A Thousand Deaths (8 page)

"What does he call you, then?" asked Kenny.

Klára gave the boy an unpleasant look and moved farther away from him on the davenport.

"Mrs. Hriniak," said Arthur, "we are pretty well limited in our ability to communicate with Earth. We can use the tect to learn anything in its memory banks, but that doesn't allow us to make telephone calls to whomever we want back home. We can inform TECT of emergencies here, or of supplies and things we need urgently, and TECT will decide what should be done and then let us know. But you can't just ring up your husband for a chat because you miss him."

"Miss him!" She gave a derisive laugh.

"Whatever. The best you can do is ask TECT for permission to contact him through a tect unit on Earth. Other people have tried that here, though I don't recall anyone getting that permission."

Klára was outraged. "I don't believe it!" she cried. "TECT can't do that kind of thing. That's illegal. Every citizen has the right to free communication. The government protects that."

"The government
is
TECT," said Courane, "and TECT makes the rules. TECT also enforces the rules and judges if they're morally and legally valid. You have nowhere to turn."

"But what am I, some kind of prisoner?" Her face had drained of its ruddy color, and one plump-fingered hand was raised to her throat as though guarding it against physical assault.

"That's precisely what you are, Mrs. Hriniak," said Arthur. "You are some kind of prisoner."

"I am not!" She was too outraged even to consider the possibility. "I have been brought here to care for some unpleasantly sick people, that disgusting machine only knows why. I have no idea at all why I was chosen, but I will not stop fighting until either I am returned to my home, or my husband and my possessions are transferred here for the duration of my stay."

"On Earth," asked Courane, "did you ever have any nursing training?"

"Good heavens, no. I was the daughter of a public official. I was married at a young age, directly after leaving school. I am neither a laborer nor servant."

"But you are a prisoner," said Courane.

"I am not." She glared at Courane malevolently.

"I could ask our tect why you were sent here."

Klára seemed flustered. "No," she said, her voice suddenly trembling just a bit, "there was an occasion, an unpleasant incident that developed between me and the terrible old man who lived just down the road from our home. We lived on the outskirts of an old village and this man, he was simply unbearable, he complained to the CAS constable. I don't even recall what it was all about."

"They wouldn't have sent you here just for that," said Kenny. "I'll go ask the tect."

Klára dropped her hand to her side. "There may have been one or two other similar occasions," she said softly.

Arthur turned to Courane, ignoring the woman. "Do you want to go for that walk now?"

To Courane, the prospect of going outside was suddenly much more attractive than remaining in the parlor with Klára Hriniak. "Sure," he said.

"Can I come, too?" asked Kenny.

"Those animals are just lying around out there," said Courane. "We can pile snow over them, and you'll have your snowblerds the easy way."

"Aw, that's no fun," said the boy. They left the large, cold parlor to Klára. She was still sitting, staring blankly into space, when they left.

 

Prison or hospital? One of the difficulties was that on Earth everything was much simpler. The Representatives had liked it that way, and TECT—in the name of the Representative, of course—continued the customs of the past. People were simple, institutions were simple, questions of right and wrong were simple, life was simple, death was simple. A person was a man or a woman, dead or alive, good or bad. Buildings housed offices or apartments, cells or wards, never a mixture. But that was too expensive a luxury on Planet D. In the colony, things had to be used up and worn out. That went for the contents of the house, the farm implements, the livestock, the cultivated fields, and the people themselves. Courane soon stopped trying to find a simple answer to his puzzle; that was a bad habit left over from an interrupted life. But if the colony were both prison and hospital, then the people around him were a mixture of patients and prisoners. At first glance, it was often difficult to decide which person carried which label:

Fletcher, the sullen black man, was a prisoner. He had probably served a long term on Planet D, but Courane was unable to get much real information out of him.

Arthur, strange as it seemed, must have been a prisoner, too, although a very useful and efficient one.

Goldie showed no sign of being anything other than a very ignorant person. She didn't appear to have warranted excarceration, and she showed none of the symptoms of the D syndrome.

