“My legendary opponent,” said Herman, extending his hand.
Doon took the offered fingers, but instead of gripping them, he spread the old man's hand on his. “Even somec takes its toll, doesn't it?” he asked, and the sadness in his eyes told Herman that, after all, someone else understood the death that somec so cleverly carried within it's life-preserving promise.
“Why did you want to see me?” Doon asked.
And heavy, slow, inexplicable tears rolled out of Herman's aging eyes. “I don't know,” he said. “I just wanted to know how you were doing.”
“I'm doing well,” Doon said. “My department has colonized dozens of worlds in the last few centuries, The enemy's on the run—we're going to out populate him if he doesn't do the same. The Empire's growing.”
“I'm so glad. Glad the Empire's growing. Building an empire's such a lovely thing.” Pointlessly he added, “I built an empire once.”
“I know,” Doon said. “I destroyed it.”
“Oh yes, yes,” Herman said. “That's why I wanted to see you.”
Doon nodded and waited for the question.
“I wondered. I wanted to know—why you chose me. Why you decided to do it. I can't remember why, you know. My memory isn't all it was.”
Doon smiled and held the old man's hand. “No one's memory is, Grandfather. I chose you because you were the greatest. I chose you because you were the highest mountain I could climb.”
“But why did you—why did you tear? Why didn't you build another empire, and rival me?” That was the question. Ah, yes, that's the question, Herman decided. It was so much more satisfying—though he still felt a small doubt. Hadn't he once had a conversation with Doon in which Doon answered him? Never. No.
Doon looked distant. “You don't know the answer?”
“Oh,” Herman said, laughing, “I was once quite mad, you know, and thought you were out to wreck the Empire. They cured me.”
Doon nodded, looking sad.
“But I'm quite better now, and I want to know. Just want to know.”
“I tore—I attacked your empire, Grandfather, because it was too beautiful to finish. If you had finished it, won the game, the game would have ended, and then what would have happened? It wouldn't have been remembered for very long. But now—its remembered forever.”
“Funny, isn't it,” Herman said, losing the thread of the conversation before Doon finished speaking, “that the greatest builder and the greatest wrecker should both come from the same—should be grandfather and grandson. Funny, isn't it?”
“It's all in the family, isn't it?” Doon said with a smile.
“I'm proud of you, Doon,” Herman said, and meant it for the time being. “I'm glad that if someone was strong enough to beat me, it was blood of my blood. Flesh of my—”
“Flesh,” Doon interrupted. “So you're religious after all.”
“I don't remember,” Herman said. “Something happened to my memory, Abner Doon, and I'm not sure of everything. Was I religious? Or was it someone else?”
Doon's eyes filled with sorrow and he reached out to the old man sitting on a soft chair. Doon knelt and embraced him. “I'm so sorry,” he said. “I didn't know what it would cost you. I truly didn't.”
Herman only laughed. “Oh, I didn't have any bets out that waking. It didn't cost me a dime.”
Doon only held him tighter and said, again, “I'm sorry, Grandfather.”
“Oh, well, I don't mind losing,” Herman answered. “In the long run, it was only a game, wasn't it?”
17. Killing Children
He heard the door click open but did not turn away from the tall pile of soft plastic blocks he was building instead he sought among the blocks scattered on the warm floor an orange block. Orange was definitely required since it helped make no pattern whatsoever.
“Link?” said an overfamiliar voice behind him, a strange familiar voice that, alone of all voices, could make him turn, startled. I killed her, he thought softly. She is dead.
But he turned around slowly and there, indeed, was his mother, flesh as well as voice, the slender, oh-so-delicious looking body (not forty-five! couldn't be forty-five!) and the immaculate clothing and the terror in her eyes.
“Link?” she asked.
“Hello, Mother,” he said stupidly, his voice deep and slow. I sound like a mental cripple, he realized. But he did not repeat the words. He merely smiled at her (the light making her hair seem like a halo, the fabric of her blouse clinging slightly to the under curve of her breast, no, mustn't notice that, must think instead of motherhood and filial devotion. Why isn't she dead? Was that, please God, the dream, and this the reality? Or is this vision why I'm in this place?) and a tear or two dazzled in his eyes, making it hard for him to see, and in the dimness he supposed for a moment that she was not blond, but brown-haired; but she had always been blond—
Seeing, the tear and ignoring the continued madness in his dancing gaze, his mother held out her arms for a second, only a second, and then put her hands on her hips (note the way the point of her hips and the curve of her abdomen leave two slender depressions pointing downward, Link said to himself, and got an angry look, a hurt look on her face, and said, “What, don't I even get a hug from my boy?”
The words were the incantation required to get Link from the floor to his full 190 centimeters of height. He walked to her, reaching out his long arms for her.
