Psion (15 page)

Burial alive was what came next. We went inside one of the buildings that stood away from the rest, and the guard herded us into a freight elevator. It dropped down a vertical shaft that could have gone straight to Cinder’s core before it finally stopped and we got off again, somewhere deep in the heart of the stone. The controls were print-idented; no one could operate the lift
who
wasn’t meant to. It was the only way down, the only way out.

The guard left us in a long room lit up nearly as bright as day, full of mats,
most
with bodies lying on them. I just stood and stared, not understanding, until the bondie who’d worked with me went to the nearest empty mat and collapsed onto it. A couple of the others raised their heads, let them drop back again; all of the faces had blue skin. I began to understand.

This was where we slept, or tried to. The small red points of light at the corners of the ceiling were monitor cameras. There was no privacy, no peace, nowhere to hide here, except in sleep. . . . I found a mat and lay down, feeling the light prying through my eyelids. Ten years. . . . I flopped onto my stomach and buried my face in my arms, waiting for oblivion. It didn’t keep me waiting long. I dreamed about the Sakaffe Institute, about soft beds and good food and laughter, and about touching Jule taMing.

A kick woke me up again, after what seemed like only a couple of hours. I staggered out to the mess hall with a hundred others, and gulped down the plate of slop that was breakfast. And then we went on down the black hole, and I started to learn how long a day in hell could be.

At the bottom of the shaft was a huge vault cut from the stone, fogged with dust, the fog glowing yellow under banks of lights. Someone handed me a helmet with a lamp on it and something heavy that turned out to be a cutter. I followed the rest of the shift through the sulfur-colored haze like a blind man, up ladders on the far wall of the vault into a shadowy gallery half-eaten into the blue-gray rock.

They started in to work, nobody saying a word to me or each other while the guards were watching. The sound of their cutters was almost too high and too low to hear, drilling into my head, echoing and reechoing against the sound of half a thousand other cutters all through the underground. I stood where I was, watching, trying to figure out how to start. A guard came toward me; the light on my helmet filled in his silhouette as I looked up at him. He didn’t look human-until I realized he was wearing a mask against the dust. We didn’t have masks. “Get to work.” The words were only a mumble, but I didn’t have to guess what he was telling me.

I shook my head. “I don’t know-
“ His
prod jabbed me in the ribs and I finished it with a yelp, backing into the wall and dropping my cutter. “Wait, listen, will you”-starting to panic as his arm came up again-“just tell me what to do!”

The bondie working next to me reached out for my shoulder and jerked me around. “Shut up and take this.” He pushed a clear, silvery tube into my hands. I held it while he dropped a blue crystal the size of his fist into it and sealed the lid. “Stick it into my shoulder bag.” I did. The guard watched us, the prod glowing in his fist; and then he moved on.

“Thanks,” I said, feeling weak.

The bondie shrugged, pushing stringy blue-black hair back from his blue-stained face.
“For what?
I need a new partner, you’re it. Do everything I tell you, do it fast and right, or I’ll beat the crap out of you myself.” He broke off, coughing deep in his chest, and spat. “Understand?” He was bigger than I was, and older, and he might still be stronger. His fingers tangled in my hair.

I nodded, too tired to fight or even to resent it. “Anything you say.” He let me go. When he didn’t say anything more, I asked, “What’re you called?” He almost looked surprised.
“Mikah.”
He didn’t ask back. Finally I said, “Cat. I’m
Cat.
”

“Shut up. Pick up that cutter and do what I tell you with it.”

I picked up the cutter and did what he told me. And every day after that was the same; until I didn’t know day from night, buried alive in a blue stone tomb. Day after day we peeled off layers of ore and dumped it, looking for blue lumps of crystal, and everything weighed too much, even your feet felt like lead. Break the stone. Find the crystal and drop it into a tube, before its structure shattered and the matrix fell apart around it. . . . They used human beings because it was a delicate, dirty job; machinery broke down too easily, and was too hard to replace out here in the middle of nowhere. Warm bodies were cheaper than cold machines-when a pair of hands couldn’t hold a cutter or pry out a crystal anymore there was always another pair to replace it, or ten, or a hundred: it didn’t matter to Federation Mining whether you lived or died. After a while it hardly even mattered to me. Everything that had ever had any meaning shrank down to the simple effort of living through a few more hours of breaking stone.

