Back | Next
Contents

33: Hesitant Pursuit

Billister marveled at the grand stairway that led to nowhere. They were outside of the abandoned school building that served as temporary dormitory for the freed farm workers. A playing field gone to weeds flanked the brick building, and two large nets were rotting at either end. Soccer. Billister had heard of it.

The large stairway actually was a seating arrangement, for large amounts of observers of the game. Let's see. A cow's stomach was filled with air and sewn closed. Two teams would kick the inflated stomach about the playing field until. . ..

"Over there, please." One of the shelter staffers had tapped him on the shoulder. Billister had been in an obedient line of former farm workers filling the bleachers, but a man in a drab green shirt was directing him to the little wooden platform down front.

"Me?"

The shelter man nodded yes.

Another shelter man, this one wearing a brown tunic reaching to his feet, waved to Billister from the speaker's stand. His head was shaved, like Billister's had been until recently, except that the shelter man wore a small pony tail sprouting from his left temple. Also on the stand were a thin metal post topped with some kind of electronic instrument and a cabinet connected to the post by a wire.

As Billister stepped through the high grass to the stand, dozens of burrs attached themselves to the cuffs of his trousers. He mounted the platform and began picking them off, grumbling to the man in the tunic, "Irritating vegetation."

"My name is Ponzer," said the shelter man, ignoring the complaint. He tapped at the electronic instrument and the cabinet to his side boomed with the amplified noise. He stepped away from the microphone again. "I am told that you are the man Billister from the islands, the one what speaks both English and Rafer."

Billister finished picking the burrs, and two of his fingers were smeared with blood. "Ya," he said. "And Spanish and Latin and French." He watched the orderly crowd, half of them dark skinned, filling the bleachers. They moved so cautiously, precisely as told, as if they doubted their new freedom. Billister wiped the blood onto his newly issued trousers, a pair of Government surplus khakis given to him in the shelter. They bore the name L. Banner stenciled inside the waist, and Billister amused himself imagining a man by that name driving his delivery truck, or whatever, with no pants on. They were rather roomy, as trousers go, but still Billister preferred tunics and he felt jealous of Ponzer's.

"I need you to translate for those who do not unnerstand," Ponzer said. "Please say into the microphone, in your Rafer language, precisely what I say in English."

Billister nodded. They waited until all of the new shelter residents were seated, filling three-quarters of the bleachers. The sun was rising, a blinding ball of mist, and Billister was beginning to dread the steamy mainland day that was coming.

"My fellow Merquans, welcome," Ponzer said into the mike, and his tinny voice howled across the unused playing field and bounced back off the brick apartment building beyond. "I am Alo Ponzer, director of the Chautown Shelter. Let me apologize first for the limited accommodations and provisions, but I can assure you that we are diligently rounding up sufficient food, clothing, cots, and other materials to make your short-term stay in our shelter comfortable."

Ponzer stepped back from the microphone and motioned Billister up to it. Billister repeated the essence of the message in Rafer, and was surprised at the feeling of power brought by his voice dashing over the stands. He stepped aside and noticed that two of the new Government men were now flanking the door to the old school, each with a semiautomatic with those curved ammo clips.

Ponzer continued: "In a moment, I will review the possibilities of new, voluntary work assignments, relocation arrangements, and options open to every one of you. But first-now, I would like to set the record straight about the inevitable rumors, as it is easy to misinterpret what is heard or seen without the proper background. The Government, for which we desire unity and power, has taken a humane turn and has decided that Ag Agency field work will be voluntary, and not punitive as it has been in recent past. This has merely involved a few personnel changes in the supervisory positions."

Ponzer motioned Billister forward again. Personnel changes? Billister glanced back at the sentries with their evil-looking bangers. He paused to compose his translation, then began, "The Fungus Person standing here asks me to make you believe that. . .."

 

In exchange for his services, Billister was allowed to be among the morning's first shift of shelter residents to use the men's shower room. They were rationed a quarter hour, and Billister showered quickly, saving most of his time to razor away the tight black curls that had sprouted on his head and face. The razor was a flimsy device, built so that the blade itself could not be removed. It was tethered by a thin chain to the wall beside the locker room mirror. He used the old razor carefully, in his methodical pattern, to avoid cuts. Then he toweled off and dressed again in the same clothes.

Back in the main school building, Billister feared that he might be asked to man one of the information tables clotted with the curious and confused. He gaped at the array of hastily scrawled signs, the milling suspicious and unshowered field workers. He found a door, marked in fading English lettering "Fire Exit Only—Alarm Will Sound" and leaned into it. It fell open and there was no bell.

The noon street of Chautown sweltered, and Billister noted how even in a mainland capital, the weather did not cooperate—just two blocks from the waterfront, there was no cooling breeze. No relief.

