“I don’t know him,” said Rod.
“Who?” asked Beasley, momentarily off his trail of thought.
“The Onseck. I don’t know any Onseck. I’ve never been to New Canberra. I’ve never seen an official, no, nor an offworlder neither, not until I met that foreign gentleman we were talking about. How can the Onseck know me if I don’t know him?”
“But you did, laddie. He wasn’t Onseck then.”
“For sheep’s sake, sir,” said Rod, “tell me who it is!”
“Never use the Lord’s name unless you are talking to the Lord,” said Beasley glumly.
“I’m sorry, sir. I apologize. Who was it?”
“Houghton Syme to the hundred-and-forty-ninth,” said Beasley.
“We have no neighbor of that name, sir.”
“No, we don’t,” said Beasley hoarsely, as though he had come to the end of his road in imparting secrets.
Rod stared at him, still puzzled.
In the far, far distance, way beyond Pillow Hill, his giant sheep baa’ed. That probably meant that Hopper was hoisting her into a new position on her platform, so that she could reach fresh grass.
Beasley brought his face close to Rod’s. He whispered, and it was funny to see the hash a normal man made out of whispering when he hadn’t even talked with his voice for half a year.
His words had a low, dirty tone to them, as though he were going to tell Rod an extremely filthy story or ask him some personal and most improper question.
“Your life, laddie,” he gasped, “I know you’ve had a rum one. I hate to ask you, but I must. How much do you know of your own life?”
“Oh, that,” said Rod easily, “that. I don’t mind being asked that, even if it is a little wrongo. I have had four childhoods, zero to sixteen each time. My family kept hoping that I would grow up to spiek and hier like everybody else, but I just stayed me. Of course, I wasn’t a real baby on the three times they started me over, just sort of an educated idiot the size of a boy sixteen.”
“That’s it, lad. But can you remember them, those other lives?”
“Bits and pieces, sir. Pieces and bits. It didn’t hold together—” He checked himself and gasped, “Houghton Syme! Houghton Syme! Old Hot and Simple. Of course I know him. The one-shot boy. I knew him in my first prepper, in my first childhood. We were pretty good friends, but we hated each other anyhow. I was a freak and he was too. I couldn’t spiek or hier, and he couldn’t take stroon. That meant that I would never get through the Garden of Death — just the Giggle Room and fine owner’s coffin for me. And him — he was worse. He would just get an Old Earth lifetime — a hundred and sixty years or so and then blotto. He must be an oldish man now. Poor chap! How did he get to be Onseck? What power does an Onseck have?”
“Now you have it, laddie. He says he’s your friend and that he hates to do it, but he’s got to see to it that you are killed. For the good of Norstrilia. He says it’s his duty. He got to be Onseck because he was always jawing about his duty and people were a little sorry for him because he was going to die so soon, just one Old Earth lifetime with all the stroon in the universe produced around his feet and him unable to take it-”
“They never cured him, then?”
“Never,” said Beasley. “He’s an old man now, and bitter. And he’s sworn to see you die.”
“Can he do it? Being Onseck, I mean.”
“He might. He hates that foreign gentleman we were talking about because that offworlder told him he was a provincial fool. He hates you because you will live and he will not. What was it you called him in school?”
“Old Hot and Simple. A boy’s joke on his name.”
“He’s not hot and he’s not simple. He’s cold and complicated and cruel and unhappy. If we didn’t all of-us think that he was going to die in a little while, ten or a hundred years or so, we might vote him into a Giggle Room ourselves. For misery and incompetence. But he is Onseck and he’s after you. I’ve said it now. I shouldn’t have. But when I saw that sly cold face talking about you and trying to declare your board incompetent right while you, laddie, were having an honest binge with your family and neighbors at having gotten through at last — when I saw that white sly face creeping around where you couldn’t even see him for a fair fight — then I said to myself, Rod Mc-Ban may not be a man officially, but the poor clodding crutt has paid the full price for being a man, so I’ve told you. I may have taken a chance, and I may have hurt my honor.” Beasley sighed. His honest red face was troubled indeed. “I may have hurt my honor, and that’s a sore thing here in Norstrilia where a man can live as long as he wants. But I’m glad I did. Besides, my throat is sore with all this talking. Give me another bottle of bitter ale, lad, before I go and get my horse.”
Wordlessly Rod got him the ale, and poured it for him with a pleasant nod.
Beasley, uninclined to do any more talking, sipped at the ale. Perhaps, thought Rod, he is hiering around carefully to see if there have been any human minds nearby which might have picked up the telepathic leakage from the conversation.
As Beasley handed back the mug and started to leave with a wordless neighborly nod, Rod could not restrain himself from asking one last question, which he spoke in a hissed whisper. Beasley had gotten his mind so far off the subject of sound talk that he merely stared at Rod. Perhaps, Rod thought, he is asking me to spiek plainly because he has forgotten that I cannot spiek at all. That was the case, because Beasley croaked in a very hoarse voice,
“What is it, lad? Don’t make me talk much. My voice is scratching me and my honor is sore within me.”
“What should I do, sir? What should I do?”
“Mister and Owner McBan, that’s your problem. I’m not you. I wouldn’t know.”
“But what would you do, sir? Suppose you were me.”
Beasley’s blue eyes looked over at Pillow Hill for a moment, abstractedly. “Get — off — planet. Get off. Go away. For a hundred years or so. Then that man — him — he’ll be dead in due time and you can come back, fresh as a new-blossomed twinkle.”
“But how, sir? How can I do it?”
Beasley patted him on his shoulder, gave him a broad wordless smile, put his foot in his stirrup, sprang into his saddle, and looked down at Rod.
“I wouldn’t know, neighbor. But good luck to you, just the same. I’ve done more than I should. Goodbye.”
He slapped his horse gently with his open hand and trotted out of the yard. At the edge of the yard the horse changed to a canter.
Rod stood in his own doorway, utterly alone.
THE OLD BROKEN TREASURES IN THE GAP
After Beasley left, Rod loped miserably around his farm. He missed his grandfather, who had been living during his first three childhoods, but who had died while Rod was going through a fourth, simulated infancy in an attempt to cure his telepathic handicap. He even missed his Aunt Margot, who had voluntarily gone into Withdrawal at the age of nine hundred two. There were plenty of cousins and kinsmen from whom he could ask advice; there were the two hands on the farm; there was even the chance that he could go see Mother Hitton herself, because she had once been married to one of his great11-uncles. But this time he did not want companionship. There was nothing he could do with people. The Onseck was people too; imagine Old Hot and Simple becoming a power in the land. Rod knew that this was his own fight.
His own.
What had ever been his own before?
Not even his life. He could remember bits about the different boyhoods he had. He even had vague uncomfortable glimpses of seasons of pain — the times they had sent him back to babyhood while leaving him large. That hadn’t been his choice. The old man had ordered it or the Vice-Chairman had approved it or Aunt Margot had begged for it. Nobody had asked him much, except to say, “You will agree…”