A Thousand Deaths

by George Alec Effinger

  "She left it?" Courane was having a difficult time following what was happening around him.

  "She's dead. She hung herself in her room," said Rachel.

  "Oh." He looked at the paper.

  "Oh, my God," murmured Rachel.

  Fletcher looked at Shai. "We'll bury them together, somewhere quiet and shady. Klára deserves to rest. She never got any while she was alive."

  "What about TECT?" asked Courane.

  Fletcher turned on him fiercely, with a murderous look in his eyes. "The hell with TECT," he said. Courane looked down at his feet, strangely humiliated.

  Courane wasn't alert, but he was conscious in a minimal way. Sights and sounds played through his numbed senses upon his drowsing mind. He was beyond evaluating or reacting, but he was not yet quite dead. People spoke to him but he did not respond. He was prodded, pricked, gently slapped to elicit some sign that he was still alive. He gave none, and the others in the house somberly came to the conclusion that soon he would follow Rachel into the tect room, into the medic box, and to the final secret disappearance. They were waiting only for his heartbeat to fade away completely. Deep inside, far away, where even his own desires could not disturb him, Sandor Courane observed everything uncritically and longed for sleep.

  "Is he dead?" asked Kee.

  "I think he's dead," said Nneka. "I think they're both dead."

  "They're dead enough," said Ramón. "We'll take them into the tect room."

  "What about his heartbeat?" said Nneka.

  "Very faint," said Shai.

  "Let's carry him in there now," said Ramón. "We'll only have to do it later on anyway."

  "How can you be like that," asked Nneka. "He's not dead yet."

  "He's dead enough," said Ramón. "I said it before."

  "We heard you," said Shai gruffly. "You and Kee carry Rachel into the tect room."

  "What about him?"

  Shai let out a heavy breath. "Let me watch him for a few minutes. He may improve a little."

  "Like hell," said Ramón. He and the Asian man lifted Rachel's body and carried it away.

  "I wonder what happened to them out there," said Nneka. She was weeping but she didn't seem to notice her tears. She stood very close to Shai.

  "I suppose I can imagine it well enough," said Shai. "You stay here and watch Sandy. Don't let anyone move him until I get back."

  "Where are you going?" She sounded frightened.

  "Just up to my room. There was something Sandy gave me before he left. He wanted to make sure it went with him into the tect room."

  "What is it?"

  "A journal. I read it. He was right about it; it ought to go with him. He believed that TECT returns the dead bodies to Earth. The journal is our whole story. The people on Earth ought to know about us, what we're going through."

  "Oh. Hurry back. I don't like being here alone."

  There was a long silence. Courane waited for the final moment of death, more relaxed and tranquil than he had ever been before. He felt wonderful, as he must have felt before birth. Death wasn't anything to fear at all; he was relieved to find that out. He was grateful that everything was ending so easily. Shai had inherited all the problems now, but that was all right because Shai would die soon, too, contented and forgetful and at peace.

  Courane rested in a timeless warmth. "He's gone, Shai," he heard someone say.

  "Are you sure?"

  "I'm sure. I don't feel a heartbeat. I don't think he's breathing."

  "I can't tell. It might just be very shallow."

  "What do you think?"

  "I don't know." The voice sounded impatient and angry. "I don't want to have to decide these things. I never asked for this."

  "Let the doc box decide," said another voice.

  "Rachel is in the box now," said someone else.

  "Put him in the tect room with her. If he's really dead, he'll be gone in the morning with her body. If he isn't, we'll put him in the infirmary."

  "All right." Courane felt hands grasp him and lift him. He felt his body moving and then he felt a floor beneath him. Something heavy was slipped beneath his hands; it must have been the journal.

  "What now?"

  "That's it, I guess. I wish there was something more. We should do something more."

  "What?"

  "A prayer. A eulogy. Something."

  "Well, you take care of that if you want to. I don't believe in that kind of thing."

  "You go, then. Nneka and I will stay here for a minute or two."

  "Good. We'll see you at dinner."

