HARM Read online

  He struck out vigorously, kicking the water into a foam with his legs and feet.

  Something else was swimming there. It came up from the depths at him, curious, or perhaps hungry. In sudden alarm, he grasped it and flung it onto the bank. It lay thrashing. He climbed out after it.

  The creature was two feet long, clad in chitin scales which the water had smoothed against its body. It was certainly not a fish, having no fins or gills. There were four clawlike appendages, which reached up to grasp Fremant. The head, attached to an ungainly body, appeared only slightly similar to a human’s, while its protruding jaws suggested something like a bird’s beak. He stood over it. It stared up at him with four multifaceted eyes, making low continuous noises.

  He shivered to look at it, was frightened of it; taking up a stone, he smashed its skull, which delivered forth a foaming, creamy mass. Then he regretted doing so. Had the creature been hostile? he asked himself. Perhaps it had been merely curious, as he was curious.

  He knelt by it to examine it and its sexual quarters. The longing for a woman came upon him—for a woman’s embrace, for her ardor and pleasure; for her love.

  He remained, thinking, on the bank, the sound of the water unheeded. Here was this miraculous world of Stygia, almost unexplored, little understood. Why did men not explore it, instead of dividing into factions and quarreling, one group against another group? Did they fear it so much? Maybe if they ventured into the interior they would find this Jesus walking there, robed in purity.

  At length he stood up. He gazed into the water, wondering if the dead creature had a mate lurking in its depths. He did not venture into the pool again.

  After days of wandering, he came to a small valley where salack grew profusely, low to the ground. It flowered with a little blue-and-white flower, very sweet smelling. He gathered handfuls of it and made himself a bed. The scent had a dizzying effect, not unpleasant. He made no attempt to eat it.

  As he was lying there, a flying creature, with wings that might have been cut from colored paper, and a long stalklike tail, settled on his chest. Alarmed, Fremant, in one quick movement, seized it in his fist and crushed it to death. He sat up in fear and revulsion, shaking its sappy remains from his hand. He was in an alien land. He did not know whether or not such insects were harmless.

  And he thought of himself, Always this impulse to kill…

  Nor did he know what beasts might roam the country, which consisted of savannah, scrub, and small trees. In the region where he now found himself, small twittering things like grasshoppers, walking on long legs, often came near him in the daytime. They scampered off when he tried to approach. In the day, they seemed playful; but as the sun set and dusk drew on, these creatures sought refuge in the branches of small trees, weaving webs for cradles, to become silent and huddle together, clutching one another.

  Fremant inferred from this that there must be large predators on the prowl by night. He also took to a safe tree, driving off the grasshopper-things in order to have the upper branches to himself. It was chillier there than on the ground but, he was sure, safer. He, too, wished he had someone to huddle with. He slept badly, unsure of what might lurk below, at ground level.

  Sometimes he seemed to be freezing, sometimes floating.

  Rousing one night, he saw the Brothers trailing overhead. They shed a fugitive light on the world below. He watched them with a sort of longing. In the LPR for centuries of space travel, the mortals preserved there had lost all personal characteristics, all history of personal relationships. Men had no wives, women no mothers. Only overhead remained the symbolic relationship of brotherhood. The future was everyone’s dubious bride.

  In his exhaustion, as he turned restlessly, he thought he heard the tread of predators. All was confusion. Was it two—or was it three—days since they had allowed him to sleep? He was made to stand in a corridor by a closed door. A guard watched over him. He was weak. He had stood there shivering for an hour, two hours. He fought against the tears of weakness that threatened.

  Although he longed not to be standing there, he feared what would be his treatment when they summoned him into the room.

  They summoned him in.

  It was a small, windowless room. It contained only a bare table and two chairs. One of the chairs was an armchair. He stared at it longingly, not daring to approach it.

  A casually dressed man with an open-neck shirt entered the room by a rear door.

  He gestured toward the armchair.

