Rob Chilson - Refuge

The meal was lavish and included quite a few choices, including real meat sausages. Derec ate heavily, she saw, taking his own advice: it might be a long day. She tried to do so, but could not.

“I thought you were feeling better,” he said.

“Yes,” she said, and tried valiantly to eat more. How could she explain that her problem was as much psychological as physical? She had felt better this morning, but perhaps she was still feverish. Derec, in fact, had looked bad himself, as if he’d had another and worse nightmare. He’d said nothing.

“Just a claustrophobic attack,” she muttered to him.

Derec nodded somberly.

It was partly that. Partly it was depression. Partly, she thought, it was sensory overload. Earth was so overwhelming! Even now-ten thousand jaws masticating food and the ceaseless din and motion around her-she wanted it all to stop for a minute, just for a minute! Even in her sleep, however, it never stopped.

And her illness was undoubtedly creeping up on her. If it crossed the blood-brain barrier, they had told her, it would be fatal. Until then she could still hope-dream-of a cure. Well, the moments of inattention she had been experiencing, the fugues as she relived past memories only to lose them forever, the dreamlike hallucinatory state she often found herself in, could only mean one thing.

How could she tell Derec?

“Ready?”

Nodding, concealing her dread, Ariel rose and followed him out into yet more motion and noise.

The ways were surprisingly quiet, considering how many tons of people they carried, considering the speeds they moved at, considering the cleaving of the air over them. But the roar was always there under all consciousness, making Ariel feel more than ever that it was all a hallucination.

They retraced their route to Old Town Section, then through “Yeast Town,” which began with East St. Louis Section. They sat, quiet, tense, through this section, but nobody paid any attention to them. Beyond, the sections stretched again, on and on to the east.

New York lay to the east, Derec had found, and he had no desire to try to drive around the City.

“Mommer!” yelled a young girl not far from them.

Derec and Ariel glanced at her apprehensively. It was rush hour, and all of them were standing, the Earthers patiently.

“Yeahr?” inquired an older woman, presumably Mommer. She wore a dark, baggy suit. The daughter wore a tight yellow one, over a rather unfortunate figure

“‘Member when Mayor Wong and all the Notables was at Busch Stadium ‘time the Reds played?” she yelled.

“No,” said Mommer, indifferently.

“‘Member the girl that played the-” Ariel didn’t get the title; it sounded like “star-mangled spanner”-”on the bugle?”

“Yeahr, so what?”

“That’s my boyfriend Freddy’s cousin Rosine!” the daughter shouted. She looked around triumphantly.

“No kiddin’?” Mommer asked, losing her indifference.

“‘Swearta God!” cried the girl, looking around proudly, famous by contagion. “In fronta Wong an ‘ all them NotahIes!”

At length, the lightwoffils overhead signaled END OF LINE. The crowd had thinned out long before, Mommer and daughter among the first to go. Only a few distinctly scruffy types were still on the ways. The edge of the City was evidently not a fashionable place. A number of men in obvious workmen’s dress also rode with them.

The eastbound and westbound strips separated, were further divided by a building, and the strips tilted. At heartstopping full speed the eastbound lane looped to the left, circled the building, and became the westbound lane. Ariel followed Derec down the strips just after the turn. He’d apparently been too interested to get off sooner.

“Oh, no!”

There was no crowd, and she thought that was the reason he got careless. Derec’s foot came down on the join of two strips, and in a moment he’d been jerked off his feet. He rolled on his back down onto the slower strip.

Ariel leaped after him, in her haste not bracing herself, and fell forward at full length-fortunately, on the slower strip.

Derec, grunting, had rolled half onto a yet slower strip, which slipped from under his fingers as he clawed at it. With great presence of mind he rolled over yet again fully onto that strip.

Ariel hastily picked herself up and gingerly transferred to his new strip. Derec sat grinning faintly and watched her as she walked back toward him. A couple of Earthers glanced at them incuriously and looked up at the lightworms. Apparently falling riders weren’t that uncommon. Nobody laughed.

Dusting himself off, Derec grinned more widely and led her down, then stopped in some consternation.

“Where’s your purse?”

Ariel clapped a hand to her side, gasped. She didn’t often carry a purse, but had had to on Earth. With all the identification and such she had to carry here, it was a real necessity. Now it was all gone.

“No real matter-R. David can fake up more identification for you,” Derec said.

They looked along the ways, but saw no sign of it. It must be hundreds of meters off by now, and they didn’t know on which strip. Ariel shrugged.

“There must be some central office where you can reclaim things lost on the ways,” Derec said, but dismissed it.

With a skill increased by their previous experiences, they made their way down into the bowels of the City to the freightway level. NO RIDING. PEDESTRIANS FORBIDDEN, the signs proclaimed. So they walked along beside them to the terminus, which was much like that of the passengerways above.

Small trucks with lifts in front and broad, flat beds behind brought in cannisters of freight. Somewhere not far from here big trucks were unloading these cannisters, driving in, wheeling out.

“Hey, you-you kids! Git away from there! Don’t you see the sign? Go on, back!”

Muttering, Derec led Ariel up a motionless ramp, hesitated, and struck out along a corridor running east. After half an hour of fruitlessly trying to go down to the entrance there, he retraced his steps and they went down to the lower level, and then marched toward the entrance. It was marked on the City maps as an entrance, not as an exit. There were no exits on the map.

Derec opened the door cautiously, beckoned her through. Beyond it they found a garage for the handling trucks that transferred the cannisters. Men swarmed around it, but ignored them.

“We can’t go there,” Ariel said when he had led her behind the trucks to the motorway.

It was a stub motorway joining the entrance with the freightway strips. To step out into that rumbling passage would be to get run over on the spot.

Derec hesitated. “Steal a handler and drive it out there?” he asked.

“And maybe keep on going?” she asked wistfully, thinking of sunlight and air. Tomorrow and New York were too far away to bother about. Her head hurt.

“No, we couldn’t get much past the exit. These things are all beam-powered. That’s why we have to have one of those big trucks. They’re nukes.”

In the end, they picked out a small handler and figured out the controls, which were quite simple.

“I’m surprised there’s no control lock,” said Ariel. “Knowing Earthly psychology.”

“Frost, you’re right,” said Derec, worried, and looked it over. “This slot,” he said after a moment. “For an ID tag, probably a specialized one.” He looked it over and said, “I wish I had my tools.”

Wonders can be performed with such things as metal ration tags. He worked away behind the control panel while Ariel crouched behind him in the tiny cab and watched anxiously for anyone approaching.