Viktor puzzled earnestly over all of that. He understood all the words, though they had a strange quality, as though they had come from afar. But whatever was wrong with Viktor's head kept him from putting them together to make any kind of coherent picture. "Freezer burn—" Viktor began, but the man was already gone.
Lacking any better alternatives that he could see, Viktor did as he was told. He let the woman peer into his eyes, touch him in all sorts of personal places with her shiny instruments with their rainbow lights, lift up a corner of the pale pink sausage on his leg and peer under it, and finally replace it, looking satisfied. She patted his head—so gently, this time, that it didn't send him into a blaze of new pain.
Then she beckoned him to follow her.
He tried. He did his best, but his best wasn't very good. The right side of his head felt numb, and his right leg wouldn't support him, even in the astonishingly light gravity of the place they were in. She had to let him lean on her as they walked—it was more like gliding in a dream; like getting about in a spaceship under microdrive—through an amber-walled corridor, to their first stop.
The first stop was a tiny room containing an amber, glassy bowl in which water gently whirled. Viktor identified it easily enough: a toilet.
Viktor had not forgotten that he was quite naked, though the woman didn't seem interested in that fact. Neither did she watch him while, embarrassed, he relieved himself, nor on the other hand did she specially look away. The second stop was a shower. He looked at it doubtfully. He wasn't sure how to make it work, and he wasn't sure he could stand alone in it.
When he tried it, the leg, at least, was feeling stronger. The woman turned the shower on for him. He limped inside, bracing himself against the soft, shiny wall of the cubicle. As the gentle, warm cascade began to pour over him it was so relaxing that he found that he was actually enjoying it.
When Viktor came out of the shower the woman handed him a round, soft towel for drying himself. "Thank you," he said hoarsely, rubbing his face.
The woman looked pleased, as though at a dog that had given an appreciative woof. But when he pointed at the dressings on leg and hip, trying to ask if they had been harmed by the shower, she only shrugged, either uncomprehending or just not interested in his question.
The third stop they made was stranger and a lot less pleasant.
The woman abandoned him in another room, to the care of a different man. This one was almost as skinny as herself, though he did have some strangely knotted muscles—whereas the woman's calves were like pencils and she had no visible biceps at all. The man gestured Viktor to a seat in something that looked like a dentist's chair.
When Viktor sat down as ordered, the arms of the thing quite suddenly swung out and wrapped themselves around him. He couldn't move. At the same time something else slipped around his head and gripped it as in a vise. It wasn't painful, but it wasn't resistible, either. Then the man approached Viktor with a different kind of a glittery instrument.
He touched it to Viktor's forehead.
This metallic thing wasn't soft at all. It bit into the flesh of Viktor's forehead and stung like a wasp. Viktor shouted in surprise and tried to struggle. That was no use. He was held fast. When the man took the instrument away the spot itched terribly, like a bee sting; but then the man sprayed the spot where he had been working with a different kind of metallic thing. The itching stopped at once, and the man touched something that caused the chair to release Viktor.
That ruled out the cloudy theory Viktor had just begun to formulate provisionally, that these people had thawed him out for the purpose of a little recreational torture. Then the man led him, stepping in long, gentle, high-rising paces, to another chamber, where he shoved Viktor inside and closed the door behind him.
Viktor looked around him. He was in a room with a number of flimsy-looking chairs (perhaps a waiting room?) and a kind of glass-topped desk (but it showed no other signs of being an office). Glassware and some metallic things sat under a mirror that was set against one wall, but it wasn't, as far as Viktor could decide, a laboratory.
He was not alone in it. Three other men, as naked as Viktor himself, were sitting uneasily in the frail chairs, talking to each other in worried, low tones. One of the men was black, one short and pale. The third was also pale but taller than Viktor and hugely built; and all three had the human-scale bodily form Viktor was used to, not the famine-victim limbs and structure of the woman who had thawed him out.
As Viktor came in, all three of the men looked quickly up at him with a fearful sort of suspicion in their eyes. Then their expressions cleared quickly, as though they had recognized him.
Well, they couldn't have. Viktor knew that. He was quite sure they were all total strangers to him; but then he saw that each of them bore a bright blue device tattooed on their foreheads, and in the wall mirror he caught a glimpse of the same design on his own. It was an elliptical border enclosing some hen-scratchings that might have been numbers or words.
It was that tattoo that they had recognized. They all wore the same brand. So they were all in the same boat—whatever that boat was.
The tall man got up, offering a hand to shake. "Welcome to the party," he said, in the quick, rough English of the quarreling sects of frozen Newmanhome. "What did you get the freeze for?"
Viktor puzzled over the meaning of what the man had just said to him, rubbing the mark on his forehead absently. When he had put it together, through the cloud that seemed to pervade his mind, he rehearsed for a moment, then managed a full sentence. "They just didn't like me," he croaked.
"Mary!" the black one said. "When did they start doing it for that? I got my own freeze in three eighty-six, but at least I had a trial. They said it was for unauthorized parenting. Well, it was just her word against mine, but what could I do? Jeren here was frozen for drunkenness, and Mescro got it for thievery—"
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—"