The Annals of the Heechee

11 HEIMAT

I’ve told you about some good people and some flawed people, and now it is time to tell about a really bad person. You won’t like him, but you need to know him. I mentioned him briefly when I was talking about terrorists, but I didn’t do him justice. I would certainly have liked to do him justice-plenty of justice, preferably at the end of a rope-but that hadn’t happened. Unfortunately.

His name was Beaupre Heimat, and once he had been a two-star general on the High Pentagon.

It was Heimat who had persuaded Klara’s new husband that the only way to achieve peace and justice was to blow a lot of people up. That was one of the least of his crimes.

Among other bad things, he once tried to kill me personally.

It may have been twice, because not everything came out at his trial. With me he failed. With several hundred others, though-at least several hundred-he was more efficient. Heimat refused to plead guilty to murder at his trial. He wouldn’t call it murder. He called it revolutionary justice, because he was a terrorist. The court, on the other hand, had no trouble calling it murder-calling each individual case of it murder-and they gave him a life sentence for each one of the deaths. And as Heirnat had been not just any mixed-up moke but a trusted general in the American space forces, they made the sentences consecutive. Altogether, Heimat’s sentences added up to an aggregate minimum stay in jail of 8,750 years, but time had passed and now Heimat had only 8,683 yet to serve.

He had every reason to believe that he would serve every day of those years, too, because even felons were entitled to machine storage. His prison term would not automatically end with his death.

Actually, I rather enjoy talking about General Beaupre Heimat now. It makes a welcome relief. After Albert’s soul-numbing display of immensity and eternity, it is relaxing to think about a mere person, who is merely despicable.

One day for Heimat was much like every other. This is how he started his days:

When he woke up, the bedthing was still and curled beside him, but he knew she wasn’t asleep. He also knew she was not a she but an it, but as Heimat had almost nothing but its for company anymore, he had stopped recognizing the difference.

As Heirnat threw his legs over the side of the bed, she started to get up, too. He pushed her back down. Gently enough, after the violence of the night before. Not all that gently, because (disappointingly) she was very strong.

She watched him dress for a moment before she asked, “Where are you going?”

“Why,” said Heimat, “I think I will walk down to the beach, then swim across the channel and catch a plane to Los Angeles, where I propose to blow up a few buildings.” He waited a moment for a response, and got none. He hadn’t expected any. Typically, she had no sense of humor. It was a chronic disappointment. Heimat would have enjoyed his life a great deal more if he could have made some of his bedthings laugh-though not, of course, as much as if he had been able to make them weep in pain. The authorities gave him female constructions that looked and felt and smelled and tasted like humans, why couldn’t they be considerate enough to make them fret?

It did not occur to Heimat that he had not earned much consideration from the authorities, or from anyone else.

Outside the door his guardthing winked and whispered, “What do you say, Heimat? Was she all right?”

“Not really.” Heimat kept walking and finished the conversation without turning his head: “I told you I like blondes. Little young ones. Fragile.”

The guard called after him, “I’ll see what I can do tonight,” but Heimat didn’t answer. He was thinking of the word he had just used—“fragile”—and the way it made him feel. Fragile. A tiny fragile blonde. A live one! A real female human one, with her fragile little limbs twisted and broken and her mouth screaming and her face contorted in pain—He stopped the thought at that point. He didn’t stop because what he was thinking shamed him, because Heimat was long past shame. He stopped because he was enjoying it so much, with such desperate yearning, that he was afraid his face might give away something of what he was feeling; and the only victory Heimat ever had anymore was to keep some secrets to himself.

Heimat’s island prison was very far from any continent or any major city. It had been built to hold thirty-eight hundred desperate convicts and keep them inside no matter what they planned or did.