  “Do, please, sit down. I must apologize for keeping you waiting.” He turned smilingly to the guard. “You can leave us now, Charlie. We’ll get on fine on our own, thanks.”

  By way of introduction, he said that the prisoner could call him “Dick.”

  He was clean-shaven and in his mid-forties, of good complexion. His dark hair was long and rumpled. He sat down opposite Prisoner B. Before him on the table he placed a fat dossier, which he proceeded to leaf slowly through.

  Prisoner B was made nervous by this procedure, and alarmed by the comfort of the armchair. He longed to sleep.

  Suddenly darting a glance at his prisoner, the interrogator said, “You are looking a touch pale. Not been sleeping too well lately? Would you like a cup of tea?”

  In the prisoner’s mind rose a vision of a cup of tea in all its benison. He agreed eagerly. “Dick” nodded encouragingly but, doing nothing further, again immersed himself in the dossier.

  “I see here that you are fluent in Pashto, Baluchi, and Urdu?”

  “No, I’m not. I know a few words of Urdu.”

  “In what language did you converse with Osama bin Laden?”

  Such disconcerting questions made him stutter. “I didn’t—I never—I never spoke—I never met—bin Laden when he was alive.”

  With a supercilious smile, the interrogator said, “You could hardly be suspected of speaking to him once he was dead.” He returned to his burrowing in the dossier.

  “So, Paul, would you like to tell me something about your life?”

  The man’s mild tone, his seeming friendliness, released something in the prisoner, released a torrent of speech he could hardly check.

  Paul began talking about his father’s arrival in England, years ago. Maybe twenty-five years. No, twenty-four. He spoke good English and grew to love England, with its mild, reasonable politics and climate. His wife never accepted that she had left Uganda, made no effort to learn the language. He divorced her and kicked her out.

  His father then married an Englishwoman, Gloriana Harbottle, who soon gave birth to Paul. Gloriana demanded too much of her husband. She made him feel inferior. He took to drink and became brutal.

  Paul dressed like an English boy. Integration was encouraged. His mother defended him from his father. He was bidden to respect English justice. He was sent to a good school, where he was mercilessly bullied and teased. The other boys called him “Insane Hussein.” But he learned his lessons, later procuring a decent job in a law office, where he—

  “I don’t know when that cup of tea is coming,” said the interrogator absently, cutting into the flow of reminiscence.

  The prisoner, hurt, fell silent before continuing. “It was in that solicitor’s—”

  “I see here you were suspected,” the interrogator said, without looking up from the page, “of being brainwashed, so that without your knowing it you were in reality a compulsive killer—a latent killer awaiting the signal to kill…”

  “That is utter rubbish. I am completely normal.”

  The interrogator looked up. He gestured, raising an eyebrow, saying in a reasonable tone, “But surely not completely normal. Your medical records show a split-personality syndrome. What they call multiple personality disorder.”

  So they had his medical records…He said, “I am not a killer. Far from it.”

  “Oh, I accept that. It’s a laughable suggestion. Someone must have been watching a DVD of The Manchurian Candidate one too many times!” He chuckled.

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sp; Paul felt that here at last was someone on his side. “The—what used to be called a ‘split personality’ is actually a help to me as a writer.”

  “Oh? So when did you first have sexual intercourse with this Irishwoman, Doris McKay, or whatever her name was?”

  He was startled, shocked. “That has nothing to do with it!”

  “And you fucked her sister, I believe.”

  “Certainly not.”

  “Have you been circumcised?”

  “Why are you asking me this?”

  “How frequently did you have anal congress with this woman?”

  “What’s this all about?”

  “I understand she disliked the flavor of your semen.”

  He tried to stand up but it proved not so easy. “These bloody questions!”

