Sign of the Labrys Read online

  Margaret St. Clair

  Sign of the Labrys

  1

  There is a fungus that grows on the walls that they eat. It is a violet color, a dark reddish violet, and tastes fresh and sweet. People go into the clefts to pick it.

  The caves themselves are not very deep, though the excavated portions go much deeper. They were never actually occupied, and there had been no need for peace to be made for them to be abandoned entirely. People live in them now because they are quiet, even luxurious. There are stockpiles of everything in the world in the caves, if one only knows where to look. But of course there is not much smell of fresh air.

  To get to where I live—in the tier called E3—you have to go through rooms filled with filing cabinets, computers, and refrigerators whose shelves hold tray after tray of spoiled antibiotics. I know where I can get lots of flashlight bulbs, and the long detour doesn’t bother me. I couldn’t stand living on the surface, where the bulldozers keep one awake half the night with their clanking, and one is always likely to be forced into contact with people.

  That night I had got home rather late. I don’t know whether I have a job or not: I go there in the mornings, and sometimes they put me to work. Other times I stand around all day. The work is something any man with fair physical strength could do—moving boxes in a warehouse. I have moved the same stack of boxes over and over again. But it keeps one from thinking, and on Saturdays they give me a voucher. If they don’t give me a voucher, it doesn’t matter. I have a whole drawer full of them.

  Anyhow, they had kept me late that night. When I got near my pad, I saw light coming out around the edges of the door. That meant there must be somebody inside. It bothered me.

  It is odd how much we dislike contact with each other nowadays. Partly, of course, it is the habit of avoidance we all formed during the time the yeast plagues were so bad. But the plagues have been in abeyance for years now. B day—the time by which all the plague victims must be buried, to avoid new outbreaks—has been set forward a couple of times already, without anything happening. Still we stay away from each other. We want to be separate, apart. We can’t stand each other’s company.

  And now there was somebody inside my pad. I didn’t like it. I was in a bad mood when I went in.

  He got up politely when I closed the door. He was a young, thin man in a dark plum-colored uniform. His hair and eyes were light.

  “Mr. Sewell,” he said, “I’m from the FBY. Here is my identification.” He opened a little box and held it out to me.

  I glanced inside. My heart was beating fast. As far as I could see, his identification was in order. “Umm,” I said.

  The FBY is not popular. It has no record of brutality, and, as far as we can be said to have a government nowadays, it is the FBY; I don’t know why we dread it so. Perhaps it is the background of “science” which, to a man of my generation, is automatically dreadful. But there is a recurrent rumor that the organization is breeding yeasts for its own purposes. And the FBY men are a little too friendly, and at the same time a little too impersonal. The friendliness seems practiced, the impersonality contemptuous. As I said, they are not popular.

  “Mr. Sewell,” he said, smiling amiably, “I’ve come to you for information. My name, by the way is Ames, Clifford Ames. We’ve been told that you are in contact with a young woman whom we’d like very much to locate. Her name—at least, the name she is currently going under—is Despoina.”

  I raised my eyebrows. “I never heard the name before,” I said. “It’s an odd name.”

  “You don’t have to answer me, of course,” the FBY man answered, still smiling. “But it would be very much to your advantage to do so.”

  “My advantage?” I answered. “How can anything be to anyone’s advantage nowadays?”

  He laughed. “You have a point there,” he conceded. “But we’ve been told that you’re not only in contact with Despoina, or Spina, or just D, but that she’s actually living with you.”

  “Living with me?” I was more surprised than annoyed. “Nobody’s living with me. I couldn’t stand it. If you searched my place, you wouldn’t find any traces of feminine occupancy.”

  “None are evident, certainly. But we would very much like to locate her.”

  “I told you, I never heard the name before.” His constant smiling was beginning to get on my nerves. “I don’t know any young women, anyhow. Why are you hunting for this one? Wild yeasts?”

  “We suspect she may be a sower.”

  A shiver ran down my spine. Sowers are people who, crazed by the destruction we’ve all lived through, deliberately disseminate neurolytic strains of yeasts. They are blind mass murderers. Or so it is said. Myself, I’ve never seen one.

  “Even so, I can’t help you,” I said. “I just don’t know anything.”

  “Our information—”

  “You’ve been misinformed.”

  “I see.” Ames moved toward the door. “You work long hours, don’t you?” he said idly. “I waited for you a long time. Seven to six, you must work, or something like that.”

  “Seven to six!” It was my turn to laugh. “Oh, no, not even the bulldozer men, with B day to aim at, work hours like that. I don’t even work eight to five.”

  Ames drew in his breath. I seemed to have said something significant without knowing it. He looked at me with kindling eyes. “Seven to six, eight to five, they add up to pretty much the same thing, don’t they?” he said deliberately.

  “By the way, I didn’t give you a description of the girl we’re hunting. She’s said to be a little above medium height, slender and small-boned, with a remarkably fair skin. Unless she’s cut it or dyed it, she has very heavy red-gold hair. Do you know anybody that looks like that?”

  “I told you, I don’t know any women at all. I haven’t even spoken to a woman for two or three years, except to say good morning occasionally to the woman in the office where I work. And she’s short and middle-aged.”

