Once I said, “I know a story about people who live on another world.”
“What kind of world would that be?”
“One like this one, all in all; but it doesn’t go around the sun. It goes around the star you call Selemy. That’s a yellow star like the sun, and on that world, under that sun, live other people.”
“That’s in the Sanovy teachings, that about the other worlds. There used to be an old Sanovy crazy-priest would come by my Hearth when I was little and tell us children all about that, where the liars go when they die, and where the suicides go, and where the thieves go— that’s where we’re going, me and you, eh, one of those places?”
“No, this I’m telling of isn’t a spirit-world. A real one. The people that live on it are real people, alive, just like here. But very-long-ago they learned how to fly.” Asra grinned.
“Not by flapping their arms, you know. They flew in machines like cars.” But it was hard to say in Orgota, which lacks a word meaning precisely “to fly”; the closest one can come has more the meaning of “glide.”
“Well, they learned how to make machines that went right over the air as a sledge goes over snow. And after a while they learned how to make them go farther and faster, till they went like the stone out of a sling off the earth and over the clouds and out of the air, clear to another world, going around another sun. And when they got to that world, what did they find there but men…”
“Sliding in the air?”
“Maybe, maybe not…When they got to my world, we already knew how to get about in the air. But they taught us how to get from world to world, we didn’t yet have the machines for that.”
Asra was puzzled by the injection of the teller into the tale. I was feverish, bothered by the sores which the drugs had brought out on my arms and chest, and I could not remember how I had meant to weave the story.
“Go on,” he said, trying to make sense of it. “What did they do besides go in the air?”
“Oh, they did much as people do here. But they’re all in kemmer all the time.”
He chuckled. There was of course no chance of concealment in this life, and my nickname among prisoners and guards was, inevitably, “the Pervert.” But where there is no desire and no shame no one, however anomalous, is singled out; and I think Asra made no connection of this notion with myself and my peculiarities. He saw it merely as a variation on an old theme, and so he chuckled a little and said, “In kemmer all the time… Is it a place of reward, then? Or a place of punishment?”
“I don’t know, Asra. Which is this world?”
“Neither, child. This here is just the world, it’s how it is. You get born into it and… things are as they are…”
“I wasn’t born into it. I came to it. I chose it.”
The silence and the shadow hung around us. Away off in the country silence beyond the barracks walls there was one tiny edge of sound, a handsaw keening: nothing else.
“Ah well… Ah well,” Asra murmured, and sighed, and rubbed his legs, making a little moaning sound that he was not aware of himself. “We none of us choose,” he said.
A night or two after that he went into coma, and presently died. I had not learned what he had been sent to the Voluntary Farm for, what crime or fault or irregularity in his identification papers, and knew only that he had been in Pulefen Farm less than a year.
The day after Asra’s death they called me for examination; this time they had to carry me in, and I can’t remember anything further than that.
14. The Escape
when Obsle and Yegey both left town, and Slose’s doorkeeper refused me entrance, I knew it was time to turn to my enemies, for there was no more good in my friends. I went to Commissioner Shusgis, and blackmailed him. Lacking sufficient cash to buy him with, I had to spend my reputation. Among the perfidious, the name of traitor is capital in itself. I told him that I was in Orgoreyn as agent of the Nobles Faction in Karhide, which was planning the assassination of Tibe, and that he had been designated as my Sarf contact; if he refused to give me the information I needed I would tell my friends in Erhenrang that he was a double agent, serving the Open Trade Faction, and this word would of course get back to Mishnory and to the Sarf: and the damned fool believed me. He told me quick enough what I wanted to know; he even asked me if I approved.