“No—” she gurgled, pushing him away. “Don't—just a little kiss. Just a kiss.”
She puckered for a childish kiss, and so he too puckered his lips and leaned down. At the last moment, however, she turned her head and he kissed her clumsily on the ear and hair.
“Oh, how wet,” she said in her disgusted voice. She reached into her hip bag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her ear, laughing softly. “Clumsy, clumsy boy, Link, you always have been.”
Link stood in confusion. And, as so many times before, puzzled as to what to do next that would not earn a rebuke. He remained in that confusion, knowing that there was something that he ought to do, something that he must decide, but instead deciding nothing, only playing again and again the same loop of thought in the same childish mental voice in which he had always played it, “Mummy mad, mummy mad, mummy mad.”
She watched him, her lips forming a sort of half-smile (note the natural gloss on the lips, she never painted, never had to, lips always just slightly moist, partly open, the tongue playing gentle love games with the teeth), unsure of what was happening.
“Link?” she said. “Link, don't you have a smile for Mother?”
And Link tried to remember how to smile. What did it feel like? There were muscles that must be pulled, and his face should feel tight—
“No!” she screamed, stepping back from him and encountering the closed door. She apparently had expected it to be open—as if this were not a mental hospital and patients were free to roam the corridors at will. She whirled and hammered on the door with her lists, shouting frantically, “Let me out of here!”
They let her out, the tall men with the pleasant smiles who also took Link to the bathroom five times a day because somehow he had forgotten to notice when he needed to. And as the door closed behind her, Link still stood, unable to decide what he should do, and wondering why his hands were stretched out in front of him, the hands set to grip something circular, something vertical and cylindrical, something, perhaps, the shape of a human throat.
In Dr. Hort's office, Mrs. Danol sat, poised and beautiful, distractingly so, and Hort wondered whether this was indeed the same woman who had wept in the attendant's arms only a few minutes before.
“All I care about is my son,” she said. “He was gone, vanished for seven terrible, terrible months, and all I know now is that I've found Him again and I want him home. With me!”
Hort sighed. “Mrs. Danol, Linkeree is criminally insane. This is a government facility, remember? He murdered a girl.”
“She probably deserved it.”
“She probably seduced him.”
“They had a very active sex life, in which both were eager participants.”
Mis. Danol looked horrified. “Did my son tell you that?”
“No, the tenants downstairs told the police that.”
“Hearsay, then.”
“The government has a very limited budget on this planet, Mis. Danol. Most people live in apartments where privacy is strictly impossible.”
And Mrs. Danol shuddered, apparently in disgust at the plight of the poor wretches that huddled in the government compound in this benighted capital of this benighted colony.
“I wish I could leave here,” she said.
“It would have been nice at one time,” Hort answered. “Your son hates this world. Or, rather, more particularly, he hates what he has seen of this world.”
“Well... I can understand that. Those hideous wild people and the people in the city aren't much better.”
Hort was amused at her reverse democracy—she esteemed all persons her infinite inferiors, and therefore equal to each other.
“Nevertheless, now Linkeree must stay here and we must attempt a cure.”
“Oh, that's all I want for my boy. For him to be the sweet, loving child he used to be—I can't believe he really killed her!”
“There were seventeen witnesses to the strangling, two of them hospitalized when he turned on them after they pried him away from the corpse. He definitely killed her.”
“But why?” she said emotionally, her breasts heaving with passion in a way that amused Hort—he had known many such closet exhibitionists in his time. “Why would he kill her?”
“Because, Mrs. Danol, except for hair color and several years of age, she looked almost exactly like you.”
Mrs. Danol sat upright. “My God, Doctor, you're joking!”
“Almost the only thing that Link has been consistent about since he arrived here is his firm belief that it was you that he killed.”
“This is hideous. This is repulsive.”
“Sometimes he sweeps and says he's sorry, that he'll never do it again. Most of the time, however, she cackles rather gleefully about it, as if it were a game that he had, after many losses, finally won.”
“Is this what passes for psychology on this godforsaken planet?”
“This is what passes for psychology on Capitol itself, Mrs. Danol. That is, you recall, where I got my degree. I assure you I have invented nothing.” And dammit, he thought, why am I letting this woman put me on the defensive? “We thought that the fact of seeing you alive might have some effect on your son.”
“He did try to strangle me.”
“So you said. You also said you wanted him to come home with you. Is that really consistent?”
“I want you to cure him and send him home! Since his father died, whom else have I had to love?”
Yourself, Hort refrained from saying. My, but I'm getting judgmental.
The buzzer sounded and, relieved at the interruption, Hort pressed the pad that freed the door. It was Gram, the head nurse. He looked upset.
“It was time for Linkeree's toilet,” he said, beginning, as usual, in the middle, “and he wasn't there. We've looked eve where. He's not in the building.”
