V. R. T: “They are afraid.”

  Self: “Of us?”

  V. R. T: (Silent)

  Self: “Is it because the settlers have killed so many?”

  V. R. T: (Very quickly) “The Free People are good—they do not steal unless others have plenty—they will work—they can herd cattle—find horses—scare away the fire-fox.”

  Self: “You know I wouldn’t shoot one of the Free People, don’t you? I only want to ask them questions, to study them. You’ve read Miller’s Introduction to Cultural Anthropology. Didn’t you notice that the anthropologists never harm the people they’re studying?”

  V. R. T: (Stares at me)

  Self: “Do you think the Free People are frightened of us just because I shoot game to eat? That doesn’t mean I would shoot one of them.”

  V. R. T: “You leave the meat on the ground; you could hang it in the trees so that the Free People and the Shadow children could climb and get it. Instead you leave it on the ground and the ghoul-bear and tire-tiger follow us.”

  Self: “Oh, is that what’s bothering you? If there is any more meat and I give you some rope, will you hang it up for me? For them?”

  V. R. T: “Yes. Dr. Marsch…”

  Self: “Yes, what is it?”

  V. R. T: “Do you think I could ever become an anthropologist?”

  Self: “Why yes, you’re an intelligent young man, but it would take a great deal of study, and you would have to go to college. How old are you?”

  V. R. T: “Sixteen now. I know about college.”

  Self: “You seem older than that—would say seventeen at least. Are you counting in Earth years?”

  V. R. T: “No, Sainte Anne years. They are longer here, and besides we of the Free People grow up very fast. I can look older than this if I want to, but I didn’t want to change too much from when you first saw me and hired our boat. You don’t really think I could go to college though, do you?”

  Self: “Yes, I do. I didn’t say I thought you could go directly into college; your preparatory work probably hasn’t been good enough, and you would have to study for several years first, and learn at least the rudiments of a foreign language—but I forgot, you already have some French.”

  V. R. T: “Yes, I already know French. Would it be mostly reading?”

  Self: (Nods) “Mostly reading.”

  V. R. T: “I know you think I’m uneducated because I talk strangely, but I only do it because it’s the way my father taught me—to get money from people; but I can talk any way I wish. You don’t believe me, do you?”

  Self: “You’re talking very well now—I think you’re imitating me, aren’t you?”

  V. R. T: “Yes, I’ve taught myself to speak as you do. Now listen; do you know Dr. Hagsmith? I’ll do Dr. Hagsmith.” (In an excellent imitation of Hagsmith’s voice:) “‘It’s all falsity; everything is false, Dr. Marsch. Wait, let me tell you a story. Once in the long dreaming days when Trackwalker was shaman of the abos, there was a girl called Three Faces. An abo girl, you see, and she used the colored clays the abos found by the river to paint a face on each breast—one face, sir, forever saying No!—that was the left breast—and the other, the right, painted to say Yes! She met a cattle-drover in the back of beyond who fell very much in love with her, and she turned her right breast toward him! Well, sir, they lay together all night in the pitch darkness that you find at night in the back of beyond, and he asked her to come and live with him and she said she would, and learn to cook and keep house and do all the things human women do. But when the sun rose he was still asleep, and when he got up later she had gone and washed herself in the river—that’s for forgetfulness in the tales, you see—and had only her one, natural face; and when he reminded her of all the things she had promised in the dark, she stood and stared at him and wouldn’t talk, and when he tried to take hold of her, she ran away.’”

  Self: “That’s an interesting bit of folklore, Dr. Hagsmith. Is that the end of the story?”

  V. R. T: “‘No. When the drover began to dress himself—after the girl was gone—he found he had the images of the two faces on his own chest, the Yes! face on his left side and the No! face on his right. He put his shirt on over them and rode into Frenchman’s Landing where there was a man who did tattoos and had him trace them with the tattoo needle. People say that when the drover died the undertaker skinned his chest inside the coat, and that he has the two faces of Three Faces preserved, rolled with cardamom in his desk drawer in the mortuary and tied with a black ribbon; but don’t ask me if it’s true—I haven’t seen them.’”

  · · · ·

  April 21. The strain of staying up half the night to protect our animals has become unbearable. Tonight—now—I am going to kill at least one of the predators who have been following us for the last ten days. I have shot a prance-pony—not killing it, but just breaking one leg; it is tethered in the clearing below me. As I write this, I am sitting in the fork of a tree, thirty feet or so above the ground, with the heavy rifle and this notebook to keep me company; the night is very clear; Sainte Croix hangs in the sky like a great blue light.

  Now about two hours later. Nothing except a glimpse of a H. fennec. The thing that bothers me is that I know, I feel absolutely certain—call it telepathy or whatever you like—that while I am up here, the boy is with the woman who visited him before. He is supposed to be guarding the mules. That girl is Annese; I suspected it before and now I know it; he told that story to rub my nose in it, and no one else would live in these God-forsaken hills anyway. All that he would have to do would be to tell her that I wouldn’t harm her, and the expedition would be a success and I would be famous. I could climb down and catch them together (I know she is with him, I can almost hear them), except that I can smell the ghoul-bear somewhere near. They would tie, the two of them—when the boy was washing I noticed he wasn’t circumcised. If they were like that when I came, I think I would shoot them both.

