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The barbed wire scratched him unmercifully, and the electric shock from the
top wire would have stunned a cow, he thought. But grimly he hung on, his
body shuddering in the force of the voltage; climbed over; dangled a moment on
the barbs until his shirt ripped apart and let him drop; then lay, stunned, on
the ground as another alarm went off, this time nearby.
I've told them were I am, he thought. What an ass.
So he stood, his body still trembling from the electricity, and staggered
stupidly off into the high grass that began crisply a hundred meters from the
fence.
The sun was touching the horizon.
The grass was harsh and sharp.
The wind was bitterly cold.
He had no shirt.
I will freeze to death out here tonight. I will die of exposure. And the
part of him that always gloated sneered, "You deserve it, matricide. You
deserve it, Oedipus."
No, you've got it all wrong, it's the father you're supposed to kill, right?
"Why, it's a painting of me; isn't it?" asked Zad, seeing what he had, done
with the watercolors. "It's excellent, except that I'm not blond, you know."
And he looked at her and wondered, for a moment, why he had thought she was.
He was snapped out of his memory by a sound. He could not identify it, nor
even, for sure, the direction from which it had come. He stopped, stood
still, listening. Now, aware of where he was, he realized that his arms and
hands and stomach and back were scratched and slightly bloody from the rasping
grass. The suckers were clinging to his bare body; he brushed them away with
a shudder of revulsion. Bloated, they dropped -- one of the curses of the
planet, since they left no itch or other pain, and a man could bleed to death
without knowing he was even being sucked.
Linkeree turned around and looked back. The lights of the government compound
winked behind him. The sun had set, and dusk was only dimly lighting the
plain.
The sound came again. He still couldn't identify it, but now the direction
was more distinct -- he followed.
Not two meters off was a feebly crying infant, the mucus of birth still
clinging to his body, the afterbirth unceremoniously dumped beside him. The
placenta was covered with suckers. So was the baby.
Linkeree knelt, brushed away the suckers, looked at the child, whose stubby
arms and legs proclaimed him to be a Vaq. Yet apart from that, Link could see
no other sign that this was not a human infant -- the dark skin must come
after years of exposure to the hot noon sunshine. He remembered clearly that
one of the long line of tutors he had studied with had told him about this Vaq
custom. It was assumed to be the exact counterpart of the ancient Greek
custom of exposing unwanted infants, to keep the population at acceptable
levels. The baby cried. And Linkeree was struck bitterly with the unfairness
that it was this infant that was chosen to die for the good of the -- tribe?
Did Vaqs travel in tribes? If seven percent of infants had to die for the
good of the tribe, why couldn't there be a way for seven-hundredths of each
child to be done away? Impossible, of course. Linkeree stroked the child's
feeble arms. It was much more efficient to rid the world of unwelcome
children.
He picked up the infant, gingerly (he had never done so before, only seen them
in the incubators in the hospital his father had built and which, therefore,
Linkeree was "responsible" for), and held it against his bare chest, wondering
at the warmth it still had. For a moment at least the crying stopped, and
Link periodically struck off the suckers that leaped from the placenta to the
baby's or his bare skin. We are kin, he told the child silently, we are kin,
the unwanted children. "If only you'd never been born," he heard his mother
saying; this time a saying she had said only once, but the memory was sharp
and clear, the moment forever imprinted on his mind. It was no act. It was
no sham, like her hugs and kisses and I'm-so-proud-of-yous. It was a moment,
all too rare, of utter sincerity: "If only you'd never been born, I wouldn't
be getting old like this on this hideous planet!"
Why, then, mother, didn't you leave me on the plain to die? Much kinder,
much, much kinder than to have kept me at home, killing me seven percent at a
time.
The baby cried again, hunting for a breast that by now was surely many
kilometers off, leaking pap for the child that would never suckle. Did the
mother grieve, perhaps? Or was she only irritated at the sensitivity of her
breasts, only anxious for the last remnants of the pregnancy to fade?
Squatting there, holding the infant, Linkeree wondered what he should do.
Could he bring the child back into the compound? Unquestionably yes, but at a
cost. First, Linkeree would then be caught, would then be reconfined to the
hospital where the fact that he was not, was not insane would soon be
discovered and they would cleanly and kindly push the needle into his buttocks
and put him irrevocably to sleep. And then there was the child. What would
they do with a Vaq child in the capital? In an orphanage it would be tortured
by the other children who, in their poverty and usual bastardy would welcome
the nonhuman as something lower that they could torment and so prove their
power. In the schools, the child would be treated as an intellectual pariah,
incapable of learning. It would be shunted from institution to institution --
until someday on the street the torment became too much and he strangled
somebody and then died for it.
Linkeree lay the baby back down. If your own don't want you, the stranger
doesn't want you, either, he said silently. The baby cried desperately. Die,
child, Linkeree thought, and be spared. "There's not one damn thing I can
do," he said aloud.
"What do you mean, when you can paint like that?" Zad answered. But Link saw
more clearly than she. He had meant to paint Zad, but had instead painted his
mother. Now he saw what for seven months what he had been blind to -- Zad's
resemblance to his mother. That's why he had followed her through the streets
that first night, had kept watching her, until finally she had asked him what
the hell --
"What the hell?" Zad asked, but Link didn't answer, only wrinkled up the
painting clumsily (You're all thumbs, Linky!), pressed the wad against his
crotch, and struck the paper and thus himself viciously once. Cried out in
agony. Struck himself again.
"Hey! Hey, stop that! Don't -- "
And then he saw, felt, smelled, heard his mother lean over him, her hair
brushing his face (sweet-smelling hair), and Link was filled with the old
helpless fury, a helplessness made worse by clear memories of love-making hour
after hour with this woman in an apartment filled with paintings in a
government flat in the low part of the city. Now. I'm grown up, he thought,
now I'm stronger than her, and still she controls me, still she attacks me,
still she expects so damn much and I never know what I should do! And so he
stopped striking himself and found a better target.
The baby was still crying. Link was disoriented for a moment, wondering why
he was trembling. Then another gust of wind reminded him that tonight was the
night he would die in feeble expiation for his sins, he like the baby sucked
dry by tiny bites, gnawed to death by the chewers that padded through the
night, frozen to death by the wind. The difference would be, of course, that
the infant would not understand, would never have understood. Better to die
unknowing. Better to have no memories. Better to have no pain. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]