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

“Good girl. Good, good girl. You get a big, big present.” He thrust

the hypodermic into her so long that Mercer could see an air bubhle travel from the pump up to the bottle.

Then he moved back to the others, booming a word now and then, moving with improbable grace and speed amid the people. His needle flashed as he gave them hypodermics under pressure. The people dropped to sitting positions or lay down on the ground as though half-asleep.

He knew Mercer. “Hello, fellow. Now you can have the fun. It would have killed you in the cabin. Do you have anything for me?”

Mercer stammered, not knowing what B’dikkat meant, and the two-nosed man answered for him, “I think he has a nice baby head, but it isn’t big enough for you to take yet.”

Mercer never noticed the needle touch his arm.

B’dikkat had turned to the next knot of people when the super-condamine hit Mercer.

He tried to run after B’dikkat, to hug the lead space suit, to tell B’dikkat that he loved him. He stumbled and fell, but it did not hurt.

The many-bodied girl lay near him. Mercer spoke to her.

“Isn’t it wonderful? You’re beautiful, beautiful, beautiful. I’m so happy to be here.”

The woman covered with growing hands came and sat beside them. She radiated warmth and good fellowship. Mercer thought that she looked very distinguished and charming. He struggled out of his clothes. It was foolish and snobbish to wear clothing when none of these nice people did.

The two women babbled and crooned at him.

With one corner of his mind he knew that they were saying nothing, just expressing the euphoria of a drug so powerful that the known universe had forbidden it. With most of his mind he was happy. He wondered how anyone could have the good luck to visit a planet as nice as this. He tried to tell the Lady Da, but the words weren’t quite straight.

A painful stab hit him in the abdomen. The drug went after the pain and swallowed it. It was like the cap in the hospital, only a thousand times better. The pain was gone, though it had been crippling the first time.

He forced himself to be deliberate. He rammed his mind into focus and said to the two ladies who lay pinkly nude beside him in the desert, “That was a good bite. Maybe I will grow another head. That would make B’dikkat happy!”

The Lady Da forced the foremost of her bodies in an upright position. Said she, “I’m strong, too. I can talk. Remember, man, remember. People never live forever. We can die, too, we can die like real people. I do so believe in death!”

Mercer smiled at her through his happiness.

“Of course you can. But isn’t this nice… “

With this he felt his lips thicken and his mind go slack. He was wide awake, but he did not feel like doing anything. In that beautiful place, among all those companionable and attractive people, he sat and smiled.

B’dikkat was sterilizing his knives.

Mercer wondered how long the super-condamine had lasted him. He endured the ministrations of the dromozoa without screams or movement. The agonies of nerves and itching of skin were phenomena which happened somewhere near him, but meant nothing. He watched his own body with remote, casual interest. The Lady Da and the hand-covered woman stayed near him. After a long time the half-man dragged himself over to the group with his powerful arms. Having arrived he blinked sleepily and friendlily at them, and lapsed back into the restful stupor from which he had emerged. Mercer saw the sun rise on occasion, closed his eyes briefly, and opened them to see stars shining. Time had no meaning. The dromozoa fed him in their mysterious way: the drug canceled out his needs for cycles of the body.

At last he noticed a return of the inwardness of pain.

The pains themselves had not changed; he had.

He knew all the events which could take place on Shayol. He remembered them well from his happy period. Formerly he had noticed them — now he felt them.

He tried to ask the Lady Da how long they had had the drug, and how much longer they would have to wait before they had it again. She smiled at him with benign, remote happiness; apparently her many torsos, stretched out along the ground, had a greater capacity for retaining the drug than did his body. She meant him well, but was in no condition for articulate speech.

The half-man lay on the ground, arteries pulsating prettily behind the half-transparent film which protected his abdominal cavity. Mercer squeezed the man’s shoulder.

The half-man woke, recognized Mercer and gave him a healthily sleepy grin.

“ ‘A good morrow to you, my boy.’ That’s out of a play. Did you ever see a play?”

“You mean a game with cards?”

“No,” said the half-man, “a sort of eye-machine with real people doing the figures.”

“I never saw that,” said Mercer, “but I—”

“But you want to ask me when B’dikkat is going to come back with the needle.”

“Yes,” said Mercer, a little ashamed of his obviousness.

“Soon,” said the half-man. “That’s why I think of plays. We all know what is going to happen. We all know when it is going to happen. We all know what the dummies will do—” he gestured at the hummocks in which the decorticated men were cradled—” and we all know what the new people will ask. But we never know how long a scene is going to take.”

“What’s a ‘scene’?” asked Mercer. “Is that the name for the needle?”

The half-man laughed with something close to real humor. “No, no, no. You’ve got the lovelies on the brain. A scene is just part of a play. I mean we know the order in which things happen, but we have no clocks and nobody cares enough to count days or to make calendars and there’s not much climate here, so none of us know how long anything takes. The pain seems short and the pleasure seems long. I’m inclined to think that they are about two Earth-weeks each.”

Mercer did not know what an “Earth-week” was, since he had not been a well-read man before his conviction, but he got nothing more from the half-man at that time. The half-man received a dromozootic implant, turned red in the face, shouted senselessly at Mercer, “Take it out, you fool! Take it out of me!”

While Mercer looked on helplessly, the half-man twisted over on his side, his pink dusty back turned to Mercer, and wept hoarsely and quietly to himself.

Mercer himself could not tell how long it was before B’dikkat came back. It might have been several days. It might have been several months.

Once again B’dikkat moved among them like a father; once again they clustered like children. This time B’dikkat smiled pleasantly at the little head which had grown out of Mercer’s thigh — a sleeping child’s head, covered with light hair on top and with dainty eyebrows over the resting eyes. Mercer got the blissful needle.

When B’dikkat cut the head from Mercer’s thigh, he felt the knife grinding against the cartilage which held the head to his own body. He saw the child-face grimace as the head was cut; he felt the far, cool flash of unimportant pain, as B’dikkat dabbed the wound with a corrosive antiseptic which stopped all bleeding immediately.

The next time it was two legs growing from his chest.

Then there had been another head beside his own.

Or was that after the torso and legs, waist to toe-tips, of the little girl which had grown from his side?

He forgot the order.

He did not count time.

Lady Da smiled at him often, but there was no love in this place. She had lost the extra torsos. In between teratologies, she was a pretty and shapely woman; but the nicest thing about their relationship was her whisper to him, repeated some thousands of times, repeated with smiles and hope, “People never live forever.”