Empire of Two Worlds

by Barrington J. Bayley

Genres: Science Fiction; Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Military Sci-Fi

Synopsis

"In the huge termite-hills of cities that dotted the dead world of Killibol it seemed that nothing could ever change. Each city was enclosed and self-sustaining, in a stasis fixed by the one reality of power: the protein tanks in which organic nutrients could be processed to provide food. But gang-leader Becmath was a man with a vision: to build an empire for himself without breaking this stasis. His lieutenant Klein recognised Becmath's genius and stayed faithful to him even when they were forced to travel Killibol's arid surface in a desperate search for the lost gateway to Earth. He stayed faithful through murder, treachery and countless adventures. Only when Becmath's schemes reached incredible fulfilment was he able to realise that he had been serving an egomaniac and a monster . . ."

Release date: January 1, 1972

Publisher: Ace Books

Print pages: 144

Sample

The sun was not bright for us that day we fled from Klittmann City, riding at seventy miles per hour across the grey stone
plain.


Behind us Klittmann filled the landscape, a stupendous grey castle quarried and raised out of the cold rock terrain.

I had been out in the open only once before, so the scene was a great novelty to me and despite the weirdness of our situation
I took time to examine it from this new, unnatural angle.


Seen from the outside Klittmann scarcely had the appearance of an artificial construct at all. It was a vast pile, a rough-hewn
mountain. A titanic mass of rock that had risen from the ground in some natural catastrophe, breaking out in slabs, blocks,
gullies and canyons, ramp-like slides and roofs. It was all roughened and lumpy, and excess building materials spilled down
the sides in frozen avalanches.


Which was as it would be. To the inhabitants of Klittmann the external wall was incidental, unconscious. No windows or doors
except the one ground-level portal which was almost never opened. The city was completely internalised. When there was any
rebuilding or extension the work was done from the inside; nobody ever visualised the exterior.


Unpretty though it was, for us the view had a not small degree of poignancy. We had no doubt that it was our last look at
home. At that, we nearly didn’t make it. I was keeping my eye on the upright ring of the portal at the foot of the steel and
concrete pile. A police sloop shot out bullet-like and came chasing after us.


“There’s one of them on our tail!” I said to Becmath.

Becmath was in the driving seat. He glanced in a mirror, grunting.


“I thought they would. Cops got no sense. Hold on, we’ll take him.”

He decelerated fiercely to about forty. Soon the cop-ship was pacing us, racing parallel at a respectful distance over the
grey rock surface. I saw more sloops emerging from the portal.


Becmath grunted again. “He thinks he can play with us. Chase a mobster out of the city. Feel brave in the open. O.K., let’s
go.” He hurled the sloop round in a screaming curve that took us on a convergent course with the cop vehicle.


We had built the sloop originally to operate in the lowest Klittmann streets where the cops do not usually dare to enter.
But we had built it with that eventuality in mind and consequently we were bigger, with more fire-power. The sloop was thirty-five
feet in length and twelve feet in the beam, and it was armed with Jain repeaters and Hacker cannon. Becmath was laughing now.
Before the cop ship could change course we were sending Hacker shells whining away to smash through the other’s armour. Bullets
rattled against our plating. Then the cop-ship swerved crazily from side to side and finally rolled over, a mass of junk.


Bec drove in a wide arc, keeping the range steady. A couple of cops were crawling out of the wreck, torn and bleeding. Our
Jains rattled out a hail of lead. The cops twitched and jerked, then lay still.


“What about those other klugs?” Bec asked.

Reeth and I were already peering back towards Klittmann. The other sloops had started forward, but the fate of their brothers
seemed to make them more cautious. They stopped, then reversed back towards the portal,


“They’re staying put,” I said.

“I thought so. Well, let’s get out of here.”

So he charged up the engines and we lit out towards the horizon. Gradually, ever so slowly. Klittmann began to sink in the
distance behind us and we were alone in the wilderness. But it was a long time before it disappeared altogether.


The action had kept our minds off the horror of the situation. Now a silence descended on the sloop, broken only by the whine
of the engines and the creak of the bodywork. The big balloon tyres rolled soundlessly over the dead rock. We all looked bleakly, frightened, at the deadness that surrounded
us on all sides.


