Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,71

name, Pampas. The sun was still two fingers off the horizon, however, and Linkeree knew that he was plainly visible from miles away. Visible both to the government people who would surely be looking for him; but also visible to the Vaqs, who he knew waited just over the hill, waiting for a child like him to wander out to be eaten.

No, he thought. I'm not a child.

He looked at his hands. They were large, strong-- and yet unweathered, as sensitive and delicate as an artist's hands.

"You should be an artist," he heard Zad saying.

"Me?" Link answered, softly, a little amused at the suggestion.

"Yes, you," she said. "Look at this," and her hand swept around the room, and because he could not avoid following her hand, he also saw: Tapestries on tapestries on one wall, waiting to be sold. Another wall devoted to thick rugs and the huge loom that Zad used for her work. And another wall windowed ceiling to floor (glass is cheap, someone told the government architect), showing the shabbily identical government housing project in which most of the capital's people lived, and beyond them the Government Office Building from which the lives of thousands of people were run. Millions, if you counted the Vaqs. But no one counted them.

"No," Zad said, smiling. "Sweet, darling Link, look there. That wall."

And he looked and saw the drawings in pencil, the drawings in crayon, the drawings in chalk.

"You can do that."

"I'm all thumbs." Oh, you're all thumbs, he remembered his mother saying.

Zad took his hands and put them around her waist. "Not all thumbs," she said, giggling.

And so he had reached out, held the charcoal, and with her hand guiding his at first, had sketched a tree.

"Wonderful," she said.

He looked at the ground and saw that he had drawn a tree in the ground. He looked up and saw the fence. They're chasing me, he thought.

"I won't let them catch you," he remembered Zad saying. He was ashamed at having lied to her and told her he was a criminal. But how would she have treated him if she'd known he was only the reclusive son of Mrs. Donal, who owned most of Pampas that could be owned? Then she would have been shy of him. Instead, he was shy of her. She had taken him from the street where he was wandering that night, already having been mugged and beaten up-- the mugging by one man, the beating by two others who had found his hipbag empty.

"What, are you crazy?"

He had shaken his head, but now he knew better. After all, hadn't he murdered his mother?

A siren went off in the mental hospital. With a wrenching sense of despair Linkeree curled up tighter in a ball, wishing that he could turn into a bush. But that wouldn't help, would it? This is a defoliated area.

"What have you drawn?" he remembered Zad asking, and he wept.

A stinger stung him, and he flicked the insect from his hand. The pain brought him up short. What was he doing?

"What am I doing?" he thought. Then he remembered the escape from the mental hospital, the run through the maze of buildings to the perimeter-- the perimeter, because it was safety, the only hope. He vaguely recalled his childhood fear of the open plain-- his mother's horrified stories of how the Vaqs would get you if you weren't good and didn't eat your supper.

"Don't disobey me again, or I'll let the Vaqs at you. And you know what part of little boys they like to eat first."

What a sick lady, Linkeree thought for the millionth time. At least it isn't hereditary.

But it is, isn't it? Aren't I escaping from a mental hospital?

He was confused. But he knew that over the fence was safety, Vaqs or no Vaqs; he couldn't stay at the hospital. Hadn't he killed his mother? Hadn't he told them he was glad of it? And when they realized he wasn't insane at all, that he really, seriously, in cold blood strangled his mother on the public streets of Pampas City, without benefit of madness-- well, they'd kill him.

I will not die at their hands.

The barbed wire scratched him unmercifully, and the electric shock from the top wire would have stunned a cow, he thought. But grimly he hung on, his body shuddering in the force of the voltage; climbed over; dangled a moment on the barbs until his shirt ripped apart and let him drop; then lay, stunned, on the