To Bell the Cat
Joan D. Vinge
Another squeal of animal pain reached them from the bubble tent twenty meters away. Juah-u Corouda jerked involuntarily as he tossed the carved gaming pieces from the cup, spoiling his throw. “Hell, a triad…. Damn that noise; it’s like fingernails on metal.”
“Orr doesn’t know the meaning of ‘surrender.’” Albe Hyacin-Soong caught up the cup. “It must be driving him crazy that he can’t figure out how those scaly little rats survive all that radioactivity. How they ever evolved in the first place - “
“He doesn’t know the meaning of the word ‘mercy.’ ” Xena Soong - Hyacin frowned at her husband, her hands clasping her elbows. “Why doesn’t he anesthetize them?”
“Come on, Xena,” Corouda said. “They’re just animals. They don’t feel pain like we do.”
“And what are any of us, Juah-u, but animals trying to play God?”
“I just want to play squamish,” Albe muttered.
Corouda smiled faintly, looking away from Xena toward the edge of the camp. A few complaints, hers among them, had forced Orr to move his lab tent away from the rest. Corouda was just as glad. The noises annoyed him, but he didn’t take them personally. Research was necessary; Xena - any scientist - should be able to accept that. But the bleeding hearts are always with us. No matter how comfortable a society became, no matter how fair, no matter how nearly perfect, there was always someone who wanted flas to pick at. Some people were never satisfied; he was glad he wasn’t one of them. And glad he wasn’t married to one of them. But then, Albe always liked a good argument.
“Next you’ll be telling me that he doesn’t feel anything either!” Xena pointed.
“Keep your voice down, Xena. He’ll hear you. He’s right over there. And don’t pull down straw men; he’s got nothing to do with this. He’s Piper Alvarian Jary; he’s supposed to suffer.”
“He’s been brainwiped. That’s like punishing an amnesiac; he’s not the same man - “
“I don’t want to get into that again,” Albe said, unconvincingly.
Corouda shook his head, pushed the blond curls back under his peaked cap and moved further into the shade. They sat cross - legged on the soft, gray - brown earth with the studied primitivism all wardens affected. He turned his head slightly to look at Piper Alvarian Jary, sitting on a rock in the sun; alone as usual, and as usual within summoning range of Hoban Orr, his master. Piper Alvarian Jary, who for six years - six years! Was it only six? - had been serving a sentence at Simeu Biomedical Research Institute, being punished in kind for the greatness of his sin.
Not that he looked like a monster now, as he sat toying endlessly with a pile of stones. He wore a plain, pale coverall sealed shut to the neck in spite of the heat; dark hair fell forward into his eyes above a nondescript sunburned face. He could have been anyone’s menial assistant, ill at ease in this group of ecological experts on an unexplored world. He could have been anyone -
Corouda looked away, remembering the scars that the sealed suit probably covered. But he was Piper Alvarian Jary, who had supported the dictator Naron - who had bloodied his hands in one of the most brutal regimes in mankind’s long history of inhumanity to man. It had surprised Corouda that Jary was still young. But a lifetime spent as a Catspaw for Simeu Institute would age a man fast. Maybe that’s why he’s sitting in the sun; maybe he wants to fry his brains out.
” - that’s why I wanted to become a warden, Albe!” Xena’s insistent voice pulled his attention back. “So that we wouldn’t have to be a part of things like this … so that I wouldn’t have to sit here beating my head against a stone wall about the injustice and the indifference of this society - “
Albe reached out distractingly and tucked a strand of her bound - up hair behind her ear. “But you’ve got to admit this is a remarkable discovery we’ve made here. After all, a natural reactor - a concentration of uranium ore so rich that it’s fissioning. The only comparable thing we know of happened on Terra a billion years before anybody was around to care.” He waved his hand at the cave mouth 200 meters away. “And right in that soggy cave over there is a live one, and animals survive in it! To find out how they could have adapted to that much radiation - isn’t it important for us to find that out?”
“Of course it is.” Xena looked pained. “Don’t patronize me, Albe. I know that as well as you do. And you know that’s not what I’m talking about.”
“Yes, I know it isn’t….” He sighed in surrender. “This whole expedition will be clearing out soon; they’ve got most of the data they want already. And then the six of us can get down to work and forget we ever saw any of them; we’ll have a whole new world all to ourselves.”
“Until they start shipping in the damned tourists - “
“Hey, come on,” Corouda said, too loudly. “Come on. What’re we sitting here for? Roll them bones.”
Albe laughed, and shook the cup. He scattered the carved shapes and let them group in the dirt. “Hah, Two-square.”
Corouda grunted. “I know you cheat; if I could just figure out how. Xena - “
She turned back from gazing at Piper Alvarian Jary, her face tight.
“Xena, if it makes you feel any better, Jary doesn’t feel anything. Only in his hands, maybe his face a little.”
She looked at him blankly. “What?”
“Jary told me himself; Orr killed his sense of feeling when he first got him, so that he wouldn’t have to suffer needlessly from the experiments.”
Her mouth came open.
“Is that right?” Albe pushed the sweatband back on his tanned, balding forehead. “Remember last week, he backed into the campfire…. I didn’t know you’d talked to him, Juah-u. What’s he like?”
“I don’t know. Who knows what somebody like that is really like? A while back he came and offered to check a collection of potentially edible flora for me….” And Jary had returned the next day with the samples, looking tired and a little shaky, to tell him exactly what was and wasn’t edible, and to what degree. It was only later, after he’d had time to run tests of his own, that he had understood how Jary had managed to get the answers so fast, and so accurately. “He ate them, to see if they poisoned him. Don’t ask me why he did it; maybe he enjoys being punished.”
Xena withered him with a look.
“I didn’t know he was going to eat them.” Corouda slapped at a bug, annoyed. “Besides, he’d have to drink strychnine by the liter to kill himself. They made Jary into a walking biological lab - his body manufactures an immunity to anything, almost on the spot; they use him to make vaccines. You can cut off anything but his head and it’ll grow back - “
“Oh, for God’s sake.” Xena stood up, her brown face flushed. She dropped the cup between them like something unclean, and strode away into the trees.
Corouda watched her go; the wine-red crown of the forest gave her shelter from his insensitivity. In the distance through the trees he could see the stunted vegetation at the mouth of the reactor cave. Radiation had eaten out an entire hillside, and the cave’s heart was still a festering radioactive sink hot enough to boil water. Yet some tiny alien creatures had chosen to live in it … which meant that this expedition would have to go on stewing in the sun until Orr made a breakthrough, or made up his mind to quit. Corouda sighed and looked back at Hyacin-Soong. “Sorry, Albe. I even disgusted myself this time.”
Albe’s expression eased. “She’ll cool down in a while…. Tell her that, when she comes back.”
“I will.” Corouda rolled his shirtsleeves up another turn, feeling uncomfortably hot. “Well, we need three if we’re going to keep playing.” He gestured at Piper Alvarian Jary, still sitting in the sun. “You wanted to know what he’s like - why don’t we ask him?”