HARM Read Free Page A

ground.
    And his consciousness was drawn back to the squalid floor on which he lay, spread like a starfish, facedown, with the chill, dark, old room imprisoning him, throwing back his gasps like malicious whispering. It was as if Stygia never existed; the roars of triumph had turned into the thudding pulse in his head.
    At some time in the day or night, a bread roll and more cabbage soup was passed into his prison box. He ate the soup and faded out.
             
    H E WORKS FOR A STAROTH. He is a guard. He is one of four men responsible for the great leader’s safety. He is specifically delegated, in addition, to keep watch on Aster, the leader’s woman. It is dark at the center. Aster is melancholy. She does not eat. The circumference of her waist is one-half that of her lord and master, Astaroth. Prisoner B, whose name on Stygia is Fremant, she hates because he serves Astaroth.
    Astaroth is a harsh ruler. Many of his eccentricities leave their mark like scars on the city. He creates a currency with notes of four denominations: three stigs, seven stigs, thirteen stigs, and twenty-five stigs. He eats only on odd days. He drinks only water. He banishes all electronic equipment, save only that in the old rusting starship, where research is taking place. He hangs captives, not by the neck, but by an ankle, until they cease struggling and expire.
    Astaroth dresses always in black. He is continually meditating. He is a manic-depressive. In starving himself, he starves others.
    Fremant is sometimes on duty when Astaroth calls his council together. These arid men, the WAAbees—now the Waabees—have an arid form of belief. The regulations by which the Waabees live include total commitment to the organization; also important are the edicts that there should be no sex before marriage, no private ownership, no fun, no reading, no singing, no bourgeois indulgences such as “kindness” or “understanding”; no affection toward others, including wives. The council was currently debating whether to ban vegetables. Fremant hears but does not hear, for he is just a guard.
    Yet sometimes the words of the council get through to him as he stands there, unmoving as a statue. He heard Astaroth declare, “We must be austere on this alien planet or we shall lose our humanity, we shall revert to wild animals. The soil here is poor. Agriculture has yet to prove itself dependable, so we will eat only once a day, at sunset—and then sparingly. We’re human, to be sure, in this world riddled with insects. We brought that quality of humanity from the planet Earth, from which we were reconstituted on shipboard. What we did not bring were all the hard-won organizations, the web of relationships between groups of people and nations. Those organizations we must rebuild, even if we kill people in doing so.”
             
    W HEN ON DUTY, Fremant sleeps at night on a palliasse spread out before the door to Astaroth’s quarters, where Aster also lives. The door is black. Fremant is given a guard’s ration, two meals a day, one meal of fish just before dawn, one meal of meat at sunset. The meat is insect “meat” from the dacoim; the fish has been caught within the hour from the great encompassing sea.
    Every day at sunup, Fremant exercises, fighting a comrade or else climbing down a cliff and back up again. He is given one free evening per week. At midday every day, he comes before Astaroth and swears his allegiance—unless it is one of those days when the leader’s mood is so black he shuts himself in an inner room and will see no one.
    “He’s not a bad sort of feller. He suffers like the rest of us come off that ship,” said Bellamia, brushing back her unruly locks. “We all got somming wrong with us. It’s how we were made, I reckon…”
    Fremant rented a room in Bellamia’s house. Whenever Bellamia spoke, a strange aroma issued from her mouth. She grew the herb salack in a patch by her door and chewed it continually. Her