The Worthing Saga (51 page)

Seeing, the tear and ignoring the continued madness in his dancing gaze, his mother held out her arms for a second, only a second, and then put her hands on her hips (note the way the point of her hips and the curve of her abdomen leave two slender depressions pointing downward, Link said to himself, and got an angry look, a hurt look on her face, and said, “What, don't I even get a hug from my boy?”

The words were the incantation required to get Link from the floor to his full 190 centimeters of height. He walked to her, reaching out his long arms for her.

“No—” she gurgled, pushing him away. “Don't—just a little kiss. Just a kiss.”

She puckered for a childish kiss, and so he too puckered his lips and leaned down. At the last moment, however, she turned her head and he kissed her clumsily on the ear and hair.

“Oh, how wet,” she said in her disgusted voice. She reached into her hip bag and pulled out a tissue, wiped her ear, laughing softly. “Clumsy, clumsy boy, Link, you always have been.”

Link stood in confusion. And, as so many times before, puzzled as to what to do next that would not earn a rebuke. He remained in that confusion, knowing that there was something that he ought to do, something that he must decide, but instead deciding nothing, only playing again and again the same loop of thought in the same childish mental voice in which he had always played it, “Mummy mad, mummy mad, mummy mad.”

She watched him, her lips forming a sort of half-smile (note the natural gloss on the lips, she never painted, never had to, lips always just slightly moist, partly open, the tongue playing gentle love games with the teeth), unsure of what was happening.

“Link?” she said. “Link, don't you have a smile for Mother?”

And Link tried to remember how to smile. What did it feel like? There were muscles that must be pulled, and his face should feel tight—

“No!” she screamed, stepping back from him and encountering the closed door. She apparently had expected it to be open—as if this were not a mental hospital and patients were free to roam the corridors at will. She whirled and hammered on the door with her lists, shouting frantically, “Let me out of here!”

They let her out, the tall men with the pleasant smiles who also took Link to the bathroom five times a day because somehow he had forgotten to notice when he needed to. And as the door closed behind her, Link still stood, unable to decide what he should do, and wondering why his hands were stretched out in front of him, the hands set to grip something circular, something vertical and cylindrical, something, perhaps, the shape of a human throat.

In Dr. Hort's office, Mrs. Danol sat, poised and beautiful, distractingly so, and Hort wondered whether this was indeed the same woman who had wept in the attendant's arms only a few minutes before.

“All I care about is my son,” she said. “He was gone, vanished for seven terrible, terrible months, and all I know now is that I've found Him again and I want him home. With me!”

Hort sighed. “Mrs. Danol, Linkeree is criminally insane. This is a
government
facility, remember? He murdered a girl.”

“She probably deserved it.”

“She had supported him and cared for him for seven months, Mrs. Danol.”

“She probably seduced him.”

“They had a very active sex life, in which both were eager participants.”

Mis. Danol looked horrified. “Did my son tell you that?”

“No, the tenants downstairs told the police that.”

“Hearsay, then.”

“The government has a very limited budget on this planet, Mis. Danol. Most people live in apartments where privacy is strictly impossible.”

And Mrs. Danol shuddered, apparently in disgust at the plight of the poor wretches that huddled in the government compound in this benighted capital of this benighted colony.

“I wish I could leave here,” she said.

“It would have been nice at one time,” Hort answered. “Your son hates this world. Or, rather, more particularly, he hates what he has seen of this world.”

“Well... I can understand that. Those hideous wild people and the people in the city aren't much better.”

Hort was amused at her reverse democracy—she esteemed all persons her infinite inferiors, and therefore equal to each other.

“Nevertheless, now Linkeree must stay here and we must attempt a cure.”

“Oh, that's all I want for my boy. For him to be the sweet, loving child he used to be—I can't believe he really killed her!”

“There were seventeen witnesses to the strangling, two of them hospitalized when he turned on them after they pried him away from the corpse. He definitely killed her.”

“But why?” she said emotionally, her breasts heaving with passion in a way that amused Hort—he had known many such closet exhibitionists in his time. “Why would he kill her?”

“Because, Mrs. Danol, except for hair color and several years of age, she looked almost exactly like you.”

Mrs. Danol sat upright. “My God, Doctor, you're joking!”

