Free The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner Page B

it wasn’t any good learning from your fist mistake.”
    “I do know what you mean,” Kazan said. He leaned his elbows on his knees. “Is that why you signed on to work on Vashti?”
    “Well—somewhat. But there was the man I was living with, too—the man who taught me to read. He thought he was going to live off me, and I didn’t.”
    Kazan nodded. He didn’t need details.
    “And you?” Clary said.
    “Why did I join the line to sign on, you mean? Oh, mostly I went because that was where people from the Dyasthala were going. I had this crazy notion out of fear. I was going back into the Dyasthala because people have always gone there to hide, and I guess I hoped in the back of my mind that the devil couldn’t trace me there. Same reason took me out to the spaceport with the rest. Maybe the devil couldn’t follow me off the planet. But that was a crazy hope, of course.”
    Something in his tone alerted Clary. She said sharply, “What do you mean?”
    “When the conjurer called up the devil inside his ring,” Kazan said slowly, “the first thing the devil said was ‘What world is this?’ And the conjurer said something in reply. I thought it was a charm to control the devil. But I heard it pretty clearly, it turned out, and the doctor was able to make me remember it even though I didn’t understand it. He recorded it and played it to me, and said that it was a set of stellar co-ordinates. Like an address, he said. The conjurer was actually telling the devil what world he had come to and where it lay in the galaxy.”
    He shivered; she felt it all up the arm she had laid across his shoulders.
    “If you want to look at it that way,” she said, “it’s a pretty poor devil that has to be told where it’s come to. I think you’re right in hoping that it can’t follow you to Vashti. How’s it to know where you’ve gone?”
    He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand,” he said in a hopeless voice. “I was pledged for a year and a day, and only a couple of months have gone by. The problem isn’t: how would it know where I’ve gone? It’s how am I to know what it meant by service, and how do I know that I’m not already serving it by going to Vashti? Maybe it wanted me on Vashti!”
    When Clary could offer no answer, he got to his feet. A crooked smile lit his face, which reassured her a little. He said, “Of course, I know the only thing to do is to wait and see. And a year and a day isn’t long anyway. Whatever the doctor did for me, he at least seems to have given me the guts to sweat it out. And you’re helping me too, you know.”
    Clary met his eyes steadily. After a moment she said, “I’m very glad. I really am very glad indeed.”

X

    For Kazan, that was to be born—into this curious self-contained traveling world which was the ship, the thing by definition going somewhere and yet as it vibrated through the dark spaces carrying ignorance within itself, in the skulls of the travelers. The ship was enclosed. It was still, so far as anyone aboard could tell; even the engineers who controlled it never directly perceived its motion, but read dials emotionlessly. To Kazan this was a parable of himself. A journey undertaken in a womb, like a mother bearing her foetus unknowing, beginning at the familiar Berak spaceport and ending soon on Vashti.
    A word. A label without an object. A scrap of tacky paper clinging to the fingers against attempts to throw it away.
    Here, there had to be the start of an understanding of himself. To accept was not enough if he had to wrestle with the central problem: is Kazan Kazan or is he a black devil? They had said, “He is highly intelligent.” He began now to realize what the word meant, because it applied itself to his worries. It wasn’t the Dyasthala comment: “He’s sharp.” That was a business of assessing risk, of knowing how best to organize a pattern of action centered on a clothman’s store, or a drunken spaceman, so that it ended with