Dennis swung his right leg to bring it up, but just then he felt his hold begin to slip. He had forgotten the coating of sled oil still on his right hand. His grip was too slick to hold, and he fell to the ground with a painful thump.

Much as he would have liked to have lain there groaning for a little while, there just wasn't time. Shakily, he got up for another try.

Then he heard footsteps behind him.

He turned and saw Gil'm the Guard enter the alley mouth about ten meters away, grinning happily and holding his weapon high. The halberd blade gleamed menacingly.

Dennis noted that Gil'm wasn't using his left hand at all and a.s.sumed it must still be coated with the sled oil. The stuff was insidious.

Dennis popped the flap of his holster and drew his needler. He pointed it at the guard. "All right," he said, "hold it right there. I don't want to have to hurt you, Gil'm."

The soldier kept coming, grinning happily in antic.i.p.ation, apparently, of slicing Dennis in twain.

Dennis frowned. Even if no one here had ever seen a hand weapon like the needler before, his own self-a.s.surance at least should have given the fellow pause.

Perhaps Gil'm was unimaginative.

"I don't think you know what you're facing here," he told the guard.

Gil'm came on, holding his weapon high with one hand. Dennis decided he had no choice but to play out his bluff. He felt a brief panic as his oiled thumb slipped over the safety lever twice. Then it clicked.

He took aim with the needler and fired.

There was a staccato sound, and several things happened all at once.

The polished wood of the halberd's handle split into fragments as a stream of high-velocity metal slivers tore into the elevated weapon.

Gil'm ducked aside as the glistening blade fell. The guard stared dully at the severed stump of his weapon.

But Dennis couldn't hold on as the recoil kicked the needler out of his slippery right hand. It bounced off his chest, then went rattling along the ground in front of him.

He and Gil'm stood in a momentary tableau, both of them suddenly disarmed. The guard's face was blank and the whites of his eyes showed. He didn't move.

Dennis started to edge forward, hoping the fellow's daze would last long enough for him to retrieve his weapon. The needler had fetched up against the fallen halberd blade, midway between him and the giant.

Dennis was reaching for it when two more soldiers in high bearskin hats appeared in the alley mouth. They shouted in surprise.

Dennis grabbed the needler and raised it. But in that telescoped moment he found that he just couldn't bring himself to kill. It was a flaw in his personality, he realized, but there was nothing he could do about it.

He turned to run but only got a dozen paces before the b.u.t.t of a thrown knife struck him on the side of the head, knocking him forward into the dark shadows.

5 "'ere, now. Easy do it. Ye'll have a bruise like a searchlight in a day or so! A real shiner it'll be!"

The voice came from somewhere nearby. Bony fingers held his arm as Dennis sat up awkwardly, his head athrob.

"Yep, a real shiner. Practice it good an' you'll be able to use it to see in th' dark with!" The voice cackled in generous self-appreciation.

Dennis could barely focus on the person. He tried to rub his eyes and almost fainted when he touched the bruise on the left side of his face.

Blearily, he saw an elderly man who grinned back at him with only half a mouth of teeth. Dennis nearly fell over sideways in a wave of dizziness, but the old fellow caught him.

"I said easy there, didn't I? Give it a minute an the worl' will look a lot better. Here, drink some o' this."

Dennis shook his head, then coughed and choked as his would-be nurse grabbed his hair and poured a slug of tepid liquid into his mouth. The stuff tasted vile, but Dennis grabbed the rough mug in both his own hands and gulped greedily until it was taken away.

"Tha's enough for now. You just sit an' get yer senses back. You don't gotta start workin' 'til second day, not when they bring you in lumped like this." The man arranged a rough pillow behind his head.

"My name is Dennis." His voice came out a barely audible croak.

"What is this place?"

"I'm Teth, an' you're in jail, punky. Don' you recognize a jail when you see one?"

Dennis looked left and right, able at last to focus his eyes. His bed was part of a long row of rude cots, sheltered by an overhanging wooden canopy. A wattle and daub wall behind him supported the roof. Beyond the open front of the shed was a large courtyard, hemmed in by a tall wooden palisade.

