ERASED HIS CONNECTING LINE

1563 4D

He awoke again. Marra sat fully clothed by his bed, napping in a soft chair. When he tried to speak, a croak escaped him, and Marra jumped and woke up.

“My wife,” he said, when she had given him a drink of water, “Her name is Leil. I’ve got to go tell her.” He looked closely at the old woman’s coveralls, the same as in his dream.

Putting a thin hand on his shoulder, she said, “You can’t move. The corporate police are all over the place. They’re looking for someone and they’ll take you again. They’re visiting everyone around. What did they want with you?”

He told her, adding, “I had a dream about you. Is the doctor coming back?”

She looked at him with wide, remarkably young, brown eyes. “He can’t. They’re watching him now. He sent a note for you.” She picked a folded piece of paper off the small table by the bed and handed it to him. He eased his bandaged arms out and fumbled with it. It read,

Do what Marra and Deen tell you. Gradual exercise to pain level each day.

“Pain level. That won’t be hard.” He let the paper drop. Exhaustion drained him, and he dozed.

Hunger woke him again. Marra arrived with a steaming bowl of something smelling so good that Andrew almost tried to sit up.

“No, no, stay there, and I’ll feed you this.” It was a stew, succulent and easy to swallow. Andrew craned his neck forward to get each spoonful. Marra laughed. “Like it?”

“Yes. More.”

She laughed again, a high chuckle. “That’s enough for now — you’ll be sick.” She stroked his head and arranged his pillow. “I’ll be back later. Call me if you want anything else.”

“This is good.” He relaxed, his belly warm. Why were these women so kind to him? He was a discard, a dead man in the eyes of the corp, and that was as good as official death. People weren’t supposed to touch the bodies the corporations left by the road, whether they were dead bodies or living ones. How did these women dare?

He inched one arm up to look at it. Shocked, he turned it back and forth, his eyes jumping from one scar to the next, coming to rest in the area where his initiation marks from the Hejj coll, his tribelike line of descent from the Colonists, should have been.

Instead of his name-story, the delicately-incised and pillowed symbols his collechi uncle had tooled on his inside forearm, a tangle of scratches and blisters now scarred his skin. His stomach, so comforted by the nourishment, began to churn.

The corpos had erased his connecting line, his bond with his brothers and his cross-coll kin of the same name. He lowered his arm, very slowly, and closed his eyes. He couldn’t remember when they had done this to him. Tears ran down his face. He fell asleep.