Brass bands marched and counter-marched, stunning the overheated air with music and competing brassily with one another for unheeding ears. Foolish papier mache masks grinned and bumbled along, brilliantly colored, eliciting shrieks of laughter and shudders of revulsion. Tickling feather screechers unrolled as youngsters puffed out their cheeks. Food and wine were dispensed on a lavish scale. The aromas of cooking food, sizzling fat, the sweet heady scent of wine, the flat taste of dust in the heated atmosphere, the myriad perfumes of scented women, all combined with the stink of human sweat into a nasal orgy.
Stead pushed along with his group and was pushed along. Painted women clutched his arm. Screechers unrolled, pecking his face, making him dodge, laughing. Someone blew a huge brass snort in his ear and he jumped and Honey dragged him away from the brass band, laughing.
They ate magnificently from nookside tables piled with the warrens’ profusion. Wine flowed. Stead drank as his companions drank, laughing.
Thorburn boasted for them, “All this wealth, all this food and wine—all of it brought here through the work of the Foragers. The Foragers keep men alive on Earth!”
And no one could gainsay that.
Honey held his arm, laughing up at him. She wore a parti-colored, red and black costume. Her legs—one black, the other red—were encased in shrunken-on tights. Her body, quartered red and black, and her head, hooded in red and black, moved in jig time to different strains of music as band succeeded band. Her eyes sparkled. Her cheeks flushed. Stead had not missed the single glance from Julia, at once surprised and then femininely understanding; he had not missed it but he had not comprehended it.
Honey, the reserved, dark, shyly withdrawn Honey, flamed in livid electric brilliance this day.
Stead had contented himself with his old blue shirt and slacks, but among the Foragers that old clothing of his Controller days was itself a fancy dress. He didn’t bother; he smiled and drank wine and let Honey tug him along with the others.
A surging, swaying, singing tide of maskers crossed their path, bursting from a cross-runnel. They trundled barrels of wine on handcarts and took their refreshment with them. Everywhere, Stead could see men and women hugging each other, meeting and parting, dancing on, linking hands in long chains, swinging and breaking free. The resemblance to the stately dances of the Controllers struck him with in-congruousness. Here, men and women danced with an abandon, a verve, a vivacity that would have gonged a harsh note of discord in the more delicate world of the Controllers.
And then, flushed and laughing, reeling just a little, Stead was dragged away from Honey and from his group. He saw Thorburn’s massive head, the mouth open and shouting jovially to Julia, and then the group vanished behind a prancing wall of men and women intoxicated as much by excitement as by wine.
Without a qualm, he joined a jigging line, went bellowing up a lighted runnel. A goblet was thrust into his hand. He drained it on a laugh, danced on.
He had no idea where he was. Each side of the runnel contained the usual rows of wooden doors and glazed windows. Lights blazed, brilliant vegetable growths depended in artfully wrought wreaths and streamers before every door. Gaily embroidered cloths hung down; banners waved in the electric fans’ continuous currents of air. People surged around him bemusingly; noise clanged in his ears incessantly.
Spinning, he staggered from the end of a dancing line as slippery fingers failed to hold him; spinning, he staggered away into a shadowed crevice between cubby holes. He leaned against the wall, whooping, panting for breath, feeling the wine clouding in his brain. This, indeed, was life!
“More wine!” bellowed a fat, paunchy worker, waving his goblet frenziedly. Stead felt the deep sympathy of complete understanding with the fat, sweaty man. If he didn’t have wine immediately, the tragedy would be beyond a mortal’s bearing.
“Wine for my friend!” shouted Stead, looking blearily about, angry that no one should leap forward with ready cup.
A lean, rascally-looking fellow, a silversmith’s apprentice, rolled forward, splashed wine liberally into the fat man’s goblet and over the stone paving. A girl slithered up behind him, thrust her bare arms under the ruby stream, head back, laughing, her red mouth open and shining, her eyes glittering. Then she sucked the glistening drops from the whiteness of her arms.
“More wine!” yelled Stead, lurching forward.
The girl turned with the speed of a Rang, saw him, gurgled deep in her throat. She thrust her hands under the spilling stream of wine, caught a splashing double-handful, swung towards Stead.
“Here! Here is wine for the good of your immortal soul!”
Scarcely knowing what he did, Stead bent, drank the warm sweet wine. The girl’s hands trembled against his mouth. Then they opened and ruby drops cascaded to the ground. She laughed. Looking up at her, still bent over, Stead laughed too.
Her brown, lusterless hair had been powdered with sparkling dust. Her yellow bodice, caught in a deep vee-shape at the neck by large scarlet buttons, had been half torn away. Her black skirt, short and shining, had been even further ripped up its side slit. She swayed there before him, laughing, disheveled, wanton, unknowable and… suddenly, a vivid reminder of Belle.
Her tongue flicked over her lips. She took one deep breath, and flung herself forward on Stead. He felt her arms about him, her hot breath on his face, a warm breathing aliveness that stirred a deep-sleeping demon within him.
“Come on, lover boy! Why so coy! This is bacchanal-come on!”
Vertigo seized Stead. His hands trembled. He bent forward with that hot breath of the girl breathing full on him from her open mouth. He bent forward without knowing why or what to do next.
Rough hands dragged the girl away, thrust her spinning and cursing to fall on one knee. She plunged one hand into her bosom, drew out a slender stiletto, lunged, shrilling curses, to her feet.
Stead sagged back, bemused.
The two men in tight-fitting black, with the square, patient, unemotional faces so much alike, took her by the arms. The stiletto dropped to ring against the flags. They dragged her off bodily. Stead caught a single glimpse of the girl’s contorted and frightened face before high black shoulders cut off that disturbing vision.
What they said to her he could not hear above the uproar cannonading down the runnels. But she cast one horrified look at Stead and then turned, all aquiver, ran as though a Rang trod her heels.
The two men in black regarded Stead for a long, scrutinizing moment, a moment that hung humming isolated from the bacchanalia all about. Then they turned as one, and marched off, keeping perfect step. Stead wiped a hand across his forehead. It dripped sweat.
So they were the Controllers’ watchdogs. Purvis had been right. He was being watched, and more than watched; Delia and Simon intended with utmost severity to prevent him learning anything of that forbidden country of the relationships between men and women.
As a character and a personality, Stead was a very immature being, newly born and still soaking up knowledge and understanding, still hazy about life. He stood swaying for a few indecisive moments. He supposed Simon and Delia had the right to order his life; after all, they had conjured it into being from the empty husk he had been. But something he could not define deep within his core rebelled at their high-handed treatment of him. It smacked of the master-slave relationship and, coming as it did on top of the revelations he had experienced in the outlook of the Foragers, presented him with a crisis of conscience.