Capitol

KILLING CHILDREN

O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall

Frightful, sheer, no-man fathomed. Hold them cheap

May who ne'er hung there.

-- Gerard Manley Hopkins

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 undercurve 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 hipbag 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 fists, shouting frantically, "Let me out of here!"

They lot 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 Doctor 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 attendants' 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 govemment facility, remember? He murdered a girl."

"She probably deserved it."

"She had supported him and cared for him for seven months, Mrs. Danol."

"She probably seduced him."

"They had a very active sex life, in which both were eager participants."

Mrs. 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 ths planet, Mrs. 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 weeps and says he's sorry, that he'll never do it again. Most of the time, however, he 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, Holt refrained from saying. My, but I'm getting judgmental.

The buzzer sounded and, relieved at the interruption, Holt 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 everywhere. He's not in the building."

Mrs. Danol gasped. "Not in the building!"

Holt 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 fine hospital!"

Holt 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 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 lit 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. Donal, 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 beating by two others who had found his hipbag 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 that 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 mental hospital, the run through the maze of buildings to the perimeter-- the perimeter, because it was safety, the only hope. He vaguely recalled 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 killed his mother? Hadn't he told them he was glad of it? And 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 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 metets 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.

And Link reached down and put his thumb and forefinger around the baby's throat, to kill it now and spare it the brief agony of death later in the night. But when it was time to squeeze tightly and shut off blood and breath, Link discovered that he could not.

"I am not a killer," Link said. "I can't help you."

And he got up and walked away, leaving behind the child's mewling to be buried in the noise of the wind pushing through the grass. The blades rasped against his naked chest, and he remembered his mother scrubbing him in the bath. "See? Only I can reach your back. You need me, just to stay clean."

I need you.

"That's mother's good boy."

Yes. I am, I am.

"Don't touch me! I won't have any man touch me!"

But you said--

"I'm through with men. You're a bastard and a son of a bastard and you've made me old!"

But Mother--

"No, no, what am I doing? It isn't your fault that men are like that. You're different, you, my sweet little boy, give Mother a hug-- not so tight, for God's sake, you little devil, what are you trying to do? Go to your room!"

He stumbled in the near darkness and fell, cutting his wrist in the grass.

"Why are you hitting me?" he heard the brownhaired woman who ought to be blond crying out. But he hit her again, and she fled the apartment, ran down the stairs, stumbled out into the street. It was the stumbling that let him catch her, and there in the middle of the road he stifled her scream by showing her precisely what a man was like, by throwing her at long, long last away.

A knife pricked into his chest.

He looked up from where he lay in the grass at a short, stocky man-- no, not a man, a Vaq-- and not just one, a half dozen, all armed, though some were just rising from the ground-- and still seemed half asleep. He had stumbled in his daze into a Vaq camping place.

This is better, he thought, than the suckers and chewers, and so with a pillar of blackness and chill in place of his spine, he weakly stood, waiting for the knife.

But the knife pressed no deeper toward his heart, and he grew impatient. Wasn't he the heir of the man who had done most to hurt the Vaqs, whose great tractors had swept away the livelihood of a dozen tribes, whose hunters had killed Vaqs who chanced to wander on land marked out as his? I am the owner of half this world that is worth owning; kill me and free yourselves.

One of the Vaqs hissed impatiently. Press the knife, Link thought he seemed to say. And so he, too, hissed. Impatiently. Act now. Hurry.

In surprise at his having echoed his own death sentence, the Vaq with the knife at his chest withdrew a step, though he still held out the knife, pointing at Linkeree. The Vaq babbled something, something ripe with rolled Rs and hissed Ss-- not a human language, they taught the children in the government schools, even, though as Link well knew there were dozens of anthropological reports pointing out that the Vaq language was merely corrupted Spanish, and the Vaqs were obviously the descendants of the colony ship Argentine that had been thought lost in the first decade of interstellar colonization thousands of years ago, when man had first reached out from the small planet that they had utterly spoiled. Human. Definitely human, however cruel Pampas had selected for ugliness and ignorance and viciousness and inhumanity.