  Later. There is a new prisoner, I think about five cells down from mine. Seeing him brought in, has, I think, saved me from losing my mind; for that I do not thank him—sanity, after all, is only reason applied to human affairs, and when this reason, applied over years, has resulted in disaster, destruction, despair, misery, starvation, and rot, the mind is correct to abandon it. This decision to discard reason, I see now, is not the last but the first reasonable act; and this insanity we are taught to fear consists in nothing but responding naturally and instinctively rather than with the culturally acquired, mannered thing called reason; an insane man talks nonsense because like a bird or a cat he is too sensible to talk sense.

  Our new prisoner is a middle-aged fat man, very probably a businessman of the kind who works for others. My candle had burned out, and I was sitting here with my head on my knees when the faint sounds—we don’t have the soundproof, shatterproof glass in the spy holes down here that all the doors had on the upper floors, but only a wire grille—reached me through the Judas. I thought it was the guard with food, and knelt at the door to watch him coming: there were two guards this time, the usual one with his flashlight and a uniformed stranger who might have been a soldier, the two of them holding our gross, frightened man between them and going crabwise in the narrow corridor, with him looking so white I laughed at him (which frightened him more); because the Judas is so small I could only show my eyes or my lips, not both together; but I let them have them alternately, less than waist-high to him as they took him past my door, and I shouted to him, “What have you done? What have you done?” and he sobbed, “Nothing, nothing!” which made me laugh more, not only at him but at myself because I could speak again, and most of all because I knew he had nothing to do with me, was not a part of me in any way, not of Sainte Anne, not of the university or the lodginghouse here or the Cave Canem or the dusty shop where I bought my brass implement, but simply a gross, frightened man who meant nothing and would be my neighbor now but nothing else at all to me.

  · · · ·

  I have been interrogated again. Not the usual thing. Something different was in the air, and I don’t know what. He began with the regular bullying, then became friendly, offered me a cigarette—something he has not done in weeks—and even unbent so far as to recite a satirical little verse ridiculing academic degrees, which for him meant it was a party. I decided to take advantage of the jollity and asked for another cigarette; to my own astonishment I got it, and after that instead of more questions, a long lecture on the wonders of government on Sainte Croix, as though I had applied for citizenship. Then a short lecture pointing out that they had neither tortured me nor drugged me, both perfectly true. He attributed this to the nobility and humanity native to all sharp-chinned, hunch-shouldered Croix-codiles, but my own opinion is that it is due to a sort of arrogance, a feeling that they don’t need those things and can break me, or anyone, without them.

  He said one thing in this connection that interested me: that a certain doctor whom they knew and who cooperated with them when they required him could have gotten everything they wanted from me in a few minutes. He seemed to expect me to react in some way to this remark. It might have meant they were no longer interested in my case, but this seemed unlikely since certain indirect questions had been scattered throughout the interview; or that they have already gotten information from some other source, but this also seems improbable since there is none to get. The best interpretation seemed to me to be that this doctor is no longer available, and since I thought, or at least suspected (whether by a flash of insight or because of something said earlier, I’m not certain now) that I knew who he was, I commented that it was too bad they hadn’t questioned me under drugs while they could, since it would have proved my innocence, but that I was sure they’d find someone just as good soon.

  “No. He was unique—an artist. We could find someone else, surely. But for someone half as skilled we have to send to the capital.”

  I said: “I know someone who might be able to help you. The man who operates a place called the Maison du Chien. He certainly doesn’t seem too particular about what he does if he’s paid well, and he has a great reputation.”

  The look he gave me was answer enough. The whoremaster is dead.

  I could have told him—though he would not have believed me—that he would have been dealing with the same man if he employed the son in his place; but no doubt the young one is under arrest by now; he might even be in another part of this building. His aunt—biologically his daughter, but I will use the same designation the family does to save confusion—will by this time be trying to get him out.

  Perhaps (this is the first time I have thought of it) she is trying to secure my release as well; she possessed real intelligence as well as a fascinating mind, and we had a number of long talks—often with one or more of her “girls,” as she called them, for audience. Where are you now, Tante Jeannine? Do you even know they have me?

  She believed, though she pretended not to, that the Annese have devoured and replaced homo sapiens—Veil’s Hypothesis, and she is Veil; it has been used for years to discredit other heterodox theories about the original population of Sainte Anne. But who, then, Tante Jeannine, are the Free People? Conservatives who would not desert the old ways? The question is not, as I once thought, how much the thoughts of the Shadow children influence reality; but how much our own do. I have read the interview with Mrs. Blount—a hundred times while I was in the hills—and I know who I believe the Free People to be: I call it Liev’s Postpostulate. I am Liev and I have left.