So we were thrown out of Klittmann City State for trying to be too big. But where to now? I had a sick feeling in my stomach,
like you get when an elevator drops from the top to the bottom in ten seconds flat. Somebody switched on the lights inside
the sloop, which only made the scene outside even more dismal.


Grey. Grey, flat landscape. Grey sky. Grey light. Even the air is grey on Killibol. Grey and dead. Nothing grows. Nothing
moves. The only life is human life, the only food that which is grown in the tanks of human cities or in the vans of a handful
of nomad tribes. How, in this world without charity, could we eat?


When we were well out of sight of the exit portal we stopped for repairs. The sloop had taken a beating in the battle in the
city, but had stood up well. We also got rid of the bodies of Brogatham and Fleg, who had been laid out at the back of the
main cabin but were bleeding all over the place.


“Bec,” I said, “we lost two. That gives us food for about two and a half months, if we half starve ourselves.”

There were seven of us left: Becmath, me, Grale, Reeth and Hassmann, and the two passengers — Tone the Taker, who like a fool
had jumped aboard at the last moment, and Harmen, the alk, whom Becmath had put in the storage hold for reasons of his own.


“I’m thinking about it, Klein,” Bec said tonelessly, “I’m thinking pretty hard.”

I had to feel sorry for Bec. For him it must have been bitter, desperate, to see the shattering of all his dreams and ambitions.
But hell, we were all desperate too.


“But, Bec,” I urged in a low voice, “what’re we gonna do? We can’t get back inside Klittmann. We can’t get in anywhere.”

While the repairs were in progress the boys seemed to develop a slightly hysterical hilarity. There’s always a kind of mobster
comradeship after a close shave; now, though, I think the hopelessness of our position had brought it on. They wanted to show
each other they weren’t afraid.


Grale opened some cans to celebrate our successful retreat into the wilderness. Becmath was silent throughout it all. As soon
as the repairs were completed he set the sloop in motion again, even though the sun was now lower in the sky and it was getting
darker. I thought ruefully of the comforts I was used to back in Klittmann.


I dropped into the seat next to Bec’s. “We’ve got to decide soon, while our supplies last. Maybe we could make it to some
other city and take a chance on getting in there.”


“And what chance would we have in another city — or of getting in, for that matter?” Bec replied wryly. “Cease worrying, we’ll
make it. We got us a practitioner of the Hermetic Art.”


I was bewildered. “What, that old fool in the back? Why did we bring him, Bec? We can’t afford to feed him, we ought to throw
him off.”


“If anybody’s thrown off, I’ll tell you who.”

“But, Bec,” I said, staring at the endless, bare landscape into which we were plunging like a bullet, “where are we gonna go?”

Bec glanced at me with his hard black eyes.

“Earth.”

Earth? I shook my head, not understanding. If Bec doesn’t want to tell you, he won’t. But I knew we couldn’t get to Earth.
There wasn’t any way of getting off Killibol.


A Killibol city is a lot like one of those termite hills they have on Earth and Luna.


The inside is big enough to be a whole, totally enclosed world. It’s monotonous. On all sides there is grey: the cold grey
of metal and the warmer grey of stone and concrete.


Our city, Klittmann, is a typical example. Some parts of it are bustling with life, in others there’s a deathly quiet. Wherever
you go you’re surrounded by a maze of streets, ramps, alleys, rickety chasms, buttresses and girders. In the busier districts
everything vibrates slightly and dust is always falling through the air.


Nuclear furnaces provide enough power; food comes from the protein tanks. Nobody ever managed to grow food in Killibol’s utterly
dead, inert soil. By a long, difficult process it is possible to break down the Killibol rock and use a fraction of its material
in the food-producing process, and that way they make up for loss and waste; but most of the material in the tanks is recycled
by reclaiming sewage and garbage.


The tanks are the most important things on Killibol. Everybody’s life focuses around his connection with a Tank. By the letter
of the law of practically any city a citizen’s right to food is inalienable; the most severe penalty is to be turned outside,
into the open where you starve to death. But in practice it’s possible to lose your connection and have to try to make a living
by scavenging, by performing irregular services, or by crime. The tanks are attached to all the organisations that exist inside
the city. The police have their own tanks, the construction workers have their own tanks, and so do the manufacturers as well
as the city government. So any of those people might become displeased with you and cut off your connection and there’s not much you can do about it because the law is rough and ready in Klittmann. Even if you work for
the government, if they fire you they tear up your allotment card.