On the right stood a far more impressive wall, one that gleamed seamlessly in the bright sunshine. It was the lowest and widest in a series of tiers that extended up a dozen stories or more. In the center of the shining wall was a small gatehouse. Two bored guards lounged on benches there.

Men in the courtyard, presumably his fellow prisoners, moved about at tasks Dennis couldn't identify.

"What kind of work are you talking about?" Dennis asked. He felt a little giddy, with a trace of that queer detachment from reality that had come over him before. "Do you make personalized license plates here?"

He didn't care when the old man looked at him funny.

"They work us hard, but we don' make nothin'. We're mostly lower- cla.s.s riffraff in here-vagrants an' such. Most of us wouldn' know how to make anythin'.

"O' course, there's some in here for gettin' in trouble with th guilds.

An' others who served the old Duke long afore Kremer's father moved into these parts an' took over. Some o' them might know a little about makin' things, I suppose. . . ."

Dennis shook his head. Teth and he didn't seem to be talking on the same wavelength at all. Or perhaps he just wasn't hearing the fellow right. His head hurt, and he was all confused.

"We grow some of our own food," the old man went on. "I take care of new gremmies like you. But mostly we practice for the Baron. How else would we earn our keep?"

There was that word, again. . .practice. Dennis was getting sick of it.

He got a gnawing sensation whenever he heard it, as if his subconscious were trying to tell him something it had already figured out. Something another part of him was just as frantically rejecting.

With some difficulty he sat up and swung his feet over the side of the cot.

"Here, now! You shouldn' do that for a few hours yet. You lie back down!"

Dennis shook his head. "No! I've had it!" He turned to the old man, who looked back with plain concern. "I'm finished being patient with this crazy planet of yours, do you hear? I want to know what's going on, now! Right now!"

"Easy," Teth began. Then he squawked as Dennis grabbed his shirtfront and pulled him forward. Their faces were inches apart.

"Let's get down to basics," Dennis whispered through gritted teeth.

"This shirt, for instance. Where did you get it?"

Teth blinked as if he were in the grip of a lunatic. "It's bran' new.

They giv' it to me to break in! Wearin' it's one of my jobs!"

Dennis clutched the shirt tighter. "This? New? It's hardly more than a rag! The weave is so coa.r.s.e it's about to fall apart!"

The old man gulped and nodded. "So?"

Dennis s.n.a.t.c.hed at a spot of color at the fellow's waist. He pulled free a square of filmy, opalescent fabric. It bore delicate patterns and had the feel of fine silk.

"Hey! Tha's mine!"

Dennis shook the beautiful cloth under Tern's nose. "They dress you in rags and let you keep something like this?"

"Yeah! They let us keep some of our personal stuff, so it won't go bad wi'out us workin' on 'it! They may be mean, but they're not that mean!"

"And this piece isn't new, I suppose." The kerchief looked fresh from some expensive shop.

"Palmi no!" Teth looked shocked. "It's been in my family five generations!" he protested proudly. "An' we been using it nonstop all that time! I look at it an' blow my nose in it lots of times every day!"

It was such an unusual protestation that Dennis's grip slackened.

Teth slid to the floor, staring at him.

Shaking his head numbly, Dennis stood up and stumbled outside, blinking against the brightness. He walked unevenly past knots of laboring men-all dressed in prisoners' garb- until he reached a point where the outer palisade came into contact with the glistening wall of the castle.

With his left hand he touched the rough tree trunks, crudely trimmed and mud-grouted, which comprised the palisade. With his right hand he stroked the castle wall, a slick, metal-hard surface that shone translucently like a ma.s.sive, light-brown, semiprecious stone. .

.or like the polished trunk of a mammoth petrified tree.

He heard someone approach from behind. He glanced back and saw it was Teth, now accompanied by two more prisoners, who looked over the newcomer curiously.

"When was the war?" Dennis asked softly without turning around.

They looked at each other. A tall, stout man answered, "Uh, what war you talkin' about, Grem? There's lots of 'em, all the time. The one when th' Baron's dad kicked out the old Duke? Or this trouble Kremer's havin' with the King. . . ?"

