"Well, she said, "they want us to ball, Wayne. You know. The Groombridge people. They've got interested in what human beings do to each other, and they want to kind of watch.
I started to ask why us, but I didn't have to; I could see where Carolyn and I had had a lot of that on our minds, and maybe our masters could get curious about it. I didn't exactly like it. Not exactly; in fact in a way I kind of hated it, hut it was so much better than nothing at all that I said, "Why, honey, that's great! -almost meaning it; trying to talk her into it; moving in next to her and putting my arm around her. And then she said:
"Only we have to wait, Wayne. They want to do it. Not us.
"What do you mean, wait? Wait for what? She shrugged under my arm. You mean, I said, "that we have to be plugged in to them'? Like they'll be doing it with our bodies?
She leaned against me. "That's what they told me, Wayne. Any minute now, I guess.
I pushed her away. "Honey, I said, half crying, "all this time I've been wanting to-Jesus, Carolyn! I mean, it isn't just that I wanted to go to bed with you. I mean-
"I'm sorry, she cried, big tears on her face.
"That's lousy! I shouted. My head was pounding, I was so furious. "It isn't fair! I'm not going to stand for it. They don't have any right !"
But they did, of course, they had all the right in the world; they had bought us and paid for us, and so they owned us. I knew that. I just didn't want to accept it, even by admitting what I knew was so. The notion of screwing Carolyn flipped polarity; it wasn't what I desperately wanted, it was what I would have died to avoid, as long as it meant letting them paw her with my hands, kiss her with my mouth, flood her with my juices; it was like the worst kind of rape, worse than anything I had ever done, both of us raped at once. And then- And then I felt that burning tingle in my forehead as they took over. I couldn't even scream. I just had to sit there inside my own head, no longer owning a muscle, while those freaks who owned me did to Carolyn with my body all manner of things, and I could not even cry.
After concluding the planned series of experimental procedures, which were duly recorded, the purchased person known as Carolyn Schoerner was no longer salvageable. Appropriate entries were made. The Probation and Out-Service department of the Meadville Women's Reformatory was notified that she had ceased to be alive. A purchasing requisition was initiated for a replacement, and her account was terminated.
The purchased person known as Wayne Golden was assigned to usual duties, at which he functioned normally while under control. It was discovered that when control was withdrawn he became destructive, both to others and to himself. The conjecture has been advanced that that sexual behavior which had been established as his norm- the destruction of the sexual partner-may not have been appropriate in the conditions obtaining at the time of the experimental procedures. Further experiments will be made with differing procedures and other partners in the near future. Meanwhile Wayne Golden continues to function at normal efficiency, provided control is not withdrawn at any time, and apparently will do so indefinitely.
REM THE REMEMBERER
I don't much like writing "special occasion stories for particular purposes. To be saddled with somebody else's theme or settings comports very poorly with the undisciplined and stochastic way I think I am best able to write; so it's hard work. If editors as a race had group awareness, they wouldn't ask me, either, because all too often I have dutifully done what some editor asked me to do, only to find about the time I finished the story that some higher-up had canceled the special issue or the magazine or project itself; "Kiss of Death Fred one editor called me, and she was at least in this respect right. This story is one such. It represents one of my very few involvements with the United Nations, specifically with UNICEF. I got a call from a man who said that UNICEF had decided to publish a book of what the children of the next generation would make of their world, in all the parts of the world the United Nations covered, and would I care to write one for the United States? I could not say no. With all its nasty and conspicuous faults, the United Nations has greatly bettered the world we live in; and of all the things it does, UNICEF is the most clearly, unequivocally good. So I wrote this story.., and hardly had I finished it when the word came that high-level consultations had voted to torpedo the whole plan, and the book would never appear.
Sometimes when Rememberer awoke in the morning he was crying. Not for long. Just for a minute, out of a dream he didn't like. When his mother, Peg, heard him, she came into his small, cheerful room and stood in the doorway, smiling at him until she was sure he was altogether awake. She worried about him. He was ten years old, and she thought he was too old for that. She gave him his breakfast and sent him off to school on his bicycle. By then he was cheerful again.
In the afternoons he helped the grownups. When Peg was housecleaning, Rem mopped and brushed and helped prepare the food. When Burt, his father, was working at home on his analyses (Burt was something like a public accountant, in charge of the Southern New York Regional energy budgets), Rem checked his figures on a pocket calculator. On Tuesdays and Fridays he went out in catamarans with his Uncle Marc to help harvest mussels from the Long Island Sound Nurseries. The mussels grew on long, knotted manila lines that hung from floats. Each day hundreds of cords had to be pulled up, and stripped of the grown mussels, and reseeded with tiny mussel larvae, and put back in the water. It was hard work. Rem was too small to handle pulling up the ropes, but he could strip and reseed, and pick up the mussels that fell in the bottom of the boat so the men wouldn't crush them with their feet, and generally be useful. It was tiring. But it felt good to be tired after three hours in the catamaran, and the water was always warm, even when the air coming down off Connecticut was blustery and cold. In all but the worst weather Marc would wink and nod toward the side, and Rem would skin out of his outer clothes and dive overboard and swim down among the dangling cords, looking to see how the mussels were growing. Sometimes he took an air-pack and his uncle or one of the other men came with him, and together they would go clear down to the bottom to look for stray oysters or crabs or even lobsters that had escaped from the pens out around Block Island.
Then he would go home and meet his father, bicycling back from the Sands Point railroad station. If the weather was nice they'd dig in the garden or toss a ball around. Then they would have dinner-wherever they were having dinner that night; they rotated around from home to home most nights of the week so that each family had the job of cooking and cleaning up only two or three times a week. One of the grownups usually helped the children with their homework after dinner. Rem liked it when it was his father's turn, particularly when the homework assignment was about ecology. He was always popping up with questions. Don't hog the floor, son, his father would say. "Give the others a chance.
"It's always the same dumb questions, too, his cousin, Grace, complained. She was eight, still pretty much a brat. " Why don't we get sick from eating sewage?' What a dumb question!
His father laughed. "Well, it's not all that dumb. The thing is, we don't eat sewage. We just use it to grow things. All the New York City sewage goes into the settling ponds and then the algae tanks. Who knows what algae is?
Rem knew the answer, of course, but he was polite enough to let one of the younger ones answer. Even Grace. "What they make bread out of, she said.