Mrs. Danol gasped. “Not in the building!”
Hort said, “She's his mother,” and Gram went on. “He climbed through the ceiling tiles and out the air-conditioning system. We had no idea he was that strong.”
“Oh, what a line hospital!”
Hort was irritated. “Mrs. Danol, the quality of this hospital as a hospital is indisputably excellent. The quality of this hospital as a prison is woefully deficient. Take it up with the government.” Defensive again, dammit. And the bitch is still throwing her chest at me. I'm beginning to understand Linkeree, I think. “Mrs. Danol, please wait here.”
“No.”
“Then go home. But I assure you you'll be entirely in the I way while we search for your son.”
She glared at him and stood her ground.
He merely nodded. “As you will,” he said, and picked up the door control from the desk, carried it with him out of the room, and slid the door shut in Mrs. Danol's face as she tried to follow. He got an altogether unhealthy feeling of satisfaction at having done so.
“Wouldn't mind strangling her myself,” he said to Gram, who missed the point and looked a bit worried. “A joke, Gram. I'm not getting homicidal. Where did the fellow go?”
Gram had no answer, and so they went outside to see.
Linkeree huddled against the fence of the government compound, the miles of heavy metal fencing that separated civilization from the rest of the world. The evening wind was already blowing in from the thick grass and rolling hills of the plain that gave the planet its name, Pampas. The sun was still two fingers off the horizon, however, and Linkeree knew that he was plainly visible from miles away. Visible both to the government people who would surely be looking for him; but also visible to the Vaqs, who he knew waited just over the hill, waiting for a child like him to wander out to be eaten.
No, he thought. I'm not a child.
He looked at his hands. They were large, strong—and yet unweathered, as sensitive and delicate as an artist's hands.
“You should be an artist,” he heard Zad saying.
“Me?” Link answered, softly, a little amused at the suggestion.
“Yes, you,”she said. “Look at this,” and her hand swept around the room, and because he could not avoid following her hand, he also saw: tapestries on tapestries on one wall, waiting to be sold Another wall devoted to thick rugs and the huge loom that Zad used for her work. And another wall windowed ceiling to floor (glass is cheap, someone told the government architect), showing the shabbily identical government housing project in which most of the capital's people lived, and beyond them the Government Office Building from which the lives of thousands of people were run. Millions, if you counted the Vaqs. But no one counted them.
“No,” Zad said, smiling. “Sweet, darling Link, look there. That wall.”
And he looked and saw the drawings in pencil, the drawings in crayon, the drawings in chalk.
“You can do that,”
“I'm all thumbs.” Oh, you're all thumbs, he remembered his mother saying.
Zad took his hands and put them around her waist. “Not all thumbs,” she said, giggling.
And so he had reached out, held the charcoal, and with her hand guiding his at first, had sketched a tree.
“Wonderful,” she said.
He looked at the ground and saw that he had drawn a tree in the ground. He looked up and saw the fence. They're chasing me, he thought.
“I won't let them catch you,” he remembered Zad saying. He was ashamed at having lied to her and told her he was a criminal. But how would she have treated him if she'd known he was only the reclusive son of Mrs. Danol, who owned most of Pampas that could be owned? Then she would have been shy of him. Instead, he was shy of her: She had taken him from the street where he was wandering that night, already having been mugged and beaten up—the mugging by one man, the beatings by two others who had found his hip bag empty.
“What, are you crazy?”
He had shaken his head, but now he knew better. After all, hadn't he murdered his mother?
A siren went off in the mental hospital. With a wrenching sense of despair Linkeree curled up tighter in a ball, wishing he could turn into a bush. But that wouldn't help, would it? This is a defoliated area.
“What have you drawn?” he remembered Zad asking, and he wept.
A stinger stung him, and he flicked the insect from his hand. The pain brought him up short. What was he doing?
What am I doing? he thought. Then he remembered the escape from the I mental hospital, the run through the maze of buildings to the perimeter—the perimeter, because it was safety, the only hope. He vaguely reca
lled his childhood fear of the open plain—his mother's horrified stories of how the Vaqs would get you if you weren't good and didn't eat your supper.
“Don't disobey me again, or I'll let the Vaqs at you. And you know what part of little boys they like to eat first.”
What a sick lady, Linkeree thought for the millionth time. At least it isn't hereditary.
But it is, isn't it? Aren't I escaping from a mental hospital?
He was confused. But he knew that over the fence was safety, Vaqs or no Vaqs; he couldn't stay at the hospital. Hadn't he Ad killed his mother? Hadn't he told them he was glad of it? When they realized he wasn't insane at all, that he really, seriously, in cold blood strangled his mother on the public streets of Pampas City, without benefit of madness—well, they'd kill him.
I will not die at their hands.
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 where 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 ever, 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.
The Worthing Saga Page 40