Savages have no monopoly on that.

And Linkeree reached out, gently took the hind that held the blade, and guided it back until the point pressed against his belly. Then he hissed again, impatiently.

The Vaq's eyes widened; And he tuned to look at his fellows, who were equally puzzled. They babbled; some backed away from Link, apparently in fear. Link couldn't understand. He guided the knife deeper into his flesh; blood crept back along the horizontal blade.

The Vaq withdrew his knife, abruptly, and his eyes filled with tears, and he knelt and took Linkeree by the hand.

Link tried to pull his hand away. The Vaq only followed, offering no resistance. The others, also, gathered around. He couldn't understand their language, but he could understand the gestures. They were, he realized, worshipping him.

Gentle hands led him to the center of the encampment. All around, little braziers of peat burned brightly, sizzling constantly as the heatseeking suckers left the Vaqs and gathered to die in the fire.

They sang to him, plaintive melodies that were only deepened and enhanced by the sweep and howl of the wind. They stripped him and touched him all over, gently exploring, then dressed him again and fed him (and he thought bitterly of the child who, because of the lack of food, was even now dying in the grass) and surrounded him and lay down around him to protect him as he slept.

You're cheating me. I came here to die, and you're cheating me.

And he wept bitterly, and they admired his tears, and after a half hour, long before the cold moon rose, he slept, feeling cheated but somehow utterly at peace.

Mrs. Danol sat in a chair in Hort's office, her arms folded tightly, her eyes savagely watching every move he made-- or didn't make.

"Mrs. Danol," he finally said, "it would help everyone, including you, if you went home."

"Not," she answered acidly, "until you find my boy."

"Mrs. Danol, we are not even looking!"

"And that's why I'm not leaving."

"The government doesn't send searchers out on the plains in the nighttime. It's suicidal."

"And so Linkeree is going to die. I assure you, Mr. Hort, that the hospital will regret not doing anything."

He sighed. He was sure that the hospital would-- the annual gifts from the Danol family were more than half of the operating budget. Some salaries would go immediately-- primarily his, there was little doubt. And so, knowing that, and also because he was extremely tired, he tossed aside his politic courtesy and pointed out some blunt facts.

"Mrs. Danol, are you aware that in ninety percent of our cases, treating the patient's parents is the most effective step toward a cure?"

Her mouth grew tight and hard.

"And are you aware that your son is not genuinely psychotic at all?"

At that she laughed. "Good. All the more reason to get him away from here-- if he lives through this night out there in that hell that passes for a terraformed planet."

"Actually, your son is quite sane, half the time-- a very intelligent, very creative young man. Very much like his father." That last was intended as a very deep dig. It worked.

She rose from her chair. "I don't want any mention of that son-of-a-bitch!"

"But the other half of the time, he is merely reenacting childhood. Children are insane, all of them-- by adult standards. Their defense strategies, their adaptations, are all such that an adult using them is regarded as utterly mad. Paranoia, acting out, denial, self-destruction. For some reason, Mrs. Danol, your son has been kept penned into the relationship structures of his childhood."

"And you think the reason is me."

"Actually, it's not just a matter of opinion. The only times that Linkeree was sane were the times when he believed he had killed you. Believing you dead, he functions as an adult. Believing you alive, he functions as an infant."

He had gone too far. She shouted in rage and struck out at him across the desk. Her fingers raked his face; her other hand sprawled along his desk, shoving papers and books off onto the floor. He managed to push the call button while he grappled with her with his other hand. But he had lost a handful of hair and gained bruises in his shins by the time the attendants came in and held her back, sedated her, took her to a room in the hospital to rest.

Morning. The hairy birds of the plains were awake, foraging briskly in the dawn, eating the now sluggish suckers that had bloated themselves on the night life of the grasslands. Linkeree woke, mildly surprised at how natural and good it felt to awaken in the open, lying on a mat of grass, with birds crying. Is there some racial memory of life in the open land that makes me feel so comfortable? he wondered. But he yawned, stood, stretched, feeling vigorously alive, feeling good.

