“This is hideous. This is repulsive.”

  “Sometimes he weeps and says he’s sorry, that he’ll never do it again. Most of the time, however, he 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 everywhere. 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 fine 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 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.

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

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

  “Yqs, 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 beating by two others who had found his hipbag 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 that 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 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 horrid 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 killed his mother? Hadn’t he told them he was glad of it? And 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 even, 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.

  He picked up the infant, gingerly (he had never done so before, only seen them in the incubators in the hospital his father had built and which, therefore, Linkeree was “responsible” for), and held it against his bare chest, wondering at the warmth it still had. For a moment at least the crying stopped, and Link periodically struck off the suckers that leaped from the placenta to the baby’s or his bare skin.

  We are kin, he told the child silently, we are kin, the unwanted children. “If only you’d never been born,” he heard his mother saying; this time a saying she had said only once, but the memory was sharp and clear, the moment forever imprinted on his mind. It was no act. It was no sham, like her hugs and kisses and I’m-so-proud-of-yous. It was a moment, all too rare, of utter sincerity: “If only you’d never been born, I wouldn’t be getting old like this on this hideous planet!”

  Why, then, mother, didn’t you leave me on the plain to die? Much kinder, much, much kinder than to have kept me at home, killing me seven percent at a time.

  The baby cried again, hunting for a breast that by now was surely many kilometers off, leaking pap for the child that would never suckle. Did the mother grieve, perhaps? Or was she only irritated at the sensitivity of her breasts, only anxious for the last remnants of the pregnancy to fade?

  Squatting there, holding the infant, Linkeree wondered what he should do. Could he bring the child back into the compound? Unquestionably yes, but at a cost. First, Linkeree would then be caught, would then be reconfined to the hospital where the fact that he was not, was not insane would soon be discovered and they would cleanly and kindly push the needle into his buttocks and put him irrevocably to sleep. And then there was the child. What would they do with a Vaq child in the capital? In an orphanage it would be tortured by the other children who, in their poverty and usual bastardy would welcome the nonhuman as something lower that they could torment and so prove their power. In the schools, the child would be treated as an intellectual pariah, incapable of learning. It would be shunted from institution to institution—until someday on the street the torment became too much and he strangled somebody and then died for it . . . .

  Linkeree laid the baby back down. If your own don’t want you, the stranger doesn’t want you, either, he said silently. The baby cried desperately. Die, child, Linkeree thought, and be spared. “There’s not one damn thing I can do,” he said aloud.

  “What do you mean, when you can paint like that?” Zad answered. But Link saw more clearly than she. He had meant to paint Zad, but had instead painted his mother. Now he saw what for seven months he had been blind to—Zad’s resemblance to his mother. That’s why he had followed her through the streets that first night, had kept watching her, until finally she had asked him what the hell—

  “What the hell?” Zad asked, but Link didn’t answer, only wrinkled up the painting clumsily (You’re all thumbs, Linky!), pressed the wad against his crotch, and struck the paper and thus himself viciously once. Cried out in agony. Struck himself again.

  “Hey! Hey, stop that! Don’t—”

  And then he saw, felt, smelled, heard his mother lean over him, her hair brushing his face (sweet-smelling hair), and Link was filled with the old helpless fury, a helplessness made worse by clear memories of love-making hour after hour with this woman in an apartment filled with paintings in a government flat in the low part of the city. Now I’m grown up, he thought, now I’m stronger than her, and still she controls me, still she attacks me, still she expects so damn much and I never know what I should do! And so he stopped striking himself and found a better target.

  The baby was still crying. Link was disoriented for a moment, wondering why he was trembling. Then another gust of wind reminded him that tonight was the night he would die in feeble expiation for his sins, he like the baby sucked dry by tiny bites, gnawed to death by the chewers that-padded through the night, frozen to death by the wind. The difference would be, of course, that the infant would not understand, would never have understood. Better to die unknowing. Better to have no memories. Better to have no pain.

  And Link reached down and put his thumb and forefinger around the baby’s throat, to kill it now and spare it the brief agony of death later in the night. But when it was time to squeeze tightly and shut off blood and breath, Link discovered that he could not.

  “I am not a killer,” Link said. “I can’t help you.”

  And he got up and walked away, leaving behind the child’s mewling to be buried in the noise of the wind pushing through the grass. The blades rasped against his naked chest, and he remembered his mother scrubbing him in the bath. “See? Only I can reach your back. You need me, just to stay clean.”

  I need you.

  “That’s mother’s good boy.”

  Yes. I am, I am.

  “Don’t touch me! I won’t have any man touch me!”

  But you said—

  “I’m through with men. You’re a bastard and a son of a bastard and you’ve made me old!”

  But Mother—

  “No, no, what am I doing? It isn’t your fault that men are like that. You’re different, you my sweet little boy, give Mother a hug—not so tight, for God’s sake, you little devil, what are you trying to do? Go to your room!”

  He stumbled in the near darkness and fell, cutting his wrist in the grass.

  “Why are you hitting me?” he heard the brown-haired woman who ought to be blond crying out. But he hit her again, and she fled the apartment, ran down the stairs, stumbled out into the street. It was the stumbling that let him catch her, and there in the middle of the road he stifled her scream by showing her precisely what a man was like, by throwing her at long, long last away.

  A knife pricked into his chest.

  He looked up from where he lay in the grass at a short, stocky man—no, not a man, a Vaq—and not just one, a half dozen, all armed, though some were just rising from the ground and still seemed half asleep. He had stumbled in his daze into a Vaq camping place.

  This is better, he thought, than the suckers and chewers, and so with a pillar of blackness and chill in place of his spine, he weakly stood, waiting for the knife.

  But the knife pressed no deeper toward his heart, and he grew impatient. Wasn’t he the heir of the man who had done most to hurt the Vaqs, whose great tractors had swept away the livelihood of a dozen tribes, whose hunters had killed Vaqs who chanced to wander on land marked out as his? I am the owner of half this world that is worth owning; kill me and free yourselves.

  One of the Vaqs hissed impatiently. Press the knife, Link thought he seemed to say. And so he, too, hissed. Impatiently. Act now. Hurry.

  In surprise at his having echoed his own death sentence, the Vaq with the knife at his chest withdrew a step, though he still held out the knife, pointing at Linkeree. The Vaq babbled something, something ripe with rolled Rs and hissed Ss—not a human language, they taught the children in the government schools, even though as Link well knew there were dozens of anthropological reports pointing out that the Vaq language was merely corrupted Spanish, and the Vaqs were obviously the descendants of the colony ship Argentine that had been thought lost in the first decade of interstellar colonization thousands of years ago, when man had first reached out from the small planet that they had utterly spoiled. Human. Definitely human, however cruel Pampas had selected for ugliness and ignorance and viciousness and inhumanity.

  Savages have no monopoly on that.

  And Linkeree reached out, gently took the hand that held the blade, and guided it back until the point pressed against his belly. Then he hissed again, impatiently.

  The Vaq’s eyes widened, and he turned to look at his fellows, who were equally puzzled. They babbled; some backed away from Link, apparently in fear. Link couldn’t understand. He guided the knife deeper into his flesh; blood crept back along the horizontal blade.

  The Vaq withdrew his knife, abruptly, and his eyes filled with tears, and he knelt and took Linkeree by the hand.

  Link tried to pull his hand away. The Vaq only followed, offering no resistance. The others, also, gathered around. He couldn’t understand their language, but he could understand the gestures. They were, he realized, worshiping him.