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The whole process was inhuman.

The last ounce of effort was taken from every slave.

It was possible to survive, for I saw old men still laboring away, although the turnover was rapid, for the labor simply wore a man down until he saw no good reason to go on living. Absolute inhumanity reigned here. Work — slaving work — filled every day. Rest periods were calculated out with a nicety that allowed a man to recuperate just enough energy to return with his shift to work the next time around. By comparison, the Black Marble Quarries of Zenicce, in which I’d spent some time, seemed to have been run by amateurs.

Order, law, discipline, rule. The lash, starvation, deprivation of water so that thirst tore a man’s spirit and made of him a tool in the hands of the Hamalese, all these things conspired together to make of the Heavenly Mines a place that proved Agilis knew what he was doing when he strangled his brother and would have allowed his brother to strangle him in return. .

So I entered another period of my varied life on Kregen that, even now, fills me with a most profound horror, a revulsion of spirit that brought me face to face with the man I thought I was, the man Dray Prescot, shorn of all titles and petty ranks and symbols. It was just me, Dray Prescot, pitted against inhuman will and discipline.

I knew only one thing.

I would not give in.

CHAPTER FIVE

The Heavenly Mines

Everything had a number.

Every pickax carried its number burned into the haft and punched into the ax. Every shovel carried its number burned and cut. Every drinking bowl. Every spoon. Every eating bowl. A number was branded on the hide of every calsany. Each tunnel, each chamber, each working face, every one possessed its own number.

We slept in rock shelters set against an old and abandoned cut’s side. Each rock hut had a number painted above the open door, which was provided with no blanket or hide. We slept on packed earth and each little space had a number scribed in the earth. We each possessed a single thin blanket, and this miserable covering had its number also.

And, as was inevitable, every slave had his own number.

Dray Prescot scarcely existed any longer.

The slave, number 8281, stood in his stead.

The number was branded on my chest and on my back for all to see.

The Hamalese used the common Kregish numbering and in normal times that linear script form is most beautiful. Here they had adopted the square and blocky numerology, so that my chest and back shouted aloud to the indifferent world that I was 8281.

The weird distortion of reality that must take place in surroundings of this nature and under psychological pressures so matter-of-fact and ingrained caught me up, so that I became completely habituated to think of myself as 8281. Whereas I might have taken violently against the number, instead I embraced it. For the number was me. I was the number. Eight-two-eight-one was Dray Prescot. Eight-two-eight-one existed.

By thus rushing forward and embracing my numerical alter ego I was able to dissociate myself from the almost psychotic anger of some of my fellows, who would not answer to their numbers until beaten, who refused to think of themselves as a number because of the lessening of simple human dignity. I knew a little about human dignity; but I wished to survive.

I had witnessed the punishment of the Gon who wanted his head to be shaved, as is the fashion of Gons, through what I consider to be a foolish matter of shame over their white hair. He was not thrashed unmercifully, for the Hamalese guards and overseers had nothing written down in their laws and rules about mercy. He was simply punished as the law ordained for refusing to do his quota of work. The summary court which sat on the matter dismissed his reasons as untenable. He was beaten with the regulation number of strokes each day he refused to work. Everything was carried out with the punctilio and observance of the law that I had seen so many times aboard a King’s Ship, when a hand was triced up to the gratings and given a red-checked shirt at the gangway. His crime placed him into most serious jeopardy, so that it was lawful to jikaider him, that is, flog crisscross. After he had been flogged jikaider for the regulation fifty lashes he would be cut down and then the medical men would see to him, as was required by law. His back would be doctored and the medic would pronounce him unfit to work for the period his back would take to heal. Then, when he refused to work again, he would be jikaidered again.

This went on until he died.

And when he died that long and flowing white hair of the typical Gon glittered silver and brave in the dying light of the suns.

He had been number 8279, and that was how I remembered him.

I lost count of the days, and that alarmed me. But the apathy of work and of numbers held me in a grip I could not break. Fresh fliers brought fresh slaves. A Bleg came into our hut with the numbers 8279

branded on his breast and back over the atrophied carapace, and I shook my head and called him that, although I did not forget the Gon.

The question of what was mined here teased me at the beginning; but gradually I grew indifferent. The mountains existed. We must chop them down and break them up and shovel them into the wicker baskets, they would be carried to the chaldrons, and the calsanys would draw them out to the crushers. The refiners, powered by a sickly green stream flowing over a bluff and falling into a scummy pool, rich in minerals, would do their work; then what was left over would be packed in wooden crates, lined with leather, and loaded aboard fliers. When the quota dropped, the law permitted an increase in working burs. A bur is forty Earth minutes long. It grew so that at the face a bur seemed to stretch to a Terrestrial hour. And still I had no idea what the refined rock was needed for, what the Hamalese, Zair rot ’em, did with it, why they forced this agony on fellow human beings.

The tailings stretched for dwaburs along the base of the foothills, ulm after ulm of them, spreading a powdery and ashlike detritus. What the refiners did, what sort of rock this was, what was taken from it

— all these things I did not know and gradually came not to care about. Early on I had said to a man, an apim, laboring alongside me, “What do they want the rock for, dom?”

“I do not know,” he had said, bashing his pick so that chips flew. “I only wish I could choke the rasts with it.”

“Amen to that,” I said, striking with my pick.

No one knew.

Every day we labored. There were no rest days.

The knowledge that if I did not escape soon I might forget that escape existed drove me on. While loading the fliers one day — for the Hamalese rotated tasks according to their rules — a man was discovered secreted in one of the leather-lined wooden boxes. Where guards of other peoples perhaps would have had sport with him — for example, taking him aloft so that he thought he was escaping, and then pitching him overboard; or weighing the box and declaring it was short-weight and so pouring rock upon him until he was crushed — the guards at the Heavenly Mines acted strictly according to the law. The Hamalians — or Hamalese, either term is quite correct — took him in chains to a summary court, where he was found guilty — for he was certainly that, having tried to escape — and sentenced to the prescribed punishment.