Linkeree lay the baby back down. If your own don't want you, the stranger doesn't want you, either, he said silently. The baby cried desperately. Die, child, Linkeree thought, and be spared. "There's not one damn thing I can do," he said aloud.
"What do you mean, when you can paint like that?" Zad answered. But Link saw more clearly than she. He had meant to paint Zad, but had instead painted his mother. Now he saw what for seven months what he had been blind to-- Zad's resemblance to his mother. That's why he had followed her through the streets that first night, had kept watching her, until finally she had asked him what the hell--
"What the hell?" Zad asked, but Link didn't answer, only wrinkled up the painting clumsily (You're all thumbs, Linky!), pressed the wad against his crotch, and struck the paper and thus himself viciously once. Cried out in agony. Struck himself again.
"Hey! Hey, stop that! Don't--"
And then he saw, felt, smelled, heard his mother lean over him, her hair brushing his face (sweet-smelling hair), and Link was filled with the old helpless fury, a helplessness made worse by clear memories of love-making hour after hour with this woman in an apartment filled with paintings in a government flat in the low part of the city. Now. I'm grown up, he thought, now I'm stronger than her, and still she controls me, still she attacks me, still she expects so damn much and I never know what I should do! And so he stopped striking himself and found a better target.
The baby was still crying. Link was disoriented for a moment, wondering why he was trembling. Then another gust of wind reminded him that tonight was the night he would die in feeble expiation for his sins, he like the baby sucked dry by tiny bites, gnawed to death by the chewers that padded through the night, frozen to death by the wind. The difference would be, of course, that the infant would not understand, would never have understood. Better to die unknowing. Better to have no memories. Better to have no pain.
And Link reached down and put his thumb and forefinger around the baby's throat, to kill it now and spare it the brief agony of death later in the night. But when it was time to squeeze tightly and shut off blood and breath, Link discovered that he could not.
"I am not a killer," Link said. "I can't help you."
And he got up and walked away, leaving behind the child's mewling to be buried in the noise of the wind pushing through the grass. The blades rasped against his naked chest, and he remembered his mother scrubbing him in the bath. "See? Only I can reach your back. You need me, just to stay clean."
I need you.
"That's mother's good boy."
Yes. I am, I am.
"Don't touch me! I won't have any man touch me!"
But you said--
"I'm through with men. You're a bastard and a son of a bastard and you've made me old!"
But Mother--
"No, no, what am I doing? It isn't your fault that men are like that. You're different, you, my sweet little boy, give Mother a hug-- not so tight, for God's sake, you little devil, what are you trying to do? Go to your room!"
He stumbled in the near darkness and fell, cutting his wrist in the grass.
"Why are you hitting me?" he heard the brownhaired woman who ought to be blond crying out. But he hit her again, and she fled the apartment, ran down the stairs, stumbled out into the street. It was the stumbling that let him catch her, and there in the middle of the road he stifled her scream by showing her precisely what a man was like, by throwing her at long, long last away.
A knife pricked into his chest.
He looked up from where he lay in the grass at a short, stocky man-- no, not a man, a Vaq-- and not just one, a half dozen, all armed, though some were just rising from the ground-- and still seemed half asleep. He had stumbled in his daze into a Vaq camping place.
This is better, he thought, than the suckers and chewers, and so with a pillar of blackness and chill in place of his spine, he weakly stood, waiting for the knife.
But the knife pressed no deeper toward his heart, and he grew impatient. Wasn't he the heir of the man who had done most to hurt the Vaqs, whose great tractors had swept away the livelihood of a dozen tribes, whose hunters had killed Vaqs who chanced to wander on land marked out as his? I am the owner of half this world that is worth owning; kill me and free yourselves.
One of the Vaqs hissed impatiently. Press the knife, Link thought he seemed to say. And so he, too, hissed. Impatiently. Act now. Hurry.
In surprise at his having echoed his own death sentence, the Vaq with the knife at his chest withdrew a step, though he still held out the knife, pointing at Linkeree. The Vaq babbled something, something ripe with rolled Rs and hissed Ss-- not a human language, they taught the children in the government schools, even, though as Link well knew there were dozens of anthropological reports pointing out that the Vaq language was merely corrupted Spanish, and the Vaqs were obviously the descendants of the colony ship Argentine that had been thought lost in the first decade of interstellar colonization thousands of years ago, when man had first reached out from the small planet that they had utterly spoiled. Human. Definitely human, however cruel Pampas had selected for ugliness and ignorance and viciousness and inhumanity.
Savages have no monopoly on that.
And Linkeree reached out, gently took the hind that held the blade, and guided it back until the point pressed against his belly. Then he hissed again, impatiently.
The Vaq's eyes widened; And he tuned to look at his fellows, who were equally puzzled. They babbled; some backed away from Link, apparently in fear. Link couldn't understand. He guided the knife deeper into his flesh; blood crept back along the horizontal blade.
The Vaq withdrew his knife, abruptly, and his eyes filled with tears, and he knelt and took Linkeree by the hand.
Link tried to pull his hand away. The Vaq only followed, offering no resistance. The others, also, gathered around. He couldn't understand their language, but he could understand the gestures. They were, he realized, worshipping him.
Gentle hands led him to the center of the encampment. All around, little braziers of peat burned brightly, sizzling constantly as the heatseeking suckers left the Vaqs and gathered to die in the fire.
They sang to him, plaintive melodies that were only deepened and enhanced by the sweep and howl of the wind. They stripped him and touched him all over, gently exploring, then dressed him again and fed him (and he thought bitterly of the child who, because of the lack of food, was even now dying in the grass) and surrounded him and lay down around him to protect him as he slept.
You're cheating me. I came here to die, and you're cheating me.
And he wept bitterly, and they admired his tears, and after a half hour, long before the cold moon rose, he slept, feeling cheated but somehow utterly at peace.
Mrs. Danol sat in a chair in Hort's office, her arms folded tightly, her eyes savagely watching every move he made-- or didn't make.
"Mrs. Danol," he finally said, "it would help everyone, including you, if you went home."