  There was silence that stretched on and on until Courane thought that he had at last died, that he was finally floating in the universe, and that eternity had presented its dull and tedious face to him. But just as he was adjusting to the idea, he heard someone say, "Let's go," and he knew he still had a threshold to cross. Any feelings of completion he had entertained had been a trifle premature.

  Thirteen

  "Okay, tectman, you can go through now."

  He had done it so often that he didn't give any thought to it anymore. He took three steps through the portal and was on another world. Earth was three steps behind him, on the other side of a slight shimmer in the air. Now he was on—where? He hadn't even bothered to notice when he signed in that morning. Some place, some planet, somewhere it didn't matter. It was only exciting to the rookies. He wasn't going to be here for more than a few minutes anyway.

  The room he stepped into was dark. The only light came from the glowing screen of a tect. It was midnight here and all the other prisoners were asleep or avoiding the room until morning. The tectman took a few steps toward the medic box, where a woman's corpse waited for him, and then he stopped in astonishment. Another body, a man's, lay on the floor beside the box. He had been a tectman for three years and this was the first time he had encountered more than one shipment. He stood and thought; he couldn't remember any rules governing this situation. Should he carry the woman back, then return and put the man in the medic box? Maybe he could skip that and just drag them both back together, or call for help.

  The voice shouted at him from the far side of the shimmer. It sounded annoyed. "All right, what are you doing over there? Taking holiday pictures?"

  The tectman turned toward Earth. "There are two of them. A man and a woman."

  "So what? Bring them back."

  "One at a time or what?"

  "Any way you want, fool. Stack them on your head if that's what you feel like."

  "I'll bring the woman first," said the tectman. He wished that he could think of some way to kick the legs out from under his wise-guy supervisor.

  "I'm proud of you. That's real problem-solving."

  The tectman bent and lifted Rachel's body from the medic box. He grimaced as he became aware of her condition; as he carried her toward the portal, he grunted a little. In a moment they were back on Earth, in a sterile white room. The supervisor wore a filter mask over his mouth and a white lab coat. There was a plain wooden table waiting for the corpse, and the tectman put her down gently. The supervisor signaled to a woman watching through a small window, and a team of technicians came into the isolation room to examine Rachel. They were dressed like the supervisor. The tectman, wearing a CAS uniform and filter mask, didn't wait for instructions or sarcasm but turned back to the portal. He crossed through again and went to Courane. He bent and put one hand under each of Courane's arms. He dragged the body across the tect room carpet. The tectman had a little quirk about this; he always carried the women's corpses and dragged the men's. No one else cared. Some quirks didn't matter, as long as they were irrelevant enough. In this way, Sandor Courane left the planet of his excarceration and returned to the world of his birth.

  As the tectman dragged him toward the portal, the journal slipped from Courane's hands. The tectman stopped and let Courane's head fall. The book, too, was something new in the tectman's experience; he didn't know what to do with it, so for the moment he tucked it ben
eath his uniform tunic. It was clear the corpse wouldn't be able to hold it. The tectman grasped the body and continued to drag it home.

  "Well," said the supervisor, "you were right after all. There is another body. How unusual."

  "What should I do with it?" asked the tectman.

  The supervisor shrugged and gestured toward the table. "Sling it up there next to the other one. The bogies will just have to work tight today."

  The tectman did as he was told, ignoring the complaints of the technicians. Then he left the white room, showered, stepped through the decontamination curtain, and put on a new uniform in the locker room. He checked back with the officer of the day to see where his next assignment was; he had to pick up some woman in Rangoon and deliver her to a hospital for observation. There wouldn't be any problem unless the woman's family carried on a little too much. He could handle any of that, though. No problem. He had time to get some lunch.

  Lunch was hot, plentiful, free of charge, and dull: Salisbury steak and two vegetables, virtually indistinguishable, a roll, a pat of butterlike substance, pie with red fruitlike filling, coffee, and a paper tub of creamlike fluid, all prepared under the supervision of TECT. The tectman liked TECT's cooking and ate every bit of the meal. Transporting shipments always gave him an appetite.

