“No you’re not,” Linc said. “You don’t look anything like Jerlet.”
9
A slow smile spread across the old man’s craggy features. His face was shaggy with stubbly white hair across his cheeks and chin. The skin hung loose from his jowls and looked gray, not healthy. His hair was dead white and tangled in crazy locks that floated every which way in the weightlessness.
“Don’t recognize me, huh,” he said. He seemed amused by the idea.
He started unfastening the straps that held Linc down. “Don’t move that arm,” he warned, “until I get the l.V. out of you—”
Ivy? Linc wondered. That was something that grew down in the farms.
The old man floated lightly over the bed, to the side where the tube was, his huge bulk blotting out the light from overhead as he passed over Linc.
“Yep,” he muttered in a throaty deep rumbling voice, “it’s been a helluva long time since I cut those training tapes for you squirts. You’re practically an adult— What’s your name?”
“Linc.”
“Linc… Linc--” The old man’s face knotted in a frown of concentration. “Hell, been so long I don’t even remember myself. Got to look back at the records.”
Linc was studying his face. The more he watched it, the more he had to admit that there was some resemblance to the Jerlet who showed himself on the screen down in the Living Wheel. But while the Jerlet he knew from the screen was old, this man seemed ancient. Even his hands were gnarled and covered with blue veins. Yet his body was huge, immense.
Those gnarled old fingers withdrew the tube from Linc’s arm and covered the wound with a patch of plastic so quickly that Linc couldn’t see the wound itself.
“The l.V.’s been feeding you since I brought you here… you’ve been out cold for nearly seventy hours.”
“Hours?” Linc echoed.
The old man made a sour face. “Yeah, you squirts probably don’t measure time that way at all, do you?”
Linc shook his head.
“Okay, see if you can sit up. Go easy now…”
Linc pushed himself up to a sitting position, then gripped the edge of the bed to keep from floating away. Weightless… maybe this is Jerlet’s domain, after all.
“Guess I’ve aged a bit,” he was saying. “Bloat like a gasbag up here in zero g. But listen, son—I am Jerlet. The one and only. Nobody here but me. Those pictures of me you see on the screens down in your area, well, those tapes were cut a long time ago. I was a lot younger then. So were you.”
Linc was barely listening. He was staring down at his bandaged arms and legs. “You saved me from the rats.”
Shaking his head, the old man said, “Nope, you saved yourself from them. I just saved you from bleeding to death, or freezing. You ran smack into my electrical fence and knocked yourself out. I had to come out and get you. Wasn’t expecting visitors. But I’m glad you came.” •
“You… really are Jerlet?” Linc asked.
He bobbed his head up and down, and his tangled hair waved around his face.
Linc scratched at his own shoulder-length hair and realized that it too was floating weightlessly.
“Look, kid, I know I look kinda shabby, but I’ve been living alone up here for a lotta years… since you and your batchmates were barely big enough to reach the selector buttons in the autogalley.”
“Why did you leave us?”
Jerlet shrugged. “I was dying. If I had stayed down there, in a full Earth gravity, my ol’ ticker would’ve popped out on me.”
“What? I don’t understand?”
Jerlet smiled at him, an oddly gentle smile in that stubbly, shaggy face. “C’mon, I’ll explain over lunch.”
“What’s lunch?”
“Hot food, sonny. Best in the world … this world, at least.”
Jerlet led Linc out of the little room and down a narrow passageway that curved so steeply Linc couldn’t see more than a few paces ahead. Yet it was all weightless.
“It’s not really zero gravity here,” Jerlet said as they glided along the passageway. “Just enough weight here to keep something down where you put it. But with your one-g muscles this must seem like total weightlessness.”
Linc nodded, not really sure he understood what the old man was rumbling about. He must be Jerlet, all right. Linc told himself. But he sure doesn’t look the way I thought he would!
They passed a double door. Jerlet nodded at it. “Biology lab; where you and the rest of the kids were born. Show you later.”
Linc said nothing. Jerlet’s words were puzzling.
Jerlet squeezed his bulk through a doorway, and Linc followed him into another small room. But this one had a round table and several soft-looking chairs in it. One wall was covered with buttons and little hatches and strange symbols.
“A food selector!” Linc marveled. “And it works?”
“Sure,” Jerlet answered heartily. “Look at the size of me! Think I’d let the food recyclers go out of whack?”
Linc studied the buttons and the symbols on each one.
Jerlet loomed beside him. “Go on! Pick anything you want… it all works fine.”
“Uh—” Linc suddenly felt stupid. “How do you know which button to push? I mean, back home we knew which button gave what kind of food… before it all broke down—”
“Broke down?” Jerlet snapped. “You mean the repair servomechs didn’t keep it going?”
“They broke down, too…”
“Then how do you … you cook the food yourselves?”
Linc nodded.
The old man looked upset. “I didn’t think the machines would fail so soon… the repair units, especially. I’m not as smart as I thought I was.” He put a hand on Linc’s shoulder. His voice sounded strange, almost as if he was afraid of what he was saying. “How… how many of you… are still alive?”
Linc shrugged. “More than both hands.”
“Both hands? You don’t know the number? You can’t even count? What happened to the education tapes?”
Somehow Linc felt as if he had hurt the old man. “I can name everybody for you. Would that be all right?”
Jerlet didn’t answer, so Linc began, “There’s Magda, she’s the priestess, of course. And Monel, and Slav—” He went through all the names of all the people. He almost said Peta’s name, but left it out when he remembered.
“Fifty-seven of you,” Jerlet muttered. He seemed shaken. He shuffled slowly from the food selector to the nearest chair and sat down heavily, despite the minuscule gravity. “Fifty-seven. Out of a hundred. Nearly half of you “dead in less than fifteen years—” He sank his face in his hands.
Linc stood by the food selector wall, helpless, and watched the old man, his huge bloated expanse of flesh squeezed into the graceful little chair. A far part of Linc’s mind marveled that the chair’s slim legs didn’t buckle under Jerlet’s gross weight, despite the low gravity.
The old man looked up at last, and his eyes were rimmed with red.
“Don’t you understand?” His voice was rough, shaky, almost begging. “I made you! You’re my children, just as surely as if I was your father… I made you, and then I had to leave. Now nearly half of you are dead … my fault—”
Linc stared at him.
Jerlet pulled himself out of the chair and took a shambling step toward Linc.
“Don’t you understand?” His voice rose to a roar. “It’s my fault! You were going to be the beautiful new people, the best generation ever! You were going to reach the new world … raised in love and kindness… BUT YOU’RE NOTHING BUT A PACK OF IGNORANT HOWLING SAVAGES!”