Part I
I
CASTOR was halfway across the paddy, part of the long line of farm workers, when he stepped on the dead man's head. He was not thinking about dead men. He wasn't really thinking about poking the rice seedlings into the muck, either, or about the warm rain dripping on his bent shoulders or about the ache in his back; he was thinking about Maria and her problem and about going for a swim and about whether it was possible that the people at the observatory would let him apply for a job there and mostly about what he and Maria would do in bed that night, and then all of a sudden there it was. He didn't know it was a dead man's head at first. He couldn't see it, though the water was only centimeters deep, because the sowers had stirred up the bottom mud. His foot told him it was solid, and heavy, and didn't belong there. "Tourists," he muttered to old Sarah, next to him in line. "They throw their garbage anywhere they like!"
He reached down into the muck. Tiny tilapia slipped between his fingers, angry as poked wasps at the disturbance. Castor felt that the thing was round and soggy, and then as he lifted it up he saw what it was. His scared, furious bellow brought the whole production team splashing and squashing over to him. Fat Rhoda came up scowling, because she'd had enough of Castor's foolishness, and old Franky was giggling and calling out jokey questions—"What is it then, Castor, you found another baby in the bullrushes?"—and almost all of them smiling, because nobody but Rhoda minded an excuse to pause for a moment from the endless stoop labor of transplanting the seedlings.
Then they saw what Castor was holding, and all smiles froze. They stood staring, sweating through the rain-glistened skin, while the tilapia played about their toes and no one knew what to do. "It's a murder!" quavered old Franky, leaning on his stick. "Don't say that!" ordered Fat Rhoda, but her voice was a lot more frightened than commanding. Then she reached for the talkie that hung, around her neck and said, "Commune, this is Production Team Three. We've just discovered a dead body. Part of a dead body, a head." She licked her lips and added, "Call the cops, and tell them it isn't one of us. It looks like a Han Chinese."
Although the Heavenly Grain Collective Farm was more than a hundred kilometers from Biloxi, the police helicopter was there in half an hour. It was a long half hour. The production team was ordered to do nothing but stay right where they were. Stay they did, all fourteen of them sitting on the dike, looking at the place where Castor in horror had dropped the head back out of sight and old Franky had jammed in his hobbling stick for a marker. "They'll drain the paddy," Franky predicted gloomily, "and everything to do all over again!"
Little Nan cried out with shock, "We'll lose the fish. Rhoda! Sixty kilos of tilapia fry, we just put them in!"
"I know," Rhoda said crossly, frowning. The ecology of rice farming was not just rice. First you prepared the paddy, then you flooded the paddy, then you seeded brine shrimp, then you seeded tilapia. The shrimp fed on bits of anything and on insect larvae. The tilapia fed on the insect larvae and on the shrimp; then, when they had grown, people fed on the meal made from the adult tilapia; it was "the commune's best and cheapest protein. Since both shrimp and tilapia were resolutely carnivorous, insect pests were destroyed and the rice seedlings were spared.
"Get traps," Franky suggested. "Maybe we can save the tilapia."
"I'm just going to get traps," Rhoda fretted and talked to the commune again on the little radio that hung around her neck; though what good the traps would do no one was sure, for the baby tilapia were so tiny that many of them might slip right through the mesh and be lost.
At least the rain had stopped, though the burning sun was no easier to take. The excitement had attracted a tour bus away from the village's souvenir shops. Forty Mainland tourists were snatching pictures of the paddy, the grumpy production team, and each other. Already two schoolgirls from the village had hurried out with bike-loads of sweet persimmons and golden limes from the private plots. The tourists bought eagerly. The production team looked wistfully at the fruit but didn't buy—not at tourist prices—not, especially, when the tourist renmin-dollars were pouring into the village's economy so easily. One tourist persimmon was worth more than a kilo of state-bought rice, and no taxes to pay.
The production team heard the sudden buzz of tourist cameras before they heard the flutter of the approaching choppers. They all stood up as three police helicopters settled on the truck hardstand. Three! What were they expecting, an armed gang of murderers waiting to shoot it out with the cops? But the six police from the first craft wore the green shoulder boards of traffic control and expeditiously shepherded the grumbling tourists back to their bus and away. The second chopper carried real police; armed and helmeted, along with a couple of unarmed, older police carrying cameras and black attach^ cases. The third seemed to hold only one person, a woman wearing the collar insignia of an inspector.
She stepped down and paused. She gazed at the rice paddy, at the departing tourist bus, at the clouds building again out over the Gulf of Mexico; and then she turned to the production team. In excellent English she asked, "Which one found the body?"
Grateful hands pushed Castor forward. "It wasn't a body, only a head," he said to set the record straight.
She confronted him staring up into his face. She was less than shoulder-high to him, but she did not seem to notice the difference in their heights. "Oh, only a head, then? I see. But that makes quite a difference, if it is only a head rather than a whole body! Still, in my experience I have learned that if a dead head turns up, then somewhere there is a dead body it has belonged to."
Castor's annoyance at her sarcasm exceeded his worry at being involved with the Renmin Police. In faultless Mandarin he answered her. "A high police officer will understand these things better than a peasant, I know."
"Ah!" she exclaimed. "I am in the presence of a scholar! But please, permit me to speak in your language, since some of your colleagues may not understand the high tongue. Tell me, then, scholar, how did you find this thing, whether it be body or merely inexplicably separate head?"
So Castor told her, and all the other members of the production team told her, and the police began their work. Some did indeed stamp and scuffle around the paddy, ordering the water level be lowered a little at a time. Others conducted separate interrogations of all fourteen witnesses; others still took pictures and bottled little samples of water and mud and other things. There was a flurry when the interrogating police found that some of the production team did not have their passport cards on their persons. Castor was one. He thought angrily of the criticism that would follow, perhaps even punishment duty. But the inspector would have none of that. "Forget that!" she ordered. "Of course these people don't carry cards on their own farm, that is foolishness. You can perfectly well verify their identities in the village." And she was equally short at Fat Rhoda's request to be allowed to trap as many of the tilapia as possible as the water was drained away. "No one wishes to waste valuable food! Certainly, catch your fish." And so half the production team was set to placing the traps and bailing out their squirming contents to be put in transport tanks, while the other half was put to walking the paddy with nets to capture as many as possible of those flapping away in the mud. That was Castor's job—the job of a ten-year-old, really! It was an indignity. He was always suffering indignities. Even being assigned to planting rice was an indignity. Stoop-labor gangs were picked from the shortest members of the commune—they didn't have so far to stoop—and Castor was nearly two meters tall. He felt the amused eyes of the People's Police inspector on him from time to time as he tripped 01 fell m the pursuit of the glittery, flopping little creatures; and all in all it was a bad day.