  “I see,” he said again. “Well, if you change your mind and decide to cooperate with us, you can get in touch with me at this address.” He handed me a card.

  I took it, fuming. How neatly he’d given me the lie! “It’s not a question of cooperation. I simply haven’t anything to tell you… Will you have any trouble finding your way back to the entrance? I can let you have an extra flashlight, if that would help.” I wanted to get rid of him.

  He opened the door of my pad and stepped out into the corridor. “Thank you, no. I know a shorter way.” While I looked on from the threshold, he unhooked a small tube from the array of gadgets that hung from his belt. He squinted up at the rough ceiling, as if hunting a particular spot. He moved the small tube so a beam from it would have described a circle on the ceiling, and after a second or two I felt a rush of cold air. There was a hole two feet across where the rough, dim ceiling of the corridor had been. Ames hung the tube back on his belt and unhooked something else. It looked like a bunch of twine. He tossed this up into the hole. It spread out as it went up, and I saw it was an extremely light ladder of cord.

  The FBY man put a hand on either side of it and began to climb. When he was halfway inside the hole, he called down something in a muffled voice that sounded like, “We FBY people can do magic too!”

  He went on up. The cord ladder hung for a moment and then followed him. The dim ceiling became solid once more. The FBY man was gone.

  I went back inside my pad. What I had just seen made me thoughtful. There was nothing inherently improbable in there being emergency exits at various spots in the caves, exits known only to a few. But what had Ames meant by his last remark? I was pretty sure I’d heard him correctly. Why had he said he could work magic too?

  I sho
ok my head. I started to the cupboard to get a can of stew for my supper, and then stopped. I really wasn’t hungry. The interview with Ames had taken away my appetite, and in more senses than one. The conversation I’d had with him was the longest I’d had with anybody for years. So much human proximity was sickening. And on top of that, he was from the FBY.

  In the end, I got out a bowl of the violet-colored fungus and supped on it. I had picked it only last week, and it was still sweet and fresh. It would have been better lightly boiled, but I was in no mood for cookery.

  When I had eaten what I wanted, I put the bowl back. I tried to read—a textbook on bio-chemistry—but I couldn’t keep my attention on the printed page.

  At last I laid the book down. Despoina. A slender girl with red-gold hair and a very fair skin. Why did the FBY want her? And why did they think she was in contact with me?

  2

  If we human beings can bear each other’s proximity for only a few minutes nowadays, it is odd how different the case is with the dead. On my way to work, I pass one of the vast fields where the plague victims lie, each in his yeast-proof plastic covering, awaiting burial. I feel no antipathy to them.

  And yet, it could be horrible. The plastic coverings are translucent; one can catch glimpses of the puffy, unhappy dead within. But horror is absent. All I have ever felt is pity at the sight.

  The bulldozers were working as I went by that morning. They are always working; there is even a night shift. The wonder is that they get so little done. I suppose the reason is partly the size of the task, and partly that not enough men, after all, are working at it. It is hard to find any inducement that is strong enough to make people work.

  I got to the warehouse. The woman in the office nodded at me. The antipathy people feel toward each other nowadays is no less marked between males and females than it is between members of the same sex. People satisfy their sexual needs in fifteen-minute contacts, and run away from each other afterwards. It’s not a way of living I care for. I don’t suppose anybody likes it.

  The foreman put me to work moving a stack of boxes. It was the same stack of boxes I had moved from the north side of the warehouse the day before yesterday. Now he was having me put them back there again.

  As I worked, I thought about the man from the FBY. That organization (it was called into being when the plagues started, specifically to deal with the yeasts, but it was built upon an earlier organization) has always had the name of being closely knit. Are the FBY people somehow able to stand close contacts with each other, while the rest of us can’t? Or is it merely their famous “discipline” that allows them to work together?

  At noon, the foreman told me I could go home. As I left, I saw another of the warehouse workers moving my stack of boxes back to the south side.

  The bulldozer men were eating lunch when I passed them. One of them, a small dark man, shouted at me, “Hey, Mac, how’d you like to run one of these things?”

  I stopped. I yelled back, “You need men?”

  “Sure. I’ll teach you how to run this rig.”

  I spent the rest of the day learning how to operate a bulldozer, while the man who had called me “Mac” shouted instructions at me as often as needed.

  By five I knew why the burials were going so slowly. In the first place, there weren’t any diggers, and a bulldozer is an unsuitable rig with which to dig a burial ditch. And in the second place, there was no arrangement at all for moving the bodies into the trench. We had to scoop them up on the blades of the bulldozer and move them in, one at a time. But my feelings toward the bodies in their plastic bags did not change. They still filled me with pity, a sort of tenderness.

  When I got home, I went to the sink to wash my hands. I turned on the tap. No water came out. This was serious.

  All the rooms in E3—it was designed to house the more important government employees—contain a bunk, a sink, and a two-burner stove powered with batteries. There is a bath and a toilet for every four rooms. All the rooms in the tier draw water from a common reservoir.

  I went into the room next to me, and turned on the water. No water came out. I hadn’t thought it would.

