Forty Thousand in Gehenna Read Free Page B

it.
    And the other part rested in the hands of special op, and employees of the government who for various reasons, volunteered.
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    T-20 hours
Cyteen dock
    The lines fell into order, white-clad, shaven headed, a slow procession across the dock, and no one paid it more than the curiosity the event was due—the loading of cloned-man workers onto transports, which always shocked Alliance citizens and sent a shiver up the staunchest of Union backbones. It was an aspect of life most citizens never had to see, the reminder of the lab-born ancestry of many of them—the labor pool on which worlds were built. Azi workers served in citizen homes, and worked on farms and took jobs others found undesirable—quiet and cheerful workers in the main.
    But these were quiet indeed, and the lines were unnaturally patient, and the shaved heads and faces and the white sameness was grim and without illusion.
    And to stand in that line—himself shaven and blank except for the small blue triangle on his right cheek and a number on his hand—Marco Gutierrez felt a constant panic. Keep the eyes unfocused or fixed, they had said onworld, when they were loaded onto the shuttles. Don’t worry. The numbers you’re wearing are specially flagged in the comp. The same system that lets the azi all get the right tape will get you no worse than an informational lecture. They’ll know who you are.
    The azi frightened him—all of them, so silent, so fixed on what they did and where they went. He stared at the whiteclad shoulders in front of him, which by the hips belonged to a woman, but he could not tell for sure from the back. There were sets of these workers, twins and triplets, quads and quints. But of some he had seen only a single example, unique. He had not gotten a wrong tape when they passed through the lab: he had lain down under the machine terrified that they might slip him a wrong one, and he might end by needing psychiatric help—his mind, his mind, that was his life, all the years of study—But it had come out right, and he had only the dimmest impression of what they had fed him—
    Unless—the thought occurred to him—that was the same confidence all of them in the lines had, and they were all being deceived and programmed. The imagination that something might have been done to him without his knowledge sent the sweat coursing over a shaved, too-smooth body. He trusted his government. But mistakes were made with the push of a computer key. And sometimes the government had done harsh things in harsh times—and lied—
    Eyes blank. He heard noises, the crash of machinery, and the movement of vehicles. He was aware of people on the sidelines staring at them; at him. It was hard not to be human, hard not to turn and look, or to shift the feet or to fret in line or make some small random movement—but the azi did not.
    At least some of these close to him must be citizens like him. He had no idea how many. He knew that some of his colleagues were with him, but he had lost track of them, in the shifting of the lines. They were boarding. They went toward the ship; and they moved with incredible slowness.
    There had been a time, in that white-tiled room on Cyteen where he and others of his group had last been human—that they had been able to laugh about it; that they made jokes and took it lightly. But that was before they had been taken singly into the next room and shaved, before they had had a number stamped on them and individually gotten the instruction on behavior, before they had fallen into the lines at the shuttleport and been lost.
    There was no more humor in it, no more at all. There was terror…and humiliation, the violation of privacy, the fear of coercion. All he had to do to back out now was to turn and walk away from the line, which no azi could do; and something was holding him there, a constraint he believed was his own volition, his courage keeping him where he was.
    But lately all realities had shifted. And he was no