Then, you tried to get the same plate full of slop into your mouth while your hands shook. You stumbled back to your dormitory and fell onto a mat still hungry, to sleep like the dead under the endless daylight of the spotlights. You tried to do it all over again, at the new shift; a few more hours, one more day. . . . The blue dust from the mines got into your eyes and nose and mouth, into every pore; it made you cough, it stained your skin blue, but nobody cared if you were too tired to scrub it off.

I kept thinking I’d get used to
it,
the work would get easier after a while. But it never did. I just got more and more tired; too tired to think straight about anything, or even to remember. . . . But over and over I dreamed about the Sakaffe Institute, about the psions and belonging to something good. And always the dream changed, and I was a slave, crawling through mud, digging my own grave out of blue stone, while Dr. Ardan Siebeling stood over me with a whip. I’d wake up coughing and full of hate, and wonder why I’d ever thought I was saving myself from anything by coming to this place.

But I didn’t want to be a slave, I wanted out-there had to be a way out. I knew that to get away you had to get back to the spaceport; there was nothing else on Cinder. On a clear day you could see the Green Mountains from the mines compound, if you were lucky enough to be on the surface. Sticking up at a freaky angle, like the ragged edge of spring calling me out of winter-across fifty kilometers of wasteland, where the temperature never got up to freezing and the snow turned to acid when it touched your skin.

I’d heard strange stories about things happening outside, too, that no one could explain away by “snow accidents.” The bondies claimed that there were “others” here who hated the mines, but no one would admit it. But they also claimed that Cinder was haunted, that it could drive you crazy, that it tried to get you lost outside so you’d freeze . . . until I didn’t know whether to believe anything I heard.

And a blue-stained face wouldn’t get me out of that hellhole anyway, so what was the use?

But there was a way-an easy way. Whenever they shipped the telhassium to the spaceport and brought back supplies, they used a couple of the bondies to do the heavy work, the way they’d done on my trip out. It was a free ride all the way to town, and they picked newer men because they were in better shape.

I’d figured Kielhosa would stop any chance I had of getting a break; I guess it was stupid to think he cared that much. But I couldn’t believe my luck when one day they called me out for the trip.

Mikah and I loaded crates of crystals and bars of half-refined ores, our bloodshot eyes half-blind in the glaring daylight of the yard, while a guard leaned against the snow-track and yawned. Mikah was coughing all the time-he was spitting red, something I’d never noticed down in the darkness. I did my own work and half of his, to keep the guard off our backs. Even so, I felt stronger than I had since I’d gotten here; almost human again.

We were nearly finished when the driver came up-the official named Joraleman. He stared at me for a minute, before he grinned and said, “Sainted Sarro, it is you! You’ve made me a lot of extra work, bondie. We haven’t been able to find anyone else that handles a snow-track like you do.” He laughed; I stood blinking at him for a minute before I realized he was making a joke. “Kielhosa’s sharp, kid. Nobody’s outmaneuvered him like that in a long time.” He stopped smiling. “Sorry it didn’t do you more
good
.”

I just shrugged, moving my tongue inside my dust-dry mouth, wondering if he expected me to answer. Afraid to try, but afraid to guess wrong, I did something I hadn’t even thought of for months: I probed his mind. Lying on its surface I saw his relief at finding me still alive. And below it was something I almost thought was guilt. He was the one who’d gotten me this ride. He’d asked them specifically to find me. I wondered why the hell he should care what happened to me. But I squinted past him at the mountains, wiping my face, and I almost smiled.

