Judith Merril - The Year's Best Science Fiction & Fantasy 7

They had lost no time at all in getting to work.

He peered at them sidewise to look at them. There was nothing about them to indicate that they were human devils in the antechambers of hell itself. Nothing was there to indicate that this was the satellite of Shayol, the final and uttermost place of chastisement and shame. They looked like medical people from his life before he committed the crime without a name.

They changed from one routine to another. A woman, wearing a surgical mask, waved her hand at a white table.

“Climb up on that, please.”

No one had said “please” to Mercer since the guards had seized him at the edge of the palace. He started to obey her and then he saw that there were padded handcuffs at the head of the table. He stopped.

“Get along, please,” she demanded. Two or three of the others turned around to look at both of them.

The second “please” shook him. He had to speak. These were people, and he was a person again. He felt his voice rising, almost cracking into shrillness as he asked her, “Please, Ma’am, is the punishment going to begin?”

“There’s no punishment here,” said the woman. “This is the satellite. Get on the table. We’re going to give you your first skin-toughening before you talk to the head doctor. Then you can tell him all about your crime—”

“You know my crime?” he said, greeting it almost like a neighbor.

“Of course not,” said she, “but all the people who come through here are believed to have committed crimes. Somebody thinks so or they wouldn’t be here. Most of them want to talk about their personal crimes. But don’t slow me down. I’m a skin technician, and down on the surface of Shayol you’re going to need the very best work that any of us can do for you. Now get on that table. And when you are ready to talk to the chief you’ll have something to talk about besides your crime.”

He complied.

Another masked person, probably a girl, took his hands in cool, gentle fingers and fitted them to the padded cuffs in a way he had never sensed before. By now he thought he knew every interrogation machine in the whole empire, but this was nothing like any of them.

The orderly stepped back. “All clear, Sir and Doctor.”

“Which do you prefer?” said the skin technician. “A great deal of pain or a couple of hours’ unconsciousness?”

“Why should I want pain?” said Mercer.

“Some specimens do,” said the technician, “by the time they arrive here. I suppose it depends on what people have done to them before they got here. I take it you did not get any of the dream-punishments.”

“No,” said Mercer. “I missed those.” He thought to himself, I didn’t know that I missed anything at all.

He remembered his last trial, himself wired and plugged in to the witness stand. The room had been high and dark. Bright blue light shone on the panel of judges, their judicial caps a fantastic parody of the episcopal mitres of long, long ago. The judges were talking, but he could not hear them. Momentarily the insulation slipped and he heard one of them say, “Look at that white, devilish face. A man like that is guilty of everything. I vote for Pain Terminal.”

“Not Planet Shayol?” said a second voice.

“The dromozoa place,” said a third voice.

“That should suit him,” said the first voice. One of the judicial engineers must then have noticed that the prisoner was listening illegally. He was cut off. Mercer then thought that he had gone through everything which the cruelty and intelligence of mankind could devise.

But this woman said he had missed the dream-punishments. Could there be people in the universe even worse off than himself? There must be a lot of people down on Shayol. They never came back.

He was going to be one of them; would they boast to him of what they had done, before they were made to come to this place?

“You asked for it,” said the woman technician. “It is just an ordinary anesthetic. Don’t panic when you awaken. Your skin is going to be thickened and strengthened chemically and biologically.”

“Does it hurt?”

“Of course,” said she. “But get this out of your head. We’re not punishing you. The pain here is just ordinary medical pain. Anybody might get it if they needed a lot of surgery. The punishment, if that’s what you want to call it, is down on Shayol. Our only job is to make sure that you are fit to survive after you are landed. In a way, we are saving your life ahead of time. You can be grateful for that if you want to be. Meanwhile, you will save yourself a lot of trouble if you realize that your nerve endings will respond to the change in the skin. You had better expect to be very uncomfortable when you recover. But then, we can help that, too.” She brought down an enormous lever and Mercer blacked out.

When he came to, he was in an ordinary hospital room, but he did not notice it. He seemed bedded in fire. He lifted his hand to see if there were flames on it. It looked the way it always had, except that it was a little red and a little swollen. He tried to turn in the bed. The fire became a scorching blast which stopped him in mid-turn. Uncontrollably, he moaned.

A voice spoke, “You are ready for some pain-killer.”

It was a girl nurse. “Hold your head still,” she said, “and I will give you half an amp of pleasure. Your skin won’t bother you then.”

She slipped a soft cap on his head. It looked like metal but it felt like silk.

He had to dig his fingernails into his palms to keep from threshing about on the bed.

“Scream if you want to,” she said. “A lot of them do. It will just be a minute or two before the cap finds the right lobe in your brain.”

She stepped to the corner and did something which he could not see.

There was the flick of a switch.

The fire did not vanish from his skin. He still felt it; but suddenly it did not matter. His mind was full of delicious pleasure which throbbed outward from his head and seemed to pulse down through his nerves.

He had visited the pleasure palaces, but he had never felt anything like this before.

He wanted to thank the girl, and he twisted around in the bed to see her. He could feel his whole body flash with pain as he did so, but the pain was far away. And the pulsating pleasure which coursed out of his head, down his spinal cord and into his nerves was so intense that the pain got through only as a remote, unimportant signal.

She was standing very still in the corner.

“Thank you, nurse,” said he.

She said nothing.

He looked more closely, though it was hard to look while enormous pleasure pulsed through his body like a symphony written in nerve-messages. He focused his eyes on her and saw that she too wore a soft metallic cap.

He pointed at it.

She blushed all the way down to her throat.

She spoke dreamily, “You looked like a nice man to me. I didn’t think you’d tell on me… “

He gave her what he thought was a friendly smile, but with the pain in his skin and the pleasure bursting out of his head, he really had no idea of what his actual expression might be. “It’s against the law,” he said. “It’s terribly against the law. But it is nice.”

“How do you think we stand it here?” said the nurse. “You specimens come in here talking like ordinary people and then you go down to Shayol. Terrible things happen to you on Shayol. Then the surface station sends up parts of you, over and over again. I may see your head ten times, quick-frozen and ready for cutting up, before my two years are up. You prisoners ought to know how we suffer,” she crooned, the pleasure-charge still keeping her relaxed and happy, “you ought to die as soon as you get down there and not pester us with your torments. We can hear you screaming, you know. You keep on sounding like people even after Shayol begins to work on you. Why do you do it, Mr. Specimen?” She giggled sillily. “You hurt our feelings so. No wonder a girl like me has to have a little jolt now and then. It’s real, real dreamy and I don’t mind getting you ready to go down on Shayol.” She staggered over to his bed. “Pull this cap off me, will you? I haven’t got enough will power left to raise my hands.”