  Dick became furious. “You dare raise your voice to me! Why do you suddenly refuse to answer my questions? I thought we were getting along well, establishing rapport, as it were. Now you dare take advantage of my—”

  “Oh, I don’t have to—”

  “What’s this? You are contradicting me now? Just when I was trying to help you? You ungrateful swine!” He banged his fist on the desk. “Records show you to be a ruffian of the first order! Guard!”

  The guard appeared with astonishing promptitude.

  “Charlie, take this blackguard and lock him up in one of the basement cells.”

  Paul cried, “Look, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—”

  “You Muslims are all the fucking same!” Dick shouted. “Ungrateful pigs!”

  “Come on, sonny boy!” said the guard, propelling the prisoner forward by the neck.

  THE BASEMENT CELL was small and dark. Its walls were slimy. Its floor was slimy. A stink of vomit prevailed. Something came crawling over the prisoner’s body and he shrieked. It scampered off. He supposed it was a rat. And there were other rats. He heard them running here and there. They ran across his legs.

  It seemed the rats had fleas. Or the last miserable wretch to be shut in here had left some of his fleas behind. There were other things, too. Crawling or flying. Gnats hummed by his ear.

  Suddenly an overhead light came on, blindingly bright. Someone down the end of the corridor had switched on the light—not out of kindness, but so that he could see the filth that surrounded him. The vomit lay in a corner, mainly green and streaked with blood. The rats were at it. They flinched for a moment at the light and then went on with their feast.

  As Prisoner B scrunched himself up against the opposite wall, a large cockroach ran from under his heel. It scuttled away, took a swift turn, and disappeared under the cell door. A mosquito, flying blind, came too near. He scrunched it against his forehead.

  His whole body itched. He was in the kingdom of the insects.

  And the cell was chillingly cold.

  SLEEPING IN THE TREES was chillingly cold.

  Initially, he chose a tree which had a creeper climbing over it, covered in little fruits like pearls. The creeper grew from the ground, twisting around the trunk of the tree and ascending into its very tops. It was the season for the small fruits. Fremant tasted one, but the flavor was repugnant. With dawn, the fruits shone like teardrops.

  He regarded the creeper as a parasite and took some trouble to haul its many stalks out of the branches of the tree. Finally the strands were all cleared away and lay in a pile nearby. The tree immediately began to die. By the next Dimoff, it had fallen, rotten, to the ground.

  One day he awoke at sunrise, shivering. Looking down from the rough platform he had constructed in a tree, he saw the ground overnight had become covered with wild irises which were just bursting into pristine bloom, coloring the landscape with their purple-blue flowers. Each opening bud contained a blue-tinted grub.

  Although he wondered if the irises exuded poison if you touched them, he climbed down and crouched among them, still shaking with cold. He listened, all senses alert. He caught surrounding vibrations. Something like a noise, almost music, came to him. It could be unseen insects. The plants he had taken for irises themselves gave out a low vibration; their petals were crisp and rubbed gently against each other—Fremant assumed to attract pollinators and to shake out the nesting grubs.

  Or fractions of those elusive vibrations possibly emanated from his own body. That extra 3 percent of oxygen on Stygia, as compared to Earth, could be affecting his own metabolism. He was burning out more quickly than normal—burning to death. A kind of religious angst overcame him.

  He stood up, to find himself ankle-deep in the stridulating purple flowers.

  He was filled with wonder for this strange planet—wonder and dread. He was alien to it, and it to him.

  Similar worries bedeviled his quest for food: Was this or that berry edible or poisonous? The one fruit he recognized was the clammerdumm, which he had eaten when under Bellamia’s care. He thought affectionately of the woman, with her gentle ways.

  Rambling about the nearby hillsides, he came on a sheltered gulch. In the gulch stood a strange artifact. A central stake supported a leather tent which rose to a point. Its sides were decorated with symbols. The structure, temporary at best, was in a dilapidated state. Fremant stood for some while staring at it. It reminded him of something he could not trace. At last he went forward, to pull aside the flap of the tent.