The Vaqs watched him, even as they pursued their morning tasks-- packing up for the day's journey, fixing a skimpy breakfast of cold meat and hot water. But after the eating, they came to him, touched him again, knelt again, making arcane signs with their hands. When they were through (and Linkeree thought bitterly that it was strange that murder and worship were the only intercourse men could have with the Vaqs) they led Linkeree out of the camp, back in the direction he had come last night.

Now, in daylight, he could see why it was that the Vaqs were such deadly adversaries when met in their native habitat. They were short, and not one of them stood taller than the thickest part of the grass, though Link, not a tall man by any human standard, could see clearly over the crest of the blades. And the grass ate up their footprints, closed behind them, hid their movements from any possible observer or follower. An army of Vaqs could pass by unnoticed a meter from the keenest observer, he thought, with some exaggeration.

And then they arrived. They had brought him back to where the baby had been abandoned. It shocked Linkeree profoundly, that they would return to the scene of their crime. Was there no shame to the murders? At least they could have the decency to forget the existence of the child, instead of coming back to gloat.

But they formed a circle around the small corpse (how had they found him again in the grass?) and Linkeree looked down at the child's body.

A chewer had come in the night, and then several others. The first had (shades of Mother's nighttime threats) chewed off the infant genitals, gnawed into the abdomen at the soft entrails, ignoring the muscle tissue entirely. But the baby and the placenta had attracted a huge concentration of suckers, and these had eagerly transferred to the much warmer chewer, bleeding it to death before its meal was finished, The later chewers were bled to death even faster, as more and more suckers came, sucked, laid eggs, and died.

And then the birds, which had danced skyward when Link and the Vaqs had arrived, eating the dying suckers, but ignoring the sucker eggs which were implanted on the blades of grass, where tonight they would hatch, and the lucky ones would find food before they starved to death, find food and reproduce in a mad, one-night life.

Except for the gnawed away crotch, the child's body was intact.

The Vaqs knelt, nodded toward Link, and began cutting up the child's body. The incisions were neat, precise. Breastbone to crotch, a U-shaped cut around the breasts, a long slice down the arms, the head completely removed; all cuts were quick and deft, and in a moment the body was entirely skinned.

And then they ate.

Link watched, appalled, as they each in turn lifted a strip of raw meat toward him, as if it were a votive offering. He shook his head each time, and each time the Vaq murmured (in thanks) and ate.

And when the raw bones were left, and the skin, and the heart, the Vaqs opened the skin smoothside up and laid it before Link. They picked up the pile of bones, and held it out to him. He took them-- he was afraid, in the face of such inhumanity, to refuse. Then they waited.

What do I do now? he wondered. They were beginning to look a bit disturbed as he knelt, motionless, with the bones in his hands. And so, vaguely remembering some of his classical history, he tossed down the bones onto the blanket of skin and then stood, wiping the blood off his hands onto his trousers.

The Vaqs all looked at the bones, pointing to this one and that one, though they had landed in no pattern discernible to Link. At last, however, they began to grin, to laugh, to jump up and down and jig in delight at whatever the bones had told them.

Linkeree was more than a little glad that the portents had turned out so well. What would they have done if the bones had somehow spelled disaster?

The Vaqs decided to reward him. They picked up the head and offered it to him.

He refused.

They looked puzzled. So did he. Was he supposed to eat the head? It was ghastly-- the stump had not bled at all, looked like a laboratory specimen, reminded him of--

No, he would not.

But the Vaqs were not angry. They seemed to understand-- they only took the bones, buried each in a separate but shallow hole scrabbled out of the rich deep soil under the grass, and then took the skin and draped it over Link's bare shoulders. It occurred to him that they were signifying that he was the child. The leader's gesture confirmed that they believed that-- he kept gesturing from the skin and the head to Linkeree, and then pausing, waiting for an answer.

Linkeree didn't know how to respond. If he denied he was the child's spirit or successor or something, would they kill him? Or if he admitted that he was, would they finish their sacrifice by killing him? Either choice might end his life, and he was not feeling suicidal this morning.

