“You’re shaking!” Magda said.
He grasped her shoulders. “I haven’t liked Monel since we were all children together and Jerlet lived with us. When he had the fall and his legs were crippled, well… I tried to forget that I didn’t like him. But now… now—”
“It’s all right,” Magda soothed, stepping close enough to Linc to lean her cheek against his chest. “I know how to handle Monel. Don’t fear—”
“It’s not fear that I feel,” Linc said tightly. His arms slid around her. Then a new thought struck him. “But… why did you do what Monel wanted? Why did you send Peta away?”
She pulled away from Linc slightly and looked up into his eyes. “Suppose I let Peta go free. And suppose somebody was attacked afterward? What then?”
“But Peta wouldn’t—”
“No. But Monel would. And then say that Peta did it.”
The breath nearly left Linc’s body. “Now I understand.”
“I couldn’t let that happen; I couldn’t take the chance. It would mean that Monel would take charge of everything and everyone—even me. I will not have that. I am the priestess and I’m going to stay the priestess, no matter what Monel tries.”
“So Peta had to be sacrificed.”
“Punished,” Magda corrected. “He was lazy, and stupid, and violent. Showing him mercy would have been playing into Monel’s hands.”
For a long moment Linc said nothing. Finally, “I hope he makes it up to Jerlet’s area. It’s a long climb. And dangerous.”
Magda turned slightly in his arms to glance at the wall screen. “Let’s get out of here. I have the feeling that he sees and hears everything we do in here.”
“Jerlet?”
“No. Monel.”
They were walking down the corridor toward the living area when Linc told her about the yellow star.
“It’s bright enough now to cast shadows. It’s getting so close that you can’t look at it without hurting your eyes.”
“How long do we have?” Magda asked.
He shrugged. “Who can tell? Maybe only a few sleeps. Maybe so long that we’ll all grow as old as Jerlet.”
“No one could ever get that old!”
They laughed together.
Then Linc said, “Want to go up and see it?”
Magda hesitated only a moment. “Yes. Show me.”
They were almost at the hatch that led into the tube-tunnel when one of the farm workers called out to them. Magda and Linc waited at the hatch as he hurried along the passageway toward them. The overhead light panels were mostly dead in this section of the passageway, so the worker flashed from light to shadow, light to shadow, as he approached.
“Magda,” he puffed as he came to a stop before them, “Monel… wants to see you… right away.”
“He can wait,” Linc said.
“No… it’s about the crops. Now that there’s not enough food for everybody—”
Magda’s face set into a tight mask. Even so, she’s beautiful, Linc thought.
“All right,” Magda said to the worker. “I’ll speak to Monel about the food.”
The three of them started down the passageway. Linc looked back over his shoulder at the hatch to the tube-tunnel. That must be the tunnel they put Peta into. I wonder if he’s a II right? Can he get to Jerlet before he needs food or sleep? Does the tunnel really go all the way up to Jerlet’s domain?
Monel was in a warm little compartment that had a rumpled bunk, a dead viewing screen on the far wall, and a desk studded with push buttons—also dead.
But on the bare part of the desk he had strewn lots and lots of colored chips of plastic. Where did he get them? Linc wondered.
He and Magda stood by the door of the little room. Monel sat behind the desk in his wheeled chair, his long skinny fingers toying with the plastic chips. Sitting on the bunk was Jayna, a girl who had worked as a farmer. Now, somehow, she seemed to work for Monel all the time.
“I’ve learned how to use these bits of plastic to solve our food problem,” Monel said.
“And I helped,” Jayna added.
“We’re going to eat plastic?” Linc asked.
“Of course not!” Monel snapped. “But these plastic pieces can show us how to give food to the right people.”
“The right people?” Magda echoed.
“Yes… look—” Monel touched a few of the chips, began lining them in straight files. “You see? Each piece stands for one of us.”
“The yellow ones are for the boys and the green ones are for the girls,” Jayna said, with a big smile of accomplishment on her face.
Linc watched Monel lining them up. “How do you know you’ve got the same number of chips as there are people?”
“That’s what I did,” Jayna said happily. “I picked out one chip for each person. I remembered everybody’s chip… see, they’re all shaped a little differently. So I can remember which chip belongs to which person. I’m good at remembering.” She jumped eagerly from the bunk and bounced to the desk. “See? This one is you, Magda… it’s the biggest green one. And this one is Monel, he’s right behind you. Each chip means somebody!”
Monel seemed to be smiling and frowning at once.
“Very interesting,” Magda said. It sounded to Linc as if she were trying to keep her voice as flat and calm as possible, and not quite succeeding. “But what does all this have to do with food?”
“Ahah!” Monel’s frown vanished and he was all toothy smile. “Since Peta broke the pump, we have a problem: not enough food for everybody.”
“Not yet,” Linc said. “We have enough for the time being.”
Monel shot him a nasty glance. “But when the next crop is harvested, we’ll only have half of what we need. Somebody’s going to go hungry… lots of people, in fact.”
“We all will,” Magda said. “We share the food equally.”
“We always have,” Monel agreed, “up to now. But that doesn’t mean we have to keep on doing things the old way. With these little chips, we can decide who should get food and how much he or she should get.”
“But everybody needs food,” Linc said.
Monet’s answer was swift. “But not everybody deserves it.”
“Deserves…?”
“You know people are always doing wrong things.” Monel said. “Not working hard enough, getting angry, not meditating when they’re supposed to… my guards see a lot of wrongs being done, and so do you, if you keep your eyes open. With these chips, we can put a mark down on a person’s chip whenever he does something wrong. The more marks he gets, the less food we give him.”
Linc felt his jaw drop open, but before he could say any thing, Magda’s voice cut through the room like an ice knife:
“And who decides when someone’s done something wrong?”
Monel smiled again, and it was enough to turn Linc’s stomach. “Why, the priestess will decide, of course,” Monel said. “Assisted by these chips and those who know how to work them.”
“You can’t—” Linc began, but Magda waved him silent.
“And suppose,” she asked, “that the priestess is unwilling to do this? Suppose that the priestess decides that this is an evil scheme, to deprive people of food deliberately?”
The smile on Monel’s thin face stayed fixed, as if frozen there. Finally he said, “When the people get tired of having so little to eat, they will see that this scheme is better for them.”
“Some of them.”
“The good ones among us,” Monel said. “Once they are convinced that this plan is better than letting everyone go hungry, they will decide that the priestess is wrong to oppose it.”