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BORGO PRESS BOOKS BY FRANCIS JARMAN
Culture and Identity (editor)
Encountering the Other (editor)
Girls Will Be Girls: A Play
Intercultural Communication in Action (editor)
Invictus: A Play
Lip Service: A Play
A Star Fell: A Play
White Skin, Dark Skin, Power, Dream: Collected Essays on Literature & Culture
THE GATE OF LEMNOS
FRANCIS JARMAN
COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 2011 by Francis Jarman
Published by Wildside Press LLC
www.wildsidebooks.com
DEDICATION
For Lucy
QUOTATION
“By the pricking of my thumbs,
Something wicked this way comes”
William Shakespeare, Macbeth
CHAPTER ONE
IN CUSTODY
Buzz-Click. The strip lighting went on. Burk was already awake, but the sudden light dazzled him. There must be a reason for switching it on. They had let him sleep—probably for hours—but now they wanted something from him.
Burk stretched, got up, and stretched again. The cell was narrow, much narrower than a single room in any of the living units, but the ceiling was high enough to allow him to stretch comfortably. This wasn’t some punishment cell tucked away under the machinery deck. Those cells weren’t pleasant at all. This one was on a main level, he guessed, between one of the outer gangways and the shell. He’d had time to learn the layout of the ship. He was still in the civilized world! And, sure enough, there was even a small porthole window.
He looked out, without expecting to see anything, perhaps just a blur of starlight. The ship was in slide hyperdrive. Its destination, Lemnos in the Zora System, would still be light-years away, and to reach it they would eventually need to go even faster, putting everyone into transportation pods for a final burst of interstellar high slide. So how did Burk know that the ship was only moving at slide, at normal cruising speed? Because if it wasn’t, he would have fragmented into particles long ago. A very messy business, that.
Two low-ranking Guardians had come for him, both of them women, which was normal enough when it was a serious matter. He confirmed his name and number to them. They had asked him to step outside his living unit, and then some comedian had hit him from behind with a sedative taser. Was that last night? Or this morning? On a space flight, concepts like that didn’t mean very much. Hours ago, certainly. The bastards! Why use a taser on him? He wouldn’t have put up a fight—though in retrospect (feeling the soreness) he would have liked to—because there wouldn’t have been any point. Where do you run to, on a space transporter in mid-flight? Where do you hide? And why should he need to hide anyway? He wasn’t aware of having broken any serious regulations. A few recreational misdemeanors. Nothing that he thought they needed to know about.
With a brief whirring sound the door to the cell slid open. A Guardian stood silhouetted against the gangway, a taser of some kind in one hand and a small tray of food in the other. She was quite young, but ugly, slab-faced and expressionless. With a twist of her neck she motioned to Burk to step back. Without taking her eyes off him, she placed the tray down on the sleeping ledge.
Even if Burk hadn’t seen the single red slash on her shoulder, he would have known from the coarseness of the dark green uniform and her slovenly manner and movements that she was only a Grade I—and she would likely never be anything more than that. Hers would be a life of crude, brutal service, yet also of privilege. She would never have her food resources withheld, she would never be triaged. For just a second the image of Milliya flashed through his mind: even younger, that same uniform, also Grade I, though there the resemblance ended. He repressed the thought. Milliya…it was not to be. It was painful to think of her.
Slabface went out, the door whirred shut, and Burk turned to the food tray. They were standard AdPop rations, neither better nor worse than what he had been eating and drinking since the ship left Terra. It wasn’t a diet that you’d want to recommend to your dearest friends. Or serve at a party. But you got the food resources that your classification entitled you to, which was fair enough. That was the way things were. Burk was classified as Additional (not even as Useful) Population, AdPop for short, and he was certainly not a Guardian. When food resources were limited (as they frequently were), the AdPops wouldn’t starve, but they couldn’t expect to do much by way of feasting.
But something was wrong here. He counted the little bars and the tablets of concentrate. They had given him barely half of what he should be getting. Had they already reclassified him, then? Perhaps he was now a SurPop, one of those convict laborers, prisoners, delinquents, addicts and social inadequates who made up the lowest rung, the Surplus Population. Some people said it would have been more honest and more realistic to call them “Superfluous”. The proposal to start triaging them systematically, the repeat offenders at least, came up year after year in Parliament. So far it had always been voted down. Did SurPops routinely get less of the same food resources that the AdPops received? Or did they perhaps get the same quantity, but poorer quality stuff?
He didn’t know. The strata of society weren’t encouraged to mix more than was necessary—his relationship with Milliya, brief as it had been, had been very discreet—and SurPops were always trouble, there was no denying that. Burk didn’t like them, he kept away from them, and he didn’t know much about their official rations. Their preferred (though unofficial) diet was centered on what used to be called “forbidden substances”, before the Government started mass-producing the stuff. In any case, on a space flight the arrangements would likely be different.
Were there any SurPops on board? Burk hadn’t actually seen any. Before the Guardians had come for him, his job had taken him all round the ship and he had had plenty of contact with the crew and the passengers. The Starstretcher was a comfortable people transporter, of fairly new design. It had the ability to go into high slide for quite long bursts, though that did mean putting almost everyone into transportation pods, which was expensive. Lemnos needed quality settlers, though, and the Starstretcher was now bringing several thousand of them. SurPops (if they were needed at all—did Lemnos have mines or quarries, for instance? Or was there a convict settlement there?) could be shipped out cheaply on a non-priority freighter, some ore- or coal-transporter that never went any faster than good old S-mode, standard slide. There was no special hurry to get them anywhere. Making the SurPops spend a couple of years trundling through space in some discomfort and with no access to their precious “substances” could even have been designed as part of their punishment.
Burk didn’t want to be a SurPop, no sirree, anywhere in the Terran Empire.
He nibbled at the food resources, without appetite or enthusiasm. The wrapper on the bar said “DELICIO EXTRA”. Oh dear, they must be joking! Still, who knew when he might next get an even halfway decent meal? And he would need his strength. He didn’t know what they wanted from him, or why the violence, but when the Guardians came for you like that, one thing was sure: it was hardly going to be a lot of fun