Daan had admitted that he, too, was a prisoner.

Kenny couldn't have been a prisoner, could he? He must be a patient, but one who hadn't yet realized the fact. Perhaps his parents and doctor and TECT had hidden that information. If he hadn't figured it out for himself yet, Courane didn't want to be the one to tell him. Courane didn't have the fortitude for that kind of chore.

Molly was criminally Christian. That was very obvious.

Sheldon was a terminal patient, and the fact grieved Courane. Sheldon had been the first friend that Courane had made.

Beautiful Lani was also a patient, dying so young of such an ugly condition. Courane thought about her for a few seconds and had to repress a frightened shiver.

It was too early yet to make a judgment about the new arrivals, the three women. Klara, though, was probably a prisoner while Rachel and Nneka were likely patients.

In Otho of the colony's year 125, that was the limit of Courane's hard information. Something Nneka said made him realize that his picture of the colony—and of TECT's ultimate purpose for it—was too narrow.

They were putting up decorations in the parlor for their simple celebration of Arbor Day. Nneka and Courane were being helped by Goldie and Daan. "This place reminds me of the house where TECT sent my mother," said Nneka.

"Your mother?" said Daan.

"My mother was blinded in an accident about three years ago. When TECT found out—it wasn't more than four or five days later—she was ordered to report to a home for the blind in Ajilele. But whenever I visited her, I saw that she seemed to be a kind of prisoner there. Just like we are here. She said she was happy enough: the food was good and the people there took good care of her. But she couldn't leave the grounds. And there weren't any doctors or nurses. I don't know who was taking care of her. I never thought much about it before."

"Prisoners and patients," said Courane.

"Possibly," said Daan.

"Have you ever noticed that lots of places on Earth are the same way?" said Goldie. "Homes for the elderly are exactly the same. So are orphanages and poorhouses. Nobody ever leaves there, either. And hospitals. Hospitals for people with dangerous diseases, those patients are prisoners. Mental hospitals, too."

"Why doesn't TECT send those people off to their own colony, then?" asked Courane. No one had an answer.

"We used to hear the same thing about this boarding school near us in Kisangani," said Kenny, who came into the room and watched the decorators critically. "Kids would go there to learn all sorts of things and you'd never see them again."

"What do all these places have in common?" asked Daan. "They're all places where people go and put themselves in the charge of someone else."

"But TECT is supposed to supervise it all," said Nneka.

"TECT
is
supervising it all," said Courane. "But maybe it's taking its duties too seriously."

"Don't say that," said Goldie, looking around the dimly lit room as though some informer was hiding behind the worn furniture. "You can't say things like that about TECT. Some people have to make sacrifices, that's all, and TECT sees to it that the sacrifices are fairly shared by everybody."

"It used to be, I remember," said Daan, "that people made sacrifices so that the Representative could have a little extra on his plate."

Goldie's face flushed bright red. "I can't stay here and listen to talk like this," she said anxiously. She dropped the paper decorations that were in her hand and hurried out of the room. Kenny laughed. Daan only shrugged.

"We were taught that if TECT seemed to make a harsh decision, it was harsh only because we made it necessary," said Nneka. "From TECT's point of view it was proper, at least in how it affected the community at large."

"There's no such thing as the community at large," said Kenny.

Daan nodded approvingly. "Now that's a smart kid," he said.

 

Pain brought Courane back to the present. He had walked headlong into one of the stumpy, tough black trees. He sprawled forward into the gnarled limbs, one branch knuckled up into his belly, another digging painfully into the side of his face. Courane had dropped the young woman's body and he rested now and tried to gather his thoughts. The tree supported him in a leaning, awkward position. It was restful, in a way, and Courane was in no great hurry to extricate himself. The corpse had fallen to the ground and rolled a quarter turn away, arms and legs bent in stiff, unnatural positions, hands clutching, clawlike, at nothing. Courane paid it little attention.

He had forgotten the storm already, and his clothes had nearly dried beneath the sun. It was almost noon. His body was hungry, but his emptiness intruded on his consciousness at infrequent intervals.