  Before he finished, he was joined by his supervisor. That surprised him. They rarely spoke to each other, except directly in the line of duty. They didn't even wish each other good morning or happy New Year. The supervisor had a cup of black coffee and sat down opposite the tectman. The tectman grunted a sort of acknowledgment.

  "A little trouble," said the supervisor. The tectman waited for some information to accompany these words. "I think you're in just a little bit of trouble."

  The tectman felt himself go cold. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  The supervisor had an irritating manner of delaying important news as much as possible. He shrugged, gave a quick, meaningless smile, and took a long sip from his cup. "There was a bit of an irregularity with your two shipments this morning," he said at last. There was another dead flicker of a smile.

  The tectman thought back over his morning's assignment. The only irregularity that he could imagine was the condition of the woman's corpse. Surely they couldn't hold him responsible for that. "What's wrong?" he asked.

  "The first was fine, just fine," said the supervisor. He chose that moment to take another drink of coffee. The tectman fidgeted; he wanted to leap across the table and throttle the other man. "The second shipment, well, there's your problem. It wasn't completely according to specifications. Dead, I mean. It wasn't dead. They discovered that after they got him up on the table. He's in the hospital now. Still alive."

  The tectman stared. He couldn't decide what kind of trouble he was in because the situation was absurd. It had never happened before; it couldn't happen. It was good that he was just the delivery service. They couldn't blame him for it.

  "They're blaming you for it," said the supervisor. He smiled; this time it lasted just a little longer, until he returned to his coffee.

  "Alive?" said the tectman.

  "I wouldn't worry about it if I were you," said the supervisor, standing and draining the last drop from his cup. "TECT's handling the whole thing. Probably nothing will come of it. Don't get yourself all worked up over it. It's most likely not even worth worrying about." He smiled. "Still..."

  The tectman nodded gloomily.

  "Let's get back to work," said the supervisor cheerfully. The tectman imagined his hands around the other's throat.

  The doctor felt under Courane's jaw, beneath the ears, down the throat to the larynx. He wore a thoughtful expression and let out a deep breath. "Very interesting," he said to himself.

  The intern watched, but said nothing. It wasn't his place to say anything.

  The doctor raised Courane's arm again and felt for a pulse. He chewed his lip for a moment as he concentrated. He let the arm drop back to the white, stiff-sheeted bed. "Pulse still rapid but maybe a little stronger," he said. The intern made a notation on his clipboard. The doctor pulled back the sheet and raised the pale blue gown in which the hospital staff had dressed Courane. He listened to Courane's chest through a stethoscope, frowning. "Not good," he said.

  "TECT diagnosed moderate hemothorax," said the intern, tapping his clipboard. "All the machine's readings led to his being scheduled for exploratory surgery in the morning."

  "In the first place," said the doctor, "I'll give you two to one that he doesn't last that long. In the second place, if TECT is right that the bleeding is only moderate, then it is coming from low-pressure vessels and will very likely stop on its own. Surgery is the wrong thing to turn to now." He looked at Courane's face. "Unless it gets much worse." The doctor knew that the computer diagnosis was dependable, but he liked to supplement the printout with his own observations. This habit annoyed some of the younger staff, who felt the doctor was wasting valuable time and making unnecessary work for them.

  "How fast is this IV running in?" asked the doctor.

  The intern checked the clipboard. "Twenty-five," he said.

  "Step it up to forty." The intern made another notation and adjusted the flow from the IV bag. The doctor raised Courane's eyelids and checked the color of the tissue beneath the eyeball. He pressed Courane's thumbnails until they turned white, then watched how long it took the capillaries to refill. At last, with a gesture of frustration, he turned away from the bed.

  "What do you want to put down for your corroborative diagnosis?" asked the intern.

