Capitol - By Orson Scott Card Page 0,72

ground as another alarm went off, this time nearby.

I've told them were I am, he thought. What an ass.

So he stood, his body still trembling from the electricity, and staggered stupidly off into the high grass that began crisply a hundred metets from the fence.

The sun was touching the horizon.

The grass was harsh and sharp.

The wind was bitterly cold.

He had no shirt.

I will freeze to death out here tonight. I will die of exposure. And the part of him that always gloated sneered, "You deserve it, matricide. You deserve it, Oedipus."

No, you've got it all wrong, it's the father you're supposed to kill, right?

"Why, it's a painting of me; isn't it?" asked Zad, seeing what he had, done with the watercolors. "It's excellent, except that I'm not blond, you know."

And he looked at her and wondered, for a moment, why he had thought she was.

He was snapped out of his memory by a sound. He could not identify it, nor even, for sure, the direction from which it had come. He stopped, stood still, listening. Now, aware of where he was, he realized that his arms and hands and stomach and back were scratched and slightly bloody from the rasping grass. The suckers were clinging to his bare body; he brushed them away with a shudder of revulsion. Bloated, they dropped-- one of the curses of the planet, since they left no itch or other pain, and a man could bleed to death without knowing he was even being sucked.

Linkeree turned around and looked back. The lights of the government compound winked behind him. The sun had set, and dusk was only dimly lighting the plain.

The sound came again. He still couldn't identify it, but now the direction was more distinct-- he followed.

Not two meters off was a feebly crying infant, the mucus of birth still clinging to his body, the afterbirth unceremoniously dumped beside him. The placenta was covered with suckers. So was the baby.

Linkeree knelt, brushed away the suckers, looked at the child, whose stubby arms and legs proclaimed him to be a Vaq. Yet apart from that, Link could see no other sign that this was not a human infant-- the dark skin must come after years of exposure to the hot noon sunshine. He remembered clearly that one of the long line of tutors he had studied with had told him about this Vaq custom. It was assumed to be the exact counterpart of the ancient Greek custom of exposing unwanted infants, to keep the population at acceptable levels. The baby cried. And Linkeree was struck bitterly with the unfairness that it was this infant that was chosen to die for the good of the-- tribe? Did Vaqs travel in tribes? If seven percent of infants had to die for the good of the tribe, why couldn't there be a way for seven-hundredths of each child to be done away? Impossible, of course. Linkeree stroked the child's feeble arms. It was much more efficient to rid the world of unwelcome children.

He picked up the infant, gingerly (he had never done so before, only seen them in the incubators in the hospital his father had built and which, therefore, Linkeree was "responsible" for), and held it against his bare chest, wondering at the warmth it still had. For a moment at least the crying stopped, and Link periodically struck off the suckers that leaped from the placenta to the baby's or his bare skin. We are kin, he told the child silently, we are kin, the unwanted children. "If only you'd never been born," he heard his mother saying; this time a saying she had said only once, but the memory was sharp and clear, the moment forever imprinted on his mind. It was no act. It was no sham, like her hugs and kisses and I'm-so-proud-of-yous. It was a moment, all too rare, of utter sincerity: "If only you'd never been born, I wouldn't be getting old like this on this hideous planet!"

Why, then, mother, didn't you leave me on the plain to die? Much kinder, much, much kinder than to have kept me at home, killing me seven percent at a time.

The baby cried again, hunting for, a breast that by now was surely many kilometers off, leaking pap for the child that would never suckle. Did the mother grieve, perhaps? Or was she only irritated at the sensitivity of her breasts, only anxious for the last remnants of the pregnancy to fade?

Squatting there, holding