Now all that construction was overkill, because the only active survivor in the prison was Heimat himself. There weren’t thirty-eight hundred desperate prisoners left in his prison. There weren’t that many in the whole world. Recruitment had fallen off greatly since the bad old days of terrorism and famine. Oh, sociopaths turned up every now and then, of course, but what Albert (when he and I discussed such matters) called “the preconditions for opportunistic crime” were scarce. —

The thing was, conditions had got a lot better. Nowhere in the human galaxy were there places where whole generations grew up to mug or murder or destroy because they had no easier way to ease their miseries. Most of the worst of the prisoners still somewhere jailed were veterans of the days of terrorism and mass crime, and there weren’t many of those left. Many of the malcontents had long since let themselves be plea-bargained into a different kind of imprisonment in one of the hard-service colonies. Most of the others had finally become either sufficiently rehabilitated or sufficiently dead. Heimat himself was quite an old man-older than I, a hundred and thirty at least. Of course, he got Full Medical. He might go on another fifty years in the flesh, because the prisoners were repaired and reconditioned as often as necessary; it wasn’t usually age, sickness, or accident that they died of when they died. It was almost always simple, terminal boredom. On one morning just like every other morning they would wake up and look around and decide that enough was at last enough and machine storage could be no worse. Then they would find the right chance and kill themselves.

But not Heimat.

The only other living meat inmate of the prison was a former Soviet marshal named Pernetsky. Like Heimat, he had been a mole for the terrorists, using his military position to help them kill and wreck. The two had been colleagues in the secret underground, then fellow prisoners for hell’s own years. Not friends, exactly. Neither of them had any real friends. But close enough as inmates that Heimat had been really surprised when he heard one day that Pernetsky had eaten out his entire digestive system with cleaning fluids.

It was not an efficient suicide attempt. The guardthings had spotted it at once, and now Pernetsky was in intensive care in the prison hospital.

One destination is as good as any other for a man who has none, and Heimat decided to look in on Pernetsky.

The prison hospital was on the same scale as the great penitentiary complex itself. The hospital had a hundred and thirty beds, each one capable of being isolated with partitions of shatterproof glass and steel. Pernetsky was the only patient.

Heimat crossed the warm, wide lawn with its hibiscus and palm trees to the hospital, ignoring the workthings that picked the blossoms for his table and tidied up the fallen fronds. He could not ignore the medic in the reception room, though. As he entered she peered out at him and called, with a smile of professional cheer, “Good morning, General Heimat! You’re looking a little flushed. Would you like me to check your blood pressure?”

“No chance,” sneered Heimat, but he stopped within conversational range of her. He was always more courteous to the medics than to any other prison personnel-it was his theory, which he never chose to put to the test, that some of them, sometimes, were living humans. It was also his habit, because in the presence of the medical staff he could think of himself as hospital patient rather than jailbird. Role playing was important to Heimat. He had acted well in consecutive roles as West Point cadet, grunt lieutenant, company commander, division 0-2, two-star general-secret soldier in the liberation forces!—convict. “I don’t want you to take my blood pressure,” he said, “because you already know perfectly well what it is and you just want to give me some medication I don’t want. But I’ll tell you. If you were about six centimeters shorter and ten years younger I’d let you raise it a little. Especially if you were blond.” (And fragile.)

The nurse’s professional smile stayed professional. “You want a lot from me,” she murmured.

“You’re supposed to give me everything I need,” he said. The conversation had begun to bore him. He decided this one wasn’t really human anyway, and moved on.

No one stopped him. What was the point? The shatterproof walls were not up around Pernetsky’s bed, either. There was even less point in that, because Pernetsky’s transplants were a long way from healed and he was tied to his life-support systems more firmly than by any chains.

Heimat looked down on his last living companion, trussed in his bed with the tubes in his nose and the tiny pumps whirring away. “Well, Pyotr,” he said, “are you going to get up from there? Or is your next stop the Dead File?”

The Russian didn’t respond. He hadn’t responded to anything for weeks. It was only the traitorous CRT at the foot of his bed, with its telltale sine waves billowing and sometimes erupting, that showed he was not only alive but sometimes even awake. “I almost miss you,” Heimat said meditatively, and lit a cigarette, heedless of the signs that warned of oxygen and risks of fire. A wardthing moved unobtrusively closer but did not interfere.