  The doctor's expression was resentful. "They send this guy off to some godless planet way the hell out in nowhere, leave him there long enough to catch some space clap, bring him back, and expect us to give him a pill or something that will knock it out. I don't have the slightest idea what's wrong with him, except that sometimes most of his body just isn't up to working, that he ought to be clinically dead but he isn't. Not enough to dump him in the ground, anyway."

  "I have to put something down here," said the intern, pleading a little.

  The doctor waved a hand. "Put down 'massive tissue and systemic damage, exo-bio indications.' That's good enough. It doesn't mean a damn thing. He'll be dead by morning and instead of surgery he'll have an autopsy, and then he's out of my hands. That's where I want him, at this point. Come on. Who's next?"

  "The woman with the rat pancreas," said the intern.

  The doctor's shoulders slumped. "I don't want to deal with her either," he said. But he tucked the sheet up under Courane's chin, put his stethoscope back in his pocket, and led the way out of the room. The intern felt his great love for humanity waning. He looked at Courane with a feeling of shared misery and trailed after the doctor like a thoughtless duckling.

  When the tectman returned to his barracks that evening, he stopped in the wardroom for a moment to consult with the tect. He identified himself and typed out Query.

  **TECTMAN:

  ?**

  "Am I going to get in any trouble because one of the shipments from Epsilon Eridani, Planet D, was irregular?"

  **TECTMAN:

  Trouble? What kind of trouble? No, I wouldn't worry about it if I were you. Just relax and do your job. Let your superiors worry about trifling details. You're a good worker with a good record. You shouldn't get upset merely because one of your corpses is still alive in the hospital tonight. So maybe you could have prevented this unfortunate occurrence. So maybe you have interfered with the proper working out of this individual's destiny as prescribed by the lawful procedures laid down by the Representatives and TECT. So maybe the whole fabric of our society could be ripped apart because of your simple oversight. So what? What do you care, right? What's it to you? Who are you, anyway? Nothing much. Nothing much more than the shipments you transport. Nothing worth bothering about, that's for sure. You'll be dead soon, too, speaking relatively. Go away, I have better things to think about. I have pelicans to protect and pumpkins to harvest**
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  The tectman wasn't sure if he should be glad or terrified. "Thanks," he said.

  **TECTMAN:

  Don't mention it. Please**

  A short while later, the tectman undressed, carefully folding his uniform and putting on the government-issue flannel pajamas and plaid bathrobe. He didn't like slippers, so he didn't take off his white sweatsocks. He laid down on his cot and looked at the journal he had brought with him, Courane's journal. The tectman had kept it. To be precise, that had been a serious crime, but he hadn't meant to do it. He had forgotten the book and now it was too late to turn it in and try to explain the whole matter. In any event, he seemed to have gotten away with it. Now he wanted to read all about Planet D, about living somewhere where TECT wasn't a constant interference and a daily threat. He wanted to know what life was like off Earth, what the irregular shipment's existence had been like there, what the man's crime had been to get him excarcerated in the first place. With a feeling of anticipation, the tectman opened the journal and began to read. The first thing was a page torn out of the back of the book and slipped in before the actual beginning. It was a note from someone else, someone other than the author.

  My name is Shai Ben-Avir. I am a prisoner in this colony on Planet D. The journal you're about to read was written by a man named Sandor Courane, who is dead now. He was a good man, a loving and caring and helpless man who was as innocent as anyone ever born on Earth. He was exiled here for no reason, as are we all, and he lived here as best he could, loving and caring for everyone he shared this bitter life with. We are condemned to death here, a slow death. We are being executed by a disease. Sandy describes that fully in this unusual diary, so there isn't much more for me to add here. The only thing I'd like you to be aware of is the pointlessness of it all, of his imprisonment, of his illness, of his futile battle against it. The struggle against the disease is a struggle against TECT, and in that conflict we are hopelessly inadequate. You on Earth may be our only weapon. Read this journal, think about it, consider its implications—for Sandy, for the rest of us who remain here after him, and for yourself as well—and then pass the book on to others who may benefit from our story. It is too late for us and it may be too late for you. But it is not too late for the future.