“Ser,” Raen said. He surveyed them both, blinked, all at once seemed to take the full situation into account, for his face went from ruddy to pale; a Kontrin in Colour, a man in impeccable innerworlds dress and with an azi-mark on his cheek.
“Sera.”
“I understand,” Raen said, “that there are numerous personnel to be contracted.”
“We have available contracts, yes, sera.”
“Numerous contracts. I’d like a full tour, ser—”
“Itavvy,” he breathed.
“Itavvy. A tour of the whole facility, ser.”
The smallish beta, greying, balding…looked utterly distressed. “The office—I’ve responsibility—”
“It really doesn’t look as if you’re overwhelmed with visitors. The whole facility, ser, floor by floor, the whole process, so long as it amuses me.”
Itavvy nodded, reached for the communications switch on the desk. Raen stepped across the interval and put out her chitined hand, shook her head slowly. “No. You can guide us, I’m sure. Softly. Quietly. With minimum disturbance to the ordinary routine of the building. Do you object, ser?”
vi
The Labour Registry was a maze of curving corridors, all white, all the same. Lifts designated sub-basements down to the fifth level; Raen recalled as many as twenty stories above ground, although the lifts in this area only went to the seventh: she recalled the overhang. They passed row on row of halls, a great deal of seemingly pointless walking with ser Itavvy in the lead. There were doors, neat letters: LIBRARY: COMP I: LEVEL I: RED CARDS ONLY.
She made no sense of it, had no idea in fact what she was seeking, save that in this building was what should have been a thriving industry, and in the front of it were empty desks and silent halls.
Itavvy paused at last at a lift and showed them in, took them to third level, into other identical halls, places at least populated. Grey-suited techs stared at the intrusion of such visitors and stopped dead in their tracks, staring. White-suited azi, distinguishable by their tattoos, stepped from their path and then resumed their cleaning and their pushing of carts.
Itavvy led them farther.
“I’m tired of walking aimlessly,” Raen said. “What do you propose to show us on this level? More doors?”
“The available contracts, sera.”
Raen walked along in silence, scanning doors and labels, searching for something of information. Periodically corridors branched of from theirs, always on the right. Inevitably those corridors ended at the same interval, closed off by heavy security doors. RED CARD ONLY, the signs said.
She stopped, gestured toward the latest of them. “What’s there, ser Itavvy?”
“General retention,” Itavvy said, looking uncomfortable. “If sera will, please, there are more comfortable areas—”
“Unlock this one. I’d like to see.”
Itavvy unhappily preceded them down the short corridor, produced his card and unlocked the door.
A second door lay beyond, similarly locked: they three stood within the narrow intervening space as the outer door boomed and sealed with a resounding noise of locks. Then Itavvy used his card on the second, and a wave of tainted air met them, a vastness of glaring lights and grey concrete; a web of catwalks.
The scent was again that of antiseptic, compounded this time with something else. Itavvy would too obviously have been glad to close the door with that brief look, but Raen walked stubbornly ahead, moving Itavvy out before her—no beta would have the chance to slam a door at her back—and looked about her.
Concrete, damp with antiseptic, and the stench of humanity and sewage.
Pits. Brightly lit doorless pits, a bit of matting and one human in each, like larvae bestowed in chambered comb. Five paces by five, if that; no doors, no halls between the cells…only the grid of catwalks above, with machinery to move them, with an extended process of ladders which could, only if lowered, afford the occupants exit, and that only a few at a time.
The whole stretched out of view around the curve of the building and far, far, across before them. Their steps echoed fearsomely on the steel grids. Faces looked up at them, only mildly curious.
Raen looked the full sweep of it, sickened, deliberately inhaled the stench.
“Are contracts on these available?”
“For onworld use, sera.”
“No export license.”
“No, sera.”
“I understand that a great number of azi have been confiscated from estates. But the contracts on those azi would be entangled. Where are they housed? Among these?”
“There are facilities in the country.”
“As elaborate as these?”
Itavvy said nothing. Raen calculated for herself what manner of facilities could be constructed in the sparsely populated countryside, in haste, by a pressured corporation-government. These facilities must be luxurious by comparison.
“Yet all of these,” she said, “are warehoused. Is that the right word?”
“Essentially,” Itavvy whispered.
“Are you still producing azi at the same rate?”
“Sera, if only you would inquire with ITAK Central—I’m sure I don’t know the reasons of things.”
“You’re quite satisfactory, ser Itavvy. Answer the question. I assure you of your safety to do so.”
“I don’t know of any authorisation for change. I’m not over Embryonics. That’s another administration, round the other side, 51. Labour doesn’t get them until the sixth year. We haven’t had any less of that age coming in. I don’t think… I don’t think there can be any change. The order was to produce.”
“Origin of that order?”
“Kontrin licensing, sera.” The answer was a hoarse whisper. “Originally—we appealed for a moderate increase. The order came back quadrupled.”
“In spite of the fact that there existed no Kontrin license to dispose of them when they reached eighteen. The export quota wasn’t changed”
“We…trusted, sera, that the license would be granted when the time came. We’ve applied, sera. We’ve even applied for permission to terminate. We can’t do that either. The estates—were all crowded above their limits. They’re supposed to turn them back after a year, for training. But now—now they’re running their operations primarily to feed their own workers…and they’re panicked, refusing to give them up, the permanent workers and the temporaries.” Itavvy wiped at his face. “They divert food—to maintain the work force and it doesn’t get to the depots. Our food. The station’s food. ISPAK has threatened a power cutoff if the estates go on holding out, but ITAK has—reasoned with ISPAK. It wouldn’t stop the estate-holders. They have their own collectors, their own power. And they won’t give up the azi.”
“Are the holders organised?”
The beta shook his head. “They’re just outbackers. Blind, hardheaded outbackers. They hold the azi because they’re manpower; and they’re a means to hold out by human labour if ISPAK follows through with its threat. Always…always the farms were a part of the process; azi went out there in the finishing of their training and shifted back again, those that would be contracted for specialised work—good for the azi, good for the farms. But now, sera, the estates have been threatening to break out of the corporation.”
“Hardly sounds as if these holders are blind, ser Itavvy…if it comes to a fight, they’ve the manpower.”
“Azi.”
“You don’t think they’d fight.”
Beta deference robbed her of an honest answer. Itavvy swallowed whatever he would have said; but he looked as if he would have disputed it.
“It hardly sounds as if they’re without communication on the issue,” Raen said, “since they’re all doing alike. Aren’t they?”
“I wouldn’t know, sera.”
“Only on East, or is West also afflicted?”
Itavvy moistened his lips. “I think it’s general.”