In Klittmann there are thousands of such people and most of them are to be found in the bowels of the city, in the seedy,
dangerous quarter that bustles around the foundations. The cops never came in there much; although they would have liked to,
the hard facts of life had created something of a boundary between the domain of the police and the domain of crime.


Well, that gives you a fragment of the picture. A Killibol city is isolated, absorbed in itself — there’s no ionosphere for
long-range radio and the trading caravans that once in a while set out fall foul more often than not of nomad bands, so there’s
not much scope for adventure or travel — but it needs to be said that the affairs of a place like Klittmann scarcely vary
at all from generation to generation. There’s no progress, and no decline. The citizens carry out their work and life habits
with a blind instinct, exactly like those termites I was talking about. And naturally, change is something the cops, the government,
practically everybody, wants to see least of all.


But I guess nothing lasts forever. Even in the changeless conditions of those big termite hills a man like Becmath was bound
to turn up eventually.


The constructional urge in Klittmann is to build up. The magnates and government bosses who build themselves lavish apartments
or put city extension schemes into operation always place them on the outer, upper part of the pile. It’s an instinct with
them. Sometimes their efforts go too far and the new excrescences collapse and go avalanching down the outer wall, taking
hundreds of workmen with them. Efforts at rescue are brief and halfhearted; by reflex the people inside seal off the affected
section, embarrassed at their mistake.


In general, though, the work of Klittmann engineers is sound. And as the pile masses itself further up, the buttresses and
bastions down below become broader and more solid, to take the strain. Parts of the Basement — the vast sprawling district
right down in the guts of the city — are little more than slums huddled beneath massive arches of steel and concrete.


Hidden under the curve of Tenth North Bastion is Mud Street. Its name is because the buildings are jerry-built from a hastily
made concrete mix that looks like mud. Mud Street is what passes in Klittmann for an outlying shanty town — in fact it looks
a little like some primitive villages I saw on Luna later. It’s dusty, the buildings are thrown together and badly shaped.
The only difference is that the bastion, with the whole weight of Klittmann above it, leans over and seems to press down with
a crushing presence. The light from the overhead arcs is a sickly yellow.


Just where the bastion comes to an end, and Mud Street opens into a mile-long metal carriageway that’s deserted now, there’s
a place known locally as Klamer’s. You enter the door through a curtain and inside there are tables and wall machines for
games like Ricochet and Spin-Ball. Sometimes you can get pop there, too, so the place tends to fill up with addicts.


At that time Klamer’s belonged to Darak Klamer, a smalltime operator who more or less controlled Mud Street. When I first
met Becmath, which was in the games room on Mud Street, I worked for Klamer. You might say he owned me, too. Bec changed that.


The first I knew of the raid was when I heard shouts and screams mingled with gunfire from the main games room. I was in the
back with another of Klamer’s boys when a third looking scared, scuttled in from the main room to join us.


I didn’t stop to ask questions. “Let’s get to the car,” I said. We left through the back door that opened on a side alley,
at the end of which our vehicle was parked.


The raiders had already put a man in the alley to nab us if we came out, but I guess he didn’t expect us so soon. As it was
I practically came out firing. The bullets from his gun showered powder from the soft stone of the wall near my head, while
mine sent him sprawling right up against the back of the alley.


“Let’s push out of here fast,” Hersh said as we jumped in the vehicle. I remember he was a spry little guy who never liked
to take chances he couldn’t calculate.


“No,” I said.

As we came out of the alley, I saw that two bigger cars were parked on the other side of Mud Street, looking like humpbacked beetles against the massive rise of the bastion. The cars
were occupied; not all the newcomers were inside the gaming rooms.


I swung round and crashed the car into the entrance, blocking it. Then I flung open the nearside door and we piled out, back
into the gaming room.


There were four gunmen in there. Apparently they thought they already had the place secure. Our customers — those who were
still alive — were streaming out the back way. Good, I thought, now the back way’s blocked too.
. . .