The guard gave Mikah and me thermal jackets, shoved us in on top of the crates, and locked the doors. I felt the snow-track start up, and felt us go through the dome airlock.

After a while I found a check window and got it open. It wasn’t big enough to squeeze through, but at least there was light, and something to do. The cold air stung my nose and numbed my face; but once I began to watch, I couldn’t look away. The endless blue-and-whiteness burned away the exhaustion that fogged my mind.

I swallowed and swallowed again; my mouth was always dry, no matter how much I drank. “Look”-trying again-“look out there, Mikah.
All that snow and sky.
The real world-
“ My
voice broke. I coughed up blue phlegm and wiped my mouth. “It makes you remember you’re still alive.” He didn’t say anything. “You want to look?”

“Nah.
Somebody could go blind staring at all that snow. What makes you such a poet?” He frowned, scratching inside his jacket.

I flexed my hands, feeling the calluses on my palms. “I ain’t digging ore.”

“Crap. You think you’re going to take off when we reach the port.”

“What makes you figure that?” I stared out the window, feeling the snow-track’s hold close around us again.

“They all think it at first.
Even me, once.”

“How long you been here, anyhow?” trying to change the subject.

“I don’t know. What year is it?”

I looked back at him. “Twenty-two seventeen, I guess.”

“God,” he mumbled. “Is that all?
Five stinking years?”
I wondered why I hadn’t seen anybody down in the mines
who
was even close to the end of his ten years. Mikah’s voice hardened. “Listen to me. Don’t try to make a break. Joraleman doesn’t come on as strong as some of the others, but he’ll stun you as quick as the next if you do. And when you get back to the mines . . . ever see what they do to runaways?”

“What if I did make it?” I remembered how Joraleman had asked for me.

“You wouldn’t. But even if you did, you’d never get off-world. They check for the bond tags. It just ain’t
no
use. Look, anything you do this trip reflects on me, too. So don’t try anything stupid.” He broke off, coughing again. “Damn . . . damn it! Shut that thing, for God’s sake. We could freeze in here.” He stretched out on the bars of ore and shut his eyes. “I’m going to sleep. . . .” He was asleep almost before he finished saying it.

I reached over to pull the window shut. And then suddenly the world tilted and fell out from under us.

Cold . . . so cold.
My hands were stiff with the cold, stretched above my head; my whole body was numb. All except my head-somebody must have kicked me in the head, but I couldn’t remember the fight, couldn’t even remember. . . . But then I remembered that I hadn’t been in Oldcity, or even on Ardattee, for a long time. I opened my eyes.

I was lying head down in a pile of crates, and far up above me was sky, a deep twilight purple. I watched aurora move silently in the gap of the snow-track’s sprung doors, watched the fog of my own breath blur and combine with it. I sighed, enjoying the peace of the sky.

Somebody moaned. I raised my head, remembering Mikah and then finally everything else up to the end of the world. “Mikah . . . ?” I struggled, kicking broken boxes away, feeling a kind of sweet pain at the sound of muffled shattering as crystals decomposed inside them. I pulled myself up, buried to my knees in the jumble of crates and ore bars. Mikah lay on his back close to me, mostly clear of the ore. I moved what I had to to get him free, glad after all that we’d had to load the snow-track as full as we did. The front wall was the closest thing it had to a floor, now; if there’d been less of a load, we would have been buried under the ore.

Mikah was out cold, but he was breathing easy, and when I reached into his mind he wasn’t far below the surface. I left him alone and stood still for a minute. There was nothing to hear except the sound of his breathing and mine.
Nothing.
I wondered what had happened to Joraleman . . . what had happened to us all. It looked like we’d fallen into a ditch.

I put a hand up to the knot on the back of my head. My eyes weren’t working just right, and I couldn’t seem to think about more than one thing at a time. I decided to think about getting up front to Joraleman.
Getting help.
He must have a
radio,
or something. . . . The doors were sprung, and I knew I ought to feel happier about that than I did. I started to climb up and out.