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life-objects, Dixit perceived, was going to be such a matter: endlessly fascinating, entirely insoluble&
He thought, returning to his cell, and told himself: Patel still puzzles me. But it is no use hanging about
here being puzzled. Here I sit, waiting for a knife in the guts. It must be night now. I've got to get out of
here.
There was no way out of the room. He paced restlessly up and down. They brought him no meal, which
was ominous.
A long while later, the door was unlocked and opened.
It was Malti. She lifted one finger as a caution to silence, and closed the door behind her.
"It's time for me& ?" Dixit asked.
She came quickly over to him, not touching him, staring at him.
Though she was an ugly despondent woman, beauty lay in her time-haunted eyes.
"I can help you escape, Dixit. Patel sleeps now, and I have an understanding with the guards here.
Understandings have been reached to smuggle you down to my own deck, where perhaps you can get
back to the outside where you belong. This place is full of arrangements. But you must be quick. Are you
ready?"
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"He'll kill you when he finds out!"
She shrugged. "He may not. I think perhaps he likes me. Prahlad Patel is not inhuman, whatever you
think of him."
"No? But he plans to murder someone else tonight. He has acquired some poor fellow's life-object and
plans to have his holy man kill him with night-visions, whatever they are."
She said, "People have to die. You are going to be lucky. You will not die, not this night."
"If you take that fatalistic view, why help me?"
He saw a flash of defiance in her eyes. "Because you must take a message outside for me."
"Outside? To whom?"
"To everyone there, everyone who greedily spies on us here and would spoil this world. Tell them to go
away and leave us and let us make our own world. Forget us! That is my message! Take it! Deliver it
with all the strength you have! This is our world not yours!"
Her vehemence, her ignorance, silenced him. She led him from the room. There were guards on the
outer door. They stood rigid with their eyes closed, seeing no evil, and she slid between them, leading
Dixit, and opening the door. They hurried outside, onto the balcony, which was still as crowded as ever,
people sprawling everywhere in the disconsolate gestures of public sleep. With the noise and chaos and
animation of daytime fled, Total Environment stood fully revealed for the echoing prison it was.
As Malti turned to go, Dixit grasped her wrist.
"I must return," she said. "Get quickly to the steps down to Ninth Deck, the near steps. That's three
flights to go down, the inter-deck flight guarded. They will let you through; they expect you."
"Malti, I must try to help this other man who is to die. Do you happen to know someone called Gita?"
She gasped and clung to him. "Gita?"
"Gita of the Ninth Deck. Patel has Gita's life-object, and he is to die tonight."
"Gita is my stepfather, my mother's third husband. A good man! Oh, he must not die, for my mother's
sake!"
"He's to die tonight. Malti, I can help you and Gita. I appreciate how you feel about outside, but you are
mistaken. You would be free in a way you cannot understand! Take me to Gita, and we'll all three get
out together."
Conflicting emotions chased all over her face. "You are sure Gita is to die?"
"Come and check with him to see if his life-object has gone!"
Without waiting for her to make a decision in fact she looked as if she were just about to bolt back
into Patel's quarters Dixit took hold of her and forced her along the balcony, picking his way through
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the piles of sleepers.
Ramps ran down from balcony to balcony in long zigzags. For all its multitudes of people even the
ramps had been taken up as dosses by whole swarms of urchins Total Environment seemed much
larger than it had when one looked in from the monitoring room. He kept peering back to see if they
were being followed; it seemed to him unlikely that he would be able to get away.
But they had now reached the stairs leading down to Deck Nine. Oh, well, he thought, corruption he
could believe in; it was the universal oriental system whereby the small man contrived to live under
oppression. As soon as the guards saw him and Malti, they all stood and closed their eyes. Among them
was the wretched Raital, who hurriedly clapped palms over eyes as they approached.
"I must go back to Patel," Malti gasped.
"Why? You know he will kill you," Dixit said. He kept tight hold of her thin wrist. "All these witnesses to
the way you led me to safety you can't believe he will not discover what you are doing. Let's get to Gita
quickly."
He hustled her down the stairs. There were Deck Nine guards at the bottom. They smiled and saluted
Malti and let her by. As if resigned now to doing what Dixit wished, she led him forward, and they
picked their way down a ramp to a lower floor. The squalor and confusion were greater here than they
had been above, the slumbers more broken. This was a deck without a strong leader, and it showed.
He must have seen just such a picture as this over the bugging, in the air-conditioned comfort of the
UHDRE offices, and remained comparatively unmoved. You had to be among it to feel it. Then you
caught also the aroma of Environment. It was pungent in the extreme.
As they moved slowly down among the huddled figures abased by fatigue, he saw that a corpse burned
slowly on a wood pile. It was the corpse of a child. Smoke rose from it in a leisurely coil until it was
sucked into a wall vent. A mother squatted by the body, her face shielded by one skeletal hand. "It is the
time when the old die," Malti had said of the previous night; and the young had to answer that same call.
This was the Indian way of facing the inhumanity of Environment: with their age-old acceptance of
suffering. Had one of the white races been shut in here to breed to intolerable numbers, they would have
met the situation with a general massacre. Dixit, a half-caste, would not permit himself to judge which
response he most respected.
Malti kept her gaze fixed on the worn concrete underfoot as they moved down the ramp past the
corpse. At the bottom, she led him forward again without a word.
They pushed through the sleazy ways, arriving at last at a battered doorway. With a glance at Dixit, [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]