  A foul smell, the effluvium of a decaying body, assailed him. On the floor lay a small bipedal body in an advanced state of decomposition. Flying things rose up from it, angry at being disturbed. The surface of the body, and its pits as well, seethed with maggots.

  He was staring at the remains of a Dogover who had died alone.

  He dropped the flap and retreated.

  Hunger drove him back into Haven. Bellamia gave him an affectionate welcome and embraced him. “You are welcome in my little nook,” she said. Later, he thought about her phraseology.

  FOUR

  FREMANT GOT A JOB working in a gunmaker’s forge, owned by a big blank-looking man whose small boy was in charge of the bellows. The bellows brought the fire to a temperature which made malleable the metal parts necessary for the machining of crude guns. Fremant’s job was to shape wooden stocks for the guns. The last man doing the job had just died.

  “You got to keep at it,” said the gunsmith, by name Utrersin. “Them stocks don’t make themselves.” He had a thin skull with a hank of black hair that hung over his forehead like grass over a cliff edge.

  His boy politely brought Fremant bread and meat every day at midday.

  Fremant took a liking to this lad, whose name was Wellmod. He tried to teach Wellmod the elements of procosmology, drawing diagrams in the ashes of the fire with a poker. The boy was interested.

  “Here is the system from which we originated, with a G-type sun. Way over here is another G-type. This is where we are. The distance is vast. We say one thousand and eighty light-years.”

  “What’s a light-year?” Wellmod asked. As Fremant explained, the gunmaker, Utrersin, came over and listened to the explanation.

  He mopped his brow. “How did we ever do it? I opted for years in Cryogenic Storage, as they calls it, so I can’t make out how old I be. Centuries, in all probability. ’Tis a bit confusing.”

  Fremant tried to explain that no one had remained physically whole for the long journey; the brain functions and DNA of many people, male and female, had been stored in so-called Life Process Reservoirs. There was no one on the ship for many centuries. Its shell remained empty and airless; only computers and certain androids were functioning. Otherwise, it traveled chill, without atmosphere, the only sounds being the whisper of cybernetic instruments.

  “What about me?” Utrersin asked. “Jupers…I heard all this before but never did I believe it possible.”

  “It’s what happened. What was planned. Five years before landfall on Stygia, the ship awoke, the LPRs reconstituted people. The PR it was—Process of Reconstitution. A computer bestowed names on us at random. No two people had any relationship toge
ther. It was part of the plan. We were exercised to bring us back to physical health. There were exercises, too, for mental health, and those who did not pass examination were simply eliminated. The LPRs had their failures.”

  Utrersin shook his head slowly. “All that…I thought all that was just bad dreams I had.”

  “We all have bad dreams.”

  “Uh. Mine are partickler bad.”

  “The real bad thing was how quickly people divided into various sects. Atheists, technophobes, religious, and so on…”

  Utrersin said in wonder, “Jupers, so that’s how we was born for life here on Stygia…No wonder we be such a rum lot…”

  “I wasn’t born on the ship,” said Wellmod brightly. “I’m too young for that.”

  “Back to work,” said Utrersin. “I still can’t hardly believe what you say.”

  The boy started bringing Fremant a jelly of the golden busk, which he ate with pleasure. “You children are so well behaved and kind,” he said.

  Wellmod smiled and nodded his head without answering.

  Every evening in the little square, Elder Deselden and Essanits held a service which all attended. An a cappella choir chanted sacred songs, after which dancers danced. Such songs were designed to be understood by the peasant farmers.

  The seed we put in the land

  In ways that we don’t understand

  Will grow into food we eat—

  As God takes us all by the hand

  And when our growth is complete

  Will lead us on to the Glor-huh-hory Seat…

  And one evening after this ceremony, a bench was brought out and a boy tied down on it, his arms spread and strapped down along the bench. Fremant was amazed to recognize the lad as Wellmod. He was then subjected to twelve lashes with a long, springy cane.