“Almost the only thing that Link has been consistent about since he arrived here is his firm belief that it was you that he killed.”

“This is hideous. This is repulsive.”

“Sometimes he sweeps and says he's sorry, that he'll never do it again. Most of the time, however, she cackles rather gleefully about it, as if it were a game that he had, after many losses, finally won.”

“Is this what passes for psychology on this godforsaken planet?”

“This is what passes for psychology on Capitol itself, Mrs. Danol. That is, you recall, where I got my degree. I assure you I have invented nothing.” And dammit, he thought, why am I letting this woman put me on the defensive? “We thought that the fact of seeing you alive might have some effect on your son.”

“He did try to strangle me.”

“So you said. You also said you wanted him to come home with you. Is that really consistent?”

“I want you to cure him and send him home! Since his father died, whom else have I had to love?”

Yourself, Hort refrained from saying. My, but I'm getting judgmental.

The buzzer sounded and, relieved at the interruption, Hort pressed the pad that freed the door. It was Gram, the head nurse. He looked upset.

“It was time for Linkeree's toilet,” he said, beginning, as usual, in the middle, “and he wasn't there. We've looked eve where. He's not in the building.”

Mrs. Danol gasped. “Not in the building!”

Hort said, “She's his mother,” and Gram went on. “He climbed through the ceiling tiles and out the air-conditioning system. We had no idea he was that strong.”

“Oh, what a line hospital!”

Hort was irritated. “Mrs. Danol, the quality of this hospital as a hospital is indisputably excellent. The quality of this hospital as a prison is woefully deficient. Take it up with the government.” Defensive again, dammit. And the bitch is still throwing her chest at me. I'm beginning to understand Linkeree, I think. “Mrs. Danol, please wait here.”

“No.”

“Then go home. But I assure you you'll be entirely in the I way while we search for your son.”

She glared at him and stood her ground.

He merely nodded. “As you will,” he said, and picked up the door control from the desk, carried it with him out of the room, and slid the door shut in Mrs. Danol's face as she tried to follow. He got an altogether unhealthy feeling of satisfaction at having done so.

“Wouldn't mind strangling her myself,” he said to Gram, who missed the point and looked a bit worried. “A joke, Gram. I'm not getting homicidal. Where did the fellow go?”

Gram had no answer, and so they went outside to see.

Linkeree huddled against the fence of the government compound, the miles of heavy metal fencing that separated civilization from the rest of the world. The evening wind was already blowing in from the thick grass and rolling hills of the plain that gave the planet its name, Pampas. The sun was still two fingers off the horizon, however, and Linkeree knew that he was plainly visible from miles away. Visible both to the government people who would surely be looking for him; but also visible to the Vaqs, who he knew waited just over the hill, waiting for a child like him to wander out to be eaten.

No, he thought. I'm not a child.

He looked at his hands. They were large, strong—and yet unweathered, as sensitive and delicate as an artist's hands.

“You should be an artist,” he heard Zad saying.

“Me?” Link answered, softly, a little amused at the suggestion.

“Yes, you,”she said. “Look at this,” and her hand swept around the room, and because he could not avoid following her hand, he also saw: tapestries on tapestries on one wall, waiting to be sold Another wall devoted to thick rugs and the huge loom that Zad used for her work. And another wall windowed ceiling to floor (glass is cheap, someone told the government architect), showing the shabbily identical government housing project in which most of the capital's people lived, and beyond them the Government Office Building from which the lives of thousands of people were run. Millions, if you counted the Vaqs. But no one counted them.

“No,” Zad said, smiling. “Sweet, darling Link, look there. That wall.”

And he looked and saw the drawings in pencil, the drawings in crayon, the drawings in chalk.

“You can do that,”

“I'm all thumbs.” Oh, you're all thumbs, he remembered his mother saying.

Zad took his hands and put them around her waist. “Not
all
thumbs,” she said, giggling.

And so he had reached out, held the charcoal, and with her hand guiding his at first, had sketched a tree.

“Wonderful,” she said.

He looked at the ground and saw that he had drawn a tree in the ground. He looked up and saw the fence. They're chasing me, he thought.

