Johnny laughed. “That’s the sort of crack you were always best at, Vic. The big, soft man who carries a stiletto! Melissa knows about it, all right—she just enjoys acting mad like that. It’s a kind of ritual with girls like her. A prenuptial ritual.”
“What’s she doing up here anyway?”
“She lives here.”
“How did she get here?”
“That’s a long story.” Johnny glanced around henignly at the other men squatting against the walls; he did it strangely, like a savage king surveying his court. “Her father brought her up about fifteen years ago when she was just a kid. You’ll never guess what old Latham was before he came here.”
“Tell me,” Stirling said. Fifteen years, he thought, fifteen years of this.
“A judge,” Johnny announced. “Imagine a high court judge breaking out of the Compression! It’s fair enough, I suppose, but he set himself up as a judge up here too. A real little philosopher-king, he was.
“When I arrived he watched me for a couple of days out of those watery old eyes and told me he had assessed me. Assessed me! He said I was best suited for foraging. I was to cover a whole fifteen-mile strip by myself, breaking off an ear of corn or something every hundred paces so as not to cause a localized drop in the harvest—which would be noticed down in the station.” Johnny snorted—one of the few sounds he could make naturally, without the aid of the vocal prosthetic.
“You didn’t like the idea,” Stirling said mechanically.
“You bet I didn’t. People were always assessing me down below and coming out with the wrong answers. I told him I was going to sit in the village all day, and he was going to forage. I told him I was going to do all the assessing from now on.” Johnny savored the memory for a few seconds before he went on.
“Old man Latham kicked up hell. He called in his own little law-enforcement agency, a big dumb hulk called . ..” “Luciano,” one of the listeners supplied. “That’s it. Luciano. The only thing was, I did all the enforcing.” Johnny glanced down complacently at his broad, flat forearms. “You didn’t kill him?”
“Of course not. He’s foraging too now. Along with Judge Latham. I saw him a couple of days ago and”— Johnny winked broadly at the other men—”he’s walking almost normally again.”
There was a ripple of amusement which took in everybody except, Stirling noticed, the man called Paddy. He stared at his brother in disbelief. Two short months in the Stone-Age society of the Be had turned Johnny Considine into a stranger. Could this really be the kid brother he had protected all the way through junior school because his classmates had ribbed him so much about the voice box? Stirling’s eyes instinctively searched for and found the L-shaped scar on Johnny’s throat. It had been shortly after Johnny’s fourth birthday when he had fallen, while carrying a drinking glass, and a transparent spear had gouged its way through his vocal cords. He was wrong, Stirling realized, to think that Johnny had changed, but the new environment was developing latent aspects of his character which would be better kept in the background. This is my big-brother act again, Stirling thought, but family responsibilities must mean something. He remembered, with a stirring of guilt, that neither of them had yet mentioned their mother. Filled with a sudden sense of urgency, Stirling tried for something significant to say, but then became aware of the incongruity of the two of them sorting out their family problems before an audience of strangers.
“Johnny,” he said, “I’ve got things I want to discuss with you, in private.”
“This is private.”
“This is the He’s equivalent of Grand Central station.”
“Things are different up here. I don’t have any secrete from the other members of the Council.”
“Get rid of them, Johnny.”
Johnny’s eyes clouded with something like pain. “There are things you’ll have to learn, Vic, and I think it’s going to be hard on both of us. Come on—I’ll show you around.”
He got up and left the hut with a dismissive wave to the rest of the group. As Stirling, followed him out, he had to stoop to pass through the doorway with its curtain of the same black plastic used on the He for clothing. The night breezes were cool, but not nearly as cold as Stirling had expected at the altitude.
“Greenhouse effect,” Johnny explained as they walked. “There’s a shell field covering the whole productive area of the He. The intensity’s very low—a goose can fly right through it without even blinking—but it’s enough to increase the wavelength of solar radiations coming through, and the heat doesn’t get back out again. Keeps in most of the oxygen all this green stuff gives off, which is a good thing for us too.”
“So you didn’t need the big boots, after all.”
“No. I didn’t need the big boots.”
Stirling took a deep breath. “Johnny, this whole business is a charade. You can’t go on hiding up here, chief of a tribe of dropouts.”
“Why not?”
“Because it’s too fantastic. Normal people don’t live like this. And think of your mother.”
“Oh, brother! Are you scraping the bottom of the barrel!”
“All right,” Stirling said. “That sounded corny, even to me. But what about her?”
“Mother knows I can look after myself and that I’m not the suicidal type. You know, Vic, that’s good, coming from you. You got out just as soon as you were able, and you never took time off to visit her even though you were only a few miles away.”
“I’m not proud of that, but mother doesn’t really need people much.”
“Precisely my point, big brother. So why bring her into it? This is purely between us. How about getting down to the real reason you came after me?”
“Which is … ?”
“Which is that you hated it down there as much as I did. You got your newspaper job and poured your salary into a single apartment because that was the only escape you could visualize. And when I got right out of the whole setup, really escaped from the whole stinking mess down there, it made you sick.
“You want to bring me back because you couldn’t have gone on living in the Compression knowing I was up here. It’s the post-1992 situation all over again on a smaller scale. When the Government set out to brainwash everybody into thinking they liked living like sardines, they ruled that nobody would be allowed to live on the lies because the Compression could only be made bearable if everybody was in it together. No favorites. No bending the law for the rich and the powerful, wasn’t that it, big brother? That’s why you came after me. Admit it.”
Stirling could feel depths which dwarfed the three-mile fall from Heaven opening up under his feet. “You couldn’t be further off the beam, Johnny. You’re my brother. …”
“Half-brother,” Johnny interrupted in a voice which sounded like an electrical discharge in the prosthetic. He turned to face Stirling. “My father was not your father.”
“It makes no difference to me.”
“Victor! While we’re at it, let’s dig down even deeper. Let’s say the one thing which has never been said before.” Stirling suddenly felt tired, defeated. “Let’s get some sleep and talk this over in the morning.”
“You and I,” Johnny said slowly and distinctly. “We never liked each other.”
Stirling was conscious of no pain, no torment, only a feeling of release as deep-seated tensions ebbed away. The psychic orgasm brought him a few moments of cool, blessed sanity. He stared past Johnny towards the night-black fields and the ancient gleams of the cooking fires. He saw them with new eyes. This was … freedom.
“My kid brother has grown up and passed me,” he said finally. “I’ll leave in the morning.”
“I’m sorry,” Johnny replied softly. “Nobody goes back down.”