And then, as he stared into the child's dead face, remembering that last night the infant had been alive, had responded to his touch, he realized that there was more truth than they realized to their belief. Yes, he was the infant, chewed and cut and eaten and cast away to be buried in a hundred tiny graves. Yes, he was dead. And he nodded in acceptance, nodded in agreement.

The Vaqs all nodded, too, and one by one they came to him and kissed him. He was unsure of whether the kiss was a prelude to leaving or to killing; but then they each kissed the child's head that he held in his hands in front of him, and as he saw their lips tenderly rest on the infant forehead or cheeks or mouth he was overcome by self-pity and grief; he wept.

And, seeing his tears, the Vaqs grew afraid, babbled quietly among themselves, and then disappeared silently into the tall grass, leaving Linkeree alone with the child's relics.

Dr. Hort went to see Mrs. Danol as soon, as he woke up in the morning. She was sitting in one of the empty private rooms, her hands folded in her lap. He knocked. She looked up, saw him through the window, nodded, and he came in.

"Good morning," he said to her.

"Is it?" she answered. "My son is dead by now, Dr. Hort."

"Perhaps not. He wouldn't be the first to survive a night in the grass, Mrs. Danol."

She only shook her head.

"I'm sorry about last night's fracas," he said. "I was tired."

"You were also too damn right," she answered. "I woke up at four this morning, sedative or no sedative. I thought and thought about it. I'm poison. I've poisoned my son just by being his mother. I wish I could be out there on the plain in his place, dying for him."

"And what the hell good would that do?"

She only cried in answer. He waited. The sobbing let up only a few moments later.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I've been crying off and on all morning." Then she looked at Hort, pleading in her eyes, and said, "Help me."

He smiled-- kindly, not triumphantly-- and said, "I'll try. Why don't you just tell me what you've been thinking about?"

She laughed bitterly. "That's a rat's nest we hardly need to go into. I spent most of the time thinking about my husband."

"Whom you don't like."

"Whom I loathe. He married me because I wouldn't sleep with him otherwise. He slept with me until I got pregnant; then he moved on. When Linkeree turned out to be a boy, he was delighted, and changed his will to leave everything to the boy. Nothing to me. And then, after he had slept with every girl on this planet and half the boys, he was run over by a tractor and I gave a little cheer."

"He was well thought of on the planet."

"People always think well of money."

"They often think well of beauty, too."

And at that she cried again. Through her sobs, in a twisted, little-girl voice, she said, "All I ever wanted was to go to Capitol. To go to Capitol and meet all the famous people and be on somec so that I could live forever and be beautiful forever. It's all I had, being beautiful-- I had no money, no education, and no talent for anything, not even motherhood. Do you know what it means to have only one thing that makes other people love you?"

No, Hort thought to himself, but I can see what a tragedy it is.

"You were your son's guardian. You could have taken him to Capitol."

"No, I couldn't. It's the law, Hort. Planet money must be invested on the planet until it achieves full provincial status. It protects us from exploitation. " She spat the word. "No somec allowed until we're a province. No chance to have life!"

"There are some of us who don't want to sleep for years on end, just to stay young a few years longer," Dr. Hort said.

"Then you're the insane ones," she retorted, and he almost agreed. Eternal life didn't appeal to him. Sleeping through life seemed like a disgusting waste of time. But he knew the draw, knew that most people who came to the colonies were desperate or stupid, that the gifted ones or the rich ones or the hopeful ones stayed where somec was within reach.

"Not only that," she said, "my damnable husband entailed the entire fortune, everything. Not a penny could be taken from Pampas."

"Oh."

"So I stayed, hoping that when my son grew up we could find some way, go anyway--"

"If your son hadn't been born, the money would all have been left to you, unentailed, and you could have sold it to an offworlder and gone."

She nodded, and began to weep again.

"No wonder you hated your son."

"Chains. Chains, holding me here, stripping away my only asset as the years made hash of my face and my figure."

"You're still beautiful."

