Being still in the recovery-period I was very weak and sleepy, but whenever I could rouse myself I gave Ai broth, a little at a time; and in the evening of that day he came to life, if not to his wits. He sat up crying out as if in great terror. When I knelt by him he struggled to get away from me, and the effort being too much for him, fainted. That night he talked much, in no tongue I knew. It was strange, in that dark stillness of the wilds, to hear him mutter words of a language he had learned on another world than this. The next day was hard, for whenever I tried to look after him he took me, I think, for one of the guards at the Farm, and was in terror that I would give him some drug. He would break out into Orgota and Karhidish all babbled pitifully together, begging me “not to,” and he fought me with a panic strength. This happened again and again, and as I was still in thangen and weak of limb and will, it seemed I could not care for him at all. That day I thought that they had not only drugged but mindchanged him, leaving him insane or imbecile. Then I wished that he had died on the sledge in the thore-forest, or that I had never had any luck at all, but had been arrested as I left Mishnory and sent to some Farm to work out my own damnation.
I woke from sleep and he was watching me.
“Estraven?” he said in a weak amazed whisper.
Then my heart lifted up. I could reassure him, and see to his needs; and that night we both slept well.
The next day he was much improved, and sat up to eat. The sores on his body were healing. I asked him what they were.
“I don’t know. I think the drugs caused them; they kept giving me injections…”
“To prevent kemmer?” That was one report I had heard from men escaped or released from Voluntary Farms.
“Yes. And others, I don’t know what they were, veridicals of some kind. They made me ill, and they kept giving them to me. What were they trying to find out, what could I tell them?”
“They may have not so much been questioning as domesticating you.”
“Domesticating?”
“Rendering you docile by a forced addiction to one of the orgrevy derivatives. That practice is not unknown in Karhide. Or they may have been carrying out an experiment on you and the others. I have been told they test mindchanging drugs and techniques on prisoners in the Farms. I doubted that, when I heard it; not now.”
“You have these Farms in Karhide?”
“In Karhide?” I said. “No.”
He rubbed his forehead fretfully. “They’d say in Mishnory that there are no such places in Orgoreyn, I suppose.”
“On the contrary. They’d boast of them, and show you tapes and pictures of the Voluntary Farms, where deviates are rehabilitated and vestigial tribal groups are given refuge. They might show you around the First District Voluntary Farm just outside Mishnory, a fine showplace from all accounts. If you believe that we have Farms in Karhide, Mr. Ai, you overestimate us seriously. We are not a sophisticated people.”
He lay a long time staring at the glowing Chabe stove, which I had turned up till it gave out suffocating heat. Then he looked at me.
“You told me this morning, I know, but my mind wasn’t clear, I think. Where are we, how did we get here?” I told him again.
“You simply… walked out with me?”
“Mr. Ai, any one of you prisoners, or all of you together, could have walked out of that place, any night. If you weren’t starved, exhausted, demoralized, and drugged; and if you had winter clothing; and if you had somewhere to go… There’s the catch. Where would you go? To a town? No papers; you’re done for. Into the wilderness? No shelter; you’re done for. In summer, I expect they bring more guards into Pulefen Farm. In winter, they use winter itself to guard it.”