“But that is one of my needs, Beau,” said Basingstoke. He had given the cookthings exact instructions, and they had of course obliged. Heimat had to admit that some of the things weren’t bad. There was an ugly-looking fruit that tasted splendid, and some kinds of shellfish that were divine. But some were awful. The worst was a sort of green pepper and onion stew made with salt dried codfish that tasted and smelled exactly like the garbage cans outside a seafood restaurant, after they have ripened all night. It was called a chiki, and when it wasn’t made with the rotten fish, it was made with something only marginally less repulsive, like goat.
Heimat tried diluting Basingstoke’s presence by introducing him to Pernetsky, but the Soviet marshal would not even open his eyes, much less speak to the newcomer. Outside the prison hospital Basingstoke asked, “But why is he doing this, Beaupre? He is certainly conscious, after all.”
“I think he has some idea of escape. Maybe he thinks if he continues to pretend to be asleep, they will take him to another hospital somewhere, outside of the prison, and then he can make a try.”
“They won’t.”
“I know,” said Heimat, looking around. “Well, Cyril? Do you want to explore the grounds some more today?”
Basingstoke glanced down the hill toward the sparkling, distant lagoon and the broad Pacific beyond it, then back wistfully at the recreation hall. But Heimat had finally refused to look at any more pictures with him, and Heimat at least was an audience. “Oh, I suppose so,” he said. “What are those buildings down by the shore?”
“A school, I think. And there is a little port there, where they have dredged out the lagoon so small ships can come in.”
“Yes, I see the port,” said Basingstoke. “We had such a port in Curacao, away from the big one. It was for slaves, Beau. In the old days, when they brought a shipload of slaves in, they would not parade them through the town; they would bring them in a few kilometers away—”
“At the slave port,” Heimat finished for him, “where the auction block was. Yes. Let’s walk down toward the baby farm.”
“I do not like such things!” Basingstoke sulked. But as Heimat started down the path without him, he added, “But I will go with you.”
The baby farm was within the outer perimeter of the prison, but only just; it was a separate fenced-off enclave, green meadow with a few handsome cows grazing, and the prisoners were not allowed inside it.
Heimat was amused to find how much it offended Cyril. “It is decadent, Beau,” the old man muttered. “Oh, how I wish we had not failed in our cause! We should have forced them to forget such things. We should have made them scream.”
“We did,” said Heimat.
“We should have done more. I am revolted to think that a human child should be in the womb of a cow. When I was a tiny child—”
“Perhaps,” Heimat cut in, to head oft’ the reminiscence, “if you were a woman, the idea of extra-uterine childbirth would not be so revolting to you, Cyril. Pregnancy is not without suffering.”
“Of course, suffering! Why shouldn’t they suffer? We suffered. When I was a boy—”
“Yes, I know what it was like when you were a boy,” said Heimat, but that didn’t stop Cyril from telling him all over again.
Heimat tuned the voice out. It was comfortably hot on the island, but there was a breeze coming up the hill from the sea. He could smell the faint wisp of cattle aroma from the meadow, where the herdthings were moving about, checking the temperatures and conditions of their charges.
Actually, Heimat thought, surrogate childbearing was a good thing. Assuming childbearing was a good thing in the first place, anyway. His own sexual pleasures went in quite different lines but, for a couple who wanted to be a family, it made sense. They started the baby in the usual way, with frolicsome and slippery pokings; Heimat was broad-minded enough to accept that that was what turned most people on. So if that was their pleasure, why should the pleasure then turn to pain for one of them? It was so easy to take the fertilized ovum away. It had already received all it would ever need of ancestry. The DNA spirals had already danced apart and recombined; the heredity was established. The chef, as you might say, had assembled the souffle that was his piece-deresistance. Now all it needed was a warm oven to rise in, and the oven did not have to be human. Anything that was vertebrate and mammalian, of human size or larger, would do. Cows were perfect.
There were not many cows in the baby farm, because there weren’t very many human families left on the island to require them. But Heimat counted ten, twelve, fifteen-altogether eighteen surrogate mothers, placidly cropping grass while the herdthings poked thermometers into them and gazed into their ears.
“It is most disgusting,” breathed Cyril Basingstoke.
“No, why?” Heimat argued. “They don’t do drugs, or smoke, or do any of the other things human women might do to hurt the babies. No. If we had won, I would have instituted this system myself.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Basingstoke pleasantly.
They grinned at each other, two old gladiators amused at the thought of the final conflict that would never have to take place. Old fool, Heimat thought comfortably; it would of course have been necessary to get rid of him, too-if the revolution had succeeded.
“Beau?” said Basingstoke. “Look.”
One of the mothers was lowing in mild distress. Her temperature was being taken, but the herdthing was apparently holding the thermometer in an uncomfortable way. The cow shook its rear end free, trotted a few steps away, and began to graze again.
“It isn’t moving,” said Heimat, perplexed.
Basingstoke looked around at the four or five herders in the baby farm, then back up the hill toward the gardenerthings and the distant workthings on the paths. All were frozen motionless. Even the sounds of fans from the hoverbarrows had stopped.
Basingstoke said, “None of them are moving, Beau. They’re all dead.”
The pasture that was the baby farm was at the very lowermost edge of the prison compound. The slope steepened there, and Heimat looked at it with distaste. When you are an old man you are an old man, even with every possible replacement of tissue and recalcification of bone. “if we go down,” he said, “we will just have to come up again.”
“Will we, man?” said Basingstoke softly. “Have a look.”
“Ah, some momentary power failure,” muttered Heimat. “They’ll be back on in a moment.”
“Yes. And then the moment for us will be past.”
“But, Basil,” Heimat said reasonably, “all right, suppose the mobile units are out of service for a moment, the barriers are still there.”
Basingstoke looked at him carefully. He didn’t speak. He just turned away, lifted a strand of the wire that kept the cattle on their meadow, and ducked under it.
Heimat stared irritably after him. The guards would be back on in a moment, of course. And even if that moment lasted long enough for the two prisoners to, for example, cross the wide cow pasture, what he had said about the barriers was still true, perhaps. It wasn’t the guards that kept the prisoners inside, but the sophisticated and unthwartable electronic pen. It came in three courses: pain, stun, death. It was difficult to get past the first and almost impossible to pass the second-also pointless, because there was the third. He told himself that Basingstoke simply didn’t know, not having had the experience; for Heimat had, in fact, actually tried. He only once got past the terrible, heart-stopping pain line, and then only to be knocked out at the second and awaken in his own bed, with a guardthing grinning down at him.
The simple fact that the workthings were temporarily powered down meant nothing at all about the barriers, he told himself. What a fool Basingstoke was!