28.
 The innkeeper was Girex, his wife Giru. They were quiet, kind people whose only child was severely disabled in a special clinic on their home planet. They welcomed a little gaxba, 'so-so money,' on the side to send home. Each time they did, it meant their child could receive special medicine and be released home a time with a nurse. Jory did not ask—he did not want to pry. What if they sold him back to the Oba road police for a higher price after they finished receiving payments from the unknown parties in Kusi-O? He kept an eye out for treachery, but they must be good actors indeed if they meant to betray him. No, as long as he was in their inn, he could say they harbored him, and they would be delivered to the Obayyo officials in wooden stocks, ready for the chopping block.
He stayed in what once had been a giant chimney. His bed and a few items of furniture were on a sandy floor. The odor of whatever had burned here, kjirs ago, still clung faintly to the walls like a decaying cheese. The walls appeared dry, except for traces of ubiquitous Oba fungi. Jory recognized a dozen kinds amid cracks in the white plaster, on blunt rock surfaces where plaster had fallen off, and in the interstices where heavy structural beams poked through. Where the thick, low wooden door now hung, which Girex and Giru had to bow to walk through, had once been a steel furnace door.
As the fire in his gut healed, Jory became aware of the source of what, in his sickness, he had thought of as fire surrounding him with pain: Light. The light at the bottom of the chimney had a bluish cast. When he peered upward in fascination, the chimney's top disappeared into what looked like a vortex of blue-white light.
"We on Fril enjoy direct sunlight," Girex told Jory one afternoon. Girex was bigger than his wife, and more powerfully built, but just as gentle. Both seemed to have a faint deviousness about them that made Jory wonder if it was an invention of his mind, or a property of persons who looked like snakes. But it was open, not hidden, and maybe it was just their sense of shame and guilt about deceiving the authorities and risking death for a sum of money.
Girex helped Jory climb up within the old chimney. A wide, sturdy ladder stretched some forty feet upward. Jory climbed ahead, while Girex followed, coaxing him on. "Hold on tight," he admonished.
"Ah!" Jory gasped with pain and averted his face. The blue-white light burned his eyes like a searing sun.
"You'll have to go slowly," Girex said, "Your eyes were made to enjoy the beautiful light."
Yes, Jory thought bitterly, not to be enslaved by people who live in perpetual night. There was an expression on Oba: 'Blind as a crx,' a kind of fungus-eating mole. Shurians were just as likely to say "blind as a human."
"You will become accustomed to the beautiful light," Girex said as they climbed back down. "There are spy holes up there where you can look without being seen. They will be your only glimpse of this place before you leave for deep space."
"Deep space," Jory said slowly. "I have heard that ships travel from star to star."
Girex waved his arm contemptuously. "It is a dark age on the other side of the wall. Ships do not travel to stars—they would burn up. They travel to moons, like Shur, or planets, like Fril. You will learn all these things soon enough."
"So who has paid you for me, and what do they want from me?"
Girex raised his hands, empty. "I don't know. I don't care. I think you are different from the other humans. They say you have horns." He gingerly reached for one of Jory's temples. "Are they broken off?"
"I have never had horns," Jory said. "This is something else." The other humans had laughed at him and shied away from him because of them. Now even this snake was acting as if there were something wrong with him. He brushed Girex's hand away.
"It must be something expensive else," Girex said with lewd nerviness.
Jory would soon learn the source of Girex's strange behavior. In the meantime, he ate well. He exercised as best he could to build up his strength— the heavy poison had left him strangely weak for a young man, but he felt his energy rebounding. Every few hours, he practiced climbing up the ladder and tried to accustom himself to the brightness outside.
Girex watched him and laughed. "That's not even real daylight. Wait until you step onto a real planet with two or three suns in a white sky."
The intense light in Kusi-O was caused by an imported power unit that sat in the center of the mile-diameter circle wall. Girex explained that the hydrogen powered helium chewer, as he called it, glowed through a thick, milky wall of glass two palms thick. Still there was enough energy left to pipe light through glass cables, out to the wall on all sides, up the wall, where it shone down from hundreds of spotlights. The substitute sunlight was evenly distributed and could burn for ages.
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Copyright © 2018 by Jean-Thomas Cullen, Clocktower Books. All Rights Reserved.
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