Chapter 7: The Underground Economy
The bed was nothing special. A cot with a lockable cabinet underneath it, in a square chamber—maybe four meters across—that appeared to be hewn directly out of the basalt bedrock. Frozen stone foam and drill-bit chatter marks gave the walls a ghastly and uneven appearance, but at least the air was clean and dry enough that the slime didn’t grow in there.
Five other cots populated room. The ceiling was low—barely two meters—and the floor was covered with a red and tan rug filled with geometric patterns that looked like they might have been photographed through a microscope. Ern had never seen anything like it before. It felt alien, but oddly reassuring. Was it because it marked this place as belonging to an entirely different world than the one he was hiding from? Or was it something else? He couldn’t say. But it did feel comfortable.
His pack—which he’d been allowed to retrieve—and helmet and clothes went into the locker, Phil took him through a maze of passages and into a little closet, where Ern was assigned a mop and told to mop all the floors in the complex, except for those behind the large circular hatch beside the boss-man’s office.
“We’ll get to that later,” Phil said.
It was hard work. Harder than pressure washing the slime off the sidewalk. By the time he got done with the section of hall leading from his bedroom to the main “boiler room” (that was what Phil called the nerve center where everyone was bustling about) he felt as if his entire center was yawning open to swallow the world.
He tried to find Phil to ask about lunch, but Phil wasn’t around. The people working in the “boiler room” either wouldn’t speak to him or didn’t understand what he was saying. He didn’t have money to go out and buy something, so he did the only thing he could think of to do: he kept working. He felt his patience stretching like a rubber band on a sprocket.
Three rooms later, a handful of other boys walked across his newly mopped floor heading for a room he hadn’t been in yet. When they opened the door, he was greeted with the smell of eggs.
He dropped his mop where he stood and followed them. Through the door he found a small caféteria, with a handful of other workers lined up at a serving counter with trays. He joined the end of the queue and was rewarded with a spoonful of a gray-brown slop he didn’t recognize.
It tasted good, though. Better than anything he’d tasted in a while, actually. Of course, as hungry as he was, he’d have considered cellophane a delicacy.
The other kids didn’t seem to be interested in talking to him. He took his food at a table off to the side, and listened. They seemed to be speaking his language, but used so many words that he’d never heard before that he couldn’t follow what they were saying, and quickly gave up.
The rest of the day wiped away under the mop. When quitting time arrived, the boiler room emptied so he could finally mop that floor without everyone treading across it. By the time his head hit his cot, he couldn’t remember anything in the universe except the aching, sloshing, agonizing pendulum swing of the wet string on stone.
He’d gone to sleep in an empty room, and he woke up in one. The other cots had blankets on them—his own did not. Last night he hadn’t even thought about it. This morning he was cold and sore and his clothes were sticking to him where he’d sweat into them. He wondered if he should have taken some of the other bedding for himself. Then he resolved to do it tonight if the room remained unoccupied.
His stomach was as empty as his room, but the caféteria wasn’t open. He still didn’t have any money to get himself food in the outside world. He set off in search of Phil, who showed him to a white-tiled cube-shaped room lined on one side with floor-to-ceiling laundry machines opposite large rolling carts and built-in bins all overflowing with dirty linens of one sort or another.
Phil wanted all of them done before he quit for the day.
“You’re paying me twenty a day to clean?” Ern asked.
Phil just chuckled. Yesterday that chuckle had sounded friendly. This morning, it made him angry. He balled his hands into fists, but managed to keep a lid on himself until Phil left the room, whereupon he attacked the piles of laundry with as much violence as he could muster.
Once he calmed down, he started feeding the piles into the washing machines, trying his best to follow the printed directions—they were bigger than what Mom had at home, and didn’t have any adaptive AI at all. Probably, like everything at school, they were made dumb so the acid in the Venusian air wouldn’t ruin them before their time.
It took a couple tries, and a lot of quiet swearing, before he managed to get it working right. He was so hungry he couldn’t think straight, and when the machines were running he was so bored he found himself doing jumping jacks and floor stretches just to keep himself from going crazy inside his little prison of a workspace.
The buzzers sounded. The first loads came out smelling fresh and bright. He piled them in an empty bin and started another load.
Eventually, the only way to escape the hunger was to sleep in the clean laundry.
When the buzzer rang, he realized that there wasn’t going to be enough room to pile all the finished laundry. He was going to have to find something else to do with it.
There were cubbies beneath a long flat table along the wall opposite the door. They were marked “uniforms,” “sheets,” “socks,” “shirts.” So he took the load, dumped it onto the table, and started folding it. The sheets and socks were easiest to figure out. The uniforms and shirts took almost a full laundry cycle to figure out. But eventually he did, and they stacked nicely in their cubby.
Over the next several hours he established his rhythm:
Start a load. Fold most of it. Sleep on what was left. Wake up. Repeat the cycle.
Once the cubbies filled up he made piles on the folding bench. When the bench had no more room, he transferred the clothes to the emptied rolling bins, keeping the sheets apart from the socks apart from the uniforms apart from the shirts.
Three loads in he realized he could throw his own clothes in and get them clean. Since nobody had bothered him, he didn’t figure anyone would notice, so he stripped to the skin and ran them through.
By the time hunger forced him into his clothes and out to the cafeteria, he discovered that he’d missed lunch, and that today was the cook’s night off, so there would be no dinner. Left with little choice, Ern scrounged around until he found a clean glass and a water fountain, and drank himself nearly sick trying to stave off his hunger.
Then he went looking for Phil, but Phil was nowhere to be found. Neither was boss-man French. And still none of the other workers would talk to him. So he returned to his laundering, sleeping between buzzers, folding when he woke up, making sure to sleep on the freshest warmest clothes, because they at least helped him feel less hungry somehow.
By the time he stuffed the last folded uniform into its pile in the cubby, the offices were empty again. He stumbled through the maze of corridors back to the boiler room, hoping to find Phil, or the boss, but there was nobody around. The caféteria was empty. His room was empty.
He laid down on his cot. He closed his eyes.
But sleep didn’t come. It wouldn’t come. No matter what he did to calm himself down—and he tried everything he knew—his stomach was screaming so loudly he couldn’t sleep.
After what felt like a few cores, he opened up his under-bed locker and found his stash of electrolyte bottles. He drank four of them, and would have drunk more if he wasn’t afraid it would make him throw up.
Then, with a full belly and at least a few calories to keep him from dying, he managed, slowly, to drop off to sleep.
SOMETIME IN THE NIGHT, Ern wrested himself from a dream of his left arm being torn off. He turned over in his cot so that his back was to the room, stretched his right arm over his head, and rested his head on it since he didn’t have a pillow. He took a soft breath and let himself drift back off to...
Fomp.
Ern’s breath caught in his throat.
Scuff
Just the merest whisper of a scuff, too.
Someone was moving in his room.
It was pitch dark. There were no windows in this underground world that might admit the dim glow of the city’s haze. Whoever it was couldn’t see him.
If he could just stay still...
Fomp.