"This isn't bad," Fisher said, watching with cold eyes. "No prayers anyway." He suspected that prayers would have frightened him — especially the sight of aliens praying.
"We don't believe in second chances," Echois said.
The graves were like postholes — deep and narrow. That was why they had taken so long to dig. Fisher watched with interest as the bodies were slung in headfirst and lowered by their feet, until their foot soles showed about thirty centimeters below ground level.
"A few months ago there were eleven of us," Mr. Blue said.
"Where are the others?" Fisher asked. But he knew: Hooper had burned two and snatched one, and the Diggers had done the rest.
"Dead," Gumbie said. "Gone."
Fisher was staring at the yellow-gray feet in the holes.
"These bodies are empty," Mr. Blue said. "There is nothing left inside. Our friends are gone."
He chucked some dirt in with a mattock.
"They're nowhere," he said.
Then the rest of them piled in dirt and rocks, and they filled the holes and sealed them. They hurriedly shoveled until the holes were indistinguishable from the surrounding land. There was nothing to mark the graves, nothing left behind. Mr. Blue led the small group away as soon as it was done, and only Fisher looked back. He believed that this burial made more sense than a tombstone ceremony and was much better than the voodoo ritual that accompanied old Grampy Allbright to his ridiculous mausoleum.
Fisher liked this, the way the dead went back to the earth and broke down. Clean degradation; no sentiment. And he liked the way these people had fought. These feelings gave him his first stirring of hope and made him proud of surviving among these animals.
"Except," he said, continuing his thought aloud, "as a result of your probable contamination from exposure to radiation in O-Zone, and the gene mutation in your somatic cells—"
The six remaining aliens had turned from the rubble on the graves to stare at Fisher, who was quacking at them.
"— as a result of that, you've got a very short life span."
They all looked black with the rising sun right behind them.
"What makes you think you've got a long one, Fish?"
Nothing more was said about those dead aliens. Fisher wondered why, and asked, but there was no reply. He was stared at and the stares said: Who are you? They did not talk about the past: what was dead was gone forever. They had few memories. They had no ancestors, nor any ghosts.
They had decided to dig up the sealed provisions and take them back to their original camp at the center of their quarter in O-Zone. Fisher did not tell them that he had been near it at New Year's with Hooper and Murdick. He pretended to be interested in the place — they called it variously "The Valley" and "The Frying Pan," because it was an enormous circular depression. But the area was not noted for its caves, and he had not been able to find any huts there; so where did they live?
He asked.
"You'll see. Fish."
"What are we going to do there?"
"We'll decide when we get there," Mr. Blue said.
A squawk shot out of Fisher's helmet.
"Until you came along, we never thought much about the future," Echols said. "Never had to."
"Now it's the only fucking thing," Rooks said.
Someone grunted, "Shut up."
Fisher knew he was different from the rest of them. It was more than a suspicion or a feeling; it was a visible fact. His intelligence, he knew, made him a member of a superior race — but he had long felt that he was superior to Hardy and Hooper and Moura, and they knew it too. He had proven himself to these aliens by repairing the helmet and the particle beam. Now they had a radio and a weapon, though they hardly seemed to care. Their uncaring attitude to his technological genius was further evidence that they were savages, Fisher felt.
He still wore his padded suit with the baggy pants and boots. His long red hands and bitten fingers protruded from his.sleeves — his skin was still circled where he had insect bites. He usually wore the helmet, and often with the faceplate down, so that he seemed bizarre and doll-like in that wilderness.
They asked him to take the helmet off, and when he refused, they wanted to know why.
"The faceplate's optical — I lost my contacts. Hey, I need it to see. You want me to be blind! You're afraid of me!"
It was a lie, all that squawking — the first deliberate lie he had told them. But he did not blame himself. He was still very frightened and often when he reviewed his situation he was in fear of his life.
Savages were unreasonable and unpredictable. Aliens had no legal existence, no legitimacy. He felt that they were parodies of his own life, for they gambled and halved their chances every time they mated; and though Moura could have made a better match at the clinic, she had taken no chances.
But living in O-Zone had improved them, for although they were certainly aliens and savages, they were also tough sunburned people — strong and very silent and watchful. They could move very fast through the trees and hills of this place. They wore knitted hats and knitted clothes — they were always knitting, even the men, when they were at rest. They also wore surprising clothes, like bomber jackets and bush hats.and old-style slacks and sneakers, and Mr. Blue wore a brilliant silk scarf.
But he did not have to ask where they had gotten them. O-Zone had been a Prohibited Area for over fifteen years: its inhabitants had been evacuated but they had left a great deal behind — in their houses and shops and hotel rooms. Even Firehills had been full of abandoned belongings, and though it had disgusted Fisher, Hooper had taken pleasure in looking this stuff over, and opening drawers looking for treasures. It was all secondhand junk, Fisher felt, and probably contaminated; but for an alien the whole of O-Zone was a treasure house.
He knew that being aliens, they were predatory. How else could they have survived here so long? His suit and helmet protected him from them. He hated hearing them and being reminded that he was their prisoner, and that they were somehow stuck with him. Until you came along we never thought much about the future — that crap.
He wanted to tell them that he had always thought about the future — how it was contained in the present, and was familiar and visitable; how it was always a version of the remote past; and how it could be discovered and accurately projected a thousand years hence. But he spoke a different language. This mode of life in O-Zone was worse even than the prison of the present or the usable past. This was the chaos of prehistory, the aliens like the first beings sniffing the world.
But he also thought: I am farther away from people like Moura and Hooper, than people like Moura and Hooper are from aliens like these. And there were times when these aliens were just as exasperating and stupid, in just the same way, as many New Yorkers he knew.
Yet in New York he had seldom been self-conscious. But here in O-Zone, the way they isolated him forced him to think about himself and his effect on other people. It had an unexpected result.
He said, "When I was a baby, my parents bored me."
And Valda laughed. She had been walking behind him. She laughed out loud.
Fisher was not used to laughter. He was startled and in an obscure way thrilled by it.
He said, "I hate to hear people laugh. Or talk. Or eat. Especially eat."
Valda laughed again. In spite of himself, he was flattered: he felt it gave him strength. He turned and saw that she had thrown her head back. She was a young woman with heavy breasts, and the gesture lifted them and gave them life. He watched them, liking the weight of them, the way they moved as she laughed. There was something careless and wild — and perhaps brave — in the way she leaned back and laughed. He could see the root of her tongue, and her small discolored teeth. Now they excited him, and her body smell teased his nose like new paint. The sound of her laughter seemed to say that she was not afraid of anything at all. He wanted more of it,
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