A Thousand Deaths (22 page)

"I think it's coming from the deadrye field," she said. "Do you want to go take a look?"

"No, I don't want to, but I think we have to anyway." Reluctantly the two ran through the muck and standing water. When they got to the field they saw a man lying in the mud, barely able to hold his head above the shallow water.

"Who's that?" asked Rachel.

"I don't know," said Courane. "A new recruit, I'll bet."

"I wonder how long he's been there."

"I'm afraid to guess." Together they helped the man up to his feet and back to the house. His face was swollen and bloody and he was in a dazed, semiconscious state. He was cold, wet, and matted with twigs and mud. They took him up to the infirmary. Nneka was tending the sick now that Goldie herself occupied one of the beds. The month was Domiti, and Goldie had begun to suffer so greatly from the worsening symptoms of D syndrome that she could no longer adequately care for Molly, Kenny, and Daan.

"Someone new?" asked Nneka. She looked at the man with pity, and directed Rachel and Courane to put him gently into an empty bed.

"Yes," said Rachel. "We found him in one of the fields. We don't know how long he's been here, exposed to that storm."

"Help me get his clothes off," said Nneka. "I'll take care of him. He'll be all right in a little while."

The man murmured something that Courane couldn't hear. "He seems to be conscious," said Rachel.

"That's good," said Courane. "Maybe he wasn't out there very long."

The man raised a hand weakly, indicating that Courane should bend close. The man whispered something.

"What did he say?" asked Rachel.

"He said, 'Shai,' " said Courane. "Is that your name?" The man nodded.

"Welcome to Home," said Nneka. "We'll take care of you now. You'll just get some rest today and tonight. We'll fix you a light meal in a little while, just some soup I think. Are you hungry?" The man nodded more vigorously.

"Good," said Courane. "Well, Shai, you've had a rough introduction to life here on the farm. Get your strength back, because it just gets crazier from here on."

"Shai," murmured Nneka, as they walked away from his bed.

Rachel smiled. "You've got an odd look on your face," she said.

Nneka seemed embarrassed. "Oh, it's just that he's such a good-looking man. I've never known anyone like him before."

"He looks like a rat in a rain barrel," said Courane.

"Then think how nice he'll look when he dries off!" said Nneka.

Rachel looked suddenly very sad. "It's spring," she said, "and love blossoms again here in the vale of tears."

Courane sighed. "Be thankful for that," he said. "Imagine what this place would be without it."

Rachel gazed at Courane in silence, but he pretended that he didn't understand the significance of her look.

 

Courane recalled Nneka's first days in the community. She cried often when she first arrived. The utter isolation of the farm was something she had never before experienced. Such solitude was a difficult state to achieve on Earth. Courane had been assigned to take her on the tour of the farm, showing her the strange and funny and frightening things just as Sheldon had shown him.

Courane guided her from floor to floor in the house, introducing her to her new fellows. Nneka was young and innocent and outgoing. Everyone liked her immediately and she returned their affection. She was disturbed a bit by the physical appearance of her new home, but she was determined to adjust as quickly as possible, and she promised to become a productive new member of the community.

Kenny worshipped Nneka; he thought he was hiding his feelings successfully but everyone, including Nneka herself, was aware of his infatuation. He made certain that he sat next to her at meals. He brought her little snacks of ick slime on toast or glasses of Daan's beer. He offered to let her ride around on the osoi after they finished their day's labor. Of all the people on the farm, Kenny and Nneka may have had the most in common: they were both citizens of Africa, they were both very perceptive and lively, and they were both young—the three years she had in excess of him made little difference to Kenny, but it very likely prevented Nneka from returning his fondness. The one other thing they shared was a liking for animals, even the grotesque beasts of Planet D.

Courane, Nneka, and Kenny stood by the plank fence as the last stop on her introductory tour. It was very cold and the snow fell steadily. They looked out across the pasture at the blerds. Most of the large, unkempt animals were lying in the snow, digging out the buried red grass, munching and moaning to themselves, twitching their great flat heads at unseen annoyances. "Blerds?" asked Nneka.

"That's right," said Courane. "They look scary, but they're gentle."

