Anarchaos

XVI

They gave me a new job. Because of the amputation I could no longer work in the mine, so I was put to work on a machine in a small shed next to where the ore was loaded onto trucks and driven away. The machine did number problems, with my assistance. That is, slips of paper would be handed to me, with numbers on them. I would punch buttons showing the same numbers, and the machine would go on from there. The job required an ability to recognize numbers, and a right hand to push the buttons.

Now that I had been shocked back to myself, everything seemed to be working to help me keep my awareness. This job, though elementary, required at least a little brainwork, which the digging in the mine had not. And it was not continuous, as the mine work was; most of my time at the machine was idle, waiting for more carts to be wheeled out of the mine, more slips of paper to be handed in through the window to me. I still slept in the same shed with the same group, but the group identity was no longer strong with me, now that I was separated from them during all our working hours.

Still, a great deal of time went by before I had recovered sufficiently to start thinking in terms of escape. Simple awareness of my own identity was at first startling enough to occupy my full attention, and I spent work period after work period sitting slack-jawed in front of the machine, lost in contemplation of the wonders of my own brain, picking through the grand wealth of knowledge therein like a child delightedly investigating a trunk filled with bright-colored costume jewelry. I spent uncountable time, for instance, merely spelling words in my head, exalted at the vast store of words I knew and the unending diversity of their lettering.

(If, in speaking of the passage of time, I do not use the normal words — hours, days, weeks, minutes, seconds — it is because in this situation they had no real meaning. I lived to a pattern of sleeping and waking, with a communal meal at the trough at each transition; how long this pattern took to round itself out, in terms of hours and minutes, I have no idea. Nor could I guess how many of these cycles I lived through at each stage of my development; by the time I was capable of thinking in terms of recordkeeping, I had more sophisticated thoughts of escape to hold my attention.)

At any rate, it was only after I had thoroughly explored myself that I could devote some attention to the world around me. And when at first I began to study the life of the compound I did so with no motive other than the use of my newly-regained faculties of observation and memory. The possibility of finding a way to live any existence other than my present one had not as yet occurred to me.

The compound was a rather large area, containing twenty-six rough wooden sheds, none of them very big. They contained one of three classes of thing: slaves, officials, or machinery. The sheds containing machinery were the most carefully and soundly constructed, those containing slaves were the most ramshackle. I was glad to be working on the counting machine when the long cold rains came, as at odd intervals they did, because the roof of the shed housing that machine did not leak. None of the machine-holding sheds leaked, and all of them had stout wooden floors.

In my work, I sat at a tall black stool. The machine was to my right, with a counter where I could set the slips of paper. These were handed to me through a large open window directly to my left, out of which I could see a good view of almost the entire compound, including the main gate, which was just beside this shed.

The compound had been beaten out of ground so jagged and rocky and inhospitable that nothing at all lived here under normal conditions except a kind of tenacious moss. The rocky outcroppings had been pulverized by sledges and the resultant pebbly dust used to fill crannies and holes, until at last a large square of mostly flat ground had been torn out of the environment. One side of this square was against a rocky vertical mountain face, but the other three sides, naturally open, had been enclosed by high wooden walls.

I still don’t know what mineral we were bringing out of that mountain. It was a pale gray stuff, lighter than the useless rock around it, and would sometimes chip off in layers, like shale. Picks were used to break this stuff free, and then it would be loaded by hand onto small deep carts with metal wheels. Slaves pushed these carts up the long tunnels to the compound, where officials added the slips of paper which eventually came to me. Other slaves emptied the carts by hand into large motorized trucks with treads rather than wheels, and the loaded trucks drove past my window and out the main gate and away.

Food and other material — and new slaves — arrived the same way, by truck or wagon, coming through the main gate and being unloaded very close to my window. The flow of traffic was really very light, but any movement at all was thrilling to a mind newly emerged from atrophy, so I watched the ore trucks and the supply trucks with fascination and a retentive memory. I came to know the pattern of the compound possibly better than anyone else within it.

Only once did anything break into that pattern, and that was the day the helicopter came. It was green and yellow, and it settled into the middle of the compound with a great whirling of wings, blowing dust up and seeming to have been lowered into our midst on the end of an invisible rope. There was an insignia in outline on its side: a hammer with a dog’s head. Hadn’t I seen that symbol before?

Three men emerged from the helicopter, young and well-dressed, and I understood at once that they were also officials, but of much more importance than the officials who lived in the compound and who now clustered around the new arrivals the way we slaves clustered at feeding times around our trough.

It was a tour of inspection. The little group of officials moved off in a body, and for the next long while, very nearly until my work period ended, the ordinary routine of the compound was disrupted and almost halted, so much so that the flow of papers containing numbers for me to punch onto the machine slowed to the barest trickle. The officials still at their normal work were affected by this break in the pattern, being increasingly short-tempered and agitated, and the slaves felt it too, growing restive and sullen and unwilling to work, some of them having to be beaten with sticks.

The inspection was very thorough, including the sheds, the mine itself, everything. Near the end of it they came at last around to me and my machine. It was the machine, of course, which interested them; one of the compound officials hastily explained its function and methodology — an explanation I was incapable of following — while the three visitors listened carefully and observantly, nodding their heads.

As they were starting out, one of the visitors glanced in my direction for the first time, and stopped in his tracks, staring at me. “Malone?” he said, as though pointing out to himself the existence of an impossibility. He stepped closer to me, saying my name again: “Malone?” But this time it was a question directed at me, wanting an explanation.

I was terrified. No one had looked upon me as an individual for so long that I now couldn’t possibly handle it. I stared at the compound officials, waiting for one of them to solve this problem for me.

The visitor called to one of his companions, “Elman, look! Could it be—”

The other one said, “Don’t be silly. Malone’s dead.” Then he looked at me himself and said, “He’s close, all right.”

“It’s uncanny,” said the first one.

Elman said, “His head is broader, and his eyes are different. Besides, Malone is dead. You know it as well as I do.”

I wanted to say that I wasn’t dead, but I was unable to make any sound at all. I merely stood there and stared at the faces of the officials I knew, and hoped they would solve this for me soon.

It solved itself. Elman and the one who had seen me first and the one who had been no part of it at all, the three of them turned around and walked out of the shed. I had never seen any of them before, of that I was positive, and I was pleased when, a short while later, they got back into their helicopter and were drawn up once again into the sky.

Much later, after sleep periods and work periods, it occurred to me the particular mistake they had made. That was the day I found the note.