Jary opened his eyes again; seemed surprised to find Corouda still in front of him. He laughed suddenly, uncomfortably. “You’re welcome to play with my rocks, Warden, since you let me play squamish. B - but I won’t join you.” He pushed a rock forward carefully with his foot.
Corouda leaned over to pick it up: a lavender cobble flecked with clear quartz, worn smooth by eons rolled in the rivers of some other world. He smiled at the even coolness and the solidness of it; the smile stopped when he realized how much more that must mean to Jary.
“Orr lets me have rocks,” Jary was saying. “I started collecting when they sent me to the Institute. If I held still and did what I was told, sometimes somebody would let me go out and walk around the grounds…. I like rocks: They don’t d - d - die,” his voice cracked unexpectedly. “What did you really see, there in the cave, W - warden?”
“Enough.” Corouda sat down on the ground and tossed the rock back into the pile. “Why did you do it, Jary?”
Jary’s eyes moved aimlessly, searching the woods for the cave mouth. “I d - don’t know.”
“I mean - what you did to the people on Angsith. And on Ikeba. Why? How could anyone - “
Jary’s eyes came back to his face, blurred with the desperate pain of a man being forced to stare at the sun. “I don’t remember. I don’t remember….” He might have laughed.
Corouda had a sudden, sickening double vision of the strutting, uniformed Jary who had helped to turn worlds into charnel houses … and Jary the Catspaw, who collected stones.
Jary’s hands tightened into fists. “But I did it. I am P - piper Alvarian Jary! I am guilty.” He stretched his fingers again with a small gasp; his palms oozed bright blood like a revelation. “Fifteen b - billion people can’t be wrong … and I’ve been lucky.”
“Lucky?” Corouda said, inadequately.
Jary nodded at his feet. “Lucky they gave me to Orr. Some of the others … I’ve heard stories … they didn’t care who they gave them to.” Then, as if he sensed Corouda’s unspoken question, “Orr only punishes me when I do something wrong. He’s not cruel to me … he didn’t have to make sure I wouldn’t feel p - pain. He doesn’t care what I did; I’m just something he uses. At least I’m useful.” His voice rose slightly: “I’m really very grateful that I’m so well off. That I only spend half my time cut up like a f - flatworm, or flat on my back with fever and diarrhea, or vomiting or fed through a tube or cleaning up the guts of d - dead animals - ” Jary’s hands stopped short of his face. He wiped his face roughly with the sleeve of his coveralls and stood up, scattering rocks.
“Jary - wait a minute.” Corouda rose to his knees. “Sit down.”
Jary’s face was under control again; Corouda couldn’t tell whether he turned his back gladly or only obediently. He sat down hard, without hands to guide him. “You know, if you wanted to be useful …” Corouda struggled with the half - formed idea. “The thing you did for me, testing those plants; the way you can synthesize antidotes and vaccines. You could be very useful, working on a new world like this one.” Jary gaped at him. “What do you m - m” he bit his lips” mean?” “Is there any way Orr would be willing to let you work for some other group?”
Jary sat silently while his disbelief faded through suspicion into nothing. His mouth formed the imitation of a smile that Corouda had seen before. “It cost too much to make me a b - biochemical miracle, Warden. You couldn’t afford me … unless Orr disowned me. Then I’d be nobody’s - or anybody’s.”
“You mean, he could just let you go? And you’d be free?”
“Free.” Jary’s mouth twitched. “If I m - made him mad enough, I guess he would.”
“My God, then why haven’t you made him mad enough?”
Jary pulled his hands up impassively to his chest. “Some people like to l - look at my scars, Warden. If I didn’t belong to a research institute, they could do more than just look. They could do anything they wanted to….”
Corouda searched for words, and picked a burr from the dark-brown sleeve of his shirt.
Jary shifted on the rock, shifted again. “Simeu Institute protects me. And Orr n - needs me. I’d have to make him angrier than he ever has been before he’d throw me out.” He met Corouda’s eyes again, strangely resentful.
“Piper!”
Jary stood up in sudden reflex at the sound of Orr’s voice. Corouda saw that he looked relieved, and realized that relief was the main emotion in his own mind. Hell, even if Orr would sell Jary, or loan him, or disown him - how did he know the other wardens would accept it? Xena might, if she was willing to act on her rhetoric. But Albe wasn’t even apologetic about causing Jary to fall….
Jary had gone past him without a word, starting back toward Orr’s lab.
“Jary!” Corouda called after him suddenly. “I still think Piper Alvarian Jary deserved to be punished. But I think they’re punishing the wrong man.”
Jary stopped and turned back to look at him. And Corouda realized that the expression on his face was not gratitude, but something closer to hatred.
“All right, you’re safely across. I’ll wait here for you.”
Jary stood alone in the darkness on the far side of the Split, pinned in the beam of Orr’s headlamp. He nodded, breathing hard, unsure of his voice.
“You know your way from here, and what to do. Go and do it.” Orr’s voice was cutting; Orr was angry again, because Etchamendy had supported Soong-Hyacin’s complaint.
Jary reached down for the carrying case at his feet. He shut his eyes as he used his hand, twitched the strap hurriedly up onto his shoulder. He turned his back on Orr without answering and started on into the cave.
“Don’t come back without them!”
Jary bit down on the taste of unaccustomed fury and kept walking. Orr was sending him into the cave totally alone to bring back more trogs, to complete his penance. As if his stiffened, bandaged hands weren’t enough to convince him how much of a fool he’d been. He had lost half his supper on the ground because his hands could barely hold a spoon … he would catch hell for his clumsy lab work tomorrow … he couldn’t even have the comfort of touching his stones. Orr didn’t give a damn if he broke both his legs, and had to crawl all the way to the cave’s heart and back … Orr didn’t care if he broke his neck, or drowned in radioactive mud -
Jary stopped suddenly in the blackness. What was wrong with him; why did he feel like this - ? He looked back, falling against the wall as the crazy dance of his headlamp made him dizzy. There was no echoing beam of light; Orr was already beyond sight. Deliberately he tightened his hands, startling himself back into reason with a curse. Orr wouldn’t have made him do this if he thought it would get him killed; Orr hated waste.
Jary pushed himself away from the wall, looking down at the patches of dried mud that still caked his suit. Most of it had fallen off as he walked; his dosimeters barely registered what was left. He started on, moving more slowly, picking his way across the rubble where the ledge narrowed. After all, he wasn’t in any hurry to bring back more trogs; to let Orr prove all over again how futile it had been to turn them loose … how futile his own suffering had been; how futile everything was -
And all at once he understood. It was Corouda. “Corouda - !” He threw the word like a challenge into the blackness. That damned Corouda was doing this to him. Corouda, who had pretended interest to draw him out, and then used false pity like a scalpel on his sanity: telling him that just because he couldn’t remember his crimes, he was guiltless; that he was being punished for no reason. Trying to make him believe that he had suffered years of hatred and abuse for nothing. No, he was guilty, guilty! And Corouda had done it to him because Corouda was like all the rest. The whole universe hated him; except for Orr. Orr was all he had. And Orr had told him to bring the trogs, or else. He slipped unexpectedly and fell down, going to his elbows to save his hands. Orr was all he had …