"That one over there," said Kenny, pointing to a blerd that was indistinguishable in appearance to any of the other colonists, "do you want to know what her name is?"

"Sure," said Nneka.

"That's Tweetie."

Nneka turned to look at Kenny. "Why ever would you name something like that Tweetie?"

Kenny smiled. "Oh," he said airily, "she just looks like a Tweetie."

Nneka frowned at him and turned back to Courane. "O brave new world that has such creatures in it," she said.

Courane laughed. "I know just what you mean. But were you talking about the blerds or our friend Kenny?

 

 

 

Nine

 

 

Sheldon and Courane sat on a log overlooking
the ice-covered river. Snow fell gently on them and the cold air pinched their exposed faces. They had pulled a sled downstream about a mile from the house, looking for firewood. They had piled dead branches and small logs on the sled and now they rested before completing their task and beginning the arduous trip home. The day was old and the sky was the dark gray that meant that soon the world would be muffled in night, silent and cold.

"I visited Markie in the infirmary yesterday," said Sheldon. "You know, I always thought of him as my boy. Isn't that silly? As if he were my own son. He doesn't have much time left...."

"I know. I saw him this morning when I went to visit Lani."

"I wish we could make it easier for her."

Courane nodded. "She said her headaches have gone away, but she gets flashes of pain up her arms and legs. She says the worst part of it are the things she can't manage. She was embarrassed to see me. She's lost control over some of her bodily functions. She seemed to keep drifting in and out when she talked to me. I was almost in tears before I left."

"It's an ugly disease. If TECT had tailored it, it couldn't have done more to rob the last bits of dignity left to us.

"Courane stood up and slapped his hands together. "Do you want to start back now?"

"Sure," said Sheldon. He didn't stand. "Sandy, you know, I think I'm not going to wait for the end. I don't want to go through all that. I can't stand the thought of being reduced to that. I have a low threshold of humiliation."

"What's wrong, Sheldon?" asked Courane. "You never talked this way before."

"I'm exhausted, Sandy. I surrender. I thought I knew what D syndrome meant, what it was about. I expected to have moments when it would be tough for me to recall things, or people, or events out of the past. I was all set for that. But there's so much more. I have strange phantom pains, Sandy. My nerves tell me that I'm burning or freezing, or that I'm ravenously hungry or thirsty, or that I'm not where I should be. Sometimes I sit and stare for heaven only knows how long because I've forgotten what I'm supposed to be doing. I wake up in the morning sometimes and I can't tell the difference between consciousness and dreaming. Reflexes I've depended on all my life only work sometimes now. My body is running like a two-dollar watch."

"I know, Sheldon. Is there anything I can do to help you?"

"There's nothing you can do for me. It's hopeless."

"You don't know that for certain. Maybe TECT has the answer."

Sheldon rubbed his eyes with a trembling hand. "The hell with that," he said, his voice wavering. "It's pointless. You can't cope with it. You can't fight it. We'll never save ourselves or anyone else."

Courane brushed the snow from his face. "Maybe it's about time we tried," he said. "Let's get going." Sheldon stood up, too, and the two men carried the last armfuls of wood to the sled. It would be a slow, tiring haul back to the fireplace in the parlor. They wanted to be home before nightfall.

 

Courane swung his long-handled sickle and staggered a few steps. "Take a rest, Sandy," called Shai.

"This sun is hotter than I expected today," said Courane. He stopped to wipe his face with his discarded shirt.

"Get used to it," said Fletcher. "It's going to take us another couple of months to get there. It will be the height of summer before we finish this road." He looked toward the western hills, which now seemed impossibly distant, tantalizingly fresh and blue. The colonists were building a road on the opposite bank of the river toward the hills. Firewood had become scarce near the house. They had searched both sides of the river, and Rachel and Fletcher reported that to the west was a great, inexhaustible supply. With the road through the high, rippling red grass of the west bank, the hills would be a full day closer than the forests of the slopes to the east.

Courane swung his sickle again and cut down a swath of grass. Every stroke brought them a yard nearer to their goal. Every swing took a little more of his strength and cost him a bit of his vitality.