“I won't let them catch you,” he remembered Zad saying. He was ashamed at having lied to her and told her he was a criminal. But how would she have treated him if she'd known he was only the reclusive son of Mrs. Danol, who owned most of Pampas that could be owned? Then she would have been shy of him. Instead, he was shy of her: She had taken him from the street where he was wandering that night, already having been mugged and beaten up—the mugging by one man, the beatings by two others who had found his hip bag empty.

“What, are you crazy?”

He had shaken his head, but now he knew better. After all, hadn't he murdered his mother?

A siren went off in the mental hospital. With a wrenching sense of despair Linkeree curled up tighter in a ball, wishing he could turn into a bush. But that wouldn't help, would it? This is a defoliated area.

“What have you drawn?” he remembered Zad asking, and he wept.

A stinger stung him, and he flicked the insect from his hand. The pain brought him up short. What was he doing?

What am I doing?
he thought. Then he remembered the escape from the I mental hospital, the run through the maze of buildings to the perimeter—the perimeter, because it was safety, the only hope. He vaguely recalled his childhood fear of the open plain—his mother's horrified stories of how the Vaqs would get you if you weren't good and didn't eat your supper.

“Don't disobey me again, or I'll let the Vaqs at you. And you know what part of little boys they like to eat first.”

What a sick lady, Linkeree thought for the millionth time. At least it isn't hereditary.

But it is, isn't it? Aren't I escaping from a mental hospital?

He was confused. But he knew that over the fence was safety, Vaqs or no Vaqs; he couldn't stay at the hospital. Hadn't he Ad killed his mother? Hadn't he told them he was glad of it? When they realized he wasn't insane at all, that he really, seriously, in cold blood strangled his mother on the public streets of Pampas City, without benefit of madness—well, they'd kill him.

I will not die at their hands.

The barbed wire scratched him unmercifully, and the electric shock from the top wire would have stunned a cow, he thought. But grimly he hung on, his body shuddering in the force of the voltage; climbed over; dangled a moment on the barbs until his shirt ripped apart and let him drop; then lay, stunned, on the ground as another alarm went off, this time nearby.

I've told them where I am, he thought. What an ass.

So he stood, his body still trembling from the electricity, and staggered stupidly off into the high grass that began crisply a hundred meters from the fence.

The sun was touching the horizon.

The grass was harsh and sharp.

The wind was bitterly cold.

He had no shirt.

I will freeze to death out here tonight. I will die of exposure. And the part of him that always gloated sneered, “You deserve it, matricide. You deserve it, Oedipus.”

No, you've got it all wrong, it's the father you're supposed to kill, right?

“Why, it's a painting of me, isn't it?” asked Zad, seeing what he had done with the watercolors. “It's excellent, except that I'm not blond, you know.”

And he looked at her and wondered, for a moment, why he had thought she was.

He was snapped out of his memory by a sound. He could not identify it, nor ever, for sure, the direction from which it had come. He stopped, stood still, listening. Now, aware of where he was, he realized that his arms and hands and stomach and back were scratched and slightly bloody from the rasping grass. The suckers were clinging to his bare body; he brushed them away with a shudder of revulsion. Bloated, they dropped one of the curses of the planet, since they left no itch or other pain, and a man could bleed to death without knowing he was even being sucked.

Linkeree turned around and looked back. The lights of the government compound winked behind him. The sun had set, and dusk was only dimly lighting the plain.

The sound came again. He still couldn't identify it, but now the direction was more distinct—he followed.

Not two meters off was a feebly crying infant, the mucus of birth still clinging to his body, the afterbirth unceremoniously dumped beside him. The placenta was covered with suckers. So was the baby.

Linkeree knelt, brushed away the suckers, looked at the child, whose stubby arms and legs proclaimed him to be a Vaq. Yet apart from that, Link could see no other sign that this was not a human infant—the dark skin must come after years of exposure to the hot noon sunshine. He remembered clearly that one of the long line of tutors he had studied with had told him about this Vaq custom. It was assumed to be the exact counterpart of the ancient Greek custom of exposing unwanted infants, to keep the population at acceptable levels. The baby cried. And Linkeree was struck bitterly with the unfairness that it was
this
infant that was chosen to die for the good of the—tribe? Did Vaqs travel in tribes? If seven percent of infants had to die for the good of the tribe, why couldn't there be a way for seven-hundredths of each child to be done away? Impossible, of course. Linkeree stroked the child's feeble arms. It was much more efficient to rid the world of unwelcome children.