"I'm forty-five years old. It's too late. Even if I left for Capitol today, they won't let someone over forty-five go on somec at all. It's the law."

"I know. So--"

"So stay here and make the best of it? Thanks, Doctor, thanks. I might as well have a priest as you."

She turned away from him, and muttered, "And now the boy dies. Now, when it's too late. Why the bloody hell couldn't he have died a year ago?"

Linkeree patted the last of the earth over the grave he had dug for the head and skin of the child. The tears had long since dried; now the only liquid on him was sweat from the exertion in the hot sun of digging through the heavy roots of the grass. No wonder the Vaqs had dug shallowly to hide the bones. It was already afternoon, and he had only just finished.

But as he had worked, he had forced himself back, coldly reassembling his memories in his mind, burying them one by one in the child's grave. It was not Mother I killed in the street, it was Zad. Mother is still alive; she visited me yesterday. That was why I fled the hospital; that was why I wanted to die. Because if ever there was a person who deserved to live, it was Zad. And if ever one deserved to die, it was Mother.

Several times he felt himself longing to curl up and hide, to retreat into the cool shade under the standing grass, to deny that any of this had ever happened, to deny that he had ever turned five at all. But he fought off the feeling, insisted on the facts, the whole history of his life, and then hid it under the dirt.

You, child, he thought. I am you. I came out here last night to die in the grassland, to be eaten alive, to have my blood sucked out. And it happened; and the Vaqs ate my flesh and now I'm buried.

I who bury you, child, I am the you who might have been. I am without a past; I have only a future. I will start from here, without a mother, without blood on my hands, rejected by my own tribe and unacceptable to strangers. I will live among the strangers anyway, and live unencumbered. I will be you, and therefore I will be free.

He brushed the dirt off his hands, ignored the painful sunburn on his back, and stood. Around him the sucker eggs on the grassblades were already hatching, and the newborn suckers were devotedly eating each other so that only the few thousand strongest would survive, fed by the others. Link avoided obvious comparisons, merely turned and headed back toward the government compound.

He avoided the gate, instead climbing the fence and enduring the electricity that coursed through him when he gripped the top wire. And then, as the alarms went off, he walked back to the hospital.

Dr. Hort was alone in his office, eating a late lunch from a tray that Gram had brought him. Someone tapped at his door. He opened it, and Linkeree walked in.

Hort was surprised, but out of long professional habit, he didn't show it. Instead, he dispassionately watched as Linkeree walked to the chair, sat down comfortably, and leaned back with a sigh.

"Welcome back," Hort said.

"Hope I didn't cause any inconvenience," Linkeree answered.

"How was your night in the grass?"

Linkeree looked down at his scratches and scabs. "Painful. But therapeutic."

Silence for a moment. Hort took another bite of his sandwich.

"Dr. Hort, right now I'm in control. I know that my mother's alive. I know that I killed Zad. I also know that I was insane when I did it. But I understand and I accept those things."

Hort nodded.

"I believe, Doctor, that I am sane right now. I believe that I am viewing the world as accurately as most people, and can function in a capable manner. Except."

"Except?"

"Except that I'm Linkeree Danol, and as soon as it is known that I am capable of running things, I will be forced to take control of a very large fortune and a huge business that employs, in the long run, most of the people on Pampas. I will have to live in a certain house in this city. And in that house will be my mother."

"Ah."

"I don't believe my sanity would last fifteen minutes, Doctor, if I had to live with her again."

"She's changed somewhat," Dr. Hort said. "I understand her a little now."

"I have understood her completely for years, and she'll never change, Dr. Hort. More important, though, is the fact that I'll never change when I'm around her."

Hort sucked in a deep breath, leaned back in his chair. "What happened to you out on the desert?"

Linkme smiled wanly. "I died and buried myself. I can't return to that life. And if it means staying here in this institution all my life, pretending to be insane, I'll do that. But I'll never go back to Mother. If I did that, I'd have to live with all that I've hated all my life-- and with the fact that I killed the only person I ever loved. It isn't a pleasant memory. My sanity is not a pleasant thing to hold onto."

