"Piers Anthony - Bio of a Space Tyrant 02 - Mercenary" - читать интересную книгу автора (Anthony Piers)

The man stopped. He was old and grizzled, with deep lines around and through his face. "It's my song," he said mildly. "Had it for thirty years."

I backed off, embarrassed. Of course, songs could duplicate; I had seen it happen to others. There were hundreds of songs, and thousands of workers. It just hadn't occurred to me that mine could have another owner. I now look back at this adolescent naivete with a certain wonder; but the loss of innocence does seem to be a lifelong chore.

The man smiled. "It's good to meet a brother," he said, and extended his lined hand. "Haven't run into one in three years."

I took his hand, grateful for his attitude. "Mine's only six months."

"It's still authentic. Who named you, Worry?"

"Well, really, it was Joe Hill and Old Man Rivers. They're on another shift right now."

"Them brothers!" he exclaimed. "If them two agreed on anything, it must be right!"

Brothers? Not in the sense of matching songs. Song-brothers were those who shared a song, and they did not.

"Well, come on, Worry," he said. "It don't matter how long anyone's had it, it's ours. We'll sing it together."

And sing it we did. His voice wasn't any better than mine, but we complemented each other and made a richer song than either could have alone-and perhaps that is a suitable analogy for any type of cooperation in life. His version differed slightly from mine, but that only added to the appeal.

After that we talked, exchanging information and attitudes. We really were not much alike, but the rules of this society bound us together, and this man was rather like an uncle to me, and I like a nephew to him. He had been a migrant laborer all his life and knew nothing else. He was largely illiterate, so could find no other work. Much of the time, he confessed, he was on the bottle; it eased his mind, but his liver was starting to go, and that worried him-of course!-but what else was there?

And I learned that there was a duty as well as a friendship that went with the sharing of a song. If one of us died, and the other heard about it, he was supposed to come and investigate and set things to right if they needed it. Usually a few questions sufficed, and sometimes personal effects had to be taken to a blood relative, but once in a while there was foul play, and vengeance had to be sought. "But don't worry, Worry, 'about that," he reassured me. "My liver'll take me out within five years if not sooner, and I don't have no living relatives and nothing worth saving. I'll never be a caution to you. See that you ain't to me."

I promised not to be a caution to him, and that was it. We parted ways on the next tour, and I never saw him again. But the experience buoyed me. There was someone who would look out for me, not from proximity or friendship, but because the migrant society required it. It was the code of the song. That gave me an odd, deep comfort.

It was almost a year after my entry into the migrant labor circuit when things got ugly. My replacement identification had never come through; all I had was a temporary card that listed only my name and planet of origin: Callisto. The bureaucracy ground exceeding slow! The bubble-farmers and labor foremen didn't care, but this prevented me from seeking better employment elsewhere. So I was locked in, but as long as I was with Joe Hill, I didn't really mind.

The people changed, but Rivers was always with us. Fas cinated for more than incidental reason now, I studied the relations between Joe and Rivers. Though their politics were opposite, and the two often came to blows, I noticed that the quarrels were never serious. Neither man ever drew his knife or tried for a mutilating blow. Other men in other controversies sometimes went the whole route, and once I saw one killed. The migrant code was strong, but not absolute; passions of the moment could erupt disastrously. No one seemed overly concerned about the dead man. The bubble-guards picked up the one who did it and turned him over to the police, and he did not return; maybe he was brought to trial, maybe just bounced to another orbit. It was the nuisance of violence the police objected to, not the loss of a worker or two. But Joe and Rivers never went that far. Could they, in fact, be brothers, bound by a more subtle tie than they advertised? I concluded that they did hold each other in a certain veiled respect.

Rivers was well named. He sang his song, and it was him:

. . . Tired of livin', and feared of dyin'!

But Old Man River, he just keeps rollin' along.

There was something about the way he sounded the word "dyin' " that sent a shiver through me. It signaled an enormous and terrible comprehension of the concept. I had seen my father treacherously and brutally slain; I had seen my fiancee's body cut open, her guts drawn out. I knew what death was!

But Rivers was no death-dealer, but the apostle of peaceful change. He argued that the condition of the pickers, which he deplored as much as Joe Hill did, would not change until underlying economics and social factors changed. Until the climate was right, he said, overt action could only be counterproductive. Joe, by inciting open resistance to oppression, was more apt to bring the storm down upon his own head, and increase the suffering of the rest of us.

I sided with Joe, of course, though in retrospect I feel I was mistaken. As the Jupiter-System economy wallowed in the ebb tide of an economic recession, and things tightened up all over the Juclip, and the slop the bubble-farmers fed us got worse, and the work harder for no increase in pay, my anger boiled up along with that of the others. Now Joe's reception was serious, not polite; the pickers were at last ready to organize, and the ones with this militant attitude were becoming a clear majority. The union songs became more strident, and the first open signs of rebellion manifested.

Then Joe got sick. His harvesting suffered, and he missed his quota. Now I carried him, paying for his meals and bunk. I was glad to expiate my social debt this way, owed for the manner in which he had rescued me from the concourse at Leda and given me support and a kind of family. I was a good picker now, well able to stay ahead, and on good terms with most of the other workers. I was, for one thing, thoroughly literate; when others had paperwork to decipher, I helped, sometimes saving them grief. Had either Joe or I asked for help, it would have been provided, but I preferred to help him myself.

I brought Joe his supper, which the foreman had served out especially for him, a generous portion. But he consumed only a mouthful and relapsed into his lethargy. There was no doctor; I could only sit by him and hope he got better.

I waited, finishing some of his meal for him, rather than let it go to waste. But my own appetite was gone, and so most of the stew was lost, anyway.

Others came by to express concern, but no one knew what to do. There were no contagious diseases in the Juclip; the bad days of personal contamination had been eliminated when man went out into the Solar System, with its natural quarantine. Only on septic Earth itself did the ancient maladies still flourish, and in occasional pockets in the major System cities. But there were degenerative maladies, such as the other Worry's declining liver. This one of Joe's was not familiar to any of us. We carried him back to his bunk in the ship where he lay unconscious.