Snaking with cold and exhaustion, he wanted desperately to sleep, but he did not dare leave the smuggler unguarded. Anana suggested that they solve that problem by killing Petotoc. The prisoner was listening, but he did not understand, since they were talking in the speech of the Lords. He did see her draw her finger across her throat though, and then he knew what they were discussing. He turned pale under his dark pigment.
“I won’t do that unless it’s necessary,” Kickaha said. “Besides, even if he’s .dead, we still have to keep a guard. What if other smugglers come in? We can’t be caught sleeping. Clatatol and her bunch were able to resist the temptation of the reward—although I’m not sure they could have held out much longer—but others may not be so noble.”
He took first watch and only kept awake by dipping water and throwing it in his face, by talking to Petotoc, by pacing savagely back and forth on the shelf. When he thought two hours had passed, he roused her with slaps and water. After getting her promise that she would not succumb to sleep, he closed his eyes. This happened twice more, and then he was awakened the third time. But now he was not to stand guard.
She had placed her hand over his mouth and was
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whispering into his ear. “Be quiet! You were snoring! There are men aboard.”
He lay for a long while listening to the thumps of feet, the shouts and talking, the banging and knocking as cargo was moved about and bulkheads and decks were knocked on to check for hollow compartments.
After ! ,200 seconds, each of which Kickaha had silently counted off, the search party moved on. Again, he and Anana tried to overtake their lost sleep in turns.
VII
WHEN THE TIME came that they both felt refreshed enough to stay awake at the same time, he asked her how she had gotten into this situation.
“The Black Sellers,” she said. She held up her right hand. A ring with a deep black metal band and a large dark-green jewel was on the middle finger.
“I gave the smugglers all my jewels except this,” she said. “I refused to part with that; I said I’d have to be killed first. For a moment, I thought they would kill me for it.
“Let me see, how to begin? The Black Bellers were originally an artificial form of life created by the Lord scientists about ten thousand years ago. The scientists created the Bellers during their quest for a true immortality.
“A Beller is bell-shaped, black, of indestructible material. Even if one were attached to a hydrogen bomb, the Beller would survive the fission. Or a Beller could be shot into the heart of a star, and it would go unscathed for a billion years.
“Now, the scientists had originally constructed the Beller so that it was purely automatic. It had no mind of its own; it was a device only. When placed on a man’s head, it detected the man’s skin poten-
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tial and automatically extruded two extremely thin but rigid needles. These bored through the skull and into the brain.
“Through the needles, the Beller could discharge the contents of a man’s mind, that is, it could uncoil the chains of giant protein molecules composing memory. And it could dissociate the complex neural patterns of the conscious and unconscious mind.”
“What could be the purpose of that?” Kickaha said. “Why would a Lord want his brain unscrambled, that is, discharged? Wouldn’t he be a blank, a tabula rasa, then?”
“Yes, but you don’t understand. The discharged and uncoiled mind belonged to a human subject of the Lords. A slave.”
Kickaha wasn’t easily shocked, but he was startled and sickened now. “What? But …”
Anana said earnestly, “This was necessary. The slave would die someday anyway, so what’s the difference? But a Lord could live even if his body was mortally hurt.”
She did not explain that the scientific techniques of the Lords enabled them to live for millennia, perhaps millions of years, if no accidents, homicide, or suicide occurred. Kickaha, of course, knew this. The agelessness was, to a slighter degree, prevalent for human beings throughout this, Wolffs universe. The waters of this world contained substances provided by Wolff which kept human beings from aging for approximately a thousand years. It also cut down on fertility, so that there was no increase in the birth rate.