Pain started in his arms and legs, growing like the rising river in the spring flood. It began with quick stabs in his shoulders, forearms, and the calves of his legs. He winced at each cut. He let the rigid scaffolding of the tree support his weight; his arms hung down nearly to the stone-covered ground, his legs were limp as he collapsed further into the tree. The pain returned again and again, stronger at each attack. He cried out in a low wailing voice, helpless. He knew there was no one near to help him. The agony in his body flashed like lightning. Then, like lightning, it seemed to recede, to fade into the distance, and after a time he rested, exhausted by the siege, his face wet with tears, his mind more bewildered than ever.

Slowly he disentangled himself from the tree. He moved his aching arms inch by inch, lifting himself free like a green lizard on a heated rock. He supported his weight with his arms, then made sure his legs were free. He was covered with large bruises and deep cuts, but none of these troubled him. Those pains were insignificant compared to his larger worries. His brain didn't even bother to evaluate the surface wounds. Once completely extricated from the tree, he rolled to one side and let himself fall to the ground. He lay just as he fell, with his face pressed close to the smooth stones. He opened his mouth and for a long time he uttered strange, almost inhuman sounds as he breathed.

 

There was a certain joy involved in watching a cultivated field clothe itself in rust-red sprouts. Then, as the crops grew and produced their fruit, there was work, a lot of work, but Courane discovered that it gave him a considerable amount of pleasure. The work was simple but essential, and failure could come only through calculated neglect. His new job on Planet D was almost failure-proof, because he worked harder than anyone else in the community. He had never been lazy or shiftless on Earth; his failures came about only because he and TECT had differing ideas about his talents. It seemed to Courane that if anyone should be punished for those failures, it ought to be TECT itself. But of course such a thing was impossible.

Courane loved working in the fields. He liked that job much better than caring for the animals, the blerds and the fowl-like smudgeons, the docile osoi that could be used as draft animals, the unpleasant grease-shedding icks, the other indigenous creatures around the barnyard. He preferred the cultivating and weeding and pruning and harvesting in the fields.

TECT had been right, after all. Courane did have a growing sense of his own worth. The hard labor under the sun had been good for him. There was a marvelous feeling of self-sufficiency that came from putting food on the table that he had grown himself.

"Failure is important," Molly had said once, in the autumn about a month after she had shown her first sign of D syndrome. "God doesn't expect you to be perfect. Just the opposite; He knows you aren't perfect."

"That's probably true," said Rachel, "but it isn't true for TECT."

"TECT isn't God," said Molly.

"The way it runs everybody's life, it might as well be," said Fletcher.

Molly shrugged. She didn't mind being on Planet D. "It doesn't change things, being here," she said. "You're still working to bring yourself closer to God."

"Not so as you'd notice," said Fletcher. He looked around at the others, grinned again, and walked away.

"I wouldn't be here at all except for some bad luck," said Arthur. "I was—"

"There's no such thing as bad luck," said Molly, shaking her head sadly. "Our Lord wasn't crucified because of bad luck. He never spent His time wallowing in self-pity. He never wanted to overthrow God because of the unfairness of the situation."

"Maybe just a little toward the end," said Rachel.

"That doesn't count," said Molly, "that was the human part talking."

"TECT gave up on us," said Arthur.

"I don't know about that," said Courane. "I'm kind of grateful. Some people like Fletcher won't ever get the point. If it weren't for the fact that we don't have our liberty, I'd be very happy."

"You always have your liberty in the Lord," said Molly. "The Lord doesn't give up on you."

"Yeah, sure," said Rachel in a bored voice, tapping the side of her head with an index finger. "Let's go play Softball."

 

After graduating from high school in Greusching, Courane waited for TECT to plan his future life. He had applied for admission to a university. His schoolwork was not better than average, so Courane really didn't think it was likely that TECT would honor his request. Courane believed that TECT would order him into the armed forces. It was the usual course for most people. Courane was ready to accept that decision.