Val chuckled over the lull. “With Jupiter in Sagittarius you’d think we’d be having better hunting.”
Walter frowned. The supernatural was nothing to joke about. After a long moment of strained silence the old man spoke.
“Not funny. In the ten years I’ve been in HC I’ve come to respect the buckeye’s peculiar cycle of activity and migration. Their shamen go by the planets—have to—cycles of weather and crops are important to them. And they sleep right under the stars. Hive citizens can laugh at astrology. The Big ES protects them. Horoscopes are faulty when cast by a meck who isn’t watching the heavens anyway. But my charts are serious. Help with the Hunt. I try to outguess buckeye shamen. Right now I think they’ve gone into hiding because Jupiter is in Sagittarius. They figure it is a good sign for the hunter. More citizens will request a Hunt after seeing their horoscope—so the buckeyes are smart to avoid detection.”
“Perhaps we’re in for a long rest—Jupiter will be in that sign for a long time,” chuckled Val.
Walter just grunted and coughed. He opened a box of artifacts collected from buckeye campsites. The beads interested him. He held up an intact string—twelve black beads, a ringed bead at one end, and four colored beads in the center.
“What do you make of these?”
“Clan—” suggested Val.
“What if they represent time?” said old Walter. “Planetary time—zodiacal. If the ringed one is Saturn, then this big white one could be Jupiter in Sagittarius—”
Val nodded, half interested. “But three more beads are with the big white one—a four-planet conjunction just isn’t on any of my star charts here.” He pulled out projections of future positions—nothing matched the beads for hundreds of years as far as he could tell. “If it is a conjunction, it is way off in the future. Can’t see what interest buckeyes could have in that—but any fourplanet conjunction would be significant for someone.”
“Sagittarius? Hunter—or hunted?” mumbled Walter.
Val had lost interest already. He was casting a light-hearted horoscope to help him decide which entertainment channel to watch. Walter closed his artifact box with an interruptive bang.
“Well!” he shouted. “We can’t solve any more buckeye problems on this shift. Let’s drop over to my place for a meld.”
Val shook his head—declining.
“Not tonite. I’m going ’tween walls on a rat hunt. Pick up a few extra flavors.”
“Maybe next time then,” said Walter in parting. “Female Bitter has been asking about you.”
They went their separate ways. Val had strong feelings about the meld. Rubbing souls with anyone irritated him. He clashed with the polarized and found the neuts too bland. Walter, on the other hand, enjoyed his family-5 and all their little intimacies and pleasurings. He accepted ritual hugs from female Bitter and talked job with Jo Jo and grumpy Busch. Neutral Arthur planned family fun and games. A well-rounded family-5.
Val sat in his cubicle checking his ratting gear. The coveralls were well worn. They had helped him take many calories. He changed the dust filters and tested the power cell. The helmet light and communicator still functioned, although both had low reliability quotients by now. Picking up the anoxic gas bag he started upspiral to the mid-level gratings.
“Level thirty-five OK, City?” he asked.
“Go ahead,” said the cybercity. “I’ll track you.”
He waded into the powdery soot. Cobwebs clung. His lamp picked out a circle of old dry skeletons—humans gone mushroom on Molecular Reward. He gave the location to the city, but Sampling wasn’t indicated for bones.
He tracked along weight-bearing struts, hollow cylinders, and pipes of all sizes—some pulsating, some hot, others flexible and cold. Underfoot, the black and gray spongy dust averaged ankle-deep, but it drifted in corners and formed friable and pillowy cushions on everything. Thin cables and wires resembled thick columns. He repeatedly swatted away the cottony debris to identify the object being drifted over.
Deep, snakelike rat trails crisscrossed the dust drifts. Rat droppings were everywhere. As he flashed his light around it was reflected back by hundreds of pairs of beady retinas.
“City,” he said, “you’ve got a lot of rats down here.”
“Most of my citizens are reincarnationists,” said the voice in his helmet, “—don’t eat meat. They see their ancestors in the eyes of the rat.”
Val smirked: “If I were a believer in transmigration of the soul I’d think my ancestors would appreciate having their sojourn as a rat shortened. Besides, we’re the only carnivore the rat has to worry about now, so eating them may be Nature’s Way.”
His bitter philosophy was wasted on the city. It directed him toward the highest density of rats’ nests. He crawled under a whistling air conduit. Using a heavy girder for hand-holds, he scaled across a deep void on a narrow pipe. When he flashed his helmet light down, vertigo gripped his cardio-esophageal junction. Only an occasional cobweb caught his beam. The blackness of ’tween walls appeared bottomless. Ahead he saw one of the city’s organs—a thirty-yard-diameter sphere with a medusa head of flexi-cables. He touched it. It was warm, dry and silent.
“Found your energy organ.”
City reviewed its own anatomy. “Membrane filters to your right.”
He dust-waded along the top of a large pipe. It was hollow. Voices and shuffling vibrated. It was a crawlway. The larger rats became more numerous—and bolder. They remained stubbornly in his path until he nudged them with his toe. They wouldn’t be too tasty. The sweet stink of the nests hit him. Moist and dripping, the huge cool sphere of the membrane filters loomed ahead. The city’s sweat condensed and trickled down the sphere’s outer shell—providing drops of drinking water for the rodents. The struts beneath the filter were packed with dark little nests—short tunnels dug into the stringy dust. The hum of the membrane pumps tickled his feet as he approached.
He hissed nitrogen into his bag and pulled on the heavy ratting glove. Selecting a large nest, he thrust in his hand. Expecting mother-with-food, the soft young rats swarmed onto the glove. He pulled out three handfulls and squeezed them through the sphincter of the anoxic bag. Their squirming and squeaking ceased.
He worked his way down the moist struts filling the bag. Feeling something heavy on his boot he looked down to see a bold rat gnawing on his sole. He kicked it away. Soon the bag weighed half as much as he did.
He sat down to rest and brushed the larger gobs of dust from his helmet.
“Is there an access hatch to a crawlway on this level?”
“Behind you—fifty-three yards.”
The pasty-faced citizens glanced up and got speckled with soot as the hatch moved. A cloud of black feathery particles billowed ahead of him as he dropped into the crawlway. Balancing the lumpy bag on his shoulders he tracked black footprints downspiral to the Watcher’s quarters to pay his tithe.
The Watcher, a melon-headed neut, patted his pudgy hands together and grinned at the size of the catch. He went to the press and pulled open its heavy door.
“Six hundred degrees before press—and three hundred after?” asked Watcher.
Val nodded through his soiled helmet. The Watcher motioned for him to use the public refresher while the meats were processed. Val grumbled at the class thirteen’s slowness in getting the water up to temperature. Then he waded through, rinsed his gear, and took a new issue tissue garment from the dispenser. Sounds of pop frying and smells of scorched fur filled the room while he dressed.