  · · · ·

  The new prisoner has been talking. He asked if there was anyone in the other cells and what their names were and when we would be fed and if it were possible to get bedding and a hundred other things. Of course no one answered him—anyone caught talking is beaten. After a while, when I realized the guard was away, I warned him. He was silent then for a long time, then asked me in a voice he thought very soft and secret, “Who was the madman who laughed at me when they brought me here?” By that time the guard had returned, and that great fat man screamed like a rose-rabbit in a noose when they pulled him out of his cell for the whips. Poor bastard.

  · · · ·

  Incredible! You will never guess where I am! Go on—you may have as many guesses as you want

  That is foolishness, of course, but I feel foolish, so why not out with it. I am back in the other 143, my old place above ground, with a mattress and a blanket, and light that comes in through the window—even if there’s no glass and the chill comes in, too, at night. It looks like a palace.

  Forty-seven started tapping the pipe about an hour after I got here; he had heard some sort of gossip about my return and sent his greetings. He says this cell was empty while I was gone. I have lost the soupbone I used to use, but I replied as well as I could with my knuckles. The prisoner next to me knew I was back, too, and began tapping and scraping the wall between us in the old way, but still has not learned the code or is using a different one I cannot decipher. The sounds are so various I think sometimes he must be trying to talk with his noises.

  · · · ·

  Next day. Does this mean they are going to release me? The beat meal last night since being arrested—bean soup, thick, with real pieces of pork in it. Tea with lemon and sugar. They gave me a big tin mug of it, and there was milk with the bread this morning. Then out of my cell for a bath in the shower room with five others, and insect powder for my hair, beard, and groin. I have a different blanket, fairly new and almost clean—better than the one I had before. I am writing now with it wrapped around my shoulders. Not because I am cold, but just to feel it.

  · · · ·

  Another interrogation, this one not by Constant but by a man I have never seen before who introduced himself as Mr. Jabez. Fairly young, good civilian clothing. He gave me a cigarette and told me he was risking typhus by talking to me—he should have seen me before they let me wash. When I asked him for another blanket and more paper he showed me that he had some of the pages I had written earlier in his file, and complained about the work it would take to have them transcribed. Since I knew there was nothing harmful in them I suggested he have them photocopied instead if he wanted (as he implied he might) to send them to someone of higher rank; but I don’t think I should let them take what I have here now. I let my imagination range pretty freely about my life with my parents on Earth—to tell the truth, I was thinking of doing a novel, a great many books have been written in prisons—and it would only confuse my case. I will destroy the pages at the first opportunity.

  Midnight or past. Fortunately they let me keep my candles and matches, or I could not write this. I had gone to sleep when a guard came in, took me by the shoulder, and told me I was “wanted.” My first thought was that I was to die; but he was grinning in a way that made that seem improbable, and I thought then that it was to be some nasty but half-funny indignity like getting my head shaved.

  He took me to a room just at the edge of the cell area and shoved me in, and there waiting for me was Celestine Etienne, the girl from Mme. Duclose’s lodginghouse. It must be the height of summer outside now, for she was dressed as if to attend an evening mass on a summer Sunday—a pink dress without sleeves, white gloves, and a hat I know I used to think her tall as a stork, but the truth is that she looked a pretty creature there, with her big, frightened, blue-violet eyes. She stood when I came in, and said, “Oh, Doctor, how thin you look.”

  There was one chair, a light we could not turn off, a wall mirror (which meant, I feel sure, that we were being observed from the next room) and an old, sagging bed with clean sheets stretched over a mattress it was probably better not to see.

  And, surprisingly, a bolt on the inside of the door. We talked for a time afterward, and she told me that the day after I was arrested a man from the city treasurer’s office had come to see her and told her that on Thursday of the following week—the day she was to see me—at eight P.M. precisely, she was to report herself to the Bureau of Licences. She had, and had been kept waiting until eleven, when an official told her she could see no one that night as they were closing the office, but to come back in two weeks. She had known very well, she said, what was being done, but had been afraid not to go every two weeks as they told her. Tonight she had no sooner sat down on the bench in the waiting room than the same official who had always dismissed her at eleven appeared and suggested that she go here to the citadel instead, adding that her presence at the Bureau of Licences would not be required again in the foreseeable future. She had stopped by Mme. Duclose’s to put on scent and changed her frock, and come here.

  · · · ·

  And that is enough. It has been a pleasure writing all this, seeing my pen leave its weeks’-long spidery trail of black, but the sight of my earlier writings in the new interrogator’s file folder was somewhat disturbing. I am fairly certain the guard is asleep in the corridor outside, and I intend to burn everything, page by page, in the flame of my candle.

  The transcription ended in the middle of a sheet with a notation giving the place, time, and date on which the originals had been confiscated from the prisoner.

  You must excuse my writing in this entry, and I suppose some of the subsequent entries as well. An absurd accident has occurred, which I will explain when the time comes. I have killed the tire-tiger and the ghoul-bear, the latter over the tire-tiger’s body the night after. The tiger sprang at me when I climbed down from the tree, where I had waited for it all night I suppose I should have been badly mauled, but I got nothing more than a few scratches from the thorns when the animal’s body knocked me down.

  The officer laid down the canvas-bound journal and rummaged for the tattered school composition book with the note about the shrike. When he found the book he glanced at the first few pages, nodded to himself, and picked up the journal again.