“An exceptionally slow learner,” repeated the former speaker, kicking Snark not ungently in the ribs. “Poor old Snark.”
“Good baby-girl shadow.” Willit sneered as he passed on his way to the door. “Play nice.”
Snark sobbed as the room emptied.
“Have you quite finished?” asked the mechanical voice from a ceiling grille.
“Umph,” she moaned.
“I’ll ask one more time. Have you quite finished?”
“Yessir.” The word dragged reluctantly from her throat, burning as it came.
“Then get up and get dressed. The locker room will be steam-cleaned in five minutes. Besides, you are no doubt hungry.”
She was hungry. Procurator had hosted a banquet today, and shadows had served the food, seeing it, smelling it, seeing other people eat it. Shadows didn’t eat. Shadows didn’t get hungry or sleepy or need the toilet. Sometimes they got in the way of things and were killed, but if so, they did it quietly. Ordinary people didn’t stare at shadows, it wasn’t civilized, any more than wondering about them was. Shadows were a peculiar possession of bureaucrats in office in Alliance Prime, and that’s all anyone really needed to know unless one was a shadow oneself.
The metallic voice preached at her. “If you’ll make it a habit to eat just before you go on shift and immediately after, you’ll feel less hunger and you’ll be less uncontrolled. If you are less uncontrolled, you won’t find yourself rolling around on the floor making infant noises and attracting the scorn and derision of your fellows.”
“Damn motherfuckers ain my fellows.”
“What did you say?”
“I said I feel little collegiality for those sharing my conditions of servitude.”
In the sanctuary, when Snark was a little kid, the grown-ups had talked High Alliance. She could talk like that anytime. If she hadn’t been able to remember back that far, she could mimic her fellow-shad, Kane the Brain. Kane talked like an official butthead.
The voice said, “You aren’t required to feel collegiality. You are only required to behave as though you do.”
Snark panted, letting the rage seep away. Each time she came off shift, it was the same. Everything that had happened to her, every glance that had slid across her without seeing her, every gesture she was supposed to notice, every need she was expected to anticipate, all of them boiled inside her all day, rising higher and higher, until the cubicle took the controls off and she exploded.
Which was wasting time, she told herself. Wasting her own time. She only had one third of her time to herself, as herself. One third she was a shadow, under full control. One third she was asleep, also under control. The rest of the time, here in Shadowland, she could feel however she wanted to feel, do whatever she wanted to do. She could eat, talk, have sex—if she could find somebody willing. She could read, attend classes, engage in hobbies. If she wanted to kill somebody, have sex with somebody unavailable, the simulation booth would accommodate her. The booth would help her do anything! Anything except kill people so they stayed dead.
If they didn’t stay dead, what was the point! So she’d asked herself before. What was the point of living like this?
“You are at liberty to end it,” Kane had told her. “The fourth human right is the right to die.”
“Th’fucks that mean?” she’d screamed the first time she’d heard Kane on this subject.
Kane had explained it all. Kane had even escorted Snark to a disposal booth and explained the controls. “Simple, for the simpleminded,” Kane had said. “Enter, close door, press button. Wait five minutes to see if you change your mind. When the bell rings, press button again. Zip. All that’s left are a few ashes. No pain, no blood, no guts, no untidiness whatsoever.”
So said Kane, but the last thing Snark wanted was a neat disposal booth and a handful of ashes. Where was the joy in no pain, no blood? Who got anything out of that? That was no way to kill anybody, not even yourself! God, if you were going to kill yourself, at least make it a real mess! Make ’em clean up after you!
“Why you all the time wanting to kill folks?” Susso, one of her sometime sex partners, wanted to know.
“Get in my nose,” she’d snarled. “Push against me!”
“Everybody gets in your nose,” Susso said. “All the time. The only way you could be happy is if you killed everybody in the world and had it all to yourself.”
It wasn’t true. There’d been some good kids at the sanctuary when they’d first brought Snark there. Snark hadn’t wanted to kill them. She’d liked them. She’d been what? Nine or ten maybe? Old enough to tell them things. And to tell the supervisor as well.
“Where are you from, little girl?”
“From the frontier.”
“Don’t tell lies, little girl. Children don’t come from the frontier.”
“It’s not a lie! I did so!”
“Don’t contradict me, little girl. Don’t be a nasty, contradictory little liar.”
Her name hadn’t been Snark then. It had been something else. And she hadn’t wanted to kill people then. That came later, after they’d named her Snark the liar, Snark the thief. Not Snark the murderer, though. She’d never actually killed anybody, though she’d wanted to. Just her luck they’d caught her before she’d done it.
The judgment machines were clear about that: “You are sentenced to lifetime shadowhood because of your emotional need to breach the first and second rights of man.”
“They got no right,” Snark had snarled to Susso. “They got no right.”
“Why don’ they?” he’d asked. “As much as you.”
“They’re machines,” she’d told him. “On’y machines. I’m a person, a human. The universe was made for me!”
Susso had shaken his head. “You been listenin’ to some Firster godmonger on the newslink, girl. Some belly-sweller. Some prick-waver. Forget Firsters. They don’t talk for this world. Not for Alliance Central, they don’t. Too many Fastigats on Alliance Central. Fastigats don’t listen to Firsters. This world is different. This world has shadows, and most of
