“Only three years more, and I’ll have paid my debt,” whispered my bunkmate, as the dormitory shuddered and howled with the storm outside. “I’ll start again. You’ll see. I’ve got it all mapped out.”
I didn’t say anything, and he didn’t expect me to. The words he spoke were not for my sake. A little hope – just a little hope – it was all that kept us alive. Much as people will turn away from the things they fear the most, they will cling to hope, however implausible, however impossible, because if they do not, they must surely die.
I do not know if I had hope. My mind, my body – it all seemed so distant.
Eight Normmonths into my sentence – the months of Hasha-to were meaningless things – I saw the sign of the double suns for the very first time. Debtors were constantly scratching some marker of their passage into the floors, walls, ceilings, any dark corner where they thought the guards wouldn’t look too closely. It was a way, perhaps, of saying: look, look. I’m still here. I was here. I lived. I am still alive.
I didn’t ask who made the mark, or what it meant. I felt I already knew.
Lhonoja, the Lovers, the binary star that would end us all, unstoppable, unnegotiable, the cleansing fire.
On Hasha-to, the end of the world seemed somewhat beautiful.
Three weeks later, I broke my leg. I had been in the loading bay when the outer doors sprung a leak and the atmosphere of Hasha-to began to flood into the docks. The inner doors began to seal, and I, with everyone else, sprinted for safety. Two died in the race; I was shoved by another man desperate to live, a newbie who hadn’t yet learned that living was just a habit. I fell, knew it was bad, but pulled myself hand-over-hand into the safety of the interior before the bay was sealed off entirely. Only once my body understood that I was alive, that I would live, did it allow the pain to register.
“Fucking waste,” was the foreman’s assessment, as I lay howling on the ground.
And: “We could put him in the chair,” suggested his deputy.
I had no idea what “the chair” meant, thought perhaps it might be some sort of medical device. Cheaper, surely, to fix me up and keep me working than just discard me to the dark? (In fact, no: there wasn’t much in it financially, and my death would be tax-deductible.)
In the end, they did put me in front of a medic, who rather than assess my leg asked a series of questions.
“You are in a room of butterflies; one flies into your mouth. What do you do?”
“You write your name on the side of a building. Do you use red or yellow paint?”
“Your friend asks you to pay for their medical insurance, but you don’t think they will survive the treatment and may not live to pay you back. Do you lend them the money?”
“Describe this picture. Do not use the words ‘black’ or ‘line’.”
I mumbled my way through the test, obedience embedded in me, and felt a moment of excitement when I was told that I had passed. Then they said that there was a ship going out tomorrow and the current baggage was looking the worse for wear. It was that – the mention of a ship – that finally alerted me to what was about to happen. By the time I saw what “the chair” meant,complete with straps for head, neck, chest, arms and legs and the radio-lobotomy probe, I was doing my very best to struggle and scream, which doubtless hurt me far more than it hurt anyone else.
When they lined the probe up with my frontal cortex, I begged and gibbered and offered them any service, no matter how degrading or inhuman, for their mercy. Again, with my rather limited imagination, I don’t think anything I said was especially remarkable or inspiring, so they switched on the machine designed to turn me into a semi-lucid human vegetable, said, “All right, stand back…”
And the machine fizzled out.
This was entirely in keeping with the ethos of Hasha-to, where maintenance was absolutely more expensive than labour.
I wept with gratitude and relief, sobbed my gibbering heart out, thanked anyone, anything, the universe, the stars, the great blackness of arcspace itself for my salvation. This turned out to be pre-emptive, as the Manager still needed a Pilot and couldn’t be bothered to find an alternative.
“Just shoot him full of something!” he roared at the cowering med-tech. “You’ve got drugs – use them!”
“It’s not really protocol…”
“Fuck your protocol!”
Sometimes being a bully can get you a long way in life. Usually the point where bullying stops being useful is the point where the bully’s entire world falls apart.
My gibbering relief turned back into gibbering terror as, in the absence of radiation, the medic started pumping me with drugs instead.
I do not remember much about what followed.
Records show that the ship they strapped me into was called the MSVMyrmida. It carried a crew of nineteen, and a cargo of 780,000 Normmils of refined metals from the surface of Hasha-to. (This figure was probably closer to 710,000 – fudging productivityoutputs was one of the few truly celebrated arts of Hasha-to.) The previous Pilot had, like me, been a debtor judged incapable of paying back what they owed to society. She was discharged after only five flights as cerebral fluid had started oozing from her ears and the ground crew were reporting persistent patches of darkness in the furthest recesses of the hold that weren’t dissipating even when exposed to fibre-optic sunlight. Her death was written off as an operating expense.
I think I remember the moment the navcomm interfaced with my brain.
I think it hurt.
