Free Dancers in the Afterglow by Jack L. Chalker

easily a hundred meters long. Giving off a dull yellow glow that yielded a little light and no heat, it was looped around the spot where they rested and waited, with warnings that anyone who crossed the line would be shot Moira shook her head and tried to wake up from a bad dream. She peered around in the gloomy rope-glow at the misery in the faces of the others, and knew that she must look much the same. It humiliated her; all the worse because she had been reduced to their level, the common people's level, with no way to change things. Even Genji, the little nebbish. She'd told him to bring her some water and he'd told her to get it herself. She felt as if she were sulking, alone, helpless, friendless.
    And she was scared to death.

    The man thought the girl was asleep, and he leaned over and brushed some mud from her forehead and pushed back her hair. She smiled and opened her eyes.
    "I'm sorry," he started, but she cut him off.
    "Don't be silly. I hurt too much to sleep."
    He chuckled. Strange, he thought, chuckling now. The human race seems to adapt to almost anything.
    She had a sudden, quizzical look on her face. "You know—it's funny, but I don't even know your name."
    He smiled. "Doesn't matter. For the record, it's Yuri. Yuri Alban. And you're Azure."
    Her eyebrows went up. "You remembered! Now I feel doubly guilty." She paused for a minute, thinking. "Yuri. That's a nice name." She leaned over and kissed him lightly on the cheek. "I'm glad you were with me through this, Yuri."
    "I'm glad, too," he whispered softly. He leaned back on the grass. Funny, he thought to himself, how these things go. Here we are, torn from the lives and civilization that we know, sitting in the middle of the wilderness in the muck, guarded by creatures of unknown motives — yet this is the most human I've felt in fifteen years. I know I should be crying, like that hysterical man over there, or in shock, or despairing, but I'm not. He looked around at the dim figures nearby.
    The ones with something to lose.
    A whirring, whining sound woke them up. The guards had let them sleep long and late. They were still sore, still tired, and still starving, but it had been a welcome respite.
    The sound came from an enormous flyer, perhaps eighty meters around, wedge-shaped with a command bubble. The figures in the bubble were impossible to make out, but the flyer was Ondinian, a long-haul cargo craft.
    They watched the vehicle as it stirred the grass some fifty meters away, hovering just a few meters above the ground. Hatches opened underneath, and three conveyor belts lowered and touched the ground. Almost immediately, large cartons began offloading. The flyer continued moving slightly forward, leaving the cargo in rows. In just a few minutes perhaps fifteen crates, several extremely large, had been deposited. Then, as suddenly as it appeared, the flyer was gone.

    One of the soldiers came over to them, picking up the light-rope and handing it to another to take in.
    "All right!" he yelled. "Everybody up! Lots of work to be done!"
    "What about food?" somebody grumbled. "Any food in that cargo?"
    The soldier showed no expression, but neither did he seem irritated or taken aback by the question or its tone. "Plenty of food for those who work," he replied. "First you break down the crates. Then we eat."
    They moved off toward the supplies. The boxes were of unfamiliar design, but easy to disassemble without tools. You just pulled a set of handles in each corner and the outer cartons folded neatly back, revealing the close-packed contents: more of those blue loaves—a lot of them.
    After the crates were unlatched the soldiers let them eat. Then the work really began.
    The crates were prefabricated structures that needed only to be fitted and locked together, much like a puzzle. It took only two hours, with the soldiers' instructions, to assemble a squat little building that used an unfolded crate as its floor. A heavy-duty generator of some sort fit