The Ladder in the Sky by John Brunner

safety and anonymity and a handful of cash instead of the impersonal retribution of the law.
    In the Dyasthala, Kazan’s world: hunger yesterday, fullness today, randomly. The belly had no chance to build its own clock. Time was different. The wakening into the world of the ship, so arbitrary—like being inside a clock, because the passage of time was totally controlled—was another difference to add to others. Emergent, the new Kazan chose this fact for a centerpole of personality, thinking of Yarco and his sighing resignation to the decree of the wyrds. He would still have liked to talk to Yarco about his situation, but not to learn more of Yarco’s way of adapting; now, to try and make him see that it was not universally applicable.
    The Kazan of the Dyasthala (curious, that Clary should have seen the same parallel as he, between Yarco’s state of bondage and the invisible bonds tying down inhabitants of the Dyasthala!) had been tempted by Yarco’s philosophy. The Kazan of the ship was not. It was clear to him from looking around that men could organize the events they experienced. What he had to do was make himselfbelievethat he was the organizer, and that was difficult.
    A creature hatched from an egg, he thought, would be in his condition. In the egg it was certainly—for at leastalittle while—living and aware. It could be heard to movefora time before it cracked or tore open the shell or tough integument about it. Already it was in a sense independent, before it came out. He also. Not as a womb-born child.Forhim this would come later, perhaps, after landing on Vashti, with the opening of the ship, which would be soon.
    Meantime he had to wrestle in his mind, and fanatical urgency stemming from the shortness of the time till the shell opened on Vashti created for him the exact reverse of the dull apathy he had shown when he came aboard. He had to know. He had to know his past as much as his present.
    The Dyasthala: the cracked walls and the tilted flagstones of the streets, the smells and sights and sounds. List them, and they were not pretty. They were smells of rotting garbage, which was not garbage in the Dyasthala so long as anyone could conceive any use at all for it, and of the people who found such uses and descended to them. They were sights of children in gutters and parents in rags. They were sounds of screams, from pain or from hate.
    The heritage Kazan carried with him into his new existence was compounded of that, and his need to be himself. He had to work hardest of all at being himself, because he was so frightened of being a black devil instead.
    Who was anybody? He took to staring curiously at the other workers, sometimes without their noticing for long minutes together as they attended to some small task or relaxed, eyes closed, wondering: what is in that person which makes him, or her, not me? There would be a clue to himself there, perhaps. And again he had to spend time feverishly working over the Dyasthala memories, the memories of the period of parturition, the memories of the new and vivid self, which seemed to be lit from within by a powerful lamp.
    Merely to be able to categorize his existence in that way—as a sentient egg-born creature might categorize his into intra-ovular preconscious, intra-ovular conscious, and extra-ovular—led him to views of being which he could not before have found the mental strength to handle.
    Still he lacked words for much of what occurred to him; among his fellow workers were some whose education had gone beyond an elementary level and he cornered these and sweated out for them a set of verbal parameters defining the thing he wanted to name and had no word for, while they cowered back and flinched and shot glances from side to side, seeking a way of escape. Often they gave him words; often they could not. He made the best of what they offered. Fixation. Conditioning. Instinctual. Subconscious. Logic. Intellectual. Whether he attached the handles to