The short, pale man cut in, scowling. “Watch your mouth, Korelto! I didn’t steal anything. I just made a mistake and went through the meal line twice—it could’ve happened to anybody when they were on overload!”
“Does it matter?” The black man smiled. “Only it looks to me as though things must’ve got really bad by the time they froze you—uh—”
It took Viktor a moment to realize he was being asked his name. “Ah, Viktor,” he got out.
The black man—Korelto?—looked at him searchingly, then glanced at his companions. “Are you all right?” he asked.
“He’s a dummy,” the short one named Mescro declared.
“Aw, no,” the big one said. He looked down at the floor, as though abashed at his own temerity in trying to contradict the other. “He’s just, you know, mixed up.” He looked up appealingly at Viktor, then at the doorway. “Isn’t that true, Manett?” he asked.
The man who had been in the thawing-out room stood there, gazing at them without pleasure. “No, Jeren, he’s a dummy, all right,” Manett confirmed. “Nrina says he’s got freezer burn. Looks like it got his leg and his brain. But he’ll do for what Nrina wants him for.”
There was a satisfied, challenging look on his face that made the black man ask worriedly, “What’s that, Manett?”
“That’s what you’re about to find out, guys,” Manett said, with the pleasure of an old hand breaking in the new recruits. “It’s time for you to pay for your thawing out.”
“Pay how?” the little thief named Mescro demanded. “And what’s going on, anyway?”
Manett pursed his lips thoughtfully. “Well, I’m willing to clue you in first,” he said, hiking himself up on one of the benches to lecture. “Only don’t interrupt, because you’ve got to earn your pay in a few minutes; Nrina’s waiting for the stuff. Let’s see. My name’s Manett, I told you that, and I’m your boss. That’s the most important thing you have to remember. It means you do everything I tell you, understand that? You’ll be seeing a lot of me for a while. Then, next thing, probably you’ll want to know the date. All right. It’s the forty-fourth of Summer, in the year forty-two hundred and fifty-one A.L.” There were gasps at that—Viktor was only one of the ones gasping—but Manett quelled it with a frown and went on. “Next: What’s going to happen to you? Nothing bad. You’ll be all right. Don’t worry about that. You’ll stay here for a few days, as long as Nrina wants you. You’ll have to start learning the language while you’re here, but that’s pretty easy. You’ll see. Then you’ll go to live in another habitat, probably—I don’t know which one—”
“Hey!” Korelto interrupted. “Hold on a minute! What’s a habitat?”
Manett gave him a mean look. “Didn’t I tell you not to interrupt? This is a habitat. What you’re living in now. Anyway, what happens when you leave here I don’t exactly know—I’ve never been on any habitat but this one, but Dekkaduk and Nrina say you’ll be okay. You might as well believe them—you don’t have any other choice, do you? Anyway, right after you do what you’re here for we’ll get something to eat and then I’ll have more time, all right? Now,” he said, standing up, “it’s time to earn your pay. So will you get up, all of you, and go over there and take one of those specimen bottles each? And then, what you do, you each jack off into it, and be sure you don’t spill a drop.”
The fuzziness in Viktor’s brain wasn’t altogether a disadvantage right then, he thought. The thing he was told to do was degrading, and it made him feel ashamed and angry. If he had felt really sober he would have been twice as humiliated at what he was made to do.
But he did it. So did all three of the others, as startled as Viktor at the bizarre orders. They grumbled and tried to joke while they did it, but the jokes were resentful and nobody laughed.
Viktor was still trying to sort out the dreamy maze in his mind. There were so many questions! It was hard even to form them, but some stood out. For one: What was “freezer burn”? Viktor knew he’d heard the words before, and he knew they meant something bad. He just didn’t know what. He knew that he could have asked the others, but he wasn’t ready to do that—wasn’t ready to hear the answer, perhaps.
Then there was that other big question. When Manett told them the date, was he joking?
It couldn’t really be nearly four thousand years since he’d last been alive. Could it?
He cursed the fogginess in his brain then. He wanted to think. There were things he had forgotten, and he wanted them back! The things he did remember were fragmentary and unsatisfying . . .
They weren’t pleasing, either.
He did remember, cloudily, waking up from a different freezing—had it been in old Ark? (He did remember the old interstellar ship Ark, though the memory was peculiarly fragmentary. It was almost as though there had been two different ships.) That time it had been a terrible shock. To have learned that everyone he had known was four hundred Newmanhome years dead had been numbing.
But at least then he had recognized the sensation. He had known that he felt numb.
To find out that another four thousand years, nearly, had passed while he lay as a lump of dreamless and unfeeling ice—why, it felt like nothing at all. He didn’t feel pain. He didn’t even feel the numbness. He didn’t feel at all.
When they had embarrassedly made their donations of sperm, the trusty named Manett showed them to their quarters. Food was waiting for them, fresh fruits and things like meat patties and things like little cakes—and things Viktor could hardly recognize at all, some cold, some hot, some tasting nasty to his untrained palate.
“You’re on your own time now,” Manett announced. “You have to start learning to talk to these people pretty soon, but right now all you have to do is eat.”
The tall man named Jeren cleared his throat and whispered apologetically, “Do we get paid for this?”
“Paid! Holy Freddy, man! Don’t you think you got paid already, just by being taken out of the freezer?” Then Manett paused to think it over. “Actually, that’s a tough question,” he admitted. “I can’t say I exactly understand the money system here, but there is one, I guess. No, you don’t get paid. Whatever it costs for your food and all that probably gets charged to Nrina’s laboratory somehow. If you want anything else, forget it. You can’t afford it.”
Mescro pricked up his ears. “What can’t we afford?” he asked.
“Different things,” Manett said, scowling. “Don’t bother me with that kind of stuff now. Now, you all look like you’ve got enough jism stored up to squeeze out a sample four or five times a day for Nrina, so we’re going to do you one more time before you go to sleep—but for right now you better get started learning the language.”
“Aw, wait a minute,” Korelto objected. “We haven’t even finished eating yet!”
“Well, snap it up,” Manett growled. But he was enjoying his role as mentor and straw boss, and when they insisted on asking him more questions, endless questions, through mouths stuffed with food, he tolerantly gave them answers.
Viktor wasn’t one of the questioners. He ate in silence, trying to follow what was being said, missing most of it. Could it really be true that his brain had been damaged by “freezer burn”? It was certain that something had happened; the talk rolled over him, too fast to follow, too hard to understand. Then a familiar word caught his attention: the black man, Korelto, asking, “Where are we? It isn’t Newmanhome, is it?”
“Hell, no. I told you that. It’s a habitat.”
“You mean another planet? Maybe Nebo?”
Manett gave him an incredulous stare. “Nebo? Don’t you know what it’s like on Nebo? We never go near Nebo—it’s hot as hell, and people get hurt there!”
Viktor frowned, puzzled. He had been close enough to Nebo to know that it couldn’t be called “hot” anymore—not after the weakening of the sun’s output. Still, he supposed, in comparison with the system’s frozen-over other planets . . .
But Manett wasn’t waiting for the next question. “You want to know where we are?” he asked. “I’ll show you.” And he got up from the table and walked over to one of those glass-topped things that looked like desks. “Come on over,” he called, scowling over a thing like a keypad in one corner of it. “Just a minute . . .”
They were all clustered around it as Manett hit a key. The glass turned misty, then cleared again.
“There’s old Nergal,” Manett said, proud of his success in getting the thing to work.