Dr. Hort nodded.

There was a knock at the door. Link straightened up. "Who is it?" Hort asked.

"Me. Mrs. Danol."

Linkeree stood up abruptly, walked around the office to a point at the far wall from the door.

"I'm consulting, Mrs. Danol."

Her voice was strident, even through the muffling door. "They told me Linkeree had come back. I heard you talking to him in there."

"Go away, Mrs. Danol," Dr. Hort said. "You will see your son in due time."

"I will see him now. I have a writ that says I can see him. I got it from the court at noon. I want to see him."

Hort turned to Link. "She thinks ahead, doesn't she?"

Link was shaking. "If she comes in, I'll kill her."

"All right, Mrs. Danol. Just a moment."

"No!" Link shouted, making spastic motions as if he wanted to claw his way through the wall backward.

Hort whispered, "Relax, Link. I won't let her near you." Hort opened a closet-- Link started to walk in it. "No, Link." And Hort took his spare suit off the hanger, and a clean shirt. The suit, in the standard one piece, was a little long for Linkeree, but the waist and shoulders were not far wrong, and Link didn't look out of place in it when he had finished dressing.

"I don't know what you hope to gain by stalling, Dr. Hort, but I will see my son," Mrs. Danot shouted. "In three minutes I'll call the police!"

Hort shouted back, "Patience, Mrs. Danol. It takes a moment to prepare your son to see you."

"Nonsense! My son wants to see me!"

Linkeree was trembling, hard. Hort put his arms around the young man, gripped him tight. "Keep control," he whispered.

"I'm trying," Link chattered back, his lower jaw out of control.

Hort reached into his hipbag, pulled out his id and his cred, and handed them to Link. "I won't report them missing until you are on a ship out of here."

"Ship?"

"Go to Capitol. You'll have little trouble there, finding a place. Even without money. There's always room for someone like you."

Link snorted "That's a damn lie and you know it."

"Right. But even if they send you back here, your mother will be dby then."

Linkeree nodded.

"Now here's the door control. When I say, open the door."

"No."

"Open the door and let her in. I'll keep her under control until you get out the door and close it from the outside. There's no way out of here, then, except Gram's masterkey, and this note should take care of that." Hort scribbled a quick note. "He'll cooperate because he hates your mother almost as much as I do. Which is a terrible thing for an impartial psychologist to say, but at this point, who the hell cares?"

Linkeree took the note and the door control and stood beside the door with his back to the wall. "Doctor," he asked, "what'll they do to you for this?"

"Raise holy hell, of course," he said. "But I can only be removed by a council of medical practitioners-- and that's the same group that can have Mrs. Danol committed."

"Committed?"

"She needs help, Link."

Linkeree smiled-- and was surprised to realize it was his first smile in months. Since. Since Zad died.

He touched the open button.

The door slid open and Mrs. Danol swept in. "I knew you'd see reason," she pronounced, then whirled to look as Link stepped out the door, closing it so quickly that he almost got caught in it. His mother was already screaming and pounding as Link handed the note to Gram, who read it, looked closely at the man, and then nodded. "But hurry your ass, boy," Gram said. "What we're doing here is called kidnapping in some courts."

Linkeree set the door control on the desk and left, running.

He lay in the ship's passenger hold, recovering from the dizziness that they told him was normal with a person's first mindtaping. The brain patterns that held all his memories and all his personality were now in a cassette securely stored in the ship's cabin, and now he lay on a table waiting for them to drug him with somec. When he woke up and had his memory played back into his mind in Capitol, he would only remember up to the moment of taping. These moments now, between the tape and the tap, would be lost forever.

And that was why he thought back to the infant whose warm body he had held, and why he let himself wish that he could have saved him, could have protected him, could have let him live.

No, I'm living for him.

The hell I am. I'm living for me.

They came and put the needle into his buttocks, not for the cold sleep of death, but for the burning sleep of life. And as the hot agony of somec swept over him, he writhed into a ball on the table and cried out, "Mother! I love you!"