, at the table. He had a long, flat, equine face, and a triplex of scars started on his cheek, veered down to his neck, and disappeared under his collarless shirt. As Tel watched, he turned to a plate of food he was eating, so that his scars disappeared.
Suddenly, from the stair’s top, a harpoon-straight old man appeared. He hurried down, his white hair spiking out in all directions. Reaching the bottom, he whirled around, darting black eyes to every person in the room. “All right,” he said. “I’ve received the message. I’ve received the message. And it’s time.”
Alter whispered to Tel, “That’s Geryn.”
“Are we all here?” the old man demanded. “Are we all here now?”
A woman at the counter snickered. Suddenly Geryn turned toward Tel, Alter, and Rara. “You!” he demanded. His pointing finger wavered so they could not tell which of the three he meant.
“You mean him?” asked Alter, pointing to Tel.
Geryn nodded vigorously. “What are you doing here? Are you a spy?”
“No, sir,” said Tel.
Geryn stepped around the table and looked at him closely. The black eyes were two sharp spots of darkness in a face the color of shipboards gone two winters without paint.
“Geryn,” Alter said. “Geryn, he isn’t a spy. He’s from the mainland. And Geryn, he doesn’t have any papers, either. He stowed away.”
“You’re not a spy?” Geryn demanded again.
“No, sir,” Tel repeated.
Geryn backed away. “I like you,” he said. “I trust you.” Slowly he turned away. Then he whirled back. “I have no choice, you see. It’s too late. The message has come. So I need you.” He laughed. Then the laugh stopped short as if sliced by a razor. He put his hands over his eyes, and then brought his finger down slowly. “I’m tired,” he said. “Rara, you owe me rent. Pay up or I’ll kick you all out. I’m tired.” He walked heavily toward the bar. “Give me something to drink. In my own tavern you can give me something to drink.”
Someone laughed again. Tel looked at Alter.
“Well,” she said. “He likes you.”
“He does?”
“Um-hm,” she nodded.
“Oh,” said Tel.
At the bar, Geryn drained a large glass of pale green liquid, slammed the empty glass on the board and cried out, “The war. Yes, the war!”
“Oh, here we go,” Alter whispered.
Geryn ran his finger slowly along the rim of the glass. “The war,” he said again. He turned suddenly. “It’s coming!” he declaimed. “And do you know why it’s coming? Do you know how it’s coming? We can’t stop it, not now, not any more. I’ve received the signal, so there’s no hope left. We must just go ahead and try to save something, something to start and build from again.” Geryn looked directly at Tel. “Boy, do you know what a war is?”
“No, sir,” said Tel, which wasn’t exactly true. He’d heard the word.
“Hey,” someone cried from the bar. “Are we gonna get stories, great fires and destruction again?”
Geryn ignored the cry. “Do you know what the Great Fire was?”
Tel shook his head.
“The world was once much bigger than it is today,” Geryn said. “Once man flew not just between island and mainland, island and island, but skirted the entire globe of the earth. Once man flew to the moon, even to the moving lights in the sky. There were empires, like Toromon, only bigger. And there were many of them. Often they fought with one another, and that was called a war. And the end of the final war was the Great Fire. That was over fifteen hundred years ago. Most of the world, from what little we know of it today, is scarred with strips of impassable land, the sea is run through with deadly currents. Only fragments of the earth, widely separated can hold life. Toromon may be the only one, for all we are sure of. And now we will have another war.”
Some one from the bar yelled, “So what if it comes? It might bring some excitement.”
Geryn whirled. “You don’t understand!” He whipped one hand through his shocked white hair. “What are we fighting? We don’t know. It’s something mysterious and unnamable on the other side of the radiation barrier. Why are we fighting?”
“Because…” began a bored voice at the bar.
“Because,” interrupted Geryn, suddenly pointing directly at Tel’s face, “we have to fight. Toromon has gotten into a situation where its excesses must be channelled toward something external. Our science has outrun our economics. Our laws have become stricter, and we say it is to stop the rising lawlessness. But it is to supply workers for the mines that the laws tighten, workers who will dig more tetron, that more citizens shall be jobless, and must therefore become lawless to survive. Ten years ago, before the aquariums, fish was five times its present price. There was perhaps four per cent unemployment in Toron. Today the prices of fish are a fifth of what they were, yet unemployment has reached twenty-five per cent of the city’s populace. A quarter of our people starve. More arrive every day. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. Our university turns out scientists whose science we can not use lest it put more people out of work. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. Eventually the mines will flood us with tetron, too much for even the aquariums and the hydroponic gardens. It will be used for the war.”
“Then what?” asked Tel.
“We do not know who or what we are fighting,” repeated Geryn. “We will be fighting ourselves, but we will not know it. According to the books, it is customary in a war to keep each side in complete ignorance of the other. Or give them lies like those we use to frighten children instead of truth. But here the truth may be…” His voice trailed off.
“What’s your plan?” Tel asked.
There