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only a year a real heartbreaker, too. Most of us send 'em all away to
government child-care centers so we don't have to go through any more pain
than we have to.
Have 'em, nurse 'em, then forget 'em. Some get hardened to it, but some just
get sick of it or fed up. You're trapped, though, and you just keep at it
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until the docs say you gotta stop. Then you get a fresh young body if you have
done well and made your life quota."
I had to admit it was sounding less and less pleasant. I was beginning to see
why Laroo's assumption of power had been accompanied by a population increase
all out of proportion to the numbers. Although the system probably predated
him, he would order stepped-up life quotas strictly out of paranoia. The top
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20...0-%20Cerberus%20A%20Wolf%20in
%20the%20Fold.txt (29 of 122) [7/1/03 1:26:17 AM]
file:///F|/rah/Jack%20L.%20Chalker/Chalker,%20Jack%20-%20FLOD%202%20-%20Cerber
us%20A%20Wolf%20in%20the%20Fold.txt leadership's one nightmare would be a
declining birthrate.
"Surely you can quit. A simple operation "
She laughed derisively. "Sure. And forget all about being reborn into a new
body. Because you lack any useful skills, there's only the dirtiest labor jobs
to make any sort of a living, and that would be only if they let you. Most
likely you'd just not find a job, be declared a vagrant, and then it's a
one-way trip to the mines, or maybe they'd just knock you off. Those mines are
mostly automated most folks don't think too many people are really sent
anywhere."
More information to file, but the subject was becoming increasingly
unpleasant.
"I don't know about that lack of useful skills, though," I told her. "You have
a pretty good vocabulary."
She shrugged. "Mostly self-taught. You get bored and have to do something, A
lot of girls are artists or try and write stuff or things like that. Me, I
just read and watch Otah's bootlegs. Hell, I'm just twenty, bore four kids
with another comin' in six months, and I'm already climbing the walls. I got
fifteen, maybe twenty more years of this before they let me out. And you know
what they'll do?
Give me another fifteen-year-old girl's body and put me back at it again!
After twenty years I'd be an expert at nothin' but motherhood."
The bitterness and frustration in her voice was very real, and for the first
time I understood Otah's attitude and the attitude of most Cerberans toward
both the mothers and the subject of children. Nobody liked to think of
children, since they realized that was where their new bodies would come from.
Having once been young themselves, they really didn't like to think they were
robbing some kid of a lifetime, advancing him or her from fifteen or
forty-five in one step, perhaps condemning him or her to death or forced labor
on some airless moon.
They knew but they wanted to live, wanted their new bodies, and so they just
didn't talk about it, tried not to think about it, on the grounds that facts
ignored were not facts at all. Seeing those who bore those children brought up
all the guilt, so they were treated in the same way as people with some
horrible disease. And they did carry such a plague it was called conscience.
What this told me was that they had already sold their souls. Sold them to
Wagant Laroo. The population of Cerberus took on a whole new light for me that
day, there in the bright sunshine and salt air. I remembered old horror
stories of vampires the living dead who drank the blood of the living to
survive, to be immortal. And that's what Cerberus really was a planet of
vampires.
You're lucky to be sent to Cerberus. Here you might live forever!
Yeah, in absolute slavery to a government that could grant you eternal life at
the cost of an innocent child's life or take it away.
"I don't understand why they don't just invest in cloning," I told her. "They
would still control the bodies and thus the people."
"They can't," she told me. "The Warden organism can't cope with a clone in the
early stages. The natural way's the only way on any of the Diamond worlds."
Well, so much for the easy way out, I told myself. Still, there had to be
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better ways than this. Better managed with less heartbreak. I took a fresh
look at
Sanda Tyne. Tragic figure, perhaps, but the ultimate vampire herself.
"I would think the lure of eternal life wouldn't be enough for some people," I
noted. "Some might prefer death."
"Not outside the motherhood," she responded. "And inside, yes, you're right.
But they monitor us very carefully for signs of depression and suicidal
tendencies.
Almost nobody really goes through with it maybe two or three a year. The [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]