“You mean a game with cards?”
“No,” said the half-man, “a sort of eye-machine with real people doing the figures.”
“I never saw that,” said Mercer, “but I—”
“But you want to ask me when B’dikkat is going to come back with the needle.”
“Yes,” said Mercer, a little ashamed of his obviousness.
“Soon,” said the half-man. “That’s why I think of plays. We all know what is going to happen. We all know when it is going to happen. We all know what the dummies will do—” he gestured at the hummocks in which the decorticated men were cradled—” and we all know what the new people will ask. But we never know how long a scene is going to take.”
“What’s a ‘scene’?” asked Mercer. “Is that the name for the needle?”
The half-man laughed with something close to real humor. “No, no, no. You’ve got the lovelies on the brain. A scene is just part of a play. I mean we know the order in which things happen, but we have no clocks and nobody cares enough to count days or to make calendars and there’s not much climate here, so none of us know how long anything takes. The pain seems short and the pleasure seems long. I’m inclined to think that they are about two Earth-weeks each.”
Mercer did not know what an “Earth-week” was, since he had not been a well-read man before his conviction, but he got nothing more from the half-man at that time. The half-man received a dromozootic implant, turned red in the face, shouted senselessly at Mercer, “Take it out, you fool! Take it out of me!”
While Mercer looked on helplessly, the half-man twisted over on his side, his pink dusty back turned to Mercer, and wept hoarsely and quietly to himself.
Mercer himself could not tell how long it was before B’dikkat came back. It might have been several days. It might have been several months.
Once again B’dikkat moved among them like a father; once again they clustered like children. This time B’dikkat smiled pleasantly at the little head which had grown out of Mercer’s thigh — a sleeping child’s head, covered with light hair on top and with dainty eyebrows over the resting eyes. Mercer got the blissful needle.
When B’dikkat cut the head from Mercer’s thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the child-face grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B’dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately.
The next time it was two legs growing from his chest.
Then there had been another head beside his own.
Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side?
He forgot the order.
He did not count time.
Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of times, repeated with smiles and hope, “People never live forever.”
She found this immensely comforting, even though Mercer did not make much sense out of it.
Thus events occurred, and victims changed in appearance, and new ones arrived. Sometimes B’dikkat took the new ones, resting in the everlasting sleep of their burned-out brains, in a ground-truck to be added to other herds. The bodies in the truck threshed and bawled without human speech when the dromozoa struck them.
Finally, Mercer did manage to follow B’dikkat to the door of the cabin. He had to fight the bliss of super-condamine to do it. Only the memory of previous hurt, bewilderment and perplexity made him sure that if he did not ask B’dikkat when he, Mercer, was happy, the answer would no longer be available when he needed it. Fighting pleasure itself, he begged B’dikkat to check the records and to tell him how long he had been there.
B’dikkat grudgingly agreed, but he did not come out of the doorway. He spoke through the public address box built into the cabin, and his gigantic voice roared out over the empty plain, so that the pink herd of talking people stirred gently in their happiness and wondered what their friend B’dikkat might be wanting to tell them. When he said it, they thought it exceedingly profound, though none of them understood it, since it was simply the amount of time that Mercer had been on Shayoclass="underline"
“Standard years — eighty-four years, seven months, three days, two hours, eleven and one half minutes. Good luck, fellow.”
Mercer turned away.
The secret little corner of his mind, which stayed sane through happiness and pain, made him wonder about B’dikkat. What persuaded the cow-man to remain on Shayol? What kept him happy without super-condamine? Was B’dikkat a crazy slave to his own duty or was he a man who had hopes of going back to his own planet some day, surrounded by a family of little cow-people resembling himself? Mercer, despite his happiness, wept a little at the strange fate of B’dikkat. His own fate he accepted.
He remembered the last time he had eaten — actual eggs from an actual pan. The dromozoa kept him alive, but he did not know how they did it.
He staggered back to the group. The Lady Da, naked in the dusty plain, waved a hospitable hand and showed that there was a place for him to sit beside her. There were unclaimed square miles of seating space around them, but he appreciated the kindliness of her gesture none the less.
The years, if they were years, went by. The land of Shayol did not change.
Sometimes the bubbling sound of geysers came faintly across the plain to the herd of men; those who could talk declared it to be the breathing of Captain Alvarez. There was night and day, but no setting of crops, no change of season, no generations of men. Time stood still for these people, and their load of pleasure was so commingled with the shocks and pains of the dromozoa that the words of the Lady Da took on very remote meaning.
“People never live forever.”
Her statement was a hope, not a truth in which they could believe. They did not have the wit to follow the stars in their courses, to exchange names with each other, to harvest the experience of each for the wisdom of all. There was no dream of escape for these people. Though they saw the old-style chemical rockets lift up from the field beyond B’dikkat’s cabin, they did not make plans to hide among the frozen crop of transmuted flesh.
Far long ago, some other prisoner than one of these had tried to write a letter. His handwriting was on a rock. Mercer read it, and so had a few of the others, but they could not tell which man had done it. Nor did they care.
The letter, scraped on stone, had been a message home. They could still read the opening: “Once, I was like you, stepping out of my window at the end of day, and letting the winds blow me gently toward the place I lived in. Once, like you, I had one head, two hands, ten fingers on my hands. The front part of my head was called a face, and I could talk with it. Now I can only write, and that only when I get out of pain. Once, like you, I ate foods, drank liquid, had a name. I cannot remember the name I had. You can stand up, you who get this letter. I cannot even stand up. I just wait for the lights to put my food in me molecule by molecule, and to take it out again. Don’t think that I am punished any more. This place is not a punishment. It is something else.”
Among the pink herd, none of them ever decided what was “something else.”
Curiosity had died among them long ago.
Then came the day of the little people.
It was a time — not an hour, not a year: a duration somewhere between them — when the Lady Da and Mercer sat wordless with happiness and filled with the joy of super-condamine. They had nothing to say to one another; the drug said all things for them.