  Obviously, something was wrong with the reservoir. I didn’t think the water supply was exhausted. It had been designed to last for half a century or so. What had probably happened was that a fungus growth had got into the main somewhere and stopped it up.

  I’d have to move. Which way should it be, up or down?

  The deeper one goes in the caves, the more luxurious the appointments get. But the thought of the deeper levels has always repelled me… I’d try just a little lower, half a tier or so, and sideways.

  I packed up what I wanted to take with me—a few books, a Go board, and an assortment of canned and dehydrated foods. I could always get more foods from the stockpiles, of course, but these were things I particularly liked. Then I started out.

  A suitcase in either hand, I walked along the dim corridor until I came to F1 (this is a tier, and different from F, which is a separate level). Then I walked down a couple of steps and turned left.

  I had not gone far along the F1 tier before I saw that one of the red lights in a signal panel on the corridor wall was blinking. That meant something had gone wrong along the tier; what, I couldn’t guess. It probably wasn’t serious, or the whole system would have been shut off, except for emergency exits.

  I hesitated. Should I turn back? But F2 was a little deeper than I liked, and besides, I was curious. I walked on.

  A door opened as I drew abreast of it. A man appeared in the opening, holding onto the door frame. He was staggering on his feet. I thought he must be sick or drunk.

  He made a noise in his throat, and then the word “seven” came out. He gasped desperately, struggled for breath, and collapsed at my feet.

  I had an instant of panic. I had seen people die like that before, when the plagues were so bad. But of course this man might just be drunk. From a little distance, I examined him.

  Now, there are—were—two main types of yeast plague. The commoner was the pulmonary, in which the yeast cells proliferated within the lungs to the extent that the victim could no longer breathe, and died, essentially, of asphyxiation. The bodies of people who died of this form were characteristically bloated and puffed. The other form was the neurolytic. The yeast cells secreted an enzyme that destroyed the conductivity of nerve cells, and death followed so quickly after the ingestion of the yeasts that the victim seemed to have been struck by an invisible lightning flash. He died before he knew anything was happening to him.

  The man on the corridor floor near my feet was wearing the dark plum-colored uniform of the FBY. Even as I watched, the seams of his neat, braid-trimmed tunic snapped under the pressure of the swelling flesh inside. His bloated chest showed through the gaps. There was no doubt that he was dead. And there was no doubt that what had killed him was the pulmonary form of the yeast plague.

  The yeast cells are air-borne and easily disseminated. With my suitcases still in my hand, I turned and ran back the way I had come.

  I stopped when I was back in E3 again. I was really frightened. Pulmonary plague takes about two hours to kill, after exposure, and I certainly had been exposed. I spent the next two hours sitting on the bed in my old pad, listening to myself breathe, and coughing and inhaling experimentally.

  Seven o’clock came, and I was still alive. Either none of the yeast cells had reached me, or I had a natural immunity.

  I drew a deep breath. I still had to think about getting another place to live, and I hadn’t had any supper. And what ought I to do about the dead man on the F1 tier? The disposal people ought to be told, so he could be sprayed and put in one of the plastic bags for burial. But I hated to get mixed up in it.

  In the end, I decided it was the FBY’s problem. They were said to keep in close touch with their people; they were sure to find this one soon.

  This time I went the other way in the corridor, toward level D. The accommodat
ions on this level—half-level, actually—are for three or four people, and not at all on the plushy side. I settled at last on a room with no furniture except four rather Spartan bunks. But the lights and water worked, and there was the same old two-burner electric plate. Now, what about something to eat?

  I looked over my store of food. I was hungry, but nothing sounded good. What I really wanted, of course, was some of the violet-colored fungus.

  People eat the fungus because it is almost the only fresh, unprocessed foodstuff that we have. When the yeast cells escaped from the scientists who had been working with them, and started the great plagues, it was not only the sorts that were deleterious to human beings that escaped. Our domestic animals died too—the mortality was even higher among them—and our food plants too were affected.

  Some food plants became extinct—wheat, for example, and barley and rice. Woody plants of all sorts died. I haven’t seen a tree for nearly ten years. And the germ cells of the common vegetables, like lettuce and tomatoes, mutated to become polyploid. Nowadays a lettuce plant is ten feet tall, covered with a sort of bark, and about as edible as a floor mop.

  But the fungus is good, fresh and crisp and sweet. When it is lightly boiled, it tastes a lot like water chestnuts. And one never gets tired of its taste. The only trouble is finding it. It grows beyond the part of the caves that has been furnished for people, on the bare face of the rock.

  I took a melmac tray and a knife from one suitcase. If one cuts the fungus fronds with a knife, rather than just tearing them loose, they grow back again. I stuck a flashlight in my belt, and started out.

  The place I was going was at the end of E3, my old tier. The fungus probably grew a lot of other places too, but I was sure of that one.

  It was a longish, rather tiring walk. There was considerable clambering about needed for me to reach the sloping cleft where the fungus grew. I had to go on hands and knees for the last few feet. But the fungus had grown back luxuriantly since my last visit, and I filled my tray easily.