Once this had been the military ward of the prison. Beyond the glass doors of the wardrobes Heimat could see the racks of uniforms, American blue and khaki, Russian white and drab, that would never be worn again. “If you get up,” Heimat wheedled, “I’ll take off this stupid hospital robe and put on my Class As. You can too. We’ll have a war game or something; remember how you used to nuke New York and Washington, and I’d wipe out your whole missile complex?”

There was no response from the patient. This was beginning to be boring, too, Heimat decided. “Ah, well,” he said, blowing smoke in Pernetsky’s face, “we knew all along that the winners always put the losers on trial. Foolish of us to lose.”

As Heimat turned to leave, the Soviet marshal’s head moved ever so slightly and one eye winked. “Ah, Pyotr!” cried Heimat. “You’ve been fooling them!”

The marshal’s lips opened. “Last night,” he whispered. “The hover-trucks. Find out why.”

And then he closed lips and eyes and would not open either again.

Naturally none of the prisonthings would answer Heimat’s questions. He had to go and find out what Pernetsky had been talking about for himself.

He roamed the prison compound, all the three square kilometers of it on the side of the mountain, with its heartbreaking view of the sea no prisoner could ever reach. Most of the cell blocks were empty and sealed. The engineering buildings-the power sources and the disposal units and the laundries-weren’t empty because they had to keep on chugging away at their tasks. But they were sealed to Heimat anyway.

Everything else was open, but there wasn’t much of everything else. The prison had a farm; it had been work for the inmates when there were enough inmates to matter, and it was kept going by the work-things even now because it produced a number of valuable, if sometimes peculiar, crops. But there was nothing there that hadn’t always been there. Nor around the pool, nor in the gymnasium, nor in the vast, empty recreation hall, with its games and books and screens.

So what had Pernetsky meant about trucks?

Heimat wondered if it would be worth the trouble to look at the Dead File. It was trouble, because the building was off all by itself, upslope, near the outer barriers of the prison, and it was quite a climb. It had been some time since Heimat had made the effort.

When he realized this, he decided promptly to do it now. It was always a good idea to keep checking the prison perimeters. One day, just for a moment, someone might slip up, and then there would be a chance of—Of what?

Heimat grinned sourly to himself as he climbed the flower-bordered walk to the Dead File. Of escape, of course. Even after all these years, that hope was what kept him going.

“Hope” was too strong a word. Heimat had no real hope of escaping, or at least not of staying escaped even if somehow he were able to get out of the prison itself. With all the wise and watching computer programs in the world, it would not be long before one or another of them penetrated any disguise.

On the other hand.

On the other hand, thought Heimat, careful not to show any expression on his face lest some nearby workthing catch a glimpse of it-on the other hand a man who was sufficiently courageous and daring, a natural leader gifted with charisma and power-a man like himself, in fact-might easily overturn the odds! Think of Napoleon back from Elba! The people flocking to him! Armies springing out of nowhere! Once free he would find followers, and then the hell with their machines and spies, the people would shield him. Of this Heimat had no doubt. He was certain in his heart that, whatever people pretended to themselves, most of the human race was as greedy and arrogant as himself, and what they really wanted most was a leader to tell them that greed and arrogance were permissible, even admirable, behavior.

But first one had to escape.

Heimat stopped at the fork in the walk, panting slightly. It was a hard climb for a man a hundred and some years old, even with so many new parts that he had long lost count, and the sun was hot. He surveyed the perimeter walls of the prison resignedly. They had not changed. They weren’t even walls; there was a barrier of bushes, handsomely ornamental but filled with sensors, then a space and another barrier, equally beautiful to the eye but this time filled with paralyzing circuits—and, just to make sure, a third line behind them, and this one was lethal. The late Major Adrian Winterkoop had proven that for all of them, because that was the way he had chosen for his own suicide. The experiment had worked well. (Or as well as dying ever worked, when all that happened was that they put you into machine storage in the Dead File.)

And, in any case, those industrious gardenerthings that were never out of sight somewhere in the area could quickly become guardthings. Because you were never out of their sight, either.

Heimat sighed and took the left-hand fork, toward the Dead File.