Dennis turned and shouted, "The Big War, you idiots! The one that destroyed your ancestors! The one that threw you back to living off the dregs of your forefathers. . . their self-lubricating roads. . . their indestructible handkerchiefs!"

He brought a hand to his throbbing head as a dizzy spell struck. The others whispered to each other.

Finally a short, dark man with a very black beard shrugged and said, "Don't know what you're talkin' about, man. We've got it better'n our ancestors ever had it. An' our grandchildren'll have it better'n us.

That's called progress. Ain't you heard of progress? You from someplace that has ancestor worship, or somethin' backward like that?"

He looked genuinely interested. Dennis let out a faint moan of despair and stumbled on, followed by a growing entourage.

He pa.s.sed prisoners working in a vegetable garden. The neat rows of green seedlings seemed normal enough. But the implements the gardeners used were of the flint and tree-branch variety he had seen at Tomosh Sigel's house. He pointed to the rakes and hoes.

"Those tools are new, right?" he demanded of Teth.

The old man shrugged.

"Just as I thought! Anything new is crude and, barely better than sticks and stones, while the rich get to h.o.a.rd all the best remnants of your ancestors' ancient-"

"Uh," the small, dark man interrupted, "these tools are for the rich, Gremmie."

Dennis s.n.a.t.c.hed a flintheaded hoe out of the hands of one of the nearby farmers and waved it under the short fellow's nose. "These?

For the rich? In an obviously hierarchical society like yours? These tools are crude, barbaric, inefficient, clumsy-"

The fat gardener he had taken the tool from protested, "Well, I'm doin' my best! I just got started on it, fer heaven's sake! It'll get better!

Won't it, guys?" He snuffled. The others muttered in agreement, apparently coming to the conclusion that Dennis was somewhat of a bully.

Dennis blinked at the apparent non sequitur. He hadn't said anything about the farmer at all. Why did he take it personally?

He looked about for another example-anything else to get through to these people. He turned and spotted a group of men at the far end of the courtyard. They were not dressed in crude homespun. Instead they wore finery of the most brilliant and eye-pleasing shades. Their clothing shimmered in the afternoon light.

These men were engaged in a series of mock fencing bouts using wooden dowels instead of swords. A few guards lounged about, watching them.

Dennis had no idea why these aristocrats and their guards were here in the prison yard, but he seized the opportunity. "There!" he said, pointing. "Those clothes those men are wearing are old, aren't they?"

Although it was now less friendly, the crowd nodded in agreement.

"They were made by your ancestors, then, right?"

The small, dark man shrugged. "I suppose you could say so. So what? It doesn't matter who makes somethin'. It's whether you keep it up that counts!"

Were these people blind to history? Had the holocaust that destroyed the marvelous old science of this world so traumatized them that they shied away from the truth? He walked purposefully over to where the dandies fenced by the wall. A bored guard looked up lazily, then returned to his nap.

Dennis had quite lost his head by now. He shouted at the prisoners who had followed him. "You don't deny that aristocrats get the best, and coincidentally the oldest, of everything?"

"Well, sure. . ."

"And these aristocrats are wearing only old things. Right?"

The crowd erupted in laughter. Even some of those in the bright clothes stopped their dour mock swordfights and smiled. Old Teth gave Dennis a gap-toothed grin. "They's not rich people, Denniz.

They's poor prisoners like us. They's just built like some of the Baron's cronies. 'If you can wear a rich man's clothes, you will wear a rich man's clothes, whether you want to or not!'" It sounded like an aphorism.

Dennis shook his head. His subconscious was spinning and seemed to be trying to tell him something.

"Imprisoned for being 'built just like' the Baron. . . that's what Tomosh Sigel's aunt said happened to the kid's dad. . .." Someone nearby gasped aloud, but Dennis continued talking to himself, faster and faster.

"The rich force the poor to wear their gaudy clothes for them, day in, day out. . . but that doesn't fray the clothes, wearing them out.

Instead . . ."

Someone was talking urgently nearby, but Dennis's mind was completely full. He wandered aimlessly, paying no attention to where he was going. Prisoners made way for him, as men do for the sainted or the mad.