I said to the doctor, "You aren't from this world." Because it was true, it could be seen in his face. But he acted as though I hadn't spoken.
I tried to observe everything, thinking of escape, but I saw nothing to give me hope. Only the compound, enclosed by the tall wooden fence everywhere except at the face of the mountain, where the mine entrance gaped like an open mouth. Inside the compound were several sheds, some for the administrators, the rest meant to house the slaves. The one I slept in had straw on a dirt floor, that was all. Fifteen of us slept in it. Because it was so cold here, at the edge of the Evening Mountains, we huddled together tike cattle every sleep period, and our communal stench came to be precious to me, representing warmth and rest and our closest approximation to comfort. I don't know if any of the others were women, and it couldn't have mattered; brute exhaustion had desexed us.
Without the solar rhythm of day and night it was impossible to keep hold of the concept of the passage of time, so that we lived our lives to a pattern we could not comprehend. We were awakened by shouts, and the sun read evening. We ate gruel from a trough and then trotted into the mine, and behind us as we went the sun still read evening. We worked, scraping out a vein of some pale metal through the interior of the mountain, and at a shouted order we put down our tools and trotted back to the compound along the cold damp tunnels, and when we emerged the sun said evening still. We ate again at the trough, and crowded into our shed, and closed our eyes against the light of the evening sun, and slept.
At first I tried to keep hold of that within me which was
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rational and human, but it was impossible. My brain atrophied; in any realistic sense, I had ceased to exist.
I was brought out of this nothingness twice, the first time temporarily, in a brief incident that stands out in my memory like a single star in an otherwise black sky. I was at the trough with the others, and laughter made me raise my head. Some distance off, talking with a mine official, were two large muscular men with shaved bald heads. Seeing them, it came into my mind that I had been looking for these two, and I very nearly moved away from the trough in their direction, as though there was something I had to say to them. But then fear struck me, and my back twinged with pain, and I became very afraid—without knowing why—that they would see me. I ducked my head down again, and continued to eat, and kept my face hidden when a little while later we trotted past them on our way to work.
But the incident had driven me to self-awareness, and I remained nervous and upset for some time after that, until the monotonous routine of the work lulled me back to indifference.
The second incident was much stronger, and jolted me back to myself violently and permanently. That was when they cut off my hand.
Infection had set in where my finger had been bitten. Gradually the entire hand had become discolored and I felt increasing waves of pain. Apparently I had begun to howl, both while awake and in my sleep, until finally one of the guards took a look at my hand and I was taken to the doctor who had examined me back at the beginning.
It is possible the hand could have been saved by a doctor disposed to expend time and effort on the problem, but I think it more likely that the infection had been left to itself too long and there was by now nothing left to do but amputate. In any case, I was strapped into a chair, my left arm was tied to a kind of board, and a knife came down on my wrist.
I screamed myself back to life. First the knife, and then the cauterizing fire, and when the stony-faced doctor was done I was trembling and weak and half-mad with pain, but I was alive again, and I would know no more deaths until the last one.
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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
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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 record-keeping, 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.