The street itself was a clatter of horsecarts and motor wagons, sand and potholes and dung. The dainty ladies in long dresses carried parasols; the male drivers cursed, shirtless in their seats; businessmen hurried about with leather cases. All of them were Fungus People.

Billister looked high for two landmarks and memorized their positions—a steeple here, a towering oak webbed with Spanish moss there. He set out north, feeling secure as long as he could catch a glimpse of the sea when the buildings parted at the end of each block.

Four blocks up he found a flower stand, a wall-less shelter with bins of blooms displayed in the shade. The sidewalk was wet from sprinkling to preserve them. Hah. A little outdoor store with no purpose other than to sell pretty plants that would wilt in a few days.

A particularly beautiful woman was buying a cluster of purple irises. He studied her profile under the white, wide-brimmed hat—faultless cheeks and a rounded nose poised over an open purse. She selected a few centime notes and gave them to the attendant, then walked west with her paper-wrapped stalks.

Billister stared into space, still studying the ghost she had left behind, that profile. Her hair had been the blackest possible ringlets, her nose gently flared, her skin the color of coffee with a dash of cream. Undoubtedly a Rafer. At home here in the festering coastal capital of the Fungus People. Gliding uphill into the elegant residential neighborhoods overlooking the harbor. Trailing behind her a waterfall of white skirt ruffles.

He followed. Up the easy rise to the shaded streets, where water hissed in precise spray patterns over trimmed lawns, where staunch iron fences guarded mansions, where even the wide edifices losing their whitewash looked regal in their timeworn weary.

When she turned a corner, Billister hung back, tactfully watching children torture a small park's swing sets and little steel carousels. Some of the youngsters were dark skinned, as were some of the distant parents watching from the row of benches. For the first time ever, he imagined himself a parent, watching his son dip himself upside down from a plank on two chains, swinging gaily in a public park.

He almost lost her, for she turned again at the next corner. But her form was an unmistakable beacon along the oak-shrouded walkways. With a series of rapid trots, he caught up to a respectable half-block distance. She never looked back.

There were few men on the streets—not particularly unusual for a residential neighborhood during a work day, he guessed. He did meet on the sidewalk a dark-skinned gentleman, equally elegant as the woman he was following—finely tailored linen coat and trousers, a dark brown leather case dangling from one arm.

Billister greeted him with the traditional Rafer salutation used among strangers, "Sownda say-bode, hom." It was not a taxing exchange, even for a busy man, but the manicured gentleman merely flashed him a quizzical look and walked on.

Finally, the stunning woman, the object of his hesitant pursuit, threw up the latch of an iron gate and glided up the concrete steps toward a broad, three-tiered mansion. Billister stopped at the closed gate and watched with frantic helplessness as she ascended the wide porch hung with swings and jungly potted plants.

She drew out a key, and as she fit it into the door, Billister shouted in desperation. It was an improvised plea, a rough one, for there was no tradition fitting such a situation—a Rafer man daring to follow a Rafer woman down the streets of a foul mainland metropolis.

"Woun-nuitte!" he shouted, the way one man might ask another to stop for casual conversation. "Woun-nuitte!"

The woman turned slowly and regarded the rumpled man at the gate. She propped the bundle of irises over her right shoulder, soldier-style, and swayed down the steps again. Her eyebrows rose, asking the vague question, asking for a repeat of whatever had been said that could not have been heard from such a distance.

Billister now faced her directly, and he felt that tingling privilege, that reward. The purple iris blooms shimmered over her shoulder, and Billister considered how envious all plant life must be, for there was no flora known that glowed with the deep brass of her complexion.

He said it again, almost a prayer now, "Woun-nuitte!"

Her lips pressed together and curled in unison. "You've been out ta long in the noon sun," she drawled in that rough tongue of the Fungus People. "Makes a man talk oddlike, no? You here 'bout the sign? The sign?"

Billister felt his chest collapsing, his hope dissipating at the horror of a delicate dark-skinned woman cognizant only in the Fungus People language: How could this be? And he felt his reason sliding its battered self over to that frame of mind in which one human may converse with another in the rocky tongue of English. He asked meekly, still in awe of her, "What sign do you speak of?"

She coughed into a gloved hand, a broad polite excusing of everything that had come before, and pointed her bundle of flowers at a living room window behind her. A small hand-lettered sign there read, "Live-in house servant desired."

It was as if Billister had lost control of his own mouth, for he felt it spread out into a gentle smile and he heard the throaty English words escape his lips, "Ho, ya. The sign. Of course, I came about the sign."

Her brow tightened with consternation under the white hat brim, and she asked, "But do you have any experience?"

Back | Next
Framed