Heimat didn’t go there often. It was not a place a living prisoner enjoyed visiting, because a living prisoner knew that sooner or later he would be a dead one, and there he then would be. No well person enjoys looking at his own grave.

Of course, the five or six thousand true incorrigibles stored in the Dead File weren’t really dead, they were only “dead.” Major Winterkoop was still there, for instance, or at least the machine-stored analog of him was there, because the guardthings had recovered his body in time. Not in time to revive it, no. But before the quick processes of decay had made the contents of that angry brain unrecoverable. Being dead had not changed Winterkoop; he was still the same reckless, heedless person who had been Heimat’s adjutant in the glory days, when they used their position to bomb and kill and destroy for the sake of the glorious new world to come.

And this, thought Heimat sourly, was the new world, and neither he nor Major Winterkoop had any part in it.

As he walked toward the low pastel building that held the Dead File, he thought briefly of accessing Winterkoop, or one of the other Dead Men, just for the sake of a chat and a change. But they were all so damned dull! Imprisonment didn’t stop with death. None of them would ever leave the Dead File, and none of them had changed a bit since their deaths . . .

Heimat stopped short, gaping at the Dead File.

Around the corner, just out of sight from the path, was the main cargo entrance that he had never once seen used. It was being used now.

Two huge trucks sat on their bellies outside it, their fans silent, as a dozen workthings busily carried racks of datafans and coils inside.

“Please, General Heimat,” said a gardenerthing from behind him, “don’t go any closer. It is not allowed.”

“They came in last night while I was asleep!” said Heimat, staring. “But what is it?”

“Consolidation,” the gardenerthing said apologetically. “The Pensacola facility is being closed and all the inmates moved here.”

Heimat recovered himself. It was the first rule of his prison existence that he never let any of the watchthings know what he was thinking or feeling, so he simply said with a pleasant smile, “Not enough of us enemies of society left to keep you all busy, I suppose. Do you fear for your job?”

“Oh, no, General Heimat,” said the workthing seriously. “We will simply be assigned to other tasks as needed, of course. But it is only Pensacola that is being terminated. Here, as you see, we are accepting their cases.”

“Ah, yes, their cases,” said Heimat, beaming at the workthing as he wondered if it would be worth the trouble to try to destroy it. It had been given the form of a young Polynesian male, even to the beads of sweat on the hairless chest. “So I suppose all of the Pensacola cases are now in our Dead File.”

“Oh, no, General. There is one live one. According to your records you know him. Cyril Basingstoke.”

Heimat lost his calm for a moment. “Basingstoke?” He gaped at the workthing. Cyril Basingstoke had been one of the major terrorist leaders, the only one, perhaps, who commanded a network as big as, and almost as deadly as, Heimat’s own. “But Basingstoke was paroled a year ago,” he said. “It was on the news.”

“He was, General Heimat, yes.” The workthing nodded. “But he is a recidivist. While he was on parole he killed thirty-five people.”

To understand, they tell me, is to forgive, but I don’t believe it.

I think I do pretty nearly understand people like Heimat and Basing-stoke. Like every other terrorist from the Stone Age on, they killed and destroyed for a principle, and convinced themselves that the principle they killed for justified the bloodshed and agony they caused.

They never convinced me, though. I saw some of the casualties. Essie and I barely missed being two of them ourselves, when Heimat’s hit squads blew up a Lofstrom loop they thought we were on. And, because we were witnesses to that one, we were there for Heimat’s trial, and I heard all about the others. Most of all I heard Heimat, and saw him, erect and military in the prisoner’s dock, looking the very model of a modern major general in his dress whites and strong, right-stuff face. He listened with polite attention as the witnesses detailed how, in his proper person as a major general in the United States Defense Forces, he had secretly organized the bands that blew up launch loops, struck down satellites, poisoned water supplies, and even managed to steal a Dream Couch to sicken the entire world with mad fantasies. Of course, he had been caught in the end. But he had fooled them all for nearly ten years, sitting straight-faced in staff meetings discussing antiterrorist measures, before people like Eskladar had come to their senses and through them the world’s police forces at last succeeded in linking Heimat with the massacres and bombings. None of these were crimes to him. They were simple strategies.

