Day by Night by Tanith Lee

Author:Tanith Lee [Lee, Tanith]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: DAW
Published: 2021-08-03T00:00:00+00:00

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Besides dread, and the frozen dripping of stars, there was on the surface a measure of freedom. The form of travel, in large bounds, an effortless almost-flight, was not unpleasing when understood and in control. Yet they worked throughout the Jate, unrecalled by any bell, told by machines when to attach a tube to the facial area of their air balloons and sip a gruel that gave strength but tasted of diluted plastomil. Even without gravity, the muscles of the spirit began at last to ache. To cleanse the mirror bowls, to haul equipment in the tracks of the machines, to apply force-drills to unspecified vents in the ground. That was the Jate. Repetition and unchanging vistas of black and white. The cold, too, pressed against the air suits, quietly coming in, so that by the end of his stint, each man felt the threat of freezing half an inch away beyond his suit’s skin, leaden mouth breathing at his flesh as if through a window. The false staling air in the bubbles that shrouded them, drugged them with inexorable fatigue.

By Jate’s end, Casrus, with the rest, knew exhaustion. But they were worn to the shape of their fate, and he, indifferent to it as he might be, not yet worn. The rigors and the soullessness of this time jarred on him, body and mind, on those parts unworn, unshaped. That the next ten Jates would be all the same was no consolation.

The ovoid transport took them down to their cheerless home. Dorte had come to see how the prince had fared. All were too enervated to pay much heed. Sneering, Dorte walked Casrus to his hovel in Aita Slink. For a while, Dorte stood in the alley, joking, pointing out to those who went that way by Maram the royal residence of Klarn. At length, a woman came and Dorte rolled off with her.

Later, a woman came also to Casrus’ sealed metal door, begging for coal. Word had apparently spread fast. Casrus gave her one piece, all he could spare. Then, like the dead, insomnia and all else vanquished, he slept.

The Jate bell woke him, as it was intended to wake the sleepers of the Subterior. Those who overslept would lose their work, and maybe starve, or maybe worse than starve.

To work the surface was hard but profitable labor. The computers had been just in selecting it for Casrus. If he retained his stamina, in a few years he might become an Upperling like Dorte, finding others for the work, taking dues from them, living as well as he could, given living’s low shape in the Subterior.

Casrus warmed a cube of concentrated food in a small pot of water rations he had been mechanically awarded as he left the surface, along with the other men. The light of the two coals had become greenish, for they were low. About to quench them, Casrus heard a stone rattled along the metal mesh of his locked door.

He turned.

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