Although the building Sheryl lived in was not very old, it was in Boston. Therefore it was preserved, though centuries past its prime. It looked out on the sort of backyard Boston tenements had had since the early days of electricity, rectangular plots, each with its postage-stamp square of grass and its scattered, sickly shrubs and its ailanthus tree. And, across the garden, ancient Irishtown flats, also preserved. "Historical landmarks," they were called.
They were not beautiful. But Jen Babylon sighed, wiped his glasses and replaced them to stare at the buildings with longing. The roof of the nearest of them was no more than a meter from the little balcony outside the apartment window. An easy jump . . .
An impossible jump. Impossible, because every square centimeter of that balcony was occupied. The entire floor surface was filled with crabs, small ones, torpid in the Boston sun—such as the Boston sun was. But such as it was they seemed to need it. They spent every sunlit hour soaking up radiation. When the shadows shifted to darken the little balcony they would scratch and clatter their way back into the already crowded apartments to cluster around the electric heaters that were kept going day and night. Babylon found himself sweating and begged relief of one of the Kooks, without result. The gaunt old lady he addressed merely told him—very sweetly!—that this small discomfort was a tiny price to pay in die service of the Savior and Destroyer.
He tried again with Sheryl, when she came back into the apartment with one of those loads of miscellaneous trash, and she listened, vaguely sympathetic, but gave him the same patient answer. "But why?" he demanded. "Don't we smell bad enough already without making us sweat?"
She laughed sweetly. "It's for our brothers and sisters, the Lambs of the Maid," she explained, nodding lovingly toward the nearest of the crystal crabs. "They have to have thermal radiation to survive. That's why they were sent first to the tropics, where they do really well—here not so well," she said sadly. But then brightened. "But look, hon! I know you don't like our food, so I got you a special treat!" And she pulled out of the shopping sack a six-pack of peanut butter and cheese crackers.
He turned away—but then reconsidered and took it.
He could not even use the shower for relief, for the bathtubs were filled with the dirty, debris-strewn water he was forbidden to disturb. So he stared longingly out of the window most of the time, and pondered schemes. When all the crabs came inside for warmth . . . When, somehow, they forgot to lock the windows one time . . . When everyone was asleep at once . . .
But there were no such times.
Apart from that, he was fed when he needed it, allowed to talk to the human Kooks when he was inoffensive in what he said, given as much room to fall down in as anyone else . . . until the time when Sheryl answered a coded knock at the door of the smaller apartment, murmured briefly to someone inside, and then came to his window to call him. "Jen, hon! Come and see! We've got company!"
As he started to turn he hesitated, his eyes fixed on the rooftop next door.
A moment later he said, as calmly as he could with his heart thundering in his ears, "All right, Sheryl, I'm coming." And he resolutely did not look toward the window again, though it took all his strength to keep from smashing it open to shout at the figure he had barely glimpsed, peeping from behind a pigeon roost, with its fingers to its lips.
It had looked very much like Ben Pertin.
Sheryl's surprise was the Crystal Maid herself, the same one Babylon had seen on the beach at Moorea, and she was not alone.
She laid her hand on the shoulder of the giant who entered with her and spoke in slow, chiming tones, which sounded like snippets from an artificially generated speech program. "This man is to be . . . treated ... as a full and equal . . . comrade among us." She turned her diamond eyes on Babylon. "Why is this . . . person . . . here?" she demanded.
Sheryl apologized quickly, "He came looking for me, and I didn't know what else to do with him. He can't get away."
The Maid seemed to meditate for a moment. "I . . . know this person," she announced. She stared at him for a moment longer, then dismissed him. "He may remain. Now ... I wish to see . . . the Lambs!"
Babylon's eyes were studying the man who had come in with her. He was tall, bronzed, with wide shoulders; he towered over everyone else in the room, and Babylon recognized him. Of course! He had seen that bronzed face on the news stereo often enough, had even seen him in person, with the other convicts at the Tachyon Base. Te'ehala Tupaia! The mad revolutionary who had been captured while he was still in Polynesia!
Tupaia seemed to have come down in the world, for now he appeared to be a slave to the Crystal Maid. He came in burdened with shopping bags obviously strained to capacity. They proved to be full not of food but of sand, salt, pieces of scrap metal. A couple of the largest crabs reared up and took them from him, and Tupaia turned to look contemptuously at his surroundings and at Babylon.
The entrance of the Maid had produced a great stir, with all the humans abasing themselves to her and even the crabs seeming to genuflect briefly before taking the materials from Tupaia and clattering off to the bathrooms with them. When the Maid had completed her inspection, she summoned all the human Kooks to one room and closed the door, leaving Babylon with Tupaia and two great guardian crabs. The Polynesian paid no attention to them. He turned away from Babylon and found himself a plate of the greasy stew the occupants of the apartment had been preparing—lentils and salt pork, with what seemed to be turnip greens floating in it—and began to devour it.
Babylon approached him. "They haven't been feeding you much, have they?" he offered, staring at the gaunt cheeks.
The giant glowered at him for a moment without answering, but finally he shrugged and nodded, his mouth full. When he had stuffed a full kilo of the mess down his huge throat he was even willing to talk. Not out of friendship, surely; mostly out of disdain. Only when Babylon asked about the look he had intercepted in the Tachyon Base did he pause to laugh. "It is true," the giant said contemptuously. "I was not as the others! I am Te'ehala Tupaia, paramount king-warrior of the forces of Polynisie-libre, and not a common convict." Evidently, Babylon discovered as the giant boasted on, Tupaia's distant owner had either died or lost interest, and the slave had found himself free. But only relatively free. If he was not dominated by the master within his mind, he had remained a prisoner all the same—until in the confusion of the Kook demonstration at his hearing he had managed to break free. Since then he and the Crystal Maid had been running strange errands, skulking and hiding by night. The Maid, said Tupaia, for the first time subdued, seemed to have much manna.
Babylon coughed and ventured, "But do you, ah, believe in all this stuff about Cuckoo the Savior and Destroyer?"
Tupaia grimaced. "I do not invest belief in the doings of whiteskins," he said, and would say no more.
The conference in the bedroom was over, and Sheryl came out to supervise what the crabs were doing. Babylon followed, peering over her shoulder, and at last the purpose of those stagnating pools of trash and water in the bathtubs became clear. The crabs, with help from some of the Kooks, patiently fished out all the larger, undissolved bits of debris. Then, gently and carefully, they sieved out of the murky stew what seemed to be thousands of tiny new crabs! The larger ones carried the infants to the balcony and placed them in the sunlight, then refilled the tubs with the litter of rock and sand and metal and ran water to cover them.
Then, lining up like a students' queue at the registrar's office, the crabs did the strangest thing of all. One by one the largest ones came to Sheryl, who patiently began stroking their undersides—like a milkmaid, Babylon thought— catching in a bowl a fine rain of diamond dust from each. When she had finished her chore she packed some of the dust into little plastic bags and handed them to Tupaia, who silently stowed them away in the shabby shopping bags. The rest she sifted meticulously into the tubs. Then she rose from the side of the tub, sighing as she stretched her cramped leg muscles, and caught sight of Babylon gawking incredulously. "Oh, Jen, isn't it wonderful?" she said, glowing. "In just a few days there will be thousands of others to distribute around the city!"