Heimat’s trial was a peculiar experience for me. I had died not long before, and that was the first time I had appeared in public in a holographic body, with my essential self stored in gigabit space. That was still a rather unusual situation, and Heimat’s lawyers tried to keep me from testifying because I wasn’t a “person.” They failed, of course. It wouldn’t have mattered if they had succeeded, because there were plenty of other witnesses.

Heimat obviously didn’t care. His arrest and prosecution he regarded as an unfortunate misadventure. Cynically and confidently he resigned himself to the verdict of history, because he could have had no doubt what the verdict of the court would be. But when I was on the stand he insisted on taking the cross-examination himself, while his lawyers fumed. “You, Broadhead,” he said. “You dare to accuse me of treason while you associate with the enemies of the human race! We shouldn’t parley with the Heechee! Kill them, take them prisoner-surround that place in the core where they hide out, shoot them down—”

It was an incredible performance. When the court finally stopped it, Heimat bowed courteously to the bench, smiled, said, “I have no further questions of this contraption that calls itself Robinette Broadhead,” and returned to look proud and confident for the rest of the trial.

That was Heimat. Cyril Basingstoke was, if anything, worse than he.

The meeting of the two retired monsters was wary on both sides. They knew each other.

Heimat hurried back to the recreation hall and found Basingstoke there already, idly glancing through the PV stores to see what entertainments this new place had to offer. They shook hands gravely, then stepped back to look at each other.

Cyril Basingstoke was a Curacaon, a rich purple-black in color, as old as Heimat (or I), but fully cosseted by the medics so that he looked, maybe, forty-five. “It is good to see you, Beau,” he said, voice deep and rich and friendly. Basingstoke had no accent-well, maybe a touch of what sounded German and was probably Dutch, from the good Frisian monks who had taught him English in the Catholic school. Basingstoke was Islands-born, but there was nothing “Eyelunds, mon!” about the way he talked. If you could not see him, you would not guess it was a black man speaking, although he said each word larger than an American would-vowels more resonant and rounded, intonation more marked.

Basingstoke glanced out the window, toward the distant lagoon. “This is no bad place, Beaupre,” he said. “When they told me I was to be transferred, I thought it would be to some far worse one. That planet Aphrodite, perhaps-the one that goes around a flare star, so that one can live only in tunnels under the surface.”

Heimat nodded, though in fact he did not much care where he was anymore. Remembering that he was, in a sense, the host, he ordered drinks from the waiterthing. “Unfortunately—” he smiled “—they don’t allow alcohol.”

“They did not in Pensacola, either,” said Basingstoke. “That is why I was so pleased to be paroled, although if you remember, I was never a hard-drinldng man.”

Heimat nodded, studying him. “Cyril?” he ventured.

“Yes, Beau?”

“You were out. Then you violated pt. role. Why did you kill those people?”

“Ah, well,” said Basingstoke, courteously accepting his ginger ale from the waiterthing, “they angered me, you see.”

“I thought that was the case,” Heimat said dryly. “But you must have known they’d just put you back here.”

“Yes, but I have my pride. Or habit? I think it is a matter of habit.” Heimat said severely, “That’s the kind of thing a prosecutor might say.”

“Perhaps in some sense a prosecutor might be right for people like you and me, Beau. I didn’t need to kill those people. I was not used to crowds, you see. There was pushing and shoving to board a bus. I fell. They all laughed. There was a policeman with a machine-pistol and he was laughing too. I got up and took it away from him—”

“And shot thirty-five people.”

“Oh, no, Beau. I shot nearly ninety, but only thirty-five died. Or so they tell me.” He smiled. “I did not count the corpses.”

He nodded courteously to Heimat, who sat silent for a moment, sipping his own drink while Basingstoke idly summoned up pictures of Martinique and Curacao and the Virgins. “What lovely places they are,” he sighed. “I almost wish I had not killed those people.”

Heimat laughed out loud, shaking his head. “Oh, Cyril! Is it true that we have the habit of killing?”