"We'll reach the next ravine by tomorrow night," said Shai. "I can see the marker already. We'll have to loop around to the northwest."

"Is that the last detour?" asked Courane.

"No," said Shai, "there are at least two more ravines and a small tributary of the river farther on. Arthur seems to think we'll have no trouble building a bridge across it. It's only fifty feet or so."

"Fifty feet?" said Fletcher. "Do you think Arthur's ever designed a bridge before? He's a nice little man, Cap, but sometimes I don't think he knows what he's talking about. Where did he learn how to put up bridges?"

"From TECT," said Courane.

"See what I mean?" said Fletcher.

"Just because he learned it from a tect screen doesn't mean he can't do what he says," said Courane.

"Forget it," said Shai. "Just cut your grass." All three men returned to their work in silence, concentrating on hacking down the flood plain's vegetation. They moved slowly through the waving grass, grunting and gasping with the exertion.

After a long, weary afternoon, Rachel called, "Time to quit."

All three men straightened up and threw down their tools. "What a wonderful sound," said Shai.

"I've had enough of these bugs crawling all over me," said Fletcher, slapping at the tiny purple miseries.

They carried their sickles back to their temporary camp where they covered the implements with a waterproof canvas. "You made a lot of progress today," said Rachel. "I guess we're about halfway, don't you think? Will we finish it before winter?" She handed Fletcher a bottle of water and he drank.

"We'll finish it," said Shai. He took the water bottle next.

"And then we'll build a wagon over here and transport the osoi to this side, yoke them up, and drive them to the hills," said Fletcher. "We can bring back the whole winter's supply of wood in one trip."

Courane said nothing. He knew—and Fletcher knew—that they would both be too ill to make that journey. By then the colony would be in the hands of the people who had arrived after he had: Klára, Nneka, Shai, and whomever TECT would send in the next few weeks.

"Kenny would love to take the first wagon ride to the hills," said Rachel sadly. "Maybe we'll finish all the work before it's too late for him."

"A lot of this is Daan's idea," said Courane. "I wish he were well enough to see how good it's going to be."

Courane began to understand what Sheldon had told him. It was all pointless in the long run. The work around the farm, the grand projects, the road and the wagon and the expedition, everything was meaningless. They existed only to give the inmates something to occupy their time, to distract them from the ugliness of their lives and their fates. Why bother? Courane asked himself. What good would it do? He pulled his shirt on again and sat down beside the campfire, while Shai and Fletcher began to get the evening meal ready.

 

Daan crumbled a clump of dirt between his fingers. "This has been an unusually dry summer," he said, looking up at Courane.

"Dry?" said Courane. "It seems like it hasn't done anything but storm since I've been here."

"It hasn't rained in three days," said Daan. "Last summer, it was wet six days out of seven. Some of the crops look like they're unhappy about it." He stood up and dropped the soil, brushing his fingers clean on his trousers.

"So we'll plant this empty field later this year?"

"Yes, toward the end of autumn, about the third week in Claudy. I'm thinking of putting in dantella and fengsell0ks. It's uneven ground and pretty stony, but TECT picked a good site for the farm. It's very fertile."

"You seem to be the expert here on agriculture," said Courane. "Did you live on a farm back on Earth?"

Daan seemed displeased. He looked into Courane's eyes, his face impassive. "You should know better by now than to pry. We don't ask questions like that here."

"I'm sorry," said Courane. "I couldn't help wondering. What I mean is that I know perfectly well what I'm guilty of and why TECT wanted to send me here. Fletcher and Molly are easy to figure, too. But some people here don't strike me as typical lawbreakers. You, for instance, and Lani and Markie. Do you remember the old woman who died the day after I came here?"

"Zofia."

"Yes. What could she possibly have done to be sent here?"

"I never found out," said Daan. They walked across the fallow field toward the acre of fishfruit plants. They were large spreading things that grew from a thick central stalk of a pale blue color. Dozens of wide flat blades reached out and up in all directions. These long "leaves" had a disturbing fleshy pink color and a fat, soft, succulent feel to them. Some of the leaves were rolled up tight against the stalk, and inside these rolls were the spiny red fishfruit.