Basingstoke said politely, “For a matter of pride or principle, it is perhaps so.”

“So we should never be released?”

“Ah, Beau,” Basingstoke said fondly, “we never will, you know.”

Heimat brushed the remark aside. “But do you think it is true, we are incorrigible?”

Basingstoke said reflectively, “I think—No. Let me show you.” He whispered to the control, and the PV views ifickered and returned to a scene of Curacao. “You see, Beau,” he said, settling himself down comfortably for a nice long chat, “in my case it is pride. We were very poor when I was a child, but we always had pride. We had nothing else. Seldom even enough to eat. We would open a snack shop for the tourists, but all the neighbors had snack shops, too, and so we never made money from it. We had only the things that were free-the beautiful sun, the sands, the lovely colibri hummingbirds, the palm trees. But we had no shoes. Do you know what it is like to have no shoes?”

“Well, actually—”

“You do not—” Basingstoke smiled “—because you were American and rich. Do you see that bridge?”

He pointed to the PV vista, a bay with two bridges across it. “Not that ugly high thing, the other one. The one on pontoons that floats. With the outboard motors that open and close it, there at the end.”

“What about it?” asked Heimat, already beginning to wonder if having a companion would relieve boredom or add to it.

“That is a matter of pride without shoes, Beau. This I learned from my grandfather.”

Heimat said, “Look, Basil, I’m glad to see you and all that, but do you really have to—”

“Patience, Beau! If you have pride you must also have patience; this is what my grandfather taught me. He too was descamisado-without shoes. So on this bridge when it was new they had a toll. Two cents to walk across it . . . but only for rich people, that is, the people who wore shoes. People who were barefoot, they crossed free. So the rich people who wore shoes were not stupid; they would take them off and hide them, and cross, and put them back on at the other side.”

Heimat was beginning to get angry. “But your grandfather had no shoes!”

“No, but he had pride. Like you. Like me. So he would wait at the bridge until someone with shoes came along. Then he would borrow his shoes so he could pay his two cents and cross the bridge with his pride still safe. Do you see what I am saying, Beau? Pride is expensive. It has cost us both very much.”

I didn’t want to stop talking about the children because they were appealing; I can hardly stop talking about Heimat and Basingstoke, either, but for quite other reasons. If ever two persons were hateful to me, they are the ones. It is the attraction of the horrible.

When Cyril Basingstoke came to join Beaupre Heimat, the children on the Wheel were just getting the word that they were being evacuated. It made the news. Both Basingstoke and Heimat took an interest; probably they were rooting for the Foe, if anything, though it must have been a conflict for them both. (Pride in the human race? Resentment against that major fraction of it that had put them in prison?) But they had other conflicts, not least with each other. For neither Heimat nor Basingstoke cared much for the society of equals.

They bored each other, in fact. When Heimat found Basingstoke dreaming in front of the PV views of Curacao or Sint Maarten or the coast of Venezuela, he would say, “Why do you let your mind rust out? I have made use of my prison time! Learn something. A language, as I have done.”

Indeed he had, a new language, perfectly, every few years; with all the time he had had to do it he was now fluent in Mandarin, Heechee, Russian, Tamil, aassical Greek, and eight other languages. “And who will you speak them to?” Basingstoke would ask, not taking his eyes from the tropic scene before them.

“That isn’t the point! The point is to keep sharp!”

And Basingstoke would look up at last and say, “For what?”

If Basingstoke was tired of Heimat’s nagging, Heimat was tired of Basingstoke’s interminable reminiscences. Every time the black man started a story, the general knew how to finish it. “When I was a boy,” Basingstoke would begin, and Heimat would chime in:

“You were very poor.”

“Yes, Heimat, very poor. We would sell snacks to the tourists—”

“But there was no money in it, because all your neighbors had snack shops, too.”

“Precisely. None at all. So sometimes we boys would catch an iguana and try to find a tourist to buy that. None of them wanted an iguana, of course.”

“But once in a while one would buy it, because he was sorry for you.”

“He would, so then we would follow the tourist to see where he let it go, and then we’d catch it and sell it again.”

“And after a while you’d eat it.”

“Why, yes, Beau. Iguana is very good, like chicken. Have I told you this story before?”

It was not just the boredom. There was, each found, something about the other that really grated on the nerves. Basingstoke found Heimat’s sexual habits revolting: “Why must you try to hurt the things, Beau? They are not alive anyway!”

“Because it gives me pleasure. The keepers have to take care of my needs; that is one of them. And it’s none of your business, Basil. It does not affect you, while that ifithy stuff you eat stinks up the whole prison.”

“But that is one of my needs, Beau,” said Basingstoke. He had given the cookthings exact instructions, and they had of course obliged. Heimat had to admit that some of the things weren’t bad. There was an ugly-looking fruit that tasted splendid, and some kinds of shellfish that were divine. But some were awful. The worst was a sort of green pepper and onion stew made with salt dried codfish that tasted and smelled exactly like the garbage cans outside a seafood restaurant, after they have ripened all night. It was called a chiki, and when it wasn’t made with the rotten fish, it was made with something only marginally less repulsive, like goat.

Heimat tried diluting Basingstoke’s presence by introducing him to Pernetsky, but the Soviet marshal would not even open his eyes, much less speak to the newcomer. Outside the prison hospital Basingstoke asked, “But why is he doing this, Beaupre? He is certainly conscious, after all.”

“I think he has some idea of escape. Maybe he thinks if he continues to pretend to be asleep, they will take him to another hospital somewhere, outside of the prison, and then he can make a try.”

“They won’t.”

“I know,” said Heimat, looking around. “Well, Cyril? Do you want to explore the grounds some more today?”

Basingstoke glanced down the hill toward the sparkling, distant lagoon and the broad Pacific beyond it, then back wistfully at the recreation hall. But Heimat had finally refused to look at any more pictures with him, and Heimat at least was an audience. “Oh, I suppose so,” he said. “What are those buildings down by the shore?”

“A school, I think. And there is a little port there, where they have dredged out the lagoon so small ships can come in.”

“Yes, I see the port,” said Basingstoke. “We had such a port in Curacao, away from the big one. It was for slaves, Beau. In the old days, when they brought a shipload of slaves in, they would not parade them through the town; they would bring them in a few kilometers away—”

“At the slave port,” Heimat finished for him, “where the auction block was. Yes. Let’s walk down toward the baby farm.”

“I do not like such things!” Basingstoke sulked. But as Heimat started down the path without him, he added, “But I will go with you.”

The baby farm was within the outer perimeter of the prison, but only just; it was a separate fenced-off enclave, green meadow with a few handsome cows grazing, and the prisoners were not allowed inside it.

Heimat was amused to find how much it offended Cyril. “It is decadent, Beau,” the old man muttered. “Oh, how I wish we had not failed in our cause! We should have forced them to forget such things. We should have made them scream.”

“We did,” said Heimat.

“We should have done more. I am revolted to think that a human child should be in the womb of a cow. When I was a tiny child—”

“Perhaps,” Heimat cut in, to head oft’ the reminiscence, “if you were a woman, the idea of extra-uterine childbirth would not be so revolting to you, Cyril. Pregnancy is not without suffering.”

“Of course, suffering! Why shouldn’t they suffer? We suffered. When I was a boy—”

“Yes, I know what it was like when you were a boy,” said Heimat, but that didn’t stop Cyril from telling him all over again.

Heimat tuned the voice out. It was comfortably hot on the island, but there was a breeze coming up the hill from the sea. He could smell the faint wisp of cattle aroma from the meadow, where the herdthings were moving about, checking the temperatures and conditions of their charges.

Actually, Heimat thought, surrogate childbearing was a good thing. Assuming childbearing was a good thing in the first place, anyway. His own sexual pleasures went in quite different lines but, for a couple who wanted to be a family, it made sense. They started the baby in the usual way, with frolicsome and slippery pokings; Heimat was broad-minded enough to accept that that was what turned most people on. So if that was their pleasure, why should the pleasure then turn to pain for one of them? It was so easy to take the fertilized ovum away. It had already received all it would ever need of ancestry. The DNA spirals had already danced apart and recombined; the heredity was established. The chef, as you might say, had assembled the souffle that was his piece-deresistance. Now all it needed was a warm oven to rise in, and the oven did not have to be human. Anything that was vertebrate and mammalian, of human size or larger, would do. Cows were perfect.

There were not many cows in the baby farm, because there weren’t very many human families left on the island to require them. But Heimat counted ten, twelve, fifteen-altogether eighteen surrogate mothers, placidly cropping grass while the herdthings poked thermometers into them and gazed into their ears.

“It is most disgusting,” breathed Cyril Basingstoke.

“No, why?” Heimat argued. “They don’t do drugs, or smoke, or do any of the other things human women might do to hurt the babies. No. If we had won, I would have instituted this system myself.”

“I wouldn’t,” said Basingstoke pleasantly.

They grinned at each other, two old gladiators amused at the thought of the final conflict that would never have to take place. Old fool, Heimat thought comfortably; it would of course have been necessary to get rid of him, too-if the revolution had succeeded.

“Beau?” said Basingstoke. “Look.”

One of the mothers was lowing in mild distress. Her temperature was being taken, but the herdthing was apparently holding the thermometer in an uncomfortable way. The cow shook its rear end free, trotted a few steps away, and began to graze again.

“It isn’t moving,” said Heimat, perplexed.

Basingstoke looked around at the four or five herders in the baby farm, then back up the hill toward the gardenerthings and the distant workthings on the paths. All were frozen motionless. Even the sounds of fans from the hoverbarrows had stopped.

Basingstoke said, “None of them are moving, Beau. They’re all dead.”

The pasture that was the baby farm was at the very lowermost edge of the prison compound. The slope steepened there, and Heimat looked at it with distaste. When you are an old man you are an old man, even with every possible replacement of tissue and recalcification of bone. “if we go down,” he said, “we will just have to come up again.”

“Will we, man?” said Basingstoke softly. “Have a look.”

“Ah, some momentary power failure,” muttered Heimat. “They’ll be back on in a moment.”

“Yes. And then the moment for us will be past.”

“But, Basil,” Heimat said reasonably, “all right, suppose the mobile units are out of service for a moment, the barriers are still there.”

Basingstoke looked at him carefully. He didn’t speak. He just turned away, lifted a strand of the wire that kept the cattle on their meadow, and ducked under it.

Heimat stared irritably after him. The guards would be back on in a moment, of course. And even if that moment lasted long enough for the two prisoners to, for example, cross the wide cow pasture, what he had said about the barriers was still true, perhaps. It wasn’t the guards that kept the prisoners inside, but the sophisticated and unthwartable electronic pen. It came in three courses: pain, stun, death. It was difficult to get past the first and almost impossible to pass the second-also pointless, because there was the third. He told himself that Basingstoke simply didn’t know, not having had the experience; for Heimat had, in fact, actually tried. He only once got past the terrible, heart-stopping pain line, and then only to be knocked out at the second and awaken in his own bed, with a guardthing grinning down at him.

The simple fact that the workthings were temporarily powered down meant nothing at all about the barriers, he told himself. What a fool Basingstoke was!

And while he was thinking all this, Beaupre Heimat was lifting the wire for himself and hurrying after the other man, fastidiously dodging the cowflops on the grass, pausing only to kick at a herdthing to make sure it would not respond.

It did not.

He caught up with Basingstoke, panting, at the very edge of the compound. The pain wires were quite visible here-for the sake of the cattle, not the prisoners-against a row of pretty hibiscus and torch flowers.

A gardenerthing was toppled motionless against a torch-flower shrub. Its hand was raised and frozen to a trowel. Heimat spat on it thoughtfully.

“The power is off, man,” Basingstoke said softly.

Said Heimat, swallowing, “You go first, Cyril. I’ll drag you back if you’re caught.”

Basingstoke laughed. “Oh, Beau, what a hero you are! Come along, we’ll do it together!”